Find Her (The Erodium Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Find Her

  The Erodium Trilogy Book One

  Kenneth Zink

  Fahrenheit Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Links

  1

  Protect her. Those were the words Lyla felt thrumming through Mac, after the grenades clinked along the sidewalk bordering the elementary school and popped out plumes of pale smoke that smelled like burnt sugar, as soon as he detached from the surrounding ring of Secret Service agents to haul her from the ground and swaddle her against his chest. The words belonged to President Molly Walker. Protect her. POTUS said them each morning she left her granddaughter with Mac. It started years ago, back when Molly was a congresswoman and Lyla was a giggling clump of dough. Now the woman was the most powerful person on the planet and the girl was as tall as a kitchen counter, quivering against his chest. Protect her.

  “Little Bird is falling,” Mac said into the watch on his wrist, detaching himself from his emotions, “I repeat, Little Bird is falling.”

  “Roger, Big Bird, eyes on,” a voice crackled in his earpiece, coming from one of the rooftop snipers, perched on high.

  “Targets?”

  “Negative.”

  “Headed for transport,” Mac said, remembering the hulking armored car further down the sidewalk, outside the mist.

  He kicked the grenades into the street while the other agents formed a circular phalanx around him and the girl, turning outward, throwing their forearms across their noses and drawing their guns. Mac drew his own piece and held his breath and buried the girl in his shirt. The hiss of gas sputtered to a stop and the wail of fleeing pedestrians faded, the world masked by a quiet twilight haze.

  “Move,” he said.

  Together, they crept along the sidewalk, toward the edge of the shroud, but stopped when bullets pebbled the pavement around them.

  “Hold.”

  Lasers sliced through the smog.

  “Eagles, you got anything?” Mac asked into his wrist.

  The lasers drifted until they settled on the heads of the agents surrounding him and the girl.

  “No,” Mac said.

  He squinted through the fog while the ring of agents ducked and the lasers ducked with them.

  “No!”

  In a single second, a colossus of bullets synchronized into one biblical shot, like a ripple of thunder and lightning, splitting the earth in two. Blood splattered through the grey air, and the agents flopped to the ground.

  Lyla saw nothing but the insides of her eyelids and felt nothing but his pulse barreling through his breastbone and heard nothing but the gruesome din of the real world. The roar of gunfire and the dull slap of flesh against stone. Her body shook while her mind desperately tried to fantasize Mac and the other agents as a team of superheroes clobbering a horde of monsters, pows and bams erupting from each hit in colored bubbles that painted an image of the good guys saving an equally good world.

  Mac clutched the girl to his chest. Huffed through the smoke. Soaked in the aftermath. Men and women he’d served with for years, people with families and hobbies and even dreams that still endured into midlife, reduced to bodies and blood. A massacre plucked from war. Activating the best and worst parts of himself. The ones that could create and the ones that could destroy.

  Protect her.

  Mac ran. Away from the carnage, down the sidewalk, out of the smoke. Knowing he was alone. Up ahead, where the car should have been, the road was empty. He pivoted toward the nearest building, looking for targets but finding none, when a bullet tore into his leg and his knee crashed to the cement. He pushed off the ground and into a hobble but another bullet tore into his other leg and then he fell, twisting as he arced down toward the sidewalk so that he would take the blow and the girl would be safe.

  His back thudded against the concrete and she rolled out of his arms, his gun skittering across the sidewalk.

  Pain. Roasting through his legs, beating the muscles across his back like a mallet against meat, rushing him back to each time he’d taken a bullet while deployed, doing things for what he’d thought at the time was the greater good. He looked down. Blood leaked from his calves and seeped through his pants. He tried scraping himself up to a standing position but kept collapsing, his legs limp and searing.

  The girl.

  Mac rolled on his side, his head lolled against the pavement, and looked at her.

  She was on her side too, facing him, her eyes fluttering open and closed, creating the same look she often had late at night, when he would watch POTUS tuck her under a shield of blankets.

  The grenades. They must have spurted sleeping gas to neutralize the girl. Which meant he was next.

  Her lips moved but nothing came out. It looked like she was trying to say his name, the man who had sworn an oath to keep her safe, the only thing her brain could formulate as she drifted off to a dangerous sleep.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Mac said. “We’re going to see each other again. You’re going to be okay.”

  Out of the swirling smoke, dissipating by the second, strode a masked figure. Black pants, black leather jacket, black motorcycle helmet with the visor down over the face, Heckler and Koch MP5 in its hand. Not an inch of skin in sight. Mac crawled toward his gun but the terrorist kicked it away, stepped on his side, and rolled him on his back.

  The terrorist looked down at Mac. Tilted its head, as if out of curiosity. Flipped the selector switch on the submachine gun. Aimed the barrel at his stomach. Pulled the trigger.

  One bullet, more blood. This time in his mouth. Iron coating his tongue, his body desperate to spit the stuff out. It wasn’t something the girl should have to see. Mac swallowed it and almost hurled and rocked back on his side to reach out and touch her tiny fingers, curled toward her palm, her curly hair thrown across her face and her eyes barely visible behind her shuddering lids, wisps of smoke worming through the air between them.

  Another terrorist snatched her from the ground and then their hands were pulled apart. His and hers. Severed.

  Lyla, slung over the shoulder of the monster that had taken her, saw nothing through the slits in her drooping lids but the shrinking image of the man whose name she couldn’t say, laying on his side, spurting blood like a toppled fountain.

  Protect her.

  Mac watched the terrorists jump in a van and squeal away down the street. As his mind slipped from his body and blood erupted up his throat, the chill of death freezing its way through his legs while the faraway howl of ambulances grew, he held onto only one thought.

  He would do anything for her. Even this.

  2

  Just one drink, that was all she needed. Something to get her through the next few moments.

  Robin pulled the flask from her trench coat, looked around the daylit alley of puddles and garbage, and tossed back a swig of liquor. Nothing left to do but her job. Fragment detective. Sift through the memories that clung to everyone and everything. Solve the case and collect her commission, the same loop of work that had ensnared her for almost two decades, ever since she was eighteen.

  She tugged off a glove and dropped a scrap of cloth into her now bare hand. Minutes
ago she’d torn it from the shirt of her target, Sahil Khatri, seventeen years old, a trainee who’d escaped A-Cad, the Academy of the National Institute for Frags, where kids like him became people like her. Fragment detectives. She’d tracked the target back to his parents, hiding in their apartment while he contracted work for the Frag Liberation Front, a terrorist organization led by a man known simply as Joel. No other intel. She’d been hunting him for years, the most wanted man in the world, broadcasting untraceable manifestos, growing a syndicate of rogue frags and their sympathizers, deploying everything from misinformation to violence to lobbying to get what he wanted, which was supposedly a world where frags, like Robin and Sahil and even Joel himself, could live freely. Whatever the hell that meant.

  Leaning her gloved hand against a brick building, she closed her eyes, letting the memories that clung to the cloth in her bare hand drown her in a torrent of bleeding watercolors.

  The target. That was who she was now. Days before.

  Sahil, sitting at his desk, a puny remnant of his childhood, his fingers flying across his keyboard as he hacked into a server for an anonymous contact in the FLF.

  Running to the local bodega in the middle of the night for an energy drink, a bag of chips, and a pack of cigarettes he bribed the clerk for, going home, taking breaks from programming to sit by his open window and puff smoke out into the warm night air, feeling like a man.

  Robin scrubbed through the memories.

  Sahil, coming back from a snack run the next night to find his parents waiting for him in their cramped living room, his laptop open on the coffee table, his mother yelling at him in Hindi for getting involved with a terrorist organization, his father silent beside her.

  Grabbing his laptop and slamming his door and working until dawn, messaging his FLF contact, letting them know the job was almost done, not knowing why they needed him to hack this particular server but simply happy to contribute to a cause he believed in and make some money doing it, dumping every payday into an untraceable bank account so that one day he could disappear for good.

  More scrubbing.

  Sahil, grumbling when his mother nudged him awake and told him there was a woman there to speak to him.

  Panicking when, through his cracked door, he saw her. Robin. Hair cut close to her head, body robed in a black trench coat, hands in her pockets, the black gloves she wore poking out and telling him who she was and why she was there.

  Pushing his mother from his room and shutting the door, locking the knob, stuffing his laptop and clothes into a backpack, the knob twisting from a hand on the other side, rattling against the lock.

  Freezing when the knob went still and quiet.

  Running when the fragment detective kicked in the door, heaving open the only window in his room and throwing a leg out onto the fire escape, imagining what his life would have been like without the NIF, a fantasy of hopping onto the rusted platform after school to play video games and watch the sunset.

  Yelping when she dragged him back into the apartment and tossed him on his stomach and pushed his cheek into the carpet that smelled like sandalwood, foreign instead of familiar, while she whipped out a pair of clacking cuffs.

  More focus.

  Sahil, panting and confused when the fragment detective rolled off him.

  Scrambling away and seeing the aftermath, her slumped against his dresser and him standing above her, his dad, palming a statue of Shiva the Destroyer, the two of them, father and son, sharing a look that felt like the last of their lives.

  Grabbing his bag as his mother rushed into the bedroom and gasped, dropping to her knees and clamping her hands together, praying for the fragment detective to spare her son.

  Thinking of an address, wrenching away when the stunned fragment detective clenched the bottom of his shirt, trying to push the address from his mind now that she had ahold of him, the shirt tearing while he looked at his parents, now complicit in his crimes of escaping the NIF and aiding the FLF, and he thought about how much he still loved them, and how he never told them that, and—

  An address. That was what she needed. Robin cycled back through the memories and caught it swimming in a sea of fear the moment Sahil looked down at her.

  89 Bargo Street.

  Something compelled her to cycle further back though, until she was looking at his parents the night before she’d come for him. They looked so much like her own parents, or at least her memories of them, way back when. Unsure of how to keep their child safe.

  The wail of ambulances and cop cars zooming by pulled her out of the stew of color and sound and worst of all, feeling. Too much of that and she’d fall apart. Unravel.

  Robin opened her eyes. Back in the alley. That was where she was. Remembering.

  2021. She was five years old. On an ordinary day at school she grabbed a bar on the playground and suffered an onslaught of every sense and more, thinking and feeling and being, whipped into a monsoon of memory that belonged to someone else. She screamed, fell on the woodchips, wondered if it was real. It happened the whole rest of the day, anytime her hands touched anyone or anything. Touch then scream then flinch or recoil or stumble, drowning in memories that weren’t hers. Somehow it hurt, up in her head, like a hot knife lodged in her brain, searing and splitting. Pain without pain. She cried. Saw the nurse. Called her parents. They picked her up early and pegged her with questions.

  What happened?

  Are you sure?

  Can you tell us where it hurts?

  Are you sure?

  From then on she stayed home from school, wearing a pair of fuzzy winter gloves her parents shoved on her hands while they figured out how to stop their child from suffering.

  Soon the truth swept the news. Cases like hers, bouts of insanity linked to bare hands, had popped up all around the world, always in children her own age. Her parents were relieved to learn there were others like her, but she still felt like a freak, especially once the scientists identified the problem, a genetic mutation that affected less than .00000006 percent of the population, which, out of a pool of eight billion, came to just under five hundred kids who could glimpse the recent experiental energy that apparently clung to nearly everything. Skin, clothes, rocks. Everything but water.

  The woman who discovered the mutation nicknamed it Erodium. Robin always wondered how she’d come up with that name. What it meant.

  Why the gene had flipped when it had, across the globe and all at once, and how exactly mutants like Robin did what they did, pulling Erodium energy to experience the recent past of others, were questions that still didn’t have answers. The science had been at a deadend for decades. That didn’t stop people from speculating though, everyone from religious leaders to conspiracy theorists dropping their suspicions into the communal pot, brewing a gumbo of fear and anger that always boiled into hate.

  Some scientists argued that the mutation was actually an evolution, and that evolution only arose as an adaptation to stress. For a time Robin believed them, early in her career, when she still believed everything happened for a reason.

  2052. She had a headache. Got them all the time. She knocked back another swallow from her flask. Dropped the scrap of cloth and watched it sink to the bottom of a puddle. Slipped back out into the moving mass of Washington D.C. Flagged an autocab and slid in the backseat. Slid her NIF credit card through the reader and stated the address. 89 Bargo Street. When the cab pulled away from the sidewalk she pulled her flask from her coat and took a sip. Barely enough to constitute a drink. Any more and she’d be compromised, she knew that, but she needed to go through the motions. If only for a drop of the stuff.

  Apprehend Sahil Khatri. If she did that she could go home and drink until she was as close to gone as she could get.

  Midway through the trip, the cab stopped in front of a mob of protesters swarming the metal bars guarding the White House lawn, spilling into the streets, shouting, their mouths chomping air while they bobbed their signs and slogans up and down.
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  MAKE CHINA PAY

  TAKE THE MOON

  STOP THE FRAGS

  Three issues, intricate and nuanced but reduced to three words a piece, nothing new, war cries all railing against President Molly Walker.

  “Would you like context for the current protests?” the artificial intelligence driving the cab asked with the dialect of a human but the energy of a computer.

  “Fuck context,” Robin said as the cab was swallowed by protesters. She knew enough.

  China and the moon and frags were all tied together in one ugly knot. Walker had spent decades in Washington trying to win what historians were calling the Warless War between America and China, the planet existing without a definitive superpower while the two countries fought with everything except actual firepower. To her credit, Walker hadn’t been afraid to risk political capital for policies that kept America racing alongside China, but change was slow, and there were always people ready to burn the system down if it didn’t happen overnight. Now, as President of the United States, Molly Walker was playing political chess against Lu Huang, President of China, with no end in sight. The Warless War had lasted so long it felt like the globe was a boiling cauldron, simmering at the rim, ready to explode. Robin wasn’t sure what the people wanted from Walker. War, it seemed. The real thing. Maybe a magic wand that could wind back the clock and return things to what they’d once been, all that time ago. America reigning supreme.

  “Take the moon,” the AI said, clearly analyzing the protesters and their slogans. “Speaking of which, you ever go to space? If you use the code UPANDUP I can offer you ten whole percent off your first purchase of a flight from—”