by Lan Chan
At the corner of King and Collins Street, I pushed open the door of the twenty-four-hour convenience store and zipped through the aisles.
“Hey!” The store attendant shouted. “What are you doing?”
His shouts became muffled as I slammed the door to the employee bathroom shut and jimmied open the window above the toilet. The store was in a row of buildings. The alleyway the window opened into could only be accessed from the end of the street. I hoped it would buy me enough time to get away.
They were inside the store when I slipped out the window and made a beeline for the huge eight-lane intersection that marked the overlap of City Square with Silhouette Row.
Only two blocks to go. My breath came in shallow gasps. I ripped off the bandana and gulped in air. Man, I’d really dropped the ball without mum acting as my drill sergeant. To be fair, there was a lot of good stuff on television these days.
The sky was beginning to lighten which made it easier for them to trace me. Pushing hard against the resistance of my own fatigue, I ran the last few hundred feet to the entrance of the Rendezvous Hotel. There was a bruiser of a man leaning up against the iron fence smoking a cigarette. He stepped out unexpectedly. I clipped him as I ran past.
“Sorry!” I shouted back.
Squeezing through the rotating glass doors, I curled over with my hands on my knees, gasping but thankful I’d made it. A calloused hand came down hard on my shoulder, knocking me off-balance.
“You stupid little bitch.” Cigarette breath clouded my nostrils. I coughed at the sooty smell and looked up until a pock-marked face. “Think you own the footpath, do you? Someone needs to teach you some manners.”
He drew his gorilla-sized fists back. I braced for impact.
3
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a low baritone voice called out from the bar. Rex! Thank God. The stranger who now had me by the scruff of my T-shirt yanked back abruptly.
“Oh, and why is that?” My attacker had an exotic brogue. It would have been nice if it weren’t attached to the man hauling me around like a marionette doll.
We stopped moving halfway to the bar. It didn’t bode well to get too close to Rex’s territory. He stood behind the mahogany and brass bar, cleaning shot glasses with a white towel that was almost luminous against his rich brown skin. His parents were Samoan, but I swore there was bear blood running through his veins.
I shook my head at him, but he paid me no mind. Oh well. It was worth a try. He’d probably paged Gabe as soon as he saw me barge through the door. Rex nodded his head towards the staircase behind us. My equilibrium flipped as the stranger turned his body, dragging me along with him. If I could just get my hands on a bare patch of his skin, I’d be able to treat him to a little electric shock that would give the Taser a run for its money. As it was, there was no need.
“Let go of her,” Gabe said, stepping down the staircase one ominous boot at a time. I was free in an instant, toppling over and landing on my ass. Just great.
The stranger had his hands up in front of him. If he were a dog, he’d roll over and show his belly. “Apologies, Captain. I didn’t know she was one of yours.”
“Screw you,” I said. “All I did was run into you and it was your fault for not looking where you were going!”
“Get out,” Gabe said, coming to a halt at the bottom of the staircase.
The other man paled. “I’ve got to see Greg –”
“Don’t make me repeat myself.”
He disappeared so fast I barely caught the wind in his movement. Of course, now the stranger was gone, that left me the sole focus of Gabe’s attention. If Rex was a bear, then Gabe was a rhino. There aren’t any rhinos with russet-red hair but that didn’t negate the point. He pierced me with his best Captain stare. Gabe was second-in-command to the City Square King. That look would have had men twice my size spoiling their underpants. If he wasn’t my godfather, I would be hightailing it in the other direction.
“What are you doing here?” Gabe asked. I wasn’t fooled by the casual tone.
I looked at my watch and grinned. “Yes! Fifteen minutes to six. It’s officially my birthday. Free pass!”
Frowning, Gabe checked the ornamental clock that sat on the dais around a glass elevator. “It’s not even a day in and you’ve already used one,” he said.
Dad wouldn’t allow Gabe to get me presents. He didn’t like the idea of Gabe’s money coming from underhanded sources. So once a year on my birthday, I got three free passes. I could use them for anything and he wouldn’t be able to question me about it. They were not accumulative and any I didn’t use in one year couldn’t be transferred to the next. So far, I’d never actually run into that problem. In non-monetary terms, it was a gold mine.
“Why are you all dressed in black?” Gabe asked.
“You’re not supposed to ask,” I bit back.
“It’s a different question.”
“Along the same lines.”
He made a growling sound at the back of his throat. “Go home!”
“Gladly.” I glanced outside. No signs of pursuit. But that didn’t mean much. He caught the focus of my attention. I whistled nonchalantly and tried not to look guilty.
“Tell me what you did and I’ll drive you home,” he said.
“No thanks. I’ll just hang around the bar for a bit.”
“Willow!”
I crossed my arms over my chest and mirrored his glare. The more time I bought in here, the more likely my pursuers would be long gone. “Don’t you have some lackeys to scare?” I said.
“Don’t let me catch you in here again,” he said. “This isn’t some teenage clubhouse.”
He strode away through the door beside the staircase that led to the underground conference rooms. I let out a contained breath.
“Hey, Rex.”
“I’m not making you a drink for your birthday.”
I screwed my face up at him. What kind of mob bartender refused to give alcohol to underage patrons? One who didn’t want to get their head knocked in, I guess. Gabe’s position really cramped my style sometimes.
“I wasn’t asking,” I said, coming up to the bar. “It’s a bit early even for me. Do you have any decks of cards in the lost and found?”
It was like asking if there were any olives in a dirty martini. Rex reached under the bar and hauled the lost and found box up. By rights, a lost and found box was against everything the Kings stood for. If you lost it, it was theirs. But the Rendezvous Hotel, like most of the legal fronts for the Kings, was neutral ground. Like an embassy in enemy territory. They had to at least keep up the pretence of civility. There were five decks. I swiped two whole ones so as not to arouse suspicion.
“Taking up gambling?” Rex asked.
“School project.” It was six-thirty. More than enough time had passed for me to get the heck out of there. “See ya later.”
“Happy birthday, kid.” He saluted me like a sailor and went back to polishing glasses.
Outside, I walked steadily, not wanting to draw attention to myself. It was Sunday which meant there weren’t any office workers clogging up the intersections. A hover drone flew past as I waited for the light to change. I tapped into its feed to scan the area for signs of my pursuers. All clear.
The feed wasn’t showing any reports of an incident at Heritage First National either. Lightheaded with relief, I strolled down the staircase to the train tunnels.
It was only a twenty-minute ride and then a five-minute walk home. But it was too late to fool Dad into thinking I was still asleep. Fingers crossed, I opened the front door and panted like I’d just been for a run.
When Mum lived with us, that hadn’t been an unusual occurrence. She’d often drag me out of bed at all hours with no notice and forced me to do all kinds of strenuous combat exercises. It was like she lived in a perpetual state of paranoia.
My parents argued about it a lot when I was younger. Sometimes I’d lie in bed and pray that Dad would
put his foot down, so we wouldn’t have to keep moving from place to place. She always won.
He didn’t know about the cage fighting. Mum said if I told him it would just upset him. When I was angry at her, which was a lot, I’d build myself up to it. Once I was halfway to his study only to chicken out. The problem with my mother was that her insanity was contagious. So as much as I despised the gruelling training, not once did I question their necessity. Case in point, I would probably be rotting in a jail cell right now without it
The smell and sound of bacon sizzling on the frying pan greeted me. “Hey, Dad!” I called from the kitchen door.
“Hey there, birthday girl!” Big smile, arms open wide. He was totally unsuspecting. Woohoo!
I walked over and he caught me in a bear hug. “Fifteen,” he said. “I can’t believe it. Did you go for a run?”
“If you could call it that. I’m a bit rusty.”
His smile dropped for a split second before he rallied himself. “Sit down. Breakfast is almost ready.”
“Where’s Jenny?” I asked.
“Right here,” my aunt said. She pushed open the back security door and came inside. She wore gardening gloves and had a small trowel in her hands.
“You’re trailing dirt inside again, Jen,” Dad said.
“Well, it’s my house so I can do what I like, eh?”
“We could always move out.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that threat before.”
“My bacon is getting cold,” I said, chewing on the edge of a piece of toast. I was ravenous. That tended to happen after a spike in telepathic energy use.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” they said together. And then, “Jinx!” Dad tried to swat at Aunt Jenny as she took off her gloves and left them next to the back door. It was hard to tell they were twins. Dad was stocky with an open face and calming blue eyes. Aunt Jenny reminded me of a swan, tall, and graceful with her dark hair cut into a classic bob. It was only when they smiled that you could really see the resemblance. I had the same overly-toothy smile. Thanks to Mum’s high cheekbones, sometimes I looked like an escaped mental patient in photos.
“So,” I said in the middle of breakfast, “instead of presents, how’s about someone clue me in on where Mum went?” I licked bacon grease off my fingers. They both frowned at me and shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
“Please don’t start this again, Will,” Dad said.
“Why not?”
“Because you know I’ve got no idea where she is. This isn’t some conspiracy to keep you in the dark.”
He put his fork down. We sat at loggerheads for a moment. If I hadn’t promised not to when I was a kid, I would read his mind. It would hurt and he’d know I’d done it, but maybe it would be worth it to know the truth. Jenny cleared her throat. As a Void, her brainwaves were immune to telepathy. She was useless to me.
“Let’s not ruin such a special day with this old topic,” she said. “It’s not every day that you turn fifteen.”
“Nice try, counselor,” I said. But her smooth lawyer tone made Dad pick up his fork again. I rolled my eyes and pushed the eggs around my plate.
“Any chance you want to help your old man stack Psi-Q papers?” Dad asked.
“Are you serious? It’s my birthday and you want me to help you with homework?”
“Or I can take you dress shopping?” Jenny suggested. I eyed her plaid pants and cardigan. The last time we’d gone shopping together, the sales assistant had a nervous breakdown.
“I think I’ll stick to the homework.”
Dad grinned. It was okay. All I had to do was bide my time. Sooner or later, I’d get to the bottom of where Mum had gone.
4
Dad hadn’t been kidding about homework. Right after breakfast, he brought out boxes and boxes of papers. He stacked them on one side of the living room table.
“Do you need me to go through the sequence again?” Dad asked. I shook my head. Unfortunately, I was well-versed in this cruel and intentional form of child labour.
“Every six months,” I sighed. “You know there’s a schedule for these tests, right? You can prepare this ahead of time.”
Now it was his turn to sigh. “I know. But somehow it always seems to sneak up on me. Where did your aunt go?”
“Back outside. She can be really quiet when she needs to be.”
He laughed. “You know what it’s like for her. She’s a Void. All this esper stuff just bores her.”
“It bores me too! Yet here I am.”
I got busy sorting the various pamphlets into neat piles while Dad shoved them into paper tote bags. The Psi-Q tests were twice-yearly tests conducted by the Psionic Special Operations Unit or Psi-Ops to test and verify the psychic status of all Melbourne’s citizens. Registration was mandatory.
I grouped the papers into six categories. After the Reset when the first repercussions to the EMP bombs began surfacing, scientists like Dad got together to chart the levels. They separated those affected into groups. Alpha, beta, delta, gamma, Whisper, and Basic. The first four are the levels of actual telepathy. The espers. Even rarer than those are the ones like me who exhibit secondary abilities. Electrokinesis, telekinesis, mind-reading, mental coercion – the list went on.
Whispers had it rough. They could project mental signals and receive them from espers, but they couldn’t bridge the gap and communicate on their own. It was a no man’s land. I imagined it was completely frustrating.
Basics made up the biggest proportion of the population. They had no affinity for telepathy at all.
And then there were the Voids. Dad thought the incidences of Voids were proportional to the incidents of alphas. So it was a miracle we had one of each in our family. Especially because the traits weren’t genetic.
“Are you sure you don’t want to sit the test tomorrow?” Dad asked as we sorted.
“No thanks. I have plans.”
“Yes,” he said. “Those plans are called school.”
“That’s what I meant.”
He raised a brow but said nothing more. When your dad was a theoretical biologist and your aunt was a lawyer, having to do well at school was a given. It was a shame nobody told my brain that. And my report card. It wasn’t my fault that for the first fourteen years of my life Mum gave me mixed messages. She’d often yank me out of school to go on a simulated mission so that I ended up way behind the other kids.
“This is a lot of questions to ask for a test that’s not supposed to account for much,” I said.
“It’s for their own good,” Dad said. “The Psi-Ops keep the results securely guarded but some kids need more help than what’s available to them through conventional means.”
That was just another way of saying espers were dangerous and if they didn’t get force-fed this information when they were still young enough to control their powers, it often resulted in injury or death. You know, just another day in paradise.
I suffered through the afternoon and then my birthday dinner with Dad, Jenny, Gabe, and his husband Julian at a fancy restaurant in Kew Gardens. When Dad asked last month if I wanted to invite any friends, it was impossible not to snark at him.
“What friends?”
Dad promised when we arrived six months ago that this would be our last move. A final destination. Colour me sceptical. I didn’t want to get friendly with anyone in case we suddenly needed to get the hell out of Melbourne.
By the time we got home, it was well past ten in the evening. Perfect timing for a little stroll to the seedier side of town. Feigning fatigue, I pre-set the hologram of me sleeping that I’d bought with all of my birthday money last year, and stole out the bedroom window. The train ride into the city gave me enough time to transfer the markings I remembered from the card in Aunt Jenny’s vault to two kings of diamond cards I’d pulled out of the decks.
The design wasn’t complicated. I had a feeling the king represented his actual counterpart. Melbourne was separated into five key Street
King territories. Edward Blake, Gabe’s boss, ran City Square, the centre and hub of the business district. To the south was Silhouette Row and the Slums, the territory of the Shadowman. To the west were the Docks governed by One-Eyed Moe. In the east was Kew Gardens, where Ricky Wong reigned. To the west was Industry Place, run by Claudia Degrassi. There were smaller territories in between but the power play between the big five often meant the smaller territories didn’t last long. Technically, Claudia was a Queen but collectively, they referred to themselves as the Kings.
Any one of them could be the king of diamonds. They didn’t lack for money. But considering the casino was in the Shadowman’s territory, I would be remiss to start my investigation anywhere else.
At this time of night, the patrons and businesses in Silhouette Row were only just beginning to liven up. My life would be over if Dad caught me here amongst the brothels and illusion parlours. Once upon a time, the Row used to be an upper-class sector with million-dollar terraced houses and sports cars clogging up the streets. After the Reset it was one of the hardest hit by the failing technology. Being so close to the port, waves of people from Tasmania flooded to the Row. The city drowned under the pressure to rebuild and take care of its citizens. Hence the Slums were born. A hundred years on, they haven’t managed to recover. Now it was a lifestyle and one that the Shadowman banked on.
The Academy had no physical presence in the Row. Their resources were finite, and they preferred to direct them where it would make a difference. Instead, they utilised more hover drones. It was cheaper and safer even if the Shadowman’s foot soldiers sometimes used them for target practice. As a result, the Row became a law unto its own and the Shadowman was the law. Even Gabe made a sign against evil when the Shadowman was mentioned.
