Eternity's Echo

by H. C. Southwark

  But Cookie was better than that. She said, “Nobody escapes death. If it comes now, or comes later, it will come. This is your time. The most important moment of your life. Don’t waste it by wishing it away. Now, will you please tell me your name?”

  “Well,” choked the man, “Since you asked nicely. I am Moshe.”

  He smiled through bloody teeth. Ellie realized how young he was in that moment, not much older than herself, perhaps two or three years. He said his name like a charm, like speaking his magic word would prevent his own death.

  “I will remember you,” said Cookie. “You didn’t live and die for nothing. Just a secret between us, I’m pretty sure you guys win this.” The man laughed, in joy or bitterness or both, then breathing seemed too much effort for his body, and he was suffocating.

  Cookie reached forward and knocked his helmet off to stroke his hair. Ellie felt embarrassed, that this bodily contact violated personal space in an undefined way. But Cookie did not look concerned with such things as social niceties—

  And against Ellie’s breast, her pocket-watch thrummed.

  Time froze.

  A scream leapt to Ellie’s lips, but she held back. This is the past, she told herself, this sort of thing happened sometimes. A snapshot in time, is all. Reapers see this a lot. Remember Keith Smithson crossing the road, asking for the red-haired girl’s hand...

  But still, Ellie was terrified. What if she and the others had brought the end of the world like a curse, had affected the timeline here in the past? No—not possible—

  Calm down, she thought, wildly, feeling her heart flutter in tune with the struggle of her pocket-watch’s seconds hand to tick to the next. Time is moving. This is a brief interruption. It’s not possible to change the past. All this has already happened.

  And yet...

  The tableau was what calmed her.

  Cookie was frozen, too. Ellie had never seen a reaper frozen before. Uncontained by her gloves, Cookie’s fingers wove into the man’s hair, stitching them together.

  At her wrists the muddy color was fresh red, probably due to her wounds opening in the Holy Sepulchre, but this was not gruesome. Instead it connected her with the man, who was bloodied and battered and frozen, now, in the process of dying. They seemed to have become one entity, trying to comfort itself in this single moment of crisis.

  Her touch was working, too, because the creases between the man’s eyes eased, like the contact from another human being was enough to calm his fears if not his pain.

  They were beautiful, thought Ellie. She let out her breath, slow, even.

  In her coat, the pocket-watch thrummed, seconds hand resuming its march around the wires of the golden birdcage. Time resumed like it had never stopped.

  “We have to go,” said someone, but Ellie did not know if it was Shawn or Jude.

  Glancing up, she saw Shawn had Jude by the sleeve. We have what we came here for, she thought, and time is literally running out no matter how you look at things.

  Ellie put her hand on Cookie’s shoulder. Cookie tensed, but then relaxed and nodded, but in a way that spoke more to the man on the ground than to assent to Ellie returning her to the present. Good enough, Ellie considered.

  She pulled out her pocket-watch and put her thumb on the knob—

  A shout of alarm sounded. Ellie’s eyes caught the shouter’s even as her thumb moved, and she was looking at who had to be another reaper: a girl in a robe with dark curly hair, and in her hand was a golden reaper’s tool, a string of beads. She, too, had a ring of bruises around her throat. But unlike Ellie, she was not hiding them with a scarf.

  She looked as surprised to see Ellie as Ellie was to see her.

  Good thing that Ellie’s thumb was already in motion. The knob of the pocket-watch clicked. Jerusalem disappeared. The dying man’s body vanished. Their surroundings lit up with afternoon sun like someone had flicked a light switch.

  They were back in the stacks of Kramer Library.

  “Shit,” Ellie breathed out, feeling how wide her eyes were in her face.

  Jude was confused. “Wait... why are we back in the library?”

  “It’s standard,” said Shawn, flippant, though his tone sounded forced. “Going to the past usually’s for reaping. We go upstairs, to our assignment, to our assignment’s past, bring them upstairs. So the tools usually send you back to where you were two clicks ago whenever you go to the past and just click the knob again, without any settings.”

  “Huh,” said Jude. “That’s... efficient, actually.”

  “Yeah,” said Shawn, and there was a thump, as he kicked at the empty body he had shoved on the floor a while ago, in front of the couch. His ball and chain rattled. The body tumbled only as far as Shawn’s foot remained connected, having no momentum to continue rolling in the timelessness of the present.

  “Hey,” said Cookie, a bit crossly, still kneeling. She wiped at her eyes, pulled away from Ellie’s hand on her shoulder to stand up. “Don’t mess with them like that.”

  “Cool your horses,” said Shawn. “Nobody is in there.”

  “Still doesn’t make it right, you psycho.”

  “Hey,” said Jude, “Not to interrupt your lover’s quarrel, but why is he wearing that chain?”

  And that was the worst interpretation of two people’s relationship that Ellie had ever heard from anyone, ever. Turned out Jude was as bad with people as she was.

  Cookie and Shawn sputtered, but before they could tear into Jude and each other, Ellie demanded, “Would you morons cut it out? Do you not understand what just happened?”

  Three faces looked at her, varying shades of pissed off and surprised. Something about Ellie’s expression must have marked her as dangerous, because Cookie responded with a gentle, “What do you mean?”

  “We just broke a rule of time,” said Ellie. “We observed an observer.”

  More varied reactions. Cookie’s face became thoughtful, and Shawn sneered, but Jude responded with, “What observer?”

  “The other reaper!” Ellie nearly shouted. “That girl, in the past. She was coming to reap the soldier. And she saw all four of us just before we jumped back.”

  “You don’t know she was a reaper,” said Shawn. Ellie gave him an unimpressed look.

  “She was holding a reaper’s tool.”

  “Could have been anything,” said Shawn, but the objection was weak, because he knew as well as Ellie did that reapers recognized the presence of reaper’s tools.

  Jude was frowning. “So what happens now? Is there some kind of punishment?”

  “No,” said Ellie. “The rules of time are like physics. We just broke the law of gravity.”

  “I’d point out that while you can get around the laws of physics, like using aerodynamics to fly in spite of gravity, you can’t actually break them. That’s why they’re called laws.”

  “We observed an observer,” said Ellie, flatly. She felt her teeth dig into the insides of her mouth. “No, more than that. We were observed by an observer. We’re from the future, but we just affected the past. Created a paradox.”

  “Not necessarily,” Cookie said. “She only saw us for a bit. Just seeing an observer in the past isn’t enough; I mean, we talked with the Susan from a week ago.”

  “But that wasn’t breaking the rule,” said Ellie. “We know Susan and she knows us, plus we were in a place we often go. So if Susan sees us one extra time upstairs, then so what? Nothing about that affects the past. Remember how he—” gesturing to Shawn—“couldn’t go upstairs and be seen? Because his ball and chain gives him away as being from the future. Things from the future can’t affect the past.”

  “And that’s why you can’t observe any observer,” Jude mused, “because observers from the past, seeing someone from the future, could learn something about the future and potentially put that knowledge into action. Creating a time loop or paradox.”

  “Exactly,” Ellie spoke in a rus
h. “Susan seeing Shawn would make her question why he has a ball-and-chain. Which could affect the future. And in Jerusalem? 1967? We were strangers interfering with someone else’s assignment. I’m sure that reaper went around asking questions about who we were and what we were doing there. Who knows how something like that could affect the past?”

  “That’s stupid,” Shawn said. “Nothing must’ve happened. Because that breaks the rule.”

  “That’s what I’m saying!” Ellie shouted. “That we did break a rule of time!”

  All three of her companions started at her outburst, and gave quick glances among each other. Ellie stared at them, waiting for them to understand the implications of what had just happened. But they instead looked even more unconvinced.

  “Again, not necessarily,” Cookie said. “I mean, it makes sense that the other reaper would have gone around asking questions, but that either must not have happened, or not gone anywhere enough to be important. Because otherwise we could not have been allowed near her enough to be seen, and yet we were.”

  “Yeah,” Shawn said. “So we must have just been a weird thing she saw once and then forgot about because we weren’t important.”

  “But we were important,” Ellie said. “I mean... she was really surprised to see us. We interfered with her job. And Cookie—you told that soul your name! If she asks him anything while she reaps him then the people in Jerusalem 1967 know your name. And it can’t be hard for them to guess that you’re a reaper—before you even died!”

  “But it must have come to nothing,” Jude said. “Again, no observing the observer.”

  “Are you guys deaf or something?” Ellie demanded. “I’m saying we broke the rule!”

  “Ellie,” said Cookie, rather quietly, “Why is this so important?”

  “Because—” Ellie said, but cut herself off before she could complete the answer:

  Because if it is possible to break this rule, then it’s possible to break the other rules. So if you can sometimes observe the observer, then that means that maybe, just maybe...

  Sometimes you can go back and change the past.

  But no. She could not say that. The very idea was ludicrous beyond understanding. Because if anyone could change the past, then someone would have done that already. Some reaper would have paradoxed herself alive again.

  The words were unspoken, but they rattled around Ellie’s skull all the same. She felt the pressure narrowing her vision, darkening the edges, tunneling...

  “Ellie,” said Cookie, sounding alarmed, and Ellie realized that she was pulling her scarf so tight that her air was cut off. She loosed her grip but the scarf was caught, a knot unable to relax. Ellie clawed at the fabric, and Cookie stepped forward quickly to help.

  Her throat was on fire.

  Cookie steered her down, and she sank onto the nearby couch. There was residual wetness on her rear from falling on the grass of her family’s lawn only an hour ago. She sat for a while and just breathed, while there was a murmur of words around her.

  In her pockets, the shards of the Spindle were warm.

  Chapter Twenty: Race Around the Clock Face.

  The first thing Ellie heard, when she began to understand words again, was:

  “What I want to know,” said Jude, “is why it was so hard to find that dang shard.”

  “That was weird,” said Cookie. “I was thinking we would show up right on top of it. Kind of like how when reaper’s tools set themselves to a soul, and you go to the past, you’re always right in the perfect spot to observe the weighing of the heart.”

  “I don’t understand what you just said,” Jude said, “but okay. It was weird.”

  “Like the shard was inside the guy,” said Shawn, who had noticed the shard first. “It was coming from the bullet wound or in the blood or something.”

  “Perhaps that was all a fluke,” said Cookie. “They travel through time and seem kinda... insubstantial, I guess is the word? So this one happened to land inside of a person, maybe? And then him getting shot let it out.”

  “But that’s crazy,” Shawn said. “We can’t appear in walls or anything, but it can?”

  “The Spindle of Necessity wasn’t fully ‘there’ there in the church,” said Jude. “And you say it’s connected to time? Maybe it has properties we don’t fully understand.”

  “Then we’re screwed!” Shawn said. “When we go back we don’t land on top of it, so we have to look for it, and then it could be inside things. That’s crazy. We can’t win this.”

  That sounded too much like defeat. And so Ellie spoke up, “Do we have a choice?”

  A small pause in the conversation, as the other three looked her over, and she gazed back at them. When they did not immediately respond, Ellie dug the shard out of her left pocket and held it up. The dim light was a bit obscured by the man’s drying blood.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s kind of not glowy. But—” and she dug the other one out, and the light from both doubled. As she moved them closer, the effect was like from a magnet, the brightness increasing the closer they came—

  Hold on, Ellie realized. Not just light. They really do feel like they’re attracted...

  She held them a little too close, and some threshold must have been reached, because the force between them increased dramatically and she did not react in time to keep them apart. They snapped together with a click and would not separate.

  All three of Ellie’s companions drew in a breath. The glow from the shards faded back to a more manageable level—and now, as Ellie inspected, there was only one shard.

  “Like calls to like,” said Cookie, thoughtfully, repeating the demon’s words.

  “Hockeysticks,” muttered Jude. “We could have had twice the looking power.”

  Ellie blinked in confusion. Jude shrugged. “Well, there’s three time travelers here. That means we could split into three groups when we have three shards. We’ll just have to get another shard as a group, and then we can split up and really start.”

  The three reapers processed this plan for a moment, and then Shawn said, “Finally. College boy pulls his weight.” A beat. “Also, what kind of curse is ‘hockeysticks’?”

  “Right,” said Ellie, who was kicking herself for not thinking of this idea earlier. Not that the mere idea would have helped—she had not known that the shards would combine.

  “So let’s get started,” said Shawn, holding up his reaper’s tool, the faces of his cube puzzle eerie in the reduced glow of the Spindle’s shard. Ellie did the same, and Cookie took Jude by the wrist and followed. The three reaper’s tools spun and flicked, gears turning and clicking into place, and then three knobs were pressed.

  As they left, Ellie glanced at Cookie. Strange, she thought—Cookie looks worried.

  * * *

  Ellie had forgotten she was sitting. In the absence of support, her butt hit the ground with a thwack that left her glutes numb. She heard Shawn whoop and Cookie gasp.

  “I knew it!” Shawn laughed. “You’re such a dumbass bitch. That was so lame!”

  Cookie turned and struck out at Shawn, swiping the side of his face, but the blow was glancing and not hard enough to stop him from laughing. Ellie scrambled upright while Jude said, “Now, children, we have priorities...”

  Ellie took in their surroundings. They were in the middle of nowhere, in a long clearing like a tunnel, with railroad tracks in the middle stretching to both ends of the horizon. Framing both sides of the clearing was a grove of trees with big broad leaves that were in varying shades of yellow, orange, red. They tossed in the wind, impetuous. The sun was bright but the chill in the air was that of late morning.

  For a moment, just a quick moment, Ellie saw Cookie close her eyes and enjoy the feel of everything. This was a much nicer place than dusty, war-zone Jerusalem. The rustling of the leaves was like the earth was sighing, carefree.

  “Where are we?” said Jude. Cookie’s eyes opened and she loo
ked at the dials and gears of her compass. Shawn had stuffed his cube into his pocket already.

  “Ohio, I think,” Cookie read. “Late 2002.”

  “Huh,” said Jude, “I would be around a year old.”

  “Me too,” said Shawn, and Jude started, glanced at him curiously. Shawn shrugged.

  Ellie did not add that she, too, would have been a baby. And as for Cookie... she was a reaper for three decades by this point. That last fact felt odd to acknowledge.

  “The shard,” Ellie muttered, and held up the fragment in her left hand, her right stuffing her pocket-watch back into her coat. The warmth of the shard was just enough to be noticeable, but Ellie suspected that the things only heated when they were together.

  Probably it’s close to evaporating when it cools too far, thought Ellie. Or at least, the demon talked about something like that. Need to keep an eye on its temperature. And probably how much it glows, too. If it starts getting cold and dark... well.

  That could not be good. We’ll just have to return it to the Spindle before then.

  But another part of her was pleased. Everything was going as the demon had said it would—the shard had led them to another shard that was formerly a neighbor on the Spindle, at least she assumed so based on how they had so easily fitted together. Eventually they could find them all, if they were fast enough.

  If the stars did not fall anytime soon.

  Ellie walked faster, holding the shard high and waiting to feel any sort of attraction, heat, or see glowing. The others trailed after like searchers following a bloodhound.

  Just as Ellie thought, This isn’t going to work, they crested over a hill, and the shard glimmered, just enough to be noticeable. Ellie felt triumph rise within her.

  “Hold on,” said Cookie, looking down the hill to what lay ahead.

  A young man in jeans and a button-up shirt, with a pair of large headphones attached to a retro-looking ipod, was plodding along the train tracks. He was humming off-key, which Ellie thought was an accomplishment all its own, and paid them no attention as they approached. But the closer they came to him, the brighter the shard glowed.