by Xander Gray
“Yes.” I pictured the license I had found in his wallet shortly after escaping the prison. “First name Derek.”
He dialed a number and waited as crickets chirped and wind sighed, and then he pressed the phone against his ear and spoke softly. “I’m calling for Derek Slaven. Tell him it’s Quentin Navarez. I have someone he’s looking for.”
I raised my hands in mock surrender. “You selling me out?”
He shook his head and put the phone on speaker.
Slaven’s voice came on the line, strangely calm. “Navarez?”
Navarez positioned the phone between us on the bench. “I have Joshua Briar with me. Maybe I can bring him to you, but I need information.”
Static popped on the line. “You work for the Ouroboros.”
“Not anymore,” Navarez said. “They’re hunting me.”
“Convenient.”
“Do you have a stratification pod at the prison? Yes or no?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to magnetize Briar and send him skipping through time, see if he can verify your version of the future.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“Let me worry about that. I have my own theories.”
“You always did.” A long silence drew out. “Yes, I have a stratification pod at the prison—do what you want. I have my own reasons for wanting Joshua here, as he’s likely told you.”
“I’m not agreeing to lead a man to his death.”
“I don’t want to kill him.”
“What then?”
“Take me off speaker.”
Navarez pushed the speaker button and pressed the phone to his ear, holding up his finger: one minute. In the ensuing silence, I heard Slaven chatting indecipherably in the background. In the pine branches overhead, an owl hooted.
“Let me talk to Joshua. I’ll let you know.” Navarez hung up the phone.
“Well?”
“He says if we go to the prison, you won’t be harmed.”
“Of course he says that. Did he say he’ll return my body?”
“Yes. In return, he wants to run experiments on you. He was not specific, but said it wasn’t anything you haven’t done before.”
I sighed, kicking at the pine needles. “That could mean anything.”
“And there’s something else.” Navarez put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. “He has your wife.”
My heart sank. An electric current raced up my spine to the base of my skull. Somewhere in the treetops, something popped—a cluster of birds bolted into the night, shaking the branches.
“What was that?” Navarez looked toward the sound.
I had no idea what it was. “Is she alive?”
“He says she’s fine.”
Her fate was no longer theoretical. She had been taken. She was in danger. It was my job to save her, danger be damned. “I have to get her back.”
“Then we’re going?”
“We’re going.”
Chapter Twenty-five
After I knocked him out with the tree branch in grade school, kids teased Gar mercilessly. They called him Goliath, after the Biblical giant felled by the smaller David, and far less articulate names. This turned Gar from an occasional nuisance into an unavoidable terror. He caused me as much pain as he could get away with for the next three years, until finally he moved across the street to the high school, leaving me behind to enjoy three years of relative peace. I encountered other bullies during his absence, but none as determined and mean. By the time I graduated middle school, he was a senior in high school, and whenever I saw him lugging his bag through the high school corridors or stuffing books into his locker, he seemed not to notice me. I was thankful.
After he failed senior year, everything changed. Turned out, his father had died the year before and he’d taken a job to help his mother pay bills. He had wanted to drop out, but his mother wouldn’t have it. At the time, I had known none of this. All I knew was that Gar had started his second iteration of twelfth grade with a chip on his shoulder.
Everything came to a head on a cold January afternoon during my 10th grade year. School had cancelled due to snow, but a few unfortunate kids, myself included, had missed the last minute announcement. We’d shown up to find a skeleton crew of teachers and were permitted to phone our parents to request a ride home.
I hauled my backpack up the stairs to my locker—who wanted to take books home on a snow day? Maybe I would head over to Crystal’s house. Her parents might be at work.
Gar was standing there, leaning against the lockers.
I could tell right away he wanted to fight.
“I’ve been doing some thinking.” He reached into his pocket. His eyes were wild, his hair mussed. “I don’t think I ever paid you back for what you did to me.”
“You paid me back with interest.” I was holding a sharpened pencil—I concealed it in my palm. “I’ve told you a hundred times I don’t even remember what happened. Why don’t you step aside and let me pass?”
He pulled his hand from his pocket and slid open the blade on his knife. “How about I stick you one time, just to make sure?”
My breath lodged in my throat. This wasn’t kid’s stuff anymore. “Put that away, Tommy. You’ll get in trouble for this. Not school trouble—police trouble.”
“What do I care about police?” A wicked grin spread across his face as he stepped into the soft light from the glass-block window at the end of the hall. “My old man did time in The Gas. My uncle died up there.”
If I ran, I might get around him—or take a blade in the gut. “There’s no reason to make prison a family tradition.”
“Don’t talk about my family.”
“I’m sorry—”
“You don’t know about my family.” He stepped toward me, his blade flashing. “The people in this town say there’s something rotten in our blood. But they don’t know us. You don’t know us.”
A young woman’s voice carried down the hallway: “I know your family, Tommy. Want me to start telling people?”
I looked over Tommy’s shoulder—Crystal strode toward us, swinging her book bag.
Tommy laughed. “Is your girlfriend doing your fighting now?”
“You’re God damned right,” she said. “What do you think your gang will say when they find out you got your ass kicked by a girl?”
I shook my head and motioned for her to lay off. She was going to start him swinging that knife.
He stepped toward her, the knife in a jabbing position at his side. “If you think I’m going to let a girl beat me up, you’ve got another thing coming. I’ll cut you before that happens.”
“Oh yeah, you dumb fuck?” She stepped toward him, choking up on the straps of her bag.
Tommy laughed, rocking forward, hands on his thighs. “Oh, that’s funny.”
I had never seen Crystal like this. She charged him, boots pounding tile, leaving slushy footprints. She swung her bag overhead in a smooth arc. The bag smashed his face. He staggered backward, swinging the knife, barely missing her.
I came up behind him and jammed the pencil into his shoulder. It snapped, leaving a jagged shard.
He roared and spun toward me, the knife whooshing before my face, leaving a flickering trail of sunlight.
Crystal lifted her boot and kicked him right in the ass, sending him into the lockers with a bang. Before he could turn around to face her, she swung her bag into his head. The knife flung itself from his grip and skittered across the floor, into the corner beneath the window. He slid down the lockers until he was sitting on the floor.
I bent down and grabbed the knife. My breath sawed in and out of my lungs. My hands trembled.
He offered a pitiful smile and held up his hands. “At least I don’t need my girlfriend to defend me.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend.” Crystal kicked him in the stomach.
“Jesus, stop!” He grabbed at her leg but was too slow.
&n
bsp; I took Crystal’s arm and pulled her away from him. He was down, but he had a look in his eye like a rabid dog. I knelt in front of him, two fingers on the tile, ready to bolt. “I don’t mind having my girlfriend do my fighting. We’re a team.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s right—a team. And if you ever touch my boyfriend again I’ll tell this whole damned school how your daddy used to beat your momma and you just watched like a fucking coward. Is that what you want? You want the whole world knowing your business?”
“You shut your mouth.” He glared at her, but made no move to stand.
I don’t know how long we stood there watching him. It might have been seconds, but it was long enough to form an indelible picture in my mind—his head bent forward, the side of his face already bruising, one leg kicked out and the other tucked beneath him, all his details softened by the strange light shining through the glass bricks. Once we were certain he would not pursue us, we left him there.
I looked at her when we reached the bottom of the steps. “We should tell the principal.”
“Tommy will see that as a sign of weakness.”
“Maybe, but this is serious. He had a knife.”
“Had being the operative word.”
I looked down at the knife in my hand. “I’m pretty sure he can find another knife. But we’ll do it your way.”
Once we had left the school in the distance and the world was strangely silent but for the crunch of footfalls in fresh powder, I threw Tommy’s knife into a snow bank. I never saw it again.
Crystal slapped me on the back. “Good thing I was there to save your ass.”
I chuckled, pulling her close. “Save my ass everyday if you want.”
“Bullies piss me off.” She blew steam into the air. “I watched my younger brothers go through that. What I learned is that bullies are like any other predator—they only attack things that look and act like prey. If you act like another predator, they back off.”
“I don’t know if it’s that easy with Tommy. He’s had it out for me since third grade. I think he fancies himself an alpha predator.”
“I don’t care how he fancies himself. He lives across the street from me. What I said about Tommy’s dad was true. He was an inhuman piece of scum who beat his wife. My dad says it’s not Tommy’s fault, but I swear I sat on my front porch one day and watched him stand there while his mother got beat. I had to go inside and call the cops myself. That was two years ago. Tommy was old enough to help her and he just stood there in the driveway with his hands in his pockets.”
I’d heard stories about Tommy’s family, but nothing like this. “Maybe he’d been bullied by his own father for so many years he felt powerless.”
“Maybe.” She shook her head. “But fuck him for taking his aggression out on younger kids.”
Crystal and I sat on the curb in front of the gas station, watching snow fall on the gas pumps and cars rattle through the slush, trailing great plumes of exhaust. Things were going to be different now. We were a team. We were together.
Tommy Garfield never bullied me again. During the months that followed, I saw him every now and again in the hallways, but he never made eye contact, and when the school year was over, he passed into history and I didn’t see him again for another twenty years.
Chapter
Twenty-six
I tried to block all memory of Crystal as the taxi trundled down the back roads of Gasconade County, but whenever I closed my eyes, I saw her swinging above the black waters of the lake: a girl of sixteen, smiling in the sun. If Slaven had hurt her, I would kill him. I would drive my fist into his abdomen, shattering his battery, spilling his radioactive blood, and then I would straddle his chest and dismantle his monstrous, transmogrifying face with my bare hands.
Something touched my shoulder.
I jumped, nearly bumping my head on the cab ceiling. “What?”
Navarez eyed me cautiously, his considerable bulk hunched over his legs. “We can’t just go in guns blazing. You know that, right?”
I looked out the window, at the dark trees. “I’ll play nice unless he’s hurt her.”
“Where we’re going, he controls the variables.”
“I get it.” I shot him a look. “What you need to do is explain to me how I’m going to make this time travel thing work.”
“During the nanite trials, they loaded your mind into a server. Attis was in the server with you. He was alone then. The other Ouroboros had not yet traveled back. If you can go back to that moment, you can find out who’s telling the truth.”
“How do I go back to that one, specific moment?”
“It might be easier than you think.” He popped a knuckle. “According to McSorley, you were quite the wonder.”
I knew bullshit when I heard it. The truth was, Navarez didn’t have the slightest idea how the experience of time travel would unfold from the perspective of the traveler because he only knew about it secondhand. He knew how to strap me to the pod—after that, I would be on my own.
The taxi came to a four-way stop at Mills Road. Turning right would take us across the bridge toward Nexus—we turned left toward The Gas. I wondered why Slaven—McSorley—had chosen to work so closely to his nemesis. The prison and Nexus were the two largest buildings in the county, the distance between them dotted by barns in open fields. I opened my mouth to solicit Navarez’s opinion, but the prison came into view at the bottom of the hill—a gray cinderblock fortress sprawled across the terrain like a dead giant—and the question no longer seemed to matter.
As the taxi parked, I looked up at the moon. Would I ever see it again so clearly? Or would it be reduced to a hazy glow, only glimpsed beyond the rusty grates of my cell window?
Navarez opened his door. Cool air flowed into the cabin.
I slid out behind him and cast my eyes toward the entrance to the Gasconade County Correctional Facility. On the day of my escape, I could never have imagined returning of my own volition, but I would sacrifice my freedom—my life—to ensure my wife’s safety, and so here I stood, fists clenched at my sides, watching moonlit clouds floating behind the observation towers.
#
Slaven met us in the entry foyer in front of the guard cage, wearing a neatly pressed corrections uniform, blue shirt and black pants, the same uniform he always wore, the same uniform every officer in Gasconade wore except the tower sentries. “Which of you is Briar?”
I raised my hand. Rage pulsed behind my eyes.
“Typical. No creativity.” He had the guard buzz us inside and then ushered us into a consultation room and promptly seated himself at the head of the table.
Navarez and I sat across from him.
This looked like the room where Crystal had revealed the Capgras photo. All these rooms looked the same, but only a few had windows. The blinds were drawn tight. Open, they would have revealed nothing except the moonlit tops of buildings.
Slaven retrieved a scanner from his pocket and pointed it at me. “Tell me why I shouldn’t haul you back to your cell, Joshua Briar.”
“Try it.”
Slaven leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “You’ve come loaded for bear.”
I slammed my hands on the table—wood splintered—and leaned toward him. “You have my wife.”
He waggled his finger. “She’s fine.”
“Prove it.”
“In time.”
Navarez, offering a bit of gamesmanship, retrieved his own scanner from his shirt pocket and pointed it at Slaven. “Well McSorley, you look different. Gasconade blue suits you. I can’t say much for your new face, except that it’s younger. That’s nice I guess.”
“Don’t call me McSorley.” Slaven scowled. “That’s the name of an Ouroboros.”
Navarez tucked the scanner away. “What would you prefer?”
“You’ll call me Slaven.” His eyes passed from Navarez to me, and he didn’t speak for several seconds. “Before we go any further, I want to
make one thing clear. If I catch any of Attis’ goons creeping around the prison, I’ll kill you before you can blink. Unlike Joshua here, I have the power to follow through on my threats.”
“Your suspicion is understandable under the circumstances, but please.” Navarez raised his palm. “I’m here because I have to be. I wouldn’t need your stratification pod if I still had access to Nexus.”
Slaven stood and opened the door. “If one of us has a trick up his sleeve, we’ll find out.”
I remained seated. “You still haven’t explained what you want.”
“Two things.” Slaven leaned against the door frame. “First, I’ll hook you to a server so I can run trace programs to harden security. This will not hurt you. Secondly, you’ll try summoning a target bubble.”
I looked at him questioningly.
“I’ll explain what that means later. For now, just know it won’t require me to do anything to you, nor will you be in any danger. That one is all you.”
A flower of doubt unfolded in my mind. “If your requests have always been so innocuous, why didn’t you just ask? Why attack me? Why take my wife?”
Slaven leaned back into the room. “I assumed you worked for the enemy and would not help unless coerced. If I didn’t have leverage, you would not be here, so let’s not pretend I was wrong.”
“You were wrong.” I stood from the table. “I’m not working for anyone except myself.”
“We’ll see.” He looked me up and down, then stepped backward into the hallway.
“You’ll return my wife? Set us free?” I had no idea why I was asking. I had no choice but to trust him.
“Of course.” He gave a tight-lipped smile, a feeble attempt at reassurance. “Follow me.”
#
As Slaven led us across the yard toward the death row building, the bloated moon shone on the high perimeter walls and swaying weeds. The guards on the catwalk—two black silhouettes against the sky—watched indifferently, rifles hanging.
The porch steps groaned under our weight. The door had been repaired and apparently fitted with a new lock—we waited as Slaven flipped through the keys on his belt and got it open.
