Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “Yeah.”

  He paused and looked at me. I had the feeling he was sizing up my courage. “Take care of yourself, Mitch. It’s a more dangerous world than you know.”

  “So I’m learning.”

  “Good. I gotta scoot.” He stood and swiftly but quietly headed toward the door. “Oh, and remember…”

  “You never gave me this and you were never here.”

  “That’s my girl.” He kissed my forehead and slipped out the door. I watched from the living room window as he walked down the sidewalk, casually looking around, checking to see if he was observed. He’d probably parked a block or two away. Once a spook, always a spook.

  I hid the jammer in a sock in my dresser drawer for the night. I had a weapon. I figured, if nothing else, maybe I could give Angela’s old hive-girls a taste of their own medicine. Maybe, if I timed it right, I could ruin their plans to cut the next girl. Now I just had to wait for those two things Uncle Ted relies on—luck and inspiration.

  When Uncle Ted came home, late, I told him that Skip had called, but just left a message.

  Uncle Ted nodded, distracted. “You okay?”

  I shrugged. “As okay as anyone who couldn’t stop a murder.”

  Uncle Ted sighed and rubbed his stubbly chin. “I had some boys check out that computer lab at ’Leezza Rice.”

  My heart rose. “Yeah?”

  He sighed more heavily. “They found nothing. No transmitter. Guess your guts aren’t always right, honey. Well, I gotta sleep. You too. Get to bed.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure, Uncle Ted.” I went to bed but didn’t sleep for a long time. I was too busy hitting my pillow with my fist.

  I slept in and vegged the next day, Saturday. Late afternoon, Uncle Ted called—he still had to work, said they’d found a big meth lab, dealers shot, and he had to tie it all to terrorism to get enough funding from Homeland Security to tide the department over for the year. I commiserated, told him politics sucked while inwardly I crowed for joy. Grounding or no, I was going out tonight.

  I dressed for blending in—jeans, camo T-shirt, and a scarred-up leather jacket. At about nine, I slipped out the back door of the apartment complex. Yeah, there were cameras and Uncle Ted could’ve requested the tape, but if things got that far he’d already know. I caught a bus two blocks away and took it downtown.

  The Crazy C was in a low brick building, wedged between a shabby used bookstore and an even shabbier teriyaki place. I was early, for the crowd, so I had no problem slipping up to the bar and ordering a beer. Hey, I was already violating curfew, what was another broken rule? Besides, the bartender didn’t even ask for my fake ID. I felt slightly insulted. I settled onto a stool in the corner and pretended I was a chameleon.

  There was a small stage against the back wall and a group of gangly, scruffy guys were setting up band equipment. When they set up the stands with the funny-shaped knobs on top, I muttered, “Who uses mikes on stands anymore?”

  “Didja bring your rig?” asked the barrie.

  I jumped, spilling some beer. His question was a little too pertinent. “Uh, yeah. Matter of fact I did. Why?”

  “Well, put it on, chica. Those are BrainBombs they’re setting up. Make the music sound inside your head. Really cool. Band starts in about forty-five. Stick around.”

  “Yeah, think I will, thanks.” I took another swig of beer to hide my surprise. The street finds uses for technology. No wonder Zeek and the hive-girls liked this place.

  A few minutes later, one of those same hive-girls strode in, but it wasn’t Sarah. It was one of her underlings, whom I’d only seen in a couple of Angela’s photos—a blonde with shoulder-length, curled hair, wearing a bangly crop top and jeans. Not the brightest of the bunch, according to Angela’s notes. The blonde was also wearing her rig, and I could see her throat bobbing a bit. She was sub-voking, probably to the rest of the hive. I tried to practice some of Uncle Ted’s technique of watching without seeming to. I fetched my old rig out of my backpack, now feeling self-conscious about how out-of-date the phone was. I slipped the headset on and flipped my hair over the pads.

  The place was starting to fill up, but I still didn’t see Sarah. Hive-girl was starting to look a little anxious, too. I wondered what was up. I saw her head to the bathroom, and on a whim, I followed her.

  She stood by the sink, fussing with a make-up bag while I went into a stall. I heard her whisper audibly, “Are you there? Sarah? Renee?” Hmmm…reception problems. That gave me an idea. I took the jammer out of my backpack and clipped it on to my belt at the small of my back, beneath my leather jacket. Then I turned the jammer switch on.

  “Hello? Hello, Sarah?” Hive-girl’s voice became panicked and louder. “Sarah, don’t do this! Shitshitshitshitshit!”

  I gotta admit, for several seconds I drank in the delightful draft of vengeance. Poor miss co-conspirator now thinks she might be victim number four. Awwwww. I let her panic rise a few seconds more, then my delicious joy made me bolder. Why stop at that?

  I flushed and stepped out of the stall. Hive-girl was stabbing at her rig with the business end of a pair of tweezers. “Having problems?”

  “Shut up.”

  I ignored her rudeness. “Oh, hey, you got one of those Cayce 1500s.”

  “I said shut up! Go away.”

  “I know how to fix those. These new rigs are touchy, they need a lot of tweaking. But I know a few tricks.”

  She finally looked up and noticed me, blue eyes slightly red around the rims. She looked so young—what, fourteen, maybe fifteen, tops? “You can fix it?”

  “Maybe.” I almost felt sorry for her…and then imagined Angela taking a nosedive off the hospital roof.

  “But you’re wearing an old rig.”

  “Yeah, well, I find the old ones are more stable. These new ones are hot, but they need a little extra loving care. Want me to have a look at it?”

  She stared at me with fear, distrust, hope, and desperation warring in her eyes. “Yeah, okay, but do it fast.” She yanked the rig off her head, pulling out a few golden hairs with it, and handed the rig to me.

  “Sure. And ice out. It should just take a sec.” I took her silvery-opalescent rig in one hand and slipped my other hand behind my back, to pull a toothpick out of my back jeans pocket. I slid open the panel where the headset widens to get at the command pad. Just like cell phones have always had, there’s a place you can look up the last number dialed. And thanks to hive-girl’s desperation, I was pretty sure the six-digit number repeating over and over on the screen was the conf code. I quickly memorized it and the phone number, pretended to tweak some more, then slid the toothpick back in my back pocket, turning off the jammer as I did so. “There ya go. Should be workin’ now.”

  Hive-girl swiftly slipped the rig back on, redialed with her tongue. “Hey? Hey?” I swear tears slid down her cheeks and a smile ten miles wide crossed her face. She jumped up and down and flashed me a high sign before dashing out the bathroom door giddy with joy.

  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or puke. Sad thing was, I was jealous.

  The room was packed when I came out, and a too-angular-to-be-cute young man was standing at the BrainBomb. “Are you ready to get Beamed?” he teased the crowd.

  “Yeah!” they all cheered back as one.

  “Headsets on, space cadets. Here comes the noise.” He jammed his fist down across his guitar strings. The jangling chord resounded in my brain, filling every neuron. He played a long, trilling riff and I felt his fingers playing the nerves up my spinal column. I blinked in astonishment. The drummer began a rhythm on his bass drum pad that replaced my heartbeat in the center of my chest.

  I didn’t want to be distracted like this, not when there was information to get and deeds to be done. But the music might make good cover. Before my personality was completely wiped by waves of sound, I tongued in the phone number of the hive, then, at the prompt, the conf code.

  Just in time as another power chord washed through me.


  “We’re here,” I heard Sarah’s husky voice rasp amid the music. In my head, as if she spoke from the center of my cerebellum.

  —“by the door,” said another hive-girl.

  —“was waiting so long. What took you?”

  —“we had take care of—oh!”

  Another chord crashed like an ocean wave in a storm. Thoughts flew from my brain and all that was left was the sound. The drums started their pulsing beat again and my body moved, no longer entirely under my control. I swayed and shook, my hair standing on end, my skin tingling. The hive-girls began chanting in my brain, “Yeah…yeah…yeah,” over and over, an affirmation of the high of sound, the high of togetherness, “yeah…yeah…yeah,” they sighed in ecstasy, and it was so good, this oneness filling the void in me, that I began to whisper with them, “yeah…yeah…yeah,” my breath their breath, my words their words.

  “Who’s there?” Sarah snapped sharply, cutting across the music.

  —“Who?”

  —“What?”

  —“Someone’s cutting in…I don’t know that voice.”

  —“That girl from the bathroom—”

  Oh my God. It took all my will to force my waving arms up to my head to yank off my headset. I began to shake uncontrollably in panic. How could I be so stupid? How could I?

  The music still reverberated inside me but no longer controlled my limbs. I was able to slip, hunched over, through the writhing, oblivious bodies to the bar. I didn’t see any of the hive-girls, so I hoped they couldn’t see me. I drank down the last gulps of my beer, trying to calm my nerves. I must have looked like a spastic wreck, but the bartender was so caught up in the music, he didn’t care. Desperate to get my brain cells back, after a couple of minutes, as the song the band played was ending, I put my rig in my backpack and slipped out the back door.

  A chill northwestern drizzle was falling. I leaned back against the brick wall and let the drops flow down on my face and neck. It felt good, and I could finally think again. Okay, I’d been stupid, but they didn’t know who I was. I hadn’t learned anything useful about soon-to-be-victim girl. And Sarah was probably going to change the conf code right away. Oh, well, live to fight another day and think of something else. I sighed and stepped away, turned right into the small passageway beside the building.

  They were waiting for me. By the few beams of light that escaped the painted windows of the Crazy C, I counted five of them, Blondie on my far right, Sarah in the middle. The others, two black girls and a redhead I recognized from Angela’s Spanish class.

  “That’s her,” said Blondie. “The one who fixed my phone.”

  “Stole our number, you mean,” growled the redhead.

  “Well, aren’t you the clever bitch,” said Sarah, striding languidly toward me.

  “Let’s rip her!” said one of the black girls.

  Sarah stopped and held up her right hand.

  “She don’t do that to you,” the black girl protested. “Nobody does that to you. Not and live to tell about it.”

  I thought hard about running, but I could hear the other black girl circling quietly behind me. I wouldn’t get far.

  There was a silent pause, which I figured was filled with them sub-voking at one another. Then Sarah tilted her head at me. “Before you receive your just punishment, bitch, I just want to know why. Are you such a loser that you have to hijack other people’s hives?”

  “I’m here for Angela,” I snarled back.

  “Angela?” Sarah acted as though she didn’t recognize the name.

  “You know who she is. You cut her, didn’t you? Angela threw herself off a building and now she’s dead, thanks to you.”

  “Oh. Angela. She’s dead? Oh, I’m so sorry.” Sarah didn’t even try to hide her laughter. She was really enjoying the news.

  Blondie chimed in, “Well, Angela was such a waste of skin.”

  “Pathetic. Better off dead, really,” said the redhead.

  “Shut up!” I yelled.

  “Oh, was Angela a…friend of yours?” cooed Sarah, as if Angela couldn’t possibly have had worthwhile friends.

  That’s when I reached back behind my jacket with my right hand. Time to give them a taste of their own medicine. And maybe distract them just long enough to have a chance to run away.

  “Watch it, she’s packing!” said the black girl now in front of me.

  “It’s not a gun.” I sneered at her. My fingers touched the jammer switch.

  “Better show us what it is, then, bitch.” She grabbed my arm and yanked on it. My fingers scraped across the box, dragging against the booster switch and the volume wheel. I heard the band strike another chord inside the bar. A loud hum erupted in my head that I’m sure didn’t come from the band’s equipment.

  For a moment, Sarah and the hive-girls stood absolutely still. Then their hands flew to their heads, but they didn’t take off their rigs. Their knees buckled, and one by one, each girl sank to the ground. Blondie began to twitch as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. Sarah began mewling like a lost, confused kitten, her eyes wide. The other girls were shaking and flailing, too.

  I fumbled for precious seconds with the jammer, my hands shaking horribly. Finally I toggled the booster switch and the volume wheel. The hum in my head went away. It was off.

  But the girls on the ground didn’t get up. Two of them stopped moving altogether. Sarah continued her strange, sick cries. I swallowed hard, and like a gutless coward, I ran. At a gas station I called 911, then I grabbed a bus for home.

  Thank God Uncle Ted wasn’t in when I got there. I dashed for the bathroom and puked my guts out. I threw the jammer back in the dresser, as if it were hot to the touch. Then I paced and paced the apartment, hugging myself to control my shaking. Then I crawled into bed. When the adrenaline was finally spent, I fell into sleep as fast as falling off a building.

  When I woke up, it was already bright morning. I heard a rustling sound and glanced up. Uncle Ted was standing in the bedroom doorway, staring down at me. I wondered how long he had been there. “Morning,” I mumbled.

  “I got news,” he said, walking farther into my room. He turned his back to me and ran his gaze lightly over the poster-covered walls, the bookshelves. His fingers idly played with a few papers on my desk. As if he were seeing the place for the first time. As if examining a perp’s lair.

  “What…” My voice rasped and I had to clear my throat. “What sort of news?” I sat up, drawing my knees up to my chin beneath the covers.

  “You know that Sarah Potosi, the one you thought was a killer hive queen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Seems she and four of her hive mates were found in the alley beside the Crazy C last night.”

  “Is she…are they okay?” I really did want to know. And much to my own disgust, I also wanted to know…did they talk?

  “No,” Uncle Ted said, leaning heavily on my desk with both hands. He still didn’t look at me. “They’re not okay. Best as anyone can figure, something went wack with their ESPs. Girls got a huge jolt of RFs right to the brain.” He waggled his hands over his ears. “Fried the synapses in their amygdalawhatsis. They got serious memory loss. Some loss of limb control. Worst of all, they got hit in the parts of the brain that deal with sound. They’ll be totally deaf the rest of their lives. Not even able to hear their own thoughts, the docs say. Already the parents are screaming lawsuit and lawyers are circling the hospital like buzzards. It’s a crappy thing, but thanks to this there’s a chance this whole hive addiction business will be blown into the open.”

  “Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  His gaze fell on my rig headset hanging out of my backpack on the floor. He snatched up the rig and began to methodically snap the plastic headgear in many places. “You. Will. Not. Ever. Wear. One of these. Again. Understood?”

  “Y-yeah, Uncle Ted. Sure. I understand.”

  Uncle Ted flung the rig in the wastebasket, turned, and walked back to the door, still
not meeting my eyes. Pausing in the doorway, he said softly, “You wanted justice, sweetheart. You got it.” Then he left, closing the door behind him.

  I should have felt righteous joy. I should have pumped my fist in the air, saying “Yes!” Instead, I felt sick to my stomach again, and I curled back up under the covers, hiding my face from the light of day.

  A week and a half later, on a miserable May afternoon, I took the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge. Halfway across, I dropped the jammer into Puget Sound. It didn’t make a noise over the hiss of the wake and the rumble of the ferry’s engine. I watched the churning water behind the boat as the ferry plowed into the fog ahead. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this girl-detective stuff. Maybe it was time to get some new goals.

  I’d tried to tell Uncle Ted what happened, but he made it clear he did not want to hear it. Did he know? Did he not know and not want to know? It made my brain hurt. I wondered if I’d been set up by Cousin Skip. Had he used me to expose Ebisu? Seemed like a long shot to just give me the jammer and hope for the best. Unless there was something to all this mind control shit…

  I shook my head as if I could get the memories out of my mind. But they wouldn’t leave, playing on endless loop. I could hear Angela saying “Don’t leave me!”, hear the power chords from the BrainBombs, replay the hive-girls chanting their glorious “yeah…,” replay Sarah’s mewling as her brain melted down. Replay the stricken tone of Uncle Ted’s voice as he told me the news about the hive, and the fact they couldn’t hear their own thoughts anymore.

  And I’ve decided that, those girls now living in utter silence? I envy them.

  KARA DALKEYis the author of fifteen novels and a dozen short stories, all fantasy, historical fantasy, or science fiction. Her most recent publications have been Water, a trilogy of young adult novels she describes as “the Atlantis and Arthurian myths in a blender.” Her short story “The Lady of the Ice Garden,” which appeared in Firebirds, was selected for the James Tiptree, Jr., Award shortlist. Kara lives in the Pacific Northwest, land of overly caffeinated creative people. On the side, she plays electric bass in an oldies rock band and spends too much time playing computer games.