If Will’s body was pressed to the surface when the next one hit it could scramble his organs.
“Get up!”
Will did, sort of. With a desperate heave he got his body off the glass as a section of panels to his left took the hit, knocking him sideways. Jack watched his brother flail, collapse, and slide, his fingers dragging across the glass. He was close to the curve-it was gentle, but another blast like that would send him flying over the edge, three hundred feet down to the university lawn.
Gibson hitched his lip, dissatisfied. “I got a better idea.” He switched targets.
Foonk.
Jack got halfway to Will when the shock wave hit-blowing him backward.
Gibson retargeted.
Foonk.
Both brothers shouted as the panel section behind Will that had taken the first grenade hit took a second. Thick, reinforced glass volcanoed upward. The ejecta from the explosion tinkled delicately as it rained in heavy, jagged fistfuls across the dome.
Punch-drunk and battered, Jack struggled to interpret the world around him through senses that had traded places with one other: he smelled pain, felt brightness, heard fear. The world was two images skating atop one another. His head was an endlessly sounding dial tone. He stood on a hot crystal moon that sweated dollops of melted polycarbonate. The atmosphere was sharp and poisonous. His eyes didn’t work.
His brother was on his feet, back on top, away from the curve, away from Jack. Will was also standing on unreliable feet-low and unsteady.
Jack said his brother’s name. Will seemed to realize that he was not alone in this place, and recognized his brother. He extended a hand, like a child wanting to be lifted from dock to boat.
The fifth round struck exactly between them. Jack flew one way, Will toward the freshly blasted hole in the dome.
Gibson hooted, long and loud, as the body flipped a low arc through the night air, and through the ragged wound in the double-dome. “Hole in one, son!”
Jack’s perception of time slowed. He reached for Will, futile as it was, wanting him back and safe more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. His boots gripped the hardened polycarbonate, braking his backward flight, and he kicked off, launching himself toward Will, crossing the space between them-impossibly-in a heartbeat.
The world stopped, Jack ran, and the world restarted a moment too soon.
Inches from Jack’s grasp Will’s body fell through the jagged maw of the dome’s wound. Watching him fall Jack’s every thought became singular: No.
The air around his brother’s limp body buckled. Inverted? And snapped.
Jack skidded, stumbled, kept his footing.
Will floated twenty-five feet below the wounded dome, suspended inside a ministutter of Jack’s creation.
“Ah… Monarch Actual. This is Senior Operative Gibson at the Quantum Physics Building.”
“What the fuck am I seeing, boss?”
“Shut up, Don. You there, Actual?”
“Actual here. What is it, Senior Operative?”
Gibson eyeballed the space-time distortion filling most of the hole he had blasted through eight layers of sandwiched polycarbonate.
“Actual… at least one of the two escapees from the time lab are chronon-active. Natively.”
“Say again?”
“They’re live. Actual. Teleporting. No rescue rig, no Striker tech. Target spontaneously manifested an M-J field deformation, with intent. Check the feeds.” Gibson slung the M32 over his shoulder, turned to Guardian’s CO. “Good luck.”
And walked out the door.
Will’s body was an arc, eyes to the stars, mouth open in a silent exclamation. Fragments of heated polycarbonate and acrid smoke were suspended inside the bubble with him, a three-dimensional portrait frozen in a sphere of paused time. He had fallen wide of the walkway that connected the fourth floor of the old science building to the admin facility on the other side.
When the stutter broke, Will would fall 270 feet to the lobby floor.
The six smiley-faced goons on the floor below were done being impressed.
Jack dropped through the shattered dome without a thought, straight into the ministutter. Jack’s feet connected with Will’s chest, with zero give.
Jack balanced there, above the drop, surfing his brother in mid-air.
“Don’t wake up, don’t wake up, don’t wake up…” It had been a calculated bet. Will held.
The squad opened up, Jack flinched, and a hundred military rounds vip vip vip-ed as they impacted the stutter… and caught-leaving the outside of the sphere stippled with lead acne.
The squad reloaded.
Gibson’s playdate with five rounds of forty mike had the attention of pretty much everybody. Monarch’s regular squads had done a good job of preemptively securing the neighborhood-nothing was getting in or out-but now encrypted comms chatter was rattling off sightings of media closing in by road and air. Civvies were congregating on main thoroughfares. It was a cowboy move, lighting up the dome like that, but orders were orders. Monarch wanted the Peace Movement to make an impression; consider it made.
His earpiece pinged.
“Mr. Gibson?”
Shit.
“Receiving, Mr. Hatch.”
“Guardian tells me you’re responsible for the chaos I’m witnessing. Is that correct?”
“More than likely, sir.”
Gibson was marching toward the last remaining BearCat-one of a couple Monarch had assigned to university security six months ago in preparation for this strike. A plausible story about keys stolen from dead guards was ready for the media.
The vehicle was still idling on the lawn. Almost all other Monarch forces had been reassigned to crowd control on a four-point perimeter. He muted his mic, put two fingers in his mouth, and ripped a sharp whistle. The pair manning the BearCat-one on the MG, the other stretching his legs-acknowledged with a salute.
“Explain yourself.”
Mic on. “I was given orders to make a scene. The scene has been made.” Mic off. “I need your ride.”
“You are aware that one of the men you attempted to kill is considered a high-value asset? We need him alive.”
The gunner dismounted as Gibson climbed into the cab. “The skinny guy?”
“Dr. William Joyce: a pioneer in chronon theory and the originator of much of the technology you have been trained to use.” Hatch confirmed something on another line. “Guardian tells me both targets remain, miraculously, alive.”
“Sir, I consider it a miracle that Guardian is reporting at all.” The engine woke with a satisfying thud beneath his feet, soundless inside the cab. “And I’m returning forthwith to render them the benefit of my wisdom and experience.” One round left. The BearCat spat dirt and leaped forward, toward the dome.
Jack leaped to the walkway and reached inside the stutter. His hand penetrated the sparkling cloud and closed around his brother’s ankle. “I,” he admitted, “have no idea what I’m doing.” Jack drew back his arm. Will didn’t budge. How had he done this the first time? What had he been feeling? Thinking? Jack closed his eyes, pulled gently, and still Will remained fixed. “Come on, Will.”
He tried again, imagined Will as a black-and-white image, Technicolor soaking into him from Jack’s hand.
Something warm impacted against Jack’s arm. A short sound snapped from Will’s throat: “Aa-!” Some of the shattered glass was beginning to drop, pause… drop. Will’s exclamation was an erratic sometimes-rewinding stutter. Jack could smell cordite. The bubble was breaking.