Ripple Effects

by Laura J. Mixon

  “Good. We’re still in the shadow.”

  “Shadow?” Rashida asked. “What shadow?”

  Tiffani gave her an unconvincing smile. She brushed herself off. “Listen, I’d love to stay and chat but I’ve got prior commitments … places to go. You know!” She stood and started to wobble off. The look on her face made the hairs on John’s neck bristle.

  “No we don’t know. Tiffani—wait! I have more questions.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I don’t have time right now to give you answers. I really must be off.” She was power walking—or trying to—but given that his legs were about half again as long as hers and she was missing a shoe and had just plummeted from more than a mile in the air and nearly drowned, he had no problem catching up.

  “Maybe we can help you.”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Tiffani, slow down.” John grabbed her arm. “For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong? Talk to me.”

  At his touch, she spun with a snarl. “Don’t touch me!” He released her. She stared at him, then covered her mouth with both hands and crumpled to the ground, sobbing great big gulping, body-racking sobs.

  Rashida had caught up. She and John looked at each other. “This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  John knelt next to Tiffani. “I have a feeling we have a common enemy.” She gave him a hollow look, holding her sleeve to her nose. “If you’ll just take a minute to let us in on what’s happened to you, we might be able to help each other.”

  She wiped her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her coveralls, and gave him a bitter smile. “All right. I can spare a few minutes. But then I really must go.” She leaned closer. “And we should find someplace more private.”

  “Follow me.”

  He led the way inside the museum at the base of the Golden Lady. Not many people were around. At the gift shop John bought her a souvenir T-shirt and sweatshorts to replace her torn coveralls. While she ducked into the bathroom to change, Rashida edged closer. “You want to clue me in?”

  “The short version? There’s a new ace in town. A powerful one. A total psycho. Something tells me she”—John gestured with his chin toward the bathroom, where they could hear the water running—“is connected to him in some way. I don’t know how yet.”

  Ras looked alarmed. “Wait. What? A dangerous ace?”

  He shushed her. “You know that guy who approached me in the bar?” he asked.

  “The blond?” He nodded. Her eyes widened. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What are his powers?”

  “He says he sees possible futures. He uses it to spy on people and manipulate events in his favor. Calls himself ‘Ripple Master’ or ‘the Rippler’ or something.”

  “Ripple Effect,” said Tiffani, emerging from the bathroom. She leaned against the wall nearby. “I’ve seen what he can do, Candle. He’s deadly.”

  “Agreed,” John said. “Today he asked me to meet him in Battery Park and caused a truck to crash into a cyclist before my eyes. He nearly killed the guy. And … this will sound delusional, but … I was headed back to the ship not ten minutes ago and a napkin landed under my foot.” He pulled it out of his pocket and showed it to them. “I mean, he was nowhere around. The breeze just blew it there. He couldn’t have done it. And yet he did.”

  Rashida took it. “What are these symbols?”

  “Just a sec.” John looked at Tiffani. “He recruited you, didn’t he? Why? For the goods on me?”

  “Yes.” Tiffani’s color rose. “He wanted me tell him all the skinny I could on you, from our time on the show.” At his frown, she shrugged. “Sorry Candle, but I needed the money.

  “Looking back, I think it’s because he can’t get as good a read on you as he’d like. There’s a blurring effect or something. He says your ‘fates are entwined.’” She gnawed at her lip. “He’s been threatening my family to make me help him. This morning he tried to force me to sabotage the airship. But I didn’t do it. And when he finds out, my family will be in danger. Which is why I have to go save them, now, before he can kill them all.”

  “Whoa, whoa—slow down,” John said. “The people on the airship are in danger?”

  “Not anymore. I didn’t switch out the part like Rip told me to.”

  “‘The part?’” Rashida repeated. She and John exchanged a look.

  “For the ‘thrust turbine.’” Tiffani made air quotes. “Don’t ask me, but it has to do with the helium they use to make the airship float. He wanted me to swap out the real part for one that I guess he had messed with or something. But I—I couldn’t go through with it. And now he’s going to punish me. My family, I mean. He’ll kill them first and then he’ll hunt me down and kill me. That’s what he does.” Her lips quivered again, but her expression remained impassive.

  “But I mean—what’s his aim?” Rashida asked. “Why is he doing this?”

  “He wants Satchmo’s horn,” John replied.

  Rashida frowned. “I don’t get it. Why go to all this trouble? Why drag John into it? If he can manipulate events as he says he can, why not just arrange it so there’s a crash or flat tire while the horn is in transit, and just walk away with the goods while one guard is changing the tire and the other one’s tying his shoe, or something? That’s how I’d do it.”

  Rashida was looking at Tiffani as spoke. Tiffani looked at John. “I don’t think I’m the best one to answer that,” she replied.

  He sighed. “Because this guy has it in for me. Because he knows me from our childhood. Because”—deep breath—“John Montaño is not the name I was born with. It’s an alias. Like in witness protection. Only I did it on my own. He told you, didn’t he?” he asked Tiffani. She nodded. John turned back to Rashida. Her eyes had widened. “There’s no time for all the details now,” he said. “But there was a good reason.”

  “Oh, hell no. You’re not getting off that easy. going to tell me exactly what’s going on, John. Or whoever you are.”

  He flinched. “Ras … you know me. This was a long time ago. Can’t it wait?” But the stern lines in her face didn’t soften. “All right. Fine. This guy, Titus—”

  “He calls himself Rip now,” Tiffani said.

  “Right. Rip. He was someone I knew back when I was a kid. He was my best friend. My first love.” He felt his face heat up as he said it. “The virus hit when I was seventeen, and I entered a coma for three months before my card finished turning. And Titus, Rip—whatever—he was in the room when I came to.” He hesitated. “Unfortunately, I came out on fire and burned the ever-loving shit out of him. I gave him burns over twenty percent of his body.”

  Rashida gasped. “That … that’s messed up.”

  “Honestly, Ras, I didn’t even know about his injuries until last night. I woke up with the room on fire, and I fled.

  “But I did ditch him. He’s right about that. And my mom, too—though she’d given up on me long before my card turned.” He paused. “I was a real asshole when I was a teen. A thief and a forger. A dropout. I spent as much of my teens in juvie as I did out of it. And it wasn’t because we were poor or lived in a bad neighborhood. It wasn’t bad influences. I just was pissed off after my dad drew a black queen, and I decided, Fuck it. I made a bunch of shitty choices. And this guy Fagan, he’s a crime lord, he made us all kinds of promises that we were suckers enough to believe.” John shook his head at his younger self. “He had his claws in us good and deep by the time my card turned. That was why I ran.

  “So. Since everyone thought I’d self-immolated, I stole a bunch of money from one of Fagan’s dealers and got out of town. I bought a shiny new identity in Colorado. Next thing I know I’m trying out for American Hero, I’m on the show, and my future is set. No more crimes since, Ras. I promise.”

  The horrified look Rashida wore shamed him. But she said only, “Is he going to try to kill you and make it look like an accident?”

  “No,
he wants to humiliate him,” Tiffani said. “He wants to reveal John’s past and make him out to be a criminal. He wants him alive, so he can make him suffer.”

  “Well, I am a criminal,” John said, but Tiffani shook her head. “You don’t get it. He will steal the trumpet and frame you for it. And he’ll probably kill off all the people you care about while you’re in prison. Or force you to do terrible things for him …” She lowered her gaze. It sure sounded like she was speaking from personal experience.

  Rashida put her hands on her hips and looked from Tiffani to John. “Well then, we’d better stop him.”

  The clock above the cashier read twelve thirty-five. Tiffani pointed. “We don’t have much time. His power has limits. We’re in what he calls a causality shadow right now. He can’t see his own future—it sets up a feedback loop. And he can’t see what happens after he makes a decision that changes his future. Not for a while, at least. In both cases he gets thrown out on his ass and has to wait for a reset before he can go back in and future-snoop. But things’ll reset soon. We need to leave.”

  “He gets thrown out?” Rashida repeated. “You mean he actually leaves the room with his power?”

  “Yep! He walks right into mirrors. Anything shiny. They’re doorways for him. You can kind of see what he sees, for a second, when he comes and goes. It’s like a glass pinwheel, only bigger and stranger.”

  John started, remembering his dream last night, and the effect he’d been seeing at his own dimensional threshold.

  Rashida was focused on something else. “So he needs a shiny surface big enough to get through to use his power?”

  Tiffani nodded. “He can see out through mirrored surfaces, while he’s up there poking around in people’s business. But where there’s nothing shiny, he can’t see you. And he has to come out the same mirror he goes in. He has some other limits too. It’s his ‘temporal physics.’” She made sarcastic air quotes.

  “Oh, really?” John said. Hmmmm …

  “Mmm-hmm. We’re in a causality shadow right now. That’s why I keep looking at the time. Up till he met up with you, Candle, he wasn’t sure he was going to tell you about his ace. He hoped not to. Almost no one knows, and I think he’ll kill anyone who finds out, if he can’t control them. That’s why you’ll be in danger, yourself,” she told Rashida, “once he finds out you know. And he will find out.” She turned back to John. “Candle, when he revealed his ability to you, I figure lots of people were affected. Yes?”

  John nodded. “Absolutely. Not only the cyclist who got hit, and the driver, but everyone whose commute was delayed. And there was the motorcycle cop, and the EMTs and all the people they would have come in contact with. Plus the people in the hospital where the cyclist was taken …”

  “Good! All those are the ‘ripple effects’ that went out from his choice.” Tiffani made spiraling motions with her hands. “The more of those the better. He’s created a humdinger of a blind spot.”

  “How long do we have,” Rashida asked, “before he comes out from behind this ‘causality shadow’ of his?”

  “They usually last an hour or so.” They all glanced at the clock this time. Twelve forty-five. John’s skin crawled. A few minutes before 12:03 p.m., Rip had shown John his ace. They had a maximum of fifteen minutes. It could be less; Tiffani didn’t sound all that sure about the timing. And the gift shop was filled with shiny surfaces.

  Tiffani said, “I’m thinking … we may have a way to get away from his spying eyes, even after the blind spot ends. He said once he can only see futures for places he’s physically near—within walking distance. He has this fancy smartwatch that helps him find future versions of people by tracing their cell signals, but he has to be close to them for it to work.

  “He’s already surveilled the shit out of New Liberty Island, because he knew the concert would be here tonight. So this is the first place he’ll look for us. But now that he’s hit the reset on the timeline … I’ve never tested this, but I don’t see how, if we’re far enough away before the shadow lifts and he doesn’t know where we’re going to be, he could surveil us.”

  John massaged his temples. “This is making my head hurt.”

  “How do we even know that’s true?” Ras asked Tiffani. “He could have been lying to you.”

  “We don’t. But here’s the other thing. There’s no escaping Rip forever, Patina. Even if we could get away—and maybe we can; I’m not saying we can’t hide for a good while. Believe me, I’d much rather run than fight. But I don’t think we’ll ever get a better chance at defeating him than now. Each of us could run to different corners of the Earth and huddle alone like rats in a sewer drain, but it’d only be temporary. He’s a billionaire. Who can see into the future.”

  “Uh, he’s a billionaire?” Rashida repeated, and John felt the blood drain from his own face. Tiffani nodded, grim.

  “A multi-billionaire. He could buy a country and barely make a dent in his net worth. Hell, he’s only not a trillionaire because he doesn’t need to bother. And you know what? Even if we lived a lifetime hidden away from him, he’d still be right up here.” She tapped her own forehead. “No, thank you! I have had more than enough of Titus ‘Ripple Effect’ Maguire. I want him out of my head, and out of my life. And yours, too, Candle.” She took John’s hands, and looked right into his eyes. “You listen to me. He’s obsessed with you. He’ll never stop hunting you. And I’ve seen him at work. He can’t be stopped. No prison can hold him. We have to end him. There is no other way.”

  John jerked his hands free, staring in alarm. Rashida cleared her throat. “John, a word with you?” She glanced at Tiffani. “Privately?”

  Tiffani shrugged. “Whatever. But I’m getting off this island in the next five minutes. With or without you.” She went back into the bathroom and shut the door.

  Rashida pulled him close. “I don’t think we should be trying to do this ourselves, John. If this guy is all that dangerous, shouldn’t we call Chubb? Or … the police or, or SCARE, or the Committee? Someone?”

  “And what? Try to convince someone in middle management in one or more major bureaucracies that we’re being targeted by a billionaire time-traveler who can murder people using the beat of a butterfly’s wings? With no proof except some scribbles on a napkin?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Ras, the only two people who have actually seen what he can do are me and Tiffani. A ‘gay-ish’ guy living under a fake identity with a criminal youth, and a B-list actress-slash-model famous for being self-serving and untrustworthy.”

  “Hey!” Tiffani’s head popped out of the restroom door. “Bubbles again? It’s always poor Bub-Bub-Bubbles. What about poor me?” The door slammed.

  John told Rashida, “By the time SCARE even opens a file, Tiffani and I will be dead of ‘natural causes.’ Maybe they’ll eventually catch him, but I don’t want to end up as an entry in somebody’s murder book. No. Tiffani is right. Time is his advantage. Surprise is ours. We have this one shot to stop him. But”—he forced the words out—“I think you should bow out of this, Ras. It isn’t your fight, and you probably aren’t a target yet.”

  “What? Oh, hell no! How could you even think that? It’s my job to protect that damn horn. And you’re not just my boss, John. You’re my friend. Even if you’re a fucking jerk for lying to me, you asshole.”

  John winced. “You’re right. I’m trash. I’m sorry.”

  “We’ll hash that out later. But I’m not going to stand by while you get framed. Plus, you know? Fuck this ‘Ripple Effect’ guy. He’s a hazard to public safety. He needs to be stopped.”

  He gave her a grateful look. “Thanks, Ras.”

  Tiffani came back out. “All righty, then. Now we need to find a place he won’t think to look for us.”

  Rashida said, “You could have, you know, at least pretended not to listen.”

  “Sorry. Guess I’m too riled up about getting the hell out of here.” Tiffani tilted her head towar
d the clock above the cashier. It said 12:53. “We need to go now.”

  Rashida fiddled with her phone and swiped through some screens. “All right. Follow me.” She led the way out of the gift shop to the wharf, where a tour boat was disembarking visitors. “That boat is headed to Manhattan. If we run, we can catch it.”

  * * *

  With sunset came the crowds, and after sunset, a show—if not quite the one the audience was expecting. John watched from the amphitheater’s west side, just offstage, where he could see the performers and the crowd, as well as all the approaches from the amphitheatre’s west. Arry covered the approaches and stage from the east.

  It was a clear night. Spotlights pirouetted across the dark sky. Twilight had not cooled the air nor made it less muggy, though the promoters had installed giant electric fans that bracketed the stands and piped the air up atop them with big ducts that blew the hot air around. The secured building below the stands had an exit in a pit that separated the stage from the audience. There they’d installed a cooling unit with a duct that came up alongside the stage and blew chilled air onto the performers from the catwalk. John, standing at the top of the stairs from the pit, was glad to be an unintended beneficiary: wearing the requisite suit jacket was sheer misery in this weather, and he was dripping sweat.

  Thousands had crowded into the stands over the past forty-five minutes and now sat shoulder to shoulder, fanning themselves. Their conversations added up to a din you could hear even over the fans. City and state officials sat in air-conditioned comfort in the skybox at the back, behind glass. The airship had returned from the Empire State Building around sunset, and had sunk like a giant soap bubble from high overhead to a few hundred feet above the skybox. John looked up. New York City’s skyline was reflected on the dirigible’s near side.

  Halfway up the stands, two lighting towers held spotlights that swept the crowds. The stage was cast in shadow. John wore his own earpiece, mic, and radio, as well as a walkie-talkie the stage manager had provided him so she could cue him when it was time to bring out the horn.