Demorn: Soul Fighter (The Asanti Series Book 3)

by David Finn

  If she was lost in this assault upon the Source Core the Clubhouse would survive. Her money flowed back through trusts, Smile and the Club accountant Jackie Z managed the funds—the time spent with Baron Santos had been unexpectedly profitable, what had been intended to be a temporary assignment turned into a convenient home base to launch many hit missions, many snatch and grabs.

  Demorn skimmed a percentage off the top to cover expenses and her comic and video game habit while Santos covered the room and board. She barely drank outside of an occasional pina colada and knew drugs would just dull her edge, so a steady diet of missions, fight training and some hot girlfriends that didn’t get too close and cared just enough had been good for her.

  A few years ago, after the White Fort was decimated and before meeting Santos, she had been lost in Dragon Cage gambling and the Soul Fighter tour, going head to head with some of the most brutal killers out there. The pain locket had been invaluable then. It was an arrangement that worked for both her and the Baron, and if Santos hadn’t gotten so sick she probably wouldn’t have left Ceron to cross the Glass Desert.

  But he had gotten sick and they were losing the War and reality was ending, so here we are in a modern art museum, Demorn thought with a tired sigh. Smile wanted her back, as he always did. Her brother thought she’d disappeared too completely and too violently into the vivid world of Firethorn. He had always thought that since the first day they had come here, and he was probably right. He had probably always been right. Now she longed for the Clubhouse.

  ‘Are you ready for the big time?’

  Iverson’s voice cut through her like a shock, making her heart leap and she swivelled, looking for an open shot. He was coming through her audio implant.

  She guffawed. ‘Iverson! Give a girl a heart attack next time!’

  He sounded relaxed. Life up in the Moth must be nice. Padded seats, plenty of legroom.

  ‘The window to leave opens in four hours.’

  ‘What happens then?’

  He said, ‘The sun won’t rise on this world again. It’s a twin eclipse out there, the first one in three hundred years. That’s when the Void will open and this place and all of Parallel 37 will be consumed. The Ultimate Fate virus will swallow this world and the Triton Demons will come through the sigils.’

  Heavy. Demorn held up a finger. ‘Question. How do we get to the Source Core and not get swallowed up by all the lovely demon gods?’

  ‘There’s an airlock on the lower level, right near where you are. Josephine might be a loose unit but she knows how to navigate her piece of the God Fort through these alternate universes.’

  Demorn looked around the darkened lower level which featured sculptures of creatures she hoped weren’t actual skeletons.

  ‘Makes up for her taste in “modern art” I guess. Is there a games room or anything more interesting than tentacle art?’

  Iverson chuckled. Whatever pain the Order had put him through had clearly eased or he was on a ton of medication.

  He said, ‘There’s a shooting range on the lowest level. I’ve got the codes if you need them.’

  Demorn tinkled the golden key around her neck. ‘No need, Mister Investigator, I’ve got the master key for this whole place.’

  ‘Where’s Wolf?’ he asked, and she could sense his careful phrasing, a tight control in his voice.

  ‘He’s enjoying the many and varied pleasures of the flesh, Iverson.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  Iverson sigh was a laugh. ‘Not at all. There’s deep cover and then there’s deep cover.’

  Demorn said, ‘Oh, he’s gone, hon, forget about cover. Once you lie with a voodoo chick, you may as well say goodbye to your heart. They take a big chunk.’

  Iverson said, ‘He never wavered till Bay City.’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s a big boy. As long as he shoots the right bad guys, I don’t care if you can’t remote control him.’

  ‘I could never control Wolf that way. I ran him with some subliminal sequencing but mostly I just asked. He’s a good soldier and a friend.’

  She popped a mint, grinning. ‘Well, you’ve only yourself to blame then. Tit and ass commands beat most everything else.’

  ‘He knows so much about us.’

  Iverson sounded distant, cold. She wondered if he was already picturing taking off, destroying this whole Universe, dooming the no-retreat option, a void where their exit route might lay.

  She cracked her knuckles. ‘Don’t worry, Iverson, we won’t be spies stealing microfilm when we cross into the Source Core.’

  ‘What will you be?’

  ‘Assassin. Killer.’

  Demorn slammed her fist into the wall. ‘They want to destroy us, remember. They want to destroy us all. If Josie steps out of line, she can join the rest of them.’

  Iverson rumbled a reply and she could feel him nodding. She could feel some kind of raw anticipation clawing into her heart now that they were about to hit the end. It was this rawness that kept her alive on the Tours and out here. Years ago, it had been a empty chasm that the killing filled. Making out with drunk models in clubs with the cash and the confidence the bounties provided. Getting matching tattoos with girls that lasted a week. She hadn’t been happy or sad, kind of floating in a drunken state of self awareness. She’d lost count of the number of times those same girls had called her shallow. Now her heart glowed, the ruby feeding her raw strength, a determination to survive, to see the next day, to see who and what emerged from the wreckage, once the storm had taken its toll upon everything and everyone. All the comics and all the prophecies and all the bibles in the hotel rooms talked about an Armageddon or even several layered endings—she was as keen to avoid that as anybody else, but she did not know if she could. Often Demorn was grateful that she couldn’t remember the precise details of her actions in Firethorn. Who wanted to always know how everything would end? If Josephine went too far, she would stop her.

  ‘Catch you in four,’ she said, a slight tremor in her voice as she walked away, shutting down the implant, trying to find that lightness still inside her as the ruby burnt in her chest and visions of the end filled her glittering eyes.

  6

  * * *

  Demorn pumped bullet after bullet into the targets, a rotation of zombies and quick-footed military operatives, plus the occasional insect-head, filtered in through her sunglasses. The VR was completely immersive, the slight smell of burnt plastic filtering through to Demorn, telling her that this range was an older model, not upgraded like the shooting rooms in the Clubhouse in Babelzon were.

  She’d been shooting good groups, sticking with the Athena gun, growing familiar with a frequent rate of fire again, artificial calm imposing over stress and tired muscles. Bay City had mostly been a post-War, month-long, chill-zone until the last day or so, with Winter’s skilful hands working her exhausted muscles, until the mad dash escape with Iverson from the captured Ruby Room had been so desperate and frantic it felt almost surreal. She sought solid ground, a return to mission readiness.

  Demorn plugged an operative in the torso, going for main body mass. She ejected the clip and slammed a new one home as the simulation came to an end, shifting back to the grey featureless range. There was nothing to see. The room was empty. The walls were pockmarked with her bullet holes. They vanished as the material self-repaired, bullets popping out and falling into exit vents.

  The finest layer of dust lay over everything. The gold master key Iverson had given Demorn had worked like a charm, guiding her down into the depths of the God Fort, past the thick steel safe door tucked away behind an abstract painting of the Babelzon Tyrant eating grapes in his mansion in the Hills while a bizarre tentacled monster stood over his burning city. Demorn appreciated the sentiment but she somehow doubted the Tyrant would ever allow himself to get so close to the end.

  Demorn gulped down the Coke Zero she’d gotten from a vending machine. Her long hair was slick with sweat as she remove
d her range ears. The air conditioning was temperamental in this room, just a side chamber off the main concourse. Josie didn’t come down here. Whoever Josie had stolen this Fort from hadn’t come down here either. The VR program that ran the simulations were five years behind from the state of art programs running in Babelzon but Demorn wasn’t after graphical perfection, she needed the consistency of regular shooting after the strange lull in Bay City.

  The whole lower level felt like a Disney haunted house, blinking lights on computer banks, eerily quiet in the low lit fluorescent glow. In Babelzon, the Innocents had part of a God Fort like this one, locked down in the subterranean levels of the Clubhouse beneath layers of security, multiple reality and dream locks. Perhaps the builders of these ancient fortresses had worked off the same design manual. She remembered when Red Morning, the prior leader of the Innocents, had taken Demorn down into the lower Club levels for the first time.

  She’d barely been fourteen, the first couple of bounties fresh on her belt. The Spire had crashed only months before, Demorn and her brother were desperate for cash. Red Morning must have spotted potential in her newest recruit, a mix of hunger and a certain cold skill.

  Demorn recalled like it was yesterday the sounds of the Innocents fighting and battling against each other in the lower levels beyond the storm doors, a cacophony of shouting, cursing and savage double-edged banter, punctuated by the shots on the shooting range, muffled but inescapable as they walked deeper into the twilight darkness of the lower levels, the storm doors locking in place behind them. She remembered a feeling close to exaltation as Red Morning took her down these halls for the first time, watching the tautly muscled, tattooed bodies of the Innocents, male and female, the best of us, and they all seemed so strong, so determined to conquer and endure through the changing times.

  ‘It’s like we can’t lose,’ Demorn had breathed, hope soaring into her heart, and Red Morning’s return laughter had been cruel. Demorn still remembered the pity in Red Morning’s eyes as she spoke with the dry bitterness of experience.

  ‘You say that because you don’t know what we must fight. You don’t know how fragile the gate is.’

  ‘What gate?’ Demorn had asked, with the compromised naivety of a teen who had already lost her world. Her past felt like ashes, not hope. Babelzon was blinking lights and shining scores. If there was any future for Demorn or her brother, it lay here, not in the dead past.

  ‘The gate we must hold against forces so great and so dark that they would chill your soul, Demorn. It should chill your soul.’

  She was older now. She had seen much darkness, she had seen the bars of the Iron Prison in the Grave Dimension. Red Morning was long dead, a traitor, cast down into the pits of hell. Demorn felt fourteen again, fresh to the streets of Babelzon, with just the desperate wits of a thief to hold her place in the world.

  ‘If you believe you will lose, you will always lose,’ she had replied, aware even then that she was walking a chasm, trading the ruins of lost Asanti for the faint promise of this vast, mysterious city named Babelzon, upon a world that seemed both similar and yet so different from the one she had escaped from. Asanti never to be reborn.

  Without realising it, flying on automatic, Demorn had slid her glasses back on, mental triggers kicking the VR into high gear, a legion of insect-heads rushing her position, as she shot her way through another clip, mind blank, until suddenly Demorn came back to herself, tearing the glasses off her face, tears in her glittering eyes. The creatures lasted another half second in her eyes as the VR program collapsed.

  Demorn’s head felt heavy, the first pressure of a severe headache. She holstered her pistol and left the shooting room, draining the rest of the Coke Zero and heading back into the low lights of the hallway which reminded her so much of what she had left behind.

  She felt a slight, half-familiar, half-forgotten burning around her upper arm. An old, almost welcome pain. Demorn looked up as the staff cracked across her face, and a savage kick to the guts laid her on the ground.

  Toxis leapt at her with a scream that seemed torn from the history books, her face a mask of fire, the red cloak of her Clan merged with insanity in blood-red eyes. The staff smashed again with a heavy blow to the face as she rolled to get up, barely avoiding her windpipe. Her vision blurred for a moment, conscious only that Xalos would not spawn, her ruby heart and the goddess who gave her the power either exhausted or unwilling to assist.

  She dodged another stab from the staff which whistled by her neck, a needle-like blade extending. Xalos wasn’t coming to this party. Suddenly she realized there was a gash around her neck, the skin slick with blood. The locket had come off and lay behind her. She was mortal. Such was the way with the gifts of the gods. Their trinkets and favours could be as fickle and transient as the summer wind.

  Her fist turned to steel as she blinked her vision back into clarity. Demorn knew she was in no VR program. She was in the fight of her life against a former friend and sometime soul-mate who wanted her dead.

  7

  * * *

  ‘Why?’ Demorn said, uninterested in the response, knowing it would change nothing, gathering quick breath.

  She could feel the bruising on her shoulder and neck. It was tender but of little consequence.

  Toxis hadn’t used the blade hidden inside the staff but she wasn’t pulling her strikes. She had taken the locket and was fighting to kill. Her familiar dark red cowl was completely down. Her face was clean of any facial tattoos, unlike the last time Demorn had seen the Huntress. The blood rage in her eyes told Demorn that negotiating wasn’t an option. Whatever crack cocaine Toxis was smoking to make her go crazy, Demorn was pretty sure her hunter instincts remained intact. There would be another hunter circling their position, somebody who knew the inner workings of this God Fort as she did not. To flee would be to fall deeper into the web. Sometimes it was fight or fall.

  Toxis said, ‘The Blood Clan decreed you must die.’

  Demorn said, ‘I decree them full of shit,’ flinging a pair of energy stars at Toxis, who effortlessly evaded one and struck the other with her staff, an inch from her face. Demorn took advantage of the gap and came in behind the stars, throwing a hard left, catching a glancing blow with the edge of her steel fist. Toxis weaved like a cage fighter, delivering a swift kick to the gut.

  Demorn kept her grunt of pain silent, barely, and danced back, outside the range of Toxis’s kicks. Her vision swam with pain. In her mind, she knew to go down again would be death. She knew this Clan followed a ritual more than it obeyed rules. Allowing the prey to rise up once was a token to their blood gods and often exercised in their most holy and blessed fights. It didn’t bring Demorn any comfort to know that this battle was being viewed as holy. That only took an already intense situation up to eleven and made the chances of each of them walking away from this close to zero.

  Her watch crackled into life in her audio implant. ‘Sis, you won’t believe this, I’ve got a trace on Toxis. An exact match, right on you!’

  Thanks, Smile, she sighed. Put that in the redundant information file. She saw Toxis snarl even as she cut the connection, the invisible watch fading out on her wrist. Toxis’s telepathic voice lashed through her mind, stunning and abrasive.

  YOUR BROTHER STILL HOLDS YOUR HAND LIKE A CHILD!

  The Huntress could still get inside her head, like the good old, bad old days when they had been a team and killed for each other, and fought as one.

  Demorn could feel the golden armband burning on her skin, the connective link still alive between the two of them. Toxis had fallen into an abyss, a casualty of war, seemingly dead only to return abruptly, filled with a hatred Demorn could neither understand nor share.

  Her heart felt hollow as Toxis came at her again.

  Demorn hunched low, watching the staff arc through the air, the blade tip glistening as Toxis shouted words of fury that Demorn heard only in random bursts. Traitor. Bitch. Alien. Accusations that were meaningless to the out
come. Designed to distract. She had never seen Toxis so enraged. She was faster than ever with her legs and through the air, but there was a crazy tinge Demorn didn’t recall, a chaotic looseness that didn’t mesh with the ice-blood killer Demorn remembered.

  The staff spun, she weaved under, sending a hard elbow into Toxis’s shoulder, followed by a killer left jab that knocked the huntress back a step. Demorn came back in with a hard right, noticing in a slo-mo, disconnected way of thinking that her right fist had turned to steel, too. That hadn’t happened since the Tour. That didn’t happen in the War. That didn’t happen in the missions for Santos.

  The right almost put Toxis on the ground, but not quite. Toxis grinned, blood in her mouth, knocking Demorn back with a fast kick, then flipping away, deeper into the corridor. Demorn saw the glistening quiver on her back, her brain registering it as the weapon Josephine had boasted of stealing. Danger signals flicked through her head as Toxis landed, moving with the speed of a cat.

  Demorn flicked her last three energy stars, strong out of the wrist, watched as two caught the dark legs of the Huntress, taking a chunk of flesh, crippling her run. Toxis stumbled, falling into a fire position. Demorn was almost on her.

  The first golden arrow seared past Demorn’s face. She felt the wind rush past in burning gold and heard the THUNK. Then she was upon the huntress, who had seized a second arrow from her quiver, holding the shaft and stabbing it at Demorn, who barely deflected it from her face with a metal hand. The arrow tip sank into her shoulder hard, causing Demorn to gasp. She slapped Toxis with a wild backhander, rhythm gone.

  She caught Toxis by the throat, metal fingers gripping her neck tight, choking her, smashing her against the corridor wall. Toxis thrashed out with strong legs, wild. The huntress was a seasoned fighter, a killer without compunction, as lethal as anybody Demorn had ever fought on the Tour. Demorn sank a fist into her stomach, aiming for the solar plexus, finding it. The huntress coughed blood, weakening.