The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

 

  Esis confirmed.

  He sent a fragment of his consciousness back in time to amend all damage, a new branch of history where he never upset Yvonne, never revealed his true self to Zack. Indeed, the Semerjean of that timeline would have a much nicer morning. But here in this string, life continued. Here, Semerjean had no choice but to face the consequences of his errors.

  Azral’s calm thoughts soothed him like a warm, tender hand. he assured his father.

  Semerjean closed his eyes and sighed. Azral had grown up in the light of his mother’s ambition, a lifelong obsession that blinded him to certain nuances. He thought the people of this era were as simple as cogs, and could be strong-armed into doing whatever the Pelletiers wanted. No. That might work for the Gothams, who only knew death through nibbles and pecks. But the Silvers were different. They had seen the universe at its absolute cruelest. They required a subtler hand.

  Esis scoffed at her husband’s gloom.

  “Wait!”

  Semerjean de-shifted Yvonne. She stood up from the table, disoriented.

  “W-what . . . what just happened? I feel—”

  “Go home.”

  “What?”

  He dropped his Australian accent and looked at her with Semerjean’s eyes. “Leave this place. In thirty seconds, you won’t want to be here.”

  Yvonne stared at him in shock. “David, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “No! You can’t talk to me like that. I thought we respected each other.”

  Semerjean sighed in surrender. It was already too late. His wife was looking for blood and she’d get it, if not from Yvonne, then from someone more important, like Zack or Mia.

  “I never respected you,” Semerjean confessed. “But I do like you. I enjoyed most of the time we spent together.”

  Yvonne took a horrified step back. “Who are you?”

  To Semerjean’s dismay, he was briefly stuck for an answer.

  “I am the patriarch of a very ambitious family,” he said. “I believe in what we’re doing here. I believe that any harm we cause will be exponentially dwarfed by the benefits to humanity.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “My name is Semerjean Pelletier,” he said. “And I am sorry.”

  A ten-foot portal split the air behind Yvonne. She barely had a chance to feel the cool wind of the temporis before Esis arrived onstage. The two of them looked remarkably similar, with their dark eyes and supple beauty, their lissome builds and wavy hair. The resemblance wasn’t entirely coincidence. In the Pelletiers’ timeline, Yvonne Whitten had lived a full life and birthed many children. Her lineage stretched on and on through the centuries, until a distant descendant—a granddaughter of forty-eight greats—gave life to a perfect girl named Esis.

  Unfortunately for Yvonne, the rules of time didn’t work in her favor. A person could kill their direct ancestor without paradox or consequence. That was one advantage to living in a multistring paradigm.

  Semerjean looked away as Esis stabbed Yvonne through the shoulder blade. The tempic sword pierced her heart so quickly that the girl didn’t even have time to understand what was happening to her. Her head snapped back. She sucked a loud gasp. Then her body fell limp on the blade.

  Esis whisked away the tempis. Yvonne crumpled face down onto the stage. Semerjean studied her corpse only briefly before glaring at his wife.

  “You didn’t have to kill her,” he growled in English.

  Esis responded in their native tongue, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you speak to me as my husband or the boy he portrays?”

  “I’m speaking to you. She wasn’t a threat to us!”

  “Her death serves a purpose,” Esis said. “In forty-eight hours—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Don’t be petulant.”

  “Petulant? I put ten months into the Silvers!”

  Azral sent.

  He stepped out of the portal and faced Semerjean from downstage. “You’ve suffered these fools long enough, Father. Rejoin us.”

  Semerjean closed his eyes and took another scan of Mia and the others. By now, their biometric readings were practically off the charts—all the grief, all the rage, all the regret and humiliation. He knew all along that this day would come, but he’d hoped—perhaps naïvely—that he would leave them under better circumstances. They’d scarcely have a day to recover before the next storm hit, before Integrity waged their final assault.

  He supposed there was only one thing left to do.

  “Give me a minute,” he urged his wife and son. “I will follow.”

  Esis eyed him suspiciously a moment before exiting with Azral. Alone again, Semerjean walked to the elders’ table and fumbled with the band of his wristwatch.

  “This was a necessary evil,” he began. He spoke for two more minutes before placing his watch on the table. The device had served him well these many months, but he didn’t need it anymore. One of his former companions would get a better use out of it.

  As the village clock chimed the top of the hour, Semerjean stepped halfway into the portal and took a final look around the theater. This had not been his best performance. Not by a long shot. Mistakes were made. People were hurt. All Semerjean could do was spare a sorrowful thought for the two young souls who’d died just now, right here on this very stage. On some small level, he’d miss Yvonne. He’d miss David even more.

  FORTY-ONE

  Forty-one minutes after Semerjean departed, an ear-splitting shriek tore through the underland. The noise was loud enough to turn every head in the village, shrill enough to shatter lightbulbs. Winnie Whitten had once again unleashed her banshee scream on her people, and with good cause. She’d gone looking for her sister and found her bloody corpse in the amphitheater.

  Within minutes, everyone in the clan knew that Yvonne Whitten was dead.

  The Mayor was the first to scan the past and view his daughter’s final moments, an unfathomable betrayal that turned his legs to jelly and sent him weeping to the floor. Word spread fast about what he saw, until hundreds of panicked Gothams gathered in the village square. Soon the elders arrived to confirm the ugly rumors: a Pelletier had been living among them for weeks, hiding in plain sight as the breacher David Dormer.

  Ten minutes later, another girl’s scream pierced the windows of Freak Street. The residents hurried outside and saw a scuffling commotion through Carrie’s window.

  “Daddy, no!”

  Stan Bloom stormed out the front door, his daughter thrashing and kicking in his grip. He didn’t need his tempis to secure her. One beefy arm was more than enough to keep her slung over his shoulder.

  “Daddy, please! You don’t understand!”

  “I understand plenty.”

  The orphans and Pendergens watched them from a distance, their eyes drooped, their faces racked with grief. David’s bombshell treachery had reduced them all to smoking craters. They didn’t have the strength of mind to handle this newest drama.

  Carrie fixed her crying eyes on Peter. “Please! Tell him! Tell him I’m safe here!”

  He stepped forward with a sigh. “Stan—”

  “Shut up.” Stan spun around and pointed at David’s house. “Two doors. He was living two doors down from my daughter!”

  “He had us all fooled.”

  “All of you?” He jerked his head at the Silvers. “Those people have been with him from the very beginning. They damn well knew what he was.”

  Amanda’s teeth clenched. Her knuckles frosted over with tempis. “You’r
e an idiot.”

  Peter held her arm. “Amanda . . .”

  “You think we aren’t hurting? He was like a brother to us!”

  “Yeah,” Stan said. “That’s what worries me.”

  The back of his sweatshirt shredded apart as waxy white wings grew out of his shoulder blades. He secured his daughter with a tempic harness, then shot a dirty look at her friends.

  “Stay away from us. All of you.”

  He took to the sky with a graceless leap. Mia lowered her head, wincing as Carrie screamed at her from above.

  “Mia!”

  The Blooms disappeared beyond the tree line, invisible but not inaudible.

  “Mia!”

  The group dawdled on the street in dismal silence until Carrie’s voice finally faded into the distance. One by one, the orphans returned to their houses. Peter followed Mia across the lawn.

  “Look, Stan’s just rattled. Once he calms down—”

  “He’s right.”

  “What?”

  Mia turned around to face him, her brown eyes cracked with veins. “She’s not safe with us.”

  “Mia—”

  “Nobody is.”

  She waved a portal in the air, then charged headfirst into it. As the disc closed behind her, Peter stuffed his hands into his pockets and took a sullen look at the fourth-to-last cottage, the one that Semerjean had shared with the sisters. The bastard had done immeasurable damage, and the fallout was only just beginning. God only knew what kind of mess the Platinums and Irons would find when they got here next week—fractured people, fractured trust. They’d be lucky if this place didn’t fall into war.

  —

  By noon, Mia had moved all her belongings back to Zack and Theo’s house, to the rustic little bedroom with the cedar walls and the cherrywood desk. As she unpacked her shirts, she glanced out the window and saw a small gathering in the backyard. Hannah, Theo, Jonathan, and Liam sat scattered in a circle of twelve folding chairs, a remnant from last night’s party. Mia recognized the complicated looks on their faces. They were trying to shape their grief into something manageable, as if such a thing were even possible. How do you mourn a boy who never existed? How do you miss a living lie?

  You’re such a marvel to me, David had once told Mia. You never speak just to hear yourself talk and you always mean what you say. You’re a truly genuine person. Just one of the many reasons I adore you.

  “Fuck!”

  Mia threw her shirts to the floor. If anything, Semerjean had adored her gullibility, her predictability, her blind and fawning devotion to him. He’d probably shared a thousand laughs with Esis over that fat, smitten child. If only the others were as easy as her.

  She rushed to the desk, tore a blank scrap from her journal, and began scribbling furiously. That piece of shit wouldn’t laugh if she managed to warn a past Mia about him. Maybe she could make life that much harder for Semerjean in another string.

  Don’t trust David. He’s not

  Cursing, she crumpled up the paper. If she’d learned one thing today, it was that the Pelletier filters worked. She had to phrase her message carefully if she wanted it to get through.

  Mia tore a new scrap and started again.

  Don’t trust the boy. Everything he says is a lie, even his name.

  She opened a keyhole portal to last August and pushed the note through. The paper burned quickly enough to singe her fingers.

  “Ow! Shit!”

  Mia spent the next twenty minutes trying to work around the censors, using everything from code words to pictographs to esoteric song references. Some of her warnings were so cryptic that she feared even her younger self wouldn’t understand them. But it was all moot. Even her most obscure messages burst into flames, just more flakes of ash on the beds of Past Mias.

  She swept her journal to the floor and buried her face in her hands. She couldn’t do a thing to save her other selves from this agony. They were all whistling toward the cliffside, smiling at David with hearts in their eyes while that horrible creature—

  You’re such a marvel to me.

  —kept lying.

  Mia jumped to her feet and rushed out of the bedroom. She couldn’t spend one more second alone with her thoughts. They’d eat her alive like piranha.

  The backyard chatter came to a stop as soon as Mia stepped outside. She hated the way the others looked at her, as if the wife of the deceased had just arrived at the wake. She wanted to tell them that she and David hadn’t been all that close in the end. She’d fallen in love with a much better person, while that monster dug his claws into poor Yvonne.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Hannah said. “These guys don’t believe me.”

  Liam frowned at her. “It was obviously a trick.”

  “How do you know? You weren’t even there.”

  Mia was distracted by something in the neighboring yard. Heath sat on the grass in sulky repose, his whole body crawling with tempic tarantulas. Best Mia could guess, it was his own weird way of asking for space.

  She looked at Hannah again. “Sorry. What are you talking about?”

  “Back on that aerstraunt, when you and I met Semerjean. David was right there with us. They talked to each other. He cut David’s hand.”

  Mia slumped in her chair. Hannah was clearly still clinging to hope that all of this was a frame-up, that the David she knew and loved was still out there somewhere.

  “He was playing us,” Mia told her. “That Semerjean we saw was nothing but a ghost.”

  Liam nodded. “That’s what we’ve been saying.”

  Hannah threw her hands up. “It just doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t I feel him when he was shifting? Why didn’t Heath and Amanda feel his tempis?”

  “Because he’s smart,” Theo said. “He covered his tracks and kept a tight leash on anyone who could sniff him out. Me and Mia, Prudent Lee. He must have even had a way to keep Evan quiet.”

  Mia snorted derisively. Semerjean was a brute and Evan was a coward. The “trick” was probably nothing more than a physical threat.

  Liam absently tugged at the fabric of his gloves. “He saved my life at Atropos.”

  “He saved all of us,” Mia said. “It was just part of his job.”

  Jonathan polished his guitar, his glum eyes fixed on the distance. “I don’t know what Heath and I did to get on his shit list.”

  “Yes you do,” Hannah said.

  “If this is about you and me ‘entwining,’ then why did David—”

  “Semerjean,” Mia corrected.

  “—why did Semerjean try to frame Heath?”

  Theo stroked his arm in vacant thought. “I don’t think he was trying to frame Heath. I think he was trying to frame Ioni.”

  “What do you mean?” Jonathan asked.

  “She’s no friend of the Pelletiers, and she’s smart enough to stay out of their reach. The only way for them to stop her is to discredit her. And the best way to do that is to make us think she’s one of them.”

  Theo looked to Heath, still playing with spiders. “He just got caught up in that.”

  Hannah leaned forward and muttered at her lap. “She knew.”

  “What?” Theo asked. “About Semerjean?”

  “Yeah. When I met her last year, she told me that I had to take care of you. Me and Amanda and Zack and Mia. She said we’re your family now. I always . . .”

  Hannah closed her eyes. Mia could see her fighting back tears.

  “I always wondered why she didn’t mention David.”

  Jonathan turned a knob on his guitar and then tested a C-minor chord. A black chuckle escaped him.

  “What?” Liam asked.

  “Just thinking about all the times I saw him gagging at us. Whenever we ate a sausage or a skeezy cheese.”

  Hannah fought a grin. “Or whe
n I put on my skin cream.”

  “Or when we talked about science,” Theo said. “You could see his lip quivering, like he just wanted to say ‘No, you idiots! That’s not how it works!’”

  Jonathan laughed. “Man, we must have driven him crazy.”

  “Good,” Mia said. “I hope he suffered every day.”

  “And I hope he’s proud of himself now,” Hannah said. “Wherever he is. The king of all liars. The world’s greatest sleeper agent.”

  An old memory hit Mia like the tail of a whip, her very first conversation with David. They had just arrived at Sterling Quint’s research facility when the scientists left them alone in the game room. Despite the fact that their world (her world) had come crashing down ninety minutes earlier, David seemed fine enough to putter around the pool table and make small talk. He’d asked Mia what “Farisi” meant. She told him she didn’t know. Then, out of politeness more than anything, she asked him the meaning of his last name. The question had brought a ghost of a smile to his face.

  Dormer, he replied. French-Latin.

  Mia stood up fast enough to knock her chair over. Hannah reached for her. “Mia?”

  It means “sleeper.”

  She covered her mouth and fled back into the house. There had been a moment this morning when she considered the notion that maybe, just maybe, Semerjean had developed some genuine fondness for her. Now she knew exactly where she stood in his esteem. He’d been mocking her relentlessly for ten months straight, brandishing his name like a middle finger.

  Crying, Mia scooped her journal off the floor, ripped a blank page, and began a new missive.

  I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a way to spare you from the pain I’m feeling. I don’t even know why I’m bothering. The clues have been there from the very beginning. You’re just too stupid to see them. You’re so stupid and blind that you can’t even see what’s happening right under your nose.

  You want some advice? Kill yourself. Just find a rope and end it. There’s no hope for you, Mia. You deserve every bit of what’s coming.

  She rolled the note into a tight stick, then pushed it into a portal. The paper passed through time without interference, just like the ten thousand other hate letters that had reached her from the future. Clearly the Pelletiers approved of the message.