I Am Not Junco Omnibus: Books Four - Six (77 page)

“Yeah, sure, Ashur. But what’s this—”

“Merkar, I’m trusting you with Selia. Do not let her leave here, understand?”

“Ashur, I’m right here. I can—”

I shake her by the shoulders a little. “Sel, listen to me, OK? Stay here and do not leave unless it’s a life-or-death thing, OK? Not saving anyone, either. Like you’re gonna die if you stay. Understand?”

“Ashur, what’s—”

“I don’t have time. I gotta go find Ryse.”

“Wait!” She grabs my arm before I can port away. “Wait.”

I stop and give her my attention.

“I love you, OK? I’ll let you go and I’ll be good, but I want to know what this is about.”

“The Siblings and the Punishments, Selia. It’s not something you’d understand, it’s one of the High Secrets. The Siblings.” I look over at Wyrd. “I’m not sure, but I think we have the wrong Siblings.” Wyrd just looks at me, helpless to understand. “Before Lucan was banned and sent into his punishment cycle, Aesin made the Seven Cylinders filled with Lucan’s Punishments. But we found the Siblings and there were no cylinders. And only Junco has the demon qualities you’d expect from the prophecy. So what’s in the Sealed Cylinders?”

They just stare at me.

I port away.

What the fuck are the Punishments? If we have the Siblings, if we have the Seven, if we have all these things… then why do I feel like we’re missing something?

Like we’re being duped?

Because we are, Ashur.

I hear it clear as day as I move through the port but before I can make out if that really was Lucan’s voice in my head, I come out on the deck of a ship near Pillar Four.

“Arel!” I shout up to him and Ryse as they perch on the roof of the ship’s highest level. “Arel! We’ve got the wrong Siblings! We’ve got the wrong fucking Siblings and we’ve infected our genome with the wrong fucking DNA!”

“Calm down, man!” Ryse screams at me over the sound of crashing waves. “We have the right fucking Siblings. We have hundreds of thousands of kids to prove it. Gib knows what he’s doing…”

“Ryse, I was just out at the Stag and I saw how they kept Junco subdued all these years, OK? It was a cage, it was a piano, it was training, it was lot of fucking shit to keep that girl from morphing into her demon form. Now you tell me—why the fuck did Moju and Esta never have the same issues? Why didn’t they ever change? No one did shit for them, Ryse. There was never a time when we thought Esta was gonna go balls-out ballistic on us. Moju did some crazy shit, but there was never a time when we feared for our lives just talking to him. They are not the same things!”

Ryse is still shaking his head and the waves are getting bigger, pitching our ship back and forth as the sea rolls with the turbulence that I suddenly feel. “Arel?” I look over at him for help.

“Ashur,” he says calmly, “Lucan know what he’s doing. Gib knows what he’s doing. Do you really think they’d let us create all those kids if they weren’t from the true code?”

I shake my head and search for Tier on my vision screen. “Where the fuck is Tier? He’s been fucking missing for hours.”

“The last we heard he was in the Polar Friendly, and you know it’s like the Sagitta Building in there. No coms in or out. No vision screens. He came back online for a few minutes, then disappeared again, so he must’ve gone outside for something then went back in.”

“Then where the fuck is Annun?”

Ryse answers this time. “He’s in the Sagitta Building, we logged him outside of it about twenty minutes ago.”

“You guys got this? Or what?” And just as those words are coming out of my mouth, Pillar Four shudders. It sorta, skips or blinks, or fades. “Shit!” I look over at my brothers. “Shit! She’s coming back!”
HALO IMMINENT
flashes across my screen and I know all of us, every warrior on the planet, just got the same message.

“Go find Tier up in the Polar Friendly and sort it out,” Ryse yells over the crashing waves. “We cannot afford to second-guess Lucan, but we can’t afford to ignore the warning signs that something is off track either.”

The three of us do an awkward
might-never-see-you-again
back-clapping session, and then I port away.

Because it’s time.

The Angels are coming.

Chapter Twenty-One—ANNUN

Sagitta Building – Dallas

John Hando sighs. “What is this shit? She’s like… a monster?”

“Demon,” I correct him. “Junco is part demon, so this clone is as well.” I look at her for a little bit longer. I’ve seen the footage of Junco coming out of her Aves morph on Amelia. Wyrd hacked into the security archives before Tier came back from Earth and sent him to science college. She was fine. Better than fine actually. Junco came out of her first morph like a champ. Like she took a short nap and her post-morph shower was a day at the spa. She looked good. And even though I could tell she was a little sad, she was not crazy in the least. In fact, that was probably the sanest I’ve ever seen Junco.

And I wasn’t there when Juncs came out of her Archer morph, but Selia saw her that night, she was staying at the Sargassum condo with Gideon at the time. And she never mentioned any demon issues.

That’s something humans normally notice.

This… clone thing. Iliana. She’s out of her mind with rage. And her fangs and claws never disappear, not even when we send in a bot to deliver food. Sometimes the hunger can drive them wild. And she does eat the food, but it changes nothing. Only gives her more energy, if you ask me.

“Well?” Hando says. “What the fuck are we gonna do with her?”

“Take her to Peaks, like you said.”

“Yeah? And how we gonna get her there without killing ourselves, genius?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Annun?” Deb says from the ceiling.

“Yeah, Deb. How can I help you?”

“I have an idea.”

At first I’m annoyed because I’m trying to have deep thoughts on figuring out a solution to our little problem. But then I hear that smile in her voice again. “Go, Deb. What’s your idea?”

The door whooshes open and Web appears. “Ignore her, Annun. She’s insane, as you can see.” He pans his arm back at his twin. Deb stands behind him, muttering a collection of incoherent syllables.

I hold out my hand to Deb and she tilts her good eye towards me. “Come here,” I command. She shuffles towards me, but Web puts a hand out to stop her.

“No, Annun. She’s off limits.”

I look over at Hand and raise my eyebrows. “I’d like to talk to her, John. She says she has an idea and I want to know what it is. I’m the captain of this operation, so you in or out?”

“Annun,” Deb’s voice says from the ceiling. I’m looking right at her body when this happens and it’s creepy as all fuck. I can tell it’s her, her mouth even moves a little as the words form. “I can get Iliana to Peak City for you.”

“How?”

“Enough!” Web commands. And then the whole room shakes and shit falls off some shelves, breaking.

“John?” I ask. “You gonna handle this or what, dude?”

Hando steps forward to Web. “Hey, let’s go talk about this out in the hallway, OK?” He nods his head towards me while keeping his eyes on Web. “In private, got it?” I keep my mouth shut because Hand’s working his end so I can work mine. Web doesn’t agree and nothing more is said, but the AI follows the Texican outside and into the hallway.

Deb latches onto my arm again and I turn to smile at her. “Talk, woman. We only got a few seconds.”

Her mouth moves slightly again, and this time her words come from the mutated body. “I can help you,” she says. Clear as fucking day. “This clone has a place for an AI, just like Junco. I can slip inside and take over, keep her subdued until we get her to Peak City.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” I whisper back.

“Web,” she says, motioning to the hallway. “He will never let me leave. He keeps me here. I’m a prisoner.”

We stop and listen to the hushed argument out in the hallway. I’ve never heard an AI get pissed before. Sera is not a yeller and I never really met Amelia, but every time I saw her in public with Lucan, she looked sweet. But the Sagitta Duality is weird and from what I know of them, this Web is very fucking unstable. “What do we do?”

“Get us out of the building. Any way you can, but make sure it happens fast.”

“Well, Deb, hon, we’re a hundred and ten fucking floors up in the sky. Getting out of here is gonna be a lot of things, but fast isn’t one of them.”

She touches my wing with the tips of her fingers. A shiver pulses through my body and I look at the wing and then up at her face. She’s smiling. “OK, well, let’s see what happens, that will be the last resort. Go take over the clone.” And then the coherent expression on the mutilated face disappears and I know she’s vacated the premises. The body stands there, slack and pliant.

“Yo,” I call out to Hando in the hallway. “Hey, you guys decent out there?” I walk through the door and they both look like they’re in a heated argument. “Web, what’s the problem? Deb says she has an idea, we should hear her out at least.”

Web folds his hands together in front of his body. “She is insane, Mr. Annun. You—”

“Ah, not to be a stickler or anything, there, Web, but it’s Captain Annun now. Tier promoted me, so I’m like, in charge of this operation.”

He tilts his head at me, like he’s a dog that’s just heard something curious, but not worthy of a bark. “Captain Annun,” he corrects. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to forbid any more interaction with Deb.” He smiles and then calls out, “Deb, please come.”

His disfigured partner shuffles on the other side of the door, making her way towards him with her head down.
He keeps me here. I’m a prisoner.
Web smiles at her and takes her by the hand. “We need to leave now, it’s clear the clone cannot be removed. I’m going to end the visit.”

“What?” Hando acts, an incredulous look on his face. “No, Web, we need that fucking clone. I’m not leaving without her!”

“The visit is over,” Web says with more authority, his voice deepening mid-sentence and projecting much louder than I’ve ever heard him before.

This shit is about to get ugly. “OK, well, hold up there, Web. We don’t need Deb here to get the clone. I just so happen to have a fucking canister of demon whoop-ass gas in my sidearm, OK? So we can just shoot her with that and we’ll be out of your hair here in like five minutes. Cool?”

It’s clearly not cool, but I ignore him and turn quickly to Hando who is looking pretty stupid with his mouth open right about now. “Come on, John, help me with the fucking demon gas, OK?”

“Yeah, OK. Web, sorry, but I’m under orders from Annun right now, he’s the one in charge. Just let us try—”

“No! This is over now!”

I slip past Hando, grab his arm as I twist, hope that the fucking clone is ready, and draw my weapon. We slide back into the room. Iliana/Deb is standing front and center, half Archer and half demon. I fire my mini plasma at the glass window. It cracks. I drop the rifle, grab a grenade from my pocket, still holding onto Hando with my left hand, and lob it at the crack. The shit explodes. Glass fragments shatter and every fucking alarm you can think of starts screaming.

I grab Iliana with my right hand and run full balls-out towards the window, dragging the demon AI and the human along with me. “Jump!” I say when we get to the edge and I’m not sure if they do jump, but fuck it, too late now.

Web has taken over the security systems in the building and rockets from down below begin firing at us as I unfurl my wings and flap frantically for a few seconds until my vision screen comes back online so I can port our asses the fuck out of Dallas.

We exit the shift on the west side of Peaks, down in the Red Rocks theater where that fucking bitch Cora is singing to a packed house at the End of the World Con as the Angels descend down upon us.

Chapter Twenty-Two—ASHUR