The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “I’ll still have the audio recording,” Melissa reminded him. “And a fair bit of camera footage.”

  “You’re a little bit crazy. You know that, right?”

  She gave him a glum shrug. “It’s a delicate game I’m playing, Theo. I believe Integrity can become a powerful ally to you and your friends, but not in its current state.”

  Melissa looked to the smoking remains of an agency dropship. “The situation will get worse before it gets better, so stay safe. Stay hidden.”

  Theo gripped her arm. “Just look out for yourself. Please.”

  Hannah watched them through the van’s broken windows. She knew enough about Theo’s body language to know that he was smitten. Jesus, she thought. He really does love a challenge.

  Soon Theo and Melissa rejoined the others. Zack cleared a ten-foot space around her.

  “I don’t like doing this,” he said. “If it goes wrong . . .”

  She grinned at him. “You’re a good man to worry but I assure you that reversal’s quite safe on healthy people.” Her humor quickly faded. “Just don’t overdo it. I’d rather not relive puberty.”

  “I’m only setting you back six hours.”

  “That’ll work,” she said.

  Amanda looked at her, guiltily. “We won’t forget what you did for us.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” Melissa joked. “In any case, I’m glad you’re all—” Her eyes went wide in sudden recollection. “Wait!”

  Zack stopped his preparations. The others looked at Melissa in puzzlement.

  “There are seven people at large in the Seattle area,” she told them. “Chronokinetics, just like you. They destroyed an abandoned church back in March. One of them recently killed a civilian with her tempis.”

  Mia rose to her feet, fascinated. “Wait. That mini-Cataclysm that was all over the news . . .”

  “That was them,” Melissa said. “I’ve been chasing them for weeks. They’re very elusive. All I’ve managed to capture of them is a hazy ghost image. They each wear a bracelet that closely resembles Heath’s, except not gold. Their bands look more like brass. Or copper.”

  Zack was flabbergasted by her news. She wasn’t kidding when she said the orphans were coming out of the woodwork. “Why are you telling us this?”

  “Because despite their crimes, I suspect they’re good people in a bad situation, much like you. It’s in their best interest that you find them before Integrity does.”

  “That’s . . . incredibly decent of you,” David said.

  “We still have a lot to learn about each other. Maybe someday we’ll get the chance.”

  Sirens blared in the distance. Melissa turned to Zack. “You better get on with it.”

  Zack steeled himself with a breath, then engulfed her in a sheath of bright white temporis. Melissa’s eyes rolled back. Her muscles froze. Her hair and clothes rippled. By the time the process finished, her pantsuit was clean and the bruises on her neck had vanished.

  Melissa teetered on her feet, dazed and disoriented. Amanda caught her before she could collapse. She kneeled on the ground beside her and checked her vital signs.

  “She’s all right.”

  Theo whispered at his hand, into the wafer-thin transmitter that Melissa had given him.

  “You keep her safe now, Cedric. I’ll be watching you.”

  He threw the device to the concrete and crushed it under his shoe.

  A piercing squeal filled Cain’s earphones. Grimacing, he pulled them off his head. It took him ten long seconds to realize that Melissa had never told Theo his name.

  All around the aerport, the sirens grew louder. Peter drew one last portal in the wall before tossing a nod at Heath. “Uh, son, if you don’t mind . . .”

  Heath conjured another tempic gorilla and sent it to retrieve Rebel from the van. Even Jonathan was thrown by the sight of it. “Apes? When the hell did you start making apes?”

  Hannah took his arm. “Come on.”

  Two by two, the survivors moved toward the portal—six Silvers, two Golds, two Pendergens, and their prisoner-of-war, the only man who could put an end to the Gothams’ bloody conflict.

  This, Peter knew, would be the hardest part.

  As the last of his people disappeared through the portal, Peter stopped at the edge and took a final look at the wreckage. He drew a deep breath, stepped into the breach, and then left Atropos behind by miles.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  At the northern edge of New Jersey, in the genteel suburb of Old Tappan, a cylindrical tower loomed hundreds of feet above its neighbors. It was a frequent source of scorn among the locals, a bubbly glass eyesore that stuck out from the landscape like a giant cob of corn.

  It was famously known as the Aerie.

  The building debuted at the peak of America’s antigravity craze, the nation’s first and only aerial apartment complex. Beyond the space-age premise of modular flying housepods, the Aerie promised unprecedented freedom for its residents. Tired of your view? Trade docks with a neighbor. Tired of your neighbor? Pick up your apartment and move to another side of the building.

  Though its developers billed the Aerie as the future of American living, its tenants quickly learned the downsides of their new mobile lifestyle. A liftplate hiccup broke half the windows in one unit. A woman nearly drowned after a piloting error sent her apartment into Lake Tappan. Two neighbors came to blows in the wake of a fender-bender home collision. The final straw broke when hooligans made off with the building owner’s penthouse. It was recovered in Hackensack, freed of all valuables and soiled in unmentionable ways.

  One year after its christening, the hundred and sixty-two housepods were fused to the framework, never to fly again. Today the Aerie was just another static high-rise, though the developers continued to tout its futuristic design and modular plumbing system.

  Peter didn’t care about any of that. He only came to the Aerie for its easy cash leases. He’d secured a twelfth-floor unit six months ago under the name Lance Percival, then kept it as an emergency backup residence. Of course, if he’d known he’d be housing eleven people, he would have sprung for something larger than a one-level, three-bedroom box unit.

  “It’s only temporary,” he assured his companions. “A few days at the most.”

  Mia woke up at dawn on the floor of a closet, the only space in the apartment she could rightfully claim for herself. She didn’t want anyone else to suffer the near-constant glow of her sleep portals. More than that, she just wanted a place of her own to be miserable. Like everyone else, she was still recovering from the ordeal at Atropos. Between her altitude sickness and her thundering head cold, her body felt like it was hanging upside-down in a moving meat truck.

  Groaning, Mia switched on the closet light and studied her latest sleep notes: a hundred and twelve paper scraps, all rolled into sticks and delivered by portal. She didn’t have the strength to clean them up at the moment. That would have to be a job for her future self.

  She stepped out of the closet and walked a sleepy path toward the bathroom. The door was closed, but someone was talking in there. Mia pressed her ear to the wood and heard Hannah embroiled in a tense conversation.

  “—just worried we’re making the same mistake as Zack and Amanda.”

  “Says who?” Jonathan argued. “Did anyone ever warn you about entwining with me?”

  “No.”

  “And wasn’t it an augur who brought us together?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Okay then. So if the Pelletiers aren’t bitching about us, and if this Ioni woman thinks we have a future together, then what the hell are we talking about?”

  Good point, Mia conceded.

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said. “When you fell out of that ship yesterday, my heart just—”

  Mia pulled away from the door, embarrassed. She s
houldn’t have been eavesdropping on them. She knew how the conversation would end, anyway. More kisses. More groping. At least someone in this apartment was having a good time.

  A door creaked open. David shambled into the hallway, looking worse than Mia had ever seen him. His hair was limp. His eyes were puffy. He moved like a man five times his age. His body clearly didn’t enjoy his four-mile skydive. It was a wonder he was still in one piece.

  David blew his nose into a tissue and read Mia’s expression. “That bad, huh?”

  “You look fine.”

  “I feel wretched.”

  “Serves you right for the stunt you pulled. What the hell were you thinking?”

  David shrugged and sniffled. “Liam fell. Someone had to save him.”

  Mia’s heartbeat doubled, and she once again found herself in a fluttering state of awe. David was just three months shy of seventeen, and he was already a superhero. She didn’t think his parents made him that way, or even fate. At some point, he simply chose to be the incredible person that he was.

  David backstepped at her approach. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

  “I’m already sick.”

  She took his hand and studied the scabrous wound on the back of it, the one-inch gash that Semerjean had inflicted. “God.”

  “It’s all right. Could have been worse.”

  “Yeah. He could have killed you. You should have never talked back to him.” She dropped his hand with a stern expression. “One of these days, your bravery’s gonna backfire on you.”

  “Look—”

  “I just hope you think twice next time, because there are people on this world who love you and need you.”

  “Mia . . .”

  “I love you.”

  Mia sucked a sharp breath, as if she’d suddenly become naked, as if she’d leapt through a portal into a strange and dangerous realm. Her immediate instinct was to backtrack, to insist that she didn’t mean it like that. Of course I didn’t. Don’t be silly.

  But after a hard day at Atropos, in which the universe once again went out of its way to remind her that life was short, Mia was out of excuses. She was out of anxieties, out of time, out of patience with the status quo. And she couldn’t forget the way that Hannah had kissed Jonathan. She’d thrown herself at him while they were a mile in the sky. And he caught her.

  As her stomach lurched and blood rushed furiously in her ears, Mia closed her eyes. She drew a deep breath. And then she jumped.

  “I love you,” she echoed, her voice barely a whisper. “I’m in love with you.”

  In an instant, time seemed to come to a skidding halt. Mia had minutes, hours, days to analyze David’s reaction. She watched his brow curl in painful slow motion, saw the corners of his lips twist with a tectonic grind. His expression was going the wrong way. Everything was going the wrong way.

  She looked down at her trembling fingers. “It’s okay. You don’t . . . you don’t . . .”

  “Mia . . .”

  “You don’t have to say it back.”

  David held her by the shoulders. “Mia, look at me.”

  She could only manage a half second of eye contact. The look on his face—solemn, pitying—made her want to run back to her closet and lock the door forever.

  “We can’t be together,” he told her. “Not in that way.”

  “I’m only two years younger than you.”

  “It’s not about age.”

  “I know I’m not pretty—”

  “Of course you are. That’s not even remotely the issue.”

  “Then why?”

  “You know why.”

  She could hear the impatience in his voice now, enough to make her wonder. All this time, she thought he’d been oblivious to her feelings. But what if he’d known all along?

  “The Pelletiers don’t want us together,” David said. “Any of us. Zack and Amanda didn’t listen and they paid the price. Jonathan and Hannah aren’t listening, and they’ll pay the price. If I thought I could dissuade them—”

  Mia shook her head. “Bullshit.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “I think you’re wrong. More than that, I think you’re using the whole Pelletier thing as an excuse. If you don’t feel that way about me, just tell me. Say the words.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to know!”

  David looked away, exasperated. It suddenly dawned on Mia, with no pleasant amount of irony, that Hannah and Jonathan were probably eavesdropping on her from the bathroom.

  “We shouldn’t have had this conversation,” David grumbled. “She should have told you the truth a long time ago.”

  “Who?”

  “Your future self.”

  A bedroom door creaked open a few inches, but no one stepped outside. Mia could only guess that Amanda was awake. The door was her gentle way of warning Mia that everyone could hear them. Everyone.

  Mia rushed back into her closet refuge and slammed the door behind her. Her bare feet crunched over dozens of notes, all the latest words and “wisdom” of the Future Mias.

  She opened her bookbag, ripped a scrap of paper from her journal, and then began writing a message of her own.

  It’s never going to happen with you and David. Nobody ever told me, so I’m telling you now. He doesn’t feel that way about you. He never did.

  By the time Mia finished, her face was drenched in tears. She opened a half-inch portal to December of last year, then hesitated. Why save a younger Mia from this horrible pain she was feeling? The stupid girl deserved every bit of it. The signs had been there all along. She was just too stupid to see them.

  Mia closed the portal with a brusque hand gesture, then crumpled up her note. To hell with her other selves. Let them all learn the hard way. Let them all suffer.

  —

  The living room was a twenty-foot box at the front of the apartment, all slate and bare plaster. Peter had only done a minimal amount of furnishing, with no decoration whatsoever. The only thing that saved the room from dreariness was the panoramic window on the north side. Sadly, Peter insisted on keeping the blinds closed at all hours, just in case Integrity got lucky with their camera drones.

  Nestled among the folding seats and inflatable sofas was a squeaky metal wheelchair. Bicycle chains held Rebel to the frame, though he was hardly a threat with his injuries. Amanda had gone through four medkits trying to treat the damage that she herself had inflicted, for all the good it did. Rebel’s abdomen was rock hard and purple, which suggested internal bleeding.

  Theo’s prognosis was even less encouraging. “He’ll be dead before sunrise.”

  He’d followed Peter into the kitchen, speaking in a mutter while they dumped bowl fragments into the trasher. Rebel wasn’t keen to be spoon-fed by anyone, least of all Peter. He’d bucked at just the right moment to send corn chowder everywhere.

  “How sure are you?” he asked Theo.

  “It’s the only future I see.”

  Peter closed the trasher, scowling. “Then he sees it, too.”

  Rebel hadn’t been coy about his desire to die. He resisted all nourishment, thrashed violently in his chair to aggravate his wounds. He provoked Zack and Jonathan, his two most vocal enemies, in the hope that one of them would snap. He didn’t care if he was rifted or dropped as long as it did the job.

  “We’re running out of time,” Theo said. “Look, I talked to Zack. He’s willing to heal him.”

  Peter shook his head. “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if we reverse Rebel, he’ll forget everything that happened yesterday. The Pelletiers, Ivy, all of it. He needs those memories fresh in his head if we want any chance of turning him.”

  Theo rubbed his face, exasperated. They could be recuperating in a nice, secluded house in Mai
ne. But no, Peter thought it was a much better plan to pin all their hopes on a psychopath.

  “You’re not going to turn Rebel,” Theo told him. “Not in twelve hours. Not in twelve weeks.”

  Peter pulled off his soup-stained shirt and reversed it in the juve. Theo couldn’t help but marvel at the pristine state of his chest. His Pelletier healing disc had crumbled to dust in the middle of the night, its work well completed. The gunshot wound that had nearly killed him yesterday was just a faint red line today.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Peter said. “Rebel built this war to outlast him. If he dies, his replacements will take over and we’ll all be back at square one. We have to turn him. There’s no other way.”

  “Peter, look at him. His apocalypse already happened. He doesn’t give a shit.”

  Though Rebel couldn’t make out what Peter and Theo were saying, their hushed, angry whispers brought a smile to his face. There was a pleasure to be had in aggravating one’s captors. If anyone knew that, it was the breacher in the room.

  Zack sprawled on a sofa, sketching Bloom County characters on scrap paper. Rebel found it funny, in a jaw-clenching way, that the man he shot yesterday was one of the healthiest people in the apartment.

  “You must be loving this,” Rebel growled. “Tables turned. Now I’m the one in the chair.”

  Zack continued his Opus with inscrutable aloofness. “It’s not without its irony.”

  “I’m sitting right here, the man who killed Josh Trillinger. And you’re just drawing horseflakes.”

  “Horseflakes?”

  “Nonsense,” Rebel explained. “Things that don’t exist.”

  “Oh.” Zack creased his brow. “Never heard that one.”

  Rebel shook his head. “Pathetic. If your brother could see you now—”

  “Oh, shut up already.” Zack finally made eye contact with him. “You can goad me all you want. I’m not going to kill you.”

  “You’d rather I suffer.”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s what Azral wants, too. You like carrying his water?”