The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Gingold listened intently from the other side of the room, his thoughts swimming with theories. Two weeks before, just six miles away, an empty church had made national news after exploding in a miniature Cataclysm. The proximity hardly seemed a coincidence. More likely than not, there was a new group of chronokinetics causing trouble out here.

  An analyst from Central Command hailed him through his earpiece. “Sir, I have an update on the Hudson pier incident. The speedsuit chase.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, our satellite images were blurry but we managed to form a fairly good composite of the runners. It’s a woman riding a man’s back. Neither of them are wearing speedsuits.”

  Gingold wound his finger. “We guessed this already. I want to know who they are.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, sir . . .”

  “What?”

  “Our computers give the woman a thirty percent match for Hannah Given.”

  Gingold stood in place, expressionless, before retreating to the front porch. His words came out in a hissing whisper. “That’s impossible.”

  “I know.”

  “That woman’s dead. I watched them cut her open.”

  “I understand, sir. I’m just telling you what the computer said.”

  Gingold groaned and pressed the bridge of his nose, a small ounce of pressure that caused his vision to go dark. The scientists who’d designed his cybernetic lenses had included the off switch as a comfort. There were times when even a man like Gingold needed to close his eyes and shut out the world.

  Twenty-two hundred miles away, in the basement of Integrity’s Bethesda headquarters, the analyst balked at Gingold’s silence. “Sir, perhaps Agent Masaad would have an idea—”

  “She’s not an agent. She’s an associate. And when I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get me on the next dart to New York,” said Gingold. “Have a ghost team ready the minute I arrive. And put a clamp on your findings, you understand me? I don’t want anyone else hearing about it.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Melissa watched from the living room as Gingold commandeered an agency Griffin. “You leaving now?” she asked him through the transcom. “The drills are nearly ready.”

  Gingold met her gaze from the driver’s seat. “Something came up.”

  “Anything I can help with?”

  He paused a moment, deliberating. Melissa was not a trusted or welcome presence in Integrity, mostly due to her background in British Intelligence. Some people in the agency feared she was funneling sensitive data across the pond, helping to plant the seeds for a second invasion.

  Gingold knew that Melissa bore no allegiance to England. But she did show a troubling amount of regard for the Given sisters and their friends. For all he knew, those corpses in the cinema were part of some clever and elaborate ruse to save them.

  He forced a cordial smile through the window. “It’s all right. I can handle it myself.”

  The aerovan launched up into the rain. Gingold glanced down at the home of the late Arnold Hyde Macklin and solemnly shook his head. The freaks were coming out of the woodwork now. He feared the true invasion was only just beginning.

  PART TWO

  ATROPOS

  EIGHT

  A cold rain came to Brooklyn on Wednesday, the first of April’s showers. The updraft winds and low air temperature prompted the New York Weather Bureau to issue a Level 1 hailstorm alert. All over the city, people doubled back home for their tempic umbrellas. Aeromobile drivers rushed to get to their destinations before flight traffic was grounded.

  Jonathan watched the rain from the backyard patio, a red umbrella in his grip. Under normal circumstances, he’d be standing beneath the overhang of the Union Square Skybus Station, playing rock songs for pocket change. Today would have been a real slog. Weather like this made everyone grumpy, stingy. Jonathan would have been lucky to get anything more than nickels in his guitar case.

  Thankfully, his scrounging days seemed to be over. Some remarkable strangers had rolled out the red carpet for him on Monday and offered him a better way to live. Now he had all the food, clothing, and shelter he could have ever possibly hoped for, with no strings attached.

  Actually, no. There was one string.

  Hannah, Amanda, and Peter watched him anxiously from patio chairs, an ominous-looking trio in their hooded black rain slickers. They’d spoken in turns for fifteen minutes, filling him in on the Earth’s secret illness. Now, at last, came the Q&A part of the discussion.

  Jonathan gazed at the clouds with tense, busy eyes. “Four years,” he said. “Shit, that’s . . .”

  He switched his umbrella to his other hand, then slowly shook his head. “I mean I never expected to grow old on this world. But four years . . .”

  “Jonathan—”

  “Why does this keep happening?”

  Hannah rose from her chair and crouched at his side. “Look, we told you it’s not set in stone. We have a chance of stopping it.”

  “Right. The one string to rule them all.”

  “It exists,” Peter insisted. “I’ve seen it.”

  “Even though you’re not an augur.”

  Peter rose from his chair and moved behind Amanda. “I had a bit of a stroke last year. Put me in a coma and sent me to the God’s Eye. You don’t have to be an augur to go there. You just need the right wires to touch in your brain.”

  Jonathan took a moment to study Peter and Amanda. He’d thought they were married when he first met them, but apparently they were just friends. They sure did have a vibe to them, though. He wondered what kept them from boffing each other, especially in light of the world’s ticking deadline.

  “How do you know it wasn’t just a dream?” he asked.

  Amanda wriggled uncomfortably in her chair. “Because Rebel’s seen it too.”

  Jonathan peeked over his shoulder at the patio door, increasingly nervous that Heath would come looking for him. This wasn’t a conversation for his ears. Not yet, anyway.

  He turned back to Amanda, skeptical. “So Theo’s gonna go to the God’s Eye, find the string, prove Rebel to be the asshole that he is, and then save the whole planet.”

  She shook her head. “He’ll tell us what needs to be done.”

  “It’ll be up to all of us to make it happen,” Peter said.

  A brief white flash filled the eastern half of the sky. Jonathan counted six Mississippis before the thunder came.

  “I wasn’t exactly a mover and shaker on the old world,” he admitted. “This is way beyond my pay grade.”

  “I was an actress,” Hannah said. “Zack was a cartoonist. Theo was a law school dropout. None of us are trained for this.”

  “We’re handling it day by day,” Amanda said. “And so will you. Just give it time.”

  “Time.” Jonathan scoffed. “What if Rebel’s right? What if killing us ‘breachers’ is the only way to save everyone?”

  The sisters traded a heavy look. Peter cut a slow path toward the brownstone. “I don’t believe that’s the case.”

  “And if Theo finds out that it is?”

  Peter opened the back door and turned around in the light of the kitchen. Jonathan didn’t like the expression on his face. Not one bit.

  “Then I guess we’re in for another discussion.”

  —

  Despite all warnings, the hailstorm never came. The rain continued in dribs and drabs throughout the day. By nightfall, the clouds gave way to a bright crescent moon.

  At ten o’clock, just minutes after Jonathan and Heath retired to the attic, Peter summoned the Silvers to the basement den. They sat among the beds and chairs, their eyes following Peter as he paced the beaded carpet.

  “I’m afraid we have a problem,” he began. “A dilemma, actua
lly. Can you stop that?”

  Two Davids sat at the foot of Theo’s bed: one real, one made entirely out of last night’s darkness. He unsummoned his shadow self, then gave Peter his full attention. “Is this about the wolves?”

  “It’s not Heath’s power that worries me. It’s Jonathan’s.” Peter snatched a pencil from Zack’s drawing table. “There have been forty-four droppers in the history of my clan, and they’ve all had the same unfortunate tendency.”

  “To do what?” asked Amanda.

  “To die.”

  The others paused, blank-faced, while Peter resumed pacing. “When it comes to temporal abilities, my people bloom early and fast. Most of us manifest around the age of two. My son . . .”

  He deliberated his words before continuing. “It was God’s folly to put such big power in little hands. We’ve had our share of accidents.”

  Peter raised Zack’s pencil to eye level and dangled it between his fingers.

  “The problem with droppers is that their first mistake is always their last. A sudden shock, a bad dream, even an ill-timed thought could trigger their power on themselves. Before anyone can do anything . . .”

  He let go of the pencil. It dropped through the air, then disappeared into a twelve-inch portal on the floor.

  Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  “I saw it happen once,” Peter said. “Poor girl was playing in the village square. She skinned her knee and next thing we knew, she fell through the grass like a phantom. Didn’t even have time to scream.”

  Theo sat forward, gape-mouthed. “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes. It’s the one power we don’t consider to be a blessing. It’s more like a death sentence.”

  “How old was the girl when she, uh . . . ?”

  “Four,” Peter said. “Droppers don’t usually live past six.”

  “But Jonathan’s an adult,” Mia said. “He has more control than a kid.”

  “It’s not about age, darling. It’s experience. And Jonathan’s still new to his talent. All things considered, it’s a miracle he’s still alive.”

  Amanda flashed back to her early tempic mishaps. If she’d been cursed with Jonathan’s power, she would have dropped herself on her very first day.

  “There has to be something we can do.”

  “Maybe,” Peter said. “We discovered a while back that tempis is the only thing an intangible object can’t fall through. Now our one living dropper spends all his time on it. He has a tempic catcher under his bed, a tempic sheath on his chairs, even tempis on the soles of his shoes. It’s not an easy life he lives, but he’s twelve years old and still with us.”

  Zack creased his brow at Peter. “Okay. So we buy a bunch of barriers and line the floors with them. What’s the dilemma?”

  “It might not be the best choice. There’s a force out there even stronger than tempis. It may have been saving Jonathan all along.”

  Only Amanda caught his gist. “Ignorance.”

  “Exactly. He doesn’t know the danger he’s in. We put the fear in his head and it could be self-defeating, like telling a man on a tightrope not to look down. The minute he steps off the tempis, and it’s bound to happen sooner or later, his mind could get the better of him. All it takes is a thought.”

  Theo’s heart sank with dread. He’d learned from his many trips through the God’s Eye just how cruel the human subconscious could be.

  “I have my preference on how to proceed,” Peter said. “But we’re a group. This should be a group decision.”

  “It should be his decision,” Zack countered.

  “If we take away his ignorance, the choice is already made.”

  Mia scratched her neck, agitated. “I don’t like this. We shouldn’t keep secrets from each other.”

  “Even if that secret saves his life?” David asked her.

  “Ignorance didn’t stop me from getting portals in my sleep. It didn’t stop you from blinding yourself.”

  Zack nodded in agreement. “If Jonathan drops in the middle of the night, we’ll never forgive ourselves. We’ll always know we could have saved him.”

  “That goes both ways,” Amanda said. “If he dies from our meddling—”

  “Wouldn’t you want us to tell you?”

  “I’d want you to do whatever it takes to keep me alive, even if that means lying to me.”

  Peter puffed a loud breath. “As it stands, I agree with Amanda and David. But if the augur among us has any insight, now’s the time to share it.”

  Theo tapped his leg distractedly. Once again, he caught a prescient glimpse of Amanda screaming with grief, her body erupting in hard spikes of tempis. He didn’t think she’d get that hysterical over a man she’d just met. She had to be mourning someone closer to her. Someone in this room.

  “I haven’t seen a single future where Jonathan drops himself,” Theo attested. “That’s not to say it can’t happen. I just know from experience that some prophecies are self-fulfilling. Some warnings . . .” He took a nervous look at Amanda. “I think telling him will do more harm than good. It won’t be great for Heath’s state of mind either.”

  David shook a finger at him. “That’s a good point.”

  “Very good point,” Peter said. “We seem to be approaching a quorum.”

  Mia rose up from her chair. “You can’t do this. It’s not right!”

  “Jonathan put his trust in us,” Zack said. “If we keep this from him, we won’t deserve it.”

  Amanda looked to her sister, the lone holdout in the conversation. “Hannah?”

  She sat to the side on an inflatable lounger, her finger tracing a slow path across the vinyl. After a moment of thought, she jumped to her feet and fixed her stern brown eyes on Peter.

  “There’s no dilemma. No debate. First thing tomorrow, I’m telling him.”

  “Hannah—”

  “You don’t know him like I do, okay? He’s a strong man. A survivor. If anyone deserves our respect, it’s him.”

  She gave David a hard look. “And Zack’s right. If we start lying to each other, where does it stop?”

  —

  The next morning, as a flat gray sky brought another drizzle to Brooklyn, Hannah remembered why she’d spent most of her life avoiding bold decisions.

  “Shit.”

  Jonathan leaned against the rail of her balcony. He rapped the metal with his knuckles, then spun around to face her. “Shit! Hannah, why would you tell me that?”

  “I don’t know! I thought it was something you needed to hear.”

  “Yeah, well, you thought wrong. This is even worse than your other news.”

  “How is it worse?”

  “Because it is, all right? I just . . .” He rubbed his face with both hands. “You didn’t know me on the old world, Hannah. I was a screwup. Anyone who knew me learned real fast not to count on me. Then Heath came along and . . . goddamn it, I promised him I’d never leave him. I gave him my word and I meant it.”

  Hannah shook her head. “It doesn’t have to be like that. The tempis—”

  “Oh, fuck the tempis. I’m not spending the rest of my life as an invalid. What good does that do anyone?”

  “Jonathan . . .”

  “Look, I appreciate your concern. I do. But you have to let me handle this my way, okay? Just . . .”

  He closed his eyes and let out a pitch-black chuckle. “Just drop it.”

  Hannah reached out to touch him, then pulled her hand back. She could already feel old patterns reemerging, an insatiable craving for physical distraction. It would be so damn easy for them to screw away the pain, but the relief never lasted. After the intimacy came her fear of intimacy, then the distance, then the fighting. And by this time next week, Hannah Banana (always needs a man-a) would have another ex-lover in the house.

  N
o. Not this time. She’d spent the last six months in a state of self-reliance and she had very much come to like it. She would just have to comfort Jonathan as a friend.

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “Your life was so much simpler before you met us.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” He looked down at his calloused fingers. “It wasn’t exactly a picnic.”

  Once again, Hannah pondered Ioni’s motive for bringing her and Jonathan together. Maybe it was never about sex or romance. Maybe it wasn’t about Jonathan at all.

  “Heath won’t be alone,” Hannah told him. “If anything happens to you, and I hope to God it doesn’t, we’ll take good care of him. I promise.”

  Jonathan looked at her with a complicated expression, an evincible mixture of fondness and doubt.

  “You don’t seem convinced,” Hannah noted.

  “I’m convinced you’ll try,” he said. “I’m not so sure you’ll succeed.”

  He gripped the railing and blew a hot breath through his nose. “He really doesn’t like you people.”

  —

  The next twelve days passed with slow unease, like sandaled feet on broken glass. Though the Silvers and Peter formed an instant rapport with Jonathan, they had a more difficult time with their other new housemate: a hundred-pound boy of singular name who seemed all but determined not to fit in.

  Heath didn’t need his tempis to keep the others on edge. He wandered into bedrooms without any sense of propriety, shook dandruff from his hair at the dinner table. He griped to Jonathan about the Silvers while they were in full view and earshot. “His shirt’s torn.” “I don’t like what she cooked.” “Why does he make that sound when he eats?”

  Even worse were his daily outbursts, where he’d flap his arms in shrieking tantrum and run barreling back to his bedroom. No provocation was seemingly too small for him—the wrong word, the wrong sound, the wrong color entrée. The others grew accustomed to hearing his cries from the attic, interrupted by the sound of Jonathan’s soft appeasements: [mumble mumble] “No!” [mumble mumble] “No! I want to leave!”