Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  I…

  I…

  “We find it and we stop it.” Felicity rescues me. Pushes against the crushing gravity of it all. “That’s our plan. That’s what we’re going to do.”

  “Erm…” Clyde clears his throat. “God, this is the bit where I hate having read about this stuff, but it was a Friday night and it was late and there was nothing good on TV, and I was sort of a bit down about the recently-having-been-a-supervillain thing at the time, and there was a sort of grim fascination thing going on. And please understand, I really don’t want this to be the truth, it just happens to be the theory supported by pretty much all the evidence.

  “You see, if the echo has arrived then that means that the Uhrwerkgerät has to go off.” He stares about, looking for someone to nod and say it’s OK. No one does. He plows on anyway. “It’s like a ripple in a pond. If you see the ripple then you know someone threw a stone. Here we saw there was a future echo, so we know there was a detonation. We can’t have had one without the other. So basically the manifestation of the echo means the detonation is sort of, well, one doesn’t really want to use the word ‘unavoidable’ but pretty much it’s unavoidable.”

  I sit down. My legs just go out from under me. The floor comes up and smacks me in the arse. My death. Predestined. Signed, stamped, post-marked, and delivered love and kisses from the universe. Reality is conspiring against me.

  There is chaos around me again. Felicity is shouting something again. Clyde is backing up, hunching his shoulders defensively. Kayla has her sword drawn for some reason and is eyeing the closet door.

  I can’t hold onto their words. I can’t hold onto anything. Not even my own fucking life.

  Jesus.

  I am going to die. I mean, I was always going to die. Death and taxes and all that crap. But… I mean, soon, right? Before my time, I suppose. I am going to die young and I don’t even have a good-looking corpse to leave behind. Felicity might disagree, but…

  God, Felicity. She’s…

  Actually she’s going to die too. This bomb is going to go off. Clyde just said it. It’s predetermined. It’s already happened. We just have to catch up to it. A detonation powerful enough to distort reality. Felicity’s not going to survive that. No one in MI37 is. England isn’t. Hell, Earth might not.

  What do we do? What the hell do we do, when there’s nothing we can do?

  “Ephie.” The name cuts through my fug. Felicity has rounded on Kayla. She grabs her by the lapels of her flannel overshirt. “This is reality magic. Get Ephie. She’s a Dreamer. She determines what’s reality. She is reality magic. Get her here. Make her fix it.”

  “That wee bitch?” Kayla’s expression is incredulous. “She can’t do shite for this.”

  “Get her!” Felicity’s voice breaks slightly.

  “It’s not like that. I can’t just go to her. I just call her and if she’s not being an uppity wee shite she feckin’ comes.”

  “So fucking call her.” Felicity still hasn’t let go of Kayla’s shirt.

  “She won’t come.”

  “Call her!”

  Kayla hesitates, then sighs. “Ephie,” she says loudly. “Ephie!”

  Nothing. I sit in the lab soaked in my own blood and misery and Kayla’s call goes unheeded.

  “Again,” Felicity demands.

  “Ephie!”

  Nothing.

  “Again.”

  Kayla looks miserable. It’s so unexpected and unguarded a look, I almost turn away. This is Kayla’s pain. Pain she can’t stab or hack away. Pain she’s so defenseless against she’s trying to bury it under another pregnancy.

  “Ephie!” Her shout is hollow in the room.

  Nothing.

  “Again.” Felicity is merciless.

  Kayla’s expression twists. She finds her anger. “The wee bitch isn’t listening to me!” She’s almost shouting. “She’s got her head shoved up her reality-bending arse so feckin’ far she can see out of her own eyeballs. She can’t do shite for us. Forget her.”

  Then Kayla seems to notice that she’s breathing hard, takes a moment to steady herself, rests a hand on Felicity’s arm. “We’ll go to the Himalayas. Clyde and Tabitha will find something feckin’ there.” She nods at me. “We’ll fix him. It’ll be all right. You ken?”

  Felicity holds her for a moment, not relaxing a muscle. Then she sags. Kayla catches her with her other hand, props her against a lab table.

  “It’s all theory and shite,” she says. “Thaumaturgical bollocks. We’ll kick them there, make ’em squeal, and all this shit will be sorted.” She looks to Clyde. “Right?”

  “Well,” Clyde retreats to the far side of the computer. “I mean, I suppose if we’re going to learn any more about the Uhrwerkgerät anywhere it’s going to be there. And Lang seems to be the expert on this stuff. Maybe if he made theory into practice then… well, I don’t know… I think the fact that I don’t know is sort of the point. So I need to find out. Could totally be a way to save Arthur. And the world. And everything.” For a moment he looks like he actually means it. Then he glances down at the papers he pulled up on the computer. The sight of him blanching gives me less confidence.

  “It’s what we do,” I hear Felicity mutter. There are a few lines of hope drafted around her eyes. She looks down at me, takes a breath. “It’s going to be alright,” she says.

  I start laughing. I don’t know what else to do. I see it again. The figure of night and stars standing before me, destroying my mind.

  “Of course it is,” I say. “Yeah. Totally.”

  “You’ll be OK,” Felicity says. “I promise you.”

  They’re words divorced from their meaning by the absurdity and cruelty of the world.

  But what is the other option? Curl up here? Maybe I can use those words. At least for a little bit. And then denial will kick in and I can coast on that.

  Coast on it up until the moment when I am violently blown up.

  Oh Jesus.

  I take Felicity’s hand, hold on tight.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she says.

  “It’s going to be all right.” I repeat the words back to her. I even try out a smile. It’s not so hard to fake. I feel I’ve been practicing it the past few days.

  “Yes. It will be.” I think Felicity’s smile might even be genuine. She may really believe me. “Now,” she says, “let’s go to Nepal and sort this shit out.”

  26

  BRIZE NORTON AIR BASE

  Clouds roll in as we make our way south to the RAF base just outside Brize Norton. Rain spatters the car windows. Felicity drives. Tabitha and Clyde sit in the back of Felicity’s minivan trying to hide the fact that they’re holding hands.

  Someone on the radio jokes at the Prime Minister’s expense. Felicity laughs. She is sunshine despite the rain. It’s as if everything is already fixed for her. She was quiet earlier. But then after a few miles she coughed and made some quip about Kayla and pregnancy. Something about needing a man with balls of steel, and how composite metals typically had a low sperm count. It’s been smiles since then.

  Maybe it’s genuine. Maybe it’s denial. I’m just glad she seems better than she did back at the lab.

  We approach the air base. It is large and fenced off. We start to trace its circumference, finding our way to the gate.

  “What the hell?”

  Felicity’s tone makes me look up from contemplating my own navel. Two massive figures stand by the road, their shapes barely discernible beneath heavy brown cloaks.

  Volk and Hermann. How the hell did they get here?

  “Careful,” Tabitha says from the back seat. “Could be anyone.”

  And actually she’s right. Those cloaks conceal the figures’ true identities. They’re too small to be Friedrich, but that’s about the only robot we can rule out.

  “Should we keep driving?” Clyde asks. “It seems a little impolite and all, but, well, we can’t be completely sure that they’re here for us. Well, that
said, I suppose if one starts down that road, well it’s very difficult to be completely sure about anything, isn’t it? I mean one is constantly reliant on one’s own senses, and there’s just so much evidence demonstrating how they really aren’t as reliable as we’d like to think. What if one has gone mad in the night and doesn’t realize it? I might not even be in a car on my way to the Himalayas right now. I might be in my kitchen talking to two watermelons and a spatula and hallucinating wildly. I mean when that’s a possibility, what is certainty?”

  I’m not sure if that’s rhetorical or not, but it’s definitely a pause. “I’ll see what they want,” I say to Felicity. “You keep the engine running.”

  “I’ll come too,” she says. “Tabitha—”

  “No.” I put my hand on her arm, practice my smile. “The one good thing about knowing a bomb is going to kill me is that I can be certain that these guys won’t.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Felicity says. It sounds like a reflex.

  “Actually—” Clyde starts from the back seat, but the car is already slowing. I open the door as we roll to a halt, hop out into the rain.

  The two hulking Uhrwerkmänner turn to face me. The gravity of their movements makes me feel small and fragile and full of extremely squishable organs. My pistol feels unhelpfully small. I need to find some sort of missile launcher I can carry around without raising eyebrows.

  “You are leaving without us.” There’s no mistaking that grating resentment. These are my guys.

  “Hello, Hermann,” I say. “Lovely to see you too.”

  I can’t tell if he grunts or slips a gear. “You abandon your task,” he says.

  He is buried deep in his cloak again. The thick cloth is sodden, clinging to his angular frame, yet it still obfuscates more than it reveals. Volk, on the other hand, pokes his head forward, round glass eyes protruding, rain dripping down their surface.

  “You have found something?” He sounds hopeful, eager even. The yin to Hermann’s despondent yang.

  “Maybe,” I say. “We’re not sure. We want to check it out.”

  “See, Hermann!” Volk slaps his companion on the back. “I told you it was so. They are coming closer to the solution we all search for.”

  Another grinding grunt from Hermann.

  “How did you know we were going to be here?” I ask them. If I can find that out, I might be closer to working out how Friedrich and his mechanical posse intercepted us at Lang’s apartment.

  “You mean so you can keep us out of the loop next time?” Hermann spits. “So you can keep whatever secrets you find close to yourself and share them with no one else? We shall tell you nothing.”

  Seriously—does he act like a jackass on purpose?

  “I ask,” I say, starting to wish I’d brought an umbrella, “because last time we told you where we were going, your friend Friedrich turned up and tried to endurance test our spines, and I want to know if the leak is on our end or yours.”

  “You accuse us?” Hermann’s voice is a knife blade being sharpened. “You dare? With no understanding? With no concept of our sacrifice, our battle? You say we are betrayers?” He straightens, limbs unfolding beneath his cloak. He looms over me, ten feet tall or more.

  The bomb will kill me. Not him.

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility,” I say, looking up into the overhanging darkness of his cloak. I put no malice into the words, just let them hang.

  Hermann’s weight shifts suddenly. A foot coming forward, an elbow swinging back.

  “No, Hermann!” Volk shoves his bulk between the two of us.

  For my part, I stand my ground. He can’t kill me. It’s predetermined.

  “How did you know we’d be here?” I ask again. “Because the leak could also be on our end—”

  “So he admits it!” Hermann froths behind Volk’s outstretched arms.

  “It’s another possibility,” I say, still keeping my voice flat. For once I feel in control of something. Hermann’s hysterics are terribly predictable. “It would be unintentional,” I hesitate, “obviously. But you being here suggests our communications aren’t as secure as we thought they were.”

  “See,” says Volk, turning his back on me, voice placating, “this is concern. The same as ours. We work together.”

  A wodge of oil arcs over Volk’s shoulder, lands in a thick puddle beside me. Which means Lang even designed a way for them to spit. That seems a little unnecessary.

  “Calm yourself.” There’s finally an edge to Volk’s voice. And then a string of German words that I don’t understand. “Du machst dich lächerlich.” Then he turns to me.

  “We have hidden for many years. Underground. Where you do not look. You have tunnels everywhere. You abandon them over and over. These hidden, forgotten spaces are ours now. They go many places and allow us to hear many things.”

  I hesitate, working out the implications.

  “There are tunnels below MI37?” I ask. “You just stuck a glass up against the wall and listened to us talking?”

  Volk nods. The speaker-bar that is his mouth twists slightly—the suggestion of a smile. “Not just below MI37.”

  Well, that’s not creepy at all.

  “You are a fool.” Hermann spits again. Not at me this time. It spatters over Volk’s cloak, leaving an ugly stain on the side of his hood.

  “But you haven’t seen Friedrich or any of his cronies down in the tunnels with you?” I say, ignoring Hermann.

  Volk shrugs. “There are many tunnels. We cannot be in them all at once.”

  Not quite the “no” I was hoping for. There are still no definitive answers.

  “OK,” I say, “that’s your show and tell over with. My turn.” And so I lay it out for them. What we found beneath London, our plan to go to the Himalayas and do more research. I leave out the bit about the future echo. That feels personal. And likely to cause Hermann to have another hissy fit.

  “So you have nothing,” Hermann says when I’m done.

  “Well,” I snap back, “I do think I have a bit of a cold now that I’ve been standing in the rain for ten minutes telling you about all the shit we’ve been through on your behalf.” This, I remember, is why we normally let Felicity do the talking. She keeps her temper on a tighter rein.

  “Forgive my friend,” Volk says. “It is hard to watch our people die. We are anxious for news.”

  My anger ebbs. I think I have a little insight on that sort of stress now. “I understand,” I say.

  There is a moment while everyone pulls themselves together a little bit.

  “So,” Hermann breaks the silence. “Where is this plane? When do we take off?”

  “We?” I say. “This—”

  “Of course we,” Hermann snaps. “You do not think we will let you simply run off and abscond with what we need. You will show us the way and we will retrieve it. I will not have you fail again as you did at Lang’s house.”

  “Hey,” I say, whatever momentary calm I enjoyed evaporating, “we’ve been on this less than a week and gotten further than you. So a little fucking gratitude might not go amiss.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  A voice from the car draws all our attention. Felicity is standing by the driver’s door, shielding her eyes from the rain.

  “Fine,” I call back. “Just discussing Hermann’s desire to come with us to the Himalayas.”

  Felicity’s mouth makes an “o.”

  “When do you take off?” Hermann calls. “Your friend,” he spits the word, “is reluctant to tell us.”

  “Well,” Felicity hesitates. “It might be hard to disguise your presence in Nepal, and—”

  “We are coming,” Hermann insists.

  I look to Volk. “Come on,” I say, “help me out here.”

  “We are most anxious to retrieve the papers,” Volk calls to Felicity, “and eager to be of assistance in any way we can be.”

  It doesn’t sound like any more of a request than Hermann’s stat
ement. The tone is friendlier, but that’s about it. I sigh.

  Felicity sees me do it. “Runway Bravo,” she calls. “Half an hour.”

  RUNWAY BRAVO. HALF AN HOUR

  The RAF seems a touch surprised to find two mechanical giants in the middle of one of their hangars. To be honest, I am too. They declined a ride from us and we left them by the side of the road. The idea that the pair of them can bypass military defenses so easily as to have beaten us here is a little worrying.

  Still after a brief standoff where the pair of them are threatened by fifty or so soldiers with rifles, and alarm klaxons sound from every corner of the base, Felicity manages to smooth things over.

  Eventually the base chief disperses his men with mutterings about “irregular bollocks.” A vast Hercules carrier plane waits for us, which at least solves the problem of where to store Volk and Hermann. Despite his immobile features, Hermann still manages to give me a dirty look as he gets on board.

  “Friendly bugger, ain’t he?” says Hannah.

  She and Kayla drove up together in Kayla’s car. They arrived only in time to catch the tail-end of the excitement.

  I remember my conversation with Felicity the night before. About how Hannah unknowingly holds MI37’s future in her hands. About how important it is to be nice to her.

  Then I remember how I’m going to get blown to bits in a few days, and how that is probably the only thing Hannah will ever remember about me.

  So I don’t bother replying. I just get onto the plane, sit down, and wait for the future to get a little closer.

  THREE HOURS LATER

  As far as in-flight entertainment goes, military aircraft are shit. Instead of a movie, I get to listen to Kayla discuss the desired genetic traits of a sperm donor with Hannah. Apparently she is looking for someone “intelligent and shite”, “not a fatty,” “with none of that genetic disease bollocks,” and with “a tiny wee bum.”

  “Are tiny wee bums genetic?” Hannah asks her as I attempt to have the seat swallow me.