The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything

by Phillion, Matthew

"Alley Hawk from Dancer," she said. "We're in his lair. He's been gone for a while."

  "How can you tell?" the gravelly voice of the older vigilante who had become Kate's friend and mentor asked.

  "Titus's nose."

  "I'm coming to you," Alley Hawk said. "Hang tight."

  "Don't get sick," Kate said. "Alley Hawk is coming."

  "Don't embarrass you is what you're really saying," Titus said.

  Kate stared at him.

  Titus shrugged.

  "Kate," Titus said, walking up to one of the stacks of candles burning along the wall of the underground next. Wax had spilled down in lumpy trickles like accidental art.

  "What?"

  "He can't have been gone for a great period of time. How long could these candles burn without going out? The Vermin King was here recently," Titus said.

  "Your werewolf bodyguard has a good eye for detail," Alley Hawk said, emerging from a shadowy corridor into the light. "He's not coming back though."

  "How do you know?" Titus said.

  "He never does," Alley Hawk said. "The Vermin King never set up a permanent base when he knew he was being chased."

  Kate picked up one of the purses and flipped though the contents. No money or credit cards, but otherwise it was difficult to tell what was missing and what was not. The fact that the Vermin King—a strange, mutated killer who'd been Alley Hawk's greatest enemy his entire career and had escaped from a prison for super-powered criminals during the Indestructibles' own breakout not long ago—had been collecting these purses made him somehow even creepier than his appearance. Why keep them? Souvenirs? Trophies?

  Kate tossed one handbag aside then stopped when something caught her eye. A glimmer of candlelight off glass, tucked away in a corner of the Vermin King's temporary hideout.

  "Huh," Kate said, picking up the object.

  It was a snow globe, delicately crafted, with a base decorated in designs hinting at the Nutcracker. Alone in the center of the snow globe, a tiny prima ballerina stood waiting to dance.

  Kate shook the globe and snow swirled. A spurt of red kicked up from the bottom of the glass ball as she tipped it, filling the globe with crimson fluid. Suddenly the miniature ballet dancer was surrounded by a viscous stream of blood. Kate watched as the red fluid danced around in the water, staining the snowflakes.

  "What do you have?" Titus said.

  Alley Hawk said nothing, taking the globe from Kate's hands and turning it over and over in his own.

  "That's not real blood," he said.

  "I know," Kate said. "It's a threat though."

  Alley Hawk grunted.

  "This was his specialty, back in the old days. Trying to terrorize you enough to distract you."

  "So he knows I'm helping you look for him," Kate said.

  "We shouldn't be surprised by that," said Alley Hawk. "Does that worry you?"

  "Only enough to make me want to make sure I'm ready for him if he comes after me," said Kate.

  Alley Hawk nodded.

  "Good," he said, placing the globe back on the floor. "We should move on."

  Kate closed her eyes.

  "Hawk," she said.

  The old vigilante paused, waiting for her to continue speaking.

  "You know Anachronism Annie is back. Doc's friend," Kate said.

  The infamous time traveler had arrived at the Indestructibles base recently, unannounced. Kate had trust issues on a good day; so a woman claiming to move through time set off all her alarms.

  "Doc told me," Alley Hawk said.

  "What do you think of her?"

  "Her nature is to be a good person," Alley Hawk said. "You can trust her motives. But—"

  "—But," Titus said. "There's always a 'but.'"

  "But she's a time traveler," Alley Hawk said. "Nothing good comes from time travel."

  Titus had loosened his grip on his hood and settled for waving his hand in front of his own nose to cut back on the Vermin King's stench.

  "I can't imagine what could go wrong with time travel," said Titus.

  "So you think what she does is wrong," Kate said.

  "It's not her fault," Alley Hawk said. "Annie . . . she's not a time traveler in the conventional sense. She's a refugee."

  "How so?" Kate said.

  "She's the better one to explain it, but wherever she's from . . . it's no longer there to go back to. And time-hopping is what she does. It's who she is."

  "But," Kate said.

  "But just think about all the things that could go wrong if you go into the past," said Alley Hawk. "Think about all the mistakes you could make if you knew the future."

  "Have you ever time traveled, Hawk?" Titus asked.

  The old vigilante looked away, eyes narrowed, mouth a tight thin line.

  "It's good she's back," Alley Hawk said. "We all thought she was gone forever."

  Chapter 3:

  Anachronism Annie

  Doc Silence sat across the table from the woman who had once been his best friend. A long time ago, Anachronism Annie said she was going into the future and never coming back, and Doc, by that time used to losing friends, had made his peace with her decision.

  Annie was from the future originally anyway. Her specific future was gone, a dead end in the time stream, and she never truly belonged to this world. Disappearing into the unknown was exactly what everyone expected her to do some day.

  Which didn't mean Doc hadn't missed her when she was gone.

  Annie peered back at Doc through her red sunglasses, almost identical to his own, an old in-joke between the two of them no one else quite understood. Doc wore his red lenses to hide his glowing eyes, the strange deformity from magic gone awry when he was young. Annie, when they first met, asked if he wore rose-tinted lenses to see the world in a better light. When he told her the real story, she got a pair of her own.

  The magician and the time traveler, making the world strange together for all those years.

  "Why didn't you tell me I was your time-anchor?" Doc said.

  Annie had returned to this timeline just hours after Doc himself had been rescued from a different dimension—truly, a scenario as weird as it sounds—pulled back into this world in a rescue attempt by Jane. The first thing Annie did upon seeing him was curse him out for not being here on Earth, because she'd made him her chronological anchor, her method of finding a way back to this timeline among all the others when she returned. An important fact that Annie, who was frequently guilty of not sharing important facts, had neglected to tell him earlier.

  Both Annie and Doc had been avoiding this conversation since their return. Doc needed to get the Indestructibles situated after what he later learned had been essentially a jail break, with Jane, Emily, and Billy held in custody by a rogue government agency. And Annie had always needed time to acclimate to a timeline, to adjust her internal clocks correctly.

  They'd been avoiding each other, as well. Annie, always hard to read, made only the slightest attempt to mask a guilty appearance every time Doc looked at her, while Doc found himself unexpectedly angry with her. He lost friends constantly, but Annie was the one who left voluntarily, done with this timeline, done with their team, and finally, Doc thought, done with him.

  "Of course you were my anchor, Doc," Annie said. "You've been my anchor for everything else. Why wouldn't you be my fix to this timeline?"

  "Still," Doc said.

  "Still," Annie repeated.

  She took her sunglasses off, revealing eyes with irises the same shade of metallic pink as her messy hair. Pink hair, pink eyes, tattoos covering every inch of her arms, her angry, angular build, everything about Annie said back away from her, but they'd been best friends from the moment they met. Billy and Emily reminded Doc of Annie and himself, in several ways. Always together, conversing in a private language no one else really understood.

  "Where were you?" Doc asked.

  Annie looked at the table, folding her tattooed hands in front of her.

  "I kept t
rying to get home, to this home, Doc," Annie said. "But I couldn't get here, because someone—and by someone I mean you—wasn't here, so I couldn't find my way back to this timeline. I kept bouncing around to different futures. And then I found the last one."

  "The one you want to talk to me about," Doc said.

  "Yeah," Annie said. "It's a dead future, Doc. A timeline in final decline. A line on the fishbone diagram coming to an end. It's a terminal track. And I want to save it."

  "We have rules," Doc said. "Regulations you gave us yourself. We don't get to change the past, we don't get to manipulate the future. You said that. Those are your own rules, Annie."

  "We need to save this timeline I found, Doc," Annie said.

  She fumbled with her red glasses, crossed and uncrossed her legs under the table.

  "Why this one in particular?" Doc asked.

  He leaned back in his chair, thinking back to all the reasons Annie gave Doc and their colleagues years ago as to why they should never meddle with the time stream. If you time traveled, you were an observer, never a participant, she said. You can't fix the present; if you change the past, a new timeline is created. The past is immutable. You can't alter the future. It can't be repaired, no matter how hard you tried. If you meddled in the past, you made a new line on the diagram. Nothing else.

  Time travel is nothing but trouble, Doc thought. At least his own work, moving between dimensions, had a lasting effect; those other dimensions, like the strange, dreamlike places he and the Lady had wandered through during their banishment last year, were real. They had different rules, different effects, but in the end, they were simply places, like any other place. They existed. If you won a war in the Dreamless Lands, it had a lasting impact.

  Time was more complicated than that. Time hated to be changed. Time actively worked against you if you tried to change it. Which was why Annie was so strange, and so hard to understand. Her ability to move through time was unique and dangerous and something she never explained, not even to Doc Silence.

  "Doc, the timeline I just came from is dying, and it's our fault," Annie said.

  He sat up straighter in his chair.

  "How so?"

  "That little blue-haired lunatic you recruited?" Annie said. "In this other timeline, someone else found her instead. And they turned her into the most dangerous weapon ever known."

  "Emily. We're talking about Emily. The one who earlier today deliberately instigated fights on Internet message boards with strangers. That Emily."

  "Doc, you understand she's more powerful than you've let her know," Annie said.

  "I'm hoping it'll be a little longer before she's able to figure that out," Doc said. "Who found her? And why didn't I get to her first in this other timeline?"

  "Because you're dead."

  Doc rubbed his eyes with his thumbs.

  "Of course I am," Doc said. "Why wouldn't I be? Do you know who killed . . . me in this other timeline?"

  "We should talk about that later."

  "Annie."

  "Later."

  "Fine," Doc said. "Then will you at least tell me who found her instead? Was it the Children of the Elder Star?"

  "They're dead too, Doc," Annie said. "That's what I mean. We're looking at a terminal timeline. And it's our fault. We've got to help them."

  Doc studied Annie's face, the lines of worry around her eyes. She looked more tired than he'd ever seen her.

  "You got attached, didn't you?" Doc said.

  "Doc."

  "That was your other rule. Never get attached. You can't stay in another timeline. Don't get emotionally involved."

  "Well I was bloody stuck there because of you, you twit," Annie said. "Of course I got attached. Doc, please. Help me help them."

  He sighed. It was difficult enough keeping one timeline safe without meddling in another, but if Annie said this was a timeline they needed to help, Doc wasn't sure how to argue with her.

  "You and me?"

  "And the kids."

  "You're joking."

  "No," Annie said. "We need them."

  "Aren't they already there? I know Emily's not an Indestructible there, but the others?"

  "Doc, we need them. For more reasons than I can really explain. I have to show you."

  Doc rubbed his eyes again, with growing intensity. Time travel was challenging enough for adult heroes. He was confident Jane would be able to handle this request relatively well, but the boys on occasion were still more immature than they let on, and Emily posed a wildcard by just walking out the door in the morning. Finally, Kate would remain a skeptic no matter what happened.

  "You're going to have to help me explain it to them," Doc said.

  "I've been trying to explain time travel to you for twenty years, Doc Silence," Annie said. "You think I'll be able to teach it to five kids in a crash course?"

  Chapter 4:

  The girl in the glass bubble

  Keaton Bohr never expected to become a zealot.

  And yet here, at the end of the world, it seemed the only word appropriate anymore. He'd been called many things in his life: scientist, optimist, dreamer, genius; but never a believer, never a warrior for any cause other than knowledge.

  Until he met the White Shadow.

  He'd been angry then, disillusioned, a scientist cast aside for unpopular ideas, an idealist screaming to deaf ears. The White Shadow had come to him, found him on a bridge in the City at the end of his rope, thinking about the home he would need to sell, fingers sooty from setting his lab coat on fire in effigy for the corporations who rejected his ideas on clean and alternate energy concepts, and the Shadow had given him purpose.

  "I need a man like you," the Shadow said. "I could use someone to help me change the world."

  And they certainly did, Keaton the scientist and Shadow the planner, Shadow the avenger, Shadow the former hero.

  But this is the end of the world, and it's all our fault, Keaton thought. He had just watched the hero Solar battling his latest weapons, giant mechs like creatures from an old anime. He knew they wouldn't stand up to her, but they were something to keep the hero distracted. And distracting the aging and dwindling Indestructibles had become Keaton's leisure activity these days, when he wasn't doing the bidding of the White Shadow, when he wasn't using their captive to change the face of the world.

  When does it all end? Keaton thought. He ran a hand through his thin hair, looked for the cup of instant coffee he'd abandoned earlier, and wondered how their not-so-secret weapon was doing today.

  Their secret weapon. We built this future on the back of a little girl, Keaton silently said to himself. And with the things they had created, the monsters and miracles, they'd drawn so many other zealots to their cause. Keaton knew that if any of those fanatics, those blind followers of the White Shadow, knew the doubts he had in his heart, they would kill him.

  Or not. He was, after all, the only one who knew how to talk to the girl in glass bubble anymore.

  Why not go see her, he thought. He picked up the room-temperature cup of coffee he'd lost and headed downstairs.

  The hallways of his lab echoed like a tomb. When they'd first started, there'd been so many other people like him, believers in the White Shadow's cause, people who wanted to change the world by force. They made it easier, those others. Staff and assistants and colleagues, feeding on each others' beliefs and energy. They really did think they could make a better world. There were still followers, but the smart ones—the scientists, the explorers—wandered off, literally and metaphorically. The thinkers had driven themselves to despair. They still had foot soldiers, extremists willing to die for the cause, but men and women of science . . . the world didn't have many of them left anymore.

  Keaton sometimes wondered if they'd been just as enthusiastic about something better how differently things might have turned out. Certainly the thought had occurred to others before him, accounting for some of the attrition as the different scientists began to realize the fruit
s of their labor were strangling the very world they wanted to change. Many more left after what had become known as the California incident.

  There wasn't much disguising the White Shadow's true intentions after the California incident, after all.

  Keaton sometimes wondered why he stayed. In part, he thought, it was love. He did love the Shadow, as a friend, as a makeshift family, despite his monstrous decisions. The Shadow had saved Keaton's life after all, had reeled him in from the brink, had given him purpose. The Shadow made Keaton something, and gave him a legacy. A horrific legacy, but, Keaton thought, was it better to be the man who helped end the world, or to simply be nothing at all? The world was on a fast track to self-destruction anyway. All Keaton did was help clear the path for some other species to give it all a try. Let the cats inherit the Earth. The apes had done a lousy job as caretakers.

  But the real reason Keaton stayed was locked in the basement laboratory. The girl in the glass bubble.

  He remembered first meeting her, when she was just a child, with brightly colored hair and a mouth that never stopped talking. They'd let her keep the hair that color, a way of making her feel human, but after a while the experiments dulled her personality and her spirit, and dying her hair no longer lifted her spirits. Nothing did, really. She rarely spoke anymore, had barely said a word in years, trapped in a bubble the size of a room, the thin geodesic patterns on the glass that harvested her power and turned it into a never-ending supply of energy gleaming in the dark.

  Tonight, the girl sat in a chair in the center of the globe where she remained a captive, staring into the darkness beyond her glass room.

  Keaton watched her, pity and regret welling up in his gut as it always did. He wanted to set her free, but he knew they'd tampered with her powers too much over the years. They'd done irreparable harm. The dome they kept her in was designed not only to harvest her energy but to keep it in check. The girl had no control over her abilities any longer. To set her free would be like inviting the cosmos to kick Earth into deep space. She was trapped.

  And ultimately that was why Keaton stayed. This was his fault, and the girl was his responsibility.