“Laugh again, and I’ll break it off and stick it up there,” Barry said without looking at him. “Don’t forget, you’re still ants, and I’m the anteater.”
“Looks like you got royally screwed, and we know a hell of a lot more about this than you do,” said Joblonsky.
“Enough,” Kat said, casting a stern look in Joblonsky’s direction. “This isn’t a pissing contest. We start working together now, or bringing you here was pointless—and we’re all dead.”
Barry waved her on impatiently. “All right. Fine. You made your point. Get on with story time so I can get out of here.”
A muscle leapt in her jaw, but she pressed on. “Most of the feeds show underground complexes Harper’s organisation has been building. They go deep, big enough to hold over a hundred people for at least a month. We have sleeper agents inside.”
“Fallout shelters? He’s planning to nuke us?” Jack said.
“No. There’s no radiation shielding. But there is something else. Some kind of next-gen integrated circuitry built into the walls.”
“What does it do?”
“No idea. We got a sample, but nobody could make heads or tails of it. It doesn’t seem to do anything; a bunch of junk, wires and strips of exotic compounds. Some don’t even make electrical contact. But it means something.”
“Maybe it’s a decoy? Maybe they know you’re onto them.”
“It’s no decoy. They’ve been filling the vaults with people for three days, rushing them by airlift from all over the world. Most are already sealed.”
“Eleven confirmed,” Gant said from her terminal.
“Bastard must have given them a way to hide from the Frost,” Barry muttered. He shook his head. “This isn’t right. It’s against the rules. Everyone has to play by them. Everyone.”
“So what’s this?”
Barry made to speak, but faltered. “I don’t know.”
“Comforting.” Jack nodded to the monitors again. “What about the others? The scaffolds?” He bit back the urge to mutter, Seven, seven, seven.
Kat nodded to the rock in his hands. “That right there is a part of an object uncovered in the seventeenth century, during an exploratory in a place called Radden Moor in England. It’s made of some material that doesn’t correlate with any known geology on the planet.” She held up a hand to staunch his retort. “It’s regular old matter. No little green men, sorry.”
At this point, I would have welcomed Martians, Jack thought.
“But it’s not from around here.”
“The Beacons,” Barry said. “They bind your world to others in the Web. If Harper tears this place apart, the others will start decaying, too.”
Kat and the others shared an incredulous stare. From the look in their eyes, Jack guessed this was new to them.
They’re just like the rest of us. Duped into doing things they don’t understand.
Kat finished with an impotent gesture towards the monitors, then returned to her companions. As a group, they turned their attention to Jack and Barry. “So, now you know us. And you know the score.”
Jack expected some pithy retort from Barry. Instead, ringing silence filled the void between them.
“So,” Jack said, looking between them, “we’re totally screwed. Now what?”
16
Harper walked in total darkness with the surefootedness of one who followed a brightly-lit corridor. While no ordinary light reached down here, far beneath even the deepest subway tunnel or water pipe, every surface glowed with that strange aural otherness that emanated from the people above. The same radiant rainbows, dripping off the walls, pooling on the floor. Lighting his way.
Descending with every step, the tunnel narrowed gradually, transforming from a long-forgotten exploratory channel, to something altogether different; low and jagged and twisting, scarcely large enough for even his svelte body to pass.
Good thing my suit was already ruined.
Still, he hated to think what the sharp spurs of rock and slicks of mossy gruel were doing to his jacket. Several times he was forced to stop and manoeuvre inch by inch, slipping through gaps no wider than the span of his hands, a strange dance upon his toes even, his torso pivoting, angled to an absurd degree.
A silent creeping in the dark, malleable as shadow, Milton Harper poured himself down into the earth. Descending ever deeper, he moved on determined, not a thought passing his mind, until even the most distant shudders of overhead trains had faded, the rocks grew warm, and the effervescent light dripping off the walls shone like the surface of the sun.
Then the lights in his ancient, wicked mind blinked to life, gears machined by cruel insane hands chugging to life in his skull. A grin spread over his face, the stretching of his cheeks driving him forward.
This world’s time is done. It’s time to free the master.
Somewhere, from no particular direction but at the same time everywhere, he felt hands pulling at him, pinching and tugging, questioning and watching; a thousand creatures across All Where, sensing him for the first time, and the chaos he prepared to rain down upon this place.
But they were all so far away, scattered and already dwindling.
Fools. Of all the Great Weaver’s legions, all that had been sent against him was a band of piss-ant humans, and that slick of bearded scum. There was nothing any of them could do to stop him.
A few of them might have noted something amiss when Harper had arrived here, so long ago, and set their own plans spinning (to his chagrin, there was no denying that his carefully laid scheme, everything he had built, teetered on the brink of ruin), but to most, he had slipped under the RADAR.
They had grown prideful, blind.
It’s time for the Pendulum to serve its real masters.
From that same not-but-every direction as those thousand pairs of eyes, came a single presence. Not quite a voice, yet deafening; not there, yet all-consuming; intangible and more unreachable than any world in the Web, forcing ugly fingers into the meat of his being and threatening to tear it asunder with the merest jerk.
Yes. It’s time. Too long have I held the Web together. It’s time to make the first tear. A gentle, silky sigh, threaded with peaceful dulcet tones upon the surface. Yet underneath it all, permeating each angelic syllable, an emotionless, white malice. There is no room for error. Such a shame it would be, should you fail me.
Harper froze a moment, swallowing a full-body shudder with difficulty. Almost swaying, he wiped a sliver of drool from his lip with the back of his hand.
Yes. Yes, master. Soon you will be free.
Harper kept descending, using his hands now, moving forward with hunger and, somewhere under all the tarry sludge of his soul, a childish and mewling fear.
17
“The subway?” Jack said, leaning close to the monitor.
On the screen, a shimmering bag of air floated amidst weaving tracks of tourists, parting them like a stone in a river, heading up the street. Nobody seemed to notice what they were doing, sidestepping as naturally as though avoiding a streetlight.
But there was nothing there, just an undulating pocket of air, like a heat wave.
A heat wave that stopped in front of the stairs to the subway—Jack thought he might have momentarily caught a glimpse of a polished loafer or freshly-pressed jacket—and then headed down.
“We can get you close, do what we can,” Kat said. “The others will stay here and coordinate with our people across the world. We have a plan: we’re going to crack the vaults open.”
“How?”
“Explosions. Big ones.”
“And the other Beacons?”
“They’re not the same as this one.” Kat looked to Barry for help. “I don’t pretend to understand, I just follow Mr Purple’s word. It seems this one, the one Harper’s going after, is the key. Without this one, without him, it’s a no-show for doomsday.” She arched her eyebrow, inviting Jack to join her in incred
ulity.
Jack resisted the urge to oblige.
Barry pointed a beefy finger to the monitor. “You have him on tape?”
Kat nodded. “We had people tracking him the moment he arrived in the city. A few tried to take him down—they really thought they knew what they were up against.” She shook her head bitterly. “All this time, preparing, and I couldn’t stop the very people I helped train from throwing themselves onto a bed of knives.” Her brow tightened. “But at least it helped us find you.”
She looked to Barry. “We saw you go against him.”
He cleared his throat gruffly. “Didn’t exactly go down how I had planned.”
“We know he can’t die. Not how we think of it. Bullets, incendiaries, chemical or biological weapons—nothing we have can touch him. What was your plan?” She stood up from the monitor, arms akimbo. “No offence, but it looked like you just kind of ran at the guy, wind-milling your fists.”
“What, you were expecting me to pull out my magic wand and challenge him to a duel? I might be from another part of All Where, lady, but that doesn’t mean I graduated from Hogwarts.”
“Well?” Jack said, eyebrows raised.
Barry rolled his eyes. “Like I said, at the time, I didn’t know who he was. I thought I could handle it. I’m used to dealing with thugs a few rungs down the ladder. It’s easy enough to cart them back off to where they belong.”
In reply, Kat pulled up a recording from a security camera, showing an elevated view of Jack standing on the sidewalk. Before him, and the staring, screaming crowd, two shimmering slabs of air raced towards one another, figures without form or shadow, before the entire street erupted in a mayhem of flying shrapnel and ice. The recording cut to static.
Barry cleared his throat, his eyes darting back and forth, as though embarrassed to be speaking in front of Kat. He nodded to Jack. “It was because of you.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Don’t get cute.” Barry took a small step closer. “You know what I’m going to say?”
Jack squinted, pushed through a great slab of consciousness, as though lifting a cover stone from a tomb, and broke through into Barry’s head. “Creature of destiny?”
Barry nodded. “I need you. You have power, and the Web always gives us a way to set things right.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Right. What I haven’t said is that it works both ways. He can use you too. If he gets to you, that power inside you will work against us.”
Jack felt Kat’s eyes on him, searching and hostile, as though he had suddenly revealed himself a double-agent with a flash of cape and a tweak of moustache. “And if he does?”
“Then we really don’t stand a chance.”
Jack felt the attention of the entire room fixed on him. His throat dry, he said, “I thought I was just a compass?”
“Like Purple Toes said. That’s just the start of it. You’ve just woken up. There’s a lot more to come. You just have to wait for it to surface.”
“If I live long enough.”
Barry said nothing.
After a long moment, Kat’s gaze softened a little, and she rested back on her heels. “Okay, so we don’t let Harper get to him. Jack can hang back and help us. We can’t go in after Harper, anyway.”
Barry shook his head immediately, as though he had been ready for it, his face a picture of regret.
“No?” Jack said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I already told you, I can’t stop him. Not alone.” His eyes turned meekly on Jack. “Maybe you can. If we’re going to beat him, it’s going to be both of us in there.”
Jack swallowed thickly. “Where he can get to me.”
Barry nodded slowly. “Where he can get to you.”
Great.
The others moved forward and arranged in a parabola around them, waiting. Kat cleared her throat, and Jack noticed, just for a moment, a hint of something amateur and unsure underneath all that bravado and hard-ass poise. “I’m taking Gant and Joblonsky with me down there. We’re going to get these two as close as we can and clear the way, if Harper has any people to put between him and us. Hartree, Forman, you stay here, coordinate the others. What’s our progress?”
Joblonsky said, “We have teams waiting on our signal. They’ll blow the charges on the vaults when we give the go ahead.”
“Do we have every site covered?”
“All but three.”
“Not good enough!”
He shrugged. “It’s all we got. They beefed up security once we made the run on Harper earlier. A few of our people on the inside got caught trying to plant their charges. There’s no way we could fight our way in. Those places are more secure than military fallout shelters.”
Kat turned to Barry. “If we can’t take them out, and we can’t stop Harper, he’ll have free rein. Even if only a few of those vaults survive, there’s enough organised firepower to take down anything that will be left.”
Her eyes glazed, her lip twitching. “Cold. Mist. And… Nothing. All over the world, just silence. They’ll all be gone. Gone to that dark place. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”
Jack nodded.
“I can’t let anyone be sent there. I won’t.”
“None of us will,” Joblonsky said, arms crossed.
The others tightened in a display of solidarity that didn’t quite dispel their motley-crew appearance.
We’re saving the world on a shoe string, Jack thought. Oh well. At least I fit in.
“Nice,” Barry said with a strained smile. “Go team. Now can we get moving?”
Kat nodded. “Five minutes. Then we go.”
18
Jack and Barry waited for the others to gear up, standing aside in collusion. Barry had his foot on a swivel chair, propping up a hand stroking his beard. “I hate being kept out of the loop,” he muttered.
“Yeah, sucks,” Jack said absently. “What’s up with that?”
“Just a soldier,” Barry muttered. He cursed, shaking his head. “When this is over, I’m going to bang that bloody Jester’s head against a wall.”
“What jester?”
“Never mind.”
Jack let it go, his tired imagination too stretched to bother conjuring what kind of other-world place needed a jester. He watched Kat, Gant and Joblonsky pulling on Kevlar combat gear in lieu of their bike leathers. He half expected them to pull out rocket launchers and high calibre magnums, but instead they picked up scoped M4 carbines, holstering no-nonsense Gloch 9mm pistols. They handled them well, moving without a second thought.
There was no denying Kat’s people were out of their league, but now that they all stood on the precipice, Jack was glad to have them, even if they couldn’t face Harper. He needed somebody else to know that they had tried.
He cleared his throat. “How long do we have?”
“Why?” Barry said.
“I’m feeling kind of funny.”
Barry grunted. “Yeah. I feel it too.”
“It’s like I’m late for something, or I have to take a piss, or something.” Even as he spoke he resisted the urge to dance on the balls of his feet, a building anxiety and impatience, stemming from the same hokery pokery as his divining rod, slicking the base of his cranium. “It’s getting close now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Barry picked at the spaces between his teeth with his thumbnail, looking off into the middle distance. “Real close. Few hours, maybe.” His brow furrowed. “Stop that.”
Jack forced himself to be still. “Sorry.”
“You sure you’re ready for this?”
“I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“No, no bullshit. No hiding behind facetiousness.”
“That’s a big word. Don’t strain yourself, you’ll pull something.” Jack couldn’t help himself. Hiding behind humour was all he’d ever had.
Barry laughed,
not his usual rough ironic bark, but almost soft, warm. He made to clap Jack on the arm, halting his speeding hand just before he made contact, and turned it into a gentle prod. “You’re all right.”
“Don’t. If you start crying then I’ll start crying, and we’ll never get ourselves together again.”
Barry rolled his eyes, still smiling under all that beard. Then the genuine upward curve drained away. “We’re probably going to lose, Jack.”
The warm fuzz of the previous moment vanished, replaced by the clacking of keyboards behind them, and the ruffling of combat gear. “I know,” Jack said.
“Even if we win, I don’t know what will happen. You’ve got a lot of strength in you. At first I thought you were a throw-away. No offence. But I did.” His head fell a little to the side. “But you ain’t. And that’s a blessing and a curse. We might just have a shot against him. But there are always consequences.”
Jack attempted several replies, but they all failed. He settled for another nod. “It’ll change everything. Harper’s run-in with the cops must have made the news. People saw him. And the bodies…”
“Nobody would remember.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d remember those claws.”
“Don’t forget, only we can see him for what he really is, claws and all. You saw the recording. We’re different somehow.” He gestured to the screen, frozen mid-frame, showing the two shimmering figures upon Forty-Sixth. “There, but not.”
Jack couldn’t help wondering what he must have looked like, if nobody but him could see Barry: hurtling backwards along the street, dragged in the wake of a pocket of shimmering air. In his mind’s eye, everybody was decked out in sunglasses and carried walking sticks; blind to everything around them.
Barry picked the thought out of his head. Jack felt him wheedle his fingers in, but let him take it.
Barry snorted. His brow flickered. “You all right?”
Jack shook his head. Every day of his adult life had seemed ill-fitting, misshapen and, quite simply, wrong. The boy who had dressed up in scraps of spare carpet and searched for other lands had retreated to a place deep within. A place he could reach only sometimes, through books, when night was total and the apartment was quiet, and he was so lost in a story that the words vanished, and he lived the lives of all those heroes and villains.
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