Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  I follow him to his chosen food line, sighing. “True words, unfortunately.”

  “Well, at least you have a chance to redeem yourself, yeah? Tomorrow night?” He slips two plastic trays off the top of the stack and spins them around in his fingers. “A bunch of chirping Homicide chicks let slip we’re involved in some deep shit. Art heists and murders and mysteries, oh my!” The trays separate in his hands, and he offers one to me. “Can you confirm, oh smart one?”

  “I can confirm, oh nosy one.” I snatch the tray and gently bop him on the head with it. “That and a hell of a lot more. More than you can joke about. More than you can smile about. More, far more, than the world could stand to know without falling off its axis.” A breath. “More than you want to know. More than I want to know. More than anyone could ever want to know.”

  Jin scoffs and turns toward the menu hanging from the ceiling. “Hah! There is no such thing as more than you want to know, Adem. You want to know everything. Don’t lie.”

  “Funny. Dynara says that, too.”

  A choked sound passes his lips, and his expression warps into a mixture of disdain and concern, caused by the sort-of-funny-but-terribly-awful-and-downright-unacceptable revelation that Jin Connors and Dynara Chamberlain have something in common. There’s a yuck stuck in his throat somewhere, but he swallows it and says instead, “Well, I guess she does know something about you, after all.”

  She knows everything about me, buddy, I don’t say and hide behind a smile, and probably everything about you, too.

  Chapter Twelve

  The raid goes south at a quarter to midnight. About the time four agents crash through a three-story window, each moving at a human body’s terminal velocity, and splatter on the pavement below in a vibrant burst of blood and guts and bone. Just as a sand twister erupts into existence in the main hall of the Museum of 20th Century Art and sucks in five SWAT men, snapping necks and suffocating, before anyone has a chance to scream. Moments after the GM Poly kids realize they’ve been set up—being surrounded by men and women in black with intimidating guns is a pretty good hint—and break for freedom, fleeing every conceivable direction into the maze of sprawling galleries.

  Before the raid goes south, the joint taskforce stakes its claim on the six blocks surrounding the museum. The combined team of EDPA coordinators and techs and the IBI Cyber Sec trio are squirreled away in a black van parked between two restaurants at the edge of the perimeter, wired into the museum’s security system to fend off the inevitable hack attack by the savvy GM Poly students. May, two strike teams under her command, and the IBI SWAT group ward off the entrances to the building. Doors, windows, rooftop access, and even the vents. Wearing their enhanced army camouflage, they are nearly invisible in the burgeoning night. Nothing but sentient shadows squirming in the corner of your eye.

  Dynara and Murrough, Briggs and Weiss set up shop in a jewelry store across the street from the museum, a command center hastily erected in a cramped back room. From there, the four will be calling the shots, and if something requires their personal use of force, they can reach the museum in under forty-five seconds. (I wonder briefly if they informed the jewelry store owner that they’d be commandeering his store to prevent an art heist across the street; then I remember that Dynara prefers to ask for “forgiveness” in the form of throwing money at her squabbling problems until they shut up.)

  Me? I’m stationed with a crew of backup dancers who get to linger in the alley behind an athletic wear shop and trade war stories while sipping hot cocoa from large, communal mugs. And while it certainly isn’t the worst way I’ve ever been sidelined by an angry boss, the familiar sense of restlessness assaults me. I try to sit down and twiddle my thumbs like an obedient agent, but I can’t stop fidgeting. So I rise and pace around the reject circle, the IBI and EDPA “extras” while they talk. Donovan, the temporarily defunct Captain of Day Team Four, now with noticeably lighter bruises and scrapes, is among them.

  “Yo, Adamend,” he says when he spots me moving through the dimness, “calm down. Walking a ditch into the concrete isn’t going to make this operation run any quicker. Or easier.”

  I halt a few feet from his position in the circle and shrug. “I need something to do. I can’t stand being idle.”

  The man nods like he understands, and I admit that he must. Now of all times if he didn’t before. He was a successful team captain, leading missions, giving orders, saving lives. But now his team is in tatters, his leadership abilities compromised, his body battered, and the ability to resolve his need for vengeance snatched out of his hands by Dynara and company. Because the importance of this case supersedes his personal feelings.

  Yeah, I can see it written into his premature wrinkles, dry lips, drooping eyelids: all the pent-up frustration, anger, sorrow, and that dash of inescapable madness that accompanies acute emotional trauma.

  I nod my head in deference to this man, who had it all and lost it in a matter of minutes…and may never regain it again. “Don’t get me wrong,” I add. “I do understand our importance. If the main raid formation breaks down, we’ll be put to good use, no?”

  The man slips his helmet off, sits it in his lap, and runs his gloved hand through his graying hair. “I suppose so. But that’s not something to look forward to. If the Commissioner’s plan breaks down, we have a big problem on our hands. She’s skilled as hell at real-world raids and echo assaults; she’s been handling them almost flawlessly for close to thirty years now. So whenever someone manages to pull the rug out from under her—and it does happen, on occasion—you know we’re in trouble.”

  Some of the IBI agents tense up at the mention of Dynara’s tenure. They know she’s much older than she appears, but it’s still a hard fact to believe at times, after you’ve seen her face, all soft lines and a touch of underdeveloped naïveté. It’s something in the curve of her nose or the flush in her cheeks or the roundness of her eyes. And it’s something dispelled quicker than the average bullet train whenever an ounce of danger sneaks into the situation. They’ll learn, these agents. Perhaps tonight.

  Eleven o’clock draws close, and the raid formation solidifies via brief ear-com messages and hand signals and black figures moving across rooftops. From my position in the alleyway, I can only glimpse the five-story museum building, a gray-white marble colossus tucked neatly into a series of small business blocks and mid-priced realty. Its massive columns and outdoor statues and well-groomed gardens and elaborate iron fencing and all the rest—these things produce the illusion of old world grandeur and—

  “First contact made!” hisses a voice through my ear-com. “Four figures in dark clothing. Approaching from the south, via Davis Avenue.”

  All the agents in the alley freeze, alert. I plaster myself against the alleyway wall and creep forward, crouching low in the shadows, until I have a reasonable view of the streets that empty into the parking lot beside the museum’s sprawling front lawn. My eyes track across the courtyard, searching for signs of movement I can’t attribute to the virtual EDPA-IBI army surrounding the target location. At first, I see nothing but empty sidewalks lit by violet-hued streetlights.

  But then there’s a flicker. And another. And another. And another. Four ghosts creeping through the night.

  The evening is cloudy and cold, snow threatening to fall, yet I sweat beneath my combat uniform, hand glued to my holster. Don’t let anyone, anything, at any time catch you unaware, Adem! I scold. One more misstep, and Dynara is liable to reassign you to the janitorial staff. (And that’s not an exaggeration. She’s done that to at least one newbie agent in the past five years to teach him a lesson about making dumb mistakes while on her payroll. Funny tidbit: That agent was Lance. Who is now presumably cozy and warm inside his surveillance van, Dynara’s faith in him long restored. I can only hope for the same.)

  The four GM Poly thieves creep closer to a side entrance to the museum. The plan is to let them break inside and then surround them with more guns than most would
care to challenge. So I crouch there in the darkness, eyes on the slinking forms, as they finagle the door open with a combination of hacking—to unlock it without the proper passcode—and brute force when it’s revealed to have an interior security chain.

  When the reinforced door swings open and slams against the back wall, the boom echoing across the courtyard, the four thieves pause to scan the area for any untoward passersby.

  They don’t see the lions hiding in the grass.

  Not Kelsey Garcia, math whiz. Not Camden Morse, the would-be engineer. Not Grace Harlow, who’s double majoring in computer science and chemistry. Not Lawrence Tanaka, who, as a freshman, was scouted by the top software firms in the world and offered at least two dozen high-paying jobs. No, these brilliant kids who could have had brilliant futures disappear into the museum without an inkling that their world is minutes from crashing down around them.

  Thing is, I mean that metaphorically. The world crashing down.

  Because it isn’t supposed to happen literally. The museum ceiling is not supposed to collapse. The walls aren’t supposed to crack and tumble into one another. The windows aren’t supposed to explode in a lethal rain of glass shards.

  The taskforce raid party is supposed to sneak in from all eighteen entrances, capture the kids red handed as they’re snatching paintings off the walls, cuff them, and haul them away for questioning related to the DuPont and Stiegel murders.

  But that’s not what happens.

  Because at a quarter to midnight, as the kids are making their way down the wide gallery halls toward a certain group of paintings by a 1940s American artist, as the black-clad figures armed to the teeth begin to close in around them, an inescapable circle of gun barrels and bravado, as the students who thought they were so damn smart suddenly grasp the trap closing on them…a level three echo breaches reality without warning.

  And brings with it the brutal sandstorm. And brings with it the ugly monsters. And brings with it the seething, raw fury of a need for vengeance so profound I feel it vibrating through the ground—the sandstorm roaring—a hundred feet away from the epicenter.

  What follows is a frenzy of half-remembered images and sensations:

  Screams from the first wave of SWAT and strike team agents as they’re thrown out of windows, killed by the sandstorm vortex, crushed and torn and gutted by the lumbering monsters who appear in between one blink and the next.

  Shouts to retreat. From Briggs or Dynara or Murrough or May, I can’t discern. There are so many voices, so many pitches, so many tones, so much horror that it all blends into a senseless cacophony around me.

  The thudding of boots on concrete and stone. The muffled shots of rifles fired inside the museum halls, useless in the face of a trillion grains of sharp-edged sand. Huffing and puffing and gasping and swearing as half the agents outside rush in and half the agents inside rush out, most of the latter maimed in mere seconds.

  Glass breaking. Wind screeching along walls and ceilings and floors. Sand scraping, scratching, cutting along with it. Flesh being stripped from skin with the sickening sound of soft fabric peeling off a sweaty body. Bones cracking against concrete and marble and metal.

  And me—I’m running. Toward the danger. Not away.

  From the alley, up the front steps, through the main door, and under the vaulted arches, three stories high, of the main lobby. Lungs burning, legs aching, chest heaving all the way. For a second, I think I hear someone calling my name, but as soon as my body passes the doorway threshold, all sound is submerged beneath the mighty roar of the sandstorm raging before me.

  Through the orange haze, I see struggling figures. The GM Poly kids, pinned down by the sand that sears their eyes and tears their skin and chokes their throats. EDPA and IBI agents dashed against the walls by the wicked winds, again and again, until there are no intact bones left in their bodies. And at the core of it all, a figure in red, face nothing but an indistinct blur. Posture indicative of a rage so pure and hot that it will burn the life out of every soul inside the museum without regret before anyone, even the great immortal Dynara, can stop it.

  I unclip my holster strap, pull out my gun, and point it toward the echo maker standing amidst the chaos. I’m aware that there are ten or twenty others in my immediate vicinity doing the same, all their weapons aimed to rivet the slim form in the sandstorm’s center point. But as they all begin to shoot into the whirling sand, none of them say a word. Not a cry. Not a peep. They only look on in unbridled terror, mouths agape, eyes wide behind goggles and underneath helmets. They only look on and pull their triggers. Again and again and again.

  So I speak for them all…

  …or, well, I try to.

  “Hey!” I scream over the deafening roar. And it’s the only thing I say.

  Before the head of a broken statue shoots out from the sandstorm vortex at close to eighty miles per hour, rebounds off a support pillar in the corner, and clocks me in the face so hard my nose shatters on impact (yet again). I crumple in a heap of blood and pain and nausea so intense I vomit on the floor seconds before my consciousness fades to black in the wake of one final, ominous thought:

  Dynara is going to kick my ass.

  * * *

  There is a brief moment where I think, Oh, Gods. I’m a ghost!

  I wake up on the floor, head pounding. Terrified shouts and agonized screams and the constant din of the sandstorm dream assault my weary eardrums. For minutes or seconds or hours or days—I can’t tell—my limbs won’t respond to my commands to move and my head won’t crane up far enough to see what’s become of the museum since that stupid statue knocked me senseless. For all I know, the raid force and the murderous echo maker have been at war for two days straight, the entire city of Washington is a sand-wasted ruin, giant, lumbering, bloody-fisted monsters running through the streets.

  But when I manage to gather an ounce of energy and sit up in the wild, sandy winds—the vortex still churns twenty-five feet from where I fell—I realize that no time has passed at all. The agents who were fighting alongside me are still emptying their clips into the high, orange-hued winds. Fruitlessly. The red-coated figure, hazy and indistinct, is still bearing down on the GM Poly kids, inching closer to one, Tanaka, every few seconds. He will be the first to die. The rest will follow.

  Unless we can break through the sandstorm twister and stop the maker in time.

  I rub my head, and my hand comes away bloody; a sharp edge on the statue ripped my scalp open. Hot, sticky red runs down my face and neck, soaks into my combat uniform. My balance is shot. I make it to my knees in one, dizzying push before my strength reserve runs dry. Blinding white pain zips up my spine and pools around my injury, and it’s all I can do not to clench my eyes shut and butcher my already raw throat with a piercing scream.

  When the pain passes (momentarily), I start to search for my gun.

  And that’s when I realize I’m sitting next to my body.

  It’s lying on the floor, face down. Blood creeps out from around a gaping wound on my skull (and seeps from my nose). With the orange haze, I can’t be sure, but I swear I spot a flash of white bone beneath the bloody pulp and tangled, matted patch of hair. My body doesn’t move, doesn’t even twitch, and for years in seconds I don’t think it’s breathing, this thing with my face and my shape and my clothes and my recently acquired injuries.

  I’m a ghost.

  That’s the first thought that pops into my head.

  I was killed by a fucking statue, and now I’m a ghost.

  The logic is sound, if you believe in the supernatural. Which I don’t. So sitting there, injured and pained and tired as all hell, next to my own unconscious body, I seek out a more rational answer. And though it takes me twice as long as it normally would, I find one:

  I’m a cross. After I was knocked out, my mind connected with the sandstorm dream and made an echo copy of my body inside it. And because the dream is taking place in the same location where I “fell asleep,” there are no
w two versions of my body present. The real me, dead to the world, a crumpled heap of limbs, and the dream me, “awake” but still reeling from the effects of the wounds that sent me into the dream world. This technically happens every time there’s a level three breach—anyone inside the dream lives with two bodies at once. But you rarely see both bodies. They’re almost never in the same place.

  The tang of copper and death fills the air, and I shake the idle thoughts away. Concentrate on the task at hand, the maker, and the sandstorm dream, and the vortex, and the monsters that have wandered off down the museum’s halls in search of skittering prey. The first thing I do is concentrate on alleviating the pain that has me shuddering on the floor. If the dream’s laws are as loose as I think they are—it’s certainly not in the realm of realistic—then I should be able to alter my personal perception, at the very least. Hide the pain away in the recesses of my mind. For now.

  I shut my eyes, count to three, and will the pain to cease. It does.

  My next order of business is to stand on my wobbly legs, bend down, grab the arms of my real-world self, and drag the unconscious form into the gap between a long statue of a naked man with a very large penis and the pastel blue wall behind him. I try not to jostle my body’s injured head too much, but I feel a distant, almost phantom pain, when my bloodied head knocks softly against the marble base of the statue.

  Once my body is hidden, safe, I leap back into the fray. Not a soul noticed my little “ghost” episode, all the EDPA and IBI agents running around like ants, hiding behind pillars and statues, around corners, shooting out rounds as quick as they can at the red-coated figure, who pretends not to notice their efforts. While I was out, at least three more men were taken by the power of the vortex, launched into the walls. One of them struck a painting of a picnic and took it down with him. It covers his twisted body like a death shroud.