The City Unseen, page 1
part #2 of The Unseen Series
Contents
The City Unseen
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
AFTER
Coming Soon
A Small Request
Free Unseen Starter Library
The Unseen Series
About the Author
Dedication
Copyright
THE CITY UNSEEN
Book Two of the Unseen
by Andrew C. Jaxson
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The tiny town of Ettney, Australia is full of dark secrets. Ari, a sixteen-year-old rural girl is de-facto mother to her younger sister, Skye; as their father left, and their mother is an alcoholic. After a devastating accident, Ari wakes up in hospital. She shouldn’t have survived, and while she was unconscious, she was transported to a strange, dark landscape full of impossible things.
A stranger visits Ari during her recovery, claiming she is special, and that she will know everything in time.
The new boy in town, Noah, wants to hang out after school, but his dad makes her uncertain; especially after Mr. Hackman comes to visit her at school. Hackman is the stranger who visited her in hospital, and he also happens to be the new Police Chief at Ettney.
During their date, Noah and Ari are attacked by hooded figures, and Noah is killed in a firestorm.
Ari wakes in a police holding cell. The cops say Noah rolled his truck and it caught fire. She’s sure of what she saw, though. The cops are hiding something. They can’t be trusted with anything that comes next.
At Noah’s funeral Ari meets Rachel, who seems to share a secret with Hackman. Rachel is sympathetic to Ari’s plight, and offers to drive her to the accident site. At the site, a strange whisper echoes through the trees, and Rachel panics, driving Ari straight home.
Ari is woken in the middle of the night by a spidery presence on her bedroom roof. It attacks her, and then disappears. In the morning, a black spot has appeared on her stomach. It’s cold to the touch.
Josh, Ari’s best friend, is pushing for answers, and thinks Noah was a creep. Ari lashes out, hitting Josh, before apologising and kissing him instead. He comes back in the evening, as her mum is working overnight and Ari doesn’t feel safe in her house after the prior attack. In the middle of the night, Skye cries out in her sleep. Ari enters the bedroom, and sees Skye suspended in the air by black tendrils. The tendrils speak through Skye in an unknown language, then the house bursts into flames. Josh, Ari and Skye evacuate, surrounded by black tendrils and smoke, and find themselves chased by masked figures. They’re rescued by Hackman in his police car, but Skye is taken by the hooded figures, then Ari is knocked unconscious.
Ari wakes in an underground base called the Complex. She’s invited to join the Kindred, a secret and ancient organisation whose members can manipulate matter with their minds. Hackman and Rachel are both part of the Kindred, as was Noah until his death. They use the natural resonance of the universe to accelerate and decelerate the particles that make up the world, allowing them to destroy, freeze, or set fire to the world around them. The problem is their power only works when no-one else is watching the same place; only the most powerful Kindred can over-ride the interference generated by someone else’s gaze.
The Kindred are the mortal enemies of the Unseen, an organisation as old as the Kindred but with competing aims. The Unseen have taken Skye and Ari’s mother, seemingly to use as leverage to get Ari to join them. Josh is safe and being held in the Complex for his own protection. A romance grows between the pair, although Ari feels guilty about betraying Noah - despite his death and their short relationship.
Ari is trained in her power and demonstrates unusual ability. During an outdoor competition, she witnesses a strange sandstone building in the forest that moves when she blinks. A melting figure stands in the doorway, calling to her. Later, Rachel shows Ari a secret entrance to a ledge in the side of the base, where they again witness one of the dark creatures. They’re called Shadows, and they seem to absorb energy from the world around them.
Ari is sent out on a reconnaissance mission to an old farmhouse, so they can find her family. On the mission, they overhear an Unseen member mention they have a mole in the Kindred. On return from the mission, Ari overhears Rachel talking to the Unseen on a satellite phone. Ari turns Rachel in, and she is tortured for information.
A mission is launched to recover Ari’s family and destroy the Unseen; with the information from Rachel’s phone they’ve located the Unseen safehouses and can wipe them from the region.
During the mission, most of Ari’s team are killed, and Ari’s family are not located. Ari manages to kill several Unseen in the process.
After the battle, while Ari is alone, Noah reappears. He wasn’t killed that night, but rather rescued by Rachel who took him to an Unseen safehouse. The Kindred are the ones who have Ari’s family, and now Josh as well. They’re using her loved ones to manipulate her into joining them. They are the true villains, and the Unseen are made of up ex-Kindred who defected once they learned the truth about the organisation’s goals. Noah and Rachel have been working as double-agents for the Unseen until Ari turned Rachel in.
Noah and Ari mount a rescue mission back into the Kindred complex, rescuing Rachel and her loved ones, but not before a Shadow begins feeding on the Kindred. In the escape, the entire facility is destroyed, and Ari witnesses thirteen Shadows emerging from an altar.
Outside, the team take stock, but Hackman kills Ari’s mum and forces Ari and Josh to follow him to the sandstone building called the Chapel. In the process, Hackman cuts off Josh’s finger. Inside, Ari has a vision of herself transforming into a Shadow in a street filled with blood. In the vision, Noah dies in front of her, blaming her for everything that’s happened. Hackman is convinced that Ari will bring about the Final Day spoken of in the Kindred Agenda. In a fit of rage, Ari uses her abilities to set fire to the air around her, and the resulting fire kills Hackman in the doorway of the Chapel; he looks just like the figure she’d seen during her training session. The first vision had come true.
ONE
The girl stared at me for a moment, then dove off the boardwalk, disappearing under the black surface of the water. I ran for her, but she was gone. She was a girl just like me, although a few years younger, and this was the second time she had tried to kill me.
The harbour was quiet, a stark contrast to the cacophony carried on the wind from the casino three blocks away. This part of Coleton didn’t get much traffic at night, which was why she had planned her attack here. The far end of the wharf was mostly used for tourist boats during the day, and dozens of masts bobbed against the reflection of the water, their constant motion blending into the dark edges of the dock. Standing on the boardwalk, I scanned the area for possible accomplices, but there seemed to be no one else bent on killing me.
For now.
It was a dead end here. Waves lapped against a tiny beach that was accessible only by a small wooden staircase, and the sand was rimmed by imposing houses built by millionaires but owned now by the middle class, thanks to the brutal recession that had hit the city three years before. Despite the seclusion, there were still a thousand ways someone could get to me, so I had to move. Plus, the police might have questions if they found me here, considering a wooden yacht mast was smashed across the boardwalk a few feet away. Thankfully, I had heard the crack when the girl snapped it, and jumped out of its path. If I hadn’t, my head would now be crushed into pulpy bits on the boards, ruining an otherwise lovely view for the tourists in the morning.
Last night, on her first attempt, the girl had shoved me into the path of a bus as it thundered down North Avenue. It had braked just in time, and I’d passed it off as an unfortunate mistake, until I saw her glaring from the crowd that had gathered on the pavement. The whites of her eyes glowed under her hoodie, the same one she was wearing tonight, though her face was mostly obscured by the darkness. She had disappeared into the crowd before I’d caught her.
Tonight, though, she had used resonance. She had shattered the base of the mast with her mind and sent it falling my way
My eyes darted to dark windows in an off ice building to my left. No movement, although I couldn’t be sure it was empty.
The only reason I knew she wasn’t Kindred was because no one else had turned up to finish the job. The Kindred would never be that sloppy. They wanted me dead, but I’d flown under the radar so far.
I took out my phone and sent Noah a text.
We need to meet ASAP.
My phone buzzed a moment later.
Meet at Location D.
I sent back a thumbs-up icon. If the Kindred were tracking our phones, they wouldn’t know where we were going. The scrambler installed by the Unseen techies meant the Kindred couldn’t locate us by our signal, but an old-fashioned intercept of our messages might lead to an ambush, if we weren’t careful.
Location D was under a bridge in Century Park, a sprawling botanical garden with plenty of entrances. It was easy to hide in the park, which is why it was one of our five emergency locations. The Unseen were paranoid about security, which was a pain at times but also kept me alive. The only reason I had been allowed to stay at Dad’s place was because he’d gone to a lot of trouble to buy it under a fake name, with no clear paper trail, in order to keep it from Mum if they got divorced. Lawyers did things like that. She was dead, now, so that ship had sailed, but his trick had come in handy. Either way, Dad’s was as safe a place as any for us, and Skye needed the stability after everything she’d gone through back in Ettney. Kidnapping is a traumatic experience by itself, let alone being nearly sacrificed to an impossible Shadow creature, and watching your mum burn to death from the inside out.
I was coping better these days, thinking more like a soldier and a fighter. It helped. Any time the memories of those awful weeks in Ettney returned, I’d ask myself how the soldier version of me would react.
Noah and I had done a couple of missions with the Unseen, little things like reconnaissance of suspected Kindred facilities in the city, but this was the most threatened I had felt in months. The uncertainty was the worst part. This girl had come from nowhere, and if she wasn’t Kindred there was possibly another faction out there who wanted me dead.
Despite my best efforts to stay silent, my feet slapped on the wet pavement. A car engine roared, and the hiss of wheels on wet tarmac slithered up on my right.
“Hey, princess,” said a gravelly voice, “You look a bit wet. Want to get in?”
The man was in his late twenties, at least, with slicked hair and a manicured moustache. One earring glistened on his left lobe. The car was expensive, black, with custom silver number plates and glowing lights under the body.
His friend leaned over from the back, eyes sunken into their sockets. He had attempted to grow a moustache too, but it was fluffy and weird. He ran his tongue over his teeth. “She’s probably hot under all those layers. Maybe we could help her lose a few, you know, dry off.”
I didn’t break my pace, and kept my eyes fixed ahead.
“What’s wrong?” said the moustache man. “You frigid or something?”
I sighed. “Get lost.”
He kept driving slowly alongside me. “Come on, you stupid bitch. At least look at me.”
He revved the engine, and I stopped walking.
“That’s better,” he grinned, and leaned over, sticking his head out the window. Slowly, I walked over to him. The leer was awful. I smiled at him, then reached out and slammed his head down on the edge of the car door. He swore, and blood stained the chrome window edge. While he held his head in his hands, I tuned into the car’s front wheel, raising its resonance. The tyre melted onto the road, then caught fire, sending black smoke curling into the air. Sunken-eyes in the back stared at me, too surprised to be angry. He couldn’t see the outside of the car, so I melted it shut, fusing the car door to the body. Moustache wiped the blood from his eyes, cursing me out. He reached for the handle, but I’d fused his door shut too. He ducked his head out the window to see what was blocking his exit, then, eyes wide, stared back at me.
“She’s one of those kids,” he muttered to Sunken-eyes. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, please.”
Kids? I was seventeen, but whatever.
“Don’t kill us,” Sunken-eyes whined. “We won’t do it again.”
The fire in the front wheel spread to the bonnet.
I grinned. “I won’t kill you, but you should probably climb out the window and run. That fire’s gonna reach a fuel line soon.”
They swore simultaneously and tried to unclip their seatbelts. Apparently, even creeps care about safety. Moustache clambered out of his car window, falling to smack his shoulder on the pavement. He staggered to his feet, ignoring his friend in the back seat, and sprinted off down the road. Sunken-eyes couldn’t undo his seatbelt, and looked at me with sweat running down his forehead.
“Help me, please.” His eyes darted between me and the fire, and he let out a little sob.
“Close your eyes,” I sighed, feeling a bit sorry for him, despite his earlier actions.
“What?”
“Just look away or something, creep.”
He did, tears squeezing out of the edges of his eyes.
I tuned back in to the car body and wheel. The steel rang clear, but that wasn’t what I was after. The plastic was a muddy, wet mush of notes, especially now that it was on fire. I lowered the sound, dropping the resonance of the plastic parts until they were cold enough to draw ice from the air around them. The rain froze as it hit the bonnet, and frost crystallised on the wheel edge, drawn out of the air by the icy surface. The fire was gone.
Static broke off my tuning. The creep had opened his eyes. He stared open-mouthed at the frozen wheel.
“Who’s frigid now?” I smirked and set off at a jog away from the car. The creep wouldn’t follow me. He was too scared.
The street curved to the left so, by the time I reached the end, I’d lost sight of the creep and the car. Hopefully, he would make better choices in the future.
I reached the edge of Century Park as the night turned to drizzle. Coleton had its own weather; the coast had a personality almost opposite to Ettney’s inland heat. Coleton was wet, and cold, and wet again.
Century Park was ominous in the rain-mist, and path lights glowed dim as they wound their way across the turf. Black steel fence-posts marked garden beds as off-limits, and huge fig trees grew across the artificial hills, branches woven together at the top to make a canopy that, while thick, failed to keep out the rain. It did, however, keep the sun from reaching the ground during daylight hours, so most of the grass had given way to dirt and fallen leaves.
Something stirred in the cavity of one of the figs, a man pulling his weatherproof jacket tighter across his body. He watched me for a moment from behind his enormous beard, then rolled over to try and keep the rain off his face. I wanted to help him, somehow, but had nothing to give. I didn’t even have a coat myself, and my shirt was growing damp in the drizzle.
A tent city sprawled under a large bridge to my right, made up of veterans, single mums, and families who had run out of luck. The recession had hit this city hard. The tents were tolerated by the council as these people had nowhere else to go. The place had become a kind of fixture in Coleton, so much so that locals called it Downtown, because the people were down on their luck. Some were scared of Downtown, but I wasn’t worried. In a way, I had been homeless myself for a while, after the Kindred fire that destroyed our family home. These people weren’t dangerous, they were just having a rough time.
Besides, Downtown’s existence made it an excellent place for Location D, as no-one would think twice about a seventeen-year-old girl wandering Century Park in the middle of the night.
As I walked past the tent city, I scanned it for any sign of the girl. It was unlikely she had followed me, but better safe than sorry.
Towels and clothes hung drying on guy ropes, and the effect was of rows of banners, like flags that signalled the occupants’ identities. A row of baby clothes meant a newborn lived inside. Next door a huge black overcoat belonged to an elderly man who was cooking over a small gas fire. He smiled at me as I walked past, but I turned away. I wasn’t being rude, but I had to stay under the radar. I couldn’t afford anyone remembering I was here. My stunt with the car was dangerous enough. No point adding to my exposure.
Leaving Downtown, I walked slowly across the park, trying not to attract attention. Anyone could be Kindred. I had learned that by now. I couldn’t trust a soul except for Noah and my friends. Honestly, I barely trusted the Unseen. I didn’t know much about them, and they had played me just as much as the Kindred back at Ettney, leaving me out of the loop and putting my family in danger. Besides, any one of the Unseen could be a Kindred spy. I couldn’t trust anyone. Not anymore.
