Through the now-open window hatch on his left he had a panoramic view of the woods, sloping downward toward the south side of the house: greenhouse, garage, barn. He wondered if Will was there now.
Crouching by the bed he lifted the soft, floral covers, finding the large drawer built into the base of the shelf. Inside was a red metal tool chest, which he hefted out. Something hanging from the bed frame caught his eye as he prepared to lift the chest onto the bench behind him.
Hanging from the canopy, above the pillow, was a silver bullet on a long, thin chain. Leaving the tool kit on the rug, Jack stood up and cupped the bullet in one hand. She had inscribed it with a collection of scratches: two sets of four vertical strokes and one cross-stroke, and one single vertical stroke. Eleven. Marking off the years as she did her time here.
He rotated the bullet. She had inscribed the casing again, beneath the marks, with a single word: “Trouble.”
“I borrowed a metal detector.” She was standing by the fireplace with a gym bag in one hand. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
He didn’t know if he was feeling joy or grief. “Why not?”
“Because it’ll make what happens next harder than it needs to be.” She put the bag down, crossed the room, and took the bullet from him, unlooping it from the frame.
It had been quick work to dismantle her home. All of the wood, rugs, curtains, netting, sacking, anything flammable they piled in a nearby clearing. Jack doused the collection in gasoline. Beth tossed the match. As they watched it burn, she reached and took his hand in hers.
“Is this what you did the first time? In 2010?” he asked.
“First rule of a good disappearance,” she said. “Zed’s burning her gear right now, at her place, which your past self will discover in about an hour.”
“Why didn’t you want me to see the bullet?”
She looked him in the eye. “When I was Zed… I never saw my future self after today. So-”
“So it means everything goes to plan. We get the Countermeasure and leave.”
“Maybe. But we need your head squarely in the game. The Countermeasure makes it to 2016. Nothing else matters.”
“Not to me.”
“Jack…”
“Knowing you changed my life. You showed me what life could be. That I could change things. I loved you for that.” He shrugged. “Take that away, that’s when nothing matters.”
Sunday, 4 July 2010. 10:10 A.M. Riverport dockyard.
“Are you sure this is all just ‘playing safe’?” Jack wore Kevlar beneath his shirt and jacket, a 2016-era Monarch-issued assault carbine slung from his shoulder. Beth was decked out paramilitary; also Monarch-issued.
A tanked shipbuilding industry meant 2010 prices for dockside real estate were mighty low. That’s how Will was able to buy and outfit a workshop for himself, away from the house and without Jack’s knowledge.
Jack and Beth were two doors down from that workshop. Parked between two large warehouses, Jack had heard his past self tear up on his motorcycle, throw open the workshop door, and immediately start shouting at Will. Accusations of stupidity, irresponsibility, neglect. Theft.
This was happening in the hour before past Jack found Zed gone and pointed his motorcycle toward the nearest Greyhound station, in the futile hope of finding her again: the beginning of a meandering four-year quest for answers.
Now Beth was beside him, leaning against the cooling hood of the car with a carbine in her hand, waiting for the final moments of that quest to run out.
Jack could hear his brother feebly defending himself, caught red-handed, surrounded by everything family money had bought.
There came sounds of violence: Jack remembered picking up a chair, smashing it into whatever he could find. Will shouting no no no.
He remembered an object that Will had made: a geometric sphere about the size of a volleyball. Something about the workshop told Jack that this was what all the money had gone into. So he had taken to it with a chair, smashed it once, twice…
“Stop! You’re killing the universe! Stop! St-!”
Jack’s nails bit into his palms. That was the moment his past self had punched Will in the face. Will’s dumbfounded expression-baffled, hurt, childlike-stayed with Jack for years. And then Jack had left.
Jack and Beth heard the motorcycle kick to life. Seconds later, Jack’s past self roared past the alley in which they were parked, heading for Zed’s place.
“Wait,” Jack said.
Beth stopped, threw a questioning look.
Will called Jack’s name, heartbroken. Then the sound of a car starting, and Jack caught a glimpse of his brother as he drove past.
That would be the last time he would see Will alive.
“You okay?”
He wasn’t ready to say anything. Just needed a second.
“Remember what I showed you by the river, with the revolver? I couldn’t die because it wasn’t my time, and you couldn’t have said anything to Will that would have-”
“Enough,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”
The warehouse was no small affair: two stories tall and three times the size of the family home. Beth had a key for the front door, and pulled the ten-foot-high rolling mass of steel aside. It led into a smaller anteroom with a security door. Beth punched in the code, and the lock popped.
“My birth date?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Jesus, Will. Security.”
They moved inside. They took no more than a few steps before having to stop.
The majesty of Will’s workshop made Jack believe in his brother’s genius in much the same way that Notre Dame de Paris had made twelfth-century peasants believe in God. Vast and complex, everything with a purpose, the workshop was a meticulously ordered warren of raw technology. Jack appreciated the inner workings of that place as much as he could the inner workings of a person: the incomprehensibility was as unsettling as it was astounding.
Above and around: wonder. At his feet a spray of smaller items scattered across the floor, the smashed body of a laptop-evidence of the furious violence Jack remembered inflicting.
Directly in front of them was a glass chamber, thirty feet a side, atop a three-foot-high square platform beneath which was buried a jumble of heavy-duty technology. A canopy of wires and cabling attached the transparent box to scaffolding that housed two floors of unidentifiable machinery.
The door to the box was slid aside. Inside, at the center of the glassed-in space, was a spindly stainless steel dais. Delicate upraised pincers, designed to support something delicately and precisely, held nothing. On the floor next to the dais was the chair Jack remembered using to knock a geometric sphere from the grip of those claws.
He walked around the box, checking it out from all angles. Beth trailed along behind, glancing at her watch.
The sphere-the Countermeasure-lay on the room’s insulated floor. A couple of its faces were now slightly deformed. An access panel had divorced itself from the housing.
Beth got close to the glass. “Oh Christ.”
“I didn’t know what it was.” Then: “What is it?”
“It contains a self-replenishing chronon charge powerful enough to brute-force the M-J field back into shape.”
Jack eyed the bent panels. “And what if it breaks open?”
Beth glanced at him. “Then an infinite number of your alternate selves cease to get along.” She straightened, rechecked her watch. “Catastrophically.”
She glanced at the device lying battered on the floor of the glass chamber. Something changed in her suddenly. Jack watched the tension drain from her, urgency fading.
“Beth?”
“Dr. Kim was credited with creating a self-replenishing source of power that was intended to be the heart of Project Lifeboat,” Beth mumbled. “The Regulator.”
Jack looked back into the chamber, skin flushing cold.