Paradox Bound

by Peter Clines

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, let’s think this through. Where would it be? Where do you put the most valuable thing in the country to protect it?”

  “In a safe? A vault?”

  “Maybe? But where?”

  A gaunt faceless man looked up as they walked past his desk. He followed them with his blank features. Eli shot a quick glance back over his shoulder. The figure was still focused on them.

  “You’re holding the badge too high,” whispered Harry. “It’s attracting attention.”

  “We’ll attract more attention if I put it down.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Fifteen always held it up high,” said Eli. “I don’t think he did it to look cool.”

  They walked past file cabinets and rows of desks and more faceless men. “Perhaps we should head back to the edge of the room,” murmured Harry. “There might be a sign or a map. And we wouldn’t be at the center of things.”

  Eli’s fingers tingled. He tried to flex them and a spasm slid up his ring finger, stiffening it. The badge almost slipped away and he twisted his hand around to catch it.

  “Careful,” muttered Harry.

  He felt another pinprick. Not from his fingers. Eli turned the leather case to look at the badge. The letters shimmered across the gold and silver surface. It felt like static electricity racing across his hand. “I think we’re running out of time,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The badge. It’s…I think it’s rejecting me or something.”

  Harry scowled. “The ones chasing us must’ve found Zero.”

  Eli looked at the dozens of faceless men around them. “How long do we have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long did it take when they shut Porter’s off?”

  “I don’t know,” she snapped. “I thought we’d have more time, closer to the dream, that they wouldn’t think we’d…”

  Her eyes got wide.

  “What?”

  “Look around,” she said. “Look as far as you can see, at the distant ones.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The dream affects time,” she said. “It flows differently as we get closer to it.”

  He nodded. “Right.”

  She studied the crowd. “Look for the faceless men who are moving slower.”

  Eli felt his own eyes go wide.

  He looked down the rows of desks and cabinets, the aisles created by corkboards and pneumatic tubes. There were hundreds of faceless men, all in suits, all in motion. Filing, processing, marching from place to place. Trying to pick one out, to look for a particular detail, was like a childhood puzzle. Find the difference between these two—

  A few hundred yards away, off to his left, a faceless man closed a file folder and moved it to a bin on the corner of his desk. His arm swung in a graceful, steady arc. He released the folder and it drifted down into the bin. Eli’s heart beat twice while the file dropped.

  “There,” he said. “That way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The badge prickled his fingers again. “Sure enough.”

  They headed down the row. Eli pushed the badge across his body, keeping it close to Harry. Three faceless men passed by, each holding a clear mask in their hands. One was a clown’s face. Another looked like some kind of animal, maybe a fox or wolf. The third turned his head to study Eli and Harry.

  A wall loomed up ahead. The far side of the room. Eli could see some kind of arch or doorway there.

  “Hello, Mr. Teague,” a voice called out behind them. “Mrs. Pritchard. That is you, yes?”

  Every faceless man around them straightened up from desks, reports, and conversations, their heads turning to focus on the two searchers. Harry’s fingers tightened on Eli’s and pulled him into a run. Blank skulls swung to follow them. They dodged between suited figures and grasping hands and reached the far wall.

  Molding wrapped the archway there, and heavy curtains hung behind it like a small stage. They’d been tied off to each side, revealing a staircase of white marble. It would’ve fit very well in a big courthouse or capitol building.

  A shot rang out and one of the curtains rippled.

  They ran up the stairs blind, their shoes hitting each step with a whap. Harry raced ahead. Eli struggled to keep up, and took some small relief in seeing the top of the stairs only thirty or forty feet above.

  Another gunshot echoed in the marble stairway. Harry shouted and grabbed at her leg. She stumbled off the top step and into the room by the landing. Eli ran to join her.

  The room at the top of the stairs had marble floors and walls. A massive set of doors dominated one side of it. Eli didn’t see any other furniture or decoration. Or light sources, even though midday brilliance filled the room.

  Harry sprawled a few feet from the stairs. Her pants were bloody, but not so much that it leaked down to the floor. “Just grazed me,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Possibly?”

  Footsteps echoed up the stairwell. Lots of them, in perfect sync. Harry let go of her leg and grabbed for her pistols.

  “No, give them to me,” said Eli, shoving the badge into his jeans. “You can barely stand.”

  The Colts spun in her palms and stopped with the grips to him. “Have you ever even fired a gun before?”

  “Nope.” He aimed at the stairwell and squeezed both triggers at once. The pistols bucked in his hands and he heard a crack of metal on stone over the echo of the gunshots.

  The footsteps stopped.

  He squeezed off two more rounds with each pistol. The noise echoed in the room. One of the rounds sparked in the stairwell and left a black mark on the wall.

  “Hello, Mr. Teague,” said a voice. Fifteen. “I see you have weapons now.”

  Eli answered with a few more shots. The footsteps retreated. Quickly. Unevenly.

  “What’s going on?” whispered Harry.

  He leaned back to her. “I don’t know,” he murmured back. “You keep saying they can dodge, they can’t miss, but they haven’t been able to shoot us.”

  “They just shot me,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “You were just in the hospital four days ago.”

  “But they didn’t kill us.”

  She rolled her eyes and pushed herself up the wall to her feet.

  Eli studied the doors on the far side of the room. They had to be close to ten feet tall, and each one wider than he was tall. The clean, elegant panels held a round disk of brass which stretched between the two doors, and a simple, old-fashioned keyhole sat at the center, right on the hairline seam between the doors. At the top and bottom, four brass sliders locked the doors in position.

  He peered a little closer. The doors didn’t seem to be made of wood, but they also didn’t look like metal. After a few moments of staring, it almost seemed like the door was painted on the wall, like an elaborate Wile E. Coyote work of art. The longer he looked, the less sure he felt about the material.

  A sound came from the stairwell. He turned and squeezed the triggers two or three times each. The faceless man standing there flung himself back. The noise of shuffling, sliding, falling bodies echoed up to them.

  “Mr. Teague,” called Fifteen. His voice echoed up the steps. “What do you think this will gain you? There’s no way out of the rotunda except past us.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” said Harry.

  Eli studied the doors. “I know.”

  “Or a lot of ammunition.”

  “Surrender now,” Fifteen said, “and I promise your execution will be swift and painless.”

  Eli looked at the lock. “Any ideas?”

  She shrugged. “If I had my toolbox, there’s a lockpick set in it, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t work.”

  He reached out, brushed the lock, and felt a hum of power travel through his arm and down to the floor. His fingers jumped back, then reached out again. It reminded him of a low-level e
lectric shock, conducted down to the…

  Not to the floor.

  He handed one of the pistols back to Harry and felt the square badge case buzzing against his thigh. He fumbled it out, flipped it open.

  A gold and silver key sat in the leather case. One end was a heavy disc covered with more shifting letters and symbols. Its long neck ended in three simple teeth, the kind of thing used to open a cartoon jail cell.

  Harry fired off four precise shots at the stairwell, one after another. On the fourth the slide of her Colt locked back. She released it, dropped the weapon into its holster, and plucked the other pistol from Eli’s hands. “Whatever you plan on doing,” she said, “now would be an excellent time for it.”

  “Hey, this heist was all your idea.”

  Eli pulled the key from the case and slid it into the lock. It twitched between his fingers and then grew rigid, as if something had clamped down on it. “I think it’s—”

  The key lunged an inch deeper into the lock, spun around twice, and then sank in up to its disk. It rotated one more time, then vanished into the lock.

  Harry pulled the trigger twice, then twice again. She holstered the pistol. “We just need to get to the dream,” she said. “We know whoever stole the dream got away without a trace.”

  “Fingers cross,” said Eli.

  The brass sliders at the top and bottom of each door retracted, vanishing into the doorframe. The seam between the two doors darkened and widened. The keyhole swelled with it and came apart, just an odd ripple on the edge of either door. Eli looked for some sort of lock mechanism as the doors opened wider, but saw nothing other than smooth whatever-the-doors-were-made-of.

  The gap stretched to a foot wide, then two. Harry put a hand on Eli’s shoulder and pushed him forward. She limped after him.

  The air in the circular chamber smelled of dust and old paper and wood. Museum smells. Soft light illuminated a large stone table, almost a plinth, at the center of the room.

  Dozens of flags hung in the chamber. The one on Eli’s left had the stripes of an American flag, but a squat British flag sat in place of the blue field of stars. The one next to it had a familiar array of thirteen stars and stripes, and the one past that had the stars arranged in a circle. Eli followed them around the room, watching the pattern of stars change from grids to circles to uneven arrays and back.

  His eyes returned to the first one and counted. Forty-seven American flags. Despite the smell in the air, all of them looked new. The last one had a dense grid—six rows of nine stars each.

  Definitely a plinth, not a table, at the center of the room. A rounded slab of…granite? Limestone? It had to be five feet across and two feet tall. It looked old. Ancient old.

  It also looked very empty.

  41

  Harry took a few limping steps forward. “Where is it?”

  Eli approached the plinth, then gazed around the chamber. “It’s…it’s not here.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  He studied the flags, the vaulted ceiling, the backs of the doors. “We must not be early enough. It must’ve vanished sooner than everyone thought.”

  She shook her head. “It vanished in the ’60s.”

  “Yeah, but how does anyone know that?”

  “It’s what came down the Chai—”

  “But how do they know?!”

  “I don’t know!” she snapped. “It should be here!”

  Eli heard the rustle of clothes and shoes in the marble room behind them. He shuffled around to face the door.

  Fifteen strode into the chamber. He wore his transparent mask, the one Eli had first seen weeks ago and one town over. His suit looked sharp, as if he’d had it cleaned and pressed just for this encounter. Half a dozen immaculate faceless men flanked him on either side.

  “Being in this room,” he said, “is an act of treason against the United States, punishable by immediate execution.” His pistol came up. The other faceless man mirrored him.

  Harry reached past Eli, holding something up. For an instant, he thought it was one of her pistols, that he was going to be her human shield in a last stand against the faceless men.

  But she held a small object between her thumb and finger. A poker chip. She raised it slowly, as unthreateningly as possible, to put it between them and Fifteen.

  The faceless man’s chin went up and his head tilted back. Just a little. As if the wooden token had caught his attention.

  Eli studied the chip himself. Dark-red paint, an eerily exact match for blood, ran along the edge and up onto the face at points. Some of it had chipped away or rubbed off over time. Where the bare wood showed, it had the dark, smooth look left by years of handling.

  The marks on the poker chip’s face looked like an elongated loop and skinny triangle, both stretching across the circle. Then, where they intersected, his focus shifted just a little. Just enough. He saw the stylized “AP,” the sides of the two letters pressed together to form a single line.

  Harry swiveled her wrist, turning the token back and forth. “You know what this is?”

  “It’s a dislocated item,” said Fifteen. “A poker chip from one of the saloons of Hourglass, California, 1886. You fugitives use them as representative tokens.”

  “It’s a favor,” said Harry. She limped up next to Eli, keeping the wooden token in front of them. “Your favor.”

  Fifteen pulled the slide back on his pistol. It slammed into place with a hard clack that echoed across the second landing, and then the weapon dropped to point at Eli’s chest.

  “Whatever information you may have about the location of the dream can be just as easily cut out of you as long as your head’s intact.”

  Eli swallowed.

  “Except,” Harry said, “I’m calling in the favor.” She thrust the poker chip forward like a horror-movie nun warding off vampires with her cross.

  Fifteen paused, a faceless statue. “You’re what?”

  “This is the only favor Abraham Porter ever gave out.” She locked her eyes on the empty sockets of the mask, on the smooth skin beneath the transparent plastic. “That you gave out, before you became one of the faceless men. This is your favor. I’m calling it in and asking you to honor it.”

  Fifteen’s chin came down, then tilted ever so slightly up again.

  “I ask for safe passage,” she said. “Eli and I walk out of here, unharmed, un…unchanged. No pursuit. We’re simply allowed to leave.” She looked at the empty plinth. “To leave all of this.”

  A moment of silence stretched out in the tabernacle of the dream.

  Fifteen took a step forward. Then another. He was twelve feet away. Ten feet. Eight. The pistol stayed level with Eli’s chest.

  Eli and Harry stood their ground.

  The faceless man reached out with his free hand and plucked the favor from Harry’s grip. The pistol never wavered. His fingers moved up and down, pushing the wooden token onto its edge and over onto the other side. He flipped it again and again.

  Harry’s wounded leg gave out. She fell against Eli with a grunt, her empty hand still held out in front of them.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Pritchard, Mr. Teague…why did you, or any of the searchers, think that a faceless man would be bound by some vague contract made by a dead man?”

  Her hand dropped. “He isn’t dead.”

  “Abraham Porter no longer exists.”

  “But he isn’t dead,” Eli insisted. “You’re him.”

  “I had no existence before the faceless men.”

  “Then you’re a liar,” said Harry.

  The poker chip made a crisp, sharp sound as it snapped in half. Eli’s stomach dropped. The pistol jabbed into his sternum to catch it.

  “I,” said Fifteen, “would mind your tongue. The faceless men are the true heroes of America.”

  “Heroes who don’t honor their debts,” said Harry.

  “Abraham Porter is—”

  “Was a good man,” interrupted Eli, trying hard to ignore the pistol.
“An honorable man. Honorable to a fault, the way Harry tells it. She couldn’t imagine a situation where he wouldn’t honor a favor when it was called in.”

  Fifteen closed his fist around the two pieces of the poker chip and squeezed.

  “It seems I was wrong,” said Harry, pushing her chin up.

  Eli’s gut swirled again and carried up memories of talking over Truss, back when the old man was just his boss at a small branch of a bank. Of knowing he was either saving his job or ending it. Of being almost sick with fear and confident at the same time.

  “Are the two of you,” asked Fifteen, “familiar with the concept of the filibuster?”

  Eli glanced at Harry. She met his gaze, then looked at the faceless man. “The…what?”

  “The filibuster is a delaying tactic used in the United States Senate, to prevent a bill from being brought to the floor for a vote.”

  “Okay.” Eli glanced down at the pistol.

  “The senator must keep talking,” explained Fifteen. “They cannot sit down. They may not take breaks. They cannot eat. They cannot drink anything except water or milk.”

  “Milk?”

  “If any of these rules are violated,” said the faceless man, ignoring him, “or if the Senate invokes cloture, the filibuster is at an end and the business of government proceeds. Do you understand?”

  Eli swallowed. “I…no, I’m not sure I do.” He glanced at Harry, and she shook her head.

  Fifteen opened his fist and let the broken splinters of the favor fall to the stone floor. “I am honoring Abraham Porter’s favor in a manner that matches the rules of our government. We are delaying your execution. You may speak for as long as you wish, without moving, without a break, without nourishment. And when you’re finished, unless you’ve somehow convinced me of a reason to let you go, I will shoot each of you in the head.”

  Harry straightened up. “What?”

  The faceless man took a step back. The hand holding the pistol settled down to his waist, pointing it between them. “Your time has begun, Mrs. Pritchard, Mr. Teague.”

  42

  Eli stood by the plinth and tried not to focus on the enormous pistol aimed in his general direction. It had to be close to a foot long. The angular barrel had squared-off ridges along the top, like the teeth of a gear.