Orphan of Mythcorp

by R. S. Darling

  “It seems you have an enemy.”

  I took the spitball from him. I wouldn’t even have known about it if Ash hadn’t noticed; one of the many side effects of not having sensation. Ash nodded at Lamorak, who trod down the hall after the culprit of the walk-by-spitballing.

  Ninety minutes later, as I was approaching my locker after ninth period, Lamorak appeared in front of me. He handed me two dozen or so forms, all filled out, signed and dated, then walked away without a word.

  I checked the date of the conference-in-waiting. The Morai had scheduled it for Wednesday, two days away. What’s the rush? As I huffed and headed for Principal Steck’s office, I wondered how many schedules had been ruined thanks to Ash’s impatience to meet this senator. What else would be ruined by the time Ash was through with me and us and them?

  The main office was filled with yahoos whining about their schedules. Talking with Principal Steck in the back was Wes Dodds. While fiddling with my papers to look preoccupied, I strained to hear what they were saying. Apparently they were discussing the appropriate punishment for Morgan, should he ever return from his escape. Principal Steck was pointing out that he didn’t care what the Iconocops did, ‘just so long as it isn’t done on school property.’

  I shuffled past the whiny yahoos over to the chair designated for waiting. The Vice Principal noticed me ten seconds later and, no doubt impressed by my calm demeanor, walked over to hear what I had to say. “I need Principal Steck to sign something for my folks,” I explained.

  “Okay dear,” the nice old lady said. “Why don’t you wait in his office? I’ll let him know.”

  “Thank you.” Hmm, I thought, maybe there is something to this good manner crap after all. Maybe Ash isn’t as daft as he seems.

  Roll ahead five minutes: Principal Steck invited me into his office. I spewed my rehearsed lie and mentioned how I thought this conference would prevent a student exodus. He nodded, looked over the teacher signatures, and added his John Hancock to the fold with an “I’ll make the calls,” promise.

  Feeling pretty darn smug, I practically danced out of his office—and ran smack into Wes Dodds’ chest. “Umph.”

  He grabbed my shoulders; his hands lingered. I was glad I couldn’t feel them there; he was probably squeezing in a vain attempt to hurt me. “What kind of BS were you trying to pull on Jim in there, huh? Something about giving the Morai more freedom, maybe? Don’t pretend I don’t know. I’ve seen you. You’ve been spending a lot of time with them manfacs. They’ve got you mind-screwed.”

  “Ah, actually, they can’t mesmerize me. I was talking to Principal Steck for me.”

  “That’s how it works,” he whispered with a knowing grin. “They make you think it was your idea, and then, when things go to put, you take the fall. So, what are you going to go down for, Sanson?”

  I shrugged out of his grasp and tried to steer around him. He sidestepped and blocked me. I sighed. “Why don’t you go in there and ask ‘Jim’ what’s what? I need to go, I got to be someplace.” I regretted the words as soon as they jumped out of my mouth.

  “You ‘got to be someplace?’” He was blocking my sight of the office, but I could hear that most of the yahoos had fled during my talk with Mr. Steck. So I was pretty much alone with this huge angry dude and his sick-stick and breath that could wither roses. “Where do you ‘got to be?’”

  “My dad is taking me straight to Dr. Wilmut’s office to pick up another case of nanites.”

  Nice.

  Wes Dodds stood like a statue. I could only assume he was giving me the evil eye; those chem-shades he never takes off completely concealed his eyes, neutralizing any possible evil-eye. At last he stepped aside and let me pass.

  What were the odds he was going to follow me as I went to meet Nimrod?

  Chapter 21

  Being laid up for a day with a bum knee and a totally buggered torso isn’t so bad, not when you’ve got a bottle of dynamite painkillers and three manuscripts explaining everything you never knew you wanted to know. The first script from Dex was titled ICONOCOP. It had nothing to do with me except that it was all about my father.

  Apparently Solomon Knox had been the kind of guy who did bad things for the right reasons—occasionally. The blow of discovering my father was not the hero I imagined him to be was softened by the glorious morphine. Also helping was the fact that ICONOCOP revealed the origin of Kana, Faustus and even Marie, back when she had a pulse.

  I’d downed a few pills by the time I finished reading the second manuscript, MYTHICON. So my memory of that tale might be somewhat muddled: It was all about Knox’s quest to kill Alexander (Alexander being the megalomaniacal Icon who had manipulated and murdered his way into becoming the President of Mythcorp). Turned out this Alexander had created the original Morai and used them to Mesmerize the leaders of the free world into signing some sham treaty designed to give him control of their militaries. Oh, and Alexander had commissioned the creation of Nimrod and given the Hunter the mission of executing Knox and his friends. I was starting to understand my father’s obsession with destroying this guy.

  I don’t know if it was the shoddy forty watt bulbs hanging over my head, or the pills I’d gorged, but my gut was rumbling and I could feel a puke escapade coming on.

  ‘Someone’s coming up the stairs,’ Marie warned, dancing away from the door.

  “Oh man,” I clutched my stomach. Seconds later someone knocked. All the Morai were at their classes, so it was up to me to play butler. I groaned to my feet, clutching my gut with one hand, leaning on my old man’s old cane with the other. “Just shove on it, it’ll give,” I yelled. Didn’t want to wander too far from the bathroom, which was about fifteen feet from my cot.

  More knocking. ‘Hey Kurt Kobain,’ Castor said, ‘I think you better get the door.’

  I had no idea who he was talking about. Most of his references are like that—old school.

  “Just shove on the frigging thing!”

  More knocking.

  “Dang it all.” I shuffled forward, ready to give an earful to whoever was on the other side of the door. I reached for the knob, hesitated at the memory of Naked Charlie’s appearance here, and then yanked on it. “Why didn’t you shove like I . . . oh, hey Izzy. What’s going on?”

  The lovely dwarf pushed past me and started checking out Camelot with focused peepers. She then turned her gaze on me, swiveling on the tiniest crutch you ever saw. It gave me a rush to see that I wasn’t the only cripple at PHS. Izzy noticed my gut-clutching.

  “God, you’re almost as pale as your Morai buddies.”

  My stomach clenched. It felt like a capuchin was doing loopedy-loops inside. My hands zipped from stomach up to my mouth. I raced for the toilet. After heaving and groaning and spewing my guts all over the place, I gulped some funky-tasting sink water and stumbled out of the bathroom.

  “Wow,” Izzy said. “That was a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sorry,” I managed. “It’s just—” But the girl had wandered over to my cot and found the bottle. She popped it open.

  “If the rumor-mill is to be believed,” she said, setting the bottle down and walking over to me, “you returned only last night. Which means Miss Little could only have given you this bottle this morning, seven hours ago. Correct?”

  “Right,” I said. Her motherly tone and the disapproving scrunching of her brows reminded me of Ava, or rather, a miniature Ava.

  “And since the school doesn’t normally stock pharmaceuticals, I’d guess no one else has dipped into this bottle; so you must’ve swallowed twice the recommend dosage.”

  I hobbled over to my cot, plopped down. Felt a smidge better. Now our peepers were almost level (sure as sure she had nice peepers, but that was probably not why I felt better). “Actually, Miss Little gave a few to Gareth. So technically I might be within the recommended . . . um, sodage—” I couldn’t think clearly.

  “Technically,” Izzy snorted. And then she just stare
d.

  Spun and dumb as I was, many ticks passed by before I realized she was waiting for me to ask “Did you want something to drink?”

  “No, but you should drink some Listerine or something, your breath is nasty.” When I didn’t immediately get up, she digressed as only girls can. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you said the other day.” She set her crutch on my cot and, with a bit of an effort, raised herself up along beside me.

  A girl was on my cot.

  I always suspected I was The Man.

  ‘Well say something you dickless goof,’ Castor said. ‘You think the tiny chick is going to wait all day for you to make your move? Come on, at least say hello, you useless mound of flaccid flesh.’

  I searched the drawer of my nightstand, spotting the bottle on top as I rummaged. I knew I would pop another couple pills as soon as Izzy left. I drew out a pack of gum, started chewing on a couple sticks, and offered some to Izzy.

  Izzy ignored me. She’d discovered the manuscripts, which I’d foolishly left on the blanket. “How did you get these? I thought they were all destroyed.”

  “You know about them?”

  “Of course,” she answered, holding up the third script, titled PHILICITY. “My mom told me about the Mythcorp Trilogy, said she had one when she was twenty-one, but FBI guys came and took them.” She set the manuscript down, inspected my draggled form. “These are the originals, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.” Another gut-wrencher attacked as I answered.

  “How’d you . . . What are you doing with them? Are you planning something?”

  I paused to consider my answer. Looked back at the bottle on the bed stand. Now that I’d puked up the morphine, I was unfortunately mostly sober, so now all my spooks were showing up: in addition to Castor and Marie and Naked Charlie, Felix and Her Royal Highness were milling about, inspecting Izzy with looks of disapproval on their eternally buggered faces.

  And my hands were jittering again. I twisted on the cot to reach for the bottle, and groaned as I ripped open a few welts. Izzy hopped down and hobbled to the bed stand, swiped the bottle and dropped it in her bag. “I think you’ve had quite enough of these, mister.” She glowered. “They’re going to destroy your kidneys, or give you bleeding ulcers or something. “Lift your shirt.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She hopped back up onto the bed and started to lift my shirt, but her itty-bitty arms made it impossible for her to raise it past my chest. Even so, she got a good peep at the snaky wounds. “Jeez out loud. The Iconocops did this to you?” She was talking about the welts on my back too, the ones Faustus had administered.

  “Yeah.”

  Izzy ran her hand along my back, drew it around to my chest, brushing my flesh with hers. If not for the pain, it would’ve been glorious and—at least in my noodle—intimate. With Castor the Perverted Ghost and Charlie the Nudist Spook bouncing in the background, I felt like an anatomy class guinea pig. I flinched under her touch.

  “Ooh, I’m sorry,” she jerked her hand back. “Did I hurt you? They look infected.”

  “No,” I assured her. “They’re just like megabomb sensitive. I need to apply another layer of this ointment crap Miss Little gave me. I can do the front but . . . I guess I got to get Ava or someone to apply it to my back.” Ah yes, how deviously clever of me.

  “Ava?” Izzy wondered. “She’s the female Morai, right? Is she like, your bitch?”

  “What? No. She’s a friend. Jeez.” I began to apply the ointment to my chest, starting with the recently opened welts. When I finished with the front, I made a show of struggling to reach the back.

  Izzy grabbed the bottle from me and laughed. “Give me that.” I liked her laugh, it was honest and alluring. She was gentle. I shivered, hoping she noticed neither that nor my other inadvertent gesture of appreciation. “You know, you’re not nearly as clever as you think. There was nothing subtle about that devious ploy you just pulled.”

  “And yet the result is the same,” I boasted. “You think you can you reach all the way around?”

  “Hey, I may be a little person, or a smidge girl, as your pals put it,” she continued applying the ointment while I observed the bottle in her purse, itching to pop a few caplets, “but I can do anything Ava can do.”

  “I’ll bet you can.”

  Finished, Izzy went to wash her hands in the bathroom. Meanwhile, Castor checked her out. “Hey,” I whispered. “Isn’t there some zipperdick you’re supposed to be spying on?”

  He snapped off a totally un-witty one-liner before bamfing away.

  For some inexplicable reason (I fed my ego by convincing myself it was due to my charm and rugged good looks) Miss Izzy kept me company for the next few hours, missing four classes and giving excuses for her presence on my bed whenever one of my fellow orphans wandered in to grab a book.

  We spent that time reading the manuscripts, gleaning loads of info on Knox and the Mythcorp War and on Alexander and Nimrod. By Final Bell we’d perused all three scripts and declared ourselves experts on all things Mythcorp. The feeling was not as pleasant as you’d think. Sickly, in fact. There was a reason all copies of the Mythcorp Trilogy had been burned.

  I couldn’t even process the emotions I suddenly had concerning my so-called mother, who’d turned out to be a nasty hermaphroditic witch—and that was before she’d been sent to some Void and transformed into a spirit-goddess-thingy. Way too much to process.

  “So,” Izzy said as Camelot began filling up with Morai. “You’re going to try to break him out, aren’t you?”

  She meant my father, who, at the end of the War, had been cryogenically frozen inside Mythcorp. The reason he’d been unceremoniously banished to the land of quasi-eternal-buggery? The same reason the manuscripts had been burned: he knew too much, and a lot of people wanted to see him swinging at the end of a short rope.

  “Heck yeah I’m going to break him out,” I whispered. “But we’ve got three major problems: First, we have to find a way to break in to Mythcorp.”

  “Incredibly impossible,” Izzy drawled. “You think that Gabriel gangster still has his people positioned on the tops of the buildings in Virgil’s Nave?”

  “Considering Murphy’s Law? Absolutely he does. Second problem: the impregnable doors.”

  “Opened only by keyed cards we don’t have and cannot get,” Izzy said. “Check.”

  I nodded with a smile, but this was no laughing matter. “Problemo the third: if my paranoia is correct, Ash is already working on getting inside, and he’ll probably do it with the help of the Mayor—and right soon like too.”

  “How do you know?”

  How droll could I be without coming off as a jerk? “I have my sources.” Very droll, apparently.

  Castor bamfed into existence between me and Izzy just as the dwarf was about to speak. I jerked back on the cot, startling her. “You all right?” Meanwhile Castor was waving his hands and blathering on about something.

  “Ah, yeah,” I stammered. “Hey, I could use some water.”

  “You’ve got legs,” Izzy snorted. “Nice long skinny legs. Get me some water too while you’re about it. What? You have any idea what a hassle it is for a little person to get a glass of water?”

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry.” As I stood and hobbled over to the stainless steel kitchen at the back of Camelot, I could hear Castor arguing with Marie. No idea what they were arguing about, though.

  While puttering around in the kitchen, appreciating for the first time in my life how easy it was to get a glass of water, Castor wafted over to me. ‘They’re going to get inside Mythcorp,’ he ranted. I’d never seen him so animated, even when mocking me. ‘Did you hear me, Morgan? Your pal Ash is going to get inside Mythcorp, soon. And he’s got no interest in your excuse-for-a-father.”

  “Then what exactly does he want?”

  Castor jerry-rigged his ripped up face into an ‘are-you-serious’ expression. ‘They froze the Sorcerer too. Do I have to spell it out
for you? Ash is going to wake the Sorcerer and use him to manipulate congress into reopening that bastard of a corporation, with Ash as lord of all he surveys, the creepy little manfac.’

  I thought about it. “Of course. Why didn’t I realize that?”

  ‘Ah, because you’re about as smart as a horseshoe,’ Castor offered.

  ‘Leave him alone, Cas,’ Naked Charlie chimed in, bouncing over to us in the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marie agreed. ‘He’s just getting used to the fact that his father is a—’

  ‘A first rate scumbag?’ Castor said.

  “What do you expect me to do about it?” I asked them. The kitchen was getting crowded and if anyone noticed me meandering around to avoid the dead-heads, they’d probably think me loony-tunes. “Call his mom? He hasn’t got one of those. Tell a teacher or an Iconocop? Fat lot of good that’ll do; they’re all either Mesmerized or afraid of Ash.”

  ‘Oh my God, what a whiny little pissant,’ Castor said. ‘Marie, it’s time you took over. If this skinny jerkoff isn’t going to prevent the reopening of Mythcorp, then we’ve got to do it ourselves.’

  Marie retreated, floating backwards out of the kitchen through the large center island. ‘No. I promised Knox I’d never do that again.’

  ‘If you don’t do it, I will,’ Castor threatened. My left hand, grasping Izzy’s glass of water, was jittering. What the flip were these crazy spooks going on about? ‘If I do it,’ Castor continued, ‘I’ll enjoy it—a lot. Now do it, Marie. Do it!’

  I peeped at Marie. “Do what? What is he talking about?” But I knew. In MYTHICON, Marie had found a way to temporarily possess Knox. He’d lost consciousness during her possession, and woke up covered in blood in the car of the man who’d been chasing him. A raging migraine had accompanied his waking.

  Izzy called my name just as Marie zoomed towards me, apologizing. ‘Sorrysorrysorry.’