The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  David’s face went slack. “You can’t do that.”

  “Watch me.”

  “Damn it, Zack. Wait.”

  Zack turned around. David threw his hands up, exasperated. “Look, you could be right. This could all be a hoax. But if it’s not—”

  “It is.”

  “If it’s not, then you and I have some very dangerous information, something the Pelletiers don’t want us knowing. We make one bad move and there’ll be consequences. They could kill us. Or worse!”

  “David—”

  “Do you really want go back to the mirror room?”

  The words froze Zack to his very soul. He stood in perfect stasis, wide-eyed, white-faced.

  David raised his palms. “Look, I’m just saying that we need to think before we act. Now I have a plan, a more cautious one. Will you at least hear me out?”

  Zack nodded his head from a million miles away, from a dark corner of the universe where he could see nothing, feel nothing, think nothing at all. Only a fragment of a thought hovered in the periphery. It flickered in the blackness like a distant star.

  I never . . . I never . . .

  “Jonathan and Heath are night owls,” David said. “They don’t go to sleep until three or four. I suggest we play it safe until then. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t do anything suspicious. At first light, we’ll start bringing the others into the fold. First Amanda and Peter, then Mia.”

  Zack nodded again, though David might as well have been talking from the far side of the moon. All he could hear was the sputtering voice in his head.

  I never . . . I never told . . .

  “We should leave Theo out of this for now,” David added. “The Pelletiers put a ring in his brain and I don’t trust it. For all we know, they can see and hear us through him.”

  He took a wary look at Zack. “Are you listening to me?”

  I never told you . . .

  “Zack?”

  His paralysis broke. The blood came rushing back to his face. He forced himself to make eye contact with David, using every ounce of his willpower to keep his screams inside of him.

  “Okay,” Zack mumbled.

  “Okay to what?”

  “Your plan. You want to wait until morning, I’ll wait. I . . .” Zack could feel his composure crumbling, a web of cracks snaking in all directions. “I’ll try it your way.”

  David studied him suspiciously before nodding.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I really am.” He clasped Zack’s shoulder. “The only way we’ll get through this is if we work together.”

  A streak of light caught Zack’s eye from above, a shooting star against the nightscape. Like nearly everything else down here, the meteor was an illusion, a façade, a parody of something real. But the scream in Zack’s throat was all too genuine. He had to keep it down inside him if he wanted to survive. He had to play along with the joke, even though it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even remotely funny anymore.

  He turned to David and gave him a shaky nod, while his mind and soul continued to howl. I never told you about the mirrors.

  —

  Mia woke up at half past four, alert and unrested. She was a veteran insomniac by now and knew that nothing on Earth would help her fall back asleep. Her hungry id urged her to roll over and spoon Carrie, to caress her so tenderly that she’d wake up in a loving mood. But the poor girl had her power finals in the morning. She needed all the rest she could get.

  Mia slipped out from under the covers and admired Carrie from the edge of the bed. She slept on her back, her hair spread across the pillows like molten gold. The sight of her evoked such powerful feelings that Mia almost felt like a stranger to herself. Luckily, she wasn’t suffering her madness alone. Carrie was just as loopy as she was, just as clueless, just as frightened and delighted. If there was a more beautiful force in the universe than warm, reciprocal love, Mia couldn’t think of it.

  A noise from the living room made her heart jump—the unmistakable flitter of window blinds. She peeked out of the bedroom and saw a tall, shadowed figure keeping watch on the street through a crack in the slats. Mia’s fists unclenched the moment she recognized him.

  She hurried into the living room and closed the door behind her, her voice hissing out in a whisper. “Hey!”

  Zack threw a desolate look over his shoulder before resuming his vigil. “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She turned on a lamp and balked at the state of him. His clothes were ripped all over, his jeans mottled with blood.

  “Oh my God. What happened to you?”

  He released the blinds and turned around. Now Mia could see the full extent of his trauma. He looked shell-shocked, devastated, as if he’d lost another brother.

  “You’re scaring me, Zack. Talk to me.”

  He took a seat at the dining table, his fingers moving absently over the scars on his hand.

  “When the Pelletiers took me, they put me in a room. They made it so that I never got hungry and I never needed sleep. I couldn’t rip my clothes, pull my hair out, or do anything to change anything. It was like I was trapped in a moment, locked in a cage of pure consistency. And no matter where I looked, there I was. A single mirror image. There was always just one of me and he was always the same.”

  He snatched a ballpoint pen and clicked it over and over. “The mirrors were the worst part, and I can’t even explain why. They turned my reflection into a thumbscrew and they just kept twisting it into me.”

  Mia sat down and held his arm. “God. Zack . . .”

  “You didn’t know any of that, did you?”

  “No. How would I?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe Evan told you. At least about the mirrors.”

  Mia shook her head. “He didn’t say a word.”

  Zack leaned forward and propped his head with his hands. “Neither did I. Not to anyone.”

  “I’m worried about you, Zack.”

  “Not me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not the one you need to worry about.”

  He tore a blank scrap of paper from Carrie’s math book and scribbled furiously onto it. Mia tried to read it but he was too quick with the pen. Before she could make out the first words, he rolled the paper into a tight stick.

  “What is that?” Mia asked. “What did you write?”

  Zack stared at the message before holding it out to her.

  “This is what the Pelletiers have been hiding from us,” he said. “This is the note they keep burning.”

  Mia plucked the stick from his fingers, her stomach gurgling with stress. Her body went rigid as she read Zack’s sloppy handwriting. Her voice turned low and cold.

  “Get out.”

  “Mia . . .”

  “Get out of this house right now.”

  “Mia, look at me.”

  She didn’t have to look to know that he was crying. She could hear the tremors in his voice, a nebulous mixture of sorrow and rage.

  “I’m not broken,” he told her. “I’m cracked as hell but I am not broken. And I know what I know. Every word of that note is true.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “He screwed up tonight. When he mentioned the mirror room, he gave himself away.” Zack wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “There was no possible way he could have known.”

  A savage scream welled up inside Mia. She wanted to flip the table over, throw everything in the kitchen at Zack. But even now, she knew her rage was misplaced. Her future selves knew exactly where it belonged, and had told her so a thousand times.

  You’re so stupid.

  So stupid.

  So blind.

  You’re so blind.

  You’re so blind you can’t even see what’s going on right in front of you.

 
Right under your nose.

  Right under your fucking nose!

  You can’t even see that he’s laughing at you.

  He’s laughing at you, Mia.

  He is laughing at you.

  Tears dribbled down her cheeks. She covered her face with her hands. “Goddamn you, Zack . . .”

  “You can prove me right or wrong,” he told her. “You know how.”

  “I tried that already.”

  “Mia . . .”

  “I sent a warning with his name on it. It didn’t burn.”

  “But you also sent a retraction.”

  Mia nodded uneasily. She’d felt so bad about abusing her past selves that she’d chased every fake warning with an apology. Disregard that first note. I was just testing something.

  “You put out your own fire,” Zack told her. “The Pelletiers didn’t have to do a thing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know them.” He let out the bleakest of chuckles. “I understand them now.”

  Mia launched from her chair and paced around the kitchen island. She made three sloppy circuits before she returned to the table and snatched the note.

  “If this doesn’t work—”

  “Just send it.”

  Mia once again looked at the warning in her hand, the nightmare that fit like a lock and key into her future.

  There was never a David. There is only Semerjean.

  Mia’s breath whistled in her throat as she opened a tiny portal to last week. She dawdled at the rift, her mind stuck between moving forward and running away. A fatalistic voice in her head assured her that there was no choice left in the matter. This was the night the future caught up to her. This was the moment she joined all the billions of screaming Mias out there in the strings.

  She pushed the note into the portal with a quivering hand, and then watched the paper burn.

  PART FOUR

  THE ACTOR

  FORTY

  He flew like a hawk over the plains of Québec, his arms spread, his body sheathed in aeris. From the view at ground level, he was nearly imperceptible, just a glimmering speck against the cloudscape. Only an elderly birdwatcher on the outskirts of Granby managed to see him for the airborne anomaly that he was. Her eyes bulged behind her binoculars. Her voice trickled out in a stammer, “Ça a pas . . .”

  Semerjean acknowledged her with a teasing wave, then vanished in a streak of light.

  He de-shifted fifty miles to the west, a thousand feet above the center of Montréal. There in the Outremont district, on the upscale end of Boulevard Laplante, stood a four-story structure of marble and glass: an eight-hundred-seat performance hall that was just days away from opening. Like everything else on this terminal planet, the building was doomed to fall in four years’ time. But in another string of history, the one that Semerjean remembered, the St. David Theater would abide through twenty-six hundred winters. It would survive countless recessions and regional makeovers, even a war or two, until it became the oldest, most distinguished playhouse in North America.

  Semerjean lowered himself into a portal and apparated inside the building. Once his feet touched down on the wooden planks of the thrust stage, he melted away his aeris and took an astonished look around. The theater was nothing like he remembered. Everything was so different, so new, yet he was overwhelmed with nostalgia. It was here at St. David that a struggling Australian actor got his first big break. It was here that he learned the vaunted art of lumicraft, until he could perform all of Shakespeare’s plays with nothing more than his will and his ensemble of ghosts. And it was right here onstage, during one of his most celebrated performances, that he first laid eyes on the love of his life: a brilliant young doctor who crackled with power. She didn’t need augments or cybernetic implants. She was a child of the Cataclysm, a direct descendant of the world’s first timebenders. She was a natural talent, just like him, and she was beautiful.

  They’d made love on a bed of tempis, in a small dressing room just thirty yards from where Semerjean was currently standing. Esis had stroked his chest beneath his red silk blanket and confirmed his suspicions that this was no mere dalliance. She’d looked to the future and saw their lives together. Their strings were entwined as far as the eye could see.

  “We will marry in short order,” Esis had informed him. “We’ll have one child and a house by a lake. Together we’ll share a most joyous life, though your pride will be tested when I become more famous than you.”

  “Famous.” Semerjean had smiled as if she were toying with him. “The only famous doctors are the ones who’ve cured something. There aren’t many ailments left.”

  It was then that Esis put her lips to his ears and whispered the words that would eventually change everything.

  “There is death,” she said. “And I will cure it forever.”

  Now, Semerjean wandered aimlessly across the stage, his thoughts drifting back to their thirtieth year of marriage. The memories of an old argument circled his head like a swarm of gnats.

  “You have to stop this, Esis. Your reputation—”

  “You think I care what those fools say of me?”

  “I care. You had a promising career once. Now you can scarcely find work because of this . . . preoccupation of yours.”

  “Preoccupation?”

  “Do you even realize how mad you sound? You want to crossbreed our ancestors with people who don’t even exist!”

  “They exist.”

  “Even if you had the technology to visit this theoretical Earth of yours—”

  “We’ll have it,” Esis assured him. “Our son will invent it.”

  “Azral doesn’t share your optimism. He also believes that even in the best case, there would be untold devastation.”

  “That is . . . unavoidable.”

  “Two Earths, Esis. Billions of people.”

  “Our discovery will spread across the strings. Eternal life for trillions of people.”

  “Only if you succeed.”

  “We’ll succeed,” Esis assured him. “I see this future, clear as sky. I’m sorry that you can’t.”

  Semerjean stopped at the edge of the stage. He’d come to St. David to unwind for a bit, to lose himself in better times. But all he seemed to be doing was dredging up old doubts.

  “I’m not even sure why you need me,” he’d once confessed to his wife and son. “You’re both brilliant scientists. I’m just a tired old actor who plays with ghosts.”

  Esis had reminded him that he wasn’t just any old actor. He was a legend, and he had a finesse with people that she and Azral lacked. That skill would become invaluable soon, as there was one group of subjects—the most difficult and promising of all the chosen ones—who required special attention. The Silvers needed a strong arm to protect them, a subtle hand to guide them. No one was better suited for the task.

  Semerjean moved to the footlights and gazed out at the seats. Oh, to be a simple performer again, to work with the figments of his imagination instead of live, stubborn beings. He’d assumed these children would be easy to manipulate, but they surprised and defied him every step of the way, continually forcing him to improvise. He’d shed blood and lost fingers, suffered contusions and poisons and four-mile plummets. Now one of his charges was even coming dangerously close to uncovering his true identity. Semerjean had pulled a desperate trick on Zack last night. He still wasn’t sure if it worked.

  No, he assured himself, it’ll be fine. All he had to do was remove Jonathan and Heath from the equation, create another ghost show to make it look like they fled. Those two had long outlived their usefulness anyway. Only a handful of people would miss them.

  He flicked his finger at the audience, creating five familiar holograms in the middle of the tenth row. The Silvers stared back at him with vacant eyes—the actress, the widow, the augur, the cartooni
st. Semerjean fixed his gaze on the youngest member of the group, his favorite one by far.

  “Jua non’na no searis denikala né a coeura,” he said to Mia.

  It had been a poetic expression in his native era, a slogan for all the rule-breakers and trailblazers, the ones who did questionable things for the greater good. Some hearts must break for the sake of the future.

  Semerjean vanquished the spectral images, then drew a portal to New York. He’d dawdled enough in the Great White North. It was time to get back to work. This would be a heartbreaking day for the Silvers, he feared. It’d be even worse for the Golds.

  —

  He returned to the underland at half past six, in a thin and cluttered alley behind the lumic guild headquarters. Semerjean always hated coming back to this place. The processed air tasted awful in his mouth. The artificial sky, which was just now beginning to show the first hints of sunlight, looked as crude as a child’s crayon sketch. How the Gothams took comfort in this fake, plastic world was a mystery to him. His forebears were even simpler than he’d imagined.

  After ghostproofing the alley with a quick burst of solis, he closed his eyes and pressed the face of his wristwatch. A three-dimensional rendering of Freak Street appeared inside his eyelids: six translucent cottages, four of them filled with live human images. Zack continued to pace his kitchen in a state of distress while Theo dozed soundly in the bedroom. Most of the others were still fast asleep: Hannah and the Golds, Amanda and Liam. Clearly Zack had opted not to raise any alarms. He was biding his time, strategizing, just as Semerjean had hoped.

  Only Mia was awake and flailing about. Her heart rate was elevated to a disturbing degree. She and Carrie were both anguished to the point of tears. Were the two girls having a love spat or did Zack say something to them? And where on Earth was—

  “David?”

  Semerjean turned around and saw Peter watching him from the alley’s edge. Though his sweatshirt and jeans looked fresh out of the dresser, his hair was unwashed, his face unshaven. Something had abruptly pulled him out of bed, but his stress indicators were normal.