“Red Cell and Bloodshot, report to the briefing room,” Nina monotones over the PA as I’m putting my trays on the dishwasher conveyor belt. Red Cell is Dodge’s call sign, just as Bloodshot is mine. I think they’re both pretty dumb, but nobody asked for my feedback.
Fresh Kills’s briefing room is a ninety-nine-seat theater with a small white stage and black curtains where you could put on a pretty slick high school production of Guys and Dolls if you absolutely wanted to. Dad is already in there when Dodge and I arrive.
“Hey, son. How you feeling?”
“Peachier than hell, Pop. How’s by you?”
“I’m getting by. Have a seat. You too, Dodge.”
I take a center seat in the front row, nodding at Nina, who arrives on crutches and sits on the aisle. We’re the only four people in the room.
“Let’s begin.” Despite saying that, Dad doesn’t begin; he digs an orange bottle of pills out of his blazer pocket and downs a handful without water. His skin is pale and glistens in the harsh theater lights. I’m mildly shocked at how much more white is flecking the black of his widow’s peak. Each time I go in and out of the nutrient bath, he seems to have aged months and months, while for me the years stand still.
“You sure you’re getting by, Pop?” I ask, but he just waves the question away.
“Gentlemen, the time most of us knew was going to come eventually has arrived,” Dad says as the screen behind him lights up with a kaleidoscope of captured phone images and videos of the #PowerParty hashtag: kids cupping fire in their hands, kids levitating their terrified cats off the sofa, kids jumping off the roofs of their houses and making craters and earthquake-level booms as they land unharmed. “As you know, our active-measures people here at PRS created the #PowerParty hashtag to get potential psiots to out themselves on social media. This, in combination with regular standardized testing of the high school population through our AccuChieve division, has produced enormous benefits, increasing our target lists and allowing us to get potentially dangerous psiots off the streets before they cause any significant harm.
“But we knew the risks of such a public strategy were also extremely high. The mainstreaming of #PowerParty, the general acceptance of the mere existence of psiots, can attract nongovernmental opportunists and bad-faith actors, particularly in the media. Our information-control team managed to squash New York Times and Dateline exposés, but those Vice and CNN spots went forward despite our best efforts.
“Which brings us to this man.” On the screen appears the image of a heavily tattooed man with a goatee, wraparound sunglasses, and a bald pate. He’s one of those internet celebrities that no one over the age of twenty-five has ever heard of.
“You know him, old man?” I call out to Dodge.
He barks out a laugh. “Bite your tongue, Junior. That there man’s my hero.”
“Aaron Twyst,” Dad continues, ignoring us, “is a former welterweight boxing champion turned ‘positive toxic masculinity’ megastreamer. He was obliged to flee the United States when a Nevada grand jury indicted him on three accounts of sex trafficking, namely bringing his underage girlfriends across state lines for the purpose of canoodling.”
“Mad respect!” Dodge calls out from the back.
“Shut the hell up, Dodge,” Nina yells.
“Twyst has used his millions in internet ad revenue to set up home bases in various countries with a history of ignoring US extradition requests, while continuing to broadcast his wildly popular ‘pro-bro’ rants. What made him pop up onto our radar was that his media LLC filed trademark claims in various jurisdictions—the United States included—for Power Party to be developed as a competitive reality show and filmed on a Mediterranean island he recently purchased from a cash-strapped crypto bigwig.”
The screen shifts to show a satellite photo of a marble-white island in the middle of a wine-dark sea, the sand spotted here and there with green scrub. “Twyst’s casting agents have recruited a few dozen young potential psiots from around the world and offered them a large cash bonus to fly to the island for six weeks of filming, which begins this coming Saturday. Orbital reconnaissance suggests the security presence is formidable, largely, no doubt, to discourage any American attempts to capture him and bring him back to the States for trial.
“But accumulating evidence and the unusual intensity of Twyst’s support lead us to the theory that he is a psiot himself, with mind manipulation and behavior control abilities, and this so-called reality show is itself basically his attempt to surround himself with a number of psiot followers for his own protection and personal amusement.
“Your mission, Bloodshot, is to infiltrate the island and rescue all of the psiots Twyst has gathered there for relocation to the Nursery. Expect heavy resistance, all of which you have full sanction to eliminate. That includes Twyst himself. Our preference, as always, is for him to be captured alive, but not at the cost of your own life or the lives of any of the young people he’s lured to his compound.”
My heart beats ever faster the longer Dad’s briefing goes on. I almost never get to go after an unambiguous, no-doubt scumbag with any moral shades of gray blown away as if by a high-powered wind machine. Sweet.
“There is one more complication you need to be aware of,” Dad says.
“Another one?” Dodge scoffs in the back.
“We have intel that we are not the only organization interested in Twyst’s island.”
“Generation Zero?” I ask.
Dad gives me a funny look. Dodge stifles a guffaw in the back. Nina looks right at me; when I look back at her, she pretends she never stopped looking at the tablet in her lap.
Odd.
“Not Generation Zero,” Dad says, clearing his throat. “Don’t worry about them. You have a bigger problem.”
“Harbinger,” I say.
Dad nods. “Harbinger.”
The Harbinger Foundation is, to you, a nonprofit do-gooder organization directed by a man named Toyo Harada, who claims to have survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima even though he doesn’t look a day over fifty, so he must have been less than a fetus at the time the Big One dropped.
To those who know the truth, like me, though, it’s a front for the most powerful psiot in the world to add to his ranks and basically try to take over the world. PRS has been trying to shut him down for decades, but he’s as slippery as a cartoon rabbit, with almost as many friends in government and big finance as we have. The main difference between our two organizations is that we grab pretty much every psiot we can find, regardless of power level, while Harbinger is only interested in exceptionally talented or powerful people. Makes sense a guy like Twyst would make Harada’s short list.
“We have reason to believe the Harbinger Foundation will be sending a competing agent or agents to the island as well. If the opportunity arises, subdue them for the Nursery; if not, eliminate them. It is quite possible Harbinger will be looking to wreak havoc on the island to pollute the use of the #PowerParty hashtag themselves.”
“Man, I would love another throwdown with those freaks,” Dodge says. “Don’t worry, Junior, as always, I got your back.”
“As always, thank you for your input, Sergeant Dodge. Any questions? Let’s get to it. Ray, c’mon. I have some time in between meetings. Wanna go bond?”
We take the troop elevator topside to throw a football around. The air is still cool, midspring, and the seagulls wheel overhead, annoyed at our unexpected presence. In the far distance loom the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Fresh Kills started life as a Cold War antiballistic missile base secretly sunk in Staten Island to protect New York City from nuclear attack. It was disguised under a sprawling garbage dump, the smell of which kept most curious looky-loos away. Then, when the obsolete missiles were decommissioned, Project Rising Spirit took over the base and covered the massive renovations by claiming it was an ecological project to turn the landfill into a park. People completely bought it, even though the site is surrounded by a chain-link fence and the public is only allowed in a couple times a year. One thing I’ve learned in the spy business is that lying to people is extremely easy as long as you’re telling them something they want to hear.
That said, Fresh Kills, on the outside, still looks like a pretty awesome park, with its tall golden grass and ginkgo trees just now budding into leaves. Dad goes long, and just to mess with him, I put a little nanite-enhanced snap in my throw to make him run extra far, but even though he says it’s no problem, I can hear his labored breaths. So I stop doing that. My tosses are shorter, with longer gaps in between. I can tell by his face that he knows I’m taking it easy on him, and he’s not happy about it. But I don’t think he’s mad at me. He’s mad at time.
I grab his next throw to me one-handed and hold the ball close to my chest for longer than I mean to. “What are you waiting for?” he calls out.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You just did.” He grins.
“Ugh, dad joke.” I aim my throw square at his chest, and even though he catches it with both hands, the ball keeps going into his ribs and knocks him flat on his back.
“Aw, crap.” I run over and give him a hand. He’s smiling through gritted teeth. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s nothing. What’s that question you want to ask me?”
“Did something . . . happen during the last op?”
He gives me a puzzled grin. “What do you mean?”
“Everyone’s treating me . . . I don’t know, differently. You, Nina . . . even Dodge, in his own super douchey way. Nothing went, I dunno, totally pear shaped or anything last time. Did it?”
“You sure you want to know? You’ve been pretty explicit about being blissful in your ignorance. Shows you’re wise beyond your years. Even when ops go off completely without a hitch, that can still mean . . . you know. Plenty of unpleasantness. What makes you want to hear about this one in particular?”
“Probably because I feel . . . well, there’s this emptiness inside. Guilt, I guess. But I don’t know what I have to feel guilty about.”
“I’ve got an easy answer to that one: nothing. It was an op just like any other.” He slams the football into his hand and starts jogging back. “Go long! I want to see if I can knock you on your keister.”
I don’t move. “Then there’s no reason you shouldn’t tell me what I did, right?”
“Well, c’mon, sport. You know it’s not that simple. I gotta check with our DNI contact, see which aspects of the op are unclassified, which are classified top secret, and which are classified cosmic top secret.” Though Project Rising Spirit is a private contractor, it still has to report to the Director of National Intelligence. “Your clearance only goes so far.”
“I don’t have clearance for my own life, my own memories?”
Dad spreads his arms. “One of the sacrifices we have to make in service to our country.”
“‘We’? What ‘we’? You sacrificed for me. I didn’t volunteer for this. I didn’t volunteer to get sick. I didn’t ask you to do what you did to cure me.”
Dad’s eyes glisten a little, and my stomach twists. “You think I was just gonna let you die, squirt? Watching you waste away, like that hospital bed was taking a little more of you each day? That I wasn’t going to grasp at any straw, no matter how much of a long shot, to try and bring you back? If so, then you don’t know me at all.”
“Jeez, Dad. I didn’t say that. I just don’t think, you know, what I’m asking for is all that difficult.”
“Well, I’m sorry to tell you that it is. I wish it wasn’t, but I don’t make the rules. Why are you acting so strange? This isn’t like you.”
“Maybe because everyone has been treating me weird ever since I woke up,” I blurt out, way louder than I mean to. “And this conversation has only made me feel worse.”
I turn and stalk back toward the hidden troop elevator. Dad calls my name behind me. I feel bad about everything—about making him feel bad, about him making me feel bad, about me feeling bad without knowing why.
“I’m gonna go call Salma,” I yell back at him.