Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6)

by Matthew S. Cox

  A lump in Kate’s throat wouldn’t let her speak, so she patted the girl on the back and offered an apologetic glance to Karina. The older girl’s hostility had weakened to suspicion, but trust still seemed a ways off.

  Althea looked up at her with a smile weighed down by worry. She took Karina’s hand and they walked off together.

  “So,” said David. “Crisis averted. Whatever that… sentience made her see hit her hard enough that she radiated her fear over Querq.”

  “You’re not worried about the boy?”

  “I doubt he’s in danger. The girl is mildly clairvoyant. I don’t think she could be so calm if something threatened him; worry would gnaw at her and not let go. At least, from what I understand about clairvoyants with strong emotional ties.”

  Kate stared eastward at the ruins of the Old City, squinting against the breeze. The dark spaces within the crumbling ancient high-rises seemed to gaze back at her. “I hope you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right.” He leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “I’m psychic.”

  10

  Everyone’s Eyes are Blue

  Aaron

  Sleep had been fitful on a bed of sofa cushions in a room once used as some middle manager’s office on the seventh floor. Iliana’s late night visit in a tank top and red panties hadn’t helped Aaron sleep. She’d brought him some blankets and offered to keep him warm. He wondered what had come over him, not jumping at the chance to take the nineteen-year-old sylph up on her offer.

  Aaron couldn’t stop thinking of Anna, despite her still-obvious attachment to Archon. Perhaps the quiet desperation in Iliana’s eyes had gotten to him, the barely-contained fear that at any moment the military would find them. Living seconds away from an imagined death tended to loosen one’s knickers. The way he’d tried to soothe the little girl hiding in the vent endeared him to her.

  Aaron rubbed the crumbs from his eyes and stared in a daze at the decomposing, grey drop ceiling. He almost remembered saying she didn’t have to have sex with him to make him like her. She’d gone wide-eyed at that and flopped down next to him, chatting about her life growing up in the region around Prypiat, Russia. Her family had been part of an experiment; her parents hadn’t even met before they were assigned to each other and forced to have four children.

  Half-awake, Aaron retained bits and pieces of the story: soldiers bothering them at all hours with strange, painful injections, dragging her and her siblings off in the middle of the night, and testing for evidence of psionic ability. The eldest, Leonid, took to it and had turned into a little drill sergeant by the age of twelve. When the other three decided to run away, he almost got them arrested. Aaron didn’t know if she’d embellished her stories of crawling through the sewers of a Russian city with an assault rifle as a nine-year-old for pity, or if she’d needed to open up to someone.

  He didn’t bother looking into her thoughts last night, and she’d gone by the time he awoke.

  After a stretch, he gave up on going back to sleep and got up. Since his ‘apartment’ consisted of a one-room office without a bathroom, he stumbled down the hall outside to the men’s. Someone, likely the same people responsible for the working elevators, had installed a portable autoshower in one of the stalls. He’d have to put on the same two-day-worn suit afterward, but he couldn’t resist the lure of hot water and soap.

  Aaron followed his nose into the lobby of the west tower, amid the tent city housing most of the psionics Archon had collected. More than half looked younger than eighteen, and the youngest of them either stared shell-shocked at the walls or clustered in small groups speaking languages other than English. Most of the older teens seemed local and wore tattered jackets with spray-painted, lopsided capital As on their backs. He’d come to realize they all referred to themselves as ‘The Awakened,’ essentially a gang. They seemed able to use the word interchangeably referring to either the collective or to an individual of greater power. The teens seemed to know the intended meaning—the gang or someone like him—at an instinctual level he couldn’t quite grasp.

  Maybe I’m just too old.

  People stared at him as he stumbled over to a line waiting by where a woman and two men cooked on portable hot plates. He didn’t bother trying to figure out how they had obtained cases of expensive vat-grown chicken, fish, and hydroponic vegetables. Chances are, the room held at least a half-dozen suggestives, likely far more than that.

  “It is!” squeaked a young girl.

  Aaron glanced in the direction of further squealing, cocking an eyebrow at a pair of tween girls clinging to each other and pointing at him. Their matching outfits screamed British schoolgirl.

  “Oh, bloody hell.” He tried not to make eye contact.

  The pair rushed over, both clutching their NetMinis, one pink and one white, to their chests. He forced a weak smile, a bit embarrassed at all the attention after so long, especially with everyone in the room staring at him. Aside from the girls, everyone else looked confused and wary. They wore rumpled uniforms: stained white shirts, navy skirts and coats with the same red shield on the breast pocket. A rather unpleasant odor wafted from their clothes. That both girls had attended the same private school raised an inkling of suspicion in the back of his mind. He wondered how long the CSB had been monitoring them, or if they had a hand in their existence—as with Anna.

  “Aaron Pryce?” asked the younger one. “I’m Meredith. I’m a massive Arsenal fan!”

  “Yes, yes,” chirped the other. “I’m…” Her eyes fluttered.

  “Oh, please don’t faint.” Aaron smiled and steadied her with a hand on the shoulder.

  “Lucy,” the older girl whispered, shaking.

  “T’was such a kick in the bollocks about your leg,” said Meredith.

  Aaron chuckled. “Were you even old enough to watch a match when I last played?”

  Meredith looked downcast. Plates and small objects on the table around the cooks rattled. “Mum would always have it on. I wanna go home.”

  “We can’t!” whispered Lucy. “They’ll lock us away.”

  Aaron glanced at the imminent poltergeist. “Telekinetic, what?”

  “Aye.” Meredith sniffled.

  “Me, too.” Aaron grinned at her.

  “Really?” Meredith’s face lit up.

  Lucy did the math right away; her mouth hung open.

  He winked at her. “Just a little nudge ‘ere and there.”

  “Can we ‘ave your siggie?” Meredith bounced up and down, holding her NetMini up.

  Aaron fished his device out of his pocket, opening an app he hadn’t touched in years. He waved it past the kids’ handhelds and all three of them chirped with the transfer of a digital autograph. The girls’ devices played a ten-second version of ‘God Save the King’ in stereo. They gripped them tight to their chests and squealed again before scurrying back to where they had been sitting.

  The line moved, leaving him on the opposite side of a folding table from a short, black man with a shaved head who nudged three hunks of chicken around a pan. Seasonings had left the meat somewhere between orange and brown, studded with tiny fragments of leaves and garlic.

  “Something wrong?” asked Aaron, at the man’s perplexed look.

  “Why you not eating with th’ others like ya?” His accent had a trace of French.

  “Others like…” It dawned on him he meant Awakened. “Oh, right… I wasn’t aware we had separate kitchens.” He figured that the more likely reason everyone had been staring at him. A big shot associating with the little people. “Is it a problem?”

  “No, sir. Just unexpected.” The man handed him a plate: chicken, something green, and sliced yams. “You are welcome here. A nice change.”

  Aaron fought the urge to roll his eyes at the thought of Archon. “I’m not so puffed up.”

  Nervous chuckles spread out among those close enough to hear. Aaron took his food and wandered to the nearest open table, sitting opposite a pair of well-tanned men in
ragged clothes who burst into rapid conversation in Arabic, of which he picked out his name and ‘Frictionless.’ After a few minutes, they got their excitement under control and switched to weak English. The men preferred to cheer for the Iraq National team, though due to having different leagues, they wound up not being direct rivals. The men respected his career, feeling honored to be in the presence of a ‘big celebrity’ and managed a pleasant—though frustratingly slow—conversation about the nuances of the game.

  After eating, Aaron spent the next hour and change wandering around, getting a look at the layout of the facility. The west building housed non-Awakened psionics, mostly the younger ones, as well as a small number of ungifted relatives or friends who’d refused to be separated. The first two floors of the central tower were home to the gang members—Aaron couldn’t help but think of them in that way—who had been with Archon the longest. They made up the bulk of the ‘security team,’ and all but two looked old enough to vote. One man sat in the corner of the grand lobby, between a pair of plastic bamboo plants in four-foot tall onyx vases. He looked like he’d worn the same white suit and black dress shirt for months. Shaggy black hair hung down to his belt, and he had the vacant stare of an avant-garde rock star who’d hit the Nightcandy a bit too hard and couldn’t come back from his high.

  Aaron drifted in the direction of flashing light, crossing the lobby to lean against the wall by the door to an old conference room. A giant table with rounded ends, large enough for thirty people, lay covered with dozens of net decks and terminals. At least a hundred holo-panels floated above it, varying in size and angle as if an explosion of light tiles had frozen in time. The operators were young, ranging from eleven to fifteen, except for three twenty-something men at the far end of the table who appeared to be in charge of the ‘tech team.’ None of them had plugged in via wires. A few of the kids used helmets, though most linked to the hardware by touch, psionic communication between brain and machine.

  Most of the screens showed star charts and database entries listing the attributes of various colonized worlds. He watched them scout potential new homes for a while, mesmerized by the shifting screens full of high-resolution images depicting colorful planets. The biggest holographic display threw off enough light to tint the walls. Deep azure saturated the conference room as an enormous water-covered planet raced forward to fill the forty-inch panel.

  He shifted out of the way of a grumbling teenaged girl carrying a large canister of self-heating soup in one hand and a spoon in the other. Her head wagged about to music pumped into her skull via earbuds, and she sang along in either Korean or Chinese. Aaron rolled flat against the wall to let her pass. She went over to the catatonic man, sat cross-legged next to him, and squeezed a button on the side of the metal cylinder. Twenty seconds later, the smell of chicken and mushrooms reached him.

  Aaron raised an eyebrow as the girl removed her buds and put them in the man’s ears. She set the soup on the floor with the spoon balanced on top and placed one of his hands on the bare skin of her thigh between a skirt and red-ringed leggings. After a moment, the girl faded into a trance and the man blinked and looked around.

  He took the canister, opened it, and spooned soup into his mouth with a jerky, robotic motion that fit the image of a horror-vid zombie. Aaron wandered closer, hands tucked in his pants pockets, and an amused smirk on his face. Two sets of surface thoughts dwelled in the man’s mind: a male presence stuck in an endless loop of crippling sadness, and a chipper female voice mentally singing along with the lyrics. The man seemed aware of the sound but too depressed to care about it.

  “Hey,” moaned the man. “You’re that new guy, right?”

  Considering the despondent sod looked like a burned out British glam-rocker, Aaron assumed by the Asian accent, the girl ‘drove.’

  “Aye. I’m Aaron. What happened to this poor bastard?”

  “Little miss angel.” Soup dribbled down his chin. “She dropped some kinda big-ass sadbomb on Donnie. Archon tried to fix him, but he went from crying his eyes out twenty-four damn hours a day to staring into space in silence. Too bad Pixie killed her for being a little bitch, woulda been nice if she could unfuck him. I’m so done with making him eat.”

  Aaron exhaled. “That’s a neat trick.”

  “Astral projection, not a big deal. Lucky me I’m the only one here who can do it. ‘Cept the queen of the freak show, and this is below her.” Donnie jammed the spoon into his nose. “Dammit, Donnie, eat already. Possessing people is such a pain in the ass. They should make fuckin’ Aurora do this. She wears people like clothes. So easy for her.”

  “You sound jealous.”

  “You’re not the one sitting in someone else’s loaded adult diaper.”

  Aaron winced. “A fair point. Maybe Aurora could ask her to fix him. Oh, by the by, Pixie didn’t kill that sprog.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “She rather saved my scrawny ass the other day.” Aaron rubbed his thigh.

  “No shit?” Donnie attempted to shrug. “For someone supposed to be so sweet and innocent, she worse than killed him.”

  Aaron tapped his chin. “Now what would make her do that?”

  “The hell should I know?” Donnie shrugged again. Another spoonful missed his mouth.

  “Telempathy isn’t my thing, sorry.” An unpleasant thought made him snarl. “Maybe that other bitch could help, only problem being she doesn’t help anyone.”

  “The one you wanna kill?” Donnie gave up on the spoon and drank from the canister. After a heavy gulp, he moaned. “Hot, ain’t it? Stop fucking fighting me then, asshole.”

  “You know about that?” Aaron chuckled.

  “Everyone knows about that, and how you’re some kinda walking apocalypse so we’re not s’posed to do anything to your head.”

  “Yeah, well…” Aaron sighed. “We all have our problems.”

  Motion from the corner of his eye drew his gaze to the front door. Melissa emerged from an interior hall and stomped across the room, arms folded tight across her jacket, head down, and boots clomping. Everyone got quiet as she bee-lined for the entrance.

  “I’d say talkin’ to Talis about his problem is better than sittin’ in shite, but I’m not so sure. Either way, your choice.” Aaron waved. “Nice meetin’ ya, but I gotta run.”

  He rushed to the doors, jumping through the glass-less metal frame into a strong, cold breeze outside. Melissa had stopped at the corner of the building, staring into the west tower at the tent city. She hovered at the edge as if afraid to get close enough for anyone inside to notice her. Aaron jogged to a halt about ten paces away, letting his feet land loud enough to announce his approach.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him; her initial casual dismissal became a double take and a glare when she recognized him.

  “What do you want? Go away.”

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets and took a few steps closer, summoning his most disarming smile. “I wanted to apologize for last night. I didn’t mean to patronize you. Figured you’d look better to your friends that way.”

  “I don’t want your fuckin’ pity.” She ran around the corner, trailed by a waterfall of dark, curly hair.

  Aaron chased her over a series of yellowing spots from a row of exterior lights protruding from the second story. She kept going past the far end of the building, darting across the false grass in the ‘park’ area in the south-central part of the corporate campus. Her foot caught on the lip of the dried out reflecting pool, but she spared herself a fall with a telekinetic push and wound up pulling a superhero flight to the other side. Aaron vaulted the edge, shoes clanking over brown metal patterned with silt.

  The girl spun around, jogging backward long enough to lift and throw a chunk of stone in his general direction. Shiny black marble from what had once been a field of artistic obelisks careened over his head and thudded into the ground. It seemed a deliberate miss to distract. He continued pursuing as she sprinted off, heading for the wreckage
of an old parking deck, collapsed decades ago.

  “Melissa, wait,” he yelled.

  She ducked around the back end of a crushed police hovercar, past shattered pieces of metal in the ghastly likeness of human body parts. Aaron followed, careful not to step on anything sharp as he made his way past the car and into a maze of smashed vehicles and the toppled remnants of the parking deck.

  He paused where a metal torso and arm protruded from under a concrete slab, crushed into the front end of a six-wheeled military transport. The cyborg’s skull, stark white bone, had blackened in trails down the front where fluids had long ago leaked from the eyes, nose, and mouth. Narrow rods of dust glowed in light leaking from bullet holes in the floor of a flipped police car. Her fleeing shadow disrupted similar rays at the far end of a corridor formed by debris.

  What the bloody hell am I doing? Aaron slowed to a halt, panting.

  Seconds after she cornered at the end, a frightened scream echoed back.

  “Bugger.” He swallowed his fatigue and ran.

  Melissa had stopped ten feet from the turn, hands clasped over her face and trembling, her gaze locked upon a massive human form forged from black plastisteel. Gothic pauldrons flanked a blood-red skull with luminous green eyes. The figure looked like a techno-nightmare reconstruction of a medieval knight that likely would have stood fourteen feet tall had he not been sheared in half at the waist. Dark ichor stained the dusty metal ground, a starburst-shaped blotch spread outward from the torso. The man had been dead for at least fifty years, but the cybernetic eyes seemed to hold more than simple electronic light. In the odd way that psionics tended to do, Aaron felt like the thing still watched them.

  Aaron’s shoe scuffed over grit as he stopped, startling another scream out of Melissa. She stared at him, lost to a momentary convulsion, and gasped.

  “T-tell me that was you.”

  He leaned on a hunk of shattered concrete covered in tire skid marks, trying to catch his breath. “What’s that?”