The Rogue Wolf

by KT Belt

  Phaethon felled another clone, though it seemed that the battle was slowly being lost. There were just too many. He could only pay them so much attention, though.

  “Our enemies? I don’t have any enemies,” he spoke.

  There was a long pause before the voice spoke again. “You are a foolish, foolish boy. What’s happened to our self-respect? If this is what I must do, it is without regret. This will be the end of everything.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  Phaethon turned around and was immediately pinned in place. The Clairvoyant standing before him was no clone. He was different from any he’d ever seen. He wasn’t very tall and was rather slimly built. His clothes were dark, tattered, and hung wispily off him like dead skin. But his metal mask was as unnerving as it was captivating. It completely shrouded his features while also reflecting the scene around Phaethon as a distorted mess. The mirrorlike finish warped the young Clairvoyant’s image into a feeble tangle.

  “Crazy?” Charon asked. “I’m simply burdened with a sharper view.”

  “Well, whatever. I’m tired of you,” Phaethon said as he assumed a guard.

  Charon was armed with a Taper, which was attached to his waist. The weapon was collapsed for now, and if he was any sort of Clairvoyant, he would fight on his opponent’s level. Phaethon hoped for as much, since he was bare fisted.

  “You want to fight me, boy?” Charon asked with an amused tone.

  Phaethon made no reply other than a kick that missed badly, but he never expected it to connect. Charon’s movements were effortlessly direct in execution. A small step on his part took Phaethon’s best counter away before it could even be made. He decided to try a punch, and the next thing he knew, he was flipping through the air. A quick reaction with telekinesis let him land on his feet.

  “There is fire in you,” Charon remarked. “Foolish.”

  Phaethon gritted his teeth and went on the attack again. He never fought so hard in his life, but it was like Charon was three moves ahead. He’d fought other Clairvoyants before. He’d never lost a sparring match. All those battles, however, were child’s play compared to this. Charon was just so smooth, almost perfectly efficient. His movements were precise and focused. The disparity only grew over time. Phaethon wobbled and his form grew messy as a mixture of conscious thought and rage marred his action. He wanted to kill his opponent. But the further that bitter reality seemed from fruition, the angrier and more desperate he became. The feelings fed on each other.

  “It seems you were miseducated. I make you angry. Anger, however, is not a Clairvoyant’s salve,” Charon said as he blocked the boy’s blows. “We are meant to impose our will—direct it—not scream at the unyielding. That conflict is what makes us what we are.”

  Just like that, Charon went on the attack. Phaethon wasn’t ready for it. The hits weren’t very hard, but the blows were starting to add up.

  “We revel in it,” Charon continued as the young Clairvoyant spat blood. “It’s every sting shapes our vision as we bend it to ours.”

  Phaethon looked at his distorted image on the metal face mask. He didn’t think he could defend himself much longer.

  “Then…then, we get the one thing we’ve wanted, when the previously unyielding breaks. It’s a look—a hopeless, defeated self-reflection—that signals the triumph of our Dark and gives the true rush of its power.”

  Phaethon threw a punch that Charon’s open hand caught. He watched in horror as a beam of heat seared away his arm to the elbow. He staggered, falling to one knee. Then he looked up at Charon, which made the man pause.

  “That’s the look exactly!” Charon declared.

  9

  Game Over

  Carmen had felt uncomfortable from the moment she stepped off the transport shuttle. The feeling was new to her Clairvoyant senses. It was like someone was watching her. That didn’t mean much, since people had been watching her all day, both on the shuttle itself and while on her way to Michael’s grave. The feeling persisted, though. She tried to ignore it. It wouldn’t be the first time she had sensed something irrelevant.

  There was only one thing on her mind anyway: That she had just bought her last bouquet of flowers. She’d been buying them for Michael for so long. The realization that they would no longer be needed was halting in a strangely distant way. It was like the rug had been pulled out from under her, but after she came back to her feet, it didn’t really matter that the floor was bare. Part of her was still crying in that bar on Evonea. She accepted it, though, just like she accepted that the sky was blue. He’d been dying for so long that she supposed she had long before prepared herself for his final day without even realizing it. She hadn’t even tried to stop the flowers she had placed on his grave from blowing away in the wind. After everything she’d done—after all the trying and hoping—that was how it ended.

  She left the cemetery with her head held low. What now? she wondered. She had no real want for money with Michael dead. Her first step would be to resign as Phaethon’s handler. She’d never had any idea what she was doing, and it was obvious she was no good for him. He’d be better off with someone else. He certainly wouldn’t miss the chess games. She guessed she could still stay with her new construction job—until they fired her, at least, which she figured would be in maybe a month and a half. She considered that possibility and found the worry a little odd now that she had just herself to look out for. It had been a constant source of dread. Money, money, money—she never had enough. It hadn’t been out of the ordinary for her to skip a few meals to save a credit or two.

  Just then, the sum total of her life to this point, especially the past two years, made her ball her hands into angry fists. Yet it also made her feel weak at the same time. All she could do—all her abilities and all her training—counted for as much as spit on a burning blaze. No one could say she hadn’t tried. Myths and legends could be written about her determination. But now, with the unreachable summit still far in the distance, lost wasn’t just a word; it seemed to be an inescapable state of being.

  She got on her bus, and everyone stared at her, as usual, while she moved to an open seat. She decided to do them all a favor by sitting as far away from them as possible. As Carmen glanced at everyone tensely trying to pretend she wasn’t there, she came to one conclusion. She had a month and a half probably, maybe two or even three if she was lucky with her new job. Then she would start over, possibly on another planet. There were too many memories here.

  It was a while till she got back to the city, as it was another bus after the first to get within walking distance of the facility. As always, it was too tiring to fly everywhere. She had to have slept for a straight day after the chase on Evonea.

  As she began the last leg of her journey on foot, she reflected that this was going to be quite the day of goodbyes. She had said goodbye to Michael, and she’d be saying goodbye to Phaethon. She paused for a moment when she realized she also wouldn’t be coming back to the facility ever again after today. She’d thought that before, but this time there was absolutely nothing at all tying her to anything on this planet. Her mood took her mind to when Kali had first brought her to the bluff. Just as she had then, she stood at a precipice now. Unfortunately, there were no friendly shores in sight this time.

  A soft sigh put her frenzied thoughts to rest for the moment. The walls of the facility were in view, and several police cars were parked outside, along with other emergency vehicles. Strange, Carmen thought. She couldn’t see a lot of activity from this distance, but something had certainly happened. One of the few personnel dorms that lay outside the main compound was destroyed. Workers tended to the rubble as she walked by. They didn’t seem to be looking for survivors; she couldn’t sense anyone alive in the rubble at all.

  She turned her attention back to the facility proper, more curious than concerned. Everyone she cared about now was a Clairvoyant, and they could take care of themselves if anything serious happened. The only things she could think o
f that could affect them were a major fight among the assets, some sort of accident, or the place being shut down. Her curiosity prompted her to fly over the walls rather than take the time with the usual check-in procedures. It wasn’t like anyone would try to stop her.

  Her eyebrows furrowed when she saw what was on the other side. The place looked like a warzone. One whole section of the wall was missing, and blood stains covered the field for as far as she could see, as did hologram projections of dead bodies. She gave up counting after two dozen. Most of the bodies looked exactly the same. If she didn’t know better, Carmen would say they were clones, but that made no sense.

  She walked aimlessly through it all, weaving through the agents and detectives trying to make sense of the carnage. It was only after a few minutes that she realized the quiet dread rising within her could be sated more easily than using her eyes.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the closest agent.

  “Yes?” He paused when he realized he was talking to a Clairvoyant. “Yes, ma’am. How may I help you?” he asked.

  “Are—” she began, but then she stopped short. It would be easier to just read him. She wanted to be sure.

  Her eyebrows furrowed again when she finally understood what had happened. I should have been here, she thought. The answer to her next question wasn’t as easy to determine. All that really mattered to her was whether Kali and Phaethon were okay. Regrettably, people couldn’t be read like a book. Thoughts weren’t arranged so conveniently and were often fragmented, chaotic. She peered through the layers of the agent’s mind before stopping at memories of the first Terran-Sorten War. Even now, her time with Eli occasionally kept her up at night, and she preferred not to go through it again with someone else. If Kali and Phaethon were alive or dead, this man didn’t know.

  “Thank you,” she said, walking away.

  “Yeah, right. Sure,” he muttered, confused.

  Carmen shook her head at the next thing he thought. She always wondered why people thought it would be fun to read minds. There were many thoughts she’d rather not know. A moment later, something caught her eye across the field. She was surprised no one had moved it, with everything going on. Maybe they wanted to keep everything as it was for evidence collection?

  She came upon the chessboard as she had dozens of times before. This time, though, the board and table it always rested on were overturned. She felt the need to reset the board. Perhaps with all the times Phaethon had turned it over, it had become a reflex. Her first instinct was to do so telekinetically. She knelt down, however, and fixed the mess with her own two hands. Carmen appreciated the added focus of using muscles and sinew in this instance. A small smirk graced her lips when she noticed the board’s computer was set to training mode. He was practicing for me, she thought. Well, she liked to think as much. Phaethon probably hadn’t even been using it at all.

  She sat on one of the previously overturned chairs, needing a moment before she made her next move. Everything has been such a nightmare lately, she noted. She had traveled across the galaxy to kill someone she didn’t even know, Michael had died, and now this. She looked at the overturned chair on the other side of the board. Administration has to know what happened to them, she thought, as the uncomfortable feeling that’d been her company almost all day returned.

  She turned her head. It was Kali. Carmen rushed toward her.

  “I was worried,” she said as she hugged her former handler tightly. Carmen didn’t see her smile weakly in response. “Are you okay?” she asked as she pulled away.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Phaethon?”

  Kali paused with a quick sigh. Carmen swallowed hard. “I don’t know,” she said simply.

  Carmen opened her mouth to speak, but Kali waved to one of the chairs. Carmen nodded, and they sat down.

  “We were attacked by a veritable army of Clairvoyants,” Kali explained. “They seemed to be clones. We’ll know for sure once the bodies are finished being analyzed. But one was a normal Clairvoyant. Phaethon was last seen fighting him.”

  Carmen looked at her old handler hard. “No one knows what happened to him?” she asked. She already knew about the attack from reading the investigator, but it was difficult for her to believe that Phaethon, as fiery as he was, would just up and disappear during a fight.

  “No, we don’t,” Kali said. “These clones may not have been very strong, but they had to have outnumbered us by at least five to one. No one was really able to keep track of anybody.”

  “Who is this Clairvoyant?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw him.”

  Carmen nodded slowly while taking a deep breath. She looked at the agent and detectives surveying the aftermath and then turned back to Kali. “Is anyone else missing?”

  “Only the dead,” Kali answered.

  “And you’re sure he isn’t dead? Has somebody—” Carmen paused for a moment. She was unprepared for the emotions her next words created. “Has somebody checked all the bodies?” she finally asked as matter-of-factly as she could. She didn’t think the question would bother her. Things she cared about died around her all the time. Just a few minutes ago, she’d been quite comfortable with never seeing Phaethon again.

  Kali noted the momentary influence of Carmen’s Dark but decided to say nothing about it. “We checked. We’re sure,” she said. “He’s not here. Whether he’ll be declared dead is still up in the air,” she added.

  “He’s alive,” Carmen said after a few seconds of musing. “If there’s any mercy at all in the galaxy, he is alive.”

  Kali gave her former charge a sidewise glance. “Edge?”

  “Michael’s dead,” she muttered. “He died while I was away. In fact, I just came from the cemetery.”

  “…I’m sorry.”

  Carmen nodded meekly. “It was a long time coming,” she said, resting her head on an open palm. She didn’t care that she knocked down some of the chess pieces she had just picked up.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t change anything,” Kali remarked.

  “I know.”

  “How did you trip go anyway?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” Carmen said timidly.

  Kali sat still for a moment before she leaned back in her chair with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t think you’ve ever told me that before,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”

  Carmen glanced at her and then shied away when the look was returned. No, she never had told Kali that before. Everything between them till now had been freely shared. It made her feel guilty, but she still didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Why would they take Phaethon?” she asked instead, trying to change the subject.

  Kali watched the asset she was once responsible for shift uncomfortably under her gaze. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “This attack was too random to know much of anything.”

  “It’s not like Clairvoyants don’t make guesses,” Carmen remarked.

  Kali smiled weakly. “I don’t think they were trying to kill us. At least, not all of us,” she added after glancing around the compound and surveying the damage.

  “What makes you say that?” Carmen asked, but by this point she wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation. She stared at the chessboard in front of her, wondering if Phaethon would still be alive if she hadn’t been such a waste of a handler. I can’t believe I made him play this, she thought.

  “There was no point to,” Kali said. “Anyone can be a Clairvoyant. You can’t stop Clairvoyants by destroying this place.”

  “Tell that to the protestors,” Carmen remarked.

  Kali shook her head. “They don’t know what they do. They’re scared. This was different. It was planned and had purpose. If the point was to kill us all, they would have just used a bomb, not these Clairvoyant clones,” she added. Derision bled into her voice.

  “I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Carmen said.

  Her old handler sat back in her chair and r
olled her eyes. “I can’t read you, Edge. You don’t understand how what is possible? It’s almost like talking to a normal person sometimes.”

  Carmen gave a pained smirk at that. “Clairvoyant clones. I don’t understand how that is possible. Janus said no one knows how or why Clairvoyants are clairvoyant. He said that, if you cloned me, for instance, it wouldn’t be me. It wouldn’t have the same Dark as me, the same experiences, or any of my other intangibles. We would be genetically identical, but we wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Well, it seems like someone figured it out,” Kali said, her voice growing harsher after each word. “If there is any consolation to all this, it’s that most of these abominations died in the attack.” Her tone became much the same as when she spoke of the sortens, with bitter hate turning her soft, melodic voice into thorns. Carmen hated when she talked like that; she sounded like a completely different person. Yet the wrath fit her former handler just as surely as her sweetest smile.

  “I guess so,” she muttered disbelievingly under her breath. Kali heard her anyway, and Carmen saw her eyes narrow, but she kept whatever comment was brewing to herself. “What about the mystery Clairvoyant? What happened to him?” Carmen asked. “Was he killed?”

  “No, no one saw him after he started fighting Phaethon.” Carmen nodded slowly, and Kali continued. “It’s a pity that he didn’t die as well. I despise Clairvoyants like that.”

  Carmen glanced at her old handler, looked away, and shifted uncomfortably again. She didn’t say anything, though.

  “Don’t start with me, Edge,” Kali said, ignoring her prudence. “If you think this was bad…” She waved her finger all around her. “You don’t know. You really, really don’t know what it was like with the sortens. You don’t know what kind of vile creatures they are. We deserve blood for blood for their crimes—for what they turned us into. And if this Clairvoyant, whoever he is, is helping them in any way, he must suffer as well. If you lived a life that approached anything like mine, you would feel the same.”