The Ophelia Prophecy

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

  “It’s market day,” was the terse reply. “Everyone wears them.”

  The others left their positions and advanced on him. He had to give up his protected backside to maneuver between them.

  “Get him!” the woman shouted, and they all charged at once.

  He sprang for the balcony, catching the rails and drawing his lower body away from the ground.

  Someone caught his ankle and hauled him back down to the alley. They spilled together onto the cobblestones.

  “Hold him down!” cried one of the others.

  Pax punched the first man who tried to grab him, then rolled out of another’s reach. He scrambled to his feet, running for the alley’s entrance, but the woman swept her legs out and tripped him. She clambered onto Pax’s back, pressing her blade against the base of his neck.

  As he braced himself to eject her, someone cried, “Let him go!”

  He glanced up to see Iris and Carrick moving into the alley.

  “Do it now!” Iris ordered.

  “Get out of here,” barked one of the disciples. “This doesn’t concern you.”

  Iris hissed at him, wings lifting slightly. “You don’t want this fight. I’m giving you a chance to walk away from it.”

  “Caleb,” the woman said sharply. “That’s the amir’s daughter.”

  Iris was no longer wearing a mask, and one of the men gave her a hard look. He shifted forward a couple of steps, raising his dagger. Light from the alley washed over his bare chest.

  “Don’t let her get away,” he said.

  Iris laughed, but the priest did not. He gave a menacing growl and took two long strides toward the speaker.

  * * *

  Concern for Pax shifted to the background of Asha’s thoughts as she followed Micah out of the alley. Suddenly he steered her against the front of a house with an overhanging terrace.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped.

  She flinched as he reached toward her face, pulling the mask back down over her eyes. Then he removed his cloak.

  “Put this on. The Guard will be looking for you.”

  She slipped the cloak over her shoulders and drew up the hood. “Aren’t we going to the temple?”

  “By an alternate route. The entrance is too easy to monitor. And it’s secured on the evening of the market.”

  He led her back to Debajo, and the mantis guardian admitted them without question, bobbing his head at her companion. As they descended into the room she glanced at the bar. Her heart jumped when she saw Iris and Carrick. They stood talking to the bartender with their backs to the entrance. Asha tugged her hood lower as they reached the bottom of the stairs, hoping the strong smell of the place would shield her from the pair’s heightened senses.

  Micah guided her away from the bar and around the sunken seating area. She risked a glance back at Iris and saw them bounding up the stairs toward the exit. She let out the breath she’d been holding and followed Micah to another stairway at the far end of the room, this one leading down.

  “Watch your step,” he said. She pushed back the mask and cloak and took hold of the railing.

  The stairway curved, and after a few moments of careful foot placement the stairwell brightened—lanterns hung from hooks mounted along the brick wall.

  “Where does this go?” she asked, her voice sounding too loud in the vertical tunnel.

  “Under the street. It connects Debajo and the temple. There are passages under much of the old city. Mostly unused. They’re considered unsafe.”

  Perfect. Already she was questioning her decision to leave Pax.

  “Were you being taken to Al Campo?” he asked her.

  Asha bit her lip, studying him. He’d removed his mask, but at the moment all she could see was the wavy blond hair covering the back of his head. “Actually I’m hoping to get to Al Campo. There’s someone I need to find.”

  “Really?” She could hear the surprise in his voice, and he glanced over his shoulder. “You know if you’d stayed in the Scarab, it’s likely where you would have ended up.”

  “I didn’t have that option,” she replied, uncertain how much to reveal. She’d have to trust someone eventually if she wanted help. But for the moment she preferred to hold her cards close. They were all she had for leverage. “It’s a long story.”

  “I see,” he said softly.

  She was relieved he hadn’t pressed her further, but she also knew the reprieve was likely temporary.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and walked through an archway into a narrow passage illuminated by more of the phosphorescent lanterns. About half of the floor tiles were missing—accounting for the piles of rubble along the walls—and the remainder were cracked or broken and coated with dust.

  “When we were talking in the alley,” she ventured, “it sounded like you were about to say you’d like to see the people in Al Campo freed.”

  They passed through a twin archway on the opposite end of the tunnel, and he waved her toward another stairway.

  “Yes. But don’t misunderstand. We were wronged by humanity even while we were still human. If we let ourselves forget that, we risk becoming that.”

  She knew what he meant, due partly to her work in the Archive, but mostly due to conversations with her father. Many of the garage bio operations found their “volunteers” among the most impoverished members of society. By the time of the transgenic experiments, that class had grown particularly large.

  Micah joined her at the top of the stairs. Taking a closer look at him in the light, she decided he was younger than she’d thought—maybe close to her own age. He was clean-shaven, with a kind face and eyes that were a lighter shade of brown than her own. She also noticed tan swirls of pigment marking either side of his neck.

  “The worst of the transgressors have been punished,” he continued. “Most of them are dead. Those who survived are prisoners of war, and we see our parents in them—exploited, and existing at the mercy of others.”

  When she’d asked Zee to help her go after her father, she had never dreamed she’d find Manti sympathetic to humanity. Micah’s words reinforced the decision she’d made to leave Pax. Despite the protective impulses he seemed to feel toward her, he was still an enemy to her people and her cause. Eventually he would have learned the truth about why and how she’d come here, and she’d have been in no position to help anyone, including herself.

  Afraid their conversation might be cut short by their arrival at the temple, she hurried on with her next question.

  “That phrase above your entrance—science will destroy us—is that the basis for your … for your religion?”

  Micah shook his head. “Rebelión Sagrada has its roots in the anti-genetic engineering community. It’s been around longer than the prophecy. We view the prophecy more as affirmation.”

  “Where did you hear it?” Asha held her breath and tried to mask her eagerness.

  He took a few steps into shadow and raised his arm to what looked like a solid wall. But as she joined him she saw there was an opening there. She followed him down a thickly carpeted passage that erased the sound of their footsteps.

  He lowered his voice as he continued. “The prophecy came out of Sustainable Transgenics, where babies are designed. Our scientists have taken the work your scientists did and elevated it to an art form. You would think we’d have taken a lesson from Gregoire.”

  Gregoire was the self-taught geneticist who “designed” the Manti. Some believed it was one of his creations, a creature much like Iris, who had stolen the data that allowed the Manti to engineer the plague that wiped out humanity. Some even believed he’d been so enamored of his creations that he intended for them to supplant humans. Gregoire died in a fire that destroyed his lab, shortly before the dawn of chaos, so no one ever learned the truth. No human, anyway.

  “I don’t understand why an anti-science message would come from your genetics lab,” she replied.

  “Someone hacked into the lab’s syste
m, and the prophecy spread virally from there. It locked up every computer in the city for two days. The official word is it was some kind of hoax. But the symbolism—and the irony—was compelling. It doubled Rebelión’s membership.”

  Micah parted a curtain at the end of the passage. A wave of perfumed air slapped against them. The same scent that pervaded Debajo, but much stronger. Intoxicating, and cloying.

  “The hacker called the virus ‘The Ophelia Prophecy,’” he said as they stepped past the curtain. “We’ve only recently figured out what that means.”

  Only someone from Sanctuary would know. Pax had told her the humans in Al Campo were sometimes examined by the geneticists. Was it possible the genetics computers had been hacked by someone from her home?

  “Have you brought us another virus, child?”

  Asha’s attention was drawn from her escort—who had frozen just inside the circular chamber on the other side of the curtain—toward the source of the unfamiliar voice.

  “I apologize, my lady,” said Micah, bowing his head. “I didn’t know you were using this chamber.”

  At first Asha’s eyes failed to interpret what she was seeing. What appeared to be a decorative cloak was in fact a set of wings. The wings were mostly translucent white, but where they pressed together, two green-and-yellow spiral patterns created the illusion of large eyes staring back at her. The wings moved delicately as the creature turned.

  “It’s the farthest off the street and therefore the quietest,” she explained, “but you weren’t to know. Now that you’re here, let me see what you’ve brought me.”

  She took a few steps toward them, and Asha’s heart pulsed with warning. The woman’s ivory torso was almost entirely mantis-like, and yet maintained its femininity, with gentle curves at her breast and waist. Like Iris she had hands at the end of spiked appendages, but her lower body rested on four legs like the doorman at Debajo. Her arms and legs were scored with bands of orange and green—though it was hard to be sure about the colors, as the crimson fabrics and low lighting in the room created a rosy glow.

  Her eyes were large, widely spaced, and a light shade of … purple? Antennae projected from the top of her forehead, striped like her torso and curving gracefully away from her face toward pale, wavy hair. Her thin-lipped mouth curved in a smile above a sharp chin.

  She was beautiful, and the most alien of Pax’s kind so far. A lighter sister to Iris, and yet no less suggestive of darkness.

  The woman’s lips parted, and she uttered a string of unintelligible syllables: Pseudocreobotra wahlbergi. But she continued in Spanish-accented English, “Common name, spiny flower mantis. You may call me Cleo.”

  Asha swallowed, pressing her hands against her thighs. “I’m Asha,” she said, feeling unfit to be in such a creature’s presence in her current condition. “Brought here from Sanctuary.”

  Cleo moved toward her with slow, precise movements of her lower legs and abdomen. Asha shrank inwardly and fought the urge to step back. As the Manti woman’s body shifted a little to one side, she noticed a man behind her. He had a much smaller, plainer set of wings, spiked forearms, and a well-muscled human body. His eyes glittered fiercely in the dimly lit room. They rested on her face for only a moment before shifting back to Cleo.

  Before Asha looked away she saw his wrists were chained to the wall.

  “You are not our first visitor from Sanctuary,” said the mantis woman, stopping less than an arm’s length away.

  “So I understand.”

  Cleo glanced at Micah. “Where did you find this pretty, soiled thing?”

  “In an alley outside Debajo, Priestess. Said she escaped from a Scarab today.”

  Cleo’s eyes moved slowly over her. Asha flushed at the priestess’s expression of distaste, angry with herself for feeling self-conscious about her mud-stained, hand-me-down appearance.

  “This pains me,” Cleo said, frowning. She motioned to a woman standing nearby. “Clean her up. Give her something more suitable to wear.”

  “My lady,” Asha spoke up, “I was hoping you might be able to help me. I’m looking for Al Campo.”

  The triangular head swiveled on the slender neck, lilac eyes coming back to her. The penetrating gaze was all the communication Asha needed to understand the risk she was taking in getting involved with these people.

  “Perhaps I shall,” replied Cleo at last. “That will depend entirely on what you have to offer in exchange.” Again her gaze raked over Asha. “But as you are, you’re defiling my temple.”

  “Cleo, enough!” The protest came from the man chained behind the priestess. The links clanked together as he launched away from the wall.

  Cleo smiled. “If you’ll excuse me, my mate is impatient. We’ll talk again soon.”

  Suddenly Asha understood the chains. And the hungry look in the man’s eyes. She’d seen it before. Cleo moved toward her mate, stopping just out of his reach. Perspiration dripped down his chest and abdomen as he strained against his bonds. She stretched delicate fingers toward him, teasing them through his hair.

  The male fell to his knees at her feet, groaning loudly. She raised his bowed head with her hands, and a single word grated out of him. “Please.”

  Asha couldn’t help contrasting this picture with the struggle that had taken place by the reservoir. This male looked capable of much worse than Pax. And this female was receptive. Though clearly she’d taken precautions. She was in control of the encounter.

  “It’s time,” Cleo replied softly, stroking his cheeks with her thumbs as half-choked moans came out of him. “Release him.”

  Cleo’s attendants looked to her with surprise. “Shouldn’t we leave him bound, Priestess?” one asked.

  Cleo smiled, her eyes never leaving her mate. “Not this time. I want to see what he can do.”

  Again his body jerked against the chains.

  The attendant drew a key from her pocket and moved toward him.

  Asha watched breathlessly, her body so taut she jumped when someone touched her arm.

  “Come,” murmured the attendant who’d been ordered to make her presentable.

  The attendant guided her toward a door, Micah following on their heels.

  She heard the rattle and muffled thud of the chains striking the carpeted floor. There was a low growl, followed by the same hiss she’d heard Iris make. Asha glanced back, but the attendant closed the door between them. A high-pitched cry sounded from the other side.

  * * *

  The priest stood over the fallen disciple looking not at the body, but at his own hands. Pax understood exactly how he felt. He wondered if the priest had ever killed anyone before.

  “One of them recognized you,” Pax said to Iris. “We need to get out of here.”

  “Agreed.” She glanced around the alley. “Where’s Asha?”

  “One of the disciples took her.”

  Iris raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

  Pax rubbed his lips together and gazed up at the Gaudí Spike. It was no time to start lying to his sister. Not if he wanted her help. “She asked them for protection.”

  Iris rolled her eyes, sighing in exasperation. “Bloody hell, Pax. I knew this would happen.”

  He glanced back sharply. “No, you didn’t.” He overcame a strong urge to remind her she was in much the same boat with the half-feral holy man standing beside her.

  “Well, something like this. What are you going to tell Father?”

  “Nothing. I’m going to get her back. Let’s get out of this damned alley.”

  “Pax!” Iris started after him. “We can’t storm that temple. Not the three of us. You have to let her go for now. Help me with Carrick, and then we’ll go to Father together. We’ll figure something out.”

  He could hear the edge of panic in Iris’s voice. Her usual approach was to try and shame him out of unreasonable behavior, and the change almost shocked him to his senses. It meant she had all but given up saving him from himself.

  But leaving As
ha to Rebelión was not an option. His chances of recovering her were much better with Iris’s help, but he’d go after her on his own if he had to.

  “We don’t need to storm the temple,” he said. “Put your masks on.”

  * * *

  Asha’s heart still pounded against her chest as she and the attendant reached their destination. The stair climb was only partly to blame.

  The smaller chamber they entered was three flights up in the tower. The priestess’s luxurious dungeon had been fully enclosed, but here an arched window let in a rectangle of moonlight, which spotlighted a tub in the center of the room. The steps up to the tub were decorated with the color-shifting mosaic tiles, and the slow, subtle transitions between pink and purple and blue and green had a soothing effect.

  The attendant pressed her palm against a disk on one side of the tub, and water cascaded into the basin at both ends. Asha watched as the woman—whose Manti markings consisted of green-tinged skin and creamy wings that hung limply between her shoulder blades—poured in a few drops from several colored-glass bottles. She lifted a series of cups made of the same colored glass, and as she stirred what looked like sand with a small stick, they glowed with light. She arranged these around the edges of the tub.

  Asha didn’t feel she had time to waste on ritualistic pampering. But she needed an audience with Cleo, and apparently this was a prerequisite. She peeled Pax’s shirt over her head, then pushed the loose pants past her hips. She stood staring at the pile of clothes, thinking about their owner and wondering what he was thinking about her.

  Would he come after her? Would he make her pay? She was pretty sure he wouldn’t be so keen about protecting her from Manti interrogators the next time around.

  “Your bath is ready.” The attendant smiled and gestured toward the tub.

  She climbed the steps, dipping her toes in first. In Sanctuary water was rationed. They had enough for short showers, but no one took baths. Heavy rains sometimes created temporary bathing spots, but nothing that could compare to this. Like so many things, it was an aspect of the pre-holocaust world she understood only through her work at the Archive. It seemed strange to her now that she’d spent most of her life acquiring an intimate familiarity with a world she would never know.