Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “She’s a bad fit.” Red lights start to blur together in the lane next to us. “We’re being set up to fail.”

  “Bad fit?” Felicity sounds like she doesn’t understand. “Arthur, she’s exactly like you. That’s why I thought this might work.”

  “Like me?” I take my eyes off the road. I can’t believe Felicity would say that. My foot slips down a little harder on the accelerator. The vibration of the car helps to ground me. “What are you talking about? She couldn’t be less of a team player if she tried.”

  “You mean she follows her instincts? She challenges the accepted rules?”

  I risk a glance away from the road. Felicity’s eyes are an open challenge. “I mean she’s going to get me or her or someone else killed.”

  “She’s the most trained field agent out there.”

  “She’s trained for the wrong thing.”

  Felicity grabs her head. “Arthur, fucking listen to me. You have to get on with her. You have to try harder. If we get absorbed by MI6 then, as things stand, it will be your fault. You are the point of friction. I’ve never seen Kayla take a shine to someone more quickly. I think Clyde may be incapable of disliking people at a fundamental biological level. Tabitha… is Tabitha. But whatever this problem is that you have with her, you need to get over it. I honestly don’t care if it’s justified or not. You have to get on with her or everything we have here is at risk.”

  “Everything?” The monumentality of the word lands in my lap like a rock. Everything. Jesus, when did this ground shift on me?

  But Felicity is already shaking her head. “Not…” Her hand flaps back and forth in the gulf between us. “You and me. Jesus, I just asked you to move in with me.”

  God, that does not help. It should. Of course it bloody should. I know it should. And I know she’s right and I’m in the wrong, and that doesn’t help either. I feel like Lang’s reality key. Nothing on me lines up. And there is no magician willing to twist me through reality and into a shape that aligns.

  We fly through darkness. Rear lights are a red river beside us. The car rocks as we pass others on the road.

  Felicity puts a hand on my shoulder. “Slow down, Arthur.” And then, as I start to finally ease off the accelerator, “This isn’t an attack. It’s a request. It’s me asking for help. OK? Help me save MI37. If Hannah really is that bad then once it’s safe we’ll get rid of her. OK? We save the world. We save MI37. Everything’s good. Everything goes back to normal after that. OK?”

  “OK,” I say, though not loudly, and not necessarily with the conviction I should muster. Because I feel brittle right now. Ever since that incident in the Highlands something in my head has been wrong. And the way I am now I don’t know how far I can bend to accommodate Hannah without snapping.

  But I slow down, and I join the other cars, and slowly we find our way back to Oxford.

  OUTSIDE FELICITY’S APARTMENT

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  Felicity stands on the curb, framed by the car door, her hair lit by the street light, brown strands painted yellow. She looks puzzled.

  “I just—” I start. I have rehearsed this in my head as we piloted our way through the quiet twisting streets, but now the moment has come I hesitate. I am running out of excuses to not stay over. And part of me does want to stay over. But I also need some calm right now, some stability. If I’m to do what she asks of me, if I’m to finally extract my head from my arse, then I need to do it in my own space. I need to do it on home ground, somewhere I’m not worrying about making a commitment that will leave Felicity a bloody widow.

  God, I’m doing it again.

  “If this is about what I said in the car…” Felicity starts.

  I force a grin on my face. “Only in a way,” I say. “I just… if we’re going to the Himalayas tomorrow, I want to be prepared. I want to go back to the office and look at all the stuff we have on Lang there. Make sure there’s something the others aren’t missing while they’re down in London.”

  Hell, that may even be a good idea. The thought buoys me a little. “I’ll just be an hour or so. I’ll be next to you when you wake up.”

  A little distance. A little alone time. And it will be good to wake up beside Felicity. That may be exactly what I need to calm down and be reasonable about Hannah.

  “OK,” Felicity says and she smiles. “That’s good, Arthur. We’re going to be good, right?”

  “Hannah will be amazed by our poise and professionalism.”

  Felicity looks dubious. “If we could just aim for borderline competent that would probably be enough. No need to get ambitious.”

  I smile. Genuinely this time. “OK, love.”

  The smile she returns is broad. “I like it when you call me that.”

  A QUIET WHILE LATER

  Down in conference room B, I stare at the Google Maps image on my laptop. A lone valley in the Himalayas. Utterly isolated.

  Like me here, in MI37 at midnight.

  The offices are quiet at the best of times—a space built for a hundred people housing only five. With just me here, there’s a sort of comforting desolation to the space. And I’m not learning anything here that I couldn’t have learned back at the apartment, but it’s nice all the same.

  I get up, stretch my legs. I think I saw some folders about Lang down in the laboratory. If I bundle those up then this won’t look so much like what it is—me wasting time. But I’m glad I came here.

  I whistle as I walk down the empty corridors, try to imagine the sounds transmuted into a trumpet’s solo wail. My fingers tap the ghost of a drum beat on the wall as I walk.

  It’s coming back to me. My center. My balance. Felicity was right, in the car. I need to get over myself. There is a way to get along with Hannah, as obnoxious as she is. Everyone else is managing it.

  That stupid bloody robot up in the Highlands throwing me off my game.

  I picture it again, here in the reassuring hallows of MI37. The event seems distant when framed by concrete walls and lit by fluorescent strips. Manageable. It was just another close call in a long series of close calls. I have lived through those events.

  Felicity was right. She’s always right.

  My feet carry me to the lab and I suffer a momentary flashback to the ungodly sight of Clyde’s naked white arse bobbing up and down. Jesus, that was this morning. I saw that this morning.

  And I thought almost having my brains clubbed from my skull was traumatizing.

  Abruptly I’m laughing. Not a small chuckle, but something deep and hard. As if some primal clasp has slipped on a chest deep in my gut. I have to hold onto the side of a table to steady myself. My eyes are leaking.

  Tabitha and Clyde. In the bloody closet. Oh Jesus. Oh God.

  I’m on my knees before I recover. And my sides hurt, and my knees are weak, but I really do feel better. Catharsis via hysterics. Hell, if it works, I’ll take it.

  I scan the room, still chuckling. And there are the folders. I pick one up, start leafing through. It better look at least vaguely relevant. And, yes, there is the word Uhrwerkgerät. I leaf through other pages, but it’s all in German and I don’t know the German word for Himalayas.

  “Shit.” I curse as a piece of paper nicks the pad of my thumb. A thin paper cut. I stick the digit in my mouth and taste blood.

  A thump from behind distracts me from the cut’s sting. I spin around, already reaching for my gun.

  There’s no one there. I am alone.

  I hesitate. Did I really hear something? I strain my ears. You have to break through five or six ridiculously complicated security locks to get down here. I must have—

  Another thump. Distinct this time. Undeniable. Something heavy… two heavy things colliding.

  Then silence. I am overly aware of my heartbeat. My breath.

  “Hello?” I call. “Is anyone there?”

  No answer.

  Nice one, Arthur. If anyone thought they were alone down here, there goes the element o
f surprise.

  I’m glad Hannah isn’t here to point that out to me.

  Another thump, and I get a bead on it this time. I spin, face the closet door, with the, CAUTION, CONTAINS CAUSTIC MATERIALS, sign tacked on it.

  “No way.” The thought emerges audibly. But it can’t be. Not twice in one day. I cannot be trapped listening to Clyde and Tabitha go at it twice in one day. The world is not that cruel.

  But then it strikes me that Clyde and Tabitha are still back in London packing up Lang’s paperwork. Even if they had a very weird and very specific fetish involving that exact closet then they couldn’t have beaten Felicity and me back to Oxford. There’s no way. Which means it can’t be them in the closet.

  Another thump.

  I level my gun. I wish I had a sword. I’m better with that, but there’s a certain impracticality to walking around Oxford with one strapped to my back. Not that I’d ever dream of telling Kayla that.

  I approach the door slowly. And for the first time in a while, I am holding my gun with a steady hand. I am ready for this, whatever it is.

  Well, I’m ready for it to be whatever, I suppose.

  I pause two paces away, steel myself to grab the door handle and fling it open.

  Whatever is on the other side beats me to the punch. The door swings open while I’m still a yard shy of my goal. I leap back even as I jab my pistol forward.

  But there is nothing there. Just shelves and shadow. My gun threatens an empty room.

  I stare deep in, searching. Step forward.

  Nothing.

  And then something detaches itself from the darkness. A chunk of reality flaking away, walking forward. Shelving, plaster, crates. It’s as if someone was sitting there wearing an outfit painted to blend in precisely with the view of someone standing exactly where I am now. Like some extended art joke. An example of near perfect camouflage suddenly revealed. Even as it moves, it’s still difficult to determine exactly what’s going on. I think I make out… an arm? A leg?

  And then—because, of course, they always do—things get weirder. The costume starts to lose its color, starts to fall away. Not clothing falling away item by item, but a slow unraveling, like string pooling on the floor, revealing beneath…

  It is a figure. I got that much right. But it is not anyone or anything I would go so far as to call human.

  It is a human-shaped hole in reality. It is a man-sized piece of… space? The figure is flat and featureless, its skin night-sky black, spattered with stars.

  Is this more camouflage? But I can think of nothing like this. No practically manufactured item. No, this is something Other. Proper, upper-case, mess-with-your-head, MI37 WEIRD.

  Of course, this is the point where any rational person would take off after their sanity, running and screaming up through the corridors and passageways.

  I go with saying, “Hello?”

  The figure raises a hand. Points at me.

  “Arthur,” I say. “Agent Arthur Wallace.” I clarify. I think about it, and then throw in, “Of MI37. We save the world. Mostly from things that look like you.”

  It pauses. We stand there, two sides of a deeply fucked up mirror. Its jaw works. An echo of my own speech?

  And then its voice comes.

  “Beyond the collapse—” it says.

  Oh God. Oh no. Jesus, its voice is doing something to my head. It’s opening holes in my brain. Opening up space.

  The syllables send me to my knees. I try to bring my hands up to cover my ears, but my muscles are spasming wildly. My eyes start to twitch and roll. I lose sight of it, but the words don’t stop. Won’t stop.

  “—I am you.”

  I can feel blood coursing from my nose, down my chin. The taste of copper fills my mouth again. The figure’s words fall through space into my mind.

  And then everything goes dark.

  24

  “Arthur? Arthur? Arthur!”

  Hands. Hands shaking me. What the—

  And then it comes back to me. The crushing grating agony in my mind. The unspooling of my sanity. The creature. The figure.

  “No!” I yell, and kick my legs backwards. I grab at whoever is talking to me, try to drag them back, drag them clear.

  “Hey! Calm down! Get him! Grab him!” A confusion of words around me. A smothering blanket of shouted concern and snatching hands. Someone pins my arms, holds them in an iron grip. I buck and yell. They have to get out of here. This is not safe.

  “Hey, hey, hey, hey.” A low rush of words, a flutter of syllables against my ear. Felicity’s voice. “It’s OK, Arthur. It’s OK. You’re OK.”

  And that grounds me. That brings me back. It’s over. Whatever the hell it was, it’s over.

  They help me to my feet. Felicity, Kayla, and Clyde. Clyde rubs at his hip where I caught him with a flailing arm or leg.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  He shrugs. “Oh no, quite all right. Could have happened to anybody. Probably happening to hundreds of people right now. I mean probabilistically speaking. Seven billion people on the planet. At least a hundred being kicked by flailing friends. Stands to reason. It’s going to happen to you at some point or other. Why complain about it? That’s what I always say. Well not always. Doesn’t happen often enough for me to say, ‘always,’ but you get the gist of—”

  “I do,” I cut him off.

  Felicity is peering at my face, horror-struck. “What the hell happened?”

  And my face does feel odd. I reach up, touch my chin, my upper lip. They are coated with something crusty and dry. I rub at it. Rusty-looking flakes come away on my fingers.

  And then I remember the blood. Pouring out of my nose. I look down and see my shirt is soaked.

  “We have to get you to a doctor,” Felicity says. “This could have been some sort of seizure, or—”

  “No.” I cut her off sharply. Too sharply. My own worry reacting to hers. “I mean… no,” I say more softly. “It’s not that.”

  And I explain. When I finish Clyde is rubbing his beard, tracing the line of his chin. “God, that sounds so familiar. I’m sure I’ve read something like that before.” He moves to one of the lab computers, starts clicking. “I wish Tabby was here.”

  “Keep it in your pants,” Kayla mutters, but Clyde doesn’t appear to hear her.

  “Oh damn, that reminds me,” Felicity says. “I should tell Tabitha and Hannah to stop checking the pubs for you.”

  “You had them checking pubs?” That’s not a great default location for people to check for you.

  Felicity shrugs. “You seemed out of sorts last night, and we didn’t need everyone searching here. Plus I’d called the hospital and you weren’t there.”

  Pubs. Third on the list. OK, that actually sounds reasonable.

  “I’m so sorry you were worried.” I take her hand.

  “I’m so sorry you almost had your brains bleed out your nose.”

  In the background, Kayla makes gagging sounds. I wonder if it’s possible for someone to be allergic to human affection.

  “Yes! There it is!” Clyde says from his computer. He turns to us, beaming. “Tabby would be very proud of me. Normally I’m horrible with her databases. Though they were much easier when I was an AI. But anyway,” he shakes his head, “future echoes.”

  A quick glance around the room assures me that I’m not the only one who has no clue what Clyde’s talking about.

  Clyde seems to reach that conclusion around the same time as me. “Oh,” he says, “right. Well, they’ve only been theoretical up to this point.” He rubs the side of his head, mussing the hair.

  “Wait,” he looks at me, “Arthur, did you hurt yourself in any way just before the thing appeared?”

  I think about it. “Erm, well,” it feels silly, but usually withholding information leads to supernatural horrors trying to eat my spleen, so I say, “I did get a papercut.” I show him my thumb. Kayla makes gentle scoffing noises.

  “On what?” Clyde is intent. “This is
very important.”

  I shrug. “I was just checking some of the stuff we had on Lang. And I found some stuff about the Uhrwerkgerät, and, well… then, I suppose.”

  “Oh.” Clyde doesn’t look very happy. “Oh poop sticks.”

  I want to question the curse, but his expression keeps me focused.

  “Why?”

  “Well,” he says, “like I say, future echoes have been theoretical up until now, though there’s been some pretty solid math to describe them. They’re this rather odd feature of composite realities. Like ours, for example. Pretty obvious example to go with, I admit. But they only happen when there’s a fairly massive disruption to multiple realities within the composite. An event so large that it distorts other realities in the composite. An act of violence that extends beyond the realities initially caught up in the mess. In other words echoes, or ripples spreading out from the disruption, moving forward and backward through time and space.”

  “That doesn’t sound feckin’ fabulous,” Kayla puts in.

  Clyde shakes his head. “Not at all. Sort of frog in a microwave sort of bad. If you assume the frog is a large portion of reality that you’re generally quite keen on continuing to exist. But it does make sense given that Lang was an expert at manipulating realities.”

  “What’s Lang got to do with it?” I wish Felicity’s face would go back to neutral. Her absence of calm is beginning to leak into me.

  “Well, a future echo is usually triggered by something related to the main event. In this case it was Arthur hurting himself while doing something related to the Uhrwerkgerät.”

  I almost don’t want to ask. But I have to. For my job. For my sanity. “Which means?”

  “Well…” Clyde shrugs, a violent spasm. “This is all theory, you realize. Best guesses and all that.” His face twists. “But the most obvious inference is that the Uhrwerkgerät is going to go off, and when it does it’s going to kill you.”

  25

  Oh.

  Oh shit and balls.

  The silence that greets Clyde’s utterance grows. And grows. A crushing eclipsing vacuum of sound. And I need someone to fill it. To stop it. Because I…