We Aimless Few

by Robert J. Crane

  We Aimless Few

  The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 6

  Robert J. Crane

  We Aimless Few

  The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 6

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2018 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email cyrusdavidon@gmail.com.

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Author’s Note

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  1

  Now

  No matter how hard I try, I just cannot stay out of trouble.

  “CEASE THIS,” trilled the many-armed automaton—and it thrust at me again with long, winding arms, like the tentacles of an octopus, all winding and twisting in a vortex of shimmering silver slicked with rain.

  I swung up Decidian’s Spear to meet it. A powerful metallic CLANG, and it was reeling backward.

  I pushed forward with another swing—

  “Where am I supposed to stab you?!” I shouted, the pointed end of the spear screeching across the automaton’s metal carapace—

  —and then I was sprinting. Better part of valor and all that. Fighting an invincible metal robot was stupid, and not my particular brand (hah) of stupid.

  These damned things—so many of them, right on our tails.

  A distant thought went out to the others—how were they doing?—but the damned street began to tilt under me. All of it metal, a deeply dark color, the downpour had turned the entire city into a treacherous battlefield.

  And even the damned battlefield itself was working against me.

  The cityscape stretched around me, a vast skyline of dark metal. A storm roiled overhead, turning the surfaces slick, and gluing my hair to my head, my clothes to my body. There was a faintly burnt smell in the air, an odor like fumes belched from the exhaust of dozens of cars, idling in traffic, all their catalytic converters on their very last legs.

  I tilted forward, into the rising slope, as mechanisms lifted the street beneath my feet even as I fought to pound away—“Oh, for crying out loud …!”—but the angle became too much. My legs fell out from under me. I clattered hard onto my hands, Decidian’s Spear digging into both palms where I gripped it.

  I yelped.

  I was falling.

  I had a dizzying moment where the towering cityscape came into view overhead, dark metal smears against an equally dark and stormy sky. Lights illuminated it in streaks, not unlike that last awful place where Manny and I had gone, before he—before he …

  I couldn’t think of the word. But I should’ve—because as I rolled down the increasing gradient, toward the barrel-bodied, many-armed automaton bleating at me, it was exactly the fate I was about to befall.

  I had one second to scream, to bring Decidian’s Spear about—

  And then I fell into its twisting maze of arms.

  2

  This Morning

  Thirty-seven days since my brother disappeared. Thirty-seven days since he stepped through a gate into a void and was wiped from the face of existence. Thirty-seven days since I watched it happen, right before my very eyes, powerless to stop it from the clutch of a—a malevolent god, the alien equivalent of a boy with a magnifying glass and a garden full of bugs, or whatever the Antecessors can be called.

  Thirty-seven days since I gave up Seeking.

  I don’t know the date. Sometime in September, I should think. I can work it out, actually, because I know when Manny … when he stepped into the void. But mostly I just count.

  Counting is as close to living as I really get these days.

  Except today. Mum decided I’d been moping about the house too much.

  The best way of curing it?

  Taking me on a walk into Colchester town center to the Sainsbury’s tucked down Priory Walk.

  I followed along in a dreary fog. The heat was high—damn the Indian summer I’d managed to largely avoid in my hideout and, you know, in as many other worlds than this one I could squeeze into a day—but nevertheless I’d gone out in a hoodie.

  “You don’t need to wear that today,” said Mum when I came down the stairs to meet her at the front door. “It is baking hot. You will melt.”

  Melting sounded just fine to me, thank you. A drizzle of Mira Brand spread across the sidewalk like jam? Didn't seem like the worst thing that had happened to me in the last month or so.

  “I’m not hot,” I said.

  She scrutinized me.

  In the months we’d been apart, I’d forgotten a lot about Mum. I forgot how strong her Nigerian accent remained, and how foreign I sometimes felt beside her with a rather more Essex ‘twang’ (read: totally lazy with the letter ‘T’, ‘H’ was ignored on the beginning of most words: I’ve bin to twenny ’otels this week. No one has ever said that specific example sentence, but you get the picture).

  I forgot how expressive her face was. Anyone scrutinized by Mum knew it was happening; it was a very blatant thing. Her left eye narrowed, like she was peering through an eyeglass stuck up to the other, and her lips came forward in a sort of duck-ish pout. Dad called it her Popeye look, minus the pipe. Had to Google that one, but he was kind of on the money.

  “You have plenty of summer dresses,” she said, quite firmly.

  “I’m fine in this.”

  Her lips thinned. A look up and down, not concealed, nor her look of disdain. Then she said, “We will go.”

  We did … and every few minutes, as we walked, she looked over. “My, it is hot today.” She dramatically wiped her forehead, as though she were beaded with sweat already. Then, a couple of minutes down the road: “You would look so much nicer in the dress your father bought you for your birthday last year. I know you still fit in it.” A little farther, when we passed a pair of girls headed in the opposite direction, laughing and joking: “Look at their dresses. Much more appropriate for this weather.”

  I looked behind. Close to my age, either they were off to a barbecue or had a drinking problem, because both of their Tesco bags clinked with bottles of spirits. No comment on that from Mum, though. Why would she? She was busy drumming in just how I should’ve listened to her and gone upstairs to put on a garish orange thing with brown triangles—like some sort of bizarre Cubist leopard.

  I just listened and followed and let her prattle on. Sometimes I had to add something—conversation with Mum wasn’t just totally one-sided, although you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise—but
mostly I just walked along, half a step behind, and let her words flow over me.

  Town was busy. All the sixth-formers and college students were back to their studies, so they drifted about the town in pairs, threes, the odd larger group on their off periods. During the day, Colchester wasn’t really free of them, honestly, any time of the year—not teens, at any rate. If it’s not college students in the week, it’s a drove of secondary-schoolers at the weekends, flocking to Castle Park or milling about town for who knows what—loitering, I guess, which … makes me feel really damned old, not seeing the apparent fun value in it. They’re here during the holidays too, unless it’s pouring rain.

  The market was in session, or what passed as one anyway, down the rear of Marks & Spencers. With only four stalls in total, it’s hard to believe my mum is interested in three of them—the veg stall, where she picked up a bundle of carrots, runner beans, and a broccoli; a clothes stall, where she perused dresses on a rack with a hand drawn sign (“£5 EACH, £8 FOR 2”) and made a show of holding them up and alternating looks at me; and finally the fishmongers, which smelled of, yes, fish. Better that than the vape stall beside it though, the only one Mum didn’t have any interest in, with its many-flavored liquids. The man sat there looking bored. Which was weird, because the way people have started harping on about vaping, you’d think it was a laugh a minute.

  Past Poundland, past a very ill-positioned Argos (I once saw a fat, long-haired teenager muscling a flat-packed television stand out of the door and toward the bus station), and finally down Priory Walk—which is one of many areas in Colchester that looks like a bomb has hit. A full third of the shops there were closed. At least two of those—an Asian food market, and a knock-off CEX that I swear had had a full window display of VHS tapes when it was open—had been closed before last Christmas.

  Mum was still prattling on when we walked into Sainsbury’s. Overhead air conditioning blew down the back of my hoodie, a little too cold to be a welcome chill even in the morning’s high heat.

  Along the veg aisle, where Mum looked at carrots and runner beans and broccoli even though she had a carrier bag with all three of these things already; then to the chillers to pick the meat for tonight’s stew. (Because summer is most definitely stew weather.)

  “Isn’t this nice,” said Mum, as she ambled for the third time past the beef. She picked up a packet of diced beef, also for the third time, and had a long, good look at it.

  Please. Pick that one. And then let this grocery death march be over.

  “Shopping with your mum,” she droned on, putting the diced beef back on the shelf and moving on again. “What a nice way to spend a morning.” So humble, my mother. She was back to the diced beef. She picked it up once more, peering at it with her Popeye look, left eye even more squinted than ever. Assessing how fatty it was? The size of the pieces? Ascertaining its molecular structure to check the spices would glue to it so as to maximize its flavor?

  “A nice, normal morning,” she murmured.

  Staring at some beef. Yep. Super nice.

  After a literal age of weighing it up, she finally decided that, yes, this was the diced beef that she wanted. She laid it gingerly in her basket, held in the crook of her elbow, and then it was a come-along look at me before she bustled farther into the shop.

  “Spices, spices,” she mused, pausing to peer up and down every aisle.

  I followed, hands in my hoodie’s pockets.

  Mum found them eventually—which was kind of ridiculous, because she must’ve come in this particular Sainsbury’s umpteen times over the years, and the staff weren’t in the habit of rearranging the contents of the aisles every other week.

  She scoured the offerings, rows and rows of small glass jars with helpful bold letters on the front—‘B’ for basil, ‘C’ for cayenne but also crushed chilis as well as chili powder, ‘P’ for paprika and parsley, and also peppercorns. Funny to think you could alphabetize your spice rack.

  Mum selected a handful of jars, very methodical, as she had been with the diced beef. They tinkled against each other in the basket, as she moved off again, this time for chopped tomatoes—tinned, all the work done for her. There, she picked up four tins of the basics variety, with a white label, thirty-three pence a can, as cheap as you could get.

  Distantly, I thought this act of penny-pinching peculiar. In the Seeker world, we Brands were well off—the many-bedroomed, three-floored house my parents owned was a testament to that. Saving twenty, thirty pence a tin on chopped tomatoes wasn’t down to any particular need to. But maybe it was a part of her own upbringing, before meeting my dad, a thrifty childhood where every penny counted. Wouldn’t surprise me. She was from Nigeria. I didn’t know a whole lot about it—never visited, didn’t listen much to Mum’s reminiscing when she started—but I knew it definitely did not have the droves of rich princes that email spammers claimed.

  Mum filled out her shopping basket with some last things—a sourdough loaf from the bakery, a bottle of extra virgin olive oil, then a pause to consider a rack of romance novels, although she didn’t pick one up. Then she meandered to the self-service area, chattering on and off all the while as I dragged my heels in her wake.

  “We must find something for you to do,” she was saying. “You need to get back on track.” She eyed the bored-looking teenager who stood beside the self-service area, watching for the blink of a light that heralded him to help with some poor sap whose machine had had a temper tantrum because its customer had, heavens forbid, placed something in the bagging area a moment sooner than anticipated. “Maybe a job will give you some direction?”

  “I don’t want to work in Sainsbury’s, Mum,” I muttered.

  “No, of course not,” she said, swiping the diced beef past the scanner—beep. Please place the item in the bagging area. “Something, though—something that will challenge you—but safely.” She added that last bit sternly, shooting me a beady-eyed glare.

  I just waited, enduring it.

  Mum must’ve expected something from me—maybe she even wanted something—because, when I did not reply, she sighed heavily. “This gap year business … I did warn you, many times. It’s dangerous out there, for a little girl.”

  My irritation flared at that. Yet the spark died just as soon as it had breathed.

  “Why, just look at what happened to Manny. And he is—he was … so capable.”

  She was sniffling now.

  I hated this. She always sounded so damned dramatic when she cried, like an amateur theatre student. And yes, for good reason—her son, my brother, had … had...

  (died)

  ...gone. It hurt me too—damn, did it hurt.

  But Mum sounded so much like a bad actor on a soap opera that I couldn’t help the new flare of emotion in me: second-hand embarrassment.

  She’d finished scanning all her shopping now. It sat in a canvas bag in the bagging area, packed in with perfect order. The machine was bleating at her to choose her payment method. It had been for a while though—and with Mum in the early stages of a mental breakdown, right here in the Sainsbury’s self-service area, she was drawing attention from the gangly teenager poised to help.

  Looking half-petrified at the woman wiping tears out of the corners of her eyes with one hand, fanning herself with the other, he approached in his maroon T-shirt. The name badge proclaimed him JACK.

  “Are you okay?” he stammered, casting a wide-eyed look between us.

  Mum nodded, swallowing down gulps of air like they’d steady her emotions before they got too far out of control. She waved the boy off. He cast his terrified gaze at me, for confirmation, then scurried away before I could grant it.

  If only I could do the same.

  When finally she had gathered herself, she tapped her debit card on the contactless reader. The machine printed out a receipt, then spewed three vouchers for bonus Nectar points, or money off, or something—all of which she grabbed and shoved into her purse, and all of which would be fished out
in a month’s time and placed in the recycling because they’d expired—and then she fetched up the bag and trotted out of the shop. With that, her bag from the market, and the puffy little flowery handbag she carried everywhere with her, she looked like the human equivalent of a packhorse.

  “We’ll find something nice for you,” she droned, grief left behind in her mad dash back to finding a purpose for my flailing self. “A nice little job—maybe an office job?—where you’ll be safe from the dangers of the world …”

  I ignored her. Apathy kept me from scowling.

  She turned sharply, glaring, at the end of Priory Walk.

  “I am serious, Mira,” she said, her accent coming on thicker—always did, when her temper flared like this. “You have walked around like a zombie for long enough. It is time to get your life back on track, all of this madness put behind you. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, Mother.” It was all I could muster in reply.

  I sounded just as zombified as I ever had. And that was bad, when I’d been accused of shambling about like the undead. But I had agreed with her—and so that won out. Mum’s irritated expression was replaced with a look of victory. She nodded and turned and headed onward.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, what was it I saw in the papers this morning? There was a vacancy at …”

  She droned, and I tuned it out—half because I didn’t want to hear it, and half because, as we walked past the health food shop (which had more bottles of dietary supplements than food capable of providing those nutrients in the first place), a streak of black on the opposite street caught my eye.

  Someone was watching me, in a long, dark coat, even more out of place in the summer than I was.

  And that someone was Alain Borrick.

  3

  Borrick crossed the road, looking out for traffic. Which was pointless—in this part of Colchester, the roads weren’t used by traffic unless it was to come deliver to the Argos, one of the other shops along this street, or to set up a market stall, like the one selling ancient CDs that would one day go out of business when its elderly clientele finally died. The rest of the time—that is to say, all but two one-hour windows, one pre-dawn and one close to sundown—these local roads were effectively just a super wide pavement.