Operation Blackout

by J. L. Middleton

  There had been no ceremony for his parents, but the moment that the siblings shared made him feel lighter, as if the memories of their parents had been a burden to be discarded. No words were exchanged between them as they returned to the rental car—not even to inquire about their next destination—and Orion wasn’t certain where he was heading until he was halfway to Central Park. While the traffic made him regret renting a vehicle, he’d had little choice in the matter if he’d wanted to visit his sister, and fortunately, there had been a parking garage within convenient walking distance.

  He bought her a hotdog on the way, and they ate in comfortable silence as they strolled along the route to her favorite place in the city. He’d introduced her to Umpire Rock after a local festival almost a decade ago, and she’d fallen in love. He’d been too meek to attempt to scale the rock, even with offered assistance from community enthusiasts, and while she’d initially made several futile attempts, she’d eventually decided to admire it from afar, asking to make a detour anytime they’d been in the park. To his knowledge, she hadn’t outgrown her fascination with the formation, though she hadn’t taken up bouldering either, and she didn’t comment as they found a spot under a nearby tree. The ground was damp, gradually saturating his jeans, and he offered her his hoodie as a meager seat; she accepted, sitting beside him and laying her head on his shoulder.

  She remained quiet as he rested his head on hers and listened to her breathing. She’d been right; it had always been just the two of them, and even though she’d frequently tested the boundaries he’d set, she’d always known that she could rely on him to rescue her from her bad decisions. He’d been her father as well as her brother, and it was now obvious to Orion why she’d taken offense to her new custodial arrangement.

  Despite being rid of the last physical reminder of their parents—the apartment belonged to the siblings, no matter who had paid the mortgage—his heart was still heavy with residual guilt, and he sought absolution from the one person from whom it’d have meaning. “Did you ever suspect them?” he whispered, irrationally afraid that a louder volume would summon the ghosts of their parents.

  For a long time, she didn’t move, and her low breathing ceased. As the pause stretched out, he considered repeating the question, but then she sighed deeply. “No,” she replied softly. Though she tried to infuse her voice with incredulity and derision for the question, beneath her bravado, he heard the same doubt that he was experiencing; perhaps she, too, felt that she’d failed to detect obvious behaviors and clues and had, therefore, been inadvertently complicit in their parents’ crimes.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the soft tickle of her feathery hair against his cheek. “I think I was a witness,” he murmured. He felt her shift beneath him and he moved, allowing her to sit up. Her brown eyes, hooded by a knitted brow, focused on him, and he quickly averted his gaze from her scrutiny. While the siblings had shared many secrets over the years, and his sister was the individual with whom he was most comfortable, he still had difficulty with sustained eye contact, and he feared that her opinion of him might change as a result of what he had to say. “I keep having these dreams… nightmares really,” he said quietly. “There’s this woman. Her face is…” He hesitated, recalling the horrible vision. The blow had missed its mark and skidded down the side of her head, cleaving her face and shattering her cheekbone. Her eyelid had begun to swell, possibly in an effort to protect the uninjured eye from harm, and blood had flowed freely, matting her hair and obscuring the wound. Cassie did not need to know the specifics. “Bloody,” he decided, his voice becoming strained as he continued; he hoped that she wouldn’t notice the difference in tenor. “It’s like it’s been slashed open. She needs help, but I can’t help her. I’m too scared, and I don’t even know what to do, if I can even do anything. Then I’m dragged away before I can even try.”

  She shrugged and then resettled her head on his shoulder. “It’s a nightmare,” she replied easily. “What makes you think it’s a memory?”

  “I was having this other strange dream at first.” The gray mist had made an appearance only thrice in his unconscious mind, but each encounter had been carved into his memory, granting it greater significance. There was an abnormal quality to his sister in these dreams—as if she were a doppelganger or changeling—and he didn’t want to contemplate what her surreal part as his guide meant, so he chose to omit any description to focus on the nightmares. “I ended up at our old apartment in Bay Ridge, and that’s when these nightmares started,” he explained. “It’s always the same woman, the same screaming, the same running. All in our old living room.” He shook his head and wrapped his arm around his sister, more to comfort himself than her. “I can feel her terror, like she’s running for her life, but I’m helpless. I’m a hindrance.” He sighed deeply. “When I wake up, everything about it seems so real, and I can’t shake that feeling.”

  He expected her to respond, to be either supportive or more likely sarcastic, but she refrained, and as the silence grew, he tore his attention from the single faded leaf on the ground in front of them to look at her. Her brow was still furrowed, and she gnawed at her bottom lip. “What?” he asked, concerned.

  She sat up, leaning against the tree trunk fully, and looked upward toward the city lights. She sighed deeply before slowly and quietly answering. “The police think they’d been killing for a few years before they began working in the observatory.” Orion scowled with disapproval. The whole point of her living with the Vickers was to shield her from the sins of their parents; if she’d discovered more than the fragment she’d witnessed, then she’d rendered her foster placement purposeless. “They refined their technique over the years, so by the time they started working in Mason, they were impossible to catch.” Her gaze didn’t leave the skyline, and her voice droned onward as if she were reciting a report in front of a classroom rather than her personal history. “Everything about them is a cold trail. Johnstown seems to have been one of many dump sites because they’ve yet to find a whole body there—only pieces of several different people—and they haven’t identified any victims, except for that runaway.” She paused, drawing her lips together, and something about her expression made him wonder if she felt a kinship with the victim. The runaway girl had been young, closer to his age than Cassie’s. She’d had no one to turn to, save an older sibling who hadn’t been aware of her situation and who’d later publicly expressed regret that the victim had ended up on the street instead of turning to family for assistance. Perhaps Cassie had also considered leaving home at one point to stay permanently at a friend’s residence to escape the turmoil at home and realized that the victim could have been her under different circumstances.

  Regardless of her thoughts, she pressed forward. “They’re all John or Jane Does—people no one would report missing. The observatory had a whole room dedicated to…” She trailed off; despite being frank about the murder spree, she couldn’t bring herself to name their pinnacle crime. He’d heard the same rumor about the slaughter room repeated endlessly during the brief media circus and had immediately discounted it as false; if it had been true, how had their parents not been discovered early in their criminal careers when they’d occasionally shared a workspace with other astronomers?

  “What I’m saying is that it’s possible they did murder someone in our apartment.” Cassie swallowed and then rubbed her palms on her raised knees before resting her head on her hands and looking him in the eye. “If you think it’ll help you, we can go drop by the old place and see if it jogs your memory,” she offered, chewing her lip.

  Orion’s frown deepened as he considered how much she appeared to know about the murders, and he scolded himself; she knew how to utilize the Internet—probably better than he did—so he should have realized that she’d conduct research on her own. He slid his hand beneath her chin, cupping her fingers, and he gave her a comfortable squeeze. “No,” he replied, and r
elieved, she relaxed imperceptibly. He was morbidly curious, and though he knew that a revelation about being a child witness would do him no favors, it was his sister’s discomfort that concerned him more; he’d failed to spare her the terrible experience of many things, but this was in his control, and there was no concrete reason to proceed. “No,” he reiterated, “I think we’ve spent too much time on them already.”

  He’d recorded his thoughts about the Bramble Butchers in a journal with the intent to share them with his sister later. His mind had been a jumble of emotions: betrayal, anger, and even an irrational fear that he might become like them someday. Later, he’d also written scraps of his memories—moments when he might have noticed their unusual habits. He assumed that Cassie would experience the same troubled thoughts, and he wanted to reassure her that she was not alone in her uncertainty, but after their conversation, he realized that the journal would do more harm than good. He flashed her a reassuring smile, which she affectionately shared, and he pulled her into a close embrace and kissed the top of her head. Their parents were dead, and they were not, so they should live their lives out from beneath their shadow.

  - - -

  The lock failed to provide the anticipated resistance as Orion turned the key and opened the door to his apartment. It was midmorning, yet he was only somewhat surprised to find Connor sprawled across his couch with his unbuttoned shirt hanging open; his paisley tie was draped across the arm, and an empty bottle sat on the floor next to a glass containing what he assumed was melted ice. He sighed heavily and hesitated before quietly shutting the door and placing his keys on the counter. At least the agent had chosen the couch to occupy rather than one of his beds, though Orion wished that he knew why Connor hadn’t spent the night at his own place.

  Connor stirred, startling Orion as he leaned over to retrieve the glass next to him, and his yawn turned into a self-satisfied smirk. “Ah, I see you’re back. Enjoy your trip?”

  “Didn’t I lock the door?” Orion asked, determined not to be baited or allow his partner to ruin the good mood generated by the visit with his sister. He took the bottle and glass into the kitchen, where he placed one in the recycling bin and the other in the sink.

  “No, mate,” he replied, rising to follow him. He casually propped his elbows up on the bar and leaned heavily against it. There were shadows beneath his eyes, which were marginally bloodshot, and Orion could smell the alcohol on his breath if not his person. “How about a bit of breakfast? I’m a bit peckish.”

  “And I bet a bit hungover, too,” Orion quipped, eyeing his disheveled appearance with disapproval.

  Connor chuckled, grinning wider, and began buttoning his shirt to reestablish a semblance of professionalism. “I see your sister’s rubbed off on you. Glad the visit did you a bit of good.” He scowled abruptly, as if a dark thought had flitted into his mind, and he sharply buttoned his sleeves before tucking in his shirt. He forced a new smile onto his face and reclaimed his nonchalant position against the bar. “Need you to stay focused,” he said, his reproval spiced by unconvincing affected superiority. “You made it home right on time. The case has been solved for us.” He pulled his scuffed smartphone from his pocket and showed Orion the fine print on its screen. “I was right. Kabamba was an Other,” he explained. Despite having been proven correct, he sounded a bit disappointed. “I’ve been waiting to share the case notes with you, and it took you long enough to get back.” He nodded behind Orion and suggested, “Why don’t you make us something while I read it aloud to you?”

  Begrudgingly, Orion accommodated him by pulling cereal and bowls out of the cupboards. If his sister had still lived with him, he might’ve had more substantial fare, but since living alone, he’d been less motivated to grocery shop and had subsisted on more basic meals. Connor didn’t complain, laying into the bowl like it was a feast instead, and Orion contributed his enthusiasm to the hangover.

  Connor’s demeanor was slightly off as he recited the case file; it was as if he didn’t quite believe it himself and Orion was serving as a sounding board for credibility. The agent described the afternoon following Orion’s departure—which didn’t amount to much explanation, as Connor had spent most of that time laid out by an awful headache—and then he relied on Johnson’s own narrative. The other agent had left Little Italy with his partner for their own inspection of Félicité, whereupon they’d found a modicum of the evidence that Connor had sought: On each of Moise’s pieces, there had been a single smooth spot like polished glass, which had often been well-hidden. While the disparity had meant nothing out of context, it had gained meaning as the night had progressed, and the petrified Okoumé incident had been later reexamined.

  Through a series of events better kept discreet for the sake of those involved, Moise Kabamba had been arrested for the attempted murder of the mayor, and his booking had recorded an outlandish method of assassination: an attempt to turn her to stone, which had been foiled by the accidental transformation of a chair in her stead and her subsequent disabling of him with a heavy object. The incident had been flagged by the BSI as soon as it had been entered into the system, much like Cassie’s mugging, and Agent Johnson had been able to establish federal jurisdiction and had escorted Moise back to headquarters, where a battery of tests had confirmed his preternatural ability. The mayor had been politely informed that she could not press charges—as this was now a matter of national security—but she had been assured that her assailant would be punished, and Blackout had been maintained.

  It had all fallen into place, and this appeared to trouble Connor deeply. While the agent hadn’t examined the entire surface of Moise’s pieces, he was confident that his thorough inspection would’ve detected the same flaws that Johnson had found, and he expressed skepticism about the coincidental nature of the apprehension. “It seems to me like it’d be hard to keep a lid on Blackout with such a high-profile victim, eh? You’d think she’d be calling for a more thorough investigation or begging for a better grasp on what’s going on.”

  Orion shrugged. “Maybe they forced her to sign a nondisclosure agreement?”

  Connor shook his head. “An NDA isn’t going to do much to stop chin wagging, especially when you’re looking for answers,” he refuted. “How did you feel the first time you figured out you and your sister were Others? You did research, and when you didn’t find anything, I bet you were frustrated you couldn’t find anyone to ask questions.” He raised his eyebrows persuasively, tilting his head. “She’s got more resources than you, so she’s more likely to dig.”

  After a moment’s reflection, during which he most likely recalled Amanda Darling-Whitcomb’s perfect face beaming from billboards scattered throughout the city, he added, “Though the mayor doesn’t seem to be the sort who’d serve jail time, so maybe staying out of prison is her incentive to keep silent.”

  Being an outsider, Connor wasn’t familiar with the mayor’s background, and he made an incorrect assumption about her character. Orion believed that her charming personality was genuine and not rehearsed, but her PR rep constantly carted her around to homeless shelters and galas for photo ops and kept her approval rating at a phenomenal eighty-one percent, and he fully believed that no judge would place her in prison if they even bothered to go to trial; as she liked to remind her constituents, she was heir to the Connecticut Darlings, and they seemed to get away with murder. While a federal judge might challenge her prominence, he doubted the government would heavily pursue charges unless the damage she caused was catastrophic, and it seemed, in his limited experience, that the BSI was well accomplished in burying the truth, so there’d be little point in calling more attention to any security lapse that her testimony might produce, as it would only exacerbate the problem if the story made national news.

  Orion didn’t have much to add to the conversation. He had to defer to Connor’s expertise, and when the seasoned agent expressed suspicions,
he couldn’t do much to refute them, which he inferred Connor desired him to do. Orion believed that the agent’s fixation on Moise Kabamba had been inappropriate until he’d proved to be an Other—and a dangerous one at that—and despite Connor’s skepticism of Johnson’s report, neither of them had been present for Kabamba’s capture. Even though he hadn’t read any of Connor’s reports, his access to Tinder’s file had demonstrated that case summaries weren’t always comprehensive, and it was perfectly possible that the coincidences that Connor saw in the Kabamba case were, in reality, a flawed narrative; the fact that it was a preliminary report supported this conclusion.

  Connor stared at him over the island, clearly expecting further input, but he remained quiet, instead looking into his empty bowl and refilling it. The agent shrugged, took the cereal box from Orion’s hand, and replenished his own helping. A look of unpleasant contemplation suddenly crossed his face, and he slammed the box on the counter and angrily shoved a hearty spoonful into his mouth. He seemed to chew with antagonism, or perhaps he no longer enjoyed the taste, and then he swallowed. In a low, sour voice, he said, “So, Starr, I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you about that incident the other day.” He might have smiled then, except the expression instead emerged as a grimace. “Actually, it’s been going on quite a while.” He paused, cringing as appropriate words failed to precipitate, and he seemingly struggled as he announced, “It’s not that I don’t like you, mate, but I can’t do what I do and be your friend. I need to remain objective.”

  Connor rose suddenly, the stool shrieking as it scraped across the tile, and as he entered the living room, he turned abruptly, as if he’d forgotten his objective, and started pacing instead. “What if you join VSION? Or go off the deep end?” he said, possibly speculating aloud as he gestured with his free hand; the other was thrust violently in his pocket. “What am I supposed to do about that?” He hesitated briefly, perhaps soliciting an answer to what must have been a rhetorical question, and then he pressed forward before Orion could formulate an answer, if he’d even had one. “It’s better for both of us if we just keep a bit of distance,” he declared in a reasonable tone and grinned winningly to emphasize his point.