The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “Amanda?”

  The soldiers arched their heads back, yelping.

  “Amanda, wait—”

  A loud crack reverberated through the basement, followed by a soldier’s scream. Hannah had no idea what her sister had done until it happened again: a violent twist of an enemy’s hand, a splintering of bone.

  Holy shit, Hannah thought. She’s breaking their arms.

  Amanda dropped the soldier to the floor, then snapped the wrists of the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. By the time she got to the eighth and last soldier, Hannah was sure she knew what Hell sounded like. The victims writhed atop each other, cursing and howling and swearing revenge.

  “Shut up,” Amanda said. “Just shut up.”

  She kneeled at Hannah’s side and examined her shoulder. Even her gentlest touch made her sister flinch in pain.

  “It’s out of joint,” she told Hannah. “I’ll have to pop it back in.”

  “Not here.” Hannah raised her good arm and ran her fingers down her sister’s face. “Take this off.”

  Amanda dissolved the tempis and looked away. Hannah could see every bit of pain on her face, the thick streams of tears that rolled down her cheeks. She’d been crying nonstop since she’d crushed the two men, and Hannah didn’t have the heart to tell her the awful truth: that it got easier. The grief, the guilt, it all went away. She barely even remembered what Naomi Byers looked like.

  She pressed her forehead to Amanda’s, while the soldiers behind them continued to writhe.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We’re all right.”

  —

  Melissa stood against the dirt wall, her hands raised, her sciatic nerve throbbing. Falling twelve feet in metal armor wasn’t especially good for her back, or the armor. But these were ancillary concerns, as there were currently six technicians holding her hostage. Three of them looked jittery enough to shoot at shadows. Two of them weren’t even holding their guns properly.

  “Look at me,” said the oldest man in the group, a weak-chinned analyst with the beadiest eyes Melissa had ever seen. He reminded her of the old British caricatures of King George VII, with the two black dots in the middle of his face. Appropriate really, as this fellow seemed determined to play King of the Pit.

  “I said look at me.”

  Melissa wearily made eye contact. “What’s your name?”

  “Shut up. I’m the one asking questions.”

  A soldier wailed from the upper reaches of the cellar. King George flinched at the man’s agonized cry.

  “What’s happening up there?” he asked Melissa. “What are they doing?”

  “They’re breaking wrists, just as I advised them to do.”

  “How the hell do you live with yourself?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” Melissa said. “You’re waging war on American soil, imprisoning people who’ve never once broken the law.”

  “You know damn well why we’re doing this!”

  “Yes.” Melissa glared at him reproachfully. “Because you’re frightened little men, afraid of change. Afraid of anything that threatens your delicate dominance.”

  King George stepped forward and pressed his gun to Melissa’s temple. She could tell from his body language that he wasn’t blustering. He was looking for an excuse to kill her.

  “You think I’ll stand here and get lectured by you? You’re a goddamn traitor. If I plugged you right now, I bet—”

  An electric substation disappeared into the dirt, tearing dozens of cables. Only Melissa and a technician saw it happen. The rest merely blinked at the glaring new gap in the console deck.

  “What the hell—”

  A computer fell next, then another one, then a cooling tower. The devices weren’t sinking into the ground. They were plummeting through it, like ghosts.

  “That’s enough,” Jonathan yelled from above. “Drop the guns or I drop you.”

  Melissa’s heart skipped a beat. She didn’t know Jonathan well enough to tell if he was bluffing. The man could obviously kill with a thought. But would he?

  As another substation dropped through the earth, five of the technicians surrendered their sidearms. King George kept his gun against Melissa’s head.

  “One more and I shoot your friend!”

  “Friend?” Jonathan chuckled. “Buddy, I barely know her.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  “He’s not,” Melissa confirmed. “We’ve only met once before.”

  “But I like her well enough,” Jonathan said. “And you’re clearly a prick. So I’m giving you three seconds to throw down your gun before I make your arms fall off.”

  The others took a step back as, one by one, their surrendered weapons vanished into the earth.

  King George stood his shaky ground. “You’re lying.”

  Jonathan sighed. “One . . .”

  “I’ll shoot her! I mean it!”

  “Two . . .”

  Melissa grabbed George by the wrist and flipped him over her shoulder. He didn’t have a chance to catch his breath before her hard metal boot pressed down on his chest.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure if he’d really maim you, and I didn’t feel like finding out.”

  “Go on,” George wheezed. “Kill me. That’s the only way you’ll—”

  “Oh shut up.” Melissa released her foot, then shot him in the neck with her stun chaser. “Prat.”

  She ordered the other techies against the wall, then bound their wrists with the bresin ties from her shoulder pack.

  By the time she finished, Jonathan had reunited with the sisters. They made their way down the scaffold ramp. Melissa saw Hannah’s arm wrapped in Amanda’s jacket, an ad hoc sling.

  “Is it broken?”

  Hannah shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  Melissa studied Amanda’s face. Clearly the older Given wasn’t fine, and it was easy to guess why. “How many?”

  Amanda lowered her head. Hannah stood in front of her defensively. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’ll matter very much to the agency. I assure you of that.”

  “Let’s just find the generator,” Jonathan said. “Before they send backup.”

  Melissa led the group to the far end of the pit, down a sloping tunnel of cables and lanterns that ended in a large chamber. A humming machine filled the majority of the space, a five-ton orb with gauges on one side and dozens of plugged cables on the other. Though the generator vibrated heavily enough to shake dirt from the walls, it didn’t sound much louder than the average table fan.

  Jonathan walked around the metal sphere, his finger brushing against the surface. “So this is it, huh? I would have expected—”

  “Jonathan!” yelled Hannah.

  He paused where he stood. He’d been so distracted, he nearly stepped into a pit at the base of the generator. It was four feet wide and unnaturally smooth, as if Integrity had drilled through the world with a laser. A cable as thick as a velvet rope extended from the generator and spilled deep into the abyss.

  Jonathan stepped away from the edge. “Wow. Does that thing—”

  “Yes,” said Melissa. “All the way down to the solic disseminator.”

  “Can’t I just drop the wire?”

  She shook her head. “They could replace it in minutes. Best to be sure.”

  “Okay. Stand back.”

  Jonathan needed a full minute of concentration to turn the generator intangible. As the sphere fell through the earth, its severed wires flopped to the ground, hissing and crackling before going dormant. The disseminator cable retracted into the pit.

  “Is that it?” Hannah asked Melissa. “Did we do it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”r />
  Melissa pulled her transceiver out of her shoulder bag. “The generator was built by Dalton, a British manufacturer. They’re for wartime use, which means they’re loaded with contingencies. If the disseminator’s also a Dalton, then it probably has a backup battery inside of it.”

  Hannah scowled at her. “So it’s still pumping solis down there.”

  “If it has a battery, then yes. It would have enough power for at least forty more minutes of operation.”

  Jonathan smacked a wall. “Goddamn it!”

  “That’s too long,” Amanda said. “We have to do something.”

  Melissa nodded. “I agree. But before we decide our next step, I need to know for sure.”

  She turned on her radio and raised it to her lips. “Theo, can you hear me?”

  No response. She tested the device for damage before trying again. “Theo, are you there?”

  The speaker came to life with a garbled hiss. “Who is this?”

  The sisters and Jonathan looked at each other, baffled. The man on the line was most definitely not Theo, though his low, raspy voice was easy enough to recognize. They all had a long and tortured history with him.

  Amanda plucked the radio out of Melissa’s hand. “Rebel?”

  “Oh, hey, Given. We were just talking about you.”

  “What are you doing? Where’s Theo?”

  Rebel puttered about the warrens, in a wide tunnel junction just fifteen feet below Freak Street. He cradled Theo’s radio on his shoulder while placing a half pound of putty explosive in an air vent.

  “He’s fine,” he assured Amanda. “We got him to the shelter.”

  “What about the others?”

  Rebel looked over his shoulder. Zack sat against the wall, awake but only marginally lucid. Mercy grabbed a painkiller patch from her medkit and pressed it to his neck.

  “Trillinger’s in good hands,” Rebel said. “Heath ran off. Haven’t seen any of the others.”

  Jonathan snatched the radio from Amanda. “What do you mean, he ran off?”

  “Is that Christie?”

  “What’d you do to him?”

  “Saved his ass is what I did. Kid wasn’t grateful.”

  “I swear to God, if you hurt him—”

  “It’s not me you need to worry about, brother. You got bigger problems.”

  Melissa took her radio back. They didn’t have time to trade banter with this fool.

  “Rebel, listen to me. We just deactivated the power supply for the solic disseminator. Do you feel any change down there?”

  Rebel looked to Mercy, the clan’s foremost expert in solis. She grimly shook her head.

  “Nope. Still swimming in it.”

  Melissa rubbed her brow. “Damn it.”

  Hannah leaned in to the radio. “Rebel, what were you talking about? Why does Jonathan have bigger problems?”

  Rebel stuck a detonator onto the explosive charge. “I’ve seen the future, Given. These soldiers are just a temporary problem. When the Pelletiers get here, and you can bet your ass they will, the real pain begins. They’re coming to clean house. All the folks who’ve wrenched up their plans, all the obstacles in their path. I’m on that list, and so’s your boyfriend. Guess they really don’t like the two of you together.”

  Hannah’s face went pale. “You’re lying.”

  “Believe what you want, but it’s happening. If you see Azral coming, Christie, I only got one piece of advice.”

  Rebel lifted the air vent cover and secured it with a click. “Run.”

  Jonathan closed his eyes, cursing. “What about Zack?” Amanda asked Rebel.

  A brief silence passed. Amanda raised the handset. “Rebel, what about Zack?”

  Rebel took a long sip from a water bottle before answering. “Esis is coming for him.”

  “No!”

  “It’s all right,” Rebel assured her. “We’ll be ready for her.”

  “Wait. What are you talking about?”

  “Gotta go.”

  “Rebel!”

  Amanda dropped the radio and looked down at her hands. They were trembling and spotted with tempis.

  “I have to get down there.”

  “Amanda . . .”

  “I have to stop her.”

  Melissa held her by the shoulders. “Amanda, listen to me. Our work here isn’t done. If we want to save those people down below, we have to finish what we started. I can’t do it without you.”

  Hannah gestured at Jonathan. “What about us. What do we do?”

  Melissa rummaged through her shoulder pack and pulled out three more items: a keycard, a scrap of paper, and a handheld computer. She loaded a map of Quarter Hill on the screen and marked a digital waypoint.

  “You two need to leave as fast as you can. Follow this map to Irwin Sunder’s house. You’ll find a false thermostat in his wine cellar. The keycard and access code will get you back to the underland.”

  “Not if the power’s still out,” Jonathan said.

  “We’ll get it back,” Melissa assured him. “Just be careful. There are soldiers all over town.”

  “What about you and Amanda?” Hannah asked.

  Melissa jerked her head at the yawning pit. “That’s our way back.”

  Jonathan stared down the hole, horrified. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Someone has to destroy the disseminator. It’s our only hope.”

  Hannah shook her head. “Uh-uh. You’re not dragging my sister down that—”

  “Hannah.” Amanda squeezed her good arm. “She’s right. We can’t wait for the battery to die.”

  “What if your tempis craps out halfway? What if they drop a bomb?”

  “We’ll be all right,” Amanda insisted. “Just go.”

  While Melissa shed her broken armor, Hannah steeled herself for another temporal shift. Her head and shoulder still ached like crazy, and she couldn’t get Azral out of her mind. Still, the road ahead felt easy compared to Amanda’s. The woman had already been through hell today, and now she had to go deeper.

  She wrapped her sister in a one-armed hug. “Be careful. Please.”

  “I will,” Amanda said. “Stay safe, both of you.”

  Hannah climbed onto Jonathan’s back and launched them both into blueshift. Loose cables fluttered as they made a quick escape.

  Amanda looked to Melissa. “How exactly are we going to destroy the disseminator? If we get too close—”

  “We won’t. We just have to get within dropping distance.”

  Melissa stripped down to her tights and shock padding. Amanda watched her closely as she grabbed her grenade belt.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You wanted to save everyone,” Melissa said. “This is how we do it.”

  Amanda peered down the well with heavy eyes. She’d never made a tempic rappel before, much less an eight-hundred-foot one. If she lost her concentration, even for a moment . . .

  “Two,” she mumbled.

  “What?”

  “You asked me how many soldiers I killed back there. The answer is two.”

  Melissa clasped the grenade belt around her waist, expressionless. “I’ve killed four people in the line of duty.”

  “Criminals,” Amanda guessed. “Not federal agents.”

  “These agents are criminals. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Amanda nodded absently. “I’m just thinking about my people. Zack . . .”

  “We’ll help them,” Melissa said. “Just get us down there.”

  Amanda grew a willowy white tendril from her palm, then pulled Melissa into an embrace. The tempis snaked around their bodies, binding them together.

  “You believe in God?” Amanda asked.

  Melissa thought about it a moment before answering. “Can’
t say I do. But then I didn’t believe in chronokinesis either, so what do I know?”

  Amanda formed a strong tempic clamp around the mouth of the well, then sighed over Melissa’s shoulder.

  “You’re a good woman.”

  “So are you,” Melissa said. “If the afterlife works like the Christians believe, then I have no doubt you’re going where the good people go.”

  Amanda wasn’t as sure about that. Her faith in God had become shakier than ever. She feared that one more trauma would send her into a dark place, where people like her became monsters like Esis.

  Melissa tightened her grip on Amanda. “Okay. Let’s do this before we lose our nerve.”

  She and Amanda drew a simultaneous breath before plunging into the pit. They disappeared into the murky depths, then began their long trip back to the underland.

  FORTY-SIX

  Theo had no idea where his mind had taken him this time. He staggered down the street of a vast and empty city, one that had been utterly ransacked. Cars lined the streets at haphazard angles. Half the store windows were broken. Stray cats prowled the wreckage of a pizzeria, jumping from table to table in search of scraps. Theo couldn’t tell if he was having a dream or a premonition. If this was the future, then where was he? When was he?

  He stopped in an intersection and looked up at the sky. The sun was bright enough to burn spots in his vision but the temperature was erratic—a warm breeze one moment, a cool one the next. Something very unnatural had happened here. Theo couldn’t shake the fear that all of this was just prelude to something worse. A storm. A war.

  An ending.

  “I know this place,” he muttered. “I’ve seen it in dreams but—”

  “—always from a distance,” said a familiar voice behind him.

  Ioni sat on the hood of a taxi. Her blond hair was wet. Her body was wrapped in a thick white bath towel.

  Theo turned around and shot her a black look. “You.”

  “Yup. There’s that Maranan charm again.”

  “What is this? Why did you bring me here?”

  “It’s your brain, buddy. You brought me.”

  “From the shower?”