Part XV – Coming Together

“What greater tragedy is there than two lovers,
racing for each other, desperate and longing,
only to pass, unbeknownst, in the darkness?”

~The Bern Seer~

37

Cole held the wooden sword with his right hand and twirled it in the air. It made a satisfying, swooshing sound. Arthur frowned at him.

“More wrist,” he said. “You don’t have a new shoulder, so the power has to come from your elbow and wrist.”

“Why not just give me a new shoulder?” Cole asked, smiling.

“Because it’s expensive and parts are hard to come by. But more importantly, where would you want me to stop? Replace everything from the neck down? At what point would you quit feeling like you?”

“Maybe everything from the neck up would be better,” someone said.

Cole turned to the voice—

It was the girl with the red hair. She had on one of the same training suits he’d been given, her bright locks up in a tight bun and a wooden sword in her hand.

“Have you two officially met?” Arthur asked.

“That’s a good question,” Cole said. He stepped forward and extended his hand. “Have we?”

“Penny,” the girl said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. Hard.

Cole tried to pull away, but she had an iron grip.

“I don’t think we have,” she said, smiling. “Not officially.”

Arthur clapped his hands together. “Okay, you two square off. Just the basics today. Bear with me, Penny, and go easy on the lad.”

“I will,” she said, winking at Cole and freeing his hand.

He looked down at it and flexed his artificial fingers, marveling at the pain interface.

Arthur turned to Cole. “Any fencing at the Academy?”

“Two semesters,” he said proudly.

“Aw, hell,” Arthur said. “Well, do me a favor and forget all that non-sense. Buckblades aren’t swords.”

“Buckblades? The invisible things?”

“That’s right.” Arthur stepped over and adjusted Cole’s grip on the handle. “Buckminster Fuller came up with the design hundreds of years ago. Well, sorta.” He ran his hand down the wooden approximation of a blade while he talked. “It’s a single matrix of carbon laced with iron, neodymium, and cobalt. Extremely ferromagnetic, okay? Super sharp. But the trick is in the blade’s handle, that’s where the electromagnetic field is created that spools the wire out and keeps it stiff. The blade’ll cut through damn near anything.”

“Even each other?”

“Sharp kid,” Arthur said, looking at Penny and jabbing a thumb his way. She shrugged and twirled her stick in a graceful pattern, so fast Cole could hear the air screaming in protest as it tried to move out of the way.

“No, not each other. Buckblades have orthogonal magnetic charges, otherwise they’d fly out of your hand and stick to something metal, get it?”

“Orthogonal?” Cole asked. “Is that positive or negative?”

“Neither. There’s two other kinds of magnetic fields, monopoles that can be harvested here in hyperspace. All Buckblades have the same charge, so it’s almost impossible to get them together, much less cut through one another.”