The Wraith's Story (BRIGAND Book 1) Read online

  Book One

  The Wraith's Story

  by

  Natalie K. French

  and

  Scot Bayless

  Copyright © 2015 by Natalie K. French and Scot Bayless

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN 978-1511474894

  Scry Media LLC

  www.scrymedia.com

  www.nataliekfrench.com

  www.scotbayless.com

  Cover illustration by Ravven. Other illustrations used by permission and are the exclusive property of their originators or copyright holders.

  FOREWORD

  In 2003, I had a meeting with Christopher Nolan on the set of Batman Begins and, at some point during our conversation, I asked him, "Chris, there's all this canon and existing lore out there, what's the vision for your version of Batman?"

  Nolan laughed and said, "That's easy. If Batman was a real guy, what would that be like?"

  The inspiration for the world of Brigand is a concatenation of that brilliantly simple answer with another question, "What will it be like when we finally figure out how to live outside the womb we call Earth?" or, perhaps more to the point, "What will we be like?"

  Brigand is meant to be a blend of those two ideas wrapped in a sincere belief that, no matter how much the future changes us, we'll still be just as craven and self-absorbed and visionary and heroic as we've ever been. It's a world I wish for and fear in pretty much equal parts, a place that's filled with things that my inner 11 yr old thinks are just so damned cool, and my grown up self knows will be just as messy and screwed up as where we live now.

  But then that's kind of the point.

  – Scot Bayless, March 2015

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to say a huge thank you to all of my beta readers: Tony D'Andrea, Yvette Wagner, Melissa Leschuck and especially my cousin, Jesse Curtis. Jesse also put up with a bunch of my ramblings at odd hours of the night over Facebook. Jesse, thank you for being in a different time zone, and for always being awake.

  The character in this novella is one of my favorites and she wouldn't be a reality without the original concept from Scot Bayless. Thank you, Scot, for creating the world for her to come alive in.

  – NKF

  CHAPTER ONE

  I've been strangled three times in my life. Not to death.

  Not yet.

  The first was an accident I'm sure — my earliest out of utero memory. Warm hands grabbed my head and shoulders and tugged as I was uncomfortably pushed through a tight, sinewy opening. With blurred eyes, I saw the Bishop. Of course I didn't know his name yet, but it was him. He wore a gray gown then, with a matching skull cap. His eyebrows pulled together over light green eyes that held concern.

  A sensation of constriction pulled at the soft folds of my neck. I couldn't move my head. The room became hazy and I wanted to tell someone to help me, but my lips and vocal cords were too immature to form the words. Still, I knew. I formed the thought. My brain was already functioning well above that of a mundane adult. I opened my mouth and a shrill gasp escaped.

  The Bishop quickly pulled at the fleshy rope that twined around my neck, and sighed when, at last, a bellowing scream escaped my throat.

  He wrapped me in a white blanket, held me up high and turned me to face the figure on the table.

  "Here she is," he whispered to the woman on the table.

  The Woman.

  For years after, she defined what beauty meant to the blank palette of my mind. Her blue eyes gleamed with tears, and her white hair, so fine, like wisps of spider silk, sparkled under the harsh light that hung overhead. She sobbed, but beneath the tears she wore a smile and it was then I learned what joy looked like — an emotion I would not see, or experience, for a long time.

  The noise and bustle of nurses around me receded as I gazed with my eyes that were already learning to focus with automatic precision — at The Woman — at the only person who mattered.

  Then a man in a matte black helmet and what I would know later as a light combat exo walked into the room. The sweat and blood streaked nurses stood aside, deferentially framing his approach to the bed. The blue-eyed woman glanced at him, then looked directly at me and whispered, "Be free."

  Then she closed her eyes and dropped her chin to her chest.

  The man in the military suit aimed a blunt-muzzled instrument at her chest and vaporized her, with only a small electric pop to mark her extermination.

  A team of five in clean uniforms, with white helmets shielding their faces, entered and filled the small room. They quickly removed the mess of blood and fluid left on the table and sanitized the area.

  "You should not know who they are," The Bishop explained.

  I blinked.

  The Bishop wiped my face and handed me to a nurse. He told me not to think of the woman. So I did not — when I was awake. When I slept, she engulfed my dreams, swaddling my soul. I would not be strangled again until my ninth year.

  I am a Wraith. My name is Subject 11.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I received my corneal implants in my third year. Most of the other girls didn't get theirs until their eighth or ninth, closer to their ceremony, but my visual acuity was so advanced that the Council worried that my brain would outpace the enhancements if they waited. As a result of the implants, my training accelerated and, by the time I was in my eighth year, I was sharing a corridor with girls of eleven and twelve. From a maturity perspective I was not far behind them but, physically, I was by far the smallest. A trait that sometimes served to my advantage.

  We lived in the Templum, Corridor B. Four long hallways A, B, C and D all met in the middle at the Cell, where the main nurse's station and control center were located. It was impossible to go in or out of the Cell without being scanned. Every millisecond of my life was data — blips, traces and numbers on screens.

  The Bishop wore black then, with a bright red skull cap. I never saw his actual hair color, but I speculated that it was dark, like mine, to match his eyebrows.

  I liked the smell and stiff, scratchy feel of his robes. Sometimes, if we were alone in the garden and I'd learned my day's lesson particularly well, he would place his hand for the briefest of moments on my arm, and I relished in the roughness of his skin. It was pleasant.

  I always wore the standard issue gray exoderms, semi-sentient fabric that molded to my small body like a second skin, only with multi-factor sensors and holographic camouflage. All of my vitals, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, were monitored by the suit. Which meant I always had to control those vitals.

  I had to remain calm. Always.

  I had one friend, Subject 82. We got along well, for Wraiths. Our socialization consisted mainly of discussing the blandness of our daily protein cubes. Hers were always smaller than mine due to the two percent body mass she was constantly trying to shed. Wraiths must be fit and small. And calm.

  Calm is all.

  I never endured restriction of my protein cubes. If anything, I was occasionally instructed to consume an extra ration. I didn't care for that, but I complied. 82 and I whispered about food – real food. The kind we read about, that you could find outside the Templum — with the people. We said we wanted to try food, but I think we were really more curious about the people.

  I learned ballet, gymnastics, fencing, linguistics, and etiquette. Being the smallest of my Cohort, even in my age group, flexibility and athleticism, came easily to me.

  So did the pocke
ts. Before we even were introduced to them in our training regimen, I had already mastered the pockets. But I chose not to tell anyone – the only one of the Templum's rules I did not follow. The Bishop had taught me early on the value of silence.

  The only way to describe the pockets to someone who can't see them is little rips in the world — voids between energy and cells. Normal human eyes can't even come close to perceiving them but, with the right talent — and discipline, some Wraiths can. With training, we can learn to step into them. Those of us with exceptional talent can move between them, from pocket to pocket. To the untrained, it might look like invisibility, or teleportation. But it's not. It's just physics and biology and discipline. Our instructors said that the best of us would, in time, be able to pocket jump two at a time. By my seventh year I had already managed three in a row.

  Mastery of the pockets was something only a few of us would ever achieve. The real secret of the Wraiths, I knew, was that most of us, however skilled, were primarily masters of illusion. With full-body exoderms, we could camouflage ourselves. We used tricks of perspective, psychology, light, anything that could deceive the untrained human eye, to hide in plain sight. With deft application, our training could, for the briefest of moments, make us seem to move through time and space.

  Pockets were different. The skill of a true Wraith, seeing and stepping through the pockets — the fugue — as some of the instructors called it, is a rare talent. I think only a tiny number of us can actually see the energy. Only a handful of us have the right combination of perception and instinct to delicately tug at the fibers of matter and slip through spaces so small that we cannot be detected. The energy slips are not long. Or perhaps they are and I am not brave enough to travel long within them.

  But I do travel.

  I never told anyone but the Bishop. We were in the garden, on one of my rare forays there. The weather screen high above simulated sun and sky so well that sometimes I could pretend it was real. The plants were real. The iridescent water molecules drifting in the air from the lush ficuses with the tiniest flecks of purple, were real. I breathed them in and pretended they had a different taste from the protein cubes.

  Anything different.

  I wondered about the texture of taste. I experienced the physical sensation of it during our poisons classes. We ingested simulated sweet, savory, and salty protein cubes. And gradually consumed small doses of poison — nothing quite fatal of course. The quicker you learned the subtleties of the taste, the less sick you would be when you correctly identified the toxin and could stop eating the cube. I completed those lessons after only one trip to the nurses. Most girls took longer, weeks sometimes, and several extra rations of cubes for strength.

  The Bishop sat still beside me that day in the garden. I acknowledged him with a small nod — a signal that I was prepared for verbal interaction. He gave me a few moments to savor the atmosphere in the garden before speaking.

  His hand emerged from under his robe and, cradled inside his enormous palm, nestled a baby chick. I'd only seen images of them on the screens during my studies. But I knew what it was.

  "Would you like to hold it?" He asked without turning his gaze from the leafy bush in front of us. He kept his movements small, his profile low so the nurses at the end of the garden would not notice us.

  "Yes." I did not nod, or turn my head.

  He reached with his left hand and gently placed the creature into my cupped hands. It barely fit within my palms.

  I repressed an urge to run my finger over the soft head of the bird for fear it would fall out if I tried to balance it in one hand. I stared down at the cloud of yellow fluff in wonder. My face remained impassive.

  "What do you want to do with it?"

  I knew it was a test. Everything was a test. I also knew several probable correct answers. But I wasn't certain which one he wanted to hear. I needed context. "It's weak."

  "Yes."

  "It has no mother. No way to care for itself."

  "Yes."

  "It is useless to me."

  "Yes."

  "I should kill it."

  "Yes."

  I waited a few seconds for him to say more.

  "Would you like me to do it right now?"

  "I asked you what you wanted to do with it. I didn't ask you what you should do with it."

  I paused. One. Two. Three seconds.

  "I want to touch it with my finger. To feel how soft it is. But I worry if I balance it in one hand there is a high probability that it will fall to the ground and be injured."

  The Bishop leaned forward stiffly resting his forearms on his knees.

  "If you were to hold it in both hands, up to your cheek, you could feel it. The nurses will not see you."

  I stared forward. I lifted the baby chick to my cheek without hesitation, as he suggested. The softness of the downy feathers was like nothing I'd experienced before. Smooth, a whisper of a touch — immense pleasure.

  One red blip beeped along the wrist of my gray suit. A 'soft' warning that my heart rate had changed. You get two soft warnings if the variance is not statistically relevant. After a third, intervention is required.

  "Breathe, Ma Petite. Be calm." The Bishop did not react or change his posture. But he used the name he called me instead of my assignment, Subject 11. His voice soothed my vital signs into the nominal range.

  I inhaled slightly and relaxed my heart rate. No other warning beeps sounded.

  We sat still for exactly one minute. I had three minutes of garden time left.

  "I jumped three pockets this morning, Mon Pere."

  Since he used my name I knew it was acceptable to address him in this way. 'Mon Pere', French, the language of love – and intrigue. It meant 'My Father'. I assumed it had to do with his place in the Templum.

  The Bishop hadn't always been a bishop. A long time ago, he had been a soldier of the Confed. I overheard the nurses once, saying he'd been a Jack, a shipboard marine. Jacks were known for their brutality — and ethical pragmatism. But The Bishop exuded calm strength and a gentleness that made the nurses look upon him with curious expressions. The arteries along their necks pulsed more quickly when he approached. Their breath would labor ever so slightly. I practiced my calm and imagined biting their throats so that their life blood would drain away. I learned that in my first year of combat training. When you are small, and not the strongest, you use whatever means will work. In the absence of other weapons, teeth are quite effective.

  But calm is all.

  The Bishop didn't appear surprised by my confession about the pockets. But I knew no one had ever done three in a row. Ever.

  "Are you boasting?"

  "No, Mon Pere. I'm required to report a mastery."

  "Have you told anyone else?"

  "No. And I was not observed." We both knew that meant far more than the simple fact that nobody had been in the room with me.

  The left corner of his mouth lifted almost imperceptibly. One of his tells. He had taught me to read facial expressions, his facial expressions, in careful detail. The smallest nuances could represent intense emotion. This faint twitch was a smile. He was proud of me. He had taught me nearly a hundred other tells. It was our secret language. We both knew it was a gross violation of protocol. I never revealed that either.

  "Tell no one, Ma Petite. Comprenéz?" I waited for a twitch or blink, any indication that he wished me to do the opposite of what he said. His face remained relaxed.

  He looked directly at me. The direct eye contact almost triggered another soft warning from my monitor, but I controlled the fluctuations in my body as quickly as they rose in my chest.

  "Do not reveal this to anyone else." He said it so quietly I had to read his lips.

  "No."

  The Bishop never shared with me like this. I felt brave. And frightened.

  "Am I safe here, Mon Pere?"

  He turned back to the flowers. The pinks of them reflected in the corners of his eyes. A wrinkle c
reased ever so slightly along his full lips, so small and insignificant that even he wasn't aware of the movement. It was for my eyes alone.

  After twenty-three seconds he answered, "No."

  CHAPTER THREE

  We both went back to staring at the flowers at our feet. After sixty more seconds of silence The Bishop held out his left hand. I placed the chick gently inside of his cupped palm, careful not to touch him. He tucked the bird inside his enormous black robe and walked away.

  I spent the remaining fifty-seven seconds of my garden time in mediation. I would not disobey the Bishop, even if it meant breaking a rule of the Mandate of St. Nicolo, the order that created us. And I knew on that day, in my eighth year, that I would need to escape the Templum.

  When Mastery Check came the following week, I reported that I successfully jumped one pocket. I placed the tissue-thin gray cap over my head and tucked up my short raven wisps of hair, then folded it low to cover even my eyebrows. My eyes were sea blue, bordering gray and with the implants I could phase them to a lighter shade, almost white. Every other girl had blonde, gray, or in the rarest and most special cases, white hair. It made pocket jumping and hiding so much easier when your hair didn't contrast against the white and gray walls.

  I was the only dark haired one in the advanced group and they thought the skin cap helped me mask myself. What their less capable eyes didn't register was the fact that I jumped through four pockets, disappearing entirely for a short time. I had traveled to the center of the Cell and back in the span of a single heartbeat.

  I pulled the cap on and demonstrated a quick jump. The nurse in the white coat nodded curtly and tapped her transparent tablet, noting my achievement. She nodded again and I retreated to the back of the line. I removed my cap and reached as if to drop it on the table, with the other caps that were needed for some of the ash blonde girls. But as soon as the nurse looked away, I quickly pulled my arm back and gently pressed it to the inside of my leg. It was so thin that you couldn't see – well she couldn't see that it was there. I wasn't sure if I actually needed it. I suspected my hair could be bright purple and they still wouldn't see me as I slipped into a pocket. But I knew that, if I was serious about planning an exit, uncertainty was unacceptable.