“Fix? You heard them shooting out there. How many people have they killed? You saw what-”
“Jack, it wasn’t your fault.”
The ferocity in his voice surprised Jack. “What wasn’t my fault?”
“The guard. Your school friend. Attacking this man won’t-”
But Jack was gone. Blink.
The cigarette fell from Gibson’s lips. “Whup. Donny? Go. Go go go.”
The target had separated from the asset, covering ground like Gibson had only seen under controlled conditions. Jack rematerialized outside the dome’s double door-the one Gibson had machine-gunned into art. Looked like the kid had one more burst in him.
Gibson swung the M32, aimed wide.
Foonk.
Jack took off, watched the grenade ride a contrail of propellant off to his right, toward the dome wall behind him. He covered eighty feet, maybe more, before the round detonated. The blast wave almost caught up to him in slow motion, and then time woke up.
The force belted him flat in the back, took him for a short ride, and smashed him chest-first into the BearCat’s antiballistic geometry.
The Joyce kid was lying faceup in the dirt, sucking wind. Gibson took out his sidearm.
“Kid, feel like guessin’ what one of my favorite things to do is?”
Choking, gasping: “That dance from The Silence of the Lambs?” He willed time to invert and pop, protecting himself inside a bubble of time-out-of-time.
Nothing happened.
“Nah,” Gibson said. “This.”
The gunshot cracked, a sledgehammer came down, and Jack’s left knee erupted. Jack watched it happen from some cold place above his left shoulder, like it was happening on television. The reprieve lasted two seconds before every nerve and pain receptor in his body lit up and he screamed.
“For starters,” Gibson wondered if his cigarette was still around somewhere. “Actual, this is Gibson. Target is neutralized. Donny, what’s the sitch?”
“We got the scientist, boss. He just about shit when that last grenade hit. You coulda warned us.”
“Get him to the library. Big man wants a word.”
“Copy.”
Jack’s mind was an animal mess: a howling, confused, red-strobed darkness. He wanted escape. He wanted to kill this man. He wanted to go home. He wanted his brother. He and his brother, in their old living room. He was, he realized, never going to use this leg again.
Gibson’s earpiece blipped, the frequency switched remotely.
“Senior Operative, good evening.”
Gibson knew that voice: the face behind Monarch’s face. The Consultant. “Gibson receiving.” If the Consultant was on the line things were almost certainly going to achieve an undesirable level of complication.
“Mr. Hatch tells me you’ve neutralized the target. Meaning?”
“Meaning I was about to help him with his blood pressure.”
Head lolling, Jack tried to take an interest in his surroundings, but the grass felt so good. Will. He’d fucked up. Why hadn’t he listened to his brother? What was it Will had said? “Do not go out there! We can fix all of this…”
No, before that.
“Do not,” the Consultant said to Gibson. “Secure him. A chronon-containment team will be on scene shortly.”
Gibson did not like that. This kid was chronon-active. Taking him down, unassisted, had been balls and luck on Gibson’s part. He’d only succeeded because the target had no idea what he was doing. A seasoned chronon operative was more than capable of fucking a body up given half a chance.
Jack reached deeper: what had Will said? “You’ve healed, and rapidly.” That was it.
“ETA?”
“Five minutes.”
The blood-soaked fabric of Jack’s jeans was cleaning itself, the stain crawling back to the hole in his leg, focusing to a point, retreating back into his devastated flesh just before shattered cartilage self-assembled into a working joint. The lips of the wound quivered, vacillated, and closed shut seamlessly.
“I’d say your relationship to time has changed,” Will had told him.
The bullet hole stitched itself shut.
Jack’s eyes fluttered. “Your name’s Gibson,” he rasped.
Jack locked eyes with him, and Gibson saw a short future of nothing but eye shine and blood.
“Affirmative, sir.” Gibson was already moving, hands gripping the BearCat’s roof before swinging double-booted into the cabin and locking it tight behind him. The engine woke, headlights flared, and the target was right there: staring at him over the hood. Back from the dead.
Gibson flipped him the bird and threw the truck into reverse.
6
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:48 A.M. Riverport University campus.
Two Monarch operatives dragged Will, like luggage, out the west-facing doors of the Quantum Physics dome.
Jack lurched back toward the fractured light of the now-vacant lobby. He tried to push himself back into the gaps between seconds, to close the distance in a blink. It didn’t happen. He felt wide and hard and heavy, and could do nothing but lumber. He looked again and Will was gone.
The adrenaline left his system abruptly and the tunnel vision of his focus loosened. The reality of where he was and all that had happened rushed in and knocked him to his knees.
A great, wracking sob burst out of him, a kick in the chest and shoulders so hard his ribs flared with bright pain. They had his brother. Paul was gone. He had killed.
Will had begged him to leave with him. He hadn’t listened. Everything had gone to shit because he did what he had always done: act first, think later. Get it done because nobody else would. He was in so far over his head he’d need a jetpack and a map just to see daylight.
They had Will. Paul was gone.
There was a cartoon series he and Paul had loved as kids: Team Outland. Zed had, too. Six years ago they were on the couch, streaming an old ep. A character had popped onscreen and made the Team’s trademark hand signal-the time-out sign: “Think Before You Act!” They’d chanted it, snarfed popcorn, drank beer, and winced at how badly the series had aged.
Good memory, weird timing.
Stop. Think.
These were the facts, as he understood them.
Paul oversaw a time travel project for Monarch. Will was hired to consult, but was kept largely out of the loop. Nonetheless, the machine was clearly based on Will’s research. Then Monarch either hired mercenaries or used their own troops, dressed in weird gear, and had them attack the lab they own. They were supposed to “steal” the core of the machine and kill a bunch of innocent people in the process.
Why?
Kill a bunch of people, but they wanted Will alive. Why? He was valuable to them. Which probably meant they weren’t done with the machine.
But none of this would have happened if Paul hadn’t turned on the machine. The attack kicked off almost immediately after, as if the machine’s activation had been a signal.
There had to be an answer but Will was the one with the brains.
Had Jack’s involvement been planned? What about his abilities? Were they intended? Had Paul been in on it?
Was Paul even alive? If he was trapped at some kind of end-of-time point, could he be saved?
An hour ago everything had been fine. Now the world-the universe, maybe-was falling apart.
Will. He had to get Will away from these people. He dragged his face along one filthy sleeve, shook his head again, blinked, did what he could to banish the killing sense of grief that threatened to undo him, and stood up.