by Daniel Price
Her screen displayed a grainy still photo of the group’s youngest member. Mia cradled a pay phone handset and scribbled something into her ever-present journal. Three tall people stood behind her. Though their masks prevented the camera from making positive IDs, Melissa had no trouble recognizing David, Zack, and Amanda.
As she phoned the local office, she kept her somber gaze on Mia’s frozen image. Should have kept your mask on.
Rosie Herrera was Melissa’s equivalent at the New York DP-9 branch, a stout and square-jawed matron who endlessly groused about the Bureau’s glass ceiling. Fortunately, she wasn’t too jaded to help.
“They can’t have gotten far,” she told Melissa. “Let me call my guy at the precinct.”
“No. The police aren’t prepared to handle these people. All I need is your fastest ghost team at Union Square. The girl wrote something in her book. I’m guessing it’s a new meeting address.”
Melissa’s phone beeped with an interrupting call from a person marked simply as Nameless. She narrowed her eyes at the screen.
“Rosie, hold on.” She switched lines. “Cedric?”
Cain chuckled. “Professional pointer: when a shade hides his name, you don’t say it out loud.”
“Look, this isn’t the best time . . .”
“I know. I got the same alert you did. Don’t bother with the ghost drills. In five minutes, I’ll know exactly where your runners are headed.”
Melissa’s stomach churned as she tried to guess his methods. Integrity’s resources were as frightening as their freedoms.
“I see,” she replied. “So this is an anonymous tip then.”
“No. That’s coming. This is just a heads-up warning to gather your forces and gather them big, because you’ve got one last chance to bring these people in. They get away this time, it’s out of my hands. They’ll become Integrity’s problem, and vice versa.”
Melissa rubbed her aching back. “I understand.”
“Good. Make your calls. Get ready for mine. And next time, don’t say my name.”
He hung up. Melissa heaved a loud breath, then switched lines again. “Rosie?”
“Yeah. I’m here. You still need that drill team?”
“No. Now I need everyone.”
The young agent leaned forward in his chair, baffled by the thermal scanner. A moment ago, there were two orange figures on the monitor. Now there was just one. In the blink of an eye, Peter Pendergen had vanished.
—
Battery Park was one of the few areas of Manhattan that had to be rebuilt twice. In August of 1931, a clash between police and pro-immigrant protesters erupted into a citywide riot known as the Deadsetter’s Brawl. It culminated with a massive blaze that killed 112 people and destroyed half the new buildings on Battery Place.
Today the street was a posh and pristine beauty, flanked by acres of lush greenery to the south and sleek glass office towers to the north. Commemoration had turned the business side into a tranquil void. Pigeons merrily strutted about the concrete, free to forage without the usual human bustle.
Zack found a parking spot mere yards from their destination, a twelve-story structure of sloped steel and mirrors. The entire ground floor was enclosed in a thick sheath of tempis.
Amanda swept a nervous scan of the area. “So where is he?”
“Inside,” Mia guessed. She motioned to the four-foot metal post that stood near the barrier. “There’s the buzzer.”
“Seems like a strange place to meet. I mean, why here?”
“I’m sure it’s all just part of the zigzag,” Zack speculated. “He’s dodging his own people as well as the Deps.”
Hannah tapped a tense beat into her thigh. She didn’t have the strength to tell her companions about her encounter at the parade. Now she reeled in the dark subtext of Ioni’s comments. She’d called today a minefield. What if this was the first bad step?
They chose to travel light for their rendezvous, limiting themselves to one knapsack each. Zack nestled the last of their cash in a front flap. The sisters combined their essentials into one bag, saving their strength for an ailing Theo. They propped him up like crutches and walked him to the building.
Mia hunched over the intercom and pressed the call button.
“Uh, hello? Peter?”
After five seconds of silence, a ten-foot square of tempis melted away to reveal a pair of swinging glass doors. They unlocked with a hollow click.
The Silvers moved dazedly through a brushed stone foyer, past the unmanned security desk. The directory listed fifty-four different companies in the building, everything from law firms to placement agencies for corporate augurs. Zack swallowed a daffy chuckle when he noticed a nonprofit advocacy group called the Justice League of America.
Suddenly the tempis sealed up behind them, blocking the doors like a snowdrift. Hannah fixed her round white eyes at the barrier.
“I don’t like this.”
“If Peter wanted to hurt us, he would have done it already,” Zack insisted. “He could’ve killed us all in our sleep at that old man’s house.”
Amanda eyed him cynically. “The Pelletiers don’t want us dead either. Doesn’t mean they have good intentions.”
Zack looked to David. “This is the part where you say something smart and assuring.”
The boy had little to offer at the moment. A bad bump of the arm had set his wounds on fire. Between the agony in his hand and the area’s screaming history, David could barely hold a thought. He cast a blank stare down the hallway.
“We came a very long way to meet this man. Might as well finish what we started.”
The hallway soon opened up to a gargantuan lobby of polished green marble. Four towering ghostboxes swirled with abstract holograms while a bubbling stone fountain filled the area with serene white noise. Above the four balcony levels, a giant lumic projection of clear blue sky turned the chamber into a synthetic courtyard.
Mia looked around with discomfort. This stony paradise reminded her too much of the Pelletier lobby in Terra Vista. What if Peter was merely another Sterling Quint in waiting? What if they’d traveled 2,500 miles just to come full circle?
“Hello at last.”
The Silvers threw their busy stares around the lobby, and soon discovered a brown-haired man sitting alone among the many sofa clusters. He propped his feet on a coffee table and shined them a guarded smile.
“You’ve been through stitch and strain, my friends, but you did it. You’re here. Now the hard part’s over and you get some well-deserved rest.”
He motioned them over. “Come. Sit.”
He was dressed in a simple blue button-down over jeans, with white running shoes that were faded at the soles. His feathered hair was peppered with hints of gray and his steel-blue eyes were marked with gentle crow’s-feet. Even while lounging, the man radiated a coarse virility. He was a Hollywood gumshoe in color, an Indiana Jones between sequels. Hannah figured he was the type of man she’d go wobbly for in ten to fifteen years, when she was finally done with moody creatives.
Amanda looked at his handsome face and saw a hint of something that bothered her, the same artificial cheer that Derek had always carried around terminal patients.
“You’re Peter Pendergen.”
“That I am,” he replied, in the same curt voice that had ruffled Mia over the phone. “Which pretty sister are you?”
“Amanda.”
“Ah yes. The formerly incarcerated. Glad to see you guys got out of that fix in one piece.” His gaze wandered to Theo, still lost in a harrowed daze. “Mostly.”
Mia took the farthest easy chair in the cluster. “So . . . what happens now?”
“Now we talk of a great many things. If you like what I have to say, then we move on together. If not . . .” He forced a nonchalant shrug. “We go our separate ways with no hard feel
ings.”
Zack perched on the arm of Mia’s chair. “You sure it’s safe to talk here?”
“Normally it wouldn’t be, but you did a good thing by coming on Commemoration. I paid off the few security guards on duty. We have the whole building to ourselves.”
He looked to David, shuffling restlessly behind a love seat. “Have a seat, lad. I don’t bite.”
“It’s okay. I’d rather stand.”
Theo moaned with pain and bedlam as the sisters walked him to the sofas. His consciousness had become a rapid-fire montage of premonitions, all as vivid and real as the present. He dodged falling debris in San Francisco and lay dying on a street in Washington, D.C. He danced at Zack’s wedding and cried at Mia’s funeral. He shouted with joy as he watched Amanda soar above him on butterfly wings of aeris. He saw Hannah in more iterations than he could count. She stood tall and proud over every corner of his future.
This man in front of him stood nowhere.
As Theo cast his bleary eyes on the brown-haired stranger, his foresight screamed at him. He fell to his knees and screamed back.
Hannah and Amanda dropped to his side. “Theo!”
“What happened?”
He gritted his teeth, curling his fists. “Not him . . .”
The man rose to his feet, peering at Theo over the cushions. “What’s the matter with him?”
“We were hoping you knew,” Zack said.
“That’s why I asked you for painkillers,” Mia complained.
He threw a quick and helpless glance at the upper railings, then turned back to Theo. “Look, why don’t we get him to the sofa, all right?”
Amanda felt his sweaty forehead. “He’s burning up.”
“Just get him to the sofa and stay here. I’ll find a first aid kit.”
“Not him,” Theo wheezed. “That’s not Peter.”
Now the other five Silvers eyed their host in wide alarm. He stopped and turned around, his hands raised defensively.
“Look, I don’t know what your friend is suffering, but I assure you I’m Peter Pendergen. I can prove it. Just let me . . .”
David caught a reflective glint on the balcony. His eyes popped wide.
“GET DOWN!”
“Hannah!”
Theo pulled her down just as a hissing bullet struck the floor beyond her. A second shot shattered the lamp next to Zack. He fell off the chair.
Mia barely had a chance to process the gunfire when she saw the false Peter run away in a speedy blur. Her mind stammered with shock. He shifted. He shifted. He’s a—
Zack grabbed her and yanked her down, just as a bullet cracked the arm of her chair. He pulled her under the coffee table.
Amanda’s thoughts turned white, and a geyser of tempis erupted from her hands. It quickly bloomed into a crude but massive shield that covered the sisters and Theo. She had no idea if tempis could stop bullets until she heard two gunshots and felt a pair of agonizing stings in her thoughts, like hot knitting needles. She shrieked and toppled to the ground, her barrier vanishing in a blink. A pair of crushed bullets dropped to the marble.
David was the last to stand his ground, caught like a pinball between reason, panic, and rage. For the boy who could dredge up the past, it was easy to look back thirty-one hours and relive his recent errors. He’d hurled a gunshot noise at an armed and twitchy Dep, a foolish move that cost him two fingers. Now he waltzed right into an ambush, ignoring his instincts as this false Peter Pendergen tried to get him to stand still for the rifle scopes.
No more mistakes, he thought, and then dredged up the past again.
The lobby suddenly filled with screaming people and flames, a spectral re-creation of the great blaze that engulfed Battery Place in August 1931. Firemen in tin helmets ran back and forth with axes while smoldering wooden furniture lay juxtaposed among the sleek sofas of the present. The images were so realistic that Hannah shrieked with pain when her arm fell into fire. It took three full seconds to realize she wasn’t burning.
“What’s happening?!”
Amanda seized her arm, shouting above the ghosted din. “It’s David! He’s giving us cover!”
“Where is he?”
The pair frantically looked around, but they couldn’t see anything through the eighty-year-old smoke. Amanda flinched when a burning woman ran through her.
“I don’t know! We’ll get Theo out and come back!”
The sisters struggled to ferry Theo through forty yards of ghosted chaos, retreating all the way to the entry hall. Amanda jostled the knob of a utility door, then broke it open with a tempic shove.
They scrambled down a narrow white hallway, its concrete walls echoing with loud clamor. Hannah kicked open the first door on the left, a locker room for security guards. Wooden batons hung from wall hooks while a leaky faucet dripped into a moldy sink.
Amanda swatted the towels from a bench and sat Theo down. He panted with strain, still lost in branching futures. He glimpsed David four minutes from now. Through a half-bloody face, the boy calmly asked Theo not to tell the others about the awful thing he just did.
“I won’t . . .”
Hannah kneeled by his side. “What?”
“I don’t know. I’m all . . . I’m all messed up.”
Amanda doused a towel and dabbed it against his forehead. Hannah looked at her nose.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Huh?”
The widow ran a finger under her nostrils, then shook the blood off.
“It’s okay. It’s from the tempis. We need to find the others.”
The thundering ruckus from the lobby came to a stop. Hannah and Amanda hurried back to the hallway to see a lone figure stagger through the archway. Blood poured from a thin gash in his forehead, striping the left side of his face.
The sisters ran to him. “David!”
“Are you hit?”
He closed his eyes and leaned on Amanda as she walked him into the maintenance hall.
“I tripped over a coffee table. Smacked my head on the edge.”
“Where are Zack and Mia?”
He glanced behind him, throwing flecks of blood. “I thought they came this way. You didn’t see them?”
“No.”
Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh my God . . .”
“Shit. Shit!” David broke away from Amanda and unslung his knapsack. Between his T-shirts and spare jeans lay the two compact service pistols he’d seized from his Dep hostages. Each one was loaded with a dozen .40 caliber rounds.
Amanda bounced her hot green stare between the gun and David. “Wait, what are you doing?”
“Going back for them.”
“The hell you are. You cracked your head open. You probably have a concussion.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“No you won’t!” Hannah yelled. A half hour ago, Ioni painted a quick glimpse of the future that had suspiciously omitted David. Now the actress had a dark hunch why.
“Amanda and I will find them. You go in there and watch over Theo. Keep him safe.”
“Look, I’m telling you—”
“And I’m telling you, David, if you don’t listen to me right now, I’ll never speak to you again!”
David eyed her with wide surprise, then plucked the baton from Hannah’s hand. He thrust a pistol in its place. “Okay, but you’re not going out there with that stick. These people are shooting on sight. You can’t give them the chance.”
While Hannah tested the frightening weight of Ross Daley’s weapon, Amanda took a cautious peek into the lobby.
“Those can’t be Deps. I mean they wouldn’t just fire at us. Would they?”
Like Mia, David had seen the false Peter Pendergen flee the scene in a streaking blur. These weren’t Melissa’s people at all.
—
&n
bsp; Rebel dropped his rifle against the wall and scratched his stubbly head. He’d dressed for battle like he was going to the gym—black T-shirt and sweatpants, white high-top sneakers. He didn’t bother with the bandana mask this time. His wife had commandeered all the security cameras an hour ago while Mercy Lee flooded the lobby with enough solic static to ensure that the Deps wouldn’t see a thing in their ghost drills. They’d taken a day and a half to set this trap. Everything had gone flawlessly until forty-one seconds ago.
He pressed his collar mic and summoned his team back to his perch on the mezzanine. One by one, they returned—four men and one woman, each from a different family. They were all inexperienced in long-range weapons, but desperate times had motivated them to learn.
Freddy Ballad, a tall and stringy blond of twenty, threw his hands up in fluster. “What happened?”
Rebel shrugged his broad shoulders. “Maranan got wise.”
“Gemma said the augur wouldn’t be a problem.”
The shrill voice of a ten-year-old girl hissed through their earpieces. “I said he probably wouldn’t be a problem.”
Freddy snarled into his mic. “It’s your job to be sure.”
“And it was your job to shoot the Aussie before he pulled any ghost tricks. How did that work out?”
“Enough,” Rebel snapped. “Freddy, settle down. Gemma, I don’t want to hear another word out of you unless it’s intel.”
“I’m working on it.”
With a hot blast of air, Bruce Byer de-shifted at the edge of their gathering, flushed with exertion and rage.
“You idiots could have shot me!”
Rebel frowned. He knew Bruce was a self-serving coward, like all Byers. But he was a skilled actor who strongly resembled Peter. No one was better suited to bait the hook.
“Calm down. We knew you’d clear the lobby.”
“Really? Like you knew the sick yellow chinny would catch on?”
Mercy Lee gripped her rifle with ire. The willowy young woman was a daughter of the clan’s last pure Asian family, though one could hardly tell from the excessive amount of mascara she wore.