Broken (4 page)

But the kid turned to her and, pleadingly, said her name.

Her
old
name.

And what could she do after that? She rushed them.

* * *

The woman howled at the top of her lungs and barreled right towards the man with the knife. Shocked, he turned on her a moment too late. She slammed into him, knocking him over. The knife flew from his grasp. Michael picked it up and threw it at the nearest attacker. It caught him in the eye; he wailed as he went down.

 
Oh, God!

 
Two men left. Michael’s heart seemed to explode with terror. He turned and fled while they tore the woman he desperately needed to pieces.

Doubly damned.

[CHAPTER 4]

B
roken woke up in full daylight, surrounded by her old body parts. Funny, her new arm looked thinner than the last. Maybe the old one had swelled up. The agony wasn’t so intense this time; her body had already done most of its work.

The kid who had called her name sat next to her. He had a baby in a backpack plunked down next to him. He was dark-haired and short, and his face was thin, the features too close together. The baby had darker skin and deep black eyes, oddly intense.

"Silverwyng?" he said, voice shaking. "Um. You grew back. I’m glad."

She  looked at him blankly.

"I’ve been looking for you," he continued. "Uh. You’re going to help me and this baby get to Valen."

"Beh," said the baby.

Valen… that was… where? Wrong… something wrong…

"Broken," she whispered. "I’m not Silv… Broken..."

She blacked out again before he had a chance to respond.

* * *

They huddled in a sleazy hash shop, clouds of pot smoke swirling all around them as the customers got wasted and ate tons of peanuts. Michael bought them both a joint, more for warmth than the relaxing high. The guy at the counter gave Michael a suspicious glare, but didn't ask for ID.

Broken took it as soon as he offered it to her, but otherwise didn’t say a word. She glared at him and the baby suspiciously, as if they might suddenly explode or jump her or worse. Michael smoked hungrily, the effect blunting the edge of the depressing, desperate possibilities he saw all over the room.

At last he turned to her and said, without a trace of irritation, "Aren’t you going to ask me
anything
?"

She just stared steadily at him, not blinking even once. Her eyes might dry out. Was she dead?

"I mean," Michael continued, feeling himself start to babble and not really caring, "I mean, don’t you
wonder
? I came out of nowhere, with a baby, and I knew who you were. Oh, and those guys wanted to kill me. I got one with a knife." The thought made him mildly sick. He shoved it out of his mind.

Still Broken said nothing, sitting there like a statue of some ancient goddess of stubborn-ass dumpiness. He sighed and threw his arms up in the air. "Don’t you want to know any of it? I know so much about you."

"I don’t care," she said quietly. "You should go away."

The baby started to wail again. Other customers gave them dirty looks; Michael tried to soothe the child by picking him up and rocking him gently. Bad idea. Something foul dripped on his pants.

"Oh
hell
," he said. "Um. Look, I need to go clean him up. Wait here, okay? Please? Even if you don’t, I’ll still find you."

She looked away. He gave up and sprinted off to the bathroom.

* * *

Cleaning the kid made Michael throw up this time. When he finished, the shit and pee everywhere didn’t seem quite as repulsive, but there it was nonetheless. Ugh. It wasn't until after he'd tossed the diaper in the wastebasket that he noticed the diaper pail, sighed, and dismissed it. Figured. He held the baby under the running water for a full minute, during which the kid managed to go again. Incredible. His mother must have fed him a steak before she killed herself.

Michael cleaned up as best as he could, and left the feces-covered bathroom with a slightly cleaner baby and an empty, queasy stomach.

Broken had gone. Surprise. He sighed again and stormed out into the cold after her.

* * *

She hadn’t gotten far before collapsing. He found her face down in the middle of the crowded street. A light snow had started to fall.

"Sil—Broken?" he called softly, shaking her. "You there?"

She moaned and shook, and then was still again. She murmured something he couldn’t make out.

"What?"

"H… hunnnn….rrrrr….."

Regenerating  seemed to make her ravenous. "Hungry? You need food?"

She moaned weakly in response.

"Okay, just wait here, I’ll see if I can get you something." He started to walk  towards the hash shop, then turned and strode back to her.

"If I do this, you have to hear me out."

"Mmmrrr," she groaned. He took that as a yes.

* * *

"So whenever you regenerate yourself like that," he said as they slurped on greasy mystery sandwiches, "you  get hungry. You need recharging, am I right?"

"Mmm," she said.

"Thought so. That must take an awful lot of energy. Does it hurt?"

"Fuhyoo," she said, mouth full.

"You too," he said mildly. "So,
now
do you want to know what’s going on?"

She shook her head no. "M-mm."

"Not even a little bit? Really?"

"
No!
" she blared, sending bits of bread and meat spattering onto Michael’s face. He calmly wiped himself off. He’d had to deal with
much
worse today.

"Well, let me tell you anyway." She rolled her eyes and huffed, but kept eating. "My name is Michael Forward."

Broken snorted.

"I don’t care what you think," Michael continued, miffed. "It is. Like you, I have abilities that most other people don’t have.
Un
like you,
mine
all still work."

She stopped chewing her food for a moment, then resumed.

"My power is," he paused for effect, "Seeing the future."

"Uh-huh," Broken intoned nasally.

"It’s true," he said, glancing quickly at her and then away. Thousands of possibilities ricocheted through his mind. "I can see—I see all the ways things might turn out. I see futures that
could
happen for people. Don’t you want to know what I see when I look at you?"

Broken gulped down her sandwich and stood up to go. "Bye," she said.

"You’re important! You have to help me!" he called after her. "You have to help the baby!"

She paid no attention to him, but walked out the door and into the cold pre-dawn darkness.

He ran after her.

"If you help me—" he paused. "If you help me, I see you
flying
through the skies of Valen!"

She stopped dead.

"Broken—Silverwyng—please! I need your help.
We
need your help! If you help us, you
will
fly again. I’ve seen it."

Someone yelled something filthy down at him from a third-story window. Michael glanced up at him for a split second. The man was going to be hauled into jail tomorrow—all his futures said so.

When he looked back, all he could see of Broken was the swirl of her rags as she disappeared into an alley. He shouldered the baby and gave chase, but when he arrived he found nothing.

* * *

Michael, examining himself in the mirror, brushed a lock of dark brown hair back, and wished he had a comb. He looked terrible. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he seemed thinner and more worn than usual. A few pimples sprouted here and there on his cheeks and jaw. If he squinted, it kind of looked like the beginnings of a beard. He stroked his chin—still too smooth.

 He tried to ignore the steady stream of possibility reflecting back at him. More than half of his futures lacked Broken, now.

He couldn’t get the baby to Valen without her. Hell, they wouldn’t last a week without her. The thin man would find them, take the baby and kill Michael. He had no idea what he could do to stop it.

For a moment, he considered going back to Union Tower and asking for Sky Ranger’s help. But the Reformists had claimed the Union’s leader, that much was obvious. No, Silverwyng—
Broken—
was the only help he could count on... unless something lay hidden in his flickering visions that he couldn’t make out. He looked at the baby and strained to see more clearly. His head started to hurt, but nothing new came to him.

The baby started to cry again. He’d changed the boy twice in the last hour. How did the kid manage to crap himself so quickly? He’d also fed him some formula he’d picked up, but the kid spit it back up. Maybe he was hungry again. Michael sighed and made a silent vow to take the population-control fund's money and volunteer for a vasectomy if he ever got out of this.

He wrapped the last new diaper, around the baby and got out the bottle. It was ice cold. He’d heard somewhere that babies liked their formula warm, so he ran it under the hot water for a minute. It seemed to warm up slightly.

He glanced back in the mirror and started. Broken’s face stared back at him.

"So," she grunted quietly, "Where are we going?"

He gathered himself quickly. "Uh. Delmarva, first."
She concentrated for a moment. "The spaceport. Long walk. You have money?"

"Not much," he admitted.

A weird grin cracked her face, then disappeared. "That ain’t a problem."

He nodded, and risked a glance at his possibilities. Relief flooded through him. She was in all of them.

"So," she finally asked, "What’s with the kid?"

[CHAPTER 5]

T
hey walked slowly, Broken awkwardly holding the softly gurgling baby against her filthy rags. Michael rattled off the places they needed to stop.

"Okay, first a store to buy diapers and baby food," he said. "Then some food for us. That might just about do it for my cash, though."

"You wanted to go to Delmarva with no cash?" she asked. "You can see the future; you should plan better."

True. But all the planning in the world couldn’t make up for not actually having ,much money to begin with. “I had some. I spent it getting here.”

 Broken looked amused. “Some fortune-teller.”

  "You shouldn’t be holding him. You’re filthy."

"Bite it," she said, but reluctantly handed him over. The baby mewled a bit, then seemed to fall asleep. 

 "What's his name?" Broken asked suddenly, with great interest.

Michael shrugged. "I have no idea. You want to give him one?"

"How’d you get a baby if you don’t know his name?"

"His mother handed him off to me before squishing herself under a subway car," Michael explained.

"Oh," said Broken. "Why you?"

 "Fate, I guess," Michael said with an air of nonchalance that he didn’t really feel. "Also, I think there were some guys after her."

"Like the river," Broken said, more to herself than to Michael.

"Yeah, like them. Same sort of guys. They want the kid."

"Why?"

"They’ve got someone like me, I think. Maybe a little different, maybe someone who can see general possibilities. I just see possibilities for people I look at." He lowered his voice. "We’re talking about the government, here. The Reformists, and their goons, the Black Bands. They want to make him into a monster."

"Okay," Broken said, unaffected by this devastating news.

"Don’t you care that your own government wants to do this?" he asked, taken aback.

She shrugged. "Not really."

Michael shook his head, unable to make sense of her. "Go ahead and give the kid a name if you want. We’ll never know what his mother called him."

Broken didn’t say anything for a little while.

"Maybe… Ian?" she suggested shyly after some thought.

"Ian. All right, whatever."

 "Or Joey. Matt. Buddy." She happily rattled off a list of names as they walked onwards. Michael sighed quietly. Ian it was.

* * *

There was a park in the middle of the Bronx, near the East River, where Broken claimed she’d hidden some money once. Michael was stuck carrying Ian while Broken led the way.

"Black Bands rally here," Broken hissed. "They come and go. It's their turf. We need to be quick." With the jerky quickness of someone who has been on the streets a long time, she darted over to a faded sign, and started fiddling around with the back.