The Miranda Contract

by Ben Langdon

  “Stuff?”

  “I’m like you. I saw you on the TV and I did some research back home. You’re the only one who can…”

  Dan held up his hand.

  “Don’t say it,” he said. “This is for kids who’ve broken the law… uh, what’s your name?”

  “Jess. I’m really serous about this.”

  “Right,” Dan said, shrugging. “We don’t really do good kids. We don’t really do serious kids either.”

  “Do you want me to break something, then?” Jess asked and picked up the desk fan. Dan reached for it, standing up and reaching out, but Jess pulled it back towards her.

  “What? No. It’s just that, I don’t think we can help you,” he said, reaching again.

  “Why?” Her eyes were so wide. Tears pushed their way out and Dan sat back down in his chair, the surrender spinning it slightly as he settled. Jess held the fan to her chest.

  “We just deal with the bad kids,” Dan said.

  “I don’t think you’re bad, Mister Galkin. What you did with Miranda and your grandfather, well, that was kind of … awesome.”

  Dan looked to the door. It was closed, but he could see the silhouettes of Sal and Wicks in the front office through the frosted glass. They were having an animated discussion. He could hear the slamming of cabinets. They worked for him, in an indirect way. He looked back at Jess.

  “Don’t call me Mister Galkin, okay?” he said, drumming his fingers on the desk. “I’m Dan.”

  Jess stretched out her hand, her pack slipping to the floor as she reached right across the wide desk. She still held the fan.

  “I’m Jess. I can break things with my mind.”

  “Welcome to the program,” Dan said. “Can I get the fan back now?”

  After lunch Dan met with the police liaison who had another two candidates for the program. Detective Schwarz had managed to get himself assigned to the job as a consultant, but it was the dark haired Jo Ryan who was the official liaison. Dan brought his staff with him: Wicks and Sally. He still found it difficult to belief he had made management level, with staff of his own. The guys at Birdie’s would have been impressed, if they remembered him at all.

  “That’ll be three, then,” Ryan said. She had the files opened on a tablet and Dan had his own in front of him.

  “Four, actually,” he said, eyes to the screen. “Just had a volunteer this morning.” He looked up at the police woman and smiled. “She can do weird stuff with her mind.”

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to actually recruit them yourself, Dan,” Ryan said slowly.

  “See, that’s probably where Alsana got it wrong,” Dan said. “We’re dealing with kids here. It’s not just the files and the court orders. They’re kids, like with problems and stuff.”

  “Says the seventeen year old,” Wicks added, raising his eyebrows.

  “Like I said, they’re kids and we can help them. Now. Not when it’s too late. We don’t have to wait till they step over the line,” Dan said. “Let’s do some of that pre-emptive stuff.”

  “They do it in Sydney,” Sally said, sharing a glance with Dan. “They’ve been doing it there for years.”

  “I can’t authorize it,” Ryan said, but there was hesitancy in her voice. “It makes sense, it does. I just have to…”

  “It’s taken care of,” Dan said. “Executive decision.”

  “Power’s gone to his head already,” Wicks said.

  “Your guys tapped me on the shoulder to do this,” Dan said to her. “And I will. None of them has to do what I did, not if I can help it.”

  He had floated in the air, a god. Five years before.

  While his friends slipped away through the cracks of a broken city square, Dan had lifted into the skies and defied the power of the Celestial Knights. He had resisted them, punished them.

  But the power faded.

  And he was twelve years old and alone.

  Stumbling to the ground, surrounded by blackened concrete and smoldering roads. He fell to his knees, bare hands against the heated surface.

  And he was lost.

  He couldn’t hear the electronic world, couldn’t feel the hum around him, nor the bathing light of the city’s power.

  His father was dead. Reduced to atoms.

  His grandfather was gone too. Broken promises cutting him like glass.

  It was just Dan.

  And the police.

  And the sirens.

  “I’m calling it,” Dan said, standing up from the meeting table. “Meeting’s over.”

  Dan picked up the tablet and slid it into his satchel. Wicks stood by the door and opened it when Dan reached for the handle. The man gave him a grin and they quickly shook hands before Dan left via the stairs, jogging down the final steps and out into Collins Street. He paused as the people moved around him on their way to other places, oblivious to him or who he was in the past. Dan slipped on his shades against the early afternoon sun and breathed in the city.

  It’d been five weeks since he defeated his grandfather. Five weeks since Miranda had flown away. Looking up and down the street, he noticed the cranes at work. Melbourne hadn’t fully recovered yet, and he figured he still had time to feel a little broken too.

  And yet, the sun was bright and warm against his skin.

  Dan smiled and jacked in his earphones.

  The world hadn’t ended.

  Alsana was gone. He had her office to prove it.

  He was free to do what he wanted. Mostly.

  As he walked back to his new apartment, a silly Miranda Brody tune started up in his head. Her voice carried him back to the beach even as his legs carried him towards Spencer Street where he shared a place with Tabitha from Birdie’s. It had made some sense. He didn’t have anywhere to live anymore and her place had been reduced to fire, concrete and slag.

  Tabitha was on holiday in Europe though, relaxing her way through the insurance money she’d scored from Marco. She promised to return but Dan wasn’t in any hurry to share the new space.

  He reached his door and fumbled with his keys. Leaning to pick them up he banged his head against the door and dropped his phone, the plugs coming loose as it hit the hard floor and cracked the screen. Music crooned out of the broken phone, and he knelt to pick it up.

  “Are you listening to my music now?”

  He looked up and saw a girl in jeans and a Union Jack t-shirt. She’d been waiting for him. Miranda Brody stood with her arms crossed, a smile on her face. Dan picked up the phone and pressed the music off. He stood up slowly.

  “This is awkward,” Miranda said, and she looked back to the elevator. “Maybe I should have called first.”

  “I tried to come after you,” he said.

  She looked back at him quickly, her teeth shining. She’d scored a tan back in California, her olive skin even darker.

  “I did, I really did, but they wouldn’t let me. Said I was a dangerous weapon.”

  “Flattery,” she said and leaned forward, a hand on his hip while the other touched his jawline. She kissed him and he kissed her back, the taste of cherries bursting from her lips. He held her close, kissing her again, and she pushed him against the door. Miranda pulled back a little, her hands still on his hips.

  “I can’t get a passport,” Dan said, eyes closed. She kissed them and he pulled her into a hug, standing there with the sound of trains rushing below.

  “I’m here,” Miranda said, finally. “I had to do some things back home, but I’m here now.”

  She pulled away again, and looked at him. She touched his short hair with the back of her hand and then pulled at his tie. Dan felt his skin flush and tugged the tie loose, unbuttoning the top of his shirt.

  “It’s the new you,” she said.

  “It’s just a shirt.”

  “Can I come in?”

  Dan retrieved the key and stumbled inside. Miranda followed but he couldn’t tell if she was impressed with the interior. It was a two bedroom apartment without any
remarkable views of the city. The train lines were close – you could feel their passing – but you could also see the sky and Dan knew the place was his.

  “Have you seen him?” Miranda asked, looking at the lounge, slowly walking around with her fingers touching everything. Dan pulled out some water from the fridge.

  “Who?”

  “Your grandfather.”

  Dan clinked glasses together from the cupboard and poured the water. He felt a little overwhelmed by the conversation already, and his hands shook as they poured. He’d been shown photos of the old man: grey and absent from his own body. He was hooked up to a machine that kept him alive but only just.

  “They’ve got him someplace. They won’t let me see him.” Dan tapped his temple and smiled. “Dangerous weapon in here, y’know?”

  Miranda took one of the glasses.

  “They cancelled my contract,” she said.

  “Oh crap.” Dan tossed his tie away.

  “No, it’s good. I’ve been writing. My own stuff, like you told me.”

  Dan didn’t remember telling her that, but he felt good that she was there – with him. She moved to the other rooms, looking inside and making little sounds of approval. Dan sat at the kitchen bench, watching her.

  “Are you here for good?” he asked, and she stopped at his bedroom door. “I mean, you’re not going to leave again, right?”

  She smiled at him.

  “Is this your room?”

  Dan woke at 3am. Even with his eyes closed, he could sense it from the oven-clock in the kitchen, from the phones tossed to the floor. The whole electronic world was calling softly to him that morning was still a far away place.

  His eyes opened suddenly: wide and happy. There was a sense of having just lost a moment of time, a second perhaps; like they’d just paused in their conversation, just taking a breath between acts.

  He could feel her beside him. Miranda. In his bed.

  Dan looked up at the ceiling and saw the motionless fan. He felt the smile on his face, the almost audible hum that charged through his body, eclipsing anything he might have generated himself.

  And the hum was happiness.

  He could feel her skin now, his fingers exploring without upsetting the covers. Warm skin, and close and charged. Biting his lower lip, Dan turned his head so he could see her beside him. She was a tumble of dark hair and smooth olive skin. He wanted to kiss her again, to hold her. He ran his fingers down her shoulder and along her arm. She moved a little and he sat up slowly, moving the pillows behind his back so he could look at her bare shoulders.

  “’s cold,” she mumbled.

  Miranda slid her hand back towards him and took a hold of his fingers. He moved closer, kissing down on that beautiful shoulder, lingering there. She pulled his hand across her skin into an embrace and he slid next to her, his lips touching her ear. They fit so well together.

  “Miranda Brody,” he whispered and she screwed up her nose. “Miranda Brody,” he teased again. “The Miranda Brody. Oh my God…”

  “Shut up,” she said softly.

  Dan pressed himself against her and kissed her neck, his hand moving down her body. She pushed back against him, reaching back to grab his hair. She turned her head and brought his mouth to hers.

  He smiled into it.

  She still tasted like cherries.

  Epilogue

  Halo

  Rainmaker Four Holding Facility,

  South Australia

  It had taken only a few weeks to locate, and another week to gain entry to the government holding facility where the authorities had dumped the Mad Russian. It was called Rainmaker Four, an unmarked secure facility to the west of Cooper Pedy, buried away in the dry and forlorn wasteland of the South Australian outback.

  Halo already had the contacts within the Uberhuman Affairs Offices in Melbourne and Sydney, so it didn’t take long for him to uncover Rainmaker Four. He drove three days to get to Cooper Pedy and then spent the night at a hotel, drinking with the locals as he slowly wove his magic among them.

  It only took a single look from Halo, a connection of eyes no matter how fleeting or guarded, and he could step right into another man’s mind. He pushed through recent memories, carved up insecurities and passions, until he caught a psychic whisper of the Rainmaker facility. The man was a cleaner. A further push into the man’s mind and Halo uncovered the names of other cleaners, the supervisor, the passcodes and the schedules. He bought the man a drink.

  Later that night he dumped the man’s body in the back of his hire car. Time was running out. Halo had to find the old man before the Celestial Knights returned and took him out of reach forever.

  Inside the facility, Halo stuck to the cleaning routine. He pushed the mop along the floors, cleaned the washrooms and helped take out the garbage. The other workers called him Lockheardt and forgot the differences they saw in front of their eyes. They’d worked together for months. Lockheardt wasn’t an overweight forty-six year old joker from Perth. He was a skinny Pak kid. Always had been.

  After a couple of days Halo located the room where the old man was being held. He used his coercive powers to shift Lockheardt’s name onto the duty roster, convinced security that it had always been that way. The room itself wasn’t anything special. There was a simple security check on the door, but Lockheardt’s pass was configured to get through, as long as he was scheduled for the shift.

  The Mad Russian looked like a regular old man. His skin was pale, stretched tight over bones, and his hair and beard had been shaved back to a short fuzz. The eyes were taped shut with skin-tone adhesive and a pair of tubes disappeared up the man’s nostrils. Along his wrists were more tubes, jacked into different points and leading back to monitoring devices.

  There was a dull hum in the room.

  The monitors all seemed passive. Heart rates and brain activity moved steadily across the screens, although they were very close to the baseline. Halo figured that meant the old man was alive, but only barely.

  Halo closed the door behind him and moved to the end of the hospital bed, his eyes scanning the electronic tablet attached to the steel frame. It was password encrypted. He was tempted to go back and hunt down a medical staffer, to rip the password out of their skulls, but in the end it really didn’t matter what the medical reports said. Halo was interested in the old man himself, the body and the mind.

  He reached out and touched the man’s eyes, pressing down on the tape which held them closed. There was a satisfying lack of resistance there as he pressed. The old man had no strength in him. Halo pulled the edge of the tape and lifted it away. He would only need a single eye, a single entry point.

  The eye was completely white. It surprised him and he let the lid drop for a moment before pulling it down a second time. Halo reminded himself that the Mad Russian was now just a husk. Nothing to fear.

  It took a bit of manipulation to get the iris into place but as soon as he did, Halo found himself pushing inside the man’s mostly-vacant mind. There was an immediate sense of stepping into an abandoned building, but one so vast that it must have once held a museum or expansive gallery. Halo had never dared look into the old man’s mind before. The consequences would have been brutal and irreversible.

  But the old man was helpless now.

  Halo started with sequences of numbers, of hidden accounts and passcodes. He always started with the numbers. Emotions were more difficult to handle, especially in cases where the subject was a raging psychopath like the Russian. It came easily, the flow of numbers and the links to banks and institutions. Halo had long ago trained himself to compartmentalize his own mind, to shift new data into ‘boxes’ which he could unpack at a later, safer, time.

  There was a clicking sound from the door. He had expected it, knowing he only had a short window of opportunity with the old man, but it still irritated him. He pulled out of the Russian’s mind, replaced the tape and stepped back, his hands already moving to the mop and bucket. When the door opene
d he was pushing the mop along the wall opposite, his headphones plugged in and a look of general disengagement firmly on his face.

  The nurse moved to the end of the bed and checked the tablet. He looked at his watch and moved past Halo to a small locked cupboard. Halo smiled at the man and then pushed his mop and bucket out into the corridor.

  Outside he moved up the corridor to the next room which was empty but still required cleaning. As the door closed behind him he returned to the old man’s memories, the after taste of the invasion laying in his own head. There was something wrong, something lodged inside.

  He shook his head. A rogue memory had been brought out along with the financial data and it was dominating his own thoughts. He couldn’t shake it, it was so brilliant.

  It was all blue skies and bright sun.

  A recent memory, it had the distinct feeling of being a turning point in the Mad Russian’s life. Halo stumbled over these events all the time, but he usually shook them off after regaining his own mind. Each person was built upon the foundations of key memories, the clarity and hyper-realism of them sometimes surprised him.

  Blue skies.

  But not the skies of this world.

  There was something missing: an invisible hole, bound up with the Russian’s overwhelming sense of failure, his drive to return.

  He pushed back the headphones and concentrated on the memory, clearing away his own identity and extraneous thoughts, leaving nothing but the snapshot of skies. It was a real memory. The Mad Russian wasn’t as mad as everyone believed, at least not all the time. It had the energy and pseudo-corporeal feel of a foundation, and as he reconstructed the images around other memories and experiences he had pillaged Halo soon discovered it was from the old man’s missing years.

  The pieces fell into place, lining up in a way that Halo knew could make him a lot of money. Everyone wanted to know where the Mad Russian had disappeared to, and, more importantly, why he had returned.

  Now Halo had the answer.

  For the whole five years the man had been desperately fighting to return, his rage a firestorm within mind and body. But beyond the rage and the mad intellect, the Mad Russian was powerless. In the other world he had no mastery over the elements; it had stripped him back to a pathetic, rambling old man.