There is still a chance I have make-up sex to live for.
One more stride. One more. One more. The stitch builds in my side. One more.
We round the corner. Big Ben stands before us, vast and shadowy. The clock face is lost in the EMP-enforced gloom. There are a few uniformed policemen standing near the base of the clock tower. A group of tourists chat in German. One of them clutches an old SLR camera to his eye. Something with a strip film and cogs and gears. Old-school tech that survived the blast. He takes photographs of the city in darkness. Each time the flash goes off, I almost shoot him.
“Where are they?” Felicity peers into the dark.
“Well, I think the Russian must be in there already.” Devon looks at Big Ben. “Didn’t seem the sort of chap to hang around and have a good old-fashioned natter about the best way to pluck a turkey.” I turn to stare at her. “Or anything else that may catch his fancy,” she says, a little defensively.
“No.” I shake my head. Look for straws to grasp. It can’t be. “Where’s Tabitha? Malcolm? Kayla?” I stare around looking for an abandoned police car, for any sign of them.
“We have to get in there!” Aiko jams a finger at Big Ben. “The others could be roadkill by now!”
Not exactly sugar-coating it for me. But still, I can’t think that way. If Malkin’s already in there we’ve already lost.
“Clyde,” I say. “What about Sinsdale? That took out one of them on the way here. Can you… I don’t know, booby-trap this place. Prime it with a Sinsdale spell to chop the bastard in two.”
Clyde looks around. “Too many tourists,” he says simply.
“Would anyone really miss Germans?” Devon asks.
Another flash from their camera. I’m tempted to side with Devon. I turn to stare at them, annoyed.
Except they’re nowhere near where the flash came from.
Another flash. Larger. Closer.
“Oh shit!” I pull my sword. Flames flicker forth. “Incoming!”
There’s a yell from one of the policemen at the base of the tower. Another from the Germans. Their camera clicks compete with Leo Malkin’s portable battery.
Tabitha’s car slews round a corner and into sight. At least two of the tires are blown. Bare rims throw up a wake of glittering sparks. A figure sprawls on the roof, clinging on. Kayla, her sword clenched between her teeth. Malcolm leans from the window. His shots are still a steady metronome beat.
Closer. Closer.
I toss my gun to Aiko. “Get ready.”
“Will be,” she says, steadying her aim.
My adrenaline is pushing my heartbeat up into my throat. And what would Kurt Russell do? He’d kick this guy’s ass.
Flash. Flash. Leo Malkin draws closer, outpacing Tabitha’s car, pulling away, pulling closer to us. Flash. Flash.
I ready the sword. Hold it high. A powerful position, my mind tells me. One of dominance. Bring the sword down, let gravity help power the swing. The flames are warm against the October damp. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck.
Closer. Closer.
I see him as he emerges from a flare of light. Yellow hair wild. Clothes torn. Bleeding from a long gash in his arm. His face: a mask of determination, rage… fear.
God, I almost feel sorry for him then, in that brief instant of connection. Out of time, out of friends, armed with only one desperate plan to try and make it all right. In some ways he’s not so different from me.
Except that, well… I’ve never tried to screw over all of space and time just to get what I want.
And then the moment passes. He closes his eyes, mouths a few empty syllables, jumps, and—
Nothing. He lands, almost trips on the ground. He stares, bewildered. He jumps again, an almost idiotic motion. Like a child pretending he can fly. I half expect him to flap his arms.
He stares around desperately.
“He’s out of power,” I say it as I realize it. “His battery, it’s dead.”
“He’s dead.” Aiko lines up the shot.
“No!” I hold up a hand.
The policeman is still yelling at us, but seems to have decided to come no closer. He grabs his radio ineffectually. It’s as dead as every other electronic device that was on during the blast. No back up for him.
The Germans are still snapping away.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Aiko doesn’t put the gun away. “He killed Jasmine.”
“We are not an execution squad,” Felicity insists.
And she’s right. We need to do this the right way.
We move in on him, slowly draw the circle tight. Behind him, Tabitha’s car grinds to a halt. She and Malcolm step out fast, guns drawn, also aiming at the frozen Russian. Kayla leaps down from the roof.
“I could stop him,” Clyde says quietly. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything ever again.”
“No!” Tabitha shrieks. I swear she almost brings the gun to bear on him. And did she see what happened to Kropkin? Does she suspect?
And where did my friend go? When was he replaced by the man, this thing, happily offering to overwrite a man’s brain to kill him?
“He moves, he feckin’ breathes a word, and I’ve got him.” Kayla holds her sword in both hands. The encyclopedia in my head recognizes the posture. It’s not one I would call defensive.
Felicity holds up her hand. “We are taking him in.”
Malcolm cocks his pistol. “I don’t remember agreeing to take orders from you.”
Felicity snaps her gaze to him. It’s the eye equivalent of Kayla’s sword pose. “If you shoot an unarmed man, I will arrest you.”
“He killed Jasmine,” Aiko says again.
“And he will pay for his crimes.” Felicity switches her gaze to Aiko. Aiko’s eyes slip to my face. Felicity’s eyes flick towards me and back.
And, suddenly, just like Leo Malkin, I know exactly what I want to fight for.
“We don’t kill him,” I say, shaking my head at Aiko. “We’re not like him. We’re the good guys.” I put my sword back in its sheath.
A thin smile is on Felicity’s face.
We draw in tighter on Leo Malkin. He has his hands up. He has that desperate caged look. But there’s nowhere for him to go.
It’s over.
“I say he’s too feckin’ dangerous to let live,” says Kayla. “I say we feckin’ end him.”
“To be fair,” Devon points out, “you say that about a lot of people.”
“Boy bands are a blight on the face of feckin’ humanity and they feckin’ deserve it.” I glance to see if she’s joking. Apparently she’s not.
But I’m not the only one who glances.
And, apparently, that moment of distraction was exactly what Leo Malkin was waiting for.
EIGHTY-THREE
A syllable. Another. A bright spark.
I spin, grab for the sword. A line of white fire briefly attaches Leo Malkin to Clyde’s face. To his mask. A moment of connection. And then gone.
Clyde slumps. My sword is out of its sheath. Kayla is moving. I swear I even see the muzzle flares as the guns discharge. But the world has lost its soundtrack, has gone silent as the grave.
A line of lightning. From Malkin to Felicity.
Felicity.
My Felicity.
Lightning. Bright and urgent and overwhelming. And then gone. Gone as Kayla’s sword descends, as the bullets fly. Gone as utterly as Leo Malkin.
Clyde falls to the ground.
Felicity falls to the ground.
Tabitha screams.
The smell of charred meat fills my nose.
Leo Malkin is not there.
I stare. And I stare. As Tabitha howls at the world.
Because… because… but there was no power.
Except the power in Clyde’s mask. The one power source that we brought to him. The one power source keeping Clyde alive.
Clyde lies on the ground. Felicity lies on the ground.
Tabitha screams.
The s
mell of charred meat fills my nose.
Power—stolen from Clyde. Power—electricity, lightning, that burned through the air, that lit the world, that was buried in Felicity. My Felicity. Burned into her. Scorched and blackened. And then, its last remnants, fulfilling Leo Malkin’s last wish, propelling him up, up, up. Into Big Ben.
And he’s gone. And Clyde’s gone. And Felicity… Oh God. Oh no.
He lies on the ground.
She lies on the ground.
Tabitha screams.
The smell of charred meat fills my nose.
They’re dead.
EIGHTY-FOUR
“No,” I say. “No. Please no.” And… no… I just… I try to process it. I try to understand. It’s too big, too much.
She’s dead.
Clyde’s dead.
But… but… Felicity. Oh God, she’s dead.
And, God, this can’t be happening again. Someone I… God, did I love her? I think I loved her. And she’s dead.
And Clyde. I can’t even… What did I even feel for him? I’m still caught in the muddle of who he was and who he is, who he was becoming.
Was. Jesus.
I can’t deal with the past tense. I can’t…
“Big Ben.” Aiko’s face is aghast, she’s staring at the bodies, but she’s talking about Malkin, about what’s left to be done. “He’s in Big Ben.”
And I try to care, try to give a shit about the end of the world.
She’s just lying there. She doesn’t even look like herself. Blackened, bloody. A rictus of pain. She died in pain. Leo Malkin killed her. He fucking roasted her.
The red is starting to fill my vision.
“It’s over,” someone says. And I know they’re right. It’s too late. I will never get to revenge this. I will never get to make this right. The world is going to end to the soundtrack of Tabitha’s screams.
“It’s motherfeckin’ not.”
Kayla’s arm is about my waist. I’m off my feet. I’m twenty feet from where I stood. The distance is increasing. There’s the confused, terrified-looking policeman between us and Big Ben. He holds up an open palm.
Kayla’s backhand breaks the sound barrier. He flies from our path, another useless rag doll.
Felicity’s dead.
Malkin killed her.
Two other policemen are between Kayla and Big Ben. They heave out pistols. In this post 9/11 world, London PD takes its monuments’ safety seriously. She leaps, plants a foot in one man’s throat. She launches off him as he drops gurgling. Her other foot swings, connects beneath the other copper’s chin. He flies away, dismissed.
And I’m still in her spare hand. Still bundled up like so much luggage.
We’re fighting. We’re fighting for what’s right.
She crashes through a door I couldn’t make out in the dark. We’re in a tiny black space. A yell from someone. The crunch of flesh against flesh. Something, someone, falling past me.
I don’t know how Kayla’s doing what she’s doing. The physics of it defy me. I am lost in her violent ballet. A mere accessory of her ferocity. But I don’t care. Because she’s getting me closer to Malkin. Closer to his death.
And I know revenge won’t bring her back—
God I can’t…
She’s dead…
I can’t breathe.
I need to focus on the red. I need to cling to my rage. I need to make that fucker pay. Pay, and pay, and pay.
Pounding feet. More shouts. Kayla leaps, gazelle-like. Her feet fly out. Bodies spin away. Light reflects from the blade of her sword. Flat steel twangs against skulls. Bodies fall. Gunshots boom, but they never sound near, always seem to be retreating, even as their echoes rattle in my ears.
We go faster. Faster. It’s hard to breathe, as if my head is jammed out the car window again. Kayla’s arm makes the garotting seatbelt seem like a loving embrace. Screams. Shouts. More people now. The whirl of glimpsed violence is thicker about me.
Felicity is dead. Clyde is dead.
And I can’t think about it. All I can think is that Leo Malkin must pay.
And then a sudden screeching halt. My neck cracks as the g-forces reverse. My vision blurs. I can hear Kayla panting hard, her breath short and ragged. I can hear shouts and yells, pounding feet echoing up behind us. I hear something else. A mechanical noise, repeated and repeated. The same action happening over and over all at the same time.
My vision clears.
Oh shit and balls.
Machine guns. Men and women ratcheting the action on their machine guns. Hundreds of them. That was what that noise was.
We’re in the doorway of a room perhaps thirty yards wide, and twenty yards deep, and it is full. Literally full. Metal concert mosh pit full. Soldiers pack the place. Row upon row of them. An ugly crush of people. The place is hot with the sweat of them all. They wear black sweaters, and black bullet proof vests, and black night vision goggles, each head marked by two bright green LEDs.
And every last one of them has a very large black machine gun. And every last one of them is pointing that very large black machine gun at Kayla and me.
My brain tries to dissociate, to enter denial. It wonders how the night vision goggles survived. I find myself thinking that they probably weren’t needed until Coleman set off the EMP. They probably weren’t on at the time.
“You still got them wires?” Kayla sets me down, brings me back to reality. This is not the end of our journey. This will not stop us. We are MI37. We will not allow it. We cannot.
I glance down at my left hand. Devon’s tangle of wires. Still wrapped around my fingers. Something to blow up the space-time distortion. Something to save the Chronometer. Something to blow the living crap out of Malkin with.
“Got it.”
“Through there.” Kayla nods at a door beyond the soldiers. Dark blue. Copper hinges. Something intricate carved into the whorls of wood. I can’t make it out in the half-light.
I stare at the soldiers. Clyde’s military ninjas. They stare implacably back.
Clyde’s dead.
Felicity’s dead.
“Let’s do this.”
I’m going to die. I know I’m going to die. There is no way I can fight these soldiers and live. But that doesn’t matter. I have to fight them. I have to try to get to him.
And then something happens and I only piece it together as I’m sailing through the air. The sensation of a hand on my collar. Of a great force heaving me. Of my feet leaving the ground. As Kayla throws me bodily over the heads of the soldiers, kicking and flailing, head first towards the dark blue door and the end of all things.
EIGHTY-FIVE
Adrenaline is an odd chemical. When it floods the system in great quantities your perception of time skews strangely. Every detail is crisp and clear, absorbed and processed. It’s like being Neo in The Matrix. Time slows. You observe.
If only I got Neo’s reaction times too.
Instead I watch in excruciating detail as the door flies towards my head.
My mind knows how to pull the sword, how to aim it, how to best angle it to break down the door. But the knowledge is useless.
A hundred machine guns track my path. I rotate as I fly, watch them rotate with me. I spin from headfirst to feetfirst. I see Kayla raise her sword. I can even make out her movements for once. I watch fascinated as she slices through the first of the gun barrels.
Then my feet strike the door. And time catches up with me. A compressed blur of movement and pain rushing past me, over me, trampling me.
My ankles feel broken. My head rings. The floor is cold and hard. I’m bleeding onto it.
I’m through a doorway. In the dark. Muzzle flares cast a thunderous strobe light. I wait to die, perforated by sixty rounds a minute. But the guns aren’t firing at me. The guns don’t seem to care.
Kayla dances on the shoulders of the soldiers. Her sword is a
line of liquid fire. Shards of metal spiral through the air as she hacks away with
a sushi chef’s precision and efficiency.
And the soldiers fire and fire and fire, and fill the whole world with flying lead. And they cannot hit her.
But I am not here to gawp. I am not here to stare. I have to get up. I tell my arms and legs. I have to get up. Now. I have to turn around.
Knees trembling, I make it to my feet. The room I’m in is dark, cool, and larger than I expected. Probably most of the width of the tower. It’s a mess of machinery. Great hulks of painted steel lying dead and cold. Cables and cords thick on the ground. Pipes snake to the ceiling in ropy pillars. There are great panels of dials and meters, unreadable despite the reflected light of Kayla’s firefight.
The lower edge of Big Ben’s clock face breaches the upper half of the opposite wall. A white crescent of filtered moonlight.
I take steps in, try to see past the metal hulks to the Chronometer. Try to make out Leo Malkin in the mess. Surely if you decide to enshrine the device that controls all of time, you actually, well, give it some sort of shrine. It seems implicit in the action.
I go deeper in. Where is he? Where is the bastard? Where is my piece of his goddamn hide?
The noise of the firefight outside seems to drop away too quickly. I glance over my shoulder. The doorway seems small now.
A noise to my left seizes my attention, gives it a good shake. I stoop low, peer around the corner of another metal hulk. Its surface is cold against my hand, gently dotted with condensation.
There, rising out of a tangle of metal cords is something like a plinth. An industrial interpretation of an ornamental table. Hard steel edges, decorative rivets.
Sitting on it, reflecting the filtered moonlight that slants in through the clock face—a large bell jar. And inside that…
The Chronometer.
It looks like nothing else but a large golden clock, baroque in detail, its inner workings clearly displayed from its case-less back. Tiny cogs whir. Counterweights shift. Around it, pudgy little angels stroke harps.
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