by Ben Langdon
Behind the whirl of Miranda, Halo watched Dan and Lily. The quiet girl had always been a stranger to him, but with Dan it was different. He grinned. Somehow Dan was able to melt the ice princess’s heart. He watched them disappear through a door on the other side of the club. As the door closed behind them he let out a low whistle.
Things were closing.
“What are you thinking about?” Miranda asked, smiling. She probably thought the whistle was for her, and in a way it was. Her whole life was about to come to an explosive end. It’d probably increase her sales, make her an icon for the ages. Halo reached his hands around her waist and pulled her closer, noticing the eagerness in her eyes and the shuffle of her pumps.
“No thinking here,” he said.
Their eyes met and he pushed himself into her, pressing his lips and body against hers, even as he pushed past the paper-thin barriers of her mind, plundering her surface thoughts, her various numbers and psychic knickknacks. She had a nice mind, he noticed, his excitement building. It wasn’t nearly as vague as her celebrity image suggested. She loved music, loved her home and family, the sunshine, the mountains.
Dan… Dan… where are you?
He slipped around her annoying pleas and picked the bank account details from her mind, storing them safely away for later use. He parted her thoughts a little to glimpse her childhood. A father and daughter riding through mountains on motorbikes; young Miranda singing in a cubby house with her sister. He paged through them with bored ease. It was a rush slipping into someone else’s life, enjoying the emotions, the fractured essence of a person, but he’d never found pleasure in the family flashbacks. Halo sought drama, weakness, dark secrets which he could twist and turn back on the person in the real world. He pushed aside the memories of Miranda’s childhood.
And then there was a burst of fire. It was so sudden and so complete that he stumbled. His mind withdrew a little, nearly forced out entirely. But he recovered and focused on the flames.
There was death. He could sense it, taste it, feel it, smell it. Miranda was hurting, he could tell, and the details of the boy’s face would stay with her forever.
I am fire.
The voice was there too, small and bright. Her memory would have altered it, shaped it to suit her torment. Everyone made things out to be worse than they were. He hesitated before withdrawing. With a little pressure he could wipe the memory away, or dilute it, perhaps let it fade a little so she would be more able to live with herself.
Time seemed to stand still.
I am fire.
I am fire.
The words would stay.
She wasn’t his responsibility.
He pushed her against the bar, kissing her deeper as he let go of her mind, allowing the music and half light of the club to reclaim him.
She seemed surprised. Pleased, but a little unsure of what was going on.
“You want another drink?” he asked.
He knew she was marked – a necessary sacrifice for everything else to come together. But she was attractive, in a manufactured American kind of way, and while she was his he didn’t really care about what the Russian’s plans were.
Miranda turned her head and stumbled away from him. He wondered whether she had felt the telepathic intrusion, but there was no need to worry even if she had. What was she going to do about it? She was only human.
Halo smiled. She moved well.
Like she had practice.
“What was that?” Halo asked, watching her stumble back. “You forget something?”
“Where’s Dan?”
Her concern was a surprise. Halo’s fingers hardened around the edge of the bar and he wondered how the Russian was going to kill her.
“Where’s Dan?” she asked again.
Chapter 22
Dan
The walls were close on either side and Dan ran his finger along the royal purple surface as he walked down the stairs. The lights were subdued, almost golden, and as they moved down it was like a whole new world was unveiling itself. Behind them was the rave scene, bass suddenly absent once the heavy steel door closed at the top of the stairs. And ahead of them was a darker, lower, but altogether more civilized place. For a moment, Dan wondered whether he would have been better staying with Miranda and Halo, drinking away their anxiety, dancing through their fears. But then Dan knew who was behind the attacks, he knew it was a matter for family, and you could never escape that. It had nothing to do with Miranda, nothing to do with the way her fingers brushed against Halo’s waist, the way she listened to him, breathed him in.
They were made for each other. Halo and Miranda: two shiny surfaces, reflecting their own splendor, nothing more than manufactured poses and clever rehearsed platitudes.
He hit the wall with his fist, and then again, but it didn’t clear the images from his mind. Her smile for Halo. Her tinkling laugh for Halo, the tossing of her hair. He didn’t even want to like her, to be so suddenly obsessed with her. He didn’t want anything except to get away from her, back to his life, his meaningless, empty life.
Dan forced his mind back to the present, to the swishing dress ahead of him, the sweeping dark hair and the subtle chill in the air. Lily welcomed him with an enigmatic smile and the doorway to this secret basement. Her movements were smooth, her poise perfect, and Dan followed her with a growing sense that he was walking into a trap. Lily was the lure. She always had been, even before the sundering, and it seemed she hadn’t strayed too far from that original arrangement.
“Has my grandfather been in town long?” he asked, watching the liquid movements of her dress as she seemed to float down the stairs. He wondered what she would have made of herself if she never met the Mad Russian.
She didn’t answer. Lily wasn’t the talkative type.
“I know he’s behind this. I can feel him.”
And it was true. The further he walked down the steps, the more confined he felt. The walls were still close but they hadn’t narrowed. It was the gradual silencing of the electrical world around him that caused the growing unease.
The Mad Russian, and that’s how Dan referred to his grandfather now, was a scheming old man with the power to manipulate the world around him, to bend it to his will. Dan could picture him mentally switching off the lights, the power, the connections, like a meticulous gentleman closing up his house for the night.
“You are our friend still,” Lily said when they reached the door at the end of the stairs. Her black hair fell across her face and shielded her features. Dan had given up trying to tell whether someone was lying to him, so her attempt at hiding was wasted on him.
“You don’t write, you don’t call. I think friendship’s a little more than memories, Lily,” Dan said softly, leaning down so his lips were close to her dark hair, the ear hidden but as sharp as ever. “And I don’t forget.”
“Like the grandfather,” she smiled, head still tilted to hide her eyes.
“Afraid so,” he said, straightening and looking at the door. There was a small, golden security camera peering down at them, but Dan’s senses couldn’t detect anything about it. The numbness was infuriating, like he was being kept away from something, a secret that everyone else knew.
“Not a very bad thing, Dan. To be like our elders.”
“Depends on your perspective, I guess.”
Lily’s grandmother was a match for the Mad Russian. She was known as Yellow Peril, but only during the crass years of the 1970s and 1980s. She was less dramatic than the Russian, more prone to work from the shadows, pulling strings, and she’d been manipulating the world since before the Second World War. Pearl was still influential now, although she had been forced out of her homeland decades ago by newer generations of crime lords, and relegated to the shadows of the Melbourne underworld.
Dan pushed the door with both hands, tired of being watched by the camera, but it was locked. He pushed again, harder, heard a solid click, and the door opened. He walked past Lily, his bare arm brush
ing against her dress. It was ice cold. He could feel the chill rolling off her in invisible, glacial waves. He realized some other things never changed either. She hated being touched. It was the only way to tell she wasn’t normal, wasn’t a real woman, but instead some freakish simulacrum of ice and blood.
Dan dismissed her entirely as he walked into the small office. She had made her decisions, chosen sides, long ago. The room, although small, seemed to unfold ahead of him. He knew that somewhere above him were the bright lights of Chinatown, the clusters of tourists and family groups, the smells of the Orient mixed with the relentless beats of nightclubs and the bass of circling Commodores. But looking around the office, it was as if he were in another place, another country, entirely.
Three of the walls were lined with books, leather and cloth bound, spines sorted according to color. Knowing his grandfather, Dan knew the books were more than decoration though. Each one would have contained knowledge carefully chosen and methodically absorbed. The wall directly opposite him, and the entrance, was dominated by a thick-set desk, black and lacquered, behind which sat the bearded man known throughout the world as the Mad Russian.
Dan’s grandfather looked older, especially around the eyes which were now clearly marked with dark circles. His beard had given up its jet black color and was replaced with wiry grey wisps, although the hair on his head was still a tousled mop of black. Despite the physical changes that had perhaps stolen a little of the man’s vitality, it was clear that the Mad Russian was still a man in possession of unnatural power. His eyes were filled with an elemental fierceness: black voids churning with flashes of light.
“Leave us,” the man said, his hands flat on the desk in front of him, his new posture suddenly reflecting the absolute influence he wielded in that place.
Lily closed the door as she bowed away.
“You are well, Danya,” his grandfather said, although the voice held a question in the air. Dan moved along one wall and looked at the books, knowing his grandfather’s eyes would be tracking him but that he would have been otherwise impeccably still.
“You didn’t kill me, if that’s what you mean,” Dan said, stopping as he pulled out a Dostoevsky.
“A message,” the man said, and then switched to Russian. “You are here now, grandson, and that is all that matters.”
“Why are you here?” Dan asked, sliding the book back quickly and folding his arms across his chest as he stared at the old man. He deliberately spoke in English.
Anger flashed across the Mad Russian’s face, those dark, dark eyes narrowing slightly. Dan felt his throat tighten and knew the danger.
“You are a man, almost a man,” his grandfather continued, his English stilted. “Guidance is needed now, to move into manhood, yes. And here am I to assist.”
The Russian’s face was suddenly overtaken by a smile, the fragility gone, flakes of fatigue stripped away by an almost insane grin. Dan couldn’t look away and the tightness in his throat intensified, crushed him. He reached his hand up and pressed against the skin there, massaging it, but the tension grew.
The Mad Russian stood from the desk, revealing his slender black suit and deep scarlet tie. As he walked around the impossibly long desk, he kept his eyes on Dan’s, the smile slipping into something more serious.
“You speak no more Russian,” he said. “You respect no thing but this consumer god, like all Westerners. You are my blood, my powerful blood, Danya Petrovich Galkin.”
He stood in front of Dan, their eyes level, although it had been different at their last meeting.
“You will not be disappointment to me.”
And suddenly the pressure was gone and Dan looked away, trying to slow his pulse and breathe deeply without betraying himself, his weakness. He was nothing in the presence of the Mad Russian, and both of them knew it.
The old man returned to the desk and sat down, resuming his original position. Dan settled into a chair opposite his grandfather, almost stumbling as he attempted to recover. His hands folded into his lap but he wasn’t comfortable. The man’s eyes were pinning him there, dark orbs which had no soul, no light at all now. They had always captivated him, frightened him, even as a boy.
“What do you want, grandfather?” he asked in Russian.
Dan’s words seemed to please the older man, who nodded his head twice as a smile spread again across his face, although this time without the hint of mania.
“You have been hired to kill this Miss Brody superstar,” he said, and slid across a photograph of Miranda. It was a publicity still and looked eerily familiar, a copy of the one Alsana had shown him a few days earlier. Her face was airbrushed, the smile impossibly white, but it was Miranda.
“No, I haven’t,” Dan said, and slid the photograph back. He felt his body surge, electricity fighting against whatever it was that had been holding him back since the hotel, fighting to rupture through his skin and into the air. But the metal casing attached to his wrist hummed and the surge was gone.
The Mad Russian watched Dan’s struggle. He refused to take the returned photograph, but held his grandson’s gaze.
“You have, yes.”
“Who? Who hired me?”
“Me. I want you kill this girl.”
“What? No.”
“Yes.”
Dan gripped the edge of his chair. His vision flickered a little and he caught glimpses of the circuitry entwined in the walls around the office. He sensed his grandfather’s power, dark and dangerous, swirling inside the old man’s human casing. It was returning to him, angry, crazy lightning that wanted to consume and liberate all at once. He stood up and felt a rush of blood to his face. Strobes of light crossed his vision and he clenched his jaw.
The old man simply smiled at him.
And then the power was swamped again by the numbness.
“But why?” Dan said, licking his dry lips, exhausted.
“You make good money, Danya. Good money on this. And you be someone again. A good boy.”
Chapter 23
The Mad Russian
Galkin watched his grandson across the room. He could sense the boy struggling against the restraining band, the energy spikes playing havoc with the overhead light. With a wave of his hand, Galkin pushed Danya’s powers back, restoring the room. He pushed a little further, compelling his grandson.
“Sit.”
The boy collapsed into the chair, his head falling forward, blood dripping from his nose onto the thick carpet.
When the Small Gods had thrown aside their coats and stepped out into the Melbourne sun, so many years ago, Galkin had watched them through a monitor. He had other business that day, in another State entirely. But before he attended to his own business, he made sure he watched the children’s debut.
Danya had been twelve; skinny but keen to step into an adult’s world. The five of them had been wearing sleek black costumes, with red and white highlights. Pearl had sourced the material from her Chinese contacts, an elegant Kevlar-blend.
Sebriya had lifted into the air, as instructed, whipping up a storm across the paved pedestrian area, confusing the people and drawing everyone’s attention to the central fountain.
Halo flashed his eyes at a group of shoppers and they dropped their bags and waited for his commands. He sent them at each other’s throats, clawing with manicured nails, butting each other with styled heads and kicking wildly. Galkin remembered how he had been so pleased, how he clapped his hands together with glee while watching the screen.
And Lily had fired shafts of deadly ice into the shop windows, lancing right across the mall to each side, shattering ice and glass in beautiful explosions.
Danya joined the chaos by blowing the lights up and down the lines of shops, frightening the shoppers and staff who ran into the mall. The boy was so excited, his little legs almost dancing as he let loose in a public place.
But then there was Nico, Danya’s father, who was brought in to help shape the Gods and who was to be the de facto
leader as they ran wild through Melbourne. Nico had shaved his hair to the scalp and painted red streaks across his skull. As he whipped his hands around in front of him, fire erupted outward, scorching the air and anyone who stood before him.
Burning so bright, but without the purpose Galkin had hoped to instill in him. The display was meant to draw the Celestial Knights into the open, but the way Nico was burning the world around him, Galkin knew it might be too much power too quickly; and like any dying sun, the bursts of heat and flame would burn brightest before the fall.
The Celestial Knights did arrive.
Galkin had planned it a fortnight before; a discreet conversation with an associate in Prague who fed the information along to its ultimate end. Most of his network operated out of Russia or the former Soviet states, but through the gradual drift of agents he penetrated the West, having important contacts in most developed countries. After five years of exile, the Mad Russian’s networks were still surprisingly well established. Galkin wondered whether that was a reflection on his power and influence, or simply the fact that the people he knew had all grown equally old and useless in the modern world.
In the end, things turned out as planned, in a broad sense.
Six Knights appeared in the skies, appointed above like they always were, dominating the scene immediately. There was the imperious Parhelion leading the charge, flanked by Castus and The White Rabbit, who leapt to the ground with tremulous effect. The wily Inconnu held back, floating in the air, assessing everything, and Atomic Girl grew to enormous size and landed gently at the far end of the mall.
Galkin had turned away from the screen at that time, leaving through the hotel window where he was staying and drifting across the Sydney skyline. He would later hear about his son’s spectacular explosion, which brought down half of the Knights at the cost of his own insignificant life. And the children had tried their best.
