by Nadia Afifi
Amira described the Trinity man’s memory of Zhang’s execution, and explained that his desert home was the likely hideaway for Elder Young and Rozene. Hadrian listened intently, his face flickering darkly at the mention of the famous scientist’s death.
“No surprise that it was the Trinity,” Hadrian said. “I figured it was just because he was part of the cloning club in Aldwych, but seems there was more to it than that.”
“These Cosmics,” Amira said in agreement. “They were in some kind of alliance with the Trinity and it’s gone sour. They both wanted Rozene, but also the Tiresia, though I still don’t know why. But Parrish may have changed his loyalties, based on something that Barlow told him. He’s trying to find Rozene as well, but hard to say what his end game is right now.”
“If Parrish hadn’t killed him,” Hadrian grumbled, “I could have gotten a confession out of that Trinity bastard.”
Amira pulled out the slim disc from her pocket.
“It’s in here,” Amira said. “The memories loaded from the holomentic display. I was thinking that if I could get it to Detective Pierson and get the police down here, it might help clear my name. But I don’t have a way to send them or upload them. It won’t work with my Eye.”
“First things first, love. We have a damsel in distress to find.”
“Should I contact the police?” Lee asked, and Amira jumped. She relayed the question to Hadrian and he shook his head.
“My team up in the sky can be trusted, but Westport PD, the rest of NASH, anyone with a badge could be compromised. There’s a dead man in the Carthage and you’re a fugitive. What kind of help do you think we’ll get? And if they help us rescue Rozene, where does she go? Those Cosmic folk wanted her badly enough to aid a terrorist attack and try to snatch you from police custody. I’d expect they’ll jump at the first clue of her whereabouts. No, love, we’re on our own for now. Unless my damn crew finds us.”
They unpacked the remainder of the first aid kit. To Amira’s relief, they had two days’ supply of hydration tablets and sustenance packages, a set of thin powders designed for space travel. The lack of solid food and water would be unpleasant, but they would survive. There was also gauze, antiseptic and a healing gel for deep wounds. She reapplied it generously to her maimed ear when Lee’s voice came back on.
“I’ve been going through the NASH satellites and I think I found the house you’re looking for. It’s east of where you are now, about seven miles away, over a gap in the hills. It’s pretty big and looks like it’s on some high clifftop.”
“That sounds like it,” Amira said, recalling the Trinity captive’s flashing memories of the house, as well as her own. “And that’s not too far – that would probably take us a few hours, with all of the switchbacks.”
“Right,” Lee said. There was hesitation in his voice. “So Amira, what do you know about Victor Zhang?”
“Famous scientist, headed the Volta station. He’s been reported absent for months on the Stream, Lee, but he’s actually dead. The Trinity killed him in his own home.”
“Ok, I’ve been reading about him on the Stream, and he’s called an ‘eccentric’ a lot,” Lee said, ignoring the detail of his violent homicide. “Looks like there were stories about him building weird things in his houses, experiments of his. And….”
“Yes?”
“The satellite images of the house are kind of funny as well. There’s this really bright light in the center of the house, but it’s not a reflection from the sun. There’s all these forums where people post theories on what it might be, and….”
“Lee, there are all kinds of crazy things that get shared on the Stream,” Amira said, smiling as Hadrian shot her a puzzled look. “And it wouldn’t change anything if any of it were true. If Rozene is there, then we need to go and find her.”
But Amira recalled Dr. Mercer’s last words to her about the Cosmics. A team running strange experiments in Victor Zhang’s home, attempting to form a single consciousness. What would they find in the house, aside from a retinue of heavily armed Trinity fighters?
After Lee sent the coordinates of the house to her Eye, Amira and Hadrian discussed their options. Both agreed that breaking into the house at night was the best chance of getting in and out quietly, although they would have to anticipate some security if Elder Young was indeed there. As a result, they would sleep for about three hours and start walking at 10:00 p.m. toward the house to ensure an arrival when it was still dark.
Before the sun disappeared behind the distant peaks, Amira walked along the base of the hill to explore. A rare opening between worlds had been discovered not far from here, the wives told her during the Gathering, a temporary tear in the universe’s fabric that revealed the Otherworlds to Elder Cartwright. Of course, the Feds had done their best to hide the evidence, so terrified were they that the word would spread. Creatures from the Nearhaven, ten times our height, walked through these canyons during the Cataclysm, the wives added. Their bones were excavated but hidden from the faithful. Even as a child, Amira had to stifle laughter at the compounds’ artless mixture of Otherworld lore and government conspiracy.
In the clearing on the other side of the hill were remnants of the Gathering. Amira felt like a spirit passing over familiar ground, echoes of an old life hanging in the still air.
A rotting piece of wood was partially buried in the sand. Amira knelt and brushed the sand away from the exposed beam, revealing the skeleton of the podium built to lead prayers and deliver sermons – on sin, passage, and the upcoming battle between good and evil that the compounds’ children would inherit.
Amira’s chest burned and her eyes quickly followed. She shed hot tears of grief and rage for the past she still carried and would always carry, and for others at the Gathering who remained, forgotten and waiting. Westport had become her home, its residents her new family, but she would always be bound to the compounds, molded by the scars they left her. They would always shape her future.
Amira rejoined Hadrian and they returned to the hill near the crash site to rest for the night. The smoke no longer rose from the wreckage, though a dark cloud hovered over them as the sun began its descent over the ridge.
They dined on energy bars from the first aid kit. Amira tended to her ear, which no longer bled but would never fully heal, chunks of bloody skin lost to the Carthage. Hadrian wrapped his jacket around her shivering shoulders as they lay down.
Chapter Sixteen
House of Apparition
It was pitch black when Hadrian shook Amira awake. She massaged a sore neck, body protesting as she stood. Her limbs ached for another hour of rest, but delaying their trek was not an option. They began the long walk in the darkness, Amira’s Eye shining the faintest of lights in front of them. Even that small beam of light made Hadrian nervous; he feared it would draw the Trinity to their location, but Amira pointed out that they were more liable to plunge down a ravine without something to guide them.
As they hiked the trail up the mountains, Amira silently thanked the Academy for their grueling physical exams. Though it was challenging, she knew she would complete the trek and arrive at their destination with energy to spare. Energy she would need in spades.
Following the mapped directions on Amira’s Eye, they turned the final corner along the trail and there it was – a single house on the edge of a high cliff, dim lights shining from several windows.
Hadrian let out a low whistle.
“It’s impressive, I’ll give it that.”
“And full of Trinity men, no doubt.” The Eye zoomed in. A low wall encased the house and a garden on three sides – the fourth side reached out over the plunging chasm below the cliff. There was no visible sentry outside or through the windows.
It was not unheard of for Westport’s wealthy elite to own homes in the American southwest near compound territory. To escape polluted skies in the dense
ly populated cities, those who could afford it built their retirement homes in the few remaining remote areas in North America. For some, the mountainous regions in the western Rockies and the Pacific Northwest; for others, the Baja peninsula, which remained pristine but heavily dry, the cost of water considerable even decades after the Drought Wars. For many, though, particularly the scientists of Aldwych, it was worthwhile to be able to see the night sky, free of smog and city lights, so Amira understood the desert’s appeal to Victor Zhang and others like him.
They descended the hill toward the house to get a closer look. Large boulders and scraggly pine trees punctuated the long downhill, providing cover as they advanced.
Hadrian suddenly threw out his arm in front of her to stop.
“Over there,” he whispered.
It took a moment of scanning in the dark before she saw what Hadrian was pointing at – Alistair Parrish propped against a tree, wrapping a torn piece of cloth around his midsection, where a large bloodstain spread like watercolor paint across the right side of his shirt. He tightened the makeshift bandage, oblivious to their presence.
Hadrian and Amira stayed back, silently exchanging the same look. What now? Amira distrusted Parrish, but for now at least, he shared their goal of rescuing Rozene from Elder Young. He had knowledge and resources at his disposal that they did not. And though he helped the Trinity Compound abduct her, the alliance between Cosmic and compound appeared to be over, along with Parrish’s own allegiance to the Cosmics. He wanted Rozene alive for whatever purpose Barlow had alluded to.
Amira stepped forward slowly.
Parrish sprang upright at the sight of Amira. No sooner had he stood up than he sank back down again, the color drained from his tired face.
“I have a first aid kit,” Amira said, taking another step forward. “Do you need help?” Hadrian approached him slowly, hands in his jacket pockets.
Parrish took the hint and raised his hands in the air before nodding at Amira.
As Amira helped dress and bandage his wound, a deep gash directly below his ribs, Parrish began a delirious, rambling speech, directed at himself as much as Amira.
“I have made some terrible mistakes, M. Valdez. You know, I changed once I learned that Maya would never wake up. I couldn’t accept it – that with all my power and influence, I could not change that one fact. The only thing that really matters – the awards, the research, all should be secondary to the ones we love. When cloning became closer to reality, which Valerie had been fighting forever to legalize, I saw the chance to bring Maya back somehow, born again as a genetic copy. This was before Pandora, Amira. Valerie was different. She never believed in looking back, however much she wished it. Everything always had to move forward, forward, forward.”
“Raise your arm a little higher, Dr. Parrish,” Amira said.
“But as we struggled and fought,” Parrish continued, “I found comfort in the teachings of Sentient Cosmology. You must understand, I was in deep depression – they say that to bury one’s child is the worst, most unnatural thing, but I didn’t even get the finality of a burial. No, my child resided in limbo, as the Catholics used to believe, between consciousness and death, not here but not gone, and the pain of it was unbearable. Truly unbearable. They told me what I wanted to hear, that there was more to us than these short, meaningless lives. Other realities, other planes of existence, that we are not what we fear ourselves to be – something brief and temporary and small.”
“You became an official Cosmic?” Amira asked. She recalled seeing him on that hazy day at Infinity Park, tears streaming down his face at the Cosmic lecture. It made sense to her. Some, like Dr. Mercer, patched their losses with a robot, reliving old memories through a crude imitation of the past. Parrish needed something more powerful.
“It took time, but they pulled me into the fold,” Parrish said, his pale head nodding in confirmation. “They convinced me that Pandora was a mistake, a potentially catastrophic one. They promised treatment for Maya, based on new insight into consciousness. I’m ashamed of myself. And now Valerie is gone, I saw to that! For all her faults, and she had many, she did not deserve the fate I delivered her – the desolation I wreak on everyone I touch. Maya, Valerie, Victor…I am running out of people to hurt, Amira. Only I am left.”
Parrish laughed bitterly and winced as the bandages tightened.
Hadrian paced impatiently, gun held loosely at his side, crushing pine needles under his heavy boots. Amira finished wrapping Parrish’s bandages, nodding to him as he spoke. Despite everything, she pitied him. Her own father, she always sensed, was a skeptic at heart. He had only truly surrendered to the doctrine of the compound after enduring losses of his own – Amira’s brother of three days, the son he always wanted. There is no reason in grief, no logical deductions that can heal its deep wounds, but faith could slow the bleeding.
With his wound treated and contained, Parrish led them further down the hill. The sky remained dark as they approached Zhang’s house. The Trinity’s presence was finally confirmed by the two men standing sentry in the front yard, cradling large, archaic machine guns. Neither looked to be on high alert, but they were sufficiently armed for any surprises. Hadrian jumped from the sturdy juniper tree he used to survey the scene.
“Any luck with your Eye?” he asked Amira.
Amira cradled the fragile lens in the palm of her hand, silently pleading with it, willing it to activate. Shortly after treating Parrish, she realized that it was dead. Like most modern Eyes, it operated on solar energy and after her lengthy trek in space and walk through the dark, it had no power left.
She shook her head angrily. They were on their own.
Hadrian nodded and gestured Amira and Parrish forward.
“I can take them out,” he said. “I’ll move quickly and knock them cold while you two climb in through those windows. Only problem is that we don’t know what’s inside and how many are in there.”
“That sounds terribly risky,” Parrish said.
“Any tactical assault ideas you’d like to share, scientist?”
“Listen, I knew Victor Zhang well,” Parrish said in a low voice as they crouched down in a close circle. “I’ve been in that house many times before and know the layout. Something to know about Zhang is that he took his most important work home with him, and we might be able to use that in our favor.”
“What do you mean?” Amira asked, intrigued.
“There was a project conceived decades ago, during the Drought Wars. The North American Alliance decommissioned it by the time Zhang took the Volta station, but he never stopped working on it. It was an experiment in using single-conscious commands for mechanized warfare, specifically robotic warfare.”
Hadrian shook his head in confusion, but Amira understood the concept. Dr. Mercer had devoted entire classes to it at the Academy.
“Using singular conscious navigation to control something with artificial cognition, like an advanced computer or a robot,” she said.
“Exactly. A team of people, a single person even, can direct an army, making them move and act through mental focus. Victor Zhang spent years on it after the war ended. It’s in there. Not an entire army, but robots that can attack and fight with someone directing them.”
“You’ve seen it work?” Hadrian asked eagerly.
Parrish paused.
“It wasn’t perfected when I saw a demonstration of it,” he conceded. “But the basic science is correct. The devil was in the details of execution. I know the logistics of his technology and I’m confident that I can activate it if it comes to that.”
“You’re suggesting that one of us sics these mind-sharing robots on the Trinity?” Hadrian’s eyes betrayed his doubt and the faintest trace of fear.
“You go look for the girl,” Parrish said firmly. “As quietly as possible, and hopefully, we can slip out undetected. But if someone sees u
s, and I suspect they will, I’ll make my way to the equipment Victor set up for his project and give us a weapon in return. We’re outnumbered and outgunned. This is our best chance to do this with only the three of us.”
“And what if the Trinity have already figured out how to use whatever’s in there?” Hadrian asked with a shrewd smile.
“A frightening prospect, but I doubt it. The world of inter-conscious navigation is very much out of their realm.”
Hadrian frowned as he searched for a counter-argument, but said nothing.
Amira nodded at Parrish in agreement. They had no Eye, no contact with Hadrian’s unit, and no allies available to help them. But she had an idea.
“If I find a computer in there, I can upload the disc from the holomentic machine and send it back to Lee in Westport,” Amira said. “Hadrian, I know we planned for you to do it, but I think you’ll need to back up Dr. Parrish if things…go badly. After it’s uploaded, my friends can route it to the police.”
Though Parrish shuffled uncomfortably, no one objected.
Hadrian moved first. Amira and Parrish obediently waited behind the wall of trees near the complex. Exhausted and restless, Amira bounced on the balls of her feet, craning her neck for a view into the entrance.
With adept swiftness, Hadrian pulled up over the wall, landed on the other side softly, and sprinted with his head low toward the first of the two guards. He swung his arm around and pressed a small round device against the man’s head, sending him crumpling silently to the floor. When the second guard turned and raised his weapon, Hadrian brought the instrument around again, rendering him unconscious.
Hadrian dragged the men around the building. The swift brutality of Hadrian’s attack jolted Amira out of her tired state. The hairs on her arms raised to attention, her entire body tense with the realization that their plan had become action, and events were outside of her control.
Parrish made his move over the wall. He gestured at Hadrian toward the window along the nearest corner. The two men pried the window open and quickly pulled themselves inside.