Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Six minutes and a behemoth. That is all that stands between us and freedom.

I glance at Abiola’s face. The helmet she wears prevents me from seeing her expression, but I catch the steely determination in her dark eyes. She’s ready. There’s no backing out now. I resist the urge to look behind us. I don’t want to appear fidgety and unsure in my little sister’s presence. Besides, the real threats are not the guard bots behind us, deactivated for ten minutes by my crudely assembled EMP jammer.

The real threat lies ahead.

The behemoth does not move. It stands between us and the gate, red eyes unblinking. It’s the largest robot I have ever seen, about nine feet tall with extremely long arms that hang motionless by its side. I know how fast those arms can move.

About seven months ago, someone had been caught trying to escape the plantation. The overseers had brought us out to watch the person get punished. It was a young boy who looked to be around Abiola’s age. Like me, he was dark skinned and lean with tribal tattoos on his torso. A fellow Pluisite.

The behemoth had held him upside down by the ankles. On a signal from the overseers, the behemoth swung him once and dashed his head against the floor. I quickly tried to cover Abiola’s eyes but she had already seen the boy’s brains getting splattered all over the grass.

The memory of blood seeping into the soil and staining the grass is part of what keeps us back now. I glance at the cracked screen of my controller. The EMP is going down quicker than I envisaged. We may not have the full five minutes before the bots finish rebooting and come for us.

Shit.

We have to make our move now. I show Abiola the controller’s screen, and she nods in understanding. She points to herself and then to the behemoth. I shake my head.

That’s suicide, I sign to her, hoping she can see the movement of my fingers in the dimness. If she does, she refuses to regard my warning. She leaps out from behind the low wall we’ve used for cover all along and charges straight at the behemoth.

I freeze for a moment. She steps into the circle of light surrounding the gigantic bot and despite my apprehension, I admire her crazy boldness. It sparks something inside me and before I fully realize it, I’m already running after her.

I do not allow myself to think. The only thing echoing in my head are the words of Uncle Chevu just before he sold us to the slavers. Death is better than slavery. Death is better than slavery. Death is better than—

Abiola screams.

I freeze again, coming to a complete stop as I take in the sight before me. The behemoth is awake and is holding my sister by the knees. The helmet she wears, stolen from the shed we used to sleep in with the other slaves, has fallen to the ground. Her face is exposed. The robot doesn’t move. It looks like it’s waiting for something, for a signal and I suddenly remember how the overseer had given it the go ahead to kill the boy caught trying to escape.

I set down my controller. I don’t want to look at the screen. I don’t want to know how much time we have left before the alarms go off. My EMP jammer is in the bag strapped to my back but I don’t reach for it. It’s useless against the behemoth, which is a purely mechanical construct, quite similar to the smaller bots we have back home on Pluise. We had to get by with leftover tech from the more developed worlds, so our bots were built locally, operated by gears and steam and batteries. The only way to bring down something like this was to blow it up or hit it hard enough that all the nuts and bolts that held it together were taken apart. But I don’t have any explosives, and there’s no way I’m punching the behemoth until it breaks.

Abiola is struggling, but the behemoth pays her no heed. I want to scold her for the rashness that landed her in its clutches, but there’ll be time for that later, assuming we survive.

I take a few steps forward and wave slowly. The behemoth doesn’t appear to notice me. Its main function is to catch slaves trying to escape the plantation, which is why it’s stationed before the main gate. Beyond the gate was the port where I could hijack a unijet and get off world before the overseers woke.

But there’s no way we can escape now. My sister has gotten herself captured and the robots will be back online soon—

Behind me, the alarm starts blaring. I look down at the controller on the grass. The counter has reached zero.

That’s it. We’re out of time.

• • • •

The overseers are first to arrive. Even from my hiding place, I am filled with fear at their appearance. They stand nearly eight feet tall with spikes protruding from their gray skin. Their eyes are pitch black, without irises or pupils and they have claws at the ends of their fingers. Some of the other slaves watch the scene from behind the chain link fence my sister and I had scaled to get this far. The armed bots stand between the slaves and the overseers, discouraging thoughts any of them might have about trying to make a run for it.

The overseers are saying something, but I cannot understand their language. The robots usually translate for us. I focus on Abiola instead. She’s trying to say something with her fingers, using the sign language we had come up with back in our village.

Leave . . . without . . . me.

I watch her fingers make the signs over and over. She knows I’m hiding somewhere and can see her. I want to tell her there’s no chance and to try to think of a way for us to get out of this mess but of course she can’t see me. I’m too well hidden.

The overseers gesture to the behemoth and say something. I realize what’s about to happen. They’re about to kill my sister.

In a small and detached part of my mind, I understand that this is the perfect time to escape undetected. While Abiola was getting her brains splattered on the grass, I could reach the gate, hack it, and slip out to get a jet that would take me away from here. But at what cost? What sort of life would I live, on the run and without my sister and knowing I’d left her here to die? She’s the reason I tried to escape in the first place. As an albino, she never really fit in back home. When we arrived here, she found a discarded robot helmet and hid her face in it. Only her pale eyes could be seen. I tried to tell her to be herself, to stop hiding from the world but she didn’t listen. I wanted to create a new life with her somewhere without an abusive and drunk uncle who would rather sell us off to aliens than feed us. Somewhere without endless acres of alien fruit we have to pick everyday, bots always ready to shock us if we slowed.

The behemoth raises her up. She says it again, with her fingers.

Leave me. Go.

I close my eyes. I remember Uncle Chevu, the way he had looked almost sad as the aliens paid him and took us away.

Remember, Kweku, death is better than slavery, he’d said.

I rise to my feet and start running. Nobody notices me. I run faster and reach into my bag. The bomb—built hastily with scraps for the past four months and buried directly in front of the behemoth—is incomplete but it’s my last hope. My fingers close on the detonator.

Abiola sees me and so do the overseers and the bots but before they can react, I press the button. There’s a loud blast, and I’m thrown backwards by the explosion. I hear the overseers howling in pain. The other slaves are pushing against the fence, climbing over, and mobbing the bots. I think I can hear Abiola saying something. Someone grabs me—someone with pale skin and gray eyes—and starts dragging me through the chaos. I can smell smoke and burning flesh. My eyes are blurred by tears. I feel weak and tired. I can feel the darkness pressing in and after struggling briefly, I let it drag me under, and I know nothing at all but that we’re free.