~
Eva and Alain
“Lauren,” Tian shouted above the clamour, as his breathing quickened.
“I’m here.” He felt the Chief tug the back of his jacket.
“They’re pushing them away from the Village.” He pointed ahead to the shimmering shield. “Princess Park in Arandene?”
“It’s possible, but the park’s not big enough to hold a crowd this size,” Lauren replied. “There must be a hundred-and-fifty-thousand people here.”
“And more to the point you said it would be the Village.”
Tian stayed low as his heart raced, he weaved past a woman in a billowing purple dress who blew a whistle, past a man who shouted as he ripped his scarlet shirt open, past a sobbing woman gagged with a black scarf, and past a broad man who held a banner aloft that proclaimed ‘The end of the world is now’.
A man off to his right in a long coat threw a black sphere into the air, it then popped and thick, pungent yellow smoke blanketed the crowd. Through the rank haze and between the banners, the flags and fluttering streamers, he caught a glimpse of a wall of men in black.
The road up ahead forked and the way to the left was barred by ranks of body armoured, baton wielding police, and behind their massed formation the regal cream facades and colonnades were lit by glimmering red and blue lights. Further service support was above in the shape of grey police harriers and Royal Guard raptors that throbbed beneath the leaden cloud, their lights ablaze, their monitors no doubt trained on the river below them. Within the comfortable confines of one of the floating vehicles was Lieutenant Daxa.
A bottle bounced off Tian’s head and clattered on the ground off to his right.
“Are you all right?” Lauren asked.
He nodded sharply as he rubbed his stinging scalp and looked up as dozens of bottles, streamers, smoke spheres and fire crackers sailed overhead toward the police lines, like a barrage of archers’ arrows. A clear, shimmering concave shield extended between the majestic buildings in front of the police line, it sealed off the avenue at the left fork. As the deluge of missiles bounced off the defensive screen ripples pulsed out from the impacts, like stones being thrown in a still pond.
“Daxa,” Tian said, as he looked up with his hand to his ear.
“Yes, sir,” came the reply.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know where the order came from but the police have been instructed to divert the march away from Parliament Village. They’re sealing off the quarter now and steering the protest through Waterwell Avenue into Princess Park in Arandene.”
“They had Permissions for the Village,” said Lauren.
Over the noise, Tian picked out the angry bee-like drone of the shield generator as they approached the left fork, its humming harmonics pitched up and down with each missile that struck its glistening surface. A jagged rock flew from out of the crowd and bounced off the screen to a raucous cheer, where they had managed to find rocks, Tian did not know, but it was quickly followed by another and as the trickle became a flood the police tightened up their ranks.
“Daxa, what’s going on ahead of us?”
“Sir, the protestors are probing the shields on Waterwell Avenue that lead into the Village, two of them are buckling but all are presently holding. Additionally, the Royal Guard has just been deployed from General Kalaman Barracks to reinforce the police lines.”
“We’re approaching the Woolfe Street shield now,” Tian said as he looked up into a sky that was rapidly darkening. “How’s it holding up?”
“Not well, sir, it may fail.”
Tian ducked as another bottle clipped his head and then shattered on the pavement. He turned to the yelling man in the ripped scarlet shirt whose face was contorted as spittle flew from his mouth, as the woman in the purple dress shouted profanities, as the sobbing woman with the black gag covered her ears, as Tian stumbled and fell and as the ground trembled Petra laughed and tossed her light blonde hair. His trousers ripped and his knee scraped along the cobblestones as Lauren grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back onto his feet.
“Tian?”
“I’m fine, it’s nothing.” His heart sprinted as he brushed his trousers, dabbed his knee and felt grit in the wound. He straightened up and looked at his hand, there was blood on his fingers, perhaps he had done more than just graze it. A heavy droplet of water landed on a nail and diluted the blood, as the crack, crack, crack of weapons fire punctured the air followed by a wave of screaming.
“Agent Brooke.”
It was Daxa. “Go ahead,” Tian replied.
“Sir, the Woolfe Street shield has collapsed. The protestors are surging into the ranks of police, they’re brawling and throwing missiles. The troopers are fighting back, they’re firing warning shots, using their batons and they’re about to fire pepper gas into the crowd. The police are being pushed back and the Royal Guard are being rushed in behind them.”
He turned to Lauren. “It fits, doesn’t it?”
Lauren nodded as he pulled a black felt pouch from his leather satchel. Tian stood on his tiptoes and as he strained for even a snatched glance at the breach he caught a glimpse of thick, white billowing fog as it flooded into the marchers from the end of Woolfe Street. The shrieks of hundreds tore through the dead stillness and as heavy droplets began to splash on his face and the air rapidly cooled Tian was pushed in the back as the crowd surged.
Lauren was shoved. “Damn it,” he growled, as his silver palmtop spilled from his hand.
Tian dove forward and caught the monitor before it smashed on the concrete. He gripped Lauren’s arm and thrust the instrument back into his palm.
“I’ve got you, Chief, keep at it,” he said, as the flow of crowd increased speed. “Daxa.” A high pitched screeching blasted into his head and the two men wrenched the wireless receivers from their ears.
“Hell fire,” Lauren shouted, and stamped on the miniature device.
Tian craned his neck upwards and as rain cascaded the harriers’ and raptors’ sparkling red and blue lights flashed across the rupturing clouds, a bruised canvas.
“Tian.” Lauren tugged his sleeve and pointed to his palmtop, the instrument displayed a glowing map of the immediate area above its flat screen. There was an eruption of vibrant, primary blue light that emanated from the centre of the clash at the junction of Woolfe Street and Waterwell Avenue.
A single fork of blue lightning blazed from the furious sky and struck the junction and as a crashing boom smacked the air glass shattered in a wave from the centre of the strike outwards, and as the tide of breaking glass swept past him a blast of naked rage ripped through him, like a hot, hurricane wind. Tian grabbed Lauren, pulled him to the shaking ground and threw himself on top of him, his arms over the Chief’s head. The coffee cup was a simple, white ceramic affair which suited the quiet cafe. He clamped his eyes shut as white noise howled. And in a slow and considered manner he lifted the wide rimmed cup to his lips and savoured sips of the deliciously sweetened milky drink.
Tian absently gazed beyond the vacant wooden table before him into the wild gardens beyond the open bay window. The abundance of flowers dripped with dew and burst with vivid colour, their lush scents gently drifted in with the cool spring air and their sweet fragrances were a pleasant contrast to the heavenly aroma of bubbling coffee and freshly baked pastries. If only the gentleman sat behind him would stop rustling his broadsheet newspaper and the two teenagers to his left stop publicly engaging in their lust, then all would be well.
His legs were casually stretched out under the round table instead of tightly tucked under a cushion-less, cold metal chair, he held a thick brand-new paperback instead of a fifty-page report in need of review by yesterday, and he thumbed a battered postcard of the Yanyarbe range of old instead of red-lit page tabs.
It was a quiet delight to rest in his skin as his body pleasantly ached with a contented tiredness that seemed to ooze out of his limbs in long and lazy waves, and as his head lolled slowly forward his mind unfurled as his eyes closed by slow degrees.
The scraping of wood on tiles jolted him and he bolted upright, wide awake, as a young, slim woman in a little black dress sat down at the table opposite him. As she blew a long lock of light blonde hair from her face his breath caught in his throat as the uniformed waiter carefully placed a coffee cup and a tall glass of iced lemon water before her.
“Thank you,” she said in a low voice, her face alight as she warmly smiled. The waiter bowed at the waist, an almost imperceptible gesture, and as he quietly withdrew.
Tian watched entranced as she stirred the thin layer of dark chocolate into the creamy foam, she delicately placed the silver spoon on the saucer and as she stretched and groaned with apparent contentment he could not help but smile as his gaze wandered from the fine hairs on her tanned, bare arms up to the delightful slope of her shoulders, the elegant curve of her neck, her sweet round chin and her sensuous, pursed lips … she stared at him with her eyebrows raised.
Tian promptly looked down at the table and despite having only just started the novel he opened the paperback midway through the last chapter and held his gaze on the first word his eye settled on. He raised gaze for a glance and his anxiety was transformed into relief for she smiled at him, it was a kind and, it seemed to him, a knowing gesture for which he was most grateful. He brought a hand to his cleanly shaved face and cleared his throat. A thick glob of grit-laden phlegm landed in the rain by his side, and as he lay across Lauren his head pounded and his body felt broken, as though he had been in a street fight he had badly lost. Her exquisite blue eyes sparkled with gentle humour as she lazily sipped her coffee. He crawled off the Chief onto his knees and winced as pain shot through his wound and radiated into his body. He screwed up his eyes tight, ground his teeth and growled, and as the fireworks behind his eyelids dissipated, his breathing and the smarting eased, and he shook glass from his brown leather jacket and slowly sat up.
Pain radiated through his aching limbs as he pushed himself up onto his unsteady feet and stared, numb, at a river of prone bodies haphazardly draped with banners, flags and streamers. At his feet, the woman with the black gag stirred as the man with the ripped scarlet shirt and the woman in the purple dress lay beneath her unmoving. Ahead of him, a woman with greying hair pushed herself up onto her hands, as a young man beside her raised himself up onto his knees, as a woman behind him in a dirty trouser suit struggled to her feet, their faces were still and expressionless, like mannequins.
His feet crunched glass as he turned through a slow circle, not one of the wrought iron street lamps were lit, the cream facades and columns were no longer splashed with primary colours and only darkness lay beyond the broken window panes. The dead still air was filled with powdery grey dirt, billowing black smoke and thousands of sheets of fluttering white paper, and the only sounds he could pick out were the crackle of flames, the teeming of rain and the rumbling in the sky.
As Lauren noisily cleared his throat, spat, and then began the struggle to sit up, Tian breathed evenly as he attempted to slow his hammering heart, as, through the haze, he looked up the shadowy building to his left. A police harrier had crashed into the roof, the vehicle’s power appeared to be offline and its engine grid hung precariously over the edge of the building. Masonry, shattered glass and smashed slate had spewed out into the avenue from the point of impact and had rained down onto the prostrate crowd. He looked up further still into the imperious weather, not one vehicle floated above him.
He turned around with cautiousness he felt reserved for a man twice his age, his breath caught in his throat as he looked into the smashed cockpit of a Royal Guard raptor that had slammed into the middle of the static river.
“Daxa,” he whispered.
A brilliant sheet of blue lightning blazed across the wrathful cloud as thunder smacked the air and a shockwave reverberated in his bones, and as night became day screams of terror pierced the silence and Tian whipped his head back toward Woolfe Street as the avenue was again plunged into murky darkness.
“Come on,” Tian said, as he dragged Lauren to his feet.
Pain spiked through his feet and up his legs as they picked their way through the sprawl of tangled bodies, he gripped Lauren by the arm and led him through the uneven carpet of twisted limbs as the Chief shook his dead palmtop. A thin hand reached up to Tian and he looked down upon a young woman’s contorted face as tears fell from eyes lit with fear as blood dripped generously from her temple. He shoved thought that screamed at him to pause and help and emotion that stung him for not doing so aside as he pressed on, for as much as he may want to this was not the time to stop.
His skin tingled and his scalp was suddenly cold. “Can you feel it?” he said, as he rubbed the goose flesh on his arm.
“Yes, I can,” Lauren replied. “Can you hear them?”
Tian closed his eyes, there was a distant wailing. “Sirens?”
“I think so.”
If sirens were closing, then the pulse had not knocked out the entire city, and that would surely mean police, ground troops and the Royal Guard would not be far behind. He pushed his leaden limbs into a run and though he desperately tried not to he couldn’t help but kick legs and step on arms as he jumped over inert and waking bodies and side stepped hands that reached to grasp his trouser legs.
An unseen hand grabbed his ankle and the air was forced from his lungs as he slammed into the rain and blood drenched road and narrowly avoided jagged glass. Ahead of him was a dead man in a green shirt and black trousers, the body was face down and blood pooled around the head. As Tian’s nostrils flared and his breathing raced, he inched cautiously closer as his blood ran ice cold.
Suspended in the air around the body were thousands of tiny pieces of green and black fabric, little clumps of pale flesh, soft tissue and globules of blood. Each element was being drawn toward the body, and as he stared and held his breath, fearful to disrupt the display, he followed a fragment of cloth as it settled into a gap in the shirt, like a missing puzzle piece. In a few brief seconds the spectacle had ceased and the corpse was whole.
“Lauren, tell me you see this?”
“I see it, I see it,” he replied, as he crouched next to Tian.
“We have no recorders?”
“The pulse knocked it out.”
Tian could not stare at the body a moment longer, he pushed himself hurriedly away from the dead, he had to get away from the aberration, and as he backed into another inert body, he sat onto his haunches, coughed until his throat hurt and then looked up toward Woolfe Street as an old man rose up on his knees, his head held in his hands as he and rocked back and forth and stared at the body of a young man in front of him. A man with a thick grey beard stood up next to him and turned in slow, uncertain circles as his eyes darted from one body to the next, as a woman in a long dress screamed without pause and pulled at her long hair as the eyes of a young, silent girl were fixed unblinking on the eyes of the dead face she stared into.
The air began to throb with the thump of approaching vehicles and it was not long before the clanging sirens from above overwhelmed the cries of distress on the ground. Shouted orders were then added to the discordance as police, troops and Royal Guard poured into the avenue with their weapons trained.
He looked into the Chief’s glazed eyes through a golden cigar shaped tube of light that surrounded him, as Lauren covered his mouth with a hand that shook. As Tian forced his sore body upright he reached into his shirt and pulled out a thick silver chain, and as his shiny identification badge came into view he was bathed in a golden tube of light. He ran a hand over his face and scratched his bearded cheek, and as his breathing levelled out he allowed himself a glimpse into his punch drunk mind and found only incomprehension staring back at him.
~
A stiff mandarin collar dug into Tian’s neck, the form of the brilliant white shirt was levelled out by dark blue epaulettes with shiny gold piping, trams could run on the creases in his freshly pressed black trousers and his black shoes shone as brightly as they did on his passing out parade. There was a time when he took great care in achieving the refined lines of uniform, these days he relied entirely on the Army’s clothiers.
As the agent jumped from the battered armoured carrier onto a slimy surface of glistening mud and machine oil, he lowered his gaze and listened. He was just able to make out the low-pitched beat of hawk engines close to the carrier’s position, their air cover flew dark and with sound dampened. The agent looked up into the downpour as electricity popped incessantly within the rolling blanket of pendulous black cloud. Off to the left, beyond the secure compound’s high stone walls, sensors and elemorphic fences, white lightening forked to the ground accompanied by a belting crack of thunder.
Dozens of young, stern faced, helmeted troops in desert colours and body armour, with belts of ammunition slung over their shoulders, fanned out from the squat personnel carriers and ran toward South Bayoun’s grey stone gatehouse, their utility packs slapped against their sides as they trained their bulky weapons ahead. The troop’s stocky lieutenant marched with his back straight and his hands clasped behind his back, the moustached officer seemed oblivious to the lashing storm.
The agent turned and looked back toward the stationary vehicles, two soldiers who incessantly chewed tightly guarded Tian’s team of three as they followed the troop, their faces were gaunt and pale, they were weapon-less and breathed heavily as they lugged heavy-duty camouflaged cases through the foul weather toward the gatehouse’s open arched doorway.
Tian’s arms were tightly folded, his limbs were locked and his gaze fixed ahead as he squinted, for beyond the gatehouse was the vague outline of a much larger facility hidden within the stormy shadows. White lightening blazed and as thunder reverberated through him a black, hulking building loomed out of the pitch dark.
“Captain Lynd, thank God you’ve arrived,” a Corporal said, as he strode out of the gatehouse into the sheeting rain.
The Captain stood at ease before the drawn soldier. “Has discipline broken down here, Corporal?”
The Corporal snapped to attention and his hand shook as he saluted. “No sir, my apologies, sir.” The thin soldier’s eyes were bloodshot and his teeth chattered.
Lynd casually returned the salute, a gesture that seemed laden with sarcasm. “Name?”
“Goodman, sir.”
“Are you the highest rank here?”
“The-the only soldier of rank left, sir.”
“What happened here, Corporal?”
“It was a live fire exercise, sir, but how could we have foreseen … how could we have known, sir.”
As Tian stepped forward his shoes squeaked on the smooth, black reflective floor. He glanced at a glowing display by his feet to find her name. “Agent Nyah.”
“Yes, sir,” the agent replied, as Tian’s view of events dipped down to the mud.
“Time is ticking,” he said quietly.
Tian jolted as the facility’s locking mechanism popped with a booming clang that echoed around his still chamber. As the great iron doors sluggishly opened crackling sparks were spat into the rain, and as the wheels ground in their runners the screeching of metal on metal sent cold shivers racing up and down his spine.
The soldier to the agent’s right adjusted his helmet mounted camera, inspected his wrist power meter, pulled at his ammunition belt, snatched a look over his assault rifle and then inspected his meter again. Captain Lynd strode forward to the threshold of the facility and stood with his legs apart, he popped a stick of gum into his mouth and placed his hands on his hips as he peered into the facility’s darkness. He then took in a long breath and waved the troops in.
Tian’s heartbeat picked up speed and pressure built behind his eyes, as an array of virtual windows appeared at his feet and his eye flitted from one display to the next. He settled on the soldier on point and watched as the man cautiously stepped into a cavernous space that layouts at his side told him was a multi-levelled space the size of two football fields. He switched to a soldier who stepped up to an offline deck-to-ceiling holographic projectors, he then switched to a soldier who had come across dozens of blackened shell casings and scattered assault rifles.
“Agent Brooke.”
“Yes, Nyah?” Tian replied.
Tian’s chest tightened and he dug his nails into his hands as the Agent panned her camera up from a pair of scuffed combat boots to legs and up to a torso clothed in desert colours. Nyah then zoomed in on the body’s head, it was spattered with dirt and crusted with blood, and a mouth that had once passed breath was locked agape and eyes that had once held life appeared to have horror frozen upon their glassy surfaces. Nyah stepped to her right and revealed another body face down in the filth with another alongside it curled up tight into the foetal position.
Tian exhaled slowly and lowered his head. “Badge seven-seven-three,” he muttered.
Dozens of beams of torchlight bounced off the curved frosted mirrored walls and the labyrinth of floating, gleaming floors softly lit through coloured gels. Police officers in dark blue uniforms and black helmets silently picked their way through a sea of bodies that appeared to be afloat on a dissolving, undulating mist.
The agent swung his gaze away from the officers on the lower level and moved away from the clear platform shield, and as he stepped slowly across a golden octagonal floor his breathing became ragged as he trod on a slim arm decorated with sparkling rings and bangles, and kicked a pair of twisted legs in fine heels and hosiery. He shone his black pencil torch ahead of him and the sharp focused beam picked out seven golden steps that led up to a large circular level and two semi-clad male bodies slumped by a pillar. To his left were another seven golden steps that led down to a lower level and an almost identical pair of motionless male bodies.
The agent cleared his throat and ducked an idly spinning glitter mirror as he climbed the steps. His laboured breathing filled Tian’s cold chamber as he stepped onto the platform, lumbered toward a cocktail bar and gripped its golden handrail. Shattered bottles lined the bar’s smashed mirrored walls and coloured liquids had run down the gleaming surfaces and pooled on the floor. Tian gave the scene just a cursory once over for his vision was taken by the agent’s hands, the man’s knuckles were white and his arms shook. A display at his feet revealed him the name of yet another draftee to his mushrooming department.
“Nice and slowly, Agent Fields,” Tian said quietly and he hoped reassuringly. “There’s no hurry.”
“Yes, sir,” came the rasping reply.
The agent stepped down into a secluded alcove and crouched by a long corner sofa with a leopard-skin print. The body of a tall man with a glistening bare muscled chest lay sprawled across brightly coloured cushions, his eyes were fixed open and glazed. The body of a petite woman in a short fitted red dress lay across one of the sofa arms, a low cut, high heeled red shoe dangled from her slim foot. Tian’s view of events dropped to the golden floor as the agent’s breathing became short and shallow.
“Agent Fields, you may go offline.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The image froze.
The only sounds that remained in the black chamber were the soothing hum of the air conditioning and Tian’s forced slow breathing. He took a step forward and, mindful of his knee dressing, crouched in front of the unmoving three-dimensional image.
“Pull back to time index seven-thirty-four-spot-seven-thirty-nine.”
Torchlight starkly lit the washed out face of the dead woman in the fitted red dress. The pain he was convinced he saw locked in time behind her solidified corneas spoke to something terrifying, how was it that every single corpse he had observed from these wretched events had that same naked fear etched into the fabric of their passing?
He stood, turned his back to the dead and fixed his gaze on the smooth floor. The constriction that gripped his throat eased only a little as he roughly massaged his temples. Thank goodness his stomach was empty. He raised his head and stood perfectly still as he attempted to push his thoughts aside, unwanted as they were, as he searched for a place in his mind where he could rest, a gap he was certain existed but was hidden from his vision, a blissful space where forgiveness and ease resided. As his heart slowed from its sprint, he growled and stretched his back as hard as he could.
As it cracked and creaked, and pain shot through his shoulders and spine, broken images of the faces of the Waterwell Avenue dead flashed into his mind’s eye. What in hell was he doing? What made him think he was even vaguely qualified to investigate events that were spiralling out of control? How could he stand before General Hoth and attempt to present a rational explanation and a plan for countering phenomena that he barely understood and defied logic? He saw the symptoms as plain as day but was entirely blind to their cause, but then, they all saw the blasted symptoms. To say he was out of his depth was beyond understatement.
A hairline crack appeared in the dance floor and a smooth sliding door revealed itself, it then quietly hissed open and Alain Lauren stepped in. The Chief wore the same dishevelled civilian clothes from Waterwell Avenue, his shoulders were curved inward and his body was hunched, his long face was drawn and his tanned skin did nothing to mask heavy black bags that seemed to weigh down the skin beneath his bloodshot eyes. Tian took Lauren softly by the wrist and led him to three silver chairs by the door.
His Investigative Chief did not seem to notice the bead of sweat that ran down his cheek, as he slumped onto the metal chair, dropped his hands into his lap and tightly interlaced his fingers. As his head lolled forward and thick, grey shoulder-length hair flopped before his face, Tian slowly sat down next to him.
“I … I didn’t think it would actually happen to us.” Lauren said, his voice was low and scratchy. “I thought by knowing it so precisely somehow it would just be prevented. It’s ludicrous now I think of it.”
Lauren reached into a worn pocket and pulled out a battered packet of cigarettes, and as Tian sat forward, his brow furrowed, acrid smoke billowed in front of the Chief’s face, and as he shook his head rhythmically Tian patted the Chief’s knee lightly and forced a smile. It seemed to work, for as he pulled on his cigarette, Lauren’s face cracked a little and a faint smile curled upward.
“We saw it,” Tian whispered, “finally.”
“But what does it give us?”
Tian sat back and raised his hands. “Well, we know at last for certain it is a molecular disruption causing death.”
The Chief slapped his hands on his legs. “We don’t know that, Tian. We’ve believed a molecular disruption of some description was taking place from the start, but it’s not the cause and you know it.” Tian closed his eyes, as a wave of heat pulsed through his mind, and as Lauren brushed ash from his trousers his brow creased as he raised his voice. “Not one of us came close to modelling the disruption that took place after the blackout, and if you want me to name a cause then how’s this: magic. And that’s before I try to take into account what you blithely call ‘intelligence’ that led us to Waterwell Avenue in the first place.”
“I do hear you, Chief.” Tian rubbed the bridge of his nose as his head had begun to throb, the pressure behind his eyeballs had forged a path to the forefront of his attention. Rubbing his nose was pointless, what he needed to relieve the ache was to reacquaint himself with the half bottle of single malt tucked away in the back of his desk drawer. “Look, I’ll be honest with you, Alain, right now, with these things escalating it seems exponentially and on a daily basis I am simply grateful we have intelligence even if it is a thread we don’t understand. Please, don’t let …”
The door slid open and an immaculately dressed officer in the Royal Guard’s red, silver and black uniform stepped into the chamber.
“Ouch,” Tian said, and grimaced, as he stood and pointed to the white patch on Eva Daxa’s forehead. “Are you all right?”
“Sir, I have a lousy headache,” Daxa replied, in her long, warm eastern drawl. “I could do without the nausea as well.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“Sir, I remember seeing the event and the loss of power in the vehicle that followed, but I don’t remember a great deal after that. I understand the raptor I was aboard landed on a roof and, I’m told, I smacked my head on a panel. We fell only a few feet and we all walked away from it with just a few bumps and bruises.” The young Lieutenant looked into his eyes and glared. “We were the fortunate ones, sir, the crews that hit the deck were not and nor were the people beneath their vehicles.”
Tian nodded but slammed the door on the images and the distress that sprang up in his mind, and the concern that washed into him, for he could not think of it, now was not the time. “Should you even be here?” he asked, the last thing he wanted was to exasperate the Lieutenant’s injury.
“Probably not, sir.” She pointed to the scene. “Another event?”
“Yes,” Tian replied, slowly, as he cautiously turned back to the sofa.
“Do we have a count yet, sir?” Daxa asked.
“No, not for the whole of Jeradine, but as we stand Waterwell Avenue, including the crashes from the skylanes caught within the range of the pulse, is in the order of four-thousand dead and so far today there have been seven events across the country, three of which were here in the city.”
“Sir, those numbers are double the whole of last week put together,” Daxa said, as she shook her head and furrowed her brow. “And if I’m not mistaken that’s almost last months entire count in one morning.”
Tian bit his lip and simply nodded at her incredulous face, he had no words for the Lieutenant, nothing at all in fact that might take the sting out of the new string of disasters. Without a thought, he pointed to the nightclub. “This erm … was actually the first.”
“Where is it?” Lauren asked, as he stood.
“Silk Mills tucked away in Holdale, an apparently fashionable establishment among the young, even considering the lack of content.”
Tian and Lauren folded their arms as Daxa clasped her hands behind her back. As they stood side by side and stared at the dead upon the leopard-skin sofa the stillness that surrounded Tian was reflected back into his mind. For once, the incessant swirling formation and dissolution of his thoughts and emotions had miraculously settled with the silence, as though the quietness of the outer environment had merged with his inner landscape, as if they had as one become a flat calm. It was no doubt only a momentary glimpse of quiet, one that would be swept away in an instant.
Out of his peripheral vision he saw Daxa’s head turn to him, he could almost feel her stare piercing the side of his head. “Sir, if you’ll excuse me I need to report this to General Hoth.” Tian nodded, as his gaze returned to the dead woman in the fitted red dress. The Lieutenant’s shoes squeaked as she smartly about-faced and marched from chilly room.
If he could make it to the scene in time, Tian would stand still in the wake of an event and soak in the charged atmosphere that followed the fury that flared for an instant and unleashed pain of an untold lifespan. He would try to memorise the sights, and take in the smells and textures, and over the years they had meticulously analysed and catalogued hundreds of thousands of images, samples and readings, and they had written hundreds of reports that always ended with impressions and theories but never conclusions. And they had looked upon the desperation in the eyes of the dead again and again and it seemed that no amount of skill, effort, patience or luck could begin to explain the outlandish anomalies that killed in ever frightening numbers and seemed only to be exponentially increasing in frequency, scale and ferocity.
Lauren placed a hand on his arm and squeezed it as he glanced back at Silk Mills, growled and slouched, and then ambled from the chamber. As the door quietly sealed behind him the chamber vibrated.
Tian looked upon the young woman’s painted face as his throat again constricted for she had died in the bloom of life. All he asked for was a clue as to why, a toehold on the inside of what she had seen and what had caused her to pass so suddenly. She blinked. The solution had to be there in front of him, glaring at and taunting him, and despite what General Hoth would have the Queen believe this was not and had never been the Yarcatzn military. She blinked again and smiled broadly as the teenagers kissed and played with each other’s hair, and as Tian hid behind his novel and shook his head a wide beam crept across his face.
“Can you remember a time when you were so uninhibited?” she asked.
“No, ‘uninhibited’ is not a word I’m well acquainted with.” Tian looked down into his half full coffee cup.
“That’s a shame.”
“I really wouldn’t know.” He glanced back up and caught a smirk that had to be mischievous, and as he felt his face flush he cleared his throat and racked his mind searching for something to say, anything. “So, you sound like you were born in the city?”
She nodded slowly. “Indeed, from behind one of the mustard facades in West Palentine.” She held his gaze as her smile transformed into a grin. “And your accent suggests you were not?”
He looked away. “Ah, no.”
“I’d say you’re a South Country lad, Yaltran maybe.”
“Further south, Black Barn.”
“Really?” She frowned. “You hide it well.”
He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“My name is Petra.”
“T-Tian. Tian. Tian.” He coughed. “My name is Tian.”
~
