Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles)

by Jody Wallace

  “You think she’ll do anything you want?” the tallest asshole argued. “She’s a feminist bitch. They hate men.”

  Adam just smiled. “If I tell her you guys tried to murder her Chosen One, do you think she’ll go easy on you?”

  “We’ll be back,” Quentin threatened. “We can take you. There’s more of us than you realize. People know what you did. You came back from hell to finish the job of blowing up our planet.”

  Quick as lightning, Adam hurled the knife. It landed with a sickening thunk in the tall guy’s leg. He shrieked like a macaw.

  Blood spurted. Adam tried not to get sick to his stomach. “Better get him to the infirmary before he bleeds to death.” He stood straight. Straighter. Clenched his fists. The numbness from hitting the wall—from shattering brick—disappeared.

  He took one soft step forward, and Quentin and the bloody-head guy scrambled to support their cohorts and stagger down the hallway. Adam watched them go with satisfaction burning through his bruised limbs and body.

  Apparently Dr. Sieders was wrong. He was a danger to others. If they crossed him.

  If he didn’t stop himself in time.

  …

  “On your right, Adam. No, your other right!” Will shouted. “Shoot it.”

  Adam whirled and sliced through the air with laser fire, attempting to take out the skeet hurtling toward him. The clay disk crashed against the brick wall at his back, showering him with pieces.

  It wasn’t the first disk he’d missed. In fact, he’d missed most of them, with every weapon he’d tried. Maybe he should have asked for knives.

  Still, it was a far sight better than the time he’d spent with Dr. Sieders. After his fight with Quentin, Claire had shown up, muttering about someone pulling the fire alarm. He’d told her his bruises were from the psychiatry exams. He’d been so glad to see her again, he’d nearly hugged her.

  That had been…awkward.

  But he hadn’t told her about the fight. On one hand, he wanted to share everything, just like he wanted her to share everything. On the other, explaining the hole in the bricks and other evidence of his superstrength might be stupid since there was so much else about him that was a mystery.

  No more mysteries. He needed to be normal, the opposite of the Chosen One, and he had to hope Quentin would keep his mouth shut, too.

  “You done yet? Sun’s going down, and it’s about to get nippy.” Will, safely out of the line of fire, used a remote to turn off the machine and crossed the snow-covered street toward him. They’d switched off the radio when its crackles kept breaking Adam’s concentration. “I gotta say, man, you’re doing better than you did this morning, but hand-eye coordination isn’t your strong suit. Can you see the skeets?”

  Yesterday Dixie had tested him behind the wheel of the Mustang—he’d done fairly well—and today was Will’s turn. They were outside Camp Chanute, in a place that had once been the town of Rantoul, Indiana. They’d established this area for combat training because the town was looted out, with nothing to hurt but one’s ego.

  Adam’s ego was smarting, confirming he did have one.

  “I can see them fine.” Dr. Sarah had said his vision was excellent, and he’d found that to be the case as well. “I just can’t hit ’em. With the shades in Riverbend, I swept the beam back and forth, but skeets are tiny.”

  “Accuracy saves energy, especially when you have to face off with a daemon—hell, or dregs, but we switch to stun for dregs. You’re not good enough for combat.”

  Claire had instructed Will and Dixie to find out how much training Adam, or his body, remembered. Though the original mission when he’d been the Chosen One had failed, the angeli had prepared him for the job, teaching him how to use Shipborn tech, avoid shades, and kill daemons. When he’d jumped into that nexus, he’d been in the best shape of his life, or so he was told.

  Now he knew a few more things about what kind of shape he was in. How much was due to his dormant enhancements? If that was the reason he could break brick with his fist and dent metal desks with his fingers, admitting it wouldn’t be as risky. Other people had enhancements, too, so he wouldn’t stand out.

  He wished there was some way to confirm it. If the Shipborn had boosted his strength and stamina, why couldn’t they have done something about his shit hand-eye coordination, too? He needed to figure out a way to ask Ship without Ship wanting to know why he was asking. He’d been studying current events and entity science every night using Claire’s view screen, with Ship as his tutor; he was determined lack of knowledge wouldn’t cause him to make mistakes.

  “We’ve got a few more minutes.” Five days of practice after his escape from Dr. Sieders, and he had yet to get the hang of Shipborn or Terran guns. He wanted something to show for the day besides disappointment. The pistol in his hand didn’t feel like the extension of his arm Claire said it should be. “Let me try the blaster band.”

  Will shook his head. “Claire said no. Your enhancements are expired, man.”

  “They’re not so dead I can’t use the rapid healer.” He’d bet his dessert ration that his enhancements were operating at peak capacity. It would explain a lot.

  “Gotta love Shipborn tech.” Will tossed Adam a bottle of water from their duffel bag. “Even if I don’t love some of their attitudes. They think they’re better than us.”

  Adam twisted off the cap. “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “You’ve only met a few of them. Wait till you meet Naveen VarysHan, Cap’n Stiffneck. He’s in charge of monitoring human rights violations, and man, you can’t even joke about child labor in front of him.”

  The cold snap had broken, but not before it had dumped another layer of white on the ground. While Will listed all the Shipborn who were jerks, Adam tipped up the water and finished it. Tracy had yelled at him yesterday because he’d let himself get dehydrated.

  He hadn’t been stopping enough to eat and drink, working too hard to get up to speed so he could be useful—useful as something other than a curiosity. Now that the whole town knew about him, plus half the country, a majority had felt the need to come share an opinion about his existence. Luckily, owing to his deal with Sieders and the Global Union, nobody from outside Chanute was allowed to come visit Adam any more than he was allowed to leave.

  He was careful not to let anyone corner him like Quentin and his gang had, though he’d seen them glaring across the mess hall. At lunch today he’d held up two fingers, indicating how much longer they had before he expected them out of town, and they’d left in a hurry. Then again, perhaps they’d thought it was a peace sign and everything was cool now.

  Happily, since their ambush the closest thing he’d experienced to an assault was a woman who’d wanted to remind him what sex was all about.

  Claire had told the woman she’d find him a porno and assigned her to laundry duty. His aspiring sex buddy had also had to provide him a new shirt, but since it had a cartoon illustration of facial hair with the words “Free Mustache Rides,” he hadn’t worn it.

  Not even for Claire, who’d laughed her ass off when he’d shown it to her.

  Thoughtfully, he stuck his empty water bottle into the equipment bag and retrieved one of the bands. The metal warmed under his touch. “Is this a blaster or a multipurp?”

  “Blaster, but you can’t use it. Put it back.”

  Adam shoved up his parka sleeve and molded it to his wrist. The band was about three inches wide, narrower than the multipurps, which covered adult humans to about mid-forearm.

  It clicked shut, the seam disappearing instantly.

  “Oh, look.” Adam pinged it with his fingernails. Tactanium was lightweight and stronger than any metal on Terra. “It jumped onto my arm.”

  Will lobbed a handful of snow at him. “Dude, you’re going to get me in trouble.”

  The snow splatted on his chest and he laughed. “I put the band on. You told me not to. Nobody gets in trouble but me. Besides, I probably can’t even use it.”<
br />
  He pointed at a brick wall. How did it activate? He focused on the band, imagining what it looked like when Claire used one, and felt it grow warm. Then warmer. Then uncomfortably hot. “Uh. Fire?”

  A bright, white beam poured through his hand, as if emanating from his bones, and pierced the wall like it was made of aluminum foil. Startled, Adam whipped up his arm, and the laser flamed wildly into the air.

  “Goddamn, you’re going to kill us both.” Will grabbed his arm and fumbled at the edge of the band until it fell open. The deadly beam disappeared. “Why’d you do that?”

  The laser hadn’t discharged long enough to scare him, but it had given him a definite jolt.

  The jolt felt more like success than fear.

  “I didn’t think it would actually work.” Using the weapon hadn’t hurt him. It had been effortless. Familiar. “That’s the weapon I was trained on, wasn’t it? Obviously my enhancements are functional, so why not take advantage? I can kill more shades and daemons with a blaster band.”

  “I don’t know,” Will said doubtfully. “They don’t give bands to just anybody.” The tall young man stared at Adam, his expression briefly a lot like Claire’s, before he sighed. “Be careful. Think of it being like a laser pointer. Remember those?”

  “Yeah, I can try that.” Claire had rustled one up, a mouse-shaped toy they used to entertain the cat, who came and went from their room through a broken vent. It slept on her feet at night. She pretended to hate it, but she petted the critter whenever it was within reach. The hate was an act.

  Claire pretended she hated just about everything. Including him.

  He was fairly certain that was an act, too—based on how much she smiled around him and how she’d let him talk to Frannie on the view screen. How she’d started bitching to him about the stresses of being sheriff, and how she actually listened when he shared ideas for sweet-talking Elizabeth and others.

  Not to mention the way she tried not to stare when he took off his shirt. He hadn’t streaked in front of her again, but partial nudity when you shared a room was natural.

  Will gave him more tips before he let Adam shoot again, demonstrating the indents on the band used to remove it. “If you assume what’s going to come out will be as skinny as a laser pointer, then it will. Don’t let the band charge for long. Aim carefully, and then shoot. Think go in your head. That usually works.”

  “Got it.”

  “Let me check the skeets.” Will crossed the street to the machine and loaded more disks into it. “That’ll do it. Don’t point that thing at me.” He retreated to a safer area.

  Adam held out his arm experimentally, wondering what was better—a fist or a palm? “How far does a laser penetrate? Does anybody live around here?”

  “Nah. Outwallers prefer areas with green space, and this is asphalt. They grow food to use in trade, plus they forage and handcraft things.”

  The Shipborn and Terran governments didn’t stop people from living in the buffer territories, though they did stop scavengers from venturing into the bad zone, the parts of the globe occupied by known shade hordes. The fewer people the shades ate, the slower the hordes crawled and reproduced.

  The Shipborn theorized that Terra’s success in keeping human souls away from the shades—and fighting the shades along the front of the known hordes—was why the entities had been forced to change tactics. Had they developed the ability to materialize in the buffer zone and then vanish, like Adam’s pod had seemingly done? Or were they doing something else? The Shipborn scientists wanted Adam for more tests that concerned the pod they’d been studying, but Claire hadn’t yet allowed it.

  With the remote, Will activated the skeet machine again. It rattled as it powered up, preparing to catapult the disks. When Adam was ready, he told Will to pull.

  The skeet flew toward him, arcing high over the street. He whipped his arm up and blasted the target out of the air.

  “Again!”

  Repeatedly, Will shot the skeets sideways, up-ways, down-ways, no longer warning him. Adam’s aim was as good with the blaster band as some of their deputies and soldiers. It seemed he did remember some of his training.

  Will finally turned the machine off and wiped a hand over his mouth. “I’ll be damned. Wonder what other tech you can use?”

  Pleased, Adam removed the band and checked the battery. Not drained—within their allotment for nonessential use. “What about wings? Did I have wings?”

  Did he have strength, speed, and dexterity enhancements?

  “Only the angeli have wings. They’re afraid wings would be too much tech and we’d register as Shipborn to a shade. Their people are working on non-endo-organic flight solutions, though. Jet packs with force fields. Claire’s got us signed up for anything that comes off the assembly line.”

  The ability to fly would be useful in a fight against ground-bound shades, not to mention daemons, but he wouldn’t want to endanger anyone. So much for wings.

  “Let’s do a multipurp band,” he suggested. “Somebody told me I knew how to use those.” The other device he wanted was a sensor array, to give him access to Ship’s knowledge and comms at all times. While he interacted with Ship through Claire’s console, he always had a potential audience: Claire.

  The headset would be more private.

  “All right.” Will rustled in the equipment bag and pulled out a wider silver band that was otherwise indistinguishable from the blaster bracelet. “Slip this on.”

  The metal felt cool on his heated skin. He hadn’t burned himself using the blaster band, but he hadn’t used it as long as soldiers did in battle. “You’d think there would be some way to protect your arm from the heat of the blasters.”

  The multipurp band encompassed his arm less comfortably than the blaster band. The edges pinched his skin as if it were a poor fit.

  “Sword,” he said.

  Nothing happened.

  “You gotta know the codes.” Will exposed his own multipurp band. A dagger slid into his palm, still linked to his wrist. “Here’s six-five-eight. I can keep it around my wrist, or I can make it a separate object. Depends on what I need. To change it, I have to be touching it.” He turned the object into a gauntlet, lifted his arm and inspected the silvery armor. “Horatio, the pilot who usually services this area, told me this is how he got a daemon’s teeth out of his arm once. He was a soldier at the dirtside base for a while.”

  Adam probed at the edges of the band, trying to loosen it. “Have you gotten to meet Ship?”

  “Oh, yeah. She kicks my ass at chess,” Will said. “I mean, I’ve never been on board, but we talk through the sensor array when I get issued one, and anyone can talk to her through a public terminal in the library.”

  “Ship’s got quite the sense of humor,” Adam agreed. He found it hard to believe anyone thought of Ship as a machine after talking to it for any length of time. “I’d like to go on board sometime.” He thrust his arm a few times, thinking 658, and nothing happened. “This isn’t working.”

  Will glanced at the darkening sky. “You can practice with multipurps at Camp Chanute. We need to get back.”

  They packed up their equipment, locked the skeet machine down, and walked a block to the vehicle, where they’d parked it out of blasting range. Since they were six miles from the fortifications, they’d been assigned a boxy sedan outfitted with rollover bars, snow tires, and bulletproof windows. But the closer they got to Chanute, the more traffic they encountered.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen a traffic jam in three years,” Will joked as they waited for their turn to pass through the gates. Extra guards patrolled the walls, and Adam caught the flash of the setting sun on angeli wings above the city.

  “They’re here, ma’am,” the gate guard said into a radio when Will and Adam pulled up.

  “What’s going on?” Will asked. “Chicago sighting?”

  “Shade deaths seven or eight miles out,” the guard said. “Two different directions. No sign of e
ntities, but they found more pods. We’re calling in the outwallers.”

  “Crap,” Will muttered. “We’re in deep shit.”

  Cars and trucks were parked everywhere, willy-nilly, and groups of people milled around the complex. Horses, goats, and other animals were being herded to the barns and pastures. They had to idle while harried-looking women with pigs on leashes trotted across the road. Camp Chanute was bursting at the seams.

  Claire was waiting for them at the garage, a scowl on her face that boded ill. Her parka was unzipped, the ever-present glint of armor beneath it.

  She stalked up to the car and slammed open Adam’s door. Adam’s—not Will’s. “Why the hell didn’t you answer your radio? We thought you were dead.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Claire didn’t yank Adam out of the car like she wanted to, because she wasn’t sure if she’d punch him or hug him. She stepped back, and the two guys exited the vehicle slowly, as if afraid any sudden movement would set her off.

  She wasn’t a wild animal. She was pissed. And relieved. Now they stood like two dogs caught tearing up the furniture, staring at her with pitiful expressions.

  Adam spoke first. “Sorry, Claire. We didn’t know. The radio static kept distracting my aim, and my shots went wild.”

  “His shots were wild as it was,” Will added. “It was a bad idea for them to get worse.”

  “That’s no excuse.” She stalked them, chewing them out, as Will signed in the vehicle and Adam returned the equipment bag. “If you can’t learn to shoot with distractions, how are you going to be any good in battle? We didn’t have the manpower to send out after two grown idiots who should have known better.”

  “I did all right with the distractions in Riverbend,” he pointed out, crossing his arms. “Now I’ll do better. I can use blaster bands. I trained on them before, and I retained the muscle memories.”

  Not that Adam was belligerent, but when he got defensive like this, it meant she’d struck a nerve. She didn’t care. They’d been negligent. Sloppy.