Lesser Gods

by Adrian Howell

  Terry just rolled her eyes.

  After eating, we swam and played in the pool for a while longer before Laila announced that she had to get home and do her chores, and the rest of us decided to call it a day as well. Despite having a mother on the Council, Laila lived in another building, New Haven Six, so we parted with her at the pool.

  As we walked back toward New Haven One, Terry poked my shoulder with her prosthetic fingers and said, “Looks like I didn’t need to help set up a date for you after all.”

  I shook my head. “Terry, I’m going to church service with her and her mother, with Alia tagging along as well. That’s hardly a date.”

  “Incidentally, Adrian, why did you agree to go? You don’t believe in God any more than I do.”

  “So what?” I said. “Mark’s my friend. I still don’t know why Laila’s mother wants to talk to me, but–”

  “Oh, you are so thick, Half-head!” Terry cried exasperatedly. “No wonder you can’t even figure out how to use a grenade. Laila just wanted an excuse to see you more.”

  “By asking me to church?” I asked skeptically.

  “Anywhere else and it would’ve been like a date, dummy! Laila’s old fashioned, just like her mom. She wants you to ask her out. And she’s real close to her mom, so no doubt her mom’s in on it too.”

  I said uncertainly, “I don’t know about this dating thing.”

  “Laila’s not that much older than you, Adrian. She wastes time on Sundays, but otherwise she’s a good girl. What’s the matter?”

  I didn’t reply. It was all a little too sudden and I wasn’t sure yet how I felt about Laila. I liked her, of course, but I hadn’t considered us as being anything more than friends. Besides, aside from Terry’s claim, what guarantee did I have that Laila really wanted to be asked on a date by someone like me?

  Terry laughed. “If it mattered to Laila that you were an ugly midget, she wouldn’t have asked you in the first place.”

  If I thought I could get away with it, I would have given Terry a good whack on the head, but I had to settle for an angry glare.

  Though Terry continued to tease me about it, I really would have gone to church with Laila that Sunday had something else not gotten in the way.

  Thursday was pouring outside and Terry had dragged me down to the dojo for an extra-long CQC session. Alia joined us as usual, which meant I could take mildly frequent breaks as Terry humored my sister by showing her some of the easier moves.

  “Be careful, Adrian,” said Terry, grappling with Alia, “one of these days, your sister’s going to be better at this than you.”

  “Will I really?” asked Alia, smiling up at Terry.

  “Trust me, kid,” said Terry, nodding. “Girls are naturally stronger.”

  I wasn’t about to contest that.

  Alia’s small size precluded any real test of her skill, but Terry claimed that my sister had made a good deal of progress over the last year. Even Terry, who rarely complimented anyone without good reason, might have just been saying that to make Alia happy, but I suspected Terry’s praise wasn’t entirely unjustified. Alia had, after all, managed to break free of Riles when he took her hostage.

  “Adrian!” I heard a man’s voice call from behind me. Turning, I saw Mr. Simms at the bottom of the stairs leading out of the dojo. “Might I have a word with you in private?” he called to me.

  I looked at Terry, who said, “Go, Adrian. Don’t keep him waiting.”

  Alia was watching Mr. Simms with a touch of apprehension in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.

  Leaving Terry and Alia to their practice, I jogged over to Mr. Simms, who smiled down at me and gestured toward the stairs.

  As we walked up them, he said, “I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to speak sooner, Adrian.”

  “I know you’ve been busy,” I said.

  The top of the stairs opened into the entrance hall of the underground gathering place, and at the far end of it was the elevator that led back up into our building. Several doors lined both sides of the hall, and Mr. Simms opened the one that led to the shooting range. Mr. Simms walked briskly, and it took us but half a minute to arrive.

  Sandwiched between sound barriers at each lane’s firing point, there were several people practicing here. I couldn’t see the shooters because of the barriers, but I could see the paper targets hanging from ceiling-mounted rails at various distances downrange. Each target sported a black silhouette of a man with white circles over his chest. Some were being shot at by guns, others by telekinetic blasts or small balls of pyroid flame.

  “Let’s see your arm,” said Mr. Simms, handing me a pistol and a box of bullets from the storage cabinet behind us.

  As I loaded the clip, Mr. Simms attached a fresh paper target onto the rail, and then slid the target twenty yards downrange. This was farther than I usually practiced at.

  Flipping off the safety, I slowly squeezed off five rounds, carefully aiming each. They all hit the inner circle on the target man’s chest, and one was nearly a bull’s-eye.

  “You have been practicing,” Mr. Simms stated the obvious.

  “Almost every day,” I replied. “Terry’s relentless about these things.”

  “I’m sure she is. How about your telekinesis?”

  Flipping the safety back on, I placed the pistol on the table and stretched my right arm toward the target, pointing my right index finger at the man’s silhouette. A telekinetic blast focused through a finger took longer to prepare than one fired from an outstretched arm, but it was much stronger. I put a hole through the middle of the paper man’s head, right between his eyes. At twenty yards, had the target been a real person, I probably couldn’t hurt him that much, but Mr. Simms was visibly impressed.

  “Terry was right,” he said, looking pleased. “You are quite a Knight already.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Simms,” I said.

  Mr. Simms sighed quietly and said, “The truth is I’ve been putting this off for a while now and I realize it can no longer wait. Here’s my minor dilemma, Adrian. First off, I was very impressed with your work on your first assignment. Thanks to you talking Mr. Barnum into coming of his own free will, convincing him to join us has been a comparatively easy task.”

  I smiled up at him for a moment before I noticed that Mr. Simms wasn’t smiling back.

  Mr. Simms continued in a slightly harsher voice, “What you should have done, Adrian, is let Terry shoot the man. The Wolves were fast approaching and you risked your team unnecessarily.”

  “But–”

  “Let me finish, Adrian. The reason I’m here today is to invite you on our next assignment. You are an Honorary Knight, so I can’t order you, but I could definitely use every man capable and willing, and I can see that you are both. Before allowing you to join, however, I must ask you to promise me that henceforth, you will leave the tactical decisions to your superiors and follow orders to the word.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, forgetting Terry’s words about this not being the military. “I promise, sir.”

  “Very well,” said Mr. Simms. “We leave tomorrow.”

  “What about Terry?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t she coming too?”

  Mr. Simms looked surprised. “But of course she is! I told her long ago. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No,” I said, quite irked. So that was why Terry had been so nonchalant about not knowing when our next mission was going to be.

  “Then you don’t even know where we’re going, do you, Adrian?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “We should go somewhere private,” said Mr. Simms, and led me out of the shooting range.

  We walked back to the entrance hall and through another door and a corridor until Mr. Simms found what he was looking for. He opened a heavy steel door and motioned me inside a musty, claustrophobically small concrete room. There was a table and two chairs in the middle, and it uncomfortably reminded me of an in
terrogation chamber, which it probably was. We didn’t sit down.

  Turning to me, Mr. Simms grinned and said, “This is better. You can never be too careful, after all.”

  “What’s the mission, Mr. Simms?” I asked, forcing myself to remain relaxed.

  “You can ask Terry for the specific details, Adrian, but you got yourself a big one this time. You see, we’re going after a major God-slayer training camp that’s shared by a number of their groups. It’s up in the mountains, in a spot so secret that even the trainees are taken to and from it blindfolded, which is why it has been so hard to locate.” Mr. Simms rubbed his hands together gleefully. “But we have them now. The Slayers have many of their weapons stockpiled there, but much more importantly, we have good reason to believe that this camp has valuable information concerning the Angels. Perhaps even the identity of the Angels’ second master controller.”

  I nodded gravely. The Angels currently had two master controllers who could psionically convert people into blind submission to their cause. The elder, a woman named Larissa Divine, was the queen of the Angels. She was far too well protected for the Guardians to kill, but Mr. Baker was hoping to terminate the younger master before she could succeed the Angel queen. Then the Guardians could simply wait out the natural life of Larissa Divine, who was already more than eighty years old. Once their queen died, the Angels would become masterless just like us. The problem was that we didn’t even know the younger master’s name. The Guardians simply referred to her as “Number Two.”

  Mr. Simms said seriously, “So you see, Adrian, that this mission is of the utmost importance to us, and I must insist that you keep your word and be a team player this time. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir!” I said crisply. I had a personal stake in this matter: If Larissa Divine died without a successor, there would be no one left to reconvert my first sister and I still might find and rescue her from the Angels. I wasn’t going to mess this up.

  “Good,” said Mr. Simms, grasping my shoulder. “My advance team has been on site for nearly three weeks now, gathering intelligence. You will leave with the main assault team tomorrow morning. Terry knows when and where. It will take a few days to get on site, and after we take the camp, we’ll be staying there for a while, so expect to be gone at least two weeks, possibly longer.”

  “Is Mr. Watson coming too?” I asked, wondering if the pudgy finder had a role to play in a mission like this one.

  “Just about every active member of my unit is coming for this,” said Mr. Simms. “God-slayers are just people, but armed and dangerous people. We gods need to be careful.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Mr. Simms laughed. “There’s still a bunch of ‘ifs’ involved in this, Adrian, but if we really can find out who the Angels’ Number Two is, you may find yourself one step closer to rescuing your sister.”

  Mr. Simms opened the door. “Alright, that’s it. I have to be getting ready myself now.”

  I parted with Mr. Simms at the elevator.

  “Thank you for letting me come, Mr. Simms,” I said.

  Mr. Simms gave me a curt nod. “I’ll see you tomorrow or on site, Adrian. Good luck.”

  As Mr. Simms disappeared into the elevator, I heard Alia’s voice in my head calling, “Addy, where are you?”

  I hurried back down the stairs to the dojo where Terry and Alia were resting on the mats.

  “I’ve been calling you forever, Addy!” Alia said aloud.

  “Sorry,” I said, walking up to them. “I guess there’s too much concrete down here for your telepathy to carry. What’s the matter?”

  “Terry told me you’re going away again.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s more than she told me,” I replied. Then I looked at Terry accusingly and said, “You already knew we were going.”

  “I knew I was going,” said Terry, “but after the stunt you pulled with that wild-born, Mr. Simms wasn’t so sure he wanted you along. You’re a bit of a loose cannon.”

  “That’s rich coming from you, Terry!” I said. “Anyway, I promised Mr. Simms I’d be good this time, so you don’t have to worry.”

  “Don’t I have to worry?” asked Alia, forgetting to speak with her mouth.

  “We’ve been through this before, Alia!” I said irately. “This is something I just have to do. Now speak aloud or not at all.”

  Alia maintained a sullen silence as we rode the elevator back up to the penthouse, and her temper improved little over dinner. When I told Cindy that I was going on another mission, she just nodded and said that Mr. Simms had already told her about it when he called today to ask where I was. Hoping to keep the peace, I retreated to my room soon after eating, leaving Alia to help Cindy with the cleanup.

  Terry had told me over dinner that we would be leaving at 6am tomorrow. I was glad to hear it. I didn’t want to spend the whole day tomorrow waiting for our departure time under my sister’s disapproving looks.

  I packed my duffle bag with three changes of clothes and some emergency cash. Terry offered me one of her pistols along with a spare clip and a leather holster, and this time, I actually accepted. My telekinetic blasts were far more accurate than any gun, but bullets flew farther and had a far better rate of fire than my focused shots. Holding the metal pistol didn’t drain my physical strength as much as it used to, and now that I was a bit more adept at using it, it felt a little less awkward in my hands. Nevertheless, I made sure to pack a pair of thin gloves to protect me from the metal.

  I set the duffle bag next to my bed and sat down on my mattress. As I stared out the window on the other side of the room, I wondered what I would see and do on my second mission for the Raven Knights.

  Mr. Simms had called this a “big one.” Taking down a God-slayer training camp in the mountains certainly sounded like a big deal. But I suspected that Alia and I had already seen bigger. We had been there when the Lancer Knights raided the Psionic Research Center – a veritable underground fortress guarded by heavily-armed professional soldiers. Compared to that, how dangerous could a Slayer camp be?

  “Addy?” I heard in my head.

  I looked toward the door and saw Alia standing there, quietly gazing back at me.

  “Feeling better?” I asked.

  “A little,” she replied, stepping closer to me.

  “I’m sorry I’m going away again,” I said, meaning it. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow. I’m not sure how long.”

  “That’s okay, Addy,” said Alia, sitting beside me on my bed. “But I’m going with you this time.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I sincerely doubt that, Alia.”

  “Cindy said I could,” Alia replied with a smile.

  I stared at her incredulously. “She didn’t!”

  “She did so! She said all I needed was your permission, and I could join your team.”

  I couldn’t believe that Cindy, of all people, would play with Alia’s feelings like that, and I had a mind to go tell her so in no uncertain terms. But first I had to clear up this misunderstanding.

  “Cindy was only joking,” I said. “She would never let you put yourself in danger.”

  Alia looked me straight in the eyes. “She was serious.”

  “I’m sure she wasn’t serious, Alia,” I said patiently.

  Sensing movement at the door, I looked up to find Cindy standing there and smiling at us. It wasn’t her usual warm smile, though.

  “Oh, but I am serious, Adrian,” said Cindy. “Alia can join the Knights if you give your blessing on it. She was at my rescue too, after all. If she had been a Guardian, she may very well have been awarded the same status as you. And the Knights would be delighted to have another healer. You know how precious they are, after all. I could easily pull a few strings and have Alia assigned to the Ravens.”

  I turned to my sister and said, “Ali, would you please give me a moment alone with Cindy?”

  “Why?” Alia asked al
oud.

  “Just get out,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Addy!”

  “Out!” I bellowed, telekinetically shoving Alia off of my bed. Alia stood up and glared at me for a second before stomping out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “That wasn’t very nice, Adrian,” said Cindy.

  “Oh, come on, Cindy! Alia isn’t old enough to–”

  Cindy cut across me, saying harshly, “How old is old enough?!”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Thoroughly,” Cindy replied dryly.

  I gave her a disbelieving look.

  Cindy chuckled. “After you helped Terry ambush me at her party, did you really think I wouldn’t have my little revenge?”

  “Oh yeah?!” I said, my tone rising. “What if I said yes to Alia?!”

  Cindy started laughing for real now. “Adrian, I’m not some stupid reporter that you can scare with a bluff like that. I know you too well.”

  Cindy was, of course, right. That Alia couldn’t join the Raven Knights and come with us would be entirely my doing. I glared furiously at Cindy until she stopped laughing.

  “You see?” Cindy said lightly. “Giving my permission was easy. You would never let Alia go with you.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t!”

  “Why not?” Cindy asked with a shrug. “Alia would go to the gates of Hell with you. In fact, you’ve both practically already been there. So why won’t you let her join you?”

  I stared down at my knees. “Well... because...”

  Cindy filled in the blank, saying, “Because you could not bear to see her hurt. Just remember that you are asking your little sister to endure something that you yourself couldn’t.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said quietly.

  I sighed heavily and looked up at Cindy, whose expression had softened, returning to her peaceful norm. She said to me gently, “I’ll go make sure Alia is okay and smooth things out for you a little, but you’re the one who’s going to tell her that she can’t go tomorrow.”

  Cindy left the room, leaving me sitting on my bed alone and frustrated. I knew I should go find Alia and apologize, but that put me in the even more awkward position of having to somehow make it up to her without consenting to her impossible request.