The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Heath retreated into his thoughts, to the warm white room where his animals lived. They were all wolves at heart, and they fiercely resisted whenever he tried to make them into something else. But wolves couldn’t carry Zack and Theo to safety. He needed something more versatile. He needed—

  Men? a guttural voice asked him. You want us to walk like you?

  No, Heath pleaded, I need you to run.

  The snipers watched with puzzled brows as six of Heath’s wolves began to evolve. They stood up on their hind legs and shook their bodies vigorously, as if someone had splashed water on them. By the time they stopped thrashing, the creatures had transformed into something else entirely—six tall and faceless humanoids with the sturdy build of weightlifters.

  Gingold reached a rooftop just in time to watch the tempic men flee north up Guild Street. He replayed the image in his optic feed and studied it in still frame. Two of the hulks carried Zack and Theo in their arms. The other four moved in a tight diamond formation. Gingold had to magnify the picture to see a hint of the boy between them. They had clustered around their lord and creator, shielding him from weapons fire.

  Unfortunately for Heath, Gingold already knew that trick. And he had the perfect countermeasure.

  He looked to the six agents next to him, all crouched around a trio of mortar cannons. “Now.”

  Heath could hear the discharge from a hundred yards away, a chain of thick and hollow puffing sounds. Thoop. Thoop. Thoop.

  The bombs flew a high arc over the village, then fell whistling onto Guild Street. The first one demolished the front wall of the turners’ hall, eighty feet away from Heath. The second one tore up the street behind him, rattling his eardrums, pelting his men with chunks of rubble.

  The third one hit like the end of the world.

  Heath’s tempic men vanished as the hot blast sent him tumbling through the air. Zack landed in a patch of azaleas. Theo came to a rolling stop on the concrete. Heath crashed against the door of the thermics’ guild building, his legs smacking against the wood. He fell to the ground in a messy heap and blacked out for forty-four seconds.

  By the time his eyes opened, he wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. His muscles ached. His skin bled in ten places. He couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in his ears. It wasn’t until he saw Theo’s lifeless form that he remembered the task at hand.

  Gotta . . . gotta get him to safety. Gotta . . .

  He clambered to his knees and crawled his way toward Theo, until a harsh white glow froze him in place.

  Three armored soldiers approached him, their rifle lights aimed squarely in his eyes. Frantic, Heath fled inside his head and called for his minions. No response. The explosion had done what the solis couldn’t. He was powerless.

  “Put him down,” Gingold ordered the soldiers. “Don’t take any chances.”

  Heath looked up, his eyes tearing. He imagined his mother weeping from Heaven, with God’s hand on one shoulder and Big Heath’s on the other.

  I’m sorry, Heath told them. I tried.

  One of the soldier’s helmets cracked in a spray of red mist, a fresh new hole in his visor. Heath squinted in the light, baffled, as another gunman fell, then the third one. If Heath’s ears had been working, he would have heard the booming gunshot that had accompanied each death. All three soldiers had taken a bullet to the eye.

  Heath turned his head to see a muscular figure advancing through the wreckage, a .44 revolver in his hand. He wore at least six different ammunition pouches over his black leather armor, and carried enough weapons to take down a platoon.

  He stepped into the light and held a mechanical hand out to Heath.

  “Come on,” Rebel said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  Heath scuttled away, panicked. “No. No, no, no . . .”

  Rebel motioned impatiently. “I’m on your side, kid. I don’t have time to convince you.”

  Mercy burst out of the turners’ guild building, as armed and armored as Rebel. She had just finished dressing for Yvonne’s memorial when her mother broke the news of the coming invasion.

  Go with Rebel, Prudent had told her. He has a crucial task for you and Zack.

  Mercy looked to her left and saw Zack lying face down in a flower bed. “Oh no . . .”

  “He’s all right,” Rebel told her. “I’ll take him. You get Maranan. Hurry.”

  Mercy rushed to Theo’s side. Rebel turned back to Heath. The boy had climbed to his feet and was slowly retreating.

  Rebel sighed at him. “Last chance, kid.”

  Mercy hoisted Theo into her arms, her nervous gaze fixed on Heath. “Come on. We’ll take you to—”

  Heath turned around and disappeared into the smoking ruins of Guild Street.

  “Wait!”

  “Forget it,” Rebel told Mercy. “We have bigger things to worry about.”

  “He’s just a boy.”

  Rebel slung Zack over his shoulder, scoffing at Mercy’s assessment. The kid may have been young and a little bit daffy, but he was strong in all the ways that mattered. Rebel was sure that at the end of the day, when the village lay in tatters and the dead filled the streets, the boy and his wolves would be just fine.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Stores came and went in Quarter Hill, but no one had expected Manganiel’s to close. The plant and garden megamart had been a staple of the town since 1980, winning numerous state “Shoppy” awards, including Best Nursery, Best Helpstaff, Best Inventory Design in a Large-Scale Floorspace, and Best Owner.

  At least once a year, a developer from a major retail chain serenaded Kath Manganiel, offering her blinding amounts of money for her prime location in the commercial district. No one had been able to sway her until seventeen days ago, when Integrity operatives found her in her illegal tobacco garden and offered her an entirely different kind of bargain. She relinquished her store to the U.S. government, then promptly fled to Florida.

  Now a bored young soldier prowled the aisles of the showroom, his fieldboots flecked with shriveled leaves and petals. Here on the surface, far above the solic haze, he was free to wear his light and hardy tempic armor. He almost felt bad for his comrades down below, lumbering around in those black metal chokesuits. Then again, they were actually getting to do something while he was stuck in some plant shop, reluctantly learning the difference between hydrangeas and hypericums.

  The soldier paused at the end of Aisle 9 (PARTIAL SHADE PERENNIALS), lifted his face mask, and took a swig from his water bottle. Every watt of the store’s electricity was being funneled to the basement, killing all the fans and air conditioners. Worse, the sun was already starting to bleed in through the skyglass. Come noon, it was going to be a real ball-soaker in here.

  A vibration tickled the soldier’s torso. He looked down at his chestplate and saw it dancing with milky ripples.

  “What . . .”

  He reached for his radio, just as two lily white hands bloomed out of the tempis and covered his mouth and nostrils. His body crashed into a ceramic planter, then thrashed about on the floor. After a minute of kicks and muffled cries, he finally fell still.

  Amanda peeked around the corner and reeled him in with a tendril. Jonathan studied him over her shoulder. “Is he dead?”

  She leaned in to check his breathing. “He’s alive.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “I might have overdone it,” she admitted. “You can’t deprive a brain of oxygen without risking—”

  Amanda raised her head in alarm. She felt more tempis in the area: two armored figures behind the potted trees of Aisle 10.

  She jumped in front of Jonathan. “Look out!”

  The soldiers turned the corner and raised their rifles. Before they could shoot, they were hit by a pair of quick assailants. Hannah struck the back of their knees with a billy club while Melissa zapped
their necks with a stun chaser. The soldiers slammed against the ground and stayed there.

  The two women de-shifted, then dragged the soldiers up the aisle.

  “You okay?” Jonathan asked them.

  “We’re fine.” Melissa dropped her victim next to Amanda’s. “Sorry for the close call.”

  “We had two more by the registers,” Hannah said. “They weren’t as easy.”

  Amanda looked around. “I can’t feel any more of them.”

  Melissa scanned the aisles through her thermal visor. Though the tempic armor made the soldiers easy for Amanda to detect, it also masked their heat signatures. Melissa could barely see them. All she knew was that Manganiel’s was located directly above the solic disseminator, which meant the power source was in here somewhere. Surely Gingold would have more than five men guarding it. Where were the rest?

  She switched off her thermals and examined the suffocated soldier. “He’s breathing,” Amanda said. “I might have given him brain damage.”

  “It’s all right. Whatever we do to these people can be reversed.”

  “Not everything,” Jonathan reminded her.

  “Yes, well . . .” Melissa eyed him guardedly. “Let’s do what we can to avoid fatalities.”

  After one last thermal scan, she led Jonathan and the sisters down a stairwell. The basement stockroom had been completely redone since Integrity moved in, though “undone” might have been the better word for it. All the inventory had been shoved aside by bulldozers. Dirt and rubble lay scattered about in piles. Melissa looked to the center of the room and saw the fruits of the agency’s labor: an excavated gorge, twelve feet deep and lined with wooden scaffolds. All the light in the cellar seemed to come from it.

  Jonathan studied the big square hole from a distance. “Well, that’s creepy as shit.”

  Melissa shushed him, then activated her lumiflage. Her armor became cloaked in ambient images.

  “I’ll be back,” she whispered. “Stay down and keep quiet.”

  She crept her way to the gorge and peeked down over the edge. The place was filled with industrial equipment: substations, cooling towers, precipitators . . . but no generator. Six technicians in casual clothes flittered busily between consoles, a holstered gun at each of their hips.

  Melissa traced a visual path along the maze of floor cables. The heaviest ones snaked to the north, into a wide scaffold tunnel at the farthest end of the pit. The device they were looking for must be in there, but how far did the passage go?

  A glint in the distance caught Melissa’s eye. She magnified her visor display and saw faint gray figures moving around behind the dirt mounds. There were soldiers in the upper cellar, and they were doing their best to stay hidden.

  They’re on high alert, Melissa realized. They know we’re—

  A bullet struck the small of her back. Her armor’s battery exploded in a jet of sparks, killing her shifter as well as her chameleon cloak. Melissa barely had a moment to regain herself before three more soldiers fired at her. The first bullet missed. The second one careened off the side of her helmet. The third one hit her square in the chest.

  Hannah peeked out of her hiding spot and saw Melissa fall backward into the gorge. A bullet whizzed past her head.

  Jonathan pulled her back. “Get down!”

  “They got Melissa!”

  “How many are there?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see them!”

  Amanda crouched behind a stack of debris, her eyes closed in concentration. She could only vaguely feel the tempis in the distance—eight, nine, maybe ten suits of armor, all scattered around the stockroom. They were moving so fast, they must have activated their shifters. And two of them were rushing toward—

  “Hannah!”

  The pair arrived before Hannah could even sense them. They skidded to a halt behind her and Jonathan, their rifle barrels raised mere inches behind their heads.

  “No!”

  Panicked, Amanda thrust her arms. If she’d had a split second more to formulate a strategy, she might have handled the soldiers more delicately. She could have paralyzed their trigger fingers, thrown them against a wall, crippled them or blinded them or closed up their airways.

  But the moment she saw the gun at Hannah’s head, her thoughts went blank and the tempis took over. She went to the cold white place where Esis lived.

  The soldiers yelped as their armored limbs locked firmly in place, immobilizing them. Hannah had no idea what was happening to them until their suits constricted with violent force. The sounds that came next would haunt her for the rest of her life: a pair of shrieks, a spurting gurgle, the most sickening crunch she’d ever heard. The men fell to the floor in dull, wet heaps. Blood dribbled out of the fibrous parts of their armor.

  Shaken, Hannah jumped into blueshift and closed her eyes. She sensed eight temporal auras, all moving in the same direction. The squad was regrouping at the northern end of the cellar, no doubt to call for backup and to deliberate a new plan of attack. Amanda had just crushed two of their own like beer cans. This was a full-blown crisis.

  Hannah checked on her sister, still staring at her victims in a state of trembling shock. She wouldn’t be snapping back into action anytime soon, and there was no way to bring Jonathan into the fight. The tempic armor made these enemies undroppable. They’d riddle him with bullets before he could even try.

  She had to deal with the other eight soldiers herself.

  Hannah traced her finger through the dirt on the floor, a quick and sloppy message for Jonathan: Stay down.

  He had only just begun to look her way when she snatched a rifle from one of the dead soldiers and bolted into the darkness. Her targets were armed and armored and only slightly slower than her. Her only hope was to strike at them from the shadows, to keep them off-guard and guessing while she took them out one by one.

  She hid behind a bulldozer and peeked through the hydraulics. A soldier crouched just thirty feet in front of her, back turned. Hannah’s stomach fluttered as she raised her rifle and looked through the scope. The crosshairs dawdled around the wires of his backpack shifter.

  Please let this work. Please . . .

  She squeezed the trigger with all her strength, but the thing was hopelessly jammed. If Melissa had been with her, she would have told her that Integrity didn’t like having their own weapons used against them. Every operative wore an electronic smartkey on their dominant hand, either as a ring or a subdermal implant. No agency gun would fire without one.

  Cursing, Hannah searched the rifle for a safety switch, accidentally knocking the barrel against the bulldozer blade. A metallic clang echoed through the basement. The soldiers turned their heads in synch.

  “Shit.”

  Hannah gritted her teeth and doubled her speed, ignoring the hard spikes of resistance from her brain. She escaped the bulldozer just before a hail of gunfire tore fifty new holes in the chassis. Its windows shattered. Metal shards flew through the air. Only one of the soldiers—the lone female in the group—looked beyond the wreckage and saw a trail of Hannah’s dust.

  She turned back to her teammates. “It’s a fast one! We got a sw—”

  Hannah lunged from the shadows and struck her legs with her billy club. The armor was nothing but fiberweave in the back of the knees, blade-resistant but vulnerable to blunt force. At the right speed and angle, a swifter could break a kneecap from the other side.

  The woman had only just begun to fall when Hannah looped around and clubbed another soldier on the back of the hand. While the tempis kept his bones from breaking, the shock of impact was enough to get him to drop his weapon. Hannah caught it and chucked it before her six remaining enemies could turn their rifles on her. Even at 20x, they moved like drowsy old men in her perceptions.

  Keep going, Hannah urged herself. Maintaining this speed hurt like hell, but it was
her only advantage. She couldn’t let up for a second.

  She pivoted around the nearest soldier and yanked a pair of rubber cables from his shifter. His smoky aura dissipated. He froze like a statue in Hannah’s vision. One more down. Five to go.

  You can’t keep this up, her higher functions warned her. These are trained killers. You’re just a washed-up actress.

  Shut up.

  Hannah doubled back and disabled another shifter. A frustrated soldier swung his fist at her head. She dodged it by inches and slammed her club against his helmet. He stumbled backward, a thick web of cracks on his visor.

  Three left. A trickle of blood ran down Hannah’s nose, and she came dangerously close to smiling.

  Washed-up actress, she scoffed. I’m the wind behind these people’s backs. I’m the whistling in their ears. I am a blade of steel and fire, and I will not be—

  A piercing agony suddenly struck her in the frontal lobe, a pain like none she’d ever felt before. The wound had been inflicted twenty-six days earlier, on the night that Theo got dropped through the clock tower. Hannah had pushed her powers beyond their natural limits to save him.

  Now, at last, her powers were pushing back.

  Hannah stumbled as she struggled to collect herself. She felt a shifted presence in the back of her thoughts. One of her enemies was rushing her from behind.

  She jumped to the left, but not quickly enough. The soldier’s nightstick slammed into her shoulder, the same one she’d dislocated on her very first day on this world. As the bone once again popped out of its socket, Hannah crashed to the ground and fell out of blueshift. She looked up at her assailants through a pained and teary wince. She’d been doing so well against them. Now it was all over.

  “Fuck you,” she hissed. “You can all go f—”

  The soldiers dropped their guns in unison, then raised their arms in a perfect V. Hannah scuttled away from them, mystified.

  “What?”

  She turned her head and saw her sister in the near distance, her skin covered in a rocky sheath of tempis. The crags on her brow were so pronounced that Hannah could only see shadows where her eyes should have been.