Reviled

by Dean C. Moore

  Player had a face that would make most super models retire on the spot upon glancing at it. The bangs of his black hair were jelled to fall over his forehead just enough to give him that well-cultivated wild, bad boy look. The sharp, haunting, yellow-brown eyes were well recessed under the straight across eyebrows for just the right air of mystery, simultaneously teasing, sorrowful, and playful. And his flawless skin could only exist on the supernaturally healthy. The façade, if he and not nature had constructed it, would have been designed to hypnotize so completely you were all too willing to overlook his bottomless pit of flaws, or better yet, fail to detect them entirely. If he hadn’t been born this beautiful, he’d likely have never known anyone willing to stick around more than a few seconds to put up with him when the truth came out.

  Naomi had meant to save him for last, but she was genuinely pissed at all of them right now, and he was the best outlet for her rage. He seemed to thrive on getting a rise out of people, so why not?

  “Your elemental magic could go a long way to ameliorate the suffering going on outside, Player. Why aren’t you out there doing your part?”

  “What has this world ever done for me?”

  She couldn’t resist, not with a setup like that. “Oh, it gave you the first taste of a real family you ever had, for one. But I guess you didn’t grasp what family means, not really. Otherwise you wouldn’t have fled when things turned bad for Soren. He was always there for you, and what did you do—what did all of you do?” she said raising her voice to the group—“When he needed you most, you all abandoned him.”

  “That’s not true!” Player blared, but as quickly ran out of steam, collapsing back into the chair. No doubt he was about to broadcast in glorious detail all the times the gang had fought by his side, but she knew what she meant, and guilt had obviously been riding him as it had been riding all the others. Perhaps her job was going to be easier than expected. From the looks on everyone’s faces, no one was feeling too good right about now. Sure, losing their father figure, and with it, any sense of an intact family, was a big part of the hurt they were experiencing. Meaning feeling sorry for themselves was half the dynamic. But the other half had to do with the speech Naomi had prepared for them that she was now getting the distinct sense she could dial back.

  “You all know he’s too damned weak now to be a serious threat to any of us,” she said raising her voice and addressing the entire group again. “His homicidal rages, for however they may come and go in the days ahead, the verbal and emotional and physical abuse heading our way…. Is it anything we didn’t learn long ago to toughen ourselves against? The only difference is our actual parents could help themselves; he can’t.

  “Besides, if he starts getting on your nerves too much, I’m sure Player can whip up a twister and send him flying out the window, perhaps into a pile of horse dung, being as full of shit as he is.”

  Player chuckled. “I’ll have you know that ploy is just number three on the list. I’m up to one hundred in fiendish countermeasures, you hack.”

  “And Stealy,” Naomi said, shifting her attention to her. Stealy was her confederate with the giant, all-too-alluring, upward-sloping, almond-shaped, amber eyes. Her long straight black hair was so lustrous it looked synthetic. Her Lebanese ancestry just added to the whole exotic beauty package.

  Stealy was reclined over her chair in her favorite catlike position, hypnotizing herself with her fire magic, the bowling-ball-size sphere of fire hovering just above her left palm—no doubt featuring different versions of Soren burning to death inside; her control of the flames was that good. “Stealy might just give him a hot foot to send him screaming and running for a quick dive into that fish pond he keeps in the basement.”

  Stealy smiled. “Far too good for him. But I suppose I can steal myself a more charitable heart as I make my rounds tonight looking for things to pilfer.”

  “You’ll do a lot more than that. You’re going to go out and do what he’d want you to do. Use your magic to help ease the suffering out there. Otherwise it’ll be his guilt riding him when we figure out how to heal him. He’ll own all that suffering, you know he will, that he was powerless to do anything about anyway. The only tonic he’ll have is what each of us can do every day to tone things down.”

  Naomi turned to Natura. She looked as always, elfin, down to the Spock-like ears which were larger than normal—and pointy. Her skin was flawless, in an airbrushed—can’t touch this in the real-world—sort of way. And pale. And her hair was rainbow-colored and cut short to expose her neckline, and spiky at the edges. The hues in the rainbow looked to be supplied by this month’s Kool-Aid flavor-pack variety; not a realistic shade in the spectrum. Her build complemented the elfin-like image. She was exceedingly petite.

  “Natura,” Naomi said, “more talking animals might mean less people inclined to eat them to ward off famine. And if they’re higher functioning, they might earn their keep in other ways as well.”

  Natura wiped her teary eyes, brightening at the thought. She had the most sensitive disposition of them all, and right now, was probably feeling the impact of Soren’s harsh words more than anybody. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  Lar stood up from his desk. “I bet I can find some spells amid my books that might do some good out there.”

  “And I can steal you some more, in case they don’t,” Stealy said. “I’ll add it to the list.”

  “One more thing,” Naomi said. She paused just long enough to make sure their eyes were all on her because she wanted them to see her expression when she said it. “We’re all moving in to that dilapidated mausoleum of a place with him.”

  The choir sang out in perfect harmony. “No way!” Stealy declared. “No way in hell!” Player protested. “Not on your life,” Lar insisted. “I’d rather sleep with a talking Cayman,” Natura announced, “saying nothing but, ‘I’m going to eat you,’ all night long.”

  “And when it gets too bad,” Naomi said, raising her voice in turn and ignoring them, “being pent up with him day and night, doing your best to hold him together, you’re going to go out into the world and do your best to hold it together. That way you can say after this is all over that you never stopped taking care of him, not one second of one day, so you have the satisfaction of seeing him melt in a pool of his own tears when all the anger and fury has been flushed out of him.”

  “You’re being unreasonable,” Stealy said. “I’m down with the whole subtly-played-out revenge-fuck angle of it all, but….”

  Naomi shifted into Soren—as he once was. She didn’t think she could do that still, but she’d been slipping into Soren mode the instant she started giving the speech—something Soren was very good at. And now, with the stakes this high, it must just have triggered the reflex. The group startled, taking a collective step back. “You’re going to do it because healing me is the only way to heal yourselves, fully. You’ve come a long way so far. But to be truly free of the past, you have to ensure no one can ever get through to you with verbal, emotional, or physical abuse ever again. That you can laugh it off. Not give them the satisfaction, not let them get a rise out of you. Your charity toward me, and my ultimate impotence at riling you, that’s how we’re going to heal each other.”

  Naomi shifted back, buckling at the knees. She couldn’t hold the morph any longer. It had been too many years since using the ability, and it drained her too completely to sustain Soren’s shape for this long. Lar rushed to her side to help her up. “Come on, you heard her,” he said. “First we go play house, then we go play at saving the world. It’s the perfect plan if we ever want our family to not only be whole again, but to make those bonds truly shatterproof; no matter what challenges lie ahead.”

  “I’ll take her,” Player said, lifting Naomi out of Lar’s arms. “You’ll just bruise her up more by tripping all over yourself.”

  They took a second to eye one another and take a collective breath to confirm they were all up for this. And then they scattered like cockroa
ches under lights. Each had items of a personal nature to collect up that, no doubt, would serve as security blankets in the dark days ahead.

  FIVE

  Soren studied the guard at the edge of Shelley’s Victorian England, at the barrier to the next district. He was Chinese and of diminutive size and frame; the opposite of the typical guard. He was showing off his black belt in martial arts, perhaps to discourage anyone from messing with him on account of his size. “Aren’t you on the wrong side of the wall, pal?”

  “You know how it is over there, Soren, as one chi master to another. I needed a fucking break already, so sue me.”

  Soren smiled. He’d forgotten how Americanized an immigrant could get, down to soaking up local idioms. “Didn’t I kick your ass once?”

  The guard smiled back. “I deserved it. You practically begged to get out of that fight.” The ward of the gate stepped aside for him. Triggered perhaps with a thought—the actual secret of how the centurions wielded their gateway magic remained well cloaked—the portal opened, showing up the wall to be little more than a hologram. “Take care, my friend.”

  “If I come at you again, chinaman, run. I’m not who I once was.” Soren hoped the tone and the racial slur both would help him to heed his words. To make sure the lesson took, he pulled back the hood.

  The centurion gasped. “I see you’re not just messing with me. Will do, Soren.” He bowed in the way of the Chinese—and without taking his eyes off a potential opponent—in the way of a martial artist.

  Soren disappeared through the gate, thinking, perhaps more of his old self had held on than he thought. The old Soren would have warned the guard to be cautious; the beast would not bother. Then again, this beast was cunning, less brute and simpleton, more…. More what, Soren? Time would tell.

  Maybe the robes will buy you some time, Soren, he reassured himself as he gamboled up the Chinatown avenue, as frenetic with activity as any marketplace.

  They were trading fish and crab on one side of the street, out in the open. One merchant held up the spider crab for him so he could appreciate the spread of its many legs. The vendor standing by him was pointing to the aquarium with the red snappers swimming, waiting restlessly to be eaten. No doubt the seafood had been stolen off a ship. No one in this district but the richest of the rich could afford these delicacies otherwise.

  The sea-life had been nano-enhanced a while back; with the oceans having gotten overly polluted, it was the only way for them to survive. Of course, that meant you were never sure if you were getting zombie fish or not, or what that nano did once it was inside you. They were reputedly designed to self-dissolve in a human gastrointestinal tract. But people who ate a lot of fish these days, started looking like fish. So it was Soren’s guess the technology still had some kinks to be worked out.

  Ironically, the sea life had a head start on everyone and everything else. Now that the world had shifted out of orbit, it was all the other animals that were in jeopardy, humans included. Just how many the transhumans could save with their nano-cocktails was left to be seen. The rest would rely on the mercy of wizards like Natura with a thing for the natural world and an ability to revive plants and animals alike. Natura was the only such wizard he knew of. Mother Nature didn’t produce many of them, perhaps not desirous of the competition.

  Soren had come to Chinatown a couple times before, always in search of some grand wizard that had a way out of a corner he had painted himself into that he couldn’t think his way out of—or that Victor had painted the entire human race into.

  Soren was being shooed away by the fish peddlers now, suddenly less interested in selling to him and more interested in getting his stink away from them. Soren was only too happy to pick up the pace.

  He grabbed some salt prunes out of a bin without asking or offering to pay. The woman guarding the wooden bucket went to swat him with her hand whip, possibly made for dominating her husband when she wasn’t chasing away unwanted customers. But her hand and her whip stopped mid-flick as she got a load of his face under the hood. She gestured for him to take the prunes and move on. There was no one defenseless in this district, and that included her. But whatever martial arts skills she could have put on display at his expense, she must have figured it wasn’t worth risking her entire booth getting kicked over in the fracas.

  Soren never cared for salted prunes before; the electrolytes played hell with his nanites, which kept his mineral balance just so to avoid sending sparks from one to the other and shorting up their operations. It must have something to do with the infusion of the cabbalistic nanites, he thought. But what? Were they looking to make it easier on themselves to take his other nanites out of commission, to make more room for populating more of their own? And had this request come from the beast, or the part of his mindchip fighting against the beast on his behalf?

  His silicon self surely wouldn’t lie down for a total invasion and takeover of his body any more than he would. He had to believe he was inside there putting up a fight the best way he could. And that these sustained moments of lucidity were coming on account of those efforts, and not on account of the beast wanting to fuck with him, letting him think all was in hand, while he was still vulnerable. Until he didn’t need the pretense anymore.

  Soren had his eyes on the sea urchins, which was how he missed the transition. The next booth over, the sea urchins were no longer real and for sale as eatables, they were being sold as partial gloves a fighter could wear to pulverize someone. They, of course, were made of silver and with their sparkling finish in the sunlight, should have been easy enough to distinguish from the real things. But his mind, playing tricks with him, had continued to see purple. Why was it that the beast, more in tune with his five senses than Soren, would suddenly miss the transition?

  Oh, that’s why.

  He looked away from the booth at the fighter staring him down, the sea urchin gloves on, his boxing stance already in place.

  Soren held out his right hand and mumbled words of power—something he never did; he didn’t know any. He was not a spell caster. The next thing he knew, the guy was pummeling his own face with the gloves. He screamed in agony but kept punching away, even as the juices of his eyes leaked out faster and faster, until the eyeballs looked more like flat tires. The rest of the face turned progressively into hamburger with each subsequent punch. And what was Soren doing during all this? He’d reached into the stall with the real sea urchins and was slurping up the meat from the undersides and tossing the husks into the streets where cyclists were whizzing by only to be slowed by the flat tires the urchins were giving them.

  Maybe the beast wanted more of an audience. His victim couldn’t see anymore, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t speak, because of all the damage he’d continued to inflict on his face. He’d buckled at the knees; his blows were delivered less energetically now and were coming fewer and farther in between, but he refused to stop tenderizing his facade. When he finally punched his head clear off—by hammering those long needles repeatedly into his neck—the body fell to the ground, and still it wouldn’t stop punching itself, working on tenderizing the torso now.

  Soren’s guess: Norel had been right about the functioning of the cabbalistic nanites. But he’d left out the part where they could do more than just catalyze specific enzymatic reactions in Soren’s body. By allowing him to lock in particular brainwave patterns, he could magnify the energy field about him, dialing up his aura, and he could send energy from his hand as well. And that energy carried the same information as might be transmitted wirelessly by any Wi-Fi system. The broadcasted data, what’s more, could be used to encode for chemical reactions in his opponent’s body as surely as if his assailant’s brain was receiving new instructions from a flood of endorphins; endorphins telling him not to be euphoric, but to be suicidal. It was that, or Soren had managed to hypnotize the guy, not just himself, with the words of power, and once that brainwave pattern was locked in for his adversary, his own brain did the work of the cab
balistic nanites for him. Perhaps for the meld of spirit science and magic to take, both approaches were needed, at least while the beast had yet to reach maturity inside Soren.

  Beast was becoming perhaps too polite a euphemism. The monster that he was becoming was no longer crawling on all fours; it had just taken its first unsteady steps.

  The path opened up for Soren after that. Other attackers had already queued up, awaiting their turn, which is how it was in this district—the better the fighter, the more the opponents came out of the woodwork to test their mettle against him in hopes of rising in the rankings. But they were all stepping back now. They’d let the district’s master wizards handle him.

  The upstairs balcony. The voice in his head told him to look up. It was the wizard he’d come searching for. Bingwen. The name meant “master of arts.” He’d seen the fracas in the streets. He ushered Soren upstairs with a gesture.

  Bingwen was using one of the Buddha boys to guard his front door. They weighed between four hundred and six hundred pounds as a rule and seldom moved. As Soren moved toward him, several fighters thought to rush him from behind. No doubt they were on Bingwen’s payroll and missed his little gesture from upstairs.

  Buddha Boy held up his hand, palm up and the guards were immediately levitated into the air and twirled there, as if on a carousel, as Buddha Boy played with his fingers. Soren glanced over his shoulder at the show. “I see you’re in a charitable mood today,” Soren said, “or you’d have snapped their necks already. Let’s hope the feeling is contagious.”

  Buddha Boy laughed uproariously. They were known for that, too, and of course, for their chi mastery. No one displayed chi mastery like this, controlling fighters on pure energy alone. Not even Soren at the height of his martial arts practice and chi mastery—as applied to combat—had come anywhere close to these guys.