Convergence

by Alex Albrinck

  She nodded. “I’ve had pretty solid medical care for most of my life.”

  Adam smiled, but the smile dissolved quickly. “You know what I have to do now, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  Gena tensed. She knew exactly what he meant, because one couldn’t hear his revelations without realizing the implications in a scenario like this. “I understand it. I respect it. But… I don’t like it.” She paused. “But after that display of Energy power earlier… I’ll struggle to worry about you just a bit more than I might have otherwise. As for the rest of them? I wish them… if not luck, then at least a peaceful ending.”

  Adam nodded. “Then I’ll be off.”

  Athos grabbed his arm. “Take me with you.”

  Adam looked surprised. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “The rest of them don’t know that I’ve… changed. I can use that knowledge and my position as Hunter to slow the fighting. I might be able to spread some of that conversion medicine you used on me so effectively.” He paused, and his face took on a pleading look. “Please. I want to help. I want to try to start to make things right.”

  Gena frowned. “I was just stabbed by someone we were convinced was on our side and nearly died, Adam. I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  Athos looked at Adam. “Do whatever you must to convince yourself. I can’t stay here when I can do far more good elsewhere.”

  Adam studied him with a fierce intensity, and Athos seized his head, grunting in pain. Adam’s face relaxed, and Athos gradually lowered his hands. “I trust you, Victor. Are you ready?”

  The ex-Hunter nodded as Gena stared at him, with a look that clearly said that she doubted the Hunter’s sincerity.

  Adam leaned over to kiss Gena on the cheek. “I hope we can talk a bit more when I get back.”

  She nodded, trying to avoid the tears. “Make it quick, mister, or I might come looking for you.”

  Adam grabbed the arm of his former enemy and the two men vanished.

  XXVI

  FIL STARED UP INTO HER eyes, scarcely daring to breathe or believe. “It… but I saw… how?”

  Sarah smiled as she worked the net. “Nice to see you again, too, Fil.”

  The tears started flowing freely down Fil’s face as Anna knelt beside him. She didn’t touch the net, but her smile warmed him. “It’s okay, Dad. There’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything.” She nodded once, as if convincing herself of something. “Including the question of why.”

  Arthur, who’d started realizing that the numbers and momentum weren’t on his side, looked at the group with concern. “Dad? Did she call the Destructor… Dad?” He shook his head. “There are so many Oath violators walking around this room that Aramis would die—” He snapped his mouth shut suddenly and turned to glance briefly at the ground by his side.

  Will recognized genuine sadness in a man he’d thought incapable of such an emotion. “Aramis didn’t make it?”

  “It’s all your fault!” Arthur snapped. He took a deep breath, steadying himself, but the hatred for Will burned the air around him.

  Will glanced at William the Assassin, whose lifeless eyes stared up from his disembodied head, and shook his head. “I’m sorry for your losses.”

  Arthur’s face crinkled. He seemed unable to determine Will’s sincerity or how to respond if he were. Instead, he pointed at the women who’d arrived with Will. “Who are they?”

  “My daughter-in-law and granddaughter.”

  Arthur’s eyes widened, stunned at the news. “But… but your son… he’s the Destructor!”

  Will winced. “No, Arthur. He’s my son.”

  “But Abaddon… Abaddon killed the Destructor’s family. He told me so himself. He said the threat of their deaths let loose the destruction around the globe. He told me that he executed the Oath-breakers—the wife and daughter of the man we know as the Destructor—and transmitted that video to the man himself, and that upon seeing their deaths the man let loose sufficient Energy to trigger the tsunami that decimated this Island. How…?”

  Sarah stood and moved toward Arthur, pointing the knife at his face. Arthur took a step back, fearful of the ghost before him. “Perhaps your Assassin lied to you.”

  Fil looked up, startled. “What?”

  Arthur sneered. “My Assassin can’t lie to me, little lady.” His eyes flicked to the lifeless forms of the two Assassins on the floor. “More accurately, they couldn’t lie to me. If he told me it happened, it happened.” He turned toward Will and jabbed a finger at his long-time nemesis, as best he could with a knife pointed at him. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”

  Sarah turned away and moved back to Fil, where she resumed sawing through the net. “Hurry,” Fil whispered, his eyes flashing anger at Arthur. “Get me out of here so I can—”

  “Shh,” Sarah whispered. “Enough people have died today. He’s no longer a threat to anyone but himself.”

  Will glanced at Arthur and moved toward the Leader. “Guilty as charged, I suppose.”

  Arthur threw his hands up. “Doesn’t anyone stay dead around here? How many times do I have to kill you people before you’ll stay dead? It’s… it’s like you’re a family of cockroaches!”

  “Keep talking to my family like that,” Fil hissed, “and I can promise you there’ll be someone in this room who’ll stay quite dead.” His voice strengthened as Sarah was able to pull additional strands of the thick netting free.

  Arthur’s face flushed. “You really ought to teach your kid some manners, Stark.”

  Will glanced at Fil over his shoulder. “Fil, the next time you threaten him, please address him as either Mr. Lowell or Grandfather.”

  “I’ll do that, Dad.”

  He turned back to Arthur. “Is this my doing? In part. It’s a lot of people’s doing. We experimented with cloning. Full people. It wasn’t perfect, though; our clones died within a week of their births. But it was useful enough, to a degree.”

  Arthur’s face lit with understanding. “The casino. That’s why you weren’t dead.”

  Will nodded. “Correct. The Hunters did their job. The clone died. I was there, well hidden, until the sword struck. I stayed invisible and teleported my clone away to a hidden place where he could die in peace.”

  The net began to fall away even more, and Fil was able to sit up, aided by the first touch of his wife in decades. “Clones? You built clones? Of my wife and daughter? But—”

  “Adam told me enough, before I went back in time. Not everything, mind you. But enough. He told me that an Assassin—not William, but another one—would murder my son’s wife and young child, in a manner similar to the circumstances in which I believed you and Hope had died. It wasn’t much to work with. But it was enough.”

  Arthur stared. “Adam? But Adam… how could he tell you something about the Cataclysm? He was dead by the time… oh.” He scowled. “You cloned him too, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Will said. “Adam, the man you knew for centuries, had a son whom he named Adam. Since neither man aged beyond physical maturity, they looked and sounded nearly identical. Try to keep up, Arthur.”

  Arthur shook his head. “If Adam had a son, I didn’t know him at all.”

  Will sighed. “I felt the same way,” he muttered. Then he raised his voice to its normal volume level. “In any event, Adam—the son—warned of the murders forthcoming. I made certain I was the only one who knew, though.” He glanced at his son. “I especially needed to be certain that Fil didn’t know what would happen.”

  Fil shuddered beneath the weakening netting, and he stared at his father. “But why? Why would you prevent me from knowing?” Fil asked.

  “Because you wouldn’t have married me,” Sarah replied, her voice gentle. “If you’d known that our marriage would eventually lead to my death, and Anna’s as well, there’s a chance you would have avoided marrying me altogether. But you had to go through with it.”

  Fil turned to look at his wife, his eyes m
isting over. Even in his frustration at the news that his family had been saved without his knowledge, he couldn’t stop the joy seeping back into his eyes as he looked at Sarah or Anna. “So he made clones of both of you?”

  Anna nodded. “Adam’s clue was more specific than I think he realized. His words, his inflection, suggested that the attack was very similar to the Assassin’s attack when you were a boy. Grandpa”—she winked at Will—“realized I’d be about six years old when it happened. When I was five, he came by and told us what would happen, and helped us block our thoughts about it when you were around. He wanted us to know why he was doing what he’d done. Mom knew Grandpa was familiar with the future, so it wasn’t a tough sell. Grandpa came by at least once a week while you were working and replaced us with our clones. Once I turned six, he did that every day. When the day of the attack came… he took us to Eden to keep us out of harm’s way.”

  “I helped too, Daddy,” Hope said, and her scathing tone caused Arthur to jump. “Will and I made new clones every three days for almost six months. Will worked to swap Sarah and Anna and their clones in and out of the house, and I watched over the real versions. They’ve been an integral part of creating the sequence of events leading to what’s happening here today.”

  Fil pulled the net off, finally free of the damaging effects. He felt the fire roar within as his Energy stores began rebuilding. Porthos’ eyes widened at the rapidity of the regeneration. “Wait. You were there?” he asked Hope. “You were near my home, helping with everything?”

  She nodded hesitantly, hearing the accusatory tone. “It was brutally difficult, Fil. I wanted so badly to go into the house, to see you, to talk to you. But I knew I’d give up the story about why I was there, and—”

  “And I’d do something to mess it all up,” Fil said. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. His face tightened. “With all that knowledge… with Sarah and Anna both alive all this time…why? Why did you let me suffer for so long? Why not tell me the truth so I didn’t spend decades of suicidal grief blaming myself for something that didn’t happen?”

  The pain on Will’s face aged him so that he looked far nearer his true age than his usual mid-thirties. “We couldn’t,” Will said, his voice cracking.

  “You couldn’t,” Fil said, shaking his head in disbelief. The air crackled as his anger rose. “And because you couldn’t, I unintentionally killed a few billion people.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Will shouted, staring down his son. Fil, surprised, took a step back. “Don’t you understand? This is why I mocked your statement about how we’d been living in freedom a few weeks ago. We’ve all been living under this anvil, altering our lives and decisions to preserve future history for so long that we have no idea what it’s like to be free. If I were truly free, Fil, do you really think this is how I’d have it play out? Do you think I’d do anything other than stop the abduction… or at least clue you in that they were safe until we tracked Abaddon down and took him down? Do you really think that I, if I were truly free, would let you suffer?” He took a step toward his son, and Fil was stunned to see tears in his father’s eyes. “No, I wouldn’t. And that’s just one decision taken out my hands over the centuries. Do you think I wanted to let the scumbag Hunters—?”

  “Hello, still in the room,” Porthos muttered. He’d gotten to his feet and was pacing slowly around.

  “—beat me nearly to death? No. Do you think I wanted to let all the people die that I knew would die? Do you think I didn’t want to stop all of the wars and all of the death and destruction accompanying them? I wanted to stop all of it, prevent all of it, but I couldn’t, Fil. Why? Because I was a slave to the future I knew, the one I had to preserve, because…” He swallowed. “For the longest time, it was the future I had to preserve because I had to let all of that happen to make sure you could be here today. But I guess if I’m honest with myself, at least some part of it was the fear that if I made those tweaks to history I might have made, I’d end up preventing my own birth. Cowardly? Perhaps.” He shook his head before turning to look at Arthur. “One thing I’ve come to realize over those centuries, Arthur, is this: There’s been one man at the heart of most of the suffering my family has endured over the centuries. And that’s why the instant my younger self vanished in that time machine, Hope and I were prepared to launch this assault. Because I’m tired of living as the slave of future history. And I have no interest in living in fear now that I don’t know what the future will bring.” He glanced back at Fil, who’d stood up and fell into an embrace he’d thought dead these past fifteen centuries. “If I could do it all over again, Fil, I’d change one thing, and that one change would make all the difference. I’d make certain that the Aliomenti never evolved into anything but what the Alliance is now. That’s all I want now, a combining, a convergence of the groups into one, living in true freedom and using our unique abilities and perspectives to make the world a better place.”

  Fil looked at his father for several minutes, assessing his words, before finally looking at Arthur. “It’ll take me time to fully understand everything, Dad. But there’s one thing I know for certain.” He pointed at Arthur Lowell. “That man has threatened my family for the last time.” He cocked his head. “Shall we take him down together?”

  Will offered a grim nod in reply, and father and son, fire burning in their eyes moved toward Arthur. Fil knew, as did his father, that for a man like Arthur, death by Energy was too kind.

  He needed to die by the most human means possible.

  They advanced on Arthur, who seemed to recognize that he was trapped. Will shared a truth with Fil: Arthur couldn’t escape them, for though he was capable of teleportation, he feared being lost in the displacement between locations so greatly that he refused to ever utilize that skill. He could run. But he’d never outrun the Stark men.

  Arthur’s eyes suddenly widened. “No!” he screamed, his eyes focused on something behind the men approaching to finalize his execution.

  Fil thought it might be a trick. But the news about Arthur and teleportation suggested the risk of looking was minimal. He turned around, hearing his father’s breath leave him as he recognized what he was seeing a fractional second before Fil.

  Porthos had quietly slid himself to Abaddon’s fallen sword in the distraction of the meandering conversations. Fil realized that in the distraction of the moment, he’d let the nano cocoon lapse, a fact Porthos had seized upon. As Will and Fil advanced on Arthur, as Sarah and Anna moved forward to watch the death of the man who’d ordered their execution, they’d left one member of their party unprotected.

  Porthos had Abaddon’s sword raised high above Hope’s head, held in his only remaining hand. As the blade descended, Fil realized he didn’t have enough time to move to deflect the blow.

  And he knew no cavalry would arrive in time to save his mother’s life.

  XXVII

  THE ARTIFICIAL SUNLIGHT OF THE Cavern vanished as they moved through the displacement void of teleportation. Seconds later, they appeared, blinking through the natural light of Headquarters. Off to the side, they heard the sound of a monorail train leaving the station. Adam realized the train would be empty. All of the humans were on Eden.

  Adam marveled at the sight of the massive black marble Headquarters building, the polished surface glinting in the sunlight. The only indications of the chaos inside were the handful of smashed glass panels near the entry. He could hear faint sounds of explosions, and could feel the hundreds of bursts of Energy pulsing from the building.

  He found Athos staring at him. “You just teleported two people eight thousand miles.”

  Adam nodded. “Approximately.”

  “But… how…?”

  “Natural talent.” Adam nodded at the massive black marble building. “Based on the Energy coming from the building, the battle’s afoot, and a lot of people are dying. We need to get moving if we’re going to stop the fighting before they exterminate each other.”

  Ath
os nodded. “Most of the Aliomenti spend time working in the lower levels, so—”

  “We know,” Adam replied. “Most of our people started there. As those who started elsewhere finish a floor, they’re required to gradually make their way to those lower levels.”

  Athos looked confused, and then a bit of nostalgic pride surfaced. “You do realize it’s not a given that the Aliomenti will fall and they’ll even be able to move on.” His jaw set, but his eyes reflected a realization that some of his biases ran deeper than Arthur’s programming.

  “Of course it isn’t,” Adam replied. “We tried to overload the upper floors with people, hoping that overwhelming force would clear the upper floors quickly. That would bring extra fighters to the lower levels in waves that we hope will aid in our efforts to win.”

  “What do you mean by win?” Athos looked nervous, and Adam sensed the reason. He had no more interest in seeing his old friends here dead than Adam did.

  “The goal is not to kill. We never want to kill.” Adam sighed. “It’s just that you can’t know what rules your opponent will follow. But the goal, the definition of winning, is to render an opponent unconscious and then help the person undergo the same transformation you have. The goal is to use whatever means necessary to inject the medicine and undo their mental programming so they can think for themselves.”

  Athos frowned. “What happens if they still want to fight the Alliance?”

  Adam’s face turned stony. “Then there’s no choice but to try to knock them unconscious again and restrain them so they aren’t a danger to anyone. If that fails…” His voice trailed away. Athos’ face turned grim, but he nodded.

  Athos nodded. “So we’re heading to the lower levels, then? Do you need an image, or would you prefer I teleport both of us?”

  “You go on ahead. I have another responsibility I must attend to first.” Adam offered a faint smile. “I’m hopeful there’s little for me to do and I’ll join you quickly.”