by Damien Boyes
His shoulders twitch in a shrug, and his eyes get misty. “I haven’t dared risk the chance to find out. The chronoverse already reclaimed my timeline as a failed permutation, what if it deems me useless as well?”
“The last thing you are is useless.” I throw my arms around him. He stays stock still but I don’t let go, and he eventually returns my hug. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“You are my friend,” he says simply.
I can’t let him go through with this. Gibzon said it does happen, sometimes the boundless just don’t come back. Like the other Jasmin—she never returned either. There’s no chance one or the both of us doesn’t die in there. If there’s even the possibility Grackle could die for real …
I pull back from him and he seems to be feeling better.
“Thank you, Jasmin Parker—” he says, but I stop him.
“You’re not coming with me,” I say. “If there’s even a remote chance you could disappear … I won’t allow it.”
Grackle’s big eyes grow even wider. “No,” he says, and takes me by the shoulders. “That is not why I revealed this to you. I merely wished for you to understand the source of my hesitation. What good is life if it isn’t lived in the service of something greater than itself? My world is gone, but hope still remains for this one—”
“I’m not arguing with you,” I say. If he truly is the last of his entire species, no way I’m letting his extinction be on my account. I turn and stride away, leaving him back in the corner. “We ready?” I ask Captain Fan, and he pretends like they all haven’t been listening to us argue.
He glances back at Grackle. “When you are,” Fan answers.
“I’m going by myself,” I announce. “Grackle will wait with you here.”
Chen and Fan exchange a look. “Is that wise?” Captain Fan asks. “Two of you may well succeed where one would fail.”
“Jasmin Parker is overly concerned for my well-being,” Grackle says in a mollifying tone from over my shoulder. “I shall be accompanying her.”
I spin around, ready to put my foot down. “The hell you are,” I say just as the room fills with the unmistakable smell of charged air. The bunker shudders and everyone but Grackle and me are thrown to the ground. Dust clouds the small chamber as the Resistance scrambles back up to their feet, reaching for their weapons.
Not more than fifty feet down the tunnel, a dozen of Thrane’s soldiers stand in a V formation, and Einarr is leading them.
There’s a frozen moment while everyone waits to see what’s about to happen, then Einarr looks across the tunnel, locks eyes with me, and bares her teeth like she just saw her next meal.
“What a treat,” she purrs and pushes a long lock of her silver-black hair back from her forehead. “Thrane and Dhemant had their turns, and now I get the pleasure of killing you.”
My breath catches and I raise my wards, ready to fight, but the second she moves the Resistance opens fire on her.
“Activate the device,” Captain Fan yells to the technician behind the controls as the soldiers’ bullets whiz past us, then he grabs a weapon. “Everyone else, focus on Einarr!”
I don’t even bother with the gun on my back, there’s no point fighting a Remnant. Instead, I get next to the control panel and extend my wards as wide as I can, trying to protect the girl operating them while she powers up the device. I need to get inside the bubble or this was all for nothing.
“How long?” I ask her as bullets plink off my wards. I feel them hitting it, like the energy emanating from my body is still somehow a part of me.
“Sixty seconds,” she says, but her hands are shaking. She needs to get that device activated.
“What’s your name, Soldier?” I ask her.
“Zhi,” she answers.
“Zhi,” I say. “I’ll protect you, just get that thing running.”
She takes a breath as her fingers fly over the control pad. The Resistance finds cover where they can and focus fire on Einarr, but the bullets slam into her iridescent shields and don’t slow her down at all. She smirks, then blinks through the tunnel into the middle of the room and tears through the Resistance.
Captain Fan and Chen are on either side of the chamber’s wide entrance, keeping the enemy soldiers from advancing too far down the tunnel, but the black-armored soldiers don’t even need to be here, Einarr’s doing fine on her own. She’s already turned half of the Resistance soldiers to dust with slashes from the energy blades searing from her fists.
Grackle has taken up position in front of the device and is using his wards to protect it from the enemy fire. Einarr is closing on him though, probably figures if she shuts the machine down first, she can mop up the rest of us after.
“Grak!” I yell, instinctively flicking out my hand. A blast of ultraviolet energy shoots from my fingers. It slams into Einarr and throws her across the room. She cracks into the concrete wall but floats down gently to land on her feet, glaring at me.
“Good for you,” she says, wiping something from her lips. “It’s been too long since I had a satisfying opponent.”
She strides toward me, her gaze never leaving my face, and as she approaches her blades retract and her hands light up in flames of that same iridescent black shimmer that’s glowing around her body. A Resistance soldier puts himself between me and her and empties his weapon into her, but she keeps coming, walking straight into the bullets like they’re a gentle breeze, until she’s finally right in front of him. The weapon clicks dry just as she reaches him. She grabs the weapon in one glowing hand and the soldier in the other and watches me as the energy eats them away into flakes of black nothing, cutting the soldier’s scream off before it’s far past his lips.
Einarr smiles wide and flicks her hands at me, and twin balls of shimmering energy shoot out, crash into my wards, and drive me backward into the console.
“Ten seconds!” the technician yells.
The tip of the device is bright now, radiating like a tiny sun.
Einarr is nearly on me when she’s hit by a bright lance of green energy that spins her around, dazed. She twists her head to see Grackle, another shimmering spear emerging from his fist.
“Pick on someone your own age,” he says and hurls the spear at her, but this time she’s prepared and dodges it easily.
“Gladly,” she sneers and in a blur she’s got her black flaming hands around Grackle’s neck. His shields are blazing green as they fight the energy trying to eat through them, and while they’re holding, from the look on Grackle’s face he won’t last long.
“Concentrate fire,” Captain Fan yells, and the wards over Einarr’s back light up as they deflect the bullets. She hesitates, as if unsure of who she wants to kill first, and Grackle blasts her off him with an emerald shock to her chest at close quarters. She’s tossed backward but uses the momentum to twist and punch straight through Captain Fan.
I freeze in horror as he falls to the floor, blood pouring out of the hole in his chest. She throws me a glance and then looks back at Chen, who’s reloaded and firing, but his bullets are useless.
Chen’s going to die. They’re all going to die.
Then I feel the room open up, like the air pressure’s changed, and I know the device has pierced the bubble. Grackle is right, jumping through will be easy.
“Now,” Zhi yells.” Go now!”
How can I?
Einarr is pacing toward Chen, making a show of it. She turns and grins at me as she reaches him. I just can’t leave him here to die.
“NOW!” Zhi screams at me, and I notice Grackle is already on the other side of the bubble, standing completely still, as though frozen.
“Don’t look back,” Chen calls to me as he tosses his empty gun at Einarr then lunges at her. She catches him with her fingers around his throat but he doesn’t yell, just mouths go at me, and my chest heaves to scream as he disappears in a cloud of ash and black energy, and before the sound leaves my throat I blink myself to the other side
of the barrier.
By the time my eyes have refocused, the fighting is over. Fan lies unmoving on the concrete floor and Chen is gone to dust. The device is destroyed and enemy soldiers are moving at ten times normal speed, clearing out the Resistance equipment and setting what look like explosives around the chamber. Einarr stands still for all of it, watching us through the skin of the bubble with an amused smirk.
Then she disappears, and a fraction of a second later the other side of the chamber explodes in a ball of fire and leaves us in darkness.
Grackle puts his hand on my arm.
“We must move,” he says, and then he’s gone. I don’t know how long we’ve been standing here, how many hours have passed in the outside while we’ve taken a handful of breaths in here. Captain Fan is dead. Chen is dead. So is Zhi, and all the other soldiers. How long has the world been without them?
I take a breath as anger seethes in my gut.
Just when I think everything has been taken from me, Thrane finds a way to keep taking more. That’s what he does. He takes.
Well he’s taken enough.
Now he’s going to pay.
36
Singularity
We blink straight up into Central Park, and after the gloomy tunnel the bright sunlight is blinding.
I drop to my knees, overwhelmed by the dazzling light and the vision of Chen burnt away to nothing in Einarr’s blazing fist.
They’re dead, they’re all dead. And I let it happen.
I feel Grackle’s light palm on my back. He doesn’t say anything, just touches me while my chest heaves in sobs I can no longer hold back. He lets me cry it out, and once I get my breathing back under control, he removes his hand. “You have my sincere condolences, Jasmin Parker,” he says, “but we must proceed with the mission.”
I know. He’s right. How much time has passed out there while I was indulging my sorrow? My chest is still tight but I pull myself together, wipe my face on my sleeve, then get up and give Grackle a smile to let him know I’m okay. I can cry when we’re done.
We landed on a wide-open grassy lawn—Sheep Meadow, I think. It’s a perfect spring day here. People are out enjoying the sun, strolling the paths. Beside us, a bunch of kids are trying to catch a floating ball. The constant city funk is masked by the trees and the flowers. Beyond the leafy canopy, Midtown’s black and gold and glass buildings sparkle in the afternoon light.
The city looks a lot like the New York in Gibzon’s time, except for the golden obelisk, its base stretched across what has to be three blocks and going up so high I can barely see where it ends and the sky begins.
The tightness in my chest fills with hate and expands with a fire I’ve never felt before.
Thrane’s in there.
Captain Fan died because of him. All those soldiers. Zhi. Chen.
What gives him the right?
Someone beside me laughs, a man, playing with his kids, he looks healthy and happy and completely unconcerned with the devastation just outside the bubble. The rest of his world is cooking to death, and he’s enjoying a picnic. Does he know what’s going on out there? How could he not? If he’s in here it must mean he’s working with President Price, which means he’s working with Thrane. It’s all I can do to stop myself from frying him with a blast from my fingertips.
I turn and search for any signs of the outside world, but the blue sky extends off in every direction. We jumped straight up, so the bubble’s edge must be around here somewhere …
It doesn’t take long to find it. Once I’m close enough to touch it the outside world fades back in, like looking through the other side of a one-way mirror. The other side of the dome is piled nearly to my height with trash, and the sky beyond is dark—sometime in the middle of the night. I have no idea how long has passed, whether hours or days, but the sun was setting when Grackle and I first went into the Resistance cave, and that was only a few hours ago. I’ve already lost all concept of the passage of time.
I can’t see much above the trash, but I know for sure I don’t see any trees. I step back and hover up a few feet to see over the garbage. Outside the shield, Central Park is a tent city, a slum, filled from end to end with plastic sheeting and ramshackle structures. They’re dying out there, the whole world is dying. And why? So Thrane can live in this perfect bubble forever?
The negative energy collectors around the globe are gathering power for something. There’s got to be more to Thrane’s plan than keeping this place stuck in time. But what?
I drop back to the ground before anyone notices a flying girl, head back out to the lawn, and grab Grackle. We race through the park, getting looks from the people around us but causing no real alarm. Maybe they see heavily armed women and skinny guys in tweed suits in the park all the time. Or maybe they learned it’s better to keep their heads down and not get involved.
We leave the park and the base of the gaudy obelisk is right there, on the other side of 59th, stretching across 5th and for a block on either side. It’s surrounded by golden steps leading up to a massive set of doors. The Presidential Seal gleams above a wide balcony. I can imagine President Price standing there, waving to the crowd. I wonder if he’s in there too. I have half a mind to go in there and find him, see for myself what kind of a megalomaniac needs a golden monument built in his honor.
We don’t have time for that though. Armed guards stand sentry around the doors, but we can deal with them, and unlike the New York I’m used to, there aren’t a lot of people on the sidewalks. I’ve seen more action on the streets during snowstorms.
“What next?” Grackle asks.
I guess this is it. My powers aren’t as intense as they were on the other side of the bubble, but I still feel strong as hell. I’m wearing armor. I’ve got weapons, even a bit of training. We came here to get inside that building, and that’s what we’re going to do.
Thrane must know we’re coming—he sent Einarr to the tunnel to stop us. It’s probably why there’s hardly anyone around—he wants us to make the first move.
So fine, I’ll make it.
“Follow my lead,” I say, take two running steps and throw myself up into the air. I feel Grackle behind me as I cross above the street and shoot up about twenty stories, watching my distorted reflection in the obelisk’s golden surface. “Let’s see what this thing’s made of.”
I wind up and hurl a fistful of energy at the tower. The bolt shatters through the side, exposing a big round hole and sending gilt shards crashing to the ground.
Nothing else happens. I was expecting the building to be shielded, or at least armored somehow. It can’t just be glass, can it? I look back down at the street, and the guards who were protecting the doors are gone.
“This is too easy,” I say, and I hear Grackle swallow beside me. Still, I hover forward and peek my head into the hole in the side of the building.
It’s hollow inside, but a thick black cylinder, like a huge pipe standing upright, rises up the center of the building and disappears in a bright light way above us. Structural supports and gray-black beams rise along the walls, and walkways crisscross around the center and along the edges. Most of the obelisk is just an edifice, a façade around what I guess is the power conduit leading up to the black hole or whatever it is that’s keeping the Omega Guard from jumping to this timeline.
So that’s where we need to go.
“After you,” I say, and Grackle flashes me a tight smile as he floats out into the wide-open area around the rising cable.
I follow and we fly up, circling the broad black cylinder toward the light radiating from above us. The conduit hums as I drag my fingers along it, but the higher we go the more I feel my powers fading. The crackling roar of the energy inside me reduces to a blaze, and by the time we’re close enough to the source of the light to see details, I don’t feel much stronger than I did back home.
I wonder if time is even slower now that we’re near the singularity. What if days are passing with every minute? What if
we’re too late and Thrane’s invasion has already begun? What if I’m too weak to fight once we get to the top?
Doubt starts to creep in, but I refuse to let it stop me. There’s no running from this. Literally the entire universe is resting on my ability to shut this place down.
I burn through the worry with the anger still pounding in my heart and put on a burst of speed. My back tingles as I draw energy from the armor’s batteries and feel myself rejuvenated. I can do this. Even if Thrane is up there waiting, I don’t need to fight him, I just need to get the black hole shut down. If I can do that, it doesn’t matter what happens to me.
We’re probably two-thirds of the way up the building, maybe a half mile off the ground, and the air crackles with a noise like an industrial blender grinding through metal. A few dozen feet above us a beam of pure white light roars out the end of the conduit, a high-pressure torrent of concentrated energy so bright I can barely look at it. The energy shoots up twenty feet or so then flattens and spirals in toward an invisible ball—a sphere of warped space I can only see because it pinches my view of the other side of the tower down to a point—and disappears.
All this power Thrane’s collecting from our universe and he’s shooting it into a hole in nothing? And this is only one timeline—there must be drains in the sky just like this on his thousands of other worlds. Where’s it all going?
Everyone says Thrane’s a conqueror, that he wants to rule the universe, that he craves only power, but when is enough enough? If this was just about power, he could have quit a long time ago. He’s a god. What more could he possibly need?
All his conquests, these worlds he absorbs, they’re just fed back into the system, the spoils sucked away. This has got to be about more than just conquest, more than a megalomaniacal desire to rule. He’s stealing the energy from these timelines and feeding it into something.