Division Zero: Lex De Mortuis (45 page)

“I didn’t even realize there was a church here,” Kirsten said, landing at the far end of a parking lot to avoid a line of vagrants stacked up at the door.

The rest of the strip mall had closed at this hour, save for an all-night liquor store all the way on the left side.

“It’s more of an outreach to the homeless.” Dorian slipped into the driver’s seat as Kirsten got out. “There
are
still a few religious people left in the world.” He winked.

Kirsten got out, leaning back in to ruffle Evan’s hair. “Okay, Dorian’s here with you. I―” She froze.

The boy spun to stare out the window, the pass-through screen showed nothing out of the ordinary.

“I feel it, too.” Dorian pointed. “Something’s in the alley.”

She eased the door closed just as N0ra appeared in the window of the repurposed store. Seeing Kirsten, she battled her way through the waiting street people to the door; but stopped. The girl did not seem to want to step outside. Finding N0ra’s behavior odd, Kirsten jogged across the parking lot; squirming from the uncomfortable E-90 stuck through her belt against her back. A series of appraising looks and a whistle or two came from the men standing amid the smell of mass-cooked food. As Kirsten reached the door, N0ra reached out and grabbed her shirt.

“It’s still out there. I saw this place and ran inside. It didn’t come in after me.” The teen sniveled, as if ten years had been scared out of her. “Is Kincaid still alive? I didn’t see. They were all shooting. Please, don’t let it get me.”

Kirsten offered a consoling hug, patting her on the back until the sobs petered out. “I won’t.”

N0ra went stiff and pale, eyes focused over Kirsten’s shoulder.

Kirsten whirled, one hand behind her back on the weapon. Seneschal stood at the center of the parking lot. She pulled the gun out.

“Well, Agent Wren. You seem to be out of uniform.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Still here, I see. Guess you got away from them.”

“Indeed. They are rather single minded and a bit stupid. Like cops.”

“Why are you after the girl? She has nothing to do with this.”

He shifted, entering a slow circling pace, hands folded behind him. “The same reason you dragged our buddy around with you for a few days. Bait. He knows what she did to him. He’s the one that wants to harm her, not us. She
helped
us. If not for her, Lyris would never have known who compromised the production facility. Vikram cost us billions, by the way.”

“Why do you care? You’re dead.” She waved the gun at him. “You’re beyond dead; you’re dead and returned.”

A finger in her shoulder from behind; the scent of vomit mixed with piss choked the air from her throat. “Hey, you got any left?” Clad in grimy, tattered clothes, a dangerously thin man trembled―a human chihuahua offering a hopeful smile.

“Any what left?”

“Whatever you’re on dat yer talkin ta no one.”

Light flickered in her eyes. “
Go inside, eat something.”

He spun on his heel and the rigid walk of an automaton carried him into the building.

“It’s a question of oaths.” Seneschal stopped pacing. “We want her to finish helping us. He will come for her, and then we can finish what we need to finish.”

“I won’t let you destroy him.”

“You still think he’s so innocent, do you? Even after the girl told you what he did. He has the blood of thousands on his hands. Valves and pumps kicked on in the dead of night, triggered by a spark that formed across a synapse in his brain and traveled thousands of miles over the GlobeNet. It still killed people.”

“Neither you nor I are fit to judge anyone.” She took another step at him. “You don’t belong here.”

“Your friend Vikram is one of us, sweetie.” He snarled the last word. “Charazu called all four of us. We had instructions to take him alive. He cost us money. Lyris management wanted him to work it off. Dead men don’t pay debts. He blew us all to hell when he couldn’t find a way out. Your innocent little Vikram killed all three of us, and himself, and twenty thousand people halfway across the world. Those little wispy horrors of yours dragged us all down.”

“Innocent people are getting caught up in your idiocy. I know where you belong.” Kirsten flexed the fingers of her right hand. “You don’t have to be consigned to your fate, Dalton. Destroying Vikram won’t make you any less dead. Let go of your anger and help me with the real problem. Help me deal with Charazu.”

Silence, but for a vortex of wind pushing a cloud of plastic cartons along. Seneschal’s eyes narrowed, deepening the lines around them. In the distance, a cat screeched. A battered oblong advert droid rounded the corner of the building, creeping closer to her like a child afraid to be hit. Its holo-panel cycled through recruitment propaganda intended to attract the local poor into the flock of a Reverend B.G. Wallis, a dark-skinned man in a plum suit wearing the smile of a salesman.

Kirsten ignored it.

“That would be something, wouldn’t it? Turn around and bite the entity responsible for my power?” A polyphonic laugh, deeper than any human could create, leaked from his throat. Crimson glowed within his eyes. “You are living a delusion. There is no redemption, only varying degrees of suffering.”

With those words, a cloud of black vapor fell out of the folds of his long black coat, settling over his arm into the shape of an assault rifle―which he aimed at Evan’s face in the open driver side window.

Evan let out a yell and ducked down as the armor panel slid upward out of the door. Kirsten screamed and lunged into a sprint, bringing the lash spiraling into the air. The instant of confusion experienced from not expecting the boy to react to his presence left him open. Seneschal staggered from the strike, her attack caught him in the shoulder and the lash stopped midway through his chest. Arms out to his sides, he looked down at the line of white light tracing from his body to her hand.

The sight of the astral thread caused the last holdouts in the food line to disperse in a panic.

His face darkened as he walked into the stream. “You are too easy to manipulate.” Another step, the agony cracked through his attempt to remain stoic. “Now I know who to kill after Vikram. It won’t be quick.”

Kirsten gathered her rage, about to channel it into her power when his body blurred. Hard, cold metal collided with the side of her head. Seneschal’s rifle swatted her to the ground, ending her concentration. He rubbed the center of his chest, wheezing. Anger flared in his eyes as he squeezed black ichor through the fingers of a trembling fist. Kirsten clutched her bleeding left ear in an effort to stop the world from spinning.

“I’m getting really rather bored of you.” Seneschal lifted the rifle.

At a thought, she became tangible to spirits, and spun into a kick that took his left leg out from under him. Her cat-themed sneaker meowed with the impact. The rifle went off; shots clicked upon the traction-coated plastisteel behind her, tearing shiny stripes through the grainy black surface. Seneschal waved his arms in a search for balance. Kirsten continued the kick into a spin that brought her feet under her. He came out of the stagger; she thrust her arm out, glimmering tendril behind it. Rather than taste it again, Seneschal aborted his shot and dove to the side.

She stepped in and he leaned left, avoiding another strike. Metal claws sprouted from the fingers of his left hand a second before black pulsating veins grew along them. He leapt; she crouched, spinning into an attempt at a jiu-jitsu arm grapple. Tucked against him, she held on to his wrist with both hands, trying to pull him around and over her shoulder. One shove with her hips against his body should have sent him airborne, however, her feet found no ground beneath them. Released from the practiced maneuver, her mind had two seconds to comprehend Seneschal had lifted her one-handed. Claws scratched at her stomach as he groped at her belt for a better grip, continuing to heft her higher. Kirsten shot a pleading stare at the patrol craft as he carried her four steps across the parking lot toward it. He spun as if to slam her into the hood. She screamed with a mixture of fear and fury, struggling to push his hand away.

Dorian leapt through the door, tackling Seneschal. Kirsten fell in place, bent over the hood. Evan crawled down and curled in a ball on the floor in front of the driver’s seat, plenty of armor around him to stop a conventional attack; but this was anything but.

Seneschal lost his grip on his rifle, which dissipated into black smoke as he grabbed Dorian’s shirt with both hands. The men rolled over several times, grunting. Kirsten searched for an opening, but refused to move away from the car.
This is my fault; I should have taken him back to the dorm.

After suffering several blows, each of which would have crippled a living man in one hit, Dorian lost himself to a moment of rage and seized Seneschal’s face in both hands, pounding the back of his head repeatedly into the ground.

A vagrant darted out from behind the only other parked car there, running in a panic toward Kirsten as if on his way out of the lot. She shifted towards him, frowned, and snapped the lash. The homeless man disintegrated into a cloud of smoke, which fell to the ground as a curtain of darkness before it rematerialized into Mariko a few feet away. Her face, the most distorted of the trio, grew even less human as she snarled through conical teeth.

“Ninja sminja, you’re still a damn ghost, and I can feel you.” Kirsten struck out again.

Mariko evaded, still hissing. She scurried left in a circle, moving low to the ground in an inhuman creep. With the lion’s share of her worry in front of her, Kirsten advanced, swiping twice more at the ground as Mariko leapt flea-like into the air to avoid each one.

Dorian came sliding past her, startling her attention over to Seneschal’s rifle. She dropped focus on the lash and held both hands at him, fixing her mind onto the coalescence of his energy. His entire figure shuddered, forced down and to the left. The effect of her concentration settled over him in the form of immense weight on his gun arm, keeping his aim low. She pushed harder, desperate to prevent her tactical error from harming Evan.

Seneschal howled, dropping to one knee. Dorian leapt onto him with a stunrod across the face that knocked him flat. Mariko came out of nowhere; her sword cut a path of ice through Kirsten’s left calf. No blood, no wound, though pain commensurate with the loss of a limb paralyzed her mind.

Concentration shot, Kirsten fell forward. A hasty look to the rear found no trace of Mariko. Seneschal, enraged, drove his fist into Dorian’s gut with such force it threw him ten feet in the air. The rifle formed in his grip.

“Seneschal!” Kirsten screamed. Fear at losing track of Mariko reformed the scintillating lash. Her rage at his threatening Evan empowered it.

The attack blasted Seneschal’s body apart into a vee from the stomach upward, two halves scarcely connected at the crotch with a few traces of inky black threaded between them. Mariko leapt again out of the dark, landing on Kirsten’s back. In one smooth motion, she grabbed, twisted, and broke Kirsten’s right arm at the elbow. Shrieking, Kirsten rolled onto her back, projecting another lash up at the demonic ninja from her forehead.

“Oww, you bitch.” Kirsten winced. “I don’t need to aim it with my damn arm.”

Bending at an inhuman angle, Mariko leaned over backward as the strike went over her. Her face poked out between her knees with a cute toothy grin and a tilted head. Pointed teeth gleamed through a mouth twice as wide as it should be.

So damn creepy.
Kirsten whimpered, crawling backwards.

Leaving the mangled Seneschal wavering about, Dorian charged. Mariko avoided him with the grace of a matador. Her breath in short gasps, Kirsten reached for her belt to grab a stimpak, losing control of herself and screaming ‘“shit” about a dozen times when she remembered her civilian clothes did not include a utility belt―or a panic button. Seneschal’s right half waved its arm about, trying to get a grip on the left side of his body. Mariko pounced at Kirsten, catching her too-slow roll to the side. The semisolid blade pierced her other thigh, sending a burning chill along the bone. Neither one of Kirsten’s legs wanted to obey, both dragged limp and useless as she clawed at the traction coating to drag herself to the car. Bits of rubber caked like coffee grinds under her nails as she scratched.

Mariko lurched forward, shot in the back by Dorian’s projection of a sidearm. She turned on him, throwing a transparent Nano-shuriken right through his face. Dorian smirked.

“That works better on live targets, hon.”

Screeching, Mariko flung herself to the ground, scampering on all fours, a human-headed shadow serpent. Dorian rotated, following her circuitous approach. Mariko closed in and sprang upward, arcing through the air behind her sword. Dorian just barely got his stun rod in the way of the first strike; however, the next four swiped through him before he could pull his arm back from the first block. Mariko’s body had split into four pairs of arms wielding four swords; Kirsten cringed away from the sound.

Dorian wheezed, staggering away. He sent a longing look at the car, but fixed her with a determined stare as he swooned to the ground.

Mariko grinned, her eyes flickering red. “You watch girl die now.”

A wave of flame spread over the ninja, tinting the air with a hint of sulphur as thick, dark smoke wafted from the edges of her silhouette. Mariko stepped through the boundary, manifesting herself solid into the world. The twisted, demonic smile shrank to a more human-sized mouth, somehow cute and sad at the same time. Mariko’s skin turned grey and lifeless as a line of gleam slid down the blade.

Now her sword would cut flesh.

Kirsten grabbed her thigh with her one working hand, trying to rub warmth into it, trying to get her dead limbs to respond. She pushed at the ground, sliding back a few inches. Mariko stalked her, taking her sweet time.

Seneschal’s fingers caught some hair, pulling the two halves closer.

Dorian roared, charging. The Japanese woman froze in place, smiling at Kirsten with the mournful look a little girl would give to a favored doll that had broken. When Dorian’s rush was two paces behind her, she thrust herself backwards. The now-solid Mariko passed through Dorian’s ghostly essence, leaving him staggering over Kirsten.