The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “I don’t care. You’re an asshole.”

  “How am I an asshole?”

  “You were the strongest augur in the clan,” Theo said. “Peter begged you to help him, but you couldn’t be bothered. Now you’re off making millions while the whole world’s dying. And I’m the one stuck with your burden.”

  Merlin shook his head bitterly. “There’s so much wrong with that, I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Okay. Enlighten me. Tell me—” Theo stopped himself, puzzled. “Wait. How do you know this song? You’re not from my world.”

  “Everyone knows this song.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Theo looked to the skyline and finally saw movement. A speck of an aerovan circled the top of a skyscraper. Just one vehicle in the whole damn city.

  “This isn’t a vision,” Theo realized. “It’s not even a prophetic dream. It’s just nonsense.”

  Merlin shrugged. “Sometimes a guitar is just a guitar. Then again, you once had a dream where you were floating in front of a great white wall. Was that nonsense?”

  He played through the song intro again. “Shoop.”

  Theo crouched on the grass and took in the view. An ominous sense of finality plagued him, as if he’d skipped ahead to the very last page of his story. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he would die in that city, that he was meant to die there.

  “I hate this power,” he said. “I hate everything about it.”

  “You and me both, brother.”

  “You seem to have made the most of it.”

  Merlin glared at him. “You think I like being famous? I’ve got everyone and their mother hounding me for predictions. I’m always looking over my shoulder for government scientists. You just know they’re aching to get my brain in a jar.”

  “So why’d you do it, then?”

  “She made me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Who do you think? My boss. Your boss. Ioni Anata T’llari Deschane.”

  Merlin laughed at Theo’s surprise. “What, you haven’t figured it out? We’re her augurs, her soldiers, her three horsemen of the anti-apocalypse.”

  “Three?”

  “I’m including Rebel,” Merlin said. “I probably shouldn’t. The man’s all done. Ioni used him up like a soapsheet.”

  Theo felt the push of invisible fingers on his shoulder. Someone was jostling him in the real world. Waking him.

  “Theo?”

  Wait.

  “Wait.” He looked to Merlin. “Who’s Ioni? I mean who is she really?”

  “If you have to ask, you’re not ready to know.”

  “But what is this city? Why is it so—”

  “—ominous?” Merlin chuckled. “I know, right? I get butterflies just looking at it.”

  “Why?”

  Merlin jerked his head at the skyline. “That’s where all the roads converge, brother. Where it all gets decided. It’s either the end of the world or the end of the world as we know it.”

  The jostling persisted. Theo heard Zack calling him like a howl in the wind.

  “The city’s falling either way,” Merlin said. “And so are we.”

  He looked down at his guitar with somber eyes, then took a final pluck at the strings. “Shoop.”

  “Theo!”

  Theo sat up with a gasp. Zack leapt back from the bed. “Whoa. That did it.”

  “God . . .”

  Wincing, Theo looked around the bedroom. Sunlight filtered in through the half-open blinds, painting the walls in radiant stripes. His head pounded. His heart raced. The images of the dream were already beginning to fade.

  Zack sat on the edge of his bed. “Look, I’m sorry but Peter—”

  “Wait!”

  Theo yanked his notepad off the dresser and furiously scribbled in shorthand. He couldn’t let the dream slip away. There was prophetic significance to the things he’d witnessed, and not just about the city. Something about Merlin. Something about that song.

  Zack tapped his thigh patiently as Theo scrawled his final notes. “You got it?”

  He dropped the pad and rubbed his eyes. “I think so.”

  “Good vision or bad vision?”

  “I don’t know. It was different. Strange.” He glanced up at Zack. “Why’d you wake me?”

  “The meeting’s in an hour. Peter wants you fresh and ready.”

  Theo looked at the clock and groaned. The elders had given everyone the weekend to lick their wounds and gather their wits. Now the clan was officially back to business. It was time to talk about Theo’s other vision, the one that had everyone chattering. Theo wasn’t even remotely ready to deal with it.

  He fluffed his hair, then wiped the sandy grit from his eyes. “All right. I’m coming.”

  —

  Hannah could have strangled Peter. When he’d first told her and the others about the council meeting, he billed it as a small affair. Just the leaders, he’d assured them. None of the rabble.

  What he failed to mention was that the conference room was the size of a gymnasium and that the leaders were a mob unto themselves. They presided around a massive ring of tables—five elders, eight primarchs, two acting primarchs, and the voting heads of all forty-four families. They were all casually dressed and calm in demeanor, despite the gravity of the agenda. Hannah was stunned by the warm looks some of them threw her way. She’d expected them to hate her for killing Naomi Byers, yet she didn’t get a single glare. If anything, they seemed ashamed and embarrassed over what their children had done.

  She sat off to the side in the visitor seats, along with most of her people—Amanda and Mia, David and Zack, Jonathan and Heath, Liam and Carrie. None of them were required to be here, nor were they particularly enthused. They only came as a show of support for Theo, who sat trapped in the center of the ring. He faced the elders from the testimony table, looking dapper but grim in a black shirt and slacks. Peter sat at his side like a vigilant attorney. Hannah noticed a bloody bandage on his right palm, as if he’d come down with a sudden and unfortunate case of stigmata.

  She leaned in toward Mia, whispering. “What happened to him?”

  “Who?”

  “Peter. Look at his hand.”

  Mia studied his bandage from a distance. “Oh. I don’t know.”

  Amanda sank in her seat, a hot blush in her cheeks. She had gotten a little . . . spiky in the throes of passion last night. Peter had a few other tempis wounds they couldn’t see.

  The Mayor quieted the room with a flashing strobe of lumis, then called the meeting to order. He began with an apology for this morning’s unfortunate incident with the Heavensend. The early-rising Gothams had to shield their eyes from the huge, naked ass pictures that flared down at them from the undersky, a dozen moons around the sun. The elders thanked the Mayor for fixing the problem so quickly and urged him to change the password on the Heavensend.

  Carrie caught the juvenile smirk on Zack’s face. “Really?”

  “I admit nothing.”

  “Just tell me that wasn’t your splitter I saw up there.”

  “You’ll never prove it in court.”

  While the opening business continued, Theo leaned over and muttered to Peter, “Can I tell you one more time how very much I hate you?”

  “You’ll be fine,” Peter whispered. “Just follow my lead and stay sunny. All they want are assurances.”

  Theo studied him distractedly. “You have a different accent than your brother.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were both Dubliners.”

  “He’s from Belfast. Why are you bringing this up?”

  “I had a dream about him,” Theo said. “But now I’m thinking it wasn’t a dream.”

  “What?”

  “Is everything all ri
ght?” Elder Howell asked them.

  Peter nodded. “Yes, sir. We’re just eager to start so we can get to work.”

  “We understand. We’ll keep this brief.”

  The council did anything but. For the next forty minutes, they walked Peter and Theo through an exhaustive rehash of recent events, just to confirm the details. On Tuesday night, while his body lay dying on the floor of a stairwell, Theo had slipped into the God’s Eye and caught a glimpse of the vaunted string. The solution to Earth’s greatest problem had flashed before his eyes and now he had . . . something—a hunch, a hint, a revelation. The story had grown through gossip and wishful thinking, until half the clan believed that Theo had all the answers. He’d been given step-by-step instructions on how to stop the apocalypse, bow-wrapped and blessed by God Himself.

  In truth, he didn’t remember a thing about his conversation with Ioni. All he had was the scattered, fumbling message he gave to Hannah before his reversal.

  We have to find our people. All of them.

  No one was particularly pleased by that hitch, least of all the elders. Once they finally caught up on the backstory, Peter began his formal presentation. He stood up and activated a lumic display board. The screen came to life with a projection of his handwriting.

  THE PLATINUMS—TAMPA, FL

  THE IRONS—AUSTIN, TX (SPLIT INTO TWO)

  THE COPPERS—SEATTLE, WA (?)

  EVAN RANDER (??)

  “This is what we have on the orphans at large,” Peter explained. “We know there are at least five other groups in foreign countries.”

  “But you don’t know which countries,” Elder Rubinek stressed.

  “Between Theo and our other augurs, I’m sure we’ll fill in the gaps.”

  Victoria Chisholm shot him a skeptical look. “It’s not the gaps that worry me, it’s the danger. The Seattle mission was a disaster on every level. Do you deny this?”

  “It could have gone better,” Peter admitted.

  “Now you want to try the exact same thing in other cities.”

  Peter nodded. “And Seattle again.”

  A wave of grumbles filled the chamber. Irwin Sunder fumed from the elders’ table. “You’re asking us to risk our lives and freedom over the vision of an amateur augur.”

  “A vision he can’t even remember,” Elder Tam added. “You have to realize how crazy that sounds.”

  Peter shook his head. “Crazy is thinking the world will fix itself. Crazy is doing nothing while our children are dying.”

  “My children are already dead!” Sunder yelled. “I lost my son, my daughter, and my granddaughter, all because we trusted the wrong augur.”

  Mia rose to her feet. “He warned you! Peter warned you about Rebel and you didn’t listen!”

  “Sit down,” snapped Elder Howell. “This isn’t an open forum.”

  Mother Olga gestured at Mia. “But she’s right. If we had all listened to Peter—”

  “One reckless act doesn’t fix another,” said Elder Rubinek. “If anything, it’s all the more reason to be cautious.”

  “Bullshit.”

  All eyes fell on Zack. Sunder glowered at him. “We told you—”

  “I don’t care. Throw me out. It doesn’t change the facts. You guys have been begging Theo to show you the way. Now he’s saying, ‘Okay, here’s the way,’ and you’re all crapping kittens. Did you think saving the world would be easy? Did you think it wouldn’t involve risk?”

  Hannah pointed to Jonathan and Heath. “An augur once told us where to find these two. We didn’t know her and we didn’t trust her, but we took a chance anyway and it was the best decision we ever made.”

  David nodded in agreement. “Unlike you, we see the value in strangers. For all we know, there are orphans out there who’ve seen even more of the string than Theo has.”

  “We need to find these people,” Amanda said. “If you’re not going to help us, then get out of our way.”

  Elder Kohl turned her jaded eyes on Theo. “We seem to be hearing from everyone but the augur in question. Why is that?”

  Theo looked up in blinking distraction. Truth be told, he was barely listening. His mind was still stuck on Merlin McGee. How could a Gotham know a Beatles song? Why did he insist that everyone knew it? The mystery vexed Theo like a seed in his teeth. The answer was right there. He just had to pry it loose.

  He shrugged at Elder Kohl. “I don’t know what to tell you. You’re looking for assurances and I can’t give you any. All I have are hunches based on glimpses, and frankly, they’re not very encouraging.”

  Peter winced. “Look, I think we’re getting off the—”

  “No. I want to hear this,” Kohl said. She looked to Theo again. “What do you know?”

  “I know the woman who gave me my information is the same one who misled Rebel. I know that some of the people we need to find aren’t very nice.” He motioned to Evan’s name on the display board. “One of them’s a psychopath.”

  Anxious murmurs filled the room. Theo stood up and paced the floor. “And I know it’s not just our missing people we need, it’s yours. All the chronokinetics who never found their way here. All the ones you exiled. Those nine black families you willfully excluded. What are they called again?”

  Sunder’s voice dropped an octave. “The Majee.”

  “Yeah. We’re going to need them too.”

  The Mayor had to douse the room in flashing light in order to quell the ruckus. Theo cut him off before he could speak.

  “But none of this matters as long as the Pelletiers are around. They’re the ones who started this mess. If we want any chance of surviving, we’re going to have to deal with them.”

  “Deal with them?” Elder Rubinek asked.

  “I mean send them home or kill them,” Theo said. “I don’t think there’s any other way.”

  A loud din swept through the chamber. Semerjean sat off to the side and solemnly shook his head. Oh, Theo.

  “Zack’s right,” Theo continued. “No one said this would be easy. If it was, there’d be more than one string. But as long as we have one, as long as there’s a single . . .”

  He stopped in place with an astonished expression. A hissing word escaped his lips. Only Peter was close enough to hear it. It sounded an awful lot like shoop.

  All eyes followed Theo as he rushed to the edge of the table ring. He fixed his urgent gaze on Jonathan and Heath.

  “Your music sheets, those songs you’ve been working on. Is one of them ‘Come Together’?”

  The two Golds traded a confused look. “Yeah,” Jonathan said. “Why?”

  “You have the whole thing. The notes, the lyrics.”

  Heath crossed his arms indignantly. “It’s the Beatles. Of course we have it.”

  “Holy shit . . .”

  Peter gripped Theo’s arm. “Listen—”

  “Your brother. I didn’t see him. I saw a future him. That’s why I was confused.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how he’ll know the song. We teach it to him. We teach everyone!”

  Theo ran to the display board and scanned the names of the three missing groups—the Coppers, the Platinums, the Irons. All the American breachers.

  Come together, right now . . .

  “Oh my God.”

  Seventy-two people watched him with the same befuddled expression. Even his friends seemed to be questioning his state of mind. Theo didn’t care. He’d never felt saner in his life.

  He tapped the display board, his face lit up in a daffy grin.

  “I know how to find these people,” he said. “All of them.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  A vast network of tunnels stretched out beneath the village, an under-underland that only a handful of Gothams ever visited. Amidst all the storerooms and bunkers and junk-cluttered passages lay a
few buried secrets. Journey Tam kept a psilocybin mushroom farm. Rebel Rosen had his own private shooting range. Frank Godden had stashed an entire pornography theater behind a wall of emergency rations—six seats, one projector, and no judgments.

  More benign and well known was the half-million-dollar recording studio at the north end of the tunnels, directly beneath the amphitheater. The Gothams had used it to produce fourteen albums over the last eight years, all demo tracks and vanity spins from the clan’s avid musicians. The White Hand Groove, the all-tempic jazz band, recorded a new compilation disc every December. They handed them out as stocking stuffers.

  On Tuesday morning, the twenty-fourth of May, the studio was opened once again. Jonathan had recruited a bassist, a drummer, and a rhythm guitarist from The White Hand Groove and spent two days rehearsing with them. Playing “Come Together” was easy. Playing it the right way, the Heath and Beatles way, was a nightmare. The boy ruled the group with tyrannical exactitude, shrieking with rage whenever one of them strayed from the song sheet. The tempics were so fed up with him that Hannah began fearing for his safety. Luckily Jonathan, no stranger to band friction, was able to keep the peace.

  By Friday morning, the musicians were ready to cut their single. Heath took his place in the recording booth and cast a doleful look at Hannah.

  “You should be doing this,” he said. “You have the better voice.”

  It had been seventeen days since Hannah sacrificed her singing, and she had yet to croon a single note. Though she’d never intended to take her testament seriously, Irwin Sunder’s scornful tone had pushed a button deep inside of her. Hannah was fiercely determined to shatter his misconceptions. She’d keep her word like a goddamn champion and show that prick the true meaning of willpower.

  Hannah smiled at Heath from the control room. “You got this, sweetie. Nobody knows the song better than you.”

  That was certainly true. Hannah couldn’t even guess the number of times Heath had listened to Abbey Road on the old world. He channeled John Lennon with supernatural precision—every note, every cadence, every split-second pause. This was more than a cover. It was a resurrection.