The Song of the Orphans Read online

  ALSO BY DANIEL PRICE

  Slick

  The Flight of the Silvers

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Price

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  Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint lyrics from the following songs:

  “Across the Universe.” Words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © 1968, 1970 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  “Wish You Were Here.” Words and music by Roger Waters and David Gilmour. Copyright © 1975 (renewed) Roger Waters Overseas Ltd. and Pink Floyd Music Publishers Inc. All rights for Roger Waters Overseas Ltd. in the United States and Canada administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Ebook ISBN 9781101620069

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR NANCY

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY DANIEL PRICE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  A QUICK NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE | THE GUITARIST CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART TWO | ATROPOS CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  PART THREE | UNDERLAND CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PART FOUR | THE ACTOR CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A QUICK NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  The Song of the Orphans is a direct continuation of the story that began in The Flight of the Silvers. It goes without saying—though I’ll say it anyway—that you’ll have a hard time understanding this book if you haven’t read the first one.

  For those of you who haven’t read The Flight of the Silvers in a while and have a hazy recollection, fear not. I’ve set up a special area of my website to let you brush up on the essentials without having to reread it.

  Go to danielprice.info/recap for a full plot summary, a character guide, and a glossary of temporal and Altamerican terms. You can also sign up to be notified when The War of the Givens, the third and final book in the Silvers series, becomes available for pre-order.

  I apologize for the crazy long wait between installments. I’m not the world’s fastest writer, and these aren’t the world’s thinnest novels. But I’m working hard on the big finale. Hopefully you won’t have to wait too long to see how the story ends for Hannah, Amanda, and company.

  PROLOGUE

  December had been cruel to New York. The sky sucked its breath on the first of the month, then roared a four-week aria of frost and bitter winds. Aer traffic was shuttered for ten days straight while relentless snow sent Manhattan hiding under tempic cover. Glimmering white panels stretched from building to building, shrouding all the streets at fourth-floor level, turning eighty percent of the island into a lamplit subterrain.

  The winter storm ended four days after Christmas. The canopies retracted and generators gorged on the light of the prodigal sun. By the thirty-first, no one cared about the lingering chill. Champagne corks would soon be popping all over.

  It was the eve of the Turn and the city smiled in anticipation.

  By eleven o’clock, the aerstraunts had taken flight: a hundred giant saucers made of carbon steel and aeris. They drifted like blimps around the Manhattan skyline, offering music and cocktails and rotating vistas. Skyboats from the U.S. Ceremonial Guard hovered steadily at a thousand feet, their projectors primed and ready for the midnight light show.

  While the citizenry reveled, twenty-one aerocycles soared east across Newark Bay in a synchronous V. The riders were dressed all in white, from their bleached leather jackboots to their tempis-plated speedsuits to their sleek bresin headshields that looked like welding masks. Their belts were loaded with sidearms that fired everything from gas pellets to stun bolts to good old-fashioned hollow points.

  The squadron turned south at Bayonne, then crossed the Kill Van Kull on to Staten Island. The moment they passed the ferry dock of St. George, the riders spotted the first hint of trouble down below. A dozen emergency vehicles had converged outside an art house cinema, a single-screen retroplex with Romanesque trimmings and an electric-bulb marquee that was obsolete to the point to quaintness. Bystanders pooled behind the cordon to rubberneck, though there wasn’t much to see beyond the mob of first responders.

  The squadron leader ordered nine of his men to keep their sniper scopes on the theater exits, then sent another eight to do a top-down thermal scan of the building.

  “The rest of you are with me,” he said through the transcom. “Stay close. Don’t speak. Don’t do a goddamn thing until I tell you to.”

 
The lone woman in the group knew that Gingold was talking directly to her. She was still new to the unit—so new, in fact, that she didn’t have the security clearance to be on this mission. But Cedric Cain had shouted all the right arguments at all the right people, and an emergency exception had been made. No one could deny that Melissa Masaad was a well-tested expert on temporal alien weirdness. If anyone could make sense of this latest strange event, it was her.

  Everyone at the crime scene craned their necks as four aerocycles de-shifted above the street. The vehicles descended in graceful unison, as if lowered on wires. Once the wheels touched the pavement, the engines whirred to a stop and the glowing white tires reverted to steel mesh and rubber.

  The riders disembarked from their hoppers. A policeman nervously reached for his pistol until an older cop stopped him.

  “Stand down. It’s all right. They’re Integrity.”

  The police had been warned that federal agents were coming, but nobody said they’d be shades. The National Integrity Commission had been operating behind a shroud of secrecy since its creation in 1913, and had been restructured so many times that even insiders had trouble naming the current director. All the public knew, all they needed to know, was that they protected the nation from foreign threats. Seeing Integrity agents on U.S. soil was a rare and disturbing occurrence. No one liked the thought of foreign threats in St. George.

  The operatives pulled off their helmets. Melissa, as always, earned her share of curious glances from the crowd. Her cheekbones were overpronounced. Her dark brown eyes were a little bit larger than they had a right to be. And her twelve-inch ropes of dreadlocked hair—a style so uncommon that it didn’t even have a name in this country—was simply too exotic for sheltered minds to process.

  But for once she wasn’t the most conspicuous member of her team. That honor went to her new commander.

  Oren Gingold was a formidable figure at six-foot-two, with a lean dancer’s build, a sharp-angled jaw, and a fine brush cut of salt-and-pepper hair. In his heyday, before his wayward mission in Palestine, he’d been a conventionally handsome man. Now he only drew stares through the cybernetic cameras that had replaced his eyes. The mirrored black lenses were embedded firmly into his sockets and surrounded by scars, as if a horrible accident had fused a pair of sunglasses to his face.

  Sylvester Soo mulled his words carefully as Gingold crossed the police cordon. He had only just recently earned his shield, and he knew as well as anyone that careers were shattered on the frowns of Integrity agents. These people could drop mountains from the sky with a phone call.

  Soo peeled off his glove and extended a clammy hand. “Welcome. Hi. I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” Gingold said, his soft voice marred by a sandpaper rasp. “Any more of you inside?”

  “Uh, no, sir. We cleared out on Poe-Chief’s orders.”

  “What’s the latest?”

  “Well, from what it seems, the whole thing happened ’round forty minutes ago. A strange light—”

  “I know all that. I said give me the latest.”

  Soo blinked at him confusedly. “I’m sorry?”

  “The intruders,” Gingold snapped. “Did any of them leave the building?”

  “No, sir. No. I fig none of those folks are in a condition to run.”

  “You fig or you know?”

  “I know,” Soo corrected. “Sure as summer. Sir.”

  Melissa examined the five elderly women being treated under the marquee. Some were bruised. Some were bleeding. One of them had a fractured wrist. The only infirmity they shared, aside from a severe case of shell shock, was a beet-red nose and forehead. Sunburn at the cusp of midnight. That was new.

  She crouched beside the nearest casualty, a willowy matron of exquisite attire. Her tight bun had come unraveled, spilling long silver hair over her ears, her brow, her dull, vacant stare.

  Gingold photographed the woman through his ocular cameras, then transmitted the image. Two hundred miles away, in a Washington, D.C., office building, analysts ran her facial map through Integrity’s databases. The results came back as a murmur in Gingold’s earpiece.

  “Cassandra Dewalt,” he informed Melissa. “Owns the theater. What happened to her face?”

  “I have no idea, sir. Permission to ask her?”

  Gingold shot her a stony look. “Careful,” said a smoky voice in Melissa’s earpiece. “He’s not keen on sass.”

  Cedric Cain was the wily old operative who’d recruited Melissa into Integrity, the only person in the agency she even remotely trusted. He’d hacked the image feed from Gingold’s optics and now watched from his bedroom in Bethesda, Maryland. Melissa couldn’t count the number of encryptions on their private voice link.

  “Go ahead,” Gingold said to her. Cassandra Dewalt seemed lost to the wind, though Melissa could detect a spark of life behind her hazel eyes.

  She deactivated the tempis from her gloves, then touched Cassandra’s shoulder. “Ms. Dewalt, can you hear me?”

  Cassandra hugged herself anxiously, her gaze still fixed on the ticket booth. “I once sold a seat to Irving Dudley,” she creaked. “Long ago, back when he was just a councilman. He smiled at me and asked me my name. I don’t . . . I can’t remember what film he was seeing . . .”

  “Ms. Dewalt, my name’s Melissa Masaad. I’m an associate with Integrity. If I could ask you some questions . . .”

  Cassandra flinched, as if she’d just woken up from a bad dream. She looked at Melissa with frantic eyes. “Please. This theater’s been in my family for three generations. Please don’t take it from me.”

  Melissa shook her head. “We have no cause to do that.”

  “Yes we do,” said Gingold.

  “Yes we do,” Cain echoed. “The old gal runs a smoke-easy underneath the lobby. She also muds on Mondays.”

  Melissa sighed. Forty-four years before tobacco was criminalized, the government outlawed the sale and exhibition of foreign films. The act of showing one, even in private, carried a minimum penalty of ten thousand dollars and full asset forfeiture. Melissa was afraid to ask how Integrity knew of Cassandra’s crimes. They weren’t allowed to spy on U.S. citizens.

  She squeezed Cassandra’s shoulder. “Ms. Dewalt, we don’t care about your other activities. We only want to know about the intruders.”

  “They came out of the light,” Cassandra said. “They came at us so fast. Like they were falling.”

  “Can you describe this—”

  “They came right out of the screen!”

  One of Gingold’s flying operatives hailed him on the transcom. His voice crackled with wind static. “Thermal scan complete. All clear, sir.”

  Gingold motioned to his men on the ground, then spoke into his transmitter. “All right. Everyone regroup. Baggers and scanners inside. The rest of you, clear the crowd.”

  He turned to Detective Soo, his scarred brow arched in suspicion. “How’d you do it?”

  “Sir?”

  “If these people are the ones we think they are, they’re extremely dangerous. How’d you take them down?”

  Gingold and Melissa watched Soo closely as he struggled to form an answer. “As much as I’d love to take credit, sir, the truth of the matter’s that none of us fired a shot.”

  He turned his head and took an anxious look at the theater. “Far as we know, those folks showed up dead.”

  —

  The Dewalt Vintage Filmhouse was a cultural landmark, the oldest standing cinema in the city. The distinction was bittersweet for the owners, as the Cataclysm of 1912 had wiped out most of their competitors. The great white blast had missed Staten Island by a mile, leaving its residents with a deep survivor’s guilt that could still be felt today. Commemorative photos of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens lined every wall of the lobby. A brass plaque above the concession stand proudly declared the bu
ilding to be temporis-free.

  Gingold led his team into the main theater, a musty chamber of mahogany and red velvet. Antiquated bulb sconces lit the four hundred seats. Dust swam like minnows in the projector beam.

  Melissa barely had a chance to register the scattered bodies in the room before the movie screen stole her attention. A twenty-foot scorch mark scarred the canvas, as if someone had taken a giant cattle brand to it. The fabric was seared in a perfect ring.

  Three states away, Cedric Cain sat up in bed and studied the image on his lapbook computer. “Oh, that is interesting. That is very interesting.”

  Melissa checked her particle scanner. From the dancing gauges, it appeared this was no longer a temporis-free building.

  “A teleportal,” Cain mused. “Just like the one your friends used last year.”

  Had Melissa been able to reply without arousing suspicion, she might have reminded Cain that the last portal didn’t leave any char residue. It also didn’t spit out corpses.

  Gingold crouched to inspect the nearest cadaver, a lanky man spread face down in the center aisle. Though his dress shirt and slacks looked perfectly fine, his skin was ashen and covered in frost burns. An icy mist emanated from his wavy brown hair.

  Melissa watched from the periphery as Gingold turned the corpse over. The victim’s steel-gray eyes were frozen wide, his lips curled in a silent scream.

  “Partial recognition,” Gingold said. “Central gives it a twenty-two percent match. Masaad?”

  A cold grief washed over Melissa as she recognized the deceased, a man who’d been a mystery to her as much as a miscreant. He’d stolen cars, led policemen on chases, rusted the pistols of federal agents. Yet despite his crimes, he’d showed a remarkable concern for the well-being of others. He’d been a good man in a bad situation. He didn’t deserve this fate.

  “Masaad?”

  The voice in her ear grew soft with concern. “Melissa?”

  “Yes,” she replied to both Gingold and Cain. “That’s Zack Trillinger.”