Authors: Cam Rogers
Any one of these people could kill Nick as easy as turning off a TV. The elevator began to rise. Nick watched the atrium fall away beneath him.
“How’d you make it, boss? I heard—”
“Triangle of life,” Gibson muttered. “I hit the dirt alongside a couch. Beams and shit hit the couch, left me a tight shelter next to it. Debris hit the shelter, left me in a pocket.” He coughed. Sounded wet. “I’m good.”
“Rigs on,” one of them said. “Stutters.”
Thirty seconds later the elevator shushed to a stop on thirty-five, pulling level with its glass-walled neighbor—as two people filed into it.
Nick looked through the glass walls that separated the two elevators and instantly recognized the two people inside the one opposite.
Jack and Beth.
“Boss!”
Beth’s head snapped toward them, recognized Gibson’s squad—then clocked Nick.
Nick shook his head tightly, terrified.
Do not acknowledge me in this elevator full of killers.
Nick’s elevator emptied in a heartbeat as the doors to Beth and Jack’s hissed shut. She glared at him, mouthed
What the fuck?
And then they descended.
“Senior Operative Gibson, sir!” Two Monarch regulars came to a halt before the squad. “Sir, Jack Joyce … he’s…”
Nick stepped out of the elevator just as Gibson’s squad rushed back in to pursue Jack and Beth. The elevator chimed shut and departed.
The two Monarch guards, looking as though their careers were flashing before their eyes, disappeared through the security door they’d appeared from, barking into ear mics.
“Right,” Nick mumbled, trapped. “Now what?”
* * *
Martin Hatch accepted the applause. “Now, friends, if you would be kind enough to stay within the yellow zone we would like to conclude with a practical demonstration of this world-changing technology. We’ll need all of you to space out evenly, and marks have been provided.”
People shuffled, each choosing a mark for themselves, taking position.
Hatch got a thumbs-up from the four chronon techs.
“Three. Two. One.” Hatch snapped his fingers.
The techs activated the pylons, the chronon levels within that sectioned-off piece of the M-J field dropped, and the entire crowd froze.
The operatives onstage got into new positions. The pylons shut off, the crowd reanimated, exclaimed as the operatives “teleported” before them, and burst into applause.
Hatch snapped his fingers. The crowd froze. The operatives rearranged. The pylons shut off. The crowd came to life. Their laughter and applause turned to an ecstatic roar.
Repeat.
Disbelief. Delirium. Dollar signs.
From the audience’s perspective each time Hatch clicked his fingers everything changed in a moment.
Hatch’s smile was wide, but there was no joy in his eyes.
He clicked again.
* * *
Paul, in his quarters on the forty-ninth floor, sipped a small glass of champagne, dressed for operations in underarmor and urban camouflage.
Martin’s demonstration was playing out on a closed-circuit feed displayed on a laptop. It all seemed to be going well.
Then the call came in over a Monarch secure channel: Jack was loose.
Paul immediately switched the feed to elevator cams—and there was Jack in the company of a Monarch employee, headed for the ground floor. For Martin’s demonstration.
Sofia. She was down there with Martin, waiting to give her presentation.
The elevator identified the employee accompanying Jack as Beth Wilder. Paul called up her file. Her face looked back at him, and he felt, viscerally, a lost part of his own story click into place. “I know you. Beth.”
He tapped the desk, contacted the on-duty security chief. The voice on the end of the phone demanded identification.
Paul Serene had effectively founded Monarch, and yet he’d be stopped at reception if he walked in unaccompanied.
“I’m placing an alert on Beth Wilder, employee mike-romeo-one-zero-one-four with Martin Hatch’s authority, code mike-romeo…” What was it? What was the blasted number? “One-one-niner-four-golf-sierra. Do you copy?” Choosing one thought above all others hurt
so much.
His hand throbbed. He needed another treatment, and soon.
“Who is this?” the idiot on the line demanded again.
Lifeboat’s success required him to be a non-entity, but it never ceased to be an indignity.
“Do you copy?”
A pause on the line. “The code checks out.”
“Twenty Technicians, chronon enabled. Ground floor. Extreme prejudice. You will have stutter cover. Double time.”
“Whoever this is, we’re not gonna need twenty men to stop one girl.”
That neatly put-together redhead was a woman Paul had met once, a very long time ago, a long time from now.
“They won’t be able to stop her,” Paul told the security chief, getting out of his seat. “But they might slow her down.”
Cutting the line he ran for the elevator.
* * *
The elevator hushed open, parallel to the main stage. The crowd was loving it, freezing and unfreezing. This was entertainment to them, a show, not cutting-edge science that could change the world. The elevators were outside the pylons’ bracket and remained unaffected by the demonstration.
“Beth, we’ve got ten, maybe fifteen seconds before the stutter hits.”
The second elevator with Gibson’s goons was right behind them.
Beth exited. “Get Sofia. She’s Brazilian. Five eight, about a buck twenty. Dark hair, cut in a bob. Carrying a tablet. She’ll be backstage. Check the wings. I’ll draw them off.”
She ducked into the assembly before Jack could protest.
The second elevator opened and Chronon-1 fanned out, by which time Jack had warped toward the cover of side-stage: scaffolding, black cloth drapes, security barricades.
He was over and up the aluminum stairs in a blink, backstage.
The stutter slammed into being, disorienting. The entire world went still.
The area for the demonstration had been boxed out in yellow, with audience members asked to space out evenly. The Monarch performers were getting off the stage and taking up positions next to audience members, intending to wow them once the stutter broke.
Gibson silently signaled his crew to hold up. Hatch was onstage, waiting for the stutter to break before he could wrap up the performance. Gibson didn’t want him tipped off that something was up.
“No shooting,” Gibson said. “Mr. Hatch needs this to go well.”
“She’s got a gun, boss. You really want to bring blades to a gunfight?” Irene said.
“She won’t shoot. She knows as well as we do: these people are bulletproof while immobile, but once that stutter breaks and the bullets start flying … heads pop.”
Irene sighed, unclipped her knife.
The elevator came to sudden life, heading back up to retrieve a passenger. Someone upstairs had channeled chronon flow from the Regulator to the elevator’s rig—part of the Tower’s emergency system. That took authority. The elevator headed back up.
“Emergency system. Someone with clout’s coming down.” Gibson drew his knife. “Work fast.”
* * *
From the wings Jack could tell the stage was clear. The operatives were in position in the crowd, ready to surprise a few randomly selected guests by materializing in front of them.
Jack saw Sofia in the wings, frozen in the act of checking her watch.
Folding into a submoment he jetted across the space, unseen, right up next to her.
“All right, Doctor. I’m gonna need you to work with me here.” Jack stepped behind her, placed one hand around her waist and one over her mouth—everything about her as hard as stone. “I’m really sorry about this.”
With a little concentration he extended his chronon field across her and felt her begin to cohere into the frozen moment.
Sofia came to with a hand over her mouth and freaked out.
“Ssh! I’m not gonna hurt you, but I can’t let you go. You gotta listen to me.”
That didn’t work. She elbowed Jack hard in the ribs, driving one stilettoed heel hard into his foot. Jack bit down on the pain.
“
I’m a friend!
” he hissed. “My name is Jack Joyce. William Joyce was my brother.”
* * *
Beth moved low through the forest of still bodies, stealing glances toward the stage. Hatch was immobile. She couldn’t see Jack. Chronon-1 was entirely focused on her.
* * *
“We need you to help us,” Jack continued.
Sofia twisted in his grip—“I do not
care
!”—then stopped. It dawned on her that the world about her had stopped moving entirely. The demonstration was to encapsulate the audience—not the entire building.
“You admired Will. Believed in his work. He mentioned you in his notes.”
Sofia wasn’t listening. She was taking it all in, like a kid in their first snowfall. “Zero state,” she breathed. “We exist within a deformation in the Meyer-Joyce field. Yet we see. We hear. We breathe. Move.” She wheeled on him, twisting round in his arms. “You must come with me. Paul needs you.”
Sofia glanced behind herself, at Hatch, as static as all those gleeful faces before him.
“Paul’s mistaken. Will had a Countermeasure, you understand? We can stop the end before it happens.”
“Countermeasure,” Sofia cut him off. “To repair the fracture in the Meyer-Joyce field. To—”
“To save us,” Jack said. “From the end of time.”
“You!”
It was Paul—a portrait of fury at the far side of the stage.
Every chronon operative in the audience turned reflexively—with no idea what to make of the scene onstage. Performers to soldiers: weapons up.
The jumpsuited Technician barked,
“On your knees!”
Weapons were pointed at all of them—Paul included.
Paul had no time for them, stalked across the stage toward Jack.
“Get away from her!”
Jack realized they had no idea who Paul was.
“
On your knees!
” the Tech shouted. Weapons tensed in all hands.
“Final warning!”
* * *
Gibson risked a glance and saw the morons from the stage show pointing assault weapons at the Consultant.
“Hold fire! Hold fire! Target: male, left! All others high-value friendlies! Strikers, go!”
* * *
The two armored Strikers—soda can fuses flaring sun-hot—flashed up from the audience, boiling energy tracing from their back units. Sofia shrieked as they tore past. Jack let go of Sofia and dashed fifteen feet out onto the stage as the Strikers snapped to a halt. A lucky swing saw a rifle butt glance across his forehead.
Paul darted across the stage, driving his shoulder into Jack’s back and continuing on his way to stop in front of Sofia.
Jack spun with Paul’s passing blow, the pistol slipping from his hand to skid across the stage, his back on fire.
Paul took Sofia’s hand. “Come with me.”
The Strikers flashed forward, each one taking a lock hold on one of Jack’s arms, jetting him across the stage, headfirst, toward a Marshall stack.
Jack warped backward—just a nudge—the reverse momentum swinging the two Strikers into each other’s faces. There was a crack of shattering faceplates and Jack’s arms were almost ripped off in the process.
He turned to see Paul spiriting Sofia into the shadows of the wings.
* * *
Beth saw Paul take Sofia through stage right—Beth’s left. She moved fast and low, aiming to circle around the back of the stage and intercept.
* * *
The jumpsuited Technician had her handgun out, while the Juggernauts awkwardly angled for a shot that wouldn’t endanger Hatch—still frozen onstage as the satisfied host. But they were having trouble navigating through a sea of smiling people who might as well have been made of concrete.
The Strikers recovered as Jack went for his gun. They split his focus by zipping left and right. He tracked one and popped a localized substutter over him. The Striker slowed fractionally, then escaped the field—his mobility rig rendering him largely immune.
While Jack was diverted, the other Striker flashed in from behind and smashed his rifle like a club into the back of Jack’s legs. Which was when Jack realized the weapons were unloaded—show models.
Jack went down hard as the Technician closed in with cuffs. Jack warped forward, cannonballing her legs out from under her, rolling into the stutter shield he just dropped as she snapped a shot off after him.
Okay, her firearm was loaded.
The bullet impacted the shield, caught. Jack stood, his knees feeling cracked, side by side with unmoving Martin Hatch.
Jack’s energy levels were low, running out of zip. The Strikers didn’t seem to be having the same problem.
They were wearing him down.
* * *
Beth exited the crowd and looped around the left side of the stage.
Irene was waiting for her. “Hey there, chicken.” Knife out, combat-gripped.
There were no innocents behind Irene, so Beth drew her gun.
Irene leaped right, under the stage.
* * *
Jack stayed under the shield, played up his difficulty standing, and let them come to him: one Striker to the left and another to the right. The Technician dead ahead with her gun leveled. Two Juggernauts behind, but he had to assume the auto-cannons were for show.
The Strikers communicated something to each other, then one warped in hard, slowing a little as he hit the shield. Enough time for Jack to fold into a submoment, blip backward, grab the Striker’s back unit as he passed, and pull. There was an alarming crack of energy, and reflexively Jack blip-kicked the Striker out of the shield where he crashed into the back of his partner. The first detonated almost instantly in a corona of yellow-hot energy, setting off the chronon pack on the second—an eruption that sent him rocketing over the audience, where he exploded and locked. The Technician got caught in that first blast, was thrown backward by the eruption … leaving all three actors frozen in a catastrophic ballet, mid-air, as their rigs shorted.
Jack ran out of charge. His shield flickered and vanished.