The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “No. I want you to live to reach adulthood.”

  Zack lowered his head and chuckled, his first real laugh in weeks. Hannah was glad he came out with her tonight. He’d been so miserable in the brownstone, both him and Amanda.

  He peeked up and saw Hannah staring at him with big, sad eyes. “Oh, not this again.”

  “I’m sorry. It just breaks my heart. The two of you should be together.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re not.” His head fell forward. He continued his sketch with a bitter scowl. “And we never will be.”

  —

  Six months prior, on a gray October morning, Amanda joined Zack on the balcony of her bedroom. Only twenty-four hours had passed since Peter brought them to their new home in Brooklyn. Their bodies were still sore from the previous day’s battle, a four-way imbroglio in a Battery Park office building. While Zack got away with shrapnel cuts on his neck, Amanda’s ankle was broken in two places, leaving her on tempic crutches and a fistful of painkillers.

  Amanda vanquished her props and hugged Zack from behind. He stroked her wrists, his gaze flitting anxiously around the rain clouds.

  “You bracing me for support or just bad news?”

  “A little of both,” Amanda admitted.

  “Well, if you’re going to dump me, at least be funny about it. ‘I think we should see better people,’ or ‘It’s not you. It’s my opinion of you.’”

  “Zack . . .”

  “We had a good thing going.”

  “We did. We do. I want to be with you.”

  “Then why does this feel like a breakup?”

  Amanda rested her chin on his shoulder and took a deep, stuttered breath. A short silence passed before she spoke.

  “When Esis first gave me my bracelet, she said a lot of weird things. One of them was ‘Don’t entwine with the funny artist.’ That was right before I met you. I had no idea who she was talking about. I didn’t even remember she said it until just last week, when you and I . . .”

  She closed her eyes. “It was a warning. A threat.”

  “Against us?”

  “Against you,” said Amanda. “When I saw her again yesterday, she brought it up. She made it very clear that if we ‘entwined,’ I’d live to regret it and you wouldn’t.”

  Zack leaned against the railing, his eyes darting back and forth in thought. “I don’t get it. Why would she have a problem with us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why would she even care?”

  “I don’t know! I just know what she said.”

  Zack mulled the news for another moment before shaking his head. “Bullshit. She’s bluffing. She and Azral went to a lot of trouble to bring us here. They won’t kill us now.”

  “You haven’t met her, Zack. She’s crazy. I watched her murder two people without losing her smile. And the way they took Evan . . .”

  Amanda pulled her arms back. By the time Zack turned around, she was once again standing on self-made crutches.

  “She’s a sick, violent woman,” Amanda said. “And she doesn’t want us together.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Are you willing to bet your life on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  Amanda lowered her head, her crutches rippling like jelly. Her tempis was only as strong as her state of mind.

  “I’m sorry, Zack. I’ve lost too many people already, and you’re way too important to me. If I have to keep you at arm’s length to keep you alive, I will.”

  After a month of forced distance and interminable frustration, Amanda gradually began to crack under the weight of Zack’s reasoning. Maybe she was working off a faulty premise. Maybe Esis had a more stringent definition of “entwine.” Surely she wouldn’t care if Amanda hugged Zack once in a while, or held his hand on the sofa while they watched a movie. Who knew? Maybe there was a whole world of things they could do without triggering the wrath of that madwoman.

  By February, Amanda had convinced herself that sex was the only verboten activity, a limit Zack readily accepted. They spent their days and nights together like young Christian lovers, trading virginal affections under the covers of the attic bed.

  For David, the only other Silver to have personal experience with Esis, their romance became an increasing source of concern, like watching nitro dance with glycerin.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake,” he warned Amanda and Zack. “The Pelletiers are alien to us. We have no idea what they want or don’t want. For you to assume—”

  “You think we haven’t thought about that?” said Amanda. “We’ve agonized over it for months.”

  “So why take the chance?”

  “Because we want to,” Zack growled. “It’s our decision, hers and mine.”

  David eyed him skeptically. “Esis might disagree.”

  “Well, she can explain herself or she can fuck off.”

  “Or she can kill you,” David said. “Just like she warned Amanda. You may not care if you live or die, but some of us do.”

  He shot a pointed glare at Amanda. “Some of us.”

  His righteous scorn was enough to bring her full circle. The next day, after a loud and tearful argument, Amanda put a stop to her intimacy with Zack. The two of them had been wretched ever since. They lived together, ate together, forced a pitiful semblance of a friendship. All the while, their thoughts fluttered helplessly around Esis—a single question, posed over and over again. Why?

  —

  The Quadrants began their next drowsy ballad, their third song in a row about breakups. Zack snatched a blank napkin and began a sketch of the lead singer getting kicked in the groin.

  Hannah stroked his arm. “Look, don’t give up. You never know what’ll happen. Maybe Esis will change her mind or something.”

  Zack pursed his lips at her wishful thinking, her enviable freedom. She and Theo had spent a whole week banging each other in Indiana and were now the snuggliest ex-lovers Zack had ever seen. Not a peep of warning from the Pelletiers.

  “One more hour,” he told Hannah. “Then we’ll go.”

  Sighing, she finished her vim and then looked to the entry, where a brand-new arrival caused several heads to turn. She was a petite twentysomething of Asian descent, dressed in a leather jacket and miniskirt, with combat boots that were twice as thick as her ankles. Her eye makeup was so heavy that she looked half insane, yet she carried herself with the poise of a debutante. If she gave even the slightest damn about the sneering eyes around her, it didn’t show on her face.

  The woman proceeded toward the bar, then gawked at the sight of Hannah. The three nearest tables all wavered in place, as if their aeric lifters were malfunctioning in unison. Before anyone could react, the slabs fell to the floor with a thunderous crash.

  Everything came to a screeching halt. The band stopped playing. The patrons stopped talking. As a hundred people gawked at the three fallen tables, Hannah watched the mysterious woman escape through the exit.

  Zack looked around, baffled. “What just happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said. “She just saw me and freaked out.”

  “Who?”

  “No idea. She was Asian and gothy and she looked at me like she knew me. But I didn’t recognize her at all.”

  “Okay . . .” Zack eyeballed the staff as they scrambled to gather the broken tables. “How does it explain that?”

  The manager of Teke’s, a middle-age redhead in a black taffeta gown, commandeered the microphone and apologized for the disruption. She summoned a strained round of applause for the Quadrants, then announced that their next song would be the last.

  Hannah stood up and grabbed her purse. “I don’t like this. We should go.”

  Zack stayed in his seat, his pen tapping anxiously against
the table. He had his own reason for wanting to meet Ioni’s mystery man. He wasn’t ready to give up.

  “We’ve been waiting six months for this. Unless you’re absolutely sure—”

  “I’m not sure of anything! I don’t even know if this guy exists! All I know is I have a bad feeling about this. I really think we should leave.”

  The Quadrants returned to their places and began their closing number: a soft guitar intro that was far more polished than their other songs.

  Hannah moved in front of Zack. “Look, I’d rather be wrong and safe than—”

  “Pink Floyd.”

  “What?”

  Zack cocked his head like a puzzled dog, his rapt eyes locked on the musicians. “They’re playing Pink Floyd.”

  Hannah closed her eyes and listened. Zack was right. The opening was a note-for-note match for “Wish You Were Here,” one of her mother’s all-time favorite songs. Now here it was on the other side of the multiverse. Back from the dead.

  She turned around and gawked at the men onstage. “How . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” Zack said. Though the odds were slim, he couldn’t rule out the possibility of a creative coincidence. This world certainly had its share of eerie parallel synchronisms. There was a Hollywood actor named Tom Cruise, a former president named Gerald Ford, and a best-selling horror author who wrote pseudonymously under the name Stephen King. Even more bizarre was the fact that his breakout novel was called The Stand. Zack had been disappointed to learn to that the plot revolved strictly around a haunted end table.

  After eighty-one seconds of mellow instrumentals, the lead singer opened his mouth and shattered every last possibility of a fluke.

  So, so you think you can tell

  Heaven from Hell,

  Blue skies from pain.

  Can you tell a green field

  From a cold steel rail?

  A smile from a veil?

  Do you think you can tell?

  Hannah fell back into her seat, gobsmacked. She’d searched every corner of this place for the man she was supposed to meet, but she’d never checked the Quadrants. He’d been standing right in front of her this whole time.

  Her heart pounding, she scanned the singer’s skinny wrists.

  “It’s not him,” Zack told her. “It’s the guy on the right. Look.”

  Hannah turned her head and took her first good look at the guitarist.

  He was the largest of the foursome—six feet tall, with broad and powerful shoulders. Nearly everything about him was walnut brown, from his shlubby clothes to his hooded eyes to the disheveled mop of hair that had been tied into a ponytail. His skin was a sandy shade that Hannah couldn’t quite place. All she knew was that he was pretty, in a dull and wooden kind of way. He reminded her of every Keanu Reeves clone who’d tried to woo and “whoa” her in college.

  As he continued to strum his electric guitar (the only remotely clean part of his ensemble, Hannah noted), she examined the bulky sweatband around his wrist. Whenever it struck the light the right way, she caught a sharp glint of metal beneath the cotton.

  A hint of gold.

  Hannah looked to Zack, astonished. “Oh my God. You were right.”

  Zack had long ago predicted the color of the mystery man’s bracelet. Evan Rander once told him that the Pelletiers had rescued ninety-nine people from ten different cities around the world, with each group getting their own colored bangles. For the San Diegans, it was silver. For the New Yorkers . . .

  Zack’s stomach twisted as he recalled Rebel’s teasing boast from October. Two of the Golds got away from us. Six didn’t. Your brother was one of the ones who didn’t.

  At long last, Zack had found a living member of the group, someone who could tell him what really happened to Josh Trillinger. He refused to let the matter rest on the word of a psychopath.

  Hannah kept her muddled gaze on the guitarist. “How the hell did he end up in a band?”

  “I don’t know,” Zack said. “He’s had nine and a half months to adapt. Guess he’s better at it than we are.”

  The guitarist flinched at the sight of the two Silvers. He’d been noticing them all night, this poorly dressed couple who never drank, never smiled, and never stopped snooping on the people around them. Now suddenly their eyes were laser-focused on him. The black-haired woman looked ready to pounce.

  Hannah looked away. “Shit. We’re freaking him out.”

  “What?”

  “He sees us.”

  “Great.” Zack lowered his head. “He probably thinks we’re Rebel’s people.”

  “You think he’ll run?”

  Zack was more concerned that he’d fight. For all they knew, the guy had all of Amanda’s tempis and none of her qualms about using it.

  The song ended. The tavern fell into wild applause. The guitarist watched Hannah and Zack intently as they rose from their table. He rushed to unplug his instrument.

  “What’s the matter?” the bass player asked him.

  “I have to go.”

  “Now? We haven’t gotten paid.”

  “Hold my cut. If you don’t see me tomorrow, then keep it. And thanks.”

  The lead singer gripped his arm. “What is this, man? You breaking us?”

  The guitarist saw Zack and Hannah weaving their way toward him. He retreated from the stage, then threw a somber look at his bandmates.

  “Sorry.”

  He bolted through the staff door at the back of the tavern. The drummer called after him. “Trevor, wait!”

  “Wait!” Hannah and Zack yelled.

  Everyone stopped to watch the pair as they forced their way through the crowd. Hannah fell a step behind Zack, cursing. She was one of the fastest people on Earth, but she couldn’t time-shift here. There’d be hell to pay if she went supernatural in front of all these witnesses.

  Zack charged into the staff corridor and hooked a sharp left. His target had already reached the back alley exit. Zack only had a moment to shout something. Anything.

  “Pink Floyd!”

  Stunned, the guitarist stopped in the doorway. Zack took a step forward, his palms raised high. “Look, Trevor—”

  The man fled through the exit and vanished into the night.

  His name was not Trevor, as his bandmates believed. Nor was it Eric, as he’d told the soup kitchen workers. He was not the “Axel” his slumlord yelled when the rent was overdue, or the “Jimmy” his one-time lover had moaned in the middle of the night. His name was Jonathan Christie, and there was only one person in the world he trusted with that knowledge.

  There used to be more.

  Jonathan ran through the alley in his thrift store sneakers, a makeshift pair he’d purchased with street coins. He couldn’t go home with those people on his tail. He had to lose them.

  Guitar in hand, he sprinted across Christopher Street and nearly got clipped by a limousine. Angry honks filled his ears as he dashed to the left, through a twenty-foot archway of tempis and stone.

  The West Village Faith Mall had been built in 1989 as an offering of sorts to Pope Clement XV, who’d visited Manhattan the year before and called it a “godless place.” The outdoor plaza contained twenty-nine different houses of worship—churches and chapels, synagogues and mosques. All religions were welcome as long as they played nice with each other.

  In 1991, after an ecumenical rumble sent three dozen Christians to the hospital, the Faith Mall was broken up into separate properties, each surrounded by a high tempic barrier. The walls made the plaza so complex and confusing that locals took to calling it the Faith Maze.

  Jonathan weaved through the corridors without any regard for direction. Left at St. Veronica’s, right at St. Michael’s, north at the Baptist Center, west at the Temple Chai. After six sharp turns, he slowed down, then rested against a tempic wall. Aside fro
m the traffic and his own wheezing breaths, he couldn’t hear anything. He’d lost them. He actually—

  “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  He spun a frantic one-eighty. “Jesus!”

  Hannah faced him from the other wall, her hands folded behind her back. She looked like she’d been waiting for minutes. She hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  He fought to speak through winded gasps. “How . . . how the hell . . . ?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hannah said, though she knew that wasn’t true. Peter would shit a red heifer when he learned about her temporal indiscretions.

  Jonathan backed up against the wall, bug-eyed. “You’re a Gotham.”

  “I’m not. I swear. I’m from your world.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Go on. Quiz me. Ask me anything.”

  “How did you find me?”

  Hannah balked. “I meant a trivia question.”

  “How did you find me?”

  She fidgeted with the hem of her blouse. “It’s complicated. Just trust me when I say we’re not your enemy. There are six of us in my group and we’re just like you. We can protect you. You don’t have to be alone.”

  Jonathan stared at her expressionlessly before venting a chuckle. “Nice pitch. Needs a jingle.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “I know you’re lying. You think I lived this long by being gullible?”

  Hannah crossed her arms. “If I was here to kill you, I would have done it already.”

  “Except you’re not just after me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jonathan held his tongue. If she didn’t know about Heath, he certainly wasn’t going to tell her.

  Hannah waved a hand. “Okay, look. Let’s start over . . .”

  “Let’s not.” He slung his guitar over his shoulder and started back down the corridor. “I don’t know you. I don’t trust you. Whatever you’re selling, count me out.”

  Hannah threw her hands up. “I know the song you played!”

  He kept walking. “Good for you.”

  “I’ve been singing it since I was a little girl. My mother taught it to me.”

  Jonathan stopped and threw a wary look over his shoulder.