by Daniel Price
“What . . . ?”
She turned around to check on Jonathan, half expecting to see a mangled corpse. Yet there he was: still alive, still standing.
Jonathan closed the space between them, his mouth slack and trembling. His voice creaked out in a broken half whisper. “Why’d you do that?”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
“I had to! I love you. I couldn’t just let him kill you.”
His eyes filled with tears. He turned his head and wiped them with his sleeve. “Goddamn it. I didn’t ask you to do that for me.”
“Jonathan—”
“You gave your whole life away!”
“Not my life. Just . . .” Hannah wrung her hands, stymied. Her heart was still hammering from her encounter with Azral, and her mind couldn’t see past the immediate goal. He was alive. He was alive. What the hell else mattered?
“I don’t care what you say about living a good life,” she told him. “You’d give up your arms and legs to save me. You’d do it for me and Heath and everyone you love.”
Jonathan closed his eyes. Hannah gripped the cloth of his sleeve, convincing herself that Azral wouldn’t mind. Her inner Amanda grimly shook her head at her. That’s how it starts.
“We’ll find a way past this,” Hannah promised. “You and me, together.”
“Together?”
“We may not be a couple anymore, but we still get to be together. We still get to be the people we are.”
Jonathan chuckled bleakly. “Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.”
“Exactly.”
They stared at each other for a tense and awkward moment before Jonathan looked away. He smacked his fist into his hand. “No. This is bullshit. I’m not going to stand by while you play breeding horse for that piece of shit. He has no right.”
“Jonathan . . .”
“He has no right! I’ll find a way out of this. I don’t care what—”
A sudden crack filled the air, like the tail of a whip. Hannah looked around in alarm. It had sounded like someone had popped something—a tire or a balloon or a big fat cherry bomb. Maybe . . .
Hannah spun around to face Jonathan again. He stared at her vacantly, his skin freshly pale, his body teetering on wobbly legs.
“Jonathan?”
Hannah moved in closer and saw a trickle of blood run down the side of his face.
“Jonathan!”
She moved to catch him, but gravity was quicker. He fell to his knees, then collapsed on the driveway. A pool of blood formed around his skull.
“Oh, God. No . . .”
Frantic, Hannah crouched at his side and struggled to turn him over. The moment he flipped, she ran her fingers along his scalp until she felt a warm wetness. The blood seemed to be coming from behind his left ear.
The fragments of Hannah’s mind abruptly snapped together. The voices in her head became united in panic. Somebody somebody somebody shot him. Somebody shot him right in the head.
She unwrapped her arm sling her sister had fashioned for her and bunched it against Jonathan’s wound. She could already feel his blood seeping through the nylon.
“Oh God. Jonathan, hang on. Please!”
Jonathan kept his wide eyes on the sky. His breath came out in shallow gulps. Hannah didn’t need Amanda to tell her that he’d gone into shock, or that people with bullets in their heads usually had seconds to live.
“No . . .”
She pressed the jacket harder, her eyes streaming tears as Jonathan began muttering.
“He’s not gonna play. He’s not gonna play. He doesn’t like the feel of it.”
Hannah wiped her eyes, smearing fat streaks of blood across her face. “Just hang on. I’ve got you.”
“He doesn’t like the feel of the strings. You have to learn. You’ll have to . . .”
Jonathan looked at Hannah and for a moment, he seemed to recognize her. His pupils dilated. He clutched her wrist.
“Hannah, please . . .”
“Just hold on!”
“He’s not gonna play. You have to learn. You gotta . . . you gotta . . .”
“Jonathan . . .”
“You gotta keep the song going.”
His eyelids fluttered. His body seized. Hannah fell backward, then climbed to her feet. There was only one last hope for Jonathan. If she could envelop him in a redshift field . . . yes! She’d saved his life that way before. All she had to do was preserve him in a single moment, keep him in stasis until a turner could come heal him.
She’d just begun to channel her thoughts when Jonathan stopped writhing. His head rolled to the side, he let out a groan and then, with his last shudder of life, he brushed the trigger to his power.
Hannah stood there, paralyzed, as Jonathan dropped like a ghost through the bricks of Irwin Sunder’s driveway. His body fell peacefully through the soil and bedrock, past the northern lip of the underland, and straight on through to the heart of the world.
—
“Hannah?”
She kneeled on the pavement with an empty stare, her arms hanging limp at her sides. Though her mouth was open, she couldn’t seem to draw a breath or make a sound. It was as if her throat had been packed with wet cement.
No, not just her throat. All of her. She felt like she’d been hollowed out and filled with something vile.
“Hannah Given.”
She only vaguely registered the fact that someone was calling her name, a very familiar voice at that. The man sounded close and disturbingly clear, even though Hannah couldn’t see anyone around her. Maybe this was what madness felt like. Maybe her mind had finally cracked for good.
“Come on, Hannah. I know you can hear me.”
A pencil-thin passageway opened up in her esophagus. She fell onto her hands and breathed in gasps. As fresh oxygen flooded into her brain, a stray thought came loose from the wreckage. The hole in Jonathan’s head had been small, too small. Integrity would never use a gun of such weak caliber—nor would they leave Hannah alive. As for Azral, the man needed a gun like a shark needed a switchblade. He hadn’t shot Jonathan either.
There was, however, another bastard out there in the world, one who had every motive and opportunity to kill the man she loved.
“Oh, Hannah Banana . . .”
She looked at the music speaker and saw a green light blinking at the base.
“Aah . . .” Hannah tried to speak but her tongue was still twisted. She couldn’t seem to remember how to put words together.
Her tormentor snickered at her through the speaker. “Oh good. You’re making ape sounds. That’s a big improvement from last time.”
Hannah shot to her feet and took a spinning look around the premises. If there was one thing she knew about Evan Fucking Rander, it was that he always came prepared. He’d be somewhere within eyeshot but not within reach. That meant . . .
She raised her head and saw a two-wheeled Pegasus hovering thirty feet above the tennis court. The aerocycle was one of Harley-Davidson’s most illustrious models: the same high-handled, loud-engined, twin-exhaust hopper that movie stars used whenever they wanted to make a showy entrance.
Evan holstered his pistol and raised a microphone to his smiling lips. “And here we go. Helloooo, Saint Louis! Are you ready to rock?”
At long last, Hannah screamed. Her voice came out in a high, vengeful roar, one loud enough to scrape her windpipe.
Evan held up his handphone and played her cry back for her. “Perfect! Thank you. I was looking for a new ringtone. There are only so many times you can hear ‘Funkytown.’”
Hannah sped toward the court in a shifted blur, her billy club clutched in her hand. She couldn’t reach Evan, but maybe she could knock him off that bike of his. She could only pray that he’d survive the fall. She wanted him to be fully cons
cious when she jammed her thumbs into his eyes.
Evan sighed patiently as Hannah hurled the club. It barely flew ten feet before she doubled over in pain.
“Oops. Looks like someone wrenched her throwing arm.” He clucked his tongue. “What happened? You hurt your shoulder again? Did Sister Christian pop it back in?”
Panting, Hannah backed up and faced Evan from the foot of the tennis court. He was dressed in a black leather motorcycle suit, his face half obscured by a carnival mask. He wanted her to see as much of him as possible without letting Integrity get a full look in their ghost drills.
“Come down here!” Hannah yelled. “Face me like a man!”
“Mmm. Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it and . . . no. But hey, it’s nice to see you. Have you put on weight?”
“I’ll kill you!”
“Whoa, whoa, hey. I didn’t say it was bad weight.”
His mocking voice hit her from every direction. He’d set five different speakers just around the tennis court.
“I can’t lie,” Evan said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this. I don’t just mean killing Jonathan, which is always a treat—”
Hannah shrieked at him again.
“—I mean Semerjean.” Evan whooped with exaggerated relief. “I’m so glad I can finally talk about that now. The secret was killing me.”
“They’ll kill you!”
“Who, the Freaky Three?”
“You were supposed to leave us alone!”
“What? No, no, no. You’re very confused. I had a talk with Davidjean the other day and he said ‘Dude, no more killing Silvers.’ And I said ‘Dude, what about Golds?’ And he said ‘Them? Pffft. You’d be doing us a favor.’”
“You’re lying!”
“Sweetheart, why do you think Azral left? He saw me in the wings, just waiting to do his dirty work for him.”
“We had a deal!”
“A deal?” Evan bellowed with laughter. “He didn’t buy your act for a second. He took one look at the future and saw you and Jonathan banging all over Freak Street.”
“Bullshit! I would have kept my word!”
“Sweet Mother Jesus. It’s like you don’t even know yourself.”
“I know what I’ll do when I get my hands on you!”
“You should get your hands on a lozenge first. You sound like Batman.”
Hannah ran to the billy club and shifted back into high-speed. Evan rolled his eyes as she smashed one of his speakers to bits. “Hannah . . .”
If she couldn’t kill him, the least she could do was shut him up. Unfortunately—
“Hannah, dearest . . .”
—her powers were still strained. A sharp agony flooded her, like ice and barbed wire. She de-shifted on the tennis court and clutched her temples.
Evan shook his head. “Oh, this is just sad. I’m feeling for you. I really am.”
Hannah chucked the club with her left arm. It missed the Pegasus by yards.
“Come on, Hannah. This is your Empire Strikes Back. You don’t get to win this time. Take it like a Jedi.”
She suddenly realized that there was no way he could hear her over the growl of his engine, and there was no way he’d miss the chance to delight in her cries. That meant . . .
Hannah ran to another speaker and saw a wireless microphone taped to the back. Of course.
She peeled the mic off the speaker, then held it up to her lips. There was no reason to use a billy club when she could throw her words at him.
“So this is what you do?” she asked him. “Kill every man in the world who’s better than you?”
Evan rolled his eyes. “Here we go . . .”
“You’ve got your work cut out for you.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“You could murder every last man, woman, and child on this planet—”
“She sets up the zinger . . .”
“—I still won’t fuck you.”
“And . . . scene.”
Hannah gritted her teeth as Evan applauded her from above.
“Not bad, not bad,” he said. “Not as good as your last one, obviously. That one . . . yeah. You most definitely got under my skin. It made me careless and it got me in trouble. I . . .”
His smile faded. He stared at the horizon with a tortured expression before abruptly becoming chipper again.
“Anyway, it’s all good now. I’m stronger, I’m wiser, and unlike you”—Evan’s face lit up in a nasty smile—“I’m having a very good day.”
Hannah’s face tightened. She could feel her grief overtaking her rage, threatening to send her to the ground and reduce her to a sobbing wreck. But she couldn’t fall apart. Not here. Not in front of this worm.
Evan brandished his pistol for Hannah to see: a long-barreled .22 with a targeting scope. “Took me ten rewinds to shoot him in the right part of the brain. My only plan was to get him to drop himself but Jesus, the babbling. That was unexpected. ‘He’s not gonna play. He’s not gonna play. You gotta keep the song going.’ God. What was that about?”
Hannah stood perfectly still, stone-faced, while Evan went on.
“At some point, someone’s gonna ask you about Jonathan’s last words. If I were you, I’d lie. Just make up something. Because the truth is just . . . yeesh.”
Hannah kept quiet, her mind fumbling desperately. There had to be some way to kill him, something he overlooked.
Evan shrugged. “Hey, look on the bright side: if your next boyfriend’s a Gotham, I can’t kill him. At least not until—”
A sudden loud noise cut him off, an otherworldly hiss from the front of the estate. Hannah and Evan turned their heads just in time to see a huge portal open forty feet above Sunder’s lawn. A metal monstrosity came spilling out the underside: a vehicle. A dropship. It fell to the grass with a clamorous din.
Evan tapped his jaw in nervous thought. “Well, shit.”
Hannah didn’t have to look too hard to see that it was the very same ship that had nearly killed her and Jonathan. She spied six armored soldiers dangling lifelessly from their tethers. The pilot sat slumped forward in her chair, her skin warped beyond all recognition. She looked like she’d been deep-fried and flash-frozen at the same time.
The implications sent a shudder up Hannah’s back. Is that what time travel did to a body? Was that Azral’s preferred method of execution—to send his victims screaming four minutes into the future?
The future . . .
Hannah turned around and squinted at Evan. The goddamn bastard was a looper. He knew all of her moves before she did, and had well-prepared comebacks for everything she said. Yet the arrival of the dropship had clearly taken him by surprise.
Evan forced a breezy smile. “Well, if that isn’t a metaphor for your love life—”
Hannah ran toward the ship at 9x, the fastest speed she could muster without getting a headache, then disappeared inside. Evan leaned to his left to get a better look.
“Not sure what you’re doing, hon, but—”
Hannah burst out of the dropship and rushed back to the tennis court, a dead soldier’s rifle in her hands.
Evan looked down the barrel and laughed. “Oh, I get it now. Very nice. Quick thinking. There’s just one problem, Boopsie: that’s a government-issue rifle. It won’t work without—”
His head snapped back as if he’d woken up from a nightmare. He screamed and floored his aerocycle, just as Hannah’s new weapon exploded in gunfire.
She already knew damn well that civilians couldn’t fire Integrity weapons. She’d learned it the hard way in the basement of Manganiel’s. At the time, Hannah chalked it up to her own inexperience. But no, there had to be another trick.
While Hannah was shifted inside the dropship, she’d peeled the glove from a dead soldier’s hand and found an interestin
g-looking ring, an electronic smartkey that would hopefully, God willing, help her rid the world of Evan Rander.
Sadly, the odds still weren’t in Hannah’s favor. Her right arm was injured, she had no experience with rifles, and her victim had a talent for correcting past oversights. Evan had already fled a hundred yards by the time Hannah got control of the weapon’s recoil. With a savage howl, she sent a dozen bullets his way. None of them seemed to hit.
“Fuck!”
“Fuck!” Evan yelled. This was a horrible note to end on, but he was far too rattled to rewind and try again. It was a moot issue anyway, as the dropship was clearly Azral’s way of saying “enough.”
Evan had just passed the top of the Quarter Hill bulwark when he heard Hannah in his earpiece.
“You were wrong about Jonathan,” she told him. “He wasn’t babbling. He was telling me to learn guitar so I could play it for Heath, so he can keep bringing back the songs from our world. He knew exactly what he was saying.”
Hannah looked at the pool of blood on the driveway, her eyes filled with tears. “His last words were beautiful.”
Her voice dropped an octave. “Yours won’t be.”
She threw the mic to the pavement and crushed it beneath her sneaker. A high-pitched squeal filled Evan’s ear. He pulled out the receiver and threw it away.
“Fuck.”
Hannah hobbled her way to the bloodstain, then fell back to her knees. She knew that the underland was still in a state of emergency, but she was in no condition to help. All the wrath in her heart had fizzled to smoke, and there was nothing left but sorrow. She could see Jonathan standing on this very spot of the driveway, a wistful smile on his lips.
Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.
She buried her face in her bloody hands and screamed until she had no voice left.
A half mile to the south, far outside Hannah’s view, a portal opened above the rooftop of Manganiel’s. A fiery white figure crashed through the glass, then broke through the floor of the showroom. It continued on its blazing path—through the basement, down the shaft, and all the way to the underland.
The survivors in the village looked up as a streak of light burst in through the ceiling and barreled into the ground like a meteor. The rumble shook every wall and window in the village.