by David Finn
‘Nobody.’
‘Did you call the number?’
Jackie’s face was absolutely blank.
‘Not a chance in hell. I was going to send a couple of the better Innocents in. The kind who extract or kill.’
‘I’m back now. Let me handle it.’
Jackie nodded. ‘Ms President, your mask fell off when I mentioned Gareth.’
Demorn’s hand went to her face and it was true. The mask was gone, just a thin mesh in her fingers. She put it back in her jacket.
‘Who cares, it’s just something to freak people out.’
Jackie smiled perfectly. ‘You do look just like your photos. You played with your gun the whole time we spoke. I thought it might have been you. See you tomorrow.’
Demorn laughed. It was true. The pistol lay in her hand. Getting out from the Grave hadn’t changed anything really. This life was still one of floating over landmines.
She went to say something but Jackie had already winked out of existence. There was nobody left to talk to. The people at the fire were dancing to their own strange music. Demorn left, her mind flickering up through the layers of the trance, synching out of the implant, shivering slightly as she woke suddenly in the white chair, disorientated by how deep she had gone and the effort it had taken.
Her hand gripped the pistol tightly. The boys were betting on the tennis and baseball.
She let out a deep breath, running her hand through her long hair.
Gareth. Gareth.
2
* * *
She opened her bedroom door, the unicorn glittering. Dead littered the corridor, faces charred and eyes shattered. There was no logic to it.
Cleaners, guests, soldiers, all gone in horrible agony. Even a low level psychic like Demorn could pick up the echoes. She could still feel the heat in the air.
Her hand caressed the pistol on her leg as she pressed forward through the hotel.
Demorn blinked.
The corridor was empty, all heat was gone, replaced by the impersonal cold of hotel air conditioning.
Oil paintings hung on the walls. Reassuring depictions of men in black suits. Beautifully dressed women, way back sometime in the distant past, in a place she always imagined as France.
But her eyes were wise and could pierce through much of this illusion. The burning people were there, flickering in and out of reality. She kept walking. Demorn saw ghosts wandering the empty corridors, faces of those she had killed herself, brought down by the sword and the gun.
She turned her eyes away from their haunted, questioning faces, not from fear, but because she did not want to reveal too much. Demorn knew the dead wandered both the past and future.
She turned a corner. The walls were mirrored black glass, no more French paintings. Colourful images of the War burst out, interspersed with naked girls in clubs gyrating as the bombs fell, making her body ache, beauty and devastation splashed across beautiful mirrors.
Best not to think of that, she thought, stroking the black glass walls with her pale fingers, making it all go silent again.
A door at the end of the corridor lit up with a vivid purple fire. The flames were a woven intricately design of flaming birds.
Her invisible watch flashed a brilliant blue, interlocking with the images on the door. Fiery birds winging over a blinding blue sea. She heard the lock click open.
Demorn pushed the door open and walked through.
Everything was a perfect white void for one moment. The sense of space was terrifyingly vast. An emptiness as much to her mind as to her eye.
She vaguely heard the door close behind her. She closed her magic eyes, but the white emptiness penetrated everything, it was in her soul . . .
Demorn opened her eyes again. Smile hung in the air, wearing a plain white robe. Flashes of silver and red rolled through him.
Demorn smiled. ‘Are you lost on some weird Jesus trip?’
As she watched, complex, vivid images swirled on the robe, scenes of fire and flood, and a great mountain which rose above it all. Until in the end it too crumbled into the deluge.
All was still and he stood there. He seemed even younger than she had remembered. Thin, with the same pale face, wearing an engaging smile.
‘Wow, everything worked, Sis, you’re back!’ he cried.
They hugged tightly. She could feel his form, vibrating in her arms, trembling with power.
Demorn kissed him softly not wanting to let go, not after two years.
‘Hiya, bro. Yes it worked, in a very complicated way.’
‘Babelzon is hard to find.’
He drifted upward, his body mostly a hologram of light. His chest was marked with incision scars, reminders of the surgeries and the experiments of his torturers. She caught the robe between her fingers, pulling him back to her, making him more solid.
‘What did they do to you in Mexico?’
He smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, Sis, what didn’t they do?’
As his feet touched the floor, the room around them became more solid, too.
Demorn seemed to wake up. ‘This is a dream. Where are you?’
His fingers passed through her head. ‘We are Asanti, Mighty Sister. We drift through each other’s dreams, do we not?’
‘Of course we do.’
‘Mexico only just happened. I’m still in the floating chamber. You haven’t even rescued me yet.’
He paused. ‘You will soon though. You’re killing the scientists as I talk.’
She glanced back at the closed door. ‘What about the people back there?’
He nodded. ‘Sad.’
‘Very sad. I take it was you.’
He leaned his head sideways. ‘It was.’
‘Without mercy or afterthought?’
He smiled and his golden teeth sparkled. ‘What makes you think I haven’t thought of it?’
His face had gone a delicate blue. The room was still shining white.
‘Look at your watch, Sister.’
She did. The hands were slowly spinning backward.
‘It doesn’t normally do that,’ she said dryly.
The watch hands spun back in the clockwise direction.
‘Of course not. We’re not always here, in the Jade Hotel, while everything flickers around us.’
She looked through the white room. It was stylish and huge. She could see a big, modern kitchen. In the distance lay his bed, a four poster with black silk curtains drawn around it. She saw two naked women luxuriating inside. The Sympaths.
‘Catch me up, Smile. The last time we spoke I was killing zombies and rabid humans in LA. Where are we?’
Looking beyond, she caught blurry images of the sea. She was drawn to it, a black and white rolling ocean. It was more like a sketch than a real thing.
He said, ‘Ki City, above the Sea.’
She walked through the white, toward the black glass window.
Her eyes and mind hurt as she looked upon the grey-white blank weirdness of the waves, flecked with the occasional flash of blue.
Ki City.
‘What have you done while I have been gone?’
His light blue hand touched her shoulder gently. ‘Many things, sister of mine.’
He snapped his finger softly. Electro-pop played.
‘I’ve kept the Innocents alive. You were gone too long, and it got so lonely and vacant. I needed to keep moving.’
He rested his head on her shoulder. He smelt like strawberries.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It felt like everyone forgot me.’
‘I didn’t forget. It was awful for me, too. The clubhouse kids will be so happy. You’re worshipped as a hero.’
‘I shouldn’t be. In the end, I watched zombie movies every night while skeletons roamed outside.’
‘That sounds depressing.’
‘It was. It didn’t feel like there was anyone left to save. Smile, did you really kill innocent people?’
‘No.’
Her heart loose
ned a notch. ‘Really?’
His face faded from blue, glinting in the monochrome light. His graceful fingers traced the pink outline of a clock.
‘One time in Mexico, you didn’t get to me in time. You didn’t get to me till they were finished and through with me. Their experiments unlocked everything, laid all my codes bare.’
Demorn said, ‘But I did make it, I killed them all.’
His eyes glittered orange. His voice was a death whisper.
‘But not here. They made me really bad. I caught fire. I burnt everything, burnt them all up. I didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop.’
He placed his hand against the whiteness and she could see the fire in him, flickering through his core.
‘Imagine being completely ablaze in this dirty world. Imagine feeling like you could burn through all the cobweb lies. And so you do, Demorn. You do.’
The flames suddenly vanished. ‘It’s only one of a thousand possible futures. It didn’t happen. You did get to Mexico City, you found me, the scientists didn’t unlock that part of me. Not quite.’
Smile’s eyes were glassy and vacant. He turned ghostly, then solid diamond, and back again. His voice wavered in and out of tune as he looked onto the waves with his diamond eyes, endlessly falling in black and white lines like an old school test pattern.
‘You’re there now, Demorn, you’re in the room. You’ve killed all the scientists, you’re taking me out of the tank, I’m safe again.’
She kept a reassuring hand around his shoulder, holding him tight. The words of Duke Pain echoed in her like a dream, and she couldn’t remember if she had killed him or left him as a friend.
Things will get weird before they better. Things will get weird before they get better.
Her voice was calm. ‘I made it, Smile. I found the base. I killed them all. I didn’t leave anybody alive. And I hunted down the handlers, until you begged me to stop.’
She looked around the room, which was growing ever more solid, couches and bookcases coming into view, replete with fashionable books and trendy comics.
‘You did well while I was away. Jackie Z was a good hire. I met her last night.’
Suddenly, Smile brightened, his golden smile ablaze. He drew dollar bill signs across the black window.
‘Thank you! Jackie gets paid a lot but she’s worth a lot. So here we are, just like old times! SAFE AND SOUND! Making MONEY!’
He threw his arms around Demorn. She giggled. It was good to have him back, loud and dramatic as he was.
Smile was suddenly in a sleek grey business suit.
She was in black combat pants and a pale blue Wolverine t-shirt that she’d never found in The Grave, no matter how many abandoned comic stores she had prowled through.
She checked her watch. The clock hands were moving the right way again, although time and space still felt very fluid in the room.
She looked at the white wall. Her ring finger ached with a horrible cold.
‘Why did you meet me in this dream, Smile?’
‘A friend sent you something.’
A pale pink envelope glowed upon the wall.
She tried to ignore his kind eyes as she tore the envelope off the wall, fighting the urge to tear open the delicate paper, her heart beating faster and faster.
Cherry-pink writing sparkled on the paper, written in a heartbreakingly familiar spidery script. Just a few lines, every word so important.
Dear Demorn, I love you so much but it’s ashes now & we both know it. Paris sucks without you. Love Kate xx
The writing glistened on the paper. A shadow image formed of Kate floating in the air, feet clasped in a traditional yoga pose, dressed in a filmy negligee, drifting through an expensive hotel room in Paris, her fingers tracing the pink words.
Paris sucks without you. Shallow words. But Kate’s blue eyes were so pale and haunted. She was crying too. The image held for a few seconds, then Kate faded away.
It’s ashes now & we both know it.
‘What’s the point of chasing anybody?’
But Demorn wasn’t really asking. She felt blank.
Paris sucks without you.
The room was a dreamy mishmash of light and dark. The waves from outside, rising up and down, in this Ki City.
‘Don’t watch the black and white sea, it will leave you sad,’ Smile said. He drew a black silk curtain over the window.
Something terrible and cold lay on her finger. The familiar ache. It was the icy bone ring, phantom like. She had left it back in her bedroom at the Clubhouse, but there was no easy way of escaping it, Demorn realized with a cold horror. No escape after two long years in the Grave with nothing but death for company.
Demorn threw away the skull ring, smashing it against the white wall, feeling the ice fall from her heart, letting it go, forever. She never wanted the numbness again. No, she wanted this. She wanted the horrible, jagged ruin her heart had become.
Without even realizing it, Demorn found herself huddled on his bed, everything raw. The naked Sympaths nursed her, palms pressed against her head and ruby heart, letting the emotions pour out, dialed direct into her pressure points. They knew that in the ecstasy lay the pain. In the pain lay the rebirth. The mantra fed through her mind. She didn’t raise a single shield. She let it happen, let them both drain and feed her. It was the truth.
Smile held her, a floating ghostly presence, murmuring it was a real love and that all things die and grow again, his face phasing golden to porcelain blue. All things die and grow again.
Fragile powers moved through him, slowly healing, making the tears on her face sparkle bright colors. She remembered the girl she loved, so deeply, for so long. For a while, they lay there, behind the black silk curtains. The Sympaths slid out with barely a sound.
Finally it seemed the worst was over.
She stirred, rolling back on the pillows, exhaling. Her finger was free of the phantom ring. She was awake. She felt clean. Demorn wiped her burning eyes.
She went to the window. The sight of Ki City washed across her like a breath of fresh air. The Jade Hotel was on the harbor. Huge trawlers and floating supply depots were stationed in the near distance, out at sea. Military aircraft buzzed overhead.
She said, ‘You really got us to Ki, this isn’t bullshit. Do you use teleports? You could be handy in a battle.’
Smile giggled, and they both laughed hard at the absurdity. He pressed two fingers along the side of her head.
‘It’s transcendental. I couldn’t move you an inch if you didn’t want to go.’
‘It’s very cool actually,’ she said, catching her breath at last.
Demorn took a long look over the city. From her vantage point she could see the great gambling houses of Ki, glittering on the foreshore, greeting every new arrival with their hypnotic logo. She tore her eyes away.
‘Y’know, a lot of people call this a cursed city. They say you can you can loop out and die here. I never found it that sticky. Just another gambling town, complete with pretty soldiers and dancing girls.’
Smile shrugged. ‘First time here for me, Sis.’
Demorn suddenly craved a lemonade. She wandered over to the couch, tossing her black jacket on, feeling comfortable, ready for action.
‘There’s an old friend I need to check up on.’
She got her sunglasses out of her jacket, letting the purple slide over everything.
‘Who?’
‘I call him Dead Gareth.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, he’s dead to me.’
She grinned savagely, checking her pistol, then putting it back in the ankle holster. Demorn brushed her hand across Smile’s face.
It left a brilliant red trail against his stunning snow-white skin, lit up like a movie.
‘I’m closing out a scene, bro. Just remember, things will get weird before they get better.’
Smile just laughed electronically.
3
* * *
Th
ey exited the plush hotel lobby, onto the street. Rain had kicked up, clouds circled above ominously. Ki City was built on the ocean, and storms could blow up real wild.
She’d always loved it here. Scattered visits over the years. Demorn’s heart was flickering and surging as she saw the cars rolling down the expressway. It was still only 6.23 AM. Street traffic was low, shoppers and gamblers busy in the megaplexes of Ki City.
Demorn watched as Smile become almost one with her, flickering to vague shadows, holding her hand tightly. His voice was a whisper, his famous smile vanished down to nothing.
‘Is this a good idea?’
‘It might be.’
She triggered the cell on her wrist.
‘Repeater Mall, Gareth.’
Three long rings. A dry voice answered, ‘Demorn?’
‘Yeah, I’m back, Gareth.’
Silence, then a hint of warmth. ‘It’s been forever, I thought you were dead.’
She laughed. ‘I could say the same, Gareth. I’m outside the Jade in Ki. You still have the wheels?’
The dry voice was relaxed. ‘Of course. Where we going?’
‘The usual place. I have to get something.’
He sounded vague and distant. ‘Sure, there in five.’
He clicked off and Demorn stood there, holding Smile. He was shivering, huddled into her, skin translucent blue.
‘Not long, bro, not long,’ she murmured. Smile was shivering at the light crowd, anxious. He had gotten worse with her away. What else had regressed?
‘Put on your game face. It’s time to deal me back in.’
A black limo rolled up. Slowly a door opened, a gloved hand waving them in. They slid in, Demorn hyped and alert, aware things were about to get real.
The limo was slick. Gareth sat opposite, his face grey and skeletal, long brown hair luxurious and attractive even in the dim light through the tinted car windows.
He had been such a pretty boy once, with a funny turn of phrase, and kind eyes. Now he had dry, tight decaying skin, and deep black eyes that held a tiny flicker of hell-fire red.
