“Updating,” it replied and repeated, “updating,” and answered minutes later: “Celine Nephthys location not found.”
Either the device was as useless as he’d come to believe, or Celine had evaded mandatory enrollment in the global surveillance network. Cynque, a one-stop shop for personal information: occupation, age, nationality, and citizen status (i.e. fugitive), doubled as a communication device and source of entertainment. To an average person, the watch’s pros outweighed its cons. Allister was far from an average person, and his skepticism had blossomed into theories of an all-seeing government cloaked in the shiny guise of convenience. “We are all Cynqued!” the newest commercial tagline propagated. Allister liked their initial slogan better: “Cynque makes life easier.”
Humidity clung to him like a needy lover, and he reached the grand La Mamounia Palace Hotel’s fading memory drenched in perspiration. The prospect of confronting Celine kept him in the sweltering heat until he gathered the courage to go in.
The statuesque entrance was lined by half-broken pillars spread like downed trees along the ground. In rare cases, they leaned against sturdier companions, held up by the embrace of roots connected to the palace’s upper fixtures.
Damaged chandeliers lowered his expectation for decent light. He roamed the hall’s darkness. He called Celine’s name over and over. Allister scowled and turned each direction in the deteriorated lobby, before he yelled, “I need to talk to you!”
A rumble, similar to a high-speed train, foretold the wind-propelled storm. Arm over his face, Allister scrunched down, using the pillar for stability and to protect his back. Sand swarmed from all sides, carving a woman’s curvy hips, cinched waist, and squared shoulders—then solidified. Smooth, radiant skin sat between a chorus of twisted braids the color of midnight.
He left the pillar’s support and huffed, “Celine. You look... different.”
“Bow,” Princess Celine Nephthys commanded, in a French-inspired North African accent.
Already crouched halfway to the ground, he replied, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Fingers curved in, she yanked her arm to her body. He dropped to his knees and swayed upright. She flattened her palm, causing him to pitch forward, both hands on the floor.
She’s still upset about what happened, he thought. His core muscles contracted, fighting gravity. He bowed his head. “Is this what you wanted?”
She shook her wrist, erasing the increased gravitational pull. “It will suffice,” she said. “What are you doing in my country?”
“I need info on C20.”
“How inconvenient for you.” Celine’s frown straightened. The piercing brown darkening in her eyes ignited to the purple energy of her geokinetic superpowers. Sand spilled in from the outside and sloshed like a furious ocean, flooding the room.
Ankle deep. Knee deep. Waist deep. Mouth hanging open, he edged back and debated whether to defend himself. “Don’t make me fight you,” he stammered. “That’s not why I came here!”
“You thought I forgot what you did? When you saw me imprisoned and failed to give me a second glance? I’ve heard so much about this hero, Allister Adams. All I see is an impulsive, self-serving child.” She raised her arms.
Okay, she’s pissed about what happened. “Celine, calm down. I’m sure we can—”
More sand poured in. It swelled into a tsunami and crested, breaking against his chest. Knocked upside down, he flailed inside the earthen trap whipping en masse around his body.
“You left me to die! I beg you to find a reason... ”
Her muffled words refused the tumultuous trek to his ears and kept their distance. Swallowing, a bigger mistake than paddling through the rip current, filled his mouth with flavorless particles and panic.
Stabbing sensation beneath the skin in his left arm, blood-bloated veins, and a blue glow were signs he’d tapped into Z-energy, the peculiar energy inside him. He closed his fists in an attempt to contain the power to no avail. It erupted from his forearm, dispersed the sand and blasted Celine back.
Allister rolled onto his stomach, gagged, gagged again, and threw up the grains lodged in his esophagus. Fighting the puddle of sick’s smell, he turned sideways. “Crap, I didn’t... mean to use that. Did... did I hurt you?”
He held his left wrist, palm exposed, demanding the Z-energy’s cooperation under his breath as he waited for an answer. It behaved like lightning, crackling until its temper waned. Zig-zag shapes sank into his skin, and the energy’s soft flare dulled to his natural honey complexion.
She stood over him, arms crossed.
“Look, I didn’t save you, because C20 had my moth—” He coughed and wiped saliva from his chin. “I was scared. For all I knew, you were on their side.” He reached for her to help him stand, to which she let out a scoff and slapped his hand aside.
“Don’t be an opportunist. Just tell me why you’re here.”
“I told you. I need to find C20.”
La Mamounia Palace Ruins, Marrakech, Morocco
Celine led him to an open room occupied by a mid-century wooden chaise and a sparse furniture assortment. Vines dangled from the ceiling, covered in red, orange, and pink flowers. Roots stretched like veins to decorate chipped tile. A shallow pool shimmered with clarity and freshness next to an archway leading to a balcony. Nature’s luxurious accommodations.
A better-preserved chandelier spread a pure prism over a chessboard and pieces sculpted from stone. Their positions alluded to the game’s tense climax, and either she or the other person was losing. Allister didn’t need to ask how they moved, knowing at minimum, the princess’s powers involved manipulating the Earth’s crust using her mind.
The king came to Allister’s chin. Fascinated, he reached for its crown.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said.
His head whipped toward her direction. Arched eyebrows rose. Her silky twists were pulled to the front, and the blouse portion of her navy jumpsuit showed her alluring back. “And stop looking at me,” she said over her shoulder. Celine had two or three years on him, which put her in her early twenties.
He froze in embarrassment, certain his ears had turned from light brown to burnt sienna. The burning spread to his face and neck, sending his focus to the sand creeping over his boots. “Sorry, I was just—” His stomach dropped. “I, um, didn’t mean to offend you.”
Concern for her displeasure was upstaged by a squishy sponge sound. His neck turned, and he winced, stretching his arm again to touch the layer of restored epidermal cells stitching across his back. Healing used to take a lot less time.
Allister gulped, brought his arm down, and hid it under his shadow. The cosmic-powered stone attached to the back of his hand was exposed. He fiddled with a flat piece of fabric that had loosened during his curiosity. Pulling it taut, to conceal the dull artifact, he secured its place by looping it around his palm twice and tucking the fabric ends in near his wrist and then did the same on the other hand.
With a glassy stare, she pursed her lips, then examined a fraying braid. “It’s a miracle you got past the wall,” she said.
“Lucky, I guess.”
“And my soldiers.”
“Hey, I didn’t kill anyone, I wouldn’t kill... anyone.”
“For your sake,” Celine said, deciding to invest in his eye contact, “I hope that’s the truth.”
He didn’t know for sure but answered with confidence, “It is.” His fingers intertwined behind his head and he took a few steps. “A month and a half ago, the President of the United States tells me that because I ‘saved the world,’ he’s voiding my contract with the Andromeda Project, and by default the U.S. Government. So, I’m like super stoked they let me go free.”
“Ecstatic I’m sure.”
“You don’t understand, that contract was hardcore. I signed my life away.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Come to find out, my immunity lasts for a year. And my orders are to lay low, as in, no powers. President DeVries said when the time’s up,
I’ll have to go back and sign a hero-for-hire deal, some crap about me helping them bring down C20. It’s a joke of an offer if you ask me.” He checked to make sure she’d remained engaged in the story. “C20’s dangerous. Why would they wait?”
Celine stood in front of a vanity fashioned out of clay, staring at a smooth black crystal surface melded into a rectangular mirror. “What does this have to do with me?”
“I mean... you spent some time behind enemy lines. Did they tell you what they were working on?”
She flinched and cursed, preoccupied by her reflection. Almond skin, transformed to dust, escaped her shoulder and settled to the floor.
“Hey, did you hear—”
“I don’t remember!”
Her rudeness mellowed, and with the smidgeon of apology in her voice, she revealed what she did remember. She remembered going to sleep one night and waking up imprisoned in a machine a year later. She remembered the psychic, Florence Belladonna, freeing her by crashing into C20’s watchtower. And she remembered escaping as fast as she could.
Allister fumbled to get his words out without her noticing the cracks in his syllables. “H-How... how did you know her name?”
“I did my research. Wasn’t she your associate? Why can’t she help you?”
Repelled by mental walls, the question came in stifled and far off, while the woman’s name, Florence, who had abandoned him in favor of her own preservation, blared between his ears.
“Why can’t she help you?” Celine repeated, standing up straight.
“She’s dead.” He bit his lower lip. “She knew too much.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe you should’ve dug a little deeper. Can you help me or not?”
She circled him and lifted her open palm. The ground rose to his eye level, suspending a sand block over five feet in the air. She blew up at the cube. Her arid breath, as strong as the wind itself, chipped sand away and left them a 3-D sculpture of C20’s former base in the Middle East and the tunnels beneath it. “I went back. Twice. The first time it was empty, although I couldn’t access any of their technology. The second time, it was overrun. Your government sealed it off. Either they’re protecting something or hiding something.”
Allister raised an eyebrow and his neck, studying the sculpture, its layout and entry points. “Take me there,” he said flatly.
“No. The Moroccan-U.S. alliance is in negotiations. It won’t bode well.”
If he got caught, he was screwed too. Was that the worst that could happen, being captured by the government for trespassing on classified territory? Allister buried his mouth in his palm and listened to Celine as she went on about how ludicrous the idea was.
“My friend’s been kidnapped!” he blurted out.
Her eyes shifted upwards, and her chest contracted in a sigh.
“I think. I’m not sure. She’s been missing for a month. Her name is Zosma. Zosma Caster.”
“I have never heard such a name, and I have heard many.”
“She’s, uh, not from around here,” he said. A wrinkle crossed his brow. “Listen, if I can find anything to point me in the right direction... ”
“It’s worth a few casualties,” she finished. “I know your type.”
Sweat beads dotted his forehead, skin glistening with sebum and saline. Allister wiped the droplets before they passed his eyebrows and pulled a computer chip the size of a mini-USB drive from his pocket. “I figure half a mil is decent for a one-way trip.” He tossed it.
She caught the five hundred thousand dollars in virtual currency. Two of her sharpened nails plucked it from her palm to review it against the chandelier’s light. The clear plastic techno-currency behaved like cash and could be transferred into the global Cynque banking fund without tracing its origin. It could also be circulated, if say, one wasn’t part of the global Cynque banking fund. Either way, it provided assurance their association would stay anonymous.
“A bit fortuitous, too much of a coward to rescue me, yet brave enough to come here and ask me to break international law.” Celine drew her neck high and tucked the chip in her ensemble’s folds. “What is it you require?”
“Besides a ride?” he asked. Tight-lipped, his mind raced through worst-case possibilities. “Cover once we get there, which I remember you’re good at.”
“I am not amused.” She stomped. Sand gathered around them, swirling at increased speed and the propulsion of a cyclone lifted them into the air.
Abandoned C20 HQ, Former Middle East
Baking in 150 degrees of cloudless daylight, the two rode atop a chariot of sand across the Iraqi desert. Obliterated in a dust storm called the Middle Beast, dilapidated skyscrapers and houses buried under mountainous sand dunes whizzed by. Crossing three time zones at hundreds of miles per hour had put them a day ahead of his intended ambush. They stopped moving, inviting silence to surround them.
Celine’s face lost its color. “I caused this,” she whispered.
A mushroom-shaped watchtower held a wicked smile of broken windows and was bent near the base, as if welcoming them with a butler’s bow.
If it were two months prior, the watchtower would have been patrolling the region for trespassers. If it were two months prior, Celine would be inside it, strapped to a device amplifying her sand manipulation powers beyond her control. It was that machine he’d walked by, in a rush to find C20’s leader before C20’s leader found him.
Her skin opened with a loud tear, as fissures split along her arm and torso. She hid them with a rapid turn of her body, and yet, in that brief moment’s time, Allister saw her skin had mutated to slate rock. The simplicity of his hand pressed softly against her back calmed her heaving. “No one had a chance.” She wrung her hands, eyes glued to the ground under their feet. “The U.N. blamed global warming. Any fool would know there was nothing natural about what happened.”
Pressure to relieve her of her obligation elbowed its way into his conscience. He shifted his weight. He wasn’t good at doing things alone. More often than not, he screwed them up. Plus, Celine was smarter and had better control over her powers.
“I thought this had passed,” she muttered, shying away from his caress.
PTSD at its finest. She’d almost died there, and he, mustering all the audacity and naïveté in the world, had asked her to come back on a hunch. The tightness in his chest wouldn’t leave, not until she did.
Allister pushed his hair away from his face and styled it in a bun on top of his head. “Allister Adams arrived,” Cynque announced next to his ear. “30.50° N, 47.78° E. Former capital of Iraq, Al Basra.” The inevitable, dreaded check-in. Decades ago, it was a choice, celebrated and rewarded on social platforms. Now, location services went right into Cynque’s data-collecting brain, the same brain the authorities used to track anyone Cynqued. The hourglass had been turned over.
“The infantry is lighter the farther you get from the dome,” Celine pointed out. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“Hey, we agreed no questions.”
“I doubt your government considers this laying low.”
“I didn’t pay for advice, I paid for cover.”
Flushed cheeks joined the scowl on her face. Her reserve raised to normal, her tone’s temperature lowered to cold. “I’ll get to it then,” she said, ahead of him, glaring at the disheveled base. She took several calming breaths, and frustrated wrinkles subsided from her forehead. “With humility, I call upon this fallen nation’s ashes. Rise up and cover the route of this spirit on his search for the lost.”
The tattered grey bandanna around his neck slid over his mouth and nose. Awe and envy befell him in secret. Peace, the kind Allister rarely achieved, had drowned her frustration. The door to her superhuman gifts wasn’t the devil’s fiery red, it was the sky’s placid blue. When speaking or, rather, manifesting her will, the Earth listened, like child to mother or vice versa. Such calm must’ve dwelled in her heart, a calm that contrasted what unfolded on the desert hori
zon. Two opposing sand armies raised from the east and west, rushed at them, thundering and torrential. With her arm’s thrust, the storm converged and charged forward, picking up anything and everything terrestrial in its path to aid its fury. Not wanting to miss the fun, wind joined the catastrophic distraction and kept the dust moving around after her hands returned to her sides.
“I trust you can find your way from here!” she shouted, yanking the techno-currency from her bosom and shoving it into his chest. “Stay away from my country, Allister Adams!”
It took him a minute to look down, transfixed by what she’d conjured from her overactive imagination. When he did, she’d removed her hand, and he caught the chip inches from becoming a needle in a haystack. As he came back up to thank her or apologize or explain himself, her face and body dissolved, carried away by the storm as fine, ground rock.
Blustery winds threatened to push the watchtower on top of a giant metallic dome. Recalling the 3-D layout Celine provided and his previous visit, he knew the dome contained the control room. The control room contained data. Hawk-sharp eyesight cut through the maelstrom and pinpointed twenty soldiers guarding it. At least she was good on her word.
Allister slid down a dune and steadied his footing on its flattest part. Moaning, he tilted his head back. Time had eluded his planning again. He had no idea how long the storm would last. A swift exhale led to straightened posture and a shoulder roll.
“Okay,” he said.
Once he’d gotten in the zone, his jog graduated to an Olympic sprint, and he achieved a running speed of eighty miles per hour. Even with Celine absent, the sand’s brutality escalated. Foolish and fast, he powered toward the storm, his forearms acting as shields, and when he got to its outer rim he dove in, face turned away. Losing momentum, Allister veered sideways and surrendered to gale force. His stride slowed. He sank low to listen and kept both heels up, balancing on his toes, fingertips pressed in the sand.
“We’re under attack, detective!” a robust voice shouted. “Might be one of those goddamn superhumans you warned us about.”
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