Birthmarked

by Maria Violante

  There was an odd pause that seemed to stretch on for too long. “Sounds like a good guy,” Buckner finally said.

  I sighed again, but this time I was grateful. Somehow, the exchange we had just had was important—not that Buckner had to approve of Malone, not by a long-shot, but still . . . I could feel my eyes getting wet, and I rushed to change the subject. “So what’s the deal with Shawn? I mean he seemed pretty gung-ho about shooting me, and then when the opportunity came up for me to join the Order—”

  A box-van merged in front of us too fast, and Buckner quickly shifted down a gear. The motor raced, he flipped a switch, and the engine brake roared. “Yeah, that’s not your fault, kiddo. He and my last apprentice, Kenneth, were brothers—well, half-brothers, but they loved each other more than any brothers ever could. Kenneth died during a mission. Shawn blames me, because it’s too hard to not have somebody to blame.”

  Yeah. I knew how that felt. For a long time, I’d blamed my mother for father’s leaving—and then turned to blaming my father for the way my mother turned out—bitter, angry, unable to stop crying. Nobody ever knew, of course—our house always looked perfect, as long as nobody checked for the empty bottles under the sink.

  I felt a small flame of guilt. I haven’t been back to that house since the funeral.

  I shook off the thought. This wasn’t the time for that—hadn’t Buckner already told me that I needed to concentrate? “There’s never anyone to blame, though, is there?”

  “It’s a pointless exercise. He’ll realize that eventually—and hopefully before I’m dead or some harm comes to him. I miss him.”

  I sensed the pain in his words, and just like that, I knew how he felt—loss that spilled into acceptance, an understanding of the way things were in the world. More than that, I could feel my feelings soaking over into Buckner. They trailed like taffy strings, stretching and sinking with their own weight. “You’re some kind of empath, aren’t you?”

  Buckner’s brows went up. “Where’d you hear that word?”

  “It was something that Luke—my ex—was always bragging about. That he could tune into people’s emotions. He couldn’t really, he just read about it somewhere. He was kind of a con-man. I always thought it was ridiculous, like people that talk about being able to sense auras or something. But you—you can do it, can’t you? The way you look at me—and Shawn—it’s like you always understand everything a hundred percent, but it’s more than that. I feel like I can understand you.”

  A dry smile came across Buckner’s face. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  I swallowed. “Is that why you saved me? Why you decided not to kill me—why you took me on as your apprentice? You can feel something about me?”

  He nodded. “You may be something of an empath, too, if you can figure all of that out.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m usually clueless about how people feel.” Like, for example, the fact Luke was having second thoughts. “Although some things have been a little different, lately. I pulled into Elijah foods the other day—”

  Buckner pulled a face, reinforcing the idea that everybody knew about Elijah foods.

  “And I managed to bribe the gate-guard into letting me in. I don’t know how I knew he’d take it—I just saw the ring and the way he held his hands and just like that, I knew that he’d let me in. Maybe I’m hyper-observant? Is that some kind of power?”

  Buckner sucked on some of his top teeth as he executed a smooth lane change into the other lane. I could feel the way the truck shifted, the way the revs matched perfectly, and I knew he had been driving for a very long time. To do that was more art than science.

  “No, I don’t think that’s it. Most of us are pretty observant—more than your average person. It’s like we access a different part of the brain—although normal people get it too, sometimes. Cops, detectives, wilderness hikers— people that have to read whole rooms at once. Anybody can be trained to be more observant.”

  “I wasn’t trained, though.”

  “No, but if you’ve been going through a stressful time—good or bad—sometimes the kick in cortisol is enough to bring some of it out of hiding. I mean think about a P.O.W., or someone who’s been kidnapped—picking up on details could be the difference between living and dying, and the body gets good about doing that when it needs to.”

  “It’s like time slows down.” I flashed back to the crash, to watching individual objects fly through the air and having enough time to think about and name each thing, from hairdryer to coffeepot.

  “Yup.”

  “So . . . what does being a Marker mean, exactly? Am I going to get abilities or powers or something?” I felt a glimmer of excitement—I mean, who doesn’t want to be a superhero?

  “I don’t know, kiddo, although it won’t be long before you find out. Like I said, your brain isn’t going to let it wait too long—not when it might be the difference between living and dying.” He dropped the stub, pulled another cigarette out of his pocket with one hand, and lit the end, before taking a long drag. “Although, after tonight, I probably won’t be taking you out on a mission for a while. I asked them not to assign me to any new types of creatures. You need to do your training first before you’ll be of any use in the field. Until then, there’s a good possibility you’ll get us killed. Now, shut up, look alive, and don’t do anything I don’t do.”

  He hit the blinker and flicked the headlights on and off once, and grabbed the CB. “WB 401, looks like I might have a flat. Pulling over, so go slow in the creeper lane.”

  “Thank you, driver.”

  He winked at me. “In case you were wondering, that was the signal.”

  Chapter Ten

  Buckner scrambled out of his seat, and I followed suit. I shivered as a gust of wind hit me, missing the truck’s warm heat. Hopefully, we were going get inside soon.

  Buckner mentioned earlier the night was supposed to be mild. Shows what he knew.

  “Ready to get suited up?”

  I followed him as he ambled around to the back of his truck and opened up his trailer.

  “This unit is what we call an ‘S-Rig’. It had been designed exclusively for hunting glitches and related creatures.”

  I almost laughed—the inside of the trailer was set up like a house, with a table, chairs—even a small hotplate. All of them had be strapped down or anchored somehow—maybe Velcro? Closer inspection, though, revealed a great number of oddities. In the corner sprawled a bunch of cylindrical tanks, the kind scuba divers probably used—okay, it’s a guess, I’ve never been scuba diving. Oxygen, right? Isn’t that stuff flammable?

  In the back of the trailer—and I mean back, fifty-three feet back, far enough back that I had to squint a little to make sense of what I was looking at in the dark—was a series of oblong garments. Buckner climbed up and felt the side wall for a second, and then a light came on, revealing spacesuits with giant bubble domes for heads.

  I gaped at them. “Holy crap, are we going to be astronauts?”

  He grinned at me. “You know it, kiddo. These suits are hyper-insulated, both thermally and electrically.”

  “So that means. . ."

  “Our heat and electrical signatures get cancelled out or blocked—upward, I think, of ninety-nine percent, rendering us invisible to glitches. In open mode, they project a column of warm air about a foot away from your body. It’s enough to slightly throw off your thermal and electrical signatures—which might buy you a little time if you needed it.”

  I cocked my head sideways and eyed them carefully. On second thought, I wasn’t sure how jazzed I was about wearing these anymore. They looked a lot like something you’d pick up in a costume shop. One of them had duct tape over the arm, and I didn’t exactly find that reassuring.

  Buckner laid a hand on my arm and motioned for me to climb up. “I know what they look like, but think about this—until we had these suits, an operative died on pretty much every single mission that involved a glitch. It was brutal.
” He shook his head, and his grim look from earlier suddenly made sense. “These provide, in addition to blocking your signature, a small measure of protection as well—if a glitch actually managed to touch you unprotected, you’d die instantly. With a suit, you can sustain a glancing blow, though not prolonged contact. A few seconds is still enough to lose vital electrical functions in your brain and send you into a coma, and anything past that is instant death.”

  “So, the stakes are high, huh?” Great.

  “Yup, kiddo, although take heart, because we got a really lucky break here. Glitches usually slip through into this world in pairs, which makes them a lot harder to kill. In this case, though, we got a single. As far as I’m concerned, that’s Christmas. Good luck for your first mission.”

  “Great.” I tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. I wasn’t sure if I should feel embarrassed that I wasn’t acting particularly brave, or grateful that I still had a sense of self-preservation.

  Buckner clomped to the back, me in tow, and thumbed at the rack of suits. “Should be one here in your size. I’ll turn around to give you some privacy.”

  He handed me one and pivoted away. I shivered, dreading the idea of stripping down in this sudden cold-snap—although, at least, the trailer provided some small measure of wind resistance. Seeing no other way out, I wriggled into the bottom of the suit, but before I managed to get the bubble-head on, I stopped and looked over at him. “Hey . . . Bucker?”

  He was lighting a cigarette. “What?”

  “Why do they call them glitches?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly, although I think it fits. I mean, nothing good ends in “-itch.”

  I meditated on this. Snitch. Itch. Bitch.

  He gave me a conspiratorial wink and took a puff, the smoke clouding around the top of the trailer. “Now put on your helmet. They’re waiting for us.”

  “We’re going to be talking like this from here on out.”

  I jumped at Buckner’s sudden voice inside of my helmet.

  “Um, hi,” I tried. “You can hear this?”

  “Loud and clear. Looks like your helmet is working fine. Now listen—these glitches can’t really hear, but they can feel the vibrations from your voice if you talk too loud. It’s a slim chance, but a real one, so try to stay quiet. Now, your job—and your only job, at this point—is to stay exactly four steps behind me, unless I tell you to do something else.”

  I could have growled, but I could just make out the white shade of his face through his head-bubble, and his expression that was both concerned and deadly serious. So, I shut up. He reached out and flipped a switch on my suit, and there was silent hissing noise inside—not the kind of sound machinery makes, or the hissing of a snake—more like the gentle and fully creepy rasp of a yoga-breath or a ventilator—or Darth Vader’s rebreather. I was hit with a shock of sudden cold, so severe that I had to fight to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “Got to cancel out your heat signature. And one more thing—when you see them—don’t freak out. They can’t see you, not in the normal sense. They don’t have eyes. They sense vibrations and electromagnetic waves the way bats use echolocation or certain bees use non-visible light. So whatever you do, stay close to me, follow me, and follow any directions I give you. Don’t freak out. You got it?”

  I gulped. “That was not exactly the most heartening thing to hear.”

  Buckner sniggered audibly. “Oh yeah? Wait until you see what we’re talking about.”

  Between the odd, shuffling gait and the ventilator noises inside of my suit, I felt like we were a set of spacemen going for a moonwalk. I could make out Shawn’s and Buckner’s faces easily, but the third guy was one I hadn’t met—this, I supposed, was Sven.

  “Chris is already inside. Kid never could wait for anything.” I recognized Sven’s voice in my helmet from the CB.

  Buckner was pulling away. I tried to follow him and stumbled. Although the suits fit pretty tightly around the ankles and crotch, the poofy legs meant I was going to have serious issues if I forgot about them and needed to run anywhere.

  Buckner nodded at Sven, who shook his head once, violently, and then slumped his shoulders. Even with the distortion of the bubble helmet, I could see his pout—it looked like he was about to stamp his foot.

  “Sven is going to stay with the door.” Buckner’s rasp.

  “The what?”

  “You’ll see. It’s in his trailer.”

  The oxygen tank whispered, and I shivered—from the cold of the suit or just the general creepiness of everything, I wasn’t sure.

  Where do they get all of this stuff, anyway? I had gotten the impression from my blind apprenticeship ceremony that the Markers were ancient, the kind of guys who ran around in cloaks and waved daggers through the air while saying magic words. And yet, this level of technology was mind-boggling. I felt like a member of Mission Impossible—and keeping a secret in this day and time was a hard thing to do, wasn’t it?

  I shuffled along in tiny, wide steps, concentrating on lifting my feet and planting them without rubbing them against the gravel. Lift. Plant. Lift. Plant. Lift—

  I heard a sigh and knew immediately it was Shawn. “Can you stop that?”

  “Stop what?”

  Buckner coughed. “Announcing your movements. Right now, I’ve got our ‘channel’ fully open, which means all of us can hear everything you say.”

  I shivered. In a way, that was even creepier than the suit. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was speaking aloud.”

  “All right, kiddo. Whatever you do, stay behind me.”

  “Right.”

  By the time the small farmhouse came into view, I was panting. None of the other operatives seemed to be breaking a sweat—actually, given the cold, neither was I, but I was definitely thinking I should take up a walking regimen or something. Shawn and Sven didn’t slow down once, not even for a second, and Buckner was hot on their heels. I wondered if Chris could keep up with this as well. I almost chuckled at the thought of the breakfast he had served me—sparse, healthy, and sorely in need of butter. And I still couldn’t believe that whoever had seen me put me on a diet. Although in retrospect, it made sense—I’d only seen a few men in the halls when Buckner came to pick me up, but all of them were in ridiculous shape, the kind of shape that gave me a little much needed-warmth.

  I hadn’t had sex in so long.

  What if I died today?

  God, I’d almost be a re-virgin by this point.

  No, brain, this is not a good time to think about that.

  My stomach, whether at the thought of food or men, suddenly growled—loud enough that Sven turned to stare at me, and I ducked my head.

  We had almost reached the driveway of the farmhouse. The structure was square and foreboding, stained with the drab brown-grey that seems to pop into half of the horror movies about rural areas. Instantly, I felt my knees starting to lock up, my feet pulling back from getting any closer.

  I went to a haunted house when I was young. I may have wet myself. I haven’t been in one since—not for my mom, not for my best friend, and not for the incredibly hot guy in college who asked me on a date the Halloween and then dumped me when he realized what a scaredy-cat I was. And while this house looked sort of normal from the outside—quaint, even, if I ignored the odd shadows—I could feel the chill radiating through it, the heavy cold that seeped all of the way through the air and into my suit, dropping the temperature far enough that my skin broke out in goose bumps and my nipples hurt.

  And then I caught the shadow, a dark shape that moved like a piece of fabric and hung in the window for a moment before sliding away. “Did you see—?”

  Buckner shushed me.

  I gulped and fought off the urge to protest, instead launching into a silent prayer. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, rabbit-fast and bass-drum heavy. Buckner gave a hand signal and pointed at Shawn, who nodded back—stiffly, but then his head and neck were supporting the weight of a fi
shbowl.

  “Shawn is going to stay here. He’s linked with Sven, who’s watching the door.”

  “You know, I could stay here. Or I could watch the door.”

  “Tough cookies, kid. You’re my apprentice, and you’re going in with me—and besides, you’re not qualified to do either of those things.” He indicated the doorway with a sweeping wave. “I’d say ladies first, but that might be dangerous. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Um, absolutely not.”

  Buckner pulled a small metal rectangle out of his pocket. For a moment, I thought it was a business card holder. I felt my curiosity rise. Leave it to me to be too dumb to stay scared. “What is that?”

  “You’ll see—and soon enough, you’ll have a set of your own. It’s required learning. Don’t worry too much about it—owner’s definitely dead, and we try hard not leave a real obvious trace. We’ve got this road shut down.”

  I glanced at the deserted field around us. “And there aren’t any houses around. That’s sort of lucky.”

  “Not luck. Glitches are smart like that. Now shut up.”

  He kneeled besides the door and pulled on the metal rectangle with his thumb and forefinger. The outside slid off like a skin, revealing a comb of long, thin metal implements that were connected to the base by pop-rivets. He inspected them and then pushed all of them back toward the outside of the rectangle, except for one, which he inserted in the lock.

  For the lock-picker on the go. I chuckled.

  “Charlie, what did I say? Shut up.”

  I shut up.

  After a few moments of work, the door clicked open, and we were immediately greeted by a frigid wall of air that seemed to suck the life out of me, right through my suit. He scrambled to his feet—a bit awkwardly, which was somehow gratifying—and waved at me and stepped inside. I followed as closely behind as I dared.