Nick was driving slow and steady, sitting low behind the wheel, staring ahead from behind his sunglasses. Riverport at nine thirty on a Saturday morning should have been livelier-even in autumn and with most of the college crowd still away on vacation. People should have been lining up for coffee. There should have been traffic. Buskers along the Main Street area should have been laying out hats and guitar cases for the day. Not today. This morning everyone’s attention was on the university. If they weren’t laying wreaths, pinning photographs to memorial boards at the site, or just paying their respects, they were moving at half speed, processing what it meant to be the news.
“You sure they can’t track me?” The Breathalyzer’s vitals were laid out on the front seat, next to the webcam and Nick’s smashed coffee machine.
Beth was in the backseat, Jack lying out of sight with his head on her lap. “You’re good, though the cops and Monarch will be looking for your license plate.” She glanced at Jack: the face of Riverport’s tragedy-Massachusetts’s bin Laden-thanks to Hatch’s evocative on-air summary that morning. “We should ditch the cab as soon as we can.” She had gone over Jack, checking for injuries, found nothing save for a little mottling where cuts and scrapes had quickly healed over.
“They were supposed to be the solution,” Nick said.
“Who was?”
“You were. Monarch. Jobs. A future. Hope. You told us you’d save us.”
Beth felt that, wanted to rebuke it. She wasn’t Monarch. She was never Monarch. She was inside Monarch to bring Monarch down. But Nick was right: she hadn’t succeeded in preventing anything. “What’s your favorite movie, Nick?”
“Happy Gilmore.”
“Do me a favor and say Star Wars.”
“I don’t like art films.”
“You know that bit in The Matrix when Neo works out how to glitch it? He games the system, gets superpowers, rewrites reality?”
“Sure.”
“In this story Neo is Monarch. The Matrix is planet Earth. The hack is money, influence, shamelessness, lies, entitlement, not giving a fuck, and an overwhelming lack of critical thought on our part.”
“And actual superpowers.”
So there it was. “What tipped you off?”
“Monarch were waiting at my house. Figured they had to be watching Jack’s. So I watched his place for a while before coming in. You know what I saw?”
“The moment Jack’s house blew up a dozen Monarch goons popped into existence and dropped dead simultaneously. At the same time a BearCat materialized out of thin air and exploded on his front drive.”
“Also your boyfriend looked like ground beef when you rolled him onto the backseat. Now he looks just fine.” The cab rolled to a stop at a red light. Nick glanced at Beth in the rearview. “Is this some deep-black bullshit? X-Files, Alex Jones, Area 51, something like that?”
Beth glanced away from the traffic to look Nick in the eye. “It is a conspiracy. It does go all the way up. It involves other dimensions. It was all planned.”
He glanced at her again, then back to the road, saying nothing.
Jack risked lifting his head, peering out at the street. “Looks like the end of the world out there.” Outside was the wide expanse of river on one side and rows of uncared-for warehouses on the other.
Nick had navigated them carefully around Main Street’s periphery, sticking to back roads when he could, eventually taking them down a rutted service track by the river. “Who builds a swimming hall out here?”
“This was residential back in the day,” Beth said. A three-legged dog skipped across the busted curb in front of them, glancing self-consciously at them before disappearing in the weeds. “Way, way back in the day.”
Jack sat upright. Beth’s hand-still thimble-clipped into her rig-slipped from his shoulder.
“Will didn’t buy this place for the view.” Jack looked at her hands, traced a finger along the rubberized thimble covering her thumb to the first joint, then the insulated wiring that led to a wrist clip of the same color and material.
“Zero State Mobility Rig,” she said. “The exo carries its own chronon charge, maintaining my personal M-J field, even in a complete causality vacuum. It means I can walk around in a stutter, as long as the charge lasts.”
The bridge was ahead. The address put the swimming hall directly beneath it.
“Before we do this,” Jack said, “I need a few answers. That morning on Bannerman’s Overlook. That show with Aberfoyle-the chop shop, the yachts, what happened to Aberfoyle and his men, the timing. The way nobody came to ask us questions. How…?”
“Do you like Douglas Adams?” she said.
“The writer?”
“He wrote that the knack to flying lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground, and miss.”
“And?”
“Same thing.”
Jack thought about that. “No it isn’t.”
“Here we are!” Beth was pointing at a decrepit building shoved snug beneath the bridge. It was completely unremarkable. The faded signage, half-lost to gravity and vegetation, read BR BURY SWI MING HALL. Beth was out of the cab, making a line for the place.
Jack followed. Colonies of seagulls and pigeons populated the underside ribbing of that third-rate bridge. Thin-stalked greenery reached up against stanchions supported by crumbling brickwork. Even the graffiti hadn’t been updated since the nineties. The hall was as broad as the bridge itself, and built from the same brickwork. Two levels, all of the windows barred and boarded-over. Double doors of steel-banded wood sat square in the middle of the construction, falling-apart sign overhead. Steps led up to the door, a concrete wheelchair ramp swerving up from the side. Grass and vegetation had spent a decade or two undermining the concrete and brickwork, splitting it, green explosions reaching for the bridged-over sky.
Beth turned back to the cab. “Nick, you got a crowbar, tire iron, something…?”
Nick, out of the car, clicked his tongue and gave her pistol-fingers in the affirmative before jogging around to the trunk.
“So,” Jack said, trying to be casual. “Did you… see… anyone while you were away? A guy?”
“Not really.”
“Oh?”
“I had a lot to get done in that time. Well, there was one guy, I guess.”
“One guy who?”
Nick jogged over. “Here ya go!”
Beth took the tire iron, tested the heft, moved for the door.
Jack sidled over, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Was it serious?”
Beth was busy trying to wedge the iron between the two doors.
“Are you… in touch?”
Beth stopped what she was doing, looked him in the eye, and said his name in the most well-meaning tone she could manage. “Jack.” He got the hint.
She got the tire iron in there, started sawing the other end of it to and fro.
Jack found it oddly uncomfortable to watch, looked away.
Metal and wood complained, splintered, finally popped. “I think I got it.”
Jack grabbed the handle on one of the doors; she got the other. Sure enough the lock had fallen apart as it separated from the housing. The doors shrieked across the concrete.
Beth surveyed what this revealed. “Oh, get bent.” A proper, actual security door. Thick, metal, heavy, with a code lock.
Nick whistled. “He wasn’t screwing around.”
Beth gestured at it. “Where’d your brother get that? NORAD?”
“Wait a sec.” Jack stepped up to it. The code lock looked like it still had power. He punched in six digits. Waited.
From deep within the door’s body came a weighty triple-thunk and, just like that, the half-ton iron door popped loose-opening an inch.
Beth examined it, looked at Jack.
“My birth date,” he said.
“Huh.” Beth pushed the door open easily. “After you.”