Shattered by Glass (The Human-Hybrid Project Book 1) Read online

  Farley L. Dunn

  SHATTERED BY GLASS

  Copyright © 2021 by Farley L. Dunn

  1st ed.

  Book 1 in the Series:

  THE HUMAN-HYBRID PROJECT

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by electronic process or any other means, without written permission of the publisher.

  All Rights Reserved

  .

  Published in Fort Worth, Texas

  www.ThreeSkilletPublishing.com

  Three Skillet Publishing

  PO Box 162194

  Fort Worth, Texas 76161

  ― Book 1 ―

  The Human-Hybrid Project

  Contents

  ― 1 ―

  ― 2 ―

  ― 3 ―

  ― 4 ―

  ― 5 ―

  ― 6 ―

  ― 7 ―

  ― 8 ―

  ― 9 ―

  ― 10 ―

  ― 11 ―

  ― 12 ―

  Arriving April 2021

  ― 1 ―

  THE SKYSCRAPER continually collapsed and rebuilt itself.

  Forty floors of industrial steel and glass, the black, silicon fist thrust angrily into the night sky. It stood, immutable, then the glass walls flexed, burst into a billion shards of immensely beautiful silicon glitter that showered onto the Bay City streets below, obscuring the walls of the building as they shattered and fell.

  The crowded mall at its base held open arms to the sky, and the splinters of light showered the midnight revelers in a feast of mind-bending beauty before coalescing into the great, glass behemoth once again. A massive sign read SOLD OUT and revealed tonight’s featured Rez band, the Howling Pterodactyls, sporting green sequined high-heeled boots and matching bird masks. Their instruments pumped out discordant and unearthly harmonies like a raging nor’easter coming in across a churning sea.

  Costumed revelers in outrageous dress, or some hardly dressed at all, throbbed or spun or leaped impossibly far into the air as the music dictated the evening’s fanfare. Winged or masked, bare skin or leather wrapped, the assortment of variations on the human form was a sight to behold.

  Garik Shayk did a 360 as he topped the hill at First and Sycamore. The chill air pummeled his dark hair as his jet-assist Street Strider leaped to grab the night sky, revealing the black silhouette of the city with the pliable Corona Tower at its center blazing in a spiraling windstorm of light. The ever-fluid building was mesmerizingly malleable as it grew and shrank, pulsing against the eternal backdrop of the Milky Way spanning the midnight sky.

  Garik pulled on his makeshift brake and skidded to a stop. His machine rumbled between his thighs, occasionally burping a black cloud of indigestion. The quivering machine vibrated his arms, sending small earthquakes down his torso and into his legs. His clothing rippled next to his skin, more revealing than the slender 17-year-old might have wished, belying his big hands and strong features.

  The sight of the Tower sliced his soul with brokenness—no, with anger. His bronze skin kept him from joining the festivities. He was excluded, and for that, he felt he was about to erupt in fury.

  “No,” Garik whispered into the darkness. “Anger gets me nothing. I must use my hands, my mind, my desire to achieve what I want. Like my Street Strider.”

  He patted the core of the machine, the jet turbine running between his legs. He had discovered it rotting away behind Kang’s Garage underneath a shredded tarp. Kang had offered it in exchange for grunt work around the shop, Garik had begged a few dollars from his aunt for used parts, and now it was his.

  The Street Strider coughed, and with a backfire, the darkened intersection went silent.

  “No!” Garik hit the kickstand with his heel, jerked his tight, muscular frame erect, and stood with his arms crossed, scowling at the bike. “How can you do this to me again? Every time.”

  And his watch had been confiscated by his aunt—well, by her no-good boyfriend. He couldn’t even call home, not that he would. He loved Irina, but she told everything to Arik, and Arik didn’t approve of his freedom on the Strider. Envy, Garik had decided long ago. It was Marisa he trusted. She was like him, a fighter, and like him, she was frustrated by her lack of power to fight the “system.”

  The “system” was down the hill, parading over the city, melting and reforming on a cycle that was as predictable as rats producing new litters of pups. It taunted him, locked him out, and said that he wasn’t good enough to be part of them.

  Garik knelt by the cycle and he worked the cover off the high-voltage connectors. Often, this was where the problem was. He flipped the whole-bike breaker, waited to the count of ten, and flipped it back on. He remounted, rested his thumb on the starter switch, and closed his eyes.

  Sometimes it started, sometimes it didn’t. Garik whispered, “Dear God, Holy Jesus in Heaven,” hoping someone up there was paying attention, and he pressed the button.

  Nothing. The faint hiss of the Rez band at the Tower rippled around him, but his bike remained silent. The bike was powered, or so resetting the breaker might suggest, but he had forgotten that the jet assist needed to be kick-started using a spark capacitor and a jet-fuel injector. The built-in injector was fried, which meant he had to do this manually.

  Garik pulled a small injector from the pack behind him, attached a fuel cell, and inserted the end into a hole he’d drilled in the side of the jet-assist module. He pressed the start button again, triggered the injector, and whispered again, “Dear Holy Father—”

  The bike coughed hard enough that he almost lost the injector, but the assist was flaming beautifully. He breathed relief and disconnected the fuel and stored it in his pack. For a moment, with the cold night, he regretted the ceramic shielding insulating the furnace inside, but some warmth escaped. The night would be bitter before he returned home, and by then, no matter how cold the night, he would be grateful the warmth between his legs stayed between his legs.

  “YOU KNOW it’s not real.” Marisa Bruni, petite with Asian features and giant eyes that belied her fierce determination to win every time, drove her stylus hard into her MicroArt tablet. She sat with Garik Shayk on the roof of the building their families shared, wrapped in blankets under the stars, with the howling remnants of the Pterodactyls filtering through the buildings to their ears. “They don’t even sound good.”

  “Still.” Garik squeezed his arms around himself, wishing his blanket were heavier. “I wish I were there.”

  “Well, you’re not. Here, what do you think?” Marisa held up the tablet, its tight pool of glowing light shifting from her face to his. “Is it funny, almost funny, or should I just start over?”

  “No, no. Don’t start over.” He took the tablet and worked it into his lap, keeping everything except his fingers inside the blanket.

  “Yah! You haven’t even looked at it.” She was clearly laughing at him. “You are so clueless with the real world. Press here to go to the next image.”

  Garik watched Marisa’s face, mesmerized. She was beautiful, though he had yet to tell her that. She was so focused, knew what she wanted from life, and he was afraid he might lose her if he got in her way. This, well, she wanted to be a graphic artist, and she was always creating storyboards to show him. Sometimes she wiped them all away, gone as soon as he looked at them, saying that she would earn a place on a Mars flight, and her drawings were just for fun. Other times, he saw her look wistfully at the tight and trim people coming and going from The Martial Arts Center, even though she never talked much about the classes she regularly attended at Ai Kee!

  Garik? He wanted in
to the Corona Tower, at least into the mall on an event night. To sit front row to the Pterodactyls, well, maybe not the Pterodactyls, but the group of the week was his dream. To be there when the building shattered into glitter and to look up with his hands in the air as the glitter fell all around him—

  “It’s not real, Garik. Aren’t you even listening?” Marisa pulled the tablet from his hands. “I don’t know why I show you my best when you won’t even look at it. See? Look at this frame. I have Halo Sunchaser with her electrified sword. She’s about to cut off the head of the gorilla thing. I tried to draw a silverback, but I’m not sure I got it right.”

  “It looks right to me. You’re good, Marisa. Don’t doubt yourself.”

  “Oh, you’re looking, now?” She laughed. “And that’s real, by the way.”

  “What?” The tablet, the drawing, or what she had drawn?

  “The electrified sword. I’ve seen the schematics for it. If you add ESS when you search Corona Tower slash Halo Sunchaser, you can pull up the working plans to build it, although no one’s been able to. I think the schematics are incomplete, and it’s so complicated that no one can tell.” She giggled, sounding as innocent as she looked.

  “No one can tell what?” Garik took the tablet back and expanded the image of Sunchaser with the sword, the ebony face baked into hardness by the white-hot sword vibrating with the unshielded energy of the sun.

  “What’s missing, that’s what. Well, I could tell. No one will be able to build a copy, because they don’t want you to.”

  “How did you know about adding ESS to find the schematics?” The sword in the drawing did look cool. Garik had to admit that.

  “Electrified Sword Schematics. E. S. S. Duh. I thought anyone would know that. I tried it with the Tower, but no luck.”

  “The Tower?” She had his attention, now. If he could get the schematics, perhaps he could find a way for it to let him inside.

  “Yep and nope. No go, Bozo. They are secured tighter than a freezer pack of peas. Nothing escapes they don’t want to escape. There’s got to be a reason for all that security.”

  “That’s easy.” Garik had moved on past the electrified sword, and now he was seeing other creatures Marisa had drawn into her graphic storyboard. Winged people, one person dissolving into a purple mist. Others, too. He looked up. “Rich people. Everyone knows the floors up to six are a fancy hotel. Some people live there full time. That would be nice, to be waited on hand and foot. Anyway, they have to provide security for them. That’s what it is.”

  “What’s that bird that flies over the water?” The tablet was back in Marisa’s hands, and she was leaned into it, drawing away.

  “A, um, gull?”

  “Yeah, you. Gull-i-ble. What about the other floors? Buildings like that have basements, too. What’s so secure about a basement? I say something’s fishy.”

  “Didn’t your sister—” As soon as he said the words, he knew it was a mistake. Marisa had never talked about her sister who had supposedly disappeared inside, and everyone had told him she never would. He watched her hands freeze on her MicroArt tablet, and she laid the stylus to the side and clicked it to a special clip, causing the screen to go black.

  “All that stuff you see the Tower do isn’t real. It’s an illusion.” She sounded flat, as though she was shifting the topic, nothing else.

  “The glass breaking. Sure, I guess I knew that. Still—” He was stupid, and he couldn’t believe how much. Stupid, stupid Garik.

  “No still, Gari. It’s just a building, and the walls are just glass, and they use projectors and such to make it look that way. It’s a security distraction to keep you from looking closer. That’s all. You’re supposed to see the lights, the glitter, the parties on the mall and not notice what they don’t want you to see.”

  “The food court? I mean, that’s real. Anyone can visit the food court.” At Chow Down, they let you in no matter who you were. He had been there looking for clues, only there were none. Just other city kids, wannabes like him, people who wanted to move into a better life but didn’t know where the ladder was.

  “And spend money to enrich the people who already have it. I have to work in the flower shop in the morning. I need to get home.” She stood, tucking her blanket tighter when it pulled loose on one side. “Your bike, did you secure it?”

  “No one would want it.” Still, he held up the fob to the cable that looped through the spokes on the wheels and snaked through the hollow jet assist.

  “Good. I want to go for a ride on it someday.” She looked off across the city. Most lights were off, and the streetlights didn’t reach them. “This is my home, but sometimes I don’t feel that way. See you later.”

  Garik watched her tug on her blanket where it was dragging on one corner. She hiked it up, but when she turned it loose, the corner fell back down and trailed the roof anyway. He wanted to offer to help, but he didn’t know what to say. He’d already messed up once tonight, and he couldn’t risk another misfire.

  As he stood, he realized he was still wrapped in her blanket. He smiled and tugged it tighter. One day, he thought. One day, I’m getting in Corona Tower, and when I do, I’m taking you with me. We’ll find out what’s going on in there, and I bet we can even find that electrified sword. Won’t that be cool?

  Well, the air was no longer just cool, it was definitely cold. When he began to shiver, Garik made his way to the door into the building. Once inside, he headed down the stairs, light of foot and light of heart, certain that Marisa was as anxious to get inside the Tower as he was, and they would do it together.

  Inside his bedroom, he spread the blanket over his bed. He would have to return it tomorrow, but for tonight, dreams of Marisa would keep him company all night long.

  ― 2 ―

  “IRI, I’M OUT for the morning.” Garik worried the lock fob for the Strider with his thumb. It wouldn’t unlock from this distance, but still, he was careful. The small screen showed no attempts to steal it, but he had meant what he said to Marisa. It barely ran and looked worse. Some days, it was hardly worth taking out, as walking was quicker than the time he spent on his knees with the power couplings exposed and his tools deep in the workings of the finicky bucking bronc. “Irina, did you hear?”

  “Sorry, Gari.” Irina appeared, cocooned in a terry wrap, rubbing her hair with a towel. She kicked aside yesterday’s towel, revealing a damp spot on the concrete where last century’s linoleum had peeled away. “Do you want breakfast? Arik had to leave early, and I think he ate the last of the eggs. I might have some Crispies.”

  “Milk?” If Arik had finished off the eggs, likely he’d done the same with the milk.

  “Yah! Will I never remember?” Irina hit the heel of her hand to her forehead, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. Her black hair, crimped, wet, and clinging to her neck, took on a life of its own as she hit her forehead a second time.

  “It’s okay, Iri. Maybe I can snag some fries at the court.” It hadn’t been a plan, but now maybe it was. After the previous night, and Marisa, and watching the Rez concert from First and Sycamore—

  “No, no, my baby nephew.” Irina was already in the small kitchen. She dropped her towel on the counter, covering a portion of last night’s unwashed plates, and she rummaged through a cabinet. “I have some powdered from last month’s box. I know it’s here.’

  “It’s okay, Iri. I have a couple dollars, and anyway, people leave fries all the time. I don’t mind, especially when they’re free.” He grinned.

  “Here, I found it.” Irina held up a clear pouch filled with white powder. Then she looked at it more closely and smiled apologetically. “Ah, I’m sorry, Gari. This is potatoes.”

  “I like potatoes, just not for breakfast. It’s good, really, Iri. I’ll get something later.”

  “Wait, before you go. I don’t want you going all the way down to the Tower. See?” She smiled brightly. “I keep up. I know where the court is. It’s where all you kids hang out. Do you s
till call it that, hanging out?”

  “Yes, we still hang out.” Maybe not hang out. Network or chill, but it was pointless to correct her. Iri still used all her words from when she was seventeen. He had heard them so often that it was like knowing a second and very secret language.

  “I don’t want you to go there, because I don’t like what happens there, but if you do, you’ll go right by Masti’s Deli, won’t you? I have a twenty. Bring home a pint of milk, will you do that?”

  Irina rooted in the cabinet and pulled down an old Hersey’s Chocolate Powder can, worked the little lid loose, and fished out two bills. She peeled one off, folded it twice, and held it out to Garik. He took it, slipped it into a small pocket, and gave his aunt a kiss on the cheek.

  “Bye, Iri. I’ll be back before dark.”

  “Be safe! Arik will be home at four. Be kind, Gari, and don’t do anything that’s not good.”

  “Do I ever?” He grinned, waved, and pulled the door open. He understood her warning. Arik would be back at four, and that wasn’t a good time for Garik to unexpectedly appear. The two were better apart, especially on days when Garik’s Strider was running properly, and he was out and about.

  The top of the one tree on Maple Street sported a handful of scraggly leaves just off the balcony leading to the stairwell. Garik leaned out and brushed the one leaf he could reach. Not maple, he was certain. Alder, likely. Anyway, he was glad to have it outside their apartment, and he always told it good morning.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he called.

  “Thank you. I’m glad you think so.”

  He leaned out and looked up to see Mrs. Waggoner, the old dame of the building and one of his few friends besides Marisa. “What, the day or the tree, Mrs. Waggoner?”

  “Neither, sweetheart. Me, of course. How’s that aunt of yours doing? I don’t see her out much,” Mrs. Waggoner asked in a bright voice. She had a plastic watering can, and she was tipping green-tinted water into each of her hanging pots.