Eyebrows wiggling, Wisp flashed an over-the-top frown at her. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“Um.” Sara looked uncomfortable. “Because your eyes are kind of … watery?”
“Oh.” Wisp rubbed at them with her sleeve. “The chamber back there still stinks of Smog. Where’d Luca run off to?”
Max shrugged. “Said he was going to bug the border folks for new intel.”
“Intel would be nice,” she said flatly. “Hey, Max. Have you guys decided what you’re going to do next?” Are you going to stick with me through thick and thin?
His response was immediate. “We haven’t decided yet, but we’re not leaving tonight. Maybe not even tomorrow.”
“Thank you for trusting me,” Wisp said. “Max, if you’re sticking around for a bit … could you look at the radio and the other parts to check if there’s a way to contact the outside? See if you scare up some wild heroes. Villains should be their thing after all.”
“Sure,” Max said. “I might be able to get one of the phones working. Just don’t get your hopes up. There aren’t any heroes on the other side of that wall. We can’t rely on them to save Hannah.” He gritted his teeth, a bitterness coating his words.
“We won’t,” Wisp said. “Speaking of the other side of the wall. Do you guys have a plan for, you know, your way back into society?”
Sara glanced at her brother, who hesitated before responding in her stead. “If we stay off the youth welfare office’s radar, we’ll be fine. Our aunt and uncle probably think we’re dead. We’ll just have to keep our heads down and avoid the police.”
“You’ve got money tucked away, right? If not, we can find you a bunch before you go.”
“Not a problem,” Max said with the calm conviction of a man who had come to terms with the choices he made. “We can manage. Let’s focus on Hannah for now.”
“Right. I’m going to be out for a few, so you guys take care while I’m gone, okay?”
Max gave a halfhearted salute. “Always. You too.”
To Wisp’s surprise, his sister didn’t look particularly worried about anything. She waved both of her hands in a goodbye, then tugged on her brother’s hand, trying to drag him off somewhere. The gang’s supply cache, most likely.
That girl really believes I can work miracles or something. Wisp watched her go, suddenly self-conscious of the illusion she maintained for Sara’s benefit. Maybe it was time for the girl to rediscover her fear of the hostile environment. Wisp left the siblings and stepped out onto the church square, with a sphere trailing behind to pierce the darkness in her wake.
She glanced at her wristwatch to check the time. Half past one in the morning. The sun wouldn’t rise before a quarter to five, which meant that the streets should remain Smog-free until about five. On the other hand, Constantine’s men weren’t likely to abandon their posts before four-thirty. Snooping around the campus was out of the question. If Wisp got caught sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, there was a good chance Hannah would pay the price. The risk wasn’t worth it.
Wisp crossed the square in the direction of the train station and the withered zoo grounds bordering it, a more direct route to the university as the crow flies. Hannah must have checked out the warehouses for a reason, she reminded herself. There must be something there. Something Constantine doesn’t want us to know about.
The warehouses would be guarded. The guard crew always occupied the same handful of key positions from where they could best control access to the warehouses themselves. They wouldn’t move around or be scattered across a wide area, so the chances of them watching the rooftops would be slim to none.
She moved past the high-rise buildings surrounding the train station, moving her light sphere along nearby rooftops in short leaps so that its glow didn’t reveal her position to potential onlookers. Also, the elevation difference allowed for a quick getaway in case of an emergency. The distance made it harder to spot sudden color changes. Wisp would have to rely on her own senses to spot signs of danger.
For the moment, at least, the night was calm and peaceful. Wisp made good time as she walked along the edge of the former zoo, using her night vision to step over fallen branches and evade muddy, trash-filled sloughs. An abandoned plastic bag caught the wind and blew past her head. The only living beings in sight were shadows, human silhouettes shifting behind the cover of their candlelit windows.
It’s hard to believe people ever actually lived here. Wisp followed the railroad tracks leading northeast from the station. Most of the structures she remembered from better times were still there – Alfred’s sausage stand, the bus stops along Hertz Avenue – but the nightly gloom, intensified by the absence of city lights, rendered their features unrecognizable. She felt like an intruder here, and in a way, she was. The railroad tracks were leading her back into Constantine’s territory.
After a short walk, she reached the straight, artificial channel that used to connect the zoo to the Spree River. Now the channel ran dry, long blocked by the German army to prevent the flow of toxic water into the Spree. A colorful – and odorous – collection of trash covered the ground. The Shadows dumped their garbage in the dry river, and even though the Smog had taken care of most of the biological waste by now, the smell was bad enough for Wisp to hold her breath. She reconsidered her plan of using the channel to sneak up to the warehouses. Still, she couldn’t deny the fact that this was her best option for a covert op. The channel ran straight past both of the warehouses and offered a good opportunity to conceal herself and her luminescent little helper.
“Here goes nothing,” she muttered, sitting on the ledge and calling her light to her position. The sphere appeared in front of her, and she directed it downward, watching it glide across heaps of empty glass and plastic bottles, loosely tied trash bags and a clutter of dirty, bloodied cloth. At the very bottom of the channel was a human skeleton, half buried beneath clumps of earth and the tattered remains of a Bundeswehr army uniform. Dirty as it was, she recognized the urban camouflage pattern in an instant. Her heart clenched and her stomach tightened in response.
The day the air raid sirens went off … the day the Smog stirred for the first time, her dad had worn a uniform exactly like this one.
This isn’t him. Just … no. Not possible. Regardless, her gaze flicked across the corpse in a state of frenzy, noting the details. The fractured white skull. The intact belt buckle, defying the surrounding decay with its silver gleam. A skeletal hand, stretched out as if to beseech her for help.
This isn’t him.
Unable to avert her eyes, Wisp squeezed them shut instead and called up a mental image of her dad from that day, dressed for urban combat instead of his usual gray Bundeswehr officer’s uniform. She visualized the shape of his silhouette against the soft morning light, solid, broad-shouldered, but not remarkably tall. A huggable pillar of strength. The mock salute he used in place of a regular goodbye, and how she snatched the red bonnet off his head to keep him home for one more minute. But she couldn’t create an accurate image of his face. It was a blur, its features lost in the haze of the tumultuous past year.
The memory of his voice came easily enough. The audible depth of his concern when he called her on her smartphone in the middle of the day, telling her to get inside the nearest building and stay there until he came to pick her up. He never came, but the warning gave her the chance to call her best friend and let him know something was up. It gave her the time she needed to rush up to the university, call out to the unsuspecting students who were loitering about the campus, and hole up inside the physics lab on the third floor. The air raid sirens went off while she was climbing the stairway, huffing and puffing with Max in tow.
Even now, more than a year later, the memory still caused her pain. Her dad had reached out to her, and he had most likely gone against orders to make a private phone call in the middle of a military operation.
There was no way that pathetic skeleton belonged to him.
&nbs
p; The army listed him as missing on the Bundeswehr homepage. They would have found him if he had died in a stupid ditch. Soldiers in hazmat suits were all over the place for a while after all…
Invigorated by this conclusion, Wisp plucked up her courage and swapped position with the sphere that was floating within the trash-filled channel. The instant her perspective shifted and the channel walls rose up to her left and right, the soles of her boots sank into something soft and squishy. She made a step and heard a burbling sound. An unpleasantly sharp, chemical scent wafted from below, provoking her stomach to do a little flip.
“Just a puddle,” she muttered, holding a hand against her mouth and nose. “Rain water gets corrupted by Smog. Smog stinks. It’s not something nastier than stinky rainwater.” Nope, nope, nope.
As she trudged onward, Wisp called the sphere back to her side and then sent it several meters ahead, keeping a close watch on its color. She didn’t need it to see where she was putting her feet because her night vision revealed obstacles and nasty surprises with sickening clarity, but if there were any dangerous chemicals or dormant explosives mixed in with the trash, or if she was about to be spotted, she’d definitely appreciate the warning.
Advancing one step at a time, she made good progress at first. The scattered trash didn’t block her passage and large obstacles were few and far between. By the time Wisp approached Charlottenburg Gate’s channel-spanning bridge, the number of ditch-disposed bodies rose significantly. There had to be nearly a dozen of them, a scattering of bones laid bare by the Smog. The remains had accumulated on both sides of the bridge and had most likely been thrown from the highway above. As far as Wisp knew, the Shadows still used it as a main artery for the transportation of supplies in and out of Constantine’s territory.
Which shouldn’t have been possible. Dead City was supposed to be under lockdown, damn it. People got out but couldn’t go back in. After the government’s forced evacuation ordinance was implemented last summer, the army built a brand-new Berlin wall to contain the problem and prevent damage to the rest of the city. The first few weeks after the Breakdown, the Deadenings grew so frequent and severe that no one even made the effort to haul off the bodies anymore. There wasn’t usually much left of them, anyway.
Wisp edged her way forward, climbed over a rusty motorcycle, squeezed past a refrigerator riddled with bullet holes, and overcame an impassable barrier of trash by swapping herself to a position behind it.
Once she emerged on the other side of the bridge, she was covered in grime, her precious combat boots soiled with dirt and contaminated water. Looking up and ahead, she could see the uppermost portion of the crescent shaped building that had been repurposed to serve as one of Constantine’s warehouses: a car manufacturer’s branch office. Its glass-paneled front with a protruding metal canopy reminded Wisp of a sports stadium, though the uppermost part of the structure – an elongated greenhouse, set atop the flat roof and gleaming dully in the moonlight – clashed with her impression.
No guards on top. Puzzled by her observation, she gave her sphere a mental nudge, slowly directing it upward along the channel’s concrete wall. Its color didn’t change from mustard yellow. Once it reached the cover of a small delivery truck that had been abandoned among the skeletal trees lining the channel, she swapped places with it, positioning herself to peek across the street through the truck’s front-seat passenger window. Before she did, she called the displaced light back to her side.
Still, she couldn’t make out any guards near the entrance to the building, and its numerous windows didn’t reveal a hint of movement or interior illumination. Perturbed by the strangeness of the situation, she slinked to the rear end of the truck and glanced around the corner. The second warehouse, another car manufacturer’s office, smaller and blockier than its neighbor, was visible from there.
In this case, the building itself baffled her more than the absence of guards near the entrance. All the ground floor windows were gone.
No, they’re not gone. Wisp took another look. They’ve been walled off with bricks and mortar.
This was new. When she’d passed through the area two weeks prior, both buildings still had all their windows and a half dozen guards surveyed the area. A pair of armed thugs loitered about near each of the two entrance points, and two more stood on the roof with scoped rifles. Now, though … both of the fancy glass entry doors looked abandoned. Nothing moved, not even the wind. The darkness and silence felt so oppressive, so absolute that the surrounding cityscape seemed like a part of an alternate reality. One where Berlin had tipped over the edge of a soundless void and everyone in it had been erased from existence.
Shivering despite the warm summer night, Wisp pulled back from the edge of the truck and turned, anxious to check on her sphere. It flickered between the colors yellow, orange and red in frantic intervals, each phase lasting no more than a split second. This wasn’t normal. Her unease grew while she was staring at it, overcome by a sense of wrongness.
Where are the guards? No plausible explanation came to mind. They hadn’t been killed, she could tell as much. There were no bodies and no signs of a struggle. Had Constantine withdrawn them from their positions? No, that didn’t make sense unless both of the warehouses had been cleared out. Had they been cleared out? No, Wisp could still make out numerous boxes and vehicles through the larger building’s windows. And why would anyone go through the trouble of walling up the windows of an empty building? No way, Sherlock. There had to be something in there. Something worth protecting that had to be hidden from view.
The sphere kept on flickering. Yellow-red-orange-yellow-orange-red-yellow. Wisp watched it with her hands clenched into fists, her muscles taut and prepared to break into a run. She didn’t have the faintest idea what was causing this behavior. Moving any closer to the warehouses didn’t seem like a good idea, at any rate.
After a moment of consideration, she formed a picture of Hannah in her mind’s eye, paying close attention to the sphere’s appearance.
“Find Hannah.” She whispered the command.
The light didn’t budge, but the flickering halted on a soft peach-orange. Not an indication of innocuous circumstances by any means, but an improvement over the crimson it had shown Wisp when she’d tried to dispatch it from Constantine’s headquarters. This shade of amber didn’t hint at an immediate threat to Hannah’s life. At least not within the next couple of hours.
If I turn down Constantine’s offer… Wisp chewed on her lip. They’re not going to let her live if I don’t play along. If Hannah’s unconditional release was an option, the sphere would be glowing yellow or green.
While this was good to know, it didn’t explain the erratic color shift. The strangely unpopulated warehouses were a likely culprit. Let’s test this, she decided, already maneuvering the sphere away from the delivery truck and into a patch of withered shrubbery fifty meters down the road. Then she swapped positions. Her light, still barely visible from the new hiding spot, now blazed a steady yellow.
So the weird flashing only happens if I’m near the warehouses. Wisp surveyed the darkness. Is it because the threat can’t find me here?
She craned her neck, attempting to see through the smaller building’s second-floor windows, which unlike their ground floor counterparts, had not been boarded up. The sparse moonlight failed to penetrate the darkness beyond the glass, and not even her night vision helped her make out any shapes or contours from this far away. She’d have to get closer or revert to Evolved trickery.
Directing her sphere from afar, she commanded it to approach the barred-up warehouse at a walking pace. Its color didn’t change. It retained its yellow glow even as she nudged it up to the first floor, allowing it to come to a stop in front of the nearest window.
Nothing happened.
The lingering sense of wrongness persisted, making Wisp question whether this mystery was worth probing. She wasn’t a superheroine, and her options for dealing with trouble were limited. Maybe s
ome things were better left unknown.
What if the contents of that warehouse were the reason for the Conglomerate’s sudden interest in Dead City? Wisp rubbed her forehead with her knuckles while she considered the possibility. She was a Berlin girl, and despite everything that had happened to it, her heart still belonged to this twisted husk of a city. The thought of villains defiling her home made her want to puke. She could tolerate petty criminals if they didn’t harm the local populace, but actual supervillains? No thanks, Mr. Banks.
Her resolve strengthened. She gave her sphere the final push through the glass window and into the gloomy interior of the warehouse. Its brightness was sufficient to track it from a distance, and judging from its yellow reflection on the glass, the threat level hadn’t changed. The idea of swapping positions to take just one single, innocent little peek inside the building tickled the back of her mind, and she almost caved.
The sphere switched to a fiery orange with one abrupt flare. Before Wisp could process what was happening, a cascade of mist poured through a gap beneath the window and descended to the sidewalk, drifting and billowing as if it had a mind of its own. The other windows on the same floor began to release the same vaporous substance.
A moment later the building’s entire eight-story block leaked swirling mist. The haze enveloping the building’s facade appeared milky white to Wisp’s night vision, shimmering orange where the moonlight touched it.
What the…?
Wisp gaped at the mist, mouth falling open. The phenomenon before her eyes was so unlikely that it took her a moment to recognize it for what it was.
Smog.
As it expanded and started flowing toward her, the Smog infused the air with its sickening, acrid scent, and the nightly breeze delivered it straight to her nostrils. There was no mistaking the smell. This was the real deal.
Why? Nighttime Smog defied the city’s established logic even more than this morning’s unusually early Deadening. The air temperature hadn’t increased enough for the vapors to manifest again. Smog wasn’t supposed to emerge from buildings.
Gift of Light_A Powered Destinies stand-alone novel Page 8
