When Stephanie had copied Kate’s actions and followed her training to control her breathing and settle her thoughts, Kate had watched closely as the threads of Manna left the earth and, to a User’s eyes at least, lit up her entire body. Kate let out a gasp when she saw Stephanie’s face in the moonlight. It had changed—it was no longer the American Chinese features she knew so well, but an Indian or Pakistani face. Quite beautiful, with a shock of wild black hair. But not Stephanie. The vision flickered, then was gone. It was Stephanie again, getting up from the ground, shivering and grinning.
“Wow! This stuff is better than coke! You ever try coke? Probably not, right, holy lady and all that, but, man, what a buzz! Woa, I could take on the world and his uncle, shall we run back to the office, I don’t think I can walk feeling like this…I’m going to stop talking now, ok?”
Kate had just nodded, silently. They’d walked back to the office in silence, Stephanie giggling occasionally. Kate couldn’t help feeling she’d just seen the real woman beneath the mask. But how could this novice change her features without Manna, without training, and—strangest of all—without Kate having any idea of how she was doing it at all?
The lights were all off when Kate finally went to her room on the fifth floor. There was a clay pot full of soil on the windowsill. She poured the dregs of her tea into it, followed by the cup. It dissolved into the earth and was gone.
***
Meera walked quickly through the streets. It wasn’t the safest part of Mexico City, but she had two distinct advantages over most lone females. One was the subroutine Seb2 had coded into her DNA. If her body showed indications of high stress—Seb had described it as monitoring her “periaqueductal gray, the part of your midbrain which regulates defense mechanisms”, but she hadn’t really been listening—a signal would be sent and Seb would Walk to her. She’d never had to use it, mainly because of the other advantage: her own Manna ability.
Meera had turned out to be a natural Manna user, but her talent was an unusual variant on something fairly common in the Order. She was a Sensitive, could tell where other Users were, knew when Manna was being used nearby. But where her ability differed was that she could accurately predict the actions of non-Manna users with a fair degree of accuracy. The Manna she carried surrounded her like a cloud, rather than being held within her body until she used it. Her awareness stretched out to the edges of the cloud, which extended about a hundred feet in every direction. Within the cloud, she knew if anyone was angry, fearful, happy, or guilty; she knew if they had noticed her. As she knew, Manna was made up of human-manipulated alien nano-technology, rather than magic (a belief still held by many), she assumed the information she received was due to the detection of pheromones released by those around her. She always knew if they might mean to harm her. Which gave her plenty of time to get away. Or at least, it had worked that way so far. And knowing Seb would be there if her own defenses failed, reassured her, although she’d rolled her eyes when Seb had suggested it. Couldn’t have him knowing how much she still feared being found by Mason’s men.
She ducked into a maze of narrow back alleys, knowing which of them had opportunistic muggers waiting in them and which didn’t. She sang as she walked. She missed singing with the band. She had a small recording studio in the apartment, and had built quite a following online with tracks posted under an assumed name, but it wasn’t the same. She knew Mason was likely to have heard it, and possibly tried to track her, but Seb assured her it was utterly impossible. Anyone trying to pin down her IP address would be sent on a never-ending global wild goose chase.
She walked into their apartment just before midnight. As she crossed the threshold, her face and body changed, morphing instantly from Stephanie to Meera. She’d chosen her ‘outside’ face one long night just before they moved to Mexico City. As Seb had changed her features in front of the mirror she’d laughed herself into hysterics more than once, insisting he make her look like Imelda Marcos, Mama Cass, Janis Joplin and Grace Kelly, amongst others. She’d eventually settled on the relative anonymity of Stephanie, based on a face they’d found online in a 1980s college yearbook. Seb had chosen Peter, a tall Brazilian man in his forties. They could be themselves in the apartment, but only there.
Meera walked through to the kitchen. He’d left a note under a margarita.
Earthquake in Honduras 99.76% likely tonight. Off to the epicenter. Back in the morning. S x
She sipped the margarita. It was perfect of course, and beautifully chilled, despite the fact it had probably been set on the counter hours earlier. She opened the balcony door and watched, listened to, and smelled the city. Fourteen months ago she’d had a successful career as a singer but her love life was a disaster. Now she could do magic and was living with the man she loved. Who was, effectively, a superhero. Life was fucking weird.
Chapter 4
Upstate New York
Thirty-four years previously
“Put your light out, Boy. What the hell you doin’ up there?”
Boy reached out and clicked off his bedside lamp. He counted to thirty but there was no sound other than the TV burbling away downstairs. He took his flashlight from the drawer and carried on reading Catcher In the Rye under the covers.
Boy wasn’t really his name, but he answered to it. There was another name, of course, the one Mom used when Pop wasn’t home. But Boy knew that the other name wasn’t his real name. Pop heard Mom using it, he’d backhand her without a word. Pop saw Boy respond to any other name, he’d punch him under the ribs. A short, hard punch, careful. Hard enough to knock the wind out of him and have him retching for ten minutes, careful enough to avoid bruising or permanent damage.
“Bring me a beer, Boy.”
“Turn on the TV, Boy.”
“Get lost for a couple hours, Boy. Me and yer Mom want some quality time.”
Boy lived with Mom and Pop in a two-story cabin on the edge of the forest. Pop spent his days cutting down trees, his chainsaw ripping through the birch, beech and hemlock. He spent his nights drinking, either at the bar in town or home in front of the TV.
It was better when Pop drank in town. That was when Mom and Boy could pretend they lived alone in their fairytale cottage in the woods. Boy was getting a little old for stories now. He’d be thirteen next birthday. But he played along with Mom when she talked about their adventures in the magic forest. She needed the stories more than he did. When Pop got home, it could go either way. Sometimes, he’d wink at Boy, kiss Mom on the cheek, talk about football. Those nights were good nights. Mom might make pancakes with maple syrup, Pop would ask Boy about school. They’d all pretend everything was normal.
Other times, it wasn’t so good. Boy could usually tell by counting the seconds between the truck pulling up outside and Pop coming in the door. Anything more than ten seconds was bad. More than twenty seconds was real bad.
Boy had been outside one night, looking at the stars from a clearing near the cabin. He’d been to the library and borrowed a book on the constellations. He heard the truck coming up the gravel track, grabbed his flashlight and book and made a run for the door. Halfway there, he realized he’d left the binoculars. Pop’s binoculars. He skidded to a halt and sprinted back, barely slowing as he scooped up the binoculars and headed back home. When he got there, the truck was outside, its diesel engine ticking and coughing. He was already counting as he got to the back door. He made it to fifteen, then crept around the side of the trailer, craning his neck around the corner to see the truck. It was a cloudless night, perfect for star gazing, and Pop’s big balding head and salt and pepper beard were clearly visible as he sat, hands gripping the wheel. He’d killed the headlights but the engine rumbled on, sounding even rougher than normal. Boy listened closely, really paying attention now. It wasn’t just the engine. Some other noise was mixed up with it, rising and falling like blips on the throttle. Boy looked at Pop. His mouth was moving, his eyes looking blankly through the windshield, unseeing. Sometimes he w
as just mumbling, then he would twitch suddenly and smack a meaty hand on the dash, producing a cloud of dust. That’s when his face got angry, his voice growling, louder than the engine, specks of spittle hitting the inside of the windshield and glistening like frost in the starlight. Boy shrank back, got back in the house and crept upstairs without a word. He knew if he was there when Pop came in, it would make things worse. He heard the engine splutter to a stop, the heavy footsteps, the slam of the screen door. There were no words that night, no shouts, no screaming. Just three quick paces across the room, the crack of a fist hitting flesh, the thump of a body hitting the floor. Silence for a count of twenty-three, then noises worse than the silence. Boy had grabbed a book from the shelf, started reading, letting his ears tune out the sounds from downstairs. He was good at tuning out. He’d had lots of practice.
Boy clicked off the flashlight when he heard Pop lurching upstairs. He shoved Catcher In The Rye under his mattress just before his door opened and Pop’s head appeared. Boy breathed slowly and deeply, his body relaxed. It had taken years to learn how to stop his breath coming fast and loud. These days, it didn’t matter how scared he was, he could always bring himself under control in a second. Pop stood still, watching him silently.
The nights Pop drank at home were the worst. He set about drinking with a kind of grim determination, as if it were a chore that needed doing, and needed doing properly. He always drank from a tin cup that used to belong to Grandpa, before he’d passed. “See this cup? It’s my inheritance, Boy. Only thing the mean old bastard left me. One day, it’s gonna be yours.” His humorless chuckle had sounded like a chainsaw struggling to start on a cold morning.
Those nights, the two or three hours of peace were worse, somehow, than the storm that followed. The tension ratcheted up as Pop’s mood swung inexorably from sulky, through irritable to angry. When he finally hit the angry stage—Boy knew it would happen when the level of liquor was close to the bottom edge of the brown label—it was almost a relief. The angry stage lasted between seventeen and forty-three minutes. Then, like night follows day, Pop would get violent. Boy had timed him ever since he’d learned to read the hands on the clock at school seven years ago.
They had been doing percentages in class recently. Boy figured Pop punched him in the stomach sixty percent of the time, shook him till he threw up or his nose started bleeding fifteen percent of the time. Twenty percent of the time, he smacked him in the ribs, over and over. That meant taking a note to school excusing him from gym class. Pop said if he ever let anyone see the bruises, he’d kill Mom. Boy believed him because of the five percent. That was when Pop lost control and hit him in the face, knocked him to the floor and kicked him. He stopped when Boy passed out. At least Boy thought he did. Those times, he had to stay away from school until he was better. If his ribs were broken, Pop would bind them with bandages. Pop had been a medic in Vietnam. He knew how to patch folk up.
The times when Boy’s ribs were cracked, he couldn’t take a full breath for a few days. It sounded like he was wheezing. Pop gave Boy a plastic inhaler to take to school. The other kids thought Boy had asthma. Pop thought that was real funny.
Pop stood in his doorway, listening to his breathing. Boy didn’t dare open his eyes, because he knew the light would reflect on his pupils, Pop would know he was awake and things would get real bad, real quick.
Sometimes Boy daydreamed about coming home from school to find a police cruiser in front of the house. “We’re sorry, son,” the sympathetic officer would say, “but I’m afraid your father has been involved in a terrible accident at work.” Sometimes, the cop would be holding Pop’s blood-stained shirt.
Daydreams were one way of escaping. Books were even better. Boy had learned his letters early. Mom was a reader too, and when Boy was tiny, she’d sit him on her lap as she read. She’d always put her favorite music on while she did it. Pop hated classical music, so she didn’t dare play it while he was there. But when they read together, the sound of the piano or the cello would drift through the house.
Sometimes she’d read passages aloud and Boy would follow her finger along the page, listening to her sweet voice. One afternoon, not long after his third birthday, she had stopped after a few sentences and rubbed her eyes. Boy looked at her finger on the page and picked up the sentence where she’d abandoned it.
“…And that’s when I decided to get on a ship, any ship, and head for America, the land of opportunity.”
At first, Mom had just stared at him, wide-eyed. Then she’d burst out laughing, swept him up in her arms and danced around the kitchen.
“My child is a genius,” she’d said, kissing his cheeks over and over. That was the first day they caught the bus to the library. Boy picked out some books with Mom’s help—The Scarlett Letter, The Three Musketeers, David Copperfield. When they got home, Mom showed him the big saucepan where she hid her books in the kitchen (“like Pop’s ever gonna look there”) and then they found a loose floorboard in Boy’s room beneath which he could hide four or five books.
“Your daddy doesn’t read much, and he doesn’t like smart people,” she said. “It’ll be better if he doesn’t know how clever you are. Our secret, ok?”
“Ok,” he’d said, and they’d linked pinkies in a solemn promise.
He’d loved reading ever since, and once he’d started school, he’d found the library his first day there. He spent most break times in there, looking through the bigger books you weren’t allowed to take home. Encyclopedias, medical dictionaries, scientific reference books. He devoured them all.
Aged seven, he’d won book tokens as a school prize. The school had phoned Mom after she hadn’t replied to the letter inviting her and Pop to the prize giving. She’d told them Pop was working and she suffered anxiety attacks.
“I must ask you not to call me unless it’s an emergency,” she’d said. After she put the phone down, she came and stroked Boy’s cheek. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s check out the bookstore together. I’m buying.”
So Boy chose his own copies of the two books he loved most of all in all the world: Matilda, by Roald Dahl, and The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Matilda was about a girl who learned to read as early as him, but she had weird powers that meant she could move objects with her mind. Boy sometimes dreamed he could do the same. He loved Huck Finn even more. After five years, his copy was starting to fall apart, because he rarely went more than a couple days without picking it up. Huck Finn managed something Boy couldn’t even quite bring himself to dream about. Huck escaped.
“Your headache real, Boy?” Pop muttered from the doorway as Boy carried on feigning sleep. “You wouldn’t just be dreaming up ways to avoid me, would ya?”
Boy lay perfectly still, his breaths long and even, his body totally relaxed. He was floating in space, gazing back at the Earth from the outer reaches of the Milky Way. No one could reach him. Pop grunted and backed out, leaving the door half open.
Boy’s headache was real enough. It even hurt to read, not that he would let that stop him. It was the third headache that week. The pain made him irritable. He was beginning to worry he might say something to Pop, or look at him in a way he didn’t like, because the headache meant he couldn’t concentrate properly.
He opened his eyes in the darkness. From his parents’ bedroom, he heard Pop snoring. He was about to reach out for his flashlight when he heard a noise from his window. He sat up, startled. The curtain moved and a shape was briefly outlined against the moonlit window, before it dropped to the floor and padded toward him.
“Miss Honey!” he whispered, as the cat jumped lightly onto his bed and purred, waiting for some attention. He didn’t know the cat’s real name. It often snuck in nights and Boy was glad of the company. He guessed it belonged to someone in the row of newer houses near the highway. He stroked her under the chin and her purrs became deeper as she pressed against him. He smiled in the darkness.
The headache, which had been like a bac
kground noise all evening, suddenly made its presence felt again and Boy hissed as a white-hot stab of pain lit up the space behind his eyes. For a few seconds, he couldn’t see, and it took all his self-control not to call out in panic. Eventually the constant pain turned into a rhythmic throb, then it ebbed away, leaving him gasping in relief.
He took some deep breaths, his sweat cold against his hot skin. Something was wrong. He looked over at the window, the curtain moving slightly in the wind. Then he looked down at his hands. The purring had stopped.
“Miss Honey?”
The cat stared up at him, her green eyes wide open, sightless, almost popping out of their sockets amongst the ginger fur. Slowly, he opened his hands, loosening the terrible grip he’d had around her neck. Her eyes stayed open as she fell back against the cover, her neck twisted at an impossible angle. The small corpse was already stiffening as he felt the tears come. It took forty-three minutes for all of the warmth to leave her body.
Chapter 5
Mexico City
Present Day
World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine Page 3
