The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “Come,” Azral said.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t feel . . .”

  “The discomfort will pass. Rise, child. Before my mother reconsiders.”

  Azral helped him to his feet. Zack stumbled forward like a drowsy toddler. A ten-foot portal opened in front of him.

  He panicked at the sight of the glimmering disc. “No, no, no, no . . .”

  “You’re not going back to the holding cell,” Azral patiently assured him.

  “Then what . . . ?”

  “We’re releasing you, Trillinger. Must I explain everything?”

  “But . . .”

  Zack peeked over his shoulder at Esis. Though the madwoman continued to sulk and seethe, there was a glimmering hint of vindication in her eyes. Zack could see that she wasn’t entirely displeased.

  He looked at the portal, then took a shaky step back. “This doesn’t go home.”

  “Of course not,” Azral said. “Did you think you earned our clemency?”

  “Wait . . .”

  Azral grabbed him by the nape of the neck. “You are nothing, boy. Not even a speck in the larger scheme. But you were chosen, for better or worse. And you will serve our purpose, one way or another.”

  “Wait!”

  Azral pushed Zack through the portal. The world washed away in a sea of burning light.

  —

  He stumbled forward into a brand-new environment, a room so dark that he couldn’t see a thing. The ground beneath him was smooth and cold. Zack might have thought he was back in his cell if his fingers hadn’t brushed a hard line of grout.

  Tile, he thought. Where the hell am I?

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Zack looked up and saw the vague shape of a convection oven. He’d landed in somebody’s kitchen in the middle of the night. From what he could see, it was an upscale home, maybe even a mansion. But who—

  He gripped the floor in sudden pain. His empty stomach was eating him from the inside. His throat felt like a blistering desert. He was so damn tired that his knees were wobbling, yet all he truly wanted at the moment was warm human contact. He desperately needed to see someone who wasn’t a Rander or a—

  “Hello?”

  —Pelletier.

  “Is someone there?”

  Zack struggled to see through the dancing spots in his vision and caught a shadowy figure in the glow of the hallway. The woman was as tall and slender as Amanda, with dark, wavy hair that hung down to her hips. Zack could only assume that she was a stranger. But was she the friendly kind, or was he about to suffer a new ordeal?

  The woman turned on the kitchen light and gasped at the sight of Zack. “Oh my God! Richard!”

  Zack scrambled to his knees, struggling to speak through stammering lips. “Wait . . .”

  He only had a moment to process the footsteps behind him before a heavy metal fist clubbed the back of his head. He fell to the tile in a soft, messy heap.

  Ivy processed Zack through wide, blinking eyes. “Holy shit. That’s Trillinger.”

  “Sure is,” said her husband.

  “What’s he doing here, Richard? What the hell is going on?”

  Rebel looked down at the hand-delivered enemy, the Silver on a silver platter. All he could do was scratch his head and shrug.

  “I have no idea.”

  ELEVEN

  David stood at the window at the end of the hallway, his blond brow creased with confusion. The neighborhood was eerily quiet this morning. There were no children playing in their box yards, no sunbathers and their music spinners. Even the local street traffic, usually a nonstop rumble in the periphery of his hearing, had dried up. It suddenly occurred to David that today was the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The date had a religious significance on this world and the last. It even had a name.

  “Easter.”

  Hannah poked her head out of her bedroom. “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud.”

  She stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her, a breakfast plate in her hand. The food looked like it had barely been touched.

  “Still not eating,” David noted.

  “She’s eating a little.”

  “It’s been three days. Maybe she should get up for a bit. Move around.”

  Hannah looked at him tiredly. “I’ll handle Amanda. How’s Mia?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “You sure?”

  “There are portal notes raining all over her bedroom,” David said. “That’s a pretty good indicator.”

  He didn’t mean to sound snide about it. He considered apologizing to Hannah, or at least offering to help. Zack’s violent departure had shattered the orderly structure of the household, leaving most of the residents in a state of depression, dysfunction, or—in Peter’s case—absenteeism. Hannah took it upon herself to become all things to everyone: the cook, the maid, the nurse, the grief counselor. David had expected her own grief to catch up with her by now, but she kept finding new ways to outrun it.

  “Look, Hannah—”

  “What the shit?”

  The cursing came from the first floor. David barely managed to turn his head before Hannah sped downstairs, returned the food plate to the kitchen, and joined Jonathan in the laundry closet. His T-shirt and jeans were splattered with soap suds. A tattered wet bra hung from his hand.

  “What are you doing?” Hannah asked.

  Jonathan jerked his head at the elaborate Vertech machine. “I’m trying to wash clothes, but this goddamn thing’s from Bizarro World. I mean look at these buttons. Agitate. Pendulate. Exsiccate?”

  He examined the bra with a baffled expression. “Apparently that last one means ‘purée.’”

  Hannah threw the garment in the washer, then set the timer for minus-six. “Forget the water features,” she told him. “That’s for new clothes. For everything else, you want the temporal settings.”

  “Temporal.” Jonathan threw his hands up. “Everything in this house is a time machine.”

  “You never used one of these?”

  “I lived in a slum. We had a sink and a washboard.”

  Hannah closed the lid and started the Vertech. She brushed some suds from Jonathan’s shirt. “You should have told me you were doing this. I would have helped.”

  “I was doing it to help you.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m all right.”

  “You’re not all right. You’ve been running around since Friday. You haven’t slowed down. You haven’t even . . .” He dipped his head and sighed. “Heath’s cried more than you have, and he barely knew Zack.”

  Hannah stepped away from him. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.”

  Jonathan followed her into the kitchen and watched her scrape Amanda’s breakfast into juve tins. “Sorry,” he said. “After everything that’s happened, I guess I’ve learned to expect the worst.”

  Hannah surprised him by chuckling. He tilted his head. “What?”

  “When I first met Zack, he said something like that. He told me that after twenty-eight years of Jewish conditioning, he’d come to believe that, all things being equal, the darkest explanation is usually the right one.” She let out a broken laugh. “He called it Menachem’s Razor.”

  Jonathan smiled until he saw Hannah’s lips quiver. She was fighting back tears. Losing.

  “Our world had only been gone ten minutes,” she said. “And he was able to make jokes. I thought he was crazy but that’s just the way he is.”

  “Hannah . . .”

  “He never lets anything break him.”

  David sat out of view on the stairwell, wincing in misery as he listened to Hannah’s cries. He didn’t need to look to know that Jona
than was holding her. That was just how it had started with Zack and Amanda.

  But would these two learn from the tragic mistakes of others, or would they march blindly over the same cliff? David had no idea. Hindsight was his specialty, not foresight. All he knew was that he’d keep his mouth shut this time. There was nothing to be gained by nagging Jonathan and Hannah. It hadn’t done a damn thing to save Zack.

  A large portal opened on the wall of the kitchen. Hannah broke away from Jonathan and grabbed a meat cleaver from the counter.

  David ran into the kitchen. “Hannah, wait!”

  Peter stepped through the surface and jumped at the sight of Hannah’s blade. His hands flew up in surrender. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! It’s just me! Just me!”

  Hannah lowered the cleaver. “Goddamn it. Don’t do that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Your portals look just like theirs!”

  “I know.” Peter shrank the gateway out of existence. “I should have called first. I’m sorry.”

  Everyone in the kitchen took a moment to collect themselves. David looked to Peter’s arms and counted twenty-two different bandages. Amanda had become so aggrieved in the wake of Zack’s abduction that her body erupted in tempic spikes. She might have brought the whole house down if Peter hadn’t subdued her in a chokehold. His quick thinking earned him dozens of puncture wounds.

  His handphone vibrated. He pulled it out of his pocket and frowned at the screen. “The others still sleeping?”

  David nodded his head. “Pretty much.”

  “Well, wake them up,” said Peter. “I know where Zack is.”

  —

  No one knew what he’d been up to these past few days. He’d come in and out of the brownstone without a word of explanation, and rarely stayed home for more than an hour at a time. Now Mia, David, Hannah, and Theo watched Peter from the couches as he fiddled with his computer. He jiggled a small black device in the peripheral port, then looked over his shoulder at the lumivision’s screen. Whatever he was trying didn’t seem to be working.

  Mia blinked at him in confusion, her eyes still bloodshot from the Pelletiers’ portal attack. “I don’t understand. How did he end up—”

  “No idea,” said Peter. “I’ll explain what I know when everyone gets here.”

  Theo rubbed his bandaged brow, testing his power for the hundredth time. He’d been totally blind to the future since Thursday, and it wasn’t because of his concussion. The Pelletiers were clouding his foresight. They were clearly intent on keeping Zack’s fate a mystery.

  “How do you know that Rebel really has him?” he asked Peter.

  “You’ll see in a moment.”

  Jonathan and Heath came down the stairs, the former practically pushing the latter. Heath turned around every fourth step to register his shrill objection.

  “You’re not listening to me!”

  “I heard you, all right? It’ll be gone soon enough.”

  Only Jonathan knew what the boy was upset about: a large yellow truck from the Transpac moving company, parked thirty yards down the street. Heath had been watching it all morning from the attic window, and had yet to see anyone come in or out of it.

  “It shouldn’t be there,” he insisted to Jonathan. “It’s Easter. Nobody moves on Easter!”

  “Buddy, listen to me. I know you hate yellow—”

  “It’s not about the color.”

  “—but we have bigger shit to deal with. Just dial it back, okay?”

  Hannah held her hand out to him. “Sweetie, come sit with me.”

  Heath hurried past her and monitored the truck through a slit in the window blinds.

  Jonathan furrowed his brow at Peter. “You’re showing us a movie?”

  “Not a movie,” said Peter. “As soon as—”

  Everyone turned their heads toward the stairwell, where the final member of the group made a slow and clumsy descent.

  None of the men had seen Amanda since Friday. She’d stayed tucked away in her bedroom, subsisting on liquids and a fistful of sedatives. Her skin was pallid. Her eyes were puffy. Her nightshirt hung off her like a shroud.

  Amanda shambled into the living room and fixed her bleary eyes on Peter. “Just tell me he’s alive.”

  “He was as of Friday.”

  “You’ve known since Friday?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure they had him.” Peter smacked his computer. “Damn this thing. Why isn’t it working?”

  David sprang up. “For God’s sake . . .”

  “What, you fix image throwers now?”

  “I am one.”

  David touched the screen with two fingers, then raised his other hand. The room lit up with a giant projection: a still-frame of a tall and elegant Indian woman.

  Peter nodded uncomfortably at David. “Thank you. Now—”

  “Who’s the chick?” Hannah asked.

  “Rebel’s wife,” David said. “I met her last year. She’s not pleasant.”

  “Her name’s Ivy Sunder,” Peter explained. “She’s more than Rebel’s wife. She’s the other leader of the crusade. I’ve been bitmailing her these past few months, trying to arrange a parley. She didn’t respond until two days ago, when she sent me this spoolie.”

  Theo crossed his arms indignantly. “Amanda’s right. You shouldn’t have kept this from us.”

  “I had good cause. Now, I don’t have time to play the whole thing and I’m not going to stop for questions. Just watch and listen.”

  He tapped his keyboard, unfreezing the playback. The camera followed Ivy as she walked backward down a lavish hallway. Its marble walls were lined with decorations: paintings and sconces, murals and mirrors. From the length of the corridor alone, it seemed the place was a mansion.

  “It breaks my heart that it’s come to this, Peter. When I think about you, all I see is that sweet and skinny kid who used to chase me through the warrens. You were the only one who could ever go portal-for-portal with me. I miss those days.”

  Mia hated herself for finding Ivy attractive. She looked beautiful in her chiffon summer dress, and she spoke with a strong, crisp diction that radiated intelligence. How the hell was she married to a thug like Rebel?

  Ivy stared at her audience with soulful brown eyes. “I hate what you’re doing now. I hate what I’m doing. I think about all the friends I’ve lost, those six poor strangers who died in White Plains. It kills me what we had to do to those breachers. Their faces still haunt me at night.”

  Hannah peeked over her shoulder at the two surviving Golds. While Jonathan glowered at Ivy’s image, Heath dipped his head with shuddering grief.

  “We still don’t believe in your plan to save the world,” Ivy told Peter. “But now we’re starting to wonder if maybe we’ve been wrong ourselves. God knows these breachers keep surprising us. We thought they were all in league with the Pelletiers.”

  She gripped the knob of a mahogany door. “But they’re clearly no friend of Zack Trillinger. And he’s obviously not a fan of them.”

  Hannah sucked a loud gasp as the door opened to reveal Zack. He sat in an office study, his hands cuffed to the arms of a wooden chair. Tall, humming generators flanked him on all sides, suppressing his power with a solic field.

  Zack took a brief, miserable look at the camera before lowering his head. Ivy moved behind him and gripped his shoulders. “He was beaten and half-starved when he found him,” she said to the camera. “He told us who tortured him but he won’t tell us why.”

  Amanda leaned forward, her eyes drenched in tears. Though Zack was dressed in clean clothes and showed no visible signs of abuse, she could clearly see the trauma in his eyes. He was barely holding on to his sanity.

  “The restraints are just a precaution,” Ivy insisted. “As you know, there’s bad blood between him and my husband. But th
e two of them had a good conversation this morning. They hate the Pelletiers more than they hate each other. And they both have a vested interest in seeing the Earth survive.”

  Ivy crouched down to Zack’s level and addressed him in a soft, earnest voice. “If it turns out we were wrong, would you forgive us for our mistakes?”

  Zack closed his eyes and nodded. David could feel every ounce of his humiliation. This was pure theater and Zack knew it. But his life depended on playing along.

  “And if we’re right?” Ivy asked him. “If we offered solid proof that you breachers have to die in order to save this world?”

  Zack raised his head with forced dignity, his hooded eyes fixed on the camera. “Well, then I would, in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, greet the reaper with a smile.”

  Theo’s and Heath’s eyes bulged in synch. “Shit . . .”

  Hannah looked at Theo. “What?”

  Peter shushed them. “Wait.”

  Ivy led the cameraman back into the hallway. “He’s an interesting one, that Trillinger. I don’t believe everything he says, especially about his Earth being egg-shaped, but he has made us question everything we know about the breachers. If it’s true that we have a common enemy, and if it’s true we have a similar goal, then we might be able to work together after all.”

  Peter narrowed his eyes at her. “Here it comes.”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen now, Peter. On Sunday, I’ll text you the address of a meeting location. You’ll have two hours to get there. The elders have already sworn us to an oath of armistice. As long as none of you attack us, we can’t attack you. We’ll return your friend, alive and well, and then we’ll see if we can work out a truce. If not, we’ll part ways peacefully and save our fight for another day.”

  Her expression turned severe. “You can understand why, after all your betrayals, we need to be firm with you, Peter. If you’re late, or if you leave any of the breachers behind, we’ll take that as an act of bad faith. And then we’ll have no choice but to respond. I don’t have to tell you what that means for Zack.”