The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Only Peter was tall enough to see the activity on the far side of the square. A phalanx of soldiers had formed a living gate, parting only to let six male prisoners through. From there, armed guards escorted the group down the street and out of sight. The transport process had already begun.

  A guard deactivated a segment of the buzzrope and waved them inside. “Come on. Come on. Hurry.”

  “Hold it,” yelled a voice in the distance.

  Peter cursed under his breath. He’d been hoping to get into the pen without being recognized, but clearly someone was on the ball.

  Gingold approached the trio of new prisoners, then scowled at their escorts. “Idiots. Did you even look at the files?”

  “Sir?”

  He lifted Mia’s chin and brushed the bangs from her brow. Her heart dropped at the black glass discs that stood in place of his eyes.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “Our little doormaker. They’re still talking about you in Seattle.”

  Mia lowered her head and muttered something profane. Gingold smiled. “See? I knew I liked you for a reason. If you tell me where your friends are—”

  “Fuck you,” Mia repeated.

  “It’s all right. We have time.” Gingold looked at her escort. “Put her in Tent One.”

  “Don’t!” Peter yelled.

  The nearby Gothams gasped as Gingold clocked him on the jaw. Peter fell to his knees, his mouth dripping blood.

  “I know you,” Gingold said. “I’ve studied your tactics, and I don’t think for a moment that you would just surrender yourself. You’ve got a plan and I can’t wait to find out what it is.”

  He turned back to the soldiers. “Tent Five.”

  Liam opened his mouth to say something. Peter quickly shook his head. Don’t.

  As Peter and Mia were carted away, Gingold scrutinized Liam thoroughly. He rolled up the boy’s gloves, revealing six inches of burn scars.

  “Rough hands,” Gingold noted. “Some might call them warrior’s hands. Are you a fighter like your dad? Have you been hardened like Farisi?”

  Liam looked away, twin trails of tears running down his face. Gingold clucked his tongue. “Nah. You’re just a boy.”

  He straightened Liam’s gloves, then gestured to his escort. “Put him in.”

  The soldiers shoved Liam into the Gotham pen. A quick-handed lumic caught him before he could fall.

  Mother Olga saw him and fought her way toward him. “Liam!”

  The Gothams cleared a path. She pulled Liam into her heavy arms. “Oh, my sweetheart. You poor thing. Did they hurt you?”

  Liam sniffled and shook his head. Though he didn’t share his father’s faith, it seemed like divine providence that the first kinsman he encountered was the most esteemed, beloved primarch of the clan. If anyone could get their people ready, it was Olga.

  “You need to listen to me very carefully,” Liam whispered. “We have a lot to do.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  There had once been a place on the native world of the Silvers: a two-bedroom walk-up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens. Though the rooms were small, the walls were thin, the faucets spit brown water, and the heat rarely worked in the winter, Samara Bradshaw’s apartment had been decorated with a brilliant eye for color. Every inch of the place—from the wall paint to the throw rugs to the hinges on the kitchen door—complemented each other in pleasing shades of blue.

  Whenever a new boyfriend came home with Samara (and it had happened quite often, as she was a lovely young singer with an incurable weakness for charmers), he would immediately ask about her color obsession. That was when she introduced him to the apartment’s true designer: her teenage son, Ahmad.

  None of Samara’s lovers ever knew what to do with the boy, this strange little mumbler with all the charm of a seizure. When he didn’t prattle on about unsolicited topics—the principles of color theory, the musical evolution of the Beatles, the hunting habits of the arctic white wolf—he threw shrieking tantrums over everything and nothing.

  Inevitably, Samara’s boyfriends found convenient excuses to stop calling her. Some flat out told her that her boy was the deal-breaker. After being questioned about his facial mole, one man stood up at the dinner table and called Ahmad a retard. Samara chased him out the door with a kitchen knife.

  She’d barely finished catching her breath before she gripped her son by the shoulders. “Don’t you listen to him, okay? He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know a goddamn thing.”

  Ahmad wasn’t so sure. His classmates called him a retard all the time. His teachers constantly lost patience with him. He could barely count the number of times he heard his mother fighting in the principal’s office, her strong voice bleeding through the door. You see this letter? That’s my doctor saying your doctor’s full of shit. My boy’s just fine. He’s just different is all.

  On the last day of Ahmad’s freshman year, the principal finally put her foot down and told Samara that the school could no longer accommodate him. He’d have to try his luck in another district or become enrolled in a program for high-functioning autistics.

  Ahmad watched his mother on the bus ride home. She stared out the window with white-hot intensity, as if she were trying to melt the entire city with her mind.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked her.

  Samara grimly shook her head. “Nothing. God gave you more than these people can handle. This is their problem. Not yours.”

  That summer, she’d found herself a new lover: a seven-foot mountain of muscle and bone who made the couch creak every time he sat on it. Though the man could have worn Ahmad like a scarf, he spoke to him in a soft voice and smiled at him even when Samara wasn’t looking. Stranger still, he listened to every one of Ahmad’s scholarly lectures, interrupting only to ask questions. Why do TVs use a three-color system but printers use four? Why did the Beatles break up? What do the wolves do when their environment changes?

  On the third of July, the boyfriend surprised Ahmad with a birthday present: a New York Giants jersey with a 44 on the front and back. He explained that there was another Ahmad Bradshaw out there, a running back who’d recently scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. It was a good name to have. A good shirt.

  For Ahmad, who’d never cared a whit about names or sports, the jersey was a horror. The fabric felt weird, the sleeves were an odd length, and the royal blue color was all wrong for his skin tone.

  “No. No no no . . .”

  The boyfriend lowered his voice and gestured at the bedroom, where Samara was sleeping. “Son, listen to me. Your mother’s a good woman. She’ll fight for you till the day she dies. But you’re fifteen now. It’s time to step up.”

  Ahmad’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

  “The world isn’t always gonna be your color,” the boyfriend warned him. “Screaming and crying won’t fix it.”

  Ahmad looked away, scowling. “What do you expect me to do?”

  The man smiled knowingly. “What do the wolves do when their environment changes?”

  Ahmad knew the answer, of course, but the comparison hardly seemed appropriate. Wolves had to adapt in order to survive. Ahmad was merely struggling to live a less aggravating life. Still, the man had made a good point about Samara. The strain of her battles was starting to show. Maybe it was time to take some of the weight off her shoulders.

  Over the next few weeks, Ahmad began forcing himself out of his comfort zones, just to test his mettle. He sampled foods that were previously anathema to him, played music from artists that everyone but him seemed to love. He donned his hideous football jersey day after day, until the royal blue cloth became part of his personal color scheme.

  He’d been wearing the shirt on July 24, when the sky took on a sickly light and a hundred different airplanes came crashing down onto New York City. The events of the morning p
layed like a fever dream: the explosion, the fire, the panicked dash down a stairwell, the white-haired man in the lobby and the golden bracelet in his grip.

  The next thing Ahmad remembered, he was standing on the street of an entirely different Queens, his wide eyes fixed on the flying traffic. He had tried—oh, Lord, he had tried—to roll with life’s punches, to face the world like a grownup, or at least a grownup wolf. But this? This was too much for a fragile mind to handle. This would not do at all.

  Ahmad retreated to a safe room in his mind while scientists from the Azral Group took him to their research complex in White Plains. He remained catatonic for twenty-two days, staring out the window of the second-floor day lounge, until he heard the start of a very familiar song. Someone in the room—a long-haired white guy who rarely talked much himself—was playing “Day Tripper” on an electric guitar. The notes were right but the tempo . . .

  “Your timing’s off,” Ahmad calmly informed him. “You’re rushing the twelve-bar. That’s not how they played it.”

  The guitarist blinked at him in surprise, and then played the riff at a slower speed. He nodded, impressed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  He put down the guitar and studied the boy cautiously. “It’s good as hell to see you talking. I’m Jonathan. What’s your name?”

  Ahmad stammered, confounded. Though he could easily recall the details of his past, his name had become a vaporous thing. All he could recall was the name of his mother’s last boyfriend, the only one he ever liked.

  “Heath.”

  Heath snapped out of his daze and looked around. Someone was calling him in the darkness—a stern, hissing whisper that cut through the air like an arrow. He peeked above a rose hedge and saw Theo and Zack at the edge of the lumics’ guildhouse, both beckoning him with brusque gestures. He scrambled around the hedge and crept his way over to them.

  “Keep up,” Zack told him. “We don’t have time to go looking for you.”

  Heath nodded, chiding himself for falling behind. Once again, the savior of the world needed him. He refused to fail Theo by getting hung up on personal distractions: his fear and nostalgia, his worry over Jonathan, his hatred for these soldiers and the blackness they brought. The glow from the center of town cast ominous shadows throughout the village, making Guild Street look like a sinister back alley. The stairs to the bomb shelter were still six blocks away.

  Zack peeked around the corner of the lumics’ building, then quickly pulled back.

  “Soldiers?” Theo asked.

  “Yeah. Four of them.”

  “How far?”

  “About fifty yards. I can’t tell if they’re coming or going.”

  “They’re moving away,” Heath said.

  Zack and Theo didn’t have to ask him how he knew. The kid had the sharpest ears of anyone in the group. He could identify his friends by the sound of their footsteps, and knew all the doors on Freak Street by the distinct ways they creaked.

  While Heath kept his ear on the soldiers’ progress, Zack leaned against the wall and took an uneasy look at his arm. Heath’s golden bracelet now had a sinister companion, an “antique” wristwatch that, until yesterday, had been the ornament of a traitor.

  “I wish you wouldn’t wear that,” Zack muttered.

  Theo nodded. “You don’t know what it does.”

  Heath could only shrug in reply. If he had even the slightest ability to explain himself, he might have told them about a pledge he’d made to another Heath, a promise to adapt to life’s jarring changes. Instead of shrinking away from the unfamiliar, he would wrap those things around him and make them his own. It had worked with the football shirt. It had worked with Azral’s bracelet. It would work again with Semerjean’s wristwatch.

  Theo peeked over the backyard gate and caught the distant silhouette of a rooftop sniper. “I didn’t see this coming. Not a single bit of it.”

  “The Pelletiers,” Zack guessed.

  “Yeah. But what do they gain by jamming me? What do they gain by any of this?”

  “I don’t know. Semerjean said he’d have an offer for us soon. Maybe they’re softening us up for the sales pitch.” Zack frowned at Theo. “The real question is why Ioni didn’t tell you.”

  Theo matched his frustrated look. “That’s something I plan to ask her.”

  Heath heard a faint noise in the vicinity, the whimpering cry of a preadolescent. He traced the sound upward and saw a barred window on the second floor of the guildhouse: a prison cell. What on earth would the lumics be doing with a captive child? Unless . . .

  Harold.

  Peter had once mentioned something about the last surviving member of Gemma’s disparates, that chubby blond kid who made spectral blue tigers. His crimes had been horrendous, but he was too young to exile and too crazy to be free. Locking him up was the only sane compromise.

  But now the kid was a sitting duck where he was. It was just a matter of time before the soldiers found him.

  You have to help him, said a wolf in Heath’s head. Get him to the shelter. It’s the right thing to do.

  Screw that, said another wolf, the ornery creature that Heath had named Rose Tyler. That little bastard tried to kill you. You gonna risk the savior’s life just to be nice?

  Heath sighed in resignation. As much as he hated to admit it, Rose was right. Theo was the only priority. The tiger-boy would have to fend for himself.

  “What do you hear?” Zack asked Heath. “Are the soldiers gone?”

  Heath tuned out Harold’s cries, then climbed back to his feet. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  They moved carefully through the shadows until they reached a flood-lit intersection. The village square was only three blocks away, close enough to provide a glimpse of the mayhem. Gunmen paced the grass and the rooftops while the Gothams stood miserably behind a buzzrope. Zack and Theo peeked around the corner just in time to see a soldier pepper-spray a group of loud complainers. They clutched their eyes in screaming pain.

  Zack shot a hateful look at the operative. “Asshole.”

  “He’s not going to like it when the tables turn,” Theo said.

  “If they turn.”

  “They will,” Theo said. “Melissa knows what she’s doing.”

  Heath looked to the other end of Center Street, then cocked his head in confusion. Two blocks away, a dozen agents rushed to assemble some items: a pair of freestanding doorframes, each one as large as a school bus. Circuitry jutted out at strange and ugly angles. If these were machines, they were crude ones, the kind a crazy inventor would build in their garage.

  Zack squinted curiously at the constructs. “What the hell are those things?”

  “No idea,” Theo said. “They almost look like tempic barriers.”

  “If we can’t make tempis, neither can they. Even if they could—”

  “No!”

  Heath was the only one to see the jittery red dot on Zack’s shirt. He barely had time to yell before a hissing bolt flew hundreds of feet through the darkness and impaled itself in Zack’s shoulder blade.

  Grimacing, Zack fell to the concrete, his body thrashing. Theo dropped to his knees and reflexively reached for the projectile in his back. If his foresight had been working, he might have known that he was grabbing a high-voltage stun bolt, and that it was still carrying a charge. Electric current shot through Theo’s arm, just as a sniper’s second bolt struck him deep in the thigh. He shuddered in place before collapsing on top of Zack.

  Heath stumbled back, his thoughts screaming in alarm. He could already hear the clanking boots of soldiers. He didn’t have the time to drag Theo out of here. His only choice now was to—

  Fight, his inner wolves urged him. Let us out!

  No. How could he? The underland was filled with solis. Everyone’s powers were neutralized.

  Yet here we are, the wolves reminded h
im. Wide awake and ready to fight.

  The footsteps grew louder. Long shadows spilled into the intersection. Heath saw four soldiers—the same ones that had crossed his earshot earlier—approach Zack and Theo. One of them quickly spotted Heath.

  “You! Stop right there!”

  Heath’s thoughts went blank. The cage of his consciousness opened wide. By the time the soldiers aimed their weapons, ten large tempic masses had shot out of his fingers. They transformed in midair, forming tails and claws and snarling muzzles.

  “Holy—”

  Only half the group managed to fire their rifles before the wolves pounced. The creatures pinned them all to the pavement, tearing at them through the soft parts of their armor. Heath could feel a wolf chomp the index finger off one man—a phantom taste of blood and bone that nearly made the boy retch.

  Stop it, Heath ordered. Just keep them where they are!

  A hundred yards away, at the edge of the square, the soldiers and Gothams all stopped to watch the violence. The snipers aimed their sights on the wolves.

  “Hold your fire,” yelled the voice in their headsets.

  Gingold was well acquainted with Heath’s menagerie, and he had the scars to prove it. He also knew from their last encounter that the boy was squeamish about killing. The soldiers were in little danger. The real problem was the kid. Making tempis in these conditions was scientifically impossible, like lighting a match underwater. How the hell was he doing it?

  The answer, Heath suspected, was right there on his wrist.

  Eight months prior, in a Battery Park office building, Mercy Lee had crippled Esis with a well-placed burst of solis. Her near-death experience prompted Azral to make sure that no one in the family got depowered again. He built a mechanical safeguard, no larger than a teardrop, and incorporated it into three accessories: his golden ring, his mother’s diamond necklace, and his father’s silver timepiece.

  The moment Heath put on the wristwatch, he’d become completely immune to solis, a parting gift from Semerjean Pelletier.