by Therin Knite
We shake hands and part ways, me marching out the door to the beat of a downtrodden drum, him holding his Ocom as close to his tired eyes as he can without hitting his nose.
Maybe he is getting old.
Chapter Eight
A gravestone named Club Valkyrie rests between two booming drink-to-blackout bars. It’s six stories of silence and pitch black windows sucking in the night. Mistake is my first guess. Trick is my second. And my second sense is always right. Five minutes into a bout of solemn prowling around the locked club doors, one of them glides open. The glasses-bearing assassin ushers me inside with a follow me hand motion, and I trail behind him into a dim hallway lit with old-fashioned sconces. We emerge onto the main dance floor, the bonfire now a memory. Only the god-forsaken murals remain, several cherubs charred by the “fake” fire display.
Dynara lounges in heterochromia lady’s throne, feet defiling a thousand-dollar oak table, flanked by four empty chairs. She’s either playing the queen of secrets or the queen of nothing but herself. A tingle in my chest suggests I should be surprised she shut down a bustling club so we could have a private meeting, but half-amused annoyance blooms in my bones instead—because this, for some reason, is the exact sort of spectacle I’d expect from a dream-hunting businesswoman.
As I take the stage, she lights up a raspberry-flavored cigarette and sticks it in the corner of her mouth. “You arrived fifty-eight seconds late, Agent Adamend.”
“And you were, what, thirty minutes early?”
“You’re either late or early. There is no such thing as on time, not in my line of business anyway.” She knocks three times on the high-backed chair to her right, and I claim it like the good little court jester she expects me to play for the night.
“Would that business be dreams or technology?”
“Both.” Her lungs huff in a thick drag, and her chin tilts up until the curl of purple smoke begins to waft toward the wayward cherubs.
“Tobacco or marijuana?”
She exhales a violet smoke ring. “Depends on the occasion.”
“This occasion?”
“Tobacco. My EDPA shift started at six. Nothing beyond aspirin allowed on the job. Messes up your Nexus connection.”
“The Nexus is some kind of super-advanced computer that connects your brain to the echoes, I’m guessing?”
The assassin loiters in the shadows, giving Dynara an okay signal every two and a half minutes.
“You guess right, unsurprisingly.”
“So is the assassin your bodyguard or a buddy from EDPA?”
She rolls the cigarette to the opposite corner of her mouth, grinning. “Neither. He’s an old friend of mine in town for a job. I thought I’d contract him out for a bit so we could catch up.”
“Should I take that to mean you used to be an assassin?”
“I used to be a lot of things.”
“Should I take that to mean you’re a hell of a lot older than you look?”
She snorts, a haze of violet obscuring her face. “Please, you figured that out the minute you met me.”
“But you’re not modded to look younger than you actually are.”
“Nope.”
“Is your hair a mod?”
“Nope.”
“So EDPA has a few more secrets than just the capability to enter dreams?”
“Indeed.” Her fingers tap against the Ocom resting in her lap, and a sharp synth chord resounds throughout the room. A soprano singer follows with a line or two about lost loves and teen angst, and Dynara bobs her head in time with the succeeding bass beats. “Want to dance?”
“In a dark, deserted club?”
“The best place for it.” She plucks the smoldering cigarette from her lips and grinds it out on the table, leaving a noticeable violet smudge.
“I don’t dance.”
“Don’t or can’t? There’s a difference, you know?”
“Not to me, there isn’t.”
A taunting tongue peeks through her lips. “Your opinion tells me all I need to know.” I’m dragged onto the abandoned dance floor before I can protest, and she proceeds to spin us around and around, the shadows blending together into a veil of impenetrable black. There’s her. There’s me. We’re the last survivors in a world of nothing but secrets, and I want out, out, out but am afraid I’ll be swallowed by ignorance if I dare pull away from her.
Blue engulfs us; the assassin switched on a spotlight. It tracks us as we shuffle—as I shuffle and she pirouettes—from one side of the floor to the other, crossing in and out of the empty metal ring where the bonfire used to stand tall. My fingers clamp around her tiny hands, but hers still seem the stronger pair. I have the vague notion that beneath a five-hundred-dollar jacket and a priceless pair of jeans is a powerful body ready to snap my neck at any moment.
“You’re mighty quiet. You look a bit stunned.”
“What can I say? Dancing kills brain cells.”
“Yours, perhaps.” The song morphs seamlessly into another, and Dynara adjusts her pace to match. “So, what other questions do you have for me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about why do I have a superpower? That seems like a good start.” My foot clips the side of hers, and her eyebrow cocks like a gun ready to fire eight rounds of ridicule.
“Why does anyone get superpowers these days? A military experiment gone wrong, of course.”
“The military was trying to infiltrate dreams?” I cut off her clockwise spin with a counter, but she doesn’t miss a single step. Her movements are faultless. Like her assassin friend, she is hyper-aware of every move she makes. She’s been a lot of things, indeed, and all of them were deadly. “That sounds like a movie cliché.”
“Clichés are a factor of fiction, and all fiction is based on reality.”
“True. But a cliché doesn't explain how I have magic powers.”
“No magic necessary,” she sings in beat with the music. “All you need is science. Or, more specifically, Somnexolene.”
“A chemical gave people superpowers?”
“An experimental chemical. It was designed to allow the Army’s Black Ops agents to enter the dreams of high-profile terrorists, influence their behavior, discover their secrets, etc. The usual spiel. In the initial trial, however, it didn’t give the test subjects any of those abilities. At first, they thought it did squat. Then one of the subjects’ dreams came to life. Oops. And not long after that royal fuckup, disaster struck.” The song ends with a sharp melancholy note, and Dynara brings us down to a canter as silence inhabits the dance floor. “You ever heard of the Impala bombing?”
“In history class. June, 2667. A prominent terrorist group planted a bomb on a military cargo plane, codenamed Impala. It detonated at sixty thousand feet, killing everyone on board.”
“And releasing seventeen hundred tons of aerosolized Somnexolene into the atmosphere.”
“Which the winds gradually spread around the entire planet, exposing everyone?”
“And, over the next few decades, caused about one point seven percent of the world population to develop magic powers.”
I halt beside her. “Unbelievable…”
“And the most fascinating thing you’ve ever heard?”
“Without a doubt.”
Her smile deepens, but her eyes tire, shattering every false layer of youth between her appearance and her mind. “I’m glad to hear it. Now duck before you get shot in the back.”
A hand grips my coat and hurls me to the floor a second before a bullet breaks the air. It zips over us, hitting a far-off wall. Dynara’s boot nails me in the side—move out of the light, stupid—and I roll away into the sea of black. She whips a gun out from a holster hidden so well underneath her clothing that I never noticed it there, and she fires three quick rounds into the darkness. The twitch of her eye and soft mathematical murmur imply she calculates the position of the assailant from the bullet trajectory alone. Calculates correctly.
Two shots in, a
man cries out in pain. A second later, a stage exit door flies open, and a gray-clothed someone sprints outside. Dynara reaches into her pocket and hits an Ocom command. The dance floor lights flash on with a rainbow-colored glare. “Up,” she orders, and I obey because you don’t defy someone who can and will shoot you from fifty feet away in a pitch black room. “Follow me. And keep a lookout behind you. There may be more.”
“Where’s your assassin friend?” He must have left sometime during our dance recital, and my mind conjures up sixty-two different positions he could be lying dead in in the hallway.
“We’ll find out soon enough.” She speeds across the room and out the open door into a cloudless night. The assailant is rushing down the sidewalk toward a getaway van. Dynara bends down and tugs a clip—which I also didn’t spot—from her boot, exchanging it with the one in her handgun. Then she takes aim.
“He’s almost two hundred feet away,” I say as I catch up to her. “You can’t hit him.”
“I don’t need to.” She fires, and the bullet misses by fifteen-odd feet. Which I know because it’s the center of an electric explosion. A blue spark field bites into the assailant’s right side, and he collapses into an unconscious heap of muscle spasms a few feet in front of his ride.
VERA bullets.
Produced and patented by Chamberlain Corporation.
* * *
“I’m not sure this is legal, Dynara.” I hover in the corner while she finishes her masterpiece: one would-be killer tied up nice and tight in a middle-of-empty-room chair. The man grunts and groans, slowly recovering from his VERA knockout. Dynara brushes her hands together—a job well done, if I do say so myself—and takes up a sentry role near the sixth-floor lounge door. Beyond the threshold, the club is deaf dark and pitch silent, but my on-edge senses pick up every creak and shudder. Another hired gun (or twenty) could be anywhere in the expanse of the dead Valkyrie, waiting for the perfect angle at which to blow my heart out through my chest.
“Legality is irrelevant at this time.” There’s a thick sense in the air that she’s said such things before in similar rooms in similar situations. “Now get to work, Agent Adamend.” She fingers the gun tucked (but not fastened) in her now revealed waist holster. The VERA clip is still loaded.
“Me? What do you want me to do?”
“Read him, of course. It’s what you do for a living, right? You go to crime scenes and reconstruct the events leading up to them. You stand behind one-way mirrors and decipher the histories of the accused. You sneak a peek into their lives like no one else can, like no one should be able to.” She nods toward the groggy shooter. “Go on. Do your thing. It’s that, or I interrogate him the old-fashioned way.”
“Why can’t we call the IBI or EDPA? Why do we have to do this here?”
“Think it through, genius. We haven’t ruled out a traitor inside either organization as the Manson killer. And since you failed to notice, I suppose I’ll point this out to you.” From her waistband emerges the gun the assassin tried to mow me down with. “Notice anything familiar?”
In the dimness, it’s hard to discern anything, given she’s standing on the opposite side of the room, but I see her point almost immediately. Because it’s bright red. Around the barrel of the gun is a painted crimson band, a marker given to all weapons produced for government use. Dynara tosses the gun onto a nearby leather couch and glowers at me, eyes appearing to glint in the darkness like a night predator during the hunt.
“Don’t forget what types of clients Manson served, Adem. People with connections. People from the IBI and EDPA and the Presidents’ Cabinets and half a dozen security agencies and the military and who knows how many other high-profile denizens. If we take this bastard in officially, we may very well warn the killer we’re onto him.”
“But this is all wrong.”
“What’s all wrong? Don’t tell me an emotionally impaired genius like you has suddenly discovered he has a moral horizon.”
“No, not that. I mean, this guy, he’s all wrong.”
A sharp crack resounds throughout the room—the assailant abruptly waking up and jerking on his bonds. My heart rate picks up, and I feel lightheaded, not out of fear of this pitiful excuse for an assassin but of dread for what he represents.
“What the fuck?” He struggles to break his ties with brute force and succeeds in popping something out of place. He howls in pain, stomping his feet on the floor so hard the whole room quakes.
“Gee, I’ve never interrogated someone who tortures himself.”
The mask of a killer slips back over the man’s face, and his cold eyes land on Dynara. “And what do children know about torture?”
She strolls toward him like she’s walking a dog on a sunny Sunday in July. Somehow, the resemblance makes her more terrifying. “If your employer had told you anything, you would be very aware that I am not a child.” Her hands land on his strapped-down forearms, nails digging into a matching set of faded dual star tattoos. Symbol of the Under Leaguers. Defunct eco-terrorists. “The better question is what do naughty children like you know about pain?”
“Oh, I’ve had my fair share, hone—”
She unties his arm in two seconds flat and bends it backward until it snaps. The man’s rasping shriek reverberates through the darkened sixth-floor hallway. “Fuck you, you stupid little cunt! I will break your fucking neck, you—”
Dynara backhands him. “Don’t speak unless spoken to and prompted for an answer. Your voice is grating.” And I am pissed. Because we didn’t find her assassin friend. Because this ant dared to shoot at her prized prospect (me). Because no one interrupts Dynara Chamberlain and lives to tell the tale. “Now be a good boy and let the kid you tried to kill do his work.” She pats him on the head three times before flicking his injured shoulder.
He hisses as a gush of blood spills from the gaping hole where Dynara’s second bullet ate a chunk of flesh. Then his attention is on me; he sizes me up, concluding I am nothing and worth nothing and oh, how I wish that bullet tore through his heart and ended his pointless fucking life. Steely eyes track me as I claim Dynara’s position a few steps in front of him (and she retreats to her shadowy doorway to act as my impromptu evaluator).
Three hundred insults rest on his lips, but he keeps quiet per the child’s orders. At least he’s smart enough to avoid two broken arms. That’s where his intelligence ends though. A follower is strapped to this fancy Valkyrie lounge chair, not a leader. Never was this would-be killer anything important in his days as an ineffective terrorist. His eyes scream ambition left unfulfilled, and the way he sets his jaw is the indicator of someone who spends a significant amount of time pretending to be more than he has the potential to be.
This assailant is not rich. This assailant is not special. This assailant is not neat or meticulous. This assailant’s resume could not say much more than adequate shot, and adequate is not the marker of the Manson killer. “You weren’t contracted by the same man who killed Victor Manson, were you?”
He doesn’t respond.
“No, it was someone else. There’s more than one person involved in this case, isn’t there? Someone killed Victor Manson, and someone else knows he did. Someone else out there knows what’s going on, and that someone called you today to kill me. So it’s someone who considers me a threat, which means it’s likely someone I’ve met or seen before.”
A bead of sweat rolls down the man’s cheek, and his eyes widen as the words fly off my tongue. Dynara is dangerous because she is Dynara—ruthless, cunning, clever, and experienced. I am dangerous because I am me—the man who reads everything that can be read. Including the words etched on clothes and bodies that mostly go unseen.
I scan the shooter from head to toe. There are flecks of paper and food in his hair and a slimy dark sludge on his hands. And he reeks of three-day-old rotten fish. “You were near a dumpster. You put something in that dumpster.”
He stiffens, mouth agape.
“Was it the other as
sassin? There’s blood on your left pant leg, but you were shot in the right shoulder. So you must have gotten it on you some other way. You shot the other assassin who was here with us, and you stuffed him in the dumpster in the alley, right?”
“Who…who are you?”
“My name is Adem Adamend. Didn’t your employer tell you that?”
He shuts up, realizing his mistake too late.
“Seems like an obvious choice. Give your hit man the target’s name. Unless your employer doesn’t know my name. Unless he or she knows what I look like but not who I am. Knows I occasionally come to Club Valkyrie but doesn’t know anywhere else I frequent. That’s why your knees are so dirty, right? You were waiting for several hours outside in the damp, filthy alleyway because you weren’t given a timeframe for when I would arrive. Your employer didn’t know. Your employer—”
“Baby, don’t leave me on a Saturday night! Baby, don’t give up the fight of our lives! Baby, I love you like the stars in the sky. Baby, you’re a galaxy shining bright.”
Electro-pop bounces off the walls and spills out into the darkened hallway, mocking the dead Valkyrie’s former state of liveliness and mirth. The assassin gawks at me in confusion, and Dynara coughs to stifle a laugh. “That is quite possibly the worst ringtone I have ever heard,” she says.
I fish my Ocom out of my coat pocket to see the humorous office party picture of Jin’s face smiling back at me. “Yeah, he changed his ringtone to this to make sure I always know when it’s him calling.”
“Is it sad I don’t even need to ask who he is?”
“Yes. Yes, it is sad. Should I get this now, or would you prefer I wait until we’re finished?”
“Oh, no. Go ahead and have your little chat.” She breaks from the entryway and starts a slow trot toward the could-have-been-a killer, smile brightening as they make eye contact. “I can finish up here without you.” The sounds of her cracking knuckles are obscured by my obnoxious ringtone.