It had worked; he'd feared to do so much as attempt to uncramp his legs. Each time he'd felt the urge to move, he'd had visions of a ham-sized fist reaching out, clamping down on an arm or his neck, and snapping a bone cleanly in half with the merest twitch of effort.
He didn't doubt that his father's hired thugs would hurt him. He was fairly certain that they wouldn't kill him, but not completely certain, not with that sacred one-hundred-percent guarantee that scientists longed for and never saw. After all, it would be convenient for Dr. Bolivar Trask if his only child vanished from the face of the Earth. It would mean more time to focus on his work.
"How much further will it be, do you think?" Judge Chalmers asked, clearing his throat. The judge was not ancient, but he was over sixty years of age and not accustomed to sitting for endless hours in confined spaces. A federal judge had assistants and interns for that sort of thing.
The black suit who'd escorted Chalmers to Larry's door deigned to answer. "Not permitted to say, sir."
Larry went back to staring out his window. The New Mexico landscape rolled past in red-hued chunks of jutting rock and sand, and the far-off jagged purple line of mountains. They were deep in the desert, far removed from the last remnants of civilization; if not for the undeniable fact of the highway, he would have doubted that people had ever touched this ground.
"Problem?" the black suit in the driver's seat asked. Larry had taken to calling them One and Two in his mind, if only because he feared they would somehow sense more derisive nicknames and crush his skull.
One shook his head, putting the stitching of his suit at noticeable risk. "Negative. Continue."
Larry sat up straighter to ascertain what they were discussing, and was surprised to see a slender figure picked out by the yellow-white glow of the headlights ahead of them. A person standing on the side of the road, one arm outstretched - hitchhiking, he realized, as they drew closer. It was a teenage girl, wearing an olive-green jacket and pants, like army fatigues without the camo. He caught a glimpse of her face, pale and tired and white beneath a fringe of short red hair, and then they were rushing past on their journey into the darkness.
"Hey," Larry said, frowning back at the small person fading into the red-tinted night. Chalmers made a cautionary gesture, but Larry disregarded it. "We're not going to stop?"
One exchanged a glance with Two. They were both still wearing their sunglasses despite the onset of full night. "No."
"You can't handle a girl?" Larry asked, sharp, hoping to needle them. Desperate, suddenly, to rile the men he'd spent the afternoon trying to pacify. He didn't care about the girl - stranded in the middle of nowhere after dark - so much as he cared about scoring a point, any point, against these people who'd so casually hijacked his life.
One shifted in his seat to face Larry, making the metal creak under the strain. He dropped his sunglasses just low enough for Larry to see his eyes: flat, black, and soulless. A shark's eyes. "No," he rumbled. It was not an answer to his last question; it was a repetition of refusal.
Larry swallowed and nodded faintly. One stared at him with that hard, dead gaze for a moment longer, then slid his sunglasses up the shelf of his nose and resettled his bulk facing front.
Judge Chalmers gave Larry a sympathetic look. "We'll be there shortly, I'm sure, Larry. Your father will be delighted to see you safe."
"My father," Larry started, then let the rest of it die unspoken. He didn't know why his father wanted him suddenly underfoot after a lifetime's neglect; he had his suspicions, regarding his own engineering skills and research, but nothing substantive enough to say aloud. It would have been unkind to the judge to say, My father loves his robots more than he ever loved me, after Judge Chalmers had gone out of his way to ensure the family reunion. Instead he shook his head briefly and mumbled, "Nothing, sir."
The car ride continued. Now there was nothing that could been seen beyond the glass, not even stray hitchhikers. Only the cold silver pinpricks of stars glittering high overhead. Larry watched them, thinking about his mother, thinking about his father, wishing he was not an only child, and managed despite the low hum of anxiety to doze slightly.
He awoke to the lurch of inertia as the sedan slowed and braked, and blinked to see a jeep idling on the other side of the road. Armed soldiers in heavy body armor were scattered around the sedan and the jeep; directly ahead of the car was a road block guarded by more soldiers. Out of this small army, one soldier approached the car with his gun drawn.
Two lowered the driver's window and flashed a plastic ID badge. One handed over a badge of his own, which was duly inspected and checked against a clipboard the soldier held in the hand that wasn't toting an automatic weapon. The soldier returned the badges, peered into the back seat, nodded respectfully at Judge Chalmers and Larry, and waved the car on.
The ground here was broken and rockier, the road surrounded by steep edifices of crumbling, wind-carved rock. The road curved around a thick outcropping of boulders, and as the car made the turn Larry saw their destination spread out before him.
The complex was lit up like high noon, blotting out the stars with its glow, but to him it looked like nothing more than the heart of darkness itself.
And my father is its king, he thought, and had to touch his mother's medallion again.