Traitor Born

Soft instrumental music plays. A woman with thick dark glasses sits in the corner facing the door. Her hair is white, with blunt-cut bangs in the front. A fat tumbler of amber liquid rests on the table beside her. A rose-colored cigar sends a curl of fragrant pink smoke up from her ashtray. A glove masks her moniker. On the opposite side of the room sits a thin, well-built man. He’s hollow-cheeked, and dressed as if for the opera, drinking a wine spritzer. I don’t judge: wine spritzers are delicious.

A clerk—middle-aged, a Virtue-Fated secondborn with slicked-back hair and a dark suit with a high collar—stands at a blue wave-shaped desk at the back of the room. The wall behind it is a shark tank. Holographic screens in the desk cast hieroglyphic symbols up onto the clerk’s face.

“Hello and welcome to Club Faraway.” The secondborn smiles. His teeth glint. His glittering diamond ascot pin twinkles. “Do you have a reservation or are you here to meet a party?”

“A party,” I say. “Solomon Sunday.”

His nostrils flare, and his finger hesitates on the virtual screen. He has been expecting me.

“Firstborn Sunday is—” His eyes widen in terror. I duck. The clerk’s neck and jaw explode from a fusionmag shot, spattering brain matter onto the tank behind him. I don’t look back but jump over the desk. A second fusionmag blast strikes me in the back between my shoulder blades. Judging by the angle, the shot had to have come from the wine spritzer man. The Copperscale of my coat absorbs part of it, but the impact is like being hit by a speeding hovercraft. I slam into the shark tank and slide to the floor. The clerk’s corpse twitches beneath me. I wheeze. My lungs feel turned inside out. Flecks of the clerk’s blood mar his diamond tiepin. I pluck the tiepin from the cloth.

Footsteps draw nearer. Ignoring the pain, I lurch up and throw the tiepin at the man who shot me. The needle and diamond slice into his pupil. Wine Spritzer screams and holds his hand to his bloody eye. I reach across the desk, grasp his other hand, and turn his fusionmag. We shoot at the white-haired assassin stalking toward us, but she dives to the floor. I twist the fusionmag in Wine Spritzer’s hand again and shoot him through the chin with it, blowing off the top of his head. As he crumbles, I tear the weapon from his hand.

The woman on the floor fires again. The pulse hits my right bicep. My jacket absorbs most of the pulse, but it still knocks me off my feet. My fingers go numb. I can’t hold on to the fusionmag, and it drops to the floor and slides. Straightening, I reach for it with my left hand. The woman walks around the desk, and her perfect cherry lips gape open when she sees I’m not dead. My fusion pulse blows her shattered heart out of her chest. She flies backward and hits the ground, bouncing.

I stagger to my feet as the numbness in my arm gives way to aching tingles. It still works, but it aches like hell. Moving my fingers to get the feeling back into them, I search Wine Spritzer with my other hand. A spade-like knife is concealed in a leg sheath. He was waiting for me. Whoever planted the assassins in the lobby knew I was coming—or someone like me. I remove his glove. No moniker—but a scar where it used to be.

I move to the woman. Her hair is a wig, and when I pull it away, she’s bald. Gruesome scars cover her scalp. I pluck the dark glasses from her face. Brown eyes with a silver tint stare up, unseeing. I don her glasses and wig, stuffing my long brown strands beneath it. I untie her rose-colored scarf, wrap it around my throat and the lower half of my face, and remove her glove. She doesn’t have a moniker either—it was cut out. I take her fusionmag and shove it in my pocket. Back at the clerk’s desk, I use the spade knife to cut out his secondborn moniker, stuffing it inside my glove so that it shines through the mesh.

Then I use the holographic screens above the desk to find Gabriel. He’s registered in the penthouse suite. I do another search. Solomon Sunday is registered to a suite on the eighth floor—the Euphoria Room. Maybe it wasn’t Balmora who set me up. Maybe Gabriel is here after all. Maybe my mother knew someone might come to kill him, now that he’s in Virtues, and set a trap here and in the penthouse.

The wall behind me slides sideways. Straightening in surprise, I realize that the wall was merely a holographic illusion. An entryway to a drug den lies open. Everything inside is red. Huge, round, ruby-colored lanterns hang from the ceiling. It’s like a multilevel casino, but instead of gaming tables and machines, there are tall transparent cylinders containing bodies. The bodies are suspended behind the glass. Some are alone in their tubes and simply float like dreamy fetuses in wombs. Others are suspended together in massive glass cylinders, entangling each other in orgies of passion. Decadent crimson furniture surrounds some of the glass tubes, occupied by firstborns watching the haze of smoke and naked bodies.

People walk the floor like zombies, with pallid skin and unbalanced gaits. A Virtue-Fated firstborn with bloodshot eyes stops in his tracks next to me. He’s stooped and unsteady on his feet. “Is this real?” he asks.

“No,” I reply, making my way into the red-poppy haze. The wall slides shut behind me, hiding the lobby. Serpentine clouds of red smoke hang in the air. The scent spins my head in lazy circles, even through my scarf. Red banners hang, curling and floating, from beams above, blooming like poppies—opening and closing, opening and closing.

A young boy, maybe eight, takes my hand. Wordlessly he leads me to a jewel-red counter where a secondborn—wearing a mask with a painted poppy over her nose and mouth—dispenses a menagerie of mind-altering substances from behind glass. Holographic menus display on the glass.

“Do you have aerosol?” I ask the Moon-Fated attendant. “Something that will make me sleepy?”

She languidly twists pieces of her garnet-colored hair around her finger. “Of course. Hazy Daze-99.” She holds up a cylindrical can and depresses a button on top of it. The aerosol mists in a short burst. The arch of it forms a rainbow. It doesn’t seem to affect her. “How many?”

“Everything you have and a mask like yours.”

Her eyes bug out. “Do you want that on a hovercart?”

“Yes.”

“Scan your moniker,” she says.

I scan the clerk’s moniker as she loads a few dozen aerosols into a hovercart. The cart passes through to me.

“Do you know where the lifts are?” I ask the little secondborn boy at my side. He nods, calls the lift with his moniker, and tugs my hand. As we walk to the lift, I ask, “What’s your name?”

He shrugs lethargically. I make a mental note to come back for him when I have the power to change his life by rescuing him from this awful place.

I enter the lift alone and wait for the doors to close. Then, opening the lid of the hovercart, I take out several cans and place them on the floor. I slip the mask over my nose and mouth and wrap it with the scarf. I lift a can and spray the cameras in the elevator, puncture several other cans in the hovercart, and close the lid.

The dial on the hovercart is set to “Follow Mode.” I reset it to “Propel Mode.” The hovercart hits the doors and grinds against them. Positioning the clerk’s moniker beneath the scanner, I select the eighth floor. The elevator rises. I lean back into the corner where the walls of the elevator meet. I lift one foot and place it on one wall. My other foot pushes against the other wall. With my feet on each of the two corner walls, I use the leverage to scale them and press myself against the ceiling near the doors. When the car stops and opens, armed guards are waiting, their fusionmags drawn. The hovercart idles forward. One of the guards opens it. An aerosol cloud wafts out. Their shoulders round, and their arms grow heavy. Thumps resound as the guards topple over.