The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Amanda looked to Caleb. “You’ve come a long way. Is there anything we can get you?”

  “We’re a little tired,” he admitted. “We could use some beds.”

  Zack clapped his back. “We’ll do better than that. We’ll get you some houses.”

  “It’s not far,” Amanda said. “Just follow us.”

  Two by two, the orphans moved north. As Zack and Amanda led the procession, they kept looking over their shoulders and marveling at the many new faces behind them.

  “Holy shit,” Zack said. “That’s nineteen people. Our people.”

  Amanda clasped his hand, her euphoria mixed with a touch of lament. She wished Theo was here to see the fruits of his labor. She wished Jonathan was here to play them a song from the old world. She even found herself missing David, at least the illusion of him. The heart was a strong and stubborn muscle, but sometimes that worked in her favor.

  “Hey.”

  Amanda snapped out of her daze and saw Zack smiling at her. “Did I forget to say ‘I love you’?”

  “It might have slipped your mind.”

  “I love you.”

  Amanda squeezed his fingers, then looked ahead at all the new housepods on Freak Street. “Damn right you do.”

  —

  The Memorial Garden had been closed since sunrise. The gates were shrouded with thick red curtains, blocking all view of the tribute committee as they carved new names onto the Requiem Wall. They’d never been faced with such a devastating update: a hundred and eleven kinsmen who’d been alive as of Sunday morning. Now they were all just etchings in stone. The laser engravers were so overworked, the committee had to unplug the machines and let them cool for an hour.

  By late afternoon, the job was finally done. The curtains came down and the garden was reopened. Four dozen mourners came trickling in through the front gate, bearing roses and candles and photos of the deceased. One swifter brought a holographic bust of her dear, departed son. She placed it down near her family marker and set it to an endless loop.

  Hannah moved invisibly among the crowd, her head dipped, her eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. If it was gauche to come here wearing a leather jacket over a short black dress, she didn’t care. The clothes fit her mood like nothing else in the closet. She wanted to drape everything around her in dark satin and leather. Wrap the world in black until it was nothing but a gap in the stars.

  While half the mourners flocked to their family monuments, Hannah joined the rest at the Wall. There were enough new names to warrant five columns, with a special plaque for the elite deceased: the Mayor, Mother Olga, Elder Rubinek, Victoria Chisholm. Even Rebel got his own commendation for taking on the Pelletiers directly.

  But someone very important was missing from the roster, the only name Hannah cared about.

  She pushed her way forward and scanned the rest of the tally. There was no mention of Jonathan anywhere.

  “What the fuck?”

  A middle-age turner eyed her distastefully. Hannah glared at him through her shades. “He helped save you people. You’d be dead if it wasn’t for him!”

  “Hannah.”

  She turned around and saw Mercy beckoning her from the corner, her work clothes mottled with sweat and stone dust. She must have been one of the artisans on the tribute committee. Did she even know that Jonathan died? Did she care?

  Hannah hurried toward her, only vaguely taking notice of the teenage boy behind her. Sage leaned against the gate with a bored and testy expression, as if his sister had harangued him into being here.

  “Where is he?” Hannah demanded.

  “You have every reason to be pissed,” Mercy said. “I tried to get his name on the wall but some people—”

  “Who?”

  “—thought the breachers should have a separate marker.”

  “Who?”

  Mercy gestured to the south, where Irwin Sunder stood with a cluster of his relatives. Hannah narrowed her eyes at him. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, he’s a knob, but he’s not worth your trouble. It doesn’t matter anyway. Look . . .”

  She drew Hannah’s gaze to a monument by the wall, a ten-foot obelisk of bonded white marble. It featured a shiny brass plaque that, to Hannah’s surprise, already had seven engravings. A woman named Carina, a man named Sebastian, a couple of guys named Drew and Gavin. It wasn’t until she saw Josh Trillinger’s name, right below Jonathan’s, that she figured it out. They were the New York orphans, the ones with gold bracelets. The ones who died at the hands of Gothams.

  Hannah turned to Mercy, the last surviving member of Rebel and Ivy’s kill squad. “You knew their names.”

  Mercy threw a quick peek at her brother before looking away in shame. “Rebel knew them.”

  Hannah gently stroked the letters of Jonathan’s name, and suddenly realized the folly of her outrage. The Gothams could have erected a statue of him in the center of town and it wouldn’t have mattered. He was gone. He was gone and nothing on Earth would bring him back.

  “I . . .” Hannah tried to work up the nerve to thank Mercy but she was distracted by the blank space on the plaque. There was room for at least thirty more names, everyone she knew and cared about on this world.

  Sage crossed his arms and mumbled at the grass. “There are more.”

  Hannah turned to him. “What?”

  “There are more of your people,” he said. “I met some in captivity. Three Brits, an American, and a Frenchwoman. They had purple bracelets on their wrists and they kept talking about stuff I couldn’t understand. There used to be nine of them but . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to the rest.”

  Hannah approached him, fascinated. “Where was this?”

  Sage shrugged. “No idea. We didn’t have any windows. But one of the Brits swore back and forth that he heard the chime of Big Ben.”

  Hannah’s heart pounded. It seemed she and her friends were due for a trip to London.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me? Any signs or—”

  A stuttered hush fell over the mourners. Hannah looked around and saw half the Gothams staring anxiously at the front gate, at the newest arrival in the garden.

  She took off her sunglasses. “Heath?”

  The boy shambled toward her, cringing at all the attention. He’d become something of a legend since Sunday, when his great white wolf threw the Pelletiers into disarray. If the Gothams hadn’t seen it with their own eyes, they wouldn’t have believed it. The breacher was strong, and he was no friend of the demons. Even Sunder regarded him with a grudging amount of respect.

  The moment Heath reached Hannah, the others went back to their business. Mercy took Sage by the hand and let the orphans have their privacy.

  Hannah squeezed Heath’s shoulder. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  He shook his head, his moony eyes fixed on the obelisk. “What is this?”

  “They made it for us,” Hannah said. “For the ones we lost.”

  Now that she mentioned it, she realized she’d have to add Jury Curado to the list. Another dead lover. Another one of Evan’s victims.

  Heath ran a finger across Jonathan’s name, tracing every curve and contour until his eyes glistened.

  “Why did he have to die?”

  Because he loved me, Hannah thought.

  “Because . . .” She sucked a deep breath and repressed all her grief. If she started crying now, she wouldn’t stop. And she refused to fall apart in front of Irwin Fucking Sunder.

  “Because some people are cruel,” Hannah said. “They don’t know how to create anything. They only know how to destroy.”

  A long silence passed, interrupted only by the sounds of Heath’s sniffles. Hannah moved behind him and stroked his hair.

  “I’m going to take care of you from now on,” she told him. �
�And you’re going to take care of me. It’s the only way he would have wanted it. It’s what I want. Okay, Heath?”

  Heath stared intently at the names of his fellow Golds, then muttered something under his breath. For a moment, she thought he said, “I’m odd,” which, despite its truth, made no sense in context. It would take her a full day to realize that he was saying “Ahmad,” and then another week to work up the nerve to ask him about it.

  Hannah rested her chin on his head. “We’re also going to keep working on the music project, you and me. We gotta keep bringing those songs back. Jonathan was very clear about that.”

  Heath shook his head. “We need a guitarist.”

  “I’ll be the guitarist.”

  “You can’t play.”

  “I’ll learn,” Hannah insisted. “I can be a really fast learner when I want to be.”

  The light of the undersky was starting to give her a headache. She put her shades back on and stood quietly at Heath’s side. Soon she heard a soft noise from him—a coarse grunt, like he was clearing his throat. Hannah knew exactly what that meant.

  “Wait, what—”

  Heath kept his eyes on the breachers’ stone. Then, in a high, clear voice, he began to sing.

  Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup

  They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe

  Again, the Gothams stopped what they were doing and threw their rapt attention onto Heath. Hannah was the only one here who even remotely recognized the song he was singing. She knew it so well that she couldn’t keep her lips from mouthing the words as Heath continued.

  Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind

  Possessing and caressing me

  Jai guru deva om.

  Nothing’s gonna change my world

  Nothing’s gonna change my world

  The Integrity agents just outside the perimeter fence moved in closer to listen, just as fifty Gothams clustered together in the garden. By now, everyone in Altamerica had become acquainted with the Beatles, though none of them had ever heard this particular song.

  Hannah stayed perfectly still behind Heath, her brown eyes locked on Sunder’s. She thought about the vow she’d made to him and the entire clan: a promise not to sing ever again. In hindsight, she couldn’t even remember why she chose to honor that stupid pledge. There was no benefit to keeping it, no punishment for breaking it, no satisfaction at all in proving Sunder wrong. In the grand scheme of things, the man was nothing.

  And she had sacrificed enough.

  By the time Heath reached the second refrain, Hannah took a deep breath and accompanied him. A hundred people gathered around the pair as they channeled the music of their late, great Earth. Even the government agents in the audience reeled at the sorrow in their voices, the overwhelming beauty of their duet. The orphans sang in perfect harmony. They kept perfect time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Well, this was another huge book that took me way too long to write. Thank you, readers, for your extreme patience. I’ve met many, many wonderful people through The Flight of the Silvers. It drove me nuts to keep you all waiting. But you were all very nice about it, and your continued enthusiasm really kept me going on those difficult days. I thank you for that too.

  There’s no way in hell I could have finished this beast without my personal brain trust, the alpha readers who were given The Song of the Orphans in half-baked dribs and drabs: Mark Harvey, Leni Fleming, Jen Gennaco, Gretchen Smith, Ricki Bar-Zeev (aka my mother), and Nancy Price, who I’ll mention again in just a bit.

  Much gratitude to my beta readers, whose insightful comments helped me make tons of improvements to the narrative: Angela Ferrigno, Shauna Pittman, Ysabelle Pelletier, Craig Aikin, Mick Soth, Dave Bledsoe, Craig Mertens, Huan Nghiem, William McDermott, Krista Stein, Erin Anderson, Terry Minogue, Laurie Barnett, Susie Hancock, Kerri Rifkin, Dustin Shaffer, Mike Tunison, Laura Helseth, Kenja Purkey, Carey Gibbons, Sarah Brehm, Tara McDonough, Jason Cole, and the incomparable Stitch Mayo.

  Special thanks to my fellow authors Kelly Jensen and K. M. Alexander for their invaluable feedback. Find them both on Amazon and then buy their books. You won’t be sorry.

  Extra special thanks to Michael Farmer for getting me those Beatles and Pink Floyd song rights for an insanely good price. Holy crap.

  Super-mucho extra gratitude to the people who toiled behind the scenes to make this book happen, including Stuart M. Miller (my longtime agent), Marie Finamore (my production editor), Dorian Hastings (my copyeditor), David Rosenthal (my patron saint), and my incredible editor, Nina Shield, who probably put as many hours into The Song of the Orphans as I have. Huge thanks also to the dauntless Orphans marketing team: Marian Brown, Alison Coolidge, and Kayleigh George.

  And then there’s a whole mess of Bar-Zeevs to thank, most of whom share my DNA and all of whom kept me afloat in one way or another: Avi, Sara, Yona, Joan, and that aforementioned mother of mine, who’d convinced me to write the Silvers series in the first place.

  Finally, once again, there’s Nancy Price: my partner in all things. She tweeted me in 2015 to tell me how much she enjoyed The Flight of the Silvers. Next thing I know, I’m finishing the sequel in her house. I don’t always move in with the readers who tweet me. But when I do, it works out nicely.

  Thank you, Nancy, for everything you are and everything you do.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DANIEL PRICE is the author of Slick and The Flight of the Silvers. He lives in Gilbert, Arizona, with his partner, Nancy, and her three children. He cannot actually manipulate time.

  danielprice.info

  @SilversGuy

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