The Halo of Amaris

by Jade Brieanne

  And because Jin was a little kid sometimes, she’d built a fort on their bedroom floor out of pillows and blankets so they could watch movies. He wanted to watch his recording of the soccer game, and watching musicals all day wasn’t exactly his idea of fun, but who was he fooling. He’d give her anything she wanted today. He’d even cook.

  He set a pot of water on the stove and turned the burner to high. Toeing open the refrigerator in search of more ingredients, Aiden noticed a large cake box sitting on the bottom shelf. He carefully pulled the box out and placed it on the counter, rotating it until he was staring at the letters DC in bold, white strokes in some fancy script. There was a red string holding the lid closed, and it loosened with a slight tug, enough for him to tilt the cover back and peer into the box.

  “…You like red velvet cupcakes…?”

  “…Dolce Confections.”

  “…the one I always talk about…”

  Aiden pushed the box away and squeezed his eyes shut. The fractured images and sounds fluttered in without warning. A delivery man with cold eyes. Himself tied to a chair. Jin in his arms, dead. His eyes shot open when the hissing sound of water boiling over broke him out of his trance. Startled, he turned the burner down and popped the noodles in to cook, watching the angry bubbles recede. He snatched the refrigerator back open, grappled for a bottle of water, and chugged until it was empty.

  Aiden inhaled deeply, held it, and then let it go. Get it together. Now.

  He forced a smile on his face when he made his way back into the bedroom, the steaming noodles now in bowls on a tray. A foot stuck out of the end of their fort, and he nudged it with his own. “Your manservant has brought you your food, my queen. Warm, tasty, slaved-over food.”

  There was no response from under the fort.

  “You got me, it’s ramen, and it’s more tasty than slaved-over but it still counts and there is no way you fell asleep that fast. Wake up and eat.” He set the hot noodles down and dived into the fort. Jin was on her side with her eyes closed, her chest softly rising and falling. “Okay, maybe you are asleep,” he whispered. He leaned over her, content to watch her for a second.

  Aiden knew he was smiling, and now he wanted to see hers again. He moved in closer and poked her cheeks. “Jin,” he sang, holding the note. He went to poke her again, but snatched his hand back when her eyes flew open. She grinned and attacked, pulling him into an incredibly tight bear hug, squeezing his head and cackling loudly.

  Aiden wrestled his head free from her arms. “You think this is cute?”

  “The cutest thing I’ve ever done.” She tightened her hold and rolled hard to her right, running them smack into the broom holding their fort up. Her laughter pitched higher when it collapsed around them. Aiden kicked the covers off, braced his hands against the floor, and managed to stand up with Jin wrapped around him like a suction cup.

  “Two questions, and you can choose not to answer. Up to you.”

  Jin nibbled along his neck as he spoke but he wasn’t going to give in to the distraction.

  “One, what exactly are you doing and two, why are you doing it?”

  “I wanted to surprise you, and I did. I also planned on letting go about thirty seconds ago,” Jin admitted, still grinning.

  “Hmm, is that so?”

  By the time Jin caught on, Aiden had wrapped his arm around her waist and climbed up to stand on the chair.

  “Wait, what are you doing?” Jin asked, panic creeping into her voice.

  “Who knows?”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  Aiden winked at the dawning horror on her face, whispering, “Yeah, actually I would.”

  He leapt from the chair, him laughing, her screaming at the top of her lungs before they crashed onto the mattress. They hit the pillowtop with a thud and a bounce, and Aiden moved swiftly to try another move. He took both of Jin’s wrists in one of his large hands and pinned her to the mattress with a triumphant shout. “Tap out!”

  “Be serious.”

  “Nope! Tap out!”

  “I can promise you I’m not doing that. “

  “I have other tricks I can employee, Jin Amaris,” Aiden threatened. He trailed feather light touches along her ribs, watching as she tried to wiggle out of his hold. “All you have to do is tap out—”

  “Over my dead body!” she laughed.

  Aiden froze. “Don’t say that.”

  Jin laughter tapered off. “Don’t say what?”

  Aiden’s eyes darted away. “Nothing.” He laughed weakly. “Nothing, it’s nothing.”

  Jin wrestled out of his grip and slid away from him until she could sit up against the headboard with her arms crossed. Aiden knew that look. “Talk.”

  Aiden frowned. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Lie to me again and we are going to have a much bigger problem.”

  Something built up behind his eyes, a sharp pain growing in the back of his head. Tight ropes tugged against his skin. He closed his eyes, and the question rolled off his lips before he could stop himself. “You ever think about Shen?”

  She didn’t answer for a long beat of silence, so Aiden opened his eyes to look at her. She didn’t look angry, but there was a look of disbelief on her face, and for a moment, Aiden regretted asking the question.

  “What kind of question is that?” she asked, her eyes riveted on him.

  “Not like that. I mean…” He rubbed his hands over his face, frustrated.

  “No, Aiden, that’s not cryptic at all,” she said with an unimpressed frown.

  Aiden reached out, feathering a hand around Jin’s ankle. “If I told you to run, would you run and save yourself?”

  Jin didn’t hesitate. “No.”

  “Not even if it’s—”

  “No,” Jin repeated firmly. “That’s not what safety nets do, so no, I wouldn’t.”

  Aiden looked down at the bed sheets, flashes of his dream jumping in and out of his vision. “I figured you’d say that,” he mumbled.

  “Do you want to tell me where all of this is coming from?”

  “I told you. I dreamed you died.”

  Jin was silent.

  “I was home. You were out running errands. Something about the undisputed science that window-shopping caused relaxation.”

  Jin grinned.

  “The power went out in the apartment…I was at the breaker box.” He blinked as he fished out details. “There was a knock at the door. It was late, so I assumed it was you. It wasn’t.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Shen.”

  Jin blinked at the answer but stayed silent.

  “It caught me off guard. We fought and I lost.”

  Crawling up the bed, Aiden sat beside Jin and took her hand in his. “You know…he’s a sick son of a bitch. He said things…” Aiden sighed. “We waited for hours. Then you came home and I thought you’d recognize all the signs, that you’d run. But you didn’t. As soon as the door alarm went off I knew it was you. I knew.”

  “And you said in this dream, I died?”

  “Yeah,” Aiden said quietly.

  “He shot you.”

  “He shot me,” Jin echoed calmly, like he wasn’t talking about her death. Another silent nod.

  Jin squeezed his hand. “That’s horrible, Aiden. I admit that. But it was still a dream. Shen is in jail. No one cares about us anymore. Nobody is going to come knocking at the door trying to kill us.”

  “I know, I know. I just…I’m not handling this very well. I never had a dream that felt so...” He sighed. “I’ll get a grip. I swear.”

  Jin looked uncertain. “I’ll be more careful now. I’ll even turn that stupid GPS tracker on or I’ll…go get my gun from behind the sofa, start keeping it close to me like you always wanted me to,” she assured him. “But it is weird,” she said slowly as she got up to get their food and put the tray on the bed between them.

  “What is?”

  “I mean…it’s just a coincidence, but
I had planned on going out shopping today.”

  Aiden paused mid-reach for a pair of chopsticks. “You did?”

  “Yeah. I was also going to pick something up today from that bakery, Dolce Confections, the one I always talk about? I mean, I was supposed to pick the order up, but they were delivered instead.”

  “Was that the delivery from this morning?” He thought about the box with DC on it.

  “DC…Dolce Confections.”

  A sweet voice filtered through a cell phone.

  “You like Red Velvet cupcakes? I’m going to pick some up from that bakery. Dolce Confections, the one I always talk about?”

  There it was, at the back of his head, screaming at him. At this point, he couldn’t care less if he made Jin nervous. He slowly made his way off the bed, picking up speed as he flew out of the bedroom, through the apartment and to the front door. Flinging it open, he swung his head left and right, peering down the hallway, high on suspicion. There was no one there. The only thing he could see was a soft light coming from under their neighbor’s door and the sound of a news anchor delivering the night’s stories.

  “…as of eight oh five a.m. Korean Standard Time, officials are reporting the death of convicted criminal…”

  Thump. Thump. Aiden could feel his pulse in his neck. He shut the door and slid the safety chain into place. Backtracking through the living room on his way back to Jin, he grabbed his cell phone from an end table. The front screen was bright. No signal. Just the date. October fourth.

  October fourth… the day Jin died in his dream.

  Aiden glanced from Jin’s face to his gun case sitting beside the bed. Making a decision, he started for it, only glancing at Jin because he knew he looked crazy. Jin eyed him from the bed, frowning, her hand twisting the thin white-gold chain between her fingers.

  Oh, god—the pocket watch around Jin’s neck.

  The watch Aiden had bought her was gold, with a piece of jade in the center of the cover. The watch Jin wore had no jade, but a carved phoenix, its wings spread wide, decorated the front.

  Aiden almost choked.

  The phoenix from his dream. It was here.

  A sound. Aiden looked up as if something was telling him, warning him. Not a dream.

  On the fire escape, a figure peered through the open blinds as if he’d been watching them for hours. A dark set of eyes locked with his, and Aiden watched the twist of the man’s lips as he mouthed a word around the burning cigarette parked between his lips.

  “Jinni.”

  The figure threw his head back in laughter, and his hand slunk to his waist to draw out a gun.

  Aiden opened his mouth to scream, his eyes flying to Jin in warning.

  The power went out.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Spring Street, Manhattan

  October 4; 5:23p.m.

  Tahir was well aware that Rooke was brilliant. There was no simple way to put it. The Magnus Academy for The Elite, the school in their realm, taught computers, but hacking into one wasn’t on the syllabus. Everything Rooke learned, he’d learned the hard way—ripping machines apart and putting them back together again, spending his time in the underbelly of the hacker subculture, learning from the best. Morris, Lyon, Lamo. Not angels by a long shot, but they weren’t devils, either.

  Tahir glanced at the two rudimentary-looking laptops Rooke had set on the shabby coffee table. Two black screens were filled with line after line of bright green text—something called Linux, according to Rooke—and the laptops whirred with every command he typed in. A bright-red skull sticker decorated the black casing of one laptop, while the other, all white, had devil horns. Interesting choice of decoration, considering Rooke’s quiet demeanor.

  It was Rooke who set things up for the team, networking them in and out of situations with the stroke of a few keys. It was Rooke who gave them eyes where they needed them, and ears in the right places. Everyone on Team Fox had a job. Currently, the tangle of cables and hardware that Tahir didn't understand was Rooke’s responsibility.

  Key was in a far corner raking over a complicated set of new timelines for the day’s Causatum. He was probably running figures and scenarios, possible pros and cons to their current setup. His job wasn’t much fun, which is why Tahir never desired leadership. Not that she was powerful enough for it yet, but when she was, she would decline. Leadership came with responsibility; for her, for Rooke, for the lives they saved and…no. Just no. That wasn’t her.

  Tahir had never experienced a Status 3 before, but Key had. This was Key’s zone, upping the ante to get shit done, and that experience was being thoroughly tested today.

  Deciding not to disturb him, Tahir took a seat on the edge of the couch—the apartment supposedly came furnished, but by the looks of it, the furniture was older than the three of them combined, and that was saying something—and bent forward until she could rest her chin on the hacker's shoulders.

  Rooke had been upset about the unresolved feed-disruption during the previous Causatum. That wasn’t something that he could live with. So he made some phone calls, visited a few friends, and eventually came up with a solution. The solution— indicated by a large, floating, crystal-shaped image on one screen—was a program that allowed Rooke to hack into all available security cameras in the area. It allowed them to spy on Jin and Aiden without the possibility of disruption.

  “It’s called Crystal. It's really easy,” Rooke explained, pointing at a random string of numbers that looked like chicken-scratch to Tahir. “By uploading this sequence to their control station server, and with it being an immaculate duplicate of their own algorithmic passkey, I can just submit this”—he tapped on a few keys, his tongue poking out from the corner of his mouth in concentration—“and we're in! So far I’ve been able to only get to three cameras. There’s one across the street at a clothing store, one in the stairwell, and some sicko across the street has a camera he likes to point into other people’s windows. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that he’s got a clear shot into Jin and Aiden’s apartment, but I don’t have the time to be disgusted. It has a three second delay while it switches between cameras. Law enforcement scans these kinds of programs, but the passkey I used helps us keep anonymous. Moral of the story is, it works and it won’t die on us.”

  “Uh…sure,” she said.

  The delay was unfortunate, but they would have a physical body in the hallway, so this was mainly for surveillance purposes. Her attention drifted from Rooke’s screens to the three large monitors as they changed to a live shot of Jin and Aiden reclining under a pillow fort. The shot was clear and flawless, ten times better than any previous feed they'd had this Causatum. Tahir was impressed.

  “They look mighty cozy for a pair who might die at any moment,” Key chided as he looked over Rooke’s shoulder at the screens.

  “Well, Aiden was the only one left with his memories intact, and at this point I’m sure he thinks he has a straitjacket in every color. I say being relaxed instead of stark raving mad is an improvement.”

  Key shrugged. “Parker’s right. It made sense to leave him with his memories. Maybe he can be of help instead of a being a hindrance.”

  Tahir balked. “I'd hardly call last time a hindrance. The report shows—”

  “—that Jin Amaris died.” Key took a pencil and circled four points on the timeline. “Fluff it up how you want, but she died. And look, I'm not being hard on him, but this time we've changed just enough for this to actually work without imploding the timeline and everyone in it. I don't need more forces working against us. That’s why he was left with his memories, so he'd know what's at stake.”

  Key walked over to the table. “Look at this,” he demanded as he laid down a long cut of rice paper across the length of it. “This is serious, and we don’t have much time left. So make good use of your lasers and computers and halo decks”— he waved frantically to the table covered in electronics—“and all of this crap so we can go home.”


  Rooke hmphed and stared at Key from over his shoulder. “It’s a holo deck,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Whatever. Just do it.” Key snatched his wig off and stomped off to an empty bedroom.

  Tahir sighed as the bedroom door slammed shut. She never took Key’s outbursts, random mood swings, or his rare combustible temper tantrums to heart. Leadership came with responsibility.

  Tahir also could tell that this mission was getting to him, regardless of how cool he played it. The stakes were higher, the bounty more precious, and even if The Fallen were tight-lipped about it, their scrambling around Caeli in preparation for this mission was enough to let Team Fox know how important Jin Amaris was.

  Swinging back to Rooke, Tahir glanced at the screen a final time. Trusting the younger man to have complete control of his duties, she squeezed his shoulder before marching over to a dark steel military footlocker parked under a window.

  The tire factory had been easy enough to track down—its location was pinpointed after the second Causatum. Why? Because Shen never thought anyone would be watching him. And technically he was right—no one would have been watching him. But technically, Shen was an anomaly, so technically Tahir didn’t give a shit what Shen was right about.

  George’s Tire World used to belong to a George Elder, although there wasn’t much information on him. According to the property records, he’d sold it to Yoon Zicon a few years ago, and it had served as a front for the now-defunct chop shop Zicon ran back then. Now most of the warehouse was gutted and used as a transitional home for any gang member—regardless of former allegiance—that wanted out. The tire sales were the source of financial support.

  What Tahir had in the footlocker was an assortment of weaponry ranging from high-powered rifles to low-caliber pistols, collected as each member transitioned in—leaving a chunk of their former life hidden away in a bunker under the warehouse floor. Knowing that, Tahir had simply borrowed some of their inventory. They wouldn't miss it.