Void Black Shadow

by Corey J. White

  There’s a pause, then Ken says, “In that case, please follow me.”

  * * *

  It’s a tight squeeze with five of us in the elevator car, but it’s only a short ride to our floor. Walking the hotel corridors, the carpet feels lush beneath the thin soles of my prison shoes. It’s patterned in maroon with large diamonds, intricately detailed with gold and indigo, and my feet sink with every step.

  “Your accent’s from the Interior, right?”

  “You’ve got a good ear, Miss Xi.”

  “Spent a lot of time travelling, is all.”

  “What are you doing working here?” Mookie asks, and I can’t help being surprised at his amicable tone. Starved, tortured, and skull taken apart in pieces, but he’s still himself. For now, anyway.

  Ken turns so he can look at us, but keeps walking, stepping backward. “I’m not sure what you mean; this is the finest hotel in all of New Tangier,” he says, offering a polite smile.

  “Kids from the Interior don’t usually end up working service,” Mookie says.

  “Especially not at the ass-end of nowhere, beyond the empire’s borders,” I add.

  Ken’s eyes flicker to the soldiers walking behind me and Mookie. “I’m sorry, I can’t really comment,” he says, then turns to the front.

  “These two don’t care,” I say.

  “And you’ll get no judgment from us,” Mookie adds. “We just came from the Sphere; shit, we’re still in our prison get-up.”

  Ken stops. His shoulders rise then fall in a sigh and he pivots back to face us. He speaks quietly. “I did some things I shouldn’t have. My family is well connected, and if it were not for that fact, I too would be residing at Homan Sphere. This,” he says, turning his hands out to encompass the hallway and the hotel and, well, everything, “was the compromise.”

  “Are there many like you?” I ask.

  Ken turns and resumes leading us down the corridor. “I’ve met a few. Most of the workers on Seward, though, are here because it pays well.”

  “Gotta give people a reason to come all the way out here,” Mookie says.

  “I was just expecting a MEPHISTO installation.”

  “I think it started that way,” Ken says, “but it expanded when the officers brought their families here. Having a civilian population leads to commerce, education, infrastructure. Here we are.”

  Ken stops at a door and presses his palm against a panel embedded into the cherry-tinted wood. The door beeps and Ken pushes it open then steps back from the threshold. “You should find everything you need in your suite; if not, please contact room service.” Ken watches the guards as they take up positions on either side of the door, smiles at me, and departs.

  I follow Mookie inside, half expecting the guards to push their way past us, but they wait in the corridor. The door closes with a blunt thud, and the voices coming from within the suite fall silent.

  It’s a wide room, walled on one side with floor-to-ceiling glass, showing the city skyline beyond. Lights glimmer all across the metropolis—streetlights, ship and nav lights, adverts, and a thousand other types. Above, the sky is a thick haze, glowing orange. The room is crowded with black leather couches around a squat coffee table. Five women sit, drinking red wine, pausing in their conversation to inspect me and Mookie.

  I don’t need to see their tattoos to know that these are the women Hamid was talking about. They have the same look as Briggs’s voidwitch honor guard—disdain written in the set of their eyes and the curve of their lips; the certainty that they are special, powerful, feared. I’d probably have the same look on my face if I hadn’t spent most of my life on the run, feeling hunted, alone, and vulnerable. Well, maybe not vulnerable, but definitely the first two.

  I step forward, leaving Mookie behind me, and level a cool gaze at each of the women.

  One of them stands. “You must be Mariam.” She looks as though she’s the youngest by at least a couple of years. Her skin is almost black in the dimly lit lounge, her hair in fine braids that coil and stack atop each other.

  “Mars,” I say. “And you are?”

  She bows her head. “I’m Phoenix.” She motions to the others and says, “This is Ortega, Minus, Anaya, and Lin.”

  Before I can speak, Ortega puts her glass down on the table and says, “You don’t look like much.” Her voice is deep and rough, like she gargles with booze and broken glass every morning. She’s small but toned, with angular features and all-black eyes. There’s an inch-thick line of emerald-colored hair down the middle of her scalp while the rest is shaved.

  “And yet, I’m the one who killed Briggs, while you lapdogs were ready to do his bidding.”

  Ortega sneers, but Phoenix speaks up again. “You really wiped out his whole operation?”

  “Yes,” I say, not taking my eyes off Ortega.

  In my peripheral I see Phoenix’s eyes go wide as she mouths something like “Wow.” Lin nods appreciatively while the other two sip at their drinks.

  Ortega walks over and stands close enough for me to smell the wine on her breath. “If you’re so powerful, prove it.”

  Oh, I will. Not yet, but soon.

  “I don’t answer to you,” I say. “I seem to recall Hamid putting me in charge of this little gang of turncoats.”

  “What did you say?” Anaya speaks through gritted teeth. She and the one called Minus get out of their seats and round the coffee table, coming right at me.

  “Just say, how will you walk?” I say, and both Anaya and Minus stop dead in their tracks. The words are an echo of memory, carried across decades from our shared childhood to the now. In my own voice I hear the intonation of the caretakers that hypnotized us and planted these seeds of control. The other women have all gone static too, Lin with her glass tilted, burgundy wine dribbling over the edge and splashing onto her blouse.

  “The man is dead, but you’re still on his leash.” I poke Ortega’s shoulder forcefully and she blinks and shakes her head. “Go sit down,” I say, and she goes back to her seat, eyes tight with confusion, distrust, or both.

  Anaya returns to the table and helps Lin mop up the spilled wine. Minus follows, sits down, and finishes her wine in one gulp. She doesn’t speak.

  “Do you trust Hamid?” I say to the room, not expecting an answer. “Do you think she doesn’t already know about these hypnotic commands? Do you think she won’t use them?”

  Lin says, “How can you do that?”

  “Listen,” I say, ignoring the question, “we understand each other. We all went through the same shit when we were children. MEPHISTO has beaten and starved us, they’ve fucked with our bodies and minds. We’re useful but expendable, and that’s all we’ll ever be.

  “Take orders from Hamid, but don’t trust her, and maybe—just maybe—one day we’ll get out from under the empire’s thumb, we’ll be free.”

  * * *

  “That was some speech,” Mookie says, sitting on the edge of the bed, facing the window. “Isn’t it dangerous to provoke them like that, though? There’s five of them, and only one of you.”

  He takes some of the anti-inflammatories they gave him on Homan, as well as some painkillers. The swelling on his face has gone down, and I want to say he looks like himself, but his new eyes are off-putting in their unnecessary artificiality—silver sclera around the darker irises of the ocular lenses.

  “When I found my sister she, uh, opened my mind. Those women aren’t a threat.” I exhale sharply. “I just hope I don’t have to kill them when I turn on Hamid.”

  I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed, glancing at Mookie’s reflection in the glass. Even the bedrooms have a whole wall of window, that thin pane the only thing between us and the city, close enough to touch.

  “You probably shouldn’t talk like that,” Mookie says. “The whole Legion might hear.” There’s quiet for a few moments while, outside, shuttle lights zip back and forth.

  “We’ll figure something out before it’s too late; there
’s still time.”

  Mookie shakes his head. “Just, talk to me about the others; how were Trix and Squid when you saw them last?”

  “Trix has been struggling,” I say. I don’t tell him it’s because she feels guilty about wanting to leave him. “She blames me for what happened to you—rightly, I guess.”

  Mookie exhales loudly. “There was always a chance the authorities would find me.”

  I don’t argue, but we all know that chance multiplied a hundredfold when I came along. “Squid’s okay,” I say. “They held everything together for the rest of us.”

  “Like they always do,” Mookie says with affection. He lies back on the bed, still dressed, and within a few seconds he’s snoring.

  My implants haven’t been properly disabled in years, so it takes some prodding for me to find the subdermal reset switches—one behind my ear, the other along my jaw. I press them both down and count three full seconds, then my HUD comes to life with diagnostic text scrolling too fast for me to read.

  I lean my head back against the mattress and close my eyes, flickering orange text imprinted on the back of my eyelids. My leg jolts and I sit forward, forcing my eyes wide. I can’t sleep, not yet. As soon as the reset is finished I can contact Squid and the others. Then I can sleep, only then.

  * * *

  I wake lying curled up on the floor, my head resting on my arm. After sleeping on hard polycrete, the carpet feels as soft as any bed I’ve ever slept in.

  “Fuck.” I can’t believe I let myself fall asleep.

  I sit up and wait for my eyes to adjust to the rich dawn light. The sun peeks over the horizon and New Tangier looks distilled, hyper-real. The sky is a gradient of light blue through to the darkest gray. Homan glides across that expanse of void; it looks peaceful in its slow meander, but it’s speeding through space—a hollow hell for the poor fucks we left behind.

  A small icon blinks in the corner of my vision: a new message. I open it and it’s just one word: Ping.

  I check the message info and see it’s a direct burst, meaning it came from in-system. My first thought is that it’s Hamid keeping tabs on me somehow, but then I see hundreds more waiting for me, all saying Ping, all time-stamped an hour apart, going back weeks.

  I burst back, Waren? and wait. A vox request appears in response.

  When I open it, the line is dirty and there’s a few seconds of static before Waren says, “It’s about time. Do you have any concept of how boring this system is?”

  I make a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, then I get up and jump on the bed. I grab Mookie by the shoulder and shake. “Mookie!”

  He opens his eyes and peers at me, quizzical. “Wha?”

  “Ignore the AI, Mariam,” Squid says. “Do you have him? Do you have Mookie?”

  “Yes, I’ve got him.” Mookie sits up and I grab both his arms and say, “It’s Squid and the others.”

  Mookie bursts out crying-laughing, grin stretched across his face and tears running down his cheeks. Tears well in my eyes too, and I rest my hand gently on the side of his head with my thumb curled around his ear.

  “How is he doing?” Squid asks.

  Mookie pulls away from me. He gets out of bed and stands, hugging himself.

  “It’s bad, Squid, really bad.”

  Mookie glances at me, and wipes his eyes with a knuckle.

  “What did they do to him?” Trix comes on the line and spits out her question like it’s an order.

  “They make Legionnaires at the prison,” I say. “He’s—”

  Trix makes an anguished sound and cuts me off. “You lost him.”

  I look over at Mookie, standing in the corner, running a hand over his bald, scarred head.

  “I’ll get him back,” I snap.

  “How?”

  “He’s alive, Trix, that’s all that matters,” Squid says.

  There’s a few seconds of noisy silence on the line. “They have to die,” Trix says, cold. “The doctors, the guards, everyone that did that to him.”

  Including me?

  “I need to be there. I need to help,” she says.

  “Later, Trix. Squid, are you close by?” I ask.

  “As near as Waren can get without their scanners picking us up.”

  “Can you get long-range images of New Tangier?”

  “Waren’s already done it,” Squid replies. “What do you need to know?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “There’s no way you can do this,” Mookie says.

  I scoff, but the truth is, after all this time trying to tamp down on my power, some small part in the back of my head is worried I’ve lost it. “It’ll be fine,” I say.

  Without anything else to do while he waited for me to get in touch, Waren drew up a dozen plans. He sent me heavily annotated orbital maps of Seward and Homan, long-range images of New Tangier analyzed and marked with points of interest, population centers, and garrisons. There were also pages of incomprehensible probability calculations that Waren was especially proud of.

  I only had one question for him: Which plan kept the others safest?

  “What do you need me to do?” Mookie asks.

  “Just stay away from the window.”

  On the outskirts of New Tangier, the two massive cannons slice into the sky—effigies to man’s lust for firepower. The towers are gunmetal gray, split into segments embossed with simple but striking designs; I guess if you’re going to mar the skyline with colossal weapons, you’ve at least got to make them visually appealing. According to Waren, they’re powerful enough to shatter any ship that approaches Homan; possibly they could destroy the Sphere itself.

  I reach my hands out and breathe; my thoughts grow and swell, stretch out beyond the confines of my skull. I grab hold of the cannons and a quiet growl builds in the back of my throat as I start to tear the weapons down. The foundations crack, sharp thrum rising through steel—a vibration I can hear inside my head.

  “Void-damn,” Mookie says in a near-whisper, voice reverent.

  Dust and debris erupt around the base of each cannon as they begin their inexorable fall to earth. Gravity takes hold, and the cannons become lighter in my grip. I shift them, angling their long stretches of metal to block off the expansive starport at the north of the city. It’s empty now, but no doubt Hamid’s armada will fill the whole space when she arrives.

  I let go and the towers fall in slow-motion, bending against the force before they strike the ground, smashing office towers, apartment blocks, and barracks. Bits of detritus tumble to the ground like meteors.

  My mind sings, glows; this is how it’s supposed to be. I was made for this. I spent so many years fleeing systems of control when I was meant to be breaking them apart.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  I spin around and Phoenix is standing in the doorway. I grab her by the throat and yank her toward me, her feet off the floor as she crosses the room. I slam the door shut with my other hand and hold Phoenix in front of me.

  “Mars, don’t do it,” Mookie says.

  Phoenix groans, coughs. She croaks, “I want to help.”

  I drop her to the ground and she doubles over to catch her breath. Mookie puts a hand on her back and holds her wrist gently. He looks to me, checking I’m not about to hurt her again.

  “What do you mean, ‘help’?” I say.

  “I’d been planning to break away from Hamid’s witch squad the first chance I got.” Phoenix wheezes. “I just figured I’d have to wait longer than this.”

  “Go then,” I say, “this is your chance.”

  “But I can help you,” she says again. Looking up at me, she could be the little sister I never had . . . if you replaced familial resemblance with a shared, fucked-up childhood, and manifest psychic abilities.

  “You want to be free for once in your life?” I ask, and Phoenix nods. “Then go live whatever life you want for yourself.”

  Phoenix puts a hand to her throat and, with help from Mookie, stands u
p straight. She walks to the door and pauses, but then leaves.

  “We could have used her,” Mookie says.

  “But could we trust her?”

  “We trusted you,” he says, softly.

  I step away from Mookie and open a comm-link to Squid. “The cannons are down.”

  “I’m headed for Homan now,” Squid says.

  “Cut through the air lock, but don’t leave the ship until you get word.”

  “I remember,” they say: “autoturrets at the dock. Trix is coming for you in the shuttle. She’ll be there in approximately six minutes.”

  “That’s not part of the plan,” I growl.

  “Waren said the same thing. Good luck, Mars.”

  “Thanks, Squid. Voidspeed,” I say, signing off. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Mookie and I get out into the lounge area of the suite and the other space witches are standing at the window, watching parts of the city disappear in a cloud of detritus.

  Ortega spins when she hears us. “This was you?” she asks, but her tone tells me she doesn’t believe it. “Kill her,” she says.

  Ortega’s already lashing out with her mind, but before the other women can strike, I push her assault aside and hit them all with a telekinetic blast. It shatters the window behind them, and the four witches tumble out the opening in a storm of glinting glass shards.

  I walk to the edge and smell the acrid air of the city as a warm breeze rustles my cloak. We’re too high up to see the ground, hidden by shadows, overpasses, and a drifting fog of dust. Already the women are little more than tiny dots falling out of sight toward the bustling streets below.

  Mookie stands beside me with his hand closed above his sternum, looking down. He doesn’t speak.

  “If they’re any good, they’ll be able to break their fall,” I say. I grab him by the arm to pull him back from the edge, but he shrugs my hand off.

  I head for the exit, but it’s sealed tight. I snap it off its hinges with a hard jolt and the metal door flies into the wall opposite.

  The guards in the hall have their weapons up, but shock blanks their faces and slows their reactions. I lash out and a spray of crimson joins the rich colors of the carpet.