The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (44 page)

Sergio and Karyn’s masks lit up in green, and they stared out at the audience, arms at their sides, like two colossal figures.

When the first strums of guitar from “Plainsong” fell over us, I
 
felt the deep movement of sound, full of soul and adrenaline, like I remembered, but I knew that it wouldn’t be until later bars in the song that the stakes would go higher.

I let the bass and the melody flood my ears, and then there it was.

The second movement of the song allowed the synthesizers to trickle in, and suddenly, Arkangel’s music took me back through time, to places I had been to before.

I should have bought two tickets, dammit.

That was my thought, in my inner voice.
 

I never expected for someone to answer it, right inside my head.

Stop, fussing,
reina
. Shut up and enjoy the show.

I heard that soft voice inside of me. A voice other than my own. Male, young, just over the hill of puberty.

The music from the stage flowed over my skin and seeped into my bones, and for the first time in the three years since my brother had died, I felt real tears arrive in my eyes. My vision was dead in one, and the other felt alive and ready to absorb the lights from the stage. Both orbs filled with water, and saline rivers ran from my tear ducts and down my cheeks in long trails.

The lights from the stage made endless circles in the air. Their loops interlocked, came apart, then moved away from each other again. They were endless.

As I cried inside the sound waves of the music, I smiled, and I laughed, too. These were tears of joy, and of a certain release. Indeed, there was a festive melody found in the return trip of dead souls. And it sounded like this.
 

There was so much I still couldn’t understand, but I felt the molecules of water slide down my skin, while at the same time I felt other particles — sparking particles — rise back up, defying the laws of gravity and screaming their song of joy into the night.

AFTERWORD

The novel you hold in your hands was originally serialized on Kindle in four parts. The serial was part of an experiment to find a new form for my narratives. I am publishing both the serial and the paperback through my imprint Solar Six Books, which places emphasis on digital. Both formats have been edited to mostly mirror each other, but it’s in the digital edition that you will find all sorts of bonuses: glossaries, alternate covers, and more. The experiences of the digital book shaped the final form of both the final e-book and the paperback.

The themes and mythological elements of this novel are explorations that I have been making in my writing for decades. I welcome all reader feedback, and rest assured, readers will get more glimpses and visits to the 13 secret cities volumes to come. If you had asked me just five years ago if I could write a novel about multiple generations of parents, children and families of the human and non-human kind, I am not sure I could have said yes. And it’s better that way. The universe is better when it has the element of surprise and novelty.

We live in an interesting time for adventure books — the young-adult genre (or rather, marketing category) is going strong, and we are seeing many new amazing stories being told by some great authors. And yet, diversity is lacking. I have two nieces under the age of five, and it is my hope that in a novel like this one, they will one day see their culture, heritage and story, even if it’s through the refraction of a fiction. Perhaps they will be inspired to tell their own fictions one day, too.

Cesar Torres

New York City

December 2014

BONUS MATERIALS

Who doesn’t love a good bonus? We like to treat the digital versions of our books as a living thing — and that means that we are constantly expanding the book. Look in this part of the book for periodical updates, including alternate covers, glossaries, and even bonus shorts stories from the author. We haven’t changed the novel itself (though we do fix any typos or formatting issues as part of our updates). Got a request for more bonus materials? Send us an email at
[email protected].

ALTERNATE COVERS

We thoughts you might like to see some of the earlier versions of the cover we used in the Kindle serial, as well as the full color variations for parts 1 through 4. Keep in mind that some of these images may not look great on a black and white Kindle, but you can view on Android, iOS and other devices using the Kindle app. Be sure to click on each image to enlarge it on your Kindle.

Variant Cover by Nick Agin

This cover may be used in a future edition of the book.

Kindle Serial Part 1 Cover by Matt Davis

Kindle Serial Part 2 Cover by Matt Davis

Kindle Serial Part 3 Cover by Matt Davis

Kindle Serial Part 4 Cover by Matt Davis

Bonus Story: A Conversation with the Elephant (2010)

Author’s Note: The following story was written in 2009 and was published in
The 12 Burning Wheels
. If you are curious about some of the lore surrounding the band Rhinoceros in 13 Secret Cities, here’s a short story that describes what became of them.

By Cesar Torres

Rhinoceros ripped the audience to shreds at the last show of the last leg of the last tour they would ever perform. The show should have been historic, but the truth was, they did it for the cash, for the pussy and, mostly, to not be bored the fuck out of their minds by their shitty lives. They did it so they wouldn’t slap the shit out of their children, the product of their mediocre marriages back in the shitty suburbs. The better days of Rhinoceros had passed, but they would use every bit of professionalism they had to blow the house down.

For one night, they were going to keep their dream alive. The Olympia was sold out.

Rhinoceros, most well known for their top-forty hit, “Asphyxia” back in the late Nineties, had eventually been relegated to bargain bins and nostalgic pockets of drunken college memory. They did, however, have a single, effective trick up their sleeve at every show.

During the second encore, Rhin always played “Slowly for Those,” a melancholy number that churned and pounded like the fury of a cyclone set to slow motion. While drummer Darren Garcia put the thumping snares into overdrive, the nauseating buzz saw of Rick Nuncio’s guitar induced seizures in several concertgoers and caused pregnant women (and in some cases, those who didn’t even know they were yet pregnant) to miscarry. Lead singer Cheetah tore through the lower depths of his range every single time he spat out “Slowly for Those.”

Despite the harmony of light and the weight of the dark, balance and counterbalance, there was one single element that made “Slowly for Those” a rock monster of a song. It came from India’s bass guitar from the very start of the chorus, but it built over eight minutes to an intolerable low rumble, like an airliner taking off inside each person’s cranium. To hear that bass line was to hear the howls of the damned. India had named the infamous bass line “the Elephant” in a Rolling Stone interview, and years later he was still signing CDs not just as India, but as India, “Keeper of the Elephant.”

Tonight, the first half of the show had been a showcase for the upbeat numbers, for the ones that got girls jiggling tits and frat boys swaying like sick cattle. The last half of the set, brooding and slow, always induced stupor in the crowd, but Rhinoceros didn’t mind. A trance was better than a cup of beer in the face. Of course, right before the encores, they always closed the main set with the punker thumper, “Hail to the Chief,” which Trent Reznor had once dubbed “a song worthy of christening the Anti-Christ to.” The crowd slam danced, oblivious to its own beer bellies and sagging faces. But no matter what happened, “Slowly for Those” was always, always the last song.

10:15, Saturday night. They were almost done now. Only one thing left to do.

The four band members looked at each other the way brothers might before a game of baseball, and the first notes of “Slowly for Those” began their magic. The dance of Cheetah’s raspy vocals, the pitter-patter of death from Garcia’s high hat and the Nuncio distortion brought tears of blood to the men in the audience. The women felt stabbing needles in their nipples, but that didn’t stop the audience from swaying in a single undulation as the song rolled out its waves of melancholy, hate and animals kept in cages for far too long.

It was unclear who felt the pain of the song deepest in their core. Was it those who had lost lovers? Or was it those who sought to find other miserable souls to share meager moments of all-too-brief lives? Or was it perhaps the four members of Rhinoceros who felt their guts wrung like strings of rope over abrasive rock?

“Slowly for Those” pounded through the walls of the Olympia, and from the street, the venue drew stillness to itself, the way a street might quiet down before a car bomber rips it to shreds.

Five minutes into the iconic last song of the last set of Rhinoceros, India began the death march of his bass line, heading for the final crest of a career both banal and monumental. He forgot about his hemorrhoids and his whore of a mother, his credit card debt, and about how much pain he felt every time he saw his ex-wife. He forgot he was India, bassist for Rhinoceros.