The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “What?” Ioni glanced down at her towel. “Oh. That’s new.”

  “Why are you wearing that?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one in the driver’s seat. Maybe it turns you on a little. Maybe I stank the last time we met.”

  Theo struggled to remember his last waking moments. There had been darkness and violence in the underland, dangerous men moving around in the shadows. Someone got hurt. Was it Zack?

  “My power’s gone,” he remembered. “This can’t be a vision.”

  Ioni shrugged. “The typical augur has a hundred premonitions in his sleep every night. They’re all still there in your deepest layers of memory. Your subconscious is probably playing a golden oldie.”

  “A memory of a future.”

  “Something like that.” Ioni studied her towel again. “Oh, I get it now. Wow. You’re good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She shook her head disconcertedly. “You’ll find out next year.”

  A soiled scrap of newspaper blew past Theo’s feet. He debated catching it and checking the date.

  “Fourteen months,” Ioni informed him. “Give or take.”

  “What?”

  “You want to know where we are on the timeline. I’m telling you.”

  “We’re fourteen months in the future.”

  “Give or take.”

  Theo examined a minivan parked halfway across the sidewalk, a five-door Bandolier. The license plate read “NORTH CALIFORNIA—THE GOLD RUSH STATE.” Most of the other vehicles were similarly tagged.

  “What the hell happened here?” he asked Ioni. “Looks like war.”

  “And yet . . .”

  Theo got her gist immediately. There were no bodies, no bloodstains or bullet holes. No signs of anything other than opportunistic looting.

  “Evacuated,” Theo guessed. “The whole city’s been cleared out.”

  Ioni smiled proudly. “And then some.”

  “You did this.”

  “Not me. That would be our good friend Merlin McGee.”

  “That’s why you made him famous? To scare everyone out of a city?”

  “And save four million lives,” Ioni said. “This isn’t a prank, Theo. We have a damn good reason to get them out of here.”

  “Why? What’s going to happen?”

  Ioni stroked the bands of her watches, her fingers moving absently between the digital and the analog.

  “This city will fall,” she said. “Some good people will fall with it.”

  Theo nodded bleakly. “I’m pretty sure I’m one of them.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  Ioni looked away. “It’s not a given.”

  Theo turned his head and saw an abandoned police van down the street, with big silver letters on the side: SFPD.

  “San Francisco,” Theo said. “This is San Francisco.”

  Ioni swung her legs and dangled them off the side of the cab. “You’re dwelling on a future far ahead of you—”

  “Fourteen months isn’t far!”

  “—when you’ve got a whole mess of problems in the present.”

  Harsh memories came flooding back to him. The snipers had hit Zack with a stun dart. Theo foolishly went reaching for it. A painful shock. A stab in his leg.

  They got me, he realized. They shot me too.

  He raged at Ioni. “You knew this was coming and you didn’t tell me.”

  “Theo—”

  “You knew about David and you didn’t tell me!”

  She stared glumly down at her feet. “The knowledge would have killed you.”

  “I’m dying right now!”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve been moved to a safe place. You need to stay there.”

  “What about my friends?”

  “They can take care of themselves.”

  “Goddamn it . . .”

  “You have to survive, Theo. I’ll need you here in fourteen months.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Theo . . .”

  A crackling hiss filled his ears. The air around him rippled. Theo couldn’t tell if the world was ending or if he was simply waking up.

  Ioni appeared right in front of him and grabbed him by the shoulders. Her expression was so urgent that he barely even noticed that her towel was gone. Her skin was nothing but white light.

  “Look, tell Mia I’m sorry,” Ioni said. “It’s nothing personal. I like her.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just the way it has to be.”

  “What are you tal—”

  A hot wind overtook him. Theo fumbled in blindness until his body stopped burning and he could finally breathe again. He opened one eye and saw a dim, naked lightbulb hanging six feet above him.

  Theo sat up and took a groggy scan of his surroundings. He was lying on a cot in a large metal vault, one filled to the ceiling with supply tubs and emergency rations. He could only assume he’d reached the Gothams’ bomb shelter, but where were—

  A wrinkled hand gripped his arm from behind. “Careful. You’re still weak.”

  Flinching, Theo turned to look at his new acquaintance: a middle-age man of Asian descent. His face was lined with premature wrinkles. His hair stuck out in messy cowlicks.

  Theo struggled to focus his blurry vision. “Wait. I know you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I had dinner at your house. You’re, uh . . .”

  “Jun,” the man genially replied. “Jun Lee.”

  Theo blinked at him, confounded. The man was usually doped to the gills, a doddering bobblehead. Now he seemed shockingly lucid.

  It’s the solis, Theo guessed. He can only function when he can’t see the apocalypse.

  “What are you doing here?” Theo asked. “Where are the others?”

  Jun hobbled his way to a nearby table and poured steaming hot tea into a mug. “My wife’s in the square with the rest of the clan. My daughter is . . . elsewhere.”

  “I meant my people. Where are Zack and Heath?”

  “Zack was here just minutes ago. He left on important business.”

  “What business? What are you talking about?”

  Jun’s expression turned awkward. “It is . . . not your concern.”

  “He’s my friend. If he’s in trouble—”

  “The best way you can help him is by staying alive.” Jun held out the mug to Theo. “Here.”

  Theo knocked it to the floor. Everyone was so determined to treat him like a glass figurine, to pack him tight in bubble wrap while the people he loved kept risking their lives.

  “What about Heath?”

  Jun slowly shook his head. “We don’t know where he is.”

  “You mean he’s still out there? Alone?”

  Theo jumped to his feet, teetering on wobbly knees. He looked down and noticed a strip of white gauze around the thickest part of his right thigh. Integrity got him good with their stun bolt. His bones ached with every step. The muscles in his leg felt like jelly.

  He saw Peter’s .32 pistol on the tea table and limped as quickly as he could toward it.

  “Please,” Jun begged. “If you leave this place, you won’t be safe.”

  “If I let my friends die, I don’t deserve to be safe.”

  “You have a crucial role to play. You know this.”

  “Oh, shut the hell up. You know goddamn well I’m not the savior.”

  “Even a false messiah has power.”

  “Right.”

  Theo moved to the vault door and studied the latches. He supposed getting out was just a matter of reversing the current settings.

  Jun sighed disapprovingly. “You don’t have much foresight for an augur.”

  “And you
don’t have much courage for a husband and father.”

  “I have faith in my family. Where’s your faith in yours?”

  Theo rushed to undo the latches. They slid to the right with hollow clicks. “Heath’s saved my life three times now. Lack of faith isn’t the issue.”

  “Please. Think about the future!”

  The metal door swung open with a rumble. Theo shot a last dirty look at Jun. “Fuck the future.”

  He squeezed through the opening, into the dim and winding tunnels. His head pounded, his leg dragged, and his power remained locked behind a thick wall of solis. Worse, his friends had been scattered to the winds, each one lost in their own dire crisis. Theo couldn’t help them all. He wasn’t even sure he was doing the right thing by helping Heath first.

  Tell Mia I’m sorry, Ioni had told him. It’s nothing personal. I like her.

  Furious, Theo closed the door behind him and shambled through the warrens. Goddamn it, he thought. Goddamn it all.

  —

  She sat perfectly still on a hard metal folding chair, her right hand chained to a table. The cuff was so tight, she could barely feel her fingers. The seat pressed like knuckles against her buttocks. A small electric Thermodell, the nation’s number-one brand for space heaters and hellfans, blew stifling hot air into her face, making every breath a chore.

  But all these problems were dwarfed by the glass-eyed bastard in front of her. Mia was trapped in this tent with the leader of the invasion, the eeriest man she’d encountered since Azral. Just looking into his black lenses—never once blinking or turning away—made her envy her past self. She wanted to go crawling back through time and space until she was safe at home in her daddy’s arms.

  Still, Mia would be damned if she let Gingold see her fear. She stashed all her discomfort behind a mask of stone—no cowering, no fidgeting, no flinching at noises. She could hear the sounds of violence through the walls of her enclosure, some poor man being brutalized in another tent. If those were Peter’s cries, Mia didn’t want to know. She’d do him no good by cracking.

  Gingold watched from the other side of the table, his chair tilted back at an angle. In their six and a half minutes together, he’d barely said a word. He let the seven photographs on the table do the talking. They’d been taken from the wall of Mia’s Brooklyn bedroom, snapshots of Amanda and Hannah, Theo and Zack, Jonathan and Heath. There was even a picture of David in the mix, a small form of torture in itself.

  Fuck you, she thought but didn’t dare say. I’ll never tell you where they are.

  Something tickled her skin with tiny legs. Mia looked down and gasped as a reddish brown spider skittered across her toes. She shook her leg frantically until both the spider and her sandal went flying off her foot.

  Embarrassed, she searched Gingold’s expression. If he took pleasure in the death of her bravada, he didn’t show it. Mia supposed that entitled him to something.

  She reached out with her free hand and brushed David’s photo off the table. “He’s dead, all right? There you go. That’s one.”

  Gingold stared at her, expressionless. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “He’s not dead. Just gone. He left after you and Trillinger exposed him as a Pelletier.”

  Try as she might, Mia couldn’t hide her surprise. A hint of a smile lit Gingold’s face. “We’ve had ears on your village for twenty-six hours. His name’s come up quite a bit.”

  The spider climbed the leg of the table. Mia watched it bumble heedlessly onto the surface.

  “You need to work on your guile,” Gingold said. “You had four tells just now: two in your face, one in your voice, and one in your body language. I didn’t need my intel to know you were rubbing me.”

  The spider skittered its way toward Gingold. Mia couldn’t look away. Was the hot air messing with its senses? Was it tired of life? Why else would it throw itself into the path of a predator?

  Why would you? asked a harsh voice in her psyche. You volunteered to get captured, remember? You walked right into this.

  “I have all the time in the world for your horseshit,” Gingold attested. “I have infinite patience.”

  Mia blinked at him distractedly. “What?”

  “See, those were lies. I said them with confidence and with full control of my semblance.”

  He brought his armored glove down on the spider. Mia jumped in her seat.

  “Look at me, Farisi.”

  Mia looked up and saw herself in his lenses. Her last shreds of courage were utterly gone. She was just a small, helpless thing, mottled in sweat.

  “Playtime’s over,” said Gingold. “Now you’re going to tell me—”

  “Sir.”

  His second-in-command barged into the tent, the same operative who’d handcuffed Mia to the table. Tomlinson was easy for her to remember, as he was one of the few soldiers here who’d removed his face mask.

  Tomlinson tossed her a brief, dismissive look before turning to his commander. “We have an issue on the surface. The Dalton—”

  Gingold shushed him, then escorted him out of the tent.

  Alone at last, she wiped the sweat from her brow and fluffed the collar of her shirt. Her gaze drifted over to the poor little spider at the edge of the table, still writhing in agony after being half crushed. If Mia had been just a few inches taller, or if her handcuff chain had another few links to it, she could have reached across the table and put it out of its misery.

  Instead she counted its final seconds and wondered how long they felt in spider time. A week? A month? A year? Maybe the creature had suffered so long that it couldn’t remember its life before Gingold. Maybe dying was all it knew.

  After a long, quiet minute, the spider finally stopped kicking its legs. Gingold stormed through the tent flap and paced behind his chair. He seemed restless now. Edgy.

  “Bring him over.”

  Mia tilted her head. “What?”

  “Yes, now.”

  It took her a moment to realize that he was talking into his headset. He switched off the radio, cast an impenetrable look at Mia, then swept three more photos to the ground. Amanda, Hannah, and Jonathan were now officially off the table.

  Mia’s heart pounded. Oh no . . .

  Gingold gripped the back of his chair, his lenses once again locked on her. “Sometime today, Melissa Masaad came back into your life. She had full awareness of our operation here, thanks to a high-ranking traitor in the agency, and she came up with a plan to stop us. Part of it involved sneaking to the surface with three of your friends and disabling our Dalton.”

  He didn’t have to tell Mia that he was talking about the solic disseminator. Her stress burned like lava in the pit of her stomach. Don’t. Don’t you dare tell me they’re dead.

  Gingold opened the tent flap, giving Mia a peek at the village square. The Gothams remained penned behind a buzzrope—still helpless, still scared.

  “All your friends did was switch us to battery power.” Gingold closed the flap and resumed his fitful pacing. “We have enough spares and backups to run the Dalton for days.”

  He turned and shook a finger at her. “But you had hope, which is why you and Pendergen surrendered. You wanted to get caught so you could prep these people for a full-scale counterattack.”

  Gingold moved behind Mia and pressed his hands against the table. The weight of his chest forced her forward. She couldn’t see anything now but the photos of Zack, Theo, and Heath.

  “It all fits together,” Gingold said. “Except for these three. What’s their mission? Where are they going? How’s the boy still able to make his tempis?”

  He leaned in close enough for Mia to smell his breath, a noxious blend of coffee and menthol. “I don’t have time to mutt around with you, Farisi. I want answers now.”

  Mia kept her eyes on the photos.
Her voice creaked out in a tremulous whisper. “So do it already.”

  “Do what?”

  “Hit me, cut me, whatever it is you do.”

  Gingold followed her gaze to the dead brown spider. “You think I like hurting small things.”

  “I know you do.”

  “You don’t know shit.” He retreated to the other side of the table. “I dealt with child soldiers in Palestine. Baby terrorists and insurrectionists. You’d think they’d be easier to crack, but no. Their minds work on a much purer level. They believe their own lies.”

  Mia heard the sounds of struggle outside the tent. A curse. A thump. A low grunt of pain.

  “In my experience,” said Gingold, “there’s only one good way to get the truth out of kids.”

  Mia’s face went white as Tomlinson and another soldier dragged Peter inside. His mouth dripped blood. His left eye was swollen shut. Both his hands had been cuffed behind his back. None of that stopped him from struggling as his captors tried to force him to his knees.

  Tomlinson clubbed the backs of Peter’s thighs. “Get down!”

  Mia jumped to her feet, struggling against her chain. “Stop it! Stop!”

  Gingold eyed her smugly. “I don’t hurt children. I don’t have to.”

  He pulled his sidearm from its holster and pressed the muzzle against Peter’s temple.

  “No!” Mia cried. “Please!”

  Gingold jerked his head at the photos. “What’s their mission? Where are they going? How’s the boy still able to make his tempis?”

  Peter fixed his good eye on Mia. “Not a word, hon.”

  Tomlinson struck him again. “Shut up.”

  “You know the stakes,” Peter told her. “He has to live.”

  “I said shut up.”

  Gingold caught Tomlinson’s arm. “Let him talk. It doesn’t matter.”

  “But sir—”

  “Let him talk.” He scanned his watch, then turned back to Mia. “In sixty seconds, you’ll see something that’ll haunt you for the rest of your life. Whenever you close your eyes, whenever you let your guard down, whenever your mind feels like torturing you, you’ll see it. But you have the power to stop it from happening. It doesn’t have to go this way.”

  “He’s lying,” Peter insisted. “He’ll kill me either way.”