The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Gemma shook her head, baffled. “That’s not the way it happened. That’s not what I saw.”

  “Just use the damn turrets already,” Bug urged his sister. “The Pelletiers obviously aren’t coming!”

  Ivy grabbed Rebel by the shoulders, her eyes wide and frantic. “He’s wrong, Richard. They’re here. They’re already here and they’re toying with us. All of them!”

  “Honey—”

  She looked up at the ceiling, hang-jawed. “All of them.”

  “Ivy, wait.”

  She lunged into a portal and emerged two floors above, in a glass-domed terrace that could comfortably seat fifty. In better times, the place had been a scenic dining deck. Now every inch of window was covered by wooden panels. The main light in the room came from six floor lamps around the perimeter. A quartet of solic generators added a sickly blue glow to the center.

  Mink Rosen flinched at Ivy’s sudden entrance. He rose up from his chair and waved his hand. Radiant blue letters materialized in front of his chest.

  WHAT’S HAPPENING? ARE THEY DEAD?

  Ivy brushed past him, her eyes fixed on their prisoner. Zack sat on a folding chair between the solic generators, his hands shackled to the floor by long metal chains.

  “This was a setup!” Ivy yelled. “You’ve been working with them all along!”

  Zack stared at her, speechless. He’d been a hostage of the Gothams for two and a half days, an experience that served as a polar contrast to his time with the Pelletiers. Here, the seconds moved with fast-ticking fury. He rarely had a moment alone to think. His body churned with needs and discomforts, and he didn’t have to worry about silly things like eternity. From the way the winds were blowing, he figured the rest of his life could be measured in minutes.

  He forced an insolent sneer at Ivy, his lip still swollen from her last tantrum. Just as he’d learned that it was Azral, not Esis, who was the archvillain of the Pelletiers, it was Ivy, not Rebel, who was the true fanatic of the Gothams.

  “‘Working with them . . .’” Zack repeated. “If you mean who I think you mean—”

  “You know exactly who I mean.”

  “Jesus.” He let out a jagged laugh. “You get crazier by the hour.”

  Mercy Lee winced from the back of the room. She didn’t have to be an augur to know that Zack was in for another fat lip. The only mystery was why he insisted on provoking an unhinged woman.

  Ivy grabbed his collar. “Don’t play games with me. Why did they send you to us? What are they planning?”

  “I know therapy may seem like a big step, but with the right doctor—”

  She slapped him across the face, then crouched at his side. “We only kept you alive to give the augur hope, but Theo’s not here. Peter brought the baby traveler but he didn’t bring the augur. Does that make sense to you?”

  Try as he might, Zack couldn’t hide his anguish. He’d guessed from all the Gothams’ chatter that his friends had come to save him. They had no idea what they were walking into.

  Ivy pulled her .22 pistol from her belt and ran the barrel down Zack’s cheek. “I won’t lie, Trillinger. There’s nothing you can say that’ll stop me from killing you. But if you tell me what Azral’s planning—”

  “I don’t know what he’s planning!”

  “—I can end you quickly. Painlessly. I’ll even extend the courtesy to your friends.”

  Zack dipped his head, scowling. “You won’t. You’re just as bad as them.”

  “As bad as your friends?”

  “As bad as the Pelletiers!”

  Mercy palmed her face. “For God’s sake, Trillinger.”

  The elevator door opened. The eighth and final member of Rebel’s team stepped onto the terrace. All Zack could see was his scrawny frame, his messy mop of sandy brown hair. He was a teenager, a stranger to Zack. So then why did he look familiar?

  Ivy lowered her pistol. Her expression became soft again. “Honey, what are you doing? I told you to stay downstairs.”

  Unlike the others, the kid wasn’t fully armored. He wore a tactical vest over a T-shirt and jeans. As he moved in closer, Zack noticed his gloves—long and thin and colored to match his skin tone. The kid clearly wasn’t wearing them for protection. He was hiding something.

  He jerked a nervous shrug. “I heard shouting. I just wanted to help.”

  “You will, Liam. I promise.”

  “Liam,” Zack echoed. “Shit. Now I know where I’ve seen you. Your dad carries a photo of you in his wallet.”

  Liam Pendergen crossed in front of him, livid. Now that he was fully lit, Zack could see his resemblance to Peter. They had the same wide nose, the same sharp blue eyes. But where Peter’s face was all hard lines and angles, Liam’s features were soft and angelic. Only the rage in his eyes belied his innocence.

  “He’s not my dad. He stopped being that the minute he turned traitor.”

  Zack shook his head. “Liam, listen to me. You don’t know the whole—”

  “Save your breath,” Ivy said. “He’s too smart for your lies.”

  She looked to Mercy. “Take him downstairs. Keep him safe.”

  Mercy took Liam by the arm and walked him to the elevator. “Come on, kid.”

  They disappeared into the elevator together. Zack glared at Ivy. “You poisoned him against Peter.”

  “Peter poisoned him against Peter. He abandoned his one and only son for a group of alien strangers. How would you feel?”

  “You know damn well why he did it.”

  “Oh, I know all about his delusions.”

  Zack laughed. “His delusions?”

  “All this time, and you still think you’re the good guys.”

  “Compared to you, we’re the goddamn Justice League.”

  Ivy pressed the gun against his face, grinding his teeth through his cheek. “Stop lying and tell me what Azral and Esis are up to.” She cocked her pistol. “You’re a visual man. Try to imagine what will happen if you shoot your mouth off again.”

  Zack’s heart hammered. “I don’t know what they’re planning!”

  “Yes you do!”

  “I hate them as much as you do!”

  “Really? Did they kill your children? Did they murder your babies in the womb?”

  “Ivy.”

  She turned around and saw Rebel at the top of the stairwell. She stumbled toward him. “We have no reason to keep him alive!”

  “Yes we do.” Rebel approached her and pulled her into his arms. “He’s got one more role to play. Just stick to the plan.”

  Ivy buried her face in his shoulder. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “Yes, you can. You’re the strongest person I know. Don’t lose hope, angel. This is it.”

  Rebel pressed his forehead to hers, his voice choked with emotion. “This is the day we save everyone.”

  Zack swallowed a scream, torn between his disgust and his pity for these sad fools. He could remember a time, a thousand years ago, when he hugged Amanda in the basement of a Brooklyn brownstone and assured her in similar fashion that everything would be okay. What an idiot he’d been. What a bunch of suckers they all were—the Gothams, the breachers, all the hapless little victims of the Pelletiers. They were all going to war here in Atropos, while the real villains watched them and smiled.

  FOURTEEN

  The center of the concourse was a veritable oasis, a half-acre clearing in the Gothams’ wooden jungle. Sunlight gleamed off a dry stone fountain while long metal benches provided enough seats for dozens. A freestanding partition ran the length of the area, ten inches thick and made entirely of glass. In days of old, before its lumic components were stripped, the wall had served as a giant display board, parading all the day’s flight information between hotel ads and public service announcements.

  Peter glanced around at the many seats
and suggested that everyone take a breather. Amanda looked at him like he’d just proposed an orgy.

  “Are you crazy? We have to keep going.”

  “We will,” Peter promised. He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Just give the boy a minute.”

  David paced in front of the old display, his fingers tapping his wristwatch. If he was traumatized from having a huge chunk of glass fall through him, it didn’t show on his face. But then Amanda knew from hard experience that the David you saw wasn’t always the David you got. He could have been dancing on the edge of a nervous breakdown and none of his friends would know.

  Amanda acquiesced to Peter, then puttered anxiously by the fountain. She tied her hair back, wiped the sweat from her face, ate half a granola bar just to get something in her stomach. It wasn’t until she took a swig from her water bottle that she noticed a patch of stress tempis on her arm. She wished it away, only to feel another one emerge on the small of her back.

  You can’t hold it in anymore, said the Zack in her head. It wants to get out and hurt all the people who are hurting me.

  Amanda’s face tightened. She closed her eyes and prayed for God to give her strength.

  He already did, Zack reminded her. You have enough power in your hands to tear those Gothams down. You’re not a bomb. You’re a bazooka.

  Mia looked across the fountain and saw her fidgety discomfort. “Are you okay?”

  So point your fingers in the right direction.

  “Amanda?”

  And fire.

  The tempis on her back vanished. Her hands balled into fists. Amanda looked to the wooden maze ahead of her, then extended her arms forward.

  “Enough of this bullshit.”

  Peter eyed her worriedly. “Wait. What are you doing?”

  “We are getting him—”

  “Amanda . . .”

  “—back!”

  Her hands bloomed open. The tempis shot out of her palms with geyser force, two huge white serpents that barreled their way through the concourse. Plywood shattered. Benches broke off their bolted feet. The skeletal corpse of a hamburger stand was rendered to twisted metal bits.

  Amanda’s friends watched her from behind, their eyes wide and unblinking. Her command of tempis, like her command of words, had a tendency to collapse whenever she got upset. Her outbursts had broken walls, injured loved ones, even made national news.

  But she was in full control of her power now. She could feel every molecule of her tempis working in concert with her thoughts, and it was . . . incredible, as if she’d become a being of pure force. As if the Earth, the moon, and the heavens above all trembled at the might of her righteous fury. I will suffer no more from you, Amanda said to the universe. And the universe meekly apologized.

  At a hundred feet, the tendrils stopped growing. Amanda waved her hands apart like Moses at the water’s edge, toppling three-story scaffolds like they were made of breadsticks.

  Jonathan stepped forward and gawked at the devastation. “Holy . . .”

  By the time Amanda finished, the eastern half of the concourse had been reduced to wood shards and dust clouds. Winded, she retracted her tempis and rejoined the group, her defiant gaze locked onto Peter’s.

  “Path cleared.”

  “That it is,” Peter said. “And if they’d put Zack in that tangle of wood—”

  “They didn’t.”

  “—we’d have a nice, clear path to his corpse.”

  “They didn’t,” Amanda stressed. “I felt every inch of that place. There wasn’t—”

  “There it is!” yelled Mia.

  She pointed to the far end of the concourse, where the dust clouds had parted to reveal a large, wooden construct.

  Mia’s future self had been clear about their final destination:

  Zack’s being held in a boarded-up restaurant. You can’t miss it. It’s way over on the sunny side and it’s ugly as hell.

  She wasn’t kidding. Planks were nailed together at messy angles. Loose corners jutted out like cowlicks. The Gothams had enclosed every inch of the structure, with no care at all for aesthetics.

  Mia tilted her head at their curious work. “Why would they go through all that trouble just to hide a restaurant?”

  “Could be a trick,” David said.

  Peter shook his head. “They’re in there.” He turned to Jonathan. “Go get Hannah.”

  She stood by the restrooms, her body shifted at 20x, her eyes on alert for other falling pieces of Atropos. Jonathan waved his hand in front of her to get her attention.

  Hannah fell back to normal speed and blinked at him. “What? What’s going on?”

  “You missed it,” said Jonathan.

  “Missed what?”

  “Hurricane Amanda.”

  She turned around and gawked at the sea of splintered wood. “Oh my God.”

  Amanda wrung her hands, mortified. Her sister was the only one who knew her before the tempis, when she was just a noodle-armed nurse who could barely open a pickle jar. It was Hannah’s look more than anything that convinced her of Peter’s point. She had been reckless. The Gothams could have easily put Zack in her path of destruction.

  Hannah crossed the space between them and held Amanda’s arm. “Hey . . .”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not okay. Your hands are shaking. You’re barely—”

  “Wait.”

  Amanda looked back the way they had come and felt a sharp twinge in her senses. There was a whole lot of tempis moving toward them from the aerport’s main entrance. She could detect at least thirty different shapes, like hollowed-out people.

  Her face went slack. “Oh, no . . .”

  “What?”

  Gemma Sunder listened through the surveillance mics, then switched the view on Monitor 5. Now she could see what Amanda was feeling.

  “Shit. We’ve got company.”

  “Who?” Jinn asked. “Pelletiers?”

  “No.”

  Rebel and Ivy looked over Gemma’s shoulder as she magnified the picture on-screen. Sleek white figures marched double-file down the escalator—thirty men in tempic armor, their rifle barrels lit with flashlight beams.

  At long last, Integrity had come to Atropos.

  —

  They’d touched down on the parking lot in a caravan of dropships: thirty-eight soldiers, sixteen pilots, twelve telemetry analysts, four temporal physicists, two reversal medics, and a clergyman. At the helm of the operation was a forty-year veteran of the agency, a silver-haired giant named Noah Butterfield.

  He stepped out of the command shuttle in his black metal armor, fifty-four pounds of pure American osplate. It was six times heavier than the standard agency tempic suits, but then osplate didn’t flicker when the battery got damaged. Besides, the tempic gear was too constricting for a man like Butterfield, who stood six-foot-eight and weighed 320 pounds. Even Rebel would have looked wispy standing next to him. He could have fit Gemma inside one of his arms.

  He walked between the dropships, his head nodding patiently at the voice in his earpiece.

  “Use the wasps first,” Gingold told him. “And don’t take anything for granted. They’ve got new blood in their group. Even the children are dangerous.”

  Butterfield wound his finger, waiting for him to finish. He wasn’t a fan of that glass-eyed dandy and was glad as hell that he wasn’t here. Who was Gingold to be giving pointers, anyway? He’d botched up everything in Brooklyn. Got his arm chewed up by a tempic wolf while his targets ran away on elephants. He was still out there searching for Maranan and the boy.

  “Good advice,” Butterfield lied. “Don’t you fret, Oren. We got all our shoes tied here.”

  “Whatever you do—”

  “Take care of that arm now.”

  Butterfield terminated the
connection, then took a smiling look at Atropos. The fugitives couldn’t have picked a better place for a takedown. The aerport was free of civilians, its roof was made of glass, and the whole place was surrounded by an open sea of concrete. There was nowhere to run outside and nowhere to hide inside.

  And things were about to get very unpleasant inside.

  While a fleet of remote-controlled aercraft moved into position above the complex, Butterfield tossed a nod at the clergyman on his team, a minister of the First American Baptist Church. All the agents in the parking lot bowed their heads respectfully as he spoke a blessing for the good men and women of the National Integrity Commission. Though the prayer wasn’t standard procedure, Butterfield insisted on it and nobody dared complain. He wasn’t just a big man in the agency, he was the biggest goddamn Baptist any of them had ever seen.

  The minister finished. Butterfield thanked him, then turned to his chief weaponeer. “Drop ’em.”

  The Silvers barely had a chance to register the new shadows on the floor before sixteen drones came crashing through the ceiling. Five of them resembled crude metal wasps. The others looked like kite-size jet fighters.

  Glass once again rained down on the concourse. Hannah saw the falling shards, then wrapped her arms around her sister.

  “Amanda!”

  The Gothams watched on the monitor as Amanda cast a protective dome around her people. Her tempis grew so fast that Rebel could only guess that Hannah had shifted her. Smart woman, he thought. The bubble was barely finished before two halves of a broken ceiling pane came crashing down on top of it.

  Bug studied the drones on Monitor 1 and let out a shaky laugh. “Well, hell. This just got easy.”

  He looked around and saw that no one else shared his optimism. “What? It doesn’t matter who kills them as long as they’re dead, right?”

  Gemma scowled at him. “We told you, Daddy.”

  “Told me what?”

  Ivy closed her eyes in sorrow. The swifters of the clan rarely lived past fifty, and her brother was already starting to show the first signs of mental degradation. She gave him two more years of time-shifting before he barely remembered his name.