Drawstone

"Bring them to the others," she ordered. They lifted Sly off the ground and shoved them both forward. The men forced them to a room full of displays near the building's centre. There were a couple dozen people present, families and staff from the museum, all scattered around the room.

Hunter and Sly found a space to sit together on the far side of the room.

Anyone in the room who spoke too loudly received threats. The guards removed a father from the room after he ignored their warning. His child was crying after them. The mother tried to calm the child down. They took the man around the corner, and there was a gunshot. The guards returned, but the man didn't.

Hunter's hands shook and he couldn't seem to get enough air into his lungs. Sly was looking around the room. He didn't seem afraid, just focused.

"Deep breaths, Hunter," Sly whispered, "You're going to get out of this. Alright?"

Hunter nodded, taking deep breaths until he felt his racing heartbeat slow.

"What makes you so certain?" One of the other hostages asked.

Sly frowned and twitched his head, beckoning for the guy to come closer.

"I've got a plan," Sly said, then he hesitated. "Sort of."

"A plan?" the other man scoffed. "What, do you think we should just rush them all at once?"

Sly shook his head. Some others were noticing their exchange.

"Keep your voice down. No, that's not my plan. I've been through situations like this before, and against much more capable foes. Compared to them, these guys are amateurs. Look around the room. What do you see?"

Hunter and the man scanned the room.

"I see Force constructs," Hunter said. Sly glanced at him.

"That's not what I was referring to, but now that you mention it, you're right. Good thinking Hunter. What else do you notice?"

"The Guards don't like coming in here," the man said.

Sly nodded.

"And the point I'm making is connected to that. Why don't they spend much time inside the room?"

Now that Sly had asked, the answer seemed obvious. Hunter remembered the woman's words after she'd captured them.

He'd never gotten a look at her, but he'd bet money that she was the boss.

"There's more of us than there are of them," Hunter said, and the more he spoke, the more excited he grew. "Hypothetically, if we rushed them all at once, we'd be able to take their weapons. That would be two down, and they wouldn't be able to afford many more losses. Right? You said it yourself; law enforcement has this building surrounded."

For a moment, it had felt like the terrorists were an unstoppable force — a monster without flaw. But Sly had been thinking along another line altogether this whole time. What else was he seeing that Hunter wasn't? This new bodyguard fascinated him. He said he'd been in situations like this before, but when?

"Keep your voice down," Sly reminded Hunter. The guards were looking inside the room now.

They waited in silence until it was safe to speak again.

"At the very least, we can assume that there's enough of to count as a potential threat. They're not just threatening our lives, they're protecting their own. As long as they think we're too scared to act, they won't be too afraid of us. Which means they'll need to continue to establish their dominance over us."

Hunter did his best to avoid looking at the woman who'd just lost her husband and the child who had just lost their father.

"So what's your plan?" the man beside them asked.

"Well, the original plan involved a distraction. If we can get their attention elsewhere, we might be able to get past the guards, and once we're armed we can fight our way to an exit."

"What kind of distraction? And how would we do it? We're all trapped in here, and they have all the guns."

Sly looked at Hunter.

"That's where you come in, Hunter. You're supposed to be a wiz-kid with etherium. You figure you can throw something together?"

Hunter studied the room. He could feel the construct attached to the display behind him. He pushed his hand against the glass, and sure enough, he met resistance when his hand was about an inch away.

"I don't know about a distraction," Hunter answered, looking around the rooms. These must be some of the more expensive items in the museum. There might be force constructs all around them, which meant enough parts to create a powerful effect. He wondered how big of a battery they were running to power them, and how they were keeping it charged. They probably switched it out with a new one every morning before opening.

"I could try to create a force field powerful enough to keep them out of here. The problem is—"

"—finding the time and space to create it," Sly finished for him.

Hunter nodded. He noticed a door hidden behind a small potted tree and a styrofoam rock prop. He could barely make out a sign on it, as the lighting in the corners was dim. When he realized what it was, he smiled.

"I believe that's a maintenance room. If one of these constructs acts up, you'll want to have quick access to spare parts in order to repair it. If you can get me in there, I bet it'll have almost everything I need."

"It's not what I'd hoped, but we can still use this to our advantage. So long as I can guarantee your safety, I'll agree to whatever plan we come up with," Sly said.

The man they'd been talking with seemed excited, but worried.

"How will we get you in there?" he asked.

"Got any ideas?" Sly said, glancing at Hunter.

Before Hunter could answer, they heard a minor explosion somewhere in the building, causing the walls and displays to shake. For a moment, the guards' attention was away from the room's only entrance and exit as they shouted at each other. One of them was on a phone. Hunter assumed he was calling the boss to see what was happening.

"Now, Hunter," Sly said, lifting him up. They made it to the maintenance room. The man stood too, asking what they needed him to do. Sly looked at Hunter.

If Hunter could use the constructs that were currently used for protecting the artifacts from theft, it would make his job a lot easier, and a lot less physically taxing. But he didn't have the time to walk a bunch of laymen through the process of disassembling a Force construct while they were active.

Hunter shook his head towards Sly, showing that he couldn't think of anything.

"Just try to keep people calm," Sly said. The man looked at Sly like he'd just chosen him to swim across the ocean.

"I don't know these people, but fine, I'll do my best," he said.

The door was unlocked — which was a relief. Hunter couldn't have been sure when he pointed it out. There were constructs in various states of assembly and repair. Hunter guessed that someone was here when the alarm activated and, in their haste to leave, forgot to lock the door.

He hoped they made it out.

There were a dozen batteries with varying charges lining the walls, and scattered across the workbenches.

For the second time in a couple of days, Hunter thought through what he knew about Force constructs.

Force fields demand a lot more etherium than Hunter could supply. Creating one powerful enough to keep them safe from rifles would take more etherium than Sly could supply.

"Sly, what's your AR?" Hunter asked.

"48," Sly said.

Hunter pursed his lips. Together they could supply about 53 AR worth of etherium, but it would need more than that. To stop a storm of bullets? Maybe more than twice that much. He could reduce that by around 10 per cent, but either way it would take 3 or 4 people to keep it active.

"How much time do I have?" Hunter asked.

"Assume you're already out of time."

Hunter wanted to laugh. This was a ridiculous situation to be in. He wished they'd asked the rest of the hostages if any of them were artisans. He could use another set of hands.

He studied the constructs that were in the process of being built or repaired around him. Some were useful, but many were useless to him at the moment. He had a flashback to the final round of the competition. He wondered if he'd have done any better during the final round if losing meant the death of himself and over a couple dozen others.

The biggest difference between this, and the competition, is that he would not lose points for shoddy work. He would need to take a lot of shortcuts in order to get a device together in the next few minutes.

"I'll need your help," Hunter said. He didn't have the third arm with him, nor did he have the time to configure his workspace to suit his handicap. Hunter directed Sly to hold a few batteries and also had him activate them in bursts. Then he realized he was being stupid; Sly didn't have Hunter's handicap, and Hunter could take full advantage of that. He had Sly activate the constructs while he was working.

The difference between using batteries to create a construct, and having someone stand by with a high affinity, was night and day. He could work almost three times as fast.

Hunter had worked with shaped Force constructs before, but only ever in the role of maintenance and very basic repairs. Shaping force fields was hard, even for him. It came with a bunch of proprietary knowledge about efficient network placement and specific glyphs. Lucky for him, this was the most basic of shaped force fields. It was a flat field meant to project only an inch or two in front of a pane of glass. If this was a construct meant to create a curved field, Hunter was sure he could feel his way around the network in order to comprehend it eventually, but he would want at least a full day for that.

During the second round of the competition, all they had to do was project a force field. They didn't have to manipulate how that field manifested. This was different — and Hunter felt a bit out of his depth. Shaped fields were about a decade old, but it had never been relevant for him to learn how to manufacture them. Fortunately for him, he had the unique capacity of being able to learn new glyphs on the spot, and his previous experience with this type of construct, would make help him speed up the process.

Another small advantage was that someone had already installed most of the shaping functions. Three of the constructs were ready to go before he even started working, so he focused the entire build around them. It only took him a couple of minutes to put everything together.

Then he had an idea, and it would take less than an extra minute to configure the parts he needed to make the adjustments. He told Sly about the addition he was making, and Sly agreed it would be worth the extra time. Hunter added a few link glyphs, and made some very rough channel attachments, using extra-fine drawstone-threaded wires. These were expensive to produce, and Hunter wasn't using them to their greatest effect, but for once in his life he didn't care about efficiency. This time, he wasn't trying to prove a point or satisfy his own pride.

There were lives at stake, including his own. The anxiety was causing his hands to tremble still, but he was used to that — his hands always shook a bit when he was working.

The gunmen quieted the crowded hostages by the time Hunter finished. Sly opened the maintenance-room door as quietly as he could. They exited it and squatted behind the small tree and the fake rock that occluded most of the door from the display room's entrance.

It was a dark corner, and they hoped it would be enough to keep them hidden until they found an opportunity to place the construct.

They caught the attention of the man who'd volunteered to talk to the hostages. Hunter told him about the construct and the need for multiple volunteers to keep it active. The man started asking around to see if anyone wanted to help.

Before they parted ways, he told them that his name was John.

A steady staccato of gunshots rang out in the distance.

"It's the police! They're coming to save us!" someone yelled. Hunter saw Sly shake his head.

"This isn't good. The abolitionists are already desperate. We don't have a lot of time. Get ready to move."

Another minor explosion rocked the building, and the walls of the display room shook once more. Sly and Hunter used the guards' brief distraction to leave cover and move along the side of the room. Over the next minute, they slowly made their way towards the front of the crowd. Hunter told Sly what he would need to do in order to set the constructs up. He'd even etched a 1, 2, and 3 on each of the main parts so that Sly would know which order to set them up in.

A few hostages caught their attention. They nodded to him and Sly. He guessed these were the volunteers who would keep the construct active once it was placed.

Hunter was certain the construct would work, but he couldn't guarantee it would hold out long enough for law enforcement to arrive. If the fight between law enforcement and the abolitionists stretched for more than an hour, then they would be out of luck.

Sly held the disassembled construct in his hands. The construct comprised three thin, wide bars to be set up end to end. Hunter interrupted the channels leading to what he assumed were the glyphs which were placed to limit the force field's intensity. Once the construct was fully activated, much more etherium would run through the later sequence of glyphs than they could handle unless its only for a short period of time. To maintain some stability he added a Reinforce glyph to the output plates. He didn't have any time to debug each connection in the network. The idea that something would go horribly wrong was like an annoying itch, constantly resurfacing even though he tried to ignore it.

The construct was the best he could come up with in the time he'd had. It wouldn't stop any bullets fired from close range, but it would slow them down enough to ensure they wouldn't be able to cause any fatal damage. It should do a good job of keeping people out, though.

Hunter noticed beads of sweat forming along Sly's temples. Sly took off his overcoat, revealing a dark-grey dress shirt with a brown-leather holster strapped across his torso. The empty holster felt conspicuous to Hunter. But he figured they were past the point of having to worry about what the abolitionists would think.

Hunter watched Sly click the bars together, preparing to activate them all at once. He nodded to the volunteers. The rest of the hostages realized there was something going on. One guard seemed to notice the growing agitation, and was about to say something, but a shout down the hallway grabbed his attention.

Sly sprung into action, crossing the intervening yards between himself and the entrance in a second. The volunteers were quick to follow. The guards were already reacting, pointing their guns at them. One of them had their facemask removed. Hunter watched his face transition from an expression of panic to one of fury as he pulled the trigger.

The construct activated a split second later. Sly grunted and stiffened, but he remained focused on his job.