by Patrick Lee
"I'm sorry about your friends," Finn said. "I mean that. But I can't just let you take this thing."
He retreated a step further. Maybe he thought he could make a run for it. Put some distance behind him and cross back into the present, somewhere else in Arica. Then try to call Audra and warn her.
The MP7 required four ounces of trigger pressure to fire. Travis applied two.
Finn backed up again.
And then the wind shifted.
Whichever way it'd been blowing before, the boxes in the plaza had spun it in circles. Now it came on dead straight from behind Travis, its speed seeming to double, and in the span of five seconds the smoke drew away like a veil.
Finn took a sharp breath.
Travis felt his own eyes widen involuntarily.
They might as well have been standing in Midtown Manhattan. The Arica they'd seen in the present was long gone, and in its place reared a skyline of concrete and glass and steel, some of its towers standing to a height of seventy stories or more. Broad avenues crisscrossed at their bases, complete with traffic lights and crisp white lines. Along the length of the nearest street, Travis could see the downtown district snaking up the coast for over a mile, and the height and density of the structures held consistent for most of that distance.
None of it lay in ruins. The skyscrapers' glass faces looked like they'd been washed yesterday. The sidewalks were immaculate. Vehicles stood parked at curbsides, 2011 models or earlier as far as Travis could tell. Wooden benches framed the plaza, their green paint gleaming in the desert sun.
Yet nothing moved. Beyond the filled parking spaces, the streets were deserted. Through ground-level windows, every visible lobby sat vacant. The traffic lights were dark. The tires of every vehicle were flat and beginning to crumble. Arica was imposing and beautiful and pristine, but it was also abandoned. For how long, Travis couldn't guess.
"It worked," Finn said. He looked around at the place while keeping the gun on Travis. "The survivors flourished here. They made it."
"For a while. What does it matter? They're dead now."
"We don't know they're dead. We don't know what happened here."
"Couldn't have been good."
Finn looked at him. Some kind of new hope flickered in his eyes. "It's enough that it worked at all. And if I search this place for even a few hours, I can probably find out what happened to it. Find out how to avoid the problem."
"We could've found this place bustling and it still wouldn't be worth killing the world for it," Travis said.
"The world's going to kill itself sooner or later. Why shouldn't at least some of us live?"
"Neither of us is going to convince the other. If you want to stay here, feel free. But I'm taking the cylinder with me. I'm going to New York to get my friends."
"You're not," Finn said. "I really am sorry, but you're not. You don't have time, anyway. Look."
He held the cylinder toward Travis, showing him the side opposite the row of buttons. In the harsh light it took Travis a few seconds to see what the man was talking about.
Along part of the casing's length ran a line of blue lights, pencil-eraser-sized and spaced at centimeter intervals. They shone softly and diffused from just beneath the black surface, and extended to a little over a third of the cylinder's long dimension.
"They appeared last night," Finn said. "Right after your friends broke the other cylinder. At that time the lights covered the whole length, but they've been disappearing steadily since, like a countdown. Whoever built these things must not have wanted anyone using one without the other. My guess is, when the last one of these lights goes out, this thing becomes a paperweight."
Travis's mind was already doing the math. The other cylinder had broken maybe nine hours ago. If that amount of time had burned not-quite-two-thirds of the countdown, he had something like five hours left.
Five hours to reach New York and find Paige and Bethany.
He thought of flight time, and search time, and shit-happens time. Five hours. Was it even close to enough?
"You're wasting your time thinking about it," Finn said. "I'm not giving this to you. Not now that I've seen this place." The man took another step back. "I'm sorry," he repeated.
"So am I," Travis said, and pulled the trigger the rest of the way.
Nothing happened.
Chapter Forty-Four
The MP7 didn't even click. It wasn't empty-Travis had loaded it himself and chambered the first round. When he applied the last two ounces to the trigger, the mechanism simply froze.
He squeezed harder. Nothing.
His eyes dropped from Finn and focused on the MP7's action. There was a stress ripple in the metal, where the weapon had hit the paver blocks earlier.
He looked back up at Finn.
The man knew. Even without a click, Travis's body language had said everything.
Finn advanced two steps, his eyes narrowing. The.38 trembled a little in his hand, but he held it tightly.
"Put it down," Finn said. "Then turn around and get on your knees."
Travis exhaled, the breath almost a laugh. "Why the hell would I do any of that? If you're gonna shoot me, just do it."
Finn made no move to come closer, but he took a breath and the gun went still in his hand.
"I hope you don't feel it," Finn said, and Travis saw his forearm tense for the pull.
Then Finn's head came apart, the sides of his skull blowing out like a shaped charge had gone off inside it. A split-second later the flat crack of a high-powered rifle broke across the plaza, and Travis flinched against his will and turned toward the sound.
Thirty yards away, a figure dressed in white rose from concealment behind another planter box.
In his peripheral vision, Travis saw Finn crumple to the ground. The.38 hit with a soft clink and didn't fire. The cylinder rolled out of his other hand and settled gently onto his abdomen, as if his body's last impulse had been to protect the thing.
Travis dropped the MP7 and raised his arms at his sides, and kept his eyes on the shooter.
The newcomer held the rifle at ready without aiming it, and for a moment simply stared, assessing the situation. Travis could make out no detail of the face: the body was covered in white from top to bottom, including a loose hood with some kind of mesh screen at the front. The outfit seemed designed to reflect away sunlight while letting in the breeze. Probably a necessity in this place.
The figure stared a moment longer, then slung the rifle on a strap and stepped out from behind the concrete box. It strode across the plaza toward Travis, its movements measured, unhurried.
Travis could only stare. He felt too numb to even be afraid.
The figure came on, twenty yards away now. Ten. It stopped just out of handshake range and stared at him. Through the glare of light off the mesh fabric, Travis could just get a hint of the face. But he'd stared at it for only a second when something else drew his gaze: a bright red disc on the back of the newcomer's hand, just visible past the edge of the sleeve. The disc was the size of a quarter, and stuck to the skin somehow. Travis looked closer and saw what he already knew would be there: near-microscopic tendrils, binding the disc to the hand.
He looked at the face again, and recognized it through the mesh half a second before the figure lifted the hood.
The eyes were the same as he'd always known them-huge, brown, intense-but everything else had aged a bit, to somewhere between fifty and sixty years.
"Travis," the newcomer said.
Travis swallowed and found his voice. "Paige."
Chapter Forty-Five
For the next five seconds they said nothing. Travis heard the sound of waves breaking, the soft crashes echoing through the high-rise canyons.
Then a voice crackled over a radio, somewhere on Paige's body, the words inaudible. She reached to her waist and drew the device from a fold of her cloak.
She keyed the talk button. "I missed that. Say again."
A man spoke, h
is tone all but lost to static. "I asked what you're shooting at."
"I'll explain when I see you," Paige said. "I'm safe."
"Did you find out what the smoke came from?"
"Not exactly. Let me get back to you."
"Be careful."
The man clicked off, and Paige stowed the radio. By then, Travis realized he'd recognized the voice, even without discerning its tone. Its rhythm and cadence had been more than familiar. Much more. He felt his balance falter.
Paige stepped closer to him. She raised a hand and touched his face, gently. Her thumb traced his cheekbone, feeling the texture of his skin.
He saw the obvious confusion in her eyes, mixed with some fragile understanding, and thought he knew what it was. Paige-the other Paige-had described it to him last night in Garner's living room. Getting it without getting it. The Breach had taught her to do that.
Still, there had to be a thousand questions. He thought he saw those in her eyes too, along with a reflection of the thousand he wanted to ask.
How the hell had she gotten here? Not on board one of the flights from Yuma. No way would she have taken part in any of that, ELF effects or not. She couldn't have left all those people behind to die.
She must've come here later on, long after Bleak December had gone. If anyone in the world could've survived Umbra without going to Yuma, it would've been Tangent personnel at Border Town, with all their exotic resources. And no doubt Bethany had been right: Paige had found him before the world had ended. Had found him and kept him alive.
Those thoughts echoed in his head for maybe three seconds, and then they were gone-drowned out by the only thing he could afford to think about now.
The cylinder.
The line of blue lights.
And time-draining away like blood from a nicked artery.
Every minute he stayed here might be the one that doomed Paige and Bethany in New York.
The thumb-shaking now-retraced its path across his cheek. He raised his hand and closed it softly around hers.
"I have to leave," he said. "I have to leave right now. I'm sorry I can't explain any of this."
She shook her head, dismissing the apology, and took her hand away from his face. "Go."
He held her gaze another second, in spite of his urgency, then turned and crossed to Finn's body in two running steps. He lifted the cylinder and aimed it to put the iris just shy of the fallen shell casings where he'd come through before-where the smoke from the burning plane would hide his arrival in the present.
He put his finger to the on button.
"Wait."
He turned. Paige was just behind him. She put a hand on his shoulder.
"I can't wait," he said. "I might not have enough time as it is-"
"There's something you need to hear. It's more important than whatever you're on your way to do."
"If I'm thirty seconds late, people are going to die. One of them is you."
If that news affected her, she didn't show it.
"That's a necessary risk," she said. "Listen to me. It'll take more than thirty seconds, but I'll go as fast as I can."
Her eyes were as serious as he'd ever seen them. Scared, too.
He withdrew his finger from the button, and faced her.
"I know about the message I sent back through the Breach," Paige said. "And I know you created and sent the Whisper."
Travis felt his grip on the cylinder weaken. He pushed it against his side.
"You told me everything," Paige said. "The other you told me. The one I just talked to on the radio. You explained it the same day we sealed the Breach."
Travis stared. He'd never imagined a scenario like this, in which he could learn exactly how Paige would react to the news he'd been keeping from her.
She seemed to read the question in his eyes.
"I took it better than you expected," she said.
In a way, that response was almost as surreal as finding Paige here at all. Travis shook his head. "How is that possible? I created the Whisper, Paige. All the deaths in Zurich were my fault. All the deaths in Border Town. Your friends."
"I took it well because I understood things you didn't. Things about the Breach, and what it would take to send something back in time through it. Tangent knew, long before we had the means to actually do it, what would be involved in the process. Dr. Fagan had it all worked out, like the Manhattan Project scientists had the bomb yields calculated before they ever set one off. The machine that would transfer something into the Breach-an injector, Fagan called it-would be unstable almost to the point of uselessness. And there's no way to engineer around that. A person trying to operate it would have to position it right in front of the Breach, then stay there with it and shepherd the process to the very end. There's no practical way to automate it, or even to do it remotely. You'd have to be there. Right there."
"None of this matters," Travis said. "Some other version of you, in the original timeline before anything changed, decided I had to be killed. She sent the note back. And some other me sent back the Whisper to block that note and save his own ass. He could've given the Whisper strict limits-like don't kill anybody-but he didn't. He didn't give a shit about anyone but himself-myself."
"The Whisper was a computer beefed up with Breach technology. It would be very unpredictable. It's likely the other Travis had no idea how ruthlessly it would do its job."
"That's a guess at best, and it absolves him-me-of nothing. I sent that thing back out of selfishness, simple as that."
"You're wrong. Selfishness couldn't possibly account for it."
"How can you know that?"
"Because anyone sending something back, standing with that machine in front of the Breach, would have to still be there when the injection actually happened. And it's a violent reaction. Hyperviolent. The temperature in the receiving chamber spikes to over four thousand degrees, and stays there for about a minute and a half. You see what I'm saying? To send something back in time through the Breach, you have to die."
Travis stared at her. Whatever he'd meant to say next, it was already gone from his mind. He considered her words, and their implications.
Paige went on. "The version of me that sent that message back must've really believed it was necessary. She gave her life to do it. But when you countered her move, you gave your life too. That couldn't have been selfishness. So whatever I thought was worth killing you for, whatever it was you were doing, there must have been more to it than I knew. Like it looked evil from my point of view, but you knew better. Maybe you just couldn't share it with me. Maybe it was that bad. But necessary."
Travis looked down, his eyes going to the cylinder at his side. The soft blue lights, like stair treads up to a gallows platform.
"I'm telling you this because it matters," Paige said. "You have to go back to Tangent. You're supposed to be there. That other version of you, acting on better information than any of us have, died to put you there."
"Then why didn't he have the Whisper tell me everything? Just lay it all out in steps?"
"I've had seven decades to think about that. My guess is, if the Whisper had told you what you're expected to do someday… you wouldn't do it. Your future self could've guessed that even more easily."
The information seemed to churn around Travis, like the smoke had done minutes earlier.
"Can we just seal the Breach?" he said. "It worked for you guys."
Paige inhaled sharply. "No. Jesus, I would've forgot. Do not seal the Breach."
"But it worked. It's still sealed now, after seventy-three years."
She was shaking her head, eyes wide. "The seal held, but it's been a disaster. The best we can tell, entities that build up in the tunnel get destroyed by the pressure, over time. In some cases, the destruction releases energy, and that energy still makes it out into the world. A lot of energy, for some of them. Radiation. Strange kinds we can't even identify. We get the effects even this far away."
Travis looked arou
nd at the empty city, and began to understand.
"Yes," Paige said. "This place is all but dead because the Breach is sealed. Most of the world would've been, by now, if it hadn't ended already. Don't seal the Breach."
At the bottom of his vision, Travis saw movement. He looked down. One of the blue lights had just vanished.
"Christ," he said.
"Go back to Tangent," Paige said. "I don't know what's coming, but you need to be there when it hits. It probably matters more than either of us realizes. Go."
He nodded, leveled the cylinder, turned it on, and hit the delayed shutoff. Black smoke churned from the iris.
In the seconds he had to wait for the light cone to vanish, Travis faced Paige again. He stared at her eyes.
She was beautiful.
She always would be.
He'd known that the day he met her.
He wondered now if he would ever see her this age again. In their own timeline, however it might play out, what chance did they have of growing old together?
He saw the reflections in her eyes sharpen. She blinked at a sheen of tears.
Then the light cone vanished, and he turned away from her and didn't look back. He sprinted for the opening and vaulted through into the smoke plume. S irens. Shouting voices. Blue and red flashers strobing through the smoke. He held his breath and ran, and came out into clear light beside the gutted husk of the jet. Fire crews were laying streams of water and foam into it. Travis hardly noticed them. He scanned the onlookers gathered at the periphery of the scene, most of them near the terminal. He saw Garner, and sprinted toward him as fast as he could move.
Chapter Forty-Six
Paige stacked the pine boughs close to the fire. Hopefully they'd dry within a few hours. The fire was hard to keep going. Everything was waterlogged.
The night had been hell. From Garner's building they'd gone south as quickly as possible, which wasn't very fast through dense trees and over broken concrete, all in perfect darkness. For the first fifteen minutes Paige had told herself that everything could still turn out okay. They would hear a series of shots from the Remington far behind and above them, and then they would hear Travis calling, and with any luck at all he'd have the other cylinder when they met up.
