The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Zack tugged at the fabric with bristling indignation. A unitard. They put me in a unitard?

  He caught a glint of silver on the back of his left hand—four nickel-size discs in an even square formation. He pried at them with his fingernails, but he couldn’t peel them off. The damn things clung to his skin like warts.

  “What . . . ?”

  His voice came out in a parched rasp. Zack forced a cough and rose clumsily to his feet. His heart dropped when he noticed a complete lack of doors. He wasn’t just a prisoner here. He was entombed.

  “Oh God . . .”

  He took a deep, calming breath and then reassessed the situation. The air was fresh. There must have been a hidden vent somewhere. The lack of bed and toilet suggested that the Pelletiers weren’t planning to keep him here long. Maybe they were sweating him out like TV detectives, waiting for him to crack and confess his crime.

  My crime, he thought with a scoffing hiss. We just wanted to be together.

  He tilted his head at a mirrored wall. Now he realized what looked so strange. None of his reflections had reflections. Wherever he turned—the walls, the floor, or the ceiling above—a lone Zack stared back at him from an empty white room.

  “What the . . . ?”

  For a moment, he wondered if maybe he was looking at other people through clear glass windows, but no. They were him. They were all him. And they mirrored his every move.

  Zack felt another wave of panic coming on. He battled it back and struggled to find a workable strategy.

  Apologize, his inner David told him. It’s the only way you’re getting out of here.

  Fuck that, said the voice of Josh Trillinger. You’re a dead man and you know it. Are you gonna die on your knees or you gonna go out fighting?

  Zack paced the floor, his mouth running faster than his mind. He cursed Azral and Esis, insulted their mothers, suggested several inappropriate ways for them to interact with farm animals. He crooned Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen” in a barrage of annoying styles, from an operatic falsetto to a Cookie Monster voice, then expounded at length about the geopolitical structure of the Marvel Universe. By the end of his filibuster, he could only guess that two hours had passed. Somewhere along the way, he’d started to wonder if he was still on Earth.

  He smacked his palm against a wall. “You know, this cryptic shit is getting old. If you have something to say, just say it!”

  If his captors heard him, they didn’t respond. Zack bitterly shook his head.

  “Fine. Suit yourselves. Coming up next on Radio Free Trillinger: the many things I love about Amanda Stephanie Giv—”

  A portal opened behind him, filling the entirety of a wall. Zack barely had a chance to turn around before a tempic tendril burst through the surface, snaked around his waist, then yanked him howling into the breach.

  Zack opened his eyes and found himself being pulled down a long hexagonal tunnel of glimmering gunmetal. Huge tempic panels floated all around him, passing each other but never colliding. The view was an assault on Zack’s battered sanity, a living screensaver nestled inside the world’s biggest Allen wrench.

  Calm down, said the Mia in his thoughts. They’re trying to scare you. Don’t let them.

  His stomach flipped when he saw two figures standing side by side at the end of the passage, watching him from a floating metal platform. Once again, Azral cut an intimidating presence with his towering height, his snow-white hair, his fierce blue eyes, and tieless gray business suit. Most unnerving of all was his flawless countenance, a face so calm and eerily symmetrical that Zack wouldn’t have been surprised to find circuitry behind it.

  Esis, by contrast, looked unmistakably human, despite the tempic tentacle that extended from her arm. She frowned, she blinked, she shuffled impatiently on her feet. Her outfit, a black sleeveless top with a ruffled white skirt and stockings, was discordantly cute for a woman of her stature. For a moment Zack wondered if Amanda had oversold her fearsomeness.

  Then he drew closer and saw the unhinged ferocity behind her coal-black eyes. Shark eyes, Mercy had called them. Yes. Zack could see that now. He understood exactly why Amanda and the Gothams were terrified of her.

  Her tendril retracted to five feet of length, just enough to leave Zack suspended above the edge of the platform. The two Pelletiers studied his dangling form, intrigued, as if he were the most abstract sculpture in their art gallery.

  In the silence, Zack’s fear turned into something hard and prickly. He thought about all the sins these people had committed—the lies, the threats, the manipulations and murders. Oh, and genocide. If Ioni had told Hannah the truth, then these were the monsters who’d destroyed Zack’s world.

  He stashed his rage behind a mask of dry humor. “You know, I’m not one to complain—”

  Esis extended her tendril with a thrust of her arm, sending Zack all the way back down the length of the corridor. He flew through the portal and tumbled hard across the floor of his prison cell.

  “Christ . . .”

  Exasperated, he climbed back to his feet and resumed his fitful pacing, determined to keep himself busy. He gnawed and tugged at his clingy outfit, but the fabric refused to tear. He tried drawing on the walls with his breath fog and spit, but the mirrors proved impervious to tampering. He attempted to reverse the silver discs on his hand, only to learn—unsurprisingly—that his power had been nullified.

  Time passed invisibly around him, the minutes indistinguishable from hours. After an endless wait, a new portal opened on the opposite wall. Zack flinched at the long white tendril that popped through the surface, but Esis was gentler this time. Her tempis scooped him up in a makeshift chair and carried him leisurely down the corridor.

  The Pelletiers watched with cool skepticism as Zack made his second approach. No jokes this time, he warned himself. No back talk.

  Once again, his captors remained silent. Zack stared down at his wringing hands until he found the strength to make eye contact. He stared curiously into Azral’s opaline irises. “It wasn’t you.”

  Azral’s brow rose in query.

  “I got my bracelet from a man in a mask,” Zack told him. “I thought it was you but your eyes are different. They’re—”

  Esis flicked her hand dismissively. Her tempis wrapped around Zack like a python, then whisked him all the way back to his cell.

  Zack crashed to the floor and screamed at the shrinking portal. “Goddamn it! What do you want from me? What do you want?”

  You know what they want, said David. Fall on your knees and beg for forgiveness.

  Zack’s brother scoffed at the notion. Apologize? After all the shit they’ve done?

  It’s the only way out, David insisted.

  Bullshit, said Josh. Don’t listen to him, Zack. Don’t let those assholes break you.

  Zack shut out both voices and scrambled back to his feet. He shot a murderous glare at the ceiling.

  “You know, if you’re going to keep me here, you might want to think about feeding me. Maybe a burger and fries, a nice pasta dish. Or hey, maybe we could split a pizza. You guys like bacon?”

  The more he thought about food, the more he realized that he wasn’t even remotely hungry. He still had that heavy cement feeling inside of him.

  Zack walked the cell in a rapid circle, his fist smacking idly against his palm.

  “When Amanda and Hannah were little girls, you saved them from a freeway accident. They said there were three of you but neither of them can remember what the other guy looked like. So who is he? Where is he? Who’s the man who gave me my bracelet?”

  Zack waited for a response, or at least another portal, but the Pelletiers seemed to be done with him for now. That was fine. He had nothing but time.

  “No comment, huh? Okay. I’ll move on. Why did you give us that van and money last year? If you wanted us to get to Peter so
badly, you could have just pushed us through a portal. You’re good at that.”

  He stopped in his tracks, baffled. “Why did you want us to get to Peter?”

  Soon he found himself juggling more questions than he could handle, everything he’d been pondering for the last several months.

  “Why did you give us our powers?”

  “Who’s Ioni and how does she know you?”

  “Why do you go out of your way to save some of us but not others?”

  “Why is Rebel still alive after everything he did to you?”

  “What the hell is your problem with me and Amanda?”

  Zack sucked a sharp breath, then tapped his chin in contemplation. “What did you—”

  He was cut off by a disembodied laugh: a faint, haunting cackle that filtered in through every wall. By the time Zack stopped to listen, it was already gone. Rattled, he began pacing again.

  “What did you do with—”

  The cackle returned, louder and more insistent. Either Zack was starting to lose his mind or the Pelletiers were answering his question before he could ask it.

  “What did you do with Evan Rander?”

  His six mirror images began wavering with distortion, like water reflections. Once the ripples settled, the walls, floor, and ceiling showed the image of an entirely different prisoner: a small and scrawny fellow with ginger-blond hair. He sat in the corner of his stark white prison cube, his head dipped, his arms wrapped around his knees.

  Evan lifted his head and looked at Zack. His face lit up in a savage grin. “Well, well, well. Hello, jailbird.”

  —

  He was the black sheep of the Silvers; the problem child, the outcast. Though his enemies would have never believed it, there was a time in Evan’s life—long ago in an alternate past—that he tried to be good. It didn’t work out. Mia never warmed up to him, Theo merely tolerated him, and David made it clear in his own inimitable fashion that he was not a friend. Amanda was a hard-eyed nemesis from the moment she and Evan met. She hated his witticisms, his mannerisms, his cynicism and atheism.

  And Hannah? She was the best of them before she became the worst.

  But Zack had always been a bright spot in Evan’s world. In times undone, the two of them were brothers-in-arms, nerds of a feather. It wasn’t until Amanda got her talon hooks in him that he began to pull away. I’m telling you, Zack, there’s something wrong with him. The way he looks at Hannah . . .

  But that was all marginalia now, an obsolete draft of the story. In this string of time, Evan Rander was a nemesis of the Silvers. He’d followed them across the nation—taunting them, subverting them, punishing them for slights and transgressions that only he remembered.

  Then, in October of last year, he went a little too far, enough to earn the wrath of the Pelletiers. They yanked him away through a portal, then left him to rot in this looking-glass limbo.

  But at least now he had company.

  “So here we are,” Evan chirped. “The Team Supreme. The Dynamic Duo, reunited and doing hard time in the Pelletentiary.”

  Zack hunkered down against a wall. “Shut up.”

  “Aw, you must have just gotten here. How long has it been since they took me? What’s the date?”

  Zack kept quiet. Evan rose from the floor and scowled at him. “Come on, man. I haven’t had company in . . . shit, I don’t even know. I can only guess we’re close to the end.”

  “We’re not,” Zack said. “We still have four years left.”

  Evan howled with laughter, a maniacal sound that broadcast every ounce of his torment. Zack noticed his left hand, the same four silver discs that had been fused to his own skin. The Pelletiers must have been regulating their bodies, eliminating the need for food, sleep, anything that marked the passage of time.

  Jesus, Zack thought. This isn’t temporary.

  He rubbed his temples, fighting back the storm of screams that was welling up inside of him.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  Evan’s laughter died down. He brushed the tears from his eyes. “Do you remember the old research facility in Terra Vista?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “You ever go into Sterling Quint’s office?”

  “A couple of times. Why?”

  “Then you’d remember those ten cages he kept against the wall, that stupid mouse farm of his. He was breeding a special kind for his wife, some researcher at a drug lab. I guess she was hard up for mutants.”

  Zack glared at him. “What does any of that have to do with—”

  “You see, Quint kept an eleventh cage at the foot of his desk, a time-out cube for all the squeakers and biters and other mousy malcontents.”

  Now Zack got the gist of Evan’s metaphor. He didn’t like it one bit. “That’s all we are to them. Just lab mice.”

  “Squeak fucking squeak.”

  Zack clenched his fists. “That’s bullshit. You deserve this. I don’t.”

  “Yet here we are in our matching onesies.”

  “You know what? Don’t even talk to me. You’re a psychopath.”

  “Oh, am I?”

  “You tortured Amanda and Hannah.”

  “Please. It was just a stun charge.”

  “They never did anything to you!”

  “They did everything to me. You have no idea, Zack. You never remember. They . . .”

  Evan closed his eyes and collected himself. When he spoke again, his words came out in a grudging mumble.

  “No, you’re right. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I’m sorry.”

  Zack snorted derisively. “I’m sure the Pelletiers are moved by your sincerity.”

  “You think I don’t regret it? I’ve been stuck in here forever with nothing but my goddamn reflections. I can’t even . . .”

  He fluffed his hair with trembling fingers. “Look, I hate the sisters. Nothing’s going to change that. But I can change the way I handle it. If I get out of here, I’ll never bother them again. I mean it.”

  He threw his frenzied gaze at the ceiling. “I mean it!”

  Zack lurched to his feet and paced the floor again. There was nowhere he could turn without seeing Evan. The roof, the floor, the four walls around him, each one had Evan looking back at him from a different angle.

  “I don’t understand,” Zack said. “Why they don’t just kill us?”

  “Because we’re still potentially useful to them.”

  “And my brother wasn’t?”

  Evan shrugged. “What can I say? In their eyes, silver’s more precious than gold.”

  Zack rubbed his face, flummoxed. “Jury Curado was a Silver. They let you murder him.”

  The name drew a hard smile out of Evan. “They didn’t just allow it. They thanked me for it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whenever he lives, he steals the heart of a Given. You should know by now they don’t look kindly on that.”

  “Why?”

  Evan studied Zack in brief dilemma, then tensely shook his head. “You do this every time, man.”

  “Do what?”

  “Bang your head against Mount Pelletier. You question them, you challenge them, you go out of your way to annoy them. I can’t even count the number of times they’ve stomped you into the ground. There’s usually nothing left of you to bury.”

  “I just want to understand.”

  “You won’t,” Evan said. “The Pelletiers don’t experience time the way we do. They see all the strings at once—past, present, and future—and it colors every decision they make. When they want a sandwich, they’ll buy an umbrella. And while the rest of us are scratching our heads, wondering why the hell they did that, they’ve started a domino chain of events that ends with them getting the best goddamn sandwich in the universe. They’re playing
four-dimensional chess and they’re a hundred moves ahead of you. How do you expect to understand them, Zack? How do you expect to beat them?”

  Zack glared at the floor. If the Pelletiers were so omniscient, then how did Rebel once beat the shit out of Esis? How could their mighty plans be threatened by such a cheesy thing as love?

  A long silence passed. Evan tapped his fingertips in calculation. “Four years left. So it’s been six to eight months since you guys got to Brooklyn. That means . . .”

  He laughed with amazement. “Oh wow. She’s in the Jonathan Christie era.”

  Zack cringed at his ominous phrasing. “You enjoy being that?”

  “Being what?”

  “Hannah’s creepy stalker.”

  Evan’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Don’t buy the hype. She’s the psycho in our little dyad. She stalks me more than I stalk her.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Oh yeah? Just wait.”

  Zack glared at him. “You could have been our friend. Shit, with all the things you know, you could have been our guardian angel.”

  “I tried that,” Evan insisted. “You assholes still wouldn’t accept me.”

  “Meaning Hannah still wouldn’t sleep with you.”

  “That’s not . . .”

  Now it was Evan’s turn to bristle. No matter what he did, no matter how many edits he made to Hannah’s life, there was always someone else to catch her eye. Jury Curado. Theo Maranan. Even Peter Pendergen had his turn. And now that she’d found her way to Jonathan . . . goddamn it. That one always ended beautifully, with Hannah shattered in a million pieces. Evan hated the thought of missing it. He had to get out of here.

  He leaned against a wall and forced a soulful look for all who happened to be watching.

  “I never claimed to be a nice guy. God knows I’ve made mistakes. But you don’t know what it’s like to have my power. I’ve been living the same four and a half years for centuries, bouncing back and forth between one apocalypse and the other. I could be the greatest person ever and it wouldn’t matter. The sky will come down, the game will start over, and you guys won’t remember a thing that I did. I’ll just be that weird, skinny geek who rubs most of you the wrong way.”