Mamoru shuddered, unable to command his muscles to obey. The taste of ozone filled his mouth as biting sparks danced upon his lips.
“She’s with the police now, twat. We need to keep a low profile. Kill her, and all of Archon’s planning will be for shit. Don’t think they won’t get the military involved. We’re trying to protect psionics, not start a war that’ll make them extinct.”
Pain ran back and forth in waves over his body, mixing with a maddening itch from mending burns. Who did this woman think she was, talking to him like that? Despite his anger, he could do nothing but glare at her.
“Since when are you a healer too?” Anna stared down at him, arms folded. “You know what? I don’t care. I don’t want to know.”
Kate jumped up holding a fireball in a throwing pose. “Anna, get away from him. A demon—”
A hair-thin thread of lightning connected Anna’s hand to Kate, knocking her flat. “Stay down, girl. A pyrokinetic going rage queen isn’t going to help anyone.” She looked at the street, guilty. “Sorry… Don’t take it personally. I… can’t let you get in Archon’s way. You’ll only get hurt.”
“Ngh.” Kate twitched and convulsed.
Mamoru grumbled as Anna pulled him upright. He leaned on her for support, unable to walk while fighting off the urge in his mind driving him to kill both of them. She dragged him to the passenger side door and opened it before giving him enough of a shove that he fell in. He slumped, lost to an ocean of pain, and closed his eyes. The other door closed, and the car lurched upward.
You have no focus, spirit. The tiny woman is right.
Dry chuckling scratched at the recesses of his mind. Mamoru cringed, unsure where the old man began and he ended.
They shall soon have no dominion over my world.
Mamoru closed his eyes and focused on tuning out the pain of healing burns. The spirit devoured him more and more; how long before he ceased to exist and only the Akuryō remained?
It matters not what fate befalls me. Sadako lives.
45
Legacy of Fire
Kate
Hot spittle ran down Kate’s chin. A rush of ionized air from a departing hovercar sprayed her with bits of trash and plastic film. She grunted, forcing her arm up to cradle her breast, still tender from the shock she was certain almost stopped her heart.
One drawback to metal threads.
Anna’s telepathic apology only did so much to make her less angry at being shocked. The woman had seemed scared, as if she had begun to share her feelings toward Archon, but the man still had some inexplicable hold on her. She slid over sideways, forehead to the cold plastisteel ground. Seconds later, she curled in a ball cradling her chest. The demon wants Archon. Did that bastard reprogram Anna too? She looked so torn. Kate braced a hand on the ground and pushed herself up into a sitting position. The street at the end of the alley glowed with emergency lights. The addition of red to the flurry of blue signaled either a MedVan or Division 1 backup had arrived.
“This ‘take them alive’ thing is overrated,” she muttered while struggling to her feet. “I should’ve just killed him.”
Not quite recovered from the electrical jolt, she stumbled on stiff legs toward the street where she’d left her car. Whoever the Japanese man was, the demon had taken him. The old priest appeared on the road—in West City—scaring the color from her cheeks. If he could get to her here, could she ever be safe? His clothes had changed, but she’d never forget the entity who demanded she kill Althea. Bile collected at the back of her mouth as she tried to ignore the smell of flesh burning. The sight of scorched dead didn’t bother her much, but watching someone heal as fast as she seared it got to her.
Next time she saw him, she’d try the laser.
Kate made her way back to the intersection, finding Division 1 officers as well as medtechs on the scene. Bodies littered the street; from the looks of it, the suicidal gangers who flung themselves at the cops had gotten their wish. A few punks survived with various degrees of injury. Blue armored police dragged them to either a MedVan or a prisoner transport depending on how much blood leaked out of them. A girl of about fifteen with a black and purple throat struggled to escape restraints holding her to a hover-stretcher. She wheezed and rasped at the police and medical personnel, but couldn’t speak. The fight left her as an autoinjector to the shoulder stole her consciousness.
No one paid Kate much attention as she walked among the frenzy of activity. She didn’t look wounded enough to attract notice from anyone in white, and her Division 0 uniform kept the normal patrol officers away. She forced herself up to a jog, working the stiffness out of her muscles, and ducked under the still-open door of her patrol craft. For a few seconds, she stared at all the screens and shiny lights on the console and felt overwhelmed by it all.
“Ops?”
A hologram of a dark-haired male doll appeared. “Go ahead 1185-0T2.”
“I don’t have time to read the user manual for this damn thing. I need to find a suspect fleeing the scene.”
He, or it, smiled. “I need more information, officer.”
“Uhh, yeah. Right.” She pulled her door closed. “Fancy hovercar, gold. Left a few minutes ago from my current location.”
The man’s eyes shimmered with digital snow. “You are lucky to be in a degenerated area. There’s only one transponder signal recorded close to you not associated with a municipal vehicle within the past five minutes. Halcyon-Ormyr Executive Series III, tag D8FF94AA300C.”
“Whatever the fuck that means.” Kate pulled back on the stick, her car shot straight up. “I need to follow it. Can you do that? What button do I push?”
“Division 0 should spend more time training you kids before they throw you to the wolves. One moment.”
“Kids? You look younger than I feel.” She smirked.
When a flashing yellow arrow appeared ten feet in front of the car pointing right, she twisted the stick to swing the car around until it turned into a dotted line leading off into the distance. Waypoints she remembered from the sim. Following them was easy, setting them not so much. A ribbon of light wavered and stretched, a clear indication the far end moved.
“Thanks,” said Kate.
She accelerated along the digital marker and hit the emergency flashers.
“Do you require backup, Officer?”
“Yeah.” Kate shuddered at the memory of seeing the Japanese man’s exposed ribs vanishing beneath new skin. She’d never forget that smell. “Shitloads. Might need the damn Army.”
The young man’s holographic apparition nodded and faded away. Kate let her mind go back to the training sim, and tried not to think that the gleaming buildings and advert bots whizzing past her were real. Sweat ran down her face and made the control sticks slippery. One wrong reaction and someone would be scraping her off the armored windshield. She screamed a few times when advert bots came too close, forcing her to roll or side-slide out of the way. The idea of life as a primitive didn’t seem so bad all of a sudden.
Sometimes, technology really sucked.
A few bots responded to her approach, yielding to a patrol craft in emergency mode. The twisting light ribbon swerved, heading north and west. Her police vehicle could outpace the Halcyon-Ormyr in a straightaway, but only an idiot or a doll would dare do 600 mph between skyscrapers. Kate grinned and climbed, ramming the left stick forward to accelerate. Once she crested the top of the highest buildings, she leveled off and pulled as tight a turn as speed would allow in the direction of the waypoint guide.
The arrow stretched for miles, plunging downward into an area the Navcon marked black. Sector 10081. It took only a few minutes at full speed—a hair under Mach 1—to close the distance. From three-quarters of a mile up, the area even looked black to the naked eye. Kate slowed. The computer indicated the car she’d tracked had landed in the middle of an abandoned corporate campus with three buildings. On either side of a ten-story, central tower stood a pair of smaller structures that a
ppeared to have withstood the worst of whatever war happened there.
She kept a cautious distance in the air, waiting for backup to arrive. Magnification showed numerous bodies in the courtyard area, though most seemed to be cyborgs that had been dead for a long time. Kate tapped her fingers on the sticks, not liking the number of heat signatures thermal showed occupying the ground floor of the left building.
All the lights and controls flickered and flashed. Kate clenched her sphincter, expecting her patrol craft to fall from the sky like a brick. The image of Archon’s face, drawn from rainbow light in front of the car, scared her even more. Six feet tall, the disembodied head pulsed bright orange, striated with azure numbers streaming from right to left. The scrolling text continued within the void-like hollow of his empty eye sockets. He had to have gotten into the car’s systems, forcing his way into the digital windscreen.
“Hello again, Kate.” Archon’s voice surrounded her, emanating from hidden speakers. Skin texture, sharp enough to reveal every pore, spread as liquid over his face, wrapping him in a shroud of reality. “I’ve been wondering when you’d return to us.”
“What the fuck?” She pounded the console. “Ops? Ops? He’s hacked me.”
“Hacked?” A two-foot wide eyebrow climbed as the head grew even larger. “So droll. They cannot reach you now, Kate.”
A tingle started at the tip of her mind. She didn’t dare waste the second it would take to wonder how a hologram could use telepathy. Kate focused every ounce of her willpower on keeping him out of her head.
“No. I’m not one of your pets. You can’t have me.”
“It is in your blood, Kate.” His voice sounded as much inside her head as in the cabin around her. “Do you know who you are?”
“Out. Out. Out. Out.” She drove a fist into her thigh in time with each word.
“You have the genetic material of Ekaterina Myshkin. Do you know who she was?”
“Leave me alone!” Kate pulled on the control stick, but it clicked back and forth without effect on the car. “Shit!”
“Ekaterina Myshkin survived three gunshot wounds at the age of ten when resistance fighters smuggled her out of ACC-controlled Russia. A courageous child who made us aware of the horrors that went on there. It was by her bravery we learned of the midnight raids, the executions, and the torture. Many people died to help her escape. She was the first pyrokinetic the world knew. You have greatness flowing in your veins, Kate. Or, shall I call you Ekaterina?”
“You’re fucking crazy, you know that?” With one eye closed in concentration, she fought the energy trying to seep into her mind and punched the autopilot button. It, too, did nothing. “Go away! You have no idea what’s coming after you, do you?”
“It is time you fulfilled your destiny, Kate.”
“Fuck you.” She slapped herself. The rush of pain knocked the invasion from her mind and she poked at random buttons in an effort to regain control of the patrol craft. “My destiny is mine, bitch.”
“The man you think of… David… he is a government tool put in place to control you. You think he loves you?” Archon’s laughter vibrated the sound system in the car, shaking her bones. “Come now, Kate. You are not a stupid woman. An empath falls in love with you at first sight, and you him? Tell me you are not blind to that truth.”
“Truth? Hah. You’re lying.” Kate couldn’t help herself but cry at the possibility of David being a lie.
“He is influencing you to be part of the problem. Division 0 is not there to protect the interests of psionics, they want to enslave us.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Telepathic tingles threaded into her brain. “Ngh, stop. Get out. I know he’s not forcing me to feel. I know what it’s like. The girl already did it.”
Her recollection of Althea repelled him from her brain like a light chasing off a roach.
Still squinting one eye, Kate looked up at the monstrous face. “You’re afraid of a little girl?”
Archon scowled. “You will fulfill your destiny. Come to me.”
Kate screamed, sensing a suggestion take root in her brain. Her heart raced. Images of David flashed by; a life she’d never have. She sobbed. With the last few seconds of free will she knew she had left, she hit the emergency open on the door.
“No!” she screamed, and leapt.
Wind whipped her hair about as she sailed out into the sky, a half-mile above ground. Archon’s influence peeled away, as though a rubbery tendril connected to the car reached its limit. Whether her physical inability to obey the command in the midst of free fall or the catharsis of imminent death had kicked him out, she couldn’t tell. Freedom would come with darkness. Death would be better than slavery.
West City rushed up at her. Kate closed her eyes and let her body go limp. Please forgive me, David. Hmf. Fucking scientists. At least I’ll be free.
Seconds passed. She waited for impact, afraid of what she’d see if she opened her eyes. Her stomach lurched and twisted. Her whipping hair settled; the air rushing past her face slowed. She felt weightless.
“Well, that was certainly dramatic,” said Archon.
Kate’s eyes snapped open. She floated, her boots mere inches from the roof of the ten-story tower. Archon stood a few meters away, wearing an unassuming tweed suit and a wry smile. Thick chestnut hair wavered to his left. Behind him, another man with dirty blond hair stared at her with an intense look of concentration. His black suit and red-wine colored silk shirt looked more like the expensive outfits the Syndicate bigwigs favored. She recognized his face from hours of fruitless searching.
“Nice catch, Aaron,” said Archon.
A hint of a smile fought out from under his concentration. “Shame to lose this one; she’s top totty, aye?”
Archon smiled. “More than you know.”
Shock at surviving such a fall collided with terror at the sight of Archon so close. Kate willed a fireball into each hand.
“Don’t.” said Archon, with a flare of light in his eyes.
Her arms locked in place as if they’d become iron. Wind rippled upon the flames. A second later, her brain released the pyre against her will.
“There you go, pet.” Archon moved closer and stared into her eyes. “Everything will be fine. You are perfectly safe.”
She whined, unable to move or peel her eyes away.
Archon reached up and caressed her cheek. “Welcome home, my dear.”
46
A Minor Emergency
Althea
The burrito sat upon a dull blue plate in front of Althea, covered with gooey cheese and flakes of chopped scallions. Karina glanced across the table with an expectant look. Father, at her left, had gotten to work on his food without ceremony. To her right, Alejandra radiated confusion and worry. The woman had grown fond of Father, and he had brought her home for dinner for the first time. As friendly as the girls had been to her, she still radiated hesitance.
Althea narrowed her eyes at the fork, peered up at Karina, and growled at her food, mimicking the sound of an upset chihuahua. The huge grin on her face broke any illusion of her being angry, and the girls erupted in laughter. Alejandra’s confusion deepened; Father burst out in laughter.
She picked up the fork, still intending to make good on her promise to fate. It took her a moment to find a comfortable grip, and she stabbed it into the end of the burrito. The knife posed no difficulty. Knives she knew. After managing to slice a half-inch thick cross section of burrito onto the fork, she stuffed the piece into her mouth and tried to chew.
“Great!” chirped Karina.
“The girl’s not three,” muttered Father past a full mouth and a grin.
Althea giggled, dribbling burrito sauce all over herself.
“Or perhaps she is.” Father reached over to dab a napkin at her.
She held her chin up as he wiped, shifting her eyes toward Alejandra. The woman finally relaxed enough to laugh with them. Every so often, Althea let out a playful snarl, which se
t Karina giggling all over again.
“There’s a story behind this,” said Alejandra.
“Yes.” Father wiped his mouth on a napkin and ruffled Althea’s hair. “When we found her, she was quite wild. She growled while she ate, like a dog afraid her food would be taken away.”
Alejandra gave her a pitying look. “You don’t need to do that anymore.”
“I know.” Althea grinned. “It makes me think of Karina laughing.”
Her sister reached across the table to squeeze her hand. A sudden tremor ran down her back. Althea got up, ran around the table, and jumped into Karina’s lap.
“Thea, what’s wrong?” Karina wrapped her arms around her. “You’re trembling.”
Father’s chair scuffed on the floor. “Someone’s coming.”
“You’re gifted too?” asked Alejandra.
Karina held Althea tight.
Father stood. “No, I hear footsteps.”
The front door opened hard.
“Hello? Althea?” called a man’s voice. Soft thuds got louder. “I’m Officer Ahmed with Division 0. We need you.”
“No,” yelled Karina. “She’s not well.”
Althea relaxed and lifted her face from Karina’s chest, looking up at the man with coffee-toned skin who stood in the arch separating the kitchen from the hall. He wore the uniform of the city police as well as a cloud of anxiety. She tried to slip to her feet, but Karina held on.
“It’s okay. I have to go.”
“No, you don’t.” Karina squeezed, making her gurgle. “Father, tell him he can’t take her away.”
“I’m not taking her away.” Officer Ahmed fidgeted. “Something’s happening and we need her help.”
“You are afraid,” said Althea. “Someone you love is in danger.”
He tried to look stoic, but he couldn’t hide his strong emotions from her.
Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 44
