Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (10 page)

“What happened to you?” I ask.

Nigel is strung out, his glasses are cracked and his clothes ripped.  Smudges of dirt and blood have just begun to dry on his face. “Some kind of creature.  I was on my way to see you and I thought I’d meet a new contact.  He didn’t tell me who he was over the phone, just that he was from an organization that had a lot of secrets – secrets we needed to know about.”

“A cynsidiary?” I ask skeptically.  Darkened between forty-five and fifty-five are always calling us sentiners, usually the lower ranking cyperas, trying to blow the whistle on the evil practices of some corrupt business under the umbrella of Cynthecorp.  As I mentioned before, the city usually kills them but not always before they find our phone numbers.

“I don’t know – I told you!  When he got to the meeting place – I was already there, waiting for him – this tunnel dweller thing, dripping with water and mud and all sorts of nasty grime burst out of a sewer grate and just tore him apart.”

“And?” Val groans.

“It was all green and grey like a rotting body or something.  But it wasn’t after him.  The informer was just between us.  It was after
me
.”  I get a cold chill.  “I swear, Delano,” Nigel continues, “I never interfere.  I just stick to the shadows and do my reports.”  He opens the fridge nervously and starts pawing through it.

“What happened?” I prompt nervously, as he takes a long chug of milk from a carton.

“What
happened
?” he fixes his glasses but the ruined frames fall back down his nose. “We got hit by a car!”

“Did the creature disappear?” I ask quickly.

“Oh, thanks Delano - I’m fine.”

“Just answer him,” Val snaps.

“Of course it disappeared!  Why do you think I’m here?”

“What?” I demand.

“The thing that attacked me. It disa-fucking-peared!”  He makes a poof noise and complementary hand gesture.  “Like the ones that attacked you.”

There is suddenly a knock at the door.  Nigel hides behind the side of the fridge while Val moves silently and swiftly to a firing position near the couch.

“Calm down,” I scold them. “It’s a bloody from the hospital.”

I press a button on the wall and the outer door buzzes.  A young man in scrubs enters the chamber.  I use the intercom and tell him to hold his ID up to the camera.  He looks around for a minute then finds the lens and hold up his driver’s license.  We run through the rest of the procedure and he enters.

“See to it,” I say to Val who takes the bloody to Sabetha’s room. 

Still in the foyer I call out to Nigel who reluctantly emerges from the kitchen in the process of eating a pastry.  “The man over there is Val,” I say.  “He’s a darkened ilk and he’s here to help watch over the house.  There are two gazers in the area should anything happen.  You can stay here as long as you like but you’ll have to fight Val for the loft, he’s already claimed it.”

Nigel makes an erasing movement with his hands, unconcerned with the formalities. “Delano, Delano.  There’s
more
.  I was only seeing this guy tonight because he was in your part of town.  I was hitting him on my way to see
you
.  I looked into the latest round of reports and just last night, while you were recovering, I received word that this sort of attack has happened to at least six other sentiners.  Delano, something is happening.”

I hold my breath, thinking of a great many things over the next few seconds.  Finally I respond.  “Try and stay safe, Nigel.  We’ll fix this soon enough.”

I leave Nigel and his shocked look in the kitchen and head into my room.  Inside, I pick up the phone and spin the rotary.  I need to arrange a meeting.  A secret one.  As soon as the other end picks up the phone I begin to use an ancient language only we sentiners and our auxilias know to schedule a rendezvous.

Afterwards, since my recovery is not yet complete, I slip into bed and try to sleep, not willing to dwell on what I’m fairly certain Nigel’s recent news means.  Twenty-four hours pass in which the bloody, and later, Nigel, leaves.  By sunset, Val is in the loft dozing and Sabetha is in the kitchen.  She looks better, nibbling on some chocolate cake.  “What’s the plan for tonight?” she asks, seeing that I am healthy again, despite a subtle limp in my gait.

“We’re taking a trip.  Pack your things.”

S
abetha looks at me with a slight smirk and a raised eyebrow then heads off towards her room.

“Val?” I call up to the loft. 

A head pops up from the bed, just woken.  “Yeah?” he asks, breathing more than speaking.

“You’re free to stay here for the next few days but it might not be safe.  Sabetha and I are heading out in an hour or two.”

“Have fun,” Val waves, then resumes his sleep.

I return to my room and begin to pack.  With my sword and the rest of our weapons collected, I meet Sabetha in the living room where she has amassed her belongings.   “Where are we going, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”  It’s not a big secret, but after a thousand years without them, you start to pretend.

With Rolla fully loaded, I uncharacteristically take the driver’s seat.  Sabetha gives me a challenging look.

“Really?” I reply to it.

“You doubt my driving abilities?”

“Constantly.”

She sighs and capitulates.  I can’t do anything more about Nigel’s news than I already am, I tell myself, so best not to dwell.  I pull out a CD and push it into the console.  As we slowly pull out of the back parking lot and head northwards, a darkly-themed classic rock song begins to blare on the enhanced stereo system. 

I’m throwing the car around turns and standing on the pedal on straight-a-ways but Sabetha manages to grow impatient anyway, still feigning curiosity about our destination.  We drive a good three hours before she gives in.  “Neo Gothica,” she smiles, then suddenly thinks of what that means.  “Are you going to the Hyperion about this?”

I withhold Nigel’s information.  She’ll only obsess over it till I get back from my meeting.  “Not yet… But maybe,” I admit after a second, then give the radio knob a sharp twist and allow the wailing guitar solo of the next track overtake us.

Traffic gets heavier as we near areas where the ilk still wander the night.  On the third mix disc, a more modern, urban beat, mostly thudding percussion and a soft angelic soprano hits the speakers. 

Lights from shops and billboards illuminate the night and make it softer, more inviting and romantic… at least on the surface.  There are still influences at work in the shadows, but they are more organized, more controlled, some might even make the mistake of saying civilized.

There are darkened all around us but they are mostly ilk.  Some of them know who we are by our vehicle and watch us as we stop at lights to let pedestrians cross or traffic pass.  I haven’t been here in close to three months, my responsibilities as Captain of Central Gothica needing me elsewhere, but I guess I could have made an appearance since then.  This peaceful and relatively uneventful area just doesn’t warrant the same attention as our neighborhood beyond the outskirts of Neo Gothica.

I drive deep into the capital until we are hovering just outside Neo Square.  Neo Square is about fifty blocks squared, ringed in by a the three-foot-high, black metal fence in the middle of a green lawn.  If it were water and not grass it would be the castle moat.  Inside that barrier only ilk and sentiners are allowed.  It is also beyond that fence, in the shadow of Cynthecorp Tower, that Pantheon Theatre sits.  Once every three years, the Hyperion
meets at Pantheon, our headquarters, and reports on any new changes or discoveries.  If the need arises, we Captains may approach the council’s secretary and request an audience with them before a reckoning, but they never grant it. 

Since there was less traffic than usual, and my meeting is scheduled for the day, we decide to stop by one of the many safe houses in the area.  They’re provided for by the Hyperion who keeps them stocked with provisions.  Most often they get their use by auxilias like Sabetha who are not allowed inside Neo Square, even during a Reckoning.  Betha should be safe here after I leave tomorrow, even without cyncurity agents contracted by the Hyperion.  People we can do without.

In the morning, I button up a dark green shirt, and roll up the sleeves to my elbows.  My jacket is a little too roughed up from the subway attack to wear on a stroll down Manuel Boulevard so I’ll go without it despite the chill.  After running some product through my hair and tossing on my sunglasses, I’m ready for my walk.  Uncharacteristically unarmed, I venture out into the bright world.  I’m not too worried about being attacked though; Neo Square is the bastion of ilk power and as such is very tightly secured.  No supernaturals, with the exception of sentiners, have been over the fence in five hundred years.  It’s the safest place in the city.

T
he streets of Gothica are more depressing during the day than on any night.  The night always reaches its fullest potential; it has a darkest hour and it feels
fulfilled
each time.  But the day… the day never reaches a pinnacle.  It just sort of exists in a pale, strangled haze.  The sun is never seen through the ever present clouds and sunrise might as well be noon or sunset – it all looks the same.

I think it’s the gray that makes my step falter.  Such bland, artificial days are nearly insulting.  The precious light is so horded by the upper clouds that the sun’s energy is more of a tease or torture than a source of nourishment.  It’s a drop of water for a man dying in the desert; some would rather go without. 

As I leave the safe house, I squint up at the harsh radiance of the backlit sky and then make my way into a crowd of people.  The ilk have gathered en masse for the cattle drive to the office and I join them in the rush.  It’s a sterile process where elbow room is maintained, eye contact is avoided, and generally the presence of everyone else is ignored, especially the homeless.  No one has the slightest idea of the others’ purpose and few stop to care.  Their own tasks beckon, a new crisis each day to divert attention ever sideways. 

These people sacrifice themselves to be human gears, and the machine runs hard and fast here.  It sucks people up and demands them to devote their entire existences to the betterment of the company and the city.  Even though Cynthecorp owns everything, all the business cynsydiaries are trying to outdo their clones.  Ruthless competition breeds happy consumers and a work force without basic human rights or protections.  These people have willingly given up everything in their lives that could be meaningful in the pursuit of obscene wealth but in reality, only so that the man at the very top can continue to live in luxury. 

But in a world of survival, what choice do they have?  To recognize the absurdity in it all would only burden oneself with the knowledge that submission to the system is the only option left apart from death.  Believe me, I know; I used to be one of these people.  Ignorance and denial are not only strong presences in this lifestyle, they’re preferable.  But walking among them again, feeling their kharma, I wonder how much better my position as a sentiner really is… or even how different.

The few who actually “control” Gothica are immortals, but not like Sabetha or me. Technology has allowed these suits to get new bodies when the old ones wear out.  At first, I thought that their continued existence would make them more empathetic to the city’s suffering.  For a regular ilk in this area – a cog as sentiners call them – crushing anyone in his or her way is a matter of survival, fit to very tight time-frame since most only live to a ripe old age of sixty.  But not for the guys who run the city.  They’re around forever.  Shouldn’t they care about policies that exploit the city and its people?  One day they’ll have to face the consequences, right?  I’ve since come to realize that they don’t quite see it that way.

From the top of the hundred-fifteen-story glass tower, this group of ten darkened sit around glossy redwood tables in leather chairs and casually sift through manila folders.  Despite the renewing properties of their cloning process, they are all unflatteringly old with weak crumpled bodies and craggy faces, each wrinkle and crease speaking for ages of corrupt and deceitful acts that fresh melanin cannot hide.  Their dyed black hair and starched, fashionless suits only add to the transparency of their needless façade – they have already won.

In Gothica, a conglomerate commercetocracy, money is the vote, and investing that money in a company is casting your ticket at the ballot.  Cynthecorp, in turn, provides services such as education, healthcare, and police and fire departments.  But only to those who have a good cynsurance plan.  Ever since Cynthecorp took over the other competitors, long before I was born, things pretty much stopped changing in Gothica.  Those ten men, with the addition of Mr. Manuel, the president of the company, have all the money, and all the power.  However, it’s important not to blame
everything
on them.  They’re only responsible for a
portion
of Gothica’s stagnation.

As my old friend Lori would have said, the people of Gothica are hardly innocent victims.  Many of the policies which keep money-votes pouring in are upheld because of the ignorant opinions of the misled masses.  The average ilk doesn’t want things to change.  They’re content even in their life or death struggle.  Many are not even capable of something more.  But then again, what do I do about it?  Nothing.  I do nothing.  We are all, in fact, responsible for Gothica.