The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  She grabbed a napkin from the table and dabbed the sweat on Rebel’s brow.

  “Except it’s all gone wrong,” she continued. “You’ve lost so many people that you cared about that you don’t even know how to handle it. There’s no one on Earth who understands that feeling more than we do. We lived your worst nightmare, Rebel. Our world’s already gone.”

  Rebel looked away, quivering. Mia confronted him from his left side.

  “Look at me.” Mia clasped his cheek and turned his gaze back onto her. “You put a bullet in my chest and I forgive you. More than that, I’ll work with you to stop what’s coming. This may not be my world but I’ll lay down my life to save it. I can’t think of a better reason to die.”

  Liam studied her in admiration and then nodded at Rebel. “If she can forgive you, so can I.”

  “Me too,” Heath said from the sofa.

  “Me too,” said David.

  “Not me,” Jonathan said. “I’ll never forgive you for what you did and I hope you die painfully. But I’m all aboard the ‘save the world’ train. If that means teaming up with you, then I’ll do it. I’m a musician. I know how to work with assholes.”

  Zack wagged a finger at Jonathan. “Yeah. What he said. You fucked up bad and you’re not done paying for it. But I’ll work with you. I’ll fight by your side.”

  He moved in closer. His voice dropped an octave. “And if you’re looking to hurt the Pelletiers, you most definitely have a partner.”

  Amanda closed her eyes, livid. Zack had already learned the folly of enraging Azral and Esis. Now here he was, leaping at the chance to become their victim again.

  It’s simply his nature, Esis had told her yesterday. There is no saving him.

  Rebel shrank away from the people around him, using every last ounce of his willpower to keep his composure. But then the levees broke, and he blubbered exactly in the way he’d predicted.

  The orphans watched him jadedly as he wept in his chair. Even the most charitable among them didn’t think he was wailing over the strangers he’d murdered, or the awful things he’d done to the people in this room. Amanda wasn’t even sure he was sorry about the soldiers he’d lost, at least a dozen dead Gothams by her count. It was his dear, beloved wife he was crying over. It was all about Ivy.

  Peter dropped a box of tissues onto Rebel’s lap, then unwrapped the bicycle chains around his arms. There was no point restraining him anymore. Let the poor fool dab his own eyes.

  The others watched in confusion as Peter pushed Rebel’s chair down the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” Theo asked.

  “We have some final matters to discuss,” Peter said. “Best we do it alone.”

  He wheeled Rebel into his little green bedroom, and shut the door behind them.

  The orphans and Liam fell back in their seats, their shoulders slumped, their faces racked with gloom. Only Heath had the will to keep himself busy. He picked up his lumic puzzle sphere and continued to twist the glowing rings.

  Forty minutes later, the bedroom door reopened and Peter came out alone. He fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and drank the whole thing before addressing his companions. From the exhausted half grin on his face, no one had to ask how his final parley went.

  “We did it,” Peter announced. “War’s over.”

  —

  Peter spent the next ten minutes explaining what came next. He and Liam would take Rebel back to their village and get him the medical help he needed. Once he was well enough to face the clan elders, Rebel would reveal the faulty intelligence behind his crusade, and then publicly admit that he’d been wrong about the breachers. Peter would then ask the elders to swear the entire village to an oath of armistice, ensuring a lasting peace between the Gothams and the orphans.

  “And then?” Jonathan asked.

  “Then you all come back with me to Quarter Hill,” Peter said. “Our home becomes your home. My people become your people.”

  The faces all around him went slack with astonishment.

  Holy shit, Hannah thought. We’re going to be Gothams.

  By midnight, Peter and Liam were fully dressed and ready to go. Rebel walked between them on wobbly legs, his arms slung over their shoulders. He avoided the gazes of the Silvers and Golds until he was halfway across the living room.

  “Stop,” Rebel said to the Pendergens. “Give me a second.”

  He leveled his tired gaze at the orphans on the sofas. “I don’t know what to think anymore. If Ioni was lying . . .” He dipped his head. “There’s nothing I can say. I hurt innocent people and I lost everyone who ever mattered to me. Everyone.”

  He could see the impatience on everyone’s faces. His audience, his handlers, they all just wanted him to leave.

  “You won’t have to worry about me anymore,” he promised. “Even if it turns out Ioni was right, I don’t care. I don’t care if this world lives or dies. I only have one thing left to do.”

  Rebel looked to Zack, a fresh rage in his eyes.

  “I hope you meant what you said, Trillinger, because I’ll need all the help I can get with the Pelletiers. I also believe with all my heart that Semerjean’s disguised as one of you. I think he’s been pulling your strings from day one.”

  Rebel scanned the different reactions on their faces—skepticism and anger, confusion and distrust. Only Zack met his gaze with calm, thoughtful eyes.

  “If I’m right,” Rebel continued, “then Semerjean’s in this room right now. I’ve got a message for him.”

  He waved a splinted finger at the orphans, his aim bouncing stubbornly between Jonathan and David. “I’m coming for you. You and your wife and that chalk-headed son of yours. I will not rest until I find you all and kill you. That’s a promise.”

  A testy silence filled the apartment. Peter waved a portal onto the wall. “Come on.”

  All eyes followed Rebel as he hobbled toward the exit—the brown ones, the blue ones, the vengeful, and the weary. Only one man’s face showed a glimmer of amusement. He stared at Rebel mockingly and cast a thought in an arcane language. Noted.

  PART THREE

  UNDERLAND

  TWENTY-SIX

  May arrived in a veil of mist, an impenetrable haze that rolled in from the east and blanketed fifty square miles of New York. At sunrise, the state Transit Authority issued a Level 4 fog alert, grounding all civilian aer traffic in the metro region and its suburbs. From Staten Island to Haverstraw, the streets were clogged with automobiles and aeromobiles.

  Peter sat at the wheel of his rental van and scowled at the congestion on the freeway. What should have been a breezy Sunday drive through Rockland County had become an eighty-minute fit of stops and starts. His fault, he supposed, for being delicate. He didn’t want to teleport the orphans to their brand-new home in Quarter Hill. The village was best introduced slowly, one cold splash at a time.

  As he pushed his way into the exit lane, Peter looked in the rearview and scanned the faces of his eight passengers. If they were glad to leave the Aerie after a week of cramped quarters, they didn’t show it. Even Hannah, the sunniest of the bunch, gazed out the window with vacant gloom.

  Peter focused the mirror on Jonathan and Heath. “The Cataclysm started in Brooklyn, just a few blocks north of the old brownstone. In the blink of an eye, it spread five miles in every direction, a dome of light that stretched from Hoboken to Queens.”

  The two Golds stared at Peter, blank-faced, as he continued to answer a question they never asked.

  “Everyone inside the blast radius died, but there were thousands of people caught on the edge, in a narrow ring of space that became known as the Halo of Gotham. Aside from some trauma, those folks were just fine. The only ones who had trouble were women in the early stages of pregnancy. Most of their babies came out dead or deformed. Some were just born . . . different.”

&nb
sp; Jonathan finally got his point. “So that’s how your people came to be.”

  “That’s how we were born. You want to know how we came to be, you have to jump ahead twenty years.”

  Mia breathed with relief when Peter finally got off the freeway. This trip was taking forever. She just wanted to get to Gotham City (or whatever they called it) and get all the awkwardness out of the way.

  “Those timebending children were scattered all over the world,” Peter explained. “The Cataclysm threw everything into chaos. Thousands of families left New York, willingly and otherwise. Some, like my great-grandparents, were rounded up and sent back to Ireland.”

  Hannah looked at him askance. “They blamed the Cataclysm on the Irish?”

  “They blamed all foreigners,” Peter told her. “That’s why Integrity was originally formed. To flush out all the no-good, dirty immigrants.”

  David scoffed from the backseat. “How far they’ve come.”

  “It wasn’t a good time to be different,” Peter said. “The first of my people grew up scared and alone. But as they got older and ventured out into the world, the travelers began to sense each other. The tempics felt each other’s energy. By 1930, there were more than three dozen mini-groups. Some of the couples already had kids together, the first of the second generation.”

  Amanda sat forward. A huge mass of tempis loomed ahead of them, invisible in the fog but prevalent in her senses. She could tell from the way Heath writhed in his seat that he felt it too.

  Peter reached into his tote bag and grabbed a remote control clicker. “It was Ashwin Sunder, Ivy’s great-grandfather, who brought the founding members of the clan together. He was one of the world’s first augurs, a powerful one at that. He didn’t just see the faces of his future kinsmen, he envisioned a safe haven for all of them, a place where they could live together and look out for each other.”

  Now everyone could see the tempis up ahead: a tall, curved barrier that stretched deep into the mist. The surface was lined with cameras and trespass warnings.

  “This is it,” Peter said. “Well, the start of it.”

  Theo studied the barrier with a cocked eyebrow. “That’s how your people stayed hidden all this time? A big fat wall and a ‘Keep Out’ sign?”

  Peter chuckled. “There’s a little more to it than that.”

  As he continued toward the barrier, he explained that Quarter Hill was a gated village of twenty-two hundred people. Only half the residents were members of the clan. The other half had no idea they were living among chronokinetics. Even the local police were oblivious.

  “And your people never had a mishap?” David asked. “No tempic hands or ill-timed portals?”

  “We’ve had to erase a few memories,” Peter admitted. “It’s been at least twenty years since the last incident.”

  “Wow. That’s disciplined.”

  “That’s fear.” Peter stopped at the wall and pressed his clicker. A single-lane tunnel opened in the tempis. “We all know what the government would do to us.”

  As the van crossed the threshold, the orphans sat up in their seats and took a wary scan of the neighborhood. The houses near the barrier were all humble colonials but with each passing block, they became larger, more elaborate, with rolling front yards encased in ornate iron fences.

  Hannah marveled at the palatial estates. “Just how rich are you people?”

  “Filthy,” Peter said. “Augurs make good investors.”

  Zack was more thrown by the innocuousness of Quarter Hill, a molecular clone of every posh suburb he’d ever seen. “You Gothams sure are good at playing normal.”

  Peter scowled at him through the rearview. “I told you to stop using that word.”

  “Normal?”

  “Gothams. We don’t call ourselves that, any more than you call yourselves ‘breachers.’”

  “So what do you call yourselves?” Jonathan asked.

  “We don’t.”

  “No name?”

  “We know who we are,” Peter said. “We don’t need a letterhead.”

  Jonathan eyed him curiously. “So how did you get saddled with the G-word, then?”

  Hannah nodded. “Yeah. I mean if you guys are so careful, why does the whole country have a nickname for you?”

  Peter blew a hot breath through his nose. “Hold that thought.”

  He pulled into the parking lot of a blond brick complex, a three-story high school that looked as posh as a hotel. The campus was empty on this gray Sunday morning. Only a lone woman jogged with her sheepdog in tow. The moment she left, Peter parked the van in the faculty lot, then escorted his passengers to a utility door on the far side of the building.

  Amanda watched him closely as he opened the lock with a black metal key. “Peter, what exactly are we doing here?”

  “Just bear with me. We’re almost there.”

  He led the procession down a long, tiled corridor, its walls lined with lockers as far as the eye could see. Mia reeled at the overwhelming familiarity of the school. She could remember a time, long ago on another Earth, when her entire life revolved around being a student.

  “Is this place real?” she asked Peter.

  “Of course it is.”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe it was a front.”

  Peter shook his head. “Everything in town is exactly what it’s supposed to be.”

  He summoned an elevator and motioned everyone inside. As the doors closed and the group squeezed together, Peter stuck an electronic card key into the control console, then punched the floor buttons in an elaborate sequence of ones, twos, and threes.

  Hannah crossed her arms, skeptical. “Is there a secret wall that’s supposed to—”

  The lift came to life with a lurch. The motor hummed, and the car began descending, fast.

  Peter turned to his puzzled companions. “About forty years ago, a Dep named Alexander Wingo came to town on a murder investigation. He was a peculiar little man, a hell of a lot smarter than anyone expected him to be. He learned a bunch of stuff he shouldn’t have and he got away before anyone could reverse his memory.”

  “So he started the whole Gotham thing,” Jonathan said.

  Peter nodded. “He wrote a best-selling ‘exposé’ about us, mostly lies and exaggerations. But the myth persisted. We still get conspiracy loons sniffing around the village, hoping to catch a glimpse.”

  “Why don’t you just move?” Theo asked him.

  “We did. After that whole Wingo flap, we spent two years building a brand-new base for ourselves. Someplace more secure and out of the way.”

  “I’ll say.” Zack touched the vibrating wall. “We must be eighty floors down by now.”

  “No floors,” Peter said. “Just a thousand feet of bedrock.”

  “And then?”

  The elevator came to a stop. The orphans were shocked to see sunshine spilling into the lift.

  Peter motioned to the door. “See for yourself.”

  Two by two, they walked into the light. Amanda thought she’d stepped outside again until she saw giant air vents in the clouds. The “sky” was just a lumic projection on a dome-shaped ceiling, a rather massive one at that. This underground cavern looked large enough to fit a small town.

  And in point of fact, it did.

  The Silvers and Golds looked around in wonder at the trees and small buildings, all nestled together in a perfect grid. Gothams drove up and down the streets in golf carts, past churches and parlors and lush green parks. At least fifty pedestrians stood within eyeshot, each one going about their day. At first glance, the village looked like a replica of Everytown USA, a snow-globe dream of suburbia at its finest.

  At second glance, the dream turned weird.

  Everywhere the orphans looked, someone was using temporis. Swifter children chased each other in streaking
blurs. A pair of tempics carried groceries in self-generated baskets. A portly man in overalls unwilted several begonias with a flick of his finger. A family of four emerged from a portal on the side of a firehouse. No one batted an eye at them.

  Peter smiled at his companions. “Welcome to the underland.”

  Theo staggered forward, his mouth hanging open. “Jesus Christ. It’s just—”

  “—crazy,” Heath finished. He hadn’t spoken a word since he’d left Old Tappan, but now his anxiousness had been supplanted with a bright, mystic awe.

  He craned his neck, then tugged at Jonathan’s sleeve. The others followed their slack, upward gazes.

  A trio of Gothams soared high above them on white wings of aeris, swooping and turning in perfect synchronicity. One of them caught sight of the breachers down below and smacked his wing against the illusive sky. He might have fallen all the way into the ground if his partners hadn’t caught him with long tempic arms.

  Soon everyone in view stopped what they were doing to stare at the newcomers. The swifter boys came to a screeching halt. A tempic woman dropped her groceries.

  Amanda looked at Peter nervously. “You said they were expecting us.”

  “They are,” Peter assured her. “Give them time.”

  The last seven days had been tumultuous for the clan. They’d barely had a chance to mourn their latest casualties when everything they knew was turned upside down. Their hero Rebel Rosen had been nothing but a dupe, while the traitor Peter Pendergen had been right about everything.

  Four days ago, the council of elders absolved Peter of all crimes, then issued a startling decree. There would be no more violence against these alien breachers, on penalty of expulsion. More than that, the otherworlders would be welcomed into their society, with all the rights and protections of native kinsmen.

  Gemma Sunder took the news with such shrieking protest that she had to be dragged out of the assembly. The moment she got home, she wrote a furious bitmail to her people: