by P. T. Hylton
“That cane of his can sense other Tools. So Donald’s job is to track us. To watch us. To make sure we do as we’re told.”
Donald grimaced, but he didn’t deny it. He took a look around and saw hard looks coming at him from all directions. He reluctantly set his cane on the table.
Zed graciously nodded his thanks. He turned to the others and said, “I’ve been thinking a lot recently about our role. And I was curious if some of you might be as tired as I am of being sent out to pick ripe towns like migrant workers pick oranges.”
It was so quiet Zed could hear the slight wheeze in Donald’s breathing.
When no one spoke, Zed continued. “There is quite a lot of power in these towns. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to hand them over to our masters. People who don’t trust us enough to give us the barest of information.”
Henry shook his head slowly. “You’re crazy. You want to go up against the Exiles, but you’re afraid to do it alone, is that it?”
Zed’s smile widened. “Yes. It is. They would crush me like a bug.”
Cindy tilted her pale face at him. “So you want us to die with you?”
“Not exactly. I know I can’t beat them alone, but I believe the Tools are more than the sum of their parts. If we all worked together, we would have a chance.” He checked their blank faces before continuing. “There’s something else. The power our bosses are trying to collect seems to be learning to protect itself from the Tools. Isn’t that right, Joseph?”
Joseph paused for a moment, then nodded. “The first town you brought me to, East Gravers, Texas, the compass led us right to the book. But the last couple…it hasn’t been so easy. We searched for days. We had to be very close to the book before it even registered on the compass.”
Donald scowled at Zed. “What’s that have to do with any of this?”
Zed was honestly disappointed the others couldn’t see what he could see. “It means we’re nearing the end of our usefulness. The bosses only keep us around to use the Tools. If the Tools aren’t going to help them reach their goals, they don’t need us. It’s only starting with the compass, but I’m thinking long term here. Let’s take the power while we can.”
“I can’t believe you brought us here for this!” Joseph said. If Joseph wasn’t on board, this was not going well.
Zed held up his hand. “Please. Hear me out. I’m not advocating killing them. Merely…negotiating a profit-sharing arrangement.” He turned to Joseph. “You can’t tell me it feels good to know they could take that compass away at any time. We need to have a little power of our own.”
“Says the man who reads minds and can’t be killed.” It was Rachel. She was the youngest of them. She’d only had that hammer of hers for five years.
“That’s borrowed power, too,” Zed said. “Don’t think they can’t take it away. But there is one kind of power we do have.” He tapped the pocket watch. “Knowledge. We each know how to use one of these Tools. They’ve kept us away from each other so we don’t share, but I suggest we talk about our Tools. We know what the compass does for them, but what about the other Tools? If we have all the information in one place, I’ll bet we can find a way to use it against them.”
No one said anything. They were all looking at him in disbelief.
“I’ll start,” he continued. “This pocket watch can stop time. Even better, it can create pockets where time moves in different ways and rates. It’s how I’ve been able to get the towns ready. I take them out of time and let them ripen. Ten or twenty years go by in an instant.” He looked around at them. “Who’s next?”
After a long silence, Henry picked up his knife. “This is my knife, and I’m thinking about jamming it into your heart.”
Zed considered saying that wouldn’t do much of anything, but thought better of it. “Come on, Henry. Information is power.”
Henry twirled the knife lazily in his hand. “Here’s what bothers me, Zed. You had to know all of us wouldn’t go along with this. I doubt you believed any of us would. You also knew you’d be a dead man if word of this got back to the bosses. So why ask us in the first place?”
Zed waited, feeling the eyes of the others upon him. He’d half-hoped it would go the other way, but he’d known it wouldn’t. That was okay. Because this was his moment. This was when he stopped being the boy who found the watch and started being the man who owned it.
When the silence was so heavy in the air Zed knew one of them was sure to break it, he spoke. “Henry, you misunderstand the situation. I’m not asking. I’m telling. Consider the possibility I’m offering or face the reality of being my enemy.”
“Your enemy?” Cindy was half standing now.
Henry picked up his knife off the table and twirled it in his hands. “I owe the Exiles everything. We all do. They gave us our lives. Made us what we are. And now I’m going to take the Tool they gave me and see if you really are unkillable.”
Zed leaned back in his chair and reached casually for the pocket watch. “That’s the difference between me and the rest of you. They gave you your Tools. I took mine. Now I’ll take yours.”
He hit the button on the pocket watch.
Fifty years passed in an instant.
When he returned to time—many years later for Zed, but only a moment later in reality—he was alone. He sat for a long while, just looking at their empty seats, his anger simmering. The last fifty years hadn’t gone the way he’d planned. Not at all. Fifty years locked out of time and what did he have to show for it?
Worse, his work wasn’t done. The harder phase was next.
And then, with no warning, the harder phase was sitting right in front of him, in the seat Henry had occupied only moments ago. He hadn’t seen her appear. It was as if she’d been here all along. The look on her face was more troubled than angry.
“Hello, Wilm,” he said. “You made it here fast.”
She shrugged. “Please. You think the others didn’t tell us about your little meeting? I decided to let it play out to see what you were up to, but I never expected…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “I came when I felt you use the watch. Vee, San, and Rayd will have felt it, too. They’ll be here soon, I expect, and they won’t be as eager for discussion as I am. Vee in particular would love the opportunity to hurt you. So let’s see if we can get this sorted out.” She leaned forward and folded her hands on the table. “What did you do with them?”
“I’d hoped to simply stop time and take their Tools.” Zed realized he was clutching the watch very tightly. “It seems they were more closely bonded to their respective objects than I assumed. When I stopped time, I found their Tools unmovable. It was rather frustrating. So, I changed my strategy. I brought them outside time and let them live out the rest of their lives, hoping the bond would be broken when they died.”
Wilm’s face was even, but Zed saw a fury behind her eyes. “Not the people. There are plenty of people. What did you do with the Tools?”
Zed frowned. “They hid them. Turns out they were very good at hiding. I expect they used that compass to find places I’d never look. I searched for them for years, but…” It hurt admitting his failure to Wilm. “Anyway, my colleagues are all dead, some by natural causes and others not so much. The Tools are lost in Rook Mountain somewhere, I’d imagine. Which makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t find them.”
Wilm’s already ghostly face turned a shade paler. “You realize that’s a problem? We sense the Tools when they’re used. But if our servants are dead, they won’t be using them.”
“That is a problem, then.”
Wilm sighed. “Do you have a solution in mind? Offer it up. Otherwise, hand over the watch before the others get here. They might decide to let you live.”
Zed said nothing.
“Those powers of yours, your long life, it can all be taken away.”
Zed grinned at her. “That’s why I’m doing this. I seem to remember you laying hands on me to grant me these powers. I’m
betting you have to do the same to take them away.”
“That’s a big bet. When the others arrive—“
“They’re not coming,” Zed said. “Or rather, they are coming, but it’s not going to help you any.”
Wilm squinted at him. “What have you done?”
“I’ve taken us outside of time. Very far outside of time, in fact. I call it the Away.”
She shook her head slowly, and Zed thought maybe he saw the tiniest flicker of fear in her eyes. “That’s not possible. I’d have been able to feel it if you used the watch.”
“Yeah, I’ve been working on that. Seems I’ve found a way around it.”
She looked around suspiciously.
“Oh, you knew there were layers within time, didn’t you?” Zed asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Well, there are, and we’re in a deep one. I wanted to make sure we had time to talk.”
“Fine,” Wilm said. Her eyes were hard little things now. For a moment, Zed thought she might let the illusion of her humanity fall away and show him what she really was. But she maintained her composure. “Let’s talk. Do you want to start with how the hell you think you’re going to get out of this alive?”
“Sounds like a wonderful place to start. After this conversation, I’ll disappear and you’ll never see me again.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Not easy, but doable.” He held up the pocket watch.
“You plan to hide from us outside time? Spend your life in a frozen world?”
“Not exactly. See, I got to thinking about those towns of yours. And the way you talk about the power within them ripening. And I started wondering what would happen if that power wasn’t harvested. What if it was left alone? Would it eventually turn rotten? Unusable?”
Wilm said, “That’s just an analogy.” But Zed could see in her eyes it wasn’t.
“You’ve told me you need that power. So what will happen to you if it’s all used up? How many towns are there? Not more than a few dozen, I’ll bet. Whatever you did to me is permanent. I don’t need that energy to survive. But you do. You need it to stay alive here on Earth. So I’m thinking I’ll just wait you out.”
She shook her head sadly. “It won’t work. For a single town’s power to go rotten could take a thousand years.”
Zed shrugged. “I’ve got a thousand years.”
“And a rotting town will not be a pleasant place.”
“I’m a man of simple needs.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Why tell me?”
Zed stood up. He wanted to be standing over her. “Because, when you’re weak and dying, I want you to know who it was that beat you.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but then stopped. She cocked her head, as if listening.
There was something. Zed heard it too. It was like a distant chorus of voices singing.
“Zed.”
Wilm’s lips curled into a smile.
“Zed.”
The door to the diner eased open, and a swirling black shadow slipped inside. It circled the room.
“Zed. We know of you. You step in and out of the river of time, but we smell its stink upon you.”
Zed’s eyes tried to follow the swirling mass spinning around the room, but it made him dizzy.
“You’ve made a mistake,” Wilm said. “Just because you can drive a car doesn’t mean you know how the engine works. And time is a pretty damn big car. It just so happens I know my way around it very well.” She reached out her hand and brushed it against the passing black cloud. The creature or creatures let out a sound like a purr. “The Ones Who Sing were among the first we encountered when we came here. We have a certain understanding.”
“Zed,” the creatures sang, “you do not belong here.”
Zed took a hesitant step backwards.
“You do not belong in the river, either. Not anymore.”
The cloud was closing in on him now, he could feel it.
“You do not belong anywhere.”
He’d wanted to stay longer, to rub it all in Wilm’s face a bit more. But these creatures. The Ones Who Sing.
“You are a vile thing, a creature no longer human.”
The cloud contracted and wrapped itself around his arms. It flowed over him like a thousand razors. He let out a scream as they slid over his skin. If he survived this, he would heal. That was his gift. But, damn, did it hurt now.
Enough messing around. Time to go. He pressed the broken clock symbol on the pocket watch. And nothing happened.
His eyes grew wide with horror.
“Oh, yes, these creatures have a bit of power over time themselves,” Wilm said. “If they don’t let you go, you’re not going anywhere.”
The creatures flowed over his chest and back. His clothes had been cut away and he felt his skin falling away in ribbons.
“Sometimes,” Wilm said. “It’s a bad thing not to be able to die.”
He couldn’t move. They were gripping his arms, legs, and neck, holding tight even as they rolled over him with their razor bodies.
Wilm took a step toward him. “I may get tired of watching this in a few days. Then I’ll think of something else to do with you. Unless you’d rather I took away your powers and let you die now?”
Zed grunted in frustration, and it came out as a scream. His face was the only part of him not covered in the black mass.
“Oh that’s right,” Wilm said. “You love your power. You’d do anything to keep it.”
Zed reached out with his mind. The usual electric-sweet buzz of the pocket watch was muted. But it was there, he realized. It was there. If only he could reach it.
“See, what you don’t understand is that the best you can ever hope to be against me and mine is a mild annoyance,” Wilm said. “And I don’t say that as an insult. It’s more than anyone else has ever done. You’ve hidden the Tools, and that’s something.”
She leaned close as she spoke. “But we will find them. And that pocket watch of yours will go to some other pathetic little boy. Hopefully one that minds.”
Zed felt it, the power of the pocket watch. He felt a tiny thread of it wiggling out from the black cloud of singing creatures. He grabbed onto it with his mind and pulled as hard as he could.
And then the Ones Who Sing were gone. It was just Wilm and Zed standing in the diner, one of them with a smirk on her face and the other naked and barely looking human through the ribbons of ruined skin and streams of running blood.
Zed felt the room spinning and knew he was about to lose consciousness. Before he did, he squeezed the pocket watch, pressed the symbol on it, and took himself out of time. He didn’t go as deep as he had been—no, he hoped to never go that deep again. He just went down one level. Far enough that Wilm would be frozen in the present.
His last thought was that he’d won. It hadn’t been how he’d envisioned it, not at all, but, at least for the moment, he’d won.
He collapsed to the floor in a thick pool of his own blood and passed out.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE QUARRY
1.
Alice gripped her sword. “Okay, Zed, I hope you have a plan. Because they’re here.”
The muscles in Zed’s jaw stood out as he gritted his teeth.
“I do have a plan. But it’s going to take a few minutes. Can you hold them off for a bit?”
Alice blinked hard. “You want me to fight them?”
“That wouldn’t be my approach, but you do have a big sword. Just distract them. Keep them busy.”
Frank said, “I’ll go with her.”
“No,” Zed said. “I need you here. You’re part of my plan.”
Mason said, “She’s not going alone.”
Zed nodded curtly. “Fine. You go, Mason. The rest of you stay.”
Alice glanced at Mason. She remembered the old man looking up and seeing her in her hiding place at the top of the stairs. No other adult had ever noticed her up there.
“I don�
��t suppose you’re armed?” she asked.
Mason shook his head.
“You really brave or really stupid?”
He held up a compass. “This is a Tool. It’ll point to anything you ask it to. I just asked it to show me a safe place, and the needle didn’t move. So I’m thinking out there is just as good as in here.”
They left the shed and joined the crowd gathered in Volunteer Park.
The first thing Alice noticed was the stillness. Groups of people this large were always in motion. Like a body of water, they swayed and swelled. But this group was perfectly still. Their eyes were on the sky. Alice followed their gaze.
Wilm, Vee, and San floated thirty feet off the ground. Wilm had her hands stretched out like a benevolent god. San had hers crossed over her chest. The hulking, armless, Vee floated to the left of the other two.
Never had the three of them appeared less human. The way they held themselves, the way they almost glowed, was a glimpse past their human disguises and into what they really were. It made Alice sick to her stomach. She’d been working with them for so long now, she often thought of them as people. But they weren’t. They were deadly parasites here to feed off the Earth until there was nothing left of it.
“People of King’s Crossing,” Wilm said in a booming voice. “We have come seeking a book. It has a symbol on the cover. An object with a crack through it. Give us the book, and we will leave.”
“Seems unlikely,” Mason muttered.
Vee leaned over and whispered something in Wilm’s ear. She nodded, and he smiled.
Suddenly he shot through the sky like a bolt.
Vee slammed through the roof of the shed like it was made of paper. The crowd listened in silence as the sound of shouts and screams came from the shed.
“No,” Alice whispered.
A moment later Vee emerged, floating through the hole he’d blasted in the roof. His face and torso were covered in blood. The book with the broken man symbol floated next to him.
“It’s done,” he said.
“No,” Alice whispered again. It couldn’t go down like that. She wouldn’t allow it.
