The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  “I . . .”

  “Mia, in four seconds, all hope will be lost. For you and Carrie and everyone else in the world.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Three . . .”

  “This feels wrong!”

  “Two . . .”

  “Please!”

  “One . . .”

  “Goddamn it!”

  Mia closed her eyes. She thought about Jonathan. And she fired.

  All at once the universe seemed to come apart. The noise of the gunshot shattered her hearing. The recoil sent her tumbling backward. She bit her tongue so hard that she nearly forgot everything else that was happening around her. She was blind, deaf, senseless, helpless.

  “Mia?”

  She forced an eye open and looked up from the floor. Zack and Semerjean stood perfectly still, both equally shocked by her sudden presence. Mia swiveled her gaze to the right, toward her designated target. It had been just minutes since she’d gotten her first look at Esis. She’d been nothing but a harmless ghost then, a visual aid that Semerjean had created.

  Now the real thing was standing right in front of her: surprised, unharmed, and very, very angry. Mia thought she’d missed her mark until she saw a two-inch portal hovering closely in front of Esis’s head.

  She caught it, Mia realized. She caught the bullet. She—

  Something big and hard crashed into Mia—lifting her off her feet before shoving her against a wall. She looked down and saw Semerjean staring up at her. He held her high against the concrete, his blue eyes cutting into her like lasers.

  “What have you done?”

  “Mia!” Zack ran for her, but was held in place by Esis’s tempic hand. A long white blade hovered menacingly in front of his heart.

  “What were you thinking?” Semerjean asked Mia. “What on earth possessed you to—”

  “S’ua tolla shii hoh-no kiesse,” Esis snapped.

  “No!” Zack yelled.

  “No,” Semerjean said. “Not her. Not now. Not until I understand why.”

  He saw the broken hand mirror in the corridor, then winced in revelation. “Oh, Mia. Mia, Mia, Mia. You were supposed to be the smart one.”

  “Stop it!”

  The temperature dropped fifty degrees. Carrie stumbled into the vault, her hands raised high, her breath coming out in puffs of mist. Semerjean depowered her with a quick wave of solis, then turned his furious attention back onto Mia.

  “You were misled. Ioni played you for a fool, and now . . .” He chuckled in surprise. “You were my favorite. I didn’t think there was anything you could ever do to make me angry.”

  His smile faded. His voice dropped to a guttural growl. “But you just found a way.”

  Blood trickled from Mia’s mouth. She fought to speak through quivering lips. “Go on. Do it.”

  “Don’t!” said Zack. “If you kill her, you’ll never get anything out of us! We’ll never c—”

  Esis covered Zack’s mouth with tempis. Semerjean kept his hot stare on Mia. “He makes a good point. We’ve been relying too much on violence as a corrective tool. It doesn’t seem to help us. It only provokes more foolish acts of vengeance.”

  Tears blurred Mia’s vision. She’d stumbled her way into a whole new nightmare and she wanted to take it all back. She wanted to roll herself up in a stick and mail herself back to the past.

  “You disappoint me,” Semerjean continued. “But then it’s my own fault for being surprised. You’re just a child. All this time, that’s all you’ve ever been.”

  Semerjean dropped her back to the ground, then tossed a somber look at his wife. “La’beho no-mé.”

  Esis freed Zack, but not before slicing a superficial wound across his chest. He yelled in pain and tumbled backward to the floor.

  Semerjean joined her side. “Our son requests our presence up above,” he told the others. “So we take our leave. But before we go, I need to make something perfectly clear.”

  He flicked his hand at Carrie, enveloping her in a gossamer glow.

  Shrieking, Mia ran for her. “No!”

  Semerjean held her back with a tempic tendril. Mia could only watch through teary eyes as the temporis reduced her girlfriend to a fuzzy silhouette. Carrie twisted and writhed inside her bubble of light, her limbs flailing so fast that they barely looked human. If she was screaming, Mia couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own cries.

  “Carrie!”

  The glow dissipated. Carrie fell to her hands and knees. Thin wisps of steam rose up from her back. She moaned in discomfort, but there wasn’t a scratch or blemish on her. Against all of Mia’s expectations, the girl was still very much alive.

  But something wasn’t right. Carrie’s hair was twelve inches longer now, and tied in a ponytail. Her funeral dress had been replaced with a pink T-shirt and summer shorts. More than that, she was . . . smaller. Mia had spent many hours wrapped in the arms of Carrie Bloom, and those were not hers.

  She struggled to break out of her restraint. “Carrie?”

  Carrie rose to her knees on her circle of carpet, then looked around in confusion. Her voice was an octave higher than usual. Her teeth were lined with metal straighteners.

  “Who . . . who are you people? Where’s my mom?”

  “Carrie, it’s me!”

  She looked to Mia with the eyes of a stranger, then shrank away from the blood on her shirt. “What am I doing here? What—”

  Carrie saw Rebel’s corpse and fled the room in a panic. Her shrill screams echoed all the way down the corridor.

  “Carrie, wait!”

  “Stop,” Zack said. He’d known what was happening from the very beginning. He had felt the temporis work its cruel magic on Carrie, erasing away the last two years of her life. Every spark of growth. Every hard-earned memory.

  “There’s no point chasing her,” Semerjean told Mia. “She’s twelve years old. She doesn’t know you anymore.”

  Zack looked away with sorrow and disgust. “Bastard.”

  “Bastard? I could have taken her life instead of just a fraction of it. It would have been no less than Mia deserved.”

  Semerjean moved to her in a shifted blur. His fingers clamped around her chin, forcing her to look up at him.

  “Every time you see that girl, I want you to remember the kindness I showed here today. Next time you cross me, I won’t be so generous.”

  He pointed a stern finger at Zack. “That goes double for you and Amanda.”

  Esis waved a flat portal on the far side of the room. As she accompanied Semerjean toward the light, her voice filtered into Mia’s ear like a spectral hiss.

  “Fair warning, child. That bullet you fired at me will return one day.” She turned around at the portal and smiled teasingly at Mia. “You won’t like where it goes.”

  Hand in hand, the Pelletiers vanished into the disc. Zack waited for it to close before he finally exhaled.

  “Jesus.”

  Mia stood motionless among the mirrors, her body so rigid that Zack had to look twice to make sure she was still breathing. He wanted to ask her if she was okay, but the question seemed moot at the moment, even cruel.

  Exhausted, he sat on the floor and rested his head in his hands. Soon Mia joined him in his repose. They stayed that way for several minutes, never speaking or moving until a stuttered cough broke the silence.

  Mia watched with dead eyes as Zack tended to the other survivor in the room, a woman of some importance to him. Mercy was coming back to the world, and Mia didn’t care at all.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Sixty-eight minutes after the invasion began, the Gothams formally took back the village. The surviving soldiers were herded into the square, where they were stripped of their armor, healed of their injuries, and then thrown screaming into a portal. One shove wa
s all it took to send them thirty miles north, to a huge, empty parking lot on the eastern side of the Hudson. As the soldiers recovered from the pain and shock of their first spatial jump, they looked around and found themselves standing outside a half-wrecked megadome, the aerport that had once been known as Atropos.

  Once the living invaders were removed, the Gothams began disposing of their less fortunate enemies: a hundred and twenty armored corpses, including the mastermind behind the attack.

  Melissa emerged from the municipal building in time to watch Gingold tumble lifelessly into a portal. The tempics had gathered the bodies into a pile and were shoveling them like coal into the breach. Barbaric, she thought. But was it any more detestable than what Integrity had done to them? How on earth did Cain ever expect to make peace with these people?

  Amanda joined her on the front steps and took a gawking look around the square. By now, every dead Gotham had been covered with something: a sheet, a blanket, a crumpled black blazer. She could see at least forty casualties, and this was just one part of the village.

  “God . . .” She studied the nearest draped cadaver, a woman she would have recognized as Elder Rubinek. “We were too slow to save them.”

  Melissa shook her head grimly. “We couldn’t have done it any faster.”

  Amanda scanned the faces of the nearest survivors. The only two she recognized were Irwin Sunder and Prudent Lee, and she had no interest in talking to either of them.

  “We have to find the others,” she told Melissa. “Zack—”

  “Hey!”

  A middle-age Gotham made a beeline for them, her wrathful attention fixed on Melissa. “You don’t belong here!”

  She was a tall brunette of Asian and Irish descent, a striking woman under normal circumstances. But now her hair was a mess and her black gown hung in tatters. Amanda had never laid eyes on her before. All she could tell from her immediate senses was that she was a tempic and she was hysterical with grief. That was never a good combination.

  Amanda stepped forward. “Okay, calm down.”

  “Calm down? My husband’s dead!” The woman pointed at Melissa. “These monsters shot him right in front of me!”

  “Melissa had nothing to do with that,” Amanda said. “She risked her life to save you all.”

  “Says who, the breacher? You think I trust you after everything you’ve done?”

  Amanda gritted her teeth. “Look—”

  “You people walk with Pelletiers. You destroy everything you touch!”

  A spiky skin of tempis grew over Amanda’s hands. The woman matched her glove for glove. “Just try it. Try it. Give me an excu—”

  She froze in horror at something behind Amanda and Melissa. They turned around and saw exactly what she was staring at: a white-haired man hovering thirty feet above the ground, his feet planted firmly on a floating disc of gold.

  Amanda had no trouble recognizing him. “Oh no . . .”

  The last time she’d laid eyes on Azral Pelletier, they’d been four miles up in the sky. Now here he was below the Earth’s surface, looking as cold and ominous as ever. Though his entrance was far less dramatic this time, it was clear from the way he hovered over the square that he wanted to be seen. He dawdled on his disc with his arms crossed patiently, as if he had all the time in the world.

  One by one, the survivors looked up. Theo and Heath paused at the East Street junction. Prudent Lee cringed at the base of the fountain. Peter watched from the edge of the southwest gardens, his body crouched at the side of a half-covered corpse. From a distance, the poor dead girl had looked exactly like Mia. Luckily, she was someone else’s tragedy. He’d barely had a chance to feel guilty about his relief when Azral arrived and broke his train of thought.

  Heath grabbed Theo’s arm and pulled him back a step, as if that would somehow protect him from the tall, scary man. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he gonna kill someone?”

  Theo had no idea. As ever, the Pelletiers moved through the blind spots in his foresight—invisible, unpredictable. All he could feel was a sharp and painful absence, as if a face had been cut out of all his family photos. He only had to do a cursory scan of the future to see who was missing from it.

  Oh God. Jonathan . . .

  Theo looked at Heath with round, trembling eyes. There’d be hell to pay when the boy found out. Theo couldn’t tell him. Not here. Not now. Not until Azral did whatever it was he came here to do.

  A portal opened above the guild directory. The Gothams in the square let out a collective gasp as Semerjean and Esis emerged. They drifted through the air on small aeric platforms, then flanked their son on either side. A faint smile curled Azral’s lip—a proud smile, as if there was no greater sight in creation than the three united Pelletiers.

  Melissa stared up at Semerjean, stupefied. She suddenly figured out what everyone hadn’t told her about David. “You’re kidding me . . .”

  Amanda locked her hard gaze on Esis. “Where’s Zack?” she growled. “I know you can hear me. If you killed him—”

  “He lives,” Esis assured her. “You’ll see him soon enough.”

  Once again, the woman spoke in echoes, a temporal whisper sent directly into Amanda’s ears.

  Semerjean joined their quiet conference. “In a moment, my son will speak. You may feel the urge to interrupt him with one of your sanctimonious tirades. I wouldn’t advise it.”

  Amanda’s back frosted over with spiky tempis. She thought of Yvonne, then hissed a curse she hadn’t used in sixteen years. “Fuck you.”

  “Careful,” said Semerjean. “I’m in a bad mood and I never much liked you.”

  “Yeah?” Amanda’s voice quavered. “Well, I loved you.”

  Semerjean looked away with an uncomfortable expression. “Just be quiet and there’ll be no more deaths today.”

  The trio hovered silently for another minute, allowing their audience more time to gather. Most of the Gothams had already left the village by now, leaving their strongest ten dozen to deal with the aftermath. They trickled in from the outer streets, their anxious eyes locked on the Pelletiers. Only a handful fled in mindless panic. The rest were either too tired, too angry, or too curious to leave.

  Soon nearly every survivor in the village had assembled in the square—a hundred and fifteen Gothams, two Silvers, one Gold, and a former federal agent. They looked up at Azral with rapt, anxious attention as he raised his hand high.

  A fluorescent glow enveloped the broken clock tower. The minute hands turned backward with eerie speed. Glass, wood, and metal fragments flew out of nowhere and melded into the framework. By the time Azral finished, the structure had been restored to full health. He’d even set the clocks.

  The crowd was still looking up when Esis swept her hand and teleported something onto the grass: a shiny silver satchel at Amanda’s and Melissa’s feet. Puzzled, they stooped to examine it. The case sprang open before they could even touch the latch.

  Melissa jumped back. “Goodness.”

  Curious onlookers formed around the two women as they examined the satchel’s contents: reflective silver discs, at least a hundred of them. They were all the size of dollar coins, completely featureless except for their varying inscriptions.

  Melissa pulled one from the top and furrowed her brow at its small engraving. “‘Heart failure.’ What is this?”

  Amanda had a strong guess. She’d been the first of the Silvers to experience a Pelletier healing disc. Now it seemed she had a whole case of them at her disposal. If the inscriptions were accurate, then there were cures for every kind of malady, from blunt force trauma to temporal rift damage. Amanda even found a disc that purported to cure cancer.

  Esis stared down at her with a sly half grin. “Those devices will work on anyone, but only you can activate them.”

 
“Use them wisely,” Semerjean told Amanda. “There will be no replacements.”

  With a thrust of his hand, he delivered the third and final blessing. Everyone turned their heads and squinted as an interrogation tent became enveloped in a blazing dome of light. Four seconds after it began, the glow dissipated, revealing thirty people standing on a smoldering circle of dirt. They were all dazed-looking youths in white silk loungewear, all thoroughly unfamiliar to Melissa and the orphans.

  The Gothams, however, recognized them immediately. They’d been snatched away by Pelletiers in the middle of last August, as leverage against the clan’s surviving prophets. No one expected to see them again except for Prudent Lee. She’d been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

  She staggered toward the abductees, her glistening eyes locked on one of them. “Sage!”

  A dark-haired teenager turned around and eyed her warily, as if she were just a cruel illusion. “Mom?”

  She pulled him into a weeping hug. “Oh, my boy. My boy . . .”

  Sage brushed the tears from his eyes, then reeled at the state of the village. “God, what happened? Where’s Dad? Where’s Mercy?”

  Prudent held him tight. “They’re fine. They’re fine. I’ll explain everything.”

  The other freed prisoners slowly staggered through the crowd, like sleepwalkers, until each of them was found by a weeping spouse or relative.

  Theo watched the reunions from a distance, suspicious. The Pelletiers never did anything out of the goodness of their hearts. They were buttering up their audience, smothering them with kindness when they were weakest and most vulnerable. Theo didn’t need his foresight to know that a soft sell was coming.

  A gentle hum filled the square from above, loud enough to turn everyone’s attention back on Azral. He straightened his collar, cleared his throat, and then at long last addressed the people.

  “We give these gifts unconditionally.”

  Though he spoke at conversational volume, his voice reached every ear in the village. Carrie Bloom paused at the front of the vivery, confounded, while her father cocked his head on Temperance Street. Harold Herrick listened from the stall of a lumic guild bathroom. Even the four living souls in the tunnels—Zack and Mia, Mercy and Jun Lee—heard him loud and clear. They all looked up in muddled perplexity.