“As soon as I can eat, I will.” I rattled the handcuffs behind my back for emphasis.
“Here.”
She stepped forward and crouched down to reach for the water bottle on the ground a few feet away from me. She pulled the cap open and held it up to my mouth. My eyes burned hatred at her as she pushed it past my lips, but I still swallowed the water despite my growing desire to lash out and hurt her. If I didn’t have a growing life inside me, I would have refused the water flat-out, but there were things more important than spite. I just managed to keep my expression neutral as I guzzled down the water, the cool liquid soothing the back of my throat.
“Amanda.”
I looked up to see a man framed in the doorway to the room, and my stomach shriveled up. The open warehouse behind him was filled with sunlight, making it difficult to make out the features of his face, but his silhouette was unmistakable. It was the man we had arrested at the school. As his head turned to me, he flexed his right shoulder, and the stump which had once been his arm.
“We need to start soon. What are you doing?”
“Making sure she doesn’t die.” She glowered at him, even as he took another step into the room. “Last time I checked, Jason can’t replicate a cadaver.”
“Well.” His eyes crackled with green embers as he looked down at me. “Hurry up.”
“I’d watch out for him.” She sighed as he left the room and slammed the door shut behind him. “I think, if he gets the chance, he’s going to try to kill you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I grit my teeth as I repositioned myself and the bloody scabs on my wrists were rubbed open again.
“I wish you wouldn’t make things so difficult.” She winced as I propped myself as high up against the wall as I could manage. “Do you know how hard it was for me to convince them to give you just this much slack?”
“Yes, the amenities are top notch.” I nodded to the paint bucket and toilet paper half a foot from me, which had been my only means of relieving myself for the past day.
“I figured a pregnant woman like you would appreciate it over the alternative.” I glared at her, but she just held up her hands. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell anyone. But I do wish you would just cooperate.”
“Why? So you can go back in time, change the world, maybe start World War III?”
“Why would we need to do that?” She tilted her head to the side. “Mankind didn’t know about primes until after World War II. If the United States hadn’t entered the war when it did, perhaps we wouldn’t have discovered primes for another ten or twenty years. Maybe, with that extra time, primes would have been in a better position to fight for themselves when they were discovered.”
“You’re insane.” I grimaced as I watched her pace around the room. “People were dying by the thousands, every day, by the end of World War II. There’s no way to tell if changing even one day would make life better or worse for primes, but it would almost certainly be much worse for everyone else.”
She shrugged. “Maybe so. But then, why do their lives matter? For the past fifty years, primes have been experimented on, persecuted, and abused—all by humans who were afraid of us. And they should be afraid. They don’t matter—we do. We are the future, not them. That’s all that matters. Can’t you see it?”
“You think you’re the future?” I barked out a laugh. “There have always been people like you. People who have it all figured out. Who know exactly how to right all the perceived injustices in the world. And if a few hundred, or thousand, or million people have to die to bend the future toward that justice? Well, that’s just the cost of utopia, isn’t it? You think that’s the future? Your ideas were worn out two hundred years ago. The same thing that happened to those despots will happen to you too.”
“We’ll see.” She turned to leave.
“You’re forgetting the most important part of your plan,” I called after her, causing her to stop half-way out the door. “For me or someone with my powerset to make a time bridge, they’d have to rip a hole in spacetime. You do know what the most common holes in spacetime are called, right?”
“We won’t make a black hole.” She didn’t look back at me, but she didn’t shut the door, either.
“Maybe not. More likely, you’re just going to end up turning Chicago into ground-zero for a miniature nuclear explosion. Especially if you’re plan is to go back in time more than once.”
“Just something to think about,” I muttered as the door clicked shut.
An hour later, I was unsurprised when the door opened again and the replicator, Jason, came into the room, flanked by the woman I recognized as the morpher from the lab. As he crouched down next to me and pressed his hand to the side of my face, I saw the morpher’s lip curl in disgust.
Static buzzed on my cheek as he closed his eyes and the sound of snapping and popping bones filled the air. Within a second, his frame shrank down to the point I found myself looking at my mirror image—or, what was almost my mirror image. I couldn’t help the grin that spread across my face as the replicator stood up and looked back at the morpher.
“I guess you can’t replicate the effects of that serum, can you?” I asked, even as my thirty-nine-year-old self looked back at me.
The morpher stalked forward and slapped me across the face, even as I laughed at the look of frustration on the replicator’s face as she stalked out of the room.
“Just do me a favor, okay?” I shouted after her through the open door. “When you try and make that portal, make sure to do it far from me, eh? I don’t want to die today.”
I laughed as the morpher stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her, though my laughter quickly turned to a haggard cough from my dry throat. Feeling more optimistic than I had only minutes before, I curled up on the floor and used my knee to work the water bottle next to my mouth so I could suck down a few greedy gulps of water. I did the same trick for the plate of food next to me. My stomach gurgled loudly as I chewed on the stale and crusty bread, but I didn’t care.
My eyes darted to the door ten minutes later as a deafening explosion filled the air, loud enough that it shook the floor. I cried out as a section of the cinderblock wall behind me came free and smashed into my head just above my hairline. As warm blood trickled into my right eye, the door to my room slammed open and the energy caster I had crippled from the school stormed toward me.
“What are you doing, Bruce?” Amanda followed him into the room as I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “We need her—now more than ever.”
“I’m not going to harm her.” He breathed heavily, the fire in his eyes as he watched me belying his words.
“Jason’s dead, isn’t he?” I tilted my head so the blood flowing from my forehead wouldn’t drip into my eye as I stared right back at him.
“Ended up taking half of us with him, too. And I’m guessing, by the gravity waves he put off before that implosion, that just about every arbiter in Chicago is on their way here now.”
“I would imagine so.” I smiled.
“So, now’s when things stop being fun.” He looked past Amanda, who had been standing at his side, and nodded to someone I couldn’t see beyond the doorway.
The morpher came into the room, and my stomach dropped out at who she had with her. I tried in vain to stand up as she threw Nicole down onto the ground a few feet away from me. Like me, her arms had been bound behind her back, but she struggled to roll herself to a sitting position all the same.
”Nicole!” I screamed. I again fought against my restraints in a futile effort to get to her.
“Not so fast.” Bruce put his knee into her back and shoved her back to the ground, then rested his boot on the side of her head, causing her to cry out in pain. I clenched my fists behind my back, barely even aware of the fresh blood dripping into my palms from my reopened wrists.
“I’m sorry, dad.” She looked up at me with a pitiful expression, then whimpered.
“Let her go,
” I said through gritted teeth.
He gave me an ugly smile. “Sure thing, as soon as you make a portal to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1938.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Okay.” He snatched her by the elbow and shoved her to her feet. He pulled a pistol out of his waistband and pointed it at her temple. “I’ll give you to the count of three, then she dies.”
“Don’t,” I whispered, my eyes watering as I looked at my daughter. She was beyond tears.
“One.”
“I’ll do it!” I screamed and wrestled against my restraints. “Just don’t hurt her!”
He smiled as he looked to Amanda. “I told you: manipulating people is always about leverage. Would you mind taking that clamp off her, and those handcuffs?”
He kept the gun pressed against Nicole’s temple, even as Amanda stepped toward me and fiddled with the handcuffs on my wrists and ankles. As soon as I was free, I pushed myself to my feet and ripped the clamp off my forehead. I fought to still the euphoria and disorientation that stole over me as my grav-sense came rushing back, then turned back to Bruce.
“In case you try any funny business.” He nodded toward the door again. I followed his gaze, and a thick lump formed in my throat. A woman stood a hundred feet away at the far end of the warehouse, holding Alan at gun point.
I watched as several more people filed into the room and made a semicircle around Nicole and me. My eyes flickered to the glazed window set high in the room as I heard police sirens in the distance.
“Let’s go,” Bruce growled. “All of us.” He gestured around the room at the half-dozen men and women who had gathered around us.
I glared at him. “Nicole stays here.”
He snorted. “We’re not leaving our only piece of leverage here. She comes too.”
“Dad?”
Nicole’s tone made me look back at her, even as Amanda twisted around to watch me. She didn’t sound scared, as she had only seconds before. In fact, as I studied her, I thought she looked calm. I frowned.
“Mom told me to tell you something when I saw you.”
“I said let’s go!” he screamed, cocking his gun and pressing it against her head.
“She said to remember your first date with her.”
I blinked as I stared at her, struggling to make sense of what she meant. What immediately came to mind...
I glanced at Amanda, who had narrowed her eyes as she studied me. Kiara’s weird admonition, to use wu wei—action through non-action—filled my head as I closed my eyes and concentrated. I took a deep breath, then gripped the spacetime all around me and clamped down, tearing open a hole in the fabric of the universe.
The whole experience lasted a fraction of a second, and yet, so much happened in those microseconds. The resistance grew exponentially in the sphere of unified and compressed spacetime around me as I contorted the curvature of spacetime further than I ever had before. All at once, the resistance evaporated away in an explosion of energy as the spacetime surrounding us sheared away to leave us in a naked point of singularity. For a fragment of a second, we existed as an impossibility, a point of space and time that existed outside of and apart from either. And yet, we weren’t outside of space and time—we were in it. All of it. My mind was on the verge of collapse as I focused on the jagged fragments of spacetime trailing from the singularity around us. I couldn’t see anything. Everything around us was a blanket of absolute white. And yet, my grav-sense granted me access to the entire universe. In that instant, the infinite number of violet lines around me rippled out and brushed against the furthest reaches of space at a rate far faster than anything in the known universe should have been able to travel. It was too much—far too much—for any mortal mind to grasp. I saw everything, everywhere, and in every moment of existence. I sensed the raw forces of the universe, the pure essence of existence, converging on us. From the merest eddies of movement from quanta of matter to the most massive currents of stars and galaxies coursing through the furthest edges of space and expanding and contracting both forward and backward across time—all of it broke against the barrier of splintered spacetime around us, swelling upward in an unfathomable nexus of energy beyond anything I could have ever imagined.
To add to the mad rush of having every raw physical force inside the boundaries of the universe within my grasp, like trillions upon trillions of infinitely long threads resting at my fingertips, I could see things that I should not have been able to see. Things that weren’t meant to be seen. The entirety of human history, all of earth’s history, lay bare and exposed to my gaze. I saw the birth of the sun, the birth of the universe. The scientific consensus to that point was that the universe had all started with the Big Bang. An explosive expansion of matter and spacetime, when within fractions upon fractions of a nanosecond all matter within the universe came into being out of... out of something I could not see, even then. Well, calling what I saw a Big Bang was like calling the Pacific Ocean a puddle. Technically true at its basest level, but such a profane approximation for reality that it did nothing to explain what it actually was. It was the most breathtaking thing I had ever experienced. If I had even the most fleeting doubt of God’s existence before, it was wiped away in that singular instant. How could I deny the Composer when His entire symphony of creation was at once playing out in such absolute harmony and impossible transcendence before me?
But I didn’t have time to marvel at any of it. I pushed my consciousness through the impossible upwelling of power and information around us that, every microsecond we remained in the singularity, threatened to collapse us into far less than nothing. I sifted through everything before me, my mind shifting up and down dimensions and in and out of time as I stayed fixated on finding just one place and one time. Amazingly, despite the infinite array of information before me, as I kept my mind focused on that infinitely small point of time and space that had come to me out of the advice from Nicole, I saw it.
Forcing us there by will alone, I gasped and fell as the singularity around us collapsed and we once again existed as we should, entwined within only one point in spacetime. I dropped to the ground in the middle of a shattered crater of warm cement as everyone who I had taken into the singularity with me fell to the ground as well.
My eyes snapped up as the sound of a gunshot rang out. Nicole trembled on the ground at the edge of the crater a few feet away, but she was unharmed. Instead, I looked at Bruce, who stood over her. I saw shock written on his face, his eyes wide and his complexion pallid. As he tumbled down into the depression of fragmented cement, I saw the cause of his alarm. My sphere of compressed spacetime had only barely covered Nicole. It had cleaved him in two. The back-half of his body was still in Chicago.
“What?” Amanda’s eyes went wide as he tumbled onto her, blood and viscera spilling from where his spine and back should have been. Even as her eyes fixed on me and a buzzing swelled in my ears, I turned my attention to Nicole. I held no illusions I could fight the six remaining rogues that were pushing themselves to their feet. Not in my current state.
I ignored the buzzing and concentrated on one thought—escape. Snapping the spacetime around Nicole, I flung her high up into the air, even as I pulled myself up past the rooftops beside her. I heard a faint scream behind me as we sped off across the sky and the buzzing in my ears quieted.
24
“WHERE ARE WE?” NICOLE asked twenty minutes later as I set us down in a back alley behind a storefront.
“Los Angeles.” My eyes swept over either side of the alley, which was deserted, before I looked back at her. “Do you have any cash on you?”
“Actually, yeah.” She rooted through her back pocket and pulled out a wad of fifty-dollar bills. “Mom made me take this before we left.”
“Before you left?” I tilted my head to the side. “What are you talking about?”
“Mom sent Alan and me out this morning to go drive around downtown, after she heard from Kiara that you were missing. He knew t
hat, per standard protocol, the arbiter program would put the rest of us in protective custody, and he wanted to get that message to you.”
“Wait...” I grimaced, my face going red. “Jake sent you out to get caught? What was he thinking?”
“That they were going to kill you.” Her voice trembled, but she met my gaze with her characteristic defiance. “Have you looked in the mirror, dad?”
I didn’t say anything. Instead, I paced around the alley.
“Besides, Alan and I knew what we were getting into.”
“You had no right to put yourself at risk!” I stabbed a finger at her.
“We had every right!” She threw her hands up. “Look, dad, I know you love us, and it’s your highest duty in life to protect us, or whatever the hell it is you fathers repeat in the mirror to yourselves every morning, but you can’t do this on your own. We came to help you. And we did.”
“So, why didn’t Jake leave you at the house and go out himself?”
“Alan and I were better bait, and you know it. Powers or not, mom’s still a trained arbiter. The two of us? Much easier targets.”
I stared at her, even as I heard police sirens grow near. Finally, I sighed and looked away. “We don’t have time for this. We have to move. If anyone traced our flight, we could be in serious trouble very fast here.”
She followed me as I padded, barefoot, to the end of the alley. “Dad, you’re Gravita. Everyone in the country knows who you are. In fact, why aren’t we going to the nearest arbiter unit to collect those rogues?”
“We can’t do that.” I glanced back at her, then turned my attention back to the street in front of us. “You asked me where we were. The better question to ask would have been when we were.”
“What?”
“We went back.” I turned around to face her. “Twenty-four-and-a-half years. It’s the summer of 1993. Gravita’s not an arbiter yet. She’s a fifteen-year-old girl living in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if she’s registered or not, but regardless, I don’t have any of my documentation on me. And, even if I did, it wouldn’t make any sense for anyone here.”
Prime Identity Page 29
