The Miranda Contract (4 page)

Chapter 6

The Small Gods

The Grampians, Five years before

D
ust.

It was everywhere, covering every surface in the dimly lit basement. The old man was standing in the middle of the room with his eyes looking up at the ceiling, his wild grey hair standing up in tufts like he’d only just woken up. And that newly awake look was in his eyes too, with flashes of light reflected from the torches they’d brought down with them.

“He looks crazy,” Bree said softly, shifting the weight of her backpack from one slender shoulder to the next. Dan shrugged. He’d seen crazy before.

His grandfather had brought the four of them on a hiking trip to the Grampians, far to the west of the state. Dan was used to being alone with his grandfather, but he wasn’t accustomed to the presence of other kids, especially the ones his grandfather had assembled.

Bree was three years older than him, and at fifteen she seemed to have left childhood behind and looked at the world with knowing eyes. Dan thought maybe he was a little in love with her. The other two were older still. Halo was the eldest at sixteen and brimming with anger; while the quiet, wide-eyed Lily was somewhere in between. They’d never met before, although Dan knew that Lily was family in a way, being sort of cousins despite her being Chinese and him being Russian.

“Is this a bomb shelter?” Halo asked, arms crossed as he stood at the top of the stairs leading down into the basement. Lily, Bree and Dan had wandered down with the old man but Halo hadn’t left the filtered sunlight coming in the windows from upstairs. Dan looked up and noticed the way the light formed around his head, casting his features into darkness but brightening the edges.

“Of a sort, yes,” the old man said. “A shelter for bombs.”

He coughed a little and waved away motes of dust. After a few more waves of his hands, the lights in the basement suddenly burst into life, flickering a little before burning at full intensity. Dan felt the wave of energy coming from his grandfather and it washed over him like a warm breeze, tingling his skin.

“And then there was light,” Bree muttered as she dropped her bag to the floor. “Are you coming down or are you just going to hover up there?”

Halo leaned against the door, keeping it open, but said nothing. He hadn’t spoken at all on the trip from Melbourne.

“This isn’t my idea of a holiday either, you know?” Bree continued, although she didn’t look up at him, instead concentrating on the benches and cabinets set up in neat rows like a museum. “My guardians didn’t give me a choice.”

“None had choice,” the man said. “This is no holiday. Each of you is here for training.”

Dan sat on a high stool at a bench and leaned his head on folded arms. He watched Lily reach out to touch a glass cylinder containing a skeleton of some small, slender creature. All around them were remnants of strange collections. Lily’s fingers stopped before they touched the surface but Dan could see the glass frost suddenly, blossoming outward from where the girl’s fingers hesitated. Their eyes met and she quickly dropped her hands, thrusting them into her jeans, and turned away to look listlessly at more dust.

“What kind of training?” Halo asked, stepping down two of the steps. Dan lifted his head and watched the Pakistani kid come closer. His head was shaven and he wore a tank top which accentuated the hardness of his toned body. Dan felt like a minnow next to Halo.

“For our powers obviously,” Bree jumped in, suddenly surrounded by a mistral whirlwind of dust. She weaved her hand, index finger extended, around her body and the dust trailed after it. In the light of the basement it looked spectacular. With her captivated audience following the dust trail, Bree wiggled her finger a final time and the dust concentrated in on itself until it formed a dark solid ball, the size of a marble. She opened her palm under the dust ball and it dropped innocently into her hand.

The man clapped his hands three times, clearly proud of the moment.

“You are gods,” he said with a wide open smile. He pressed the hair back down on his head and nodded to himself. “You are the small gods, walking amongst us.”

“We’re not gods,” Halo said. “We’re monsters.”

The man took in a breath at the words, as if he recalled them from an earlier time. He looked up at Halo and his face was reflective of the boy’s pain. Dan turned away, resting his cheek on his arms which lay on the bench. He could see a console to his left, small red lights lit up in a row. There was a hum from within the machine and he absently played with the circuitry, channeling energy one way and then the next, testing its limits and formulating new paths, new possibilities. The console was a monitoring device and Dan felt the remote cameras and sensors which lay out beyond the cabin, all focused on maintaining the secrecy of this hidden place.

“You are gods,” the man repeated louder, having walked up to meet Halo on the stairs. He took the boy’s hand, unclenched the fist and held it within his own. “You see this?” he asked, gently shaking the combined hands. “This is promise to you, Sohail Pirzada.”

Dan took a second look at them. His grandfather was below the boy, almost in a supplicating pose. A part of him wanted to be where Halo stood, to be the center of his grandfather’s attention.

“A promise,” the man repeated. “You will be god.”

Later that night, after they pitched their tents in the open quadrangle between the cabin and what was supposed to be a boat or trailer shed, the four campers sat around a campfire. Dan’s grandfather was in the basement, supposedly re-establishing its glory days, whatever that meant.

Halo brightened up during the day, filled with the confidence that one day he would be able to crush all those who had ever opposed him. He flashed his charismatic smile at the girls and told them about his family, about their escape from persecution, their arrival in Australia followed by their meteoric rise to fortune. He was a self-described golden child and they all believed him.

Especially Bree.

“But what about your gifts?” Bree asked him. “What can you do?”

He leaned in close to her, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear. She kept his gaze but made no other effort to play his game. Dan felt his heart sink.

“I’m golden,” he said. “And I can read your mind.”

She looked away then, smiling a little self-consciously.

“You’re a liar,” she said.

“I can talk to machines,” Dan said, desperate to change the topic, desperate to fill the awkward gap that opened up between him and Bree. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” Halo mocked.

Dan nodded.

“And what do machines have to say?” Halo asked.

“Leave him,” Bree said. She leaned back on her arms and cocked her head up towards the stars. “That’s a great gift,” she said. Dan closed his eyes and smiled, letting the words hang in the air.

“Yeah, well, let’s see how great it is tomorrow in training,” Halo said.

“Yeah,” Dan said, hopeful.

Chapter 7

Dan

Melbourne, Present Day

“T
his has to
be illegal, doesn’t it?” Dan asked as he leaned against the railing and looked down to the street. There was a breeze behind him and it was picking up, blowing his hair forward across his face. “I mean, are you actually serious about me spying on your boyfriend?”

Alsana Owens stood next to him on top of the seven storey car park, but she didn’t hold on to the railing. Instead, her hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of her black duffel coat. Her hair was held down by a beret and her face was severe with piercing green, deadly eyes.

It was close to midnight. All of the normal people of the city were either partying or sleeping. The satchel at his feet contained a bunch of clothes and stuff he’d grabbed from the apartment. It felt pathetic against his leg. He looked at Alsana, at her gaunt profile in the moonlight, and then back across the street. Neither of them was normal, he figured. Probably hadn’t been normal for a very long time.

Alsana was his handler, a government appointed official with a tenuous link to the Uberhuman Affairs Office. After being arrested as a twelve year old supervillain and bundled through the courts and juvenile justice system, Dan had been nominated to be up-cycled. It was a program for underage ubers who managed to get on the wrong side of the law, usually for petty crimes. But in Dan’s case, things were a little more complicated. Dan had been involved in a massacre. People had died. And then there was the issue of his family.

His grandfather was the Mad Russian, an international psychopath with enough atrocities in his name to rank him up with the worst of the 20th Century supervillains, like Doctor Death or the Armageddon Krew. He was able to bring the forces of law and order to their knees in his time. But his time was, of course, firmly in the Cold War-era, well before Dan was even born. Since disappearing five years ago without a trace, the Mad Russian was generally written off as killed or otherwise indisposed. But now Dan heard his grandfather was back in town, not dead at all. He wondered what Alsana would make of that. Not that he’d ever volunteer that information. He wasn’t stupid.

And after being apprehended, tried in a juvenile court and finally up-cycled, Dan was working for the greater good on a regular basis. Redemption had no payment, but Alsana often laughed that it was good for his soul.

He wasn’t the only one, of course. The beauty of the up-cycled program was that a handful of uberhuman juvenile delinquents moved through the courts every year and those who were convicted were slapped with the program. In some cases, especially up north in Sydney, ubers with useful and impressive powers were trained to work in government-funded teams of law enforcers. It was a case of giving back to the community. In Melbourne, things were more low-key. Alsana had only three or four ubers on her books at any one time, and deployed them as she saw fit. The program was deliberately vague when it came to the duration of service. Dan had been a part of it since he was thirteen. There were others who had been in longer. In the end it seemed to depend on how useful an uber was. If they were more of a pest than an asset then they were generally let go after a few months. And so, Dan tried his best to irritate without getting into worse trouble.

“This is a training exercise,” Alsana said, keeping her eyes on the land cruiser below them. Dan blew into his hands to keep them warm.

“We’ve never had training before.”

Her eyes shifted to him and he shrugged. It wasn’t as if he was ever going to disagree with Alsana for more than a few jousts anyway, so Dan dropped his protests and focused his senses down below where a man in his fifties was talking on his cell phone while negotiating a tight exit from a parallel park.

The man was a married solicitor who had been doing the dirty with Alsana for about six months. Dan was gently appalled by the whole prospect, but also amused to finally find a chink in his handler’s armor. She’d always been so efficiently inhuman. It was nice to find out her life was just as messed up as his.

“Phone line is clear. It’s his wife.”

Dan could hear the conversation inside his head, electrical impulses that were intercepted and decoded. The man was distraught, his voice punctuated with sobs and pauses. Dan found his pleas a little boring, but the gist of the conversation was one of admission and repentance.

“He told her about the affair,” Dan said. “Promised that it didn’t mean anything. I think I saw this episode already.”

“What did he say,
exactly
?” Alsana turned around and looked away, back towards the stairwell. Her posture was stiff. Dan knew it was dangerous for him to be too frank, even though he was desperate for some payback. Alsana never treated him with anything close to kindness.

She was a horrible person.

But she wasn’t his enemy.

Dan closed his eyes, going for a theatrical stance in case she watched him. He lifted his left hand, fingers splayed, as if he was reading the broadcast. The truth was he received it instantly and translated it just as quickly.

“He’s saying that it wasn’t love,” Dan said.

“His words.”

“Right,” Dan said, awkwardness flooding through him. “I don’t love her, never did. I’d never hurt you.”

Alsana clucked her tongue.

“What else?” she asked.

“The wife is crying, saying she feels cheated.”

“Words, Galkin, words.”

“Right. It’s not that easy, you know? I’m not a voice recorder.”

“That’s exactly what you are,” Alsana said. “A device.”

Dan remembered how much he hated her, but he still couldn’t translate all of the hurtful details.

“I’ll never forgive you. You’re a … well, she’s not happy. But then he kind of grabs for her attention with something about their kids.”

Alsana walked off towards the exit, strong, deliberate steps.

“There’s a lot of swearing,” Dan called after her. She was hurting, but it was her own fault. What did she actually expect, Dan wondered, as if her little affair was going to end differently. He gave a last glance down to the car and followed her.

Back in the office, Dan cranked up the heating with his mind and took a seat opposite Alsana’s cluttered desk. There were always piles of reports on the desk and he wondered how much of the up-cycled program was kept on hard copy. Of course, he’d sneaked a look at the computer files hundreds of times, but she always seemed to have the mountains of files on her desk. His eyes darted to the small fan she had next to a reading light. Dan bit his lip and resisted the urge to turn it on and send the papers spiraling through the room. She didn’t look at him as he crossed his feet in front of him and stifled a yawn. She shuffled some of the papers into her top drawer and put on her reading glasses which made her look older. It also made her a little more approachable and he felt a rising guilt in his stomach, like he maybe did owe her something after all these years.

“Do you want me to blow up his car?” Dan asked.

“What?” she snapped, eyes narrowed for a moment before she ignored his comment and booted up her laptop. “Forget it.”

“I could…”

She stopped him with a sharp, severe intake of breath which rushed up her nostrils, flaring them slightly. It was business. Whatever happened on the rooftop was over. Dan wondered why the guy had parked out the front of the office and how convenient it was, but then realized he probably came to see Alsana. Maybe for the last time.

“Do you have a job for me?” he asked, instead of thinking more about Alsana’s messed-up life.

Her eyes moved back to the laptop for a moment before she turned it around for him to see. A photograph of Miranda Brody smiled out at him. Dan wondered why the girl kept popping up into his world all of a sudden. The screen’s image was from a promotional concert poster. Miranda’s headshot was flanked by six monsters, which looked like prosthetic and makeup until he read the words, and realized the heads belonged to ubers.

“The Human Tour?” he asked. “Isn’t that kind of insulting?”

“To you, perhaps. You’ll be working for Miranda Brody’s management team,” Alsana said, as if she were reading from a particularly dull pamphlet. Her eyes were locked on to him over her dipped reading glasses and Dan knew she was waiting for his usual arguments.

Despite his best efforts Dan was still obliged to work for her, and while it usually entailed surveillance work or decryptions using his powers, Alsana wasn’t too particular about what she got him to do. For four years he was required to sign in every fortnight, attend seminars on responsibility and civic duty, convince the counselors that he wasn’t lapsing into criminal tendencies, and do whatever it was that Alsana Owens deemed necessary for his rehabilitation.

He had been a teenage super-villain for two weeks. And no one was going to let him forget about it.

“So what would I actually do?” Dan asked.

“You tag along,” Alsana said. “There’s been some little problems in the States and something in Indonesia, so we’ve been asked to send you in.”

“Security?”

She sniffed and shook her head.

“If it was a security issue, they’d send in a professional. No, this Brody girl has a thing for freaks. Her management has agreed to let you in as surveillance. Turns out you’ve already met their security detail tonight. They seem to like your look, they’re interested in your powers, but don’t want anything more than a visually appealing footnote, okay? No heroics.”

She laughed and swung her chair around so she could stand up.

“I told them not to worry about that,” Alsana continued. “Danny’s not the heroic type.”

Dan remained silent. He knew it would be a few more minutes before Alsana would allow him to leave, so he purposefully looked at the window. It was dark outside, clouds smothering the stars and moon.

“You’ve got a meet and greet tomorrow night,” she said, moving around behind him as she cut laps in her office. “They’ve requested you dress in black, nothing too flashy, nothing too off the rack.”

Dan set his jaw and bided his time.

“Then you’ll be given details on the concert. Aren’t you the luckiest little uber-crim in the world?”

“Can I go now?” Dan asked. “It’s past my bedtime.”

“You can thank me,” she said instead. “Anytime now. I mean, people would think you’d prefer the alternative than to be this little princess’s play thing.”

Alsana never offered alternatives. They were phantoms, like fringe benefits or the concept of a personal life in her eyes. But Dan also knew she required penance and she liked to talk her way into clever conversation.

“What alternative?”

“Prison, wearing those orange jumpsuits and scrubbing the floors of the shower block. A part of me would love to see you there, Danny, of course I would, but prison isn’t actually a very nice place.”

She smiled and Dan felt like walking out. He knew how the conversation would play out, but he didn’t go anywhere. If he did anything stupid, she would reprimand him, write up an incident report, and he’d have to go back through the counseling course. So, instead, he sat and waited.

“But you know that anyway, don’t you?” she said. He knew what he was supposed to say, to do. He was supposed to get angry, maybe fry some circuits. “Do you even remember daddy’s face?”

“Not so much,” Dan said and stood up, avoiding her cruel face. There were bright flashes at the corner of his eyes, threatening to bring up memories from the plaza five years before. But he wasn’t going to let her play him so easily. He picked up his satchel and slung it over his shoulder as he turned to the door. Alsana made it back to her desk and she leaned on it, studying him. Dan figured a full lap of the office was enough of a lecture. He reached for the handle.

“Disappointing.”

“Get used to it,” he said “So the meet and greet is at six? I’ll be there.”

“You’ll need this,” Alsana said.

He turned back, reluctantly, and looked at a silver wrist band on her desk. The Human Tour was clearly visible and his mind could detect subtle electricity within the silver band. He recognized it as a security tag. State of the art but still just a way to label a person.

“Thanks,” he said, took it in a quick swipe, and headed for the door again.

He could feel Alsana’s eyes on his back as he left but she made no more sound. Outside the office he walked past the security camera which fed directly into Alsana’s office, and then jogged down the front steps, eyes closed as the cold air greeted him.

Stupid.

It was pointless to aggravate Alsana, and Dan knew it.

As he walked down the street he wondered how Miranda’s people found out about him. He remembered the security guy outside the hotel, but it still seemed a stretch for them to put everything together, especially in the one night.

But it was late and Dan just needed to find a place to crash. Even though he hated the idea of it, he found himself on the route to his work. Each step seemed like another reminder at how pathetic he had become.

“Can I crash here tonight?”

Dan had his hoody pulled up against the rain, but the light from inside Birdie’s back room sliced across his face and made him blink. The woman who opened the door didn’t look surprised to see him. Her mouth was loose around a sad looking cigarette, and her painted-on eyebrows were frozen-serious. She rubbed her hands dry on an apron and let the door open wider for Dan before heading back to cleaning the grills and fry-pits, cigarette ash dispersed in her wake. Tabitha lived above the shop and knew the owner, Marco, from some trip to Europe. She’d managed to score a cash-only job cleaning his place when she rocked up in Melbourne a few years before. She wasn’t an especially nice person, but she generally let others ruin their own lives and got on about the business of ruining her own. Since Dan started working at Birdie’s he’d heard about the procession of dead-beat boyfriends and late-night hospital visits. Some stories were back-room myth, some were true. Tonight, though, he just wanted to sleep it all away and work out his problems in the morning. Besides, Dan had all the unpleasant personalities he could handle with Alsana.