Archon's Queen

by Matthew S. Cox

  She had become a Proper overnight.

  For many blocks in all directions, patches of pale orange light flickered in the gloom of the approaching storm, a dozen-dozen pictures of Faye in hologram, mounted to any vertical surface someone could find. Little devices the size of a thumbnail projected the vision of a black-haired porcelain doll to the world, smiling in a pose for a class portrait. She looks so different with her hair blue.

  Faye Taylor, 13, missing daughter. Last seen two weeks ago. AF851.185CC.9185F.FFBDD. Reward if found. Ͼ100,000.

  That was likely her father’s code; like posting one’s name, address, phone number, resume, and bank account number, an invitation to every cyberspace criminal in the world to come sniff you out.

  The man must be nuts to post his PID in the open like that, daft or desperate.

  Anna stood by one such hologram, staring into the virtual eyes flickering with windblown debris. The ghostly face looked as innocent on the outside as Faye did on the inside, devoid of blue hair and attitude.

  A tiny grey car squeaked past her in the street and came to a halt at the adjacent building. From it, a middle-aged lumpy man emerged in a brown sweater and grey slacks. He squinted into the wind, his eyes receding into a face pasty and puffy. Anna recognized him from Faye’s nightmares: Mr. Bell, the man who had stuck his hand where it did not belong.

  Anna thought back to the Crossman in the alley and shifted her stance at the remembered touch, the sensation of a cold finger where she did not want it. Latent anger swirled as she stared at the nervous potbellied man leaning through the open door to gather things from the car. He seemed to feel the malice in her stare and looked around like a mouse sensing the eagle before the dive; with each second, his motions picked up speed.

  Her gaze shifted to the warm glow in the windows of number nine Clifton Hill, trying to guess which floor the girl lived on, which floor still held the people Mr. Bell tortured by his continued existence.

  She drew her coat tight against a building gust of wind, which knocked one of the man’s parcels to the ground. He stooped to retrieve it and she imagined the Crossmen finding Faye, and then felt the man on top of her again, the cold metal refuse bin digging into her hips. Her mind taunted her with what could have happened if she was an ordinary woman out on the blag with her mate’s no-good boyfriend, taunted her with the dread of what would have happened to her best friend if she had no little monster inside her head.

  Come off it, Anna. If you were normal, you’d have a loving home and would never have met Penny.

  The lamps on the front of Bell’s car blew off in a shower of sparks, sending him scurrying up onto the porch with a high-pitched nasal whine.

  How like a pig you squeal.

  “Evenin’ Deacon,” said another man, on his way out of the building.

  The two struck up a banal conversation, the sort of things middle-aged men in a well-to-do section of London chatted about in passing. The sort of things people with no true worries or no true desire to be friends used to fill the five minutes that fate and courtesy forced them to interact.

  Anna glanced at the empty false lawn in Faye’s yard that approximated the place the old pink bicycle had been left in hers. Her father had only beaten her, drunk and angry at how many things she broke. Drunk and terrified of the creature he shared a flat with, and rightly so. The beating that made her fear for her life had cost him his. What could she do to a wretch like Mr. Bell if she could kill her father for merely hitting her?

  Mind made up, her knuckles creaked as she stared at the unsavory man scurrying into his den.

  Run you fat bastard of a nonce. Your reckoning’s come calling.

  She shifted her weight from the lamppost onto her feet, pacing at a stalk towards the gate. The rumble of a vehicle brought her head about to the left in time to see a large black van park a short distance away on the opposite side. Something about it spooked her train of thought away from vengeance and she kept going, right past Bell’s house and down the street.

  The van slid out from the space like an orca on the hunt. Anna sped up and took the first corner she could. When the van followed, her mind raced through all manner of possibilities as to who it could be. Some disgruntled corporate from an old job she had done for Carroll, low-level Syndicate thugs looking for a new piece of ass, or most likely, hired freelancers from BT looking to pay her back for the other night on the roof.

  Her coat trailed behind her as she ran and leapt a hedge. She cut through a yard to get away from the road. A barking dog joined the chase until another fence jump ended its pursuit with the sound of a sixty-pound animal having an abrupt meeting with iron bars. The street in front of the adjoining property looked free of large black vans, or much traffic of any kind given the time, and she resumed a nervous walk.

  Without warning, a mass of black leapt from the shadows and blocked the footpath in front of her. The man was huge, towering over her with shoulders as broad as two of her. Black material even covered his face, save for two opaque round lenses over his eyes and a filter module over his mouth. The pistols, knives, and other assorted devices on his belt were not the sort of thing common people carried―he was an assassin.

  She all but ran into him as she clamped both of her hands over her mouth to swallow a startled scream. His lunging grasp at her wrist stalled her backpedal, and left her struggling like a pickpocket who had been nicked.

  “Hello, Miss Morgan. We need to talk.”

  Terror froze her muscles for an instant. Her head whirled around to the right at the sound of a sliding metal van door. Two other men, also covered head to toe in black, crouched within the glowing red interior. Puffs of fog appeared at the ends of rifles, and a stabbing pain lanced into her back upon two tiny daggers.

  A cold burn spread from the points of impact. The man holding her by the arm was the only reason she had not wound up lying on her back. Flexible rubberized material liquefied away from of his bald head, sliding into a matte black metal ring around his neck. She recognized him from the police checkpoint, the other man that arrived with the telepath who probed her.

  The CSB.

  arkness.

  Anna floated amid a void of whispers with no sense of temperature, scent, or weight. Random images flashed through the canvas of her thoughts, inane things like cartoon rabbits and car tires. A grinning blond Arsenal player held his hands up as a crowd screamed goal! Old farms and tractors, planes, people she had never seen before came one after the next. The whispering voices asked questions without waiting for the answer: what time is it, what’s your name, who is that, do you remember your mother, how far a ride is it to the West End from Trafalgar, what did you have for breakfast four Sundays ago?

  She felt her lungs lose air, and the moan of her voice rose over the din in her skull. Her toes made contact with a surface smooth and cold, icy metal against the back of her legs. Thin coarse material itched at her chest and thighs, a smock of sorts, and a band of dense fabric had been tied over her eyes. Something seemed to squeeze itself around the top of her head, beneath the blindfold, tight to her skin.

  Consciousness returned and she struggled to move. Metal restraints fixed her by the wrists and ankles to a steel chair; softer straps crossed an X over her chest and held her body against the back. Her squirming reawakened tender spots where darts had hit her and she whimpered. Chains rattled as she fought to get loose, shackles biting into her flesh. She rocked as she fought the straps, trying to lean her head toward her hand so she could pull the cloth from her face. Her desperate struggle caused the heavy chair to slide a little.

  Swirls of fear and anger followed her realization of being trapped, echoed soon after by threads of pain seeping into her mind. A hot metal headband clamped about her skull as if trying to squeeze through the skin to the underlying bone, the burning intensified with her fear. The little thing in the back of her mind leapt at the walls of a cage, zapped each time it tried to touch the bars.

  The more frightened
she became, the more it hurt. She threw her weight forward, trying to lift the chair and get onto her feet, but she lacked the strength to budge it. The noise of her battle reverberated into the distance; the cavernous echo suggested she was the only occupant of a massive structure.

  She sat there, writhing in her bindings, with no clue where she was. The cavernous space remained deathly silent, save for the clatter of restraints whenever she tried to move. It occurred to her that she had been taken by the CSB. She thrashed against the cuffs again, overwhelmed by the uncontainable need to feel the side of her neck for proof she had not been cut open and rigged with a kill switch. Metal bit into her wrists and ankles. She screamed from pain and frustration.

  Minutes later, she sagged limp, out of breath, and ventured a timid, “Hello?”

  Her voice reverberated to silence. She could not lean forward at all, and twisted her head about despite the blindfold. The incessant random whispering hammered her mind.

  “Stop it!” she screamed. “Let me out! I’m going mad!”

  Another burst of energy dissipated in impotent squirming, and she broke down and sobbed. Every time her fear got the better of her, the metal ring around her head delivered such a jolt of pain she found herself drooling. The whispers and random images continued, reaching a point where they changed her fearful struggle for freedom into a manic and desperate attempt to make it stop.

  Eventually, the sound of scuffing boots broke through the mental noise. Anna stopped moving, her limbs tensing inward as far as the chains allowed. A sense of bodies surrounded her, and she trembled. Whatever garment they had put on her felt like it covered enough, but being stared at in silence by people she could not see was more intolerable than being naked in a cage. The random whispered questions changed into comments about her height, about her tits, about how cute her hair was. The scratchy voices teased her that she found her helplessness exciting, told her she liked it, called her a bad girl. It needled her as if drawing upon her insecurities and throwing them back at her.

  The chair leapt an inch to the rear at her reaction to a cup pressed against her lip. Someone offered her water. It smelled normal, so she drank. When the cup retreated, a soft plastic object entered her mouth and forced her jaw open. Contorting in the chair, she tried to get away from it. Hands grabbed her head from behind, holding her still while a swab danced around the inside of her cheek, making her gag.

  The mechanism relaxed, and she coughed. “Who the hell are you people? What is this?”

  No one answered.

  A spot of cold metal touched her right bicep, below the short sleeve of the smock. She made a fist and gasped as an air-hypo fired, again thrashing in her seat.

  “Let me out this instant!”

  The anger that followed her shout grew into a scream from the incredible pain the band projected into her head. Her body writhed, shaking with involuntary spasms as four shackles bit into her flesh. When her brain unclenched from the sensation of being cooked, she put together that her ‘little friend’ appeared to be triggering the device every time it tried to do something.

  That’s got to be some kind of psionic leash… Damn it hurts.

  Attempting to stay calm in her current situation was an order that would have been a tall request of a Buddhist monk. A tear ran down her face as she prepared herself to feel the pain repeatedly. James’s explanation of the Awakened recited itself through her head. She was afraid to mention how her power ran away with itself. It would give her away as something strange. She had to stay quiet―if she could.

  Men shuffled about amid the clatter of armor and rifles. Fingers slipped between the black cloth and her temple, and the blindfold flew up and off with a sharp tug. Looming over her, the burly bald man offered a bemused smile and picked at his dark goatee.

  She found herself in a prison-yellow smock, handcuffed arm and leg to a rigid metal chair in the approximate center of an old hangar. The floor was equal parts grey paint and rusty smear; the ceiling hung thirty feet in the air, dotted with old gas lamps that no longer worked. Intense beams of light focused on her from a horseshoe of freestanding portables, reducing the dozen or so men behind them to figments of shadow and menace. Anna squinted; they looked like British military, common soldiers.

  Some manner of springy cord wrapped around her, the kind of thing she assumed commandos used to rappel down the side of buildings. The entire scene blurred as her head moved, swooning about like the aftermath of a drinking binge. Outside, a hovercar passed overhead, the pale blue glow of its ion drives leaked through cracks in the ceiling, angling as it went by.

  Anna’s head sagged forward and she stared at the redness she had fought into her wrists. Digital code-locked restraints blinked back at her, she found it frightening not to sense the current inside them. She twisted her hand, trying to get a better look at the buttons.

  “They’re quite secure, Miss Morgan. You’ll not be going anywhere until we’ve had a chat.”

  “I have a headache and I don’t even know who you are.” She let her skull’s weight drag it back against the chair to look up at him. “Thank you for at least letting me stay dressed.”

  He flashed a two-second smile before all mirth faded. “I am CSB Agent Gordon, and that is a military psi-inhibitor. You may be wondering why you cannot read my mind, assuming of course, telepathy is one of your gifts… This little beauty keeps us on the same playing field.”

  His finger tapped the thin strip, sending a reverberating explosion through her head three times. Anna’s hand clanked to a halt an inch above the armrest when she tried to cradle the side of her head in response to pain.

  “It will hurt more if you touch it… security mechanism. Anyway, Miss Morgan, you are probably wondering why we asked you to join us at such an ungodly hour.”

  “This is asking? I’d hate to see if you made demands.”

  “Mind your chelp, girl. We know.” The large man extended his hand to the right as if indicating something existed in open air.

  Anna lifted her head, about to inquire about the empty space when a hologram shimmered into existence. A six-foot square panel scrolled open in midair, a hole through reality looking into another time and place. The view looked down from the ceiling into a small room with a round table and chair. A little girl, about twelve, sat at the table looking bored. The only remarkable thing about her was that she had white hair. She glanced up at the camera; bruises on her face brought back bad memories.

  “I am interested in your opinion, Annabelle.” He folded his hands behind his back. “Does this look like a little girl who has just seen her father die in a freak kitchen accident?”

  The child Anna fidgeted, tapped, and folded her arms. She swung her feet for a moment while scowling at the wall. If anything, she looked annoyed at being detained. When the door opened and a constable walked in, her demeanor changed. She sniffled and wiped her eyes, thanking him for whatever hot drink he had brought for her.

  “You’ve had a lot of practice fooling the Met.” The bald man chuckled, leaving the image frozen on crocodile tears. “We’ve been watching you for quite some time. For a while there, we thought you were on to us.”

  Red warmth filled her cheeks, the indignity of being caught in a lie. Somewhere behind her, a metal door slid open and footsteps approached.

  The image changed to a floating point of view gliding over sheet-covered bodies. Silver cabinets gave away the reflection of a flying holo-recorder moving through a morgue; the only body uncovered was her father’s. She glanced away, whimpering from revulsion and guilt. The same hands that held her head for the cheek swab, grabbed her again, forcing her to watch. She twisted, biting her lip as her already raw ankles burned.

  Zooming in on a hairy leg, the claw-shaped image of a reddened handprint stood out clear on his outer left thigh. Anna squirmed, trying to look away.

  Agent Gordon leaned over her, a smug grin on his face. “We know what really happened to your father.”

  Images of
the three dead Crossmen appeared all around her, the entire hangar shimmered into a holographic recreation of the alley. The soldiers, Agent Gordon, the metal chair, all of it remained as if they had teleported to the street where she had almost been raped. Anna shifted, looking at each body. She got angry at the sight of the one who had been on Penny; the inhibitor burned her hard.

  “You really ought to stop fighting,” said Gordon.

  Anna’s arms shook, tense against the cuffs, fists clenched near to the point of bleeding palms. “I… Take it off. It hurts.”

  “How much of a fool do you take me for?” Images appeared in floating panels around the area, showing her electrocuting the men. Flickering blue lit the walls.

  “You don’t understand…”

  She sat in a permanent cringe. The black van rolled into the scene like a spectral funerary wagon, stopped, and four men got out. Three walked one each to the Crossmen and unceremoniously put a bullet in their heads with suppressed handguns. A familiar face remained by the van, watching. Agent Gordon stepped through his holographic doppelganger, halting in front of her with a pleasant smile.

  “The public can only handle so much truth.”

  The entire false world disintegrated in a snow of fading pixels, the dark alley replaced with a pristine silver floor and a modern white-walled room. The man from behind strode into view with a silver case. Nestled within black foam, a silver triangle the size of a thumbnail sat at the front end of a small bit of wiring and a capsule the size of an aspirin.

  She screamed, “No!” and thrashed. It did not matter she had no hope of breaking the chains―she tried anyway. “No!” Anna broke into whimpering. “Please don’t… it’ll kill me.”

  The big man laughed. “That is kind of the point of them, Anna. Only if you misbehave.”

  You don’t understand… It’ll go off on its own.