The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Theo couldn’t answer that. All he knew was what the strings showed him, and the strings showed Hannah, alive and well.

  He grabbed a morning meltanada. “Anything in the news?”

  “Some people in speedsuits caused trouble at a pier.”

  “Casualties?”

  “No injuries. No arrests.”

  Mia watched him closely as he bit into the melt. “Just have some,” Theo said.

  She reached for the platter, then pulled her hand back when she heard someone approaching. David entered through the living room, disheveled and groggy. The whites of his eyes were still blotted with red splotches.

  Mia pushed the melts away. “Hey. How you feeling?”

  “Embalmed.” He peeked through the window at the morning sky. “The others back yet?”

  Mia shook her head. “They’re still looking for her.”

  David scoffed. “If this keeps up, we’ll be looking for them.”

  He retreated into the kitchen and returned with his breakfast: two red bell peppers and a glass of cold water. The boy had been a vegan for as long as anyone knew him, though he repeatedly insisted that it wasn’t a choice. His father had raised him on such a strict hippie diet that he’d developed a natural aversion to most modern foods. By now, the others were used to seeing his disgust at the dining table as they consumed their meatburgers and omelets, their butter-soaked potatoes. Only Mia made an effort to eat healthier around him, or at least less repulsively.

  David glanced at Theo’s breakfast like it was an unflushed toilet. He took his peppers to the far side of the table. “We’re going to have to do something.”

  “She’ll be back,” Theo told him.

  “I’m not talking about Hannah. I’m talking about the Gothams. We can’t just wait for them to change their minds.”

  “What do you suggest we do?” Theo asked. “Bomb their village? Kill their leaders?”

  “Kill them? No, but if we’re smart about it, we could apprehend Rebel and Ivy.”

  Mia shook her head. “Peter says—”

  “Peter’s approach isn’t working,” David said. “I saw the way they talked to him. They hate him more than they hate us.”

  “He’ll turn them around. He just needs more time.”

  “I think you might have a little too much faith in him, Mia.”

  “And you don’t have enough.”

  Theo had to give Mia credit. For such a lovestruck girl, she didn’t hesitate to challenge David when she disagreed with him. More than that, she was the only one in the group who could get him to back down from an argument. David obviously adored the girl, enough to make some of their friends wonder if the crush went both ways.

  But Theo had yet to see a future where they were romantically involved. Every time he looked at David’s strings, he saw a dark-haired girl of staggering beauty, a lumic just like him. But who was she?

  David shrugged at Mia, then took a crunchy bite of his bell pepper. “Well, you know Peter better than I do. You certainly have better instincts about people.”

  Mia responded with a blushing half grin, the same look she got whenever David praised her. Theo had peeked at her future many times and was continually thrown by its inconsistency. She was a trim, athletic blonde in one string and a heavyset goth in another. She carried a Bible in some visions and a crossbow in others. She had boyfriends and girlfriends, tattoos and scars. She was even pregnant in some premonitions. The only unifying trait was the hard look in her eyes, an immutable hatred, like fire. Theo had no idea what the Future Mias were so angry about, but it seemed bigger than heartbreak. Bigger than David.

  The neighbors’ dogs started barking. Mia rose from her chair and turned toward the front door.

  “They’re back.”

  “What?”

  A ten-foot portal opened on the wall of the foyer. The brownstone came alive with heavy footsteps and clamorous voices. The louder half of the group had most definitely returned.

  “—then let him go alone!” Zack yelled. “He’s a ghoster. He’ll see what happened.”

  “I said no.”

  “You’re being stupid, Peter.”

  “Stupid? You’re the one who wants to put David in harm’s way.”

  “He wants to find Hannah,” Amanda fired back. “We’ll do it with or without you.”

  She shambled into the dining room, her shoulders drooped with fatigue. Her hoodie was riddled with dozens of new holes. She’d clearly had another outbreak of stress tempis.

  The Silvers at the table watched quietly as Amanda placed an instrument against the wall: a shiny blue electric guitar.

  David ran his finger along the polished wood surface. “Is this, uh . . . ?”

  Zack nodded tensely from the living room. “Yeah, it’s Trevor’s. Or whatever his name is.”

  “We found it at the Faith Mall,” Peter added. “Only trace of them.”

  Amanda’s head lolled to the left. Her tired eyes locked with Theo’s. “I’m about to tear this city apart.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Then tell me—”

  “She’s coming back,” Theo insisted again. “I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

  Sighing, Amanda sat down at the table and rested her head in her hands. While David fetched her a glass of water and Mia scrambled to make her some breakfast, Theo kept a nervous eye on the guitar. From the moment he saw it, he felt a tectonic shift in his foresight: a million new roads opening and a million old ones closing. Hannah was bringing two people home with her—a long-haired man and a dark, nervous boy—and their arrival was already changing the future. The strings of time shook in anticipation of the Golds.

  —

  Jonathan poked his head out of the waters of the Hudson, gasping for air as he surveyed his surroundings. When he last drew breath, it had barely been midnight. Now the sky was bright and the river gleamed with ribbons of sunshine. Tomorrow had come way ahead of schedule.

  “What? What just . . . ?”

  Hannah burst through the surface and hacked a cough. Her mouth tasted awful, like flat beer from an ashtray.

  Jonathan swam into the shady underside of the pier and then clutched a wooden strut. His bulging eyes stayed locked on Hannah. “What did you do?”

  “Hang on. I can’t see.”

  “It was nighttime a minute ago!”

  “Just wait a second!”

  She wrapped her arm around a support pillar and brushed the hair from her eyes. She had to spit three times to get the last of the Hudson out of her mouth. “I shifted us the other way.”

  “What, backward?”

  “No. I mean instead of going fast, I slowed us down.”

  “Wait . . .” Jonathan blinked at her in astonishment, as if she’d just pulled a hat out of a rabbit. “Let me get this straight. We were being chased by super-fast people—”

  “Right.”

  “—and we lost them by going super-slow?”

  When put that way, it did sound nutty. Hannah had no idea what made her think the stunt would work, yet the Gothams never saw it coming.

  Jonathan stared at the horizon, his eyes darting back and forth. “So this . . . holy shit. We were down there all night!”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Shit. Shit!”

  Hannah studied him worriedly as he flailed in the water. He’d been so brave when their lives were in danger just a minute before. Now panic washed over him as quickly as the new day.

  She noticed an oozing red gash on his shoulder. “Jonathan, you’re hurt!”

  “I don’t care. I have to get home.”

  “What?”

  “He must be freaking out.”

  “Who?”

  “Heath! Heath! I keep telling you about Heath!”

  “You only t
old me his name!”

  Jonathan scanned the pier for the nearest ladder. “He’s one of us. One of mine.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I was supposed to be back at midnight. He probably thinks I’m dead.”

  Hannah imagined her people were in a similar tizzy. Hopefully Theo had seen the future and calmed Amanda down. Unless the Gothams gave her another reason to cry.

  “Oh no. Zack . . .”

  “Who?”

  “My friend. I have to make sure he’s okay.”

  “Do what you have to,” Jonathan said. “I’m going home.”

  He found the ladder and swam toward it. Hannah paddled after him. “Wait! How will I reach you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jonathan!”

  He turned around at the ladder, frantic. “He’s just a kid, Hannah. I’m all he has.”

  Hannah took a quick moment to mull her options. There wasn’t anything she could do for Zack at this point. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to lose Jonathan now.

  “Hang on,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Okay. Fine. Just . . .”

  A delirious chuckle escaped him. Just hurry up, he was going to say. Don’t slow me down. The woman gave mad new meaning to both phrases. Whoever Hannah Given was on the old world, she was something else now. She bent the hours to her will like a wild young goddess. She played the clock like a fine guitar.

  —

  Before a great white blast changed the face of Manhattan, the neighborhood had been known as the Meatpacking District. A sprawling industrial park grew from the ashes of the Cataclysm, replacing the slaughterhouses with chemical processing plants. The area was renamed Presin Square in honor of its chief export, a light but durable petroleum resin that, on another world, might have been called “plastic.”

  In the 1960s, after bio-organic resin (bresin) became the new standard, the area fell to obsolescence. The factories were transformed into warehouses, which were converted into apartment buildings, which degraded into slums. Now Presin Square was the city’s most infamous patch of crime and poverty. Jonathan had to offer all the damp blue cash in his pocket to get a cabbie to drop him off at his ramshackle tenement.

  As the taxi made its hissing landing, Hannah looked out the window. The buildings were all in horrendous disrepair. Half the windows had been replaced with sheets or wooden boards. Garbage was strewn everywhere. Only four percent of the trashers in the neighborhood were functional. The rest had been stripped of their temporic components.

  “God . . .” Hannah watched a group of grimy, shirtless children chase a stray cat through puddles. “How long have you lived here?”

  “About seven months,” Jonathan told her. “Best I could do on a street musician’s salary.”

  She spied four ratty thugs on the stoop and understood why Jonathan gave her his button-down. She closed it tight around her still-damp blouse as she stepped out of the cab. Her right foot sank into a curbside puddle, some chunky yellow liquid that would haunt her dreams for days.

  Jonathan watched the men warily. “Stay close.”

  “It’s all right. I can smack them twelve times before they even think about touching me.”

  “Exactly what I’m trying to avoid,” he said. “I see now why you’re a fugitive.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t easy for us either, okay? We crossed the whole country with Deps and Gothams on our ass, not to mention a psychopath.”

  Jonathan paused. “Did you lose anyone?”

  “No,” Hannah said, though that wasn’t entirely true. There had once been a Silver named Jury Curado, who was stabbed in an alley before the others had a chance to meet him. You would have liked him very much, Evan Rander had teased.

  Jonathan’s expression hardened as he escorted her into his building. “There used to be eight of us. Now it’s just me and Heath.”

  The lobby reeked of mildew and rat droppings. A scrawny blond teenager nursed her infant on a pile of splintered wood. She did a double-take at Jonathan’s soaked undershirt, the thin trickles of blood that dripped from his makeshift bandage.

  “Damn, Axel. Someone ripped you up. What tell?”

  Jonathan lowered his gaze. “We got mugged.”

  “Got what?”

  “Got pouched,” he corrected.

  “What they pouch you with, a hose? And who’s the slice?”

  He put an arm around Hannah and walked her to the stairwell. “Mind your own, Hattie.”

  “Heard. But your boy was thundering all night. Beating the walls and yelling and shit.”

  Jonathan stopped short. “Is he still there? Did you see him leave?”

  “None seen. But you better step light. Bolly heard and he’s preffin’ to ex you both.”

  Hannah followed Jonathan up the steps. “Bolly?”

  “Landlord.”

  “And the reason she called you Axel?”

  “I use fake names. Makes me feel safer.”

  “I see. So is Jonathan Christie just another—”

  “No,” he told her. “You got the real one.”

  He stopped at apartment 3A, put his ear to the door, and exhaled with relief. He threw a nervous look at Hannah.

  “Uh, you might want to hang back.”

  “Why?”

  “Just trust me.”

  Hannah backstepped a few yards while Jonathan knocked on the door.

  “Heath? Buddy, it’s me. Are you in there? Are the . . . dogs out?”

  The peephole filled with shadow. A high voice filtered through the wood. “Jonathan?”

  “It’s me, pal. I’m back. If the dogs are out, call them off. It’s safe.”

  The door creaked open. Jonathan looked inside the apartment in slack-faced horror. Hannah had no idea what he was gawking at.

  “Oh shit,” he uttered. “God, Heath, I’m so sorry.”

  A child emerged into the hallway, a dark-skinned boy with a frizzy mop of hair. He stood barely an inch taller than Mia, and was so skinny that his golden bracelet would have fallen right through Hannah’s old silver one. She recognized his long blue shirt as a New York Giants jersey, a rather crude knockoff at that. The “44” on the front and back were cut from felt and stitched by an amateur hand.

  Heath scrutinized Jonathan through large wet eyes, then lowered his gaze to the floor. His left hand flapped frenetically, like he was drying nail polish.

  “I waited all night. You told me—”

  “Heath . . .”

  “You told me you’d be back at midnight.”

  “I’m sorry, Heath. I ran into trouble. You know I’d never do that on purpose.”

  “I thought that . . . I thought that maybe . . .”

  “No.”

  “I thought maybe the Gothams got you.”

  Hannah was surprised to see Jonathan keep his hands to himself. She would have smothered the boy in hugs already.

  “They tried,” Jonathan told Heath. “They tried their damnedest but we got away. Listen . . .”

  The boy looked down the hallway and made eye contact with Hannah. She’d taken him for a pre-adolescent, but now she could see that he was a baby-faced teenager, a rather beautiful one at that. His face was angelic. His lips were femininely divine. His big hazel eyes were utterly captivating. Hannah could have stared at him for hours. But even as she fell in love with him a little, she could tell right away that something was off with him. Something on the inside.

  Heath processed her for the briefest of moments before clutching his hair in panic. “No. No no no no . . .”

  Jonathan held his arm. “Listen to me, Heath. Listen. She’s one of us.”

  “No she’s not!”

  He fled into the apartment and slammed the door behind him. Jonathan groaned and raised a finger at Hannah. “O
ne minute.”

  Hannah waited by the stairwell, her mind plaguing her with grim scenarios. What if the Gothams had killed everyone but her and Mia? Would they have stayed together? Would they have made it to New York? Would they have even lasted a week in this hellhole?

  Two minutes later, Jonathan reemerged. Hannah looked him over with awe. “God . . .”

  “He’s not usually that bad.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I just . . .”

  She looked beyond him and saw a fat, bumbling roach on the wall. “You can’t live here anymore.”

  Jonathan leaned against his doorframe. “Yeah, that’s just what my landlord’s gonna say. Problem is, Heath doesn’t trust you. He thinks you’re a Gotham.”

  “So did you.”

  “I know. I told him everything, but . . .”

  He flipped a hand in surrender. Hannah stroked her jaw. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yeah, actually. He wants to know why you don’t have a bracelet, which is a pretty good question. He’d also like some proof—”

  “Name the Beatles!” Heath yelled from inside the apartment.

  “—that you’re one of us.”

  “Full names!”

  Hannah smiled. She aimed her answer at the door. “John Lennon. Paul McCartney. George Harrison. Ringo Starr. As for the bracelet, I had one in silver. Zack figured out a way to get them off. He can do the same for you.”

  The hallway fell quiet until Heath muttered something. To Hannah, it sounded an awful lot like “Trillinger.”

  She furrowed her brow. “Heath, did you just—”

  “Name the Beatles’ fourth album,” he demanded. “Studio, not live.”

  Hannah froze, stymied. Jonathan frowned at the door. “Not everyone knows that, buddy.”

  “Yes they do! It’s common knowledge.”

  Jonathan rested against the wall, looking sickly and pale. He was clearly exhausted, and the blood loss wasn’t helping.

  Hannah examined his shoulder bandage. “You need stitches. My sister’s a nurse. She can help you.”

  “She’s lying!” Heath yelled.

  Jonathan crouched down and spoke into the keyhole. “We’re going to have to trust her, buddy. We can’t stay here. When Bolly sees what you did—”