Paradox Bound

by Peter Clines

  Harry leaned against him to keep weight off her leg.

  Fifteen’s trigger finger tensed. “I’ll consider twenty seconds of silence the end of your delaying tactic, which is in six, five, four, thr—”

  “Wait,” said Eli. “So we’re just supposed to talk and make a case for you not to shoot us?”

  “Yes,” said the faceless man.

  “That wasn’t what I asked for,” said Harry. “I requested safe passage.”

  “Which you will have,” Fifteen said, “if certain conditions are met.”

  She glared at him. “This is not how favors work.”

  “Mrs. Pritchard, I am only even considering this to honor the memory of Abraham Porter, a fine American and a veteran. If you prefer, we can skip directly to the execution.”

  “Okay,” Eli blurted out, “you’ve got us. We came here to steal the dream.”

  As one, the faceless men tensed.

  Harry shot him a look.

  Eli took a breath and tried to organize his thoughts. “We used Zeke’s badge—”

  “Zero,” said Fifteen.

  “We used Zero’s badge to…to gain access to your secure headquarters. We thought if we could get the dream, if we turned out to be the ones who stole it, then we could also return it. We could end all of this. We had good intentions.

  “But the dream was already gone,” he continued, waving his hand at the empty plinth. “So we couldn’t steal it. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Regardless of the dream’s location,” said Fifteen, “your intent was theft. You have entered the rotunda. The punishment is execution.”

  “Yeah, but why isn’t…” Eli counted off a few seconds. “Are we allowed to ask questions during this…this thing?”

  “You are,” Fifteen said. “I’m under no obligation to answer them.”

  “Okay, then,” Eli sighed. “If the dream isn’t here, why do you have to kill us?”

  “Because only the faceless men are allowed in the rotunda,” said the fox-masked faceless man, “in order to keep the dream secure.”

  “But it isn’t here.”

  “Irrelevant,” said Fifteen

  “More to the point,” said Harry, “why isn’t it here? It’s the early twentieth century. The dream didn’t vanish until the ’60s.”

  “In fact, Mrs. Pritchard, it was 1898 when you and Mr. Teague entered the Founders House.”

  “Then where’s the dream. It should be—”

  “The main office exists outside the normal flow of time. It is always now here.”

  “Which now?” Eli asked.

  “All of them.”

  Harry glanced at Eli. “Is that why Sanders is different?”

  “Because of its proximity to the dream,” said Fifteen with a nod, “the town of Sanders exists outside the normal flow of history. As such, the town and its citizens are anomalies for us. They represent uncertainty.”

  “Citizens,” said Eli. “You mean…me?”

  “That’s correct. Like all citizens of Sanders, you are an anomaly.”

  “It isn’t that there’s something weird about me? It’s the whole town?”

  “Sanders is, from a temporal point of view, the most important town in the country. Possibly in the entire world, if you consider the role of the United States on a global scale.”

  Eli’s shoulder twinged where he’d been shot. Memories of the Boston bus station and fleeing the fork in the road swirled behind his eyes. Harry commenting how lucky—

  Fifteen made a tiny gesture with his pistol. “Five seconds. Four. Three.”

  “That’s how I got away at the bus station,” Eli said. “That’s how Harry and I kept getting away.” He looked down at himself, over at her. “That’s why Zeke…Zero didn’t kill me. That’s why you’re all right up close to us now. You’re uncertain. You can miss me!”

  The empty sockets of Fifteen’s mask stared at him.

  “If Zero was also an anomaly,” said Harry, “why did you take him?”

  “Our recruitment criteria are not for public knowledge.”

  “It was because of me,” said Eli. He looked at Harry. “I was traveling with you, so you were uncertain too. They were trying to even the odds. Cancel out our advantage.

  “But it didn’t work, did it?” Eli spat out the ideas as fast as they formed. “Zeke just became an…an uncertain faceless man. He was just as unpredictable to you as I was.”

  “Very perceptive, Mr. Teague.”

  “He’s hurt,” Eli said. “Back in, what did you say, 1898? He was in a crash.”

  “We are aware. The faceless men take care of our own.”

  Eli nodded and ran the paradox through his head again.

  Harry’s gaze drifted to the empty plinth. “Is it possible that someone from Sanders took the dream?”

  “No. We have searched the town extensively.”

  “When?”

  Fifteen said nothing.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Eli.

  Harry glanced at him. “What?”

  He looked at her. At the plinth. At Fifteen. “I think…I know where the dream is. Right where it is.”

  The faceless men tensed.

  The empty sockets of Fifteen’s mask bored into him. The huge pistol rose up and settled a few inches from Eli’s chest. “Where is it?”

  Eli closed his eyes for a moment, studying the thin line of thoughts that had fallen together in his mind. He worked through the line—through the chain—of events to make sure he hadn’t doomed Harry and himself.

  “It’s…complicated.”

  “Mr. Teague, if this is an attempt to delay your filibuster—”

  “No, no,” he waved his hands. “John Henry mentioned an idea to me, that he thought we were running out of history because the dream was gone. That things were unraveling. Getting eaten up. It’s what first got me thinking. In programming, sometimes you have something called a recursive function. It’s a function that calls itself, and it’ll keep doing it again and again until it gets the answer it wants. But if the function isn’t written right, it’ll just keep calling itself forever. And it eventually eats up all the system memory and causes a stack overflow. The computer crashes.”

  Fifteen’s head shifted to the left. “You believe the dream has created some kind of loop?”

  “I think it’s made a lot of them.” He looked at Harry. “Like how we stopped Zero. I knew the trees would stop his car because I’d already seen the car stopped when I was a kid. But it was only there to see because I’d already done it.”

  “The predestination paradox,” said Harry.

  “Right.” He looked at the faceless men again. “As I understand it, the founding fathers created the dream—or had it created—in the 1770s. And it existed for the next two hundred years or so as America grew and expanded.”

  “Until it was stolen in 1963,” Fifteen said.

  “We’ll get to that,” Eli said, waving away the interruption. “The real point is, something else was going on in the United States for those two hundred years too.”

  Beneath the clear mask, Fifteen’s flesh rippled.

  “We were.” Eli looked at her “Me and Harry. Harry and Christopher. John Henry. Alice Ramsey and Abraham Porter and Phoebe Fitzgerald. James and Monica and Theo. Everyone at Hourglass. All of the searchers. And all the faceless men. We were there, traveling back and forth, looking for the dream.”

  “Because it had vanished,” said Fifteen.

  He nodded. “Right. But, from a chronological point of view, we were there first.”

  “That’s the nature of traveling in history,” said Harry. “Effect sometimes comes before cause. Like hearing the train whistle in Independence.”

  “Right,” said Eli. “Exactly. So, for two hundred-plus years, hundreds of searchers were looking for the dream.” He turned his attention back to Fifteen. “Plus all of your…your people looking to get it back too. Maybe thousands of us, from a certain point of view, when you con
sider people overlapping as they travel to different periods. And, based off what Harry’s told me, what happens when a community of thousands of people want the same thing? When they all believe the same thing? What’s the dream do?”

  The faceless man didn’t move. Eli counted off fourteen seconds before the masked head moved side to side.

  “No,” Harry said.

  “No,” echoed Fifteen. “That’s wrong.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Eli. “It all makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Harry said.

  “It does,” said Eli. “Thousands of searchers looking for it. Hundreds of faceless men trying to get it back. For hundreds of years. Overlapping again and again and again. So, finally, the dream makes what they want possible.” His gaze fell on the empty slab of stone. “It vanishes. It has to. So we can all search for it.”

  Fifteen shook his head again. “Our sworn duty is to find it. It’s the searchers’ goal as well. If this was a mechanism of the dream, as you suggest, then it would’ve been found by now.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Eli. “Because the searchers all individually want to find it themselves. Each of them has their own ideas on how the search should end and which of them should find it.”

  “The faceless men don’t. Our one goal—”

  “According to Harry, since you became one of the faceless men, your goal has been to wipe out the searchers.”

  Fifteen said nothing.

  Eli took a breath and organized his remaining thoughts. “Nobody knows how the dream was stolen, right? How somebody found your base, made it past all of you, and then back out with the dream?”

  “We are investigating several possibilities.”

  “I’m an anomaly,” said Eli. “And we had one of your badges. We didn’t even get to the stairs before you spotted us.” He gestured past Fifteen at the line of faceless men. “We never would’ve made it back out.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So how did someone else do it? If we couldn’t do it with those advantages, how did someone get all the way in here and back out without any of you seeing them?”

  Harry looked at the plinth. At the doors. At the faceless men. “It would be impossible.”

  “It would be,” Eli agreed. “Nobody could’ve made it past all of the faceless men. It couldn’t happen. Unless the dream stole itself.”

  “No,” said Fifteen.

  Eli shook his head. “If someone else had it, shouldn’t we all see their influence somewhere else in the country? Shouldn’t there be another slow town out there, one that’s lagging behind history?”

  Fifteen didn’t respond.

  “If the dream vanished thirty years before I was born, why are we still seeing all of its effects here in Sanders?”

  Eli’s gut churned. A bead of sweat ran down his back. The awful sense of a moment of truth loomed over him again.

  “There’s only one place the dream can be,” he told Fifteen. “It hid itself in the last place anyone would look.”

  He reached his hand out over the empty plinth. He couldn’t quite reach the center without leaning, but he got pretty close. Two feet of empty space stretched between his palm and the limestone plinth. Harry shuffled her feet to stay leaning against him.

  “You said it’s always ‘now’ here, right?”

  Fifteen didn’t move. The blank skin behind his mask didn’t flinch.

  “So that either means the dream was never here, or…”

  Eli lowered his hand.

  And set it on top of the dream.

  43

  Harry gasped. Eli turned his head and, as it had for him a few times in the past, time slowed to a halt.

  Growing up in Sanders had been boring most of the time, and he and his friends had all declared various plans to escape their town. Eli would be an archeologist and dig up old battlefields around the world. Robin wanted to draw comic books. Josh had plotted out a path to the Supreme Court.

  For almost three years, Corey had been obsessed with movie special effects. He’d rent sci-fi movies from the Emporium and watch them again and again, studying how things had been done. None of them could go a week without at least one intense lecture about Ray Harryhausen or Stan Winston or Phil Tippett.

  The idea of forced perspective had come up a lot. Tricks to make small things look big or big things look small. According to Corey, it usually involved models, special sets, and camera lenses that worked like bifocal glasses. Done right, the effects looked amazing. Done wrong, they looked like…models and sets.

  All the objects Eli could see around the dream—the plinth, the flags, the lid of the wooden case, even his own outstretched hand—gave off the subtle, unconscious cues that told him he was seeing the thing inside the case in forced perspective. That he wasn’t seeing its true size. That he couldn’t see its full size.

  It looked like a model of an atom, its swirling rings etched with symbols. Then it turned and looked like a mechanical snake twisting around to swallow its own tail. Another twist and it looked like an old-fashioned astronomical model, with planets and moons whirling on concentric rings.

  The surfaces of the dream gleamed with gold and brass, dark wood and ivory, glass and iron. Dense, intricate detail covered some parts—were those hieroglyphs around the image of the eagle?—while others had been polished smooth. He looked at himself in its mirrored surfaces and couldn’t shake the feeling it looked back at him.

  Then the moment ended. The gentle pressure of his hand landing on the lid pushed it shut. The box closed with a low thump, hiding the dream from his view just seconds after he’d found it. His palm rested on the wooden case.

  The thump echoed back to him and he looked up.

  The faceless men had all dropped to one knee. Even Fifteen, right in front of them. Their heads were bowed, their hats in their hands. It struck Eli that their pose made them look like a group of knights waiting for a blessing.

  Or for orders.

  “What…what’s going on?”

  “Mr. Teague,” said Fifteen, not raising his head, “you have custody of the American Dream.”

  Harry shuffled closer. “It’s yours,” she whispered. “You did it. You found the dream.”

  “I did?”

  “You have custody of the dream,” Fifteen repeated. “The country is now yours to shape and guide.”

  Eli looked down at the faceless man. “Could you stand up, please. It’s kind of…weird talking to you like this.”

  Fifteen rose to his full height. His pistol vanished into his coat, but his hat stayed in his hands and his chin stayed down. “Is this better, Mr. Teague?”

  “I guess. Why are you all…” He looked at the other faceless men. “Why are you doing this?”

  “The faceless men serve the dream,” said Fifteen, “and the dream now serves you.”

  “Consarn it,” murmured Harry.

  Eli looked at her, at the wooden case. “How does this work?”

  “No one knows,” she said. “Until now, this had just been part of the story.”

  “How do the other parts of the story go? What do I do? Do I have to phrase my wish in the form of a question or something?”

  Fifteen raised his chin a half inch. “If I may?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “The dream affects beliefs. It strengthens them, but it can also shape them. As the custodian of the dream, you may decide which direction the country will take.”

  “You mean…I can control what people think?”

  “More, how they think. Their leanings and preferences.”

  “As of when?”

  “Whenever you want. We are outside of history here. You may begin where and when you like.” The faceless man’s muffled words carried a terrible weight. The weight of failure.

  “How long do I have to decide what I want to do?”

  “Consider it,” said the faceless man, “like chess. Your move isn’t complete until you remove your hand.”

&
nbsp; Harry took his other hand. Squeezed it once. Let go.

  Eli looked down at the case. It was almost two foot square. He was no expert, but he thought the wood was oak. Plain, but well made. He’d probably never give it a second look at a yard sale or antique store.

  He could feel the warmth of it, the power, seeping up into his fingertips. He imagined it making him strong and powerful, like the comic-book superheroes he’d read about as a kid. This could be his origin story. The point when his life finally started to mean something. The moment that he…

  “This shouldn’t be about me,” he said.

  Fifteen’s chin went up another half inch.

  “I mean it.” Eli shook his head. “Even if the dream was supposed to belong to one person, I shouldn’t be the guy shaping the country, no matter how much it might need it. Before these past few weeks, I’d barely met anyone who didn’t live within thirty miles of me. I hadn’t seen any of the country. Hell, I barely ever left Sanders.

  “The whole idea was that everyone would have a chance to live the life they wanted, right? It was never intended to let somebody force their dream on everyone else.” He patted the wooden case with his fingertips. “The founding fathers were right to keep this locked away. To leave it with you.”

  Fifteen bowed his head. “Thank you, Mr. Teague. So what will you do with it?”

  He looked at the box. At Harry. “I thought I wanted to go home, but really I was just scared. Truth is, all I ever wanted was to get out. To see everything else. And I can do that now.”

  “Then you release the dream back into our custody?”

  The muscles shifted in Eli’s arm. His palm lifted off the wooden case, dragging his fingers behind it. He opened his mouth to speak and—

  Harry pushed his hand back down onto the box. “Wait! Will we be safe?”

  Fifteen turned the blank gaze of his mask on her. “Safe?”

  Eli took in a breath and pressed his hand against the case. “Yeah, safe,” he echoed. “I’m not going to move my hand and then you kill both of us?”

  The faceless man said nothing.

  “Being in here is punishable by execution, right? So here’s my one wish or order or…whatever. Harry and I leave here without being killed.” He looked at her and thought of Christopher Pritchard, of Phoebe Fitzgerald, of Theo Knickerbocker. “Nobody else gets killed.”