by Jacob Whaler
The beam coils up in an elegant spiral high into the sky.
He points it at one of the mammoth buildings two or three hundred meters away. Imagining a sphere of light bursting from Stone’s tip, his thoughts are instantly translated into reality. A ball of blue fire jumps across the distance in a blur where it pierces the structure and, in an explosion of sparks, opens a massive gash in its side.
His lips curl into a grin.
With the Stone in his right hand, he stares down at Ryzaard. He studies the man for any sign of movement.
There isn’t any. Ryzaard is as still as Jessica. Perhaps he is frozen in time, just like her.
Matt’s eyes scan the face. One cheek is half buried in mud. The mouth hangs open with eyes closed to narrow slits. Without taking his eyes off Ryzaard, Matt reaches down and gently tugs at the Stone in Ryzaard’s fingers. It slips out easily.
A feeling of invincibility flows over him as he holds a Stone in each hand.
Time to kill.
The words seem to come into his mind from an outside source. He takes a step back and wills a white blade to grow two meters out of his own Stone. Raising it in the rain, he studies the pulsing white energy and brings it down slowly until it floats above Ryzaard’s exposed neck.
With just a flick of his wrist, he can be rid of this nightmare.
A tremor moves through his hand. He looks back at Jessica, standing motionlessly in the darkness behind him, still in time freeze. Her eyes don’t move, but they seem to urge him on.
But I’ve never killed anyone, he wants to tell her.
Before he can turn back to Ryzaard, a sharp pain shoots up his leg from the back of his knee. Both legs buckle, and he loses his balance. Twisting as he falls, he brings the blade down into the mud where the body of Ryzaard lay.
But Ryzaard is gone.
Ryzaard’s Stone is jerked out of Matt’s left hand. A thin white line flashes above him. His own blade instinctively rises up to meet it. As the two beams make contact, a bone-jarring vibration jolts up his arm, through his shoulder and into his chest. His back slams into the mud.
Ryzaard stands over him. “You are pathetic and despicable. A true weakling. Are you so opposed to using your power that you do not even try to kill me?” He waves his blade over Matt’s head, and the smell of burnt ozone pours off it. “Of course, no one can kill me in this world. I’m safe here. That is how I designed it. You and your friend do not have the same protection.” His jaw clenches shut as he brings the blade down with both hands.
Rolling to the side, a searing heat grazes the skin of Matt’s back.
Ryzaard’s eyes move beyond Matt to Jessica standing still as a rock in the distance. The blade of his Stone stretches out in length to reach beyond her. He grins and swings it savagely to cut her down.
Channeling all his effort, Matt raises his Stone straight up. As light concentrates in its tip, a flat disc of blue energy pops out and blocks the blow. The thought that Jessica is in danger causes a rush of adrenaline. His mind is instantly clear and connects to his body. With a quick arch of his spine, he jumps to his feet.
They stand glaring at each other, blades of pure plasma gleaming, moving in slow circles. Matt keeps the still form of Jessica to his back.
“You haven’t got a chance,” Ryzaard says. He thrusts his blade forward, and it slices the rain close to Matt’s ear before being deflected away.
Ryzaard stops and drops his hand to his side while the blade of his Stone fades away in the darkness.
Matt backs up in the direction of Jessica, keeping his blade bright and pointing at Ryzaard in a defensive posture. The flow of time pulls at him, like a swift river current, and he struggles to hold it back. Something is pushing against him, and it’s getting harder and harder to stay focused.
With his back in a rigid straight posture, Ryzaard holds his Stone at his side as the thin blade grows to a massive length. In a blur, he whips it up and over Matt, as if drawing an arch. Matt’s blade reaches up to meet it too late as it passes over his head. Ryzaard smiles in apparent satisfaction.
He turns and runs in the opposite direction, away from them.
Fighting back the instinct to chase Ryzaard, Matt turns to face Jessica. She is standing still, unharmed. He glances at Ryzaard, receding in the distance, and wonders what’s going on.
The pull of time is getting heavy, and he knows he can’t hold it back much longer. With Ryzaard gone, they seem to be out of danger, so he faces Jessica and allows himself to relax. Time flows again, and Jessica comes to life, a startled look on her face.
Suspended drops of rain pour down.
“You did it again,” she says.
“Did what?”
“Jumped. Moved. It scares me.”
“Sorry,” Matt says. “I stopped time to go have a look at him.” He points behind her. “He’s not dead.”
She turns and stares through the rain as a dark figure moves into the trees around the edge of the clearing. He looks like he’s seeking shelter under one of the mammoth structures just beyond the forest.
“Where’s he going?” Jessica says.
“I don’t know. We have to be careful. He may be playing some sort of trick. Maybe we beat him.”
Weary smiles form on their faces.
“Now that he’s gone, how do we get—” Jessica looks up and freezes, her smile fading, her mouth dropping open. She tries to speak, but the words seem to get stuck in her throat. Her eyes grow larger and larger.
Following her eyes, Matt whips around to see a line of massive skyscrapers falling down upon them, like a swath of trees in a forest cut cleanly through. With no place to run, they will be crushed in seconds.
Now Matt understands what Ryzaard was doing when he flashed his energy blade over Matt’s head and ran away.
He pulls Jessica close and relaxes into the familiar place where he goes to stop time, but something repels him and he can’t find it. Time is running out. Directly above, gravity is pulling the structures down on their heads. The lattice-work of windows comes into clear focus only a hundred meters above and closing fast.
Matt’s eyes meet Jessica’s, and they kneel together in the mud. Crouching over her, there’s popping in his ears from the rush of air. The sound of twisting steel and shattering glass is deafening. Bits and pieces of broken stone and metal splash into the mud around them.
In his mind, Matt sees the image of his father doing a yoga pose, kneeling on the ground, looking up to the ceiling with both hands above his head, elbows straight, palms together. With only a few seconds left before impact, a surge of love for him and Jessica moves through his body.
He grips the Stone in both hands and thrusts it above his head as he visualizes a large sphere of energy bursting out of the tip. A brilliant light flashes from its point.
A maelstrom of steel beams, broken glass and crumbled cement crashes down around him and Jessica in total silence. Looking to the right and left, they are inside a shimmering sphere of light hanging down from the Stone. The building debris vaporizes on contact with the energy field.
Jessica stares up with a look of wonder until the movement stops.
As Matt relaxes, the energy field fades. They both stand up in a small bubble inside a mass of hot metal and melted concrete that extends above and around them. Matt finds Jessica’s hand and closes his fingers around it.
“Incredible,” he says. “There are times when the Stone doesn’t respond, and then other times when it’s so easy to use. I don’t get it. Must have something to do with this artificial world and its creator.” He surveys the damage. “Don’t know how we are going to get out of here.”
Jessica’s eyes drop to the ground, where the mud has hardened into solid rock. There’s a bright green jewel the size of a large pearl at her feet. “What’s that?” she says, and bends down to pick it up.
A microsecond before her fingers touch it, Matt recognizes the implant and yells.
“Don’t!”
&nb
sp; But it’s too late. As her fingertips brush it, the darkness is consumed by a sea of white.
Matt opens his eyes. He can tell by the rug under his feet and the smell of leftover sushi that he and Jessica are back in the same room in the MX Global building they jumped away from. In the darkness, someone is pointing a flashlight in their eyes.
“Welcome back,” Ryzaard says.
CHAPTER 104
On the 160th floor, breathing hard.
Kent climbs up another five floors and pauses for a moment to clear his head. His eyes drop to the timer on his wrist. The numbers are slowly falling to zero. He clips a carabineer on a cord around his waist to one of the rungs. For good measure, he weaves both arms in and through the ladder, gripping it tight. His eyes drift down as he waits for visual confirmation of the MEPPs explosion. When it finally comes, it’s still a surprise.
In the darkness below, as if at the bottom of a deep well, there’s a burst of light with no sound.
One. Two.
The entire building shudders, as if it’s drunk. The voice of a hurricane howls up past him.
His earphones start to ring like a fire alarm, triggered by whoever is following him up the shaft. They’ve just passed the motion detector he stuck on the wall at the 125th floor marker. They must have seen the hole he cut into the power generator room on the fifth floor and probably weren’t surprised by the explosion. Whoever they are, they must know by now that Kent’s plan is to cut power to the building.
But none of that really matters.
It will take some time for security personnel to cut through the twisted mess of metal and chemicals on the fifth floor and find the hole leading to the old elevators. Once they get to the shaft, they’ll be crawling up and down it in droves.
By then, he’ll either be gone from the building or dead.
With the last ten floors to go and still breathing hard, he shoulders the backpack and moves up the rungs, ignoring the beating of drums in his chest, hoping that the top floors have gone dark.
At the top of the ladder, he places a single MEPPs on the wall and drops down three floors before detonating it.
After the dust settles, Kent climbs back up and kicks through a wall of crumbling brick, leaving the elevator shaft behind and moving into the dry heat and darkness on the other side of the hole. He emerges into a world of steel girders, round pipes and square ducts, all covered with a thick layer of spray-on foam insulation. It has the look and feel of a cave full of organic shapes carved from solid rock.
He steps carefully onto the floor, testing it with one foot before planting the other next to it. A wide aluminum conduit runs in a straight line past his feet into the darkness. It feels cool to the touch, evidence that it’s an air vent that should open into the ceiling of the floor below. He follows it for several meters and finds what he’s looking for. A section branches down and disappears into insulation under his feet. He sets his backpack down and works his hand through the opening, past the MEPPS anchored on the side, to the bottom where the plasma cutter lays.
He pulls out the long cylindrical device and feels for the tip made of transparent carbon. It can cut cleanly through three inches of metal, glass or cement, which makes it perfect for the job. Careful to keep the point away from his hand, he finds a raised stud three inches from its end and presses hard. There’s a click, and the tip glows the color of sky blue. Using it like a pen, he cuts out a section of the ventilation duct, first working on one end, and then the other. The caustic smell of burnt aluminum and foam insulation tells him the cutter is working.
A large square section of the ventilation duct comes off easily when he pulls it out. Cool air rises up and envelopes his face. He looks down through a mesh vent cover into the darkness of a corridor on the 175th floor below. There’s a horizontal steel girder passing just in front of his face. Grasping it with both hands, one foot steps onto the vent, followed by the other. In the silence, he holds his breath and jumps up and down on its middle. It gives only a little.
A rhythmic pinging goes off in his earphones. Someone just triggered a motion sensor twenty floors below. From the very start, they’ve been staying at a constant distance away from him all the way up the shaft, stopping when he stopped, moving when he moved. No doubt they heard him just blow a hole through the shaft into the interior of the building. No doubt they will come through it after him.
But it’s too late to worry about that now. It’s too late to do anything but keep moving.
Let my son be alive.
He thinks of Matt, and fear pushes against his chest and makes it hard to breath. Pushing all emotion aside, he slams his feet down on one side of the vent. It pops off and falls away like a trap door, leaving him hanging from the steel girder. He works away at the other edge until the whole vent cover falls into darkness and clangs against metal on the floor below. He grabs his backpack and drops into the hole.
It’s surreal to think that he’s standing in the middle of a long corridor on the 175th floor.
He stares through the IR goggles. In the darkness, the walls are smooth and lined with stainless steel, an eerie reminder of a submarine he once toured. There’s a sense of pristine cleanliness and order to the corridor, an almost oppressive perfection.
He has to decide which way to go, right or left. Consulting the plans on his slate, he opts to go left, in the direction of Ryzaard’s office. He trades the slate for a jax and scans for active motion detectors or carbon dioxide sniffers. It looks like there aren’t any. With the power still out, building security probably has no idea what floor he’s on. That’s the idea, anyway.
He moves to the end of the corridor. There’s a glass plate mounted on the wall to the right of a door, a biometric reader that bars entry to anyone not in its database.
Placing both palms on the door, he leans into it with his weight and tries to push it open, but it’s as solid as granite. Then he tries pushing the opposite way with the same result.
It’s doubtful the plasma cutter will slice through the material of the door. That leaves either the MEPPs explosives or the Corrizol. The MEPPs will be quicker, but the concussion will alert anyone within 20 floors that he’s there. The Corrizol will take time to work, and that’s the only thing he doesn’t have enough of right now.
MEPPs it is.
It takes less than thirty seconds to attach them to the door, one on the top left, the other on the bottom left. It’s enough force to take down the door and a good portion of the wall, even if it’s built like a bank vault.
He runs down the hall in the opposite direction, past the hole in the ceiling vent, and lays flat against the floor on his stomach. The backpack is next to his head to serve as a barricade.
In the darkness, his fingers find the trigger device at the bottom of a pocket.
I wonder how long it will take for them to restore auxiliary power to the building.
The thought passes through his mind. His eyes drop down as a finger taps the end of the trigger.
CHAPTER 105
Ryzaard is thankful for the darkness in the room.
He lunges forward. The point of his dagger comes down on Matt’s right fist, jarring it open. The Stone falls out of his hand, hitting the floor with a loud thud. Ryzaard drops the dagger and scoops the Stone off the floor with the little box, clamping its lid shut, and throwing it behind him in the darkness, away from Matt. Carefully, he bends down and picks up the dagger.
Matt tumbles backwards past Jessica. A warm stream of blood runs down his arm from the open gash in his hand.
“I have your Stone. Enough of your games.” Ryzaard steps closer to them and shines the flashlight on the steel blade of the dagger. It’s smeared with red, and he brings it to his mouth and slowly licks it clean with his tongue. The salty taste seems to calm him.
Matt and Jessica back up until they are huddled together against the wall.
“Pardon me for a minute.” Ryzaard relaxes into that familiar place within, stopping time and
causing silence to envelope the room. With Matt’s Stone safely inside the little box and nonfunctional, he becomes still, like Jessica. Ryzaard rests the flashlight on the metallic cube with its beam pointing at the two figures crouched on the floor and walks out the open door into his office.
Time to think.
Even without light, his fingers easily find the black cigarettes in a desk drawer. He strikes a match, brings it up to the tip and sucks in long and deep, filling the emptiness inside. The tip glows bright red in the darkness.
For a long time, he stands looking at the still life view of Manhattan spread out below him like a painting.
The calmness restored, he reaches into a lower drawer of the desk and grabs a handful of acrylic zip ties on his way back to the room where Matt and Jessica still sit motionless on the floor. The zip ties go on easily around their wrists and ankles.
He slides the knife from its sheath. The smell of oil and leather remind him of a scene long ago outside a village in Northern India when he used the same knife in an attempt at getting his first Stone. With no control over time and matter, life was much harder back then, and his efforts initially failed. He smiles to himself at the irony. He’s still using the same methods to get this new Stone. Some things never change.
With the flashlight shining in the darkness, he brings the tip of the knife close to Matt’s chest. In a few seconds, the blade will be lodged in his heart. But the moment has to be perfect, and something doesn’t quite feel right.
Taking a step back, he allows time to flow again, keeping a careful eye on his captives.
They come to life, blinking their eyes and struggling against the zip ties on their wrists and ankles.
A grin plays across Ryzaard’s face as they struggle in vain.
“Let me tell you how you will die,” Ryzaard says. “I think I owe you that.” His voice is calm and steady. “First, I am going to stop time. Then I am going to slowly, carefully, cut out your hearts with my Boker.” He brings the blade into the beam of the flashlight so its glare streaks across their eyes. “Then I will sit back and just enjoy watching you. Maybe I will get something to eat. When I am ready, I will restore the flow of time. You will see me, sitting here, watching, as your life pours out onto the floor. I think I will enjoy that very much. The look on your faces. Helplessness. Weakness. Death. Then I will take your Stone in my hand and bond with it.”
