Preserving Will

by Alex Albrinck

  Will smiled and stretched out on their bed, feeling his limbs lengthening and his muscles loosening. He relished the sound that woke him, the sound of the most beautiful voice in the world. Her beauty and goodness expressed themselves to every sense he possessed. He’d noticed that just being in her presence lately seemed to generate a flute-like sound, a tone of purity that was beyond anything he’d heard from even the greatest master musicians of the day.

  He rolled over and sat up, smiling, drinking in her image. “Thanks.”

  She held up a card. “I made sure to find your driver’s license, Mister I’m-Going-To-Drive-Myself-To-Work. Oh, and I made you some breakfast as well.” She pulled a small plate from behind her back, laden with a small cake and a single lit candle protruding from the top. “Shall I sing?”

  He leaned forward and blew out the candle; she knew what he’d wished for without asking. “Too late for that, I’m afraid.” He sat back up and accepted the plate from her. “How long have you been up, anyway?”

  “Approximately five minutes. My compliments to the person who invented microwave ovens.”

  “I thought you hated microwaving food?”

  “Well, you only turn thirty-five once, right? Live a little.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for when you hit thirty.”

  She winced a bit, but managed a smile. “Fair enough.”

  Will finished eating the cake before showering. As he did each morning before leaving, he slipped into Josh’s room to whisper a farewell, and to utter a silent wish that the boy would greet him upon his return later in the day. Josh slept soundly, an expressionless look upon his cherubic face. The sandy blond hair was, in Will’s mind, a perfect blend of Hope’s platinum blond and his own jet black. Will imagined the icy blue eyes hidden behind the closed lids, eyes which to him seemed to show an unusual intelligence for one so young, and wondered, not for the first time, what wrong he’d done that caused his son to be rendered mute, the symptoms of an ailment that the best doctors on the planet couldn’t identify.

  “Maybe today, Josh,” he whispered. “There would be no greater gift on any day.” He reached out and tousled his son’s hair, letting his hand linger a bit longer than usual. Smokey, Josh’s pet and constant companion, looked up from where she’d nestled against the boy’s side. Will smiled, and patted the animal on the head. “Take care of him, Smokey. I know you will.” Smokey thumped her tail in response, though Will could only wonder whether she did so in appreciation of the attention or in agreement with the words Will uttered.

  It was another part of what he wanted to be normal about this day. He wanted to drive himself to and from work, to go out to dinner with his family, and to hear his son speak and laugh. Those weren’t wishes that required billions of dollars, though he’d happily trade his billions for the experience. Today, perhaps, he’d see that wish come true.

  He wandered downstairs, where Hope sat at the table in the kitchen, near the sliding glass door to the backyard. She looked unusually tired today, a trend he’d noticed over the past several years. She still had far more zest than he did, but instead of the usual consistency, she was prone to bouts of adrenaline and fatigue. “Are you okay?”

  She glanced up, almost startled at his presence. “I’m fine. A little sleepy still, I guess. How’s Josh?”

  “Still asleep.” He gave a thin smile. “And still quiet.”

  “You’ll hear him talk, Will. I promise.”

  “Today?”

  “I predict that the odds are in your favor.”

  He gave her a thumbs up. “That’s the spirit.” He walked over to give her a kiss goodbye. “Thanks for breakfast. And everything else.”

  She held his hand tight. “Thank you, as well. For everything you do, and for everything you will do.”

  He smiled, and then headed out to his car.

  Hope moved to the large window at the front of the house, watching him drive away. As soon as he was out of sight, she ran upstairs, threw herself on her bed, and sobbed uncontrollably.

  To the best of her knowledge, it was the last time she’d ever see her husband.

  ●●●

  Once she’d cried until no tears were left, once she felt drained of any emotion, Hope worked to pull herself together. Much as she hated what was happening, she realized she had to play her part and ensure everything went as planned today. If not, the lives of Josh of Angel were very much at risk. She put on jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled her hair back in a ponytail.

  She released the Energy Shield on Josh as she walked downstairs, and moments later her son bounded down the steps with Smokey nipping at his heels. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  Hope sighed. Nothing could be hidden from her son. “There’s a lot going on today, sweetie, and it makes me tired just thinking about it.”

  “Can I help?”

  She thought about that, trying to anticipate how the day’s events would unfold. “Yes. Go put all of your stuffed animals in a big pile in your closet.”

  The little boy nodded and ran off to his room. Smokey, thinking it was a game, raced after him, and the little boy laughed in delight.

  Hope ran through the list of things to do, trying to ensure that she could act as normal as possible when the Assassin arrived. She checked the safe to make sure that the gun was there, along with the two clips of ammunition. She took one clip with her and locked everything back in the safe for later. Will’s spare set of glasses were in the bathroom. She moved downstairs with both the clip and the glasses, and placed both on the counter in the kitchen. Her grown son would retrieve both items later.

  She choked up a bit. It was difficult to imagine the little boy giggling in his room upstairs as a grown man. She let her senses drift to him, and watched as Josh carried out her orders. The boy tossed stuffed animals into the closet, and laughed as Smokey would rush to retrieve the projectiles and return them. She smiled.

  Hope found a couple of baseball gloves and stowed them near the bat rack at the rear of the house, and made sure several bats were there. They were all made of wood. Will preferred to take his practice with the wooden bats because he enjoyed the feel of wood connecting with a baseball far more than metal, and preferred the sounds produced by wood as well. She glanced into the backyard, to the automated batting cage he’d built there years ago. He’d hoped to watch his son take an independent turn in the cage, but Josh had never been able to do so.

  At least, not in Will’s presence.

  The unfairness of it all dragged on her once again, exaggerating—or exaggerated by—her fatigue. Why would she agree to a plan like this, one that demanded she hide her son’s soul, intelligence, personality, and voice from the wonderful man he called Daddy? Why would she deny the boy the relationship he needed and deserved with the man he rightly considered the world’s greatest hero?

  And why would she agree to say goodbye as if she didn’t know she’d never see him again?

  Get it together, Hope. The future and the past depend upon it.

  Josh trotted back down the steps, with his dog in tow. “All done, Mommy. Smokey thought we were playing fetch, though.”

  Hope smiled at her son. “Very good, Josh.” She glanced at the clock. Where had the time gone? “It looks like it’s lunchtime. Let’s have something to eat and then do some quiet reading before our naps, okay? We’re going out to dinner for Daddy’s birthday later, so we need to be wide awake when Daddy gets home.”

  Josh looked at her. “Mommy, you always tell me not to lie.”

  Hope took a deep breath. “We’re going to pretend that we’re getting ready to go out to dinner for Daddy’s birthday.”

  The boy studied her face, reading the half-truth there. But he nodded. “Okay, Mommy. We can do that. But I wish you weren’t so sad all the time, or so tired.”

  “So do I, Josh,” Hope said with a sigh. “So do I.”

  They enjoyed a simple lunch. She and Will had made the conscious choice to keep the house to a modest size
—relatively, anyway—because neither wanted to live in a home so large that they’d require live-in servants just to maintain it. Thus, lunch was a private affair, just her and Josh, with no one else milling about. It was a wonderful time for them to bond. She’d refrained from explaining to Josh too much about his abilities, that he was unique in the history of the world, as she didn’t want the Assassin to figure out exactly what the boy was through the child’s own thoughts. If he gave that information away, the Assassin might well leave them and try to locate the Hunters for assistance. They couldn’t allow that to happen. Josh knew he had special abilities that needed to be hidden, and so he made no effort to use or restrain them, pretending they were an imaginary skill. That would change after today as well. They’d spend their time in the bunker training him, especially in Shielding.

  Josh yawned after lunch, and walked to his room, unbidden, for a nap. She knew the instant he was asleep, and she collapsed into a chair to rest. Why was she so tired all the time? It wasn’t the pregnancy. She was aware of her pregnancy, knew it would impact her, knew it would be a somewhat different experience since she was carrying a girl this time. But it couldn’t be this different. And she’d been sensing the growing fatigue before her second pregnancy began.

  What was the cause?

  So deep was her focus on that question that she didn’t notice the man who’d entered the room until he spoke.

  “Hello, Hope.”

  She screamed.

  ●●●

  “Hope, are you okay?” Adam asked, frowning. “It’s just me.”

  She calmed herself, grateful that Josh hadn’t woken up. “Sorry. It’s just… it’s been a long day.”

  “It’s been a long few centuries,” Adam agreed. “But yes, the last few have been the worst.”

  “I’m so tired all the time, and I’m constantly focused on what’s going to happen to Will,” Hope admitted. “It’s been like this for a while, and I don’t know why.”

  Adam frowned. “Do you think it’s just stress and worry about what’s to come today?”

  Hope shook her head. “No. I mean, yes, I’m worried about today. But it’s more than that. I’ve known this day would come for centuries. I’ve had every opportunity to prepare myself for it. And even a decade ago, an amount of time that seems like nothing to me… even then, nothing was wrong. But lately? That worry and despair are destroying me.”

  “You’re afraid you won’t see Will again, aren’t you?” Adam surmised.

  She nodded, stunning herself by not breaking down at his words. “But I’ve always known that was a possibility. I knew when I watched him leave to go meet the Hunters that he might not come back, that I might not ever see him again. But I dealt with that without much drama. Maybe I just suspected from what I knew that he would survive, and therefore it was just a temporary separation. We’ve been apart for a century before, Adam. Maybe we’ll be apart for another century, or two centuries. Yet I have this fear that he’s going to be gone for good.” Her face crumbled. “Or maybe I will.”

  “You just saw him a few days ago. He summoned the Hunters here.”

  She gave a faint nod. “But I didn’t really see him, or talk to him. And now he’s gone again.”

  Adam sighed. “He wasn’t gone until earlier today. We hid him at the house to give him a chance to recover, so that we could all reunite and plan what to do next after today’s events finish. But when Eva went to check on him this morning he was gone. No trace of him.”

  She threw up her hands. “See? I could have seen him once more. But now? Now, he’s truly gone.”

  “Our notes from the future say he’ll be here today.”

  “Yeah, to save me.” She fumed. “I do not need to be saved. I can take care of myself and Josh. It’s the Assassin, for crying out loud. He’s an Energy lightweight.”

  “We all know that, Hope,” Adam said. His voice was calm, gentle, full of compassion. “All of us have been asked to do things we’d rather not do, you more than most. Events and circumstances may come up later today that we haven’t known about before now, and maybe given those new circumstances we’ll all decide it would be best if Will does take care of things. We just don’t know. All I ask is that you allow yourself to adapt to circumstances and do what is best for you and for Josh.”

  Hope scowled. “That would mean taking my son and leaving the house now. Would that be so bad?”

  Adam sighed. “If you do that, the Assassin will wait for you to come home, for however long that takes. And we’ll arrive from the future wondering why nothing’s happening.”

  “You’re here now, though. You could adapt future plans based on that new approach.”

  He shook his head. “No, Hope. Too many things may change as a result of that alteration, and a mere rescheduling of our arrival may not fix everything.” He paused. “I came here to talk to you for a different reason.”

  She recognized the attempt to change the subject and elected not to fight it. “What reason would that be?”

  “I’m trying to reconcile what we know with what our future notes tell us. Specifically, I’ve been wondering, like you, why Will needs to move you away from the Assassin when you can do so without issue on your own.”

  “Thank you. My current emotional state notwithstanding, right?”

  “That’s… part of it, too,” he admitted.

  Her eyes flashed.

  He held up a hand. “Hear me out, okay? My general belief is that the clues we’ve been given from the future are important, and that there’s hidden guidance to be found within them. As strange as that advice might seem, we have to ask why it might be correct, and why it was provided to us. Make sense so far?”

  She shrugged.

  “So I asked the question: why the obvious and repeated references to Will coming to the rescue today? At first, given circumstances, I wondered why because it seemed he’d died at the hands of the Hunters several years ago. Clearly, our future guidance was a mistake, right? Maybe it was metaphorical. Not only were you capable of handling things on your own, but Will didn’t look like he’d be around to be able to do anything.”

  This time, she nodded. “Go on.”

  “I saw him, though. So did the others. You surely sensed his Energy blast. He’s alive. And therefore, I had to reopen that line of thinking once more, but I made a subtle change in the question. I asked why you wouldn’t handle things, rather than why you couldn’t. Just knowing Will was coming in wouldn’t be enough. He spent years doing everything he could to keep your existence a secret from the Aliomenti; at a minimum, you’d handle things here just to keep his survival a secret from them now.”

  Hope blinked a few times, and then nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that, actually. I’d been so… offended at the idea that I needed to be protected and helped that I hadn’t considered the possibility of how my handling the teleportation effort could protect him.”

  “So let’s ask the question: if you want to handle it because you can, and because it could protect Will… why would history still tell us you don’t? There must be a reason. Because on the surface, you handling things makes far more sense.”

  She studied him. “And you know that reason, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “I think so. And if you think about it, so do you. We’ve already mentioned everything.”

  She considered it all, their conversation, the events of the past few days, and tried to reconcile that with what history said would happen.

  And then she knew.

  “He summoned them here,” she whispered. “They already know he’s alive, don’t they?”

  “It’s reasonable to assume that,” Adam agreed. “True, they may think we invented a machine to simulate Will’s Energy, but they’ll probably consider that unlikely. And with good reason. We talked about that machine idea years ago, remember, but nobody could figure out how to build it. So they know that Energy burst came from Will. And they know he’s alive.”

  “If I expend
Energy to teleport us, the Hunters will learn something they didn’t know. They’ll learn that Will Stark didn’t marry a human woman.”

  Adam nodded. “And that’s why I think you’d let him handle things. Not because you can’t handle things, but because it keeps new information from getting to the Aliomenti. If we’ve kept your existence a secret this long, I see no reason to volunteer information about your existence and power to our… friends.”

  Hope watched him. “There’s something more that you’re not telling me.”

  He sighed. “You’re right. That’s because it’s the part of my thinking that you’ll hate.”

  “Try me.”

  He considered for a moment. “We’ve speculated what the Assassin might do if he arrived here later and learned that you’re a powerful Energy user. We think he’d probably try to flee and let the Hunters know about your true nature. We don’t want that to happen. That speculation is based on your use of Energy, of you letting your Shield drop. It seems unlikely that you’d do that, though. At least, not on purpose.”

  She let that slide. “How else would he know?”

  “You’d think about it,” Adam replied, his voice quiet. “If you’re planning to teleport the two of you to the bunker, you must first think about doing so. You’re likely going to think about it because you must pick the right time to do so. Too soon, or too late, and something we don’t like might happen. Your thoughts would provide to the Assassin—and by extension, in some fashion, the Hunters—exactly what we don’t want him to learn.”

  “But how could I not think about it?” Hope asked, frustrated.

  “There’s only one way,” Adam said. “And that’s if you don’t know that you can.”

  She stared at him, the truth dawning. “You want to wipe out my memory. Just like you did with all those people you cloned.”

  He shook his head. “Not wipe out. Block. We don’t want those memories gone, just repressed until today’s events are complete. I think it would be best to try to put a trigger of some kind in place, something that we know should happen that indicates it’s safe for you to know and reveal your ability to him, when it’s too late for him to do anything about it.”