The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  The command computer for the Absence was currently located in the kitchen, according to Semerjean. David had little reason to doubt his intel. There was, however, an unexpected problem.

  He stood outside the kitchen door, his fingers pressed against tempis. The Gothams had erected a portable barrier, one strong enough to stop an elephant. “It won’t budge. We’re going to need Amanda.”

  Hannah paced the corridor, her eyes darting back and forth in thought. She and Mia were both still distracted from their encounter with Semerjean, and David could hardly blame them. Everything about the man had seemed cosmically surreal, as if a curtain had parted to reveal a secret force of the universe, a backstage helper who was never meant to be seen.

  But that was a concern for another day. The Absence was only getting higher. It was just a matter of time before a crucial system froze and the ship fell to earth like a meteor.

  “Hannah . . .”

  She stopped in her tracks and threw her arms up. “We can’t reach Amanda. The phones are dead.”

  “Then maybe you and Mia should go look for her while I try to find another way in.”

  “No,” said Hannah.

  “No,” said Mia. She snapped out of her daze and eyed David sternly. “We’ve split up enough. Either we all go together or we don’t go at all.”

  David was about to object when the tempic barrier flickered out of existence. A tall man faced him from the other side of the doorway, an unplugged power cord in his hands.

  Hannah rushed over and hugged him. “Jonathan! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I was starting to worry about you guys, though. I couldn’t find anyone.”

  “How’d you get in?” David asked him.

  “Door on the other side was open.”

  Jonathan saw their sullen faces, the bleeding cut on David’s hand. “Okay. What did I miss?”

  “We’ll tell you later,” Hannah said. “We need to find a laptop.”

  “A laptop?”

  While Hannah explained, David glanced around the kitchen and scanned its recent past. The Gothams had been here just minutes ago, at least some of them. He watched Rebel in retrospect as he fired his revolver at a nearby bank of monitors. It was easy to see what he was angry about.

  Mia saw a faint smile bloom on David’s face. “What?”

  “Three of the Gothams are down. One of them fled. And from everything I can tell, Zack’s still alive.”

  Hannah sighed in hot relief. “Oh, thank God.”

  “What about Amanda and Peter?” Jonathan asked.

  David pursed his lips. When Rebel shot the monitor, he shorted out the whole array. Shame. A camera system would have been very useful right now.

  He looked to his right and saw another bullet-cracked screen, a laptop at the far end of the kitchen. “Oh no . . .”

  Hannah followed him to the computer. “Wait. Is that it?”

  David viewed its final minutes in hindsight. “It was.” He pushed the device to the floor. “Damn it! That woman’s lost her mind.”

  “Who?”

  “Ivy,” David said. “She’s on a suicide run and she plans to take us with her.”

  Hannah looked around the kitchen. “There has to be something. An escape pod. I don’t know.”

  Mia turned to Jonathan. “Did you find anything in the manager’s office?”

  He shook a finger at her. “Yeah. I’ve been waiting to talk to you about that. Your future self has a weird sense of humor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jonathan led her to a countertop and showed her the fruits of his search: a fifty-foot cord of nylon rope and a peculiar black device the size of a bread box. The machine was like nothing any of them had ever seen. It had leather straps on one side, as if it was meant to be worn as a backpack. The other side was smooth, white, and utterly featureless.

  Hannah furrowed her brow at the mysterious contraption. “This is the big solution you were talking about?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Mia said defensively. “I’m just the messenger.”

  “But what is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Mia turned it over and found a manufacturer code on the side. “If we had Eaglenet access, I could look it up.”

  David tapped his arm, agitated. “Whatever it is, it won’t help us. We need to locate the others and find a way off the ship.”

  Mia turned her head and did a double-take at a device near Gemma’s workstation. “Huh.”

  “What?” Hannah asked. “You find something?”

  “I’ve seen that thing on the news. Deps use it to jam phone signals.”

  The others followed her gaze to a box on the floor, a portable machine with seven short antennas. A yellow sticker on the top warned people that this signal duffer was for federal law enforcement purposes. Any other use was prohibited by law and punishable by up to two years in prison.

  David squeezed Mia’s arm. “You’re brilliant.”

  He located the duffer’s power switch. The antennas retracted and the device stopped vibrating.

  Mia was the first to check her handphone screen. “Signal’s back!”

  “So’s mine,” Jonathan said. “But it’s weak as shit.”

  Hannah opened her phone and was stunned to see that she had twelve new voice mails, all from the same unidentified caller. She played the newest message.

  “Goddamn it . . . nah. Call me . . . is number as soon as you . . . this. You’re running out . . . time!”

  “Who is that?” Mia asked her.

  Though the connection was faint and cracking with static, Hannah easily recognized Theo’s voice. She pressed the callback button and listened intently. It only rang for a second before he picked up. “Jesus! Finally!”

  “Theo! Are you okay?”

  “Holy . . . it! I’ve been . . . to reach you forever!”

  Hannah covered her free ear, struggling to understand him. In addition to the connection issues, his voice was curiously muffled, as if he was speaking through a mask.

  “I can barely hear you,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Right . . . side.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m right outside!”

  Baffled, Hannah looked through the kitchen door, across the hall, and out the window of an employee lounge. A small black object briefly dotted the sky before fluttering out of view.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  The others followed Hannah as she hurried into the lounge. Now they could all see it: a sleek black aerovan thirty yards in the distance. It rose in jittery tandem with the Absence. The wind knocked it around hard enough to make Mia queasy.

  Hannah stared at the vehicle, stupefied. It seemed completely insane, yet entirely appropriate, that Theo had found his way up here. Today was Easter Sunday, a day for saviors to rise.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Jonathan squinted at the shadowy figures inside. “Is that Heath?”

  “Is Heath with you?”

  “Heath’s with me,” Theo said. “He’s fine. You’re the ones . . . trouble.”

  Mia pressed against the glass and took a closer look at Theo’s ride. She could see two silhouettes in the front seat and one in the middle row. “Who’s flying that thing?”

  “No idea.” Hannah spoke into the phone again. “Theo—”

  “I’ll explain every . . . later! We have to get you out of there!”

  David suddenly caught a glimpse of the driver’s silhouette, a slender woman with dreadlocked hair. “You’re kidding me.”

  “What?” Jonathan asked.

  “That’s Melissa Masaad.”

  “Who?”

  Hannah’s mouth dropped open. “Theo, is that Melissa?”

  Theo traded an uneasy loo
k with the driver, his newfound partner-in-crime. Even if he had the time to explain their new arrangement, he didn’t have the words for it.

  “Just trust me,” he said. “She’s on our side.”

  NINETEEN

  She’d been half-asleep in a Seattle hotel room when Cedric Cain called her. Melissa sat up in bed, still fully clothed in her lavender pantsuit and surrounded by notes from her latest investigation. She scanned the bright dawn sky through the crack in the curtains, then switched her phone to her other ear.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “They’re alive,” Cain repeated. “The orphans are still alive.”

  Melissa had decided some time ago to coin a universal term for her extraordinary case subjects. “Transdimensional chronokinetics” was a boulder on the tongue, and she refused to call them “freaks” like Gingold did. She’d hoped to make “orphans” the standard agency nomenclature, but only Cain indulged her. To the rest of Integrity, they were benders, mutants, chronnies, blights. Some had even taken to calling them “deadsetters,” which especially irked her. It was a racially charged term from the Cataclysm era, a catch-all word for unwelcome immigrants.

  In her groggy state, Melissa assumed Cain was talking about the latest group of orphans: the seven fugitives who’d been wreaking havoc in the Pacific Northwest. Melissa had been chasing them for weeks, so why would Cain call to tell her that they were . . .

  “Alive.” She launched up from the bed, spilling a dozen loose papers to the floor. “You mean my orphans. The original six.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know? Where are they?”

  “Brooklyn,” Cain told her. “Gingold found them. He’s just a few hours away from taking them down. If you hurry—”

  Melissa threw on her shoes, raced her Sparrow to the aerport, and used her badge to grab a seat on the next dart to Idlewild. She crossed the country in a transonic blur, her knees bouncing, her eyes dancing in rumination. She knew something wasn’t right about those corpses in the movie theater, and Gingold had been excessively cagey these past few weeks. But why did he cut Melissa out of the loop? Did he know what she was planning?

  Cain arranged to have an aerovan waiting for her in New York: a black, nine-seat Griffin that had been specially tailored for government use. The shifter could accelerate to twice the legal limit, while a transponder emitted an electronic warning to all policemen in range: Integrity business. Do not pursue.

  The rocket path that Melissa flew to Brooklyn would have earned anyone else a night in jail. She still didn’t get there in time.

  “They split up,” Cain told her, a mere thirty seconds before she arrived at the siege site. “Most of them fled north in a lime-green Peregrine.”

  “Who stayed behind?”

  “It’s too late to save them. Focus on the others.”

  “Who stayed behind?”

  Cain sighed in her earpiece. “Theo Maranan and some boy they can’t identify. But listen—”

  “See if there are other vehicles registered to the owner of that Peregrine.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m intercepting Theo before he gets to his escape car.”

  “Escape car? Melissa, he’s surrounded. He’s not getting out of there.”

  “He’ll get out.”

  “How do you know?”

  Melissa looked out her window just in time to see Gingold and his soldiers advancing on the brownstone. “Because I know Theo.”

  Six minutes later, she greeted him in a SmartFeast parking lot, her pistol pressed firmly against his back. It was lucky for her that Heath was still reeling from the agency’s solic wasp. She’d gotten a bird’s-eye view of his paranormal talent. The last thing she needed was a tempic animal in her face.

  Helpless, Heath shook his head in the back of the Peregrine. “No no no no . . .”

  “Calm your friend,” Melissa told Theo. “For his sake and yours.”

  Theo raised a palm at Heath, then looked at Melissa’s reflection in the van window. “Let him go. He’s just a neighbor’s kid.”

  “Oh? So it was you who made those wolves and elephants?”

  “I’m telling you, he’s not one of us.”

  “Then why does he have a Pelletier bracelet on his wrist?”

  Theo gaped at her, confounded. “How do you know about those?”

  “You know it wounds me, Theo, that the first thing out of your mouth is a lie.”

  “You have a gun in my back. You’re expecting courtesy?”

  “I’m expecting foresight.” She eyed his reflection with wonder. “You don’t see what’s coming, do you?”

  “You mean the part where scientists cut up my corpse?”

  “That already happened. I’m talking about your future.”

  “And what is my future?”

  Melissa leaned in close, smiling. She’d been mourning Theo and his people for months now, tormenting herself with notions of what might have been. Now, through some unholy magic she had yet to understand, they were back. Their second coming gave her a second chance to make everything right.

  “I am,” she said. “I’m the only future you have.”

  —

  For Theo, the only thing crazier than fleeing the house in a herd of tempic elephants was escaping the government in a government vehicle. He and Heath crouched on the floor of the Griffin until they were five miles away from the battle zone.

  Theo leaned forward in the middle row and took a good hard look at Melissa. Though she was just as lovely as he remembered, there was something off about her. Her pantsuit was wrinkled, as if she had slept in it. She looked nervous in a way Theo hadn’t seen before. Had she really turned against the U.S. government, or was this whole “rescue” just a complicated con job?

  As the Griffin sailed into Manhattan through the Lower East Side, flying high to avoid traffic cameras, Melissa peeked at Heath through the rearview mirror. “Since Theo hasn’t seen fit to introduce us, my name’s Melissa Masaad. What’s yours?”

  Heath only gave her the briefest of glances before looking out the window. His left hand rocked back and forth, as if he was shaking an invisible drink.

  “Is he . . . all right?” She asked Theo.

  “No, he’s not all right. Your people nearly killed him.”

  “They’re not my people.”

  “Bullshit. We know you’re with Integrity now.”

  “Doesn’t mean I share their cause. Who told you that, anyway?”

  “David. He saw you in that movie theater. You and those armored goons.”

  “Funny. I saw him too. He was dead, just like the rest of you. Care to explain that one?”

  Theo sank in his seat with a look of bitter gloom. “That wasn’t us.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, I mean it wasn’t our trick. I’m pretty sure the Pelletiers did it.”

  Melissa sighed out her window. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  As she flew them over the high-rises of Gramercy, Theo looked down and saw dozens of people enjoying a Sunday barbecue on a rooftop. A pair of teenage boys stood at the railing, laughing as they raced remote control saucers through a series of floating hoops.

  That’s what Heath should be doing, Theo lamented. That’s the life he should be living.

  He frowned at Melissa. “Last time I saw you, you warned me about Integrity. Kept saying how awful they were.”

  “I said lawless, not awful. Though some of them are truly foul.”

  “So why are you working with them?”

  “A smarter man might notice that I’m currently working against them.”

  “Why?”

  “Answer my question first.”

  “Which one?”

  Melissa jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Who is
he?”

  Theo stared out his window for a few quiet seconds before answering. “His name’s Heath.”

  “And I take it he’s—”

  “Yes,” Theo said. “He’s from my world.”

  Melissa took another look at the boy. “Hello, Heath. On behalf of the United States government, I sincerely apologize for your ordeal today. What those men did was inexcusable. In a perfect world, they’d be brought up on charges.”

  Heath stared down at his hands. Melissa heard him mutter something about a broken guitar.

  Two states away, Cain watched her through a bubble cam lens in the dashboard. “Careful. The solis must have worn off by now. You might want to, uh . . .”

  Melissa subtly shook her head at the camera. She had a stun chaser in her pocket. She wouldn’t use it unless she absolutely had to.

  The Griffin broke out of the Manhattan skyline and flew a northern path up the Hudson. “Where are we going?” Theo asked.

  “You tell me.”

  “What?”

  “We’re ten miles behind your friends,” she informed him. “A squadron of gunships are following them. If you have any information—”

  “I don’t,” Theo said. “Peter never, uh . . . he didn’t give me an address.”

  Melissa saw his bewildered distraction. “You all right?”

  The fog in his foresight was finally starting to clear. Through the lingering haze, he saw a black metal saucer hanging vertically in the air, like an eclipse. Smoke billowed out of its broken windows. It was plummeting toward the earth—or at least it would be.

  “We can save them,” Melissa told Theo. “But you have to trust me.”

  “I’m trying. I am. I just . . . you’re committing treason for a bunch of people you barely even know. You seem like the last person on Earth who’d do that.”

  Melissa stared out the windshield, her fingers tapping against the steering wheel. “When Amanda was in my custody, she was convinced that the government would kill and dissect her. I assured her it wouldn’t. Every human being in this nation has rights, even if they’re from another Earth, even if they shoot tempis from their hands.”