A woman, dirty brown hair down to her waist from the half of her head not shaved, appeared in the doorway of the building closest to the buggy. She held her chin high as though she ruled this place and balanced an ancient pump shotgun over her shoulders. Two sashes loaded with red plastic shells crisscrossed her otherwise bare chest over a necklace of animal teeth. Black tatters, leather as well as cloth, hung around her waist forming a thick skirt that draped over combat boots too big for her. At least three machete handles protruded from the scraps.
She regarded Mamoru with barely-contained hostility. A sneer tugged at the scar crossing her cheek below the right eye.
The rest wore a patchwork of random items: skirts, pants, sneakers, even ‘armor’ made from old sporting pads or pieces of tire. All bore a multitude of weapons, mostly blades. Another woman sat up from the bed of the pickup, her leather vest covered in dried blood and bullet holes. Wild hair exploded from her scalp like an out-of-control shrubbery, shrouding bright green eyes fixated on him with a zealot’s lust. She bowed in supplication, shuddering as if his mere presence had driven her to the brink of ecstasy.
Mamoru glanced at the woman in the doorway, a smile forming on his face at her desire to hurt him. An assortment of items, many stained with blood, littered the floor of the structure behind her.
Raiders.
A minute passed in a wordless standoff. Only the adoring wild woman made noise, whispering a mixture of English and Spanish. She wanted him to ‘take her’ and did not seem to care if he interpreted it sexually or murderously. Mamoru frowned, his distaste at her behavior fed by knowing his denial would cause her greater torment. He, or whatever it was he had made a deal with, would leave her to her pathetic pleas. The faintest eye contact between them seemed enough to communicate a sense of ‘you are not yet worthy.’
She crawled backward out of sight, hiding behind the two marauders seated on the tailgate.
The raiders’ shotgun-toting leader snorted and backed into her building. The others kept wary glances on him as he approached the grill. Mamoru helped himself to one of the skewered creatures and nodded at the cook.
“To your pleasure,” said the large man, his eyes vibrating with eagerness.
This one had come to the Badlands seeking the Akuryō. He had given up on the false society. Images of battle, conquest, and fire filled Mamoru’s mind. He smiled.
“Wilma,” he said without understanding why.
The man bowed.
Mamoru wandered away into the dark, gnawing on the charred meat.
None of them made a move or a sound until he was well enough away not to notice.
For two full days more, Mamoru walked across the desolate sands of what had once been Arizona without stopping. The farther he got from the heart of the Badlands, the weaker the presence in the back of his mind became. Late afternoon on the fifth day of his journey, the gleaming shape of West City engulfed the horizon. Endless miles of chrome-silver plastisteel buildings caught the sinking sun, shimmering as if the gods had spilled molten metal over the land. He almost felt like himself, though still the burden of obligation tugged at his soul.
Mamoru marched on, ignoring the fatigue gnawing at the mysterious endurance that had sustained him thus far. When the sun set beyond the city, the blinding expanse of metal faded to shadows. Receding daylight gave way to the glow of technology, and the horizon lit up once more: high-rise spires with racing streams of flying hovercars and advert bots laced among them.
The NetMini in his coat pocket chirped, indicating it established a connection to the GlobeNet. An hour or so later, his boots clanked up a ramp leading to the metal wall blocking the city off from the Badlands. He stopped three paces from a massive gate, large enough for two semi-trucks to pass abreast, and waited for someone inside to notice him.
Minutes later, a head-sized orb bot glided over the top, settling down to eye level with him. Blue and green laser lines crisscrossed his body as it orbited him, scanning. After a minute, it whirled about and zipped over the wall. To the right of the gate, a person-sized door opened, revealing a muscular woman in blue Division 1 police armor. She showed two signs of trust: her helmet was off and her pistol remained in its holster, though her hand rested on it. A rectangular strip on her chestplate bore white letters reading ‘PO2 Charles, C.’
“Nice night for a walk?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. No doubt she glanced over the false citizen identity profile he’d created when he first arrived in the UCF.
“My vehicle suffered a minor mechanical problem.” Mamoru offered the shallowest of salutatory bows. “I am also in need of new clothes, a bath, and a proper meal.”
“C’mon in, Mr. Haruko.” She moved out of the doorway, gesturing at him to enter. “We’ll get you on your way soon. Entry screening should only take a few minutes.”
Mamoru smiled and stepped inside.
12
Dominoes
Aurora
A great rolling curtain of fire rose up behind a tidal wave of junk, devouring gleaming towers of silver glass and plastisteel as it drew closer. The deafening inferno roared, louder than the explosions of crashing hovercars. Fragments of shattered glass rode by on a concussion wave. Aurora stood naked and calm in the center of the street, a stark white body among millions of people screaming and running. She stood her ground against the onrushing conflagration, squinting into the flame-heated wind whipping her long hair into a curtain of gold.
Half-molten advert bots careened out of the sky, smashing into the crowd of terrified citizens and falling like fireballs into the glass walls of hundred-story buildings. The ground in the distance buckled with a second concussion wave, rising several stories skyward before plummeting down with the collapsing city plates toward the earth. Panic-stricken men, women, and children rushed through her intangible body, showing no reaction to her presence. The deep rumble of West City falling back to the earth swallowed the screams of thousands.
Century towers careened away from her into the expanding maw, the enormous skyscrapers tumbling like stripped trees out of sight. The devastation halted inches from her toes; time itself ground to a standstill. Aurora glanced at a plump fireball swelling up from the ground hundreds of miles north. Her gaze climbed, following a trail of smoke that pierced the clouds. With the grace of a ballerina, she tiptoed over the buckling slabs of metal, hopping over individual, free-floating chunks of frozen destruction like stepping stones in midair. At the apex of the curve, she peered over the edge. Cars, buildings, and people hung suspended in mid-fall, raining toward the natural ground seventy-five meters below the artificial city surface.
One man had wound up in perfect position to stare right at her, outstretched hand begging for help. She closed her eyes and pressed both hands to her face.
When she looked again, she found herself face down on carpet, sprawled like a murder victim in an abandoned office building. Deep in a ‘black zone,’ no artificial light broke the darkness covering the world outside. Aside from their compound, electricity didn’t come within eight miles of Archon’s new base of operations. Some of the more technical-minded psionics had gone deep into The Beneath to tap a line for power, but she preferred it dark like the rest of the decaying buildings surrounding the campus. It almost reminded her of the cabin at County Gwynedd, how the darkness of night could be so completely enveloping without the pollution from millions of electric lights, advert bots, and civilization.
A moment of concentration changed the perfect blackness to wavering tones of sepia. Her eyes glowed with black light, peering into the astral world to illuminate the living one.
One foot remained in her hazard-orange sleeping bag, though the sofa cushions she’d arranged beneath it had gone askew. She pushed herself up and pulled her knees under her, sitting back on her heels and rubbing her face before stretching. It never got easier, watching horrors-to-be. Alone, without a judgmental eye upon her, Aurora curled into a ball and wept. From a single person’s untimely death to
an event like the collapse of the entire city, she would never be ‘grateful’ for her gift.
“Bad one, eh?” asked a growly male voice.
Her tears switched off.
“I’ve ‘ad worse.” She said, not looking.
A man’s head, with shaggy brown hair and Hispanic features, floated around in front of her. He had no body—merely a length of spinal nerve fibers trailing him like a serpent. His empty eye sockets filled with roiling black smoke. The head hovered to her side, nerve bundle swishing like the tail of a happy dog.
“Have you been behaving yourself?”
He gasped, feigning shock.
“Enrique…,” she said in the tone of a scolding parent. “You gave Melissa
nightmares.”
“Si. I only messed with esa pequeño niña a little.” He grimaced, spine-tail going limp. “She getting too close to mi cuerpo.”
Aurora stood and dusted carpet lint off her skin as she walked. “Anything interesting going on?”
The floating head trailed her across the repurposed office to a small hot tub in the corner of a private bath. “No. Is more of the same. One or two of the little ones, they see me and scream. I don’t speak no Russian or whatever. An’ that creepy one chased me for an hour.”
“The one with the giant rag doll?” asked Aurora.
“Si. Algo está muy mal con esa chica.” The floating head shifted side to side, making the spinal nerve wiggle. “Something very wrong with that girl.”
She ran the water cold and climbed in, soaking up to her neck. It didn’t refresh her like the creek in the wilds of Wales, but a tepid soak beat nothing.
“¡Ay, caramba!” yelled the floating head; the nerve cord contracted in a squiggle. “I’m a spirit and that’s makin’ me freeze.”
“Sorry.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Feels warm to me.”
“You said you was gonna help me with this.” Enrique wagged the tip of the spinal nerve about like a gesturing hand. “How I get my shit back?”
“You should’ve thought of that before you had them lop your head off and put it in a giant robot.”
He hissed. “Puta, don’t yank me.”
“You’ve not got a todger to yank.”
The head raced about in a circle for a few minutes, cursing and muttering in Spanish, before coming to a halt right in front of her face.
“Oh, fine.” She rolled her eyes, not that he noticed. “When you died, you were just a head encased in metal. Since that’s how you see yourself, that’s how you exist as a spirit. All you’ve got to do is think the rest of you back into existence.”
“What’s the trick?”
“No trick. Just want. Picture yourself as you used to be, and desire to appear that way.” She closed her eyes again and tried to get comfortable.
The spectral grunts and groans of a constipated-sounding ghost echoed amid drips of water falling from the faucet.
“You’re going to strain yourself.”
“It ain’t workin’, chica.”
Aurora put one foot up on the end of the tub and crossed her ankles. “Getting angry won’t help. In fact, you’ll not be able to do anything until you are calm. Try to remember yourself before you went and got all that metal.”
The head’s eyes bulged.
“Don’t tell me you’re in a hurry?” She laughed, cold and haughty. “Have somewhere to be?”
He grumbled and snarled. After a moment of impotent glaring, the hovering face sagged as though he hung his head in resignation. “Calm, eh?” The spirit glided away, into the wall, muttering.
“Yes, well… I suppose that’s the trick to it.”
She stopped concentrating on Darksight, and let the room go black. Water lapped at her neck and ankles, threatening to lull her back to sleep. A knock at the door disrupted her peace a short while later.
“It’s not locked.” She concentrated on the Astral realm, letting her body slip past the veil. A blast of ice washed over her as gravity lost meaning. The water collapsed to fill the space she had occupied with a loud pop, creating a tall spout. She floated out of the tub like a sylph on the wind, gliding into the main room, where Archon fumbled at the wall for the light switch, which took him a moment to find. After the lights came on, she hung in midair, laughing at his clueless expression as he searched, looking right past the space where she waited.
When his confusion took on a sense of irritation, she drifted to his side and landed on the toes of her outstretched foot, slipping back into the normal world. The sensation of the change slid over her body as though she tore through a thick sheet of hanging plastic from a comfortable, cool world to one of stifling warmth. Her hair gathered at her back, tickling her calves.
Archon shifted, his polite sideways stance affording her a bit of modesty she couldn’t care less about.
“I was in the bath.” She took her time picking among the assortment of robes, dresses, skirts, and leggings on the floor with her toe.
He stood with his back to her, muttering. “What is going on, Lauren?”
“Whatever do you mean?” She got her foot under the edge of an aqua satin robe and lifted it to her hand.
“Are you here to help or hurt us?”
“James,” she said, sounding hurt. “How could you even ask that?” She folded the floor-length robe closed over herself and tied the belt in a loose knot. “You can look now.”
Archon faced her after a hesitant peek to confirm she had dressed. “I did not think I was unclear. I am confused as to the nature of your intentions with us. Are you here to help or are you here to hinder us?”
She pushed the memory of the standing wall of fire out of her mind. “You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that.”
“You could have warned me of our difficulties with the ship.”
“What makes you think there are difficulties?” She padded to the desk, sat next to a portable food assembler, and crossed her legs. “Tea?”
“That would be lovely.” He moved to the end of the desk. “Do you see me gathering everyone to go to the starport? The bloody thing is missing.”
“Mamoru knows where it is.” Beeps punctuated the silence as she poked buttons on the machine. “Simply because it isn’t here right now doesn’t mean it won’t ever be. I assure you, the ship is coming.”
He grumbled, accepting the mug she handed him. Aurora smiled at the face he made, as if surprised she’d prepared it as he preferred—no sugar and heavy on the lemon. She set about making a second cup for herself, idly swaying her dangling foot back and forth.
“What color do you think I should use?”
“Pardon?”
“Toenails.”
He choked on his tea. “Can you for once adhere to the topic at hand? What is going on here? May I remind you that you informed me there was zero chance Anna would be a problem.”
“Aye.” Aurora sipped her creamed tea through a smile. Zero indeed.
“She has gotten a bit too comfortable around that Pryce fellow. The girl always was a bit too soft inside to do what needs to be done.”
“Still on about that office job? You’d have had us kill the lot of them?”
“Regretful, but, it would have saved months of cleanup work.”
Aurora tilted her head. “You don’t think it would’ve stepped up the police response? Even factoring out questions of moral decency, it may have proven more expedient at that moment, but the aftereffects would’ve been bothersome.”
“They were only mundanes, not a lick of gift among the lot.” Archon sipped his tea and sighed. “Sooner or later, her empty sentimentality is going to cause a problem.”
“You may be right about that bit.” Aurora held her cup with a daintily raised pinky finger. Red in Archon’s cheeks signaled a direct hit of her mockery.
“What do you see coming? Will we have any further issues?”
“’Ang on a minnit. Let me fetch the scrying ball.”
“Droll.”
“It doesn’t work like that, James. Significant things come to me when they come. Sort of like a disinterested boyfriend.”
He made a gurgling noise. “Must you turn everything into an innuendo?”
She flashed a wicked grin over her tea. “Does it make you uncomfortable?”
Archon opened his mouth as if to answer, but only glared.
Aurora lowered her arm, cradling the warm mug in her lap and staring into it. “James, you got the CSB off my back and gave me a place to stay when no one wanted the freak around.”
“I think of you like the troubled younger sister I never had.” He spent a moment studying the surface of his tea. “Have you seen anything recently?”
“Nothing that means anything to us.”
“Well, I suppose that bodes well.” Archon glanced at the coal-black windows. “I see you have not been sleeping soundly either. Should I be concerned?”
“Visions of the future are fickle things. I see endpoints, probable endpoints at that. Small wrinkles in between don’t make themselves known unless something serious goes wrong. Most future sight links on an emotional level. You know precognitives who can see the fate of total strangers are rare.”
“Such a pity.”
“What, that I’m a cold, heartless, ghost of a woman with no emotional ties? A mostly-blind precognitive?”
“No, Lauren. A pity your gift is so rare. I loathe having to constantly ask you to search such ugly dreams.”
She gazed at her lap, brief flashes of long-ago panic flashed across her mind. A little girl whose parents screamed at the sight of her. A child who panicked and etherealized out of her clothes when the soldiers came for her. Authorities dragging her away like some kind of criminal. Days spent in a featureless cell until she realized she could leave whenever she wanted.
“I’ve done everything I can to help you, but there’s something you have to accept.”
“And that is?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Some futures will come to pass whether you want them to or not.” She looked him in the eye. “You don’t seem to want to accept that. I tried to tell you taking Althea against her wishes was going to end badly for you. I honestly thought she’d have let…”
Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 14
