by Patrick Lee
"The city had a population of about fifty thousand," she said. "It was evacuated within a couple days of the accident, and it's been empty ever since. Biologists are fascinated with it. It's kind of a thumbnail view of what the world would look like if we all just disappeared one day. In Pripyat there were saplings taking root in the middle of city streets within just a couple years. We can assume the same thing would happen here. Which means the age of the trees on the other side gives us an estimate of the time frame we're dealing with. It gives us a minimum, anyway."
Travis nodded. "There's a white pine out there that's got sixty-seven rings of branches, and it's about as tall as anything in sight. Branch rings equal years, more or less."
"So call it seventy years," Bethany said. "On the other side of the opening, it's seventy years after the end of the world. Whenever that is." " The rest of it slots in easily enough," Travis said.
He was pacing at the windows again.
Bethany was still sitting in the chair. Still looking numb.
Travis continued. "Paige and the others turned on the cylinders inside Border Town. Who knows what they saw on the other side, down there. Maybe that far in the future, the place is just deserted. Whatever the case, they took the cylinders up into the desert the next morning, and spent a lot more time there. They took radio and satellite equipment through the projected opening, and set it all up in the future. They wanted to find out if there was anyone alive in that time. If there was anyone out there, on the air."
Bethany turned to him. Her eyes looked haunted.
"I wonder if they heard anyone," she said.
Travis thought about it. "One way or another, they learned something. Something specific enough that they thought the president could help them understand it."
"The first piece of the puzzle," Bethany said.
Travis nodded. "It could have been anything. Some old military transmission broadcasting on a loop somewhere, even decades after everyone was gone. Or something else entirely. Who knows, right? But whatever it was, if they couldn't make sense of it themselves, who better to go to than the president? He could put them in touch with almost anyone who might have expertise."
Bethany considered it. Nodded slowly.
Travis stopped pacing. He returned to the opening and leaned into it. He stared at the wreck of the city beyond.
What the hell had happened? Not a nuclear war. D.C. would be an ash plain in that case. There might be trees there by now, grown up in the aftermath, but there sure as hell wouldn't be girder frames left standing.
"Paige's goal was the most obvious thing in the world," Travis said. "She and the others were going to take the cylinder to some number of sites, go through to the future, and dig through the ruins for evidence. Figure out exactly how the world ends. Figure out how to prevent it. No doubt they explained all that to the president." He leaned back into the suite and turned to Bethany. "So think about this. Suppose right now, the president is involved in something nobody's supposed to know about. Something that's happening, or maybe is about to happen. Paige and the others uncovered some little scrap of it in the future. Not enough that they could recognize its full meaning, but enough that the president could. And when he saw it, he understood the threat they posed to him. Because his secret is well protected in our time, but it's vulnerable as hell in the future. Someone sifting through the rubble could eventually learn all about it."
Travis went quiet. He stared at nothing. "What is he hiding?"
"Could it just be his own complicity in whatever happens to the world?" Bethany said. "Say the thing he's involved in right now is going bad. Really bad. Say it's big enough that it's over even his head, and when it goes off the rails it's going to take the world with it. Maybe Paige and the others could have found information in the future to help us turn it all around-something to give us a chance, anyway-but in the process they'd have discovered President Currey's role in it. Jesus, could it be that simple? Would he rather let the world end than have people find out it's his fault?"
Travis thought about it for a long time. "That should be harder to believe than it is."
Bethany made a face that was a little too unnerved to register humor.
"We're guessing until we know what Paige found," Travis said.
He stepped away from the circular opening and returned to the suite's south-facing windows. He stared down Vermont at the green-tinted high-rise in the present day.
Paige.
Lying there alone.
Waiting to die.
The cylinder, powerful as it was, seemed entirely useless as a means of getting her out of that place.
Travis leaned against the window, forearms crossed above his head. He shut his eyes and breathed out slowly.
And then it came to him.
Chapter Eleven
They worked out the logistics of the plan in a matter of minutes, and then Travis took a four-mile cab ride across the river, into Virginia, and found a sporting goods store. He used his credit card-Rob Pullman's credit card-to buy a Remington 870 twelve-gauge and a hundred shells for it, along with fifty feet of inch-thick manila rope. He bought the largest duffel bag the store sold, which easily fit the rope and the disassembled shotgun. He took another cab back into D.C. and broke probably twenty laws by carrying a firearm and ammunition into the Ritz-Carlton. He took the elevator to the third floor, where Bethany-Renee, technically-had checked into a second room.
She had the cylinder resting in an armchair, the opening projected ten feet away at chest level, as it'd been upstairs.
Travis set the duffel bag down and walked to the opening. The view through it was different from this floor of the building. They were deep among the trees now, just twenty-five feet above the weed-laced concrete of the forest floor. Down here there was no hint of the wind they'd felt earlier, from their position above the canopy.
Travis leaned through and studied the immediate space around the hole. There were no girders close by. This room, like the presidential suite, occupied the building's southwest corner, which in the future was reduced to a deadfall of rusted steel filling part of the foundation below. Travis saw plenty of sturdy branches all around, but the nearest of them were a good distance away-twenty feet, at least. The far side of the opening was surrounded by a margin of empty space in all directions.
Which was good. If lions were present in this wilderness-no doubt escaped from zoos when the world came apart-then there could be any number of other large predators here. Black bears, leopards, cougars. All of which could climb trees, and were probably curious enough to investigate a wide-open hole in midair with a hotel room on the other side. Travis was sure the Ritz's staff had seen all kinds of crazy shit in their establishment over the years, but there was no reason to go for some kind of record.
Behind him, Bethany guessed what he was thinking. "I positioned the iris so nothing out there could reach it," she said.
He leaned back in and turned to her. "Iris?"
She indicated the opening, and shrugged. "I gave it a name."
"Why iris?"
"Watch what happens when you close it."
Travis stepped away from the opening as Bethany walked to the cylinder. He hadn't seen her switch it off in the suite earlier; he'd left to get a cab by then.
Bethany pressed the off button and the open circle contracted shut like an image on an old model television set. Or like an iris suddenly exposed to bright light. It shrank to a singular point and then vanished.
Bethany shrugged again. "Iris."
"Okay."
She switched the cylinder back on.
"Did you try the other button?" Travis said.
"Yeah."
"What does it do?"
"Pretty much what you expect."
He nodded. As soon as they'd learned what the entity did, he'd assumed the third button, off (detach/delay-93 sec.), allowed the hole to stay open for 93 seconds with the projection switched off-with the opening detached from the light tha
t'd created it.
Bethany pressed the button.
The light cone brightened and intensified for maybe five seconds. Travis thought he understood what it was doing: it was feeding a surge of power to the opening-the iris. Enough power to sustain it for 93 seconds. Then the cone switched off, and the iris stayed open all by itself.
"Watch," Bethany said. She took hold of the black cylinder and moved it left and right. The iris didn't move with it. It stayed fixed in place.
"I wonder what the point is," Travis said. "Why would it be useful to delay the shutdown by a minute and a half?"
Bethany's eyebrows arched a little and she shook her head. She had no idea.
Travis thought about it, but let it go after a few seconds. It was an interesting feature, but he couldn't imagine a situation in which they'd want to shut the iris slowly. He could think of all kinds of situations in which they'd want to shut it quickly, in which case the regular off button would work fine.
He crossed to where he'd left the duffel bag. He opened it and began assembling the shotgun. " You don't have to go along," Travis said.
It was a few minutes later. He had the Remington put together, loaded, and slung on his back by its strap. He was standing at the iris, his hands around the thick cord of manila rope. One end of the rope was tied to the pedestal mount of a stool at the room's wet bar. The pedestal was made of steel. Travis had put a lot of pressure on it and deemed it more than strong enough. From there the rope stretched across the room, through the iris, and hung three stories down, that end trailing among the corroded ruins of the hotel's collapsed corner. The same bar stool was probably down there somewhere, rusted all to hell.
Bethany leaned beside him and stared out into the trees. Birdsong filtered through the forest from every direction. Sparrows. Red-winged blackbirds. It sounded like any average woodland in present-day America.
"Two shooters are better than one," she said.
"Have you ever shot before?"
She nodded. "My company mandated that I carry a concealed weapon and maintain proficiency with it. There were risks to my safety, given what I knew."
"Ever climb a rope before?"
"Gym class in junior high. I wasn't great at it, but then again the motivation wasn't really there."
"You're sure you want to do this?"
She watched the forest for a long time before answering. "I don't know how it is for you, but I've given up on being sure of things for a while." T ravis positioned himself two feet beneath her as they descended, so that he could stop her fall if she slipped. She didn't slip.
They touched down onto the pile of rusted girders, tentatively at first, testing whether it was stable. It turned out to be far more so than Travis had expected. He studied it for a moment and saw why: the pile had spent decades oxidizing and sagging and settling under the weight of tree limbs and snow and ice. The result was a mass of beams rusted together as solidly as the welded geodesics of a jungle gym.
That didn't make it safe to walk on. The wreckage filled the Ritz's two-story-deep foundation to a level just about even with the street. The path across the top of the pile, to the foundation's outer wall, was like a balance-beam maze above a tangle of serrated blades. What little sunlight reached the forest floor penetrated only a few feet deeper among the beams, leaving a pool of shadow beneath them. It was hard to imagine that nothing lived down there. Travis turned and saw Bethany staring down into the depths, no doubt thinking along the same lines. He offered his hand. She took it.
They crossed the mass of girders in about thirty seconds. They stepped over a crumbled section of the foundation wall onto Vermont Avenue. Travis stared along its length to the south. Shafts of white light from the overcast were tinted green by their passage through the pine boughs. Here and there a bright red or yellow hardwood leaf spiraled down into the stillness. The street was surprisingly clear of undergrowth. There were plenty of dead weeds creeping from the mesh of cracks in the pavement, but in most places the roadbed was still visible. The pines probably had a lot to do with that. The needles they dropped had some effect on soil quality that usually killed lesser vegetation around them.
Visibility through the trees extended about as far as the sixteen-story high-rise at M Street, where in the present day Paige was being held. Travis could just see its girder skeleton past a grove of birches choking what'd once been the traffic circle.
He took the SIG-Sauer from his waistband and handed it to Bethany. He watched her appraise it, her thumb going naturally to the magazine release, getting a feel for it. She raised the weapon quickly to look down the sights, testing its target acquisition.
"Thanks," she said.
Travis handed her the three spare magazines. She pocketed them.
Then he unslung the Remington from his shoulder and racked a shell into its chamber. He had another dozen shells in his pockets. He took one out and pushed it through the weapon's loading port to replace the one he'd just chambered. It was good for five shots now.
He turned and looked at the rope, hanging with its end just touching the pile of girders. He followed it up to the surreal image of the iris hovering twenty-five feet above. Through it, from this low angle, he could see only the hotel room's ceiling and two blades of the fan above the bed. T hey moved south along Vermont at a near run. They watched the forest around them and listened for any disturbance in the trees, or any sudden lull in the birdsong that might mean something big was moving around.
The standing frames of buildings looked different from ground level than they had from the high vantage point of the presidential suite. Some of them were leaning at angles that looked impossible from below. They looked like they wanted to come down. Many had.
Travis let the inevitable question into his mind: did the breakdown of the world have anything to do with what he'd learned two summers ago, during his time with Tangent? In the two years since, he'd gotten good at not thinking about that, but there was no dodging it now. The bullet points all but lined themselves up in his head, and he considered them in careful order.
The summer before last, he'd been drawn into Tangent's business by what seemed, at the time, like chance. The organization had been in panic mode then, in the last days of a conflict over an object they called the Whisper. The Whisper was like a crystal ball out of some plague-era fairy tale. It knew things-impossible things-and shared them with anyone who held it. In the end Travis had found himself alone with the Whisper, on the deepest level of Border Town. The thing had revealed for him a few jagged edges of his future: his culpability in the deaths of 20 million people, and Paige's desire to see him killed. All of that lay waiting, somehow, along one possible track of his life to come. Somewhere out there in the darkness, years and years ahead, something was set to trip him up. To turn him into something objectively evil.
That was why he'd left Border Town and consigned himself to a life at minimum wage. It was the one way he could be sure to avoid whatever was coming. If he spent the next forty years stocking shelves, he could never cause the kind of disaster the Whisper had described. He'd be in no position to influence events on that scale, for good or bad.
And that answered the question: this was not about him. This was something else entirely. This was 6 or 7 billion deaths, not 20 million, and they'd happened without his help. Simple as that.
He and Bethany reached the junction where Vermont met the traffic circle. They halted for a moment at the cafe on the northeast quadrant, where they'd sat earlier. The patio's marble tiles lay canted and broken around the trunks of pines and sugar maples that'd punched up through them. Travis recalled the smell of sausage and the jumble of conversation as they'd studied the green building across the circle. That memory was barely an hour old, but in this place that moment was decades and decades gone.
Just off the patio, a few feet in from what remained of the curb, stood a row of corroded husks that'd once been newspaper boxes. Their tops were rusted to Swiss cheese and their doors had all
fallen off. If any newspapers had been left in these containers at the end, they were long gone now. Paper wouldn't have lasted more than a few years against humidity and mildew, even when the doors had been intact.
"Wonder what the headlines were," Bethany said. "I wonder what was on the front page of the last USA Today."
Travis had no answer.
They stared at the scene only a few seconds longer, then turned and moved across the circle, toward the standing ruin of the sixteen-story office building.
Chapter Twelve
The plan was straightforward enough: all Bethany needed was a name. The name of someone who worked inside this building in the present day. A loose thread to start pulling on, and they might have the FBI involved within the hour.
Among these ruins, paper files and computer drives would be long lost, but an office building had other storage media that should have survived the intervening years just fine. Specifically, Travis was thinking of office door nameplates. They tended to be made of either plastic or bronze, and the names and job titles on them were usually deeply engraved-sometimes they were cut fully through the plate. A plastic nameplate could probably sit out in the elements for a million years and still be legible, and even bronze should be good for a long while. Longer than most other metals. Corrosion resistance was one of the advantages that had made bronze such a big deal, way back in the day.
A single name. It was all they needed.
They rounded the cluster of birches and got a full view of the high-rise. It'd borne the years better than most of the other structures they'd seen. Its frame, though heavily rusted, was still standing whole and straight. A good portion of the concrete flooring at each level remained intact-maybe a third of it in all. Travis could see even the remnant of a stairwell near the building's core, thick metal risers and treads still in place. It wasn't hard to guess why the building had fared better than its neighbors along the street. It was newer. Built in 2006, it probably had a few decades on any other structure within a couple blocks. That meant it was not only younger, but that its steel had probably been of higher quality to begin with. It'd benefited from all the advances in refinement and impurity removal in the years leading up to its construction. For all that, it was still another relic waiting to fall. Its superior attributes would buy it an extra five years on its feet, at best.
