Will first. Then, once Will was safe, Jack would come back. He was getting back into that lab, and he was going after Paul. End of time or no, he was bringing Paul back. Nobody he loved was dying this morning. Nobody.
Will was taken to the library, Gibson had said. The library was near the protest camp. The protest camp was by the entrance to the university. The entrance was at the start of Founders’ Walk. Okay. Jack oriented. Looked around. The library was east. Whoever had taken Will west must be headed for the parking lot.
A university security BearCat tore out from the parking lot behind the dome, along the nearest treelined avenue, headed east, straight for the library.
Jack willed himself into the space between moments, and while the world wasn’t looking, he ran.
The entire city was alert to what was going on. Crowds pressed against Monarch-erected barricades two blocks from campus. Police flashbars turned anxious faces into a neon flipbook. The media were issued canned statements. Civilian drone pilots reported their toys suddenly dropping dead once they got within two miles of the campus. Bloggers screamed blue murder; phones and tablets turned to fritzing junk. Families wanted answers. People were missing. Cops yelled at Monarch troops. Monarch troops followed a policy of total non-engagement. An event had occurred, the company had state sanction to contain the event, local law enforcement and the community would be briefed shortly.
The situation made it easy for Jack to blink toward the western face of the library unseen and get inside. Particleboard fencing had been erected around the site. Signs with DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS-DO NOT ENTER were nail-gunned to each one, by order of Riverport Council and Monarch Construction. Every fourth fence panel had a four-by-five-foot employment infographic, actors in hard hats flashing I-got-mine smiles. Most of these were plastered with unflattering graffiti and anti-Monarch stickers.
The squawk and bark of Monarch bullhorns told Jack the scene two blocks away was intensifying.
Jack climbed the hood on an unattended BearCat, leaped over the fence and made for a rear door. He hit the ground on strong legs, head still spinning but eyes clear.
Fixtures and fittings had been stripped from the library, leaving a shell and the lecture theater without a door. He walked in.
It was dim inside the lecture theater, hollow-bodied and sulking. Racked tiers had been stripped of seating, the oak paneling to be consigned to landfill and history. Slack six-foot-long tubes of plastic wrap hung limply from banisters, littering the floor, along with a thick coat of dust. No fittings and no power meant no illumination. Small, gas-powered generators burbled throatily from deeper in the guts of the old place, someplace better lit than here, judging from the glare spilling from the hallway.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
“Will?” Terror had happened here, in this room. He could feel it, his new sense alive to the agitation and fear. It was imprinted upon the chronon flow in the room as clearly as tracks through snow.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
Jack’s attention gravitated toward a space at the foot of the racked tiers, in front of an antique oaken podium. His senses pulled toward that point, like iron filings toward a magnet.
Will had been here. Every cell in him knew it.
Figures leaped into existence, no more substantial than the thin light that leaked into the hall from the world outside: Will, flanked by two Monarch troopers.
“Please. Let me go. I…!”
Jack watched the trooper on the left elbow Will in the stomach, dropping him. Then they dragged him toward the hall, where they evaporated into shadow. Gone.
An after echo… or a brush with the future?
Echo. Jack didn’t know how he knew, but he trusted it. He had so many questions for Will. He needed to know what the fuck was happening to him.
The hallway would have been beautiful a year ago. Now dust gathered against the molded skirting boards, the two-tone floors strewn with discarded insulation and wiring. The hallway ended, open-mouthed, onto the library’s main room, bracketed by frosted glass panels. Light stands were arranged evenly around the cavernous space. Shelf-lined mezzanines overlooked the main room, lined with wrought-iron railings. The long oval of the information desk remained in place, but most everything else had been ripped out. Serried lines of chrome lugs patterned the checkered floor around the info desk: the footprints of vanished Internet cubicles.
Jack tried to pick up Will’s trail, feeling for another vision, scanning the main hall.
He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the two smiley-faced troopers guarding an archway in the north wall, until it was too late. He realized his mistake as soon as they clocked him.
Jack didn’t think. He warped forward and grabbed the first trooper’s weapon, failing to notice that it was strapped to him. The mask smiled at him and then Jack was struck in the face for his trouble. He recovered in time to be staring down the barrel of the gun he’d tried to snatch.
Jack warped, the trooper fired, and his partner keeled over dead-three ragged holes stitched through PEACE.
The surviving trooper’s awareness disconnected for a moment as he took in what he had done. He snapped his rifle toward Jack as Jack cannoned into him at warp speed, blasting both of them into a pile of dilapidated wooden bookshelves stacked seven deep against the wall.
The trooper didn’t move, smiling vacantly at his own lap. Jack pulled himself to his feet, stepping away from the slack-bodied trooper he’d just used as an airbag.
The northern room, which the two troopers had been standing watch in, was circular and just off the main room. It used to house the stacks, judging from the signage and the ghostly rectangular footprints that fanned the space. Jack heard generators thumping from a small room off to the side, from which cabling snaked.
“Jack?”
It was dim in the stacks chamber, the light from the main hall lighting that gutted room like dusk: clear surfaces, deep shadows. Will was there, quiet and pressed against the wall, hands zip-tied at his waist and clearly terrified. Jack searched the trooper, took his combat knife, and popped the binders off Will.
“Are you okay? Answer me later. You got a bunch of shit I want explained.”
“Jack. Look.”
Against the curved wall, near the body of the crumpled trooper, was a foot. Sneakered. Chuck Taylors.
“They brought them in here,” Will said. “Some of the students from the camp.”
The kid wearing the Chucks was propped slack against the wall, hair spilling from beneath his hoodie across the floor, his chest a bloody ruin.
Jack exited, shielded his eyes against the glare of the lamps and moved past their perimeter. Forward was the wide, doorless exit. To the right was the corridor through which he had entered. To his left was a long hall once used for shelves and periodicals.
Now it was a mortuary. Bodies lay strewn across the chessboard floor, not killed here but dumped. Not one of them would have been out of their twenties. Amy, the girl that accosted him in the quadrangle, would be here, Jack realized. Somewhere. He still had her flyers in his jacket pocket. RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE. He couldn’t bear to look.
“We gotta go,” Jack said, marching back to the light. “C’mon, Will, we gotta go.”
Two men with the familiar round-faced PEACE silhouette flanked Will. One had a carbine pointed at Jack, the other had his weapon aimed at Will’s head.
Jack cursed his stupidity. They had been in the generator room.
He needed to be sure that if he made a play, here and now, that he could warp fast enough to kill the two men in less time than it took to pull a trigger. He didn’t know. His powers had been coming and going. But he had to do something.