| |
Predatory drones bombed my house in Queens without mercy. When the onslaught began, I was down in my basement, buck naked and fast asleep. My shoulder was sideswiped by a falling beam before I could grab Thom's device. The pain was stunning. I went invisible. Bricks, plaster, floorboards, and more beams fell through me as I climbed up out of the basement, trying to see through the haze of falling debris.
People streamed out of neighboring buildings panicked and pissed off, like the hard-bitten New Yorkers that they were. The cops arrived, looking pretty mystified. It couldn't have been more than 50 degrees outside, no place to be without any clothes. There was so much pandemonium that nobody heard as I slurped through the wall of a nearby house. The people who lived there were all out on the street. I rifled through closets as quickly as possible. The only thing that fit were some bright green pants that ended above my ankles, a fluffy pink sweater, and a frumpy purple down coat with a hood that only a grandmother could love. But warmth was starting to flow through me again. I opened the drawers in two bedside tables and found some painkillers. They'd take the edge off what was ailing my shoulder.
As I took the drugs, every molecule in my being was chiding me with: “This is what you get for slipping Ginseng Childe that recording of Dove and Rico.”
Like the old refrain goes: it made a lot of sense at the time. I was starting to like Petra Cardinale. Granted, she was a cunning corporate queen at times. Wasn’t no way you could change the spots on the beast. But she didn’t kill people. She didn’t hurt them unless justifiably provoked. And she professed an interest in serving up some unadulterated truths to the world.
Even though it didn’t seem likely that her idealistic goals would amount to much at Nuhope, why not help Cardinale understand what she was up against by delivering that recording? Why not give Childe a little assist in her search for information about Rico and Dove? Why not undermine the monster who had killed Thom and stolen his Charismite Juice?
I went back outside in ghost mode and surveyed the rubble that had been my home along with a growing crowd of people and police. A little sports car zoomed up to the curb. Rico Reingold jumped out. A couple of NYPD mucky-mucks told him to clear out, but he offered them a look at his mobile ID. “Official Nuhope business,” he said. They backed off quickly.
A black bus screeched to a stop beside Rico. Out of it stormed a squad of five bots, each one about seven feet high. They had strangely delicate necks offset by long, buzz-saw beaks, big-bellied torsos, and paws with claws that looked like they were made of razor-sharp steel.
The bot goons gave Rico little head bows, oddly like waiters at a black-tie function. He waved a few command gestures. They jumped into the house's remains, cutting through the refuse with their beaks and claws, shooting infrared beams at random.
I stayed well away from their line of infrared, but close enough to see them pick through my possessions that hadn’t been destroyed. It all looked so pitiful—a coffee machine, shredded clothing, Count Down’s pallet of blankets that I had meant to throw away.
Rico jumped into the debris in his gold-tipped cowboy boots, nearly slipping in the water spurting from a broken pipe. He joined the search, despite the growing lake of water, pulling more things out of the sludge, throwing them away, until he discovered part of a painting. He couldn’t make out what it was, but it clearly caught his interest.
His hand groped through the muddy water for several minutes, then stopped. There was a huge sucking sound as he pulled out another piece of the picture. He whistled a little song through his teeth as he brushed off the gunk and put the two pieces together. It was my portrait of the Charismite, as she might have been.
Rico studied it quizzically. What I’d tried to imagine in the painting seemed to hit him slowly. “Fancy yourself an artiste, eh?” He looked around to see if he could spot some sign of where I was, dead or alive. “You rotting pile of chicken feces.”
Rico turned to the bots. "Dredge through this sewer. If there's a body, I want to see it, and every painting you can find."
Cold fear ran through me. Would they find my pictures of Mama Neeta and her kids? Rico would do anything to hurt me—except mess with my parents. Bianca and Evander Ellington were too networked and influential for him to attempt that. But the family in Dorchester? Sure.
My likeness of them was a little crude, but close enough for him to tap into facial recognition files of every U.A. citizen. He could find out who they were almost instantly. And he would kill them if he guessed that I might love them. That's when I took off.
# # #
I PARKED IT A FEW BLOCKS from Mama Neeta’s place and sprinted toward it. The building was still standing, looking small and decrepit behind the old chain-link fence. I breathed a sigh of thankfulness and unlocked the door.
Count Down greeted me with a toothy grin. We bounded up the creaky stairs together, and I shook Mama Neeta awake. She scanned my purple coat and pink sweater in confusion. The whites of her eyes went electric as my fear traveled through her.
“What you doin’?”
"Some people figured out I come to visit you."
Mama had seen the news about me on the BaseNet and my Nuhope messages. That one little sentence was enough to make her face contort with anguish. “DEKO!” she screamed.
The first bomb dropped about half a minute later, fire-balling Mama's room. She was still in there, throwing on some clothes when she was flash killed. Deko and Lilya ran out of the kids' bedroom. Count Down bounded after them down the hall. A second explosion instantly obliterated all three.
I had Shakespear in my arms. The fire blast just missed us, but the floor gave out, and we fell into the living room, slamming into the floor. Pain shot through my wrecked shoulder, and all up and down my side. The three-year-old was unhurt, cushioned by my body, but terrified. He shrieked as my shaky hands managed to wave us both into a state of invisibility.
“Let me go! Mama! Mama!” he cried in confusion.
“Shhhh, shhhh. We gotta go. Be brave, buddy.” I carried him through the side of the house, with one hand covering his mouth, and raced down the street as the third bomb destroyed what was left of the house. Reingold’s goon bots were lined up on the street half a block away, waiting for the rubble to settle. Their boss hadn’t bothered to show up, not yet anyway.
The bots reacted with little jerky movements to Shakespear’s sobs coming from out of my hand. But then he went silent, and their sensors couldn’t get a lock on where we were as I sped down the streets.
It was too dangerous to use the taxi in our ghost state, and it would be suicide to become visible. So I just kept walking, popping a few more painkillers that I'd stuffed in one pocket. "We're okay. We're okay," I lied, stroking the baby-fine hair on Shakespear's head. The boy whimpered into my one good shoulder. The bots were too far away to hear either of us, and the Boston Zone's surveillance system apparently wasn't detecting us either. Nothing was on our tail now. But the bruising I'd gotten from the bombings and my earlier wounds were taking a big toll. The drugs I'd lifted off my neighbors back in Queens just weren't enough.
About a half-hour into our journey, we stumbled across an old grocery cart. With my touch, it vanished from sight. I plopped Shakespear inside it and rolled him along, both of us still in ghost mode. Eventually, we made it to Copley Square in the heart of the Boston Treasure Zone. I settled into an alcove outside Trinity Church. Its crumbling Romanesque Revival structure enfolded us on three sides.
Shakespear sobbed in my arms. “Sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whispered, as much to him as to Jewles, the boy in my brain. It was crippling, to realize I’d caused the death of almost every member of Jewles’ family. Too many people I cared about had died. But I couldn’t let that thought slow me down, not when there was one boy left that I could protect.
I had to get back to Nuhope. Rico may have fallen out of favor with Zinder and Cardinale, but he was still around. And there was no telling what his desperation would lead to now. Trying to bomb me into non-existence could be just one particle of thought in a cloud of machinations.
Where to take the kid? That was the most urgent question. It would be impossible to care for him and counteract whatever hell was brewing at Nuhope. Who would take him on?
It was even colder in Boston than it had been in New York, and my body warmth wasn’t enough to stop Shakespear from shivering in his thread-bare pajamas. First things first. We needed some sleep and a warm shelter to collect our energy.
We went over to the Public Gardens. The bare limbs of artificial maple trees cracked in the wind above the vacant, rippling pond. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel loomed above us. That was where we needed to go. I pushed the grocery cart behind a tree.
“Wo!” said the kid as the cart came into view, the first sign that he even registered the invisible state. Thank God he was calming down enough for that.
“Ssshh. We have to be really quiet, where we’re going now.”
“’Kay.”
I made for the Ritz-Carlton. A blast of hot air shot out the open lobby door. A warm milky smell rose up from Shakespear. It was 3 AM, and no one was around except a bespectacled human receptionist. She was doing her best imitation of unflappable serenity as an elderly man berated her for offering him a room far too small for his taste.
I gazed at an air screen over the receptionist’s shoulder. Five luxury suites were vacant. The clerk created a key for one of them and sent the code to the dyspeptic guest’s mobile. He signaled his robotic luggage to follow on their buzzing little wheels as he headed for the elevators.
"Butt hole," the clerk murmured when the old geezer was out of earshot, then whisked through a floor-to-ceiling door. I studied her screen and quickly learned how to turn off the surveillance system in the room of my choice.
Three hours later, I woke up amid mounds of white sheets. A faint smell of lavender misted out of the walls. The kid and I were both visible now. My garish, dirty clothes looked even stranger, surrounded by the room’s sterile shades of silver and white furniture. The boy’s black hair poofed up on the pillow, and his faint impish grin made my chest swell with mournful love.
Pulling off the snowy white duvet, I padded over to the window. Massachusetts' old brick statehouse was spread out before me in the early morning light, its gold dome shining dimly.
"Ravenous" was a word that didn't begin to cover my state, and Shakespear would be that way too when he woke up if he wasn't too shocked by what was happening. In a minute, some food from the kitchen would go missing—coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, and fresh orange juice for the boy. Had he ever had any of those things? Probably eggs.
After that, somebody's clothes would go missing in a room nearby. Hopefully, they'd be a little more my style. All that was easily done, compared with my most pressing task: getting the kid to a safe home.
Pictures of people flashed through my mind, one after another. I stopped at the memory of a friendly face—someone I'd become aware of only recently, someone with such a kind, independent spirit and a home where a boy might thrive. Although the memory of Shakespear's whole family getting blown apart would be traumatic for a long time to come. All bets were off, concerning his well-being.
It would take too much time to get Shakespear to this new place. There was no telling what Rico would do. But I owed Mama Neeta way, way too much now. The kid came first.