“Where are you?” Lieve demanded. “I’ll come.”
“Sorry—” The comm went dead.
Lieve pulled out her earpiece and stared at it for a long moment. Why had he called her? Well, she had been the only one to talk with him while everyone else was trying to kill him.
The call was on a Central comm line. If Natan wasn’t still awake, the bots that monitored the comms would be waking him now.
Lieve pinched her upper lip. What was she supposed to do now? Natan had told her to stay out of it, but the Wardens were not making any progress. No Wardens on any world had ever made progress against the Destroyer.
But he’d called to apologize. Oh gods, he wouldn’t have been that distraught if it was just the smaller havoc he’d wreaked earlier.
She grabbed her wife’s tablet off the kitchen counter and logged in. The news search didn’t take long; panicked reports were coming in from people who’d witnessed the destruction of Hanak, a port city in the north. Footage was shaky, people were screaming. There was no footage from within the smoking city itself.
Had there been any survivors?
They knew from the other worlds that the Destroyer fed on people’s powers. After the trauma of its destruction, Hanak would be surging with the power of new manifesters, and the Destroyer would be devouring it all and growing stronger.
Lieve shut off the tablet. He had just killed millions. But then, she’d known he’d killed billions on other worlds. The new manifesters might kill or wound hundreds more in the panic of their new powers, and the Wardens didn’t have enough people to teach them control, not while they were tracking the Destroyer. What use was it to teach control when the world was ending?
Shuttles had been lifting all day to get important people to what ships were in the system. The official explanation was that there was a conference being held on Orbital 3. The path of destruction on the ground was caused by a rogue manifester, and the Wardens had it under control. It was plausible enough—the worlds had seen their share of rogues.
But no one would buy that now. Enough rumors about the destruction of the other worlds had spread, and no one truly believed it was all due to natural phenomena.
There would be panic. More people would die.
And he had called her. He could still be a rogue trying to mess with her head, but…her gut was screaming that wasn’t so.
Lieve grabbed her flight jacket and headed to the balcony.
* * *
She found him five kilometers outside the ruins of Hanak. In the distance, the sky hazed bright with fire and smoke, and sirens gave a thin, constant wail. He looked up from where he sat on a patch of bare ground by the side of the road.
Lieve threw up her defensive fields and strengthened them. The pull of his own personal black hole had grown.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Lieve carefully sat down beside the man who had just levelled a city.
“What is your name?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
She shifted. “Look, you called me. Do you want my help? I can help you learn control—”
He pushed himself up. “They try to teach me. Mostly they try to kill me. That helps, you know. It makes what I do easier to handle.”
Lieve swallowed panic and bile.
She needed physical contact. Sometimes a human touch could get through the panic of an out-of-control manifester when nothing else worked. To be willing to have contact with someone who was afraid of themselves was a form of acceptance.
She braced herself and held out a hand.
He flinched away from it, and then froze. He cocked his head as if scenting the wind. He disappeared.
For the barest breath, Lieve thought it was her hand that had spooked him, but then she felt the gathering energy of Wardens coming. She leaped an instant before they took shape and followed the power-sink trail of the Destroyer.
* * *
“I don’t look back,” he said. “I can’t look back. I can’t remember.” And more softly, “I won’t.” He flexed his hands as they walked in the dark, this time on a game trail in the forest.
Brambles and branches snagged on Lieve’s pants, and she pushed out her fields to sweep them aside. “Do you remember anything of your life before?”
“This is pointless,” he growled. “And now I feel the power building. I’ll have to dump some of it soon, and teleporting away might not be enough. This always happens when your kind try to help me. You should leave.”
“At least tell me your name,” she said. She was trying to sound calm. She needed to make a connection, but he was so cold, so drawn in on himself.
He was silent for several steps. “Matthew.”
It was such an ordinary name, one shared in some variation by most of the worlds.
She licked dry lips. “Do you remember where you used to live?”
He shook his head.
And then they walked in silence, because as much as Lieve could feel the ticking clock over their heads, she couldn’t push him. Maybe she’d already pushed him too much. She wasn’t a therapist. She just knew desperate people. She knew what it was like to be desperate.
Matthew stopped. “I have to teleport again.” But he didn’t. He waited, his shoulders trembling the branches around them.
Lieve readied herself to take to the air, and prayed she would have some warning if he was going to give off an explosion here.
At least it would be away from the more densely populated areas.
He rustled and held out his arm. “Touch my sleeve.”
Lieve hesitated. But she could feel the energy gathering within him. She touched his sleeve.
And in the endless moment between one step and the next, she felt everything. For that one moment, she knew him.
* * *
Matthew stood in the center of a wheat field. He had a pistol in his hand, heavy and slick in his grip. He raised it to his head, cold metal pressed against his temple. He dropped it. He raised it and dropped it again.
His wife couldn’t know. His children couldn’t know he had killed a man.
He’d been too drunk, and the warehouse had just laid off his whole shift. He didn’t know where money for the next bill was coming from, let alone food, and Jason Denov, whose shift hadn’t been laid off, had suggested that Matthew’s wife could take up whoring. Matthew had punched him.
In the field, Matthew tightened his grip on the gun. Crusted blood on his knuckles cracked, and the cuts began to ooze red.
He and Jason had carried the brawl from the shed in Matthew’s yard, where they’d been drinking, to the yard outside.
They grappled and fought. They were about the same size, and about the same strength.
Matthew punched Jason, and Jason punched Matthew. But Matthew had the strength of rage, and he gained ground by inches until he had Jason near the wall of the shed, and the pile of junk beside it.
Matthew clocked Jason on the chin, and Jason fell backwards into the pile of junk.
In every kind of hindsight, that had been so, so stupid. There was everything sharp about that pile. But Matthew hadn’t been smart that night.
Jason hit the pile, screamed, and looked down to see the shard of metal jutting from his chest.
Matthew screamed, and tried to pull him away from it.
Jason screamed and fought him off, tugging on the shard and tearing up his hands.
Matthew just screamed.
Jason fell still.
After a while, Matthew got the shovel from the shed and began to dig.
He buried Jason in his driveway, then parked his truck on top of the grave. He had been smart enough then to move the hovertruck up and down a few times to make the stones look like this was where it always sat. As if Jason had never been.
His wife came out of the house, wondering what all the noise was about. He told her to go back to bed. He shouted it, really.
And then he ran to the pantry to grab his pistol, and went into t
he fields.
He closed his eyes and pressed the cold muzzle back to his temple. His hand was shaking, but it was steady enough.
Jason was a prick, but he was Matthew’s best friend.
Matthew pulled the trigger.
* * *
They stepped out into a small clearing in the woods.
Lieve trembled, the memory like the taste of blood in her mouth. Did he relive that every time he teleported? No wonder he was half crazy. No wonder he had never gone beyond the first stages of the trauma. It was always still too raw.
And oh gods, he’d been on Logan’s World. That farming world had gone silent over twenty years ago, but everyone had thought it was from a rogue black hole. Something had happened when he’d pulled the trigger. He’d gained his powers, he’d jumped somewhere else—to another world, maybe ahead to another time. He hadn’t started to descend on worlds until just over a standard year ago.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
Matthew stiffened. “What?”
“Not your fault. What happened to Jason. You didn’t mean to—”
Matthew whirled on her. He glared in reverse, a directional swallowing of her life force. And his energy continued to grow, a pressure in the air.
She didn’t think, she just leaped. She was in the air when the blast hit her, sending her spinning across the sky.
* * *
Lieve landed in a field, and it was too much like the field where Matthew had held the gun, so she leaped again. She ended up by a lake, and it was too much like the lake where she had stayed when she was pregnant with her first child, and so she leaped again. She landed in a mall parking lot. It was still night, and only two cars dotted the pavement. From the top of the light posts came the occasional red flicker of a security beam.
Lieve braced her hands on her thighs, and for a long moment tried to breathe.
The breaths turned to sobs.
Her mind replayed that scene through Matthew’s eyes. She felt his shock, and the void that had opened inside of him. It was as if her fist had thrown that last punch, and her hands had buried the body.
Lieve sank onto a concrete barrier and covered her face.
She tried to tell herself it hadn’t been the worst tragedy. She had helped manifesters who’d witnessed gang shootings, or shot someone and broke because of it. She’d seen manifesters whose loved ones had been killed in a fire, or whose partner or parents or children had died in any number of horrific accidents. Some of them had been part of the accidental cause.
There were manifesters right now, in the wreckage of Hanak, who had lost everything. And they were not ending the world. She had not ended the world when she’d gained her powers.
The barriers in Lieve’s control cracked, and memories that she’d kept at bay for years flooded in.
Her wife had told her she shouldn’t drink so much, even though the wine had been bio-engineered as pregnancy-safe and boasted extra vitamins. She had been having pain in her back all week, and her boss was cramping down on her at work, and she’d had too much of a headache to care. Just one night of oblivion, she could give herself that.
She’d wrecked the hovercar on the way home from the club, drove it straight into a traffic post. In the end, she’d lost the baby. For a few drinks, she’d lost her daughter.
Lieve bared her teeth and made a sound that could have been a scream.
All Wardens were workaholics. You didn’t manifest without trauma. Why couldn’t happy people get to unlock the latent powers in their DNA? Wouldn’t the worlds be a better place?
Lieve couldn’t distract herself from the memories, so she rocked herself and let them play out. She didn’t dissect them. She didn’t have the energy—all of that had gone into surviving Matthew’s memories. She didn’t process. She just watched.
Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t that what she’d told Matthew? It was her mistake, yes, her stupid mistake. But it wasn’t murder.
After a while, she got up. She wiped her eyes again and looked around. The sky was pink and the air thick with dawn. The mall workers would be arriving soon.
She had to go home. She needed to let her wife hold her, and she needed to hold her daughter—her second daughter—tightly, and tell Ina she loved her. She hadn’t done that lately.
Lieve crouched and leaped.
And came down a half meter from where she’d been standing, stumbling to not hit the ground.
Her powers were gone.
* * *
Lieve walked into the mall when it opened and talked a store clerk into letting her use the comm. She called Central, and two minutes later, a teleporter popped in beside her. He grabbed her arm, and she was back in Central’s control room.
Natan hovered on the operations island, his shoulders hunched and eyes bloodshot. “What happened? Did he steal your powers?”
Lieve opened her hands. The control room hushed. Central was even more crowded now, a clutter of uniform colors with Wardens from other global sections brought in to help take down the Destroyer. All of them stared at her.
Wardens had lost their powers before. It was rare, but it happened. Sometimes a rogue stole them. Sometimes, the powers just went away. A Warden would be active one day, and retired the next. No one talked about it.
But Lieve thought she understood now. Her pain had given her powers, but she had faced that pain and come away with less tatters in her soul. She couldn’t explain that to the Wardens. They had been more family to her than her family, and she had been the same to them. But no one talked about their lives before, or what had caused them to manifest.
“Ah, shit,” Natan said to her silence. He looked past her to one of the big screens on the wall, his face grayer than she had ever seen it. He puffed out a cloud of dust. On the screen, a newscast showed the ruins of Hanak, still burning.
No, not Hanak. She could see parts of the skyline of New Sydney, the white pencil of the Hubble Spire still standing near the river. Matthew had destroyed another city.
“Lieve,” Natan said slowly, “I get that you want to help him. I get it. But you really screwed up this time.”
She’d screwed up because of what she’d said to him. She had escalated the Destroyer’s destruction. And she’d screwed up because she’d deprived Central of herself, one of the most sensitive trackers, when it badly needed all available resources.
She didn’t dare look around the quiet room. The other Wardens felt like strangers watching her.
“Go home, Lieve,” Natan said. “You can’t do anything here.”
* * *
The teleporter deposited her in her living room, and Lieve collapsed onto the sofa. Morning light peeked through the wall of windows, and the aroma of brewing coffee wafted in from the kitchen. She heard water running—Moira in the shower. Her daughter would be up soon.
Had it only been a few hours since she’d left, so eager to fix the Destroyer? How naïve of her, how utterly egocentric. The last out-of-control manifester she’d tried to help had almost killed a handful of people. This one had just killed millions.
And she didn’t have her powers.
She tried to throw up a field, just a small psychic barrier, but nothing happened.
Gods, but she couldn’t go back to cubicle work, not after being with the Wardens.
Lieve looked around the vaulted living room, at the trendy furniture, the chrome and red plastic decorations. Moira didn’t make enough alone to keep them in their downtown apartment. And Moira wouldn’t want her to stay home all day with their daughter—Moira’s daughter, carried by Moira, because they hadn’t wanted to make that mistake again. They had an unspoken understanding that Lieve was not the responsible one. Not in that way.
And what was she thinking planning for the future, when in a few days there would be no more future?
Panic would already be breaking out. There would be no trip off-world for her family, who had no real status, especially now that Lieve was no longer a Warden.
Lieve stilled.
The shower turned off. She heard the squeak of bare feet on tile as her wife stepped out, humming softly in the bathroom.
Was that how this worked? Lieve hadn’t wanted to deal with her problems here, so she’d gained the ability to fly above them. She’d wanted to shut out the world, so she’d given herself fields to identify threats and keep herself safe.
And maybe Matthew had gained his ability to destroy so he would never have to go back and face the ones he loved, because there was nothing to go back to. He streaked down from the sky to give the world a chance to kill him.
From Ina’s bedroom, there was a loud yawn that morphed into a giggle. Ina called for her mommy to make strawberry oatmeal. Lieve thought of answering the call, but she didn’t. That half hour could cost millions more lives.
Lieve didn’t have her powers, but the knots inside her were looser than they had been in years. Maybe the knots inside Matthew could ease as well. Maybe it wasn’t that Matthew couldn’t be helped, but like her, he didn’t think he should be.
Lieve grabbed the keys to Moira’s car. She hadn’t driven in years and she had planned to never drive again, but her need was greater than the fear.
She put on Moira’s earpiece—the Wardens could track her own comm—and hand-tuned it to the national broadcasts. Lieve would follow the chain of destruction to Matthew. She didn’t know what she would do from there.
It might take hours to get to where he was, or she might not get there at all. Even if she could ask the Wardens for help, they would only want to kill him. And they had to try. And maybe they would succeed where no one else had. Maybe they could save the world. But Lieve had to try, too.
The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 35