The White List

by Nina D'Aleo

  The fight continued for several more minutes that felt like hours before Rocco burst out of the disorder and snatched me up. He leaped from that rooftop toward the next. He swung around mid-air and raised a hand, exploding the entire roof off the house where we had stood. The explosion sent three of the soldiers crashing off onto the ground. We hit down on the neighboring house and the fourth assassin was right on top of us. He was super fast, contorting and camouflaging his body to avoid Rocco’s blows. Finally Rocco managed to get in a powerful strike, but in the process he almost dropped me off the side of the roof. He clamped a hand over my leg, right over one of the bullet wounds. I cried out, but kept my senses, managing to get a hand hold on the guttering and push myself backwards. The Shaman assassin had his arm around Rocco’s neck and was squeezing mercilessly. The arm actually looked more like the body of snake. I found I was still holding my gun and raised it. I aimed it at the Shaman’s head and fired point blank. He jolted back and collapsed, releasing Rocco.

  He coughed and gasped, holding his neck. The sound of running boots came from behind us and Rocco rasped, “Quick.”

  He grabbed my arm and leaped over the edge of the roof.

  28

  According to the Greco-Frey Measure, I had an above-average level of pain tolerance. I’d always felt pretty smug about that. As Rocco dug the third bullet out of my leg, I screamed a scream that ruptured several blood vessels in my left eyeball. Zero self-congratulation at this point in time. Unfortunately Rocco wasn’t a healing Shaman and his pain blocking influences were currently hindered by his need to self-regenerate and the extent of my injuries, so we were doing it the old-fashioned way—alcohol as an antiseptic and a pillow to muffle the screams. On the upside, the pain was so insanely intense that the discomfort of all my other minor injuries vanished in comparison. On the downside, I wanted to curl into a ball and die. Rocco was, no surprises, mechanical, swift and thorough. I was bracing for more pain when he dragged the strips of my cut jeans down and said, “Done.”

  I attempted to sit up but the room spun like a nightmare carnival ride and I slumped back down.

  Tears trickled from the corners of my eyes as I stared up at the ceiling of someone’s lounge room. We’d broken into a neighboring house to hide. I started to shake and couldn’t stop. Rocco put his hand on my shoulder and a sense of calm stilled the tremors. The pain remained, but it was dulled. I felt distanced from it. My legs were a mess, but I knew the situation would have been much much grimmer if I hadn’t been wearing the Kevlar jacket and body armor—both of which were now ripped up, dented in and lying on the floor beside me. Even with the armor, if it hadn’t been for Rocco I would have been dead.

  I looked up at his face in the moonlight, shaded with shadows and shimmers of light.

  He lifted off his shirt. His chest was riddled with bullet wounds, the injuries so gruesome they made my toes curl up in my boots.

  I watched as he turned his skills on himself—using psychokinesis to draw the bullets and frags out of his body. Some of the wounds had started to close over and he had to rip them open with his fingers to access the bullets. He didn’t even flinch, but I did enough wincing and shivering for the both of us. When it was finally over, he pulled his shirt back on and cleared away the implements we’d used.

  “At least we know for sure now,” he finally spoke.

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “The Horseman is the person who wants you dead. He sent both Pope and the Shaman after us.”

  “Could it have just been a coincidence?” I said, hoping it could be.

  “Not the way it went down. They were working together—if the assassins didn’t get us, then the Shaman soldiers would.”

  I thought about the fight and about the future—Shaman against human. Humans wouldn’t stand a chance. It was a completely different league of fighting. As Rocco had said in the beginning, they were a whole new race or model of person.

  With that thought, I remembered why we’d been in Masekela’s house in the first place. “The drive?” I asked.

  “Shot up,” Rocco said.

  My heart sank down into the acid pit of my gut.

  “I did quickly glance the List as it was copying,” Rocco said. “The telepaths may still be able to extract it from my short-term memory before it degrades, if we hurry.”

  “I’m ready,” I said, which was a complete lie. I couldn’t even walk.

  Headlights drifted across the window above us. Rocco pushed me flat to the ground and dived down beside me. We lay there, staring at each other. Voices sounded outside the house, footsteps clomped on the sidewalk. I held my breath. Shadowy silhouettes appeared behind the curtain. We watched them pass and vanish. The steps faded. The voices grew silent. I started breathing again. Rocco narrowed his eyes at the wall, seeing through to the outside. He rolled over onto his stomach but kept low.

  “How come they couldn’t see us?” I whispered.

  “I blocked them.” He gestured to his head. “But they’re still out there—we have to wait for them to leave the vicinity.”

  We fell silent, waiting. Rocco lay close, his side warm against mine.

  “What was it like for you?” I murmured, my head resting on the carpet. “Waking up?”

  Rocco was quiet for so long I didn’t think he was going to reply, but then he said, “I felt …” he struggled for the words “… confused, disoriented.”

  “Probably didn’t help waking up in the morgue,” I said.

  “No it didn’t.”

  After another stretch of silence I whispered, “When I was talking to your brother he said you and he and your sister didn’t grow up together.”

  Rocco shook his head. “We were all separated. Our sister had a stable adopted family. Marco went through many places.”

  “Where did you grow up?” I asked.

  Rocco paused as he always did when I asked for personal information. “I was born in Barbados,” he eventually said.

  “Really?” I said. “I would never have guessed that.” He definitely didn’t have a Caribbean accent. In fact, he didn’t have any discernible accent. “Was your mother living there?”

  “When my mother was pregnant with me, she was arrested there trying to smuggle drugs out of the country. They jailed her for six years.”

  “Did you … stay there with her?” I asked, imagining a child behind bars.

  He shook his head. “No one in her family would come to get me after I was born, so when I was three months old, they took me from my mother and put me into a state orphanage. I ran away early on …”

  “And your mother just kept on having children,” I said.

  “Children she didn’t want and wasn’t psychologically capable of caring for.” He glanced at me with dark eyes. “She was a damaged individual.”

  “From capping?” I asked. I was assuming she was a Shaman too, since it was genetic and all her children had it.

  “From her upbringing more than anything,” he said. “I have genetic memories so I know exactly what happened to her. It explains some things, but it doesn’t make anything better.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t,” I said. “Some things—nothing can make better.”

  I felt Rocco studying me. When he spoke, his tone was careful, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, that you entered law enforcement to help people. I can see part of you does want to save, but I can see another part of you is driven by a different motivation—a desire to punish and destroy. They’re dark feelings, but they can be used for the right purposes.”

  “Isn’t everyone like that though?” I asked, his words making me feel uncomfortable. “Good and bad?”

  “Potentially many people have the feelings, but not everyone could act on them—rationally.”

  “We were given an open directive to take out any walts that couldn’t be brought in safely. I made a personal decision to ignore that directive. If I hadn’t a lot of innocent people would be dead, ostensibly in order to pr
otect others. Where does it say one life is more important than another?”

  “I know,” he conceded. “Often it’s gray, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s very clear who is the enemy.”

  “Speaking of the enemy,” I said. “Even if we do recover the List and the rebels wake other Shaman, what’s to say they won’t turn to the Horseman and join him in exterminating humans?”

  “Some may,” Rocco said, “but I believe most won’t.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because most of them have relationships with humans. Most of them have humans who they love.”

  “Is there a human you love?” I said.

  Rocco considered the question, and I watched him in the shadows. He was definitely a person who used his face like a mask, but occasionally the mask lifted and I saw a glimpse of the real person underneath. “I want to love … but I’m not sure if I can,” he said.

  “What about your girlfriend?” I asked, aware it was the kind of question a person asks when they are actually interested in someone.

  Rocco started to answer, then he glanced sharply up at the window. “They’re leaving,” he said.

  “Then let’s go,” I said.

  He stood and lifted me, carrying me through the house to the garage, where we found a handy car. Rocco opened the doors and started the engine. The garage door lifted up in front of us and he drove out into the street. As we picked up speed, my personal cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I dragged it out and checked the ID. It said Dark. I almost dropped the phone in my rush to answer.

  “Bos!”

  “It’s me—is the line secure?” he whispered.

  Tears filled my eyes. “Under normal circumstance it would be,” I told him, trying to keep composed. “But shit’s gone crazy.”

  “Tell me about it,” he murmured, and from the way he was breathing I could hear he was in pain. A machine was beeping somewhere in the background. He was still in the hospital.

  I made a quick decision and spoke fast, “Bos, you’re being watched by two separate groups. Assassins and walts who have harnessed their mutations. They have supernatural skills. Some of the walts are allies, some are not …”

  My phone cut dead. I tried to switch it back on but couldn’t. The screen remained blank. I checked my work phone and the one Rocco had given me as well, but they were also blacked out.

  I glanced at Rocco and said, “You?”

  He shook his head. So that left Omen.

  “We have to go get Dark. He’s incapacitated and unarmed. He doesn’t stand a chance against them,” I said.

  Rocco didn’t answer; instead he grimaced with pain as Omen mentally called him in—loudly.

  “We can’t. We have to answer the call—now,” he said. He clenched his jaw and sped up, flying through the suburban streets.

  “I have to help my partner!” I told him. “Let me out. Rocco—please!”

  “You can’t risk it, Silver!” He raised his voice. “You won’t get to the hospital in time, you can’t even walk. You have to stay with me. You have to see this through—trust me.” He looked into my eyes.

  My mind spun—and all I could hear was my instincts telling me to get to my partner, but if Rocco was right and Omen would order Dark killed for retribution then if I did anything but comply I could be condemning him.

  “We’re almost there,” Rocco said quietly.

  Within minutes we were pulling up at an elementary school, its buildings square shapes in the darkness. Rocco came around to my side and lifted me out. He carried me through the grounds to the school hall. He pushed open the door and we saw the rebel Shaman gathered in the center of the space. Omen stood at the head of the group—waiting.

  Part 3

  29

  Rocco sat with his eyes closed, wires running from his head to a laptop computer, as the resistance’s strongest telepaths and others Willow told me were called retrocogs scoured his memory, trying to piece together captured fragments of the List. Omen paced the floor beside the group. Morningstar and Marco stood close by. The rebel’s best healer, a man known as the Surgeon, happily agreed to fix my legs. They went from shredded and useless to completely healed, no marks, no scars, in a matter of seconds. The pain lingered for a few extra minutes as my brain struggled to catch up and then that vanished too.

  I thanked the Surgeon. He had pungent garlic breath and spoke to me at length about various healing properties of the earth. The guy was an encyclopedia and at another time I would have been interested to listen, but as it was, I couldn’t escape fast enough. I just wanted to sit somewhere by myself and try to get my phones working and locate Dark. When I was finally able to disentangle, I found a quiet corner of the hall and pulled out all three cell phones—they were all back on, full reception. I spent a minute agonizing over whether I should phone Dark or if a sudden call might give him away if he was now trying to escape and finally I decided he would have known to turn the sound to silent. I tried to call him, but it rang into voicemail. With bad feelings wrenching my insides, I used the tracker app to check where he was. The application searched for longer than usual and then brought up an error. I tried another three times with the same result. Something, or someone, was interfering with the signal and I was pretty sure I knew who that someone was.

  I didn’t dare a glance toward Omen, afraid to do anything that might send him into another crazy fit that would end with Dark getting killed. Instead I checked my email in case my partner had written. There was nothing from Dark, but Mom and Dad had sent a letter. I skimmed it briefly to make sure all was okay. It sounded like my father was having the time of his life and Mom was—managing. They’d attached a photo of Dad looking rather sloshed, wearing a captain’s hat, saluting with one hand and squeezing Mom against his side with the other. She had a long-suffering, frazzled expression on her face. It brought tears to my eyes.

  There was nothing from my brother, which wasn’t surprising, but there were several from my mom’s cousin who was taking care of the cats and the other pets. She’d written a daily diary entry for each cat in their own individual voices, significant work considering how many of them there were—and Dark had accused me of being a crazy cat lady. I shut it down. If I lived through this I’d give the diary the attention it deserved, but at this stage I didn’t want to spend the last hours of my life reading about special fish dinners and escapades in the sand box.

  I put the phones back in my pockets and glanced up at the Shaman gathered around Rocco. Images from his mind were flashing up on the computer screen. Many of them were images of me, only I looked a lot more glamorous than in reality. Um. Wow. I noticed Morningstar glaring in my direction and an uncomfortable heat rose around me. If looks could kill … Actually, hers probably could, so I decided to go sit somewhere out of range.

  I found a bathroom at the far end of the hall. It was a typical school bathroom block, dank with dripping taps, the lingering smell of deodorant, a random sports uniform forgotten on one of the wooden benches. I went to the sink and splashed cold water over my face. It brought my senses to sharp attention. A cold breeze ran up my leg from the ripped jeans. I looked into the mirror and jolted. Morningstar stood right behind me with her arms crossed over her chest and a very Omen look on her face—all dark arched eyebrows and killer eyes. I turned to face her.

  “They can’t find the List,” she said. “Just a thousand angles of your face.”

  “What do you expect?” I said. “My face is all he’s been seeing for days.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me and stepped closer, right into my personal space, just like her brother did. “I told you to remember your place. I warned you.”

  I seriously wanted to hit her, crazy psycho bitch, but instead I said coldly, “It’s his mind: maybe you should be discussing this with him.”

  “Oh I will be,” she said, and I felt sorry for Rocco and maybe just slightly sorry for her as well. Experience had taught me that it was never helpful for couples to interrogat
e each other about whether or not either found other people attractive. Let’s face it, the real answer was always Yes. That was only natural. It was what people did with those feelings that mattered, and Rocco hadn’t done anything inappropriate—unfortunately for me.

  I knew I should probably keep my mouth shut, but I ended up saying, “Good for you.” I turned my back on her, which was like turning my back on a snarling dog.

  She grabbed me by the neck and slammed my head into the mirror, shattering the glass. I turned to take a swing at her, but she moved superfast and kicked me in the knee with her steel caps. My leg buckled from underneath me and I crashed to my side. Morningstar raised a hand to strike again. I covered my head.

  “Hey!” Someone spoke from the doorway. I looked up and saw Willow. Her usual nervousness was gone, now she just looked angry—and scary. The two Shaman girls stared at each other and I sensed a silent battle of minds, which ended in Morningstar storming out of the bathroom.

  Willow came in and kneeled down beside me.

  “Are you okay?” she asked and I nodded, massaging my forehead. “Try to avoid her,” Willow said. “She’s intense beyond normal. She was like that even before she woke up.”

  “Did you know her before?” I asked.

  “I knew the family,” she said, and there was something in her tone.

  “Why would a guy like Rocco be with a person like that?” I asked, still burning with anger.

  Willow shook her head and I recognized the emotion in her eyes was sadness. I considered the possibility that Willow herself was interested in Rocco. As I thought it, she gave a small laugh and said, “No, I’m not—it’s even worse.”

  I wondered what was worse than liking a taken man, then I realized. “Omen?”

  She looked away, as her eyes misted with tears. “For years now,” she confessed. “But he doesn’t even see me.”