She wasn’t leaving anybody. “She’s coming with us!”
“Leave! Her!” Then: the howls. Fractured, broken; ten voices, each as if shrieking from three different directions at once. A sound felt, received, but not heard. A sound that resonated in the oldest chambers of Beth’s mind, heirloom fears disinterred from dark primordial soil.
The girl on the snow began screaming.
“Wait… just hold still.” Beth said, trying to keep the quaver from her voice. The girl at her feet was thrashing, wrenching at her ankle. Beth kneeled, double-pumped her fingers.
Beth released the snow around the girl’s boot, and the girl scrambled free. Paul was already running-north. Then Beth saw them, suddenly present, coming for them from the southern streets and from behind the shrine to the east.
Shifters.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said, but the girl had already taken off, slipping, collapsing, scrambling. “I’m sorry!” Beth got to her feet and ran, stiff-legged, each heavy landing on her wounded leg like a knife twisting in her flesh.
South and east weren’t options. To her left was a building and she didn’t have time to be releasing doors-plus anything could be in there. She ran north, following the girl, following Paul Serene, headed for the fork in the path. “Bank left,” she called out. “Make for the Quant-”
The girl stopped so abruptly Beth had no alternative but to turn her shoulder and take the impact.
It was like running into a wall.
Beth spun with the impact, cycling around the girl’s right-hand side. In slow motion Beth saw that the girl’s flight had been arrested mid-run, both her feet off the ground, hair thrown forward over her face by the force of a fractal fist slamming between her breasts, passing through her chest, ending her instantly-immobilizing her in the microsecond of her death. The monstrosity’s phasing face tracked Beth as she stumbled, her steepled fingers pressed to the cobbles to keep her from going over completely. For a horrifying second pain bloomed bright and she was certain her bad leg would betray her, but then, like a runner at the blocks, she propelled herself north toward the Quantum Physics Building.
Behind her the thing howled again. Its siblings answered the call, and they were everywhere.
Her leg was stiffening, seizing. She wasn’t going to make it.
“Move!” Paul was at the end of the path. It terminated at a paved walkway that ran east-west. “Follow!” He ran west, alongside the crystalline Quantum Physics Building, making for the entrance.
Behind Beth were at least a half dozen of the shifting, flickering, howling things, converging fast, lurching weird, grasping and spasming, as if each one was having a violent argument with infinite versions of itself. She couldn’t die like this.
She hit the walkway, used hands-on-wall to arrest her momentum and shift it forty-five left, powering after Paul.
“What are they? What are those things?”
He didn’t answer. He was at the door, disappearing inside. Don’t you lock it, fucker. Don’t you lock it.
She slammed through.
“Leave the door open,” he yelled. “Over here!”
The atrium was no longer an open reception area with a wealth of superfluous space: the interior of the dome was now crowded with a maze of smaller buildings and construction. Beth ran into the narrow lobby just as Paul toppled a heavy drum onto its side in front of the doorway, and-
“Is that a grenade?”
“Door 3 behind me, get inside”-and he pulled the pin, held the spoon, released a safety seal on the drum.
A wall of flickering, roaring black forced its way through the door.
She heard the spoon ting as she leaped into the room. The room was a techno-hive, but she’d worked at Monarch long enough to know a chronon aggregation setup when she saw it: racks of charging chronon batteries, sterile surfaces, monitoring stations.
Batteries. Aggregators. Chronon energy: exactly what she needed.
Paul crashed in behind her. “Floor!” he cried, gesturing frantically. “Floor!”
A panel of flooring had been lifted aside, down which he leaped. The roars were deafening. They’d overrun…
“Floor!”
Beth leaped into darkness. Paul appeared out of nowhere and yanked the hatch shut.
The grenade detonated. Most of the howls ceased entirely. Outside, from what Beth could hear, the stragglers reluctantly, resentfully retreated.
“That,” she said, “was a chronon battery. You blew up a chronon battery.”
The crawl space beneath the aggregator was intended for maintenance. It was tight, airless, crammed with the underguts of an apparatus that might have been giving them lymphoma if it weren’t as stutter-locked as everything else. The crawl space led away from the hatch, opening into what looked like a small service area. Beth saw a wax candle, immobile as anything else: a source of perpetual yet strangely static light.
“They… we…” Paul seemed to be having trouble with language. “They don’t like… the chronon burst restarts causality for a brief time in a limited area. They can’t manifest outside of chronon-free areas, so… they’re my safeguard. Potential. It… they find it… painful.” He turned on all fours and crept toward a dim light past neat knots of fat cabling. “Hurts them. When you’re alive, you can be anything,” he was murmuring. “When you’re dead… you’re just one thing. I keep batteries up there. They… only exist in stutters.”
Beth looked to the light ahead, hand to her gun, out of a need for security.
There was a reason her Zed persona had been so extreme. It was to make her Beth persona unrecognizable by contrast. In this moment it paid off: Paul didn’t recognize her at all.
Checking her gun again she crawled toward the light.
“Cost me a week’s sleep,” he was saying. “What you made me do. When you made me waste all that chronon. A week’s sleep.”
“A week’s…?” She emerged into his hidey-hole. Ambient light from underfloor diagnostics lit the place midnight blue and shadow. He had enough space for a thin, closed-cell foam sleeping pad-with a jacket for a pillow. By this was a hunk of technology Beth recognized as being a refined, miniaturized version of the stutter shield generators Monarch used to run Strikers and Juggernauts through their paces. This was smaller, though, redesigned. “Hey,” she said. “Nice place. How long have you been sleeping here?”
Paul closed his eyes, shook his head. “Don’t know. Meaningless question. Don’t know.” He tapped the device. “Slept… a lot.” She leaned forward to get a closer look, minding her head against the low ceiling. “Don’t…,” Paul said. “Don’t touch it.”
“I won’t. Is it… it’s a stutter generator?”
Paul shook his head. “Causality.”
She took a closer look. Science really wasn’t her thing, but… “This generates a causality bubble?”
Lifeboat. Of course. Its directive was to ensure people would remain mobile and aware once time stopped flowing. Just like the bubble she had seen around the top floors of the Tower.
“Can’t sleep without it. Fall asleep, I’ll become like…” He gestured toward the hatch.
“The monsters?”
Paul shook his head. “The other people. I’ll… never wake up.”
Beth remembered: the Joyce farm. Jack knocked out by the erupting BearCat-freezing at the moment he lost consciousness. If Paul lost consciousness in a chronon-free zone he’d become as immobile as anyone else.
She imagined him, living here, under the floor, for months-maybe years-scavenging not only food but time, living in fear of Shifters, in an effort to stave off oblivion.
“My name’s Beth,” she said. “Who are you?”
He trembled. “Paul,” he said and, just like that, that pathetic figure of a man burst into tears. When was the last time someone had asked him his name? Asked him anything? “Please,” he said. “Take me back inside.”
“Inside? You mean upstairs? The lab?”
“No,” he said, hurt by her obvious cruelty. “The Tower.”
The flickering shield around the top floors of the Monarch building. Someone keeping the lights on.
Beth calmed him, distracted him, decided they needed to eat. Paul showed her how he had been surviving: canned goods, a propane cooker, bottled water, stored in the staff kitchenette upstairs.
She had about forty minutes left in her rescue rig. After that she’d be as stiff as every other poor bastard.
Out from under the floor Paul had noticed her wounded leg immediately. With all the care of a small boy tending a fallen bird he had cut away a portion of her fatigues, enough to expose the wound, and tended it as best he could with antiseptic, fresh gauze, and a tight binding.
She told him she had gashed herself running from the Shifters.
“You have to be more careful here,” he told her. “When everyday things don’t yield, they become dangerous. You could slash yourself on a falling leaf, you hit it right.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You tie a pretty competent bandage.”
“Boy Scout,” he said, closing the kit.
Paul’s kitchenette was spartan: steel benchtops, small microwave (useless, no power), fridge (redundant, food lasts forever), one table, and four chairs. He chatted as he heated a pan on a propane camp stove, cracked eggs, mixed flour, chocolate, and maple syrup. And cinnamon.
Paul told her his story, about the university shooting, going through the machine and expecting to emerge back into the Riverport University time lab. Instead he found the airlock packed with passengers: men in Monarch armor. They had been nervous, Paul’s sudden presence in the machine with them unexpected. One had almost shot him but the soldier in charge said (and this was confusing), “Don’t shoot, it’s him.” Then the main airlock had opened.
From outside the machine someone had said “Welcome.” The Monarch troopers were asked to come forward and relinquish their weapons. There had been some back-and-forth, but the troopers eventually exited, hands open.
Then someone had called Paul by name, asked him to come out of the machine.
Terrified, Paul had stepped off the Promenade, into the airlock, and surveyed what awaited.
Outside the airlock was a glossy-floored expanse of polished black ceramic, the ceiling vast above. A glassed-in observation deck looked down upon him from one side. Swaddled figures stood motionless there, faces obscured behind safety goggles. He saw the Monarch soldiers being led away by a group of men and women wrapped head to toe in protective layers of dark material, weapons held loosely in hand. Paul didn’t know what had happened to the soldiers after that. He never saw them again.
At the foot of the steel ramp people in sand-colored floor-length robes waited for him, attended by personnel in black military-style uniforms.
Behind them the far wall of the lab was gone, torn away and with it part of the glossy black floor. Riverport was laid out through a flickering violet energy haze. Smack in the middle of the view was the university. The sky above it was a thick mass of black cloud punched through with pale eddies, bolts of terrible energy leaping from earth to sky. There was flame and there was smoke-none of it moving-with great gouges slashed perpendicular to Main Street.
“Come out,” the tallest figure had coaxed, gently. “You’re expected.”
“Wait,” Beth held up a hand. “How did they know you were arriving?”
Paul was getting frustrated with what he was cooking, sighing, watching it fall to bits atop the plastic spatula. The gas cooker froze every now and then and Paul had to make contact with it for a half second to reanimate it. “The people in the Tower, they’re always working, up there.”
Project Lifeboat. Had to be.
“Sometimes they come out in BearCats, hauling trailers. Sometimes monsters come for them, and they do what I do: drop chronon charges and run.”
They did it, then. Lifeboat happened. The world ended, and Hatch got what he wanted.
“They’ve even got planes,” he said. “I’ve seen them taking off from the airport. Why go anywhere? The entire world is like this, right?”
“I really don’t know, Paul. I… woke up,” she lied. “Someone put this gadget on me, told me how to use it, then left me to it. Told me to come here and look for a chronon supply before the charge runs out.”
She watched as he reached for a plate and moved it to the stove. He scraped the mess onto it.
“Are they… good people, do you think? In the Tower?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sullenly. “They gave me supplies, led me from the Tower, and that was that. Sounds like you got the same treatment. Maybe it’s an experiment.”
“Thank you,” she said as he handed her a plate. It smelled like something a kid would make for breakfast. If she was going to eat she had to make it quick-before the charge dissipated. Taking bits and pieces between her fingers she transferred it to her mouth. Lumpy, sweet, dry, and powdery… but who knew where her next meal was coming from? She noticed him watching her hands-specifically her thimbled fingers. “The people up there wear these?” She waggled her digits.
“Only when they go outside. I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?”
Beth swallowed. “This is good.”
“I’ve seen you around.”
“Gotta get out sometime,” she said, hoping that’d be the last of it.
“You know who I am.”
Her bones flashed glass-cold. “Sure,” she said, dutifully taking another mouthful, buying a few moments to think. “You’re Paul.”
“I’m not wearing a rig,” he said. “You weren’t surprised by that at all.” The cooker’s blue flames became rigid, Paul forgetting his own meal. “Why are you here?”
She swallowed, the clumped lump sticking in her throat. “I figured that was normal for some people.”
Paul had nothing to say. He just looked at her, working her out.
She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but if he was half as skilled as the Paul Serene she knew in 2016 he could kill her here and now. All she could taste was chocolate and cinnamon and…
She knew who he would become. The things he would done. She had to shoot him. Right here, right now, with the taste of that child’s meal in her mouth.
“I’ll help you,” he said. “I have plenty of chronon batteries. I don’t need a rig so we can make them last a long time. The chronon umbrella only fits one, but we can sleep in shifts. You’ll be okay.”
Ah… shit.