The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Gemma watched Hannah and Jonathan on her camera screen. She raised her transceiver to her lips. “Speed it up, Bug. They’re about to string it.”

  A deep voice crackled through her headset. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “Just listen to me, Daddy. You have to be careful. You’re not the first swifter she’s gone up against.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bug replied. “I’m the last.”

  Despite his plebeian nickname, a stubborn remnant of his childhood, Deven “Bug” Sunder was a well-respected figure in his clan. He served as one of the three voting heads of the Sunder family and was the longtime primarch of his power guild. There were many reasons why the swifters kept electing him as their leader. His control over temporis was second to none. He could crack the 40x threshold in a heartbeat, shift a room full of people without breaking a sweat. Even more impressive was his unflappable composure. The swifters, by and large, were not known for their emotional stability. Bug proved a shining counterexample. If Hannah had been a Gotham, she might have voted for him too.

  She wrapped her legs around Jonathan’s waist. “Keep your arms close to me. Keep your balance. And whatever you do, don’t bump into anything. You don’t want to crash at our speed.”

  “Our speed? What the hell are you—”

  In an instant, everything around him changed. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. The sounds of the city fell to a murmur. His vision took on a deep blue tint, as if someone had wrapped his eyes in cellophane.

  Jonathan took a gawking look around the corridor. The windblown litter moved with slow-motion torpor, like objects in space.

  “What . . . what is this?”

  “It’s my weirdness,” Hannah said. “Go.”

  A dark figure popped around the corner, a sturdy-looking man in a black bodysuit and tinted face mask. His outfit glowed with bright blue lines of lumis. A speedsuit, Hannah realized. For a moment, she wondered if he was a federal agent, but . . . no, his aura was all natural. Best she could guess, the suit was only there to mask his identity and true nature. The Gothams were still a myth to the public at large. They preferred to keep it that way.

  Unlike everything else in the sluggish blue yonder, Bug moved with nimble haste. His arms were nearly a blur as they reached for a wooden weapon on his back. By the time Hannah recognized it as a hunting bow, it was already loaded with an arrow.

  “Run!” she yelled.

  Panicked, Jonathan turned around and bolted down the tempic corridor. Hannah felt the wind of Bug’s arrow as it whizzed past her hip.

  Gemma pushed her Hornet into hot pursuit, cursing her father and his vain choice of weapon. Bug had become jealous of Rebel’s new prestige and was desperate to outshine him as the clan’s epic hero. Heroes get results, you prancing penis. Next time bring a gun.

  Jonathan hooked a sharp left and threw a frantic look over his shoulder. “Who is that guy?”

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I just know who he’s with.”

  “Yeah, no shit.” He grunted through clenched teeth. “You led the Gothams right to me.”

  “I’ll get us out of this.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Just keep running!”

  Hannah glanced up at the liftplates of the Hornet. The vehicle was doing a fine job keeping pace. It must have been shifted as well.

  Gemma spoke into her headset. “They’re coming your way, Jinn. Get ready.”

  Her earphone squealed with a half second of incomprehensible shouting. Djinni Godden was moving much faster than the Hornet’s 12x limit. Gemma had to wait for the temporal converter to uncompress her garble.

  “I know! I can feel them! Just keep a lookout!”

  Gemma rolled her eyes. The lovely young swifter had heard the horror stories about the Pelletiers, and was deathly afraid of becoming their next victim. Luckily, Gemma had seen enough of the future to know that Azral and Esis weren’t coming tonight. These breachers were on their own.

  Jonathan turned a corner and saw a break in the tempis. The Westside exit was just forty yards away. Beyond the arch lay the slow-moving traffic of Riverside Boulevard.

  He fought to speak through wheezing breaths. “How do you feel about killing people?”

  Hannah opened her eyes. “What?”

  “We’re about to become open targets. We need a plan.”

  “How do you expect me to kill him?”

  “Not you,” Jonathan said. “Me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He threw a grim look over his shoulder. “I have a . . . weirdness too.”

  Hannah flashed back to the Dep she’d pummeled in West Virginia, the Gotham she’d shot at Battery Place. She didn’t know if either of them survived and she had no intention of dwelling on it. But she couldn’t help fear, in the wake of one doomsday and the shadow of another, that she was losing her perspective. Life was supposed to be a blessed thing, every minute of it sacred. To take it so easily from another person, even an enemy, was a slippery slope to step on. If she and her friends weren’t careful, they’d become just like the people they hated the most, the Rebels and Evans and Azrals of this world.

  She tightened her grip on Jonathan. “Can’t you just, I don’t know, hurt him enough to stop him?”

  He gravely shook his head. “There’s no middle ground. If I hit him, he’s dead.”

  Hannah felt a second energy signature near the exit. They were fast approaching another swifter. And the archer was gaining on them from behind.

  “Keep running,” she told Jonathan. “All the way to the river.”

  “What? Hannah—”

  “Just trust me!”

  She had an idea, though her last working neurons seemed united in doubt. It won’t work! It won’t work! You’re crazy! You’ll die!

  Hannah closed her eyes and floored her inner pedal, pushing her talents to a bold new extreme. The world outside her temporal bubble grew two shades bluer. The air turned cold enough to paint her breath with mist.

  Bug turned the corner and felt the aura of his targets. The breacher woman was strong but careless with her temporis. She was burning all her fuel on a wind sprint.

  Amateur, he thought. Your teacher should be ashamed.

  Jonathan burst through the archway and into the bustle of Riverside Boulevard. The pedestrians on the sidewalk were practically statues. The cars moved like boxes on a slow conveyer belt. Jonathan could only assume that he and Hannah were just a misshapen blur to the people around them. He understood now why she told him not to bump into anything. At this speed, even a love tap could—

  “Look out!” Hannah yelled.

  A swifter in a speedsuit was coming toward them, a smaller one than the man with the bow. Though Jinn Godden had stopped growing at four-foot-ten, she had more marriage offers than anyone else in the clan. She was a certified genius, a classical pianist, a blue-eyed stunner, and one of the rare few Gothams who qualified as a dualer.

  “A what?” Hannah asked Peter five weeks ago, when he first mentioned the term.

  “A dualer,” he’d said. “We’ve all been blessed. But some of us have been blessed twice.”

  Djinni Godden was both a swifter and a tempic. She was Hannah and Amanda rolled up into one.

  As Jonathan sped past her, Jinn raised her hand. A white spike tore through the palm of her glove and cut through the air like a quarrel. It missed Hannah by inches and hit a parked van with enough force to dent the grille. A second one sailed past Jonathan’s head.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Go to the pier!” Hannah screamed. Her temporal exertions were taking their toll on her—a pain in her skull, like electrified wire. Worse, she could feel her power fading fast. She had thirty seconds of speed left, if that.

  Jonathan crossed the expressway, weaving cl
umsily between cars as Jinn’s tempic bolts flew past him. Soon he reached the edge of Hudson Pier 7, a fifty-yard strip of restaurants and gift shops, all closed for the night. As far as escape paths went, the pier was worse than an alley. It was a—

  “—dead end. It’s a dead end! Hannah, what are we doing?”

  “Keep going!”

  Bug watched from a distance, shaking his head in amusement. These are the great breachers that eluded you, Rebel? They don’t even have the sense of rabbits.

  Several yards above, Gemma’s head dipped forward. Her eyes rapidly fluttered. Her older self had traveled back through time, invading her consciousness with brand-new memories. New information.

  She screamed something into her headset. His father had to reduce his velocity to understand her.

  “—jump in the water!”

  Bug furrowed his brow at the Hornet. “What?”

  “I said, don’t let them jump in the water!”

  The moment Jonathan reached the edge of the pier, Hannah de-shifted. The blue tint of their vision washed away. The world around them returned to its normal tempo.

  “Turn around!” Hannah said.

  With the last ounce of strength in his buckling legs, Jonathan turned and leaned back against the rope rail. He could see the two swifters moving toward him like missiles.

  Hannah jerked back with all her weight. As their bodies tumbled over the rope, an arrow nicked the heel of her sneaker. A tempic spike sliced Jonathan’s shoulder. They plunged into the river with a towering splash.

  Bug and Jinn ran to the railing and aimed their weapons at the rippling water. The Hornet hovered in front of them.

  “Goddamn it!” Gemma shrieked. “I told you not to let them get away!”

  Bug drank her in through an icy squint. He’d never been particularly fond of the girl, and he had no idea why she was upset now. Everyone knew that swifters weren’t exceptional swimmers. The resistance from the water negated most of their speed advantage, and they couldn’t hold their breath any longer than a normal person.

  “Relax,” he told Gemma. “They’ll come up.”

  “No they won’t! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! They’re gone!”

  “What are you talking about? Gone how?”

  “I don’t know! They just disappeared!”

  Jinn leaned as far as she could over the rope rail. “That can’t be right. Check under the pier.”

  Gemma palmed her face, groaning. She’d crossed the midnight hour twenty-six times already and had searched the area twenty-six different ways. She’d looked under the pier, over the pier, a yard to the left, an acre to the right. She even kept the Hornet’s headlights aimed on the very spot where Hannah and Jonathan submerged, waiting three hours for them to rise as swimmers or corpses.

  They didn’t show up anywhere. Against all sense and logic, the breachers had vanished.

  —

  In the middle of last December, during a relentless blizzard that had brought New York to a standstill, Hannah accidentally learned a new trick.

  She lay in her bed in a terry-cloth robe, sneezing and coughing and cursing the virus that had singled her out with malicious glee. It was the Evan Rander of colds, and she hated the fates that inflicted it on her.

  Amanda backed through the door with a tray of hot goodies—a cup of herbal tea, a bowl of minestrone, a chocolate chip cookie that had been reversed to oven freshness.

  Hannah took a sullen look at her new bounty. “Well, aren’t you the happy homemaker.”

  “Still grumpy, I see.”

  “It’s my second goddamn cold in a month.”

  Amanda placed the tray on the bedside table. “New world, new viruses. It’ll be years before our immune systems catch up.”

  “So why aren’t the rest of you sick?”

  Amanda shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  Hannah bristled at her aphorism, one their mother had used on them all the time. In a worse state of mind, she might have reminded Amanda of that, just to get under her skin. But she was trying to break old habits with her sister, all the nitpicks and microaggressions that came as naturally to them as breathing.

  “Theo asked to see you,” Amanda said. “Just to say hi.”

  “Don’t let him in.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if he catches what I have, he’ll be too sick to look for the . . . the . . .”

  Before she could say “string,” she sat up and let out a soul-rattling sneeze, one violent enough to reset all her circuits. By the time she finished blowing her nose, her head was spinning. Her skin burned all over and her vision had turned a hot shade of red.

  “God. I’m dying here. I can’t . . .”

  She looked up and screamed at the sudden presence of all six housemates. They buzzed around her like blurs, holding unintelligible conversations with each other as they repeatedly checked on her. Amanda moved to her bedside sixteen times in the span of a second and flashed a penlight in Hannah’s eyes. This was beyond madness. Everyone she knew and loved had suddenly become a swifter.

  “What . . . what’s happening?”

  She peeked down and saw that someone had draped a blanket over her. By the time she looked back up, the lamps were on and the windows had turned black with night. She checked the clock and saw the hours changing like seconds. The minutes flickered in crazy eights. It wasn’t just the people around her. The whole world was moving at hyperspeed.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  The lamps went dark and her burning heat subsided. In the faint glow of the nightlight, she saw Amanda sleeping uncomfortably on the easy chair. The clock had settled on 4:42 A.M.

  Hannah rubbed her face. “Oh God. Did it stop?”

  Amanda’s eyes snapped open. She leapt out of her chair. “Hannah! You’re back!”

  Within minutes, everyone in the brownstone had gathered in the living room to fill her in on the last sixteen hours.

  “You had us all freaked out,” Theo said. “You didn’t move. You didn’t blink. We thought you were paralyzed until you looked down at yourself.”

  “That took four hours,” Mia added.

  Hannah turned her rattled gaze onto David. “You’re the genius. Explain it.”

  He hunched his shoulders in a shrug. “Best we can guess, you changed the flow of time a different way. Instead of accelerating, you slowed yourself down. For every second you spent in your temporal bubble, a full hour passed.”

  “That’s crazy. I never . . .” Hannah looked to Peter. “You know a lot of swifters. Has that ever happened to them?”

  He shook his head distractedly. “This is brand new.”

  As soon as Hannah recuperated from her illness, she toyed with her powers until she was able to enter redshift at will. The transition proved to be ridiculously simple, like holding her breath. After losing five mornings in a row to her temporal experiments, she put aside the gimmick and forgot about it. Life was short enough as it was. It was hard to imagine a practical use for super-slowness anyway.

  But on the fourth night of April, in the cold, dark waters of the Hudson, she found one.

  The moment she dipped below the surface of the river, Hannah wrapped one arm around the pier support and the other one around Jonathan. She hoped she had enough temporis left to redshift both of them. She prayed Peter was right and the Gothams didn’t know this trick.

  With a twist of thought, she pushed time into fast-forward. The liquid around them turned forty degrees warmer. Their muscles went rigid. Their bodies sank. Their hair and clothes stopped rippling in the current. To Hannah, the sensation was surprisingly pleasant, like finding shade after a long day in the sun.

  Jonathan craned his neck and looked up through the water. All he could see was the shimmering moon—a tiny red crescent that, like many new things
in his life, moved a hell of a lot faster than it should have. Hannah could only imagine the poor man’s anguish. This was their world now. This was the crazy life they shared.

  Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, she thought.

  The Gothams departed. Hannah kept pushing the clock forward. Seventeen feet beneath the surface of the Hudson, the Silver and the Gold embraced like lovers, still holding last night’s breath as the sky grew light and the world journeyed on to tomorrow.

  FIVE

  The rejuvenator stopped with a musical chime. Theo opened the door and retrieved his breakfast: a shrink-wrapped plate of fried bread pockets, all stuffed to the seams with bacon and cheese. Anywhere else, they’d be called “empanadas.” But here in Altamerica, where foreign-sounding words gave half the nation the vapors, they were simply known as “morning melts.”

  Theo brought the platter to the dining room table, then unwrapped it in front of Mia. She looked away from her lapbook, her eyes dancing hungrily around the steaming hot pastries.

  “Have some,” Theo said. “They’re good.”

  “You know how many chemicals are in those things?”

  “That’s David talking. Do you really want to eat like him?”

  Mia hesitated a moment before shaking her head. “I’m fine.”

  The mood in the house had been bleak since midnight, when it became painfully clear that Hannah was missing. Amanda, Zack, and Peter were still out looking for her. Mia had spent all night scouring the local newswires. Only David and Theo managed to get some sleep. One was still recovering from his retinal flash burns. The other was afflicted with a rare case of optimism.

  Hannah’s okay, Theo repeatedly assured his friends. She’ll call us in the morning and she’ll be home by ten. Trust me.

  As much as the others wanted to believe him, they knew full well that no futures were certain. Plus, Theo’s scenario didn’t make sense. If Hannah was all right, she could have easily found a pay phone, borrowed someone’s mobile, hailed a cab back to Brooklyn. Yet she’d been out of touch for hours. Where was she?