by David Finn
She tried to resist being sarcastic but it didn’t work.
‘You haven’t aged a day, Gareth,’ she said.
‘Droll as ever.’ His gloved hand pushed the hair out of his black eyes, seemingly interested. ‘I see you’ve brought a guest.’
‘Yeah. My brother. We call him King Smile.’
Gareth laughed, and there was a dry tinkle in his laughter that reminded Demorn that some fragment of the real him had survived.
Smile blossomed, and she could see his face become interlocking lasers that formed an ornate Chinese dragon, infinitely complex.
‘A King, now? How honored we are—’ Gareth said, speaking to the driver up front. The driver’s name was a dead space.
The driver answered, but his response came through subtly distorted, so that it was impossible to hear what he said. Demorn glanced as the window slid down. She saw the blurred, indistinct face of somebody she half remembered.
Smile turned around to look, but Demorn knew what he would see, even as the window slid shut.
‘Why is his face blank?’ Smile asked quietly.
Her voice was cool and cruel. ‘Because I’ve chosen not to remember him.’
Gareth was smooth. ‘It’s a dangerous way to play, Demorn, calling me. Going back so far.’
‘But it’s just a game, Gareth, isn’t it?’
He nodded, almost solemnly. ‘I just wonder if you know the rules.’
She waved her left ring finger in the air. ‘Don’t be boring, Gareth. Let’s split a deck.’
Gareth clicked his gloved fingers, smiling.
She was watching a dead man smile. A muscle twitched across half-dead skin. There wasn’t much friendship left, and every visit brought less.
Demorn was sitting at a round black table, a full glass of lemonade by her side. The room was lit a dim red. A pile of holo credits shone brightest. Glass windows enclosed the players.
Beyond the glass lay the blackness of the void. A cruel male voice hissed from the abyss.
‘You nervous, sweet Demorn? You feeling the price?’
‘What price, dear Capitan?’ she asked with mock sweetness.
‘That pathetic little clubhouse. The halfway house for your misunderstood killers. The hookers, the dancing girls. The gambling. It can’t come cheap, little Princess.’
‘Oh, I do all right.’
Roberts form-flickered into being, heavy and fat on the elegant black chair. His corpulent face was flushed, marked with scars of a bad and dangerous lifestyle. He shoved junk food into his mouth. One eye glittered with avarice and greed. The other was covered by a black eye patch.
Demorn looked at the five cards glowing in her hands, shuffling them slowly. Two Red Ruby Dragons glowed in her deck. One Death Shadow, green glinting through the translucent black. The other cards were detritus, minor leaguers.
She glanced with a polite coldness across the table, across the stack of flickering holo-credits. There were just three players left. Herself, Gareth, and Capitan.
‘When your connection finally dropped out in that damn zombie dimension, it made me feel good. I thought you were dead and rotting.’
The connection from The Grave had been jittery, but she’d hardly missed a table meet until the last few months. Capitan was into her for plenty. The fat, hungry bastard was good at Dragoncage.
Demorn said, ‘It’s nice to be remembered, even by the obese. But here I am, safe and sound. Meanwhile, I heard that there was a escape from the Xaniath prison facility.’
Capitan wheezed unhealthily.
She tapped her eye, mirroring the one that was covered with the patch on Capitan.
‘I heard Kid Dragon killed ten people on his way to a jump-ship.’
Capitan grinned. He was fat, sloppy and brutal. His breath was laboured and broken as he got excited about his old nemesis. His hand pounded the dark table.
‘He’s insane, he hates me, he wants to hurt the people I love! Well, what’s new? Good luck finding them, everybody’s dead.’ Capitan chortled. ‘I caught him last time, put him in a cage. I will do it again.’
Demorn smiled her scary smile.
‘They say he caught you. They say his crystal eyes burnt you up so bad that the best optical grafter in Babelzon couldn’t even get a simple cybernetic to work. They say you’re doped up on meds. That’s why you’re so slow, haunting gaming tables instead of being in the field.’
Gareth, who had watched the whole conversation with an unreadable neutrality, turned up a table card, the Kindly Spectre.
The black table shook slightly. Her Red Ruby Dragons lost some lustre in her hand. Demorn threw some credits into the pile, raising, backing a long play.
‘So, Capitan . . . does it hurt all the time?’
Capitan was smirking at her, his bloated image so real, pockets of dead flesh around the black patch. ‘Ah, my pretty little Princess. I’ve missed thinking about what I would do to your body.’
He matched her bet.
She threw down the three Red Ruby Dragons, watching as the Kindly Spectre rose from the deck, the sickle glinting. His hooded visage gazed upon Demorn.
She tossed the Death Shadow into the mix, a hissing fog in this incarnation. The sickle swung through the mist and the three Ruby Dragons were cut down. Demorn smiled grimly as powerful skeletal dragons emerged from the mist, their ruby armour glinting with painted signs of undead power.
Capitan grinned hideously, throwing his cards down. Five basic peons dimly glowing. The lowest power card set in the deck . . . but a perfect counter-set to her elegantly constructed death trip. She watched as they created a purity circle.
Demorn couldn’t construct anything out of her last two worthless cards to counter the move, and with the other players out, there were no combo plays. She grimaced, tossing her lesser cards face down into the pile.
Capitan laughed with a casual bitterness.
‘Old, slow, and not that good anymore. But not poor, Princess, not poor.’
Demorn shrugged, slightly sneering at his flushed energy. ‘Spend it while you can, old man. You’ll pass beneath soon.’
She flicked off her connection to the game, and Capitan vanished, along with the table and his winnings.
She was back in the limo. A red fire flickered in Gareth’s hollow eyes. He was back, too.
‘That was unlucky,’ he said, with just a trace of brightness.
Demorn ran her hand through her long hair, exhausted.
‘Them’s the breaks,’ she murmured, taking off the glasses and putting them on the limo seat. Her eyes ached, her leather jacket and shirt covered a thin body that was famished and drained.
‘Where’d you go?’ Smile asked, his Chinese dragon form prowling around the back seat of the limo, keeping his distance from Gareth.
‘Chasing dollars with the sharks, babe.’
His image refracted back to her, just a shy young boy in black clothes. ‘Did you win?’
She watched the passing scenery, high roads above the ocean, made into mysterious filtered shadows through the jet-black limo windows.
‘No, not this time.’
She interlocked her fingers with Smile, letting his energy feed into her, filling up the hollowness inside.
Gareth, as ever, said nothing unless you spoke to him. She was drawn to his hypnotic, endlessly black eyes, dancing with one tiny fire.
‘We have to make that stop soon,’ he said.
‘Sometimes I wonder why.’
Gareth held his palm up. A pyramid glowed upon it. She saw a sea of fire within the pyramid, a golden castle beyond it. For a single moment, it possessed her eyes.
The car had stopped. She looked at him, almost speechless.
‘Why do you do that, Gareth?’
He yawned. ‘It’s a future I see.’
Gareth closed his hand and opened it.
She was there, a vision inside the pyramid, a burning sword in her hand. Her hand pressed against her breast, against the sigil, but n
othing burst forth.
He laughed. ‘You can’t spawn it in here, Demorn. You can’t kill me, where I am already dead.’
Her eyes blazed.
The door opened. A young man with flowing black hair opened the door. His smile was kind.
‘Stryker always wore his badge,’ the young man said.
Gareth sighed, turning away.
Demorn slid out from the seat. Smile grabbed her wrist at the last second.
‘Will you be long?’
She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
‘No, for you, this will take no time at all.’
Demorn left the car.
The Mall rose up before them, tall platinum towers. The ocean was set in the distance. Everything was deserted. A silence filled the megaplex.
There was a sudden desperate wailing from the towers.
‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ she said, looking out at the crystal lake, sparkling and icy.
‘Why are we here so early?’ the boy said.
‘You invited me!’ Demorn replied. ‘You said you wanted to start early!’
She was younger, feisty.
He grinned, his smile vague and friendly.
‘Well, I did promise to show you the secret lair, and that’s always exciting.’
Gareth walked down the narrow canal flowing off the harbor boardwalk. She was new to the city, all this was fresh to her. But the emptiness of the plaza was jarring. It felt foreign and weird.
Concrete steps led off the side street down into the bunker entrance, where a steel door was set in the shadows. He walked quickly down the steps.
Demorn followed him. She heard another wail from the platinum towers, and looking around, for a moment she imagined a single scythed figure in a long grey cloak staring down from the gambling house, haunting in the frozen morning.
‘Demorn!’
She blinked. It was gone. She felt the electric flicker of a body-scan surge through her. Lights flickered on the door. A dead metallic voice came from speakers attached to the door, devoid of emotion.
‘Male, Gareth. Female, Demorn. Ages indeterminate. Please state the code.’
Gareth said, ‘Stryker always wore his badge.’
The door slid open, soundlessly. An evil cold seeped out from the blackness. Gareth beckoned her in.
‘Wish I’d brought my gun,’ she murmured. ‘I’m not the kind of girl who normally goes with boys to strange places.’
Gareth laughed. ‘Well, I guess this isn’t normally.’
He clapped his hands. ‘Let there be light to the Ruins!’
Warmth and light blazed over her. She was in a long, concrete corridor that led downwards, seemingly into the bowels of the earth.
‘Man, it’s such a long walk,’ she said.
He placed his hand against the concrete. The palm-print glowed and the concrete shimmered. They stepped through the portal. They were in a comics den. Her eyes blurred.
Hundreds of comics covered the walls. Movie posters filled the spaces in between. A weird mash up of time periods. ’60s, ’80s, millennial, now.
Demorn could see her fingers blur as she moved them, a micro-second behind her. Familiarity surged in her heart. Demorn rushed to her favorite section, filled with classic Marvel comics. The air was thick with many presences, but she could see nobody else in the den but her and Gareth.
Her eye caught something at the counter but it vanished. There was an old fashioned phone on the wall. Gareth was reading an ancient Wolverine comic near her.
‘You found the best place, Gareth! This stuff is AWESOME!’
As he laughed, she brushed her fingers across the base of his neck, finding the metallic imprint of his genetic code. He started, but she didn’t let go.
‘What number are you?’ she whispered.
‘I’m eleven.’
‘Wow, eleven times to the well.’
He was quiet for a second. ‘You had somebody in the limo with you this time. You should never bring others to a place like this. It’s not safe.’
‘It’s just my brother. He’s used to not safe.’
‘Is he doomed, too?’
She thought about it for a second, smiling. ‘We’re from the same planet. His body was disintegrated and put back together by crazy scientists. He’s doomed at least as much as me.’ She flashed back to Asanti dying, Smile in her arms as they escaped extinction on the Spire. Her mood darkened as she thought of the file Jackie Z had uncovered while Demorn fought in the Grave. ‘Time to get serious. The same file keeps rebooting in the Innocents system. I keep getting sent back here. But all I remember is déjà vu.’
‘It’s a pocket universe,’ Gareth replied. ‘A virtual tomb that closes when I’m exhausted. No pressure or anything.’
Something brutal smashed against the door, a brief rumble as the force fields shifted.
‘How sweet. What’s through there?’
Gareth shivered. ‘Nothing good. Triton monsters from the near future. They won’t get through, but they know we’re here, hiding out in this dimension now.’
‘How?’
‘After eleven passes, the machine guiding them gets pretty smart. There are only so many frequencies we can connect to the Repeater Arcade with.’
One of the posters caught her eye, members of the X-Men fought the Avengers in a 1980’s comic glistening with drama and promise.
She pressed her hand against the cold poster on the wall.
‘Do they usually find us?’
‘Almost always. Once they killed us outside the door, but I adjusted it.’
With a sigh she put down the comic she was holding.
‘OK, so we stop reading comics and flirting.’
Gareth brushed the hair out of his eyes. ‘I didn’t know we were flirting.’
Demorn leant across and kissed him softly. ‘Oh, I’ve got a soft spot a mile wide.’
‘Show me all your secrets, I’m playing for the team win.’
Triton monsters smashed against the door. She heard the charring as the force-field triggered a kill charge. The air seemed clustered and claustrophobic, crowded with invisible presences. She could feel versions of herself circulating, hustling in the pocket dimension.
Gareth looked at her with dreamy eyes. ‘You can feel them, can’t you?’
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, fingers flicking across the screen.
‘Kinda freaks me out, but it’s cool.’
For a microsecond, ghost versions of her and him clustered the air, the differences both minute and substantial, sorting through the store, which was filled not just with comic books, but assorted knick-knacks.
One version of her, slightly older, held a mighty sword. The images vanished almost as quickly as they appeared.
Gareth kept up with the bedroom eyes. ‘Maybe twelfth time is the charm.’
Demorn breathed out. ‘That’s a heavy duty sword I was carrying.’
‘Maybe one day you will be so lucky as to have one.’
‘Maybe.’ Demorn shrugged, reaching into her jacket. ‘I brought some throwing stars and my gun. Guess that will have to do.’
Gareth adjusted something on his phone. The store vanished.
‘Into the breach, dear friend.’
They were in a huge, empty warehouse. Spheres of light surrounded them, hissing with electricity. There was a shallow pool of water, lit up by the spheres.
She stepped near the water, her shoes skimming the surface. She saw kneeling figures by the water’s edge, holding up wooden vessels filled with glistening liquid.
She stepped closer to them and vaguely recognized the young face of a thief she had known, sharp, delicate features carved into stone, almost a smirk upon the face.
Demorn half-bowed to the girl. She couldn’t remember where they had met before, but it didn’t matter. The features of the other women and men were blurred and indistinct to her eyes, resonating oblique power from their statues of stone.
‘Are we supposed to be he
re? Surely this is a vale of the gods themselves.’
‘We’re just passing through,’ Gareth said, his voice quiet, as he walked across the water, his hand touching one of the vessels.
A wizened figure poured liquid into his hand from the wooden vessel. Gareth brushed his lips with nervous fingers.
As Demorn came close, the wizened figure became stone, weathered beyond time. The liquid was muddy and dark.
‘Is it holy water?’
Gareth looked emotional. ‘No, it’s the blood of a vampire god.’
A chill ran through her. Some horrible premonition of a future which had happened. She saw an echo in his face. Dead Gareth. Dead Gareth. The words span through her head unbidden, but she did not understand.
Gareth laughed suddenly and with a hint of triumph.
‘Gawd, it’s written all over your face, Demorn. Don’t worry for me so! You look like you really believe we will all burn in some ninth hell.’
‘I have no idea what is happening,’ she said.
‘Check this out.’
His phone was blazing. The spheres span close to them both, hissing with energy. The pool seemed to burn but she felt no heat, even though she was standing in the middle of it.
The statues that held the wooden vessels become lithe shadows, dancing with each other, to another song, of which she caught the barest sound. An almost tropical tune, with hints of love and dreams and a sweeter kind of death than she had seen or known.
She felt very young. Inside the fire-lake she saw the mirror of a mighty fort, far greater and higher than her memories of Firethorn. She saw images of a great desert. Barren snow-fields where the black ice dragons flew.
A tall looming figure wearing an ornate steel helm, encased in armor overlooked the endless desert. The Ruby Lady. The Ruby Lady.
Singing this tropical song in a smoky bar, so glamorous, with eyes so radiant, and somehow cruel.
It all faded back to the mighty fortress of steel.
‘Will you ever reach there?’ he said.
‘Am I even trying to? I just want to save my friend.’
His phone blazed with lines of power from each of the spheres, uncontrolled. It fell into the lake, where it floated on the mirror surface. The lines of energy flowed back to his fingers. And for a single moment the phone was a charcoal wand, energy flowing both in and out, and Gareth wore a wine-red robe.
