The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Eventually, the prime minister of England brokered a one-of-a-kind treaty between the industrialized nations of Earth, a secret agreement to suppress all forms of teleportation technology. Everyone in the room knew the machines were a game-changer, the kind that rendered borders obsolete and made national security a thing of the past. The world simply wasn’t ready for portals.

  But Integrity was.

  Oren Gingold had always been a cautious man. When his advisors assured him that the solic disseminator was their one and only key to victory, Gingold reminded them of the teachings of Sun Tzu: never rely on just one tactic, and always have a backup plan. If the solis failed and the siege went poorly, Gingold wanted a way to beat the Gothams at their own game: a formidable army that could handle the freaks at full power.

  Theo was the first to hear the reinforcements coming, a hair-dryer hum on the other side of the portals.

  “Shit.”

  He shot the lock of the tempics’ front door and fled into their guildhall, just as the cavalry came bursting out of the Hilgendorf gates.

  Two by two, they flew into the underland. To the naked eye, they were nothing but red streaks. If Hannah had been there, and if she’d been shifted fast enough, she would have seen something that resembled a fleet of giant ladybugs. The drones were five feet in length, each one sheathed in a crimson dome of osplate. Nestled on the underside among its seven aeric liftplates were weapons and launchers of every kind. The machines shot solis, electricity, rockets, grenades, and five different types of bullets.

  But their real specialty was the twenty pounds of magnite they kept beneath their shells, enough to set fire to a whole city block.

  That was the reason Integrity called them “dragonettes.”

  From the moment Theo got his foresight back, he knew the metal beasts were coming and that Heath would be the first to suffer their wrath. But in the desperate quest to warn him, he’d dawdled too long in the open. Now the future had turned its angry eye on him.

  A dragonette broke free from formation and hovered at the tempics’ front window. Two hundred miles to the southeast, in the cubicle farm of a Washington, D.C., government office, a chubby young redhead in a sweatshirt and jeans sat forward at her computer terminal. She pressed a button on the keyboard, switching her dragonette to thermal view and exposing Theo’s location. The target had ducked behind a thick stone wall, but that only earned him a spitter.

  She pressed another button. Theo slid beneath a metal desk as a three-foot missile came crashing through the window. It bounced across the floor on weak aeric thrusters before opening its cone and shooting a dozen globs of sticky gel. Each one was as strong as half a stick of dynamite, and each one exploded on impact.

  All at once, the whole world seemed to fold in on Theo. The floor ripped up. The ceiling came down. Blast heat singed the left side of his body while the collapsing desk broke seven bones on his right side. Were it not for the thick sheath of tempis that bloomed around his skull—a last-second gift from Ioni Deschane—he would have died instantly. Instead, he fell unconscious beneath six hundred pounds of plaster, steel, and wood.

  Back in Washington, the drone pilot studied Theo’s mangled silhouette on her thermal screen before pressing a button on her flightstick. The dragonette sprayed a cone of magfire through the window, dousing half the foyer in flames.

  “First kill,” the pilot bragged. She sneered at her coworkers, all hard at work in their own shifted cubicles. “Should I slow down for you fellas?”

  Twenty yards south of Theo, and two floors up, Heath spun around at the base of the stairwell and gestured frantically at his companion. “Come on! Come on!”

  Harold hurried down from the roof, conspicuously alone. One peek at the dragonettes was enough to wreck his concentration and send his tiger into the ether. “What are those things?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “How did they even—”

  Harold stopped on the stairwell, his eyes bulged in terror. Heath followed his gaze and saw a dragonette hovering right outside the window, its machine-gun turret pointed right at them.

  “No . . .”

  The window exploded in a hail of gunfire. Two of the rounds hit Heath in the stomach. Three hit Harold in his legs and chest, and sent him rolling down the stairs.

  Many miles away, a supervisor passed the drone pilot’s desk and nodded approvingly at his screen.

  “Good work. Slag them down, then rejoin the others.”

  Scowling, the pilot waited for his boss to leave before flying his dragonette away from the window. He wasn’t going to spray magfire on his targets. They were just kids, goddamn it. They were dead enough.

  —

  Mia couldn’t tell what was going on from behind her fallen table. All she could hear was a cacophony of screams and weapon fire. She had no idea that a fleet of drones had come to kill every last timebender in the village. She did, however, feel the spatial presence of her fellow travelers. Her powers were back, which meant it was time to leave.

  She opened a four-inch portal in the grass, then dipped her handcuff chain inside it. An ounce of thought closed the disc like a guillotine. Mia fell back against the ground, her severed chain dangling from her shackle.

  She barely had a moment to enjoy her freedom when a swifter burst in through the tent flap and smashed his legs against the table. He flipped over the edge, snapped his neck, and came to a rolling stop on the grass next to her.

  “Jesus!”

  A few feet to the left and Mia would have been caught in his path. She jumped back, startled, and then cautiously checked on him. His green eyes were frozen wide in terror. His mouth hung open listlessly. He was dead, gone. The fool had been running blind at top speed.

  Rattled, Mia hurried out of the tent and took a wide-eyed look around the square. Everything had changed in the last few minutes. The undersky was nothing but a giant restart message. Fires burned everywhere in patches. A multitude of corpses, both soldiers and Gothams, lay scattered about the grass. The stench of blood was overwhelming, enough to make Mia gag.

  She looked through the smoke and saw survivors in the distance, dozens of them. The Gothams who weren’t running remained clustered under a crude tempic canopy. They all looked as panicked as that poor dead swifter.

  Mia only had to look up to see why.

  Blurry red creatures flew through the air like missiles. They moved so fast that Mia didn’t even know what she was seeing until one of them slowed down. It was a new kind of drone, even worse than the ones that had terrorized her at Atropos. It seemed Integrity had given up on herding their prisoners and were now killing everyone.

  She looked around in panic. “Peter . . .”

  A half-dead soldier staggered out of the smoke and raised his rifle at Mia. Before she could move, a long white tendril snaked around his leg. It hung him by the foot, then smashed him against the ground seven times. He spilled onto the grass like a rag doll.

  Mia stumbled backward, terrified, as the tempic tendril came for her. “No, wait!”

  It looped around her waist and yanked her thirty yards to the west, into a dark and narrow crevice between the municipal building and the recreation center. She rolled screaming into the passage. A strong pair of arms set her back on her feet.

  “Pay attention, girl. It’s a death zone out there.”

  Mia brushed the bangs from her eyes and immediately recognized the bearded man in front of her. She only knew Irwin Sunder as an elder and a blowhard. She had no idea he was a tempic.

  She winced at her throbbing arm. “Why’d you do that?”

  Sunder scoffed. “What, save your life? Good question. Can you still make portals?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Go far away and take these children with you.”

  Mia looked past Sunder and saw nine kids huddled between boxes, all
trembling in misery and fright.

  “I’m not leaving,” Mia told Sunder. “Not without my friends.”

  “Stay, go, I don’t care. But you’re making a portal and you’re saving this lot.”

  “Look, Peter’s still out there. If I don’t find him—”

  Sunder gripped her arm and spoke in a raspy growl. Mia could see that the man was at the end of his tether.

  “I only had one traveler in my family,” he reminded her. “You people killed her. So make things right—”

  “Shut up.”

  Mia closed her eyes and concentrated until she formed a link with her exit point. A ten-foot portal materialized in the air.

  “This’ll take you to Brooklyn,” she told the others. “Go.”

  The children hesitated. Half of them kept their nervous eyes on Sunder. He opened his wallet and gave all his cash to the oldest kid. “Go on. Keep moving. We’ll find you when this is over.”

  One by one, the youngsters scrambled through the portal. Mia waved them on impatiently. Peter was still somewhere out on the battlefield, injured and bound. If she missed her chance to save him . . .

  At long last, the children were gone. Mia closed the portal behind them and glared at Sunder. “We done?”

  “No. There’s an armory in the warrens—”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “—and you’re going to take me there.”

  “I’ve never even been to the w—”

  A dragonette crashed onto the roof of the rec center, spilling flaming debris into the passageway. Sunder cast a tempic shield over himself and Mia.

  “What the hell’s happening?”

  Mia had no idea. She followed Sunder back to the edge of the square and saw ten winged tempics engaging the dragonettes in combat. One of them looped a lightning-quick circle around a drone, then smashed it on the underside with a tempic hammer. The machine bled a torrent of circuitry and weapon fragments before spinning into the ground.

  Sunder took a step forward, his fist shaking high in the air. “Yes. Yes!”

  “What’s going on?” Mia asked him.

  “Victoria,” he said. “She’s way ahead of me.”

  The Gothams hadn’t been entirely unprepared for invaders. Between the bomb shelters and the storehouses, they kept a sizable armory of rainy-day weapons: pistols and rifles, grenades, even a rocket launcher or two.

  They also had speedsuits, and for very good reason. The only thing in the world more dangerous than a flying tempic was a shifted flying tempic.

  Victoria swooped onto the back of a dragonette and stabbed it with a blade of her own making. The drone wobbled through the sky, belching smoke from two wounds. Victoria jumped off its carapace just before it crashed against the base of the clock tower.

  Somewhere in Washington, a supervisor barked new orders. Half the dragonettes in the underland turned their glass eyes toward the center of town and rushed to join the fight.

  Mia looked up and saw nine swifters take formation on the rooftops, their hands moving in blurs as they aimed their assault rifles. At their speed, the dragonettes moved like blimps. Their delicate undersides were easy to hit. Two of the drones exploded in midair. Another one lost half its lifters and fell spinning to the grass.

  Sunder did a double-take at Mia as she hurried through the square. “Wait. Where are you going? I still need you.”

  “I’m looking for my people.”

  “We took you in. We are your people!”

  Mia glared at him over her shoulder. “You never cared about us.”

  She ran deeper into the square, coughing. The smoke was making her eyes water. She could barely see ten feet in front of her.

  “Peter?”

  A grim voice in her head told her to start checking the corpses. She refused to listen. Peter wouldn’t let himself die. Not here, not now, not when the people he loved were still in trouble.

  Another dragonette came crashing down onto the grass, along with a flying tempic. The drone must have gotten in a good shot before it died. Mia only had to look at the victim’s charred body to know that he was beyond saving.

  She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Peter!”

  “Mia?”

  She saw a skinny blonde through the smoke. Her heartbeat doubled. “Oh my God . . .”

  Carrie stumbled out of the haze, her hair matted, her black dress torn in a dozen places. She stared at Mia in trembling confusion, as if the lovely girl in front of her were just a mirage.

  “Is that really . . . are you really . . . ?”

  Mia ran toward her and held her tight. “Oh my God. Carrie . . .”

  “I didn’t . . . I didn’t even know if you were alive or . . .”

  “I’m alive.” Mia couldn’t stop her tears from spilling. “I’m here.”

  “Please. You have to help me.”

  “What?”

  Mia pulled back and saw smears of blood on her shirt. The front of Carrie’s dress was soaked in it.

  “It’s not mine,” Carrie said. “It’s my dad’s. They shot him.”

  “What? Where is he?”

  “Behind the library. He’s too big to move and I can’t find a turner. Please! You have to port him to a hospital!”

  “Carrie . . .”

  “He’s dying!”

  Mia closed her eyes, her thoughts spinning wildly. She’d been living so long in a tight, insular family that she forgot what it was like to be a part of a society. There were her people and there was the rest of the world. Peter Pendergen was one of her people. Stan Bloom was the rest of the world.

  But then what kind of person would she be if she didn’t help the girl she loved? How could she justify it, even in wartime?

  Daughter of my heart, Peter had called her. That’s what you are.

  Carrie tugged her hand. “Mia, come on!”

  That’s what you are.

  Crying, Mia struggled through the splinters and cracks of her concentration, until she drew a spatial link to the library. A six-foot portal opened up in the air.

  She clutched Carrie’s hand and sucked a deep breath. “Come on.”

  —

  Melissa was six hundred feet down the disseminator shaft when she finally saw light at the bottom. At long last, the situation was starting to improve. There was no more darkness down below, no more solis, no more torcher breathing fire at her head. Her stalwart companion had obliterated the drone with a tempic tantrum, a great white mouth that chomped the machine to pieces. If Melissa didn’t know it before, the wisdom was now thoroughly cemented: don’t ever make Amanda Given angry.

  But they weren’t out of trouble yet. Though Amanda had staked a firm hold on the walls of the shaft, her exertions were finally taking their toll. Her head lolled drowsily to one side. Thin streams of blood dribbled from her nose. Even more alarming was the crude, tenuous appearance of their support line. The tempis looked less a rope now and more like overstretched putty.

  As Amanda lowered them down past the 650-foot marker, Melissa reached out and wiped the sweat from her brow.

  “Hang in there,” she said. “You’re doing great.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Amanda closed her eyes in a twitchy wince. Her voice fluttered wildly. “The more I think about it, the more it hurts.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for distraction, there’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

  “A question.”

  “Yeah. Why did you leave medical school?”

  Their harness rippled. Amanda peeked at Melissa with a bloodshot eye. “How’d you know about that?”

  “I chased you for months,” Melissa reminded her. “Everywhere you went, I broke out the ghost drills and followed your old conversati
ons.”

  “Spied on us.”

  Melissa shrugged. “It was my job to understand you people.”

  “I still never talked about that.”

  “No, but your sister did. She told Theo you quit school but she didn’t say why.”

  Amanda sighed at her feet. The look on her face was miserable enough to make Melissa regret asking.

  “Lost my baby,” Amanda replied. “Lost my way.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She feebly shook her head. “He would have . . . he would’ve . . .”

  “Amanda?”

  “He would’ve died anyway . . .”

  The rope quivered. Their bodies bounced erratically. Melissa looked up and saw the tempis withering into a long, frayed thread.

  We’re not going to make it, she realized. She can’t hold on.

  “Amanda, listen to me—”

  “Please. No more pep talks . . .”

  “I’m not familiar with that term. I just know you’ve suffered and lost more than I can possibly imagine. You have every excuse in the world to be jaded, yet here you are, fighting to save a clan of people who, historically speaking, haven’t been very kind to you. You’re an extraordinary woman. Whatever happens, you need to know that.”

  Amanda dipped her head. “Killed people . . .”

  “So have I.”

  “Could’ve found a better way.”

  “That could be carved on anyone’s epitaph.”

  “Been trying so hard to live up to her example.”

  “Whose example?”

  “Hannah. She’s gotten so strong.”

  Melissa checked the rope again. The tempis was melting before her eyes. “Amanda.”

  “Wish I . . . wish I’d told her that more often.”

  Amanda’s eyelids fluttered. The rope disappeared. For the second time, she and Melissa went plummeting down the pit.

  Melissa looked down at the expanding light below her. She didn’t have the time or mind to sort her own regrets. All she could do was hold on to her friend and face the reaper with dignity.

  “You did fine,” she assured Amanda. “You did just fine.”