Also by J.T. Geissinger
Shadow’s Edge
Edge of Oblivion
Rapture’s Edge
Edge of Darkness
Darkness Bound
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 J.T. Geissinger, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477825549
ISBN-10: 1477825541
Cover design by Inkd Inc
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907966
* * *
To Jay, for knowing when to pet the bear, when not to poke it, and when to let it run off into the woods.
* * *
CONTENTS
START READING
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART TWO
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
PART THREE
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
PART FOUR
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
is also great
And would suffice.
—Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
PART ONE
PROLOGUE
The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, October 16, 2013
STOCK MARKETS COLLAPSING AMID DOOMSDAY FEARS
International stock markets are reacting to yesterday’s unexplained fire in the sky over the Amazon rainforest in Brazil with massive sell-offs. In the worst single-day decline the Dow Jones industrial average has seen since the infamous Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987, the Dow dropped 4,504 points to finish at 10,664, a loss of 29.7 percent. The SEC has temporarily suspended trading, but top financial gurus warn that without adequate, immediate explanation of the causes of the phenomenon that left approximately one hundred square miles of the rainforest northeast of Manaus burning, the hysteria will only worsen.
Combined with a ground shock that registered 7.3 on the Richter scale, the intense pulse of light was visible as far away as Lima, Peru. One eyewitness described it as an “unearthly” explosion in the atmosphere, and many religious leaders are pointing to end-time biblical prophecies. Exacerbating the public’s panic are the uncorroborated reports that Brazil’s military launched a massive sortie from the Manaus air force base minutes before the enormous fireball was first seen.
In his speech from the White House yesterday evening, President Obama denied the possibility that a nuclear weapon may have been detonated, in spite of the incredibly powerful electromagnetic pulse that destroyed satellites, power-supply networks, computers and electrical equipment in Manaus and surrounding areas, an effect consistent with a nuclear explosion.
Information coming from Brazil is virtually nonexistent, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that the firestorms decimating the rainforest have the potential to create an ecological disaster on a global scale. One of the richest areas of the world in terms of animal and plant diversity, the Amazon, if deforested, could be ground zero for global extinction.
The president is asking for calm amid a growing outcry for answers, but for now the long-term damage to both the environment and global economies remains to be seen.
New Vienna, Austria
16 September, 2027
1:17am IFST
Diary Entry #36
In the dreams, I’m always deaf.
That’s what comes first, the velvet silence, the utter lack of sound. It settles over me like the softest of blankets, comforting and warm. When I awake in that silence my dream self—so bold and fearless, so different than I—knows what’s coming. She knows exactly what to expect. She welcomes the unnatural lack of noise, my dreaming better half, and she’s glad.
She’s glad because she’s evil.
At least, that’s what Father thinks. He’s afraid of my other side almost as much as I am. The whipping he gave me this morning is proof enough of that. I didn’t mean to set the bed on fire, but I was so tired from chores and lessons and the constant effort of not touching and not speaking and generally pretending to be invisible that I forgot to put my gloves back on after my bath, and, well . . .
Father is going to have to buy me a new bed.
Again.
If only I could be good. If only I could be like the Prefect’s daughter Annika, with her shiny curls and sunny smile, or the Inquisitor’s daughter Sophie, with her winning manners. But I’m not. I’m weird, and I’m awkward, and all the Annikas and Sophies of the world hate me, though they’d never say it out loud.
They’re afraid of me, too.
But we’re careful, Father and I. We never give any indication that I might be different. Or at least different in that way, the way that could get both of us killed. So far we’ve been successful in explaining away my gloves and my silence and all the tics of my strange personality as Asperger’s and OCD. Hence the need for homeschooling. Hence my obvious lack of social skills. Or friends.
I don’t need any friends in those silent, wonderful dreams, though. I don’t need anything.
I only need him.
Unlike me, the stranger in my dreams is beautiful, more so than anyone I’ve seen in real life. He’s patient, and he’s kind, though reeking of danger, and my dreaming self—somehow years older than my actual age of fifteen—is always so glad to see him she goes a little mad. Magnus, she greets him silently. With the same resounding silence he answers, Hope.
That’s a little awkward because Hope isn’t my name. But my dream self doesn’t care. She throws her arms around this Magnus and kisses him.
He seems to really like it.
I’ve not been kissed. Though inside I burn brighter than the sun emblem of the Imperial Federation, outside I may as well be Quasimodo for all the attention boys pay me.
But Magnus pays attention. He has eyes as dark as a swan’s, and a voice as rich as brown butter, and he looks at me as if I’m something he’s been hunting for a long, long time. Something for which he’s been waiting.
Magnus. What a name. To be fair, it’s not much weirder than my own, but Magnus? Sounds like a twentieth-century porn star. Well, whoever this dream stranger is, I know one thing for sure.
He’s Aberrant. Like me.
And he’s out there. Somewhere, he’s out there.
24 January, 2028
3:22am IFST
Diary Entry #154
Today I burned the credit market to the ground.
I didn’t mean to do it, but that wretch Annika and her clique of First Form shrews were staring at me and giggling over the BioVite display, and the rage I felt took me completely by surprise. I mean, I should be used to the sneers by now. I am used to them. Growing up not only Third Form but also a weird Third Form guaranteed that.
But today . . . today I snapped. Big-time.
It wouldn’t have happened if I’d kept my glove on to stroke the grocer’s cat, as I always do. But today for some reason I was gripped by a violent urge to feel something. For once. I needed to touch something other than my own skin when I bathed.
Cinder is a black cat, glossy and plump, with fur like mink. I can’t tell you what possessed me to do it, but possess is the right choice of verb because I was as helpless against it as if a demon had slipped inside my body and started pulling strings.
I saw Cinder sitting there between the stacked wooden crates of oranges and the cart of flowers. Inscrutable as the Sphinx, she blinked up at me with her bright-yellow eyes, and, as it always does, a strange recognition crackled between us. She prowled forward. I knelt down. I furtively removed my glove, and stretched out my hand.
And oh, what bliss. I closed my eyes and simply luxuriated in the feeling of cool, silken fur as Cinder arched beneath my fingertips, gliding against my hand with a satisfied purr.
Dogs whine and cower when I draw near. Birds shriek, horses whinny and stomp, even crickets fall silent when I pass. But cats are drawn to me and I to them, and Cinder is one of dozens of neighborhood cats I know by name. I love her the way one loves children, or a favorite song. Just her presence makes me happy.
Then I heard the laughter.
I turned and saw the cluster of girls across the way. The heads bent together, the smirks hidden behind hands, the contempt as blinding as sunlight on snow. The effect was that of a struck match tossed on a giant pile of dry kindling. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d shot to my feet, flexed open my gloveless hand, and pushed.
That’s what I call it. The “push.” It’s an outward-bound sensation, no more effortful than an exhalation of breath, but vastly more deadly.
The whole place was in flames in the space of a few seconds. I grabbed Cinder and ran.
I’m still not sure if Annika and her little coven made it out.
I’m not sure if I care.
12 September, 2030
2:19am IFST
Diary Entry #1069
It’s my birthday today. At least, the day Father and I celebrate it. I sometimes feel like the baby in that banned book, what was his name? Oh, right: Moses. Found in a basket, just like me. Father would probably be found in a basket chopped into little pieces if the Prefect ever found out we had banned books, but Father is as good at keeping secrets as I am. Better, maybe.
Eighteen years old (near as we can tell), and still never been kissed. Which is probably for the best. God only knows what would happen to the poor boy. Strike that, Thorne only knows. God is one of those words on the Suppression List that keeps making its way into my diary. Not that anyone will ever read this. I hope. If you are, it means something bad has happened. That thing I’ve lived in terror of since I was little:
Discovery.
I’ve been careful since that day I snapped in the market, though. I’ve been almost perfect. I’ve learned how to control all my tics. I don’t even vanish when I sneeze anymore.
Still having those dreams of Magnus, though. I won’t detail how explicit they’ve gotten, but my older dream self sure is . . . fierce. Just thinking about it makes my face hot.
He’s still calling me Hope. I wish he wouldn’t do that.
Oh—wait ’til you hear this! At Assignations today, I got Hospice Aid. How hilarious is that? I purposely ganked the aptitude tests so I’d be allowed to work with Father in the grow light fields, but the Administrator thought I showed “advanced intuitive capacity,” “highly honed observational skills,” and a “great propensity for compassion.”
Compassion. Ha! If only they knew about the market fire. Even though no one was killed, I was ecstatic about Annika’s hair burning off.
The joke’s on me, though, because now I’ll be spending the rest of my days tending to the condemned elderly.
I hate my life.
15 October, 2036
11:37pm IFST
Diary Entry #2553
For the first time in many, many years, I heard the Girl.
I was in Mr. Kirchmann’s room, reading to him from Essays on Enlightenment—the IF’s quarterly propaganda treatise about the glory and necessity of the global unified government—and trying not to grit my teeth too hard as the crusty old goat nodded in agreement to every word I spoke as he lay feebly wheezing in his bed, when suddenly I felt as if a door kicked open inside my head, and someone barged in.
Her presence is electric, and overwhelming. And, if I’m being honest, dark. She’s much stronger now than when I last heard her, as a child, and she’s much more . . .
Angry. In fact, this Girl is really tweaked. She started shouting straight off, the words tumbling over each other in her rush to get them out.
Hope for fuck’s SAKE wake UP get off your sorry ass we NEED you here come and—
And what? I don’t know, because I threw up a mental wall and shut her out. I’ve been cloaking my mind forever—nothing slips in, nothing slips out, it’s a simple matter of survival—but when I’m tired, overly emotional, or inattentive, sometimes the cloak gets loose. The doors come unlocked, and the world in all its terrible, greedy enormity comes rushing in.
She comes rushing in. The Girl, whose name I know, from many prior rush-ins, is Honor.
Even from behind the wall I hear her muffled, angry shouts. I retreat, turn the volume down to zero, then she’s gone. But the questions remain.
Who is she? What does she want from me? And why, like my dream lover Magnus, does she insist on calling me Hope?
I think it’s time Father and I sat down and had a little chat.
Later that night
He said what he always says when I ask questions. “Stop asking so many questions, Lu.” Then he went and sat on the porch, and smoked his entire week’s tobacco ration while sitting in the dark.
Here’s what I know for sure: I can light things on fire. I can get inside people’s minds. I can vanish into a cloud of mist, and smell, hear, and feel things others don’t. I can move things without touching them, and God Thorne help you if I do touch you, because you might find yourself stripped of any special talent you have.
Father found that out the hard way. I accidentally stole his ability to play the piano and speak Czech before he figured it out and started making me wear gloves.
So even if Father won’t answer my questions, they all add up to the same thing I’ve known since I was little.
I’m different. I’m dangerous. I’m almost certainly not human.
And, if I want to stay alive, no one can know.
24 December, 2037
11:37pm IFST
Diary Entry #2987
Father is afraid.
He won’t say it, but I smell it on him. Fear smells like something sour and rotting, the same stench of decay I can ne
ver wash out of my hair and clothes after work. I overheard him on the telecom with the Prefect tonight, and his voice shook so badly I thought he might cry. When I asked him what was wrong he said “nothing,” but he looked guilty. He hates to lie.
An odd misfortune for him, since his entire life is built around doing exactly that.
In other news, I had another “incident.”
It wasn’t fire this time. It was actually worse, because at least fire is a natural phenomenon. A fire can be started by a million different things; the fire that caused the credit market to burn to the ground, for instance, was thought to have started from faulty wiring in a fan in the butcher’s stall. That was the official explanation, anyway. The rumors have never really stopped circulating. But a bunch of knives flying through the air and stopping just before they embed themselves into someone’s head . . . well, that’s not exactly something that can be explained so easily.
Talk about a red flag.
It was that bastard Cushing’s fault. He’s always handling the elderly Hospice guests (they’re called guests, though everyone, including them, knows they’re not allowed to leave) too roughly. I’ve seen more bruised arms than at Heroin Park. Anyway, I was in the kitchen helping Lars and the staff prepare Thornemas Eve dinner when I happened to glance out the door. The view from the kitchen into the communal dining room is a good one, and there was Cushing, shoving Mrs. Elkins down into a chair so hard she cried out in pain.
Then what did he do? He pinched her. He grabbed a fold of papery skin on her upper arm and twisted, hissing at her to shut the fuck up.
So, yes. I lost it. Again. Before I could stop myself, I had every knife in the kitchen flying through the air toward that sick bastard’s head.
I caught myself before any bodily damage was done, but the sight of an army of knives hovering in midair around Cushing’s head, held up by nothing, made Mrs. Elkins faint dead away. Cushing wet his pants. The kitchen staff witnessed the entire thing.
Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel) Page 1