Nimrod was lifted into the air slowly, a foot at a time until he hung there, floating higher even than Evelyn. She pointed to him, gesturing with her hands, and he felt his arms being pulled outwards until he hung like a crucified man. The empty gun was still in his right hand.
“You cannot cheat fate,” she said. “You do not die in the Cloud Club.”
“I can see that, Madam,” said Nimrod. The tingle of the Director’s power surrounded him like a warm bath, but it was getting hotter, and more intense, quickly. He gritted his teeth against the burning pain.
“Now you know what it is like, being dragged through the universes against your will. Pain — infinite, eternal.”
Nimrod said nothing, focusing instead on dragging air through his clenched teeth.
The Director lowered herself to the platform, and began to walk around its edge, trailing ghostly fingers on the railing and leaving a trail of sparkling blue dust in their wake. She surveyed the robot army below her.
“Elektro?”
A robot walked out from the beneath the platform and turned to look up at the Director. The machine saluted, cigarette smoke curling from its mouth. “At your service, boss.”
“We are almost ready. Begin synchronization.”
“You got it,” said Elektro. The machine puffed on its cigarette and walked back underneath the platform. Nimrod dragged his head down as much as possible, and through the grilling saw Elektro operating the controls of the torus. The steady hum of the device increased in amplitude, the glow of the ring brighter until it was almost white.
The Director looked up at Nimrod, pinned like a butterfly to a board in midair. “My army of atomic robots. They are necessary, Nimrod. Do you understand? The atomic army is required. Now that I have control of the Fissure, I can move it here, to the factory. My army will be taken as one through to the Empire State, and there each fusor reactor will be detonated. Each will yield twenty-five megatons. Multiply that a thousand-fold and the energy released will be enough to cause the Pocket universe to collapse.”
Nimrod hissed, and she resumed her walk around the circumference of the platform; with each step she rose a little higher in the air, until she was floating free again.
“Yes, Captain. The Pocket and the Origin cannot exist without each other, not anymore. They are tethered. The implosion will start a chain reaction, one that will continue, consuming the very fabric of this universe, accelerating exponentially until every universe, all the worlds beyond the fog, dissolve.”
Nimrod growled and forced his mouth open. His tongue was dry and his teeth hurt as the tendrils of energy from Evelyn swirled, looking for the quickest way to the Earth through his body.
“You would destroy everything?” Every word was a struggle, every syllable spat out against a tidal wave of pain. “That isn’t war, Evelyn. It’s not even madness. You would destroy all of creation.” He hissed a breath, and expelled one final question: “Why?”
The Director tilted her head at him and frowned. Perhaps it was madness, thought Nimrod. Perhaps that is what being brought back from the dead did to you.
“So I can be free,” she said. “The universes will be no longer, and I shall be free.”
“You would destroy everything, just to save yourself?”
“Enough!” The Director’s eyes flashed blue, and she turned away from Nimrod in the air. She floated to the edge of the platform and raised her arms out towards the far wall of the factory. “I control the Fissure. It is mine.”
Blue energy, smoke-like, ethereal, streamed out of Evelyn’s arms, towards the factory wall. Nimrod watched as a small spot appeared, black against the flat grey concrete, then increasing in size, the edge ragged and glowing blue. Within seconds, the blackness had swallowed half of the wall and was still growing, the blue energy pouring off Evelyn.
Then he felt it, the vibration, the pins-and-needles sensation behind his eyeballs, the same feeling he got when he was standing next to the Fissure down in Battery Park. The blackness on the factory wall seemed to flash blue, the edges still spreading as the Director of Atoms for Peace dissolved the barrier between the Origin and the Pocket.
A cold wind blew in from the blackness. It flashed again, and then Nimrod saw it: a street, buildings shrouded in darkness. As the factory wall vanished, he realized he was looking at a street in the New York night, empty and cold, frozen in winter.
No, not New York. The Empire State. Evelyn had moved the Fissure into the factory, ready for the invasion to commence.
Nimrod wanted to cry out, to scream in anguish and rage, but he was held firm in Evelyn’s grip. He ground his teeth.
“Stop,” he whispered. “You will destroy everything.”
She ignored him. The portal to the other universe opened, she lowered her arms, blue energy curling off and spinning towards the gateway like smoke on the wind.
“Elektro,” she said. “Activate.”
From directly below him, the main reactor ring spun into life, deep bass notes increasing in volume and pitch until they were howling like a tornado. With an almighty crunch, the robot army turned to face the interdimensional portal, the dark glass windows in their chests now spinning with bright red light. As Nimrod watched, they began to march, their synchronized steps vibrating the platform above the reactor as they walked slowly towards the Empire State.
Nimrod wanted to die. This was the end of all things, and he couldn’t guess why she was keeping him alive. She could see the future, and had spoken of it. Which meant it was going to happen. Her plan would work; the Empire State would die in a nuclear maelstrom, taking the rest of reality with it — not just one universe, one pocket dimension, but all of them.
The end of everything.
FIFTY
The inside of the Chrysler Building looked perfectly intact to Rad, though the lighting was low and yellowish, some kind of emergency back-up after the main power was knocked out by the airship crash. The interior was similar to that of the Empire State Building, but if anything even more ornate — all marble and glass, Art Deco motifs decorating the walls. Looking up, Rad stared at an image of the silver-crowned building itself that took up nearly the entire ceiling, and wondered why there was no equivalent structure in the Empire State. Not everything was reflected, it seemed.
“It’s quiet,” said Jennifer, wandering the lobby, looking up at the magnificently decorated ceiling.
Rad nodded. “Quiet as a grave.”
He turned his eyes to the floor. The marble was lighter than the walls, the blocks streaked with darker veins and laid out to make geometric patterns. In the dim light it was difficult to see if any of the markings were robot blood or not.
Byron stepped forward slowly, turning his head from side to side.
“What you got? You hear something?” asked Rad.
“There is an energy signature,” said Byron.
Jennifer stepped forward. “Energy?”
Byron gave a slow half-bow, reminding Rad of late-night conversations in an old house in another universe.
“The signature is unmistakable,” said Byron. “Unique.” He paused, then took a step forward. “There. The trail continues.”
Byron walked to the corner of the lobby, which lay in opaque shadow. “This way,” he said, and he vanished into the dark.
They’d been walking for what felt like hours. It was the unfamiliarity of the surroundings, the total lack of knowledge of where the corridors went, when they turned, what lurked behind each door. In Rad’s line of work it wasn’t an uncommon sensation.
Except now they were in the dark, traveling by the beam of a flashlight Grieves had found in the security guard’s desk in the lobby, being led by the ghost of Byron piloting Kane’s body in the Skyguard’s old suit.
It made Rad’s head spin, so he tried not to think about it. He also tried not to think about what they were going to do to stop the agents from Atoms for Peace, down here in the dark. They were just four people with a flashlight and a co
uple of guns, walking into the lion’s den.
“So,” he said, like he was trying to break the ice at a party. In front of him was Byron’s back; behind him Grieves and the others were so close he could feel Jennifer’s coat lapping at the backs of his legs. Underneath their feet the trail was unmistakable, now that he could see it gleam in the light. There was a surprising amount of oil. Too much.
Jennifer’s voice echoed in the corridor as they walked. “I’m fine,” she said. “Keep walking.”
“What are we going to do when we find him?”
“He needs help,” said Jennifer.
Grieves stopped and turned around, spotlighting her face with his light. The beam was split into a dozen more by the contours of her mask, golden light thrown around the corridor.
“He needs to be arrested, is what,” said Grieves. “From what you’ve said, he’s involved with all this.”
Jennifer stepped forward, bringing her golden face an inch from Mr Grieves.
“He’s injured, agent. And he was protecting the Empire State from an attack from this place. If anyone needs to be arrested, it’s your people.”
“Oh yeah?” said Grieves, rolling his shoulders. “For what, exactly?”
“For doing nothing! For letting this Atoms for Peace walk all over you. For letting them plan a war right under your nose.”
Rad sighed and pushed between the pair.
“Quit it,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re going to find down here.” He looked Grieves in the eye. “Carson sent me and Jennifer to New York to stop whatever it is that’s going on from destroying the universe. Universes.” He turned to Jennifer. “And that might just mean your brother does have something to do with it. He wasn’t exactly altogether there in the Empire State, right?” Rad tapped his temple. “He was building his own army and keeping them doped up to keep them under control. That doesn’t sound too savory.”
Jennifer sighed behind her mask. “Let’s just find him,” she said quietly.
FIFTY-ONE
James Jones — formerly the Corsair, the real King of 125th Street — staggered down the corridor, reeling. He came to rest against the wall and leaned back, one hand pressed firmly to his side where it was soft and pliable. He grimaced, or at least he thought he did, the phantom memory of his flesh-and-blood face twisting in agony as he stopped for breath. It took him a moment to remember he didn’t need to breathe, not anymore.
There was a large hole in his side. He reached in, not looking, and felt something thin and slippery move. Somewhere, buried in his mind, he felt nausea and pain and he felt dizzy. But it was distant, abstract. He wondered how much of him was left inside, how far the processing had gone before his blind servant had released him from the machine. Not every part of the process was automated; his complete conversion needed someone else to finish the job.
James pushed off the wall, leaving a rectangular smudge of black, thick fluid. He caught sight of it out of the corner of his optics and turned, surprised at how much of the substance he was leaking. He was leaving a trail easy enough for anyone to follow, he knew that, but it wouldn’t matter, not now. He turned back around, the memory of a smile playing across his frozen metal face.
He recognized the place. He was home, in his underground lair, the network of tunnels and basements built underneath Harlem, the subterranean train system that had lain dormant underneath the Empire State since the beginning of time.
His brothers, his family, were near. He knew it. He could feel it in his lubricant oil and in the coolant that bathed his rubber-sided heart. The army that he had built would be waiting for their creator, and he could lead them and they would march to victory against the evil ones who had been sent through the fog to wage terrible war against the Empire State. And their victory would be glorious.
Logic gates tripping madly, feeding the artificial part of James’s mind false data, he fell over. The ground met his face with surprising speed, the collision at just the right angle to crack the remains of the nasal septum that existed behind the metal mask. He registered the sensation, the sliding of bone, but again the pain was somewhere else, academic. He reached down and tried to push himself upright, like a solider doing pushups, only after a thousand hours (or was it more? Or maybe it was less?) he found he was still on the floor, his hands sliding hopelessly on the polished cement in something that was thick and warm and red and black and smelled of old coins and gasoline.
“James!”
There were people here, in his domain: there was big man in a hat and a thin man in a hat and someone else who looked familiar and a woman with a green coat and a golden face. She was on the floor with him, her fingers trailing over his face and coming away sticky with oil. James smiled, or thought he did, as he strained and scraped along the floor, trying to get up.
The big man was standing over him now. His skin was dark, and when he took his hat off James could see he was bald. The thin man kept his hat on and he said something but James couldn’t hear it over the music that filled the air, music he could see and touch, the air pulsing, shimmering to the beat. He knew this number. It was one of his favorites.
James found his voice, and new strength. He grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her close. The big man shouted and pulled on her shoulders but she shrugged him off.
“It’s OK,” she was saying. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” and her long brown hair fell around her face and tickled James.
“We’re home,” said James, his voice the hiss of a punctured tire. “Where are my brothers, my family?”
“I’m here,” said the woman with the golden face but that didn’t make any sense at all. James shook his head, hitting it on the wall behind him.
The big man was rolling his hat between his hands and then James’s vision went grey and fuzzy and tore at the edges.
“It’s OK,” said the woman again, and then she kept saying, “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,” like that meant something, but James could hardly hear it over the music.
“What’s he saying?” asked the thin man who was standing away, arms folded, in the electric fog that seemed to fill the corridor.
The big man sighed. “Something about jazz.”
“Sounds like he’s bought the farm.”
The woman with the golden mask pulled back, oil on the front of her green coat, black and thick and shining. “He can be fixed.”
“Jennifer, look…” said the big man, but she was shaking her head.
“He’s a machine, Rad. He can’t die. He can be fixed.”
The thin man tapped his foot. “There’s going to be nothing to fix if we don’t get moving.”
The big man nodded and pulled at the woman’s arm again. This time she didn’t resist, and she stood.
“Then go. End this,” she said. “And then we can fix my brother. I’ll wait with him.” And she knelt on the floor again, her metal face looming large in James’s crumbling vision.
The last thing James Jones heard was the big man’s voice, nearly buried under the jazz. He was asking where Kane was, and the others didn’t look like they had a clue, but then the corridor broke up into static and all James knew was the music and the darkness.
FIFTY-TWO
Black and white and blue and white and her eyes burning blue they are blue her eyes are blue cold blue the light at the end of the
Kane shook his head and found himself standing by a door in a corridor of polished grey concrete. He was awake, although he had been dreaming again. Dreaming of the woman with the blue eyes, dreaming of his old friend Captain Carson, hunched over the controls of his mighty airship as it flew towards a tall building with a silver and steel cap, like the decoration on a fancy wedding cake. He remembered Byron, who had saved him… but Byron was gone now, just a thought, an echo ringing far away. And he remembered something else, something angry and silver and fast. Something strong.
Kane blinked. The corridor was gone. He was in a room, a vast space with a ceiling so high i
t was invisible. He was walking between two huge ranks of robots, silver, impassive, all facing the far wall of the room.
Kane stopped, but it took effort, like he wasn’t in control of his body. He turned to the far wall and saw a street swathed in night, air as cold as a razor pouring out of it. He thought he recognized it, but perhaps he was dreaming. Soma Street was inside a room, a room full of robots, each of them facing the street, ready to…
“You.”
Kane looked up. There was a platform ahead, suspended over a huge red donut structure that pulsed with an internal light. Above the platform, a woman, floating in the air. She was blue and glowing, tethered to the image of Soma Street on the wall by tendrils of ethereal energy.
Blue and white and her eyes were blue they were blue they were blue
“I… I cannot see you,” said the woman with the burning blue eyes. “I can’t see your time.”
Kane had no idea how he had got to where he was, or where his friends were. But he felt a pull towards this woman with the blue eyes, something magnetic, electric. It was comfortable; it felt right. He took a step forward, and the woman smiled.
“You’re like me,” she said.
Kane nodded. He knew it was true. He knew that she was the woman from his dreams, that here was her army, ready to march into the Empire State, ready to end it all.
She floated down from the platform until she was almost on the floor of the chamber. This close, Kane felt alive, aware, his body sharp and real and powerful. In response, her aura flickered, growing larger, brighter, so close he could reach out and touch it.
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