The Silent Army

door.

I watched from next to the bed we’d once lain on, while he crossed the unit and opened the door. A tiny woman stood on the other side. She was zipped up in a huge purple parka, red hair sticking out from under a wool cap. She stared up at him from over a beaklike nose, and I saw heat stream through the veins in her face. She was excited by him.

She’d stepped closer, then, and spoke softly to him. I saw her pupils expand.

“What happened?” she asked. “Why are you so scared?”

“Don’t—”

She put one shaking hand on his. “Shhh.”

“Stop doing that,” he said.

“Why?”

She had put her other hand on his stomach and spread open her fingers.

“I know you miss it,” she said, putting her forehead to his chest. “I know you know how I feel. I wanted to thank you.”

“For what?”

“For caring about me, even a little bit.”

She was placing Nico under her control. At the time I didn’t realize what I’d seen, but I recognized it now. I saw the guilt in her eyes as she touched him, knowing his acceptance of it was coerced. I stepped out from the shadows, and she saw me.

“You’re dead—you can’t be here!”

She’d recognized me back then. We had never met, but still, she knew my face. She stared up at me, hands curled into tight fists, as heat coursed out from her chest. Even then there was something, some base instinct that told me she was trouble.

A small figure passed the mouth of the alley and toward the entrance to the convenience store. The computer took a snapshot of her face. It ran the comparison and got a match.

Target is spotted.

I stood and walked to the mouth of the alley. People streamed past me less than four feet away, but under the cloak, I was invisible. They’d see her, of course, and hear her if she screamed, but it would be over in a few seconds. By the time anyone realized she was dead, I would already be gone.

I watched her enter the store. Through the window, I watched her make her purchase. When she came out, she had a brown paper bag. Her red hair was draped around her sullen face, her lips drawn into a frown. She walked quickly, with her eyes on the sidewalk, and it looked like she’d been crying.

Now.

When she passed by me, I grabbed her by the wrist. I put my other arm around her thin waist and pulled her into the alley. She stumbled, but I held her as the brown paper bag slipped out of her hands. A bottle popped when it fell and hit the ground. An older man who passed by glanced down toward us, but didn’t even slow down. He could not see me; just some staggering drunk.

“Hey!” she yelped, and I clamped my hand over her mouth. She stuck both her legs out straight, but her heels just scraped along the wet blacktop as I pulled her deeper into the alley.

“Quiet,” I said in her ear.

I hauled her behind a trash bin, out of view. Running water ran down an open storm drain and helped cover the sound of her struggling. I forced her back and slammed her to the brick wall, then moved my right hand over her bony chest. I shut off the stealth cloak’s field, and her face went white as she saw me appear.

“You,” she whispered.

My open palm snapped apart, and my forearm split apart to my elbow. As the two halves splayed apart, she stared at the tip of the blade hidden there.

“Wait!” she said. “You’re not supposed to kill me!”

The blood rushed under her skin, and I watched the veins that pulsed along her neck. The blade was in position. One pneumatic blast would send it through her heart.

“You need me,” she gasped.

“There’s nothing I need you for.”

“You said the fate of everything was in my hands.”

“I never said—”

“In my visions. You said it.”

I was about to kill her, but that stopped me. The exact nature of their abilities was something that we hadn’t determined yet, but there was no disputing that they were real or at least based on reality, on possible outcomes. Imposing will or manipulating minds could be done by anyone, if not as well, but not the precognition. We didn’t know what it was, but we knew what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t prediction. The data points to lead them to their visions simply never existed. Nothing led them to the conclusions they reached; they just saw the end result and they were usually, if not always, right.

Fawkes had warned me against listening to her, but still, I was curious.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but that’s what you told me. You come to me in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake. You keep trying to tell me something, something important.”

“You saw me in a vision?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“The green room,” she said. “You come to me in the green room.”

I didn’t know what she was referring to. “And I spoke?”

“You were the one who told me to go to Nico two years ago,” she said. “The last time, you told me the city will burn.”

I remembered her back at the restaurant. Motoko had said that too.

“What did I mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why the messages come through you. Maybe I’m fixated on you …”

She stopped to think about that, curious, like she’d forgotten where she was. It wasn’t until I moved, stepping in closer to her, that she snapped out of it.

“You know something,” she said. “Or …some version of you does. You told me the fate of everything will be in my hands. You need me….”

She was bargaining for her life, I knew that, but I believed she meant it. I didn’t know what it meant, but I believed that she saw what she’d described. Part of me wanted to question her further, to extract the truths out of her ramblings, but there wasn’t time for that.

“You’re trying to tell me something,” she stammered. “You need me for something, or else the whole city will —”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have my orders.”

Her eyes were desperate for a few more seconds, and then she seemed to give up. She closed her eyes and let out a long, hoarse sigh.

“Can I at least have a drink first?” she asked. One of the bottles from her bag was intact. I reached down and picked it up.

“Here.” I held it out by the neck.

She opened the bottle and then tipped it back. She drained nearly a quarter of the bottle before she choked and sprayed liquor from her nose. She bent over coughing and, I thought, laughing.

“I’m going to die in an alley,” she said, smiling with tears in her eyes. “I knew it was too good to be true…. I knew all this was too good to be true….”

“It usually is,” I said.

“You want to know what I did last night?” she said, ignoring me. “I killed someone. I killed the guy that killed my friend…. I think I might have actually done it before. I actually killed somebody. Hey, didn’t you used to be a cop?”

“Detective.”