The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  This was another reason to worry.

  “You’re getting stronger,” Peter had warned her, five months prior. “Your temporal reach is expanding. Problem is, there are a lot of Mias out there in the future. Until you learn to control your gift, you’re going to hear from more of them. God forbid the day should come when you hear from all of them.”

  Mia thanked her stars every day for Peter Pendergen. The man shared all her portal talents, and had spent decades mastering them. He could draw a door on any flat surface, travel dozens of miles in the blink of an eye. Better still, he had faith that Mia could become a teleporter like him. But first she had to fix her temporal problems.

  Under Peter’s tutelage, she learned how to consciously refuse deliveries from her future selves, a simple twist of will that was no harder (or easier) than ignoring a ringing phone. Over time, the trick became ingrained into her natural state of being, until she was no longer afflicted by portals in her waking hours. While she slept, however, the Future Mias still had carte blanche to spam her. Even Peter didn’t know how to stop them.

  “We’ll find a way,” he’d assured her. “In the meantime, for your sake, there’s one thing I need you to do.”

  Today that “one thing” continued to plague Mia, a daily tug-of-war between her curiosity and her self-control. She untangled a note from her long brown hair, then studied it with tense, busy eyes. Just one, her inner self pleaded. It might be useful. It could save someone’s life.

  Guiltily, she unfurled the paper just enough to read the last line.

  —genuinely likes you. And she’s a great kisser. Give the girl a chance.

  Her eyebrows rose. Her mouth fell open. She fumbled to reveal the rest of the dispatch.

  “Stop.”

  Mia gasped and turned her head. She’d been so distracted, she didn’t even hear the door open.

  Amanda eyed her sternly from the hallway, wastebasket in hand. “You swore you’d stop reading them.”

  “It’s okay. This one’s different.”

  “I don’t care. A promise is a promise.”

  “Wait! Just let me—”

  A thin white tendril shot out of Amanda’s finger and snatched the note from Mia’s grip.

  “No!”

  Before Mia could move, a pair of large tempic tongs gripped her by the waist and lifted her two feet above the bed. Tiny sticks of paper dropped from her hair and clothes.

  “Damn it! Amanda!”

  Amanda used her other hand’s tempis to sweep the mattress clean. Once all the notes were gathered into a pile, she gently released her captive.

  Mia leaned against the headboard, her lips pursed in a seething pout. “This is bullshit.”

  “It’s for your own good.”

  “Right. Theo can check the future all he wants, but when I do it—”

  “Theo sees the future,” Amanda reminded her. “You get secondhand info from a teenage girl who’s always biased, sometimes wrong, and often very cruel to you.”

  Sadly, that was true. The Future Mias had never been kind to her, but lately they’d been downright vicious. Nearly all of the messages Mia had received over the last few months were pure self-abuse. “You stupid bitch.” “Fat dumb bitch.” “You’re clueless.” “You’re blind.” “You can’t even see what’s happening right in front of you.” “Right under your nose.” “It’s pathetic.” “You’re pathetic.” “Just do the world a favor and die.”

  Though her friends dismissed it as mere insecurity, Mia feared there was more to the situation. Maybe something was coming in the not-too-distant future: a fateful decision, a horrid mistake, a whole new reason for the older Mias to look back at her with disgust. If that was the case, then why didn’t they warn her about it? Why were they being so vague?

  After a group intervention and a private plea from Amanda, Mia finally agreed to stop reading the portal notes. Her resolve was elastic at best.

  She watched Amanda coolly as the last of the papers fell tumbling into the wastebasket. “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be throwing away useful information? Something about the string? Or this guy Hannah’s meeting? Or Zack?”

  A small patch of stress tempis broke out on Amanda’s back. It was a low blow to bring her ex-boyfriend into this.

  “I know what you’re looking for,” Amanda said. “You won’t find it.”

  Mia crossed her arms, scowling. Anyone with eyes could see that she was in love with David, though how he failed to see it was a mystery of the universe. Was he clueless? Was he shy? Was there any chance at all? Mia’s future selves could safely solve the quandary for her. Someday, God willing, one of them would.

  She looked up at Amanda defiantly. “You know, the Mias aren’t all bad. A few of them still want to help me.”

  “Yeah, but most of them don’t. How can you trust them? How do you know the next note won’t be a prank or a nasty trick?”

  Amanda had a point. In a universe of branching timelines, the Mias were free to change the past without paradox or consequence. They could ruin her life all they wanted. It would only improve their day.

  Mia buried her face in her hands. “God. I’m so screwed up.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I get hate mail from myself.”

  “And I sometimes sneeze tempis,” Amanda said. “We’re different now. It doesn’t mean we’re crazy.”

  She formed a tempic brush and began sweeping the ash from Mia’s bed. At least ten percent of the portal messages spontaneously combusted upon arrival. Even Peter couldn’t explain it.

  Mia grabbed a dust brush from her end table and helped Amanda sweep. “She’s telling me that I’m gonna kiss a girl.”

  Amanda stared at her, blank-faced. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Probably just her weird idea of a joke.”

  She dumped a handful of ash into the wastebasket, then wiped her palm on her pajamas. “I shouldn’t be thinking about this kind of stuff anyway. Not with everything going on.”

  Amanda’s heart sank at Mia’s gloom. She was fourteen. She should be thinking about boys (or girls). She should be going to school, making friends, getting worked up over silly teenage dramas. Instead she lived in the constant shadow of death, hiding from strangers who wanted to lock her up or worse. Even if all their enemies died, the second apocalypse still loomed over them like a giant sword. Mia had almost no chance of living to see her eighteenth birthday. No wonder her future selves were so angry.

  The hallway creaked with footsteps. Theo stepped through the doorframe, a handphone pressed to his ear. He stared at the floor in a gobsmacked stupor, as if his mother had just called him from Heaven.

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll tell them. Thanks.” He closed the phone, then blinked dazedly at Amanda and Mia. “That was Peter. He, uh . . .”

  He pondered his words a moment before chuckling in amazement. “The government has our bodies.”

  “What?”

  Theo told them everything he knew about Peter and David’s discovery, the six dead Silvers who had tumbled through time. Though the news was even weirder than Amanda expected, she had no trouble seeing the upside.

  “The Deps think we’re dead,” she exclaimed. “They have no reason to look for us now.”

  Theo nodded cautiously. He and Amanda had already spent a day in DP-9 custody. They weren’t eager to repeat the experience. “Guess not.”

  “What about Peter?” Mia asked. “Won’t they still be looking for him?”

  Amanda shook her head. “He’s a smart man. He can take care of himself. I’m more worried about us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Theo understood. “The minute we’re caught on camera, or use our powers in public—”

  “—they’ll know we’re alive,” Mia said. Sh
e looked down at her twitching fingers. “They’ll hunt us all over again.”

  A tense silence filled the room. Amanda rose from the bed with fresh resolve. “We’ll be all right. We’ll just keep being careful.”

  The moment she said it, she realized how naïve she sounded. She’d once made national news after Evan Rander drugged her and made her lose control of her tempis. There was careful and there was lucky, and her people weren’t lucky.

  Shaken, Amanda moved to Mia’s window and watched the glimmering streaks of aer traffic. Somewhere in Manhattan, the two most cherished and maddening people in her life were out chasing a prophecy. She squeezed the tiny golden crucifix on her necklace and cast a wish across the river.

  Please be careful, she begged Hannah and Zack. Please be lucky.

  TWO

  The Quadrants were playing for one night only. Their performance had been advertised with triple exclamation points, as if the stars had aligned to bring the biggest rock band in history to Teke’s Humble Tavern. Hannah could only guess from the half-empty tables that the four men onstage were not, in fact, the Beatles of this world. One song was enough to explain why.

  “You are my shaaaame,” the lead singer crooned, with the listless mumble of a man cleaning his garage. The instrumentalists followed his lazy cue, flopping each note to the floor like a pound of wet dough. Zack dismissed the group as Nickelback on NyQuil before retreating to the men’s room. That was ten minutes ago.

  Hannah sat alone at a back corner table, nursing a drink as she scanned her surroundings. From the name, she’d expected Teke’s to be a simple American beer joint, all bar stools and dartboards. Instead the place looked more like an alien nightclub. Glass walls danced with psychedelic holograms while a tempic fountain spilled clear blue liquid down an elaborate series of chutes. Even more vexing were the antigravity bar tables, these floating slabs of ashwood and aeris that were completely immovable, despite all logic. Hannah wanted to take a flying leap onto one of them, just to see if she could get it to wobble.

  The Quadrants finished their song to withered applause, just as a middle-age man claimed the table next to Hannah’s. Like everyone else here, he was dressed in his finest regalia: a three-piece suit, exquisitely tailored and ornamented with gold chains. Hannah wished Peter had briefed her better on Altamerican pub fashion. She felt woefully underdressed in her crepe blouse and blue jeans, her dingy brown sneakers with the Easy-Snap fasteners. Then again, she was a wanted felon with a shitload of enemies. If trouble happened to find her tonight, she’d rather not face it in a dress and high heels.

  She studied the gentleman as he took off his jacket. His shirt cuffs were long and ridiculously snug. He couldn’t possibly be hiding a thick metal bracelet. This wasn’t the guy she was looking for.

  The stranger caught her eyeballing him and gave her a curious once-over. “Hello there.”

  Hannah smiled politely, her mind hissing curses. “Hi.”

  “You look a bit out of your egg crate, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  She didn’t know how to take that, until she remembered her local slang. The man was merely telling her, in his own genteel way, that she stuck out like mud here in Fancyland.

  Hannah shrugged, her dark eyes fixed on the Quadrants. “All my gowns are in the laundry.”

  The gentleman chuckled. “Fair enough. Can I buy you a drink?”

  She held up her cherry vim, a fizzy red energy pop that was a staple of all vending machines. “Already have one.”

  “I mean a real drink.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have my drinking license.”

  Her new acquaintance stared at her, dumbstruck. “You came to a tavern without your wet card?”

  “What can I say? I really like the band.”

  At last, the man had enough of Hannah’s prickly weirdness. He stood up from his chair and wished her a pleasant evening.

  Hannah watched him guiltily as he moved to another table. She didn’t want him to take it personally. She just wasn’t in a mood to mingle. She was grumpy, she was nervous, and she was increasingly skeptical of the prophecy that had brought her here.

  She should have never listened to the girl with two watches.

  On the fifth of last October, while the rest of the New York marked the somber anniversary of the Cataclysm, a peculiar young woman had approached Hannah in Union Square. She’d introduced herself as Ioni and then spoke of many things: the nature of time, the perils of foresight, the unfathomable burden that was waiting for Theo. Before taking her leave, she gave Hannah a folded sheet of paper: a flyer for the Quadrants and their one-night-only performance at Teke’s. Scribbled in the corner, beneath the tavern’s address, was a curious message:

  Evan Rander took a good man out of your path. I’m putting one in. Go to this event. Look around. You’ll know him when you see him. He’s still wearing his bracelet.

  Hannah had been tempted many times over the last six months to crumple up the flyer and forget about it. She had little reason to trust Ioni, and even less incentive to go looking for strangers. But the mention of the bracelet was a powerful detail, a clear implication that the man in question was just like the Silvers. If Ioni was right, if this guy was indeed a survivor from Hannah’s Earth, then he was worth finding.

  But where the hell was he? Hannah had already made four circuits around the tavern, scanning dozens of arms for a Pelletier bracelet. Nothing. Had the guy not arrived yet? Did he already leave? What if this whole thing was just a stupid—

  “Any luck?”

  Startled, Hannah turned in her seat and saw a tall, unshaven man standing right behind her.

  “Christ,” she said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Around.”

  If there was anyone in the tavern who looked “out of his egg crate,” it was Zack. He wore a crimson red Henley shirt, untucked, over a rumpled pair of camouflage pants. His hair was uncombed, his posture was slouched, and he scowled like a man who’d been brought here at gunpoint. Most jarring of all to the strangers around him was his scruffy new goatee, the signature beard style of America’s fringe Leninists. If Teke’s hadn’t been so eager to fill seats tonight, and if Zack hadn’t paid double the cover charge, the bouncer might have told him to take his commie ass back to Russia.

  Hannah watched Zack sternly as he reclaimed his seat. “You said you were going to the bathroom.”

  “I did.”

  “What happened? You get accosted?”

  “No. Just texted.”

  “By who?”

  “David.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Zack gripped the edge of their floating table and pushed it as hard as he could. He’d made peace with its resolve to hover thirty-three inches off the ground, but he couldn’t understand how the damn thing stayed in place. By all scientific reasoning, it should have slid around the room like an air hockey puck.

  “He’s fine,” he told Hannah. “He and Peter are on their way home.”

  “They find anything in that movie theater?”

  Zack studied her a moment, then tensely shook his head. Hannah was jittery enough already. She didn’t need to hear that the U.S. government had her future corpse in a freezer.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “Let’s just find this guy.”

  Frustrated, Hannah looked around the tavern and caught her shadow on the wall. She must have put on at least ten pounds since coming to New York, enough to add a soft new slope to her jawline. The weight gain would have freaked her out in the old days, back when survival was just a matter of paying the rent. But after nine and a half months on a hostile, dying Earth, her perspective had been irrevocably altered. The petty concerns were just white noise in the background. Raindrops on the window.

  No one benefitted more from her newfound clarity than Theo, her ex-lover and current messiah.
Hannah reveled in her role as his nurse and nurturer, the one who held him together while he searched for the string. She was the savior’s savior, and she believed more than anyone that he would heal the world.

  But the closer she drew to this mystery meeting, the more she slid back to her old neurotic self. Hannah didn’t like the romantic subtext of Ioni’s prophecy. The last thing she needed was a new guy clouding up her thoughts. A part of her hoped she wouldn’t find him tonight.

  As her ears reached their limit on soporific alt-rock, she slouched in her chair and shot a cynical look at Zack. “We’ve checked every wrist in this place. He’s not here.”

  “I’ll take another look around.”

  “No. Stay. I don’t want anyone else hitting on me.”

  “People are hitting on you?”

  “Don’t look so surprised.”

  “I’m not. Not really.” He pulled a pen from his pocket and began doodling on a cocktail napkin. “I mean it’s dark in here. They can’t see your flaws.”

  Hannah let out a jagged laugh. “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  “Shave your face.”

  “No.”

  “You look stupid. You look like your evil twin.”

  “Well, at least it’s consistent with the rule.”

  “What rule?”

  “Original Star Trek rule,” Zack explained. “If you’re from a parallel universe and you have a goatee, you’re evil.”

  “I see.” Hannah raised an eyebrow. “Should we be worried about you?”

  “Yes, but not for long.”

  “Why?”

  He tugged the hem of his Henley. “Red shirt.”

  “So?”

  Zack eyed her strangely. “Are we even from the same world?”

  “Just tell me what it means!”

  “Original Star Trek rule: on away missions, the guy with the red shirt always dies.”

  Hannah crossed her arms, frowning. “That’s not funny.”

  “If you truly hated me, you’d find it hilarious.”

  “I don’t hate you. I love you.”

  “So you don’t want me to die?”