Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 4

  “I’ll push it.”

  The old man smiled at her. “Bless you, child.”

  Father had returned home long enough to eat, heading back out to the wall less than twenty minutes after walking in the door. Althea and Karina had agreed to handle cooking dinner and dishes in his place, since the Watch demanded more of his time, splitting it between learning and patrolling. Althea gathered the dishes from the table while Karina ran water in the sink. She carried them to the counter, confused at the strange expression on her sister’s face. About to ask what was wrong, she let out a yelp when she noticed an undulating mass of white foam where water should be.

  Karina could contain herself no longer and burst into laughter.

  “What’s in the sink?”

  “Soap.”

  Althea swiped at it, catching a blob of suds. After making a face at the strange weightless substance, she sniffed it.

  “It’s liquid soap, from the city.”

  “Eww!” She flailed her hand, throwing suds everywhere.

  Karina laughed too hard to speak for several minutes until the deepening pout on Althea’s face pulled the rug out from under her mirth. “Oh, Thea. It’s not going to hurt us.”

  “I don’t want them to make Querq like the city. Then everyone will be bad and no one will smile anymore.”

  Karina rubbed her back. “They are bringing us small things to make life easier. It is not the same as making our home into a city.”

  She frowned at the foam and stared past her reflection on the window. At the hour, Querq should have been too dark to see anything but blackness outside, but the magic lights the police people brought were bright enough to light up the street behind the house, stretching a long shadow from the water pump.

  They washed the dishes in relative silence, and by the time they finished, she felt better. No eerie feelings came over her when she thought about her family. With the chores out of the way, Karina went out onto the back porch and sat at the top of the stairs. Althea followed, taking a seat one step down, directly in front of her, with her arms draped in her lap. The city used to appear black and white, Althea’s version of ‘dark.’ Now, smears of color intruded everywhere.

  Karina spent a moment raking her fingers through Althea’s hair before going for the brush.

  “Did you try to play with the older kids when you were done helping Aldo?”

  She let the brush pull her head to the side with each stroke. “Yes, but they wanted to pretend fight each other. I didn’t like it.”

  “They won’t do that all the time, and avoiding them won’t help.”

  “I know.”

  Karina jumped at sudden banging on the front door.

  Althea curled her toes over the step and sighed. Why did people always get hurt when she had time with her sister? “I should go.”

  “Althea?” Den’s voice filled the house. The pounding stopped, and heavy footfalls on floorboards became louder.

  Karina pulled the brush through Althea’s hair once more. “I’ll go with you.”

  They stood together as Den rushed onto the porch behind them. He looked so different in a white ‘tee shirt’ and ‘jeans,’ as Father called the strange garments. However, seeing him with shoes that matched felt the most odd. A few days’ worth of stubble darkened his face and made him seem older than his fifteen years.

  “Althea, Dr. Ruiz asks for you at the hospital. A woman is hurt, almost dead.”

  She offered an eager nod. “Let’s go.”

  3

  High Noon Black

  Aaron

  Tangled strands of wire dangled from a sparking gouge on the underbelly of a huge advert bot, evidence of a recent collision. Aaron cringed at the amount of damage. The poor bastard who hit it had probably died when their car landed fifty stories down. The hulk meandered along between hovercar lanes, a lazy whale surrounded by impatient minnows.

  A thirty-foot tall hologram of a woman’s head below the enormous bot flickered in the rain, flashing an overacted smile after sipping her NuOrganix genuine coffee. Yellow letters circled around the gargantuan cup, proclaiming, ‘A taste like Earth intended.’

  The hovercar jostled in a sudden gust that also caused the neat line of traffic in front of them to sway upward and left. In a manner of seconds, individual vehicles regrouped into their usual, linear flow. Aaron sat with his back as much to the wall as the seat, dividing his attention between Anna, beside him, and Talis in the passenger seat. Archon, seated in front of him, drove. He’d directed the woman to the front. While Aaron was grateful not to have to sit next to the bitch, the black cloud over Anna’s head deepened at her being relegated to the back seat. Aaron had tried to shoot her a ‘see what I mean’ look, but she refused to make eye contact.

  Talis glanced back at him, strands of fine, long dreadlocks pulling over her shoulder. Cockiness, a trait well suited to her high, regal cheekbones, fled when she met his stare, leaving her quivering. He glanced away before she did, finding her cowering uncomfortable. Having a woman, even one he wanted to kill, cringe like that made him feel like a bastard. He found it much easier to kill the person who destroyed your life when they were arrogant.

  Of course, he knew she faked it. At least, bullshit seemed the most likely explanation. Sure, his peculiarity with invasive mental abilities scared her to death, but her rapid change from haughty to simpering reeked of an implanted trigger. Hypnotic suggestion, as the database called it, a psionic’s ability to embed a conditioned response into a subject. Aaron suspected Archon programmed her to feel extreme fear at the sight of him, though there remained a tiny chance of the woman’s terror being genuine.

  What luck he’d had to find her only to have Archon recruit the bitch. So what if she’s Awakened too? No amount of apologizing would ever bring Allison back, and Archon expected him to work with her? To pick up and leave Earth, stuck on a stolen spacecraft for who-knows-how-long with someone he’d spent months fantasizing about murdering.

  The man really is daft.

  He stared at Anna’s hand; small and pale, she’d whitened her knuckles on the edge of the seat. Unlike the PubTran, Archon’s Halcyon-Ormyr had lush, padded seats covered in leather that had never mooed. Aaron considered reaching out and putting his hand atop hers, though perhaps such a show of affection in the same car with Archon would be unwise. Lucky enough the man hesitated at peeking into his brain. It seemed even ‘the most powerful telepath in the world’ didn’t know for sure how dangerous Aaron’s mind had become.

  Almost three hours after leaving the abandoned starship plant, Archon peeled away from the hovercar lane and turned east, descending to the fortieth floor and slowing from their cruising speed of 320 mph to a casual 110. The Navcon in the center of the dashboard beeped and flashed red.

  “Warning, you have entered Sector 10079. You are ten miles from a dangerous area. Warning, Sector 10081 is disavowed. Recommend alternate flight path.”

  “Anna, how do you shut this bloody thing off?” asked Archon.

  “I can’t reach it from all the way back here, luv.”

  Aaron swore the car got ten degrees colder.

  “You would have preferred I put these two in arm’s reach of one another? We would have arrived with one left alive.”

  “I’d say I’m not the one with impulse control issues, but I’d be lying.” Aaron flashed a saccharin smile at the rearview mirror.

  The gleaming surface of silvered windows sliding by changed in the blink of an eye to shattered and twisted ruins. Archon descended further, to the third-floor level, and slowed to a veritable standstill of forty miles per hour. Rag-clad people watched them from nearby office towers; some peered with curiosity, others threw bottles, and some aimed handguns. Aaron leaned forward, raising an eyebrow at a mostly flat corporate campus that seemed to be their destination.

  Whatever corporation had owned Sector 10081, a five-mile square that showed up black on the Navcon, had used most of the area to create an artificial park-like e
nvironment. A cluster of buildings, the tallest a mere ten stories, bore obvious signs of missile strikes and had few intact windows. Two adjacent towers, each a humble six stories, sported several gaping holes tunneled all the way through them, large enough to accommodate a hovercar.

  Aaron whistled at the graveyard of cyborgs littering what had once been a grand reflecting pool. Few were full-conversion bodies; most of the dead had one or both arms replaced with crude cybernetics, and sometimes legs as well. The human parts had rotted away decades ago, leaving ghastly metal framework behind.

  The burned out shells of police vehicles, older Lunar Motors 200 series hovercars, suggested the last time the law set foot here had been over a century ago. Aaron shuddered at the thought of flying a patrol craft without any armor and actual glass windows. Compared to modern police vehicles, it would’ve been like driving a PubTran car into battle.

  “I thought you said you had a power station,” said Aaron. “This looks a bit more pastoral than I expected.”

  “We had a power station,” Anna mumbled, rubbing the front of her neck.

  “Indeed,” said Archon, a frown audible in his voice. “Your former associates discovered the place. Perhaps it was not grey enough to keep them at bay.”

  Anna trembled and covered her face with her hands. “Bugger the station, James. You almost died.”

  “Yes, well… We shan’t be having that problem here.” Archon brought the car in for a quiet landing in front of the tallest building. “The authorities have a rather useful aversion to these places.”

  “The disavowed areas aren’t as bad as people think,” said Talis. “Cops avoid them because the people can fight back there.”

  “Try livin’ out there without your tricks, luv.” Aaron winked. “You’d not last a weekend.”

  She glared over her shoulder again but cringed away as soon as they made eye contact.

  “Can I trust the two of you to mind yourselves?” Archon swiped at the dashboard, powering the car down. “It would be best if you remained inside the campus wall.”

  Talis wasted no time hopping out of the car, and rushed into the middle building without looking back.

  Aaron cringed at the sour air that greeted him outside. It surprised him to catch the occasional whiff of carrion, given how long the rotting cyborgs had been left where they’d fallen. He squinted into the foul breeze toward the doors of the shorter office tower on the left. People moved around inside among tents set up in the lobby.

  “The lodgings are not quite as luxurious as we possessed at the power plant, but I assure you, they are only temporary.” Archon started for the door, but paused. “Feel free to look about. Take any open room you care for on the seventh floor.”

  “Right.” Aaron glanced at the far side of the courtyard, past a field of broken robotics and exposed human bones. Two figures bearing submachine guns walked a patrol. Neither looked older than twenty. He glanced at where Anna had been, but found her trotting after Archon toward the doors of the main building. “Right, indeed.”

  Anna paused with a hand on the frame, her pained stare lingered on him for a few seconds before she hung her head and went inside. Aaron leaned on the luxury hovercar, rubbing his nose in an effort to acclimate to the stench. Long shadows stretched over the artificial lawn, warping the half-human remains in a macabre shadow play. Gunfire sounded in the distance, too far away to be of immediate concern. He shifted his weight onto his feet and wandered along the road passing between the central and west building. Strips of artificial grass lined both sides, interrupted by the occasional charred shaft where a decorative tree had been. Glass from innumerable destroyed windows crunched under his shoes, diverting him to the false turf before he ruined them.

  Old missile strikes scarred the east-facing wall of the shorter structure, leaving a wide-open gap into the lobby. Inside, the tents glowed in the late afternoon sun from the opposite side of the building. A trio of Asian girls armed with handguns rounded the far corner of the building, chattering away in what he assumed to be their native tongue. As soon as they saw him, they stopped and stared, their conversation halted. The oldest in the middle, perhaps sixteen, raised a battered NetMini, her face lit by the tiny screen. The shortest stared at him, and the telltale poke of a surface thought read followed.

  Muscles in his back tensed; he concentrated on his ride in with Archon, hoping the images of their leader driving him here would transcend the language barrier. The middle girl yelled at the one to her left, who ceased peering into his brain. They scurried past him, offering deferential micro-bows, before scurrying out of sight via a gap in the smashed wall.

  He wandered in after them, glancing around at a small army of young people who ranged in age from tweens to early twenties, the majority skewing toward the lower end. One boy, a few weeks away from needing his first shave, concentrated on a chrome skull sitting on the ground at the center of a circle of seated teens. The cyborg head twitched and floated upward, rotated, and settled back to the floor.

  The man’s raised an army of children.

  Aaron ducked a jagged piece of rebar and walked inside. To the right, another group of teens sat wherever they’d decided to drop, cleaning weapons. Two men moved among them offering instruction. One spoke in Greek-accented English, the other lectured a pair of twin blonde tweens in Russian. The sisters disassembled their pistols and cleaned them as if they’d been doing it for years.

  Sporadic gunfire continued out beyond the end of the abandoned corporate campus, accompanied by the occasional thud of a small explosive. He wandered among the tent city, peeking here and there at surface thoughts. Most reacted to his eavesdropping, and the ones who didn’t show a physical reaction had a sudden shift in the content of their heads. Everyone in the building he checked out possessed psionic talents in one form or another, though few seemed to have any level of real potency. About a third dwelled on their being smuggled into the country, brief images of a harrowing journey played out in their minds. The remainder dressed and acted like a mixture of runaways from the local area, as well as East City, with a fair number of refugees from Britain.

  Aaron’s head shook in disbelief by the time he reached the far side of the ‘camp.’ A plain door offered access to a gravel-filled tract behind the building where the husks of four large air handlers sat idle. Older members of ‘The Awakened’ gang lounged about on the ductwork and glanced up with curiosity and suspicion. A black-haired twig of a young woman peered over a Flowerbasket inhaler at him and winked.

  He looked up at the lack of stars. What the hell is he doing? Kids and street punks. Aaron pinched the bridge of his nose and ran over in his mind a few scenarios of how this whole mess could go completely and horribly wrong. If, as he claimed, Archon’s goal was to leave Earth and take the ‘unwanted and oppressed’ psionics with him, it might be worth considering. On the other hand, if the government got spooked and pushed Archon enough to start a war…

  The echo of a sniffle derailed his train of thought and drew him to the far side of the decrepit HVAC systems, where a vent cover lay askew on stained gravel. The unmistakable sound of a crying child echoed from within. He squatted and looked into the emerald eyes of an olive-skinned girl of about eight. Most of her face hid behind a dingy green dress drawn taut across her knees.

  “Hi there,” said Aaron, smiling. “It’s probably not very safe for you to be in there.”

  She stared at him.

  “Come on then, where’re your parents?”

  Gravel crunched to his left, drawing his gaze to the sylph with black hair walking up to him.

  “You are wasting time with that one,” said the woman, a strong Russian accent to her voice.

  “Am I then?” Aaron leaned on the air handler.

  “You are new here, yes? I am Iliana.”

  “Aaron.”

  “You are. She does not know the English.” Iliana stooped at Aaron’s side, speaking a few hesitant words in what he assumed to be Arabic.

/>   The child half-whispered back in the same language and tried to scoot deeper into the duct.

  “She is afraid of soldiers. Whenever there is shooting outside the wall, she thinks they come for her.”

  Aaron blinked. “Why would soldiers be after a little girl?”

  “She can hear the thoughts of someone else. Is against law in Iran; for this, they would shoot her like dog in street.” Iliana tapped three fingers to the side of her head. “She does not know she is far away. Most of us come here in box. No windows.”

  “Parents?” Aaron levitated a few pieces of gravel, sending them into an orbit around his hand. The girl smiled and crept forward.

  “I do not know.” Iliana shifted her stance, all her weight on one leg. “She does not talk much. She came with group, only person from Middle East.”

  Aaron let the stones clatter back to the ground as the girl crept out into the air and ran to the woman’s side, muttering.

  According to his NetMini, she asked “No soldiers?”

  “They can’t find you here,” said Aaron. Seconds later, the device in his hand repeated it in Persian.

  She smiled.

  “Hey,” said Iliana. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  “Not anymore.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you could stop being Awakened.”

  “Oh.” Aaron stood, scratching at the side of his head. “That. Yeah. I suppose I am.”