Project Phoenix

by D. C. Fergerson

  “Let me tell you what happens next,” Lucius said. “The Polizei are on their way. If you run now, you remain a fugitive. If you turn yourself in to them, all of your evidence, including the data you so selfishly decided to keep for yourself, is melting in the vehicle. Your friends are gone. You have no one and nothing. No one will believe you, after I eliminate that idiot Thompson. I think it’s time for you to run, little girl.”

  Cora balled up her fists. Her teeth clenched. With a cautious step, she walked toward the flames and snatched up her blade. She expected it to burn her, yet the sheath was cool to the touch. She held it with a white knuckle grip, her other hand reaching to her earpiece.

  “When I am finished with you, Lucius, you will wish you killed me,” she said, tapping the button to end the call.

  Sirens cried out in the distance. Cora reacted with the only thing she knew to do anymore. She ran, looking for another way to survive.

  Weathering the Storm

  Night had fallen on Großer Tiergarten, a massive public park built upon old hunting grounds. The myriad walkways and paths winding through were sparsely populated. The fewer that saw her, the better. Cora ran until she was far enough in to find dense forest. The walking path paved through it had rails on both sides. Signs warned to keep off the grass. She jumped over the rails at her feet and pushed past a thicket of bushes, down a hill to the forest below. She went deeper still, until the way she came was lost to her. Surrounded by nothing but trees and the sound of the nocturnal creatures wandering about, she pressed her back to a tree and slid down to her rear.

  Cora sobbed with abandon, Richard’s advice to calm down be damned. There was no finding her center. She had never felt so scared, lost, or alone. She was in a foreign country and made an enemy of its master. His eyes and ears proved to have reach beyond anything she understood. Lucius could call her phone, a phone she received only hours before. He killed her friends before her eyes and she watched them burn.

  As she sat in the darkness, alone with her grief, her phone rang again. Shock and anguish cut her crying short. Lucius was calling to taunt her further, no doubt. She sniffled back congestion and tears, swiping out the screen on her wrist computer. The holographic projection displayed her home screen. There was no call display. By all accounts, no apps were running, yet her phone rang again in her ear. She tapped the comm. White noise filled her ear.

  “I had a dream about you,” the ethereal male voice began. “In the dream, you fell into despair. You began to believe the dragon’s lies. You could not see the truth for yourself.”

  Cora squinted her eyes shut. Her head hurt from crying. “Who are you?”

  Swirling noise filled the dead air between them. “You will know, in time. For now, I am a guide. Your power is beginning to awaken.”

  Cora used both hands to sweep her black locks from her face. They pulled and yanked, glued to her face by sweat and tears. She reflected on the spell she cast when she leaped from the embassy. That wasn’t anything Richard taught her to do.

  “I didn’t know my power was something to awaken,” Cora replied. “Anything you can recommend to kill a three-thousand year old dragon?”

  “Not today,” the voice replied. “It will continue to grow, if you nurture it. You need allies, and a direction that sets you back on the path to overcoming this test.”

  “Test? Everyone I know or cared about here is dead,” Cora raised her voice. “Allies? What allies? I have you, and I don’t even know who you are.”

  The voice sighed, the first audible sign she was even talking to a real person. “The dead, Cora. The dead have tales to tell, if you’re willing to listen. I think you know that.”

  “That...magic I used in the restaurant?” Cora felt sick thinking of the chill swarming through her again. “What was I even seeing when I did that?”

  “The world in between, Cora,” he replied, his voice coming in and out in waves. “The spirit world.”

  “Are you a spirit, too?” she asked, afraid of the answer.

  There was a pause, white noise filling her ear. “I am...like a spirit, tethered to a space between worlds. None of that matters now, though. You know who you need to find.”

  Cora rested the back of her head against the trunk of the ancient tree. Dwelling on his words, cold shivers made her roll her shoulders. The spell in the restaurant basement was the darkest magic she ever felt come from her, and she’d sooner never repeat it. That went double if he meant the person she thought he did.

  “You can’t just tell me where to go from here, can you?” Cora asked.

  “If only I could,” he said, his voice weak and pained. “These dreams...they show much, but reveal little. I know we will speak again, at the end, though my words won’t be for your ears. Until then, I must sleep and dream.”

  Cora shut her eyes, letting a tear trace down her face. There was no other way than to confront Richard. She knew that, but it also meant his spirit hadn’t moved on. She didn’t want to see him like that, trapped between worlds. There wasn’t anyone left that could explain what the data contained except him. She wiped a tear from her cheek. Steeling herself, she nodded.

  “Yeah. I’ll get on that,” she said.

  No reply came. The hum of the white noise in the call’s background was gone, replaced by the chirping of night insects coming from everywhere around her. With her wrist computer screen still displayed across the back of her hand, she connected to NeuralNet’s database. She spent a few minutes going to various banking sites, checking balances. All of the NSA’s deposits were made and accounted for, as Richard promised. It was a drop of water in the ocean compared to Lucius’ resources, but if this was her last night on Earth, she’d gladly burn through every penny to exact revenge.

  The walk out of Tiergarten took her north, far enough from the embassies that she could feel comfortable flagging down a cab. The sight of an exotic Native woman dressed like a biker with a katana strapped to her back didn’t help matters. One cab after another passed her by. She finally had to step into the road to force a cab to stop for her. Brakes squealed as the fender came to rest inches from her knees. With the promise of a large tip, the taxi driver followed Cora’s vague direction to head for Marzahn.

  Even with good time made in light traffic, the trip was longer than a half-hour. Cora tinkered with her Arcadia, getting an address for the only dwarven coroner in Marzahn. After that, it was time to shut her eyes and listen to music.

  Her meditation clouded, lingering on the loss of her friends. Of all, Gideon weighed heaviest on her conscience. Johnny and Giovanna knew the game and its risks. Gideon was still a young man, no older than her. He was innocent, as well as he could be, and was killed to prove a point. As dignified as he presented himself, Lucius was vicious in equal measure.

  The taxi came to a stop beside a featureless dark stone building a block past the hospital. Cora got out and walked up beside the driver’s window. A few taps through her wrist computer, she presented an offer of five hundred credits on her screen for the driver. He looked at the number and back at her.

  “Put it in park and wait for me,” she said. “I won’t be long. I’ll have one more stop for you, and then you can have the whole thing. Deal?”

  The driver nodded and replied in German. “We do business.”

  Ready to break down the entrance, Cora stormed at the door and grabbed the handle. To her surprise, the front door opened right up. The checkered-tile floor of the waiting room led to a waist-high counter of dark wood, adorned with intricate black iron trim. The new installation filled the room with the fresh smell of wood. The detail work was intricate and ornate. It was a shame to be stuck in fluorescent LED lighting, robbed its natural beauty.

  A dwarf, short and wide, sat behind the desk, a sandwich in both hands. Unlike most dwarves, he kept his beard trimmed close and his chestnut hair pulled back. Glasses rested on the bridge of his nose, doing him no good as he stared at Cora’s approach.

  “Can I he
lp you?” he said in German, though his accent indicated he was not a native speaker. His right cheek puffed with a mouthful of his sandwich.

  “I’m with the UNS government, Agent 71280,” Cora replied in English. Her German was almost as bad as his. “I’m here to verify the bodies of two possible American agents brought in here earlier from Steakhaus Günther.”

  The dwarf finished chewing, nodding as he did so. He replied in kind with, “Sure, sure. I’ll just need to make a quick phone call to the embassy to verify, and-”

  Cora drew her katana and leveled it above the dwarf’s wrist before he could finish reaching for the phone on his desk. He didn’t react with fear, instead locking expectant eyes with her. She had his attention.

  “Two things,” Cora said. “The first is this - you reach for the phone to call the dragon, you lose the arm. If you don’t reach for it, I walk into your morgue, examine the bodies for a few minutes and leave without telling a soul. You get paid double whatever hush money Lucius was giving you.”

  The dwarf raised a furry eyebrow. “Dragon? No one said anything about a damn dragon.”

  “I take it from your tone, you don’t care for dragons much?” Cora asked.

  The dwarf scoffed and crossed his arms, switching to English with a thick Scottish accent. “Don’t trust the winged bastards as far as I could throw them. It was just a bunch of Bauer Securities goofs, playing soldier and talking all robotic and rigid like they had a bloody stick up the arse. Told me to sit on these bodies til Monday.”

  Cora sheathed her sword over her back. “I can tell you that you’re hiding two NSA agents that were murdered on German soil, among all the bodies brought here from that attack.”

  The dwarf held up his hands, surrendering to her. “I don’t need that kind of trouble, dear. There’s nary a friendly soul on the streets for a dwarf here in Berlin. I won’t say no to your credits, either, if Lucius is involved.”

  “I’m so glad we have an understanding,” Cora said. She swiped about on her wrist, bringing screens up before projecting one into the air so he could see. The offer was three-hundred thousand.

  Judging by his poor ability to keep a poker face, he was shocked. Cora may have gotten him far cheaper. He stared at the number with wide eyes, spending it in his mind before looking back to Cora with a nod.

  “Indeed, that will do fine,” he said.

  “Good,” Cora replied. “The second thing - are there people in that sandwich?”

  Her question wrinkled the dwarf’s brow into confusion and horror. “No. Bratwurst, onions, and peppers.”

  “Can I have some? It smells amazing.”

  The dwarf pushed the tinfoil his sandwich rested on to the edge of his desk and laughed. “For three hundred, dear, I’ll go hungry. Eat up.”

  Cora pulled up the sandwich and dug in. It tasted every bit as good as it smelled. She’d already burned up any calories provided by the instant ramen from hours ago. The dwarf watched her as she ate.

  “You’re not with any government outfit, are you?” he said.

  Cora shrugged and spoke between bites. “I really am, but this isn’t official UNS business. The two men in your care...I knew them.”

  The dwarf sighed and nodded. “I’m sorry, dear. I knew a few of them, too.”

  “You did?” Cora eyes flared.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Marzahn is looked at as the slum area of Berlin. Lucius rolled in and remade Tetriarch into a global corporation, renovated downtown, and we got all the poor, displaced people that couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Everyone knows everyone here. I ate at Steakhaus Günther twice a week. Best currywurst in the city.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Cora replied dourly. She set down the sandwich. As good as it was, reality had begun to set in. She knew what she was about to do and dreaded it. “Alright, I won’t take up too much time. I need a few minutes alone to examine the bodies, and I’ll do the transfer on my way out. As long as I don’t have a bunch of Bauer guns in my face, you’ll get paid.”

  The dwarf shook his head. “I’m not calling anyone, dear. From the sounds of it, I want no part of this.”

  He extended his hand. “Doctor Angus Krin.”

  “Agent Karen Schmidt,” Cora shook his hand.

  “A good German name,” he replied sarcastically. “For a Native girl.”

  “My real name isn’t any more believable, if you were expecting Cunning Hawk or something.”

  Krin laughed and got up from his desk. At full height, he came up to Cora’s stomach, but almost twice as wide. His broad shoulders and short stature made his lab coat look like it was cut from a perfect square. He walked into a back room through a doorway, beckoning Cora to follow. They walked in silence through a corridor of white walls and white light that taxed the eyes. She passed by examination rooms and averted her eyes as she realized what they were. Hospitals and surgeries bothered her, for whatever reason.

  The dwarf stopped at the end of the hall. Metal double doors blocked the way forward, but thin, rectangular windows on both gave a view to a metal examination table at the center of the room beyond.

  “I’ll leave you to your peace,” Krin said. “I ID’d them based on the papers they had on them, but they were the only two without Ident Chips. Should be easy for you to find, right side of the room. I’ll be up front when you’re done.”

  Cora nodded, her voice solemn. “Thank you.”

  The dwarf walked away. Cora pushed through the door. The room was lit from above, but a bright spotlight above the metal exam table shone with blinding radiance. Cora looked away, to the right side of the room. Small LED displays listed the names beside rows of metal doors, stacked three-high from floor to ceiling. The room was bitter cold. Had she not been wearing Richard’s bomber jacket, she’d be shivering in minutes.

  The names on the LED displays were more than just bodies. They were the collateral damage Vulkan Group was willing to cause to throw everyone from their tainted scent. It wasn’t much consolation that their team spent the day decaying in the sunlight coming through their abandoned warehouse. By now, Director Thompson had agents flipping the city upside-down for that warehouse since Cora mentioned it. By his own admission, the paper trail Lucius planted against her through the breach wouldn’t make those Vulkan corpses exonerate her. No, she told herself, this was the only way. She could avenge everyone lost tonight, friend and bystander alike.

  Among the information on the displays in the top row, she sifted through names. German, French, a woman. Ryan McCallister. Cora shut her eyes and reached up for the handle with a trembling hand. With a quick pull, the door hissed open and a rush of colder air hit her face. She opened her eyes to find a metal tray on rails, the body laid atop of it covered with a sheet. Before she could reconsider, she gripped the edge of the tray and slid it out.

  She wrung her hands, psyching herself up to pull away the sheet. Cora gripped the hem by two fingers and pulled it back. It was Drake. Blood pooled in his lifeless body around the areas of his face where tech was installed beneath his skin, making his face appear bruised. Cora’s jaw clenched. They were never that close, except for one misguided night involving homesickness and a lot of Jack, but it was hard to see his face like that. He was an arrogant prick, but he was damn good at his job. He kept her safe on every mission. He wiped his own wet drive, knowing it would kill him, in order to hide the data from Vulkan. Cora shook her head and covered his face back up, her throat sore from choking back tears.

  Cora slid the tray back and closed the door. The next door over, closest to the wall, displayed another American name - Jack Dempsey. Cora knew that alias well, it was Richard’s go-to name when they travelled together a lifetime ago. She didn’t hesitate grabbing for the door this time, the pain wasn’t going to become any easier to bear the longer she dragged it out. She pulled out the tray. A small, reddish-brown stain dried on the sheet near the side of his head. Cora gave a quick tug and revealed Richard, his head turned to the side so that
the small entry wound faced her.

  Unable to hold back her emotions any longer, Cora sobbed, moaning in pain. She took a few steps back from his body, hoping the distance would make it more bearable. Instead, as the entry wound disappeared from view, he appeared to only be sleeping. It taunted her, knowing there was no way to wake him up. She put her hands over her face, crying into them as she repeated to herself to get her grip back. There still wasn’t time to fall apart.

  Cora sniffled and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket. Stepping forward, she took a deep breath and put the back of her hand to his cheek. The darkness of the magic she was looking for wasn’t hard to find. She did as she had before, picturing walking amongst the graves in a cemetery at night, speaking with the lost spirits trapped between our world and the next. As she walked the rows of headstones, she found Richard. A chill filled her, not from the temperature in the room, but from the magic within. It was dark and terrifying, and the ease with which she called upon it was frightening.

  She opened her eyes to the washed-out color of the world in-between. Richard stood there in his crisp black suit, waiting for her.

  Father Figure

  Cora’s bottom lip quivered as she asked, “Does it hurt?”

  Richard’s eyes stared down at his body on the metal table. “No. I feel...nothing. Regret. That’s all.”

  The room became bitter cold, almost enough to freeze Cora’s tears to her cheeks. Even the bright light over the examination table struggled to illuminate where they stood. Her first instinct was to run to Richard and feel his warmth, but even if she didn’t pass through him, he was likely as cold as their surroundings. She held back, wrapping her arms around herself instead.

  “How many did I lose?” Richard asked.

  “Drake, Doctor Nielsen, and Toller,” Cora replied. She paused, unsure how to phrase her answer. “Every person in the restaurant - the customers, the staff, our handler.”