The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  At long last, Elder Rubinek proclaimed the orphans to be members of the clan. For a moment, the Gothams forgot all their grievances and fell into the spirit of the ceremony. The lumics threw lightworks. The tempics cast winding white streamers. Carrie blew a shrieking whistle through her fingers.

  Only Gemma Sunder withheld her applause. She stood in the mezzanine with the other children, brushing bitter tears from her eyes. She could only imagine that her beloved aunt Ivy was weeping from Heaven at the sorry spectacle down here.

  Don’t cry, Gemma told her. Don’t you cry, Ivy. I’ll take care of all of them for you.

  —

  Mia woke up at the crack of dawn on Saturday, a fog in her head and a familiar presence sleeping next to her. She and Carrie had been talking late into the night when fatigue finally got the better of them. They conked out in Carrie’s bed and now . . .

  “Oh no.”

  Mia had expected to find the bedroom covered in portal notes, but there were barely any to be seen. A few on the floor. A dozen on the bed. One of them had found its way into Carrie’s hair. But still, this was a shockingly light load. Had Carrie woken up and read some of the notes already? Or were the Mias being gentle for once?

  It’s Carrie, an inner voice suggested. She made your life better. Now she’s healing your future.

  Mia felt a tingling sensation at the base of her thoughts, a man-size portal in another part of the cottage. The traveler’s signature was strong but pleasant, like warm apple cider. Mia knew it all too well.

  She peeked into Carrie’s living room and saw Peter standing at the front door, fully dressed but half awake.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Came to get you,” he whispered back. “You weren’t home.”

  Mia closed the bedroom door behind her. “We were talking. We fell asleep.”

  “You don’t need to explain it. You’re your own girl.”

  She checked the clock in the kitchen. “It’s six A.M. What—”

  “Seattle,” he told her.

  “What, now?”

  “The dart leaves in thirty minutes. Get dressed, pack a bag, and then meet me back at my place.”

  Mia looked to the bedroom. She still had those notes to gather. “But—”

  “No buts. The plane goes with or without you.”

  Peter disappeared into the portal and emerged forty yards away, in the living room of the street’s uninhabited cottage. Mia wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept at home last night. A large heap of blankets covered the mattress in the main bedroom. A pair of bare white feet stuck out from the bottom.

  “Zack . . .”

  A bearish grumble rose up from the bed. Peter poked at the blankets. “Zack, wake up.”

  Zack peeked out from under the covers and registered Peter through his one open eye. “Huh?”

  “You still want to find those Coppers of yours?”

  “Yeah. Of course . . .”

  “Good. We leave in a half hour.”

  “What? Why the short notice?”

  “Not my doing. I just got the call.” He looked to the writhing mass at Zack’s side. “You too, darling. You’re coming with us.”

  Mercy’s head popped out of the blankets. She shot a crusty glare at Peter. “Fuck you. I’m done playing soldier.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We need a solic in case these strangers get ornery.”

  “Peter . . .”

  “Get dressed, both of you.”

  While Mercy spat a string of profanities, Zack flashed a shaky look at Peter. There were painfully few secrets in the group, and there was no hiding what had happened between him and Mercy last night. Still, he didn’t want Amanda to hear about it secondhand. He could only imagine his reaction if someone else told him that she was sleeping with Peter.

  “Uh, listen—”

  “I won’t say a word,” Peter promised.

  “Thank you.”

  “Just be ready.”

  He waved a portal in the wall and was gone in an instant. Mercy traded a bemused look with Zack.

  “Shit,” she said. “I never thought we’d be doing that together.”

  “What? Screwing?”

  “No.” Mercy leaned over and reached for her shirt. “Hunting breachers.”

  —

  At half past six, all the residents of Freak Street gathered to say good-bye to the splinter group. They stood outside in their bathrobes and sweatclothes, too sleepy to do anything more than wish Peter, Zack, and Mia good luck.

  “We’ll be gone three days,” Peter told them. “Four at the most.”

  While most of the others went back to sleep, Amanda puttered around her living room, agitated. She’d resolved days ago to get to know some Gothams, but she still couldn’t work up the stomach to become friendly with Victoria Chisholm. It was a moot point, anyway, as the primarch of the tempics was also the leader of the Seattle mission. She was already halfway across the country.

  Amanda knew she couldn’t just lounge around the house forever, but what else could she do? Maybe the vivery needed a volunteer nurse. Or maybe Theo could use someone to talk to. He’d seemed tense and distracted these past two weeks, ever since his dinner with Prudent Lee.

  A knock on the door made Amanda jump. She opened it to find a flustered Carrie Bloom.

  “Hi, what—”

  Carrie forced her way inside and slammed the door behind her. Her hair was a mess and her skin was sweaty, as if wild tigers had chased her here.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” Carrie said. “I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve never been in this shitpot before and it’s making me all zizzy!”

  “Okay, okay.” Amanda led her to the sofa and sat down next to her. “Just calm down. Breathe.”

  It took several deep breaths and a long swig of water before Carrie was able to speak coherently. She stared down at her bouncing knees.

  “Mia dashed my house in a hurry,” she began. “Leaving all these notes in my bedroom. I told her I’d clean them up. No big deal. I mean I knew all about her future-self problems. I told her I wouldn’t . . . oh God.”

  Amanda feared where this was going. “You read her notes.”

  “Only a few. I couldn’t help it! I was just so . . . look, I love Mia. Like scary love her. I just wanted to understand how a girl so sweet could be so nasty in the future.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Forget them. Whatever you saw—”

  “I can’t. I mean, I can brush aside the awful things she said to herself. But this one . . .” She plucked a paper scrap from her shirt pocket and brandished it like a live grenade. “This one scared the hell out of me. If this thing’s true, then you people are in a lot of trouble, Hannah most of all.”

  “What?” Amanda peeked out the window. Her sister was sleeping in the other house, as usual. By now, she had practically moved in with the Golds.

  Carrie held the note out. “I really think you should read this.”

  Amanda felt her instincts tugging at her, the same way she used to tug Mia away from her portal messages: Just walk away. Ignore them. Nothing good will come of it.

  But if Hannah’s life was really in danger . . .

  Amanda took the crinkled paper from Carrie’s hand. She sucked a deep breath, then unfurled it.

  Don’t trust Jonathan. He’s not who he says he is.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Douglas M-9 was the crème de la crème of the dart-class aerships: a high-end, short-winged, double-engined twenty-seater that looked like a cross between a limousine and a missile. Despite its aerodynamic chassis and electric turbine thrusters, the ship couldn’t fly much faster than an old-world seaplane, at least not without help. A 20x shifter accelerated it to four times the speed of sound, allowing it to travel from New York to Washington State in t
hirty-eight minutes, external time. The passengers inside the temporal field had twelve and a half hours to kill.

  Mia sat up in her seat and took a nervous look around the cabin. Sixteen Gothams were accompanying her and Zack, a hand-picked roster of all-stars and primarchs from most of the major power guilds. Mia was particularly vexed by Shauna and Angela Ryder, a pair of twentysomething bottle blondes who shared her teleporting talent, yet practically snarled at the sight of her.

  Peter told her not to mind the Ryder twins. The travelers were an insular group, and were wary of all newcomers to their neurospatial network. It didn’t help that they’d all worshipped Ivy and hated anyone even tangentially involved with her death.

  Mia crossed her arms, brooding. “Great. So we’re both on their shit list.”

  “We don’t need them,” Peter told her. “You and I are a guild of our own.”

  “Can I be primarch?”

  “No.”

  He reclined his seat and settled in for a long nap. Mia scowled out the window. Unlike him, she was forced to stay awake for the duration of the flight. At this speed, her sleep portals would tear through the plane like bullets.

  She unbuckled her safety belt and wandered up the aisle. The cockpit was surprisingly basic for a transonic aerojet, more Winnebago than Cessna. Victoria Chisholm leaned back in the pilot’s chair and filed her nails with a tempic emery board. Mia found it odd and a little bit funny that a woman with wings had her own private aerplane. From the frown on her face, this wasn’t her favorite way to fly.

  The Mayor rode the shotgun seat and took an admiring look at the dashboard. “I should buy a dart of my own. This is marvelous.”

  “My husband’s toy,” Victoria said. “He barely used it.”

  The Mayor’s grin deflated. “He was a good man.”

  “He was a coward.” She pursed her lips at the three-dimensional flight map. The M-9 was just a blip above the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan. “I don’t even know why we’re doing this.”

  The Mayor shrugged. “If there are more of our kind out there—”

  “Our kind?”

  “They may be alien, but they’re blessed in all the same ways we are. And they need us.”

  Mia listened from the periphery, surprised and impressed. She’d thought the Mayor’s geniality was just an act, but it seemed the man was genuinely nice.

  Victoria stared out the window at the indigo sky. “There’s still so much we don’t know about these breachers. It’s not like we can check their pasts. They could all be lying about who they are. Or what they are.”

  Mia rolled her eyes. The Mayor merely smiled. “We would have never survived this long if we didn’t have instincts.”

  “Yes, well, my instincts are screaming about that black boy of theirs. There’s something very different about his temporal energy.”

  “Can’t attest to Heath,” the Mayor said. “I just know David’s a good lad. He and my daughter have become inseparable these days. I’ve never seen her so happy.”

  Mia winced and backed away. She didn’t need to hear any more on that topic.

  She moved down the aisle, past row upon row of slumbering passengers. Zack and Mercy slept on the plane’s one sofa, their bodies spooned, their arms locked together. It seemed David wasn’t the only one to find love among the Gothams.

  Oh, like you haven’t, her inner Carrie teased.

  The rear curtain parted and a hulking figure emerged from the kitchenette. It wasn’t until they’d arrived at the aerplane hangar that Peter warned Mia about the augur on the team, a man she knew all too well.

  Rebel placed his meal on the tiny conference table. He looked at Mia through his ever-present sunglasses.

  “Can’t tell if you’re gonna run away or hit me.”

  Mia sat down at the table, if only to confound his expectations. “I don’t care that you shot me. I’m over that.”

  “Over that.” Rebel smiled at her alien slang. “You don’t look over it.”

  “It’s what you did to Carrie’s mom that pisses me off.”

  His smile flattened. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of vitamins. “I didn’t kill her. Esis did.”

  “You left her behind for Esis to kill. She was your friend—”

  “She was Ivy’s friend.”

  “—and you abandoned her.”

  Rebel stared out the window at the ever-changing colors. At 20x, the sky took on a tenuous hue. It was royal blue one moment, indigo the next. The afternoon hours brought a warmer spectrum, everything from saffron yellow to burnt orange.

  “One of these days, you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of the Pelletiers,” he warned Mia. “You’ll get their sword, not their shield. Then you’ll know what it’s like to make hard decisions.”

  “Doesn’t change what you did.”

  “Nothing does,” Rebel said. “And nothing will.”

  Mia looked at his meal and saw that it was just a bowl of plain, boiled rice. “The whitefood diet,” she guessed. “That was the sacrifice you made for Zack.”

  She checked Zack’s sleeping form, then spoke to Rebel in a hushed voice. “So you do feel guilty.”

  Rebel eyed her cynically. “Maybe I just like rice.”

  “Whatever.” Mia stood up from the table. “I can’t believe they picked you for this mission.”

  “Me neither,” Rebel admitted. “Guess I’m the only good augur they have.”

  “You’re the worst augur they have. You’ve been wrong about everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  “Shut up.”

  “There’s a Pelletier among you. He’s been right under your nose this whole time.”

  “You are so . . .” Mia closed her eyes and shook her head. “You know what? Forget it. You’re not even worth it.”

  She returned to her seat, her thoughts bubbling like lava. Though she tried to lose herself in her electronic novel, Rebel’s vague and nasty warning kept circling through her head. Her future selves kept excoriating her for being so stupid, so blind. What if they were all angry about the same thing? What if that thing was Semerjean?

  No. She flushed the thought and then lost herself in the novel. Eight hours later, the M-9 de-shifted with a lurch. As Victoria announced their impending arrival, Mia focused on the mission ahead. The Coppers were from her world, but that didn’t necessarily make them good people. She could only hope, when and if they were found, that they were less like Evan Rander and more like Jonathan Christie.

  —

  The Seattle of this world was a much different city than the one Zack remembered. In place of skyscrapers and space needles stood a four-mile strip of hotel-casinos, each one flamboyantly lit and capped with giant holograms: a chest-beating ape, an overendowed cowgirl, a fifty-foot wizard with dollar signs for eyes. After the Cataclysm of 1912 wiped out half the New York underworld, a criminal empire arose on the other side of the country. It was Gerry “Midas” Goldberg, the youngest and sharpest of the New Pacific gangsters, who turned this damp little town into a bustling neon Gomorrah.

  Today, while Las Vegas served as a tiny desert commune for artisans, Seattle had become immortalized as the “City of Chance.” Every legal vice in the country could be indulged here. A more determined sinner could book passage on one of the many drugships and aerdellos that hovered high among the clouds. The skies above the city were virtually lawless. To find the seedy underbelly of Seattle, all one had to do was look up.

  Zack had no interest in sampling the local debauchery. He had only one purpose here. Unfortunately, Victoria insisted on keeping him and Mia out of sight until they were needed. They spent their first three days sequestered inside the Poseidon, a thirty-story hotel that took its undersea gimmick to ridiculous extremes. The hallways were lined with aquatic animations, while hidden speakers pushed the
intermittent sound of whale songs. Every suite had at least three lumiquariums, each one featuring the same holographic fish. Zack had watched them long enough to know exactly when the animation looped—every forty-nine minutes, right when the red mosaic guppy kissed the green neon tetra.

  Even more grating than the accommodations were the disguises. In order to thwart the government cameras, the Ryder sisters fitted everyone on the team with face-altering prosthetics. Mia was glad that Carrie couldn’t see her with her fat putty chin, the bulbous nose that made her look like an aardvark. She and Zack were ordered to stay in their disguises at all times, even in the privacy of their rooms.

  Mercy assured them that the away team had it worse. “It’s bullshit,” she griped. “All we do is stand around and keep watch while the Mayor plays detective.”

  The hunt for the Coppers began in Grandview, a small and affluent suburb on the lip of the bay. The town had made national news back in March when an abandoned church exploded in what witnesses described as a miniature Cataclysm. Though the incident remained a public mystery, the Mayor scanned the past and saw exactly what happened. The Coppers had been using the church as a refuge when a passing patrolman caught sight of them through a window. As he parked his cruiser, the group leader—a short-haired black woman—waved her arms in a panic. The church was engulfed in a dome of light, leaving nothing behind of the building or its inhabitants.

  By all appearances, the Coppers had been vaporized. Yet two weeks later, in the nearby town of Gatewood, an elderly radio host came home to find them looting his valuables. He pulled a shotgun on them, only to be punched through a wall by a teenage girl and her tempic fist.

  This time, Integrity arrived quickly enough to keep the incident out of the news. This time, they had a trail to follow.

  The Mayor spent the next two days ghosting the chase, a path that took him all around the outskirts of Seattle. The Coppers seemed to grow savvier by the minute, thanks to their adaptive leader and their ever-improving augur. Once their solic learned how to hinder all temporal scrying efforts, that was it. The group was nothing but static in Integrity’s ghost drills. The Mayor stopped seeing them in his hindsight.