The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  He closed his eyes and held her tight. “I can’t stand this.”

  “I know.”

  “We weren’t even that close. I saw him maybe twice a year.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Amanda said. “He’s your brother and you miss him.”

  Zack pulled back to look at her, his face wet with tears. “I miss us.”

  “God, me too.” She rested her forehead against his. “It’s driving me crazy.”

  “So let’s do something about it.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We’re touching right now and there’s no fire and brimstone. No cracks in the earth.”

  “Zack—”

  “Yeah. I know. You think Esis will kill me.”

  “She’ll annihilate you.”

  “Except she won’t.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because the last time I saw Rebel, he nearly shot me in the face. You know why I’m still breathing?”

  Amanda nodded wearily. She’d heard all about the fracas behind Teke’s Humble Tavern, the mysterious white stranger who’d swooped in like lightning and clobbered three Gothams. Zack didn’t get a good look at his Lone Ranger. He wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman. But he was convinced of one thing . . .

  “A Pelletier saved me,” he told Amanda. “They want me alive.”

  “For now.”

  “For now,” Zack admitted. “Maybe they’ll kill me the next time we kiss. Or maybe we’re misreading the whole situation. You and I could be putting ourselves through hell over nothing.”

  Amanda broke away and sat on Theo’s bed. Her hands fumbled awkwardly in her lap.

  “If it was my life in danger, you wouldn’t be so reckless.”

  “Your life is in danger,” Zack reminded her. “We have four years left until the end of the world, and a one-in-a-trillion chance of stopping it. And that’s assuming Peter’s even right about the string. If he’s not—”

  “Don’t.”

  “—if he’s not, then what the hell are we doing here?”

  “Zack . . .”

  “We’re just killing time before time kills us.”

  Amanda dipped her head, her hair hanging down in flat red ribbons. She knew Zack Trillinger inside and out, and she could hear every chord being played in his head. He was grieving for his brother, grieving for the world, grieving for himself and his unfulfilled passions. He clearly wasn’t thinking straight. So why was she having such a hard time dismissing his arguments?

  “I’m still a nurse at heart,” she told him. “I was taught to fight for life, no matter what the odds are.”

  “Yeah, well, I went to art school.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought that would impress you.”

  Amanda laughed and looked away. Zack sat down next to her.

  “Look, I want to be with you. Every night and every day and all the little spaces in between. If this was a one-way thing, I could probably get over it. But you feel the same way I do. I can’t just let that slide.”

  He traced a slow finger up her wrist. “If you want to play it safe and go back to the old rules, I can do that. Gladly. It’s not sex I need from you, Amanda. It’s this.”

  He brushed her hair back and kissed the skin beneath her eye. “This.”

  Amanda turned to face him, her fingers digging into his shirt. She felt his warm breath on her cheek and, before he could utter his final “this,” he pressed his lips against hers.

  As she fell into his kiss, her thoughts drifted upward to her lord and creator, the one Zack didn’t believe in, the one she loved but only sometimes trusted.

  Please, Amanda begged. Please just let me have this.

  A pair of sneakered feet hit the stairs like punches. Zack and Amanda pulled apart to see David facing them from the seventh step. He bathed them both in his scornful blue glare.

  “Idiots.”

  Amanda jumped to her feet. “Damn it, David!”

  “Go away,” Zack growled. “This is none of your business.”

  “If I was dancing at the edge of the cliff, would you mind your own business?”

  “I don’t know. Go try it!”

  Mia hurried down the stairs and stood at David’s side. “Don’t yell at him. He’s only looking out for you.”

  Amanda shook her head. “We’re not doing anything we haven’t done a hundred times before.”

  “More than a hundred,” Zack said. “We spent four months together and we didn’t get a single warning.”

  David raised his arms, exasperated. “Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re out of warnings?”

  Their voices carried into the dining room. Hannah and Theo exchanged a weary look, then rose from their chairs.

  Jonathan noticed that Peter wasn’t joining them. “You’re not, uh . . . ?”

  “No.” He chuckled bleakly. “I don’t touch this one.”

  Soon all the Silvers stood gathered in the basement, four on the stairwell, two by the bed. Zack kept his stony eyes on David. “Since you’re the big expert on Pelletiers—”

  “I’m not even a small one,” David attested. “All I know is that they’re powerful, they’re vicious, and they don’t want you and Amanda together. Esis made that abundantly clear.”

  “No she didn’t,” Hannah said. “She only used weird words.”

  David turned around and glared at her. “Would you like her to come by and explain herself?”

  “I just don’t understand why they can’t be together.”

  “Neither do I,” David said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Not to you,” Zack grumbled.

  “Why can’t you understand that I’m trying to save you?”

  “Because everything about this feels wrong,” Zack said. “The Pelletiers have been screwing with us from the minute we got here. All they do is play head games.”

  “Zack . . .”

  “You want to keep jumping through their hoops, go ahead. But I, for one—”

  “Zack, stop.”

  The warning came from Theo this time. He sat on the stairs with a tortured look, his fingers clenched into his thighs. He hadn’t looked this scared in a very long time, not since the Gothams first ambushed them in a Battery Park office building.

  “I know you’re angry,” he told Zack. “You have every right to be. But you have no idea how much trouble you’re in. If you won’t listen to David, then listen to me.”

  Amanda’s mouth fell open. She took a shaky step toward Theo. “What are you talking about? What do you see?”

  Theo didn’t see anything. That was the problem. He’d been blind to the strings these past two days, lost in a sea of swirling fog. It wasn’t until just now that the mist parted enough to reveal a hint of things to come—a deep black grief that towered over everything. An absence.

  There was no hint of Zack in the future. Not a single trace.

  —

  The news had put a quick and decisive end to the debate. Amanda looked to Zack with wide, frightened eyes, then swore to never touch him again. They were done. Finished. End of story.

  The look on Zack’s face was severe enough to make her cry. Hannah followed Amanda up the stairs. She turned around at the last second to face Zack.

  “Don’t blame her for this. She’s already been a widow once.”

  Zack stared at his feet with hard gray eyes. “I’m not blaming her. I’m not blaming any of you. I just want to be alone, okay?”

  A black gloom lingered throughout the house all evening. Amanda and Hannah went to bed early. Jonathan and Heath made a hasty retreat to the attic. Theo and David hunkered down in the living room, their listless gazes locked on the lumivision. Mia was just about to join them when a strong hand gripped her shoulder.<
br />
  “Uh-uh,” said Peter. “You owe me a practice session.”

  “What, now?”

  “Now.”

  Mia sat on the bench by the living room window, her foot tapping impatiently as Peter brought her a smartglobe. The smooth glass ball had a lumic crystal underlay, providing twenty different layers of cartographic information, plus a real-time image of the Earth’s cloud patterns. There was a time in Mia’s life when she would have killed for a toy like that. Now she just wanted to hurl it out onto the street, along with Peter.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she whined.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m tired and upset.” She glanced over at David and Theo, still loosely absorbed in the nine o’clock news. “And the lumivision’s distracting me.”

  “Exactly why we’re doing it now,” Peter said. “You won’t always have optimal conditions. Hell, my teacher used to throw firebangers at me when I was making my portals.”

  He pushed the globe into her hands. “Come on. Just shoot it up to your room. It’ll be easy.”

  Mia scoffed at him. For all her skill communicating with her past selves, she had a hell of a time ripping portals in the present. Anything wider than eight inches felt painfully unwieldy, like dancing on stilts. If she ever wanted to teleport, she’d have to make bigger doors or become a hell of a lot thinner.

  Peter tapped the wood of the window bench. “Don’t worry about size. Let the hard, flat surface do the work for you.”

  “I don’t think my weirdness works the way yours does.”

  “That’s not . . .” Peter rubbed his brow. “Okay, first of all, stop calling it a weirdness.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it diminishes you. Call it a power. Call it a blessing. Call it a God-given talent.”

  “God had nothing to do with it,” said a voice from the hallway.

  Four heads turned as Zack shuffled into the living room, a sketchbook nestled under his arm. Though his expression remained grim, his face looked almost jarringly clean and youthful. It took Mia four seconds to realize what he’d done.

  “Your goatee,” she said. “You shaved it.”

  Shrugging, Zack threw himself onto an easy chair, then began a new doodle.

  Mia leapt to her feet and squeezed Peter’s arm. “We’ll do a double lesson tomorrow.”

  “You already owe me a double.”

  “Then we’ll make it a triple. I promise.”

  Peter sighed in surrender, then opened his lapbook. Mia joined her fellow Silvers in front of the lumivision. After a dull and pointless story about a celebrity fad diet, the newscast moved on to one of its favorite new topics: Merlin McGee. The bearded young prophet had only become more popular since his grand debut in January, and continued to stun skeptics with his spot-on weather predictions. Today he’d received a Citizen’s Medal for last month’s tornado warning, a two-week notice that saved dozens of lives in Texas.

  Theo sat up, intrigued. On the surface, there was nothing to dislike about McGee. He was a true and humble augur who used his power for good. Yet Theo couldn’t look at him without clenching his teeth. Was it gut instinct? Professional jealousy? Or was his foresight trying to tell him something?

  He looked over his shoulder at Peter. “Are you sure there isn’t more to that guy?”

  Peter had long ago explained the truth about McGee. He was an ex-Gotham named Michael. He’d left the clan years ago to live a quiet life in Oregon, which made his recent decisions all the more baffling. The man was an introvert with an eight-figure trust fund. He didn’t need this racket. He certainly didn’t need the risks involved with revealing his powers to the world.

  “Not sure what else to tell you,” Peter said to Theo. “Michael’s always been a mystery.”

  “Maybe he just likes saving lives,” Mia mused.

  Theo frowned at McGee’s image. “If he’s an augur, then he knows what’s coming. I mean why bother with floods and hurricanes when the real problem—”

  Peter and Mia suddenly hollered in pain. They clutched their heads in perfect synch, then doubled over. The smartglobe rolled out of Mia’s lap and cracked against the floor.

  Zack rushed to Mia’s side. “What’s happening?”

  “I . . .” David studied the travelers from the edge of the room—anxious, helpless. “I don’t know.”

  A piercing noise filled the air, a high-pitched whistle that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Before anyone could speak, a bright bead of light, no larger than a coin, materialized an inch below the ceiling.

  All the blood drained out of Theo’s face. Oh no . . .

  The light expanded horizontally, enveloping the ceiling in a twenty-foot disc. The surface churned with violent ripples. The edges danced like fire. Zack had never seen such an angry-looking portal before. Worse, he had a strong hunch who was making it.

  “Shit.”

  Theo screamed over the whistling clamor. “Zack, run!”

  “No!” David shouted. “You won’t escape them! Listen to me—”

  A tendril of tempis shot out of the breach. It reached for Zack with singled-minded focus, snaking around his wrist until it was thoroughly bound.

  “Don’t!” Theo pulled at the tendril. “You don’t have to do this! It’s over! They stopped!”

  A second tendril emerged from the portal. It grabbed Theo’s head with spindly fingers, then pushed him back with vicious force. His skull collided against the lumivision screen, creating a web of cracks at the center of the glass.

  Hannah ran downstairs at shifted speed, then stopped at the edge of the foyer. Theo lay unconscious and bleeding at the far end of the living room. Peter and Mia were suffering the same painful seizure.

  And Zack?

  Her heart dropped as three more tendrils reached down from the ceiling. They grabbed Zack by the wrists and ankles, dangling him in the air like a broken marionette.

  David stopped Hannah before she could reach Zack. “No! Don’t!”

  Try as she might, Hannah couldn’t forget the great tempic hand that had grabbed Evan Rander and pulled him screaming into a portal. It had almost been enough to make her feel sorry for him, and that was a man she hated.

  She struggled against David, tears spilling down her face. “Zack!”

  David cautiously approached him, his brow drenched in sweat. “Zack, listen to me! It’s not too late! When you see Esis, apologize and beg for mercy! Convince her you won’t be a problem anymore! Mean it!”

  The tendrils lifted Zack another foot off the ground. They hung him at a slanted angle.

  “What are they doing to him?” Hannah screamed. “Why are they just . . . ?”

  The answer came stumbling down the stairs. David and Hannah turned around to see Amanda in the entry, her hair tousled, her face slack with disbelief. She’d woken up to the commotion in the living room and tried to convince herself that she was dreaming, or that someone was playing the lumivision too loudly. Or maybe . . .

  “No . . .”

  The moment she saw Zack, her breath escaped her and her thoughts went white. She thrust her palms at the tempic tentacles.

  David lunged. “Wait!”

  Her tempis exploded backward, encasing her arms in a craggy shell. It spread across her frame until she was immobilized from the neck down—a creature of rock candy, a geode turned inside out.

  While his body writhed and his mind shrieked with terror, Zack found the energy to process Amanda’s predicament. They waited, he thought. Those bastards waited for her and now they’re going to make her watch.

  Zack opened his mouth to speak but a fifth tempic rope came down through the portal and coiled around his neck. He sucked in air through a croaking rasp.

  “Please!” Amanda cried. “Please! You made your point! You made your point!”
/>   Zack’s face turned a deep shade of purple. He struggled to speak. “Ah . . . ahlo . . .”

  He closed his eyes, his thoughts raging at Esis. Fuck you. You won’t even let me say it.

  “Let him go!” Amanda begged. “I won’t touch him! I promise!”

  Zack forced his eyes open. He focused every bit of his dwindling consciousness on Amanda, thinking all the words he couldn’t say.

  Sweetheart, look at me. Look at me.

  Amanda held his gaze. “Zack . . .”

  I love you.

  “Zack!”

  The tendrils retracted, pulling him through the portal. The moment he vanished through the turbulent surface, the wormhole shrank to a tiny dot, and then disappeared entirely.

  In an instant, the living room became silent. Peter and Mia stopped convulsing. They lay gasping on the floor, their faces moist with sweat and blood. While David tended to Mia and Hannah rushed to Theo’s side, the tempic sheath melted away from Amanda’s body. She fell to her hands and knees, struggling to remember how to think, how to breathe, how to make simple sounds.

  Her eyes drifted over to the smartglobe on the floor. The glass sported a jagged new crack that ran from the horn of Africa to the northern reaches of Canada. From Amanda’s angle, the fissure looked evil—a harsh, jagged smile on the face of the world.

  She turned her trembling eyes to the ceiling, she thought about Zack, and then she remembered how to scream.

  TEN

  He woke up on his back, his mind a dark and silent city. As his consciousness returned in scattered patches—a lit window here, a lamppost there—he took a cursory scan of his senses. His limbs were numb. His throat was dry. He felt an unpleasant heaviness in the center of his body, as if all its empty spaces had been filled with wet cement.

  He opened his eyes and saw his own splayed image staring down from the ceiling. What . . . ?

  Wincing, he sat up and scanned his surroundings. Everywhere he looked, another Zack looked back at him. The twelve-by-twelve cell seemed to be composed entirely of mirrors, yet something wasn’t right about his reflections. He struggled to pinpoint the discrepancy but became distracted by his attire—a tight, white, short-sleeved garment that covered him from neck to toe.