The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Sunder fidgeted with his tie, his brown eyes filled with sorrow. “Thank you, Peter. I’m surprised you heard about it, what with all the other drama.”

  “I heard.”

  While Peter had come to the meeting in a button-down shirt and jeans, Sunder was dressed in a black three-piece suit, the same one he wore to Bug and Ivy’s funeral. Yvonne’s memorial service was starting in an hour and no one, not even the Sunders, wanted to add Gemma to the ceremony. They’d place her urn in the family mausoleum and then rarely speak of her again.

  “She was a troubled child,” Sunder admitted. “Her powers warped her in ways we’ll never understand.”

  Peter looked away at a high and distant bookshelf. In a less polite mood, he might have suggested that it was lack of love, not the temporis, that made Gemma the way she was.

  “I guess every flock has its black sheep,” Sunder mused. “Yours especially.”

  Here it comes, Peter thought.

  “This Semerjean business has us all turned around, Peter. Some of the house lords are threatening to leave. Others are demanding we investigate David’s friends, you included.”

  “He had us all fooled.”

  “You lived with him for months.”

  “He had us fooled for months.”

  Sunder stood up and toyed with a wooden globe, a rare and pricey relic from pre-Cataclysm New York. “I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. Nobody trusts the breachers anymore. Everyone wants them gone.”

  Peter scowled. “Once again, you’re blaming them for the sins of the Pelletiers.”

  “One of them is a Pelletier!”

  “And that one is gone.”

  “Yeah? And how many other surprises did they leave for us? How many sleepers?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  Sunder slapped the desk, his fingers white with tempis. “You listen to me very carefully now, because you only have two options.”

  Peter sat up in his chair, a sneer on his lips. “Money or exile.”

  “That’s right. We’d like to avoid the hassle of an expulsion trial. Our people are tired. They’ve had enough drama. But if you and your friends leave willingly—”

  “You’ll make us all rich and happy fugitives.”

  Sunder frowned at his sarcasm. “Bring your son this time. Find those other breachers. You’ll have strength in numbers and you’ll have resources.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Peter, think ahead for once.”

  “Think ahead?” He rose to his feet. “The sky’s coming down in four years’ time and I’m the only one who seems to remember. If you care about your family—”

  “Don’t you dare play that card with me.”

  “Fine. I’ll play another.”

  He drew a portal on the surface of Sunder’s desk and reached into it. After a few seconds of fumbling, he pulled out a large manila envelope.

  “What are you doing?” Sunder asked him.

  Peter slid the envelope across the desk. “Thinking ahead.”

  Sunder sat down and leafed through the contents: a full schematic of the underland, plus photographs, maps, and detailed access instructions. The packet also included the contact information of every elder, primarch, and head of house.

  “I was a journalist for twelve years,” Peter reminded Sunder. “Made a lot of friends on the outside. People I trust. This morning, three of them got copies of that package.”

  Sunder’s mouth fell open. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “If they don’t hear from me once a day, they’ve been instructed to send their documents to the National Integrity Commission. I was nice enough to include postage.”

  Sunder mulled the threat a moment before shaking his head. “No. You’re bluffing. You wouldn’t destroy the clan like this.”

  “Destroy?” Peter waved him off. “You’ll be fine on the run. You’ll have strength in numbers and you’ll have resources.”

  “You vicious bastard.”

  Peter set down his teacup and walked toward the door. “We’re staying right where we are. And if you harm a hair on any of my people—”

  “Your people?”

  “My people,” Peter said. “I’m an orphan, just like them. I get to choose my family. There’s only one of them I never liked and he’s gone now.”

  He turned around at the door. “Oh, and you’ll be building houses for those new breachers that are coming. We do want them to feel welcome.”

  “I swear to Christ, Pendergen—”

  “You’re not a Christian.”

  Peter closed the door behind him and breathed a heavy sigh. It would be just a matter of time before the elders called his bluff. He needed a backup plan, fast. Maybe he could take the orphans abroad, or seek shelter with the other clan of timebenders. The Majee had an entire skyscraper to themselves, more than enough room for a few dozen refugees. Would they be willing to help?

  He took the stairs down to the wine cellar and opened the panel of a thermostat. After inserting his keycard and entering a twelve-digit code into a number pad, a wall of wine racks sank into the floor, exposing two safes and an elevator. The doors to the lift opened immediately.

  Peter took a half step forward, then stopped. Something was troubling him from the base of his instincts, a sense that he was being watched. He looked around the cellar. There was nothing down here but bottles and dust.

  Rattled, he backstepped into the elevator. The doors closed. The wine rack wall slid back into place.

  Fifteen seconds after his departure, the weekend maid that everyone knew as Dorothy crept down the stairs and examined the fake thermostat. She’d been working for the Sunders for two weeks, and had suspected from the start that the cellar was an access point. Now, at last, she had confirmation. She thanked the stars for Peter Pendergen and thanked them twice that he hadn’t recognized her.

  She pulled up her sleeve and spoke into her bracelet, an encrypted-channel transmitter that Cedric Cain had given her.

  “It’s here,” Melissa told him. “I found it.”

  —

  By nine A.M., the Gothams had descended en masse to the underland. Lift by lift, portal by portal, eleven hundred people filed into the village and formed a tight crowd in the central square. The elders didn’t like holding a memorial service from the steps of their municipal building, but they could hardly use the amphitheater after yesterday’s tragedy. For the lumics of the clan, the ones who knew and loved Yvonne the most, it would only take a slip of thought to watch the girl die in hindsight. Just as the future tormented the augurs, the past could be horrendously cruel to ghosters.

  With all the Sunders out of the house, Melissa returned to the cellar and changed into something more appropriate. Her sleek black speedsuit was a vast improvement over the clunky rig she wore at DP-9. Fiberweave armor girded her arms and legs like dragon hide while osplate panels made the rest of her nearly bulletproof. The shifter on her back had been jury-rigged for a maximum speed of 30x and her helmet visor allowed her to see both thermal and infrared. She carried a .38 pistol in her left holster, an electron chaser in her right, and four grenades on her belt.

  She also had an elevator key, a clone of the access card that Rena Bloom-Sunder had left on her dresser. Bypassing the card slot was easy. The keycode, however, required a little extra wizardry.

  Melissa pulled four candle-shaped devices from her shoulder bag and stuck them on the wall around the console. The technology had been invented two years before by an MIT dropout, a single mother with a ferocious IQ and a penchant for self-destruction. Cain had helped her straighten her life out before giving her a cushy job with Integrity. In gratitude, she made sure that no one else got their hands on her incredible machine. America wasn’t ready for miniature ghost drills. The nation’s computers and passlocks would never be sa
fe again.

  After a few moments of calibration, the hazy image of a hand appeared between the ghoststicks. Melissa sharpened the picture until she could see exactly which keys Peter had pressed, in which order. Once she repeated the sequence, the fake wine rack sank into the floor, and the elevator began its long return from the underland.

  Melissa stashed her mini-drills. “How are we doing for time?”

  Two hundred miles to the southwest, in a Capitol Hill parking lot, Cain closed the door of his Cameron Bullet and hurried toward a government security checkpoint. Though the D.C. weather was brisk enough to warrant a trench coat, his black fedora and gloves made him look conspicuously sinister. A passing tourist assumed the old man was either an assassin or a congressman.

  “Lousy,” Cain told Melissa. “Gingold’s men are all in place. He’s about to give the order.”

  “Damn it.” She checked her watch. “You said you’d stall him.”

  “I said I’d try. I’m meeting the senator now but things are going to get worse before they get better. Stay focused on the mission. Don’t go trying to save everyone.”

  “Cedric—”

  “Get the orphans out of there.”

  The line went dead. Melissa could only assume that he’d discarded his transmitter, which meant she was officially on her own.

  The elevator doors opened. She steeled herself with a breath. “All right, then.”

  Halfway into her descent, she activated a button on her belt. Her helmet and armor changed color to match her surroundings, a full-body lumiflage that adjusted itself in real time. Cain had invented that lovely feature himself. He might have even shared it with Integrity if they hadn’t taken his Sci-Tech division away from him.

  The doors opened. Melissa scanned the nearby environment, then made a high-speed dash for the trees. Her armor had barely changed color when she stopped to marvel at the underland.

  “My God . . .”

  She’d expected to find a large-scale bunker, all vault lights and metal walls. Instead it seemed the Gothams had created their own pocket universe down here. What an extraordinary feat of engineering. The fact that they’d built it all in secret—

  “Hi there.”

  She turned around to find Hannah standing right behind her, close enough to allow her blue jeans and T-shirt to become incorporated into Melissa’s lumiflage.

  “What—”

  Melissa stumbled backward. Hannah caught her arm before she could topple over.

  “Whoa. Careful there.”

  Her words sounded perfectly normal. Hannah must have been shifted at Melissa’s exact speed. Stranger still, she’d managed to recognize her through her stealthsuit.

  “How on earth—”

  “Come on,” Hannah said. “Let’s get you inside before the Gothams see you.”

  “How did you know I was . . .” The answer hit Melissa before she could even finish the question. “Theo.”

  “Saw you coming an hour ago,” Hannah said. “He sent me to get you.”

  “He must see the rest of it, then.”

  “The rest of what?”

  The air vents suddenly stopped humming. The Heavensend died, throwing the entire village into darkness. Even the lumic readout inside Melissa’s visor went black.

  “Oh no . . .”

  The distant cries of a thousand Gothams filled the air. It had been easy to forget, with the lamps and the breeze and the illusion of sky, that the underland was nothing but a giant tomb. Worse, everyone could register the tingle of solis on their skin. This was more than a generator failure. The blackout was happening deep inside their bodies, too.

  Hannah pushed her inner accelerator and felt absolutely nothing. “I’m blocked. I can’t shift.”

  Neither could Melissa. She activated her infrared vision and scanned her suit’s gauges. Her portable electronics were working just fine, but her temporic devices had been nullified.

  “Damn it.” She took off her helmet and pushed it into Hannah’s hands. “Put that on and lead me to the others. Hurry!”

  “What’s happening?”

  Melissa gripped Hannah’s arm, her stomach twisting in knots. She thought she’d have a few more minutes to extract the orphans, but clearly time was up.

  The invasion had already begun.

  FORTY-THREE

  Three and a half weeks earlier, mere hours after Gingold first heard the word “underland,” a pair of kelly-green aerotrucks descended into Quarter Hill. The residents of Troy Street watched with quiet interest as a dozen exterminators from the Smite-a-Mite company disembarked and erected a tempic shell around the Ackerman house. The place was clearly being fumigated, though the neighbors couldn’t fathom why so many men were needed for the job. They came in and out of the house at all hours, making jackhammer noises in the basement. Must have been one hell of a bug problem.

  Soon the “exterminators” sent a high-powered wave scan through the crust of the earth, revealing a solic/electric power grid a thousand feet below the surface. By the end of the week, Integrity knew the exact size, shape, and location of the underland, and had set up four more digsites around town. Sixty-two agents and seventeen mole drones worked day and night to drill tunnel paths into the earth—down, down, down to the secret world of the Gothams.

  On Saturday morning, twenty-six hours before the start of the invasion, an operative punched a one-inch hole through the ceiling of the dome and sent in a team of camera flies. While the tiny drones mapped every street and exit, directional mics picked up dozens of conversations. Integrity soon learned that the Gothams were burying one of their own on Sunday, a teenage girl named Yvonne. Every man, woman, and child would be down there at nine A.M., in a tightly enclosed space hidden far away from civilians.

  Gingold couldn’t have prayed for a better opportunity.

  At 9:03, just moments after the lights went out, a thunderous explosion rocked the eastern wall of the dome. The Gothams in the village square fell into screaming disarray, prompting Irwin Sunder to climb the base of a support column and shine his handphone onto his face.

  “People, just stay calm and stay where you are! Please!”

  Hundreds of phone screens lit up the square, giving everyone a flickering view of the chaos. Parents hugged their children defensively while panicking kinsmen tried to push their way out of the crowd. Bruce Byers fell to the grass and was trampled into unconsciousness. Shauna Ryder was shoved against the guild directory. Her front teeth cracked against the stone.

  “Please!” Sunder begged. “Calm down! You’re only going to—”

  “Stop.”

  Harsh yellow lights hit the crowd from every angle. Fifty-six soldiers flanked the square from the rooftops. Between their high, scattered perches and their head-mounted targeting displays, the snipers had the whole clan covered. They could kill any one or fifty people at a moment’s notice.

  Gingold watched from the roof of the municipal building, his body covered in deep black osplate. Like the rest of his team, he’d swapped his light tempic armor for a clunkier metal suit. All his weapons and scanners were nontemporic. Gingold had known from the start that the only way to beat these freaks was to flood their home with solis. Integrity could get by without its timebending tricks. These folks, not so much.

  He raised a bullhorn to his lips. “Ladies and gentlemen—”

  While most of the crowd looked up, Ollie Orlowski made a fevered dash down an alley. Fifty Gothams screamed as a hissing gunshot sent the boy to the ground.

  “That was a stun bolt,” Gingold attested. “The next person who runs gets a bullet in the leg. The one after that gets a bullet in the head.”

  Frantic chatter filled the square. The sounds of heavy footsteps drew closer. While Gingold and his snipers had rappelled down from the ceiling, the infantry charged in through the blast hole in the eastern wall.
Now at last they reached the center of the village: a hundred and forty armored soldiers, all spreading like oil around the Gothams. They dragged a handful of stragglers back into the cluster, then draped Ollie’s limp body over a park bench.

  Sunder stared up at the glass-eyed man with the megaphone. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Oren Gingold, senior agent of the National Integrity Commission. You’re all being detained as exceptional threats under Article Five, Section Two of the United States Security Code.”

  “You can’t do this,” Victoria yelled. “We’re American citizens!”

  Gingold magnified his view of the primarch until her personal information popped up as an overlay. “Don’t play dumb, Chisholm. You people have been skirting the law for decades. Some of you have killed federal agents. All of you are guilty of harboring fugitives.”

  He scanned the frightened faces below. No sign yet of the people on his wish list. No Rebel Rosen. No Peter Pendergen. Not a single one of the otherworlders.

  “Far as I’m concerned, each and every one of you is a threat to human life. I’d like nothing more than to bury you here.” Gingold paused in momentary thought. “But Chisholm’s right. You are Americans. That buys you one chance. Surrender peacefully and no one else gets hurt. That’s the best offer you’ll ever get from me.”

  The soldiers on the ground raised a dozen floodlights while another team set up an electric rope cordon around the Gothams.

  Carrie held her father tight. “Daddy . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Stan whispered. “Stay with me.”

  Gingold lowered the bullhorn and addressed his people through his transmitter. “Flyers, get the evacs ready. Thermals, fan out. I want every inch of this place searched.”

  He swept his electronic gaze around the Gothams, his lip curled in a scowl. “There are a lot of faces I’m not seeing.”

  —

  In better times, when the lights worked, the perimeter park was the most vibrant part of the village. The two-mile path of Crimson Queen maple trees looped all around the base of the dome, providing endless color for the Gothams who walked it. The illusion of nature was broken every hundred feet or so by a doorway on the outer wall—an elevator here, a stairwell there, a long ladder tube to the surface. There was even a golf cart ramp that sloped all the way up to West Nyack. The underland didn’t lack for exits.