An accident? Bollocks. That look he gave me was no accident. “I wanted to check up on Pen and them.” If I tell him about Faye, he’ll rewrite her. “I thought you’d decided to be a bastard again, like with the chopsticks. I needed some time to clear my head.” She picked at her coat. “The trip was a mistake. I never should’ve come here.” She thought about her father to make fake sniffles sound real. “They all practically shat themselves when they saw me. Probably have the CSB coming after me already. I’ll be back on the next shuttle.”
“Nothing to panic over. Be careful. I am sorry I was delayed. I’ll make it up to you as soon as you are back.”
“Ta.” She waited for a moment, wondering if he’d say something cute like ‘love you’ or what have you. “James?”
“Keep your head down and be safe.”
He hung up.
Love you, too… Do I?
“Next,” said the teen behind the counter. “Miss?”
She sighed and let the NetMini slip from her fingers into a pocket. “Triple espresso.”
For the fourth time, Anna stopped in the scanner tunnel as it blared an alarm. She stomped, snarled, and marched back to the entrance. Once again, she’d made it halfway when it buzzed, sensing something ‘anomalous.’ Starport security asked her to back up and remove her coat the first time. Shoes the second time, and asked about body piercings the third. As the security officer walked her to the start of the full-body scanner for pass four, Anna realized her nerves had been playing hell with the machine.
“I’ve not got any metal, your machine is wonky. I’ll go starkers, and you’ll bloody well see.”
Quite a few men took notice of her as she grabbed her shirt as if to pull it off.
“Calm down, Miss.”
“Right, if I get too loud, I’ll get arrested for daring to question the sanctity of your beloved scanners.”
“Do you have any cybernetic implants that might be too new to be in the system?”
“No. Look, I’m bloody telling you”—Anna kept her voice calm—”I’ve got nothing. I’m seconds away from flinging my clothes off and storming through it bare as a babe. Will that prove that it’s your stupid machine having a conniption?”
“Need backup at checkpoint fourteen,” said the agent into his shoulder.
“Oh, bloody hell.” Anna rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“That won’t be necessary,” said a man. “Agent Hughes, Mi6.”
Anna jumped and let her startlement look like nerves. The Starport Security Agency rep backed off. Hughes ‘pulled her aside’ and offered a conspiratorial wink.
“What’s got you nervous enough to mess with the sensors?”
“Someone I used to know said the government’s trying to track me down.”
Hughes chuckled. “That was me. That Plonk fellow’s quite the slob these days. Not quite the same bloke he used to be.”
“Tell me about it.” Anna relaxed.
A security woman ran over with Anna’s coat and shoes in a plastic bin. Anna took them, and the guard scurried away as fast as she could.
“I wanted to tell you. Lord Thompson’s motion carried. Parliament is having hearings on psionic legislation starting next week. Most of the talk is sounding like the registration program will be officially discarded, as will additional criminality attached to the use of abilities in the commission of other crimes.”
“What about the crime of simply being?”
Hughes pursed his lips. “There is a real chance of adopting the UCF’s stance on it. They’ve even been floating the idea of incepting a bureau on the order of their Division 0. Heck, another year from now and they might even let them get married.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, how charitable of them.”
“Well…” Hughes chuckled. “Everyone knows two psionics having a child will produce the antichrist on fire.”
Anna sighed. “Fire sounds like a good idea. Can we burn the C of E?”
“Now, now. That’ll just make them think they’re right. Those of us with abilities in the Bureau are being considered for the new startup agency. Pay’s top notch. We could use someone with your talents. Least they could do to make up for things.”
“What?” Anna stared at him as though he’d slapped her. “You want me to work for the people who had my mother murdered?”
He cringed. “Technically, that was Mi6, not us, and the whole paradigm is changing. We have to show the people we can be part of society in a good way.”
Anna’s lip quivered thinking about the picture of her mother’s body and her father’s ghost. He’d kept the house for her, terrifying away anyone who set foot in the place or considered buying it. That wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, someone would ignore the spookiness. Gleaming sunlight drew her eyes to the long row of windows on the far side of the security checkpoint where a shuttle slid by outside. Brick red, the corporate logo of RedLink covered it from nose to tail.
A hopeful man in thick glasses stared at her. In a moment of eye contact, she heard him wondering if she was really going to get on with the stripping. Red-faced, she averted her eyes.
Lauren told her to consider her old home. Silly as it was, Faye’s need to have her close by carried more weight than it ought to have. She didn’t completely trust Hughes, yet, but Lauren said… and Archon had started to frighten her.
Anna blinked, realizing her inner voice called him Archon and not James. She swallowed, trying to remember what she had been like before meeting him. Even working for Mr. Carroll, she dodged jobs that would have required her to kill. Aside from her Father, she managed to avoid taking life until the night the Crossmen went too far. Since falling in with Archon, she’d killed at least eleven people, because he’d needed them out of their way. Still, the Anna she used to be lurked inside. That redhead, the Awakened pyro, melted down a squad of men without batting an eyelash. Anna shivered. She could never be that cold, but Archon had changed her. The idea of staying with him made her fear she’d become like Kate had been. Of course, Althea had rewired her brain and turned her soft—at least softer. That woman had seen something in Archon that made her flee. After getting her out of that C-Branch holding facility, the woman had turned her back and run off. Aurora tried to tell her a few days later that the woman still considered Anna a friend, but had become terrified of Archon. What would he do if she tried to leave as well? She’d been his right hand for as long as he’d been in the UCF.
If she tried to leave, he would make her forget everything she ever was.
Hughes brushed her cheek with a tissue. “Is everything alright?”
She hadn’t realized she’d been crying. Anna looked down. “That offer of yours…”
“Hmm?” He raised an eyebrow.
Anna folded her arms, fighting to keep her nervousness from blowing out the entire security station. “Can I ‘ave a few ta think about it?”
41
The Ronin Returns
Mamoru
A thick haze of smoke greeted Mamoru when he opened his eyes; a trail of white fluttered up from the left end of Flatline’s deck, eye level ten feet in front of him. His fingers peeled away from the Matsushita Ultra, out of the handprint he’d melted into the housing. Thin black plastic flaked away from his closing fist. He kept his breaths shallow to minimize the taste of burned silicon and flesh.
Flatline’s arm and head poked out from the right side of the desk from where he’d collapsed to the floor. Mamoru stood and attached the katana to its place on his hip. He stared at Flatline’s pallid, unconscious face for a moment, eyelid twitching at the notice of a thread of smoke seeping out of the man’s M3 interface port. The two cats, Yin and Yang, pawed at his cheek, meowing.
Trash crunched underfoot as he advanced and took a knee by the fallen hacker. The wire plugged in behind his ear remained hot to the touch, though Mamoru resisted the pain long enough to pull it out. He gathered the twig-thin man in his arms and lifted him. The cats stared at him, tails fluffed.<
br />
An impatient sense of contempt spread up his back. The other presence returned. A shadow shifted on the wall, though Mamoru sensed no one. Four cats darted out of the room.
“Sympathy, Mamoru?”
The unexpected voice sent a wave of tension over his muscles. He turned, careful not to smack Flatline’s head into the desk, and stared at the ancient gunslinger who had come out of thin air. The man’s head tilted forward enough for the brim of his cowboy hat to obscure his eyes, though strands of whitish hair trailed to the side like cobwebs in a weak breeze. Dark miasmic fog obscured his boots and the ends of a long, brown duster coat, open to reveal a six-gun.
From where he stood, the foulness of the entity’s breath stalled the air in Mamoru’s throat.
“We have an arrangement,” said the old man, raising his head until red, glowing eyes peeked out from under his hat. The dark mass around his legs moved and congealed, as if alive and looking at Mamoru. “We have no time for mercy.”
Mamoru huffed to clear his airways. “This is not mercy. This is honor.”
He walked out, carrying Flatline. The old man’s menacing grin melted to an annoyed frown, and the rest of him burst into a column of black smoke, which fell straight onto the floor. Inky fog flooded the room, billowing out into the hallway behind Mamoru’s slow trudge. Tendrils lapped at his back, but the mass of darkness did not overtake him.
Shadows followed Mamoru for several blocks, sliding along the street and up the walls of buildings long forgotten. Gangers, dosers, and cyberjunkies watched him. Few moved. One woman with numerous feline cybernetic parts hissed before tripping over herself to run into an alley.
The dark energy following him seeped into the ground, vanishing from sight as he reached the end of the grey zone. Buildings no longer rotted in place, electronics in the walls once again worked, and the overhead glow of innumerable advert bots bathed him in neon pink and green.
Mamoru ignored the thickening crowd around him. No one seemed to notice Flatline, who appeared to be a corpse in his arms. When he felt he had left the grey zone behind, he set the man down on the curb and took his NetMini from his pocket. The device bent to Mamoru’s will and unlocked long enough to page a ride. A PubTran taxi arrived two minutes later.
He laid Flatline across the back seat and rested his hand on the roof, influencing the vehicle’s computer to think he’d paid. “Nearest medical center. The passenger is injured.”
“Thank you for choosing PubTran Corporation for your travel needs. Would you like to use our emergency expedite service? Only fifty credits.”
Mamoru frowned. “Opportunistic.” He forced the little car to register a paid boost.
Holographic flashing bar lights appeared atop the little car, which sped off after Mamoru closed the side hatch door. Flatline was no longer his responsibility. He backed away from the curb and walked. The crowd flowed around him, a river breaking around a moving boulder. A few miles deeper into the city proper, Mamoru sought the solitude of a shaded park in the courtyard of an office tower. The smog layer muted the late afternoon sun, leaving the area awash in pale grey light and the scent of recent rain.
He took a seat on a bench below an unnatural blue tree and grasped the NetMini in his pocket. The peaceful courtyard flew forward from his perception as a sense of vertigo came hand in hand with falling down into the floor. His link with the small device allowed him to send his consciousness into the GlobeNet, and he found himself standing in the center of a virtual reproduction of the same space. Advert bots remained, though few people did. Hundreds of threads of light extended from the towering structure at the far end of the park, remote connections to work-at-home employees. Every so often, a dark egg-shape pulsed over one of the gossamer strands, arriving or departing data.
The world felt slow and boggy compared to using a proper deck, and the little device lacked the power to render an avatar. Knowing he was the only one in the world who could ‘plug in’ with a NetMini made him smile.
Mamoru willed programs into being. The ground beneath his bench erupted with thousands upon thousands of palm-sized spiders made of jagged shards of onyx. The search routines rushed off in all directions, a dark stain spreading over cyberspace with the clicking of needle legs on metal. Minutes later, the last of them departed the ruptured ground, and the hole sealed.
He waited, meditating. Data moved at the periphery of his awareness; in this place, it mattered not if his eyes appeared open or closed. Over vast virtual distances, each tiny spider whispered to him.
Hours passed in cyberspace. Mamoru did not move or blink until an approaching signal shimmered in the dark. One spider scuttled toward him across the park, clutching a glass thread in its mouthparts. The fiber stretched to the horizon, flickering with the heartbeat of a keepalive signal.
Mamoru smiled and bent forward to take the offering from his pet. The little program wobbled with glee a second before the animating force faded, and it fell apart as small slivers of inert onyx. The delicate sound of billions of tiny chips of glass shattering came from far away. He had no further need of the search programs.
He raised the thread in a fist and squeezed. A rectangular pane appeared above it in blue wireframe, stretching and texturizing until it took on the appearance of a small torii gate. Open space between the poles swirled with energy, creating a portal into a corporate office. Nine copies of Archon’s face, each at a somewhat different angle, stared back at him with a mixture of surprise and indignation as Mamoru’s presence took over all nine of his display panels.
“You… How did you?”
Mamoru’s expression held no emotion. “I regret my unfortunate delay, but I am once again in the city.”
“Where have you been?” Archon’s right eye twitched. “Tell me you still possess the ship?”
“The ship is, as far as I am aware, still where I left it. I will bring it to Earth as soon as necessary.”
Archon’s heads shifted as he glanced from one copy of Mamoru’s face to the next. “Have you been compromised? What caused the delay?”
“A woman who believes herself to be my sister attempted to interfere.”
“How does an Awakened allow an ordinary human to pose a hindrance?”
“Even the Awakened must sleep,” Mamoru grumbled. “This woman had been trained from a young age in the ways of ninjitsu. Foolish is the mouse who attacks a cat in the open.”
“Ninjitsu?” Archon scoffed. “Primitives, but I suppose I should at least respect your culture for not regarding our kind as pariah. Still, someone with your gifts should have prevailed.”
“I am here now, am I not? In the right circumstances, she could have bested even you.”
Archon sighed.
Mamoru’s blank face cracked with the hint of a smile. “Do you possess some mystical resistance to poison? Her ilk have the patience of androids. All you need to do is sleep.”
Unease shone from Archon’s eyes. “Are you so certain I sleep? What took you so long?”
“Our conflict took place on a shuttle flight. She knew she could not defeat me, so she forced a crash. I have been walking through the abominable Badlands for days.”
“Go to Sector 6112 where no one will see you. Stay there,” said Archon. “I’ll send a car.”
42
Cracks in the House of Glass
Anna
Desperate fear energized Anna’s nerves as she stormed down the corridor. Forty yards separated her from Archon, dwindling with each step. She had to prepare herself. One wrong look might set him off, and she couldn’t let him in. He’d devour her like he did Alexi, make her into some other person, someone who’d do whatever he asked without a second thought. Her only chance would be that he’d never expect her to fight back.
Telekinesis couldn’t catch lightning.
She shoved the door to the office-turned-bedroom open hard enough to slam it against the wall. Archon, behind his desk in the back corner, peeled reading glasses off and raised an eyebr
ow at her.
“A bit of the dramatic today?”
Anna stopped two steps in. “Tell me what you did to my mind.”
“Anna… I told you returning to London would do nothing but stir up pain.” He set the spectacles on the desk and stood. “Come, sit. Relax.”
“So you can rewrite me again?” She pointed. “Like Alexi? He’s not even the same person.”
He softened his expression. “The boy wasn’t a person, Anna. He was a shell. You are not so cruel as to demand a child suffer those memories, are you?”
Heat rushed over her face. “I am not cruel. At least, I never used to be. Not until you… you… changed me.”
“I did nothing of the sort.” He walked around the desk, hands out. “You are being over-emotional. Tell me what happened in London.”
“You made my friends hate me. You made them not even remember what I was really like.” A knot of fear twisted with anger and sadness in her gut. “How many others are conditioned? What did you do to me?”
“If you really must know…” He stopped, letting his arms drop to his sides. “I removed a bad memory so you can function. I made you forget the chems you propped yourself up with.”
“Is that all?” She squinted. “What of my father? How could you make me think he was some random tosser from the Bureau?”
“What makes you so certain he was not?”
“Because I spent two hours yesterday talking to his fecking ghost,” shrieked Anna.
Lights flickered. One of Archon’s terminal panes winked out, the rest filled with static.
“Anna…” He raised a hand.
“Don’t ‘Anna’ me, James. You manipulated me, you turned everyone I knew against me, and you’ve made me into a monster who kills for you and kidnaps little, innocent children away from their families.”
Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 41
