Disclaimer and Author’s Note: All characters and situations except for “Sprocket” and “Commander Packbell” are copyright Sega Enterprises, Dic Entertainment, and Archie Publications. Commander Packbell, who is mentioned in passing, is a creation of author David Pistone. Sprocket is copyrighted to the author of this fanfiction and may NOT be used without permission.

A portion of the conversation between Snively and King Acorn—“Do you know the penalty for treason?”-- is inspired by a fanfiction by Allison M. Fleury, titled “The New Season.”

We all have different tastes, so this is a fair warning: My work gets pretty gritty in places but I’m not keen on obscenities or heavily sexual situations, so if you’re looking for shock value, it ain’t here. This is PG-13 material at best. Also, for those who like it fast-paced and brief, this is a very introverted, descriptive piece about the psychological exploration/development of one character. If you prefer lots of thrills and action to analyzing a person’s inner thoughts and desires, this is not for you, either.

Oh, yeah—please note, this is a VERY ROUGH DRAFT!!

Redemption

by “Ealain VanGogh”

()

“Cold as the Northern winds

In December Mornings,

Cold is the cry that rings

From this far, distant shore.

Winter has come too late,

Too close beside me.

How can I chase away

All these fears deep inside?

I’ll wait the signs to come,

I’ll find a way.

I will wait the time to come,

I’ll find a way home.

Who, then, can warm my soul?” --Enya

“Forgiveness is never going to be easy. Each day it must be fought for and struggled for and won.” --Sister Helen Prejean

Guilt is the disease that infests the newborn conscience, even before its first breath of life. That is why I pity you, Son of Hate, Nephew of Tyranny. You are but a blemished infant.

Spring 3209, Megacentral (Overlander Stronghold)

The rain hadn’t abated for two weeks, and the salty, tangy air that billowed in from the sea tempest, once the cause of shivers of delight for the city’s inhabitants, had become nauseating. Colin Kintobor, however, seemed fully oblivious to the forces of nature. Plodding along through the grime and mud with his shock of bright orange hair tumbling about atop his head, a mess of war tactical papers clutched in his fist, his hard, critical, scrutinizing eyes were fixed on one point alone: the front door of his mansion.

His mother, Vashti, a typically unshakable demon of a woman, had telephoned in a strained voice during one of his meetings with the delegates of the Government Ministry, crying, “Colin, make haste! Virginie’s in labor, and there are complications! Oh, Good God, boy, hurry! There’s so much blood!”

It had been enough to freeze his bone marrow and to turn his reasoning dizzy. In all his life he had never bothered to care very deeply for any living creature aside his radiant wife. His father Ivo Kintobor, now rightfully committed to an insane asylum, had arranged their marriage as befit traditional custom, and yet somehow they managed to turn out soul-mates, he rough-hewn and fiery and she a rose petal, delicate and long and slender-faced, with wispy locks of golden hair and the most haunting, pale blue eyes he’d ever seen. An Arctic nymph, an ice goddess. And now she was bleeding . . . oh, merciful God, bleeding away her life. The doctors had warned them, in quiet insensitive voices, against children, had said something about her internal organs not being fit to bear such strain. But it was tradition, by God, tradition to produce a male heir, and so they’d tried and tried and now finally Colin Junior was coming into the world on the heels of his mother’s blood.

Julian, his liberal, erratic, brilliant, heretical misanthrope of a younger brother, the cause of his every peptic ulcer--the son his father had coddled, who always seemed eager to test the limits of the Law and the patience of the Elders with his bizarre scientific experiments--met Colin at the door, flanked by their mother. Both wore expressions of rare fear. Julian was chewing nervously on his flame red moustache. “Colin,” he began, slowly and carefully, in that rumbling diplomatic tone he always used when about to relate something unpleasant, “I think you’d better just sit outside and let the midwife do her job.”

“I’ll be confounded if I do!” the elder Kintobor snarled, shoving his way inside. A strange noise stopped him short in the entryway of the building, one he followed down the hall, past the chandeliers and ballrooms, to his grand bedroom. That noise, a weak wail, trembled from inside the room.

Silence.

And then the lonely cry of a baby, an abandoned baby . . .

He did not need to even enter the bedroom to know what had happened, for the midwife, a bewildered slip of a girl, opened the door and slid into the hallway holding a clinging, pale and sickly infant, her own face streaked wet. ‘Milord, she . . .she,” the girl attempted, holding the whimpering bundle out to him.

But he did not see it. Death and loss hung in the air and nearly smothered him. He sank to the floor and allowed numbness to conquer him. “She’s gone,” he breathed. “She’s gone.”

Vashti and Julian had entered, and now rushed towards him. His brother stopped several feet from the door, his volcanic eyes immediately comprehending. His mother gripped his arm firmly in her hands. “It’s alright, son,” she murmured. “She’s at peace, now.”

To Colin the words were trite and meaningless. “No, it is not alright!” he roared, bursting to his feet. His eyes beheld the infant. They were hateful. “Mother, take that creature and clean it off!”

“I will do no such thing!” Vashti rapped her cane on the floor decisively. “It’s your son, Colin—your link to Virginie.”

“If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t need any ‘link’ to her. She’d be here, damn it!”

“Brother,” Julian’s disturbingly calm, silken voice interceded, “it is unfair to blame your wife’s unavoidable health problems on this child—“

“Oh, can it, Julian! Listen to you! My wife’s dead, and here you spout cool logic as if you . . . as if you were a bloody robot!”

Julian smiled like a serpent, too discretely for their mother to see; his eyes were two burning coals. “Forgive me, Colin, I only meant well—“

“Oh, did you?” Now Colin seized the infant from the midwife, saw with a flood of grief that its eyes were the same icy hue of his wife’s, and shoved it into his brother’s massive arms. “If that’s true, then here! You take care of the little brute! You clean it off, dash it all! I want it out of my sight, the sniveling little beast!” Ignoring his mother’s shrieks of protest, he fled the house, in a rage, to face the storm outside. The infant began to scream and whimper again as its father departed.

Julian stared expressionlessly, apathetically, at the child, even as it tugged at his shirtsleeve and began to gurgle at him contentedly. His nostrils wrinkled in disgust, but also in grim amusement. “ ‘Sniveling little beast,’ eh?” he smirked. “ ‘Colin Kintobor II,’ they call you? Hmm. Well, Snively Kintobor, looks like you’re about as unwanted around her e as I am.” And he laughed.

August 3236, One Week Before “Doomsday”

Amy Rose knew she shouldn’t have been out so late picking flowers. What a ridiculous engraving they’d be forced to put on her tombstone: “Brainless girl brutally seized in Great Forest meadow by babbling brook, roboticized while picking tulips. R.I.P.” Absurd! She chastised herself with augmenting severity, as her mind grew dizzy with the fear of the sight before her: the great monstrous citadel that had once been the king’s idyllic palace, like a beautiful spirit deformed—and it was here that the SWATbots were dragging her, here to be made a creature without independent will. Dead. Dead enough, at least, that the Freedom Fighters were obliged to create tombstones and to burn symbolic funeral pyres for their loved ones who had been not only killed, but also, yes, roboticized. Enslaved for eternity.

Was that not exactly the description of hell—enslavement for eternity in suffering? She remembered the pyre built for Mina’s family only a few months ago, just before Sally had liberated all the Robians; it had been hideous, all the tears and moaning and her friend’s sweet young face contorted in grief. An undeserved hell for all of those involved—yet here she was going, thrust through two great iron doors and into an elevator and down a long, dark, cold hallway. She felt a sudden urge to vomit, an urge of pure horror; she was being taken to the Main Control Room, where even he might be present. The wicked creature himself, the eater of souls. Robotnik.

Almost immediately upon entrance, the room slimmed into a long abrupt stretch of metal floor—a thin bridge—suspended over a pit of sharp glimmering spikes and feverishly grinding gears. The pit produced a continuous roaring clamor, occasionally pierced by shrieks of poorly oiled mechanisms; the noise, along with the pungent odor of exhaust and decay, parched the prisoner’s throat with fear.

The chamber was windowless and submerged in deep fathoms of darkness, save the one source of light, a lurid beacon at the end of the bridge: the titanic mainframe computer monitor, surrounded by a mosaic of other screens and flecked with a motley of keyboards, levers and buttons. Its powerful whirring sound was mesmerizing.

To the far left of the great computer rose the heart of the evil city: the tyrant’s throne, a massive iron chair mounted on a revolving platform. Thank God, it was unoccupied at the moment, but a quarrelsome robotic chicken—a plucked one, at that, if robots could have plucked feathers—perched at the head, squawking menacingly and arching its long skinny neck with more the nature of a vulture than poultry.

Vultures smelled the onset of death.

One couldn’t be sure what the fowl was fussing at unless peering very closely and realizing a pale, slight form pacing from the chair to the extreme right of the computer and back. His onyx military uniform made him emerge and dissolve like a phantom in the darkness. Flanked by a bewildered silver robotic dog and an agitated robotic crab, who tensely witnessed his every step, he cast restless eyes over the controls and monitors. Occasionally he would toss orders in a vicious and nasal rasp at his two lackeys and they’d scramble to his bidding, or he’d brush a hand across the sacred keyboard, deft and alert and almost too alive and vivacious, as if on a perpetual adrenaline rush. It was plain, by the little man’s arrogant energy, that he was a high-ranking commander in this wicked empire.

Scratch, the gawky, dim-witted robotic rooster in charge of the SWATBot patrol this hour, had escorted the terrified hedgehog from the front entrance. Now, sure enough, he stepped forward and swallowed, mustering courage, and blurted, “Chief Commander Kintobor, sir!”

The sharp little creature snapped to a halt and faced the rooster. He was an Overlander, and strikingly young for such a grim and important job—no more than 25 or 26 years old. What was perhaps most shocking was the fact that he was fully organic—there was not a roboticized bone in his body. His face was a trim sketch of angles, starved and white, but hinting at a past, spent comeliness, his nose jutting and his eyes large, severe pools of electric blue. He fixed those eyes on Scratch; they glistened with staggering coldness.

Then his gaze shifted towards the pastel-pink prisoner, who trembled uncontrollably. His face rapidly acquired an expression both stricken and listless. “Ah, yes,” he addressed the rooster dully, like a man both mournful and monumentally bored, and the whiny quality in his tone was grating. “Decent work, Scratch. I’ll be right over.”

At this Amy began to weep softly. The rooster gawked at her, utterly flabbergasted at the emotional display, and shook her arm in desperation. “Quiet, you!” he warbled, panic in his voice. “I said, be quiet! Little girl, what are you doing?”

“For God’s Sake, Scratch,” the Overlander moaned, skulking towards them with the dog and crab in hot pursuit, “she won’t hurt you, she’s crying. Haven’t you any soul?” Cynicism was thick on his ghostly pale face.

“No, sir . . . I think only living things have souls. Do you have a soul, sir?”

A chilling noise reverberated in the puny Overlander’s throat, something between a wheeze and a screech. He was grinning-- the sound must be some deformed variant of laughter. “What do you think, lieutenant?”

“Well, sir, I . . .”

“Of course not, Scratch!” the human snapped, fierce irritation and impatience turning his sullen voice wrathful. “Do I look alive to you? I’m as dead as any robot here never lived, never really breathed!”

The rooster shrunk into himself, even with Amy still in his grasp, obviously used to these mercurial and peevish outbursts. “I’m, um, sorry, sir—“

“Oh, shove it, you twit! Let’s not dawdle, shall we? Just strap her into the roboticizer tube so I can be done with it!” The Chief Commander thrust a hand upon his temples, expelled a sigh of exasperation through clenched teeth, and rubbed his white forehead, indulging in more than a little melodrama. His behavior might have struck the prisoner as absurdly funny under other circumstances.

But Amy whimpered as she was dragged by the three robots into an icy glass tube and strapped to a rod in the center. Her tears fell afresh, and her huge innocent eyes begged the question “Why?” of her assailants. Scratch would not look at her, not once, even as he scurried from the room. The crab, called Crabmeat by the human, took down a detailed record of the girl’s appearance and species, while the dog, whose intensely melancholy gold eyes were fixed on the girl with stunning compassion and grief, stood beholding the scene with wrung hands and pigeon toes. He smiled weakly, sadly, at the girl, then turned to his master. “Snively,” he spoke the Chief Commander’s first name in a meek whisper. “It’s only one little girl. Can’t you just turn her loose?”

“Protocol, Sprocket, protocol,” the little Overlander retorted haughtily, unrelenting. “I’ll not risk my hide for any Mobian furball.”

Resentment passed over the dog’s face fleetingly. “Yeah, that’s always been your problem, old friend” he mumbled, following Crabmeat out of the chamber. “You and your precious hide—all that counts, isn’t it?” He didn’t intend for the Overlander to hear, but the Chief Commander’s face twitched as if vaguely stung. It then resumed its frosty apathy.

He faced Amy, whose weeping had ceased and been replaced with defiance. To her he seemed no longer keen and alert, nor obnoxious and arrogant, but rather in a daze, a stupor, a lifeless haze. Numb. Their eyes met for a considerable, unnerving time before he cleared his throat, whipped a small bottle from his pants pocket, and took a hearty swig of the contents. Amy could smell the whiskey from ten feet away.

“You’re disgusting,” she declared, bizarrely nonchalant about her fate. “You don’t fool me for a second with your snottiness. You’re a yellow-belly, that’s all. The princess told me about you—you’re his nephew, aren’t you? The Second-In-Command?”

Snively smiled thinly. “Why do you care? Nothing will matter to you in a few minutes except serving him even more brainlessly than I have.”

“You’re so cruel!” she wailed. “The least you could do is be kind to me! What good does it do you to be mean now, when I’m captured and stuck in this awful thing, past all hope?”

“I don’t pass a crap about your feelings, brat!” Snively’s voice grew strained, escalating up an octave. It seemed to lack truth and cling to a desperate desire for indifference. The indifference of an automaton. “It’s too great an effort to be kind! Now hold still—I’m going to give you a shot. It’s . . . a painkiller.”

Amy screamed in desperation and writhed against her bonds. “Don’t lie to me! That will put me to sleep, won’t it?”

He paused, a struggle on his features; his hand, holding a large syringe filled with a green liquid, began to quiver.

“Won’t it?” She bowed her head, again succumbing to tears. “You really don’t have a soul, do you? Or a heart! You’re just like your uncle—rotten and evil to the core! You’re both worse than any of your robots. At least they’re programmed to do the awful things they do.”

The Overlander glared at the ground. “It’s better this way, trust me. The pain is. . . it’s indescribable.” His breathing grew labored. He scratched the back of his neck, pulled at his shirt collar, as if suddenly aware of a noose about his throat. “My uncle used me as a test subject when I was twelve. I’ll never forget that. It’s my policy—Under the age of twelve, I give a captive this stuff. They’re just . . . so young.” With that came a remarkable transformation: the boy’s phantom face metamorphosized into one of youth and life; a ruddy flush invaded his hollow cheeks. He looked out the door, after his melancholy canine friend, as if remembering his quietly chastising words. “Maybe . . .”

Amy’s head darted up; she looked him in the eye, trying to subdue a hopeful gasp. He set his jaw gingerly. “Maybe you can . . . I can say we had a counting error and there was truly one less Mobian caught this past hour. Then you can go. Yes . . . that would work.” The Overlander officer gnawed on the end of an unlit cigarette he jerked in and out of his coat pocket in nervous spasms, eyeing it, chewing on it, rolling it as he spoke, until it was entirely unfit to use. “Yes . . . Yes, go.”

“But . . .” she paused, scrutinizing him, her round little face squeezing into contemplative wrinkles. “Won’t you . . . get into trouble?”

The officer’s own cheeks rapidly drained their boyish flush. “Possibly,” he croaked. He stared at the shiny chrome floor, glared at it; the more he looked the more it seemed to Amy darkness crept into his countenance. “Oh, dash it all,” he grunted, and finally tossed the cigarette on the floor, littering its polished precision. The act seemed to please him; he forced back a bitter grin. “To hell with protocol.”

In two strides he crossed the distance between them and harshly stripped her of her bonds. ‘Sorry for the haste,” he murmured, distracted by his absorption in the act of her liberation. “But you must understand, the walls have ears and eyes—literally. I’m going to have to shut up quite a few of my subordinates who’ll catch wind of this.” Gently now, he lifted her out of the cage and brushed her off. “Think yourself indeed honored, my dear. I’m a first-class coward and you’ve just inspired me to do something heroic.” He inspected his buttons as apathy again overtook him; apathy, at least externally, for he stole several fearful glances at the security monitors attached to the mainframe computer.

Amy looked at him levelly, and saw beads of moisture forming on his ashen forehead, betraying his anxiety. “Maybe it was really inside you all the time,” she retorted.

The officer’s eyes snapped up from his chest to her face, studying her. They were untrusting. “Ah, yes, well, perhaps you should go now.”

In silent compliance, she did just that. For the first and only time in the history of Robotropolis, a captured Mobian escaped Robotnik’s clutches without the help of the Freedom Fighters. The perplexing account was related to Princess Sally Acorn, who visibly merely rose a skeptical eyebrow, but, deep down, stored the knowledge of her foe’s kindness in the back of her mind, where it lay unsettled and prickling, like unexpected and ill-digested food in the pit of one’s stomach. Sonic the Hedgehog, her self-proclaimed champion and closest friend, guffawed and cackled raucously and loudly dismissed the charitable act as a fortunate side effect of Snively’s perpetual drunkenness; it was thus, in the tumultuous weeks to follow, forgotten.

Autumn 3236, After Snively’s Coup

Friday night seemed a lousy time to have to embark on a rescue mission. Nevertheless, Princess Sally Acorn peered through the junk pile heaped in the center of Main Street, Robotropolis, at the towering iron monstrosity that, by birthright, was once hers. Central Command.

“This’ll be like taking the ol’ candy from the baby, Sal,” a cocky, nevertheless comforting voice whispered in her ear, as Sonic stole around behind her and rested a soothing hand on her shoulder. “It’s just the Sniv-Meister! We can take him down, easy as pie!”

“I know, you’re right,” she heard herself respond; still, the accursed link between her family and the Kintobor clan, the feud that, it seemed, would draw blood from both factions, would conjure new leader after new leader with an even greater thirst for vengeance, until time itself collapsed, had become surreal to her. She wondered when someone would finally wave that blessed white flag. Would she—or Snively—be the one to do it?

She shook her head, clearing her mind; no, it would not be her. Justice demanded that. And Snively? He was on the brink of losing all, but still he hid away in Central Command brooding, sulking, unwilling to give quarter, to surrender. The pig-headed young Overlander was determined to repeat history, despite impossible odds, having fooled himself into thinking that he was really destined to outdo his uncle. So the battle would rage on.

“Alright, then,” Sally declared. “My guess is that Snively is too afraid to leave the Main Control Center for very long. He’s probably got Tails imprisoned right in the heart of Central Command.”

“Good call! So, what’s the plan?”

“Head for the front door, type as much and as hard as you can into the control panel. That’ll overload its memory and scramble the auxiliary security functions. I’ll see if the air ducts behind the building are still unarmed and accessible—it’d be the easiest route. Don’t worry, I’ve got this new stun gun in my belt that Rotor made especially for bots to back me up. Either way we enter the building, we’ll meet back here and go in together. One more thing, Sonic,” she added as he rose to go, “don’t trust anyone—I’m sure Snively’s reprogrammed half the workerbots to guard duty.”

“Roger, wilco!” the rebel hedgehog brayed, igniting his feet for a sprint. “Juice and jam time!” And off he sped, emerald eyes aglint.

“Let’s do it to it,” Sally breathed, glaring at the evil landscape before her. With a heave, she sprang forward towards the back alley . . .

And was stopped in her tracks by the sight of a gangly, silver robotic dog.

He did not see her; indeed, he appeared severely preoccupied, mumbling angrily into a large black video/intercom watch on his wrist. Sally realized at once that it was time to take her own advice, for only Robotnik’s head commanders, including Snively and Packbell, had ever worn these precious communication devices. This robot must be a commander of considerable rank.

And he was conversing with the unmistakable nasal, hissing voice of the enemy, when suddenly his ears pricked and his eyes darted in her direction. Sally realized the canine’s hearing must be so acute that he could detect the sound of her thundering organic heart. A built-in weapon. And yet, when he beheld her, there was not a trace of malevolence on his face. Only sorrow.

He drew his laser rifle. “What are you doing?” Suddenly unattended and impatient, Snively’s voice, crackling inside the intercom microphone, rang throughout the alley. Sally shuddered at the sound of it.

For a moment the dog paused to brood at the device. “Doing you one last favor,” he retorted, his tone surprisingly soft and shy, and then his lip curled into a chastising snarl as he added, “Farewell, friend,” and shut off the intercom.

Friend? A deserter, clearly, but Snively’s friend? Her enemy, then. Sally launched at the robot, leg outstretched in one of her prime martial art maneuvers.

It all happened like lightning.

The canine growled throatily, bared his fangs and ducked. Quickly he recovered, firing rapid pot shots at her as she sailed aimlessly through the air and landed roughly behind him. Silently she cursed, dodging the attacks, and lunged again. The dog turned to face her, grabbed her assailing arms, and flipped her over on her back.

She went crashing into the debris on the ground, astounded more at his skill than at her own pain. He had, clearly, as much of a mission to accomplish as she did. He was protecting something—someone. And he had her pinned under his boot.

The robot stopped, hesitated, then, slowly, aimed his weapon at her chest. “I’m so sorry, Princess,” he moaned, and it seemed, by his drooping ears and posture, that he really meant it. His face was one she’d never seen before; it utterly lacked the dullness of the minions Robotnik had himself built. It had a child-like glow, the freshness of some past life. Then it came to her; this robot was not like Scratch or Grounder, or Metal Sonic, or even Packbell; he had once been real—he was a roboticizer victim.

One who was perfectly lucid, functioning perfectly of his own free will . . . but, by his own fealty to her foe, a slave. Still doing ‘favors’ for her foe, of his own choice.

Sally’s heart filled with rage. Traitor.

And with that she gained the upper hand. She curled her legs around those of the assaulting robot, pulled hard, and jerked him off his feet. He yelped in shock and scrambled away towards the alley, trying to gain some distance.

Air and gravity bowed to Sally’s whim as she rose, twisted in an arc and delivered a crisp kick in the canine’s jaw. An explosive metallic clang resounded in the alley, sending the hapless mercenary sprawling. Robotnik’s slave sprang to his feet, but too late—the barrel of the princess’s magnetic-shock device pressed against his chest. For a brief instant, the opponents’ eyes locked; the dog’s saddened, accepting gaze, the honorable defeat in his liquid gold eyes, drew a violent desire from within Sally not to go through with pulling the trigger. His face—clean, innocent, capable of compassion, illuminated by that intuitive sense of loyalty . . . he was indeed unlike his hollow, spiteful companions. He was what hope looked like, hope for peace and forgiveness and a fresh start.

If only he weren’t a robot. Even now, those bottomless, grieving eyes seemed to convey a sense of trust in her, in her mercy. They recognized goodness. “Please?” he said, soft and simple.

It killed her, his sweetness. But she had to do it. It would hurt—it would be excruciating for him, but it would not destroy him. He would be revived within hours. “I’m sorry,” she echoed his apology of seconds past, and pulled the trigger.

A loud jolt of electricity, and the robot convulsed, whimpered, his tongue lulling, and collapsed.

Feeling oddly guilty, Sally stepped over him and headed for the air ducts. Sonic was already perched inside the tunnel, his face contorted in fierce worry. “Sal, what took you so long? I waited in the junk pile forever! Man, I was about to come looking!”

“Sorry,” she mumbled, joining him, glancing over her shoulder at the fallen slave, wishing so hard that people like that sweet robot wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire of her war. “I’m sorry.”

Sonic frowned at her, took her hand, uncomprehending. “Let’s juice,” he suggested, with a mischievous wink. “I’m pumped for kicking some serious Kintobor-rear!”

The halls of Central Command in Robotropolis were a tomb, a musty black vacuum, a void of warmth or light or sound.

Except for the relentless, eerily echoing staccato of footsteps approaching the Main Control Room.

A short, gaunt form trimmed fully in black, a poltergeist swallowed up in its haunt, rushed down the bleak, narrow metal hall. The dim, unnatural glow of the fluorescent lights occasionally revealed a face: that of a young male human, a face eaten away to thinness and paleness by, and ruminating upon, some source of fierce rage. And intense anxiety. Rapid, purposeful strides . . . interrupted by a roboticized rat squirming out from a corroded hole in the wall. The hapless creature scurried between the phantom being’s legs, no longer intruding, but too late. He was already incensed.

Out from the depths of his black attire he jerked a laser pistol and fired. As the rodent shattered into a thousand scrap fragments, its artificial guts spilled upon the floor, the livid little man growled, pivoted on his heel, and continued briskly on. “Clean it up!” he snapped, waiving the mess with a haughty gesture over his shoulder.

Immediately, the walls came alive as ten SWATbots emerged from their storage compartments in the lining, each scrambling towards the heap of once-rat with the eagerness of fellow rodents trying to pry the cheese safely from the mousetrap.

The sound of their groveling and scuffling drew a serpentine sneer from newly instated tyrant Snively Kintobor’s face as he entered the Main Control Room. For an instant he stopped, wavered in his gait, a deep rheumatic cough wracking his body, and then continued inside as it passed.

The place itself was a corpse, decaying, rusting, infested with cobwebs, the floor littered with crumpled tactics papers. The mainframe computer was offline due to its new master’s ill temper; only the Void communicator screen flickered in the darkness. Crouched in a corner of the screen, surrounded by unforgiving shards of crystal and ice, was an immense, tattered, red-clad form: that of the imprisoned despot, Dr. Robotnik. “Look what you’ve done to my empire, you little beast,” the great man croaked, head cradled in hands, as the small man slunk gloating into the room. “You accuse me of cruelty and thanklessness towards you, nephew, yet without me your incompetence festers like a chancre!”

Snively glanced up at the monitor, stared deeply into it, then suddenly burst into harsh, frantic, desperate laughter, doubling over, making the whole chamber resound with the madness of it. “There’s no one fit to blame more than yourself, dear uncle,” he giggled, sprawling obnoxiously over the keyboard, inspecting his fingernails. “If you hadn’t gone and gotten so damned cocky about yourself on Doomsday, hadn’t gone off in that hovercraft and left me to die at the hands of the furries, after all I’d done for you, after selling my soul to you, well, then, maybe I’d feel more hospitable right about now.”

Robotnik glared up at the frail boy in whose mercy he now rested; his face indicated a struggle between fury and terror. “What do you want? An apology? Reparations? Blast it, Snively, I’ll give you anything! Let me out of the Void, lad, and I’ll help you clean this whole mess up.” False sweetness leeched into his voice.

Something of this was twice as amusing to his nephew, who again began to cackle uncontrollably. He turned and staggered towards the throne of his uncle, hiccupping back a final peal of giggles. “ ‘Anything!’ ” he murmured. “He says he can give me what he took away years ago! By God, ‘anything,’ he says!”

Panic seized Robotnik as the younger tyrant began to leave. “By the Devil’s Nostrils, boy! What are you blathering about under your breath? Pull yourself together! Are you drunk now, without end, now that I’m not around to beat you sober?”

“What will you give me to be freed and clean up this mess?” Snively turned and faced his uncle, his lip twitching, his face suddenly devoid of the insane mirth of seconds past.

Now it was black with vengeance. He teetered to his feet, flinging and gesturing wildly. “Anything? How about my pride? Eh? How about you erase the past eleven years? Change history! This time, when I’m a stupid prepubescent asking you what role I’ll play in your little coup d’etat, tell me what a worthless slave you’ll really make me! What a humiliated little bootlicker, forbidden to acknowledge our kinship for fear of your embarrassment, doing your dirty work, murdering and destroying people for you from the age of fourteen, not allowed to cry, not allowed to faint or vomit or even to flinch, flattering you, praising you, playing to your every need and being your damned little punching bag whenever the whim seized you to hurt something? And without one bloody ‘good job, Snively,’ ‘thanks, Snively’? You could start making your reparations there, dear uncle!” Again, abrupt like a hiccup, rang the maddened giggle. “Oh, don’t apologize now, uncle Julian! Not on my account! It’s quite alright now!” He swallowed rapidly, restraining some physical ailment he didn’t want to reveal to his wicked kinsman. It was a great effort, for he gripped the edge of the chair and began to perspire heavily, his eyes rolling up in his head.

Robotnik’s jaw hung ajar. But not with remorse. “Are you finished?” His eyes were infernos. “Because you’re losing precious time throwing a childish fit at me, boy! The Freedom Fighters won’t stop, you know! If they took me out, you foolish brat, they’ll slit your fine little throat in a heartbeat! Don’t you realize? They’re in the air ducts! In the shadows, behind you, above you, beneath you, everywhere, waiting to strike! They’ll take everything we ever had, Snively!”

The boy smiled at him, unmoved. “We?” he asked. “What did WE ever have, Julian? Everything was always yours, never mine.”

Robotnik flew into a panic. “They’ll eat you alive! Snively, don’t do that! Don’t turn off the monitor! Listen to me, boy! No, Snively, no, don’t leave me!”

Silence. Snively had risen, slowly swaggered to the Void monitor, and ceased the communication between them. “To hell with you, old man” he half-smirked, half-whimpered. “I don’t care if they fry my carcass, you won’t ever control me again! I . . . I can do this!” Quivering, he pressed a button on his watch, hailing the SWAT patrol to enter the Control Room with any new prisoners. “I can do what you never did.”

In stormed two SWATS. In their grasp, to Snively’s sadistic delight, was the two-tailed fox freak held so dear in the heart of the hedgehog himself. “Good evening, Master Tails,” he hissed. “So good to see you well. How is the princess? The hedgehog?”

“You’re making a big mistake, Stinkley!” the little fox spat back.

“So I’m told. No matter. I’ll prove you all wrong.”

At that instant Sonic and Sally burst into the room through the air ducts in the ceiling . . . and were met with both SWATbots aiming laser pistols point blank at their bodies. “Alert, alert, Priority one hedgehog,” a chorus of chilly droning voices bombarded the heroes.

“Ah, speak of the devil,” Snively snarled. He looked Sally over arrogantly. “Come to surrender, Your Highness?”

Sally was so taken aback by the utter and complete transformation of his appearance that, for an instant, the hazardous situation itself was forgotten.

Snively had always been thinner than a single fine needle, or a blade of grass. Puny. But now? Now, every inch of him was gaunt, wasted, starved. His complexion, once pale, was now ghastly, unearthly, a pasty, gray, sickened color, as though he were battling a deathly illness . . . or as if he were a walking corpse.

Dark rings cut the brand of exhaustion and anxiety beneath roiling, hungry, wild eyes, eyes that had not diluted with the rest of him, but rather crackled with thousands of volts of electricity, that seemed the sole remaining thing still alive within his being, his sole surviving power source. They seemed to wrack his putrid body, to starve it on a perpetual adrenaline rush. Indeed, considering the mad, twisted sneer on his face and the disheveled mop of rich brown hair that had strikingly replaced the baldness of the days of Robotnik, he seemed savagely delighted in his own new state of ailing health.

“He’s finally lost it,” Sonic growled, voicing Sally’s thoughts.

“Just like his uncle,” she breathed.

Snively overheard. He cackled; it was a disgusting noise—once grating, irritating, but now a soulless peal of harsh giggling, the sound of a crow’s death-cry. “Well,” he gloated through bared teeth, “it must be hereditary!”

“Just like your power trip,” Sonic retorted readily. “This is pathetic, Snobley! Hand over Tails and think of some original life ambitions!”

“Be careful, rodent,” the Overlander hissed. He cocked his head skyward and rose a challenging eyebrow as he spoke. “In the past you may have found me cowardly, but I assure you, my reasons for caution have quite literally dissolved.” His eyes flickered. “You’ll find me a far more dangerous man than you suspect.”

Sonic just grinned. “Unless we get ol’ Robuttnik back out of the Void and turn him loose on you.”

“You won’t do that.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Positive, Snerdly?”

Snively laughed again, but this time the cackling was aborted by a fit of wheezes and coughs—deep, violent, digging up phlegm from the bowels of his lungs. It made all three of his prisoners wince in disgust. When he stopped he seemed spent, exhausted, clutching his temple and gasping for breath. His eyes were shut tight.

But still he sneered. “Yes, because even I would rather facecertain deathat your hands than do that,” he wheezed, too soft to hear, as if lost in another world.

Sonic seized the opportunity, reaching for Tails, for the SWATbots lowered their pistols and sagged in synchronization with their new master.

Snively’s eyes snapped open in that instant; he punched the button on his watch and the SWATS sprang to attention, again aimed at the intruders. “Now, now,” he rasped, as the blue jewels in his face glimmered, “you’ll not get the better of me!” He looked so sick, so weak, but still he hung on to his control, to his power, with his sneer.

It all came together in Sally’s mind in that instant, in the disturbed young Overlander’s desperate hunger merely to prove himself competent. Something he’d tried to do for eleven years, in a way, just as she, as a makeshift leader, had. She was surprised at the generosity that suddenly welled within her. “Snively,” she said, gently, “let it go.” She gestured at the Void monitor, at the place where Robotnik had been banished. “Let him go. You need medical attention.”

“Don’t try that with me, Mobian filth,” he roared, aiming the pistol he’d used earlier to terminate a certain rat at her head. “You think I haven’t learned, after all that’s happened, when someone’s trying to manipulate me? I’ll get you, all of you, despite your wiles!” His eyes were crazed.

But the energy of his cries aggravated his lungs, and a spasm of coughs made him unable even to hold the pistol erect. He dropped it, fell to the floor in a desperate attempt to retrieve it, when Tails, now at his eye level, saw through bright innocent eyes the blood that sprayed from his lips as he wheezed.

“Are you okay?” the fox blurted instinctually. The Overlander looked into the child’s face, stunned at the question. And Sally, who saw it too, who saw Snively trying to hide it, to wipe the redness away quickly from his mouth, froze. “Oh . . .my . . .” she began, engulfed in horror and pity, but Sonic seized her arm, breaking her trance, and hoisted a wide-eyed Tails over his back. “Come on!” he shouted. “Let’s blow this joint, while he’s still down!”

Their eyes met. “But Sonic,” she began, gesturing at the Overlander crouched on the floor, “didn’t you see—“

“Yeah,” he gritted hastily, tugging her arm, “I did. But there’s nothing we can do about it, Sal. He doesn’t trust us, and I don’t trust him. Now, come on!”

And so they departed, leaving Robotnik’s legacy simpering and bleeding on the floor. Alone and terrified. But sorry?

Winter 3236

Uncle had said that it would be exquisite. Sublime. It would shed all need of heaven or hell, this nirvana called power, called respect. This ice in the heart, this trembling of the hands and body, this lowering and dulling of others’ eyes as you passed by, as the sight of you brought reverence and fear. This nirvana called power.

Uncle had lied.

What had the lie been?

That everyone would be allowed to taste it—to delight in the power. Everyone. Yes, it all went to hell the day uncle became a glutton, and seized the boy’s shoulder, squeezed it until it throbbed, his great fat jowls baring hungry fangs, and snarled hot-breathed, “You will call me sir.” Sir. Master. Authority. Superior. That was eleven years ago. Eleven damned years.

Julian had been his hero and mentor. And then that same mentor trampled his feeble heart eleven years ago with one sentence. “What are we going to do now, Uncle Julian?” he winced at the remembrance of his squeaky little voice innocently, enthusiastically piping, that sweltering 13th of August when the coup was completed, when they stood surveying the glorious carnage at their hands, the sea of metal that had once been flesh and blood. Then, damn that old villain, then he’d said it. Then reality had struck. The old tyrant had clutched him by the shirt collar, pulled him close, and rumbled, “We aren’t going to do anything. I will become a god in my own right, boy. The robotic slaves respond to my voice only. I, their creator, their destroyer. Do you know what that means, boy? I can destroy you, too. You, my servant. You will call me sir.” In ten seconds he had beenreduced from right-hand man to lackey, from prodigal to robot. He hadn’t been adequate, obviously. It mattered not what he did, how fast or hard he worked for their cause, how many backbreaking hours after midnight he toiled at the computers. The distaste in uncle’s eyes had been plain from that day on; eventually, Packbell would be built to supplement what his nephew lacked, to blazon in the boy’s face: “This is my real nephew, my real son, the son you should have been!” The only being on earth that might appreciate him had shredded his world to pieces in one nasty sentence: “You will call me sir.” And that day, the boy had learned the meaning of utter and pure hatred.

But who was the imbecile who denied the truth that for one to dominate, others must be slaves? That for one to stand so tall, others must crouch and cower—and suffer? Who was the cretin whose thirst for glory made him blind? Not uncle. No, not uncle—only himself. And now even vengeance would be an empty endeavor—because it was his fault alone that he had been so horribly violated, so desperately wronged.

So it was not anger that curdled like vomit in his throat as he stumbled outside into the dead gloom, into an alley flanked by chrome smokestacks lustrous like the freakish eyes of a cadaver. It was not anger.

It was self-loathing. Utter and complete submission to the darkness around him, for h deserved it, he deserved it, he deserved it, so stupid and weak and petty he was, so selfish and sardonic and tainted, so pale and skinny and pointless. God’s most wasted creation. Forgotten, nothing but an irritating red stain in the white linen fabric of the universe, except for the hatred he’d earned by his own hands. The hatred of those he had himself violated, with aching desire to defy uncle’s cruelty; yes, he found a vessel through which to spit in dear Uncle Julian’s face—small, so deliciously small were the stinking furry filthy animals called Mobians, and they could not strike, stab, burn or kill the way uncle could, when they were strapped to a chair or encased in a glass tube. He had mutilated their bodies in unspeakable ways with the push of a button; it turned them into their own metallic prisons. His only devoted lover became the machine that committed these sins for him, the machine called the Roboticizer; were it a woman, he’d have made violent love to her, in gratitude for helping him purge his rage on the victims who were Julian’s surrogates. All by his own choice.

He deserved to have his jugular vein dug out with a rusty dagger. By God, he did. But he was too afraid to do it himself. Too afraid that it would feed the pain that already made him its slave.

So he just walked. Just stumbled, limped, dragged his skinny white carcass forward, endlessly, through the streets, laughing softly, derisively at himself, a twenty-five-year-old human man without a soul or purpose. Laughing, moaning, madly laughing, raking thin long fingers through wild dark hair, hair like a fledgling molting, falling on its first flight. He kept walking until he reached the city border, where life again reared its green, lush, flowering head—where the Great Forest rose from the scorched and barren earth and dared, just dared, old Julian to come kill it—triumphantly. But this time, the human boy with no soul did not balk. He kept walking, numb to the brimming, teeming organic current about him, the whisper of grass and the chirp of crickets. The life, the fresh new life, of which he had been denied. It was too dark anyway. Too bloody pitch dark. He could not even see where he was going.

Nature knew him as an enemy. A gentle rain became a spiteful downpour; his black uniform jacket grew heavy and clung to his frame, his hair stuck to his skull, veiled his gaping eyes . Crystalline blue, faint and pale as twin specters, those eyes began to flood with something eleven years alien. Tears. A strangled growl in his throat as he ripped the outer jacket from him, laser pistol and all, leaving only undershirt, trousers, and soiled boots, and stumbled on. Only for an instant did he pause, peering at the red armband on the uniform—the mark of uncle’s hatred for Mobius, his power—with its black letter ‘R’ for Robotnik, boldly visible even in the gloom. It was the mark of a soul bought by the devil.

Imbecile, imbecile!

Imbecile to have ever trusted that leech, fat with the blood of others’ souls!

He thrust the coat at the ground and stomped over the letter, stomped it into the soil, the bed of earthworms and bones and roots, he stumbled four steps before something dragged him back. The wretched uniform, soiled and beaten, still commanded his soul. Unwilling to shed it forever, somehow fettered to all that it implied, he stooped and retrieved the coat, wadded it into a ball, stuffed it in his belt, and dashed ahead with new resolve. Resolve to do what, he hadn’t an inkling.

Brambles and thorns struck out and tore at his arms, his hands and legs and chest, in the darkness, and he was shivering, teeth gnashing, because a wind had risen through the wood; a layer of goose bumps surfaced on his fair skin. He didn’t feel the scratches, the cuts all over his body and face; he spat the blood from a cracked lip out onto the soil. But the coldness—it was too much to bear. Coldness and hate became one in his mind and he could no longer stand it.

So Snively Kintobor sat down in the ankle-deep mud of the Great Forest, abandoned by the whole universe, and wept bitterly, for he knew that he was going to die here, and even though he knew he deserved it, he was terrified. He fell on his knees and bent over the earth, clutching his belly, hair utterly concealing his ashen face. Heaving sobs were lost to the wailing desolation of the growing wind. Lost. And suddenly he screamed at the top of his lungs, screamed in frenzy, just to prove to whatever Mercy hovered hidden above the gnarled canopy that he still existed. Just to defy Fate and Judgment. But that, too, was barely audible above the storm.

Snively clutched his throat, scratchy and parched from the cry, and resigned his spirit to aimless memory. He remembered the night he’d first lost himself, the night he first came here to this place far from home, to follow Julian, to follow the man who was once his hero. It had rained like this; the forest had hated him just like this. He had been alone just like this, wandering like a poltergeist, floating uncaring and ascetic though the forest. But somehow, then, though the hours of coldness bred frostbite and he could no longer feel his fingertips, ears, or lips, though he could have dropped from exhaustion the moment he crawled gasping into the gates of Mobitropolis, he had seen a light at the end of the tunnel. Now?

Nothing. No hope. A void, numb, silent, callous, where he should feel remorse, a shred of meaning. Nothing.

Snively wanted to weep harder, but his stomach was beginning to churn with nausea and fatigue was softening the edges of his awareness. He was just too tired to care.

He skulked five feet further, but tripped over a boulder, and fell crashing into thicker coldness—he realized it was water when he gasped for breath and inhaled a gallon of the murky liquid. Desperately he flailed to the surface and crawled to shore, coughing and spewing. And so cold. His belly roiled, bloated full with the foulness he’d ingested; with a groan he rolled on his side, seized his gut, and retched it up. His eyes fluttered open and still he saw only blackness. Shivers became convulsive seizures; he was mesmerized by the sight of his breath snaking out his lips in tiny white vapor clouds. And it was that moment that he was certain he was going to die.

But what . . . a light? Yes, a light. God, a light—a light, celestial and warm, emanating from the water into which he’d fallen. He almost soiled himself—it was the Power Ring Pool. In one brief instant all the weariness in him fled and he was exhilarated by the radiating, flawless circle of gold that hovered in the air above his head. His eyes again flooded. “You’re beautiful,” he breathed, gnawing his dirty fingernails, still sprawled on his side in the mud. “You’re so beautiful!” It was not the fact that this place was the source of old Julian’s every greedy fantasy that made Snively cry with joy. It was not that this was the prize Julian coveted and would never find, never, now that Snively was the one who’d found it, and had the power to withhold something so gratifying, the power that he’d lacked all his life. It was no that. It was the beauty. The pure untainted beauty. The hope.

And then the light was gone.

But another light, fainter, more distant, remained. A tiny circle of wooden huts in the distance beckoned to him. And hell froze over.

For Snively had found Knothole Village.

The den of uncle’s mortal enemies—the den of monarchs exiled and heroes crafted on the backs of slavery at the age of ten years, a world of love and compassion and endurance and loyalty and other things he’d ridiculed or tried to erase in uncle’s name. The same people he’d killed, roboticized, tortured, scorned—of his own will. God, they would string him up and decapitate him if they found him here unarmed. They would cut out his traitorous heart and drink his blood. He could see Princess Sally’s elegant muzzle contorted in rage as she came at his chest with the avenging dagger, fiery auburn hair flying . . .

No. Julian would do that. Julian would make bedfellows with revenge. These people would never be so brutal—it was why Julian had been able to be their parasite for years before his coup. He had taken advantage of King Max’s utter lack of brutality.

He had known Max was a man of mercy. Mercy.

Suddenly an insane, blissful, manic thought flooded Snively’s brain. A euphoric sense of possibility, faint and frail though it was. He bolted upright and muffled a desperate giggle. God Almighty, what if . . .

What if these people have such a capacity for mercy? What if they . . .

Salvation. Redemption.

Snively, you crazy worthless bastard. What orifice did that notion come from?

But hell, why not? “What have I got to lose?” he croaked, and found himself standing.

Maybe he wasn’t going to die tonight, after all.

Maybe.

The past three months had proven to Princess Sally Acorn that she would much prefer having Dr. Robotnik restored as Robotropolis’s resident despot than the volatile, erratic Ixis Naugus, whose cruelty seemed an even greater poison than had been the Overland megalomaniac’s. Science and sorcery were indeed a powerful combination, as the Freedom Fighters soon discovered: As a “Christmas present,” Naugus exploited his control over the elements to cast a freezing spell on the Knothole water supply. The rivers that spider-webbed through the Great Forest became as solid as a rock and as stagnant as a cesspool; apparently, Naugus had expected to force them out of hiding in search of a new drinking supply, and to eradicate the wanderers once they came in sight. Wearily, and still bound to his wheelchair, King Max had ordered Sally to take an expedition of technically inclined Mobians into the cavern below the Ring Pool to revive an archaic water heating generator; it might thaw at least, Uncle Chuck had stated with fingers crossed, the hapless power ring source. Yesterday afternoon, Fortune was generous and it thawed. Among all these things, Sally was working rapidly on a plan for a scouting mission to retrieve updated deroboticizer plans from Robotropolis while the latest generator attack still had Naugus disoriented. And Elias had recently run away, dumping the deeds of heir to the throne upon his reluctant sister. Needless to say, she was up late in her hut tonight, typing out the details of the mission into Nicole’s database.

A miserable rain had grown torrential, droning on and on and freezing over the tired land outside.

Despite that, she could have heard the sudden, loud thud just outside her door through a thunderstorm. Up from her bed she darted, grabbing a laser pistol filched from the city and a flashlight, and slid to the door. Silently outside she crept . . .

And dropped the light source into the mud with a loud gasp, for having fallen onto her front step, now struggling to his feet, was Snively Kintobor, the one and only nephew of Dr. Robotnik. “Oh God!” she choked. Her hand, with the pistol, jolted up to firing position.

His eyes locked on her taut frame for an instant, the shrill whirr of the laser charging in the weapon she outstretched. Yet the skin hung pale and drained on his wet and mud-caked face, the listless expression into which it was twisted unchanging. And then, with a swallow and a fierce effort, as if reconsidering some previous intended action, he pivoted slowly until his back faced her weapon. He did not tear those shimmering blue eyes from her until the last.

Sally’s breath caught. Her wrist began to tremor as an enemy of eleven torturous years calmly, steadily produced distance between them, his body growing smaller and smaller over the horizon. Yes, her opportunity to eliminate one pivotal figure of her people’s strife slithered quietly from her fingers, as quickly as he had come. Cold, trembling fingers.

And yet the trigger finger would not budge. The Princess of Acorn gulped back a frustrated sob. She could not do it, because he was trusting her not to—trusting her mercy. But a Kintobor! Robotnik’s nephew! Oh, please, stop. Stop so that I can shoot you. Be a coward like you always have been, please! Never again such a chance . . . But to do it to his back . . . and he knew it, he knew she wouldn’t do it that way. Trust and understanding. That was what had been in those damned longsuffering eyes. He was desperate, more so than usual somehow, a beggar gobbling the breadcrumbs of kindness that anyone in existence might throw him. Pathetic. How could she, an Acorn, shoot a man when he was so far down? And yet . . .

Sally put the pistol back into her belt, and glided over to the security panel.

As if sensing her action, silent and swift though it was, Snively halted and turned back around to face her—as her finger brushed over the intercom button. Again she grew taut, searching his face for a hint of wickedness or subversion.

Nothing. He merely stood, back to her, neck stretched around, eyes observing her. He was waiting—almost expectant. At once she could not do it.

Her hand fell to her side, and slowly, so slightly that it almost seemed a meaningless shudder, she nodded her head at him once. Still he stared. Then his lips twitched, gradually curling into a grateful smile.

And Robotnik’s nephew turned and walked on into the obscurity of the forest. The silence that had enshrouded the entire encounter, except for the gentle patter of rainfall, persisted. Sally realized she was again alone, again safe—she had been in imminent danger—had so much opportunity and had been so nearly been tempted to murder . . . and not one light had gone on in any window in any of the huts.

A nightmare within her own mind, as far as Knothole, in its own tranquil slumber, was concerned. Yet an infamous scoundrel had prowled their terrain and their monarch had borne another burden upon her shoulders unbeknownst to them.

The relief came flooding to her overwhelmingly, all at once. She gulped, choked, and staggered back into her hut, slammed the door and collapsed against it sobbing.

A creak. Then, a crash, sharp and sudden.

Sally hiccupped and swallowed back her tears. She tossed her head fiercely in order to clear her vision of her tousled and ragged hair, struggling against the wet floor to stand alert. Before she even managed this, still twisted and on the ground, she was presented with the filth-covered and slouching form of Snively.

“How did you get in here?” she roared, fumbling for the pistol. Foolish of her to allow him to trick her that way!

Snively began to utter that whimpering, plaintive noise he used to make whenever Robotnik had threatened to beat him to a pulp. It was then that Sally became aware that he had no intentions of moving from his place in the middle of her bedroom, where his seeping clothes were making a murky muddy puddle on the carpet, in the dark beside the open window through which he’d apparently clambered. She found his face in the shadows; his lip was actually quavering, like that of a lost and petrified child.

Sally was at once both stunned and repulsed at his weakness, something she used to find comical when Sonic used to tease the peevish Overlander during their missions. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, maintaining more vocal restraint this time.

“I. . . “ He emerged slowly from the corner, wringing thin hands, wiping distractedly at his forehead, on which she spotted a small trickling river of redness. Now that he was within touching distance, she discovered how merciless the stormy Great Forest evening had been to him. Her stare followed one troubled hand’s route to his matted hair, scratching haplessly at a field of mud clumps, brambles and thistles. Thorns covered a torn, soiled and bastardized version of his officer’s uniform. Scratches danced all across his exposed forearms and biceps, all seeming to point towards a hideous black bruise in the center of his elbow. While the scratches had been the work of the unwelcoming natural foliage, Sally knew she need not ask from whom he had received that wound: a creature who had thankfully never set foot in the forest. Anger swelled in her chest at the pathetic little man’s association with the despot. Yes, that was what he got for never switching over to the side of the righteous all these years. She delighted in that bruise, almost thanked Robotnik for inflicting it.

And yet . . .on Snively’s face was such profound and rare earnest, such confusion and befuddlement, that her disgust subsided. “I . . .” he started again, in the careful tone of one near tears who does not want the humiliation of a broken voice. His cracked nevertheless, even in the utterance of that single word, and he winced.

“You what?” she prodded, slowly rising to her feet and making her way towards the alarm panel by the door, the panel which only moments ago she had visited for the same exact reason. This time he was groveling; this time she could do it. “Come on, out with it!”

“I . . .” carried on a whimper and finished with a soft sob, as, self-abandoning, he shrugged, “I just realized that I have no place else to go.” In what appeared to be a bizarre, clumsy sort of muscle spasm, his hands jerked across his face and hid it, and his shoulders shook once or twice as a peculiar wordless noise escaped his lips, before he was able to look at her through a visage of perfect wretchedness. Not the best actor or con artist on Mobius could have feigned that look.

Sally blinked. Her finger faltered once again on the control panel, her brows furrowed. “What?”

“He . . . he kicked me out.”

“Who did?”

“Naugus. He told me I wasn’t even worth killing. I wasn’t even ‘a big enough threat to give him indigestion.’ Just a pathetic little human, a waste of cells. ‘After all,’ he said,” and here Snively’s desolate voice acquired the wheezy rasp of Naugus’s with remarkable accuracy, with cynical despair, “ ‘the Freedom Fighters will probably string you up from the nearest tree when they find you.’ Worthless, and all that rot. Just a matter of time.” Again his voice cracked and he hid face in hands.

Sally just stood there slack-jawed, unbelieving. Surely this was a dream. Of all people in Robotnik’s forces to falter, the original arrogant twerp, the man who was egomaniac second only to his uncle, who weeks ago had exacted his own Mobian-hating empire, the least likely to ever admit wrong or to humble himself . . . of all the inconceivable . . . “Snively,” she breathed, “are you defecting?”

He bit his lip and looked at her, lost. His eyes grew wide with the implications of such a question. Are you turning on the actions of the past eleven years? On all you stood for? Are you willing to look your extremely dangerous uncle in the face, not caring how many bones he might break in your puny body, and tell him, “we were wrong—you were wrong—I should have stayed with father, I should never have come across the border and left him and our home when only a foolish boy of fourteen, and furthermore if I had known what you were going to do to good King Max, I would have squealed on you in a second now that I know”? Now that I know that . . . I was . . . wrong? Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Oh God . . .

Snively was unable to speak. Afraid to undertake such responsibility. He swallowed at her, his eyes rolled up in his head as he clenched his teeth and nodded at her rapidly, frenziedly. It was a nod of “yes.”

Sally leaned back against the door, smiling in bafflement. “Well, I’ll be . . . this is certainly . . . unexpected.”

“Damn right,” he mumbled, one hand brushing across his stomach as it began to gurgle and churn. “Oh . . . Where is your lavatory?” Urgency fueled these last words.

Sally was pushing the intercom button. “My what?”

“Your toilet!”

She gestured to the room directly to her left. “Right here. Why do you ask?” Although she already guessed the feeble response--“ I . . . I think I’m going to be sick”—and was not inclined to stop him as he stumbled inside and shut the door, collapsing in a faint on his way past the sink.

Vague dismay took hold of Sally as she heard the dull thud from within her bathroom. With a sigh, she finally pressed the intercom button and stated, “Geoffrey, we’ve got a Code Red here . . . um . . . in my lavatory.”

A bawdy Australian voice crackled over the microphone. “Your what?”

“My toilet.”

“Oh . . I see. Be right over, luv.”

The emergency council meeting at the bridge felt chillier than usual, the collaborations among the young creatures carried with a morbid thrill, with excited and disturbed whispers.

“Just let me take care of the nasty little cur,” Geoffrey St. John nearly bellowed, swaggering to the middle of the circle of Freedom Fighters. A towering, iron creature with muscles that threatened to burst from beneath his bristling black fur, he cut a persuasive figure there in the dim, chilly midmorning. “Don’t believe that nonsense he’s spouting! Tryin’ to make bleedin’ hearts out of us all, ya know!” He cracked his knuckles rapidly, eagerly. His eyes grew hooded with memories of past atrocities he’d faced at the hands of Snively’s hairless human race. Harder the knuckles cracked—louder and harder.

Sonic, perched precariously on the edge of the bridge wall, snorted. “Aw, Geoff, c’mon! Snively hasn’t got enough options to pull that kind of stunt,” he crowed. “Not at this point in the game. Besides, he ain’t even smart enough to.”

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Sonic,” Uncle Chuck injected firmly. “I’m not usually the one to agree with St. John’s militancy, but old Snively’s about as crafty as his uncle. Maybe worse. I can’t tell you how many times he almost caught me spying on Robotnik, when none of the other commanders—not even the doc himself, for that matter—caught on. I’d watch that boy carefully, whatever you decide to do.”

“But he is pretty desperate, y’all,” Bunnie pressed, sidling up to Sally, who sat with her feet dangling in the water and her head in her hands in contemplation. “I don’t think he’d push the envelope if we were his last hope.”

“He came in drunk,” Rotor offered. “Totally disgruntled, too. Really skinny and hungry. And sick. Man, is he ever sick--coughing up blood.”

“He’s always drunk!” Sonic exclaimed, exasperated. Then he paused, remembering the sight of the hated young Overlander doubled over on the metal floor of Central Command only weeks ago, helplessly hacking up his guts. “Kinda pathetic, huh? Maybe we should hear his side, try and help him…”

“Are you saying we should trust him?” Geoffrey spat, charging at the three. He jabbed a finger at Bunnie. “He did this to you, disfigured you like this, and you’re still the first one that he’s duped? Think, girl! Just look at the damage he’s done! Look how he repaid kindness in the past!”

“Yeah, in the past,” she began uncertainly. “I dunno, Geoffrey, I dunno why I’m hesitating. I know Snively’s a rotten no-good . . .a . . . a wimp. But I guess that’s why I want to give him another chance.”

Another chance. The words stuck in Sally’s head. Somehow, they were profoundly convincing, coming from the mouth of one of Snively’s roboticzer victims, coming in words that lacked all hate or ill will towards him.

Sally hated Snively to depths only touched by her contempt for Robotnik himself. Never in all her years had she known a person consumed with such a mixture of cynicism, spite, despair, and weakness. Yes, he was smart—dangerously brilliant in a way that did secretly parallel his uncle’s intellect. This, however, had rarely concerned the safety of the Freedom Fighters until now; subduing Snively’s brief succession to Robotnik’s “throne” had been child’s play, for the boy’s feeble, courage-drained heart and fondness for liquor kept his ambitions in check and his senses dulled. To Robotnik, and now apparently, to Naugus, Snively was no more than a bumbling, putrid lackey. Snively hated, whined, and moaned about everything. Otherwise, though, he was pure ice—no mercy, no warmth. Ice. Therein lied the hazard, in his soullessness. And yet . . . the least she could do, she realized, was follow Bunnie’s example. Bunnie had been hurt by this ice demon too, but she did not hate. “Contact Dr. Quack immediately,” she ordered, pulling herself to her feet. “Let’s move the prisoner to the medical hut. And then,” remembering Rotor’s remark, “the detox ward.”

“Princess, “ St. John gritted, “you’re only going to repeat history. Let me get rid of him for you, for us all—“

“That’s enough, Commander,” Sally tossed over her shoulder as she joined Sonic and the other dispersing Mobians. She did not look back. She was afraid to turn back now, for fear that she had chosen the wrong path.

As Bunnie hustled in Sally’s direction, a cold smooth hand fell on her arm and caused a severe chill to race up her spine. She turned to face a tall lanky Robian dog hiding timidly inside a black cloak. His eyes were an arresting, grieving, anguished pale gold, watery and doleful. But there was such warmth, and gentleness, in his smile. Her heart fluttered with sympathy; she always found it much more difficult to hate a robot who had once been free, a creature of flesh and blood. After all, this had once been Uncle chuck’s fate, and almost her own. A life stolen, this dog was. His eyes had good reason to be weighted with sorrow.

He offered her a lit match to ware off the darkness—oddly enough, the thing was sticking out of the end of his metallic index finger, and the brilliant flame that had lit it still flickered like a built-in Bunsen burner in his thumb. “Handy-dandy,” he remarked, his fanged grin broadening as he nodded at his torch. Bunnie couldn’t help but return the smile at the sound of his voice—a high, pure, sweet tenor, full of kindness, but quivering with nerves. He reminded her of a cross between Tails and Crabmeat, one of Robotnik’s less-notable lackeys, though bestowed with clumsier, gawky reserve than both. Countless bristles of organic hair seemed fit to burst from between the nuts and bolts in his limbs, defying his metallic shell.

“Handy-dandy,” she repeated softly, taking the match from him. “What can I do for ya?”

The dog’s expression grew grave, his eyes darting about the bridge. “A moment in private, if you please?”

“Can’t it wait till morning, Sugar-pup?” She queried through a yawn.

He took both her hands in his now, causing her to jump, a plaintive whimper gathering in his throat. “Oh, please, Miss, yes, morning’s fine as long as you’ll listen! It’s a most urgent matter. It concerns your new prisoner of war. You see, he and I are well-acquainted, and I believe I have some pertinent information that might sway the decision of his . . . his fate.”

She frowned. “You mean you know Snively Kintobor? Personally? Whoa, there, hold the phone, boy! Who are you?”

He cowered more deeply into the cloak. “Please, Miss, that must remain a secret! I’m afraid that my previous . . . alliances . . . might make the general public less than receptive of my presence.”

Bunnie slid her hands out of his, growing defensive. “You mean you used to be a . . .”

“An officer in the New Order, yes. Fourth-in-Command, to be honest. But since Naugus took over, I’ve run away as a refugee. Trying to follow old Snively to the bitter end, truly. Anyway, I couldn’t stand that android Packbell after Robotnik lost the power to keep him in line. He’s such a grouch.” He shrugged, still chipper and cheerful, as if discussing something as insignificant as the weather.

Bunnie swallowed. Hard. “Ah. Okay, then, honey, but, mind you, without a trial, or authorized entry, you’ve got to leave the vicinity as soon as we’ve finished talking, or you’ll be lynched by ol’ Geoffrey for sure!”

He nodded. “Understood.”

“Well, then. Why me? Why not the princess or Sonic, who have more influence around here?”

He stared deeply into her. Those pale eyes regained their sorrow. “Because I believe the information I have to relate is of especial significance to you in particular—to you and your . . . “ He glanced at her bionic arm and legs, pain and remorse weighting his features, but politeness keeping his stare from lingering on her. “. . . your situation.”

“Oh. Oh, I . . . see.”

The soft glow of morning in his face, warm and contenting even through his closed eyelids. The cool, fresh feel of bedsheets enveloping his body. Clean crisp air through his nostrils. Utter peaceful silence, except for a steady metallic clanking by his ear. Snively was vaguely aware of having been lifted into a rickety cot, floating, floating, or perhaps rolling down some dimly-lit corridor that stank of moss and wet dirt, hearing muffled distant voices shouting words that he knew but somehow didn’t comprehend, harsh hands probing his body as one distinctive voice said something like “concealed weapons.” He had laughed then, or rather gurgled quietly in his half-coherence, at their silliness; what good would any weapon do for someone who was unconscious? The fools. But he was so tired, so very tired, he had no will to resist and finally the hands left him alone, and then there was the blessed warmth and silence and he was here. But now something gnawed at his attention. Something cold rushing through his arm. An IV needle.

Wait a minute.

Snively bolted upright in his cot. His eyes, azure daggers, drank in the room and its occupants. He was in one of those accursed little forest huts, more spacious than usual, assumedly the makeshift hospital of the furrballs. And just to top it all off, the room was crammed with every possible Freedom Fighter to whom he’d ever become a despised enemy, every imaginable creature who’d ever made his job as the Chief Commander of Robotropolis a living hell. There was Geoffrey St. John, that rank, bigoted skunk, at the door, chewing idly on a blade of grass and staring outside, murmuring at the bright-eyed little fox freak, Tails, who kept trying to squeeze his way inside, to “scram.” Three of them sat near his bed at a wooden table whispering intently among themselves: the thunder-voiced ram, Ari, the fat walrus, Rotor, and that high-strung, anal French coyote, “Pierre” or “Francois,” or “Antoine,” or something like that. The half-robotic rabbit, with her potent green eyes and her confident swagger, was pacing from one side of the room to the other; apparently her feet were the source of the bothersome noise that had awakened him. His eyes rested on Sonic and Sally arguing heatedly in the corner, and widened with alarm, for somehow, the sight of the two of them finally registered in his mind where he was and why. His mouth twisted in a passionate current of underbreath curses, frothing, erupting with a decisive, “Bloody hell!” as he wriggled against his bonds like a mad octopus. He growled, bared his teeth like fangs and tossed his disheveled hair violently from his face. He jerked harder; the chains held fast.

He glared up, gasping wildly, and the sweat glistening on his forehead combined with the chalky hue of his cheeks and the frenzied hair like molting hawk feathers gave him the appearance of quite an agitated ghost.

The two Freedom Fighters stopped their exchange of words instantly and turned to face him, astonished.

He moaned. A pathetic noise, begun as a low cryptic grunt and ended in a sickly whimper. Thus defeated, he slouched back against the bed and set his jaw, engaged in a hardcore sulk. “Good morning,” he mumbled, scowling at the floor. “If you’re going to torture or kill me, then let’s be snappy about it, shall we?”

Sonic shook his head, snorting rhythmically, apparently laughing. “Man, Snerdly, you are such a Weird-As-“ His brassy, vulgar address was cut short by a sharp jab in the ribs from the monarch. Sally glared at her companion. “That’ll do, Sonic,” she hissed.

The three table-mates rose in unison and Ari cautiously approached the prisoner’s cot, gently loosing Snively’s arm-straps, while the coyote flailed his arms uselessly and trumpeted a loud, inexplicable cry of “Sacre Bleu Cheese!” Tails gasped and disappeared down the hallway, Rotor backed to the doorway where Geoffrey stood dark-faced with hand on his crossbow, itching to use it, and Bunnie just stood there looking at Snively as if observing a gnat. “Howdy, there,” she said, fingering her robotic arm threateningly.

Behind Geoffrey, blinking confusedly at the scene and hastening to hide its face whenever Snively glanced in his direction, was a nameless Robian dog. It did not make any motion to intrude upon the scene. Puh. Stupid ninny, probably used to be one of the worker bots he’d kicked around before Naugus’s coup, now lingering around here in the shadows begging for breadcrumbs like some pathetic refugee. Just like him. And what was it afraid of? Him, its old slavedriver? Wasn’t he chained down, a threat totally and completely expired? A thing to mock? He snorted, more deeply irritated than ever at the thought of his wounded dignity.

He turned back to the rabbit. “Too bad I gave you that hybrid body of yours, or I might have a chance to escape, come back with a SWAT troop, and finish the job,” he sneered, feeling oddly bold, feeling a desperate urge to hurt someone irrevocably, a desperate hollow fury. His words seemed to cut the rabbit straight to the heart, for her face scrunched up in a mixture of anger and pain and she turned her back to him, her hands raking through her hair. Antoine and Rotor moved towards him simultaneously, growling.

“Don’t.” Sally stepped forward and they immediately withdrew.

Snively cackled at their complacency. The IV needles must have had some sort of relaxant in them, because he felt suddenly very giddy, very drunk. Or maybe he just didn’t care anymore. “Good God, woman, and here I always thought you were the sweet and virtuous type, my uncle’s antithesis, but here we have another dictatorship--”

“If it is your wish to die, or simply to reject our hospitality, Chief Commander Kintobor, we’d be more than willing to oblige,” she cut him off crisply and mercilessly and those royal eyes flashed vengeance. “But since you can’t even seem to discern between poisonous and nonpoisonous indigenous fruits for your meals,” here a triumphant smile, “I sincerely doubt you’ll choose that option.”

He glowered at her, severely sobered and embarrassed to boot, remembering his trip to her bathroom the night before. “Touche, madam.” Then his eyebrows rose. “Hospitality?”

“That’s right. As in kindness. Something at which you’re unpracticed. All you have to do is tell us what’s going on in Robotropolis under Naugus.”

Snively’s eyes became like those of a caged animal. In one lightning motion he jerked the IV from his wrist and bolted. Geoffrey had anticipated the swift maneuver; over the bellows of protest emitted as the speedy little Overlander evaded the clutches of the group, Kintobor’s whole body propelled by vicious unearthly energy, the skunk thrust himself in the door’s path—slammed his chest full force into Snively—and tackled the fugitive. Robotnik’s nephew battled rabidly, spitting and growling and clawing, but his physical superior soon had him pinned. The two men eyed each other with staggering contempt—both with their stunning blue eyes.

Geoffrey’s eyes bore a deep metallic luster; Snively’s were a pale, pure hue—cracking with thousands of volts of electricity, flashing and glimmering like ice. As his captor held him fast on the concrete with a firm wrist—no, apparently their floors were not made of dirt as Snively’s tender head discovered—the Overlander wriggled only once, violently, then grew taut. His lips parted slightly, curled into a half-sneer, half-snarl—and air hissed out between his teeth in a low, bestial growl as he glared up at the skunk.

Geoffrey’s neck hairs quivered; if he weren’t so angry, the demonic noise might have made him squirm. “Backed against the wall, Milord ‘Snively the Great’?” he mocked.

“You just try me some other time, without shackles or a cell, man to man,” Kintobor smirked. “You may have brawn, but I have skill—“

“A real man,” St. John retorted, pressing his wrist down harder on Snively’s chest, “doesn’t need ‘some other time’ to prove himself.”

Snively’s hissing grew louder as Geoffrey pressed. He began to remind the spectators of a velociraptor, one of those skinny, bloodthirsty little dinosaurs in the storybooks. “You common filth. You’ve made a fatal enemy just now.” Venomously he spat in Geoffrey’s face.

The skunk choked on his own rage, thrusting out his crossbow and aiming it at the unblinking, indeed smiling, Overlander’s face. Reminded of how Geoffrey had once done something similar to him for displaying comparable sauciness, Sonic stepped forward and injected, “C’mon, Geoff, he’s not worth it.” He took St. John’s tight arm when the skunk didn’t respond, seeking Sally’s expression for guidance, and added, “Y’know, King Max would probably like to have say in this guy’s fate.”

Geoffrey shut his eyes in the effort to control his rage. “Do you really think he’d disagree with me?”

“Geoffrey.” Sally’s voice had grown weary now. She rubbed her temples. “We promised not to harm Snively. Let’s keep our word, please.”

Before the skunk could act, Ari was behind Snively hoisting the prisoner to his feet. Geoffrey rose dejectedly and hobbled to the door. The Overlander swallowed hard to control a rush of vertigo; he teetered badly in his gait as the ram led him back to his cot. “For Pete’s Sake, kid, you’re bleeding all over the floor,” Ari remarked, handing Snively a towel to cover his throbbing, punctured wrist. “Really, there’s no need for dramatics around here.” The act of kindness drained all the fun out of Snively’s actions, and he was again drowned in bitter melancholy. And something else. Guilt? No, of course not! Although . . .

“What are you trying to hide, Snively, if you really have, as you told me, ‘no place else to go’?” A sigh hung in Sally’s voice and in her drooping posture, her sagging eyes.

Inexplicably, he couldn’t help but comment. “You look tired.”

She cocked her head. “Um, yes, I am.”

“Why, pray?”

She clicked her tongue once to indicate her mounting annoyance. “Because, Mr. Kintobor, I was up all night discussing what to do about you with my peers.”

Oops. “Well,” he began, clearing his throat, “I suppose I, uh . . . “ but, in his attempt at sangfroid, only managed to hem and haw awkwardly.

“If we keep at this rate,” the reedy voice of the Frenchman pierced Snively’s mumbles, “then I fear we shall be beating around the bush, as you say, until next month.”

“Not if I can help it,” St. John murmured murderously, still wiping off his face. And Bunnie was coming forward again, her hand in a fist, held over his head, and Sonic was revving up one foot, all those razor quills set erect and poised to draw more blood. . .

“Fine, I’ll tell you why!” Snively shrieked with such explosive force that Sally jumped back several feet, clutching her little computer, Nicole, to her breast. “I was afraid, for God’s Sake! Afraid! Can’t you people understand that? Naugus is a powerful sorcerer! What in hell might he do if he discovered I squealed on him? What if he can hear us, all of us, right now?”

Tension seized the room. Sonic froze and the others gathered close to the bed. “Do you think that’s possible?” Sally asked urgently.

Snively grabbed his spinning head. “I don’t know!” he whined, overwhelmed. “And what gives you the idea that I’d be willing to help you, even if I knew it were safe to? You dirty rodents! You’ve made my life miserable!”

Sally did not respond. An emotional intensity far deeper than words could ever relate churned in her countenance. “How dare you?” her face seemed to scream. “So you won’t help us?” her voice breathed, as she leaned in at a hair’s breadth from his face. “Even though, last night, you claimed a full desire to defect to our side of this war, you won’t help us?”

He looked at her a long time before responding. “No,” he said. “No, I guess I won’t.”

The anonymous Robian suddenly, frenziedly, ran from the room. Had Snively not been so intent upon the princess’s reaction to his craven change of heart, he would have found the robot’s departure unsettling.

Sally nodded.

A sleek, supple tan body—small and firm—a round, keen, alert face and short slender muzzle, eyes of crystalline sapphire that demanded respect and declared intuitive brilliance, sharp brows that furrowed pensively, delicate pursed lips, and a plentiful shock of fiery auburn hair constituted Princess Sally Acorn. It was none of these, nor even her royal status, but rather the pride of her carriage, the courage and regality of her posture, the core-shaking wrath that could rise in her stern, pure, energetic voice of justice and wit, the level-headed, cool rage of her face and words, that had always made her the Freedom Fighter that Snively hated, feared, and admired the most. She was smart and merciless, genuine and virtuous to a fault, undaunted as a robot and yet capable of the heartache of one whose spirit and soul still thrive. On many occasions he’d seen her weep, and yet her tears never gave him the impression of weakness. They only reaffirmed her reality, her existence, her rebellion against all that was dead and mindless and robotic. It was when she cried that he had, in the past, almost been compelled to flee his uncle and defect to the Freedom Fighters.

Almost. But then she had looked at him like she was looking at him now, demanding that he answer for his mistakes, with disgust and vengeance—and with loathing. And he had, as he did now, recoiled from such thoughts of bravery and honor. With his own resentment, at enemy and at self. “What?” he tried to growl, but it came out as more of a squeal. He squirmed; her eyes were challenging him.

And then she whispered that word, the word most attributed to him and him alone those past eleven years, her beautiful little face utterly crushed by disappointment, in a way that made even Sonic shudder, each letter lashed with contempt. “Coward,” she said. “You ungrateful coward.” Never in all his life had Snively imagined that kind of soft ferocity in a thousand of Robotnik’s tirades and rants. Not in a million of his bruises. Worst of all, he knew she was right. It felt like she’d broken his spine.

She turned away from him. “Geoffrey, lock this drunken creature up—in the Detoxification Ward.”

That night was to pass slowly and torturously for one forgotten human boy.

Morning came again to Knothole, an unseasonably hot morning, to the makeshift prison, and with it rays of fresh sunlight and the musky scent of wet earth after the torrential storm of the previous night. Freakish climate changes like this, believed to have been caused by the pollution Robotnik’s factories had done to the planet’s atmosphere, were no longer any big surprise to the Mobians. The light bearing down through the bars of the cell in which Snively lay were of nauseating intensity, blinding any who gazed upward, foretelling a humid and sweltering day ahead. Bunnie and her mysterious Robian friend with dark connections were consorting softly outside the prison.

“So he went back on his word again, did he?” The dog was smiling like a disappointed older sibling or parent who dotes on a delinquent child but also finds that child’s behavior heart-cutting.

“Never mind that!” Bunnie was volcanic, flailing her arms and bouncing up and down, her eyes bulging with the effort not to shout. “That’s old news! You mean to tell me that Snively once saved Amy Rose, at his own risk?”

“Yes. I do. Miss Rabbot, you must understand, Snively and I were dear friends at one point in our lives. I was orphaned at the age of five—when my parents were shot down by Overland troops while we were on a scouting mission for King Max. I don’t remember much of it, only that I was suddenly alone, wandering in the land of the enemy. A scrawny little human boy found me under a big pine tree behind his father’s mansion. He was a regular spoiled corker, a real smart-mouth brat, but he offered me food and shelter right off the bat—even though his father was an army general. We became fast friends—always jokingly called our friendship the war’s ‘secret peace treaty’. I followed my best friend to hell and back, literally, as a way of thanking him, even when I knew he was killing himself—when he fled the Overland to live with Julian.

“That boy, Miss Rabbot, was Snively. I know he’s changed—I know he’s done awful, cruel things to you and yours. Life’s really eroded away the kinder side of his nature, and he’s turned into a sneaky little brute—but please, try and give him a chance.” He wrung his hands and sniffed deeply, looking far into the distance beyond her. A new compassion surfaced on his face. “Try to muster the strength to forgive him the way I finally did.”

Bunnie, captivated by the story, found this final remark puzzling. “But you said he was your best friend. What could he have done to you that demanded forgiveness?”

“I have my reasons,” he interrupted stiffly, turning away. “Just trust me on that one. And now, I think I’d better take my leave. Please consider my words. ”

“Snively Kintobor!” Sally uttered the name crisply from the outside of the secluded detox chamber of Dr. Quack’s hut. She had an unpleasant duty to perform, and she wanted it over with quickly.

There was no response.

“Princess,” Quack offered softly, “if I may make a suggestion, detoxification is very harsh on the body. It might be wiser to visit the prisoner when he is a bit less . . . indisposed.”

“Don’t be a bleedin’ heart, Horatio,” Geoffrey St. John growled, rounding the corner of the hut with crossbow braced. Behind him trailed Ari, whose face was taut with a battle of negative emotions: anger, ill-ease, uncertainty. Coarsely the skunk shoved past the duck, thrusting Quack off balance. A storm gathered on his face. “The little beggar, he can take it. Or worse, if I see fit. Go on in, Princess, I got your back.”

Quack sighed and shook his head. “Pointless,” he mumbled.

Sally entered, trailed by the doctor, Ari, and a particularly fiery Geoffrey. At once she was seized with an odd, uncomfortable feeling at what she beheld: In the farthest darkest corner, one pale hand clutching the bedpost, crouched Snively. Sally could not recall having ever seen any creature that so epitomized misery. His entire scant body, even within the folds of the oversized shirt and pants, was wracked with sporadic fits, tremors, his teeth chattering viciously. His free hand weakly massaged a pasty, chalk-white forehead and then raked through wild hair. With each tremor his nostrils flared, his hand flew to his temple, and the array of incoherent murmurs that escaped his lips rose to a pitiful, agonized variant of his usual whine, then dwindled again to mumbling.

“Bleedin’ hell, Kintobor!” Geoffrey snarled. The roaring volume of his voice, echoing madly off the walls of the room, seemed to inflict a truly excruciating wave of pain over the human, who groaned loudly and grimaced. And yet the skunk continued. “You’re the most disgusting creature I’ve ever laid eyes on! Pull yourself together—you’re in the presence of royalty.”

At the word “royalty” Snively’s misery seemed momentarily to ebb. His eyes, spitefully glistening as ever, rose to confront the princess through dark thick locks of hair, and the contempt in them was staggering. He set his jaw, wracked by another violent shiver. Then, in a very frail and wretched voice, he croaked, “I hate you.”

Sally’s heart, having found the charity to flutter, somehow, at the sight of his state, hardened in an instant. “It’s a mutual affection, Commander Kintobor,” she hissed. And a bridge of understanding and communication collapsed.

“Oh!” A more vicious seizure. “Oh, go away!” He clutched his head. “What can you want? God, woman, you call me cold! Do you delight in my suffering?”

“Don’t put your uncle’s crimes on me, Snively, nor the poor personal judgment that exposed you to him. Don’t pile your bitterness, your crimes, or your guilt on our shoulders. We don’t deserve your childish vengeance.” The room was mesmerized with the softly ferocious power of Sally’s voice.

Except for Snively, who only seemed irked by it. “Yet you exhibit that same ‘childish vengeance’ as we speak,” he hissed.

“Hardly. If that were true, you’d already be dead. Now, get up and act like a man.”

He stared at her. Oh, if looks could kill.

“Now, Snively!” A scream this time, making him scramble painfully to his feet, the unnerving glare on his face shattered. It seemed as though she’d never seen it. “I have been told that tomorrow your detoxification process will be completed. If you are well-rested and sound of mind, I would like you to be moved back to your holding cell, where you will begin the gradual process of achieving your . . . “ she paused and gulped, disturbed by the word she then uttered, “citizenship.”

His jaw dropped and he faltered, nearly collapsing back to the floor, at the word. “My what?”

“You heard me. Against my better judgment, and my father’s, Bunnie Rabbot has asked fervently that your life be spared and that you be granted immunity from exile.”

Snively was rendered utterly speechless. “Why?” he squeaked.

“She believes that there is some good in all life, even yours, and that, therefore, your own conscience will be a far more bitter punishment for you to bear than any hangman’s nose. But, more significantly, Bunnie believes in second chances—for all of us that Robotnik betrayed.” The princess crossed her arms and fixed a piercing, scrutinizing stare on the Overlander. “Even for his right-hand man.”

Snively was so stupefied that his characteristic volatile darkness at the utterance of his Uncle’s title did not even register. “I, I, I d-don’t . . I don’t know what to say,” he stammered. His bewilderment did not touch Sally’s heart.

“Say you won’t disappoint a compassionate person who has put a great deal of faith in you,” she demanded. “Again, that is. Don’t make a fool out of her, Snively.”

A vague memory in the back of Snively’s mind, once so inconsequential to him, grew sharp, lurid, intense: A boy of sixteen, months after he coup, he was laboring over the mainframe computer in the Heart Citadel of Robotropolis, deep in the bowels of the building in the roboticization chamber, scrambling to meet the daily quota of 150 roboticized Mobians per diem. All that mattered was his own hide, his own well-being, as mechanically he ordered Mobian after terrified Mobian into the tube, punched the button, and watched them robbed of their being inch by inch of flesh and fur and mind and heart. A short power surge in the main generator by the then-small band of Freedom Fighters fried the tube’s circuits; Snively was forced to prepare the back-up, more crude roboticization “table,” reminiscent of the execution tables used for lethal injections in the Overlands, while a dispatch of SWATbots assailed the rebels.

Five minutes later, one SWAT marched in the roboticization chamber carrying a very young jade-eyed female rabbit. She was putting up quite a struggle for her size, but weeping through her kicks and screams.

Snively didn’t care. Pure and simple. Indeed, he was worse than apathetic: he was pleased. Elated. For this one final creature, this child, would sufficiently excel the 150-count quota for the day. No beatings, no harsh words or admonitions today, from his uncle. Joy. Joy despite her suffering, whoever she was.

Calmly he had seized the child’s fragile arms and strapped them down, calmly while tears fell like a torrent down her cherub face; calmly he had looked her in the eye and droned, “You are hereby charged with treason”--treason, a child charged with treason?—“the penalty for which is roboticization. Prepare yourself for the greatest honor bestowed upon a mortal—servitude under our lord and master Dr. Ivo Robotnik . . . “ and such mad declarations that had become numb protocol, while the little rabbit pleaded for mercy.

And then he had pushed the full power button and smiled while a five-year-old Bunnie Rabbot watched her own body become alien.

He had smiled. It had seemed like all the vengeance he had ever felt, all the neglect and disapproval with which he’d been gorged, could finally be regurgitated into the pain suffered by this tiny stranger. Misplaced rage, misdirected revenge. A hideous, beautiful feeling.

And when Sonic had burst into the room, himself a young child, trashed the roboticizer and rescued the rabbit halfway through the awful process, Snively had been disappointed to the core.

And surely she remembered him smiling, too. Even now, the same memory must be rushing through her mind—ravaging, traumatizing. Her own physique was a daily reminder of his pointless, hollow cruelty. How could she even conceive of . . .

Of forgiving him?

“I don’t think I can make any promises,” he breathed, sinking to the floor. His eyes were heavy, burning. “I don’t think I deserve anyone’s trust. No, not like that.”

And the whole universe, to him, in this confession, went topsy-turvy and inside out. It all changed.

Dr. Quack made a startled noise in his throat at the meek declaration. Ari rose an eyebrow. And Geoffrey’s eyes narrowed to untrusting slits; angrily he gnawed at the end of a blade of grass. Sally drummed her hand on Nicole’s keyboard, attempting to appear unsurprised by her captive’s sudden humility. “Well, for once I concur, Mr. Kintobor—and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to gain our trust if I were you. You may eventually become a citizen of this kingdom, but you will be restricted to the prison for the remainder of your stay in Knothole—for the rest of your life. Don’t expect to associate with us until you’ve earned the right, or to gain respect from us until you have shown the same decency towards those you hurt and abused. And while you may gain respect, don’t ever expect to gain my affection, or that of my friends. Ever.”

Snively’s head was bowed. He glared at the crimson band strapped about his left arm, where once a bold black “R” for “Robotnik” had been blazoned on his Robotropolis militia uniform. But this band, sewn by Sally’s nannie Rosie by order of the king and fastened permanently to his prisoner’s shirt during his stay in detox, read, “Traitor.” A permanent, irrevocable, eternal stigma.

And he hated them, and himself, beyond words.

“I just admitted I was wrong. How can I ‘earn’ anything from you? What more do you want?”

Sally’s eyes glittered with coldness. She had no intentions of giving any quarter. “Proof,” she said.

“Your friend Bunnie doesn’t seem to need any proof.”

“Well, then, I suppose that makes her a greater person than I,” Sally retorted wearily, her voice wavering near tears of exhaustion. “So, do your advocate a favor, Snively: Deserve her.”

“I don’t want her advocacy,” he moaned. “She doesn’t need that. I’ll at least do the kid that favor. She doesn’t really understand . . . ”

“Listen, Snively,” she snarled, aiming an index finger at the Overlander, and making Quack, Ari, and St. John start. “You had the power to decide our fates once. Well, now it’s our turn, and we intend to do a better job with your fate. We intend to be better than you were. Live with that.”

Then came the transfer between detox ward and holding cell. Geoffrey volunteered to ‘guard’ Snively from the mob that would surely crowd around desiring the Overlander’s swift end, but for his own hateful reasons. He had insisted that Snively discard his hospital dress and re-clothe himself in what remained of his uniform. Through this, Geoffrey wanted to get some things straight. For Snively, the walk between the two buildings would be one to remember. As they crossed the green, the skunk wasn’t restraining him physically in any manner. No, he was restraining him using a far worse tactic: words.

St. John’s voice, a menacing whisper, drowned Snively’s ears. No matter where the Overlander tried to veer, he couldn’t evade the skunk, who followed him like a leech to warm wet skin, who leered in his face. “Don’t get too cocky, you traitor! Just because the Princess spared you doesn’t mean other ‘unfortunate accidents’ can’t happen to you. I’ve got my eyes on you. You’re one puny man in a sea of very angry, very vengeful natives. They ache for your blood, you know, you human filth. One sign of subversion, and I’ll see to it that you’re strung up by your privates. Are you listening to me, boy? You had better be certain you thank her devotedly, with your life. She’s given you a second chance at it, damn you! It’s the least you can do!”

Then he seized Snively’s arms and shook his slack, passive frame once, violently. The brittle brown carpet of grass and desperate barren trees that stretched across the landscape before them lurched before the young Overlander’s eyes, becoming abstract speckles like the bleary, earthen-hued splattered streaks of a modern painting. Stomach acid and nausea, mingled with a far more hideous, ferocious rush of hatred, swelled in his chest and burned in his throat, and finally he could no longer tolerate it.

On one crisp surge of force, Snively shoved both of St. John’s iron hands from his shoulders. He jutted his lower jaw belligerently, wanting so dreadfully to pull a knife and finish the cur; he felt like he’d swallowed a blazing torch. But something pulled him back, compelled his own fists to hang inanimate at his sides. Painfully he swallowed his rage, while the startled skunk still gaped at the unexpected burst of self-defense. Their eyes met, and suddenly Snively’s reluctance seeped away to unveil the old familiar scorn he’d struggled to restrain. He smiled; oh, but it was appalling in its arrogance—a slow, wicked slither—and calmly he licked his sneering lower lip. His eyes glimmered with the joyless luster of a cadaver.

St. John snorted a deep breath, disgusted, but nevertheless as disturbed as he had been the other day inside the hospital hut.

“Smashing,” Snively hissed, in a voice of nerve-peeling condescension. He drank in his assailant’s shock with glee. “You know, old sport, if it’s that important to you, I shall frolic back to my quarters and jot down a memo at once.”

Geoffrey recovered quickly and grinned, something having just dawned on him; it gave Snively a sinking feeling, as though he’d been baited excellently into a trap. “Why don’t I ‘jot’ that memo for you?” the skunk chuckled. “Give you something to make you a bit more grateful?” And with that, he withdrew from the Overlander and stepped inside the nearest hut; calmly he leaned out the window and watched.

Snively swallowed hard; immediately the act attracted at least a dozen Knothole residents, wary of his vulnerability, towards him, their hands outstretched with the same bloodlust of which St. John had just spoken. Among them was Griff, a stolid young goat, Canus, one of the Wolf-Chief Lupe’s followers, a rhino named Pollo, the black cat Hershey, and a bear named Dirk. All of them had experienced particularly nasty run-ins in the past with the young Overlander. “Get him!” a portly pig named Hamlin bellowed, followed by a chorus of angry grunts by his compatriots. “Get that treason-monger!” They encircled him, jeering and screaming oaths.

Snively cowered, his eyes frantic wide saucers. Instantly he was sorry for his sarcasm towards his benefactors, but he would not allow himself to apologize--what did that matter now? He had no way out, and he was too weak even to put up a decent fight. Still his frail arms flew up in front of his face, trying to shield it from his attackers.

The effort was futile. The men closed in on the Overlander, shoving him into the gathering crowd. Snively landed against the cat, Hershey, who shrieked a curse in his face and clawed at what remained of his New Order uniform, until only his plain white undershirt remained. The feline moved so quickly, in such a rage, and the laughter and cheers that bombarded him, praising her actions, were so overwhelming, that he could not even ware her off. She grabbed his Chief Commander badge; as she threw it into the crowd and they trampled it underfoot, Snively swore at himself for being foolish enough to forget discarding it earlier. Surely now they believed he wore it to deliberately defy them.

Hamlin picked up a rock and implored his peers to do likewise. Drooling with wicked glee, he thrust the thing at Snively. It struck him over the eyebrow and sent him reeling. Blood trickled down into his eye and impaired his vision; before he could stand, the mob jabbed at his ribs with sharp sticks and bramble twigs, each screeching in turn his or her particular grievance with the Overlander.

“You shot my brother in the leg during a mission! Now he’s crippled, you worthless human!”

“You roboticized my mother and my sisters! I was an orphan by the age of five!”

“You killed my son! You deserve to die!”

And on and on rang the accusations, drowning the Overlander who sprawled on the dirt floor of his enemy’s abode. “Oh, God,” he croaked, giving in, “this is hell.”

At that moment a pair of strong arms hoisted Snively to his feet. The mob immediately dispersed, fear in their eyes. Among them appeared a bewildered Geoffrey. “Your Majesty,” he sputtered at the unknown benefactor, “I . . . I thought you were otherwise occupied.”

Snively froze. He turned slowly to face the creature who was his savior. The king himself. Behind him stood Sally, whose eyes rolled skyward in exasperation, and the ever-observant Ari.

Max looked deeply into Snively; it was indeed the same look he had used to scrutinize the Overlander many years ago, when he was a boy, when he first ventured across the Overlander Border and into Mobitropolis. Only now it was far more guarded, far less optimistic, and far wearier. And coated with wrath. He addressed St. John, but never once did those eyes of justice, filled with fire and lightning, storms and earthquakes, waver from Snively. “The racket these citizens are arousing could have been heard from the Floating Island, Geoffrey,” he rumbled. “I obviously had little other choice but to investigate. Might I ask who is responsible for the disturbance?”

Snively ached to murder Geoffrey for the following claim. “Sire, it is obvious who is to blame. Julian Kintobor’s nephew, here! Chaos follows the worthless little beggar like a pestilence!”

It was blatant that the king doubted this, well aware of Geoffrey’s bigotry towards humans. But the desire to acknowledge and confirm the accusation, unanimously supported, borne of a justifiable rage, manifested itself in the deep furrowing of his brows. He sighed, folding his arms over his massive chest. “Very well. I’ve some questions I’ve been meaning to ask this young man in person.”

Geoffrey smirked. “Of course, My King.”

“Thank you, Commander. That will be all.”

The smug expression on the skunk’s face deteriorated. “My lord?”

“It’s under my jurisdiction now, Geoffrey. I can handle it from here.” Max gestured at his servant. “You are dismissed.”

Geoffrey balked, guffawed, sputtered. “B-but he . . . shall I not see him disciplined, Sire?”

“That,” and the lightning sparks in the king’s eyes intensified, “will be determined shortly, Commander, by me. You may go now.” He looked testily at the crowd. “All of you.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Dejectedly Geoffrey marched away, following the dispersing mob and leaving Snively to face a far more feared authority. The man whom he had ultimately wronged. He gulped. His legs became jelly, and he sank to his knees.

“Up on your feet, boy, as I have just rendered you, and behave like a man of twenty-six years,” Max snarled, “and in doing so, show me a scrap of honor!”

This Snively hastened to do, but found himself too weak to accomplish. Ari assisted him; his face reddened with embarrassment.

The king grunted, shook his head, and continued. “Colin Kintobor, you disappoint me.”

Snively’s heart hardened. “You’re not the first to say such a thing, my lord,” he mumbled resentfully, eyes downcast.

“Then let me be the last!” the king roared, making him cower. “Boy, do you know the penalty for treason?”

It was at this moment that Robotnik’s nephew found it possible to meet eyes with his judge. He opened his mouth, but Max’s piercing glare overpowered him, and his own eyes again strayed. Only a wheeze escaped his lips.

“Look at me, child.” Not threatening, but rather firm and faintly mournful, was the king’s tone. And then a touch of a warning, an assurance that he hadn’t forgotten the magnitude of the boy’s crimes, seeped in as he prodded, “Murderer. Usurper. Do you know the penalty?”

Sally groaned, seating herself in a chair against the nearest hut wall. She rubbed her temples and awaited the eruption of either sauciness or groveling soon to ensue. But then Robotnik’s nephew looked away from the king and at her, and still . . .

Nothing.

There was no fuss, no extravagance, no bitterness or melodrama, no maudlin tears or wailing, no cowardice and whining for mercy, and no final cutting insults. The spirit in Snively was simply gone. What meager, sickened, spiteful spirit there had been even that very morning was now entirely, inarguably gone. What remained was a void in his soul. He was silent.

This was the one response Sally had not anticipated—the one manifestation of her enemy that actually had the power to convince her of his sincerity. Those listless eyes stared into her, blue and wretched as ever, but having entirely lost their malevolence. They told the answers to fewer mysteries of the past generation’s hatred and strife than his mute mouth, and promised still less hope and healing and restitution for his own immeasurable cruel deeds, but they shone bottomless sorrow. They did not plead for mercy, they only agreed helplessly with her father’s accusations. Surrendering, grieving eyes, the same eyes of doomed withdrawal as those of so many Mobians thrown in the roboticizer tube. Did this mean that now he understood his victims, that he could find the heart and humility to beg their forgiveness?

The princess was shaken to her very core. This combined with all the other events of the past month . . . it was overwhelming. “Excuse me,” she blurted, aborting the mercurial moment, as three puzzled heads turned in her direction. She rose so violently from her seat that the back of her chair clanged angrily against the stone wall. She found Snively’s eyes again; the unblinking, apologizing ghosts only grew sorrier. They made her think of Elias and Knuckles, and her mother and father, and Sonic, and everybody else she’d disappointed or from whom she’d become estranged. It was as if Snively’s guilt were a contagious disease. Suddenly she hated her foe with more black passion than ever before; it filled her loving and forgiving spirit until her brain teetered. How dare he? How dare he incur her sympathy to the point of personal guilt?

He had no right. It didn’t matter hat mistakes she’d made . . . hadn’t she done her best as a child monarch for a decade all alone? She had every right to hate her family’s killer. “I . . . I’ve got to . . .” The princess got no further before abruptly fleeing the scene as though for her life.

The king called after his daughter, perturbed at her erratic withdrawal, clearly not understanding. Not understanding that she shared his, and Snively’s, and all of Knothole and Robotropolis’s, demons. Ari tried to follow, but Max grabbed his arm and shook his head, while both of them still stared after his daughter.

Snively’s face did not hint at whether he himself understood or not. But something, after that moment, changed him. His wilted spirit remained thus, but it gained a sense of acceptance. His voice was flat and frank as he finally forced the words. “Death, Sire . . . death is the appropriate punishment . . . for . . . for treason.” He almost sounded bored.

The king, having nearly forgotten his own question due to Sally’s behavior, turned back to his prisoner coldly. “Well-said. And have I, then, afforded you anything vaguely resembling the punishment you deserve?”

“ . . . No, Milord.” A mixture of relief and realization.

“And do you remember the day I welcomed you into my kingdom, defended you against the suspicions of Overlander-hating peers whom you later roboticized or killed?”

“I . . . do, Sire.” More caution in Snively’s voice, now. More wariness.

“Do you remember how I cared for you and your uncle, promoted your health and education?”

A haste, now, as the words spilled out: “Sire, I do!”

“Then why, boy? Why did you partake of such treachery?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Amazement as, in retrospect, he discovered he didn’t. It had just seemed fun, exciting, at the time, to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire empire—to, having been ridiculed by father and peers all through his childhood, have the last laugh at somebody. But now . . . what in hell had he been thinking?

The incredulity in the king’s voice, matching that in his head, was painful. “You don’t know?” His temper transiently flared, but as he stroked his moustache, shut his eyes and pondered the weak reply, it abated. “Well, then . . . Well, then. I suppose that’s a small matter compared to this one last question.” He bent down and glared into the Overlander’s face. “Answer me in all sincerity, boy, for I can, through my roots in the Source of All, measure the true sentiment of your heart to its core . . . are you sorry for what you’ve done?”

“Honestly . . .” Snively knew he’d hate himself for saying this, but he found himself somehow unable to lie, even to flatter or cajole. And he wasn’t certain of the validity of what he was about to say, but he knew it was truer than what rose-tinted words the king wanted to hear. He swallowed. Hard. “Honestly, Milord . . . No, I am not.”

“You . . . are not?” The king parroted the response soundlessly. Then it sank in. “You are not! By God, but you try my patience thin, you young devil! I had thought perhaps to make you understand! To make you really understand!” He took Snively by the shirt collar and thrust him at Ari, with a command to escort the Overlander the remainder of the distance to his holding cell. “And I wish never to look on your accursed face again!” The monarch roared over his shoulder.

“Understand what?” Snively, bewildered, had the boldness to croak after him.

Max paused, pivoted, and addressed the boy. His wrath again bowed to sadness. “The mistake I made then, and now, towards you and your damned uncle—the mistake called mercy.” And he left the thunderstruck Overlander, and his escort, gawking.

Inside the prison, also the site of Mission Strategy Meetings, Sally was huddled in a chair at a plain wooden table with her head cradled in her hands muttering about “guilty” and “how to trust him” and “where does he belong,” surrounded by her companions. Talking, obviously, about him. She was wiping tears off her exhausted face with the back of her hand: the other held by Sonic with an uncharacteristic gentleness, as Bunnie sweetly brushed a hair from her face and assured her that it would “all work out,” as Tails and Dulcy exchanged juvenile jokes and warm hugs to make her laugh, as Geoffrey slowly massaged her neck, as Antoine, Rotor and Uncle Chuck watched her fondly and smiled. A wave of envy washed over Snively as he saw them together, a thirst for such tight, indomitable camaraderie, the likes of which he’d always been denied. And would never, according to the princess herself, receive. Hell, he’d even been the cause of her sorrow in this case. Funny. He’d always been branded the “loner” type, but around these people, the desire for a team effort of survival suddenly became a pining need. Damn, he wondered, was this guilt, or still just envy?

Then they all looked over at him, and all their faces darkened, and the question was, in his mind, hatefully answered. Screw you, all of you. Mutant furrballs.

Ari led him firmly to his cell and sealed it, glanced at him with that still-ruminating, still-uncertain face. “Perhaps one day your honesty will reward you,” he remarked, after a time. Both hope and wryness were in his voice.

Snively did not look at him. The amiable old sod didn’t have a clue of the odds against that—against him. “Perhaps,” he mumbled out loud.

Sally thanked Ari for his service and dismissed him. She rose upright, declared herself refreshed, and asked that the Strategy Session for that week’s mission resume.

Snively couldn’t help, out of simple proximity to the gathered Mobians, but eavesdrop. His attention fell on Bunnie, on an argument between herself and the princess, and he remembered that she was the reason why he was still breathing this very moment. Was mercy always a mistake? Was it ever?

“Bunnie, it’s a very dangerous mission, even for you—“

“I don’t give a hoot, Sally-girl,” the rabbit declared, striking her chest in the nature of a Roman centurion. “I’m the one here with the bionic body parts; this is my war, my war to win over the deroboticizer code. If they catch me, well, then, you’ll just have to carry on . . .”

As her words sunk in, the imprisoned Overlander was overpowered by a surge of shame and dismay and sickness, and then, suddenly, as he shot to his feet, an inexplicable rush of bravado and selflessness. He knew that of which they spoke—unsuccessful attempts to deroboticize the rabbit and Sonic’s genius uncle, infamous legends to all of Robotnik’s commanders after the testimony of Robotniks’ bounty hunter spies. These failures on the Mobians’ part were the frustrating product of uncle’s sadism towards his “dear” young kin: Old Julian had recoded the deroboticizer plans years ago, as a precaution shortly after Snively had been asked to roboticize his best frien—

But no, no . . . the past was not to be unsettled; like a mudbottom lake, it would make murky the waters that were beginning to be cleared by hope. In any case, he was certain that the Princess and her compatriots would have been too young to go on their missions when the deroboticizer data had been recoded to suit only certain post-coup roboticizations.

But there was one top-secret disk—one file from the archaic deroboticizer plans that were compatible for reverting the evil done to every Mobian victim of the coup. The Freedom Fighters must have recently discovered the existence of this older model. And Snively knew exactly where in the city it was kept. There was no way in hell they would be able to get there without him—no way in hell. And so, for a brief, maddened instant, the king’s words still fresh wounds in his conscience, he actually felt the responsibility . . .

To help them.

Pacing wildly from one end to the other, he stammered through the bars. “N-no, wait, let me go too! I’m privy to some things that. . . well, what I mean to say . . . It’s . . . my fault.” He wrung his hands and bit the inside of his lip so hard that the taste of blood came.

The company turned to face him in astonishment. Bunnie smiled at him; it was the kind of warm, accepting smile he’d always imagined to be a visual indication of home—the home he’d either fled from or of which he’d been depraved. But one of his captors, still sour-tempered from the events of that afternoon, was unconvinced by his sincerity. “What isn’t your fault?” Geoffrey snapped, so instantaneously and with such virulence that even Sonic winced.

Snively jerked to a halt, his skin unusually flushed and his features paralyzed in a look of shock and nausea, as if he’d been explosively smacked across the cheek. The startlement dissolved quickly, however, and his eyes became frenzied, violently distraught. All looked on in puzzlement, and it became apparent that for such a remark to so profoundly confound the cold-hearted young man, something deeper had been unsettled and injured. “I . . .” Snively began in a high, tight voice, his lips twisted into a flow of curses he couldn’t quite articulate.

St. John only stared back slack-jawed, never having dreamed that his words might finally penetrate the Overlander’s brittle, apathetic exterior. It was not nearly as satisfying as he had imagined it would be.

Sally sighed and cast him a look that made him want to crawl out the door. “Geoffrey, we appreciate your . . . patriotism. . . but it is doing nothing to help forge new alliances. Please refrain from further comment.”

“As you wish, majesty.” Uttered, for the first time, without objection or challenge, eyes downcast.

Then the princess addressed the prisoner, who had fallen silent and was swallowing rapidly, twitching, as if trying to restrain the compulsion to vomit. “Snively, until we have witnessed extensive proof of your loyalty to our cause, I find it unwise to allow you to personally conduct a mission of this import. We thank you for your enthusiasm, however.”

Snively began to laugh softly, madly. As he had for the short month that Robotropolis had been his to dictate. “Don’t lie to me,” he breathed, jabbing a finger at the red armband. “You think I’ll ever gain your trust? Did I ever gain his?”

Sally was unperturbed. “Whose?” she asked annoyedly.

He didn’t answer. “Damn you, if I deserve nothing else, just don’t lie to me!” Explosively, he kicked the bars of his cell, teeth clenched, tossed some of the filthiest known words in the history of civilization Geoffrey’s way, and retreated to his usual corner. A strangled noise erupted from that quadrant of the cell. He tried to scratch off that armband; it wouldn’t budge. Sally’s compatriots shared uneasy looks and murmurs, in Sonic’s case a few amused and uncomprehending snorts, all except Uncle Chuck, who was watching the ravaged Overlander intently.

“Tell you what,” the old hedgehog grunted, causing them all to fall silent and turn. “What if I have you do some paperwork from your cell, Snively? I’m buried under and could use the help.” Momentarily he locked eyes with Sally, who nodded, relenting.

Snively watched him, eyes narrowed, then the flush in his cheeks deepened. “Er, I, um . . . Well, don’t you have Rover… uh, Rotor, to help you? He’s smart.”

“Yeah, but he hasn’t any experience with Robotnik’s equipment.” Chuck threw his arms in the air as if having reached a miraculous epiphany. “Land’s Sake, Snively, if I could get just a grain of your knowledge and experience, why, we’d have restored the king last week! You could be . . well, something of an ‘Assistant Spy’ for me!” The room’s occupants collectively gasped, while Sally clutched Nicole so tightly that her knuckles whitened.

“Him?” Tails and Dulcy squealed in unison, earning themselves a jab in the ribs and a loud “Shh!” from Bunnie.

The Overlander blinked, astounded. “I . . . if you . . . really need me.”

“I do.” The old knight winked. “And if you do your job thoroughly and with utmost integrity, then, why, you’ll be amazed at how generous we Freedom Fighters become with trust in others.” He nodded at Sonic. “Right, Sonny-Boy?”

The rebellious teen jerked to attention, the look on his face less-than-convinced, nevertheless the respect in his heart towards his uncle overpowering. “Right, Unc,” he affirmed, flashing Snively a reluctant thumbs-up.

And thus the week progressed, Chuck collecting his data on the new mission and rushing it to Rotor, who split the paperwork with Snively and frequently asked the Overlander brain-teasing questions. Deeply engrossed in his new task, as though possessed by a burning desire to prove his own competence and worth, Robotnik’s Nephew was exceedingly helpful. It seemed his knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the city, of secret codes and of the tactics and psychology of his uncle, was tireless. One day he even managed to repair the messenger dove device Rotor had invented for Chuck. From that day on it flew faster and smoother.

But not everything else did. Often Snively caught Bunnie staring at him openly, hissed at her to “come off it,” and fiercely crouched over, lashing both arms across his chest and scowling. Embarrassed, she would apologize; the truth of the matter was, the rabbit could not seem to surmount the realization that the grassblade-thin, wiry young Overlander and Dr. Robotnik were blood relatives. Many times she’d beheld the enormous, hulking despot, how his great, iron arms and corpulent belly spilled over his belt and his greedy, gluttonous lips and fingers curled with malicious glee. He was potent, dominating, staggering, his moustache like a violent fire erupting from his nostrils—both painful and ridiculous to the eye. His sheer size made the beholder quake with fear, his coal burning red eyes the prologue to a vicious inferno.

And here in their own abode was his nephew, gaunt and cold and pale, the embodiment of all things sharp, pale and icy, a collection of peevish, precise angles and the starved remnants of a comely face. An ode to frailty. One whose efficiency and first-hand experience were saving their rear-ends. It was funny how time revealed the master plan of all things.

Bunnie made a habit of aiding Rotor in his paperwork; the least, she offered, that she could do was to transport the schematics papers and reports from Chuck to Snively’s cell whenever the walrus had a question to ask the Overlander. As the end of the week drew near, and as Rotor’s need for a thorough job grew stronger, Bunnie’s visits to Snively’s abode grew more frequent. She began to feel accustomed to his petulance, to find his severe introversion an element of the everyday. She began to think of him as a comrade, mentally erasing his past. And that Friday, her kindness endured one final challenge.

As Bunnie entered the prison with a stack of papers, greeting the Overlander who, as usual, crouched in the corner of his cell, she expected his typical wordless grunt followed by a cold stretch of silence. But today, as she plopped the schematics down on a desk by the door, something about his demeanor was markedly vulnerable, open. He had a decisive remark in store for her.

“Everyone hates me,” he declared, voice sulky and doleful.

Bunnie realized that this was a test, one he expected her to fail, in order to feel further victimized, further vindicated for his crimes through her cruelty. So she looked at him meaningfully, honestly. “I don’t hate you.”

The kindness of it cut sharper than any measure of spite or malice would have. His breath ceased, his eyes burned and itched and watered, and he bit is lip hard. Damn, but she was making it difficult—making his typical coping mechanism of distance and callousness difficult to maintain. He wanted to throw a tantrum, drink himself stupid, swear, break something, cry, cry, cry, scream . . . Guilt, guilt, guilt . . . How? How?

But the soul-connecting moment passed, and the sweet creature that had offered him his redemption just grinned and kept breezily conversing. “Eh, King Max is probably just waiting to think of a way to test your loyalty, Sugar. Why, then you’ll be embraced by the community. Just immerse yo’self in this here paperwork, because forgiveness will come! Just gotta test your loyalty.”

The words reeled Snively back in time, back to the five-year anniversary of the day he’d joined his uncle in Mobitropolis, that long-ago day a few scant years before the coup. Before he betrayed the king who had trusted him unquestioningly, who had never before requested a test of loyalty. Robotnik had felt on one of his volcanic whims that his nephew needed to renew his proof of fealty to be spared his life. Proof, proof, always proof.

“A test of your loyalty,” old Julian had rumbled as they stood conversing in a chamber deep in the bowels of the War Ministry, where access to the banished Ixis Naugus’ magic spells had gained the tyrant particular power to pull strings. “Yes, I have quite a test in mind for you, dear nephew. I’ve a visitor for you. He’s requested the chance to make one attempt—one final attempt, mind you—to bring you back ‘home’ before he leaves on a very long journey. Tut, tut, Snively, you must indulge me on this one.” He opened a fat black book of incantations, recycled from Naugus’s old library, and began to chant in a peculiar language.

A flash of light, blinding in intensity, a peculiar low whistling chiming noise, and suddenly a towering, robust Overlander of roughly forty years, accompanied by several militia-uniformed others, appeared in the center of the room. Their leader, his head bursting with the same red hue of hair as the moustache Julian sported, circled the room like a seasoned hunter or general, his hard eyes agleam, until he beheld the conspiring Overlanders in the corner. He cleared his throat and spoke in a collected, raspy voice. “Brother. How do you do? Smashing to see you again. So glad you agreed to my request for armed guards.”

Snively was terrified. It was his father.

Julian roared a laugh. “Don’t give me that trash, Colin. You’re the one who exiled me to this animal dunghill. Just address the boy with your offer and let’s be done with it before teatime, shall we?” He winked at Colin cruelly. “Although I doubt it’ll even take that long. The boy, as you will discover, is quite stubborn.”

Colin stepped towards them, in his nightclothes, as if he lacked the enthusiasm even to dress for the confrontation. He evaluated the every inch of the kinsman he’d not looked on in nine years with a face unhinting of emotion. A cursory observer might have even taken his countenance for weariness, or boredom. When he was done measuring Snively, his eyes having traced the boy’s frame from topmost strand of his disheveled hair to his begrimed shoes, he exhaled deeply and folded his massive arms across his chest.

“Well, boy? I’ve come to take you back to Megacentral. We’re off to deep space to search for a new world ripe for Overland conquest, away from these inferior creatures you call ‘Mobians.’ ” His words were slow, calm, and yet increasingly guarded. “Haven’t you anything to say to the father you abandoned?” He smoothed his nightshirt collar while awaiting the reply, achingly uncaring, achingly callous. Like the stern patriarch wielding the whip and expectantly waiting for his trembling young child to pull down his britches and bare his hindside for the punishment.

Robotnik glided softly aside, his hands covering lips that doubtlessly smirked. To every spectator, he appeared appropriately saddened by the familial encounter.

The hypocrisy of it all only aggravated the silent young Kintobor. Where there had been terror, now there rapidly leaked into his face a mingling frosty rage. His eyes relinquished their childlike, wide-open fear and narrowed to glistening, electric aquamarine jewels. Their staggering coldness sent nearly a dozen of the armed Overlanders flanking Colin back several steps. A murmur arose in the ranks.

The boy’s teeth were bared like fangs behind curled lips. His hair wildly unkempt as if by a fierce wind or a vain battle, fell in front of those vicious eyes so as to make the pale, sparse lad seem even less domesticated. If one strained to listen, a faint growling could be heard deep in his throat.

“Is he . . . human?” Agnes, a woman who would later be able to call herself Colin’s mother-in-law, heard herself blurt, noting the long-carved scar that traversed Snively’s forehead, partially concealed by his raging hair.

“He’s a Kintobor,” Colin thrust pompously over his shoulder at her, but a curt unseen Overlander from the back of the crowd mumbled, “Yeah, and that alone gives a body reason to wonder!”

“Well, Colin Junior!” The eldest Kintobor present, oblivious, in his arrogance, to the verbal slight and subsequent snickering, startled them all into silence with a throaty, commanding voice. His brow furrowed as distaste and disapproval tainted his previous apathy. It seemed to fiercely irritate Snively, that patronizing look of annoyance and disdain. The utterance of the boy’s true name made him bristle, briefly considering drawing his laser pistol and making a fine hole in his father’s forehead. The chilly luster in his eyes remained, and the growl in his throat, as Colin Senior continued, “Here, now, you young hooligan! I see you’ve not changed your ways a bit since you flew off to live with Uncle Julian! Will you not speak to your father?”

You have no idea what I’ve gone through, Dad. How dare you judge me? You never gave me the chance to prove I could do anything right! A roaring current of comebacks rushed through Snively’s mind as he stared into his father’s typically disgusted, haughty, misunderstanding face. But nothing he said would ever be heard by deaf ears, by a mind closed against what its owner had once called, “A foul-up, a continuous disappointment.” A disappointment. That was what he was to his own father.

So he said not what he knew, but what he wished. All that he could ever, in his ocean-deep bitterness and frustration, hope for. In a tone comparable only to the icy wet fork of a snake’s tongue stinging Colin’s bare legs. And just what Uncle Julian, the ultimate puller of strings, had wanted him to say. “You are not my father.”

And then he turned dolefully to face his uncle, who sneered proprietarily back, and it became very clear to all present whom he wished had been his father. Especially to Colin, who looked as though unable to decide whether to vomit or scream in rage. Or to weep.

For a moment just looking into his father’s pained eyes made Snively nearly reconsider his words. He had not known that Colin cared so much. But it didn’t matter! No, not now! The old man had squandered his freedom all through his adolescence, had called him a dishonest and unscrupulous child, and now his chance to rebel had come full circle. He should be enjoying his revenge on the man who had neither appreciated nor trusted his own son.

“Oh, now Colin,” Julian had seized this opportunity to drive salt into the wound. “Come, come! You always said the boy was just, oh, what was it, a ‘snivelling little beast’? A ‘curse’? Why, your curse is lifted! You are cured of your plague! Go, now, and allow me to raise your son properly.”

Silence. Snively bit his lip and looked at the floor, for his father was now crying. The great overland Minister of Justice was crying. Soundlessly and humbly, but with feeling, nonetheless. Stunned, his subordinates tried to muster some respect by averting their eyes as well. “That is too cruel an accusation even for you to make, brother . . . and yet, Sweet Mary help me, I fear my deeds legitimize it,” the great Overlander mumbled, and then, “Oh, my son,” wiping his eyes hastily, “my son, how has it come to this?” He motioned at his troop and turned to leave. “How your mother would weep if she . . . “

“Yeah, I know, you old badger, that’s my fault too! Believe me, you never let me forget that!” the boy cut in sharply, a half-scream of anger and a half-sob of anguish, starting for his father, but his uncle grabbed his shoulder and stayed him in his tirade. “Be strong in your decision, boy,” his uncle whispered. “You do not belong with that cretin. He is below you, my nephew. Despise him, and grow stronger.” Oh, if only he had realized the disease in the despot’s words then, the disease from which he would be doomed to suffer. The hate he’d learned from that same man. The all-engulfing hate for all that breathed.

Colin felt the sting of it though. To him it seemed to register on a prophetic level. His heart had retreated to its hard rough shell again. “Goodbye, Snively,” he breathed, steeled, finite, his heart closed. “I hope you do not live to regret this.”

The memory of his father walking away into the shaft of light and vanishing, his back to his son, was the most vivid of all. And suddenly, oh God, suddenly Snively was angry. Sick with fury.

“Oh, cer-tainly.” Something of the peevish sarcasm in his voice acquired a more bitter edge, a darker, more intense register. Bunnie looked her prisoner in the face for the first time and shuddered at the roiling spirit trapped behind those glistening eyes of ice. Then he laughed; it was that awful noise, that soft, raspy, soul-sickened cackle, an expression of vicious pain more than of mirth. “It’ll be just that easy, won’t it?” He hissed through gritted teeth, through those crooked, impish-looking canines that made him now nearly savage, nearly demonic. With each word the ferocity in his being built tot a barely-contained frenzy. “I’ll just walk up to Good King Max and say, ‘Oh, sorry, old chap, that I buggered you and your family and all, after you adopted my uncle and myself in good faith, but hey, all’s fair in love and war, so let’s just shake hands on it!”

“Snively—“

“Can you count the number of people I’ve wronged?” He pressed his livid face against the bars, the veins of his neck and forehead protruding, his cheeks blazing with explosive and strangling emotion. He was terrifying. “Just give me an estimate. Anything, girl, quickly!”

“I. . .”

“Come on, out with it!”

“Sniv—Sn—I don’t . . .”

“Face it! Face the brute that I am! If you’re really so brave, face me before you find the grace of acceptance! Face me!”

“I don’t mean to keep count of a man’s wrongs, Snively. I look for his rights.”

“Well, I have!” Spittle flew from his jaws. “I’ve kept count! My only lover is a number, and she haunts me—she’s the number two thousand and four!”

“Stop. . .”

“Two thousand and four lives, families, souls—“

Bunnie’s robotic arm lashed through the bars and seized him by the shirt, shaking him one vicious time. “Stop it! You just stop it! How can you spend every wakin’ moment denying that you can change? You at least owe us an attempt to grow beyond that ‘brute’ you think you are! Do you hear me? Fix yourself for those two thousand an’ four!”

His lip twitched; otherwise, catatonia had seized his body in her grasp, passive aggression at her mercy, the glaze of hopelessness in his eyes. He wavered a finger in the air, tracing the paths of his twisted thoughts. “You want me to let you in on a secret? Sometimes I find I’m still basking in the glee of their miserable filthy suffering. All two thousand of them. I think of them and somehow they become my uncle, who hurt me, and I want them to hurt. Or they become the only way I can prove to him I am stronger, I am smarter, I am better . . . and I want them to hurt. I want that power. But what will you do? You’ll just all throw a house-warming party for me when you build me—out of pure charity, mind you—another of your brutish little huts out of grass and cow dung—and everybody will come over and have tea with the putrid little bastard who has killed them, plundered them, stolen their innocence and joy while shaking like the coward he is behind uncle’s computer! Do you see the madness in this? Sure, Ms. Rabbott—” he looked anguished at her arm, the shiny chrome alien that gripped his shirt”—no, not Rabbit, and that’s my fault too—sure, hell will freeze over any day now!” He snorted loudly, perhaps, Bunnie thought, to hide a sickened sob of realization, of remorse drowned in self-pity, and fell back in the chair as if utterly drained.

“Oh, Snively . . .” She rubbed her temples, a bleariness in her gaze.

“Don’t bother lecturing me.” A sickened whisper. “I still hate you. All of you.”

She stared at him—Eternity awaited her reaction.

Suddenly Bunnie Rabbott was uncontrollably amused. Her abrupt giggles flooded the chamber and only further perturbed him.

“What in hell is so funny?” he snarled, in a tone bordering on rabid. But her laughter served to putter his fiery rage out to a dull glow instantaneously.

“I. . . I have no idea, sugah! You talk too much, I guess! Lordy, Lordy, and dog my cats, but you never took a breath!”

“Did you hear anything I just said?”

“Every word, hon.” She looked into his eyes, her own emerald stare formidable—piercing. “When was the last time you did something fun?”

He just glared back, sullen.

So Bunnie opened the door to the cell, causing him to dart to his feet and retreat to the farthest corner. “Please don’t hurt me,” he whimpered, cringing away from her. “Forgive my impudence! I surrender!”

“Hurt you!” she hooted, slapping her metallic thighs jovially. “What in tarnation are you yammering about now, boy? I don’t think I have an orange moustache, last time I checked, although if I sprouted one since this morning tell me so that I can mosey on down to the barber shop an’ get the thing cropped!”

“That’s not funny,” a muffled voice retorted.

“Sure it is. C’mere!”

Reluctantly he rose and skulked to her side, as nervous as a man asked to participate in his first act of cannibalism, and offered a very large plate. “What do you want, woman?” he grunted.

Bunnie smiled at him in that melting manner of a true southern belle. “Care to escort me to the pavilion?” she purred. “I gotta meet Sally and the others in a couple a minutes.”

“Er, um, I . . .” he stammered. “I, uh, well . . . if that’s what you want.”

“I want a little peace around here, Snively,” she said, growing more solemn. ‘So allow me to take your arm, will ya, ‘kind sir’ ?”

The aristocratic breeding of Snively’s childhood seized him. Uncertainly, though urbanely, he hooked her bionic arm.

The urge to confess arrested him. He began to babble frenziedly, trying to dissuade her from befriending him. “You don’t know what you’re getting into with me. I’m a hazard. A disease. A carcinogen, Ms. Rabbott! It’s only fair to warn you—M-my father blames me for my mother’s death. I haven’t talked to him in six years. My mom died giving birth to me, you see. He calls me a foul-up, and he’s right, you know. I should stop calling him overly critical and face the music. I’m mean and cowardly and sneaky and pathetic. I am a foul-up. ”

For a moment, Bunnie gazed at him sadly, taken aback by the loaded familial knowledge. But then she gave another hoot. “Aw, Sugar, don’t worry. Everyone knows that already! Heck, we’ve all got our idiosyncrasies!”

Snively planted his feet to the floor, causing the two of them to lurch to a halt. His eyes were frantic. “But, Bunnie.”

“Yep?”

“I roboticized my own best friend. He was a Mobian dog named Sprocket. My uncle asked me to do it to prove that my duty to the New Order was a priority even above friendship. And Sprocket forgave me just like you did. But how can you know I won’t turn on you the same way someday?”

Bunnie covered her mouth to hide a gasp of realization—that Robian to whom she’d spoken about Snively, who had told her about Amy Rose, who had convinced her to ask mercy for Snively—he must have been Sprocket. So he had understood more about forgiveness than all of them. He had faced that challenge with the greatest strength. “I can’t know, Sugar. I just have to hold onto a little faith.”

Still he would not budge. “Bunnie.” His voice—it quivered now.

“Yeah?”

Say it. You have to tell her, to come clean. “I . . . I enjoyed it.”

“Enjoyed what, honey?”

“Roboticizing . . . you.”

Silence. Agonizing silence.

But Bunnie was resolute. “I know,” she said, remembering Sprocket. “I know.” A fleeting moment of deep, soulful pain. But then Snively’s jaw dropped as her face again acquired its cheer. “Now you leave the past back there in that cell and come on out here into the light! If I can do it, then you can, too.”

Snively managed a wobbly smile in return to her grin of sunshine, and walked into the fresh afternoon air with her. That was a good point. Sound logic, indeed.

Sally was upset. Nicole had been acting up all afternoon, and it was impossible to run a schematics meeting without her mechanical companion’s aide.

Rotor, unfortunately, claimed that the little computer’s ailment was beyond his skills to decipher. He shrugged apologetically and dismissed himself back into the nearby workshop. Antoine and Bunnie gazed after their resident mechanic ruefully, sharing a sigh. Snively, uncharacteristically quiet, having been marooned by Bunnie at the entrance of the pavilion, merely watched with a faint smile, seated himself unobtrusively in a corner, and waited.

Thus, many shakings, computations, tribulations, and generally hopeless groans later, Sally became certain that Nicole might never be salvaged. Teeth gnashed, the overwhelmed monarch rapped her slender fingers on the table and glared murder at the hapless device. Her gaze drifted towards the silent Overlander and she became frantic as she realized his eerie blue eyes were perceptively drinking her in. She pretended to be busy trying another route of repair in hopes that his restless temperament would breed boredom and he would leave.

But, still silent, Snively stayed. Sally felt her body succumbing to despair, and she didn’t fight it; no, she surrendered, and sank to her knees in the dirt. The question she dreaded finally floated across the chamber in a soft and raspy voice. “May I be of . . . . um, some assistance?” Robotnik’s nephew rose and warily skulked towards her. He seemed incomplete, detached, as if still exhausted from his toils in the detox ward. Indeed, his hair even still bore the rakish, almost savagely unkempt quality of the previous week, his skin was pasty, and his eyes, though forever their stunning blue, had in them a heaviness, a new and troubling awareness of something towards which he could previously be conveniently aloof, conveniently callous. He looked . . . nauseated. Antoine’s hand went to his sword hilt, but Bunnie stayed it. “Wait a minute, now,” she breathed in the coyote’s ear. “Give the guy a chance, sugar.”

“I do not trust him,” her lover growled back.

Snively heard Antoine’s words. His meek smile dissolved. Sally saw the familiar lines of anxiety and weariness so deeply ingrained in the otherwise clean-cut, youthful human face, the lines that tainted it with a too-abrupt loss of innocence, deepen with a brief pang of embarrassment. Or could it even have been guilt? Either way, it soon vanished and he proceeded, louder, in his more familiar crisp, nasal hiss, “ I don’t mean to impose, but, ah . . . I believe this is my subject of expertise.”

Sally clutched Nicole to her chest. “Thanks, but I’ve got it under control.” She looked to her companions for authentication. “We have it under control, right, guys?”

Antoine only crouched forward pugnaciously, hand on hilt, eyes glinting darkly at Snively. “Bien sur,” he affirmed, in a murderous voice. “Ne le taquine pas, ou je vais certainement te tuer.” Bunnie only swallowed violently, her eyes widening, for Antoine had recently tutored her in a little French, and she remembered well the crucial meaning of the word “tuer.”

By the icy expression on Snively’s face, he too was more than a monolinguist. “You just try it, Pretty Boy,” he snarled at the coyote, the old grating arrogance seeping rapidly into his words. His eyes glittered like crystals. “I’ve nothing to gain by helping you people. Nothing.”

“And we have nothing to gain with your presence!” Antoine erupted. Bunnie strove to pacify him, but exasperation had seized his high –strung psyche and shaken it beyond repair. It was, after all, disturbing to be at so close a proximity to one’s sworn foe for days on end. “Mon Dieu, you craven snake, you just hover, hover, hover, watching us and scrutinizing us like a wicked little scientist! Alors, there is no great secret, you know! All we want is for you to stop loitering around, standing in our light! Infidel! You are in the way, c’est tout! In the way! So why don’t you, how you say, ‘screw off’?” The delicate whiskers at the end of the Frenchman’s muzzle began to tremble with fury.

Snively didn’t blink. He patiently waited for the coyote to simmer, until finally D’Coolette was left breathless and at a loss for more scathing comments. And then he resumed his frost-tipped words as if the verbal assault had never occurred. Most likely he’d learned the tactic from years of survival at the whim of his uncle’s formidable temper. “But I’m willing to help, nonetheless.” He turned to Sally, his viciousness abating momentarily. “Now, will you accept my assistance, or not?”

Sally seemed equally unmoved by Antoine’s outburst, although she had to admit that she could relate to the raw state of his nerves. Snively was so crafty, so inherently cunning and manipulative . . . and yet . . . Her eyes scanned him from head to toe, slowly, striving to measure his every intent. His eyes were a chilly mystery, restless and piercing, but so exquisitely sad. So sad. “What do you propose to do with her?” she heard herself blurt, in a voice so small and hesitant that she wondered if she had even spoken aloud.

Behind her, Antoine expelled an incredulous snort. But Snively looked positively elated. He began to chatter like a child trying to hide its jubilation for fear of seeming unsophisticated. “Oh, ah, well, I um . . . well, first things first, you need to let me run a general scan on her memory database, and then, ah, yes, um . . . what to do . . mmm, yes, let’s see if she’ll tolerate a full circuitry replacement . . . ”

Hesitation washed back over Sally’s heart like an unpleasant wave of vertigo. “That would require you taking her into your possession for a time, wouldn’t it?” she croaked, feeling her pulse rush. Oh, the infinite potential schemes he could cook up through the use of Nicole, through the use of all the secrets locked in her hard-drive. Including the location of Knothole. “Snively . . . you must understand, I don’t think of Nicole as a Tinker Toy set”—

Snively stopped chattering instantly, looking a tad crestfallen, but nevertheless comprehending. “I understand perfectly.” He chuckled softly. “You don’t trust me with her.”

“I never said that.”

“Ah!” He rose a generous hand, smirking at a positively fuming Antoine and an observant Bunnie. “But that’s what you meant. Please don’t hide it. We’ve a lot of water under the bridge, you and I.”

Then Sally said something that dissolved his grin with the rapidity of a deflating balloon. “Snively, I don’t mean to be blunt, but you’re right—why should I talk to you? And then, for that matter, why should I trust you with Nicole? Nicole is my dearest possession—not only that, but, in a way, my friend. Let’s then compare that relationship to ours. You and I were friendly acquaintances when I was a child, but even then, before all that ‘water under the bridge,’ as you call it, before the coup, I never really learned a thing about you that people who trust each other should know. You’re practically a stranger to me.” She shook her head in amazement. “I mean, the only times we’ve ever met face-to-face were in the context of your finger on the roboticizer button, myself or one of my best friends in a roboticizer tube or at gunpoint, and your uncle screaming obscenities at us or laughing maniacally. We haven’t exactly had time to bond. I mean, come on! What’s your favorite food? Your favorite color? Your pet peeve? Your hobbies? Your preference of music? Your worst habit? What’s your middle name, for crying out loud! I couldn’t answer any of that. So why should I trust you with the duties of a Freedom Fighter just yet? Really, it’s awfully hasty to….”

“James!” he blurted, urgency in the way he wrung his hands, urgency to please—like he felt that his bridge was being burned before his eyes and he was flinging water frantically on the conflagration. She frowned at him, trying to be considerate, thinking that the stress of the past few weeks had perhaps finally taken its toll on his psyche: with a multiple personality crisis, or something to that effect. She whetted her lips. “What?”

“James—my middle name is James.” Words spilled from his mouth; he confronted the questions she’d tossed his way as if checking off a list, but with the haste of a beaten puppy trying to delight its master. “My favorite food is chocolate chip cookies, my favorite color is green, I hate it when a man slurps his tea, and I also hate sunny days because my stupid lily-white skin burns easily and I end up looking like a walking tomato and feeling like a piece of fried bacon, on the other hand a little bit of Jazz always soothes me, and I love evergreen trees! I do!” He drew in a deep breath after the extensive speech and anxiously awaited her reaction. When at first she only stared piercingly at him, scrutinizing him, he added in a hushed voice, “And I talk too much, I know. Please understand, I really want . . . I’m…just trying to belong, and all that rot. I know that I . . made a big mistake.” A fleeting image of his father flashed across his mind and was gone again. But then it came back . . . and it wasn’t so unpleasant anymore, because next to it was an image of Sprocket, the ultimate pardoner, loyal and trusting. It endured. “And I’m . . . sorry. I’m sorry.”

Something warm stirred inside of Sally. “Evergreens, huh?” Her smile was relenting. “Why is it you like evergreens? They’re pretty scarce on the mainland nowadays.”

It took a moment for the import of the moment to process, but when it did he sighed, and nodded. His own sharp, wary eyes grew soft. “They’re constant,” he said. “No matter what else changes, they stay the same, firm and strong. I need that haven, you see. I think everybody does. When I was a little boy and my dad yelled at me for some blunder or another of mine, I used to lie under the pine trees outside his mansion and breathe in the sweet smell and feel safe. And after about an hour, he called me back inside, and his temper had waned, and he was smiling at me again.” He regarded the monarch, who seemed oddly astounded, for a moment, then carefully asked, “Do you have a place like that, Princess? A haven?”

“Yes. Not a place, exactly, but a time. My haven is when my father still calls me ‘Bean,’ my childhood nickname, in front of his colleagues, or mine. I remember at those times just how much he loves me and treasures me, what a priority I am to him. His love is my constant. You know, Snively,” and confidently she placed Nicole in her once enemy’s hands, feeling how his icy fingers were beginning to thaw, “I’m really glad you and I had this conversation.”

He scratched the back of his head and grinned: slow, awkward, and unpracticed, the facial expression was, but genuine, nonetheless. “Glad to oblige, Your Majesty.” Nervously he recalled her words in the detox ward. “You . . . you’ll get proof. I’ll get you your proof.”

She shrugged. “Call me Sally.”

“Yo, Sal!” The brassy, impudent voice of Sonic, the voice of a referee or demanding justice and a ringmaster demanding undivided attention, pierced the moment. A voice meant to jar one out of slumber, the voice of a disc jockey in an alarm clock radio station, sliding up and down the scale between intimidating and annoying. It was still, despite continual exposure through the past week, as soothing to Snively as pouring salt over a paper cut. Each time he heard that voice, he shuddered at the remembrance of all the times the words “Yo, Robuttnik!” were bellowed and, beginning with the swift darkening of his uncle’s facial expression, a markedly unpleasant set of circumstances were inevitably set in motion. Good old Sonic. “Look what my mom’s baked us!”

Bernie, followed by her jubilant son, came rushing up to the company of Mobians struggling with a huge platter of food.

Sally laughed. “What, chili-dogs?”

“Nah—better!”

Bernie motioned at her son to stop bragging. “I knew my darlings might be getting hungry,” she cooed, flashing the culinary masterpiece before them. “Now, save some for Mr. Kintobor, as I understand he’s been very helpful with Uncle Chuck and Rotor lately and he deserves a little reward.”

Snively’s chest puffed out proudly; he approached Bernie with Nicole in tow and looked upon the gooey, aromatic platter with sudden and unabashed joy. “Oh!” He cried, thrusting his arms upward as if having stumbled upon some monumental serendipity, some mind-boggling innovation. “Cookies!”

The company stared at him uncomprehending. Finally Bunnie, as was the custom, broke the ice. “Sugar!” she exclaimed, eyebrows risen, a mixture of compassion and incredulity in her voice. “Y’all really haven’t gotten out much in eleven years, have ya?”

Antoine again snorted, no doubt unimpressed by what he’d always deemed in Snively to be “low-brow” culinary taste—after an incident involving an interrogation and a bucket of escargots. . . .

But Sonic and Sally found themselves chuckling, tossing each other looks of disbelief at this decidedly contradictory facet of Snively’s character: this exposure of wonder and humanity at such a simple childhood pleasure. This was nothing, this beaming, grinning, boyish creature, of the ice-hearted and sardonic, conniving little viper of a man they had grown accustomed to hating. It was a revelation both wonderful and bewildering, the knowledge that one’s enemy was a living creature with a soul. Marveling at this, they dug in to the edible loot, followed by Rotor and Antoine.

Still staring blissfully at the chocolate-chip treasure in Bernie’s arms, Snively wrung his hands together, uncertain what to do with himself. He stumbled closer, joining them. His lower lip, typically pursed in a sulk, trembled. His voice was small and earnest. “Does this mean I can have one?”

End of Part One!