The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Mia tore a new scrap and immediately began another.

  —

  Zack woke up at sunset with a head full of cotton and a strong desire to break something. He’d had more time than anyone to process David’s betrayal, yet he seemed to be moving backward on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, from Depression to Bargaining to a shit-ton of Anger. His hatred for Azral, Esis, and Semerjean had reached an almost divine apotheosis, as if he could break out of his skin at any moment and become a holy spirit of vengeance. He imagined the looks on their faces when he brought the whole damn sky down on their heads, the screams on their lips when they woke up in Hell.

  Great, an inner voice complained. Now you’re all the way back in Denial.

  Zack had barely brushed the grit from his eyes when a portal opened up on his wall. He shielded his eyes at the sudden rush of light.

  “Jesus!”

  Peter stepped through the opening and registered his surprise. “Good. You’re awake.”

  “You know, doorknobs aren’t complicated.”

  “Neither are portals.”

  “Just admit that you like freaking me out.”

  Peter shrugged. “It could’ve been worse.”

  “How?”

  “I could’ve been Semerjean.”

  Zack saw his pointed expression and looked away. “I’m sorry about that, okay? I was an asshole for ever doubting you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To get an apology?”

  “No.” He grabbed Zack’s shirt from the foot of the bed and tossed it at him. “Get dressed.”

  Soon Peter and the orphans arrived at the amphitheater, where a teenage lumic awaited them. Ollie Orlowski was no one’s idea of a handsome boy. His chin was weak, his eyes were uneven, and he had the worst acne of any kid in the clan. But he was universally well liked for his wit and intelligence, not to mention his kindness. He’d never said a bad word about the breachers, even when David stole the heart of his longtime crush, even now when half the Gothams suspected them all of being demons in disguise.

  Peter led the others onto the stage, then gave Ollie a hearty handshake. “I really appreciate this.”

  “No problem,” Ollie said, with a tone that suggested anything but. “Just play the part we talked about?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Zack said. “I want to see the whole thing.”

  “Zack . . .”

  “Maybe they said more than they meant to. There might be something we can use.”

  “Listen to me.” Peter pulled him close and lowered his voice. “That boy over there grew up with Yvonne. He loved her, and he’s doing us a courtesy. We’re not going to make him replay her death.”

  The others nodded in agreement. Half of them had already seen Esis kill people. The last thing they needed was to watch Yvonne’s murder. Zack found it funny, in a not-so-funny way, that his old friend David would have taken his side on the issue. He always favored strategy over sentiment.

  Grudgingly, Zack relented. Peter nodded at Ollie. “All right.”

  The boy raised his arm. A temporal ghost materialized onstage. The hearts of five Silvers broke at the sight of the golden-haired boy in front of them. Even now, with all their knowledge, he looked nothing like a Pelletier. He was still the dauntless young Australian who’d been part of their tribe from the very beginning.

  He was still David.

  His specter puttered at the edge of the elders’ table before turning to face his audience. Half the group flinched at his direct eye contact. Clearly he knew they’d be watching him from the not-too-distant future. More jarring still, he knew exactly where they’d stand.

  “This was a necessary evil,” the ghost of Semerjean began. “My family and I went to great lengths to find you and bring you here. Though you were all—and I use the term politely—ordinary people where you came from, you each have a neurological mutation that’s nothing short of miraculous. It . . .”

  He looked away, chuckling. “I had to bite my tongue whenever one of you wondered why the Pelletiers gave you your temporal talents. We didn’t. You’ve had the potential all along. The only thing you lacked was temporis. Here on this world, the energy flows freely. Here, you’re all extraordinary. More than that, you have the potential to provide us with something of immeasurable value, a scientific breakthrough that’ll usher in a new golden age for all of humanity.”

  Though Hannah tried to process his words, she kept getting caught on his wavering accent. It bounced back and forth from Australian to alien, as if he couldn’t decide who he wanted to be.

  He wasn’t ready, she thought. He didn’t want to give up the act.

  Semerjean continued. “We selected ninety-nine of you from ten different cities, and we took a different approach with each group. Some, like the Golds of New York, were remarkably easy. Our work with them ended months ago. Others, like the Silvers of San Diego, present continual challenges, both strategic and ethical. Do we take what we want by force, or do we coax it from you through subtle manipulations? We followed our consciences, as well as the strings, and we chose the gentler path. We gave you freedom and free will.”

  Amanda closed her eyes, sickened. He’d deceived them for months, used Yvonne as a stage prop, and then stood by idly while Esis killed her. And he had the nerve to talk about ethics.

  Semerjean pushed his hands into his pockets and rocked on his feet, a David-like gesture that hit the Silvers like a slap. “Our decision required a significant investment on our part, a full-time presence inside your group. My task was to protect and guide you, to keep you all together.”

  His expression turned grim. “And to keep some of you apart.”

  Everyone looked to Zack and Amanda. They kept their heads forward and their hard eyes locked on Semerjean.

  “I don’t expect you to believe me but . . .” He looked to his left and sighed at an empty part of the stage. “I’m well aware of the pain we’ve caused, and I don’t blame you for hating us. I think back to the great minds of this age who cured terrible diseases, like polio and smallpox. If you judged them solely by their treatment of lab animals, you’d think they were monsters. But they had a vision and a purpose. They saved more lives than . . .”

  Semerjean winced at his blunder. Hannah scoffed at him. “Yeah, that’s right. You just compared us to rats.”

  “I must have really come to like you people,” Semerjean said. “Here I am, talking to air, hoping that you’ll think more kindly of me in the future. I can’t imagine that’ll happen. I’ve seen your notes, Mia, the ones that never got to you. It breaks my heart to break yours. I’ve been dreading this day for a very long time.”

  Mia covered her face, struggling to keep her screams inside of her. If she started now, she’d never stop. She’d scream herself into oblivion.

  Semerjean looked down at his wristwatch, then unhooked the clasp. “Well, I suppose it’s time for me to step off the stage—to give up the ghost, as one might say. I offer you all my deepest apologies, and I leave this device to anyone who wants it. It has many hidden functions that only work for me, but some of its perks are universal.”

  He placed the watch on the elders’ table, merging its ghost with the real live object. None of the Gothams had dared to touch it. For all they knew, it would explode on contact.

  Semerjean sidestepped into the invisible portal, his left arm disappearing inch by inch, as if God Himself was erasing him.

  “I wish I could tell you, for your sake more than mine, that you’ll never see me again. But you will. Not long from now, my family and I will have a . . . proposition for you, a new arrangement that’ll save the lives of many people. When that time comes, I hope you’ll put aside your resentment and hear us out.”

  He threw an ominous look at his former companions. “And for those who wish to sabotage o
ur work here, out of some petty sense of vengeance, I have one last word of advice.”

  His sharp blue eyes narrowed at Zack. “Don’t.”

  At last, Semerjean departed. Ollie lowered his arm with a tired sigh. Only Peter had the strength of mind to thank him. The others dawdled onstage in frustration and depression, until Heath wandered off from the group.

  Jonathan saw what he was moving toward. “Buddy, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Hannah’s eyes bulged. “Heath, no!”

  Heath picked up Semerjean’s wristwatch and dangled it in his fingers. He studied the face, then the back, and then pressed it to his ear.

  “It ticks,” he matter-of-factly informed the others. “It sounds just like the real thing.”

  —

  After fifteen minutes of soft red dusk, the Heavensend transitioned to Nightscape Template 163: Magical Alaska. Five thousand stars twinkled down from the undersky while an aurora borealis bathed the town in fluorescent green ribbons of light.

  Zack ambled his way down the narrow neck of Freak Street, the most underdeveloped part of the village. There were no structures, no lampposts, no benches or gardens, just scattered patches of baby elms on both sides of the street. Every couple of weeks, just as nature began to remind the Gothams that Hey! Trees need sunlight!, a turner came by to reverse all the saplings to a green and healthy state. Then the pitiful things would start to die all over again. Wither, rinse, repeat.

  Their plight was so depressing that Zack was almost relieved to see the mini-apocalypse that Amanda had unleashed upon them. He followed the trail of broken trees until he saw moving figures off the side of the road: two large tempic hands that looked like misshapen creatures in the light of the borealis.

  “Wow.”

  By now, Amanda had cleared a nice parcel of land, enough for at least six new orphan cottages. Zack could see from the healthy flush in her skin that she was venting just as much as she was landscaping.

  He leaned against a tree and watched her tug at a sapling. “You plan to do this all night?”

  Amanda ripped out the elm with a grunt, then tossed it onto the street. “I shared a house with him. I don’t really feel like going back there.”

  “So stay with Peter.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Is that sarcasm?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen Mercy today?”

  Zack picked up a twig and chucked it into the darkness. “No.”

  Amanda shrank away her tempis before taking a long swig from a bottle. She swished the water in her mouth for a couple of seconds.

  “We gave him exactly what he wanted, didn’t we? Me and Peter, you and Mercy. He’s been angling for that all along.”

  Zack nodded dejectedly. “Afraid so.”

  “What about the others? Hannah? Theo?”

  “I’m pretty sure he has people in mind for them too.”

  Amanda stared up at the fake moon with visible contempt, as if she was one beat away from punching it out of the sky. “Every time I came home, he was on the couch with Yvonne, kissing her and giggling and making me feel all uncomfortable. I got so annoyed, I started hiding out in Peter’s house. It was . . .”

  She threw her bottle to the ground. “That girl was nothing to him. Just a tool.”

  “That’s all any of us are to them,” Zack said. “Tools and breeders.”

  “It doesn’t even make sense! We’ve been using . . .”

  Amanda caught herself and looked at Zack awkwardly.

  “Us too,” he told her. “Condoms. Every time.”

  “You think he tampered with them?”

  “He’d be stupid if he didn’t.”

  “Goddamn it!”

  Zack flinched. He’d seen her on some of the worst days of her life, but this was the first time he’d ever heard her take the Lord’s name in vain.

  “These are our lives,” she yelled. “They have no right to do this!”

  “That’s not the way they see it.”

  “Why push us through all these hoops? I mean, they’re scientists. They could just mix our genes up in test tubes and grow the babies they want.”

  Zack shrugged at the ground. “Maybe that’s what they did with Jonathan’s group. Maybe that’s why they don’t need them anymore.”

  “But not us,” Amanda said. “We’re supposed to make babies the old-fashioned way.”

  “Apparently.”

  Desolate, Amanda walked over to Zack and leaned against the other side of his tree. Her shoulder brushed against his.

  “I can’t stand the thought of you and Mercy,” she confessed.

  “I can’t stand the thought of you and Peter.”

  “It’s not serious.” Amanda crossed her arms and sighed. “It’s just . . . an arrangement.”

  “Yeah, well, Mercy and I aren’t exactly ring-shopping. In fact, I’m pretty sure we broke up last night.”

  “What?” Amanda looped around to face him, her eyes wide with fear. “You can’t.”

  “Didn’t you just say—”

  “It doesn’t matter how I feel. You have to go back to her. Azral and Esis already hate you. If you give them one more reason—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I care,” Amanda said. “You’re one of the most important people in my life, and I’m not going to watch them take you away. Not again.”

  Zack shook his head. “I’m not playing their game anymore.”

  “We don’t have to play their game. We just have to play ours smarter.”

  She pulled out the crucifix on her necklace and showed it to him. “This is my last possession from the old world. I nearly pawned it last year when we were desperate for money. You remember that?”

  “Of course.”

  “And do you remember who stopped me?”

  Zack looked away. “I did.”

  “That’s right. It had nothing to do with faith or Christ. You just knew that I needed one last keepsake from my old life, something to cling to when things got crazy. You were thinking ahead, and you were right. This necklace has held me together just as much as you have.”

  She cupped her hand against the side of his face. “I love you, Zack. They can stop me from being with you but they can’t change the way I feel. And if they can hatch their long-term plans, then so can we.”

  He pursed his lips, skeptical. “You seriously think we have a chance against them.”

  “I forced Esis to save your life. You exposed Semerjean for the liar he is. They’re not unstoppable, but we’ll never win just by making them mad. We have to bide our time and strategize.”

  Amanda let go of him. “So go back to Mercy. Be with her, but don’t get too comfortable. Because the minute we beat those pieces of shit, I’m coming for you. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together.”

  She cast a dismal stare at her feet. “And we’ll make lots of babies.”

  Thousands of miles away, in the penthouse suite of an Ibiza hotel, the man once known as David Dormer lay naked in bed while his wife slept beside him. He folded his arms behind his head, watching through stony eyes as a mouse-size Amanda loitered on his stomach, whispering sweet promises of victory to Zack. The woman, as usual, was acting steadfast and determined with only a quantum of facts at her disposal, though Semerjean had to give her credit for thinking strategically. Amanda was finally learning to channel her anger.

  But Zack . . . oh, Zack. What a disappointment. Semerjean only had to read his tiny face to know that Esis was right yet again. He would not go back to Mercy Lee. He wouldn’t even deign to pretend, even though he knew his life depended on it.

  Semerjean watched him quietly, and for a moment it seemed that Zack was looking right back at him. How could a man be so clever yet so dense? Semerjean supposed it didn’t matter. The die was cast. T
he future was set. Esis was coming for Zack tomorrow, and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.

  FORTY-TWO

  The Sunder family library was the most exquisite room in the manor, a two-story orgasm of mahogany and leather that had been photographed twice for American Taste magazine. The Victorian furniture alone cost a million dollars. The paintings had their own insurance policies. Peter couldn’t even guess the value of the books, all first-edition classics that had been painstakingly acquired by auction. Irwin Sunder only brought people here when he wanted to impress or intimidate them, and he didn’t seem keen on impressing Peter. The fact that they were meeting alone, without the other elders, was especially telling.

  The two men faced each other from opposite sides of Sunder’s desk, their eyes locked in contact as a young black servant prepared their tea. Sensing that she was impeding their business, she filled their cups with nimble haste, then removed the tray.

  Sunder nodded at her. “Thank you, Dorothy. Close the door behind you.”

  Peter watched over his shoulder as she made for the exit, her ponytail swinging with each hurried step. “Working early on the Lord’s day.”

  “I’m not a Christian,” Sunder reminded him. “And my weekend maids earn double pay.”

  “You ever worry about them discovering your, uh . . .”

  Sunder bristled at the mere suggestion. “My family has discipline. We never use our blessings on the surface.”

  It was lucky for Peter that the man wasn’t a ghoster. He might have looked back twenty years and seen Peter and Ivy playing portal tag throughout the house. He wouldn’t like what they did when they caught each other.

  Peter lifted his teacup. “Very sorry about your granddaughter, by the way.”

  At 7:01 yesterday morning, just as Semerjean took his leave of the Silvers, Gemma Sunder had made a quiet exit of her own. The girl shuddered on her hospital bed, her first hint of movement in three and a half weeks. Then her vital signs dropped. Her monitors squealed. By the time the nurses got to her, there was nothing they could do. Gemma died just a few days short of her eleventh birthday.