The Miranda Contract (27 page)

Dan woke at 3am. Even with his eyes closed, he could sense it from the oven-clock in the kitchen, from the phones tossed to the floor. The whole electronic world was calling softly to him that morning was still a far away place.

His eyes opened suddenly: wide and happy. There was a sense of having just lost a moment of time, a second perhaps; like they’d just paused in their conversation, just taking a breath between acts.

He could feel her beside him. Miranda. In his bed.

Dan looked up at the ceiling and saw the motionless fan. He felt the smile on his face, the almost audible hum that charged through his body, eclipsing anything he might have generated himself.

And the hum was happiness.

He could feel her skin now, his fingers exploring without upsetting the covers. Warm skin, and close and charged. Biting his lower lip, Dan turned his head so he could see her beside him. She was a tumble of dark hair and smooth olive skin. He wanted to kiss her again, to hold her. He ran his fingers down her shoulder and along her arm. She moved a little and he sat up slowly, moving the pillows behind his back so he could look at her bare shoulders.

“’s cold,” she mumbled.

Miranda slid her hand back towards him and took a hold of his fingers. He moved closer, kissing down on that beautiful shoulder, lingering there. She pulled his hand across her skin into an embrace and he slid next to her, his lips touching her ear. They fit so well together.

“Miranda Brody,” he whispered and she screwed up her nose. “Miranda Brody,” he teased again. “
The
Miranda Brody. Oh my God…”

“Shut up,” she said softly.

Dan pressed himself against her and kissed her neck, his hand moving down her body. She pushed back against him, reaching back to grab his hair. She turned her head and brought his mouth to hers.

He smiled into it.

She still tasted like cherries.

Epilogue

Halo

Rainmaker Four Holding Facility,
South Australia

I
t had taken
only a few weeks to locate, and another week to gain entry to the government holding facility where the authorities had dumped the Mad Russian. It was called Rainmaker Four, an unmarked secure facility to the west of Cooper Pedy, buried away in the dry and forlorn wasteland of the South Australian outback.

Halo already had the contacts within the Uberhuman Affairs Offices in Melbourne and Sydney, so it didn’t take long for him to uncover Rainmaker Four. He drove three days to get to Cooper Pedy and then spent the night at a hotel, drinking with the locals as he slowly wove his magic among them.

It only took a single look from Halo, a connection of eyes no matter how fleeting or guarded, and he could step right into another man’s mind. He pushed through recent memories, carved up insecurities and passions, until he caught a psychic whisper of the Rainmaker facility. The man was a cleaner. A further push into the man’s mind and Halo uncovered the names of other cleaners, the supervisor, the passcodes and the schedules. He bought the man a drink.

Later that night he dumped the man’s body in the back of his hire car. Time was running out. Halo had to find the old man before the Celestial Knights returned and took him out of reach forever.

Inside the facility, Halo stuck to the cleaning routine. He pushed the mop along the floors, cleaned the washrooms and helped take out the garbage. The other workers called him Lockheardt and forgot the differences they saw in front of their eyes. They’d worked together for months. Lockheardt wasn’t an overweight forty-six year old joker from Perth. He was a skinny Pak kid. Always had been.

After a couple of days Halo located the room where the old man was being held. He used his coercive powers to shift Lockheardt’s name onto the duty roster, convinced security that it had always been that way. The room itself wasn’t anything special. There was a simple security check on the door, but Lockheardt’s pass was configured to get through, as long as he was scheduled for the shift.

The Mad Russian looked like a regular old man. His skin was pale, stretched tight over bones, and his hair and beard had been shaved back to a short fuzz. The eyes were taped shut with skin-tone adhesive and a pair of tubes disappeared up the man’s nostrils. Along his wrists were more tubes, jacked into different points and leading back to monitoring devices.

There was a dull hum in the room.

The monitors all seemed passive. Heart rates and brain activity moved steadily across the screens, although they were very close to the baseline. Halo figured that meant the old man was alive, but only barely.

Halo closed the door behind him and moved to the end of the hospital bed, his eyes scanning the electronic tablet attached to the steel frame. It was password encrypted. He was tempted to go back and hunt down a medical staffer, to rip the password out of their skulls, but in the end it really didn’t matter what the medical reports said. Halo was interested in the old man himself, the body and the mind.

He reached out and touched the man’s eyes, pressing down on the tape which held them closed. There was a satisfying lack of resistance there as he pressed. The old man had no strength in him. Halo pulled the edge of the tape and lifted it away. He would only need a single eye, a single entry point.

The eye was completely white. It surprised him and he let the lid drop for a moment before pulling it down a second time. Halo reminded himself that the Mad Russian was now just a husk. Nothing to fear.

It took a bit of manipulation to get the iris into place but as soon as he did, Halo found himself pushing inside the man’s mostly-vacant mind. There was an immediate sense of stepping into an abandoned building, but one so vast that it must have once held a museum or expansive gallery. Halo had never dared look into the old man’s mind before. The consequences would have been brutal and irreversible.

But the old man was helpless now.

Halo started with sequences of numbers, of hidden accounts and passcodes. He always started with the numbers. Emotions were more difficult to handle, especially in cases where the subject was a raging psychopath like the Russian. It came easily, the flow of numbers and the links to banks and institutions. Halo had long ago trained himself to compartmentalize his own mind, to shift new data into ‘boxes’ which he could unpack at a later, safer, time.

There was a clicking sound from the door. He had expected it, knowing he only had a short window of opportunity with the old man, but it still irritated him. He pulled out of the Russian’s mind, replaced the tape and stepped back, his hands already moving to the mop and bucket. When the door opened he was pushing the mop along the wall opposite, his headphones plugged in and a look of general disengagement firmly on his face.

The nurse moved to the end of the bed and checked the tablet. He looked at his watch and moved past Halo to a small locked cupboard. Halo smiled at the man and then pushed his mop and bucket out into the corridor.

Outside he moved up the corridor to the next room which was empty but still required cleaning. As the door closed behind him he returned to the old man’s memories, the after taste of the invasion laying in his own head. There was something wrong, something lodged inside.

He shook his head. A rogue memory had been brought out along with the financial data and it was dominating his own thoughts. He couldn’t shake it, it was so brilliant.

It was all blue skies and bright sun.

A recent memory, it had the distinct feeling of being a turning point in the Mad Russian’s life. Halo stumbled over these events all the time, but he usually shook them off after regaining his own mind. Each person was built upon the foundations of key memories, the clarity and hyper-realism of them sometimes surprised him.

Blue skies.

But not the skies of this world.

There was something missing: an invisible hole, bound up with the Russian’s overwhelming sense of failure, his drive to return.

He pushed back the headphones and concentrated on the memory, clearing away his own identity and extraneous thoughts, leaving nothing but the snapshot of skies. It was a real memory. The Mad Russian wasn’t as mad as everyone believed, at least not all the time. It had the energy and pseudo-corporeal feel of a foundation, and as he reconstructed the images around other memories and experiences he had pillaged Halo soon discovered it was from the old man’s missing years.

The pieces fell into place, lining up in a way that Halo knew could make him a lot of money. Everyone wanted to know where the Mad Russian had disappeared to, and, more importantly, why he had returned.

Now Halo had the answer.

For the whole five years the man had been desperately fighting to return, his rage a firestorm within mind and body. But beyond the rage and the mad intellect, the Mad Russian was powerless. In the other world he had no mastery over the elements; it had stripped him back to a pathetic, rambling old man.

It was like their world, but different.

“The bastard,” Halo murmured. “A world without ubers.”

The second time Halo visited the Mad Russian was also the last time. The night before he had broken dreams of his childhood: of giant, crashing waves and monsters hurling boulders. The invasion of his homeland was the stuff of legend, the one time when the full potential of uberhuman armies became a reality. India marched into Pakistan and Sri Lanka, their demi-gods laying waste to any defenses and proclaiming a new India in their wake.

The world did nothing.

He felt his mother’s dying thoughts again.

Love you, love you.

And he woke slowly, half-child, half-adult. The room he rented in the dusty township was small and damp but in the darkness of early morning he could smell the explosions, the plaster dust and the terror. He closed his eyes and imagined the shifting forms of Rakshasa and the twins, Saraswati and Fusion. He heard the roar of Bagha and his father yelling at him to get into the car.

He lay in his bed for an hour, replaying his own memories, pushing his consciousness back to the last days he had with his mother back in Bahawalpur. He remembered walking with her through the markets, grudgingly carrying her basket. He remembered the swish of her dress, but he couldn’t remember her face.

Back at the facility, Halo checked in to the staff room and talked briefly with his co-workers, but in his mind he was counting down the minutes until he would walk out and never return. He checked the time, but he was early. The passcodes wouldn’t allow him access until he was officially on duty. The others noticed his nervousness. They laughed at him. He laughed as well.

When the time did arrive he faked a stretch and moved with the others into the elevator. He balled his fingers into fists inside the pockets of his overalls.

When the doors opened, Halo let the others leave first, satisfied with the way they moved into formation, slipping out of conversations and into work-mode. He missed Melbourne. Beyond the elevator Halo saw the strangers and paused. Their presence complicated matters and he couldn’t hide the sudden flush of anger which spread across his face. The other workers gave the Celestial Knights semi-interested glances as they approached, but kept moving. It wasn’t that unusual to see the heroes at the Rainmaker; the organizations were connected, feeding each other information, providing resources and back-up when required.

Parhelion stood with three doctors and listened to a report. The current leader of the Knights wore a white lab coat over his light blue power suit, but his face was unmasked and he seemed like any other visiting official. He was a medical doctor himself, among other things, and Botswana’s most famous uberhuman. The other man was Castus, a more brutal and abrupt man. Where Parhelion conversed with the facility’s staff, Castus stood apart. Heat pushed outward from his massive body and butted against the underground facility’s air conditioning.

Halo kept his eyes down as he passed, although he couldn’t mask the smirk that slid across his face. The anger had dropped away. Castus bore paper-thin white scars across his face. They made him look inhuman and fierce. That was us, Halo thought. Dan had blasted the hero with the power of Melbourne all those years ago, and it still left its mark. That meant something.

“We will move him to Sanctuary One,” Parhelion said. “No need to endanger the people here.”

Halo knew they were talking about the Mad Russian and he walked away a little quicker, his headphones clasped over his ears although no music was playing. He tapped his card against the access panel and pushed into the room. The old man looked even smaller than he had the day before.

“This is our goodbye, teacher,” Halo said, coming to sit next to the man. He reached out and pulled off the tape covering the left eye. “This might hurt.”

Normally Halo took his time with the deep mining of memories. He enjoyed the feeling of stepping through people’s most secret and hidden thoughts. However, as he slid back into the man’s mind he felt a rush of hatred. It rose up in him, overwhelmed him suddenly. For years, the Russian had promised Halo so much and then on the ultimate day of fulfilling those promises, he had vanished. He had abandoned everyone.

Halo stabbed at the man’s mind.

He scraped the memories raw, rip-harvesting them as he pushed through the lingering decrepit, crumbling walls of defense. He smashed the memories of Dan, of happiness and the quiet, introspective moments. There would be no peace in the old man’s mind.

Taking a breath, he paused from the destruction and turned his attention to the memories of the other world.

No uberhumans.

He glimpsed children in that other place, and they seemed familiar. Important. Faces streamed past like a collection or an exhibition. Halo shoved them aside and devoured everything the old man had. Thousands of hours, minutes and seconds, rushed through the connection and into Halo’s mental boxes.

No uberhumans.

No war.

He blinked himself back into his own body and rubbed his eyes which were only half back in the real world. He could tell one of his ears was dripping blood and suddenly felt the need to vomit. Cluttering to the floor he found the bucket and retched.