Jack saw flashes of the same hallway, decorated and designed a dozen different ways as the slowly collapsing M-J field sliced the place up along different timelines. Sometimes it wasn’t decorated so much as destroyed. Alternate hallways, alternate outcomes, alternate presents.
With his own eyes Jack watched reality inch closer to falling apart completely.
The big Shifter threw its arms wide and screamscreamscreamed.
Eyes wide, hands wide. Shining Palm.
The pack held back behind it, cowed. The Shifter on the floor thrashed infinitely, simultaneously.
Jack stumbled backward.
Beth was on her feet, hauling him now, hobbling heavily on one good leg. “This way. Run.” Blood flowed thick between the fingers clamped to her wound.
“Beth, what’s happening?”
Without warning the stutter collapsed, every still bullet flew free, glass walls shattered and the Shifters abruptly… vanished.
“This won’t last. Run.”
Paul made it into the chronon research wing as causality kicked back in. Was it over? No… just another temporary cessation. He could feel this event was not yet spent.
This exertion was costing him. The lack of focus was taking hold again, the feeling of becoming unmoored from his body, from the world. The desire to surrender to care, to allow the release to course through his entire body and take him. The voice of his sickness, his chronon syndrome, was growing louder, more seductive, within the chamber of his mind. Taking up space once occupied by his own counsel.
Treatment. He required treatment. Sofia’s lab. He would administer a treatment to himself, within the safety of an artificial pylon-generated bubble of causality, and soothe this madness. Once the chaos had passed, there would be work to do. Damage to contain. Steps to take. The final steps.
He pushed through secondary lab spaces, past coldly lit glass infoboards and the warm hum of sterile machinery.
Sofia’s laboratory was at the far end of this array, from which she could oversee all of the work being done in her name, to her guidance. It was elevated above the broad glass boxes in which the labs were contained. Moving through the secondary labs, Sofia’s quarters were always visible through clear plexiglass ceilings.
Of modern design, Sofia’s quarters were configured for living as much as working-a flat oblong with a long observation window suspended above the glass-roofed lab-farm. It had been designed to her specifications, on Paul’s orders.
Moving at speed toward these quarters, and the relief they contained, Paul watched a wide tongue of flame shoot from the observation window, spitting glass.
Secondary explosions took the roof and walls off Sofia’s laboratory quarters completely. Heavy debris blew outward and upward to crash down through the glass ceilings of the secondary laboratories.
Paul watched his only hope of forestalling the progress of his condition literally vanish in flames.
Overwhelmed, Paul blacked out.
When he came to, his hands were bloody and a nearby workstation was trashed, a desk snapped in half. His left arm was on fire, as was his chest. A coppery taste filled his mouth. His chest was alight with starlight and his mind full of howling.
Remembering himself was like struggling to remember a dream. Muscle memory took his hand to his chest, fingers closed around Aberfoyle’s bullet. He was Paul Serene. The future of humanity. And he must live.
Monitors above the workstation flashed meaningless information. He found a laptop, shakily entered his credentials and switched to secure feeds. Called up the feed for floor fifty. Scanned.
Found the corridors. Smashed walls, shattered glass, two members of Chronon-1 who had ended their lives horribly as complex stains on expensive carpet.
Scanned.
Jack and Beth, running for the garden. There she was: Beth. Hobbling on a wounded leg.
Closing on Sofia-who was now reanimated and discovering herself completely alone.
Paul fumbled for his earpiece, switched frequencies, contacted the helicopter pilot.
“Leave!”
“Sir?”
“Get that bird away from this building, pilot, or I’ll kill you myself. Go!”
Jack approached Sofia quickly, hands up and open. She was not receptive.
“No! Not again!” She was close to hyperventilating. “The… the mind is… not meant to take such shocks! Where is Paul? Paul was here. Where is…?”
Beth grabbed Sofia’s hand in her own bloody one.
Sofia recoiled “Oh my God, you’re hurt!”
“Hurt,” Beth said. “Short on time and low on patience so, please, rediscover the ol’ internal monologue.” Beth hobbled toward the stone steps leading up to Martin’s office, dragging Sofia with her.
The stairs led to a Roman-style atrium, floored in red-and-white check: a place for Martin to sit and look out across the greenery, or to meet with fellow businesspeople. His office was on the far side of this atrium, locked and sealed. Fortunately, an L-shaped gantry led from the right, straight to a square helipad that hung off the side of the building.
Their ride was already cycling its blades, building to a muted turbine shriek. The pilot glanced between them and his overheads, willing the machine to get airborne.
“Jack! That chopper’s leaving without us!”
Jack zipped down the gantry, banked left around the curve, headed for the pad-just as the helicopter lifted off the pad.
The pilot caught sight of Jack and went defensive, banking hard and low over the side of the building.
“Jack!” Beth could see what he was doing. “Don’t be stupid!”
Beth needed a medic, and that chopper was their only way out of here.
Jack threw himself toward the lip, throwing his arms forward in an attempt to localize a stutter around the chopper.
He ended facedown on the pad, two feet from a fifty-story drop. He came to as Beth grabbed him by the collar, hauling him to his feet, and laughed out loud: the helicopter floated below the platform, angled slightly, blades immobile, hanging in space. Sofia gasped at the sight of it.
Jack smiled, satisfied with himself. “If it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid. Right?”
“Eurocopter Airbus AS365,” Beth muttered. “Just like she ordered.”
The bubble wasn’t large enough to have trapped the entire bird, just the midsection and blades. Jack could see the pilot, still animated, frantically strangling the controls but going nowhere.
“Can you make the jump on that leg?”
“We got a bigger problem.” Beth pointed back the way they came. Chronon-1 had stormed the garden, moving at speed toward the helipad.
“They lost two of their guys,” Jack said. “They’re pissed.”
“Keep Sofia safe, I’ll-”
Jack took Sofia’s hand. “Trust me.”
And Jack shoved Sofia Amaral off the edge of Monarch Tower.
The doctor fell without a sound, shocked into silence that her life could end so suddenly. She fell toward the helicopter, but wide of it, connecting with the stutter bubble Jack had thrown around the chopper.
Sofia Amaral froze, suspended in space, five feet from the open passenger door of the trapped helicopter.
“Woo!”
Beth’s look was either confusion or murderous intent.
Jack gestured, success self-evident. “What?”
“Your balls,” she said. “On a stump.” Beth backed up, and took a running leap toward the edge as Chronon-1 started blasting. She bounded off the lip, the pain of it forcing a cry from her throat, launching herself into space. She aimed her still-cycling boots for the chopper’s open side door and hoped for the best.