Pain courses through my body. My thigh is a pulsing ball of agony. I feel a dull ache where my back molar once was. And now my head hurts as well. The back of my skull screams in silent torture.
“Get her up,” a voice says with implacable calm.
Two meaty hands grab me under one arm, standing me on my feet. I blink until Fatty comes into focus. He smiles, revealing his cracked and rotting teeth. I let my head drop to the side, trying to get a sense of my surroundings. There are no buildings. No trees. Only a snowy white hilltop. And the sky is a light gray, just slightly lighter than the snow. The hilltop and sky all feel blended together, as if we are suspended in a snow globe.
The tingling in the air gets stronger, accompanied by an audible thrumming. A cold wind cuts through my body. I am still only wearing the dress, leggings, ballet flats, and a thin wool coat. I wriggle my toes, just to make sure they are still there. I hug myself to warm up.
The thin woman stands behind Genevieve, Peter, and Ishimwe, pointing a rifle at them. All three of them are kneeling, hands tied behind their backs. They’ve been beaten, their faces swollen and bleeding.
“The Order of the Perpetual Dawn welcomes you.” Henri steps forward, moving with odd, jerking motions as if he wasn’t entirely in control of his body. I feel a pang of sadness. Henri’s once kind eyes are now wild and bloodshot. But then I remember that it isn’t Henri. It’s Phaedrus, having somehow wormed his way inside Henri’s body with a technology that is far beyond my grasp. Whatever process transported Phaedrus’s consciousness into Henri’s body has already changed Henri. Does Phaedrus’s consciousness in Henri’s body mean that Henri is gone for good? “What have you done to Henri?” I ask.
He sighs. “The old man’s not gone if that’s what you’re wondering. When I leave this body, he’ll simply wake up. He’ll have a terrible headache and some odd memories, but that’s all. It will be like a bad dream.”
“What about the other… body?” I ask. “You dislocated his shoulder and broke his leg when you jumped. That’s worse than a dream.”
Phaedrus shrugs. “Easily fixed, but you wouldn’t understand the process.”
“I knew coming to you in this face wouldn’t help. Even the last one wasn’t ideal, because you’d never seen it.”
What does he mean that I’ve never seen it? Do we know each other?
“I tried to track you down in my own body, but it makes traveling so much harder. Neural hijacking, on the other hand, somehow tricks the universe. It won’t try to stop us like it tries to stop you.”
Phaedrus reaches into a pocket of his jacket and takes out a metal device. Pieces unfold from it, shaping around his hand. “Whatever forces in the universe make it difficult for us to reshape history, neural hijacking seems to help. But it’s still difficult.”
He nods past me to the second truck. “She was particularly difficult to get my hands on.” Leung stands next to it. The canvas backing on the truck has been pulled to the side. Sitting inside the truck is the girl from the snowstorm. I realize why she looks familiar.
The dark hair. The wide-set cheekbones and tan skin with a splash of freckles across her face. I would see a very similar face if I looked in the mirror. Even the way she sits feels suddenly all too familiar.
It’s not just any girl. It’s me.
I jerk back, but Fatty tightens his grip on my arm. I struggle to escape. Being so close to my own timeline is the worst kind of Recursion Event. I gaze up at the sky. The clouds are boiling.
I’ve heard of wars being started when people tried to interact with themselves. I’ve heard of earthquakes swallowing people whole when they’ve tried to do this. I’ve even heard of tunnels spontaneously opening up, sucking them into some unknown era.
He must want me dead. But that doesn’t make sense. There are simpler ways to kill me. Unless, of course, he can'’. Changing history requires agency. You have to know what you are trying to change. But the more important something is the harder it is to change. So maybe he has tried to kill me, and maybe something has always stopped him. The gun has jammed. He has gotten sick and fainted.
But the answer is glaringly obvious. She’s the Interloper that caused the Recursion Event. That’s why it was strong enough to start the Station Fire, strong enough to cause riots in the streets of Paris. It wasn’t just that she was an Interloper wandering through the wrong time, she was also wandering too close to me. Phaedrus would have kept her in an apartment near the Station, knowing that when I arrived something would happen. She was an alarm clock, nothing more. After that, he kept her at a distance. Close enough to cause some astronomical interference, but not so close to risk a chance encounter. The only reason Phaedrus let her be so close now must be because he’s almost done with me.
“I brought you here to show you something,” Phaedrus says.
I pull my gaze away from my younger self. Phaedrus steps aside. Now I know where that thrumming sound is coming from.
Between the two canvas trucks I see a rocky ledge jutting out of the hillside. At the end of the ledge, there are two pillars set up on legs, like tripods. There is almost a glow around the pillars that pulse with their own rhythm. A mass of cables surround the pillars. With each pulse of the pillars I feel another surge. Between the pillars is a tunnel.
The tunnel is suspended in the air just beyond the edge of the cliff. It looks like a dark hole in the sky, as if someone has spilled ink onto glass and suspended the glass in the sky.
As an agent with the ISD, I’ve seen nearly every tunnel that we’ve had logged, categorized, and controlled. But not one of them has ever been so visible. Nor have they ever been floating.
“Aren’t you curious what’s on the other side?” Phaedrus asks.
I want to shout hell no and unload my gun at his lopsided grin. But at the same time, I am curious.
Genevieve is kneeling in the snow. Her eyes are bruised and bloodied, but she still meets my gaze. The Genevieve I thought I knew is a lie. And yet, I still see the old Genevieve in those swollen eyes. When you look deep into someone’s eyes, you see something. Call it what you want. The soul. The sum of their experiences. But it’s real. I know Genevieve and right now she is telling me to go.
Phaedrus shouts, his voice shrill. “Ironic as it may sound, we don’t actually have all the time in the world.”
I step forward, the snow crunching under my feet, the wind whipping through my thin coat, and follow him up the hill. The snow has stopped falling, but above me, dark clouds are swirling in an ominous pattern. I’ve been followed by bad weather ever since arriving through the Paris tunnel, caused by the presence of my younger self, of course. But this is different. Worse. The word apocalyptic comes to mind.
Phaedrus pauses near the edge of the cliff. He glances back at me, his pale skin turned an almost dark purple from the cold. He stretches waxen lips into a semblance of a smile. “I know you may not believe it, but I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a hundred years.”
So many unbelievable things have happened in the last twenty-four hours that my skepticism only registers briefly. I stop, unnerved by the tunnel hovering in front of me.
“Thrilling, isn’t it? No ISD drones to check out the other side first. No reports on the state of the world in that period of time. Well, no worries, Little Mouse. That’s why I’m coming with you.”
He extends a hand toward mine. I wrench my own away. Phaedrus shrugs. “It hardly matters. There’s no delay on this tunnel. If we step through five seconds apart, we will arrive five seconds apart. We can thank the gate for that. Come on, then. We’re wasting time. One big step and we’re there.”
I creep forward to the edge and am greeted by a thousand foot drop with nothing but ice and rocks to break my fall. My foot slips a little, and snow falls off the edge, spiraling down to a dizzying drop. I feel my stomach tie into knots. I can’t do this. My pulse quickens. My breathing becomes shallow. There’s no way I can do this. Then Phaedrus grabs me by the back of
my coat.
“Oh, come on!” he cries.
He pushes me, leaping after me.
And we’re both falling over the edge of the cliff.
I scream, but my voice is lost in the howling wind.
And then my voice is gone.
Because I am nothing.
All is nothing.
I float.
* * *
I collapse, rolling across a hard surface, until my shoulder hits a rigid embankment. I roll back onto my side and blink my eyes open. A harsh light assaults my corneas, and I squeeze my eyes shut again.
I remember my mantra.
You are Molly Gardner of the ISD. You have just traveled through time and space. Remember your directives. Remember your mission.
But my mission was over the moment I stepped into the burning Paris Station. My partner is missing, and I am stuck in the middle of a war between two future cadres of time travelers: The Order of the Perpetual Dawn and these—what did Genevieve call them? These Elementalists. I’m starting to feel like the future has gone insane.
I try to stand, but fall back down. Something’s wrong. I feel my chest tightening. I feel weak. I reach up, feeling the edge of the embankment. It’s smooth and hard, almost like plastic. I use it to pull myself up. It is warmer here, but the air feels thin. I stand, slowly. The wound in my thigh aches. I blink against the harsh, yellow light. But something is wrong. My vision telescopes inward. I feel suddenly dizzy. I lean over and vomit.
“What’s wrong with me!” I gasp.
“Careful,” Phaedrus says, speaking in Henri’s voice. He takes something from his pocket and hands it to me. It looks like an inhaler, but slightly larger. “Oxygen. The air is thin here.”
Phaedrus takes out a second device and puts it to his lips, pressing a button. He breathes in several times, and I can see the color returning to his wrinkled skin. I do the same, and feel instant relief. My lungs fill with a blast of cool, pure oxygen. The darkness in my vision recedes. I take in a deep breath, gasping breaths and each breath brings more clarity.
“I didn’t bring you here to kill you,” he says. “I brought you here to see something. Look around.”
Images take shape in the sunlight. Tall spires, each of them hundreds of feet high, rise up out of a large body of water. Near the water’s surface a latticework of causeways and tunnels connect the spires—or buildings—giving the whole city the appearance of being a single structure. Am I on an island? I lean forward and immediately decide that was a bad idea. The drop from the cliff was terrifying because I couldn’t see the bottom. But here, the bottom is clear. Waves pound at the base of the structure I am standing on, hundreds of feet below. I’m at the top of a building rising right out of the ocean.
“They took you away and you forgot where you came from,” Phaedrus says, his voice soft.
I turn toward Phaedrus, and my breath catches in my throat. We are on a sort of rooftop patio, but this isn’t the top of the building. It continues, impossibly tall and pale gray in the dim light, stretching high up into the clouds.
“The New York space elevator,” Phaedrus says between pulls on his oxygen. “The pinnacle of engineering in the world-alliance. That is, until the gates.”
The gate behind Phaedrus is similar to the Alpine gate, but where the other was portable, this is permanent. And larger. Two columns rise up almost twenty feet into the sky and spaced ten feet apart. While the columns forming the gate in the Alpine pass looked temporary, this gate lacks the tripod supports and is permanently fixed to the rooftop. It reminds me of a helipad. The tunnel itself is also different. All other tunnels I’ve seen are only visible by a subtle blurring of reality; by a shadow too dark to be a shadow, or by a haziness that makes your head hurt to look at. But this tunnel is a black scar in the air between the columns, clearly visible even in the sunlight.
“New York?” I ask, my voice sounding incredibly small and weak to my ears. I suck in more air, and strength returns.
“That’s right. Do you see anything familiar?” he asks.
I scan the dizzying array of skyscrapers, unsure at first what I am looking for. A bank of clouds shrouds the city below us. And closer than I would like, a lightning storm illuminates the sky.
I look for a shoreline, and see none. Everything is completely alien. Yet, at the same time, I can’t shake a feeling of familiarity. “No, it’s not possible. I’ve never been here before.”
“Well, you have,” Phaedrus says. “Let me just see if I can help you find something familiar.” He steps to the edge of the rooftop. “Look down.”
A smaller building emerges just above the surface of the water. It is crumbling from disrepair, but its peak is immediately familiar.
“That’s the Empire State Building,” I say.
“That’s right” Phaedrus smiles. “Sadly, Brooklyn is entirely underwater. This is where you and James met, is it not?”
James? Why is that name familiar? I can’t place it. It feels faded, like a half-remembered dream.
“What happened?”
“Global, catastrophic, ecological collapse.” He says, flatly. “Rising oceans, crop failure, and yearly temperature swings that render the majority of the earth unlivable. The super-scrapers we built at the end of the twenty-first century were our solution to the rising waters.” He smiles wryly. “We got as far above them as we could get.”
He points west. “If you look that way, you can just barely see the Appalachian Mountains. It’s the nearest landmass to us now.”
I follow his gaze and see a distant smudge of land in the distance.
Phaedrus steps closer to me. “It gets worse. Dropping oxygen levels in the oceans killed most of the phytoplankton. Do you know what they’re important for?” He waits for me to answer. When I don’t, he continues. “Phytoplankton creates the majority of oxygen on this planet. Current oxygen levels are about thirty percent of what they once were.”
“Thirty percent?” I ask.
His expression remains serious. “Like the top of Mount Everest. But we haven’t had time to acclimate, so don’t lose that oxygen.”
I take a step away from him. The tunnel, that dark scar in the fabric of reality, is visible between the two columns. It’s only a dozen feet away. If I run
Pain shoots up my wrist. The oxygen drops from my hand. Phaedrus is holding it in a vice-like grip. He leans in, speaking fast and quiet. “We’ve come too far, too many times, for me to let you get away just yet.”
I twist in his grasp. “Why did you want me to see this?” I’m exerting myself with the effort, my breathing becoming more labored.
He tightens his grip. “I think you have a better question to ask.”
I’m taking large breaths now, sucking in air. I try desperately to find the question he’s looking for. I search the rooftop. The gate. The surrounding buildings. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking of. There’s nothing else to see. Other than the storm moving into the city, nothing else is even moving. Cities aren’t supposed to be this still.
“The people left.” I say, quietly, my voice weakening. “Please, I need air.”
“Tell me what I need to hear.”
My vision begins to fade. I haven’t found the question yet. I’m still putting together the pieces that he expects me to see. “They went back to a time before,” I search for the words, “before all of this.”
Phaedrus kicks the oxygen away, and it drops off the edge of the building. “So what’s the right question? What aren’t you asking?”
I drop to my knees. My vision fades. “I don’t know.”
Phaedrus grimaces. “I know it’s in there somewhere.”
He lifts his hand to strike me, but I push him away and spin for the gate. My lungs gasp for air. I’m beginning to feel lightheaded. I hear a shout and Phaedrus surges forward. He pushes me and I stumble, sprawling onto the ground. I land hard. My breathing ragged. Blackness threatens to take over.
Phaedrus leans over me and hands me
his oxygen. “You can have it, if you ask the right question.”
The answer comes with sudden clarity. “They were able to build the gates. Why not fix the air?”
Phaedrus hands me the oxygen and I suck in the air. My vision returns. The dizziness recedes. Phaedrus is sitting next to me now, near the roof’s edge. “Cowards, all of them. They weren’t willing to do what had to be done. Some people tried.” He looks over at me. “Your father was one of them.”
I shake my head. “My father was a school teacher in Minnesota.”
“Your real father,” he says. “You still remember nothing, Little Mouse? Even after seeing all of this?” He raises his metal-gloved hand.
Is he trying to say that he is my father? I feel a twisting in my gut. But no, that feels wrong. “Why do you keep calling me that?” I ask, trying to control the panic rising inside of me. I’ve seen what that glove can do. How it allows its wearer to take over another person’s mind, even rewrite it somehow.
Phaedrus takes the oxygen from me, sucking in a breath, then hands it back. He cocks his head at me and gestures around at the darkening sky. “Because that was my name for you. We grew up here, together. You remember nothing?” He grows quiet.
I had assumed he was after me because of something from my future. But it was something in my past. Something I can’t remember. And he says we’ve done this before. Has he changed my past before? The thought sends a chill through me.
“I’m sorry it has come to this,” he says.
He holds the metal-gloved hand up so I can see. “I don’t need your body. Just a few memories, that’s all.” I stare at it, horror filling me. He wants what’s in my mind? But how could I have anything he needs? Doesn’t he realize that I don’t know anything?
“But I don’t remember.”
“It’s in there. I promise. I’ll be able to find it.”
I turn back to the tunnel. I see him follow my gaze.
“Wrong choice,” he says.
Recursion (Book One of the Recursion Event Saga) Page 9