The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Zack’s steel-gray eyes held Mia like chains. “You don’t even remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?”

  He snatched her note from the coffee table and brandished it in front of her.

  “Fact number four,” he said. “You got this exact same message about Peter.”

  Mia’s eyes bulged. Her righteous wrath fled her in an instant. Zack was right. It had been one of the very first notes her future self had sent her, a vague and cryptic warning about a man she had yet to meet.

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

  She waved a portal into the air and vanished. Carrie shot to her feet. “Mia, wait!”

  “It’s okay,” Theo told her. “She’ll be back.”

  Zack flicked his hand at the teacup fragments. The pieces jittered on the floor until, one by one, they all snapped together and the cracks melted away.

  While Carrie returned the cup to the kitchen, Amanda and Theo kept their cool eyes on Zack. He scooped up his playing cards and resumed his clumsy shuffling.

  “You think I like doing this? You think I want Rebel to be right?”

  “What do you want?” Amanda asked.

  A grim chuckle escaped him. Amanda knew the sound all too well. It was the noise he made when he was censoring a joke, one of his patented funny-but-truisms that exposed his rawest feelings.

  “The Pelletiers have been screwing with us for months on end,” he said. “They’ve been messing with your life since you were a little girl. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of their bullshit. For once, I’d like to know the punchline before they spring it on us.”

  He stared at her defiantly. “And if you were seeing someone, I wouldn’t want to know.”

  Amanda put on her glasses and looked out the window again. She had at least six retorts lined up, half of them profane, but she suppressed every one of them. She didn’t even have the strength to be angry with him anymore. She feared the Pelletiers broke him even more than she realized.

  “Maybe this is all part of their game,” Theo mused. “They want us to suspect each other, mistrust each other.”

  Carrie returned from the kitchen, nodding. “Maybe these notes aren’t even Mia’s.”

  A portal opened by the front door. Mia returned to the living room with her prophecy journal in hand. She sat back in her seat and began flipping through the pages.

  “I got two notes about Peter that day,” she said. “The first one told me not to trust him. The second one said just the opposite. I don’t remember the exact words but . . . wait . . .”

  She found the message she was looking for on the second page of her journal.

  Disregard that first note. I was just testing something. Peter’s good. He’s great, actually.

  Mia stared at the message, her heart pounding wildly. She’d assumed those contradictory notes were nonsense, just another prank from her future self. But now two words leapt out at her with fresh new context. Testing something. Testing something . . .

  Her mouth fell open. She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Oh my God . . .”

  The others watched in rapt attention as two long-standing mysteries converged in her head. They fit together like a lock and key, solving each other with a simple click.

  She looked to her friends in stammering wonder. “I know what she’s doing.”

  —

  Mia needed a minute and a full glass of water before she could explain herself. Her mood had become bubbly, loopy, as if she could break out in giggles at any moment. She paced in front of the fireplace, only occasionally stopping to check the confounded expressions of her audience.

  “Okay, let’s pretend for a minute that Rebel’s right, that someone we know is Semerjean. And let’s say Future Mia found out who it is beyond a shadow of a doubt. What’s the first thing she’d do?”

  “Warn you,” Theo said.

  “Right.” Mia snatched the paper scrap with Jonathan’s name on it. “But she wouldn’t write this vague shit. She’d spell it out for me in big letters. ‘Don’t trust Jonathan! He’s Semerjean Pelletier!’ And she wouldn’t just write it once. I’d be getting that note dozens of times. Hundreds. Trust me. I know her.”

  Carrie laughed, perplexed. “We trust you.”

  “But the Pelletiers don’t. If they have a spy, the last thing they’d want is for Future Me to blow his cover. And if they have a way to stop Theo from learning the truth, they must have a way to stop me.”

  Amanda saw where she was going with this. She’d spent many a morning helping Mia clean up her portal refuse—all the colorful little paper sticks, all the countless flakes of ash.

  “The burning notes . . .”

  Mia pointed at her. “The burning notes. I never understood why some of the papers caught fire before I could read them. Now I’m thinking it’s—”

  “—censorship,” Zack said. He blinked at her, astonished. “They’re reading your mail.”

  Mia nodded. She pictured Azral and Esis sitting at a kitchen table, sorting through her dispatches, laughing at the silliest ones. No, it wouldn’t be that simple. They probably had some automated system that scanned her notes in transit and burned the ones with forbidden information.

  But the news came with an upside. Carrie was the first of Mia’s friends to see it.

  “Peter and Jonathan are both innocent,” she said. “If either one of them was Semerjean—”

  “—their notes would have burned,” Theo said. He gawked at Mia. “That’s exactly why she sent those notes. She was testing the filter.”

  Mia fought a maniacal cackle. All these months, she thought her future selves were nothing but a gaggle of loons. But some of them still had their wits about them. Some were even clever enough to use the Pelletiers’ trick against them.

  Zack tapped his leg in contemplation. “She must have sent a note like that for everyone she knows. Theo, Amanda, David, me.”

  “And the one that catches fire . . .” Carrie recoiled. “You think that would work?”

  Theo was skeptical. The stunt seemed almost embarrassingly obvious, like reverse psychology. Then again, he knew from painful experience that smart people weren’t immune to dumb tricks. It was easy to kick a man’s shin when his head was in the clouds.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Seems worth a try, if only for peace of mind.”

  Mia scoffed at his choice of words. Evan had recently told her that she was one of the Pelletiers’ least favorite Silvers. Now she was about to challenge them in a way that no one had before. Even if she managed to beat their system, all she’d get for her trouble was some devastating news about someone she loved and trusted. This was a sucker’s game from the start to finish. There would certainly be no peace of mind.

  —

  At midnight, Mia ran out of excuses to stall. She sequestered herself in her bedroom with a pad, a pen, and a strawberry blender. And then she got to work.

  By the time she finished, an hour later, she was ready to cry. She didn’t want to face Zack or Theo or anyone else in her circle. There was only one person in the world she wanted to see.

  Carrie leapt up from the sofa as Mia teleported into her living room. She had no trouble reading the anguish in her eyes and lips, her drooped posture, her everything.

  “Oh shit,” Carrie said. “Is it David? It’s David, isn’t it.”

  Mia shook her head. “His note didn’t burn.”

  She dropped onto the couch, exhausted. “None of them burned.”

  Mia had sent thirty-three messages to the past, each one a warning about someone in her life. “Don’t trust Hannah. She’s not who she says she is.” “Don’t trust Liam. He’s not who he says he is.” “Don’t trust Mercy . . .” “Don’t trust the Mayor . . .” One fake warning for everyone she knew. She even gave Peter and Jonathan a second c
hance to incriminate themselves. Nothing. The papers traveled through time without a spark of interference.

  Carrie cocked her head. “Okay, well, isn’t that good news?”

  “It’s no news,” Mia said. “All it proves is that the Pelletiers are too smart for me.”

  “Yeah, or maybe all this Semerjean stuff is horseflakes. Maybe he just wears a mask because he’s ugly.”

  On a better night, Mia might have laughed, but her emotions were still too raw. With every fake note, she’d imagined a world in which the warning proved true. What if the Peter she loved was just an elaborately crafted cover identity? What if David had been sneering at her behind her back this whole time? What if the real Zack Trillinger was still rotting away in a Pelletier dungeon? What if the one they rescued was . . . not who he said he was?

  But none of those scenarios hurt as much as the one right in front of her. Carrie had piercing blue eyes, just like Semerjean’s. All it would take was a little illusion and a whole lot of tempis to make her look like a formidable man. The thought had been horrific enough to make Mia’s fingers quiver. She could barely push Carrie’s note into the temporal portal.

  Carrie sat down next to her and held her by the hands. “Aw, sweetie, don’t feel bad. That could have gone much, much worse.”

  “I know. I’m just . . .” She closed her eyes, stuck for words. “I don’t want to deal with it anymore. The notes, the warnings, the Past Mias, the Future Mias. I never asked for that power and I never wanted it. I wish I could just . . .”

  “What?”

  “I wish I could just travel.”

  Carrie tucked her legs beneath her and turned her whole body toward Mia. “Hey. Look at me.”

  Mia twisted in her seat and matched her lotus pose, until they were both sitting kneecap to kneecap. She saw the gorgeous expression on Carrie’s face—a soft, slanted grin that made her look ten years older.

  Carrie raised her injured wrists. “I got a taste of the life you guys live and it nearly killed me. I mean I knew you had it rough but . . . God, Mia. You’ve been fighting for your life from the minute you got to this world. You’ve barely had a chance to catch your breath.”

  Mia lowered her head. Carrie cupped her cheeks and raised her back into eye contact. “You want to be a traveler, then be a traveler. Go around the world, see all the things you never got to see. If anyone’s entitled to live the life they want, it’s you. There’s only one thing I ask.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take me with you,” Carrie said. “Wherever you go, for the rest of your life, just bring me along and keep me close. Because that, my dear . . .”

  She brushed a warm hand down the side of the Mia’s face. “That’s the only life I want.”

  They sat together in perfect silence, hands clasped, their bodies locked in a delicate stasis. Mia found it ironic that two girls who’d dreamed of traveling the world together couldn’t seem to venture beyond the confines of the sofa, as if a fragile thing would shatter if they spoke or moved a muscle.

  After a long, breathless moment, Mia reached her arm through a portal and turned off the overhead lights. In the darkness, hands clasped, they leaned forward into each other. Their lips touched, and then suddenly Mia’s world became perfect. There were no past or future selves to be found in the shadows, no friends, no fears, no Semerjeans or Evan Randers. Her universe had become a small and cozy thing, and it was beautiful. If there had been any doubt left about what she wanted from life and Carrie Bloom, it died right there on the couch.

  As the village clock rang the two A.M. hour, the girls stopped kissing and fell back onto the cushions. They traded soft, tender words for another forty minutes—secret thoughts, secret fears, all the things they’d never dared tell each other—until fatigue finally got the better of them.

  Soon the darkness was pierced by a twinkling coin of light, then another, then another, then a hundred others. Within moments, Mia’s portals filled the room like stars. Rolled-up scraps of paper flittered in from a hundred different futures. Every one of them carried the same dire message. Every one of them burned.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The sixteenth floor of the Poseidon Hotel had functionally ceased to exist. The rooms had been cleared of all guests and staff. The windows were shuttered with tempic blinds. Any hapless soul who wandered off the elevator was quickly turned away by goons in white armor. Integrity had become host to Seattle’s most exclusive event: a temporal investigation. Ghost teams moved through fourteen suites, scouring the past for intel. Some very interesting people had stayed here recently. Gingold was determined to learn their deepest secrets.

  He walked between the holograms of the Executive Suite, his mechanical eyes recording every detail. The drills had captured a curious meeting that occurred here Tuesday night. Eighteen adults and one minor gathered around the sofas while a stern-faced woman addressed them. The minor of course was Mia Farisi, whose teleporting shenanigans had already become the stuff of folklore. Retinal scanners recognized Zack Trillinger and Peter Pendergen through their putty disguises.

  None of the other people had criminal records, which made them harder to identify. Luckily, they’d left a bounty of clues. Victoria Chisholm had a vehicle registry code on the fob of her aerplane key. Mercy Lee sported several distinct tattoos. Rebel Rosen wore a Gelinger Mark V prosthetic hand, a device so expensive that only nine people in the country owned one. A few hours of detective work uncovered their true identities. They were all trust fund millionaires, all from the posh little enclave of Quarter Hill, New York.

  The news baffled Gingold. The town had been famous since 1971, when Alexander Wingo published a breathless “exposé” about a secret society of chronokinetics. But if Wingo was right, if Quarter Hill really was filled with these so-called Gothams, then why hadn’t anyone found proof yet? How could they have stayed hidden in plain sight for four goddamn decades?

  “Sir?”

  Gingold turned around to see a diminutive blonde in a jumpsuit, one of the many young analysts from the Tacoma office. A pop-up on his visual feed informed him that her name was Kenja Purkey.

  “What, Purkey? What is it?”

  The agent threw a furtive glance around the room. “I don’t mean to stir up trouble, sir, but I think your lipper made a mistake on one of the transcripts.”

  Gingold eyed her suspiciously. Even the most advanced ghost drills couldn’t replicate sound. All dialogue had to be gleaned from lip-readers. Purkey, however, was a forensic technician. This was far out of her playing field.

  “What do you know about lipping?” he asked her.

  She pulled back her hair and showed him the elaborate devices on the back of her ears. “I spent the first half of my life as a deaf woman, sir. I guess modern technology’s been good for both of us.”

  Purkey could see Gingold’s patience withering away. She held up her computer tablet. “Sir, if I could just show you the problem . . .”

  Gingold noticed a familiar presence in the corner of his vision, a silver-haired man in a black fedora and trench coat. He stood just outside the doorway, chatting amicably with two senior agents.

  “Damn it. Tomlinson.”

  A tall, burly operative rushed to Gingold’s side. “Sir?”

  “What the hell is he doing here?”

  Tomlinson looked at the man in the hallway, then shrugged helplessly at Gingold. “He has clearance, sir.”

  Cedric Cain had been making a lot of people nervous these days. The old man didn’t hide his frustration with Integrity’s leadership, and he had powerful friends in the White House. Rumor had it that he and his pals were planning a full management takeover, a forced return to the agency’s “good old days.” Gingold knew how eager Cain was to get the Sci-Tech division back in his hands, especially now with timebending aliens running wild.

  Gingold turned to Tomlinson. “Shadow
him. I want to know everything he says and does.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  While Tomlinson inched his way into Cain’s earshot, Gingold turned back to Purkey. “You still here?”

  “Yes, sir. I was waiting to show you—”

  “Right.” He snatched the tablet from her hands and read the screen. Purkey had highlighted a snippet of a transcript, a testy exchange between Victoria Chisholm and Zack.

  CHISHOLM: You’re part of our clan now, Trillinger. That means you follow our rules.

  TRILLINGER: Or what? You’ll kill me?

  CHISHOLM: No. We’ll just never let you back in the wonderland.

  Purkey tapped the screen. “It’s that last word I have a problem with. The phoneme for ‘W’ sounds is very distinct.” She gestured at Victoria’s image. “I watched her three times. I didn’t see it on her lips.”

  “So then what the hell was she—”

  “Oren Gingold.”

  Cain’s booming voice stopped every conversation in the room. Seven agents watched blankly as he cut a path through the ghost field. It was hard not to stare at him. He stood six-foot-nine with his hat on. His clothes were outdated to the point of anachronism. He could have stepped straight out of a 1940s crime flick, the mysterious rogue who leads the hero on a back-alley foot chase. If Zack had seen him, he would have stopped wondering what became of The Shadow.

  Cain extended his hand. “You old warhorse. How the hell are you?”

  Gingold returned the handshake. His voice could have wilted flowers. “Long time no see.”

  “Funny words coming from you.” He smiled at Purkey. “I built his eyes. First of their kind. Could’ve sold the patent and lived like a king. Yet here I am doing government work.”

  Purkey indulged him with a polite half smile. Gingold remained stone-faced. “What exactly brings you here?”

  Cain laughed and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Are you kidding? How could I miss the chance to look at Gothams? Real live no-foolin’ Gothams.”

  Everyone around him cringed at his word choice. They had barely wrapped their minds around the notion of extradimensional visitors. Now they were forced to accept an old crackpot myth about superpowered suburbanites. The world was becoming an increasingly hard place for skeptics.