Orphan of Mythcorp (29 page)

“
And then what?” Faustus stroked his
ginger stubble with his switchblade. “Maybe it won’t be so bad. For
all we know this Ash-hole isn’t the boogeyman Morgan thinks. He
might even be what America needs right now. Under the right
guidance Mythcorp could be the ace in the hole giving us the edge
over those deadheads running the world. What if Ash creates a
Weapon X program or restarts Alexander’s old Augmented Soldier
Platform.” He was smiling now and I got the feeling he would never
stop if we didn’t interrupt him. “It’ll be just like
X-Men Days of Future Past
, when all
the—”

“
Okay, we get your stupid point.” Kana
said, pressing a finger to his lips. “Maybe Mythcorp should be
reopened, but for now, how about we just help unite Morgan with his
father.”

The gingersnaps hands went to his hips as he
laughed at Kana. “Oh-Em-Gee. You still have feelings for that jerk,
don’t you? Man, I knew you had some problems with your M2N chip,
but to get all weak in the knees over Knox after what he did to us,
and after fifteen years? Oh boy.”

“
Better than pining after Emma Frost,”
Kana stood on her tiptoes to get in his face. “At least Knox is
real. Come on,” to me, “I’ll help you. Let’s leave this scrumbug to
his movies.”

“
Hold up, hold up. I didn’t say I
wouldn’t help,” Faustus said.

“
Didn’t you?” I asked, playing Kana’s
game.

“
No,” Faustus crossed his arms. “And
you won’t get within a quarter mile of that building, not without
me, I promise you that. So here’s what I want in exchange for my
all-important-and-absolutely-necessary help: you go to the Diablo’s
and have them forge an Arnold Schwarzenegger Icon, physical age of
30 so he can star in more Terminator movies. They just aren’t the
same without him, especially not that goofy T7 with Shia.
Deal?”

I looked back at Kana. “Is he serious?”

She nodded. “Probably.”

“
Fine,” I agreed.

Faustus pressed his blade to his right palm,
looked at me. “Oh, and you’ll also have to forge a James Cameron
Icon, you know, to direct the movies. Obviously.” And then he
sliced his palm slightly before handing me the blade.

“
What are you doing? Are you crazy? Is
he crazy?”

Faustus made a fist with his bloodied
hand and lowered the knife in his other. “You have to make the
unbreakable vow, otherwise it’s just words. Like in
The Half-Blood Prince.
A vow is
useless with sacrificing something.”

“
How do you know that?” Kana asked
while scratching beneath her left boob.

“
Crowley once told me.” He shoved the
switchblade into my palm and nodded.

What was I getting myself into? I groaned
and, after wiping the knife clean on my pants, cut my palm. We
shook. It was disgusting.

I handed the knife back to Faustus while Kana
closed my wound with a bottle of 3M Liquid Stitches. “Okay, we’ve
made our stupid blood vow, I’ve promised to satisfy your kooky
movie fantasies. So now can we please go now?”

For all I knew Ash was already at Mythcorp.
If he was, then our extraction of my father might prove somewhat
awkward. But at least it would give me an excuse not to forge a
clone of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’d have to somehow retrieve
Arnold’s DNA, come up with thousands of dollars, and then approach
the Diablo’s gang to have them engineer us up an actor.

Life was so much simpler back at the
Home.

Sanson

I could almost feel the nanites in my system
going cold as the cops approached. We all stopped mid-stride and
stared. Mr. Montaigne stood behind Ash, sporting a vacant look.

“
Good afternoon, officers,” Ash nodded.
“How can we help you?”

The taller officer inspected a pic on his FAD
and then glanced at me. Without looking back at Ash, he said,
“Charles Sanson? Come with us, young man.”

I looked to our tiny leader for help. Ash
darted forward, drawing the attention of the officers away from me.
Without hesitating he spoke: “Your arrival here is fortunate.
Somehow, in all my planning, I hadn’t even considered the matter of
transportation. You two officers will kindly escort us to the
Mayor’s office and I thank you in advance.”

“
Excuse me?” the shorter, slightly
pudgy officer said. “We’re taking this young man with us down to
the station. We have a few questions for him concerning a Manuel
Kant.”

“
Oh, that,” Ash never averted his eyes
from the shorter officer. “He was doing me a solid.” He stepped
even closer to the shorter officer and put out his hands as if to
accept cuffs. “I take full responsibility. Arrest me.”

Officer Shorty hesitated. The cuffs slowly
came out. As he made to cuff Ash, still moving like syrup in
December, the officer could not take his eyes off the littlest
Morai. Ash grabbed Shorty’s wrist and drew him close. All the while
the taller officer stood like a statue as the other Morai glared at
him.

Ash whispered to Shorty. “Please, put those
away and take us to your patrol car. After that, you will do
everything I say and you will do it without question, because you
want to.”

The cuffs went back into their leather pouch
and the officers kindly escorted us to their patrol car. Ash
‘asked’ Mr. Montaigne to take Lexi in his car and drive over to the
Mayor’s office. And then it was me and the little guy and Lamorak
and Agravaine stuffing ourselves into the back seat of the police
car. As the taller cop—Officer Lent—pulled away from the curb, I
checked the ambient air temp on my chrono: 76 degrees in the back
seat.

That should keep my temp up.

Philicity looks different from the
perspective of criminals (as I was coming to view myself and my
pale companions). Buildings are a little taller, the sky is a few
shades darker, and there is this intense silence; it’s like looking
through dead eyes out at a world you are no longer a part of but
rather apart from.

My fellow criminals didn’t appear to share my
views though. They were joking around and laughing.

“
I’m going to be the Vice President,”
Agravaine was saying. “The VP needs to be someone who can speak to
the press and be intimidating. And let’s face it, you just can’t do
either,” jabbing Lamorak with an elbow.

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or
just clowning around, his features are too pliable to be
distinctive. Lamorak however took it as a joking challenge. “Oh
you’re right, Aggy, except I don’t believe fatness is intimidating.
Maybe we should make the sorcerer forge an Agravaine Icon. He’ll
weigh the same, but instead of being a fatty-patty like you, he’ll
be muscular and actually intimidating.”

“
All right guys, let’s focus here.
Nothing’s in stone yet,” Ash said with a smile.

They started whispering. Perhaps feeling a
bit like a third wheel, I turned my attention to the officers on
the other side of the wire mesh. The shorter and older of the
two—Officer Graham—raised his hands and glared at them. They were
shaking.

At last we pulled into the parking garage in
Virgil’s Nave, where hundreds of cars were parked, just waiting for
their masters to finish with their boring cubicle jobs. For a few
seconds everyone was quiet. Ash broke the silence with a question
posed to the officers: “Are you wearing bullet-proof vests?”

“
We didn’t think we’d need them for
picking up a juvenile from his school,” Officer Graham sneered. “We
were just going to scare him straight anyway. No more fighting, you
know.”

“
Do you have riot gear in the trunk?”
Ash asked. His boys sat beside him, quiet and serious.

The officers turned around to look at us.
“Will we be needing riot gear?” Officer Graham was careful to keep
his hands down. I figured he must be trying to hide them from
Ash.

“
I suggest you open our doors and then
strap on your riot gear,” Ash said softly.

The officers got out, opened our doors, and
then popped the trunk. While they strapped on vests and helmets and
shin and thigh guards, I pulled Ash off to the side.

“
Are we expecting trouble?”

“
Oh, you never know,” showing his
pearly whites. “It’s always best to be prepared.”

I grunted. “Could you for once drop the
Fortune Cookie spiel and just tell me what the hell is going on?
Are we going to be shot at?”

He hesitated, watching the officers. “No.
We’ll be fine. Those two, on the other hand . . .”

He sauntered up to the officers, fingers
entwined as always. “You two will be kind enough to wait here while
we go up and speak with the mayor.”

“
There’s Mister Montaigne,” Agravaine
yelled from over by the exit. “He’s waiting in the park for us.
Man, he must’ve floored it to get here before us.”

“
Excellent,” Ash declared. He turned to
follow Agravaine, but a hand grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked
him around. His smile vanished. “Impossible.”

I’d never heard such defeat in Ash’s voice.
Officer Graham smirked and tapped the pair of chem-shades resting
on his face. Ash snapped his head around and screamed at me.

“
Charlie! Take his chem-shades. Take
them now!”

I froze. Not literally, but still, I wasn’t
much use to Ash. Meanwhile Officer Graham slapped Ash right across
his powdery left cheek, a nasty backhanded slap. The Morai fell
across the now closed trunk, holding his reddening cheek. That’s
when I remembered what Ash had said: ‘We Morai are very
fragile.’

This Officer Graham was old; he likely knew
just how fragile the Morai were. Perhaps he’d even helped recycle
the original Morai back during the Purge.

I dashed forward to rip the chem-shades from
his face. Lamorak also sprang into action. He ran right past
Officer Lent, who was standing placidly at the front of the car,
dressed in riot gear and staring off into space.

SHINK

Beside me Lamorak dropped.

I skidded to a halt and slouched down to
check on him. He was unconscious. The tiny silver dart in his neck
told the tale. I yanked it out and felt a strange feeling overcome
me; I think it was vengeance.

A peak over the car revealed Officer Graham
cuffing Ash. I shrank, cowering beside Lamorak. What could I do?
What did I have in the form of a weapon? Oh yeah, that’s right. I
tore my pack off my back and ripped the hypo-gun out of the case.
Loaded it. Hardly the weapon of choice when going up against an
experienced and obviously resilient cop, but beggars and all
that.

I jumped up and ran straight at Officer
Graham, hypo-gun concealed behind my back.

He snapped the second cuff into place and
kicked Ash to the asphalt. He was drawing his dart gun when I
body-checked him. There was a gush of air and a sort of ‘hoomph’
grunt as my shoulder sunk into his generous gut. In spite of his
age, the old fart recovered quickly, grabbing my shoulders and
dropkicking me. Now it was my turn to gasp in shock.

On the floor of the garage I noticed Officer
Grahams’ bushy gray eyebrows for the first time and felt that
all-consuming lust for vengeance resurge. Above me the sound of a
safety being clicked off roused me. Charles Henri Sanson was not
going to go out that way. I twisted my arm around, grabbed my
hypo-gun and pressed it against his calf.

Just before Officer Graham could pull his
trigger, I pulled mine.

“
Oh sheeit!” he yelped as his leg gave
out from under him.

I scrambled on the asphalt over to the
writhing crybaby. (Maybe he wasn’t a crybaby, maybe being injected
with nanites hurts like a mother and I just never knew it.) We
wrestled for possession of his weapon; eventually I, through sheer
dumb luck, managed to rip it from his grasp.

I pressed the nozzle to his throat. “Stop
moving.”

He stopped moving.

Slowly I reached up and slowly I removed the
chem-shades from his face. I was shocked to see that he was crying.
Maybe it was the effort required to overcome Ash’s Mesmer, maybe it
was the nanites wriggling through his system, or maybe the tears
were dribbling out because this cop knew what was coming.

“
Stop him,” Officer Graham whimpered.
“Shoot him now. This is how it began last time.”

Ash appeared behind me, his innocent face
inches from my own. “Thank you,” he said to me. Turning his eyes
onto Officer Graham, Ash went into his Mesmer. There’s a faint
whiff of strawberries in the air when the Morai do their thing. He
stepped forward and reached out with his hands—still cuffed—and
pressed them against Officer Graham’s cheeks.

“
I forgive you your smidge bout of
rebellion. And now, you are going to stay here and wait for our
return.” Ash looked back at me, held up his cuffed wrists. “Would
you mind removing these?”

I fished around in the numerous pouches on
the officers’ belt until I found the keys. After removing the
cuffs, Ash told me to snap them around Officer Grahams’ wrists.
Officer Graham struggled but Ash bore into his eyes with his own
whites and the fight just bled right out of the cop. I cuffed him
with his own cuffs, my hands shaking a bit in the process.

Ash inspected the chem-shades. “Why did you
even have these in your car?”

“
Every squad car in Philicity has two
pairs, just . . . in case.”

Ash sighed. “Just in case you stumble on a
Morai and need to take him in for recycling? Is that it?” His voice
was rising, and for once I thought he might lose it. “Well? Tell
me, Officer Graham, what were you planning to do with us once you
tranquilized us all? Tell me.”