The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything

by Phillion, Matthew

  So they can have this gray old world a little longer, the White Shadow thought. Because I know how it all ends. This is a place that never sought happiness. And it's time to destroy it and allow whatever the universe deemed worthy to follow them have an opportunity to try.

  I've got the might to rip this world in half, the White Shadow thought. I've offered them Solomon's choice, and they've chosen wrongly.

  Chapter 17:

  Once and Future

  Entropy Emily

  "I want to know about me," Entropy Emily said, her mouth full of something passing for frozen pizza in the area the future Indestructibles were treating as a kind of kitchen and mess hall.

  "You're five feet tall, talk too much, and are too smart for your own safety," Billy said.

  He looked more than a little worse for wear, clearly not taking the news that his future incarnation had made the ultimate sacrifice long before the younger Indestructibles arrived.

  "No seriously," Emily said. "We know you're dead."

  "Say it again. Louder. And with even less sensitivity," Billy said.

  "And we know Titus has become Conan the Barbarian Werewolf King. And that Jane grows up to be all glowy and hot."

  "Really? And that's the detail you focus on? Hot?" younger-Jane said. Their older counterparts were speaking with Doc just out of earshot, though clearly not far enough, because older-Jane turned to look back at them when Emily spoke.

  "You're literally on fire," Emily said. "That's pretty hot." She took another bite of pizza but kept talking anyway. "And Doc let the Lady murder him. So it's my turn. I want to know what happens to me," Emily said.

  "I think I can answer that," Anachronism Annie said, breaking away from the conversation with Doc and the others.

  "But you weren't here," Emily said. "I want it from the horse's mouth."

  "Annie knows more than we do, actually," future-Jane said. She sat down next to her younger self.

  Emily looked back and forth between them and repeated the motion as if unsure where to focus her eyes.

  "It's true," Annie said. "I've done some time-digging to try to figure out exactly what happened."

  "Well we know what happened. Doc never came to get me," Emily said.

  "Yes and no," Annie said. "Near as we can tell, there were two incidents that altered your future. One was, in fact, that Doc wasn't here to monitor when your powers manifested themselves."

  "Next comes the 'and' doesn't there?" Emily said.

  "Yep," Annie said. "And, the other thing that happened was that you got hit by a car."

  "I've never been hit by a car," Emily said. "Not for lack of trying. I like jaywalking. It's become kind of my sport."

  "How did your powers manifest originally, Emily?" Annie asked, smirking as if she knew the answer already.

  "I told you, I'm a fan of jaywalking," Emily said. "A car almost hit me. I bubble of floated them away. Then I bubble of floated a lot of other cars away, then problems happened, then Billy tackled me and got me out of there."

  "Yeah," Annie said. "In this timeline, that car hit you."

  "Well that doesn't sound even remotely fun," Emily said.

  "Fine," Annie said. "Let me tell you what happened."

  * * *

  Twenty years ago:

  Well, Emily thought, lying in a hospital bed with a concussion and a broken leg, maybe jaywalking is overrated.

  It happened so fast. I guess that's how you get hit by a car, she thought. If it had happened slower she could have gotten out of the way. But she'd darted out across the street, as she had a thousand times before, only this time her usual luck hadn't accompanied her. Boom. Crash. Emily street pizza.

  It could've been worse, she thought, I could've been road kill. Instead, I'm sitting here waiting for my mom to come yell at me for running into traffic again. And I can only imagine what will happen if she finds out what outfit I was wearing when I got run over.

  She never thought she'd be so happy to be dressed in a hospital johnny.

  Emily kept thinking back to the moment of the accident, though. The strangeness. She'd thrown up her arms—apparently that's what you do when you know you're about to be hit by a car, you panic and raise your arms up in front of you as if that's going to stop the car—and for a moment, a crystal clear moment, Emily was absolutely sure she could stop the oncoming car. That she could just . . . make it float away.

  But that didn't happen.

  One might deem what happened to Emily afterward floating, but at a high rate of speed, with a very sudden stop.

  There was something else, too. In the haze of the aftermath, the terrified driver trying to call 911, the police who were first to arrive on scene, the EMTs stabilizing her, somewhere in there, Emily thought, I swear I saw someone wearing a mask. A white mask, covered his face, leaving it blank. He—was it a he?—wore a dark suit and an old fedora, a red tie. Don Draper meets a pulp fiction action hero. Simply standing there, casually, content to watch Emily die.

  Except I didn't die. Rather, I broke five bones and my head has ached for the past four hours, but I'm not dead.

  And then the painkillers they'd given her finally kicked in, and Emily nodded off.

  When she woke, everything had changed.

  Her mother spoke quickly to someone just beyond Emily's line of sight. Emily propped herself up on her elbows, creaky and groggy.

  "Mom?" she said, aware that she was about to sound very whiny, and forgetting that she was probably in more trouble than she knew. Her mom had been killing her on the stop-jaywalking thing lately.

  And then Emily saw the nurse on the floor.

  Something was happening in her room.

  "Mom?" she said again, trying to shake the cobwebs out of her head. Her mother pointed at a man in a suit. Emily blinked a few times, and as the man came into focus, she saw he had no face.

  "Where's your face?" Emily said, louder than she intended.

  Her mother stopped talking. The man with no face turned that blank expression—it was a mask, she knew just like the person she remembered at the scene of the accident, a person in a suit wearing a blank white mask—towards her.

  "Leave my daughter alone," Emily's mother said. "You're not him. Not the real one. I knew the real Shadow, you're a fake—"

  The man in the suit pushed Emily's mom aside, deliberately knocking her into a chair beside Emily's bed. When her mother tried to get back up, the masked person hit her with the flat of his palm. The strike startled Emily, made the words catch in her throat, yet her mother didn't appear hurt. Stunned, definitely, but not really injured, as if the masked person had wanted to simply subdue her and not put her down.

  "You're something special, you know," the masked person said.

  The voice was wrong. Too high-pitched. The wrong age. She expected someone from Mad Men under there, not this.

  "I'm such a special snowflake you don't even know," Emily said, trying to climb out of bed. "And I'm going to show . . ."

  The room swam, her belly flip-flopped. Emily bit her lip, trying to fight the nausea, the soury sickness of her stomach.

  "Listen, Rorschach, why don't you just back off before I . . . do something I'll regret!" Emily said. She slid her feet to the floor and put up her fists like something she'd seen Rocky Balboa do. Or maybe it was from I Love Lucy? She suddenly wasn't sure.

  The masked person lifted a hand and, before Emily could fully register what was happening, fired a dart from a small gun. The dart sank into Emily's bony shoulder, and she felt the area around it go numb.

  "Sorry, Emily," the mask said. As whatever drugs Emily had been hit with crashed into her system, strange faces began forming in the shadows of the blank face. "But we need you in one piece, and we need to hold off manifesting those powers of yours just a little longer."

  "Powers?" Emily said. She tried to sit back on her bed, but slid to the floor instead. "I have powers? Are they pew pew powers, or kablammo powers?"

  "Something of eac
h," the masked person said.

  Emily felt her consciousness slipping away and she was lifted from the floor and deposited into a wheelchair.

  "You don't know it yet," the masked person said. "But you and I are going to change the world."

  * * *

  Now:

  "Remind me to never ask you to read me a bedtime story," Emily said.

  "Just telling you what we know," Annie said, shrugging. "Your powers didn't manifest in the same way in this timeline, and someone else got to you first. "

  "And the rest of the Get Along Gang never came to get me?" Emily said.

  "This was so early on we hadn't discovered Doc's files on other super-powered individuals yet," future-Jane said. "By the time we knew to look for you, you were gone."

  Future-Titus shifted again.

  Emily found herself incredibly jealous of the way the entire room deferred to him when he simply moved—everyone, future hero and the ones from her own timeline alike, stopped what they were doing to watch the older, scarred wolf when he made a motion. She was about to ask him how he did that but then he started talking.

  No one else talked when older-Titus spoke either, Emily thought. I want to learn how to do that, too.

  "We did eventually find out you were on the list of people to watch, but it wasn't until our enemy started using your powers as a weapon that we knew how to look for you," older-Titus said.

  "And by then, we were looking for ways to stop you, not recruit you," the other werewolf said, the one whom Emily had started thinking of as Lucky Charms.

  "Who really took me, then?" Emily said. "Was I recruited by the Emperor? Is it the Cybermen? All things being equal, I'd rather get recruited by the Sith than a race of cyborgs."

  "Of course you'd rather join the Dark Side," Billy said.

  "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints," Emily said.

  "Did you really just quote Billy Joel? Are you suddenly fifty years old?"

  "Well there is, in fact, a version of me running around who is almost forty," Emily said. "The same of which cannot be said about you, so—"

  "You have to be the meanest person I've ever met," Billy said.

  "Watch the hyperbole there, Spud," Emily said.

  Jessie and Finnigan exchanged a quizzical look.

  "Are we sure she's not actually supposed to be a villain?" Jessie said.

  Younger-Titus, always the most mortified person in the room, was holding his head in his hands, rubbing his hair anxiously. "We have this conversation all the time," he said.

  "I mean seriously, what's the worst thing I could've done?" Emily said. "I make bubbles of float, it's not like I'm actually a nuclear weapon."

  "You destroyed California," future-Jane said.

  Silence overtook the room. Everyone stared at older-Jane, and then back at Emily.

  "What?" Emily said. "I didn't do it. The other Emily did it. Wait, I destroyed California?"

  Future-Jane looked to her younger self, and then to Doc. Both nodded to her in return.

  "She can handle it," younger-Jane said.

  The elder Jane took a deep breath.

  "You know how there was always talk of the wrong earthquake pushing California into the sea? How the San Andreas Fault or something like that might lead to a natural disaster that would tear the geographical area apart?" future-Jane said.

  "I think I'm being unfairly accused here," Emily said. "In our timeline there's some kid running around who can make earthquakes we haven't caught yet. Clearly it's his fault."

  "No," future-Jane said. "No, we know exactly what happened. One of your gravitational fields appeared and engulfed the entire California coastline years ago. Cars floated away. Buildings unmoored. But we could fix all that. Your powers had been used to cause that kind of destruction before, in New York, in Chicago, but in small areas. A city block maybe, a few square miles."

  "I floated the entire state?" Emily said. "Can I be impressed with myself?"

  "You didn't float the state, Emily," future-Jane said. "From what we can tell, you put one of your—"

  "—Bubbles of float."

  "You created one of your bubbles of float around a huge swath of California, and then you . . . just held it. And you let the rotation of the Earth do the rest."

  "I don't get it," Billy said.

  "I get it. I understand. Think about when Watson tries to run after a squirrel but you're holding the leash," Emily said. "And he reaches the end of the leash."

  "The poor little guy gets jerked backwards," Billy said.

  "So she used the weight of the earth to tear California away," younger-Jane said. "That's got to be the most terrifying thing I've ever heard."

  "We've had some bad days," Jane's older self said. "We've experienced some terrible things. But that day. We haven't had one like that before or since."

  Emily stood silent for a moment, her eyes expanded, her hands played with her functionally useless steampunk goggles. Finally, she said, "I have a request."

  "I'm almost afraid to ask," younger-Titus said his head still buried in his hands.

  "Can we officially stop saying 'you' when referring to the stuff Evil Emily did? Because, like, separate people," Emily said. "I also think we need a way of telling the Tituses and Janes apart."

  "I'm even more afraid to ask," younger-Titus said.

  "If you suggest 'Old Jane' I'm going to punch you to the moon," younger-Jane said.

  "Okay, I'll think of something else instead," Emily said.

  "Solar and Jane," younger-Titus said softly.

  "What?" both Janes said, echoing each other.

  "We'll call you Solar," he said, pointing to the elder Jane, "and you Jane."

  The Janes glanced at each other, nodded in a perfect mirror image, then nodded again at Titus.

  "And how will we tell you two apart?" Jane the younger said.

  "Whispering," Titus's older self said.

  As always, the entire room turned their attention his way.

  "By talking softly?" Emily said.

  "No," younger-Titus said. "You're the Whispering. That's your title."

  "I'm Titus still," the older werewolf said in his rumbling, monstrous voice. "But you can call me Whispering, and we'll call you Titus. I haven't felt like simply Titus in a really long time. You should keep that name."

  The two werewolves, young and old, looked at each other with a strange and sorrowful stare, as if they suddenly knew each other's secrets.

  "I'm Titus, and you're the Whispering," the younger werewolf said.

  "Well, now I'm twice as confused," Emily said, throwing her hands up and walking away.

  Chapter 18:

  Twitterpated

  After hours of trying to get their bearings in this alternate future passed, the younger Indestructibles had been told to get some rest and were sent off to take their pick of dorm-style rooms scattered throughout the building. Some of the Whispering's pack had taken up residence on one floor, and though they did seem friendly enough, the young heroes settled in elsewhere down the hall.

  Jane lay down on a cot and stared at the ceiling, attempting to piece everything together. Nothing about this future was untroubling, but Doc's nonchalance about being dead made her more anxious than she could possibly explain. What did he mean when Doc said this wasn't the first instance that he had learned he'd died? On how many occasions had he traveled through time before?

  And then there was the Billy situation. Billy's reaction: now that was how someone should react after finding out they were dead. The poor kid was having a meltdown. She heard him talking to himself through the walls of her room, and she'd even seen him banish Emily, his constant companion, because he wanted to be alone. Or as alone as one could be with an alien living in his brain.

  And her reflections didn't even begin to address the fact that they'd been in some kind of romantic relationship, she and Billy. That made no sense to her at all.

  "So what do you think about the
whole, you and Billy sitting in a tree thing?" Emily said from Jane's doorway, startling her.

  Jane sat up and scooted her legs off the cot.

  "How long have you been standing there?"

  "I've been bubble-of-pacing up and down the hall for a half-hour," Emily said. "I'm waiting for Case to chill out so I can bother him, but he's all twitterpated in there."

  "Well, he found out he died," Jane said. "Twitterpated is just the beginning of how he could be feeling."

  "You and Billy Case. How about that?" Emily said. She flopped down on the bed beside Jane, making herself right at home, arms flailing above her head.

  "Is it weird for you?" Jane said.

  "Weird for me? It has nothing to do with me," she said. "You're mourning him. Like, your older you. Solar. Mourning. She's heartbroken."

  "I mean is it weird for you now?" Jane said. "I mean you and Billy are . . . right?"

  "We're what?" Emily said.

  "Aren't you a thing?" she said.

  Emily sat back up, stared at Jane for a second, then started to roar in laughter.

  "What. What did I say?" Jane said.

  "You think Billy and I are a thing?" Emily said.

  "You're attached at the hip. You never go anywhere without each other."

  "Jane, Billy's my bro," Emily said. "He's my boy. My best bud."

  "Isn't that what couples are?"

  "You've never had a boyfriend, have you?"

  "Have you?" Jane said.

  "No, but I've watched a lot of daytime television," Emily said. "Seriously, you really think Billy and I are a couple?"

  "You've just been friends all this time?"

  Emily laughed again, this time so hard she choked on her own saliva and caught herself in a coughing fit. She wiped tears from her eyes and put a hand on Jane's shoulder.

  "First of all, no, we're not a thing, we have never been a thing," Emily said. "We hang out all the time because we like each other. As human beings."

  Jane nodded.

  "And also, Billy is so not my type in ways I cannot even get into right now," Emily said. "We'd never be a thing. Not gonna happen."