Click.
Jack punched her in the face. Her head jerked back. The gun discharged, the bullet flying at a forty-five-degree angle past her head. It ate a piece of brickwork with a short, sharp shriek.
“Knock it off!” he yelled, uselessly, having gone sheet white. “Fuck. I’m sorry. Fuck. Are you… you were…”
She looked him in the eye, pissed off, jammed the barrel to her temple, and pulled.
Click.
When she took it away there was a circular brand where the muzzle had kissed her. Then she threw it away. “I can’t die,” she said, yanking the plugs out of her ears. “I can’t die because when I was eight years old I met my older self. I can’t die because I haven’t done that yet, I haven’t gone back and met my younger self, you understand? I’ve always done whatever I’ve wanted, knowing that at worst I’m looking at a hospital stay. Parkour, martial arts, hang gliding, skydiving, bungee jumping, hitchhiking, roof surfing, hanging out with pirates and reprobates, staying up too late, not looking before I cross the street, everything that just went down at your old house… free pass. Makes me a very, very good operative. Nobody gets to kill me, nobody gets to take me down. The laws of causality won’t permit it.” She pointed back toward the swimming hall. “I go through that machine? Meet myself? I’m done. All bets are off. After that I could develop an allergy to fabric softener and drop dead. Choke on a fucking kiwi.” The adrenaline was washing out of her, bumming her out. She leaned heavily against the brickwork. “You wanted to know how I pulled off that magic trick on Bannerman’s Overlook? It has something to do with that. Same reason I’m not dead on the ground right now with Nick’s gun in my hand.” She stared at the reeds, tossed the plugs into them along with all the other trash.
Jack had taken his out, was staring at her. “You could have just fucking said so.”
“It wouldn’t have sunk in. You’ll come to rely on me being capable, but what if I go through that machine, meet myself, and from then on I’m second-guessing every move I make? You need to step up. No matter what it costs. If we fail, everything dies.”
“And not meeting your younger self isn’t an option. Right.”
“Right. If I don’t then I’m not here, we’re not talking, and nobody is trying to stop Monarch. If my older self doesn’t spirit my younger self away to a string of West Coast and South American training camps I don’t become me and there’s nobody here to save the day. But it’s not just me. You need to do the right thing, even if that means abandoning your brother, killing your friend, anything at all that means we succeed. Be prepared to do things you never thought you’d have to, because the alternative is so much worse.”
“Paul said something similar.”
“We’re both right, but he’s going about it the wrong way. That’s all I know.” She’d said her piece. Done. “So the mission is this: we go back, we find the Countermeasure, find out what it does, and then-most likely-we get it back here. That done, we fix the Fracture and save the world.”
“Beth.”
“Yes, Jack.”
“We don’t know what the Countermeasure is, or even what it looks like.”
“No. But we know who had it last, and where. The rest we improvise.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:37 P.M. Riverport Swimming Hall.
Nick patched up the coffee maker, found a few plastic cups in the cafe overlooking the pool, and made a passable espresso with what was left of his pods. The three of them sat on camp chairs in the pool, next to Will’s workstations. The sunlight through the filthy vertical skylights was blazing amber as it approached sunset.
“What do you remember about 2010?” Beth asked.
Nick shrugged. “Best of times, worst of times. Played center position on the ice and everyone knew my name. My face was on coffee mugs. I had my college ride, and then I blew it. You?”
Jack shrugged, sipped his coffee. “Spent the first six months getting sick of my brother, the last six months looking for her.” He jerked a thumb at Beth.
“What about you, Beth?”
“First six months hanging out with this guy, last six months in a compound in Arizona. Ran a lot.”
“What kind of compound? Like-”
“Just a bunch of guys waiting for the end of the world. Ex-special forces. Thought they’d seen the writing on the wall and made a few decisions. I was just there to learn.”
“Guns and stuff?”
“Mainly cognitive, mental, and physical. Resolve. Teamwork. Judgment and adaptability. Discipline. Stress control. Multitasking.” She finished her coffee, surveyed Will’s battered old machine.
“So you’re really doing this,” Nick said.
Beth stood. Jack took her by the arm. “If we do this we’re only going back six years. That’s more than fifteen years after you met yourself. You don’t need to come along. Stay here. If I don’t come back-”
“I’ve made my peace. Don’t psych me out now, Jack, okay? Let’s do this.”
Her eyes were sharp and her voice certain. Jack let it go, but he didn’t like it.
Jack went to refamiliarize himself with the instrumentation-Will’s device being far more primitive than Monarch’s. Beth didn’t follow. She walked up the ramp.
“Paul said something similar.” That’s what Jack had said to Beth earlier. She stood at the machine’s airlock, palm against the hand-riveted metal frame. Paul had entered Monarch’s machine and been reborn as something altogether different. Beth was on the same path. Both of them were attempting to save the world, in their own way; both of them thought they were right; both of them knew the past couldn’t be changed, were dedicated to their cause and, she knew, both of them would be reshaped by traveling through these machines.
The machine shouldn’t have smelled like anything more than age and industrial grease, but not so. It had a scent of its own, the lingering, meaty heaviness of…
“Death.”
She stepped inside the airlock, a heavy, ten-foot square iron chamber reminiscent of something submersible. It was clear just how heavily Monarch had based their design on Will’s work-it was functionally identicaclass="underline" clockwise for future travel, counter-clockwise for past. Unlike the Monarch machine, this corridor was rigid, not self-assembling, and midnight dark in both directions. The stink grew more intense as she stood in the chamber.
She exited.
“I think something might have died in there,” she called out, hoping for an obvious answer.
Jack was moving from console to console. “Will wasted a lot of money on that security system if a raccoon can get in here. It’s just old. All right Nick, can you get us some juice?”
Jack’s reasoning didn’t make her feel any better. She glanced back into that darkened airlock, interior details half-formed in the shadows. Beth suppressed a chill.
Nick redirected power from the gennie. There was a deep thunk and the airlock interior illuminated under the power of an old-school filament bulb, which promptly popped. The corridor trembled as behind the scenes the contraption’s innards shifted and the core came online. Beth took a few careful steps backward down the ramp.
The vibration joined forces with a secondary instability, their crashing and separating rhythms beginning to shake components loose from the Promenade. A distortion wave struggled into existence around the corridor-ring but was failing to become substantial.
The shaking and thrashing built in strength as systems beneath the machine began to emit desperate, high-pitched alarms. This wasn’t working.
“Goddamn it, no. Nick! Reset the power!” Wheeling away from the destination console, Jack moved to reboot the core when Beth got in his way.
“No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’? I’m trying again.”