For all I know, she’s a madwoman and her whole story’s hogwash anyway. Not that it felt that way. But then, I don’t have much of a record for being a good judge in such things.
It occurs to me I hope Cusp isn’t waiting by the phone. Or my daughter, for that matter. As much as I miss them all, it’s Elisabeth my thoughts return to again and again, cringing with the memory of yet another betrayal.
Daylight filters through the hacienda and I crack my eyes open just in time to see Titania and Olga disengage from a mellow clinch. The blonde bombshell sees me peeking and winks.
“Time to rise and shine, hey, sweetheart?”
“Easy for you to say.”
I ease over the edge of the mattress like mounting a motorcycle in reverse. Sitting on the edge, it reminds me of my early days kidding everyone I was a student while staying up to all hours, busting hoods and partying the night away at Gringo’s, the Waystation and Komplex Bar. Every morning waking to the afternoon, mouth like an ashtray, phone numbers on my skin, fingers thick with the smell of pussy.
Nothing here but nostalgia of a different kind.
The kind that can kill you.
“You’ve been quiet, pops.”
I’d rather you didn’t call me that, Joey-boy.
“I could say the same thing. Were you asleep through that tutorial last night or were you just – how do they say – playing possum?”
I was at a low ebb in my cycle. Defeating that madman took it out of me, lad. But I heard what the crazy cow had to say.
“Crazy cow, is it?”
You might be biased. Trust me, it’s a long story. Ever think about all the terrible stories the birds you banged would say about you, back in your early days, Joe?
“Not many of them were hardbodies like Titanium Girl. I can’t think what any of them saw in you.”
Well, the same they see in you I dare say, Joe.
“Don’t give me that shit, pops.”
Easy, Joe. We’ll have a sit-down later and sort through all the half-truths and delusions. Right now, you’ve got to get moving. There’s more on the way.
“What?”
The lady Nocturne was right. Yon’ Twelve or Eleven or whoever, they’ve spent the night fine-tuning their psychic arsenal and they’ll ping us any minute if we don’t light out of here. You’ve got a chance to spare these people if you get going now, son.
“Shit.”
I speak aloud for the first time and heads turn, people in the canteen below looking up from breakfasts and conversations now dead in the water. I only nod and smile and snap off my gaze before Titania can engage me, clambering into my uniform and dropping from the balcony at the front of the building and down the alley even though I can hear her calling my name.
How the fuck am I going to get home now?
*
THE GUILT AND confusion about leaving them is like a thunderstorm inside my head as I power through the French afternoon headed for the remains of Paris. I have to see if what they say is true, but hopefully without dying of radiation poisoning. My father’s terse counsel punctuates my thoughts as the slipstream vector buffets around me.
“You said we would talk,” I think more than say to him.
We can. Ask me what you want, Joe.
I am still trying to strain the shitty clutter from my mind when the ak-ak gun opens up and just like that, I have to dive and weave as big caliber shells thump at the air around me. At this height I can see the traceback to the ground and I plunge lower, leaving the wispy cloud cover behind to see the landscape deepen in clarity, resolving into the post-apocalyptic outbuildings and parking lot of a small French municipality, vehicles overturned and blackened, many arranged in something like a barricade.
The anti-aircraft gun is parked on the back of a pick-up and three men tend it. Normal humans, I guess. Although the temptation is to erase them from existence, considering the geo-political situation I am wise to their mistake almost at once.
Going fast, I land heavily beside the vehicle. Hard enough to crack the pavement. The weapon is all but useless at such a range and the three-man crew wearing a peculiar mix of fatigues and casual gear stagger back, astonished themselves.
“Hey. I’m not the enemy,” I say to them.
My pronouncement triggers a rapid-fire exchange and translation. The lead figure, a man with a mild paunch and gabardine eyes, waves nicotine-stained fingers at me.
“You, flying man? If you fly, you the enemy, non?”
“I don’t think so,” I reply. “Yesterday, I killed Fortress. Il est mort. Comprends?”
The Frenchman’s jaw works like a chainless bike pedal. I leave them to it, walking away from the scene and eyeballing the hidden encampment. There’s none of the glamour of masks here. No costumes. No powers. Just men and grubby-looking women with small arms and pathetic caches of RPG grenades and other ordnance.
The pick-up crew and their vehicle vanish behind me in a white-hot flash.
I’m still reeling from this when the allegedly deceased Fortress lands in a crouch amid the blasted metal of the utility, sweeping away one of the charred corpses with his oversized mitt. Milky light leaks from his eyes and he turns the high beams on me and I throw myself aside just as the ethereal blaze cuts across the encampment.
One of the tent structures detonates with its hidden payload and the half-dozen people crouched within are toast. I’m still registering this when I get to my feet and desperately scramble for the air, only to have the fist of God cross my jaw, throwing me back down to earth.
Pain and panic blur my eyes as I lever up. A size twelve boot pushes into my chest and I look through the laces to see a Mongol-looking figure in a fur cap and vest grinning down at me with a wispy Genghis Khan mustache.
“Not so fast, tovarich.”
And a voice to one side says, “Take him.”
A wall of sleep crashes across my cerebellum and I’m gone.
Zephyr 10.8 “Sparrow With A Broken Wing”
THERE’S NO TIME to abandon control to the Preacher Man and hope his world-class mental powers can save me this time. One second I’m on my back in the parking lot outside the ruined French Mousquetaires. The next, there is a static blackness. And then I awake hanging in a Jesus Christ pose, exhausted, drained, looking up into myopic lights with my arms trailing behind me.
It’s dark in the chamber, except for the strange aquatic light trained on me.
“Don’t even think about trying to blast your way out of here,” a woman’s voice floats down. “We’ve given you a little shot of something.”
“Not tequila, I’m guessing,” I say in a cracked voice they probably can’t even hear.
Two figures walk into the light. I’m still expecting Fortress, though I can’t understand how he could still possibly function after my father burned out his brain like a tick from a wimpy kid’s thigh. Instead, the person in the lead gives me a genuine weak bowel moment.
Lennon. Or I should say, another Lennon.
He’s doing a pretty good Jesus impersonation himself. His costume, such as it is, is just a tattered white suit and a long black scarf. It’s the same outfit I saw my father wearing on the dreamscape beach when Siren was digging around in my head and that realization chills me to the very core of my miserable, withered being.
Conveniently, this Lennon has a dirty great scar running down one side of his face, starting under his left eye and disappearing into designer stubble. His eyes are glassy, pupils contracted to pinpricks. With him is the Mongol guy. Ottoman, they call him.
“Bellwether says you’ve got a little taste of me inside you, boy,” Lennon says. “How do you explain that?”
“I’m not from around here,” I say, weak in my reply.
Lennon closes his eyes and lifts a palm equidistant between my head and my dangling boots. Pain flares through my whole body. I feel like I’ve been dipped in molten lead, but just for an instant before the pain turns off.
“I’ll ask again,�
�� Lennon says. “What gives?”
“I’m your son,” I say, spluttering. “From another parallel. Jesus.”
The look on his face shows he wasn’t expecting that. His companion furrows elfin eyebrows under the Mongol cap, brawny bare arms crossed over his national costume.
“Preacher?”
Lennon lifts a hand, but this time it is just to deflect the Russian’s question.
“Is that why our mental signature is so alike?” Lennon asks. “This is what Bellwether tells me.”
“I don’t know Bellwether from shit,” I mutter.
“Tovarich,” Ottoman says and takes Preacher by the shoulder. “Let’s just take him to Matrioshka. She will be able to tell.”
“Are you mad?” the Liverpudlian replies. “What if he’s saying’s true? She’ll pull him apart, the crazy bitch. If he is my son. . . .”
“You’re getting sentimental in your old age, my friend,” Ottoman says.
I keep dangling. I don’t know if this is getting interesting or turning into an episode of Melrose Place.
“Easy for you to say, Mikhail,” Lennon says and turns. “You have your children. I have none.”
They stride together from the chamber and I relax, letting the weight go to my shoulders despite the pain as I strain to hear their last comments.
“Leave him be for now,” Lennon says. “Give me the chance to get to the bottom of this.”
*
“I THOUGHT YOU said you would be able to mask me, once we were away from Titania’s village,” I hiss to the old man inside my head.
I could, Joe. I’m sorry. I didn’t even sense these guys coming. Fortress is just like we left him: brain dead. There was someone else in control there, lad. I’m sorry. I don’t have all the answers.
“We shouldn’t have left Haven,” I say.
We would’ve brought all this down on them, Lennon replies. Haven’s powers worked by dissipating mental signatures, but mine was too strong, Joe. It would’ve looked like a black hole to any far-sensor.
“Very convenient.”
Look, Joe –
“No, pops. Just shut up a moment and let me think my own thoughts.”
You’d be used to this, wouldn’t you? Escaping the bad guy’s lair?
“It never gets old,” I agree. “Back in the day, the best way to figure out a madman’s plan was to let him capture you. Sick fucks always want to blurt it all out to a captive audience. Beats actual detective work.”
The words echo softly in the circular chamber. The walls are metal. I think it’s an old foundry of sorts. The aquamarine light continues down, no heat in it at all. And I can’t generate even a few inches of lift to take the pressure off my straining shoulders.
As I’m doing this, big doors crack open at ground level and mundane light floods in. Beyond the metal chamber it looks like any downtown office, white walls, fluorescent lighting, though it looks like no one’s clocked in for work out there in about the past thousand years. A half-dozen self-styled crack troops and a crazy-looking woman in a broad-necked gown stroll in. The collar of her studded emerald dress fans around like a platter to support her bald, oversized head. While her face is that of a weird, but otherwise normal-looking woman, her cranium is two or three times the standard, stretched and distorted, one side studded by a series of short black tubes, amethyst light bubbling between them. They seem to vanish into the ether scant distance from her skull. The woman’s face has a look of theatrical cruelty. The hand she raises to draw my attention wears a strange, possibly cybernetic glove, the fingers ending in syringes.
“I’m guessing you’re Matrioshka,” I manage to say without wheezing or peeing in my pants.
“I see my reputation’s proceeded me.”
She smiles. Her lips are nearly black and I suspect this isn’t due to cosmetics. There’s a dead pallor to her skin. She reminds me of Sinead O’Connor except evil, more dead than alive, and exhumed after two or three centuries trapped in some kind of Viking afterlife.
“What do you want?”
“I heard a whisper,” she says, voice like a sparrow with a broken wing. “I thought I would come to see for myself. Do you mind?”
I grit my teeth, immune to any illusion of permission.
She moves close now, doing the whole evil lover act as she takes her dangerous digits and caresses the side of my face, lifting my head to enforce the stare, lidless black almond-shaped eyes boring into mine.
“You are a strange one, aren’t you?” she croons. “Shall I take a look inside?”
*
I SENSE MOVEMENT from the needles prickling my stubble, but then more shadows converge at the doorway and I am strangely fucking glad to see Preacher among them.
Matrioshka.
It is thought, not speech, that rattles through my sensorium.
The scary woman turns and relinquishes my face.
Preacher. Is there a problem?
The captive is mine. Ottoman brought him in. A gift to me.
Really? the strange woman replies. But I want a gift, dear friend. Will you give him to me?
Suffice to say I am hanging on the reply. The psychic energies practically rebound from the metal walls. It’s no wonder the spill can even be heard by a psychic dummy like myself.
I haven’t finished with him, Lennon says.
Matrioshka nods. It’s a surprise to me, perhaps to everyone.
“I wonder what I have to do to earn such a favor from our dear Russian conqueror,” the mad woman says aloud.
She fetes me with a fey smile, heavy-lidded now in the best tradition of evil queens everywhere, and then glides slowly from the chamber taking her shock troops with her.
She passes Lennon standing in the doorway. There is another woman, equally deranged-looking. She wears a medieval-looking contraption on her head that is equal part Samurai helm and court jester’s cap. A bell at the bent conical tip tinkles as she moves aside, a long cloak slithering on the smooth floor behind her. Her gown is micro-fine chainmail and she carries a long staff, the end fashioned into a crescent moon. Her face is Asiatic, but not of any people I know from my world. Matrioshka inclines her head to the woman as she smooths past.
“Bellwether.”
Matrioshka.
And then she is gone.
Lennon says something I can’t quite hear and then shuts the doors on his companion, crossing hurriedly to me.
“You weren’t honest with me before,” he says as he reaches up and flicks the restraints on my wrists.
I catch myself before I drop like a dead weight to the floor. Crouching, I rub my wrists as Lennon produces a thick syringe and motions for me to turn my shoulder.
“What’s this?”
“It will give you your powers back.”
I grunt and he forces the needle in through the dense muscle even the chemical suppression of my abilities cannot undermine. I feel the shot flood my shoulder like liquid ice. I hiss gently between clenched teeth as the Preacher steps away, discarding the device.
“I have to get you out of here before Matrioshka returns. Left to her, you’d be undergoing dissection this afternoon. I can’t let that happen.”
“Why?”
Lennon eyes me seriously. Like the others, his aging has been slowed. He doesn’t look fifty, let alone the age he should be.
“You’re my ticket out of here, son.”
Zephyr 10.9 “The Matrioshka Effect”
PREACHER HELPS ME like a cripple from the detention chamber, almost fatherly in his own way. Here is this world-class psychic, like my own father, reduced to peeking around hallways as if we’re escaping the Death Star – or sneaking out of detention.
It’s the lady with the big head, Matrioshka, he fears.
“What’s the deal?” I bark, exhausted and limping and more than a little pissed to be relying on this ass-wipe for assistance. How To Be An Action Hero this is not.
“Scans confirmed you’re not from this parallel,” Lennon say
s. “We can rig you up to the wormhole and get out of here. I didn’t even get around to checking on your paternity. The mental signature seems to say it all. Then she caught wind of what we were doing and wanted in on the party.”
“Who is Matrioshka, exactly, and why are you all afraid of her?”
“Shhh, don’t even say her name. She’s too powerful,” this Lennon says.
We get to the edge of the hallway. We’re in a ruined skyscraper, the distressed remains of a shattered city stretching out through broken windows in every direction. I recognize the Reichstag, the great dome caved in, and realize this must be Berlin. Somewhere close by a bell tolls, though for whom, I try not to imagine.
“She was just one of us,” Lennon says, lost for breath a permanent state of affairs for him it seems. “The Resistance killed Arsenal, so the Twelve needed fresh blood. She was promoted through the eastern control theatre, under Ottoman’s command. Just another A-level psionic, you dig?”
Lennon laughs weakly. It turns into a racking cough.
“Every mentalist is different. Telepathy, psionic mind control, these were her big things.”
Lennon pauses to watch a flare fire into the distant scenery. There are more hovercraft peppering the twilight out there. It’s a permanent police state in a world like a regurgitated lunatic’s asylum.
“We had no idea she was a plant.”
“A plant? You mean, she was planted?”
“No, mate. I mean she’s a fucking plant. She became infected on one of her intergalactic wanderings. She has a . . . I don’t know what you call it . . . projecting tower. A place for far-sensing, in her outpost in Prague.”
“Ah, Prague,” I remark.
“You wouldn’t like it now,” Lennon says. “The Charles Bridge is a living gallows. The rivers are choked with dead. We sought to bring about a Utopia, pal. She just wants to see the world burn. And she’s winning.”
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