The 13 th tribe

[47]

The blow didn’t knock him out, but it might as well have. A spike of pain pierced his brain, kicking up incongruous thoughts like disturbed bats:

— Tyler, get to bed — technically speaking, the brain itself does not possess the sensory nerve endings to feel pain — ha ha ha ha ha — I did not come to bring peace, but a sword — the children! not the children too — the monastery was founded by the Roman Empress Helena in 330 AD — you’re here at the pleasure of Gheronda — and that gives us permission — you and the kid — you and the kid Jagger groaned, touched the new wound, and pulled his fingers away to visually confirm the blood he felt. It took his eyes a few seconds to focus.

Fast breathing drew his attention toward the man lying on his arm. His back rose and fell far more slowly than the quick breaths Jagger heard. He noticed the eyes: they were hovering near the man’s head, which teetered one way then the other unnaturally.

A woman’s voice whispered, “Phin… Phin!”

The eyes moved higher and stared at him. White sclera formed twin almond shapes, irises that appeared black in the dim light. They shifted down, and the man’s body began to roll over. Jagger tugged his arm out and pulled it close, tucking the handgun under his leg.

The eyes rose straight up and disappeared. Footsteps pattered around him. The backpack the man had dropped floated off the terrace, its strap forming a triangle above it. It swooped around, and the strap became an upside-down teardrop over what must have been someone’s shoulder. He was looking at the part of the pack that ordinarily pressed against a wearer’s back.

Jagger caught a glimpse of the eyes and said, “Who are you?”

The pack bounced in the air until it hovered over the man’s feet. One of his legs rose, the pack rotated, and the man slid away, trailing a slick of blood over the terrace. His unelevated leg cantered out, bent at the knee. The man gurgled, shook his head, lifted it.

“Ev-ah,” he said through blood and shattered teeth.

Jagger wondered if his tongue was intact.

He shook his head again and said, “No, no, wait”-or so Jagger interpreted from the “ oh, oh, aith ” the man gurgled out.

His leg came down. The pack moved around to his head and lowered, stopping a foot off the ground. His head rose-too steadily and too high to be his own doing. Jagger imagined the hand that must be holding it, the invisible woman crouching beside it. There was whispering, gurgling. The man’s head turned, and he spat. More whispering. The head lowered and the pack rose. The eyes stared at Jagger.

“Where’s the boy?” came the woman’s voice.

Jagger felt ice crystals form in his blood. He regretted not finishing the job, not pulling the trigger one last time. He sat up, bending his legs to keep the gun hidden.

“He has something of ours,” she said.

“Leave your address,” Jagger said. “I’ll mail it to you.”

Silence. Then: “We’ll find him.”

Jagger closed his eyes, then slowly opened them. “Just… leave. Please.”

“Not without what’s ours.” A beat. “Is he yours, the boy?”

“What does that matter?” Jagger said, but his words felt like denying Tyler. “Yes, he is.”

“All we want is what we came for. If he…”

Jagger stopped hearing her words. Tyler had appeared behind her, rising up from the stairs. He smiled when he saw Jagger but recognized that something was wrong-not the least of which, Jagger thought, was the backpack floating between them. His boy froze, except for his lips, the corners of which drooped.

Go back, Ty, Jagger thought, hoping beyond hope that somehow, some way his son would hear him, would understand. Back up, Tyler.. go… away.

Jagger forced his attention back to the floating eyes, but it was too late. She’d caught something in his expression or in the flick of his gaze. The eyes disappeared, and the backpack rotated around.

“Tyler, run!” Jagger yelled. “Go! Go now!”

The pack began bouncing in midair, heading toward his son.

Tyler spun and descended the steps.

Jagger lifted the revolver and pointed it at the backpack. “Stop!” he yelled, then added the word that had become, in the culture of cops-and-robbers entertainment, weighted with a specific consequence: “Freeze!”

The pack stopped and shifted sideways; it rotated back and continued toward the stairs. Jagger wondered if she had forgotten about the backpack, that it betrayed her location.

He nudged his aim a few inches to the right of the pack and fired.

When faced with something not only new but contrary to everything one has ever learned about the world, some humans are prone to suspect the supernatural or otherworldly-that hovering saucer must be from outer space because planes need wings and helicopters need rotors; those flickering lights, dropping temperatures, and self-opening cabinets are, of course, evidence of poltergeist activity. Upon first encountering the invisible being, Jagger’s mind had flashed through the possibilities- angel… demon… alien… ghost… But then he’d seen human eyes and heard a human voice, and he’d put it together: ordinary bad guys with extraordinary technology. What happened when his bullet struck the invisible thing sent his mind spinning back into the Twilight Zone.

A small explosion sprayed fire and smoke from the point of impact, as though the weapon had been loaded with exploding ammo, followed by an eruption of sparks-not the empty Bic lighter sparks the blade had kicked up when it struck RoboHand, but big, Fourth-of-July sparks. A body appeared, sleek and charcoal-colored, with blue electrical currents flashing lightning-like around every contour, every limb.

At that moment it seemed to Jagger more of a probability than a possibility that the thing was some sort of space-aged robot, a real-life Terminator who’d come from the future not for John Connor but for Tyler Baird.

The creature-definitely female, or at least constructed to resemble one-reached back with both arms to claw at the sparking point of impact. She spun around like a dog chasing its tail, like a man on fire. She pulled off the backpack and slung it aside. She slapped at her arms, stomach, head, trying, it seemed, to catch the quick squiggles of electricity coursing over her. But her hands always landed after the current had passed. In desperation, she gripped the scaly flesh of her shoulder and tore at it, spinning away from him as she did.

After ten or fifteen seconds, the sparks sputtered and stopped. The blue streaks of current diminished to a few random bursts, except in one area: they congregated around her neck, concentrating into a pulsating color of bright blue threads that flew like shooting stars over her shoulders, up around her head.

The figure turned back toward him. Both hands grabbed her neck, and in a quick upward motion she peeled off her face, revealing-Jagger realized with some relief-her true identity: very human and very beautiful, an observation coming more from the part of Jagger’s mind that told him marauding psychopaths who attacked monasteries and kids should not look like this than from the part that appreciated pretty things.

She had already torn away the material over her shoulder, arm, and chest, revealing a black athletic halter top. At first he thought her bare skin was dappled with shadows, but they were too crisp and formed images: thorny vines, a grinning skull, crosses in a variety of styles. Black, gray, blue tattoos. Among them one stood out: on her forearm, the same gold fireball he’d seen on the man.

She clutched at her neck again and pulled down, ripping the material from clavicle to armpit. A flap fell over her chest, exposing a metal collar identical to the man’s. She fumbled with something in the back-a latch, he realized, when she pulled the collar off and hurled it to the ground.

Grimacing, she rubbed her throat, then her face. Her right hand slid around to the back of her neck, and she released a curtain of black hair. She scratched at her bare arm, then at the other through the material, then her legs. She placed her hands on her knees and stayed that way, catching her breath. Slowly she raised her face and gazed at him through strands of hair.

“That hurt,” she said. More heavy breaths, then: “Well, what are you waiting for? Shoot.”