Demorn: Soul Fighter (The Asanti Series Book 3)

by David Finn

  ‘Cool. One thing, kid. Don’t play any fucking country while we drive,’ Iverson warned. The electro wave slid over him, the engine purred. This was real, this was real once, he thought, eyes heavy.

  Through the fire into the rain, through the fire into the rain. Are we through the fire, into the rain? The words and the question played back and forth in Iverson’s head until he was lost.

  5

  * * *

  The air was even colder, their breath spelling out messages in the frigid air. Iverson was glad of the coat now, losing himself in the deep folds. The air was still but if you listened, there was something howling from the wild.

  ‘How long was I asleep?’

  Wolf patted him on the shoulder. ‘A long time, old man. My hair might be going a bit salt and pepper, but at least I’m keeping my muscle tone. You look like you need a good feed.’

  Iverson laughed, stomped his boots on the hard concrete ground. ‘Sorry, I skipped gym.’

  He did feel thin. Stretched to capacity. His eyes hurt. He was looking at desert. He was looking into blank nothingness. As he turned to look away, Iverson saw a mass of gigantic concrete buildings shimmering on the horizon. His stomach lurched with nausea.

  ‘Yeesh. What the hell?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s somewhere real.’ Wolf spread his arms out. ‘It’s called Gologatha. A reality prison.’

  Iverson raised his eyebrows. He slid on a pair of aviators. The white limbo desert still burnt his eyes.

  ‘Sounds ominous.’

  The buildings flickered in and out of his vision. It was a vast complex that dominated the skyline. Then there was nothing but the white desert stretching into forever. Iverson could still hear the howling from the wilderness.

  Wolf said, ‘It’s where a lot of the people you catch wind up.’

  Iverson said, ‘I didn’t even know we had these places.’

  ‘Hey, there’s a war on. We’ve gotten a lot more efficient at putting the bad people out of the way.’

  Iverson nodded. ‘Sure, good. And how do you know about this, Wolf? Because your clearance levels are three levels below mine.’

  He knew the answer. He just wanted to hear it.

  To his credit, Wolf did look a little shamefaced. ‘It’s where they want to put Josephine. They want to stick the Lady in and that would be a crime.’

  Iverson didn’t say anything for a while. ‘Depends on what she did. Depends on what you did, too.’

  He went back to the car, exhausted. He kept seeing the kid in the ship. All those years ago. So many deals cut. Wolf got back in the car, and Iverson gave him a nod. He hoped this deal between them lasted a little longer. They drove into the prison, huge electrified gates swinging open as the Jag approached. Soulless looking towers rose above them. Black windows. He wondered if there were even human guards. The whole place seemed so vast and so empty. Iverson could still hear the howl through the synth-wave.

  Wolf stood beside him on a small metallic platform, powering up into the atmosphere. Iverson looked downward into a burning abyss. Electronic oceans of data filled his eyes.

  Iverson said, ‘What the hell was that? I was dancing with Natalia in a a Sanctum Club! We were twenty again. Before the War. Everything was like it was . . .’

  Wolf tapped a finger against his head. ‘Telepath dreams. It’s just levels of code.’

  Cold crystal tower walls surrounded them. Iverson couldn’t see anything but the empty blue sky above.

  ‘It’s like a frozen city,’ Iverson said.

  ‘It’s a prison,’ Wolf replied.

  ‘Where are the guards?’

  ‘I don’t know if there are any human ones.’

  Iverson shrugged. They were up very high. He still felt drunk on the sweet drinks from the bar. If he closed his eyes, he could still see Natalia, her beautiful dress almost fully gone, floating in the mass of sweaty bodies, her lips on his for moments, the thrill so genuine and real and young. Iverson knew that Natalia was the best and most precious thing he’d ever had. She was supposed to be a cameo in his life. Somehow they had both always known that. She’d finished first in every class she’d been in. Army parents stretching all the way back to conflicts and flashpoints that civilians didn’t even know happened. She was a First Class Ranger and had a couple of years on him, always claimed she could take him in a straight fight. These days, he had no doubt she would wipe the floor with him.

  Iverson had been born in a test tube, reared in the Order. His progress through the system had been tough but inexorable, an effort of will. Never the fastest, but close. Not the smartest, but clever and tough. They’d met in a bar in the sky. The old Saturn Station, a military stronghold then and now. You had to shuttle in and out. He’d just busted one of his first big cases, dragged out with friends to celebrate when he would rather been in the Order dormitory playing video games or dosing himself under whatever music had been trending.

  She was a Ranger who thought the Order was lame and filled with ‘celibate telepath monks,’ to quote her exact comment on her third beer. He remembered being drunk, saying there was nothing celibate about him at all and he couldn’t read a mind to save his life. Natalia had been so glamorous, so filled with life, so raw and young at heart, so unlike him with all his cold edges and disconnected places. It had been a cameo that had lasted and they had gotten married only months later.

  The lift had stopped. It was freezing. Iverson’s eyes were filled with tears. He was clinging onto the metal cage, looking through the steel buildings into the white nothingness. There was a War on and Ceron could lose everything. Every hand was needed on deck. He didn’t even know where he was and it was a long way down. He wasn’t supposed to be trying to save anybody or anything else but the Order and himself. But sometimes, he didn’t care about the Order or himself.

  Wolf was looking at him with kind eyes.

  ‘Have you ever loved a witch?’

  Iverson thought for a moment. ‘I’ve liked some. Been forced to kill a couple, back on the Front.’

  ‘It’s hard to love a witch with all your heart. And it’s hard for a witch to love you with all her heart.’

  Iverson smiled. ‘Do you think Josie has cast a spell on you, with that old Black Magic . . .’

  The question made Iverson smile even as he asked it.

  Wolf shrugged with a tight smile. ‘No. I’ve had neural inhibitors for years. Nothing gets in. It’s just that it’s mostly kill or be killed for the witches. We hunted them almost to extinction on multiple realities. There’s a lot of ignorant people out there who still believe that burning a witch is the best way to go.’

  Iverson let that mesh inside his head. The Corizan terror cells back on the Front hadn’t seemed too frightened.

  ‘Josephine doesn’t seem afraid.’

  ‘Josie is the most incredible woman I’ve ever met. She’s fearless, and wonderful. She’s going to be our ticket out of here.’

  Where are we, and why do we want out, Iverson thought. But by god, he loves her. Wolf’s face was filled with pride.

  It was now very cold. The crystal walls pressed close around them, confined in the cage. Neither of them said anything more as the platform rose to join an entry ramp, the cave’s walls widening around them. Iverson knew this was probably their last mission together. This blend of mistrust couldn’t continue much longer.

  Iverson walked onto the ramp, the claustrophobia of the cage fading. The cavern walls widened. A huge cube floated in above them in the frozen valley, spinning slowly. Swirling energy tides surrounded the cube as it slowly turned.

  ‘How beautiful,’ Iverson said. His words seemed almost expected but it was true.

  ‘It’s the power this prison is built around,’ Wolf said.

  A small cluster of three guards in red and white armour stood on the platform. Laser rifles in their hands. Iverson glanced at them, instinctively repelled by the dull, dead sheen drowning their brainwashed eyes. He could see old school tech implant
s on shaven skulls. So they hired humans but muted them.

  The cube floated across his vision. There was more than one cube, there were multiples and variants. Then a single huge cube, brutal and ice-like, dominating his sight and imagination. Iverson could see shadow figures moving inside the vast cubes. Wolf was talking in an animated fashion to the guards, speaking rapid fire fast in an alien tongue, an edge of barely familiar tech slang in his words.

  ‘Where are we, Wolf? And why are we here?’

  The guards moved away. The platform stabilised. A door opened in the ice wall. The guards sank back to the corners of the platform, apathetic and silent.

  ‘The cubes are prisons. Reality prisons. Time prisons. Personality prisons. Meshed but independent. They predate the Fracture Event and have survived it.’

  Iverson started and gave Wolf a cool look. ‘I’ve never heard you mention the Fracture before, Wolf. Never once. I assumed you had forgotten it. As you should have.’

  Wolf shrugged. ‘I was with her for years, William. I changed. She took me places. The Lady remembered it.’

  She may caused it, you fool, Iverson thought with a sudden bitterness. Santos was no tyrant, but he had expelled her from his Court for a reason. Nonetheless, he was impressed by Josephine’s tenacity in converting such a stalwart ally of the Order. In all his years of dealing with Wolf, Iverson had never found him to be an especially idealistic creature. He moved with expediency and was focused on results.

  ‘The sex must be something else,’ Iverson murmured again. Wolf just chuckled.

  Was it simple wonders that had so impressed Wolf? Was it the endless duplicating cycle of multiple realities, the illusion of infinite choice? Is that what Josephine was selling? Everything the Order taught on that topic was caution. The Order watched the torn sky above with apprehension and concern. The Fracture Event had cracked the universe and both records and memories were scattered. Iverson had sat in high level meetings and watched detailed diagrams and presentations describing how broken everything was. At a certain point, he stopped dialling in. Smarter people than he might fix it but Iverson wasn’t holding his breath. With the War raging and Ceron City on the verge of falling, the Fracture was just one more thing, a haunting abyss at the edge of the collective imagination. Like a good soldier, Iverson compartmentalised it and carried on with the mission.

  ‘Who we going to visit, Wolf?’

  Wolf sounded vague. ‘This place tries to capture and chain prisoners before they ascend to godhood.’

  ‘That sounds very ambitious.’ Iverson looked at the freezing cavern, the rotating cube shimmering in the still air. ‘Does it work?’

  Wolf looked at him with wry bleakness. ‘Somewhere in the future, the universe is dead, swallowed up by a virus. So what have we really changed?’

  Iverson couldn’t help but roll his eyes. ‘Did she tell you that? Everything explodes in the end anyway, kid.’

  In the light of the icy wall they both could see a single figure behind the door. Wolf’s face was reflected in the stark winter light. It looked like he had aged twenty years just on the elevator up. He looks older than me, Iverson realised.

  Wolf pulled a diamond from his suit and it formed a perfect Bankers key. The ice split as he turned the lock. Wolf said something about the prisoner Iverson couldn’t understand, a name that sounded like machine code. Iverson walked through the door, feeling the echo of universes clicking in around him. He glanced behind him. He saw a ghostly image of a satellite floating in the blue sky. The ice door swung closed.

  6

  * * *

  An agent dressed in a sheer black suit was talking into a speaker phone. Framed movie posters on the walls. All action splashes across multiple genres. The office was big, wooden floors and minimal walls. A huge glistening mirror. She had a nasal, accented voice, alternately harsher or softer as she made her point. Her hair was short, a brilliant black.

  ‘Carson, have you ever read a mainstream superhero book from the 1970s? Like say a Justice League?’

  The guy on the end of the line sounded both bored and opportunistic at the same time. ‘Read it? Nope. Any good?’

  She signalled at Iverson and Wolf to take a seat, holding two fingers in the air.

  ‘On the surface, hell no. But then, check out the covers, it’s glamorous, and surprisingly decadent, like some perfect masquerade ball. It’s chicks with big tits hanging out of Latex costumes, guys with clip-on hawk wings and face masks.’

  Carson at the end of the line was laughing. ‘That sounds . . . terrible.’

  Madisyn rolled her eyes and shot Iverson a look that was 100 percent warm. ‘Sure, it’s all a little creepy but it’s fun enough.’

  Carson cut back. ‘What am I supposed to do with all that, Madi?’

  Madisyn fiddled with a flashy bracelet on her wrist and tossed a digital holo-comic issue onto her glass desk. The covers glowed and Iverson couldn’t help but be drawn to them. He flicked his fingers quickly across the issue. It was all images of a huge satellite in the sky, a multitude of scantily clad superheroes spread across the room, glasses of champagne in their hands, bodies of defeated villains beneath them at the end of every story. Madisyn continued her pitch, her slight accent mixing with her slightly nasal delivery. ‘They’ve all known each other for years, pretty much all of them are perfect physical specimens. So you know everybody has fucked around a lot. We could do a lot if we play that up. The other studios are all going very safe, very formulaic, it leaves a lot of room for us to go outside the box.’

  Carson sounded so bored that Iverson knew some of that had to be an act. ‘You know why though, Madi? The studios are banking billions playing that way.’

  Madisyn was across the other side of the office. Her sheer black dress rode high. She had strong legs that Iverson thought could kick the shit out of him. He could feel her power from across the room.

  ‘Carson, what if we went for the modern angles? What if we went into the Shrine? What if we brushed against the heart of the Thorned Star? Can you imagine how fantastic that would play to some audiences?’

  There was a huge cough down the line.

  Madisyn laughed, a tad harshly. She gave a glossy photo of Steve McQueen in The Get-Away a fond brush and turned away.

  ‘You’re going nuts in there, Madisyn!’

  ‘Too close to home? We can get some into GREAT areas. Forget Romance, forget One Man, One Woman, One Life. Or any combination of that. These crazy guys and gals save the world BIG and they party hard and break up hard, etc.’

  Carson barked to cut in. ‘It won’t work, you know why? Because it doesn’t matter what year it is. The studio is on 1930’s think when it comes down to the leads blowing two different guys in the same ninety minutes. They just can’t sell that to the kids. They want implied not actual, sexy with a smile, and not much else.’

  Madisyn replied with another high wattage smile at Iverson. He could feel the jealousy radiating from Wolf.

  She said, ‘Yeah, maybe. But this is two hours plus and we’re coming off three hits in a row and we’ve got option deals up the wazoo. We’ve got a lot of room on this one—the most we will ever get. So we navigate the minefield and take the best parts from all this ’70s shit that nobody has touched. And we make the biggest hit anybody has seen! I want to shade everything more extreme. Definitely some of them fuck. But I want it sophisticated and it all works into the action, ok? Throw that whole sheen over it. Send it to the artists. Draw up some concepts. Pass it back to me by four. I have Kate on the line tonight. I want to pitch her the new direction. She’s the ace in the hole Steve, and I will be KILLED HARD before I let go of that deal. I don’t care if I go down a level, we have the power, you hang in, Carson.’

  ‘Will do. How you holding up in there, Madi?’

  Madisyn clicked her finger and the speaker went. She was quieter but direct. ‘Doing alright, Steve. We won the last appeal round, they can’t move me down another level. I’m very close to the door and al
lowed visitors.’

  Her perfect gaze met Iverson’s again. Iverson spotted a glistening platinum device on her ankle, almost invisible but there. She was chained.

  Carson hung up and she turned her full attention to them, a smile on her face. She was smooth, shaking Iverson’s hand firmly.

  ‘Sorry for the language, I get lost in the hustle! I’m Madisyn Tan, with KMG Agents.’

  Iverson was smooth. ‘William Iverson, Order Investigator.’

  Wolf showed his badge, murmuring his name. Madi sat down behind her huge glass desk, legs crossed, wearing a perfect porcelain smile.

  ‘Sounds like a fun movie,’ Iverson said.

  Her eyes glowed. She was amazingly beautiful and radiated light. Iverson noticed she had purple eyeshadow and idly wondered how old she was. She looked like she had power to burn and did.

  ‘Doesn’t it just! Picture this, “Super Force: The Dark Universe!” Because the kids like some DARKNESS! Mixed with a splash of colour and hope and light!’ Madisyn lit up with that smile. ‘Do you guys remember Super Force?’

  Wolf made a noncommittal noise, looking with faint desperation at Iverson. Iverson chuckled. Wolf was strictly into westerns so old he complained when they were in colour. He wouldn’t know a modern franchise if it hit him in the ass.

  Iverson said, ‘Sure, I do! I fly long haul with the Order, still catch an episode when I’m bored. I used to watch the show back in the day when I was a cadet. It’s the same thing, right. Teenage power kids funded by the underworld, rebel against everybody, try and tear it all down?’

  ‘Totally, honey. They bite the hand that feeds. Obviously they learn a big fat lesson and end up owning a space station. The original was a smash. We’re locking down the script on a kind of reboot with fresh young leads.’

  Madisyn slid her card across the table to each of them. Iverson tried to stay detached enough not to check out her body. He was proud of himself for mostly sticking to that rule.