“Generators,” Jack mumbled. The interior of the hole and the underside of the cover had been padded. Soundproofing. He remembered crates of fuses, the mornings when nothing worked. Whatever Will had been doing in here had required juice. Lots of it. That wasn’t a small hole.
The room on the right had been concrete-floored and air-conditioned. A window was fitted to look out on the barn floor. A control room, maybe.
“‘A spaceship,’” Jack said, in his best little-kid voice. “If only we’d known, huh Will?”
Something crashed on the porch. Nick cried out. Jack ran from the barn, skidding on the gravel and banking hard toward the house. He found Nick immobilized facedown on the boards, his left arm held painfully backward and aloft by someone in a jacket and baseball cap. A fireplace poker had skittered down the steps.
“Let him go!”
Nick’s attacker complied, bouncing upright and straight backed. “He started it.”
Jack hadn’t been sure it was her he’d seen, and if it had been he mostly expected he’d never see her again. But here she was, and six years of anger, heartbreak, and unanswered questions all pressed tight in his throat, wanting out all at once.
Instead Jack marched up the steps, helped Nick to his feet. “You okay?”
“Peachy,” he said, working his arm. “Who’s this?”
“Zed,” Jack said. “This is Nick. Nick, Zed. Zed, what the fuck?”
“He spooked me.”
“I mean ‘what the fuck’ in a more all-encompassing sense.”
“Wanna know how I found you?”
Jack closed his eyes. “The Breathalyzer. You tracked the camera and Breathalyzer.”
“No. I asked myself what the worst place for you to go would be and went there.”
Nick glanced nervously at the tree line.
“He gets it,” she said.
It was uncomfortable, but Jack had to admit: he wanted Paul to come after him. “Things have changed.”
“I know.”
“Monarch can walk in here but they won’t be walking out, I’ll tell you that.”
“You mean troopers.”
“Yeah.”
“And not snipers, who are a mile away and invisible.”
Jack had no answer.
“Let’s go inside.”
Nick twirled his keys. “Not me. I’m outta here. Also: fuck you for not telling me about your death wish.”
“Nick, wait. It’s not like that. Monarch… they’re not going to just let this go. They know you were there.”
Zed agreed. “Monarch’s been deeply preoccupied for the last few hours. Real pants-on-head behavior from management. Even so they’re probably organized by now. I can’t stop you going, but you need to know they could pick you up at some point.”
“Dad needs his meds. I’m all he’s got.”
Jack understood. “Take care, Nick.”
“Yeah.” The cabbie twirled his keys-“frickin’ namaste”-and headed for his car. Jack and Zed watched him pull out of the drive and disappear past the flaming sycamores.
“My name’s not Zed,” she said.
“And you work for Monarch.”
“And I work for Monarch.”
“So who am I speaking to?”
“Beth Wilder.” She touched his arm, placed a brief kiss on his cheek. “And she’s glad to see you.”
Beth went inside. Jack followed.
Zed-“Beth”-took Nick’s cold cup of coffee and locked it in the microwave. While she set it humming, Jack cataloged the changes: her drugstore-black hair was now a natural red. Her tattoos were gone, and the piercings. Seeing her changed left him desperately missing who she had been. The changes time had wrought on her told him how much history he had missed. She carried herself differently now, straight backed and crisp where once she had been both loose-limbed and economical with her posture and movement. “Beth” brought the cup to the table and sat. Zed would have had one booted foot on it.
He missed the glittering thread of her suicide chain running from nose ring to earring. Between the parkour, skateboarding, and general getting into trouble it could have ended badly. She hadn’t cared. Fate had backed down and her twinkle-eyed fearlessness had left Jack no recourse but to lift his game. The world had gotten him down less and seemed brighter when she was around.
“Different hair,” she said. “Different skin tone, bearing, vocabulary, hair color, hair style, no piercings, no tattoos, a breast reduction. Working out reshaped the bod a little. Dental work shaped the face just a touch. Lost the Jersey accent.”
“So which one was real?” He pulled out a chair, turned it toward her, sat. “The Jersey accent or this one?”
She hitched that Bruce Willis smile he recognized so well, dental work or no. “This one.”
“Why do all of this? Why did-”
“Jack.” She leaned forward, her hand on his knee derailing him. “We can’t do this here. We don’t have time.”
“You’ve got time for coffee.”
“While you were overseas I’ve been here, working for Monarch. Making connections, getting inside their operation. I couldn’t risk either Paul recognizing me-the young one or the older one.”
“The older one’s been here the whole time?”
“For over a decade, behind the scenes and off the books. He’s got himself an apartment on the forty-ninth floor of the Tower. Very few people can get to it. When he leaves the building it’s always via helicopter to a private airfield. Never seen, never heard. All records say Paul Serene was the twenty-seven-year-old coordinator of Project Promenade, and that last night he died in an act of domestic terrorism. Killed by a group called the Peace Movement.”
“If he’s a ghost how do you know so much about him?”
“My buddy Horatio is deep in their system. He’s high up in one of Monarch’s side projects. Being where he’s not wanted is one of Horatio’s hobbies.”
“I think he was a friend of Will’s. Hacker, moustache, boutique muffins?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “That’s him. Clearly Horatio and I need to have a conversation about security hygiene. Anyway, listen: this is the important part. What happened last night at the university was a disaster, and I’m not talking about the dead kids. The Monarch time machine initiated a small but lethal entropic feedback loop within the Meyer-Joyce field that will eventually result in a complete breakdown of causality.”
“That explains a couple of things.” Stutters, powers, and visions among them.
“Help me save the world. It’ll take a day. Two, tops.”
“Zed…”
“Beth.”
“I spent four years looking for you.” Jack said, shaking a little now. Seeing her again was becoming physiological, made it difficult to keep his voice steady. “I wasn’t sure you were even alive. I thought… I thought Aberfoyle’s…”
“I’ll be blunt,” she said. “I knew what my disappearing would do to you, and I did it anyway.”
What a fucking day.
“You don’t fully know it yet,” she said. “But we’re involved in something that’s so much bigger than anything else.” Then, again with that smile: “This might not mean anything anymore, Trouble, but I’ve really missed your stupid face.”
“You…” The air felt a little thinner. He tried to breathe. “You have no clue how far I went, trying to find you.”
“You got close, in Arizona. I was in the compound when you rocked up. I don’t say this to torture you. I’m telling you because I appreciate your sticking by me. I don’t take that for granted. You looked good on that bike.”
“You saw me?”
“As I left. Then I was under the wire.”
“I rode that thing across the entire country. Those fuckers trashed it and left me by the interstate.”
“They had to. Couldn’t risk you working out I was there and coming after me.”