Authors: Patrick Lee
Travis took the corner.
Finn was there, crouched five feet away, his pistol aimed straight back at Travis.
For three seconds neither made a move.
The cylinder lay at Finn’s feet, safely out of the crossfire; Travis saw it without breaking eye contact.
Travis considered the situation. He could pull the trigger on the guy right now and probably resolve the whole thing. The risk was that, even with half the guy’s head missing, motor reflex could still fire the .38—and probably hit the target, at this range. Travis thought he’d probably take the risk, if it were just his own life on the line. But it wasn’t.
“The two women who were with me in New York,” Travis said. “They’re still there. They’re stuck in the ruins.” He indicated the cylinder with his eyes. “I need that to get them back. I’m not leaving here without it.”
Finn’s gun hand remained steady. “That’s not going to happen. If you take this, Garner can still stop me.”
“Garner’s stopping you as we speak. He knows about Longbow. He knows you’re activating the satellites. He’s on the phone right now setting up raids at all their corporate properties. I imagine one of them will net Audra.”
Each piece of information seemed to rattle the man more deeply, though Travis thought his reaction was missing something. It looked like unwilling acceptance where surprise might have been.
“You had to know it was over,” Travis said. “From the moment Paige slapped Garner last night, you were never going to pull it off.”
Finn shook his head. He took the cylinder in his free hand and moved back two feet, rising to full height as he did. The .38 stayed level.
Travis stood upright, too. He felt sunlight begin burning his neck through the dissipating smoke. Visibility was better: it was like standing in a thin fog, though the light glared through it everywhere. Travis still couldn’t see beyond the nearest forty feet of paver stones and planter boxes. This place seemed to be a plaza of some kind, where the airport had been in the present.
Finn’s eyes narrowed. They didn’t quite leave Travis, but they moved a little, like the man was reading a list of options in his own head. Looking for some way to salvage his plans. He took another step back. Nine or ten feet away now. Travis saw the risk of getting hit by a reflexive shot begin to drop. He kept the MP7 sighted for a head shot.
“I’m sorry about your friends,” Finn said. “I mean that. But I can’t just let you take this thing.”
He retreated a step further. Maybe he thought he could make a run for it. Put some distance behind him and cross back into the present, somewhere else in Arica. Then try to call Audra and warn her.
The MP7 required four ounces of trigger pressure to fire. Travis applied two.
Finn backed up again.
And then the wind shifted.
Whichever way it’d been blowing before, the boxes in the plaza had spun it in circles. Now it came on dead straight from behind Travis, its speed seeming to double, and in the span of five seconds the smoke drew away like a veil.
Finn took a sharp breath.
Travis felt his own eyes widen involuntarily.
They might as well have been standing in Midtown Manhattan. The Arica they’d seen in the present was long gone, and in its place reared a skyline of concrete and glass and steel, some of its towers standing to a height of seventy stories or more. Broad avenues crisscrossed at their bases, complete with traffic lights and crisp white lines. Along the length of the nearest street, Travis could see the downtown district snaking up the coast for over a mile, and the height and density of the structures held consistent for most of that distance.
None of it lay in ruins. The skyscrapers’ glass faces looked like they’d been washed yesterday. The sidewalks were immaculate. Vehicles stood parked at curbsides, 2011 models or earlier as far as Travis could tell. Wooden benches framed the plaza, their green paint gleaming in the desert sun.
Yet nothing moved. Beyond the filled parking spaces, the streets were deserted. Through ground-level windows, every visible lobby sat vacant. The traffic lights were dark. The tires of every vehicle were flat and beginning to crumble. Arica was imposing and beautiful and pristine, but it was also abandoned. For how long, Travis couldn’t guess.
“It worked,” Finn said. He looked around at the place while keeping the gun on Travis. “The survivors flourished here. They made it.”
“For a while. What does it matter? They’re dead now.”
“We don’t know they’re dead. We don’t know what happened here.”
“Couldn’t have been good.”
Finn looked at him. Some kind of new hope flickered in his eyes. “It’s enough that it worked at all. And if I search this place for even a few hours, I can probably find out what happened to it. Find out how to avoid the problem.”
“We could’ve found this place bustling and it still wouldn’t be worth killing the world for it,” Travis said.
“The world’s going to kill
itself
sooner or later. Why shouldn’t at least some of us live?”
“Neither of us is going to convince the other. If you want to stay here, feel free. But I’m taking the cylinder with me. I’m going to New York to get my friends.”
“You’re not,” Finn said. “I really am sorry, but you’re not. You don’t have time, anyway. Look.”
He held the cylinder toward Travis, showing him the side opposite the row of buttons. In the harsh light it took Travis a few seconds to see what the man was talking about.
Along part of the casing’s length ran a line of blue lights, pencil-eraser-sized and spaced at centimeter intervals. They shone softly and diffused from just beneath the black surface, and extended to a little over a third of the cylinder’s long dimension.
“They appeared last night,” Finn said. “Right after your friends broke the other cylinder. At that time the lights covered the whole length, but they’ve been disappearing steadily since, like a countdown. Whoever built these things must not have wanted anyone using one without the other. My guess is, when the last one of these lights goes out, this thing becomes a paperweight.”
Travis’s mind was already doing the math. The other cylinder had broken maybe nine hours ago. If that amount of time had burned not-quite-two-thirds of the countdown, he had something like five hours left.
Five hours to reach New York and find Paige and Bethany.
He thought of flight time, and search time, and shit-happens time. Five hours. Was it even close to enough?
“You’re wasting your time thinking about it,” Finn said. “I’m not giving this to you. Not now that I’ve seen this place.” The man took another step back. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“So am I,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger the rest of the way.
Nothing happened.
T
he MP7 didn’t even click. It wasn’t empty—Travis had loaded it himself and chambered the first round. When he applied the last two ounces to the trigger, the mechanism simply froze.
He squeezed harder. Nothing.
His eyes dropped from Finn and focused on the MP7’s action. There was a stress ripple in the metal, where the weapon had hit the paver blocks earlier.
He looked back up at Finn.
The man knew. Even without a click, Travis’s body language had said everything.
Finn advanced two steps, his eyes narrowing. The .38 trembled a little in his hand, but he held it tightly.
“Put it down,” Finn said. “Then turn around and get on your knees.”
Travis exhaled, the breath almost a laugh. “Why the hell would I do any of that? If you’re gonna shoot me, just do it.”
Finn made no move to come closer, but he took a breath and the gun went still in his hand.
“I hope you don’t feel it,” Finn said, and Travis saw his forearm tense for the pull.
Then Finn’s head came apart, the sides of his skull blowing out like a shaped charge had gone off inside it. A split-second later the flat crack of a high-powered rifle broke across the plaza, and Travis flinched against his will and turned toward the sound.
Thirty yards away, a figure dressed in white rose from concealment behind another planter box.
In his peripheral vision, Travis saw Finn crumple to the ground. The .38 hit with a soft clink and didn’t fire. The cylinder rolled out of his other hand and settled gently onto his abdomen, as if his body’s last impulse had been to protect the thing.
Travis dropped the MP7 and raised his arms at his sides, and kept his eyes on the shooter.
The newcomer held the rifle at ready without aiming it, and for a moment simply stared, assessing the situation. Travis could make out no detail of the face: the body was covered in white from top to bottom, including a loose hood with some kind of mesh screen at the front. The outfit seemed designed to reflect away sunlight while letting in the breeze. Probably a necessity in this place.
The figure stared a moment longer, then slung the rifle on a strap and stepped out from behind the concrete box. It strode across the plaza toward Travis, its movements measured, unhurried.
Travis could only stare. He felt too numb to even be afraid.
The figure came on, twenty yards away now. Ten. It stopped just out of handshake range and stared at him. Through the glare of light off the mesh fabric, Travis could just get a hint of the face. But he’d stared at it for only a second when something else drew his gaze: a bright red disc on the back of the newcomer’s hand, just visible past the edge of the sleeve. The disc was the size of a quarter, and stuck to the skin somehow. Travis looked closer and saw what he already knew would be there: near-microscopic tendrils, binding the disc to the hand.
He looked at the face again, and recognized it through the mesh half a second before the figure lifted the hood.
The eyes were the same as he’d always known them—huge, brown, intense—but everything else had aged a bit, to somewhere between fifty and sixty years.
“Travis,” the newcomer said.
Travis swallowed and found his voice. “Paige.”
F
or the next five seconds they said nothing. Travis heard the sound of waves breaking, the soft crashes echoing through the high-rise canyons.
Then a voice crackled over a radio, somewhere on Paige’s body, the words inaudible. She reached to her waist and drew the device from a fold of her cloak.
She keyed the talk button. “I missed that. Say again.”
A man spoke, his tone all but lost to static. “I asked what you’re shooting at.”
“I’ll explain when I see you,” Paige said. “I’m safe.”
“Did you find out what the smoke came from?”
“Not exactly. Let me get back to you.”
“Be careful.”
The man clicked off, and Paige stowed the radio. By then, Travis realized he’d recognized the voice, even without discerning its tone. Its rhythm and cadence had been more than familiar. Much more. He felt his balance falter.
Paige stepped closer to him. She raised a hand and touched his face, gently. Her thumb traced his cheekbone, feeling the texture of his skin.
He saw the obvious confusion in her eyes, mixed with some fragile understanding, and thought he knew what it was. Paige—the other Paige—had described it to him last night in Garner’s living room. Getting it without getting it. The Breach had taught her to do that.
Still, there had to be a thousand questions. He thought he saw those in her eyes too, along with a reflection of the thousand he wanted to ask.
How the hell had she gotten here? Not on board one of the flights from Yuma. No way would she have taken part in any of that, ELF effects or not. She couldn’t have left all those people behind to die.
She must’ve come here later on, long after Bleak December had gone. If anyone in the world could’ve survived Umbra without going to Yuma, it would’ve been Tangent personnel at Border Town, with all their exotic resources. And no doubt Bethany had been right: Paige had found him before the world had ended. Had found him and kept him alive.
Those thoughts echoed in his head for maybe three seconds, and then they were gone—drowned out by the only thing he could afford to think about now.
The cylinder.
The line of blue lights.
And time—draining away like blood from a nicked artery.
Every minute he stayed here might be the one that doomed Paige and Bethany in New York.
The thumb—shaking now—retraced its path across his cheek. He raised his hand and closed it softly around hers.
“I have to leave,” he said. “I have to leave right now. I’m sorry I can’t explain any of this.”
She shook her head, dismissing the apology, and took her hand away from his face. “Go.”
He held her gaze another second, in spite of his urgency, then turned and crossed to Finn’s body in two running steps. He lifted the cylinder and aimed it to put the iris just shy of the fallen shell casings where he’d come through before—where the smoke from the burning plane would hide his arrival in the present.