Fires of Man Read online

  The Opera House lay amid Chiron’s Waterfront District, surrounded by towering skyscrapers, gleaming lights, exclusive restaurants, and opulent boutiques. The Auros Ocean was visible in the distance. Agent could smell and taste the salt air. He could hear the waves, rocking boats with their eternal rhythm.

  There were no stars in Chiron—they were drowned by the glare of lights and the near-invisible haze of pollution. At least here, at the Waterfront, there was some small respite from the filthy human refuse. This was where the elite assembled, as if the rabble that populated the city proper did not exist.

  All around, immaculately dressed members of Calchan high society milled about, chatting, laughing, posing for paparazzi. Agent noted Rhys Cordry, movie star; captain of industry Richard Greysmith; and Chamberlain Nicolas Creigan, with his wife.

  To Agent, these people were as worthless as the beggars that crowded downtown Chiron.

  He ignored them, and headed for the door.

  Magister General Virard was waiting in the lobby.

  The years had been kind to David Virard. At six feet tall, he stood unbowed by age. His hair was a mane of blond, streaked with brown, while his goatee, a shade darker, was trimmed to perfection. He was dressed sharply, in a tuxedo, bow tie, and square gold cufflinks. His shoes were black leather, expertly crafted, with delicate spiral patterns along the sides. He was a handsome man. A man brimming with charisma. With power.

  He was the only man alive Agent admired.

  Agent stepped forward, parting the throng, and shook hands with Virard. The general’s grip was iron.

  “Mr. Black,” Virard greeted him.

  Agent nodded. John Black, private defense contractor, was his public persona. “Magister General,” he replied.

  “You’ll enjoy this one. Come.”

  Agent doubted that, but he said nothing.

  They walked through the lavish atrium, with red carpeting and sweeping marble stairs that led to the upper levels. A chandelier of fine crystal hung above, the dangling pieces clinking.

  Virard stopped to chat several times, introducing Agent as a “friend and associate, Mr. Black.” Agent maintained a false veneer of good cheer, all the while wishing they could dispense with paltry formalities. He had little patience for the conventions of human interaction.

  They wound their way upstairs, Virard proffering their tickets when prompted. With ample time before the show, they paused at one of the lacquered bars and had a whiskey. Agent drank his out of courtesy for the general, rather than desire for alcohol.

  “I’ll need you to see to our new acquisition soon,” Virard said. “No result so far.”

  “I can go tonight.”

  “Ever dependable.” Virard smiled and ran a hand through his silken hair. “When he’s ready, I’d like him transferred elsewhere. Others are coming in. Can you tame him in time?”

  Agent nodded.

  Virard took a sip of whiskey. “I’ll look forward to your results.”

  After their libation, they headed to their seats in a box on the left-hand side of the theater, overlooking the stage. The place was teeming, but Agent’s attention was on one man.

  Below, in the orchestra section, sat Senator Francesco Jacovi, leading detractor of the war effort. Many viewed him as a hero who stood against the military machine. Jacovi condemned Calchis’s on-and-off war with the Orion Protectorate States, advocating a lasting reconciliation instead. Thousands had died on both sides, Jacovi reasoned, to no end. Would it not be better to forge a real peace?

  It was a pleasant sentiment, Agent thought.

  But pleasant sentiments bought very little in this world.

  Agent knew that Orion would never make peace with Calchis, not until Calchis abandoned its policies of expansionism and international interference. Calchis often supported violent uprisings in nations it felt required stabilization, for the sake of the greater good.

  If Orion had its way, Agent would still be in Tripana. Fighting, perhaps. Or rotting in some half-dug hole. Agent owed Calchis everything. Men like Jacovi, who sought compromise with Orion, would destroy Calchis’s greatness.

  That could not be allowed.

  Orion painted Calchis as an immoral land; Orion’s politicians decried the legal drugs, gambling, and prostitution, or the indentured servitude for debtors and non-violent criminals. It was uncivilized, they said. As if their own prisons, overflowing with men who’d done no more than poison their own bodies with narcotics, were any more civilized.

  After all, were men not evil, degenerate creatures at their core?

  “How’s the view?” Virard asked.

  Agent glanced again at the top of Jacovi’s head. The senator’s hair was slick, dark, neatly combed. “Perfect,” he said.

  As far as Agent was concerned, the senator’s “moral high ground” was but a vanity mask to hide the human ugliness beneath.

  The lights dimmed.

  The curtain opened, revealing an expansive stage. Walls of fabricated stone framed the scene, with gates and a raised portcullis serving as the entryway to a castle. The orchestra swelled, the strings weaving a sad melody as the brass section laid down a bellicose undercurrent. Moments later, an actress entered, clothed in an embroidered gown. Her powerful soprano spilled forth with all the force of a tidal wave.

  And for what? Art was the refuge of those who denied man’s most fundamental nature; those who embraced “feeling” and “emotion” as strengths, rather than the weaknesses they were. He observed the opera with cold detachment, watching as this queen succumbed to “love.”

  Agent did not have to see the end to know that it would be her downfall.

  Love was the most dangerous, and useless, of all human feeling. It blinded the unwary, left them vulnerable. Weak. Pitiful.

  Agent’s own heart was wrought of stone and steel, its hue dark as shadow. He could not remember what it was to feel at all. His emotions were phantoms, ghosts of things long dead. All the love, hope, sorrow, and joy he’d ever possessed had died in Tripana, along with the man who’d called himself his father.

  At last, the first act came to a close. The queen accidentally slew her own son in an argument over her new lover.

  It was as he’d predicted. Love destroyed all things.

  The queen launched into a haunting aria, but Agent was unmoved. When the curtain closed, and the audience leaped to their feet, Agent followed suit as a mere formality. He applauded, without enthusiasm.

  He had to keep up appearances.

  When the noise subsided, he checked over the railing for Jacovi. He spotted the senator winding his way toward the restroom. He glanced over at Virard.

  The general nodded his approval. “Go.”

  Agent went.

  He pushed out with his power subtly—a gentle nudging, so minute that it was imperceptible. As he walked, the crowd receded just enough for him to pass through, then rolled back in like the tide. He strode through the assemblage, descended the steps, and made for the men’s lavatory on the first floor. There was a short line, and Jacovi was several places ahead.

  The senator was small-statured, well-tanned, with an easy smile and a broad nose better suited to a bird than a man. Even now, on a restroom line, he spoke animatedly with complete strangers, gesticulating, his eyes dancing with warmth.

  His charm was dangerous.

  Agent did not enjoy murder, but in order to snuff out what Jacovi represented, he would slay the man a thousand times.

  Agent watched as Jacovi proceeded into the bathroom. He followed a minute later. He did not see the senator at the sink or urinals. Yet when Agent scanned beneath the stall doors, Jacovi’s gaudy brown loafers betrayed him. Agent nearly smiled. Such an ignominious end the man would have, his pants around his ankles, his piss and shit swimming beneath him.

  The stall next to Jacovi opened. Agent took it. He remained standing, facing inward as if to urinate. He let his power flow into him and opened himself to a sight beyond sight.

 
He parted the curtain of the material world, and gazed upon reality’s true nature.

  The world burst to life.

  Magnificent swirls and patterns passed before Agent’s eyes. Air currents, heartbeats, sound waves; they sent their vibrations through this higher dimension in variegated shapes and colors. Through years of training, he had learned to observe and act in the plane of causes.

  To his right, past the shuddering particles that made up the stall, was Jacovi. Agent focused on the senator’s beating heart. He sent but a sliver of energy into it, yet it was enough.

  Enough to short circuit a man as easily as a hunk of machinery.

  Jacovi’s heart fluttered. Spasmed. Went still. The senator let out a final shiver and gasp.

  Agent paused, listening for a reaction.

  None came.

  The people around him were too preoccupied with the thoughts parading through their pea-sized brains to notice anything awry.

  He used his foot to flush the toilet, left the stall, and washed his hands. He nodded with mock cheer when a man next to him remarked on how stunning the performance was. He faked a chuckle at a risqué remark on the queen’s copious bosom. No one saw through his charade.

  When he returned to the box seat, Virard smiled at him. “Well?” the general asked.

  “It’s done.” Agent took his seat.

  Virard leaned back, settling into his chair. “I hear act two is really quite astonishing.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Agent said.

  He wouldn’t.

  6

  AARON

  The last things Aaron remembered were the heat, and the sense of being carried.

  When he awoke, he was in a cell.

  Aaron curled into a ball and shivered against the cold. He was surrounded by gray limestone blocks, hard and unforgiving. A set of bars locked him in, and beyond them he could see only more bleak walls. Wind came from somewhere—a soft current, barely perceptible. The air smelled faintly of corruption, so different from the clean air of home.

  Where was home from here?

  And where was here, anyway?

  There must have been some mistake, Aaron thought. He’d lived his entire life on the farm, never broken the law, never done wrong by anyone. Some quirk of fate must have landed him here.

  He was sure the error would be righted before long.

  Eventually a guard appeared—a pockmarked man with greasy hair, garbed in a nondescript dark blue jailer’s uniform. Aaron explained who he was. He pleaded for a phone call. The guard shrugged and said, “This is exactly where you’re s’posed to be. Unless you can escape.”

  Then he left Aaron with a cup of water and his thoughts.

  Escape? There was no way out that Aaron could see; his cell contained nothing but a toilet, a wash basin, and a straw pallet. There wasn’t even a window. He tried to locate the source of the air current, and tracked it to a small fissure between two of the stone bricks. He pried at them until his fingers bled, but they would not budge.

  Aaron dropped to floor and began to cry.

  He couldn’t accept that he’d been locked away for no reason. This had to be a nightmare! Aaron pinched himself raw. He hit his forehead against the wall as hard as he was willing. Yet the stone remained forbidding and immovable, and the bars stood their silent watch.

  The next time the guard appeared, he laughed. “Still here? Maybe they were wrong about you.”

  Aaron gripped the bars. “Wrong about what?” he demanded. “Why am I here?”

  The guard passed Aaron a stale husk of bread and some dried beef. “Keep your strength up,” he said, then walked away.

  Aaron devoured the food hungrily, but without enjoyment. It might as well have been dirt, but it filled his belly. He had no idea how long he’d been waiting, but it felt like days.

  He slept in fits and starts, haunted by dreams of deafening noise, of people screaming, buildings burning, the scent of charred wood on the wind. He saw Lissy Pickens lying on the ground with a hole in her head, her blood soaking the grass. Each time, he awoke covered in sweat, unsure if the visions were real, or the hellish projections of his fear-addled brain.

  Had the fire been real, or fancy? Were his father and mother looking for him, or did they think he had perished? Either way, they would be beside themselves with grief. Worst was when Aaron dreamed of the man who had taken him. Over and over, he saw soulless black eyes that threatened to suck him into their abyssal depths. Every time he slept, he saw his captor’s merciless face, and the stubble of his raven-dark hair. Even awake, Aaron could not escape; he imagined the man lurking in every darkened corner.

  He tried screaming for help, but there was no response. He was utterly alone.

  The hours blended together. Aaron had nothing but the dark and the vermin and his thoughts for company. Even the guard, bringing food and water twice a day, did little to help Aaron mark the time. Sometimes his last meal felt like ages ago, but the jailer would not come. Other times Aaron would swear he’d just eaten, yet the pockmarked man was there with more stale bread and dried meat.

  Soon Aaron found himself actually hoping for the man who’d taken him; the man with the black eyes. At least he might put an end to Aaron’s suffering.

  Each time Aaron reclined on his hard straw pallet, he didn’t think he would sleep. He’d lain in straw many times on the farm, even hidden in it. This straw . . . was dead straw. It was packed together, devoid of moisture, half-rotted, stinking of piss.

  Even so, he slept, and dreams overtook him. Again he felt the heat on his face; again he saw poor Lissy Pickens with the hole in her head. He was going mad, he reasoned. Perhaps he was mad already, or sick, or injured. Could he be comatose in some hospital bed, hooked up to machines, dreaming a fevered coma dream of prison cells and dried beef and air that reeked of corpses?

  He took to playing games to keep himself going. He counted the bricks in the walls, the bars, and how many steps it took to walk the perimeter of his cell. He did jumping jacks and pushups. He tried to recall his favorite books word for word. He recited the opening lines of Tidings of the Wild almost a thousand times: “He awoke to find that all he knew had gone; there was only grass beneath him, trees around, and starry skies above. Civilization had left him far behind. Or, perhaps he had left it.” At first his voice was hoarse, but the more he spoke, the stronger it became.

  Aaron also thought of his favorite films. He loved the one in which Clyde Coburn played a prisoner of war, alone for years before he was rescued. Coburn’s character had no sunlight either; he marked the days on his cell walls with the changing of the guard, counting each one with the mantra “One day closer to freedom.” Aaron took that as his own axiom. Each time food arrived, he would whisper it to himself: “One day closer to freedom.”

  At last, Aaron began to find a rhythm.

  He stopped caring if that bastard in black showed up.

  Three walls and a line of bars became his life. His world.

  And then . . .

  With his pitch-black hair and pitch-black clothes, the dark man materialized like a phantom from the shadows outside Aaron’s cell. The man stalked up to the bars, and then, somehow, he was inside the cell, his stygian gaze boring into Aaron’s skull.

  “What are you doing?” the man asked.

  Aaron gaped. His knees quivered and gave out. He wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go. His heart hammered. When he tried to speak, what emerged was a croak.

  “Answer my question.” The man spoke in little more than a whisper, sibilant like stone on sandpaper, yet carrying an interminable weight.

  Finally, Aaron found his voice. “I was imagining . . . I was Clyde Coburn.”

  The man folded his arms. “You were supposed to escape. Or try to.” He paced around the cell. He scrutinized a set of markings on the walls: three tally marks for the three days since Aaron had been keeping track. “You acclimated.”

  Aaron swallowed. “Is that . . . good?”
r />   “I haven’t decided.” The man clasped his hands behind his back. “You’re strong, psychologically. Well-integrated. No lasting traumas. Resilient under pressure.”

  “Traumas . . .” He thought of his nightmares. The initial shock of this man’s appearance was fading, replaced by anger.

  “You remember, do you?” the man asked. “Yes, I took you from your home. But do not worry. It will be rationalized. Gas leak. Misplaced propane tank. They’ll come to believe the lies they tell themselves, eventually. They’ll believe you, and the girl I killed, both died in the explosion.”

  Aaron quivered. His fists clenched. The man said it all so matter-of-factly. How could he speak so easily of destroying Aaron’s life? Of murdering Lissy?

  “Are you angry?” the man asked.

  “Yes.” He was too afraid to lie.

  “Why don’t you do something about it?”

  Aaron paused at this, weighing his words. “I don’t want to die,” he said.

  The dark man laughed, though it was without humor. “You have a remarkable sense of self-preservation. I think I like you.”

  “What does that mean for me?” Aaron asked.

  “It depends,” said the man. Then he grabbed Aaron around the throat.

  Aaron felt his feet leave the ground. He kicked and flailed and clawed at the man’s hand. He tried to make words, but nothing came out.

  “Do something,” said the man.

  Aaron tried to think of a plan. Nothing came. The man’s grip was cutting off the blood to his brain. He was losing consciousness.

  But a part of him protested. This couldn’t be the end, not after the nightmares and the waiting and the fear. He wouldn’t allow it. There had to be something. Something he could do!

  “What do you do when someone threatens your life?” the man asked. “Do you run? Or do you fight with everything you have?” He shook Aaron in his grip.

  Aaron began to feel an odd prickling. It started behind his eyes, and wove its way through his skull. It was in his chest, too—sparks, like fireflies.