“This can’t change,” she said. “You can’t give me half the truth anymore.”
Yalé nodded. “You have my word. But, I need the same. No half-truths.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding. When she thought about what had just happened, with Rickard and Dr. Browning, she realized that the memory was duller than it should’ve been. She could still remember, prior to going back, knowing that Dr. Browning had died when he was struck by a car. Both realities competed in her head, and neither felt sharp. “I went back to stop the doctor’s death, but I just changed the way it happened. And now, it feels like both ways happened, but fuzzy, like I’m in a dream.”
“Time weaving isn’t clean,” he said. “There are remnants, fibers, that stick in your head. The hope, of course, is that this isn’t something you need to do very often.”
CHAPTER 20
August 25, 2026
* * *
Twenty-eight years later
She was pinned in her position in the laser tag arena and didn’t see a way out. She tried to control her breathing. Even if it ended here for her, she couldn’t stop fighting until she could find a way to get at least some of these civilians out safely. The flashing neon lights, and the strobe effect that alternated on and off every ten seconds, weren’t helping her.
Neither were the holographic laser tag players which appeared intermittently to fool and confuse the real people playing. She hoped the police were on their way, and hoped she could keep everyone safe until they arrived.
During the short breaks in the gunfire, she could hear Ayers and his friends laughing obnoxiously like the fifteen-year-olds they were. They sounded like they didn’t have a care in the world, with the upper hand here, and no imaginable consequences for their actions.
There might not have been ten people on the planet better than Allaire with a Karambit blade in her hand, or really, any blade. But against four gunmen with real weapons, all perched on turrets at the top level of the laser tag arena, there wasn’t much she could do in the way of going on the offensive.
She locked eyes with a young girl with dark hair who was hiding behind a huge plastic boulder. She looked about eleven, and even with tears streaming down her face, she clutched her laser gun, her back pressed one of the plastic poles that ran throughout the arena. She might’ve taken the same position when the game was still in session. The difference now was that she no longer had a weapon of any value, and all of a sudden her real life was on the line. Allaire tried to give her a comforting look, but couldn’t help her eyes from welling up, too.
Ayers’s crew had chained up the two emergency exits and started firing real bullets into the crowd. So far, Allaire didn’t think any one of the twenty or so people inside had been hit by the gunfire.
Leading her to the year 2026, to this laser tag arena, had been a trap, plain and simple.
By 2011, Allaire and Yalé had gotten savvy enough to slow down the ruthless fifteen-year-old Ayers and keep him locked in his room at the factory for weeks, and sometimes, months, at a time. Ever since he’d started taking these “joyrides” through time, as Yalé called them, when he was eight, Allaire had been like a bounty hunter, trying to pull him back through the time tunnel before he could do more damage to the future. It was like trapping a feral animal. Ayers had no qualms about violence toward Allaire, yet she needed to subdue him without hurting him.
Ayers’s joyrides—taken with little regard people’s lives or property—were doing more than just creating havoc. Because Ayers had made some friends along the way—a group of three other similarly destruction-minded teenagers without any concern for discretion—the closely guarded secrets of time weaving were less and less secret every day.
There was Vincent, pulled straight out of the 1950s, who looked nothing like the cold-blooded killer he was. He looked more like a child actor, with his feathered blond bangs and slight frame. Sonny, too, looked like more of a dandy than a thug, but Ayers had shown him, over and over, the lack of consequences they’d face when weaving through time. Allaire had a front-row seat as she watched the tall, thin redhead morph from disco kid into a remorseless murderer. Byron was the only one of the three who looked the part. Ayers pulled him from a dock somewhere in the 1920s and basically used him as a personal bodyguard.
During the past year, Ayers had left the factory completely, and was jumping through time constantly. Allaire’s life had turned into a game of Whack-a-Mole, trying to go back and fix what Ayers and his band of angry misfits had done. Her efforts weren’t enough, though. The tunnel had been shrinking every time she’d checked it, since Ayers first starting joyriding. The last year they could access through the tunnel now was 2122. The more people who knew about time weaving meant exponentially more damage to the continuum of time. She and Yalé viewed the tunnel shrinking to be evidence that the universe was striking back against all of these intrusions—all of these different timestreams created by Ayers’s disregard for anything but his own violent whims and pleasures.
Back in 2011, Ayers had been just sly enough to make Allaire think she’d figured out where he was headed. She found a flyer for a new kind of laser tag, which debuted in 2026, in the pocket of one of his jackets, and it led her right into this trap.
She had to do something. Potentially take a risk she hadn’t taken before. The gunfire started up again, and the boys began to strafe the laser tag arena. She heard a voice cry out. It sounded like an adult. The sounds of children dying were the ones that haunted Allaire when she tried to sleep these days. They were the sounds that made her think some days that she might be going over an edge that people didn’t come back from. Ayers and his gang were indiscriminate shooters, and Allaire had arrived at the aftermath of some of their most horrific work a few times before.
The strafing stopped for a few seconds. “Ayers!” she screamed.
More gunfire. The last thing he ever wanted to do was talk to her. He knew she wouldn’t kill him, so she didn’t have much to bargain with.
“Let these people go,” she said, “and I’ll give you my weapon. Do what you want with me.”
“Bullshit!” he screamed, firing at the ceiling now, sending shards of light bulbs down to the floor, and darkening the room.
The only exit they hadn’t chained up was directly behind Vincent, up where the four boys stood on the top of the arena like snipers in a war zone.
She waited for a break in the gunfire and made her way to a wooden stand, meant to be an obstacle for players in the arena. As she moved, the handcuffs clipped to her belt loop tapped against her thigh. She ducked behind the stand and immediately the boys started pelting it with gunfire. Two of the boys held their machine guns with one hand, as if Ayers had shown them Scarface too many times. One bullet pushed through the wood and Allaire saw it ricochet off the floor right next to her.
Sonny was the one who had the angle on her, and if she stayed there any longer, eventually he’d hit her. She grabbed the blade of her Karambit, and peeked up at him, loading his machine gun. She quickly stood up and flung the knife across the arena, to the corner of the upper level, hitting Sonny square in the chest. He fell against the wall in the corner and slid to the ground.
“Man down!” Vincent yelled, stopping his fire for a moment.
“What a pussy!” Ayers called out through his own crazed laughter before he started another string of gunfire.
As the boys shot in her direction, she dove from the wooden stand to a wide pole, which was only a few feet from the stairs leading to the upper level. She could see now that there were two dead bodies on the arena floor. If they put their minds to killing everyone in here quickly, they could probably accomplish it within a minute or two. Instead, they were perched up top, picking off the tragically unlucky laser tag players, one by one, just for the sport of it. And, they were trying to hunt Allaire, of course.
As it often did on these excursions, it occurred to her that getting herself and Ayers back to 2011 safely might simply not be
possible. She moved stealthily to the nearby metal stairs and crawled up, trying not to make noise. She was in the one place in the arena where none of the three boys could see her, or get a clear shot.
As she reached the top of the stairs, her head was only inches away from Vincent’s boot. If she showed herself now, on this small perch running along the upper part of one of the arena walls, the three boys could turn her into Swiss cheese in seconds. For a long time she wondered whether Ayers would actually go through with killing her, if he had the chance. After all, she was the closest thing to a mother he had. But it was clear today that, as much pleasure as the boys were getting out of terrorizing the other people in the arena, this trap was set specifically for Allaire.
When the gunfire started again, she grabbed Vincent’s Timberland and tugged it sharply. Off balance, he fell to one knee and stopped shooting for a moment. Allaire managed to pull him onto the stairs on his back, pressing his gun against his chest, so he couldn’t extend it and fire at her. She looked at his soft face. He looked like someone from TV that she might’ve had a crush on. Everyone in Ayers’s crew had screws loose upstairs. In his original timestream, before Ayers plucked him from school as a kid in the 1950s, Vincent would’ve probably spent most of his life rotting in jail. You didn’t try to gun down a roomful of innocents in one situation and live on the straight and narrow in another. Sparing him would likely mean others would die in the future.
Allaire used her body now to pin the gun against him. She grabbed him by his soft cheeks. Instead of fear, he smiled at her. Time travel was imprecise, and memories could linger from one timestream to another—Yalé had taught her that. She wondered if he was smiling at the peace of knowing he was free from the inevitability of hurting anyone else. Or maybe, Allaire thought, he’s just THAT crazy.
She lifted him to a sitting position and snapped his neck. She grabbed his gun as he slumped forward against her.
Before she could point the gun, she heard footsteps above her. She looked up at the top of the stairs and saw Byron pointing his gun at her. He was right out of central casting—an Irish immigrant born into a brutal world down by the docks in New York during the 1920s. Even his weapon was a tommy gun accurate to the time period. “Got her right ‘ere,” he called over to Ayers in a thick Irish brogue.
Allaire scooted herself down a bit, shielding herself with dead Vincent’s upper body. He was a slight kid—one hundred twenty pounds at the most. Not a ton of belly fat.
“Don’t move an inch, lady,” Byron said to her, then he looked over at Ayers again, waiting for him to come over and decide how to handle her. What must he think of a laser tag arena more than a hundred years after the world he was born into? she wondered. Were diversions like this, or paintball, enough to help modern day people stifle homicidal impulses? Or would Byron have been a deviant in any era?
She angled the nose of the machine gun against Vincent’s stomach, hoping there were enough bullets left in the clip. She tried to line up her shot, and then squeezed the trigger. At first there was nothing except the vibration of the bullets lodging into the corpse’s belly. But then, a shot hit just behind Byron’s head.
He looked down at her and realized that she was shooting him through Vincent’s body and he shot back at her.
Allaire moved the gun around now, trying to hit Byron as she buried her head against Vincent, using his body as a shield. The shooting stopped a few moments later and she saw Byron crumble to the ground.
She hustled up the stairs and trained her gun on Ayers, who was taking his time moving toward her, taking breaks to strafe bullets toward the sitting ducks down in the arena.
“How often do you just wish you could kill me?” Ayers asked her, grinning. “Don’t you wish that my uncle would finally agree that our bloodline wasn’t worth the body count?”
She held the gun toward him. “Put your gun down, Ayers.”
“Just tell me,” he said. “How often? Because I think about killing you all the time. At least I can admit it.”
She did the math in her head on how she’d have to try to disarm him, and moved a few steps closer.
“Eh, eh, eh,” he said, pointing the gun right at her chest now. “Don’t come any closer.”
She put the machine gun down at her side. There was no point occupying both of her hands if she wasn’t going to shoot him. Getting him back to the factory today wasn’t likely to happen. At this point, Allaire would be more thrilled just to escape with her life.
“You really would trade your life for mine,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, or maybe pity. She was someone to be pitied, she thought to herself. Even her basest instinct—self-preservation—set aside in favor of a family that certainly didn’t place anywhere near as much value on her life.
Allaire heard a buzz coming from down below in the arena, and both she and Ayers instinctively looked down. She didn’t see anything besides the two dead bodies lying at the feet of the poles they’d been hiding behind. The rest of the people in the arena had taken hiding spots out of view from the upper level, which was the only reason the body count wasn’t higher.
“You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” Ayers asked. “I’m not as special as you think I am.”
Allaire rarely paid much attention to what he said to her. They’d had trips through the tunnel—Ayers in handcuffs and chains, Allaire pulling him along, every few feet a battle—when he’d talked the entire time. His part-anarchist, wannabe-nihilist jibber-jabber and nonsense would get so repetitive, Allaire could tune him out like a bad television commercial.
Now, they heard a loud boom. They looked down and saw that one of the sets of double doors was shaking, collapsing in against the chains holding it shut. The police, Allaire realized. They were using some kind of battering ram.
“Your uncle wants you back home,” she said, knowing this was a futile point to make. “Give me the gun, and let’s go.”
“You didn’t hear me,” he said. He lowered the gun a little bit, more focused on what he had to say than killing her for the moment.
It was then that Allaire noticed the eleven-year-old girl—the one from downstairs—standing near Sonny’s dead body, about fifteen feet from Ayers. She pulled Allaire’s knife out of Sonny’s chest and tip-toed toward Ayers.
“Here’s a thought for you to die with,” Ayers said to Allaire, but she was barely listening, her eyes glued to the little girl. “My uncle and I aren’t the only Seres left. So this whole thing? This whole cat and mouse game, where you don’t kill me even though, damn, you must want to? Pointless. Turns out my dear father had a brother. Can you believe that? A twin brother, separated at birth! You can’t make this stuff up!”
It didn’t make any sense at all. There were no big secrets among the Seres, because they lived in such close quarters. “Ayers,” she said. “Just come back with me.” There were moments Ayers was lucid. Less crazy times, she called them. Perhaps she could tap into a moment like that now.
“This other guy, they didn’t mutilate him like my poor, dickless uncle,” Ayers said. “They just cast him off. Some Ten Commandments-level shit. He has a kid too,” Ayers said. “And I’m not going anywhere until me and my cousin have a little family reunion . . . But, you’re going to have to sit that one out. Real family only. In fact, it’s time for you to take a permanent seat on the bench.”
Allaire winced, but before he could say another word, or pull the trigger, Allaire saw him wince and fall to his knees. He turned around and shot the little girl, knocking her backward and off her feet.
“No!” Allaire screamed. She saw the knife in Ayers’s back when he turned to try to pull it out. The little girl stood behind him and smiled at her as the life passed through her.
Before she could grab him, Ayers pulled himself into his silk blot. Allaire moved back onto the stairs to catch her breath. There was no point chasing him in the tunnel, where he seemed to have super-human strength, and the ability to heal from whatever pain she cou
ld inflict almost immediately.
Moments later, as she heard the police approaching, she pulled the silk blot over her head and began moving through the hot tunnel on her way back to 2011. As she moved through, she couldn’t help but think of what Ayers had told her. Were his words the mad ravings of a crazy person? Or were there other Seres out there? Others, who would make Ayers expendable.
At first, she wondered why he would tell her this. But trying to assign motivation to anything Ayers did was futile. He might even like that he and Allaire would be on equal footing if the other Seres were ever identified. For all she knew, it might make their cat-and-mouse game more exciting for him.
CHAPTER 21
November 2, 2011
* * *
Fifteen years earlier
Allaire came back to the factory building and told Yalé what Ayers had said about there being another Sere out there. She watched him eagerly, knowing his face might tell her more than his words.
“He’s toying with you, I’m afraid,” Yalé answered, turning his back to her and looking at a file folder on his office desk. “I only wish these developers were toying with me. One of these days, they’re going to try telling me I have no choice but to sell them this entire building.”
It was frustrating to Allaire that he was changing the subject. It was a crazy notion, though. And Ayers was nothing if not crazy.
“Perhaps Ayers wants to die at this point,” Yalé said. “Or wants to believe his destiny isn’t so . . . far flung from his nature. Who can ever be sure?” Without any other evidence, and without Yalé willing to entertain the discussion, she had no choice but to let the thought go.
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