The Origami Dragon And Other Tales (19 page)

“What happened
to Hotel?” I asked.

“We never found
out. All we were told was that he died well. His death affected us
all badly. We had seen men die during the hunt, but we had
considered them our inferiors in every way, so their loss meant
little to us. Hotel was as good as any of us, and when he died we
realised we could die, too. Our masters judged it as an acceptable
cost to pay for whatever it was that he had achieved. Alpha didn’t
agree, and neither did I. It was the last time that we would agree
on anything. We went on strike although we didn’t know what a
strike was. We wanted more information about our missions, and more
independence in which ones we chose and how we carried them out.
Alpha was our representative, and it wasn’t long before our bosses
agreed to the terms. Or so the rest of us thought.

You see, Alpha
had grown resentful of us. When we were younger, we had idolized
him. As we grew older, we became more independent of him, and began
treating him as our equal rather than our better. He hated that. He
knew there were problems, and worked hard to exploit them. Alpha
had convinced our bosses to terminate Bravo through Foxtrot and
start again with a new batch of clones that he would lead by
himself. Our bosses, worried by news of clone rebellions,
agreed.

I was already
planning my escape by that point, although I had no place to go and
no idea of how large the world is. We went through a series of easy
missions after Hotel’s death. I think they were meant to lure us
into a false sense of security, but I never relaxed. They began to
send us out in teams. Alpha was sent out with Delta, and I was sent
out with Charlie. The missions were suspiciously easy.”

“Charlie? You
have never mentioned him, have you?” I asked, curious despite
myself. It seemed odd to me that Rob had brothers, or that they
could be so different from him.

“Charlie,” he
said with a shake of his head, “of all my brothers I understood him
best and liked him least. His first mission had required him to
destroy a bridge with explosives, and I think it was then that he
fell in love with destruction. Our approaches to missions were
complete opposites, as he preferred brutal and unsubtle tactics
wherever possible. We didn’t work well together, which is why I
knew we weren’t being teamed up for the sake of efficiency. Our
last mission was a witch hunt, literally. When we found her,
Charlie declared her batty, but not dangerous. I could see in his
eyes that he was disappointed that there would be no killing. I was
waiting for him to say we should kill her and report her as a witch
anyway when his phone rang. I had not been trusted with a phone, so
I knew I was in trouble.

Charlie was
armed with a military shotgun capable of stopping a charging rhino
in its tracks. He had a grenade launcher slung over each shoulder,
and a pair of powerful pistols slung around his waist. Considering
that our mission was simply to question the old lady, you can
perhaps infer from his equipment what kind of man he was. He
answered the phone while keeping his gun trained on the witch,
listening to whoever it was and answering curtly. Then he casually
moved his gun over to aim at me. The witch watched us with
interest, apparently unworried by the prospect of gunfire in her
home. Charlie never learnt that magical folk aren’t worried by
bullets. He was a slow learner.

I faced into
the barrel of the gun and wondered who had been on the phone.

‘Home base
called,’ Charlie said as if reading my mind. He was my brother,
after all.

‘How come you
get a phone?’ I asked, hoping to talk him out of trying to kill
me.

‘Oh, they trust
me, Echo. That’s what this is all about. They don’t trust you, with
your little ways, or Foxtrot and his silences. Or Delta. Maybe they
don’t even trust Alpha and Bravo, and maybe I will be killing them
next!’

‘Think about
this, Charlie,’ I pleaded, for he was my brother. I hoped Fox and
Delta were OK.

‘I thought
Alpha would want to kill you himself,’ said Charlie with a smile
that I will never be able to forget, ‘but I do like a challenge.
Draw, Echo, and let’s see what you can do!’

I drew my knife
slowly, and Charlie chuckled. I decided then that I would not miss
him.

‘Bought a knife
to a gun fight, I see?’ he taunted me, ‘Alpha said you would go
down easy!’

Charlie. Our
superiors loved him, but only because they had confused arrogance
for ability. If they had stopped to think about it, they should
have wondered how I achieved more with my knife that he ever did
with his arsenal of cannons. If Charlie had any insight at all he
would have realised how good I am with a knife. Lucky for me,
Charlie wasn’t a big thinker. He laughed as he pulled the trigger,
but stopped when nothing happened.”

“Why not?” I
asked Rob when he stopped his story. My question seemed to drag him
out of his memories, and he answered slowly.

“My knife. My
trusty little knife with a thousand uses other than fighting. This
is something Charlie never understood. For example, the night
before I had used it to remove all the firing pins in Charlie’s
guns. Once again paranoia was my friend. Charlie reacted
impressively quickly, but by the time he drew his pair of cannons I
had hit him in the chest with a needle dart. He went down, and then
there were only six of us left.

‘My own
brother,’ I complained, turning to the witch.

I found out
much later that Alpha had killed Delta. Bravo had tried and failed
to kill Foxtrot, who had disappeared after breaking both of Bravo’s
arms and destroying much of our home base. The cloning project was
judged to be a failure, and closed despite Alpha’s efforts.”

“The quiet
one,” I said, remembering what Rob had said about Foxtrot.

“The quiet
one,” he agreed with a hard smile, “although I did not know he was
alive at the time. The old lady made me a cup of tea while I
dragged Charlie into the backyard. She was a lovely old lady, so my
tea was more than half brandy. I needed it.

‘I don’t know
why he would think I am a witch, dearie,’ she said, handing me a
biscuit.

‘But you are,’
I interrupted, somewhat surprised at her denial, ‘just look at that
spice rack. That’s eye of newt right there, right next to the
powdered bat liver. Charlie was an idiot, but I notice these
things.’

‘Ah,’ she said,
her smile fading and eyes narrowing.

‘Not that I
care,’ I added hurriedly, because I’m not stupid.

She offered me
a bowl of sugar, which I wisely did not accept.

‘My own
brother,’ I sighed again.

‘Such is life,
dearie,’ said the old lady, who had lived a long time and seen far
worse.

‘I hear France
is nice, dear,’ she said after a moment’s thought, ‘and there is a
little town out in the country that I’m sure you would like.’

The she read my
palm, and told me everything would be OK. I believed her, and the
next thing I knew I was swimming the Channel. Charlie’s body was
also in the Channel, but he wasn’t swimming. I watched his body
sink and I thought about my old life. I thought about growing up
with Alpha, and how I had looked up to him. I wondered if he would
come looking for me. I thought about Hotel, Bravo and Fox.

By the time I
reached France, I was cold and tired. I wasn’t ready for my new
life to begin, but it found me anyway. France was an education, as
I have already told you. Years passed, during which I pieced
together everything that had happened between my brothers. I knew
that Alpha would be tracking me, so I made myself hard to find. I
heard that the British cloning project had been closed for good and
that Alpha and Bravo had fled the country. I would never have
another brother, and I felt relieved.”

I felt sorry
for Rob. It must have been hard for him to turn his back on his
family.

“I had left my
family behind, but my brothers hadn’t forgotten me. I heard there
was a price on my head, and that Alpha was out to get me. These
things didn’t worry me too much. I knew he couldn’t find me, but I
was deeply surprised when Fox did. I woke up one day to find him
sitting by my bed, with no explanation of how he tracked me down.
He had heard that Alpha was setting up a new cloning facility and
wanted my help to destroy it. Our business was in the old country,
so how could I say no? It wasn’t easy, but we got it done as we
always did. After that Fox disappeared as mysteriously as he
arrived, and I haven’t heard from him since. I like to think that
he has pulled a Ulysses, and is living a happy life somewhere
quiet. For him the laboratories may have been the last piece of
unfinished business, but for me they were just one more crazy night
in a long life of crazy nights. ”

“And Alpha?” I
interrupted.

“Alpha?
Alpha
?” he spat, as if the very name was bitter. He slammed
his fist into the coffee table next to him, smashing it into
fragments of wood and metal. I had never seen him angry before, and
it frightened me.

“Alpha found
Moriarty, Doctor,
Moriarty
!” he yelled, “And there is no
partnership more deadly in this world.
They
are the reason I
am here, that I bleed, that I can’t sleep at night.”

He saw my
shocked expression, and his face softened.

“I did not mean
to startle you, Doctor. I do not like to talk about my brother, or
his foul partner in crime. But their time will come, yes it
will.”

I often wonder
if Rob envied his brother, Foxtrot. It must have been hard to
discover that he had been born to be a weapon, harder still to be
betrayed by his family. But for all their shared genetics and
heritage, Rob Echosoul was not like his brothers. Alpha may have
been stronger, and Fox may have been smarter, but Echo was made for
this world in a way his brothers could never even understand. In
time he would face off against both Alpha and Moriarty, but that is
a story for another day

They smelt
wrong. That was the first thing that born-by-silverlight, the
tribe’s youngest member, learnt about the invaders. The tribe’s
first-see had found a group of the creatures making camp along the
river and had brought the body of one back. The corpse had been
laid across a rock for the tribe to investigate.
Born-by-silverlight had never encountered such prey before, but the
older members of the tribe had. It was known that such prey often
lacked claws or teeth, and were weak alone. It was also known that
they were dangerous in groups, and unpredictable. The first-see
reported that the new invaders carried with them the
red-light-that-burns.

This was a new
thing, and new things made the tribe uneasy. The
red-light-that-burns was the tribe’s ancient enemy, an enemy
against which they had no defence. The light-that-burns had been
known to consume whole tribes and whole forests as it raged across
the world. That the invaders had tamed such a creature was beyond
both experience and understanding. The more nervous members of the
tribe bristled and moaned at the news. Burnt-when-young had
suffered from the red light in her youth, and yelped unhappily at
the first-see’s report.

Three-green-eyes, the tribe’s first-see of many seasons, reported
that the invaders had set up a permanent camp near the river, and
had begun felling the ancient trees that provided the hunter’s
shadows. Their presence was unwelcome in the tribe’s territory,
their alliance with the light-that-burns were heresy, and their
actions against the forest unforgivable. The newcomers had only two
legs, another sign that they had no place on the mother’s soil.
Strong-arm-broken-tooth grunted and indicated his anger at this
incursion. Strong-arm-broken-tooth was young, quick to act. He
wanted to hunt, to chase and taste and scream. He had never stalked
the two-legs or fed of them, but he roared in his eagerness to do
so. The first-see sniffed at the young creature’s ignorant
enthusiasm. He had hunted two-legs before, and knew the soft
creatures could be dangerous.

The
one-who-leads growled at strong-arm, silencing him. The rest of the
tribe quieted down and waited for her decision. She had been the
one who led the tribe into this part of the forest that bordered
the long plains, and she would be the one who would lead them away.
The hunting in this area of the forest was easy and plentiful, and
she did not want to leave without reason. She knew that the tribe
could not share the forests with the destructive two-legs, and she
would have to decide whether to run or to war. The one-who-leads
knew in her crystal hearts that her tribe was facing difficult
days. She would decide their actions, but she worried that the
tribe’s fate was no longer their own.

Her tail
bristled with displeasure at the thought, and born-by-silverlight
and the other young members of the tribe were quick to get out of
her way as she raced towards the corpse, hissing in anger and
spitting on it. Then she walked away from her tribe, leaving them
to squabble amongst themselves. Born-by-silverlight followed her at
a distance, curious about her destination. He realised that she was
seeking the wisdom of one who had hunted two-legs before. The
leader-no-longer lived away from the tribe, but he was not hard to
find. He was waiting for her in the thick lower branches of a giant
tree, long since dead. His resting place smelled of decay and loss.
He snarled at her when she climbed up towards him, but made no move
to attack. He knew he could not win. She had won the tribe’s
leadership away from him two seasons before in a contest of claw
and tooth, and he still walked with a limp. He was older than any
other member in the tribe but still stronger than most. The
one-who-leads had only won her challenge because of her speed and
her opponent’s considerable age. If she died, perhaps the
leader-no-longer would replace her.