by Daniel Price
“Stow it, penis. No one’s in the mood for your mouth dump.”
“I said enough.” Rebel rubbed his eyes, then checked his watch. “In eight minutes, this place’ll be crawling with Deps. We gotta work fast.” He pressed his earpiece. “That means you, Gemma.”
“I got it. I got it. Trillinger and Farisi went east. They’re hiding in the office cubes. Looks like one of them’s bleeding.”
“What about the others?”
“Dormer and Maranan are in the maintenance hall. Not sure which part but . . . God.”
“What?” Rebel asked. “Are they going to be a problem?”
“No. It’s the Givens you need to worry about. In ninety-one seconds, they’ll come back through the southern arch. They are . . . Jesus, you guys have to be careful. They’ve gotten stronger. A lot stronger.”
Rebel took an anxious breath. He’d learned to listen to Gemma Sunder’s warnings. The girl saw things no one else could.
“All right. Freddy, you go after the boy and the augur. Forget the rifle. Just do what you do.”
Freddy smiled. His fists encrusted with spiky tempis. “Now we’re talking.”
“I want the rest of you on the sisters. Take them out. Do it fast. Mercy . . .”
The young woman nodded nervously. She knew she was Rebel’s ace in the hole. “I’ll be ready for them.”
Bruce narrowed his eyes at Rebel. “Where are you going?”
No one else had to ask. The cartoonist who’d rotted Rebel’s hand was in this building right now, hiding in the office cubes.
“Just help the others,” he told Bruce. “You all know what’s at stake here. Go.”
They dispersed. As Rebel hurried to the eastern door, Ivy’s dulcet voice rang through his earpiece.
“You be careful, Richard. You hear me? You kill them all and come back alive.”
Rebel pulled out his new revolver and checked the chambers. He’d been woefully unprepared in Terra Vista. It cost him six people and a hand. He knew better now. He was ready.
—
The sisters stopped at the lobby entrance, their heartbeats pounding in synch. Amanda choked back a scream and squeezed her golden crucifix. Please, God. Please let Zack and Mia be all right.
Hannah watched her sister’s teary prayer and suddenly rued her own agnosticism. She always saw higher meaning as something outside her reach, like fractal math or long-term monogamy. As the gun dangled in her quivering hand, all the actress could conjure was Ioni’s bright assurance. The sunrise. The full moon. The rainbow after a storm. These are all things that can’t be stopped by mere mortals. You know what the augurs call them?
“Givens,” she muttered.
“What?”
Hannah looked at her sister through moist eyes. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what they fought about this morning. She couldn’t fathom why they wasted any of their precious time on battles.
“I love you.”
Warm tears rolled down Amanda’s cheeks. “I love you too, Hannah. I love you more than anyone. As soon as you get in there, you go as fast as you can. You don’t slow down for a second.”
Hannah wiped her eyes. “I won’t.”
“I will not lose you today.”
“You won’t,” Hannah said. It occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely faithless after all.
“Are you ready?”
They clasped fingers in the dainty little way of children, and then anxiously pulled apart. Amanda coated her hands with shiny white tempis. Hannah shifted into the blue.
The Great Sisters Given stepped forward into the fray.
THIRTY-TWO
The matron healer watched the wall of monitors, her sausage fingers curled with tension. In her prime, Olga Varnov had been a knockout blonde of stunning proportions. Now her hair was gray as ash and her body stood a balloon-sculpture parody of its former self. Not that she cared. Her need for beauty had perished at age twenty, when a bad reversal rendered her infertile, unsuitable for marriage. She’d grown content in her role as the clan’s beloved nurse and nanny. There wasn’t a Gotham under forty who hadn’t had their diapers changed or their wounds undone by Mother Olga.
She followed Amanda’s progress from screen to screen as the lovely young woman brushed the wall of the lobby, clutching her crucifix necklace in fright. On another monitor, three hazy figures crept down the stairwell, all lumiflaged against the backdrop like chameleons. Olga knew Ben Herrick could sear poor Amanda to a crisp while Colin Chisholm could cut her to shreds with flying knives of tempis. They advanced slowly on their prey, approaching a range close enough to guarantee an instant kill.
Olga clutched her giant bosom and turned away. “I can’t watch. This is slaughter.”
“You don’t have to look,” said Ivy. “Just be ready if things go bad.”
Ilavarasi Sunder was an Indian beauty of thirty-three, as tall and slender as the woman Olga pitied. She sported the same black bodysuit she wore at the Terra Vista siege, only now the nylon was stretched by a ten-week baby bump. Ivy only had to think of her child to erase all doubt about her mission. She only had to recall the gruesome death of Krista Bloom to shed her empathy for these Pelletier pets.
She stood behind her diminutive niece, who feverishly worked the camera console. As always, Gemma dressed well beyond her ten years of age, sporting the blouzer/skirt combo of a power executive. It was an improvement over the sleek-a-boo tinytops she usually wore.
“See anything yet?” Ivy asked her.
“No.”
“I don’t mean the cameras.”
“I know what you meant. If Azral and Esis were coming, I’d be screaming right now.”
Ivy sighed with guarded optimism. It seemed these breachers were on their own. Of course she’d thought the same thing in Terra Vista, just before her best friend was brutally butchered by Esis. Oh Krista. I left you to die. I failed you so horribly. Please forgive me.
Their command center was located four blocks north of the ambush site, in a tenth-floor office that was currently closed for renovation. Three of the walls were raw wooden beams. The fourth stood bare in plaster.
Ivy only needed one solid surface for her portals. She was ready to extract wounded teammates at a moment’s notice. There would be no more casualties, she swore. Not on her side.
—
Hannah sped like a missile through the sofa clusters, launching her frantic gaze in every direction. After two dashing circuits around the lobby, a hot cry of relief escaped her throat. There were no corpses to be found here. Zack and Mia must have fled through a different exit.
Beyond the slow-motion dribble of the tiered stone fountain, she caught her sister’s laggard form. Amanda kept to the walls beneath the overhang, out of view of any high snipers. Hannah couldn’t see any movement on the upper levels.
Her heart lurched when she heard soft footsteps behind her. She spun around and raised her pistol.
Bruce Byer jumped back and threw his hands up. Unlike everything else in the sluggish blue haze, the man who’d impersonated Peter Pendergen moved quickly and carried a faint red tint to his countenance. He squawked fearful words that were too rushed for Hannah to understand. She realized, with mad consternation, that he was shifted at an even higher speed than hers.
She concentrated until his crimson hue vanished and she matched his velocity.
“—not my idea!” he yelled. “I was against this from the start!”
Hannah kept the gun fixed on him. The man had set them up to die like clay ducks in a shooting gallery. Now she’d caught him sneaking up on her. She didn’t think it was to apologize.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot you in your stupid lying face!”
“None of this was my choice! The elders forced me into it! Rebel’s got them all—”
“Reb
el?! He’s here?”
“Yeah. This was his trap. My only job was to take the call and meet you guys here. I wasn’t supposed to fight you. I’m not a fighter at all.”
Hannah could see that. Any hint of masculinity he’d displayed as Peter Pendergen was now utterly gone. She squinted at him skeptically. “What are you then? An actor?”
“Yes, actually. A very accomplished one. I’ve been on Broadway.”
She knew there were a hundred better questions she could be asking right now, but her mouth got ahead of her. “In what?”
“God. Lots of things. Angeline, Dog Days, One Summer in Paris. I was with the touring company of Babes in Toyland.”
Hannah’s eyes lit up. “I know that one.”
“Babes in Toyland?”
“Yeah. I did it in college.”
“You’re an actress?”
“Uh-huh. I played Jane.”
“I was Alan.”
The two speedsters blinked at each other in addled stupor.
“Why are you people trying to kill us?”
Bruce chucked his hands. “Honestly, I don’t even know. A few months ago, all our prophets started madding out, screaming gloom and doom. Then some of our young ones started disappearing and everyone panicked. Rebel’s the only one who seemed to have a plan. He says killing you breachers will make everything right again.”
“That’s crazy! Why does he think that?”
“Who can say with these augurs? They’re all nutballs. Of course they think the same thing about us swifters. It’s strange to meet a new one after all this time. Do you ever hallucinate when you go real fast?”
A wary voice in Hannah’s head cut her off before she could answer. He’s still playing you. He’s stalling for time.
She turned around to check on her sister and now caught the outlines of three shrouded men. They crouched fifty feet behind her, moving in with the blended stealth of crocodiles.
“AMANDA!”
A shadow grew at Hannah’s feet. Once again, she spun around to see Bruce raise his fingers in anxious surrender. He’d halved the distance between them while her back was turned. Now Hannah could see the tip of a wooden nightstick protruding from his sleeve. At this speed, he could crack her skull like an eggshell.
“You asshole!”
“It’s not what you think. I was just—”
“Fuck you!”
She aimed the gun at his thigh and pulled the trigger. His leg erupted in a bloody torrent.
Olga gasped as she watched Bruce’s plight on the monitor. Gemma yelled into her headset.
“Don’t all go for the swifter! Someone get the tempic!”
Her warning went ignored. The moment they heard the gunshot, the three Gothams swung their palms at Hannah and launched their attacks in reflex.
A pair of twelve-inch tempic shards shot from the hands of Colin Chisholm, a stocky young blond with a pocked and piggish face. Even in Hannah’s shifted state, the projectiles flew at her like fastball pitches. She dove out of their way, her shoulder colliding painfully with the edge of the fountain as she dropped to the tile. Her pistol fell in the water.
Ben Herrick, the gangly beanpole of the trio, fired an invisible blast of heat from his charred right palm, a blurry cone of air that cooked everything in its path. Tables smoldered. Upholstery bubbled. Ceramic lamps burst apart. Hannah ducked behind the concrete fountain. She shrieked as hot steam hissed above her, scalding the hand that remained clasped on the fountain’s lip.
There was no escaping the third assault. Nick McNoel was a portly redhead of seventeen, a skilled lumic who’d been bending light since he was a toddler. The cloaking colors vanished from the trio’s skin and garments as he channeled his thoughts. Suddenly Hannah became engulfed in a dome of searing white radiance. The light blinded her through the membrane of her eyelids.
Gemma’s high voice howled in their earpieces. “Goddamn it! The tempic!”
Amanda clenched her teeth and thrust her hand at the attackers. A spray of white force erupted from her palm, quickly splitting into three long arms that shoved each man back against the steps. She felt something snap in Nick McNoel’s back.
The tempis vanished. Amanda rushed to her sister’s side. “Hannah! You okay?”
“No! My hand hurts and I can’t see anything! I can’t see!”
Amanda studied her red, blistered fingers. They looked like second-degree burns.
“You’ll be okay. Just hold on to me. We have to go.”
“I shot someone,” Hannah uttered, in a stammering daze. “I aimed for the leg. Is he . . . is he alive?”
Bruce lay unconscious on the nearby tile. From the way blood spurted from his thigh, Amanda was sure the bullet hit an artery. Her inner nurse and Christian clamored for her to make a tourniquet. She dismissed them both as lunatics.
“He’ll be fine. Come on.”
A half mile away, Olga grabbed Ivy’s arm. “He’s bleeding to death! You have to extract him!”
Ivy kept her hot gaze on the sisters. “What are you waiting for, Mercy? Hit them! Now!”
Amanda caught new movement above her. By the time she looked to the second floor and saw the slender young Asian at the railing, it was already too late.
Mercurial Lee was the daughter of augurs. Her birth name itself was a prophecy, a forecast of her future temperament. Though she’d spent much of her life trying to disprove the prediction, there was no denying it. The twenty-three-year-old artist was a turbulent woman, as quick to humor as she was to huff. She heckled the elders at public assemblies and littered the walls with subversive graffiti. She arrived at a wedding wearing nothing but handcuffs, a protest against the clan’s forced unions. Her parents would have done just as well to name her Rebel.
Five weeks ago, her teenage brother Sage became the latest young Gotham to mysteriously vanish, a shock that put an end to her incendiary antics. At long last, Mercy stood aligned with her people. Her unique temporic talent, one she’d long considered useless, had single-handedly turned the tide in the battle against the Golds. To Rebel, she was more than a cherished ally. She was the key to destroying the Pelletiers.
With a heavy thought and an unblinking stare, Mercy enveloped the sisters in a field of concentrated solis, the equivalent output of a thousand home generators. The bombardment scrambled the sisters’ access to temporis, turning them back to the normal people they once were.
Hannah furrowed her brow at the faint new tickle under her skin. “Something happened. I feel weird.”
The moment Amanda wiggled her indelibly pink fingers, she recalled the four humming towers the Deps had used to suppress her tempis. Now the great white beast wasn’t just sleeping inside her. It felt all but dead.
She looked to the steps, where Colin Chisholm and Ben Herrick rose to their feet. Then she peered up at Mercy again. The two women traded a look of grim understanding.
“Hannah, take my hand. We have to run.”
“Why? What’s happening? I still can’t—”
“Run!”
She pulled Hannah away. The two angry Gothams watched them stumble helplessly across the lobby. They raised their palms for a second attack.
Gemma turned from the monitors and shined Olga an ugly grin.
“Now it’s slaughter.”
—
Rebel followed the blood drops through the elegant reception area, a razzle-dazzle array of neon sculptures and lustrous white furniture. The ground-floor office belonged to Nicomedia Magazines, publisher of such upscale monthlies as Push, Preen, American Woman, and Taste. On the dimmer end of the spectrum, they put out Wonders, a biweekly pupu platter of weird news items that always managed to include one crackpot Gotham sighting. Seventeen days after the incident, the tabloid continued to swoon over the great tempic arm that dangled a man from a hotel balcony in Evansvi
lle, Indiana. Rebel wanted to kill the Silvers just for that headache.
Beyond the white glass wall lay a sprawling grid of office cubes. The blood trail ended at the edge of the first cluster. The targets had wisely plugged the leak before moving on.
Rebel checked his watch. Six minutes until Deps stormed the building. There was no time to search every cubicle. No reason. He pitched his gravelly voice across the room.
“Zack Trillinger. I know you’re in here. You know my voice. You know I’m not leaving till you and the girl are dead.”
Forty feet away, Zack and Mia crouched beneath a copywriter’s desk, both sheet-white and drenched in sweat. As they’d escaped the lobby, ninety seconds ago, Rebel’s bullet struck the wall and cut Zack’s neck with a flying shard of marble. Mia pressed a folded T-shirt to his laceration. The fragment had missed his jugular by an inch.
Now that she knew who was in the room with them, Mia fought her panic. If Rebel’s new gun was anything like his old one, he could probably kill them through six of these flimsy partitions. Worse, Zack had seen him shoot two ceiling cameras and a friend without even looking. He didn’t need a line of sight on his targets.
The hulking Gotham prowled the edge of the office, brushing his revolver against the cubicle barriers. With each tap of the barrel, he scanned the speculative future to see the end result of a gunshot. This little bullet kills a desk lamp. This little bullet cracks glass. This little bullet goes “wee wee wee,” all the way into no one.
“You won’t believe me, Trillinger, but I got good reasons for doing this. You people were never meant to come here. If you knew the damage you were causing just by living and breathing, you’d kill yourselves. I’m prepared to do it nicely. I got a bag of sedatives here with me. Just say the word and I’ll send you both home with a smile instead of a bullet hole.”
Zack fought a pitch-black laugh as his stomach seared with stress. Rebel looked down at his prosthetic hand, a clunky thing of chrome, rubber, and circuitry. He saw the folly of his offer.