by Patrick Lee
With the rifle shouldered, Paige made her way toward the living room, ready to kill anything that appeared in front of her. She wasn’t crazy about turning her back on the man with her—she realized she hadn’t even asked him his name—but the situation demanded a few risks. Whoever he was, her own choice of attire a few moments earlier—none—seemed to imply that she trusted him.
The living room was clear. Beyond the door, shouts echoed along the primary corridor.
How could she have possibly made it back to Border Town alive? She’d been strapped down on a makeshift torture table, probably halfway dead, surrounded by enemies in the most remote place she’d ever seen. How had three days taken her from that place to her bedroom, standing around in the buff with some guy she’d never met before, who hadn’t heard of Tangent?
Had her father survived, too?
Hope and fear pulled her concentration in opposite directions, neither useful right now. Facing the door, she blocked off both feelings, then glanced over her shoulder at the stranger.
“Don’t shoot anything I’m not already shooting at,” she said, then added, “unless it shoots at you first.”
The guy shrugged, not even trying to hide his disorientation.
She found herself staring at him a second longer. He wasn’t bad-looking. Then she turned and crossed to the door, and with a steadying breath, pulled it open and stepped through.
People were running in the corridor, all of them Tangent personnel. They were confused, partly by the explosions but more so, Paige thought, by their own fractured memory. Only a few—those who belonged to the detachments—carried weapons, but even these were looking to others for direction, and finding no help.
If her guess—her guess with gaps—was right, every one of them had just skipped over three days of memory in an instant. Three days. The interval of the Jump Cut. How the hell had it affected the entire building?
And how had Pilgrim made that happen? Obviously, the raid was coming from his people. Pilgrim himself was probably with them.
The Jump Cut’s effect should only last a few minutes. That was the upside. The downside: Pilgrim would know that. Would plan for that. Would seek to take control of Border Town in those few minutes.
Down the hall, smoke poured from the seams of the elevator doors. At that moment another explosion, from somewhere in the uppermost levels, set the walls vibrating. People nearby flinched, maybe expecting the ceiling to come down. Maybe it would. Paige noticed a few of them staring at her as if she were a ghost. On some level she understood the logic of that, but it was one more thing she couldn’t afford to dwell on right now.
What would Pilgrim have to do, to get control right away?
That was easy. The nerve center of the building, Security Control, was right below Defense Control. With the Whisper—there was no question he had it with him—he would know the codes for every system in the building. Systems that could be used against them easily.
She turned to the nearest group of armed operators, meaning to call them to her and lead them to the stairs. They could reach Security Control in about sixty seconds. But before she could say anything, jets of white gas erupted from the ventilation system overhead. For a moment she thought the fire suppression system had kicked on and begun pumping halon through the vents. Then she got her first smell of it.
Not halon.
Of course. Of course Pilgrim would trigger this system. So fucking simple a move.
She spun, thinking to shepherd the others into her residence, already aware that it was a dead option: the vents in there were pumping the stuff out too. She met their eyes, one by one—some of them were already succumbing to the gas—and settled on the stranger’s gaze for some reason. Confused as he must be, he had a tight leash on his fear. She wondered again who he was.
Then her knees gave, and just as her vision failed, she saw him step forward to catch her, and then everything was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Travis woke to find his memory restored, the three lost days reinserted into his past. He woke to Paige looking like she’d been crying about something, and after a moment he thought he knew what it was. He woke to the coughing of five dozen other survivors of the attack, bound alongside the two of them in a large conference room.
And he woke to Aaron Pilgrim standing over him. Though Tangent had never shown him a photo of the man, he recognized him. He could not for the life of him say why.
Four men with rifles were watching the captives. Pilgrim got their attention with a look, then indicated Travis and Paige.
“These two.”
Two of the gunmen slung their weapons and dragged Paige, then Travis, ten feet out from the wall along which the rest were arrayed.
Pilgrim pointed out eight others; they included Crawford as well as Dr. Fagan, the red-haired woman who’d sought to establish communication with the far side of the Breach. Pilgrim’s men dragged the eight of them out onto the open floor, into a group with Travis and Paige.
Pilgrim considered the ten of them for a moment, nodded to himself, and said, “Kill the rest.”
“No!” Paige screamed.
The shooting started before her scream had reverberated off the walls. Pilgrim’s men went down the line in rapid succession, putting a single shot through the forehead of each bound victim. Travis felt Paige’s body spasm against him with each rifle crack, each pleading cry from the condemned, each hopeless effort to squirm left or right in the last second. When it ended, she was shaking beside him with quiet sobs. Bound, Travis could offer no consolation but to lean closer to her. She responded, pressing against his shoulder as she cried.
Over her head, Travis saw a steel box sitting on the conference table, a cube about ten inches in each dimension. It was latched, and had a handle bolted to the top. A miniature of the giant version aboard Box Kite. This one was closed, and from the seam that ran around its midsection, a sheet of blue light projected outward, like the ring plane of some cube-shaped planet.
Pilgrim turned to face the chosen survivors. His eyes found Travis and stayed on him.
“You’re a fucking puppet for that thing,” Travis said.
“It may call the plays,” Pilgrim said. “But it’s my game.”
Travis studied his expression when he said it. There was no bluff in his eyes. The man really believed what he’d just said. Believed the Whisper was serving his interests, and not the other way around.
“But who are you to talk about puppets?” Pilgrim said. By his tone, he seemed to think Travis should understand that statement in some deeper way. Then he smiled. “Right, right. You wouldn’t remember meeting me, would you?”
Travis only stared. If that was a joke, he didn’t get it. Wasn’t sure he cared to, either.
“Whatever,” Pilgrim said. “You’re supposed to be here, so I guess everything’s right on track. Good enough for me.”
Pilgrim’s cell rang. He answered. In the stretched silence of the room, Travis could make out the voice on the other end clearly.
“Everything we want is shut behind the blast doors,” the caller said. “The locking computers are smashed. Can’t override the codes.”
“I know,” Pilgrim said.
“Gonna take at least an hour to drill through those heavy doors into the Primary Lab.”
“An hour and fifteen,” Pilgrim said, not guessing. His eyes went calmly to the Whisper’s box on the table. “Just get them working on it. Are the techs started on getting the defenses back up?”
“They’re on it. Lotta problems. Blast took out a bunch of critical shit. They’re re-threading the array by hand, so, half an hour, give or take.”
Pilgrim ended the call and put the phone away.
“Good enough,” he said again. He nodded to two of his four men and said, “Stay and watch them.” Then he strode from the room without even a glance at the executed bodies. The other two gunmen followed close behind him. One, a guy built like a bouncer, six-three and probably th
ree hundred pounds, hefted the Whisper’s box and carried it along.
Paige grew silent. Just breathing shallowly now, but no longer crying.
It’d been only a minute since Pilgrim had left. The bodies were still bleeding. Paige’s backpack rested against one of the conference table’s legs, where someone had thrown it. They hadn’t opened it. Hadn’t cared. It occurred to Travis that the Doubler was still inside it. So was the Medic—not that it mattered. The bodies along the wall were far beyond that entity’s capacity to help.
Still, staring at the backpack, he saw a move he could make, if the opportunity came.
Travis watched the two guards without looking directly at them. They were overconfident. Not taking their job seriously. Ten prisoners, bound in a cluster in the middle of a wide-open floor. These men weren’t even weighing the possibility of a captive doing anything stupid.
Only their wrists were restrained. The bonds were zip ties made of some type of metal. Aluminum or steel, probably. They wouldn’t break—that much was certain.
But they would cut skin.
Travis needed both guards looking away. One already was; he was standing in the doorway, staring off down the hall. Maybe the smell of the blood had gotten to him. The other wandered the room, his gaze going everywhere, and nowhere in particular. He was never quite looking away long enough for Travis to do what he needed to do.
Another minute passed. Travis thought about what Pilgrim had said.
You’re supposed to be here.
The Whisper wanted him here. Had always wanted him here. Had arranged for it. And what else had the guy said? That they’d met before? Given the Whisper’s amnesia effect, that was plausible. It could’ve happened anytime. Any random day in Fairbanks. Or in prison.
He was part of the Whisper’s plan, somehow. And Pilgrim knew that. That was why he’d included him among the survivors. Why he needed any survivors, who knew? Maybe Pilgrim didn’t even know. Maybe that was just another play he’d let the Whisper dictate.
But Travis’s importance to the plan was something he could use against these guards.
He’d lost sight of the wanderer. He turned his head slightly, and saw that the man had settled into place at a dry-erase board that took up most of the wall beside the door. It was covered with random scribbles of information, no doubt most or all of it concerning Breach entities. The guy seemed pretty absorbed by it. He’d probably been with Pilgrim for years, hearing all about Border Town and the Breach, and waiting for today. Well, tough shit for him if it all ended badly in the next sixty seconds.
Travis took a hard, silent breath. Set his teeth firmly together.
Then he pulled his hands apart with all of his strength.
The metal tore into the skin at once. Like razor wire. Then, deeper. Cutting not just skin but muscle, fat tissue. Cleaving across his tendons. The loop around his left wrist was the tighter of the two: within seconds he felt the metal pull taut against the wrist bone, and stop. It would go no farther. The loop around his right, looser by maybe two notches, eased over the wrist bone, slippery with the blood it’d already drawn. Beyond the wrist, it was home free. Everything else would compress, if only barely. The fit was still tight enough for the bladed loop to carve deep, though. At the pressure points—his base knuckles and the pad of his thumb—it grated against the bone, taking the meat off like a knife against a drumstick. If there was a limit to physical pain, this was it.
The loop came free with a jerk. His left elbow hit Paige, and she turned to him, her eyes still soaked and bloodshot. He looked quickly for the guards. Both were still looking away. Down the hall. Across the note board.
Travis brought his hands forward into his lap. The right one looked even worse than it felt. Thick ribbons of skin and muscle hung ragged, blood draining from the wounds in pencil-thick streams.
Even after the carnage Paige had just witnessed, she reacted to the sight. Only for a second. Then she got control. Looked at him, questioning. No way to explain to her what he was about to do. If he tried to rationalize it even in his own mind, he’d only convince himself it was a shit idea. It was a shit idea, but it had the benefit of no competition.
He got a bearing on the guards again. Both still looking away. He tipped forward into a crawl, grateful for his lack of shoes to scuff the floor, and started toward the backpack.
There was no point in even watching the guards. No move he could make in response if he saw them turn right now. It would just be over.
He kept his eyes on the backpack instead. Kept his focus on being silent, and moving as fast as that constraint allowed.
He reached the pack. Took hold of the zipper. Eased it open. Blood still streaming from his hand. When the pack was open wide enough, he reached in. Felt for what he needed, guided by his memory of what it looked like. He felt it, and gripped it with his shredded hand. Drew it from the pack and stood. The two guards were more or less centered in his vision, twenty feet away, ten feet apart. Both of their rifles slung on their shoulders, two full seconds from being ready to fire.
“You’re covered,” Travis said, his voice ringing hard in the dead space of the room.
The guards flinched and turned, and found themselves staring at the Medic in his hand. Hard to distinguish from a gun, even up close. And they weren’t up close. Neither man even tried for his rifle. Travis thought there was another reason for that, beyond the effective bluff of the Medic.
Pilgrim really did want him alive. They knew it. The indecision was etched in their eyes.
“I’d rather not risk the sound of a shot,” Travis said. “Otherwise you’d be dead already. Weapons down and you live.”
The guards traded a look. Hesitated another second. Then the one in the doorway complied, slowly unslinging his gun, bending low and setting it on the tile. The second did the same.
Travis indicated the floor in front of him. “Slide them.”
They did. Both rifles came to rest within feet of him.
“Now lie flat,” he said. “Arms away from your bodies.”
A few seconds later they were pressed like insect specimens to the floor, faces down. Travis considered the options. He really didn’t want to shoot. No telling how far away the nearest hostile was, or how far the sound would carry.
He set the Medic down, picked up one of their rifles, and crossed the space toward them, still moving silently to keep them unaware of his position. He stopped just shy of standing between them, reversed his hold on the rifle, and rammed it down onto each man’s head, the second guy reacting and turning just enough to take the blow on his temple instead of behind the ear.
Both of them out cold.
Not good enough.
Travis saw a jackknife clipped to the second man’s belt. It offered a quicker solution than physically breaking their heads apart, as much as he might have enjoyed the catharsis of doing that. He took the knife, opened it, and cut each gunman’s throat, carotid to carotid.
Still holding it, he turned to the others. He saw more relief than revulsion in their eyes. He tested the knife’s blade on the bind that still hung from his left wrist. It did nothing. It would take heavy-duty cutters to free Paige and the rest. He searched the guards’ bodies for a pair of them, but came up empty. And just as he finished, the first guard’s cell phone rang.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
And rang. And rang. Travis looked at Paige. She looked back, eyes wide, unsure for a second. Then very sure.
“There’s no time to free us,” she said. “Take my backpack and get to the surface through the elevator shaft. Use my phone to call for—”
He shook his head, moving toward her and the others, the guard’s phone still ringing behind him. “There’s gotta be a way to get you guys free—”
“Listen to me,” she said. “They’ll be here in sixty seconds. Take the pack. Go to the elevator, press the call button three times, then hold it for a five-count. The doors will open on the empty shaft.”
“Ten o
f us against them, he said, we can double the guards’ rifles and ammo—”
“And Pilgrim will turn on the gas again,” she said.
He had no counter for that.
She was right.
Shit.
He felt every good option break off and fall away, like pieces of blacktop over a washed-out cavity in the soil.
“They blew the roof off the elevator shaft when they came in,” Paige said. “You can get all the way out. You’ll see the inset ladder when you open the doors. When you reach the surface, call the ninth number on my phone’s list. By then, you’ll understand why.”
He stared at her. Stared at the others, too. They looked back at him, almost as lost as the dead that lined the wall.
He had to leave them. It wasn’t even a choice. That didn’t take away the guilt, though.
The crucial seconds were racing by. He shook the trance and looked down at his still bleeding right hand. The blood trail would give him away. He stooped and grabbed the Medic from where he’d dropped it. Held it in his left hand. Aimed it at his right, the way Paige had aimed it at the wounded man in Zurich.
He pulled the trigger, and found out he’d been wrong a few minutes earlier when carving his hand with the metal loop. That hadn’t been the limit to how bad pain could be. Not even close.
His breath rushed out. The edges of his vision darkened. He held on. Stayed on his feet. Looked down at his hand as the pain faded. The thing hadn’t fixed him perfectly—skin and muscle still hung in strips—but the wounds had hardened over, as if cauterized without any sign of being burned.
He grabbed the backpack, shouldered it and turned to the others.
“Ninth number on my phone,” Paige said again. “And don’t get killed.”
Travis managed a smile. No more seconds to burn. He burned one anyway. Knelt and kissed her. Soft, intense, fast. Then he stood, looked at her for another half second, and ran from the room, grabbing one of the guards’ rifles as he went.
