by Patrick Lee
The voice that issued from the phone sounded scared. "Paige, it's Crawford. I'm at Secure Storage on B31. The attendants on duty called me down. There's something going on. Maybe you should come down here."
Her eyes locked on Travis's.
"Paige?" Crawford said.
"I'm here." She let go of Travis, sat up and swung her feet to the floor, hunting for her clothes. "Describe what's happening."
"We're not really sure. It has to do with the object you brought back from Zurich. The black cube."
"The amplifier," Paige said. She looked at Travis again.
In the background over the speakerphone, they could hear some kind of droning sound. Like someone humming, from deep in the diaphragm. It was the sound they'd heard on the ninth floor of 7 Theaterstrasse, just before everything went to hell.
"It's locked inside one of the vaults," Crawford said. "Where we put it yesterday morning. But it's making the sound you're probably hearing behind me. We haven't opened the vault yet. Not sure we should."
At that moment they heard a quick gap of silence over the phone, and Crawford said, "Paige, hold on, I've got a call from Defense Control. I'll put it on conference so I don't lose you." He clicked out for a second, and then they heard him say, "Defense go ahead."
A woman spoke. "Mr. Crawford, we have a situation up top. We're not sure how this is happening, but there's a radar contact directly above us, about forty thousand feet up, and falling. Computer says it's human bodies."
"Divers?" Paige said.
"We think so. They're dropping at around two hundred miles per hour, consistent with terminal velocity for humans tucked into a bullet fall. Radar didn't see a plane, so it was either an ultra-high-altitude bail-out from something like a U2, or a stealth, if that's possible."
Travis saw Paige's eyes narrow at that, but only slightly. Pilgrim had the Whisper; of course it was possible.
"The diver formation went into a sparse pattern right after the first contact, and the radar lost them, but with the thermal cams on the chain guns, we should be able to track them manually when they get low enough. With your permission, sir, we'll just kill everyone up there."
"Do it," Crawford said. The bass-range hum continued on his end of the call.
Sufficiently rattled by whatever the hell was going on down there, Paige stood, her clothes still balled up in her hand.
"Did anything trigger the amplifier?" Paige said. "Any experiment going on nearby, anything like that?"
"Nothing," Crawford said. "It just came on. Like it was on a timer."
A thought hit Travis. Hit him hard enough to make him sit up and put his feet to the floor. Paige turned, seeing his expression.
"Crawford, this is Travis Chase," he said. "What entities are in the vaults closest to the amplifier?"
There was a pause as Crawford processed the fact that Travis was speaking over Paige's phone at four in the morning. Then he answered. "I don't have that information in front of me. Hold on." They heard him talking to one of the attendants in the background.
But Travis already knew the answer. He stood from the bed and crossed to Paige's desk, looking for a pencil and something to write on. Paige followed, dropping her clothes behind her.
"What is it?" she said.
Before he could answer, the woman at Defense Control spoke up again. "I see them on the thermals now. Barely. Initializing ground cannons for manual targeting."
"We need to write ourselves a message," Travis said, "so we'll know what happened."
He pulled open a drawer, found a dull pencil, and grabbed a printout of some kind, turning it over to write on the back.
"What do you mean?" Paige said.
Crawford spoke up over the phone. "Got the list. The vault nearest the amplifier contains Entity 0436, Jump Cut."
Just what Travis had expected. The thing Paige had told him about in Zurich. The thing that was exactly like the Ares, except for its effect. Which was that it killed the past three days' memory, and left you feeling like you'd just blinked and missed that time.
Paige's mouth fell open slowly. Head shaking a little from side to side. Understanding. Unwanted understanding.
"If the Whisper can predict the lotto," Travis said, "it can predict which vault the amplifier would end up in."
"Oh my God," Paige said.
He returned his eyes to the paper, his mind laboring for what to write. Then Crawford screamed on the phone, and Travis knew it was too late. An instant later Paige's bedroom flared with bright green light, like every room in Border Town, Travis was sure. On instinct he threw his arms around Paige, as if he could protect her from it. The light seemed to shine right through their bodies
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Travis had been lying awake in his tent, listening to wolves howling somewhere along the ridge. He'd read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey-and other wolves-as to their distance. It worked on humans, too. These sounded at least as close as Suddenly he found his eyes shut, and a wild flash of light, like lightning but with a green cast to it, shone bright enough to be visible through his eyelids. It vanished almost at once, though he hardly noticed, because by then he'd realized someone was with him, holding on to him but at the same time struggling He opened his eyes to find himself standing in a room he'd never seen before. The struggling figure wrenched away from him.
It was a very beautiful-and very naked-young woman.
She was holding her right upper arm tightly, her face just now easing from what looked like a contortion of agony; Travis was sure he hadn't grabbed that arm or even bumped it. He had only an instant to consider these things, and then she was screaming at him, her eyes as bewildered as his own must look.
"What is this?" she shouted. "What the fuck is this? Where's my father?"
He reflexively stepped back from her, saying he didn't know, then repeating it; it was the only answer he had for her questions-or his own.
All at once she seemed to recognize the room, though that only confused her further, and then her eyes came to rest on a backpack and rifle leaning against the wall, and before Travis could register the danger, she'd lunged for the weapon, shouldered it and leveled it at his face.
"What the fuck have you people done?"
He had nothing he could say to her. He kept his eyes steady on hers, and shook his head, hands out from his sides to present no threat.
She racked the rifle's action and advanced a step, forcing him back against the wall. In the same moment her gaze dropped; Travis followed the look, and realized he was naked too. He met her eyes again, and saw them narrow as she looked around at the room once more, and then at herself-she noticed her own lack of clothing-as she struggled to piece the moment together. Her aggression faltered; the rifle didn't.
Somewhere nearby, agitated voices had been issuing from a speaker; now they stopped, and a single voice-an older man's voice-said, "Did I hear Paige?"
The woman-Paige, apparently-turned toward the sound, which Travis could now see came from a speakerphone. "Crawford?"
"Paige, where are you?"
She hesitated, as if too confused to say aloud what she knew. "I'm… in my room. Where are you?"
The man's answer was equally tentative. "I thought I was in the conference room, but… I'm down at Secure Storage now-"
A new sound over the phone line interrupted him: a soft computer voice saying, "Inbound… Inbound…"
For the first time, Paige lowered the rifle. That repeating word, coming from the speaker, had taken her full attention. She turned and moved toward the phone.
"Who's in Defense Control?" she said.
A woman answered, sounding as stressed as everyone else. "This is Karen-Karen Lowe. I'm sure I'm not supposed to be up here right now, I was in my room-"
"Forget about that," Paige said. "What's the inbound?"
"Nothing. The radar's blank, all fields. It looks like the gun cameras are up, but I don't know why, there's nothi
ng on them-"
Other voices spoke in the background, and then Karen said, "Okay, yeah. What are they?"
Travis watched Paige lean in close to read the lighted display of an alarm clock. She reacted to it, and whispered, "Three days…"
"I count at least ten of them up there," Karen said, to someone on her end of the call.
"Karen, tell me what you're seeing," Paige said.
"We don't know. They're not aircraft. The thermals are reading them at body temperature; they could be divers, but… are they hostiles, or-"
"Kill them," Paige said. Travis could see in her eyes that she'd jettisoned the confusion for the moment. "Get everyone at the controls and start shooting, right now. And someone hit the dead switch for all the containment levels. Lock everything down and then smash the control boards."
If the people on the other end of the call were confused, her direct tone got them past it. Travis heard alarms begin blaring, and then what sounded like someone following her orders about smashing things. He heard computer cases breaking open, fragile components inside being shattered by some blunt, heavy thing. A chair, maybe.
"Are you shooting yet?" Paige said.
"We're targeting," Karen said. "Ready in five, four, three-"
Suddenly Travis felt a jolt pass through the floor, and then the building shook from the bass wave of an explosion, somewhere high above.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The speakerphone went to static. Paige stared at it for less than a second, and then grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and threw them at Travis. By the time he caught them, she was reaching for her own clothes.
"You seem to know more than I do," he said. "Mind sharing?"
"I have a guess," she said. "With gaps."
"More than I have." He stepped into the jeans and pulled them up.
Paige buttoned her own pair, then slipped her shirt over her head and grabbed the rifle again.
"Do the words Tangent or Breach mean anything to you?" she said.
"No."
"Then I couldn't explain it if we had an hour-" The hum of an automatic weapon sounded through the nearest air vent. "And we don't have an hour."
She opened the cabinet front of her nightstand and took out a.45, along with two spare magazines.
"Do you know how to shoot a gun?" she said.
He nodded. She took a step toward him, then stopped, sizing him up one last time. More gunfire, and a small popping explosion, transmitted through the ductwork. She came forward and handed him the pistol and ammo. Already she was on her way out of the room, grabbing the backpack and shouldering it as she went.
He followed, as his most obvious question finally surfaced. "How the hell did I get here?"
Paige checked the hallway outside her bedroom, and looked satisfied that it was clear. "I'm pretty damn curious about that myself," she said, and moved out of the room. 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 s
cream 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.
