by Dan Jolley
Jorden paled when she saw the new signature. Her eyes flicked over to Fields.
“What the hell is that?” Vessler hissed, but Scott couldn’t answer. His body shook with a sudden convulsion, and small, tendrils of smoke rose from the cage of sensors around his head.
On the screen, the immense energy signature approached the smaller one, rolled over it, consumed it like an amoeba enveloping its food. The fMRI itself began to smoke.
Vessler jerked the sensor cage off the boy’s head, pulled Scott away from the console, and screamed into the phone: “Mobile units! Pull back! Pull back! I say again, mobile units, pull back!”
Brenda Jorden disappeared from the room, reappeared almost immediately with a cool, damp wash cloth. She laid Scott down on the bed and sponged away the thick, greasy sweat that had popped out all over his face. To Vessler she said, “What was that? On the screen, what was that?”
Vessler had to leave, and knew it, and hated himself for abandoning the boy. He spoke without looking at her or Fields, who’d stepped back out of the way.
“I don’t know. The second signature must have been another augment, but good lord, it was huge. Damn it, I have to get back to the temporary HQ. Take care of him.”
“Of course, sir.”
Jorden sat down on the edge of Scott’s bed. The boy shook with small tremors, and Jorden dabbed at his temples with the cloth.
Teeth gritted, Vessler ran for his car, cursing as he went. He knew he wouldn’t see Scott again for days, probably weeks. Damn it all to hell.
* * *
The mugger flung himself at Janey, gave her no time to think. Out of reflex Janey clamped one hand on the mugger’s right upper arm, jammed the other one under the man’s left armpit, and dropped to one knee as she twisted. The mugger’s feet shot over his head as his body flipped, and the force of his own momentum slammed him into a young pine. Needles showered down. He immediately rolled to his feet, still cloaked in shadow, as Janey sprang up.
They faced each other, frozen. Janey blinked. She stood opposite a perfectly normal young man. What the hell had she seen a few seconds ago? The jogger on the ground moaned, and Janey yelled, “Tim! This girl’s hurt!”
The mugger stood there, frozen, for just over three seconds, before he sprinted away like a cat through the trees. Tim rushed past Janey to the girl’s side. He started to say something, but Janey cut him off with “Stay with her!” and bolted after the retreating figure.
A dozen yards into the woods, safely out of Tim’s sight, Janey stopped briefly, cursing the time it took but too scared not to do it. She found a cleft in a lightning-struck tree and plunged her purse into the darkness inside it. Immediately the air temperature around her soared, and a number of nearby leaves cracked and fell to the ground, dry and brittle. Janey drew her hand back out of the cleft holding the Vylar suit.
Ten seconds later—the result of long hours drilling this very task—Janey dashed after the mugger, her body protected by gray segmented armor, the mask covering her face.
* * *
In Scott’s room, Ned Fields came and stood over Brenda Jorden until she looked up at him. On the bed Scott wheezed and didn’t open his eyes. Fields motioned with his head, and followed Brenda out into the hallway.
“Well,” she sighed. “Our job just got twice as complicated.”
Fields sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to find that one too. Ourselves, I mean.”
“If we do this with the first one, we’ll have to do it with the second. It’s our asses now.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “...Unless we can make the primary go after that new one.”
“Christ. We could’ve stuck with the original plan. For that matter, Vessler’s right here. Why couldn’t you just zap him, like you do the kid?”
She shook her head. “I tried to sell that to Stamford to begin with. He doesn’t think the other lieutenants would buy it. Too much faith in Vessler. It’s got to look like plain incompetence. Plus, Stamford already approved the new idea, so we’re stuck with it.”
“Grand.” Disgusted and abruptly thirsty, Fields turned and headed for the kitchen, floorboards squealing beneath his weight. He’d spent a good deal of time thinking about what the company would be like, once Vessler was out of the way. Once Jorden took his place.
Fields got the feeling that, no matter who she worked with, Brenda Jorden would be the one in charge, sooner or later. Not for the first time he wondered what the chances might be of getting a letter of resignation accepted.
Behind him, Jorden went back in to tend to Scott.
* * *
Janey caught up with the mugger underneath a small stone bridge leading out of the park. Harsh streetlights illuminated the bridge, but cast thick black shadows beneath it. Janey saw brilliant white pinpoints set in onyx, and thought, Those are eyes? The rest of the man became visible slowly in the darkness.
He was young, early twenties maybe, and strikingly handsome. Janey blinked, even more unsure of what she thought she’d seen under the tree. The guy was crouched down just beneath the road, wedged into the corner formed by the bridge and the embankment.
He made no threatening moves, just crouched, one hand raised, touching a massive archway stone. Janey approached slowly, hands open, unthreatening, but young man cringed away from her.
Guess I can’t blame him, given how I look.
Janey called out, “What’s your name?”
“Simon.” The mugger winced. “Please...I’m sorry, I didn’t...” He trailed off, uncertain and—what? Scared?
Janey stood like a statue. Somewhere a clock struck, the first of eleven chimes, and in her mind she replayed the horror show in the darkness under the tree. It couldn’t have been real.
Just then they both heard the rumble of an approaching truck on the road over the bridge, headed out of the park. Simon tensed, telegraphing, and Janey took a quick step forward. “Wait a minute!”
As the truck passed overhead Simon moved, fluid as an animal, swung himself up and onto the bridge. By the time Janey scrambled up the embankment and vaulted over the guardrails into the flat white light of the street lamps, the truck, and Simon along with it, were rapidly becoming a distant pair of taillights, about to blend smoothly into the midtown traffic.
Janey ducked back off the road, into the shadows, as another vehicle swept past, but she never took her eyes from the truck’s taillights. She saw them come to a stop in a line of cars at an intersection a few hundred yards away, where the park surrendered to the city’s concrete.
Paralleling the road, Janey sprinted toward the truck.
If it hadn’t stopped at the red light she would have lost it, and wouldn’t have tried what she attempted now. As it was, some of the city’s traffic signals took a long time to change, and this looked like one of them. The light probably wouldn’t hold the truck long enough to reach it on foot. But Janey had other options.
She tried to think clearly as she ran. She’d had only the chase through the park for a warm-up, but her breathing came deep and unlabored as her arms and legs pumped.
The truck still sat at the light, waiting for her.
She squinted, trying to make out the details of the vehicle. Bright yellow, formerly a Penske, with the black letters overpainted by a slightly different shade of yellow. A private citizen, most likely, hauling who knew what. Janey watched for silhouettes poking up from the truck’s roof, afraid the mugger would be on the lookout for her. There wasn’t much she could do about it, running out into the open, and the farther into town the truck moved, the fewer chances she’d have to flicker out and get anywhere useful.
The light changed, and the truck rolled slowly forward, Janey still a hundred yards away. The grassy shoulder of the road abruptly changed to concrete sidewalk, and the thick soles of the leather-and-Vylar boots slapped against the hard surface.
T
here: a wide ledge ran around the third story of a squat, cube-shaped building on the corner where the truck had turned, and street lights below it cast deep shadows between the ledge and the side of the building. The nearest pedestrian was easily sixty feet away, and Janey veered from the road and plunged into the darkness beneath a magnolia tree.
The tips of several branches withered and died as she disappeared beneath them.
Emerging onto the ledge, Janey saw the truck stopped at another red light. From her new vantage point she had a clear view down onto the street.
Simon still perched spread-eagled on top of the former Penske—and Janey gasped. Simon’s fingers had elongated, become more like tentacles than actual digits, and clamped onto the forward corners of the truck’s cargo compartment.
I wasn’t imagining things!
The light flicked to green, but pedestrians still moved in the cross-walk in front of the truck, and the driver leaned on his horn. Janey saw one of the pedestrians flip off the driver before skittering out of the way. The truck accelerated. She found another jumping point on the roof of a six-story building three blocks away, and flickered away from the ledge, leaving steam and blistering-hot concrete behind her.
The truck moved deeper into the city, and Janey followed, flickering from one pool of shadow to another, always in sight of it. Simon stayed on its roof until it slowed and came to a creaking halt outside a lower-class apartment building. Janey watched as Simon flung himself from the roof of the vehicle to the side of the building and bounded onto the rooftop of a nearby shop. She couldn’t believe it; the two leaps together totaled about fifty feet.
But the leaps, those patently impossible leaps, proved the point Janey hadn’t quite allowed herself to accept yet. The fingers could have been a trick, some sort of weird gloves, and the teeth might just have been a mask or an oral prosthesis. But no kind of cosmetics allowed their wearer to deny freaking gravity. Simon, the young man who’d attacked the girl in the park, wasn’t human—at least, not any more human than Janey herself. A kinship was there, a connection of some kind. Janey felt the certainty of it in her bone marrow. She had to catch up with Simon, contain him if necessary, but above all she had to talk to him. Had to.
The truck’s doors opened, and two college kids got out and went around to the back, unaware of the ride they’d provided. Janey could see the roof Simon had jumped onto, several sections of it covered with inky shadows, thrown by both the low wall that ran around its edge and by two huge air conditioning units that stood twenty feet apart, like sentries. With a sigh and a burst of heat, Janey was there.
She kept perfectly still for long moments, listening. She edged around an air conditioner housing and found herself facing an open door, a wrecked lock hanging from its hasp, stairs beyond it leading down into the building. Simon was inside, Janey could feel it, and she knew she’d lose him if she didn’t follow immediately. Janey eyed the ruined lock. Had Simon found a crowbar somewhere? ...Or had he destroyed the lock with natural strength? With a sinking feeling Janey hoped it wasn’t the latter.
The rooftop lay in icy silence. Janey went to the stairs and flickered down, into the darkness.
She stood at one end of a short hallway, polished hardwood floors partially covered with plush green carpet. Five heavy wooden doors opened off the hall. The two on her right stood open, and Janey peered into square rooms filled with expensive office furniture. Set into the north walls of both rooms were ornate, non-functional fireplaces, smooth concrete filling in where flames had once provided heat, and Janey realized the building had once been a hotel.
A glass door closed off the far end of the hallway. Through the door was a landing, with stairs going down to the right. She could see another glass door on the far side of the landing, and beyond that another hallway, a mirror-image of the one where she now stood.
The doors around her, according to the plaques on the walls next to them, led to the offices of a realtor. She squinted, and saw a similar plaque affixed to the door on the far side of the landing. A brokerage firm.
The building felt lifeless. No air currents moved. The offices had no doubt closed down and emptied at five o’clock. She could see deadbolt locks on the nearer glass door, engaged at both the floor and the ceiling.
So. Two doors open, three more shut, maybe locked. Simon had come through the door from the roof with no problem, but he’d left the lock mangled when he did. Nothing here appeared to be disturbed. Janey made adjustments to the Vylar gloves, swinging hinged metal braces from the backs of the hands around to the palms. They interlocked with a steel ridge running across the knuckles, and when they clicked into place, functioned as built-in steel knuckles.
Janey hadn’t spent much time actively looking, but in the past seven years she’d met no one else like herself, no one else who could do things no human should be able to do—until tonight, when the skinny, pale young man who called himself Simon did things that made Janey’s mind ache. She focused on regulating her breathing.
One of two possibilities: Simon came down the stairs, went into one of the two rooms with the open doors, and immediately left through a window. If the windows opened. It wouldn’t surprise her to find them painted shut. Or, Simon came down the stairs, got into one of the other rooms, closed the door behind him, and decided to wait.
Which didn’t make any sense. Simon wouldn’t have known Janey had followed him at all, much less that she had trailed him here, to this specific building. Simon had no reason to wait. He’d be long gone by now.
Unless he’d seen Janey following him.
Or unless he could feel Janey’s presence somehow?
The windows in the open rooms, as Janey had suspected, were painted shut. The building was old enough not to have any closets, and the desks she’d seen faced the walls, their knee-holes exposed and hiding nothing. If Simon were here, he’d have to be in one of the three other rooms.
Janey approached the first door.
She closed her hand around the knob, still breathing slowly and deeply, turned it, stepped to one side of the doorway, and pushed the door open.
Nothing flew out at her.
For an instant Janey flashed on the girl in the park, lying behind the tree. Her skin had glistened, wet with black blood. Janey hadn’t seen any knife. But those fingers...
Swiftly now, Janey pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped through it, one steel-jacketed fist drawn back and ready.
Ready to punch an empty bathroom.
Her shoulders slumped, and she smiled under the mask.
The next door she tried was about ten feet down the hall, and also opened when she turned the knob. She didn’t know if the realtor simply wasn’t concerned with people breaking in, trusting in the locks at the ends of the hallway, or if Simon had somehow managed to open this lock without destroying it.
Janey opened the door the same way she’d opened the one to the bathroom, and paused in the doorway, scanning the room’s contents. Two desks and a copier didn’t present much of a threat. She couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or relieved.
The third door was also unlocked, but opened onto a room smaller than the others she’d seen. Set into the far end of the wall to Janey’s left was another door, more than likely to an inner office. Several shafts of yellow-orange light from the downtown street lamps sliced through the darkness of the room, casting distorted window-shaped patches across the carpet and furniture. This is the last place he could be. If he’s not behind that door I’ve been wasting my time.
She didn’t want to take the chance of having the floor squeal under her feet as she approached the last door, and the shafts of light from outside illuminated only a small portion of the room. Janey crossed the room with a small flicker. She emerged right beside the door, and the hot air from her jump steamed up the window just as she heard the gasp from behind her.
Whirling, Jane
y saw Simon tucked into the corner above the door to the hallway like a fat, grotesque spider. Simon’s arms reached back behind him and his toes touched the lintel of the doorframe. He let go of whatever he’d been holding on to and dropped to the floor.
“Oh my God,” Simon choked out. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
Janey realized two things at once: first, Simon had seen her teleport. Second, the kid was terrified of her.
Simon scrambled backward, out the door, without taking his eyes off Janey.
As she watched, Simon’s eyes shifted and changed, warping back and forth between normal blue and the solid-black-with-white-pinpoints Janey had first seen in the park. Simon’s jaw opened, and Janey sucked in a sharp breath. The jaw was distending again, with a greasy popping sound.
“Oh my God, get away from me, get away from me!” Simon screeched, and bolted away toward the door to the roof. Janey instantly flickered into the hallway. Behind her the antique window pane cracked with the sudden heat.
Simon only had a few feet to go before he reached the door, but another flicker brought Janey to the foot of the stairs, blocking Simon’s path. Janey said, “Wait,” and was going to follow it with, “I just want to talk to you,” but Simon screeched again, wheeled and barreled headlong toward the glass door at the other end.
Flicker. Janey was there, in front of him again. She held up her gloved hands. “Stop, please, I’m not going to hurt you!” Simon’s eyes looked like saucers by now, and Janey realized he wasn’t going to stop just before Simon rammed into her, sending them both through the glass door and onto the carpet at the head of the staircase.
The Vylar suit protected her from any jagged edges, and she tried her best to make sure none of them cut Simon. They landed in a tangled heap, and Simon exploded off the floor, shoved Janey away from him and scrambled toward the stairs. Janey slid a couple of feet across the floor, and her head cracked hard against the stock broker’s doorframe. She blinked away stars and tears.
