It was cruel, she supposed, just to let them keep hunting for her, but with the recent news of her grandmother’s illness, not to mention her father’s terminal cancer, the effort of spending time with any of them - while they sat around and talked about death - was just too much to muster.
“Come on, Kim.” That was her mother. “Where are you?”
She didn’t particularly want to be found. Not now. Not today. Not ever. All she wanted to do was lie here in this secluded spot and be alone with her thoughts, her feelings.
Forever.
Daddy…
Her eyes watered triumphantly, and she let her gaze drop back towards the house. It was her grandmother’s farmhouse, on her mother’s side, but she had spent so much time here during her childhood it was like a home away from home - especially in the last year, after her father’s diagnosis. She saw the window of her bedroom, the Michaelmas daisy she and Ma had planted over the poor, dead body of Winston the cat, the chink in the bricks where, as a toddler, she used to leave notes for the fairies. In a few short months, this would all be a faint memory of a time before. Before her life changed forever.
Before her daddy died.
She would miss him when he went.
Kim Stefánsson blinked. A tear dropped down her face. She would miss him so much. The certainty was swift and heavy. It sat in her stomach like a stone. She loved him more than anything, even if he did act like a jerk sometimes.
The sun was rising, and a slice of heat fell through the tree-house window, firing her inner eyelids cherry cola. She sat up but made no further move to leave her hiding spot. She closed her eyes, cherishing the time by herself.
“Kimberley!” Her father’s voice called again. “Breakfast is ready! Don’t let it get cold!”
She opened her eyes. The sound of his voice lingered in her mind, its warmth, its familiarity, and with a satisfied stretch she followed the path of a rook casting across a graze of cloud. Fly, little bird, fly. That would be her as soon as this was all over. She continued to watch, allowing herself to blink only when the bird was a pinprick in the far-off blue, telling herself that somehow everything would be okay and the future would, somehow, unfurl neatly.
The breeze blew warm against her bare, sun-browned feet, and reluctantly, she stepped slowly out onto the top rung.
Later Kim would wonder if it all might have turned out differently if she had just stayed where she was hiding, in the tree-house. If perhaps, the whole terrible thing might have been averted had she just decided not to move. She’d heard about the Butterfly Effect in school, and although it was esoteric and unlikely, it nevertheless made her wonder.
Either way, she didn’t stay in her hiding place, and she would always blame herself in some way for what followed. At the time, though, of course, she had no idea, and hadn’t been able to help herself. As intensely as she’d earlier craved to be alone, the need now to be with her mommy and daddy and in the thick of things pressed upon her with an urgency that was breathtaking.
It had been happening this way a lot lately. She was like the weather vane on the peak of the local church roof, her emotions swinging suddenly from one direction to the other at the whim of the wind. Her mother had said it was something to do with becoming a woman. It was strange, and frightening at times, but also somehow thrilling. Like being on a lurching ride at an amusement park.
In this instance, it was injurious too. For, in her desperate hurry to join her parents back at the farmhouse, she tripped over her own feet and grazed her knee on a rock that protruded from the long grass leading up to the driveway. The graze stung and she winced, glancing down to see a rise of fresh blood, surprisingly red. Rather than continue to the house, she turned and glanced in the direction of the tree-house, deciding it might be best to go back.
But there was no tree-house to be seen. Nor, for that matter, were there any of the surrounding trees. The place where she had been hiding for the past two hours was now completely bare and open, a patch of grass she didn’t recognise. A wave of confusion suddenly assailed her, and she frowned, blinking rapidly.
For a moment she just stood there in a dumbfounded and terrified silence, puzzled, trying to digest the fact that the trees and wooden hiding place were gone completely - just… gone… as if they had never existed at all.
She exhaled heavily. “What?” she managed. “Who’s there? This isn’t funny! Whoever took away my tree-house, bring it back right now! When I get my hands on you…”
Her voice trailed off when she noticed the grass was gone too. All of the long grass - which she had stumbled into just a moment ago, which surrounded the driveway and always so desperately needed mowing - was gone. She looked down now at coarse and rough sand, filled with tiny stones. There were no footprints.
“Mommy?” Kim breathed. Her heart rate surged and her breathing became ragged as a searing panic gripped her young mind. She stared hard at the place where she had been hiding, then running, just a moment ago, and she didn’t even recognise it. The sand, now a dirty grey colour, was completely smooth, with no sign of her tracks or anything else. She turned back toward the farmhouse, and was relieved to see it still standing there, yet somehow it looked… darker. The hula hoops were gone. There was no tractor in the meadow. She sniffed the air, her little nose twitching. She could smell something nasty, something she couldn’t quite identify.
Kim bent down and looked at one of the stones at her feet. She picked it up, twirling it through her fingers, then straightened and looked around. There was no sign of the farmhouse.
Tears streamed down her face, and she screamed. “Mommy! Daddy! Where are you?”
The sound of her voice didn’t seem to carry very far. She could still see the driveway which led to the garden, but the farmhouse was now gone. A dark cloud had blown in front of the sun, throwing gloomy shadows over the area, making them look more forlorn than they probably were. But then, a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. The clouds were growing thicker and darker, dimming all the colours of the morning and shadowing them with greys and blacks. The nearby hills were brown with sand. With a sound like a shotgun, the heavens opened and thick rain mixed with icy hail began to pour out of the skies.
“What is this?” she moaned. “What happened?”
There was nobody around to answer her question.
The woman, when she first appeared, was little more than a hazy smudge on the horizon, right down at the farthest reach of the driveway. Kimberley Stefánsson was never sure, later, what it was that made her look up at that moment. For one awful moment when she first noticed her walking, where the back of the farmhouse should have been, Kim thought it was her mother, coming to find her, answering her frightened calls for help. Only as the woman’s outline clarified and she realised she was dressed all wrong - in some black, exotic chitin-like armour - did she let herself exhale.
Curiosity arrived hot on the heels of relief. Who was this person? Did they know what was going on here? There was a vague memory at the back of Kim’s mind as she approached the woman, a sense of déjà vu that she couldn’t place no matter how hard she tried. For a moment she forgot about her blind panic, and started calling out to the woman through the rain.
“Hey!” she shouted, as best she could. “Who are you?”
The woman moved then with startling haste, coming toward her. She reached out a hand and pushed Kim to the ground roughly. The gravel on the driveway was cold and wet on her legs. Shocked, she began to cry again.
“Get out of here!” the woman roared, meaning business.
It was then that Kim realised the woman carried a pistol in her other hand, one finger on the trigger. Hair prickled on the back of her neck and she found herself frozen, unable to move. She saw the woman’s face clearly now: she was very pretty, with emerald-green eyes and dark hair, with an expression on it that almost mirrored her own: raw fear.
“I’m sorry, Kimberley,” the woman said. “Please, just go. Hide! Quickly!”
Kim obeyed, pushing herself to her feet and running into the darkness.
All she knew was the watery gallop of her own blood pumping, the rasping of her own ragged breath as she disappeared into the cold wet black.
It was dark and wet where she was crouched, but Kimberley Stefánsson did as she was told. The woman had told her to hide… and something in the tone of her voice and the desperate look in her eyes suggested that real danger was near. It was a game, Kim told herself, just like hide-and-seek.
Yes. Just like hide-and-seek.
She blinked tears out of her eyes, blinded for a moment by their intensity, seized by the dread and confusion that overwhelmed her mind. Her body shook, growing numb from the cold. She couldn’t explain what was happening. She’d grown up in a world of facts and science… and this, this seemed too strange to be real. What was going on?
From behind the tall tree she listened. Made a picture in her mind the way her father had taught her. Rough, loud voices, shouting at each other through the howling wind. The rain slashing and whirling around them. Things changing and moving through the dark. She heard the aggression in the woman’s voice, and wondered what could possibly have happened to make her so angry. The other voice was hard to make out at first, lost in the maelstrom, but then…
“Daddy?” she muttered, barely able to form the word through her chapped lips. It was definitely her father’s voice, growing in intensity, barking crude curses at the woman. She recognised the F-word. In that moment she wondered, frantically, where her Mom was. When she would be coming to save her from this nightmare. And she wondered about the woman. Who she was. What she wanted with her dad…
The voices were changing now. Kim could hear a hubbub of movement, the voices devolving into straining sounds, laced with terror. She lifted her head and peered forward through the lower branches of the tree and pressed her face against the damp bark. The woman was moving quickly toward her father, and he threw himself at her. There was a scuffle, and the woman easily overpowered him. Kim got a look at her face - all fury and exertion, a face full of tears. She clubbed her father across the skull with the butt of her pistol, knocking him down. Then, with care, the woman took aim and killed him with a single shot.
No…
Kimberley felt her father die, the awful inevitability of it. She felt the horrific sense of the moment pass through her like an electric shock as Cristian Stefánsson crumpled into a nerveless heap and was still.
Everything about him, everything he was, the good, honest man who had loved her so much and raised her from infancy… all of it gone in less than a second. Tears streamed down her youthful cheeks as she struggled to hold on to consciousness, her emotional pain overwhelming everything. It all seemed impossible, unreal…
The killer halted for a long second, and she recognised the body language of someone crippled with sadness. Then, very deliberately, the woman turned to examine Kimberley, where she stood aghast behind the tall oak tree.
Kim closed her eyes, waiting for the next shot, but it never came. Even with all the madness unfolding around her, confusion rose in her thoughts as the assailant walked away, leaving her very much alive. Instead, the woman crossed to where her father was lying in a puddle of mud, and shot him again.
“NOOooooo!” Kim screamed, a pained, harsh shrill in the darkness. She slumped to her knees, and wept.
For a long moment the woman stood, staring down at the motionless body of Cristian Stefánsson. Then at last she stepped closer to the girl, moving slowly.
“Who are you?” Kim managed, still terrified.
The woman’s expression was blank. “Lora. Lorelei Chen. Are you… okay?”
Kim shook her head dejectedly, averting her gaze.
Lorelei Chen seemed relieved. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t have a choice, Kimberley. Now, go on. Get out of here.” She began to walk away.
Shocked, the girl remained close to her, following her. “No. I… I mean I can’t…”
“No, no,” Chen said, shaking her head. “Don’t follow me. I’m a monster. Go away. I killed your father, for pity’s sake. I… I’ve lost everything and everyone that was ever important to me in my life, so don’t think I won’t kill you too.”
Kimberley exhaled slowly. “No.” She shook her head, trying to gather her thoughts, trying to screen out the howling emotional pain clawing at the inside of her, forcing herself to think objectively and not like a frightened child who had just seen her father brutally gunned down in front of her. “I’m going nowhere until I find out who you are. Why you are doing this.”
Chen sighed heavily and did her best to ignore the girl, peering out into the cold rain. It seemed to be easing a little, judging by the splashes in the nearby lake. As she watched the watery surface, something huge, black and scaly rose to the surface, thrashed there for a moment and sank back into the depths. “The universe is re-writing itself,” she muttered. “That’s what happens when you screw with the timeline in places that you really shouldn’t. I’m sorry, Kim. It should stabilise soon enough. Try not to worry.”
The little girl shook her head. “You didn’t answer my question. Who are you?”
The gunshot that answered her struck Kim in the gut and she cried out. Burning, white-hot agony seared her belly and she recoiled, stumbling backward. Her legs turned to water and she slipped down, a blossom of stark crimson blooming across the white silk blouse beneath her jacket. The round had gone straight through and buried itself in the meat of her. The agony was like nothing she had ever felt before. Her hands tightened into fists, and she felt panic rise in her thoughts. She was going to be left for dead.
Kim tried to get up, but the pain flared in her torso like another bullet hit, and it forced her back down. She was gasping for breath when she saw the woman again, walking calmly off into the storm.
It was the last thing she saw, as the thundering in her ears grew loud and dragged her down toward blackness.
2
AD 2032
PORT ST. LUCIE, FLORIDA
The setting sun cast a deep red glow over the coastal city of Port St. Lucie. To the east, beyond the metropolitan area, the Atlantic Ocean loomed, glittering in the fading light. The city had become symbolic in recent years, owing much of its current splendour to its technological advancement, tall skyscrapers and high-rise buildings. Port St. Lucie epitomised the modern city in the 2030s, and its inhabitants lived in convenience-inspired luxury. Most laborious work was done by robotic machinery these days, so all the people had to worry about was keeping themselves occupied.
And that they did. Born of a need for stimulation right here in Florida, a new sport had arisen in the late Twenties and gained international acclaim: the underwater sport of Blitzball. Played in a suspended sphere of water the ball game was now the main focus of most people here in Florida, their team having become grossly more popular than the Dolphins and the Marlins, cheered on worldwide. The players had, like in any other major sport, became global celebrities and the rivalry between teams was legendary.
One of these players, an up-and-coming star of the Florida Fins, was at home getting ready for a game that very night. The Fins would be playing the Melbourne Blackhawks, their long-standing rivals and the only team close to the skill of the Fins. Tonight was the final of all finals. The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial World Cup Tournament would draw to an almighty close with the meeting of the two surviving groups of players. For the winners, it would mean championship victory after defeating all of the forty-seven teams from across the world.
Kimberley Stefánsson was dressed in an outfit of yellow and black, the team’s colours. Black shorts with thigh-high socks, a yellow Lycra jacket with front zipper, waterproof training shoes, with a full arm guard and black leather gloves. The arm guard was there on the pretence of protecting an old shoulder injury, but in reality it came in handy when tackling some of the larger defence opponents. She was thirty years old, a five-year veteran of the sport, and while she was no spring ch
icken, she was sure her best performances were still ahead of her.
Kim peered out the front window of her waterfront house. From here it was possible to see the Magnatron Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world, on a good day, a clear day when the sky was a perfect shade of teal and unhindered by clouds - a day like today.
As the sun set slowly across the bay she could see a group of excited young fans gathered on the quay not far from her front door. The pretty Blitzball star gave a wry smile, watching them with her midnight-blue eyes. At least they weren’t coming to her door anymore. She’d had more than her fair share of stalkers over the past couple of years.
Thinking forward to the game that night, she picked up her duffle bag, ran a hand through her shoulder-length blonde hair and heaved a sigh. She should have been excited and filled with anticipation, but for some reason she wasn’t feeling very positive about the game. She felt somewhat anxious, as though something was very wrong, a familiar feeling… but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, like a sense of foreboding she couldn’t explain. Shrugging the thought aside, she headed out the front door. She had only taken a few steps when one of the kids milling around outside caught sight of her, and in an instant a bunch of fans had gathered around her clamouring for attention.
“Stefánsson! Can you sign this?” a young boy asked eagerly. Two other boys, who looked equally avid, flanked her.
“No problem,” Kim told him with a patient smile. With well-rehearsed ease she pulled out an autograph pen and signed a ball the kid held out to her. The boy, who could only have been six or seven years old, looked awed and his overweight friend immediately jumped up in his stead.
“Please?” the second boy implored, holding out his own blitzball.
Kim grinned. “Alright,” she told him before giving the boy an autograph.
The Complete New Dominion Trilogy Page 54