The Song of the Orphans
Page 66
Gingold shook his head. “He’s trying to take the burden off you. It won’t work. You know his fate’s in your hands. You know exactly how to save him.” He checked the time again. “You now have forty seconds.”
Mia locked her teary eyes on Peter’s. He gave her a weak smile. “You’re gonna survive this, darlin’. You’ll get out of this place and help finish the work we started. That’s all that matters.”
Gingold pursed his lips, as if Peter was merely singing her a lullaby. “Thirty seconds.”
“Take care of Liam,” Peter told her. “Don’t let him die here. Keep honing your talents. And no matter what happens, sweetheart, no matter what—”
“Twenty seconds.”
“—don’t ever give up on the string.”
Mia covered her mouth, weeping. She could barely hear a thing over the rushing blood in her head. “Peter!”
“Daughter of my heart. That’s what you are to me.”
“Twelve seconds,” Gingold said. “He’ll die for sure. Your friends might not. Your best bet is to talk to me. What’s their mission? Where are they going? How’s the boy still able to make his tempis?”
“Fuck you!”
Peter smiled proudly. “That’s my girl.”
Gingold scowled at Mia. “Five . . .”
She forced her words through choking sobs. “I swear to God, Gingold—”
“Four . . .”
“—if you kill Peter—”
“Three . . .”
“—I’ll kill you myself.”
“Two . . .”
“I’ll make it my life’s mission!”
“One . . .”
“It’s the wristwatch! The wristwatch!”
Gingold stopped, puzzled. Mia fought to catch her breath. “If Heath’s making tempis, it has to be the watch. It used to be Semerjean’s. It has special powers.”
Tomlinson swapped a dubious look with the other soldier. Mia kept her eyes on Gingold. “I’m not lying. Look at me. Do you see any tells? Do you see any—”
The sound of a gunshot made Mia scream. She opened one eye, expecting to find Peter dead on the floor. But he was very much alive and just as confused as she was. Gingold hadn’t fired his weapon at all.
Before anyone could speak, another shot rang out. Then a third, then a fourth, and then a salvo of gunfire.
Gingold stormed out of the tent and looked around the square. The clamor was coming from the east.
He switched on his headset. “What the hell’s happening? Hastings, report!”
His earpiece crackled with pops and hisses. Gingold could barely hear his sniper over the popcorn sounds of gunfire.
“They’re attacking from all sides, sir! They’re everywhere!”
“What’s everywhere?”
“Animals!” yelled Hastings.
Gingold lowered his head and cursed. Every great warrior had a nemesis. He never expected his to be a scrawny black kid with mental problems. This was getting ridiculous. It was time to finish Heath once and for all.
He pushed through the soldiers at the edge of the square. Half of them had joined the snipers in frantic gunfire. The others merely stared in bewilderment.
Gingold shoved a dawdling soldier. “What are you doing? I told you those things aren’t lethal! Just find the boy who . . .”
He turned his head and finally saw what everyone was gawking at. Hundreds of animals came rushing down Center Street, but they weren’t wolves at all. They weren’t even tempic. These were beasts of an entirely different color.
“You’ve got to be kidding me . . .”
Gingold and his men jumped out of the way as the stampede reached the square. They spilled in like water: fluorescent blue tigers, each of them graced with saber teeth and glowing yellow eyes.
The Gothams in the pen were equally baffled. There wasn’t a soul in the clan who hadn’t been startled, stunned, or stymied by the presence of Bo the Tiger. Now here he was in multitudes, throwing an entire army into disarray.
Elder Rubinek turned her wide eyes to the east, toward the source of the disruption. “Harold?”
A hundred yards away, on the concrete roof of the lumics’ guild building, Harold Herrick watched the chaos through his coke-bottle glasses and laughed.
To call the boy a misfit would be an understatement. He was the black sheep of the Herricks, the embarrassment of the lumics, and a criminal of the clan. Under the misguided leadership of Gemma Sunder, he’d participated in a violent attack against the breachers that had backfired horribly, killing all of his teammates and forcing him to face the clan’s judgment alone.
Harold thought he’d rot in his solic prison cell, until he was freed by an unlikely ally. Heath took Harold to the roof of the guildhall, gave him an antique silver wristwatch, and then told him to raise hell.
This just might have been the best day of Harold’s life.
While the tigers continued to wreak havoc, Heath crouched down next to Harold and eyed the snipers on the distant rooftops.
“Take them out,” he said.
“Who?”
While most of Gingold’s marksmen kept their rifles on the tigers, a few were beginning to look beyond the square. One of them turned his sights to the southeast, toward Heath and Harold.
Heath pointed at the sniper. “The gunmen! The gunmen!”
“Oh.”
Harold flicked his hand. The nearest sniper shrieked as his helmet lit up on the inside. Every crack, pore, and opening flared white needles of light. His visor cast a spotlight beam at the ceiling.
The sniper had barely fallen to his knees when Harold moved on to the next victim . . . and the next one, and the next. Wave by wave, their helmets lit up like jack-o’-lanterns. They stumbled around their perches, screaming and blind. One of them tripped over the edge of the building and fell three stories onto a rose garden.
“Good job,” said the tiger at Harold’s side.
“I missed you, Bo.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t get sappy.”
The Gothams watched with wide-eyed marvel as the invaders continued to scramble. A soldier shot at a tiger and hit his partner in the knee joint. Another one shattered a lightpost, sending white-hot sparks onto the roof of an interrogation tent. While agents hurried to extinguish the fire, a second marksman stumbled off the roof and crashed into a portable generator. The machine imploded with a sizzling hiss, a momentary hiccup that caused the buzzrope to flicker.
Victoria Chisholm watched from a distance as an operative took out his hand console and wirelessly restored power to the rope.
“That’s him,” she whispered. “That’s the one who controls the fence.”
With Mother Olga’s help, Liam had quietly approached a number of clan leaders and brought them to a distant corner of the pen. They convened in the shadow of the guild directory: four elders, three primarchs, two house lords, and a house lady. None of them were optimistic about Melissa Masaad’s plan. The tigers were giving Victoria a bold idea of her own.
“Just wait until our powers come back,” Mother Olga urged her. “It’s our only chance.”
“You put too much faith in this rogue agent.”
“And the breachers,” Irwin Sunder added.
Elder Kohl stroked her arm nervously. “Olga’s right. If we attack now, it’ll be suicide.”
“What choice do we have?” Sunder asked. “How long are we supposed to wait for a miracle that’s not coming?”
“It’s coming,” Liam insisted.
“They’ve already taken a hundred of us, boy. If we wait too long, we’ll all be gone.”
Victoria kept a watchful eye on the fence technician. “Debate all you want, but Harold Herrick just gave us an opportunity. It won’t last forever.”
She wasn’t wrong. Gingold was already be
ginning to suspect the true nature of the tigers. For all their roars and threatening gestures, they had yet to maul a single soldier. And there was something about the way they moved . . .
He climbed atop a generator and studied the creatures through his bionic cameras. They didn’t register at all in thermal scans, yet they glowed like fire in infrared. A still-frame analysis revealed that their paws were barely connecting with the grass beneath their feet. One of them had brushed seamlessly through a park bench, as if it was nothing but—
“—lumis.”
Grumbling, Gingold switched his headset to the operation’s all-channel.
“It’s a ghost show, people. Hold your fire. Hold your fire.”
His soldiers could barely hear him over the gunshots and shouting. Gingold raised his mic volume, then raised his hands high.
“Goddamn it, everyone, I said—”
His left lens shattered. The back of his head opened in a spray of blood. Tomlinson had just enough time to register the gaping hole in Gingold’s skull before his body fell to the grass.
“Sir?”
Tomlinson dropped to his knees and checked Gingold’s vitals, as if he’d somehow misread the situation, as if his stoic commander had suffered anything but a bullet through the brain.
“He’s dead,” said Tomlinson. “He’s dead. Somebody—”
A second bullet tore through the generator, cutting Tomlinson’s face with shrapnel. Frantic, he dove behind a supply crate and peeked over the lid. This wasn’t friendly fire. There was a brand-new shooter in the square.
Winnie Whitten was the first to spot him. She looked up at the second floor and saw his round frame in the window. “Daddy?”
Sunder followed her gaze upward, then covered his gaping mouth. “Oh no . . .”
Daniel Whitten was an iconic figure in the clan. As primarch of the lumics, house lord of the Whittens, and primary executive in charge of underland operations, he carried even more responsibility than the elders. He wore his authority with such folksy charm that everyone in the village had a genial nickname for him.
“Mayor!”
Sixty-five seconds earlier, as Harold’s tigers invaded the square, the Mayor opened a hatch near the base of the family directory. Only the snipers could have stopped him from escaping down the ladder, but they were blind now. The Mayor took the tunnels to the municipal building, then climbed the stairs to his office. There on the western wall, in a locked glass cabinet, lay one of his most precious possessions: an 1874 Colt single-action army revolver. Like most of the Mayor’s valued possessions, the gun was strictly for show. But he kept it in mint condition, and fully loaded.
He saw no reason not to use it now.
Prudent Lee gasped as the Mayor fired on another solider. It missed the man’s head by inches, but easily got his attention.
“Daniel, stop!”
His fourth bullet hit a soldier in the chestplate and sent him toppling into the electric rope. Now the gunmen in the square began to ignore the tigers around them. Some of them looked up.
Mother Olga kept her frantic gaze on the Mayor. “For God’s sake, run!”
The Mayor fired his second-to-last bullet, another freakishly lucky shot that struck an enemy through the eye. How ironic, he thought. He’d lived such a charmed and easy life that he could only assume that the fates had divinely blessed him. Even in these dire times, when the shadow of apocalypse loomed over everything, the Mayor had every faith that the universe would provide for him and his loved ones.
But then his sixteen-year-old daughter, the light of his life, had her heart and neck broken by demons. He barely had the chance to mourn her before gunmen came storming into the village—his village—and turned Yvonne’s memorial service into a horror show.
No, this would not do. This would not do at all. All his confidence, all his serenity, all his faith in the goodness of creation, it was all just smoke and mirrors. He’d been living a life of cheap illusion and now, at long last, he could see how the world truly worked.
As fifteen soldiers aimed their rifles, and twenty Whittens screamed his name, the Mayor looked down at his kinsmen with teary eyes. He raised his pistol one last time.
Integrity tore him down before he could fire his last bullet. His body toppled over the window ledge and crashed into a shrub.
In that moment, the Rosens spun around on their captors and wrestled with their guns. They were the six sturdiest women of Rebel’s family and they were about to be taken to Integrity’s remote facility. But the Mayor’s death had triggered something inside of them. Screaming, the Rosens thrashed and kicked at their captors until half of them were disarmed. A dozen sharpshooters arrived from the transport area and plowed them all with electric bolts. Only two of them survived.
The fence technician watched from a distance, his eyes wide behind his face mask. He opened a channel to Central Command in Bethesda.
“Uh, we have a situation here. Local command’s not responding. Are there new orders? Should we, uh—”
Victoria swept his legs from behind, sending him flat onto his back. While five of her tempics pinned him to the grass, she stole his fence console, then studied the controls.
“Don’t!” Liam yelled. “We’re not ready!”
“Quiet, boy. It’s now or never.”
“You’ll get us all killed!”
Twenty yards away, Andrew Tomlinson took a frantic look around. The whole operation was going to shit. Gingold was dead. The snipers were blind. The locals were getting more violent by the minute. And those tigers—those goddamn tigers—were still raising hell everywhere.
Five soldiers ran to Tomlinson, confused and alarmed. “You’re the secondary, man! What do we do?”
Tomlinson thumped his headset, struggling to make sense of the chatter in his earpiece. Central Command had gone into a tizzy and none of the directors could agree on how to proceed.
“Pull out. Get your men out of there!”
“Do not abort, soldier. Maintain control.”
“Just kill them already!”
“Do not—repeat: do not—kill the subjects.”
At last, Victoria pressed the right button on the fence technician’s console. The buzzrope around the square stopped humming. Fleeta Byers tested the cord before jumping it. Dozens of others followed her lead. The Gothams dispersed up the streets and down the stairwells, through doorways and alleys and hatches to God-knows-where.
A soldier grabbed Tomlinson by the shoulders. “Goddamn it, man! We’re losing them! What do we do?”
Heart pounding, Tomlinson shut off the link to Central Command and hailed every soldier on the all-channel.
“Shoot them,” he ordered. “Shoot them all.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Amanda looked up in a futile attempt to gauge her progress. There was eight hundred feet of bedrock between Quarter Hill and the underland, and she had no idea how far she’d traveled. The generator room was just a tiny bead of light above her. She saw nothing but blackness down below.
She tightened her tempic hold on Melissa. “How close are we?”
“I’d say we’re friends at the very least.”
“You’re making jokes now?”
“Trying to.”
Amanda couldn’t blame her for being nervous. They were descending like spiders on a line of pure tempis, kept alive solely by the force of Amanda’s will. One bad thought, one shudder of fatigue, and gravity would take them the rest of the way down.
Melissa shined her penlight at the curved stone wall. The moledrones that had drilled this shaft were kind enough to draw marker lines.
“We’re at three hundred feet.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s all right. We’re making good progress.”
“No we’re not. Hang on.”
“Wait . . .”
Melissa raised her penlight and saw the next marker whiz past.
“Three-fifty,” she said. “The next one’s our stop.”
“What?”
“Stop.”
Amanda brought them to a dangling halt, just a few feet shy of the halfway mark. Melissa wriggled awkwardly in their tempic harness.
“What are you doing?” Amanda asked.
“Preparing the grenades.”
“We’re still four hundred feet up.”
“This is as far as we can safely go,” Melissa said. “If you get too close to the solis—”
“I know. But what if the grenades blow up before they reach the disseminator?”
“They’ll reach it.”
“How do you know?”
Melissa fumbled with her belt. “As an object falls, its speed increases nine-point-eight meters per second, squared. These grenades have a five-second timer. If my calculations are right, they should be a hundred and twenty-two meters below us when they explode.”
Amanda didn’t have the mental energy to check her math. She barely had the strength to do a metric conversion. “So that’s—”
“—four hundred feet.”
“—four hundred feet.”
“And that’s only if I drop them,” Melissa said. “I’ll get at least another eighty if I throw.”
For all her intellect, she was having the damnedest time unhooking her grenade belt. “Let me,” Amanda said.
“Your hands are already—”
“I don’t need hands.”
A spindly arm extended from the harness and manually explored the belt loop. Melissa gasped at the cool fingers on her stomach.
“Goodness. I guess we really are friends now.”
“Don’t make this weird.”
“It’s well past weird.” Melissa aimed her light at Amanda’s fumbling appendage. “After all this time, I still can’t—”