Ahndrian Archives

“Jacinda?” A deep, static polluted voice asks through the machine. The droids approaching from afar cease their slow march to scan and study the situation.

I freeze in place, bewildered by a tinge of familiarity within the fear, when an explosion of the machine’s built-in munitions sends it toppling over onto Jeno, snapping his bones under its weight.

I look away from the sight, burying my face in the sleeves of my jacket. I lose my voice and the air I breathe. Searing heat and heaviness gather behind my eyes, and a ragged ache ripples through my head and neck. I am left whimpering in the silence of a lukewarm night alone, but I can feel the scream inside me as though I hid it behind a dam. Terrible and violent and mind-splitting as it bucks at my ribcage.

My ears ring and muffle the gurgling sounds ahead. I beat against the pavement with my fist and drag my nails across it while trying to reclaim my breath. As my strength falters, the ringing consumes me. I sink lower onto the gravel until my body lays flat against the ground.

Finally, I draw a breath and scream, “Someone, please help us! Don’t let him die, please!”

The night carries my voice to the distance but returns no reply. I force myself up onto my damaged legs and limp towards the fire. To my right, the old man doesn’t stir. Blood pools around his leg and soaks his trousers. If he breathes, he isn’t breathing well. To my left are the eyes of my neighbors, daring to bear witness, but not to aid. Even our true identities stir no greater action in our fellow man.

I fall to my knees as the prosthetics finally give way. As I look around, hoping for someone to brave the chaos and fire, I see that my spectators have all drawn their curtains. Only now do I hear the shuffle of Miyavash’s machines and see them gathering around me in the growing black of night. My eyes become heavy, and my world blurs. Just before closing my eyes, I catch a pair of light brown dress shoes attached to long, stark-white pants legs running to me.

“No! God! Right-fucking-now? Hurry and get her, you dumb forklifts!” Tepda Miyavash says, his voice more grating and obnoxious than I remember. “Ms. Grant!”

I don’t remember closing my eyes or falling asleep, but I open them to find Tepda Miyavash staring at me with a cigarette in his mouth and a grim look on his face. Red and blue lights paint his back.

“She’s up.” Miyavash says, nudging the shoulder of an EMT beside him. The barely noticeable man looks to me for no longer than a moment before averting his gaze.

The two shake hands and Miyavash steps inside, the doors hissing shut behind him. He sits down, quiet but full of long exhales as the ambulance shudders to life. Blood stains the sleeves of his white dress shirt and his flamingo-colored vest and there’s an uncomfortable twitch in his hands.

“Jacinda.” He says, the pale glow of his eyes focused on the melted Loki Mask in his open palm. “We have a problem.”

“We? W-where is Jeno?”

“Let’s not do this. You know what happened, you know where you are, and you know how bad this is.” Miyavash takes a long draw from his cigarette before gently exhaling the smoke through his nostrils.

“Why did you alter it?” My voice croaks. A welled tear finally falls down my cheek.

He livens with a faint smile, but the thick vein over his temple and red glow in his eyes make me wholly aware of his anger. “Oh, you think I did this? You rich people are all the same. None of you ever think of consequences directly resulting from your actions, but you’ll sure as shit drag another fucker through the muck.”

“Enforcers aren’t made that way. They don’t break like that, and this one wouldn’t have if you kept your filthy hands out of it!”

“Call him right now, Jacinda.” Jeno’s voice layers angrily over the growing intensity of Miyavash’s.

“I called him. Just like Jeno asked. I called and called until I was sure he was no longer an option! Then I dared to seek help from anyone within earshot and got nothing, because they were too afraid of you!” I fight back the oncoming tears but try to press every ounce of hate I can into my voice.

“They were afraid of the cops and of what your milquetoast, assault droids would do to them after curfew!” He screams over the heart monitor, then quickly contains himself by pinching the bridge of his nose. After several moments of loud, mouth-breathing and attempting to stare a hole through the wall, Miyavash shakes his head. “I’m not going down for this. I didn’t owe Koushik this hot-cot affair with you and Jeno. Sheltering you two while he wriggled his way through another fight was out of the kindness of my heart! Oh, and how he begged for a favor from me, his supposed friend. Damn my business and the security of my lands. Damn the urgencies of my life and the battles I face without the wealth of eight nations to fall back on!” He stands quickly and leans over the gurney with a trembling finger raised to me. “Now, I could lose hold of my dwellings and suddenly that frigid, stick-mounting egotist you married is nowhere near his holo? I swear on the oldest and boldest of the Ahnda, Jacinda Masters, I will not be undone by you or any of your other greasy, iridium-laced associates in Central. You call Koushik and you do it right now!”

Three loud knocks from the front of the ambulance interrupt him. “Mr. Miyavash, you are out of line! You will remain seated and calm for the duration of the trip or be deemed a danger to the patient and Reiki Technica personnel. If you do not cooperate with us, the police will be called, and you will be detained upon landing.” A voice coming from a small speaker in the ceiling finishes.

Miyavash quickly deflates and backs off into his seat. “You know what? Blame me then. I’m the one who adjusted the robots and service droids in my care to better serve the needs of my land, and one of those adjusted machines brutalized someone and killed another. Open and shut, eh? What part did Koushik really play in the whole thing besides building the machine that I got on loan from Glascal Rowe’s daring boys in blue? But what about you, Jacinda? You say you’ve called Koushik before, many times even, and it’s like the man fell off the face of the earth. So, with Myrna Heights losing her head and Georgia’s favorite tinkerer disinterested in either of us, do you really have a leg left to stand on, Jacinda?”

“Shut the hell up!” A flare of pain gathers in my ribs, but I fight to muffle any sounds that would belittle my anger.

Surprisingly, Miyavash shuts up long enough for the hum of the ambulance turbines to fill our ears. I drift away on the sound, staring absently at the location my legs used to be. Somewhere along the line, my mind fills with images. Replays of the chaos in Myrna Heights at first; Jeno’s pain and the explosive death of the Enforcer, but with the addition of an unfamiliar voice. The presence of it, though not altogether frightening, tangles the near-hallucinogenic state of my daydream like noise to a radio frequency. I raise the hand, cradling my fractured ribs to the microchip in my temple, swaying arrhythmically between awareness of the external world and the racing images of my mind.

Eventually, focusing on the weathered voice and its scrambled words throws me back in the Enforcer's presence just as it was crippling the old man. A striking color of sky-blue lines his skin in patterns like the ones on Karno. The scene plays out the same, but as his lips part, a plethora of incoherent thoughts, suffocated emotions, and extravagant dreams floods outward. None of them my own.

At a blistering pace, I bear witness to Bartholomew Banner’s entire life as a man and Mancer. Karno forms at the center of the visions, silhouetted in black with only his markings and the white of his eyes made visible. He is in a constant state of change, aging back and forth from childhood to adult, while the chaos folds in around him.

“Markas Banner.” A nudge shakes me free, and I find myself in a wide, albeit blurry, hospital room with walls of pristine glass. Just beyond them, I can vaguely recognize a small stretch of Glascal Rowe under the blanket of a light-polluted night sky.

The next nudge brings me to a woman standing at the side of my bed. When my eyes and ears clear themselves enough to be of use, I realize the woman is a nurse. “Mrs. Masters! Are you okay?” She says with a bit of panic, her voice slightly robotic from augmented vocal cords. “Give me just a moment, I’ll be back with the doctor.”

Before I can utter a word, the lightly mechanized nurse swiftly aims for the glass doors and jogs her way out of view. Somewhere along the line, I must have blacked out and missed the trip here, but Miyavash’s last words chase me down. The heavy feeling in my chest and growing sense of isolation prompt me to find solace in a distraction. I search around for a button on the side of the hospital bed, opening a hatch in the ceiling that lowers a wide-screen television monitor.

“That won’t help you.” Karno says, forming from a dark corner of the room.

I sink into the bed. “Jesus Christ.”

“Markas Banner, but I won’t fault you.” There’s a certain graveness to his approach, and his unique markings become bolder as the ceiling lights wash over them.

“Nurse!” My scream is weak, barely loud enough to call a yell. I search frantically through welling eyes and thick bed covers for something to notify the hospital staff, but I freeze as his shadow climbs over my bed. The part of me that’s afraid of pain screams for me to close my eyes and demands I become small. It asks that I hope, of all things, that whatever awaits will simply pass over me if I am still, but that sort of hope doesn’t live in Glascal Rowe.

I dare to watch him, even if only through peripheral vision, as he stops at the foot of my bed. “H-hurting me won’t help you. He doesn’t care enough.” My tears fall and my body trembles.

Karno’s chest puffs and then falls quickly after, his cold sigh blowing against my face like a breeze. “I’m not here to hurt you, sister.”

“Th-Then why are you here?”

“Because you called me. That, uh, vision my grandfather cast and left in y’all’s heads, you saw every detail of himself that he wanted to be remembered in the event of his death. While you were subject to all that crazy shit, you found me, called, and I came running.” He steps slowly over to the side of the bed and kneels to my eyeline. “And because Jeno ran to my grandfather when he needed somebody most. Something I’m sure he learned from you, and I’ll never get to thank him for that. I failed my grandfather tonight. I wasn’t there for him, but I’m willing to bet someone running after you, in the same way you and Jeno run to folks, is long overdue.”

Karno stands and extends his hand to me as I fight back the urge to sob into the sheets. “I can’t. I have nothing! I don’t know what to do!”

“Let’s try recovering first, sister. Tepda is going to get his. Everyone involved will, but we will not let them destroy us.” A strange aura pools in his eyes and changes his irises into piercing blue rings of color surrounded by pitch-black sclera. He gestures for me to take his hand, with warped echoes rippling off his words. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Let’s get out of here.”

I hear the chime of the elevator down the hall and a minor storm of footsteps comes rushing toward us. “Mrs. Masters!” A male voice calls out.

 I take hold of Karno’s hand as another mountain of memories speeds by me. Jeno, Koushik, Miyavash, Ruby, Lakshmi, Grace, Mom, Dad, the Rowe-Mart kid, Bartholomew, the Enforcer, Jeno, Jeno, Jeno. I scream, my mind filling with light and pain, but as Karno finally pulls me forward, I fade with him into the dark.