by Cam Rogers
Guardian squad was scattered about inside the dome. A wide section of glass at ground level had already been blasted white by Gibson’s last grenade—the one whose force had thrown Jack face-first into the grill of Gibson’s BearCat.
He caught a glimpse of the camp. It was a flat mess, with very few tents left standing. Some of it was on fire. There wasn’t a single kid in or around the camp, just a few stray troopers walking a circuit, being thorough.
Headlights flashed to life on the south side of the dome. Jack saw his bloodied past self rise to his feet in front of Gibson’s BearCat as Monarch’s number one chronon operative threw the vehicle into reverse.
That meant Monarch had Will.
Right on cue the sound of struggle on the steps inside. Two goons had Will by each arm and were dragging him down the central stairs, toward the north doors—about 150 feet in front of Jack.
Ducking down, he figured he had enough energy left to zip across that space fast and hard, which should be enough to take out the goon on the left. Getting the one on the right would come down to luck. He stayed low, waited.
The doors opened and out they came, Will protesting the whole time. “You’re destroying yourselves! The…”
Jack launched at them—
—and never made it.
He’d covered twenty feet when a forearm swept across his path, collecting him from the throat, knocking his feet skyward, and slamming him back-first into the ground.
He couldn’t breathe. Someone stood over him, adjusting his tie.
Hatch. He said just one word: “No.”
Neither the troopers nor Will noticed, and Will was dragged toward a waiting BearCat.
Hatch glanced at the dome, then down at Jack. It was the same examining stare Hatch had used on him a short time ago in the Tower: unconcerned, as if wondering why Jack even existed.
Jack’s thoughts were suffocated, strangled by his own half-closed windpipe. He struggled to sit up but a foot shoed in fine Italian leather gently pushed him down. Hatch waited, watching the BearCat pull away and tear toward the library, then turned his attention to Jack.
“All right,” Hatch said, and removed his foot.
Jack blinked hard, tried to swallow, could barely form the question: “Who are you?”
He said it to the night air. Hatch was gone. Jack was alone. The fucker must have ghosted back into the western admin building. What was he doing here? Who had Paul partnered with?
Thunder rolled across the parking lot: the sound of the BearCat waking up, then peeling toward the library. No time for subtlety. Low on energy and struggling to breathe, Jack cut through the dome. Gibson and his own past self were already gone; the person he had been would already be at the library.
Jack accelerated toward the library. He only did one burst. He was going to need every scrap of energy that he could muster for what came next.
When a moment is witnessed the waveform collapses. That’s what Will had said—and Paul. Events cannot be changed once those events intersect with and influence causality.
Jack ran straight at the particleboard barriers around the rear of the library, converted momentum to mantling, swung a leg over, and landed facing the open entry to the rear of the library, stripped of its door.
The room was perfectly square, empty save for limp lengths of plastic like the shed skin of giant snakes, dust and insulation.
The stacks were through the empty door frame to his left and beyond the south door Paul and Will were in the final moments of their futile conversation.
“But we don’t have years for you to come to the same conclusion. We have moments.”
That was it. Jack jagged left.…
“Actual,” Paul said. “this is your Consultant. Trigger.” And then warped out.
Jack rounded the corner in time to see Paul go out the main doors. His past self looked on in horror as Paul slammed into him, sweeping him out of the building as the first charges detonated upstairs.
Jack skidded on the smooth black-and-white flooring, fingertips trailing in the dust, and dashed forward as a curtain of debris descended.
Jack kicked into a slide as the top floor came down behind him, colliding with Will’s legs at the same time as he slammed hands into the dust.
The weight of a building fell to earth on the spot where the brothers stood. The collapse kicked out a cloud that swept across the campus, obscuring everything in a thick, rolling shroud of pulverized marble, masonry, and concrete.
Jack coughed. “Will? Will!” He couldn’t see anything. “Will!”
“I think I broke my watch.”
Will was right there, sitting up beneath the flickering bubble of self-contained causality. Alive.
Jack crashed into him, holding on to him with everything he had.
“You, uh,” Will said, with difficulty. “You’re getting quite good at this.” Then he realized: “You’re not Jack. The Jack I met tonight had shaved. You have not.”
Jack let him go. “This won’t last long.”
“I should be dead,” Will said. “Same clothes, more stubble. I’d say you’re, what, two days older? Three? You’ve come back in time. For me, for this. Meaning you thought I was dead. I should be dead.”
“There’s some space outside this bubble. I’m gonna blast us clear. I doubt anyone’s gonna notice at this point.”
“I was dead, to you, but you’ve saved me. The only way that could be possible is if … if between now and when you come back for me the world has every reason to believe me dead—if I never interact with causality between now, and two days from now. Which we can achieve if you and I now travel forward in time, bypassing those two days. Jack,” Will said. “The waveform never collapses. I never die. What a brilliant solution to have formulated. Well done.”
“Cover your ears.” Jack shoved his hands through the bubble, and did to the wreckage what he had done to the two Monarch troopers beneath the time machine.
Tonnage blew outward.
* * *
Jack and Will emerged from the wreckage of the library into a world that had stopped moving.
They carved through the chalk-white atmosphere, making their way across the shattered ruin of the library and out onto the campus.
“I completely missed this the first time around,” Jack said.
“Missed?” Will inquired, dusting himself off. They were walking briskly toward the Quantum Physics Building—and their way home.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “She found me. And … oh man.”
“She?”
Jack wasn’t listening. Or walking. He’d seen something, on Founders’ Walk, and was now running toward it. Will called after him, then followed.
Beth was frozen, marching along Founders’ Walk with the unconscious body of Jack’s past self slung over her shoulder. There she was, beautiful and alive. Unmoving. The fighter he’d fallen in love with.
Jack stepped closer to her. Here she was, so very much alive. “You knew her, didn’t you?” Jack said to his brother.
“I’ve known Beth Wilder for seventeen years,” Will replied. “The first thing she did was save my life. Yours, too, actually.” Then, “You can’t save her.”
“You know what happened to her?”
“In 2010? I think so. I returned to my workshop at the dock and the area was ruined. I saw the anomalies, recognized them as the product of a Countermeasure breach. I’d hoped she was alive, had taken the Countermeasure and returned to 2016—but I knew the exposure would have killed her first. Then Monarch bought out the entire area, and set up a chronon-harvesting operation. ‘Ground Zero’ they call it. So, with eleven years of work wasted and Armageddon due, I bought a gun and tried to shut down Monarch’s lab myself. Which brings us here.”
If Jack had heard, he made no sign. “She deserves to live.”
“You have to let her go, Jack. We have a universe to consider.”
Jack couldn’t open his mouth to say a single word. He just leaned into Beth,
slid his arms around her, and held her as best he could. Just for a moment.
He whispered something he wished she could hear, but knew she never would.
22
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:55 A.M. Monarch Tower, Time Lab. One minute, local, after Jack’s departure.
Jack and Will clasped each other’s hands as they walked the Promenade, side by side, in lockstep, staying in synch as they walked two nights forward.
“What you’ll see is going to be shocking, Will. Fair warning.”
“I’ve been prepared for this since you were ten. I’m confident I can handle it.”
Arriving at the airlock they opened the seal and stepped into the first hour of Monday morning.
Jack checked through the viewplate. The airlock hissed, the seals depressurizing, and the two brothers stepped out onto the ramp.
The lab was vacant. They were alone.
“Oh,” Will said. “I expected something more dramatic.” Then, “Is that … music?”
What they heard was a lilting series of high notes, as though someone in a distant room were plinking on a xylophone, building from slow rhythm to something faster. Coming in under this simple score, abruptly, was the sound countless girders might make if they were bent and tearing beneath a weight they could no longer support.
The floor shifted alarmingly, betraying them as the far wall detached and slipped away without so much as a sound.
Freezing air rushed in and far below came the sound of hundreds of tons of concrete, glass, and iron waterfalling clumsily and catastrophically into the street.
Riverport—bucking, flaming, dying—laid itself bare to them.
Will walked across the buckled floor, toward the torn-open wall, perhaps drawn by something only he could understand. Something written in the pulsing, wailing, pointillist nighttime landscape spread before him. Or perhaps he was simply a man who was looking upon what he had done, and found himself overcome by the horror of it.
Jack reached for him, pulled him back from the ragged edge, and saw for himself what was becoming of the town that had raised him.
“Will,” Jack shouted above the high-altitude wind. “Can you stop this?” He unslung his pack, opened it, showed Will the Countermeasure. “Can you?”
The sight of the device drew Will out of his shock. He nodded. “I can try. It’s what I built it for. Yes. Yes, I believe so. I need to get under the machine.”
Taking the device from the bag, turning it over in his hands, Will said, “The charge is unusually low.”
“Monarch was shielding the top floors from the stutter with it, running some kind of dampener network. Probably running a bunch of other crap as well. I have no idea.”
Will looked out across that terribly wounded city. “It…” He struggled to find the words. “Causality relies upon an agreed-upon sequence of events. This creates what we understand as the flow of time. The Fracture is inviting other potential realities to the mix. What was once a song is now a violent confusion. This building is falling apart beneath us.”
“Well, actually,” Jack said, “it’s a little of that, and a little of me throwing a train through the reception area.” He shrugged. “It was locked.”
Will took the Countermeasure and headed for the time machine, when a voice said:
“Jack.”
Jack scanned around: the corners, the control room above, no one was here.
Will didn’t seem to have heard it, examining the Countermeasure as he walked to the machine.
“Jack?”
“Paul…?”
Jack stopped cold. Paul was in the airlock, standing on the ramp, looking into the room with terror on his face. This wasn’t the Paul whom Jack had seen drop a building on his brother; this was Paul as he had been the night he had first traveled through the machine.
Will carefully put the Countermeasure down near the story-high platinum-cased chronon reserve Monarch used to power the machine and began an examination of the power’s routing to the Promenade.
As Jack moved toward his friend-who-had-been, a second figure materialized—standing at the bottom of the ramp. Martin Hatch.
This wasn’t real, Jack realized. It was a vision, like the ones he experienced back at the house.
“You and I are destined to be great friends, Paul,” Hatch was saying. “It is the honor of my life to provide all that you need to play your singular role.”
Hatch opened an arm toward three men and women, waiting to escort Paul out of the room—toward a future that turned him into the man responsible for all that was happening to the world at that moment.
Jack watched young Paul Serene—baffled and lost—get shepherded away. Hatch took a cleansing breath, with the air of a man who had just crossed a major milestone.
Who the fuck are you? Jack thought. You monstrous son of a bitch.
Hatch moved to leave … and then stopped. His back straightened, curiously.
Martin Hatch glanced behind himself. Turned fully. Then took a step toward Jack.
Martin Hatch—years into the future—stood five feet before Jack Joyce, and appeared to look him right in the eye. Jack stepped back.
Slowly, carefully, Martin Hatch looked Jack up and down … and smiled.
“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said.
Hatch clicked his fingers … and the vision ended.
Jack was alone.
The stutter hit without warning. The intercom overloaded and exploded in sparks. The glass walls of the control room shattered, rewound, remained intact. For a vertiginous microsecond the floor vanished, sharing a moment with a world where the entire building had collapsed, before native reality reasserted itself—the spasm between what is and what could be knocking Jack and Will off their feet.
Across Riverport the skies bucked, energy flashed, shock waves kicked down streets and thrashed the river. Whole blocks lit up or went dark, most often vacillating between the two. The chorus of car alarms was a background song to whole streets opening up along their length, to spot fires and infernos. Jack had no idea what was happening on the ground. If this could happen to steel and concrete, what was happening to people?
“Jack.”
“What is it, Will?”
Will looked up from his examinations of a rack of connectors on the corridor-ring. “Did you say something?”
“Didn’t—”
“Jack!” The voice was wrong: layered, skitzing, fucked-up.
Paul Serene stepped off the stairwell to the control room, fifty feet from Jack. Broad-shouldered, and almost entirely consumed by the chronon sickness that was remaking him into something monstrous. Starlight flashed beneath his clothes. The flesh of his hands and neck was a shifting play of fractal light. When he spoke illumination poured from his throat. “Are you ready?”
“Jesus.”
“Close enough.” Paul spasmed, a flurry of multiple Pauls all at once. He was phasing from humanity to whatever the Shifters were. “You and I die here,” he rasped. “But in doing so save a universe.”
“Will, get that thing hooked up, and fast.”
“I have it connected to the primary chronon flow. I think we’re ready.”
“Then do it!”
Paul snorted. “It makes no difference.”
Will socketed the Countermeasure into the battery’s main outflow and … nothing.
“Don’t fight me, Jack.” Paul was having a hard time keeping it together. “We stick together, right?”
It was then that Jack noticed the silver chain dangling from Paul’s balled, luminescing fist: the chain attached to the bullet.
He raised that fist. “We’ve known each other all our lives … the universe … fate … arranged it just so.…” Paul shuddered. Multiple Pauls flashed and rioted for control of his friend’s identity, and were beaten back by an excruciating force of will. “I know this because I’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen things, too, Paul.”
“We are here now because my futures mak
e themselves known to me … and I choose the futures into which I take the world. And I know, Jack, that this is where you and I end … because I’ve never had a vision beyond tonight. Beyond now. They all narrow to the same inevitable point. You fail, you die, I die, and Monarch triumphs.”
Paul straightened up, then marched toward Will. “Give me the Regulator.”
Jack warped to intercept. At the last second Paul wasn’t there and Jack went careening into the diagnostic bank against the wall.
Paul stopped. “As I near my end the visions don’t stop. The less time I have, the clearer they become, as potentiality narrows. You may attack as you wish…”
Jack warped, and again Paul wasn’t there. Jack skidded, stopping short of tumbling into the maintenance recess.
“… but I am beyond surprises.”
Will ripped the Countermeasure from the machine, held it before him like a weapon. “I’ll breach this before I let you take it. It almost killed you once, it can—”
The Countermeasure vanished from Will’s grip, leaving him yelping and clutching wrenched fingers.
Paul held it, unconcerned. “This is meant for Martin Hatch, and the future.”
Jack took a gamble. “In all those visions, Paul, do you ever see Hatch?”
Paul said nothing for a moment, then, “Martin has always been with me.”
“And?”
Paul didn’t say anything.
Jack smiled, didn’t enjoy it. “That’s what I figured. So what is it? What’s off about him?”
Jack warped, Paul had moved, appeared farther down the lab, toward the breach.
“You know what I’m going to say, you know what you’re going to say. Flip ahead. Tell me how this conversation plays out.”
“Lives … are messy,” Paul said. “Martin’s … is not.”
Jack blinked. “Meaning what?”
Will stepped up. “In all the futures you can see and choose from, Martin Hatch’s actions never deviate?”
“He is the most focused man I have ever met. My life, all that I am, I owe to his clarity.”