Echoes

by Therin Knite

  Echoes

  A Novel of the Echoverse

  Therin Knite

  Echoes

  Copyright © 2014 by Therin Knite

  Cover Design by Christian Bentulan at http://coversbychristian.com/

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  For more information:

  http://www.therinknite.com

  * * *

  To contact the author, email tknitemail@gmail.com

  Contents

  Books by Therin Knite

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  September 2712

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  The Story Continues

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  About Therin Knite

  Books by Therin Knite

  ECHOVERSE

  Echoes

  Epitaphs

  Encodings (upcoming)

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Solace

  SHORT STORIES

  Venus in Red

  Urban fantasy thrillers under the pen name Clara Coulson.

  CITY OF CROWS

  Soul Breaker

  Shade Chaser

  Wraith Hunter

  Doom Sayer

  Day Killer (upcoming)

  TALES FROM THE CITY OF CROWS

  Dream Snatcher

  LARK NATION

  Hunter of the Night

  Speaker of the Lost

  Watcher of the Dead (upcoming)

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  To everyone who had to read the first edition of this book…

  * * *

  Oh, god. I’m so sorry.

  September 2712

  Chapter One

  A single dollop of raspberry donut filling. That is what prevents Victor Manson from getting burned to a crisp by a dragon for the seventy-seventh time. In a manner of speaking.

  See, the seventy-seventh iteration begins as they all do. Manson saunters onto his patio at three AM sharp with a cup of imported coffee in one hand and his Ocom loading the daily stock report in the other. Five minutes, fourteen sips, and three stock pages later, he notices the unnatural vibration that anyone with half an attention span would’ve noticed immediately. So he gets up, taking the tablet but leaving the cup, and adjusts the royal blue designer boxers practically vacuum sealed to his butt as he wanders onto his lawn. Then, the vibrating morphs into the stampeding step of something twice the size of an elephant, but Manson struggles to decipher the meaning of the sound.

  Until his hideous fence explodes into a rain of six-figure cedar chips.

  It streaks across the lawn: twenty-six feet of night-black scales and wings the size of hovercopter blades. Clawed feet hit the ground running. Sharp eyes lock on to the stupefied Manson. For two-point-one seconds, the man thinks he’s dreaming, and the flight response doesn’t kick in until the stream of fire hits his face dead on—

  The raspberry filling lands with a dull plop on a large piece of shredded fence.

  And everything stops.

  The murderous dragon freezes mid-fire stream. Manson gets stuck with his hands held up in a pitiful attempt to get a “Please don’t eat me” message across to something that gives him less consideration than a hungry diner gives the cow butchered for a steak. The grass doesn’t burn. There are no screams. And the dragon doesn’t soar over the house and disappear into the night like it has seventy-six times before.

  Despite several attempts, the death scene reconstruction won’t start moving again, and before it can be reset, another foreign element invades it. A person. Named Jin. Whose lips are stained an incriminating shade of red.

  “What’s cracking, Firecracker?” he says.

  My illusion disintegrates.

  The meticulously constructed dragon fades away to reveal a bustling cul-de-sac, IBI vehicles with flashing lights blocking the entrance to Pennimore Street and a crowd of hapless passersby staring stupidly from behind the digital DO NOT CROSS boundary. Manson’s terrified face dissolves; all that’s left of him is a set of charred remains in a body bag that rests in the black arc of grass where he made a final plea to his dragon overlord moments before it melted his face off.

  Jin rips another chunk out of his donut. Filling clings to the corner of his lips. “What’s wrong? You’ve got that ‘I hate you, asshole’ look on your face.” After a few seconds of consideration, his eyebrows arch in a Jin-exclusive manner of expressing epiphanies. “Oh, were you doing that mental movie thing again?”

  “No, Jin, I was staring off into space, brooding over my personal problems on the government’s dime.” I shove my hands into my pockets and nudge the soiled piece of fencing with my foot. “You’ve contaminated evidence, you know?”

  “Eh, the servers already got it.” He nods to the hole in the fence, where a couple of scene preservers are busy taking a high-res holograph. “Plus, what’s a single chunk of wood going to tell us anyway? I think Manson’s body, or what’s left of it, might hold a few more clues.”

  “And that’s why you’re in Cybersecurity and not Crime Scene Investigation. Using the location of every piece of wood from the fence, I can extrapolate the size of the thing that killed Manson. Not to mention what shape it was, how fast it was moving, what direction it came from, and what direction it went.” The words roll off my tongue a little too “smarter than you” sounding, and Jin’s cheeks redden.

  His tongue pokes out and licks the dirtied corner of his lips as he stares in half-embarrassed wonder. “All that from a hunk of wood, Firecracker?”

  “All that and then some. Turns out reconstructing crime scenes is about more than just looking at a body and going ‘I think fire killed him.’”

  Jin’s cheeks are purple now. “Hey, that was an accurate observation.”

  “And now Briggs thinks you’re an idiot.”

  “He thought that already.”

  “Well, you didn’t have to confirm it.”

  “All right, ginger genius, you tell me what killed Manson then.” He shoves the last bit of donut into his mouth and proceeds to lick the mess off his fingers.

  “A dragon,” I say.

  Jin pauses with a pinky finger pressed to his tongue. “Huh?”

  “A dragon, or something that looks like one. My best guess is that it’s some escaped genetic experiment from a local lab or an illegal underground project. There are other explanations, but few are as plausible. Of course, the experiment theory doesn’t explain why the dragon isn’t still flying around, terrorizing the city. My ‘mental movie,’ as you put it, can’t adequately account for its disappearance. I’ve run through the damn reconstruction almost a hundred times, and I still can’t
figure out where it went. It’s like it ceased to exist after attacking Manson. But still, if I was in charge, I’d order an investigation of all the city labs regardless. Couldn’t hurt to ask if anyone’s misplaced their dragon, yeah? I mean…”

  Jin’s thumb hangs precariously from his mouth, his eyes focused on something behind me. It turns out to be the six and a half feet of no-nonsense known as Commander Briggs, who’s close enough to have heard every word I just uttered.

  “Agent Adamend,” the commander says, “correct me if I’m wrong, but did you say a dragon killed Manson?”

  A twitching hand and bloodshot eyes indicate Briggs has been hounded by the director board on Manson’s murder since he stepped into the office at five AM. On cue, his Ocom starts ringing again, and his hand reflexively sinks to his belt clip. He doesn’t pick it up though. Instead, he waits for me to give an explanation I know and he knows he’ll never believe. I could describe a hundred thousand ways how something resembling a dragon could exist in reality, but Briggs wouldn’t believe a single one of them unless he saw it with his own eyes.

  I say nothing.

  “I brought you here to help, Adamend,” he continues, “not hinder. If you’re going to waste time by cracking jokes at crime scenes, then you’re better off back in your office. Or, where you belong, a junior cubicle.” He snatches his Ocom from his belt, scrolls through a list of text updates, and swears under his breath as he taps a few quick replies. “Now get back to work,” he barks when finished, “or leave.”

  Jin bites down on his thumb. “He’s been working very hard, Commander. It was my fault he stopped. I interrupted him.”

  Briggs halts mid-step on his warpath toward another unsuspecting group of agents and gives Jin a curious stare. He can’t fathom why anyone would stick up for me. “Have it your way, Connors. But if I see any BS in his field report, it’s on you.”

  It’s only when Briggs signals a full switch of attention by yelling at another idle loiterer that Jin deflates from puff-chested frigate to popped balloon dog. “I’m going to regret standing up for you, aren’t I?”

  “Don’t you always?” I offer him a sympathetic shoulder pat. “Could be worse though.”

  “How?”

  “You could be me.”

  He swats my arm away with a sticky hand. “Oh please, Adem. Your life is not as hard as you make it out to be. You’re young. You’re smart. You’ve got a great job.”

  “I’m the office pet.”

  “You, my friend, are a twenty-three-year-old in a thirty-five-year-old’s professional position, and you got there by way of blatant favoritism from Director Kill-us-all. You expected to be treated like, what, an equal?”

  “I do three times the work of everyone else in Crime Scene Investigation combined. I should be their king. Also, I’m in my position because Director Brennian acknowledged that I am talented enough to be there. I expected at least a few grains of respect.”

  The same sticky hand ruffles my hair in the exact manner Jin knows I detest. “If you expected respect for being a kid genius in a federal agency, then you are not nearly as smart as you think you are.”

  Guttural shouts of micro-managerial anger echo across the Manson property.

  “Now why don’t you get me a coffee,” Jin adds, “before Briggs decides this is a great day to rip off Adamend’s head for a trophy?”

  “Funny. I’m pretty sure he thinks that every day.”

  The girl with the umbrella under the sun walks in step with me from the end of Pennimore Street to the nearest coffee-selling convenience store. She says nothing and does nothing but twirl her little black umbrella and stare straight ahead through a pair of dark designer sunglasses. Adorned with a uniform I cannot place, I peg her at first as a plant from a government agency that lacks jurisdiction in the Manson case who will attempt to bribe me for information.

  We stop across the street from the store to let a few more IBI vans zip by, and a shadow makes us both peer up at the overcast morning sky. A news hovercopter is approaching the Manson property. It takes a slow, buzzard-like approach, unwilling to test the IBI’s patience too quickly.

  As if sensing trouble, the two unmarked IBI copters across the lane from Manson’s house take to the sky, cutting off the info hawk’s approach. They wage a short war, the IBI copters striking their opponent with the invisible blades of government authority until the media copter peels off and takes a position half a mile away.

  Well, that skirmish will be on the eight o’clock news ton—

  “They’re like dancers in the sky.” Umbrella girl waits for me in the middle of the street, blocking a stream of oncoming vehicles with a sort of practiced obliviousness that ignites a spark of attraction in a dusty corner of my brain. I catch up to her.

  We fall back into mimicry until I open the convenience store door and let her in ahead of me. She whips out her Ocom and accesses the store’s order app as we take a place at the end of a long line of disgruntled IBI agents and annoyed neighborhood residents who take the presence of government agencies as a personal affront. They’re the kind of people who like to yell, “Stay off my lawn.”

  I get a glimpse of the order on umbrella girl’s tablet. Five coffees. Two black. One with way too much sugar. One fancy latte. And one with more cream than ought to be available in the entire District of Columbia.

  This should be simple. Pick which one is hers. Like I can pick out which tie Jin will buy before he ever sees it. Like I can find the odd man out in a crowd of people wearing identical masks. But doubt creeps up my spine as I work through all the girl’s details. They don’t add up.

  Her uniform has no nametag or agency patch. Identifiable yet unknown? Her only obvious bod mod is a head of snow-white hair bound in a compulsively neat bun. Adventurous but restrained? The umbrella is the same designer brand as her glasses, a brand popular with older adults, and the way she holds it is unbecoming of someone her age. She’s young. Younger than me. But she stands with the posture of an old-world monarch, and the stop-n-shop may as well be a palace with the atmosphere she exudes.

  I can read everyone.

  But I can’t read umbrella girl.

  I select Jin’s standard order on my own tablet without sparing a glance at the screen, and as soon as I grab the steaming cup from the cashier, my eyes return to my adversary. She waits by the door with the sound knowledge I’ll open it for her again. I do.

  I’ve been told I have no taste for intrigue, but no one can claim I don’t humor the interesting. It’s just that most people aren’t interesting.

  Once we’re on the street again, I pick up the conversation. “Why dancers?”

  “For the hovercopters?” Her lips form words with the tilt of a long-forgotten accent.

  “Yeah. Why not warriors? They were fighting, after all.”

  The umbrella twirls again, and she taps a thumb on her overladen coffee tray. “That’s exactly why I said dancers.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Her mouth curls into a cat’s grin. “Dancers are warriors, Agent Adamend.”

  “Who—?”

  A flurry of activity erupts at the Manson house. Agents from various departments are packing up their equipment, several of them swearing and slamming SUV doors shut with all the tact of grounded teenagers. In the middle of the chaos is a fuming Briggs. He’s gripping his Ocom so hard I attempt to calculate which will break first: the tablet or his hand.

  “Firecracker! There you are.” Jin jogs over to the edge of Manson’s lawn. “Ooh, coffee.” He snatches it and takes a sip, savoring the taste. “Man, have you seen Briggs? He is pissed.”

  “Yeah, I got that. But why are we moving out, Jin? We’re not done processing the scene.”

  “Get this. We got kicked out. Lost jurisdiction.”

  “The Interdistrict Bureau of Intelligence lost jurisdiction? To who?”

  Jin shrugs and takes another sip of coffee, only to spill it down the front of his abused field uniform
. “EDPA, apparently. There’s already a running bet about what the acronym stands for. My guess was Emergency Distribution of Peanuts Agency. Anyway, they showed up about five minutes ago, flashed Briggs a level six clearance badge, and told us to get the hell out. I mean, I’m not sure…Wait, who’s your new friend?”

  I peer down at umbrella girl. With a quick nod and a sly smile, she strides off toward a group of identically dressed EDPA agents lurking around Manson’s body bag. To make matters worse, Briggs suddenly seems to remember I exist and looks at me in the same second umbrella girl acknowledges we’re acquainted.

  His glare is almost hot enough to melt my face off.

  Oh, and it starts to rain.

  Chapter Two

  The moment word spreads that I’m back in my office at the corner of Crime Scene Investigation and Maintenance, a flock of agents swarms my doorway. Most of them are from Homicide, and they all shout the same commands at me: “Help me solve this murder. Help me solve that murder. Help me solve all the murders!” It’s almost like they see me as a fancy, humanoid machine that takes in victims and churns out the killers they’re looking for. Cold. Emotionless. Built to be abused.

  I often wonder how long it’ll take them to realize I’m the one in control, that I’m the ringmaster of this circus of death.