The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Mia eyed him skeptically. “Terminus.”

  “It’s humanity’s last illness,” he told her. “A neurological sickness that follows us through the strings. It can’t be cured by any means we know of, and it takes great pleasure in killing us slowly. Some lose their memory. Some lose their sanity. Some, like me, lose their powers one by one.”

  Mia balked at his news. Lack of power seemed to be the least of Semerjean’s problems. “You have terminus?”

  “My whole family has it.”

  He stared at the rubble with an expression that Mia had never seen on him before, a deep and genuine mournfulness. All of David’s grief about the old world and the coming apocalypse had never looked like that. Those were play acts. This was real.

  “You’re all dying.”

  Semerjean sneered at her. “Don’t get your hopes up. Even if we fail, we still have decades.”

  “Fail what?”

  “Isn’t is obvious? We’re here to cure terminus.” He cast his steely gaze on a fire. “We have no intention of dying.”

  Mia’s knees briefly buckled. She was just a hapless kid from La Presa, a ninth-grade dropout. Now here she was, talking immortality with a twisted cosmic demigod.

  “You’re probably wondering what all of this has to do with you,” Semerjean mused.

  Mia nodded absently. He conjured a ghost in the middle of the disc: a full-size hologram of a tall and lovely brunette. Mia could easily guess who she was looking at.

  “Esis.”

  “The one and only,” Semerjean said. “You haven’t met her yet. If you’re lucky, you won’t meet her today.”

  “She’s coming?”

  “Yes. She . . . has her own business to take care of.”

  There it was again, that look of genuine sorrow. Mia was deathly afraid to ask him about it.

  “She’s a neurogenetic surgeon,” Semerjean explained. “Decades ahead of her peers. Some time ago, she came to believe, to much derision, that the only way to end terminus is to genetically reengineer our brains.”

  Mia blinked at him. “You can do that?”

  “Of course. Nearly everyone on my world has a designer enhancement of some sort. But what Esis proposed was much different. She suggested we fashion our brains to resemble those of our earliest chronokinetic ancestors, the so-called Gothams of Quarter Hill.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, even I was skeptical.” He gestured at the wall, at a grandiose photo of the tempic guild’s current leaders. “We’ve spent two and a half millennia evolving from these idiots. Why would we choose to regress? But their brains do have an extraordinary resilience, something my people have lost over time. For Esis, that was a starting point.”

  The tempic arms continued to clear debris. Semerjean paced the edge of his platform.

  “For many years, she tried to build a perfect brain from the Gotham template, one that would provide full immunity to terminus without compromising our abilities. But nature proved stubborn once again. Eventually Esis realized that a new genetic element had to be introduced, something that only existed in theory.”

  Mia didn’t like where this was going. “You’re talking about—”

  “You,” Semerjean said. “You, your friends, and all the other so-called breachers. You all grew up on a world without temporis, yet your brains developed the very same mechanism that allows for chronokinesis. It truly is a wonder. My people were made from the Cataclysm, but you developed naturally. You have no idea how special you are.”

  An oily nausea washed over Mia. “That’s why you picked siblings.”

  “Yes. The mutation runs strong in certain families, like the Trillingers and the Givens.”

  “But not mine.”

  His morbid look was all the answer she needed. All this time, she’d been holding on to a tiny flicker of hope that at least one of her brothers had survived. Another pipe dream. Another delusion.

  She cleared the choke from her throat. “How did you find us? How’d you even get to us?”

  “I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that what we did was unprecedented, the first lateral jump across worldstrings. My son had to invent an entirely new form of temporis to—”

  The tempic arms stopped moving. Semerjean peered down over the edge of the platform. “Damn. It’s worse than I thought.”

  Mia followed his gaze and gasped at the bloody sight below. “Oh no!”

  Theo already looked like one of the dead. The left side of his body was covered in burns. His right arm and leg had been crushed by debris. His eyes were wide open, unblinking. Mia prayed that was just an effect of the temporal shift.

  “He’s alive,” Semerjean assured her. “Barely, but . . .”

  Puzzled, he tilted his head. Mia recognized the look on his face, the same thousand-yard-stare that David used to get when he was scanning the past.

  “What?”

  Semerjean blinked at her a moment, then tensely shook his head. “Nothing. Let’s see what we can do for him.”

  He pulled a golden coin out of his shirt pocket and tossed it off the platform. It swerved toward Theo with deliberate insistence, impervious to the slowdown that affected everything around him. Mia watched with fascination as the disc landed on Theo’s chest and began burning through his sweatshirt.

  “He’ll be all right,” said Semerjean. “Let’s move on.”

  “Wait.”

  “I thought you were worried about Carrie.”

  “Now I’m worried about Theo.”

  “He’s healing,” Semerjean insisted. “We want him alive just as much as you do.”

  “Then why did you let this happen?”

  “You think I control the universe?”

  “I think you control his visions. He could have seen this war coming weeks ago, but you stopped him. You wanted it to happen because it helps your plans somehow.”

  Semerjean sighed. “Mia . . .”

  “All this pain, all this death, and for what? So you and your family can live forever?”

  “My family?” A flush rose in his cheeks. “This is for everyone. The minute we get home, we’ll make our discovery available to any living soul who wants it, at no cost or condition. Our gift will spread across the strings, trillions of people given infinite life. Can you understand a feat of that magnitude, Mia? Can you even begin to wrap your mind around the scope of our mission?”

  Mia recoiled at his anger. Stupid girl, she thought. You’ll get Carrie killed!

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

  Semerjean’s expression softened. He flashed his palms in gentle accord. “It’s all right. You’re under a lot of stress. I suppose I’m partly responsible for that.”

  Her stomach churned. She fought the urge to scream. “Who are you saving next?”

  “Well, that depends.”

  “On what?”

  Semerjean looked through the missing wall, at the lumic guildhall across the street. “On how you feel about Heath.”

  —

  They had barely pulled out of the guildhouse when Mia closed her eyes and muttered something. Semerjean looked at her confusedly, as if she’d just yipped at him in the secret language of poodles.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “I said stop.”

  The disc froze in midair, twelve feet above the asphalt of Center Street. Mia crouched at the edge of the circle, her face racked with sickness and misery.

  Semerjean backed away from her. “Are you about to, uh . . .”

  Mia shook her head, even as her breakfast threatened to surge back up. He had placed Heath’s life in her hands as if it were a cheap trinket, as if letting him die was even an option. Even more horrific than Semerjean’s “dilemma” was his shrugging explanation. I don’t know, he’d told her.
I’ve just seen the way he grates on you.

  If there had been any hope left that her good friend David still existed in some form, it was gone now. There wasn’t a trace of him left. No warmth, no charm, no morality she could even remotely comprehend. He’d been an alien this whole time. The parts of him she’d loved were just fiction.

  Semerjean looked at the Hilgendorf gates in the distance, then tapped them with a long tempic finger. The portals flickered out of existence. The machines began to sink into the concrete.

  Mia climbed to her feet and turned away from him. “Why are we even doing this? What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess I was hoping I could explain myself, give you a better sense of who I am.”

  “I know who you are. You’re a goddamn scientist—”

  “I’m nothing of the sort.”

  “—who manipulated us for his own bullshit reasons.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “If you just wanted babies, there are a million easier ways to get them.”

  Semerjean laughed. “You have no idea how true that is.”

  “So then why all these games? Why not try something else?”

  “We’re trying everything,” Semerjean assured her. “With every group and every timeline, we’re doing something different. This is admittedly one of our more complex efforts.”

  “It makes no sense!”

  “That’s because you’re thinking in linear terms,” he said. “A to B, B to C. The straightest path isn’t always the best one, especially when it comes to nature.”

  Semerjean waved a colorful image into the air: a three-dimensional rendering of a human brain. A yellow bead of light glowed at the base.

  “If you want to know why my wife has a bad temper . . .” He pointed at the dot. “It’s this. All we need is one mutation, one tiny twist of evolution right here in the temporal lobe, for humans to achieve immortality. But nothing has worked. The future teases us with glimpses of victory, but it doesn’t show us how to get it. So we experiment. We try a multitude of approaches in the hope that one of them, one of them, will finally bear fruit.”

  The image changed to ten floating bracelets, each one a different color. To Mia’s surprise, they weren’t all metal. She saw ruby and jade, multicolored opal, even a plastic-looking purple one.

  “In this string, we’ve taken a segmented approach with our subjects. For the Pearls, it’s embryonic engineering. For the Violets, germline editing. For the Golds? A multistage trial of controlled cellular parthenogenesis.”

  “What?”

  “Cloning,” Semerjean explained. “They’re our clone group.”

  A shiver ran up Mia’s spine. She imagined a lab somewhere with hundred copies of Jonathan, Heath, and Zack’s brother. No wonder Semerjean didn’t care about the originals. They were nothing but redundant spares.

  Semerjean vanquished all the bracelets but one. It expanded to the size of a truck tire, then rotated in the air.

  “Now the Silvers . . . oh, you were a challenge. We knew from the start that we needed to trust one group to the hands of nature—a natural conception, a natural mutation, a natural immunity to terminus. My wife and son looked to the strings and were very encouraged by what they saw. If their forecasts are right, then you represent our best chance for success. The sisters especially.”

  Mia felt queasy again. Semerjean eyed her worriedly. She wound her hand, urging him to continue.

  “The question was how to get you all to breed with the right partners,” he said. “Azral’s original plan was . . . distasteful, and not particularly effective. Esis and I came up with a much more humane approach, though it involved some deception. It also required a full-time presence in your group.”

  He lowered his head with a look of soft contrition. “So I opted to join you as one of your own. I developed a persona that would complement your personalities while masking my cultural differences.”

  Mia closed her eyes. “This was all just a game to you.”

  “No.”

  “That whole trip across the country—”

  “No, no, no. That was never part of the plan. If things had gone my way, you’d still be in San Diego, living in comfort in Sterling Quint’s facility. I would have eventually . . . encouraged some Gothams to join us there: Peter and Liam, Mercy Lee, a few potential partners for Theo and Hannah, even one for me. You know, for appearances.”

  Mia stared at him, hang-jawed. “Are you insane?”

  “Look—”

  “You think putting us all together would have gotten us to screw?”

  “Well, obviously, my plan was a lot more—”

  “You really do think we’re animals, don’t you?”

  “I do not,” Semerjean insisted. “I’ve given you credit from the very beginning. Please do me the same courtesy.”

  The wrath in his voice made Mia’s heart skip. He took a deep breath, then spoke in a calmer tone.

  “All I had to do was convince you that the fate of the world hinged on making children with each other. You would have questioned it, you would have complained about it, but in the end you would have done it. All of you.”

  He cast a heavy gaze at the frozen smoke plumes in the distance. “And life would have been so much easier for everyone.”

  Mia waited for her nerves to settle before speaking again. “So what happened?”

  Semerjean frowned. “You know what happened. Rebel attacked us. Ruined all my plans and forced me to improvise.”

  “How did you not see him coming?”

  “He had help.”

  “You people live off predictions. How—”

  “He had help. Ioni guided him through the cracks in our foresight. That fool would be nothing without her.”

  Mia wanted to ask him about Ioni, but she suddenly became very conscious of the time. Heath was dying, and there were still plenty other people to save.

  “Maybe we should—”

  “Yes.”

  Semerjean flew their platform to the lumics’ guild building and peeked inside a third-floor window.

  “Well, there he is.”

  Hesitantly, Mia moved to his side. She could see Heath collapsed at the base of a stairwell, clutching his stomach with bloody hands. Another boy, one Mia had never seen before, lay crumpled next to him.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Barbaric, isn’t it?” Semerjean dug into his shirt pocket and retrieved more golden discs. “Two unarmed boys, shot by their own government. There’s a reason we call this the Pre-Enlightenment Age.”

  “Who’s that other kid?”

  “Harold Herrick,” said Semerjean. “The last of Gemma’s disparates. It was rather intrepid of Heath to give him my wristwatch. He’s not usually that bold.”

  Mia saw the double coins in Semerjean’s fingers. “You’re healing both of them.”

  “Yes. Should I not?”

  “Of course you should! I just don’t understand you. I don’t know who you’re here to kill and who you’re here to save.”

  Semerjean hurled the discs through the broken window. They curved through the air like guided missiles before landing on the chests of their targets.

  “I’m not sure why I’m healing Harold, to be honest.”

  He smiled slyly at Mia. “I guess I have a soft spot for lumics.”

  Her stomach flipped. If he hadn’t just made a cruel joke about Yvonne, then he was in complete denial about what he’d done to her. Both scenarios were equally frightening. Semerjean had brought Mia on this journey to get to know the real him. It was working, but not in the way he’d hoped.

  She threw a nervous look down the street. “Who’s next?”

  —

  She stood perfectly still at the edge of the platform, her hands dangling limply
at her sides. Mia knew from the moment she returned to the village square that she would see some awful sights, things she’d missed the first time around.

  But nothing could have prepared her for the scene at Founders’ Path.

  A solider lay dead among the flowers, her armor scorched from head to toe. Someone had cooked her alive inside her tactical gear, but that was nothing compared to what happened to her comrade. The other soldier had been bisected diagonally across the abdomen, a slanted half corpse. Where his lower parts went, Mia had no idea. He’d been cut in two by a closing portal. His legs could have been anywhere within a hundred miles of here.

  Semerjean scanned Mia’s face as she processed the carnage. She kept so still that she might as well have stepped outside the temporal field, just another casualty of war trapped in still-frame.

  “Mia . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  “They’ll be fine. They’re healing as we speak.”

  Semerjean wasn’t talking about the soldiers, who were far beyond saving. Nor was he referring to Mother Olga, who’d taken a bullet to the back and had perished just a few yards up the path. He was only assuring Mia about the two Gothams next to Olga, a father and son who lay crumpled on top of each other, the blood of their wounds converging in a puddle.

  At long last, Mia had caught up with the Pendergens.

  Semerjean gestured at the gruesome half soldier. “That’s the one who shot them. Managed to put two bullets into each of them before Peter finally retaliated. If he’d been a little more attentive—”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I’m not the one who did this.”

  “You let it all happen.”

  Semerjean looked away. “I had to.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “The government was coming for you one way or another,” he said. “We did everything we could to throw them off your scent.”

  “Like what?”

  “Those bodies they found in that Staten Island movie theater. Who do you think did that?”

  Mia glowered at him. “What’d you do, kill us in another timeline?”

  Semerjean shook his head. “They were just lab clones. Mindless. Esis grew them all in a day.”