Hena Day One Read online

  The guy kept his white-knuckled grip on Nick’s collar as he yanked Nick’s head back and slammed it against the concrete.

  Nick’s world started to fracture. A ringing filled his ears as the wet press of blood filtered out from the wound to his skull.

  But he didn’t stop fighting; he started. He wrapped what was left of his weak grip around the guy’s wrist and tried to yank him off. But Nick’s body was starting to shut down.

  And that ringing… that ringing was growing unbearable.

  His life flashed before his eyes. His adoptive parents, his school, his job, his ex-girlfriend. Everything and everyone blinked away in his mind’s eye as that ringing continued to fill his ears.

  The guy leaned forward, the hood of his over-large gray sweatshirt never falling from his face as his white lips pulled back hard over his neat, perfect white teeth.

  Nick tried to wrench the guy’s arm off one more time, but it was useless. His assailant was too strong.

  Way, way too strong. Because as he yanked Nick’s head up again and slammed it against the concrete, Nick heard the stuff cracking.

  It took a lot to crack industrial concrete. A lot more than the impact of one man’s skull against it.

  One more time. The guy did it one more time, jerking Nick back and slamming him against the concrete with such force, blood splattered out over Nick’s neck and down his back, over his face, and up over the guy’s hood.

  … The ringing still wouldn’t stop. It filled Nick up, more and more, finding cracks in him he’d never known had existed.

  The guy pressed a hand forward, cupped it over Nick’s blood-covered lips, and paused.

  Nick heard something click and the faintest buzz.

  But it was on the edge of his hearing. His body was shutting down, succumbing to his irreversible brain damage.

  The guy let out a soft laugh, then stood and walked away. “It’s done,” he said to seemingly no one but himself.

  Blood seeped out of the injury to Nick’s skull, pooling behind him and slicking over his torn shirt. He stared up at the ceiling as his life left him. Just out of the corner of his eye, he saw his assailant as the guy continued to walk away.

  The last thing Nick saw before he died was the man’s hoody. The blood-covered hoody.

  The splatters disappeared. The guy didn’t wipe them off – they simply melted away as if they’d never existed.

  Then Nick Hancock died.

  For now.

  Chapter 2

  Kim

  11:30 Seoul, South Korea

  “Ah, really? Can’t it wait?” Kim rubbed the back of his head as he walked out into the yard.

  “The car’s broken, Kim. Without it, you won’t be able to go to work.”

  “Fine, fine.” Kim shrugged as he let his hand drop, grabbed the handle of the back door, and wrenched it open.

  A chilly Seoul morning hit him, prickling over his freshly shaven chin. He grabbed a hand to it as he tilted his head up and stared at the clouds.

  They were different. Wrong.

  The current wind speed and condensation couldn’t seem to account for how large they were.

  He shoved a hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. It was nonstandard. Like everything else in his life. He’d modified it.

  “Fix it properly this time,” Mi Na said from the kitchen as she leaned against the kitchen bench, crossed her arms, and shot him an angry glare.

  “Yes, aunt,” Kim managed as he quickly scanned the data on his phone. He was right, the wind pressure, current temperature, and condensation didn’t account for the meteorological show those clouds were putting on.

  He frowned.

  He shoved his phone back into his pocket.

  He walked around to the garage, kicking an old empty plastic pot out of the way and watching it tumble down the steep drive to the rusted metal gate beyond.

  He took a moment and swept his gaze over the small slice of the outskirts of the city he could see from the top of his drive. Or at least, the top of his aunt’s drive. Kim had very few things in life, save for those he’d made himself.

  He didn’t have ambitions for much more, either.

  And though that was a perpetual frustration to his adoptive family, such was life.

  Kim had a higher purpose.

  As he watched the cold morning mist settle over his neighbors’ houses, he ground his teeth back and forth. Just beyond the enamel, he felt the reassuring clunk of metal.

  He pivoted on his foot, headed over to his garage doors, slid back the bolt that kept them locked, and opened them.

  He walked inside and was instantly met by the musty smell of dust and petrol.

  Though the cold, smoggy air of the morning infiltrated the cramped room, it was no competition for years of oil, grease, and solvents.

  Mi Na hated the smell, and so did the rest of his family. Kim really didn’t care; though he could detect scents, he rarely had emotional reactions to them.

  Starting to whistle under his breath, he shifted around the old, red Hyundai Excel that took pride of place in his aunt’s garage. Popping the hood, he reached in and started messing around.

  In reality, he knew exactly what was wrong with the car. It was an inefficient combustion engine that wasted precipitous amounts of energy to power four rundown rubber wheels.

  There was only so much fixing you could do. The concept itself was broken.

  Glancing over the engine chassis, Kim brought his face close and sniffed.

  One smell was all it took.

  The fuel line was clogged.

  He stood up.

  And that’s when he heard it.

  The lightest sound of footfall on gravel.

  It wasn’t Mi Na or her kids.

  It wasn’t one of the neighbors coming around with grilled mackerel.

  It was something that was incalculably light on its feet.

  Kim paused.

  He stared right ahead.

  So they were here.

  And it was time.

  He reached up, and with one white-knuckled hand, grabbed the hood of the car. He lowered it just as he reached down and grabbed up the can of oil beside him.

  The crunch of gravel echoed out again. But it was quiet. Muffled, too. It wasn’t muffled simply by the efforts of the owner of the foot to remain quiet.

  No. All sounds were muffled. From the constant noises of traffic further into the city, to the sound of his neighbors waking up. Everything sounded as if it’d had a blanket thrown over it.

  Slowly, Kim locked his hand around the oil can.

  He focused his senses on the movement of air around him, on the subtle changes in the scent carried along by the cold morning breeze.

  There, just at his side, he smelt it. Something that shouldn’t be there. Something mechanical, something sophisticated, and something hundreds upon hundreds of years beyond the car in front of him.

  Just as Kim saw a flash of light to his side, he reacted, locking a foot on the car and pivoting backward. He threw the contents of the oil can to his left, at the precise point where he smelt the machine.

  His move was quick, calculated, and paid off. The contents of the oil can splashed out, covering the previously invisible creature.

  As the oil splashed along its form, minute holographic panels flickered as they attempted to instantaneously adjust to the presence of the viscous substance covering them.

  But it was too late. Even though they reacted quickly, for a fraction of a second, Kim saw the outline of a body in armor.

  Kim kept abreast of technological advancements. Nobody had this technology.

  The man shoved forward, the holographic sensors covering his armor finally reacting to the oil until he was once again invisible.

  But Kim didn’t need to see to track him. Kim’s sophisticated sense of smell was enough.

  Dogs may have 300 olfactory receptors in their noses – Kim had 100 times as many, and unlike a human hound, he could readi
ly categorize each scent.

  His armored assailant took another step forward, and Kim’s sophisticated hearing managed to discern the sound of almost imperceptible joints – technology that had been developed to ensure that it made barely any sound.

  But even the slightest creak was enough for Kim’s ears.

  He didn’t say a word. He didn’t scream. And God knows he didn’t call for help.

  There was nothing in this city that could help him now – except his own ingenuity.

  His assailant didn’t say a word.

  Neither did Kim as he backed off, locked a hand on his phone, and clutched his fingers around it until they started to press in against the metal.

  Every engineer knows that the quality of your finished product depends on your tools. You cannot make a sophisticated computer out of a chunk of metal and silica unless you possess other sophisticated devices.

  But everybody equally knows that a truly talented engineer can make miracles where others can only make mistakes.

  Just as his armored assailant came up to him again, Kim yanked his hand out of his pocket, drawing his phone out with him. His fingers were crushing the case, warping the metal, bending it in until the sound of metal fatigue crunched through the garage.

  Kim hadn’t lost his mind.

  But his assailant was about to.

  Kim didn’t know that much about the exact quality of the armor he was facing up against, but he could predict its security defenses based simply on the oil test. The fact the holographic sensors had taken about 0.9 of a second to react to the oil meant this wasn’t a particularly sophisticated setup. Whoever had sent it here had obviously assumed Kim wouldn’t put up much of a fight.

  A dangerous assumption.

  As Kim’s fingers twisted the metal of his phone, electrical discharges started to zap across it. It wasn’t the lithium-ion battery of his apparently simple cell phone reacting to the torsion of its metal casing. It was the disruptor chip Kim had spent the last five years perfecting. One that was designed to do one thing.

  Just as the man in armor pivoted around the car and threw himself at Kim – obviously wanting to kill Kim with his own hands and not a particle weapon – Kim threw his phone right at the guy.

  As it whistled through the air, more energy discharged over it. Though it tickled along Kim’s fingers and sank into his flesh, it did nothing more.

  His internal endoskeleton could absorb far more without complaint.

  Plus, he’d programmed that chip not to disrupt his own processes.

  The man in the armor would not be as lucky.

  The idiot didn’t dodge out of the way, and instead brought up a hand and caught the phone, just as Kim had calculated he would do.

  The sound of invisible armored fingers crunching around the phone and holding it in place echoed through the garage.

  The armor’s holographic sensors were now functioning perfectly, and to the naked eye, it simply looked as if a contorted metal phone was hovering in the air unassisted.

  “What is this?” Kim had the time to ask.

  “An invasion,” the man said, his voice twisted and crackling, coming out of his armor’s external audio feed.

  But not in English, and not in Korean.

  He was speaking in one of the eight ancient languages of the universe – Cartaxian.

  Just before adrenaline – or his body’s synthetic equivalent – could rush through Kim’s body, his armored assailant crushed the phone completely.

  And the disruptor chip did the rest.

  There was a jolt of energy as sparks erupted from the contorted case. They powered into the alien’s arm, instantly disabling the holographic sensors along his gauntlet and finally making it fully visible.

  The Cartaxian jolted to the side, grabbing his wrist with his free hand as the rest of his armor became visible.

  “What is this?” he demanded in Cartaxian, the guttural, spitting blasts of his words bouncing through the room.

  “Insurance in case I was ever disturbed,” Kim explained as he brought his hands up, dusted them off, and took a step toward the alien. “You miscalculated how much of a threat I would be.”

  “The Cartaxians never miscalculate.”

  Kim had a moment. A single moment of recognition, then the bastard in armor exploded and took the garage and half the house with him.

  Chapter 3

  Linh

  10:00 Da Nang, Vietnam

  She shoved her hands further into her pockets as she strode along Non Nuoc beach. Though it was usually cram packed with tourists, considering the devastating tsunami warning, there was hardly a Westerner to be seen.

  “Hurry up,” Harry Edwards called from behind her.

  When Linh didn’t immediately pull her hands from her pockets and hurry up to the cameraman, Harry jogged up to her instead, his heavy boots churning through the sand as he lugged his camera with him, the big rig jostling over his shoulder.

  Linh still wouldn’t turn to him. With her hands pushed all the way into the pockets of her jacket, she caught herself staring out to sea.

  “You heard the network – they want footage, and they want it now. They want peaceful shots of the beach to show there was no tsunami,” Harry repeated their brief, even though Linh had read the exact same message.

  She still didn’t reply. Slowly, she found her head tilting up to watch the clouds.

  She knew the clouds of Da Nang. She’d been here for years. From the forests and Buddhist temples inland, to the sun-kissed beaches, she understood the weather patents that predominated on the eastern coast of Vietnam.

  She understood them, in fact, in a way no one else could.

  They flowed through her. From the temperature, to the wind speed, to the condensation, to the pressure. She experienced it in a way no other person would understand.

  Humans are good at dealing with variables, and their machines are even better at the task. But there is a state beyond variables that one must access to truly predict. A state of flow in which data becomes more than mere points and numbers. It becomes a movable, living reality.

  And as Linh tilted her head back and watched the massive cloud mass, her eyes darted over the bulbous gray brain-like upper stem that penetrated high into the sky. It looked like cumulonimbus flammagenitus – a meteorological event that would only form above a source of heat like a wildfire. Except it was forming above the ocean.

  Something wasn’t right.

  When Linh had been woken abruptly this morning to the shocking warning of a tsunami, she’d felt that same feeling. The one that had rushed down her back, the one that had sliced high into her neck, chilling her flesh, pulsing over her cheeks and sinking into her jaw.

  The one that had reached right down deep and told her that peace was over.

  And now that feeling rose, higher and higher, almost like the cumulonimbus as it reached further into the heavens.

  “What are you doing?” Harry asked, exasperation clear.

  Slowly, she tugged a hand out of her pocket and pointed with a stiff, slightly shaking finger at the cloud form.

  Harry glanced at it, then shrugged. “You get weird clouds over oceans all the time.”

  “Not like that,” Linh commented, her voice quiet with knowing.

  Harry dismissed her comment with a shrug. Then he patted the expensive case of his camera. “We gotta get this footage now. Or the network is gonna be on our backs.”

  “Hmm,” was all Linh managed as she tore her gaze off the clouds.

  “Let’s get the shot here. The tourists are starting to come back,” Harry mentioned as he jammed a thumb over his shoulder. “We gotta get this footage before they return. The network wants you to highlight how false warnings like these can have deleterious effects on terrorism.”

  Linh still didn’t comment.

  She pulled her other hand out of her pocket, walked to where Harry was pointing, and got ready for the shot.

  She tried to neaten her shor
t black bob that was cut to her jawline, but at the last moment, a quick wind coming in off the coast cut a few strands over her face, sending them slashing against her nose and eyes, but more than anything, grabbing her attention.

  Again she angled her face toward the ocean.

  One of the greatest features of flow was the ability to discern when one was in danger.

  If you truly attuned to all of the information coming to you from every angle, you would always be in a constant state of readiness.

  From the subtle sounds, scents and movements around you, you could detect what was about to happen.

  “You’re running in five,” Harry said as he brought up his free hand and started to count down silently.

  Linh’s eyes widened as she stared out to sea. She detected certain scents being pushed along by the wind.

  “Hey, Linh, look at the camera already. I’m going to start the countdown again. Five—” Harry began.

  Linh turned.

  Humans feel fear when they encounter danger. It’s how they’re built. When the correct stimulus arises, their limbic system reacts, increasing adrenaline, heart rate, and breathing – getting ready to protect the body in any way it can.

  But there’s a state beyond fear. One Linh hadn’t been forced to enter for years. She’d always fondly named it sharpness.

  When your body and all of its senses narrow down into a single point and all other distractions fall away until you’re left with the focus of a laser.

  And that happened to Linh now as she turned fully toward the clouds. There was now no doubting it. The cumulonimbus flammagenitus reached high into the sky, growing with every second.

  “Hey, Linh,” Harry snapped.

  People further down and up the beach started to point to the shoreline.

  Linh glanced down as she walked toward it.

  Fish were washing up. Boiled fish, their once scaly, wet flesh cooked to beyond recognition.

  “What the hell?” Harry spat. “We need to pick this up,” he added as he turned his camera on and started to take wide sweeping shots of the beach line.

  Linh moved toward the waves. One step after another. She tilted her head back, her black bob flaring around her face as the wind picked up off the ocean. It brought with it two things. Heat and a very specific smell.