by J D Cortese
William moved away, leaving Agdinar forlorn, watching his friends sleep.
Chapter 23
The morning was ice-cold as the sun rose across the Hudson Yards buildings. The day was calling the wind and, as they walked, a breeze started to take away all the warmth they'd accumulated during their night's rest.
It was an unstable moment, when the violence of the night receded, confronted with the busy city up north. People were called to work in Manhattan North, and, as they moved between the remainders of bonfires, smashed trash containers like sleepwalkers.
Sarinda was guiding them, and Agdinar followed without questioning her zigzagging path. She was a tough, confident person, and he needed her. He felt naked in a city—a world—that was becoming more alien to him with the passing days.
“All right,” Sarinda said. “Let's go.”
“Where?” Agdinar stood next to her, but he couldn't figure a direction in which to go. All streets were equally dangerous to them.
“Where? Down, of course. To the subway.”
And there they were, next to the fenced entrance of the North-South red subways.
Tysa took Agdinar's hand and dragged him to the old stairs.
For him, subways were as strange as space stations. And this when he had seen the Towers' outrageous designs for future space clusters, up in Earth's orbit, as invisible as all their creations.
At least the subways had a clear purpose. Before entering the lower level, Agdinar looked up, to an empty blue sky that wasn't really empty.
* * *
Agdinar found the subway warm, enough to feel how cold they had been for the last hour. But there was also a faint smell of smoke, coming from the homeless transients who had taken residency in the subway’s tunnels. Bonfires could be seen in the distance, tiny orange flowers deep into the dark circles that marked both ends of the station. Swirls of whitish smoke slowly crawled out of the rims of the tunnels.
A few transients stayed huddling on the station’s corners. They were there illegally but, to some extent, Agdinar and his friends also shouldn't have been there; they had climbed the ancient turnstiles without making a payment. Agdinar resisted joking about how the Major's daughter was not paying her dues in one of the last sources of money the city had left.
An unkempt transient walked toward them, staggering on an unsteady leg. Agdinar reacted by placing himself in front of his friends, trying to see what he was up to.
The man was tall, but his head was pulling his body forward and down, as if a large and invisible weight kept pushing him to hunch his back. He had mostly white hair, especially on the temples, and was probably younger than his appearance suggested. Tattoos of flying birds covered his neck, and the pale face was half colored by a permanent skin photo-image, showing a tree and a small house near a lake—the tree's canopy was prominent on his left cheek.
Agdinar couldn't fathom why someone would want a permanent reminder of what had been a past, happier life. That man was for sure one of the leftover anarchists, the ones who hadn't become well-paid thugs.
“You,” he said, only to Agdinar, “don't you know that the subway is off-limits at night?”
“Well, no, we didn't.” Agdinar continued to stand in front his friends, gesturing Tysa to remain behind him. His viewers hadn't decided if the poor man was a threat or learned if he was armed, as one of his hands remained in his jacket’s pocket. The jacket that the man was using had parts both burned and shredded, and his hiding of a hand made Agdinar suspicious.
“What are you looking at?” the man said, and he started to take his hand out of the side pocket.
Agdinar didn't want to use his suit's weapons. But his suit was telling him that the next train was two minutes away, plenty of time to get into considerable trouble.
He was going to raise his hand and discharge a bolt of blue electricity into the transient's chest, but then he saw why the man wasn't showing his hand. He was missing the thumb and two fingers.
Agdinar had heard of the street gangs that chased and tortured the downtrodden occupants of the city. Losing fingers to them was both a reality of living in the streets and one of the problems the daily inhabitants of the said streets ignored when complaining to Sarinda’s father.
He took one step toward the man. His suit told a story of constant pain in those fingers, and of someone who rarely slept anymore.
The subway was coming. The rattling noise was already loud, and it kept rising in pitch.
Before the man could react, Agdinar surrounded the wounded hand with his own two. Sarinda rushed to tug his arm, trying to move him away, while Agdinar’s suit suddenly lit with a whirlwind of light.
Sarinda moved in front of Tysa, trying to keep her from seeing Agdinar's suit as it emitted a glare that enveloped him and the stunned man.
As the suit crawled over it, the arm of the man turned luminous, making a small tornado of light.
The train arrived with explosive noise, jumping and swerving over the uneven rails. It was as empty as the station.
Sarinda grabbed Agdinar from his shoulder and pulled him away. They moved together incoherently, each trying to regain equilibrium as the other stumbled. A door opened right next to them, and they jumped inside.
The man kept mumbling to himself and to the strange group of kids, and he tried to reach the door, which closed all too quickly for him. The subway started to trudge its way to the next station.
Agdinar couldn't talk and watched the station pass. He knew now that the man, who had been a pretty child and lost everything to the city and its perverse violence, would soon notice his hand didn't hurt. And he also knew that the man's hand had had its missing fingers restored with working mind-controlled similes. It would never hurt again.
Something wasn’t right about what had happened. The power Agdinar used from his suit was unlike anything he knew how to do, and, even more difficult to comprehend, it was beyond what he knew Watchers could do with any standard suit.
* * *
Emerging from the subway to the cold morning, and surrounded by people rushing to jobs and breakfasts, they had the illusion of being in a normal city. If someone looked at the Lincoln Center just in the right angle and light, New York would still be the bustling metropolis of the past, a city that many had considered the most beautiful in the world.
They didn't look so normal and clean themselves as to integrate with the early workers. Sarinda and Agdinar had their self-repairing suits, now unlit and opaquely black, but, although those could fix any structural damage, they weren’t self-cleaning, and crusted dirt and grime covered their legs after bouncing around so many buildings and streets.
Tysa, still in her old black jeans, had large tears in her blue jacket that made her look like a young beggar. Her hair was dirty, and it fell around her neck in clumpy bunches. She hadn't taken a shower at William's apartment, being so tired that she'd slept through most of the night.
The suited members of the group had had showers and eaten, but even after those sandwiches and cookies with hot tea, their stomachs kept growling.
Agdinar approached Sarinda, who was watching a small corner park. It had a somber statue that, from afar, resembled to him a caped demon.
“What's that?” Agdinar asked, just to get her to talk.
“A statue of Dante Alighieri. He wrote the poem about...well, Hell and Heaven, you know, all those condemned people.”
He didn't know much about ancient literature. “Remarkable,” he managed to say.
“Let's go and get breakfast,” Sarinda said. Tysa turned to look at her.
“We don't have any money...credits.” Agdinar knew about the plastic coins that transiently absorbed fingerprints and accessed the owner’s bank accounts, but he kept thinking instead of the old, beautiful coins with faces in relief he’d seen in archive view-vaults.
“I've borrowed a few credits from William,” Sarinda answered, putting her hands in both pockets and searching.
“I love Wi
lliam,” said Tysa. “He's great. We should have stayed with him.”
“No, Tysa,” Sarinda answered, curtly. “We are going to go to my father's apartment and talk with him. He needs to know what happened. He's going to get quite angry with the Hawks.”
“Like that would have an effect,” said Tysa, as she started to walk away from them.
“I think we're still sleepy,” Agdinar said, trying to avoid more discussions. “Where can we have more food to eat?” He was sleepy, but also hungry.
“Right on the corner,” she said, gesturing Tysa to come back with them. “It's the old StarCoffee place.”
* * *
“I haven't been in a coffee place for a long time,” said Tysa. “It's so...it looks old.”
“It's not old,” Sarinda said, pointing to the back of the store. “Just that all the new stores don't have tables anymore.”
“Maybe, but you, Ag—Agd'nar,” Tysa said, “when was the last time you went out for coffee?” She smiled, enjoying a teasing of Agdinar’s alienness.
“It has been a while.”
“They don't let you get out much in the military, do they?”
“I'm not with the military.”
“Come on, don't joke. With that costume, you look like you've just graduated from the academy in Maryland.”
Sarinda waved at her friend to stop. “Look at his hair, Tysa. Isn't it a little long for a cadet?”
“Not for Special Forces. Or underwater troops. Ah, also there’s the CIA’s old types. All with long hairdos, to fool us.”
Agdinar smiled at Tysa the best he could. “You really don't like the military.”
“No, not just the military, I hate all of the government. They are trying to control people and take away our freedoms.”
“You know,” Sarinda said, “that's not true. My father—”
“I thought you hated your Dad,” Tysa said. “He's also one of them, sending the police to do his dirty work.”
Agdinar had to interrupt them. “You know, Tysa, the police tried to take over the City Hall’s hangout of the Hawks. Without them—”
“It's all a dance, soldier,” Tysa answered with a smile. “They do this every week, to justify their pay. I don't think they use real bullets.”
“Ah, girl,” Sarinda said, snickering. “You have a twisted view of the world.”
“Only twisted enough to fit the world that's in front of me.”
Sarinda chuckled. “That's funny.”
“Not really.”
Tysa was going to stand, but Sarinda extended her hand and grabbed her forearm. They stared at each other, and Agdinar turned to look around the coffeehouse, trying to find a little more peace on the distracted faces who stared at their arm consoles.
“So, how old is this place?” Agdinar didn't know much about city businesses, as he'd been watching mostly the large movements of the city’s history.
“Old. It used to be called...Stars and Beaks, something like that.”
Agdinar did know that drinking coffee together had been a powerful social activity in New York. The coffeehouse was in the street floor of a large centenarian building, which loomed over the tiny park. The shop’s owner, an old woman who liked to stretch her body over the counter to better hear them, gently explained that StarCoffee had been once part of a long-standing, and at a time prosperous, family of stores. But her store had not changed much in the previous quarter century; its wood counters and tall stools set against the windows spoke of a New York where busy workers would stop to get coffee, beverages, and snacks before resuming their daily routine. Or, like those sitting at the morning tables, before starting it.
New York wasn't the same at the mid-century, and few people could afford a rare infusion from an endangered species, so they drank bio-engineered solutions whose bacterial sources were better left unexplained. Drinking coffee was now more of a banker's thing, and most of the occupants of StarCoffee—both men and women—were dressed in expensive dark suits. It resembled a private club for the rich.
The owner was very polite, and she hadn't complained about the dirty clothes of the youngsters—perhaps thinking the two in black suits were young members of a special police group, resting after carrying out some better-not-to-be-talked-about operation.
Tysa soon found a table she liked and sat with both elbows on it, watching the old chalk blackboard with the menu of the day. From that table, Agdinar couldn't see the fascinating Dante statue, and soon he turned his attention to the avenue running across the window. The automatic bus cars whined their songs as they passed each other in all directions. Broadway Avenue was so busy that it was now only safe for self-driven vehicles, with no marked direction and forming a constant, vertiginous flow of colorful beads, always looking in the brink of spectacular collisions.
He thought about controlled chaos at the heart of the city.
And then he turned to Sarinda, who was delighting at the sight and smell of her recently-arrived cup of coffee.
They were both smiling when the windows exploded.
Chapter 24
Fragments of windows covered the street side of the coffeehouse. One of the windowpanes, badly damaged, had fallen over a table that was mercifully empty from its three customers; they had rushed away, jumping over the demolished side counters.
On the opposite side of StarCoffee, the owner's counter was now reduced to a desk with rough edges, shortened by what looked like a snowplow. The vehicle that burst into the peaceful coffee-drinkers' hangout was an order of magnitude more war-like than the transport which chased the trio out of City Hall Park. It had layers of anti-weapon armor covering it like a metallic onion. And it was topped by a turret with multiple weapons ready to spew each of the alchemic elements—fire, water, explosive air blasts, and iron, lots of iron, representing the earth.
It was a true tank, and only the police had those.
Agdinar moved fast, given the surprise of the attack. He had seen the hatch of the vehicle's roof starting to open. He took Tysa's hand and dragged her as soon as she stood.
He gestured Sarinda to come with him, and she did, stepping around a woman who lay in shock, shivering uncontrollably. She was soaked in blood.
Before they managed to cross the space where the establishment’s windows had been present a minute earlier, armored policemen started to come out of the tank. Their vehicle was awkwardly placed between the smashed counter and a missing column of the building, an absence that had tilted the wall to an unnatural angle.
Agdinar didn't need confirmation from his suit to know that these people were there to kill them.
Sarinda reached for his free hand, and there was a flash of blue light. The sounds of the collapsing world around them muffled.
Tysa opened her mouth but was too stunned to say anything. Sarinda grabbed her shoulder and pulled her in the direction of Agdinar and the outside street.
The three policemen who got out of the attack vehicle started to swivel one of the tank’s guns—a dual electric-bullet contraption—and pointed it first at the disheveled owner, who stood paralyzed near her counter, and then, with certainty, straight at the spot where the teenagers had been standing.
The two tall kids in black suits and the young girl were gone.
* * *
Agdinar dragged his friends—hands linked—across the last pile of debris covering the coffeehouse’s floor, and straight to the still-standing booths, which formed a line between them and the outside.
They crossed the booths and the one intact window as if they were holographic posters. It was the first time for Tysa and, as soon as they got to the street, she knelt and threw up.
Agdinar knew this was going to happen—his stomach wasn't doing well either—but they had to run from that place as soon as possible. From outside, he could see the back of the attack vehicle, like a huge beetle that was burying itself in the rubble.
But it wasn't the vehicle that made his heart suddenly race and stopped his breathing. Or
the earthy smell of the dust cloud around them. Not even the six police cars on the street, set in a circle with their flashing lights on; or the other half dozen screeching their way to them on the avenues that converged in Lincoln Center. And for sure it wasn't the growing crowd of passersby congregating at the site of an exciting disaster.
It was that his viewers had not alerted him about the pending attack, and while Sarinda might not have noticed her suit’s alarms, he was quite familiar with their emergency bio-visual signals. No auto-defensive moves, like invisibility shifts, had been triggered.
Someone had sold them out—at least, him—to the police, and for that, there was only one candidate.
The Towers.
And there, of course, the Overseer. He could have done this, to stop Agdinar from causing more trouble. A swift move to cancel him, his nagging problem.
He briefly hugged Tysa, who didn't resist, and pulled Sarinda toward his side, sure to take her arm and bring her into a new invisibility core.
The world turned red, the dark red of blood. Nobody could see them now.
There wasn't so much charge left in their suits, even if he considered his and Sarinda's together, but he had to do it.
He switched on his environmental scanning, fully knowing he would be detected by the Towers in less than a minute. And the suit’s charge would evaporate completely after that minute had passed.
He knew what he might see but wanted to be sure.
Three tall robots, humanoid but with elongated proportions that made them look like a cross of giraffes with orangutans, were standing close to the broken end of the StarCoffee.
They were visible only to him.
They were Watchers' elite ground robots.
And they all turned at once to fix their brilliant golden eyes on him.
“We have to move,” said Agdinar.
Before Sarinda could answer, he pulled her hand and she followed. After a second of hesitation, Tysa joined them in what by now was a sprint.
