Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  My headache returned with a vengeance. At the same moment the helicopter slewed left, then right. It shot higher, spun in place, slewed again.

  And then the passenger door opened, and something plummeted from it.

  Even above the noise of the rotors I heard the scream of a falling man, a scream that ended abruptly as the plunging body hit the pier with the force of a bomb. Water and debris geysered. I found my hand clasped across my mouth, and lowered it, staring wide-eyed across the lake. What have I done?

  The helicopter roared back over the lake, closer to us than before. The canoe rocked in the rotor-blast. An amplified voice boomed down. “You’re safe now! I’ve called in, told them the sighting was a false alarm. No one else is coming. Return to the resort!” The aircraft roared away, and settled behind the trees to await our arrival.

  Waves from the falling body hitting the pier still chased each other across the lake. I felt ill. I looked at Karl. “Is it a trick?”

  “No,” he said. “I would say you successfully Shaped the pilot, but not the observer. Some minds cling more tightly to their perceived reality than others. Unfortunately, his must have been one of them. The pilot had to . . . take action.” He put his paddle back into the water, on the port side. “Paddle starboard. We’re going back.”

  “Not . . . please, not to the pier,” I said, thinking of the horrible sound the falling body had made as it struck the wood and water, imagining what might await us there . . .

  Imagining. I’d just killed a man by imagining.

  “Not to the pier,” Karl agreed gently.

  We paddled back, but landed on the shore a good hundred yards from the shattered pier and whatever horrors it hid, as soon as the gray rock wall permitted us to ground the canoe. We trudged through the underbrush. Emerging at the eastern end of the resort, we walked cautiously past the line of cabins toward the helicopter, which waited in the parking lot, its rotors still spinning lazily. The pilot door opened as we approached, and the same man I’d seen looking at us through binoculars from the pier, wearing black fatigues and a bulletproof vest emblazoned with NBI in white letters, clambered out. He raised a hand in greeting and came to meet us. “Special Agent Clarence McNally,” he said. “Glad to see you’re all right, ma’am . . . sir.”

  “Who was . . .?” My voice trailed off. The dead man, I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

  McNally looked grim. “Tom Reed, ma’am. He was one of them, would have turned you in, tried to call for reinforcements. I thought he was a friend, we’ve been partners for years, but when push came to shove . . . well. I shoved. Damn shame, but with the stakes what they are . . .”

  I had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up. I’d just made this man murder his friend and partner in cold blood, had somehow altered his perception of reality so completely he thought Tom Reed was his enemy and I, whom he had never met, was so important he was willing to kill to keep me safe.

  With great power comes great responsibility . . . The phrase ran unbidden through my mind.

  Shut up, I snarled silently to myself. This isn’t a fucking comic book.

  “Thank you,” Karl said; it must have been obvious I wasn’t going to contribute anything more. “But now we need another favor.”

  McNally nodded. “A ride, I’ll wager. Figured as much. Where to?”

  He said the first part of that to Karl, but directed the second part to me—and I didn’t have a clue. The Portal, presumably, but Karl hadn’t told me where it was.

  “The mountains,” Karl said, drawing McNally’s gaze back to him. He looked past McNally at the helicopter. “How much fuel do you have?”

  “Flown a hundred miles since take off,” McNally said. “Gives us maybe another two hundred fifty or so before we’re nothing but a fancy rock. I’d strongly suggest being on the ground before then.”

  “I don’t know the latitude and longitude,” Karl said. “But I have a name. Snakebite Mine.”

  McNally’s face lit up. “Oh, sure,” he said. “I know that place. It’s in Striper Valley. Plenty of fuel to get there.”

  “We cannot go right into the valley,” Karl said. “Not by helicopter. The mine may be guarded. We will need to sneak up to it. Can you set us down somewhere else, far enough away from the mine nobody there will hear or see us?”

  “Couple of valleys over, then,” McNally said. He looked vaguely into space for a moment, then his face cleared. “Got it. There’s an old logging camp high up, at the west end of Spukani Valley. It’s abandoned, but there’s room to set down there—it’s a designated helicopter landing zone for firefighting.”

  “Monitored?” Karl said sharply.

  McNally shook his head. “Maintenance crew goes up there a couple of times a summer, maybe, to keep the undergrowth cleared. Shouldn’t be anyone there now, not when the snow could hit any day.”

  “How far from there to the mine?”

  “Couple of days’ hike, tops,” McNally said. “You could do it in one in the summer, but not with the days growing short.”

  “That will do.”

  McNally gestured toward the helicopter. “Climb aboard, then.”

  The helicopter had two seats in front. McNally climbed into the one on the right. Karl handed me his backpack, then climbed into the one on the left. I glanced into the cockpit as I got into the back. It looked exactly like I had imagined it when I was in the canoe, before McNally . . .

  I swallowed and hurried into the back. Here there were four seats, two facing forward, two facing back, upholstered in black leather and complete with cup holders, like the interior of a luxury car. I tossed our backpacks into two of the empty seats, then buckled myself into one of the forward-facing ones. I pulled on the waiting headphones just in time to hear, “N415AT, please report in. You’re off radar. Have you landed? Over.”

  “N415AT, affirmative,” McNally answered briskly. “We’re at Candle Lake Resort. Wanted to be a hundred percent sure what we thought we saw wasn’t anything to follow up on. We were right—false alarm. Just an old pickup that happened to be the same color as the suspects’ car. Taking off again now.” Even as he spoke, the rotors were spinning up. “Might be off radar for a while—gonna stay low,” he continued. “Lots of places someone could hole up around here. Tom knows the area and wants us to check out some more campsites and resorts. Over.”

  “Roger,” said the voice on the other end. “But don’t miss another check-in, McNally. Over.”

  “I won’t,” McNally said. “Sorry again. N415AT, over and out.” He twisted around in his seat. “That’ll keep them off our tails for a while,” he said with a grin. “Hopefully long enough, if I hug the treetops, to get us to Spukani Valley. And if they do catch us on radar and want to know what we’re up to, my little story about Reed knowing the area and wanting to check out campsites should cover our asses. I’ll just say we’re playing a hunch.”

  “Well thought out,” said Karl.

  I didn’t say anything. The mention of the man McNally had thrown out of the helicopter had hit me with renewed force. I stared out the window as the engine roared and the rotors began to spin faster and faster. In a few minutes, we were in the air and slipping across the forest, the tops of spruce passing alarmingly close beneath our skids. I hoped McNally’s metaphorical “hugging” of the treetops didn’t turn into a literal embrace.

  I leaned the other way and looked forward, past McNally and Karl, over the high control console, with its bewildering conglomeration of dials and computer screens. I knew next to nothing about helicopters. So how could I really be the Shaper of this world?

  It’s copied from the First World, Karl said. Real Reality, with a capital “R.” All I’ve done is put my own twist on things . . . even if I don’t remember doing it.

  And then I thought, I must be a very boring person. Because why would I create a world that was o
nly slightly different? Why not create something more exotic, more exciting, a world of magic, or one where superheroes were real, or one where there really was a Time Lord in a blue police box who could take you anywhere and anywhen . . .

  But as the mountains rose before us and the trees rolled away beneath us, I thought, Exciting worlds are worlds where battles are fought and crimes committed and dark lords overthrown, and the death toll is enormous. If I had Shaped such a world, could not all those deaths be laid at my feet? Just like the one I knew I’d already caused here?

  Karl said the people of the Shaped worlds were real people, even if they were copies of people somewhere else. Didn’t they deserve to live their lives free from the meddling of people like me?

  I sighed. But that’s not really an option, is it? The Adversary is already meddling in this world, and he’s clearly making it worse, not better. Ignorant of who I was, I would have been more than happy to let everyone live their own lives if only I could have lived mine. But then the Adversary had found his way into my world. What had happened since—the attack on the coffee shop (which I had undone) Aesha’s death (which I couldn’t), and now McNally’s murder of Tom Reed—it all began with the Adversary, not with me.

  If there were any chance to undo what the Adversary had done, I would have taken it in an instant. But there wasn’t.

  Not, at least, if Karl were telling the truth.

  I studied the back of his ponytailed head. What he had told me certainly seemed to explain the subsequent events, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have his own agenda. I frowned, struck by a horrible thought. What if what he said about the Adversary were true—but he was himself the Adversary? What if all of this were simply a ploy to get me somewhere he needed me to be, so he could eliminate me once and for all?

  I shook my head. No, that was just paranoid. If Karl had wanted to kill me, he could have done it a dozen times by now, most recently just by pushing me out of the canoe, most easily by smothering me in my sleep the night before. He might not be telling the truth, and he might not really be on my side, but he definitely wasn’t the Adversary.

  That was some comfort, but not much.

  “How long will it take us to get to this landing site?” Karl said.

  “About half an hour,” McNally said. He pointed to a beige leather pouch attached to the door on Karl’s side. “Map’s in there. You’ll need it when you land.”

  Karl nodded and started rummaging around in the pouch.

  “Then what will you do?” I said. “After you drop us off. After . . . what happened back there.”

  “My duty,” McNally said. “I’ll lead them on a wild goose chase.”

  “They’ll arrest you,” I said. Or worse.

  “A small price to pay for your freedom, ma’am.”

  I closed my eyes. What have I done? I thought again.

  Could I undo it? Could I Shape him again, back to the person he had been before he pushed his friend Tom Reed out of the helicopter?

  Maybe. But it seemed a spectacularly bad idea. McNally would suddenly revert to being an NBI agent—an armed NBI agent—with orders to bring us in. Maybe Karl could fly a helicopter—although since he’d shown up wearing Shakespearean garb and didn’t seem to know some of the basic facts about the world, it seemed unlikely—but I couldn’t. If I played with reality up here, we might all go down in a flaming heap.

  Perhaps it was selfish of me, but I didn’t want that. What I wanted, the world the way it had been yesterday morning, I couldn’t get. Those events had started a wild ride down a slippery slope to an uncertain landing. All I could do now was hold on. At least my headache was fading again.

  Karl had found the map, and was studying it. There were occasional bursts of conversation over the headphones, other aircraft checking in, nothing to alarm us . . . until, just as we soared up a slope and into a long, narrow valley between two towering ranges, we heard, “Toma here. Got something. Candle Lake Resort. I think it’s the car. Over.”

  “Damn,” McNally muttered.

  “Candle Lake?” said the voice from control. “McNally and Reed landed there, said it was just an old pickup. Over.”

  “Must be blind, then,” Toma said. “We’re hovering low in the parking lot, right where they would have had to land, and it’s plain as day: late-model Fjord, as described. Over.”

  “Land and confirm,” control said. “Over.” A pause. “Control to Special Agents McNally and Reed. Where are you? Respond. Over.”

  “That tears it,” McNally said. “They’ll find Tom’s body and put two and two together. But it sounds like we’re not on radar—they’ve lost us.” He pointed forward. “The old logging camp is right up there past the waterfall. I’ll have you on the ground in ten minutes.”

  Control kept calling. McNally kept ignoring them. And then, just as we swept over the waterfall and we saw the clearing of the camp dead ahead, we heard, “Control, Toma here! Reed is dead! Repeat, Special Agent Tom Reed is dead. Shawna Keys was definitely here. McNally must be—”

  McNally killed the radio. “That’s that,” he said. “But maybe we bought enough time and distance for the two of you to get away.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll fly back down the valley, stay low, pop up fifty miles away and let them chase me,” McNally said. “Don’t worry about me. You just do what you have to do.” He fell silent as he maneuvered the helicopter down into the clearing, a hurricane of dust and pine needles blasting away from it in all directions. As the rotors slowed, though, he twisted around to face me head on. “You hear me, ma’am?” he said. “Do what you have to. Save the world.”

  I wanted to. But if Karl was telling the truth, I couldn’t: all I could do was escape it. Unable to speak, I nodded instead. Then I pulled off the headset, picked up our backpacks, opened the door, and stepped down into the dirt and scraggly weeds of the clearing. Karl followed, the map from the helicopter in hand. He took his pack from me, then pointed into the trees: McNally hadn’t cut the engine entirely, and the noise was still enough to make it hard to talk. I nodded.

  We shouldered our backpacks and headed into the woods. Among the trees, we turned and looked back at the helicopter as it roared to life again, raising our hands to shield our eyes from the blast of dust, twigs, and needles as it rose skyward. It thundered away from us, still frighteningly low to the tops of the trees, and out of sight.

  “He’s throwing away his career,” I said miserably as we watched it go. “Maybe his life. He murdered his friend. All because of this power you say is a good thing.”

  “I do not believe that I ever said it is a good thing. All I said is that it is a thing. You can still choose not to use it. You can choose to surrender, now or later. You will not survive long after you do so, but it is a choice you can make.”

  “If I did?” I said, turning to him. “What would you do?”

  “Leave,” he said. “Move on to another world without you. Try to stay ahead of the Adversary. Hope that somewhere in the Labyrinth there is another Shaper with the power to do what Ygrair needs done.” He pulled off his pack and put it on the ground. “McNally cannot buy us much time. He only has an hour or so of fuel left. Shortly after he lands they will know we are not with him. There are searchers on the ground who must have seen him. Which means they will soon realize he must have put us down somewhere in this area, and shortly after that, they will be looking for us up here.” He had unzipped an outside pocket on his pack; now he pulled out a compass and stood up again, holding it in his right hand. “We have to move fast. We have to get to the mine. We have to get to the Portal and destroy it, to weaken the Adversary and cut him off from reinforcements. And then we have to find the place where I can make a new Portal that will take us out of this world and into the next.”

  I couldn’t doubt him anymore, not after what had happened, not after what I had made happen.r />
  We had to move. We had to get to the mine. We had to get to the Portal. We had to destroy it. We had to open a new Portal and flee my world. I believed every word.

  But at that moment, frozen in place by the weight of my own guilt, by the enormity of all that had happened and was still happening, I didn’t think I would ever move again.

  NINE

  “GOT IT,” SAID the agent at the radar screen. The Adversary stood behind her, with Smoak, the Special Agent in Charge, at his right. “N415AT.”

  The Adversary leaned forward. “Where is that?”

  “About a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Eagle River.”

  “Call him,” said Smoak.

  The agent obliged. “N415AT, this is Control. Respond. Over.” She paused, then repeated the phrase, with no more success.

  Smoak glanced at the time, displayed to the side of the radar screen. “He can’t have much fuel left. He’ll be looking for a place to land.”

  “He’s found it,” said the agent at the screen. “He’s just set down at the old Greeley Lake AFB.”

  “Then we’ve got them,” said Smoak.

  The Adversary raised an eyebrow at him. “‘Them’? Can we be certain that Keys and Yatsar are aboard? Could he not have set down and let them out while off radar?”

  “Well, we’ll know soon enough. Believe it or not, there’s already a patrol waiting there. They’ll nab them the minute they step off the aircraft. Pure luck.”

  “Luck indeed,” said the Adversary. But he did not believe it was luck at all. Though Shawna still lived, and thus he did not have full control of this world, it did seem to him that it was beginning to accept him. For the moment, she could still do far more with it than he. Nevertheless, this bit of “luck” just might be evidence that his own power was growing. Perhaps soon he would be able to Shape more than just the weak minds of this world’s denizens. “If all three are present, then even more luck,” he continued to Smoak. “But if they are not . . . I will want to speak to this McNally personally.” To Shape him so that he answers questions, he left unspoken.