Jack was on his feet. Beth too. The light was blinding.
Beth received the worst of the blast. She had been caught between the tech and Paul, much closer to the epicenter, twenty feet from the Countermeasure. She faced Jack, her head a silhouette against that killing light, one transformed eye shining like a dying star. Her teeth, clenched against pain, were backlit.
The backup squads arrived as the warehouses and Beth’s car met alternate versions of themselves: fading in, falling apart, building up, redesigning, self-defacing, flashing clean. The first security team stood unmoving, trembling, hypnotized by the vision.
The slowly expanding radius of oversaturation showed catalogs of could-have-been. The sections of the warehouses caught in the blast were raw brick, then pristine white, then tagged with gang symbols, then gone entirely, then overgrown and abandoned. One second they were made of corrugated iron, the next they were a parking lot, followed by an outdoor café. The car changed models and colors. Sometimes it wasn’t a car, other times it was a Bronco, or gone, or riddled with bullets, or a motorcycle, or a solar-powered three-wheeled covered trike the likes of which Jack had never seen. The ground itself changed, rioting and fighting with versions of itself: concrete, blacktop, overgrown, lawn, mud…
Brakes were hit as the driver of the first backup truck spotted the anomaly, the three-truck convoy skidding to a halt outside the oversaturation’s radius. Armed men disgorged from the vehicles without order. Nobody advanced. No one wanted to get close. None of them understood what they were seeing.
Beth saw Jack. He was running to her. She brought both her hands up, intersected. T for Time-Out. Think Before You Act.
There was nothing he could do.
“Go.” Her throat, the interior of her mouth, luminesced, flickered, snapped.
Then she turned and walked toward the mad light.
“Beth!”
She didn’t look back. Her rescue rig sparked and crazed as it shielded her against the madness. Connections shorted out, sparked, burst into flame at elbow and shoulder. But it was enough to keep her going, to get her closer to the Countermeasure before the change took her completely.
Discordant energy arced and flailed from vehicles and brickwork. Men stumbled backward, scrambling like scalded cats from flickering arms of violent energy that leaped and bounced from one surface to another.
The space between the warehouses had become a storm; a force Beth had to push against, and through. It cost her to do it, as every cell in her body was forcefully introduced to its countless others. Her brain revolted. She understood in moments what it was like to be a thousand people all at once. A thousand simultaneous versions of herself. She saw infinite lives running parallel to each other; infinite futures in this life branching away from that moment. She held herself together, in this life, to finish what she had come here to do-to retrieve the Countermeasure, intact. She had given too much, lived too long, to be swept away by a torrent of potential and chaos before she had sung her final note.
She crouched before that fount of mad energy, and plunged her flickering, shifting hands-hands she didn’t recognize-into the roiling light.
The Countermeasure was in there, a thrashing, discordant sun. It plunged tendrils into her body and mind, showing her infinite possibilities, distracting her from the most important of all tasks, unmaking her capacity to be singular, introducing her to flavors of agony few people had ever known. Her rescue rig shorted out completely. Her hair caught fire, a corona around her head.
Sliding and fumbling across the surface of the Countermeasure, she was able to locate the damaged access panel. Using hands that were in the process of ceaseless reinvention, faster than she could process the changes, and with what remained of her strength and control, she forced the tiny hatch back into place, hoping against hope it would be enough.
It was.
The blinding glare vanished as Beth toppled to her side, the hot, heavy weight of the Countermeasure clutched to her chest.
“Beth…” Jack vaulted forward. The nearest security specialist fired his Taser. Jack tensed, and dropped like a side of beef.
Beth lay on her back, blue morning sky broken and wrong-colored in her new, changed, starlight eye. So many versions of her wanted to be known inside that singular body. So many lives. An infinity of other nows and heres; lives where she and Jack had walked away from this. Where this had never happened.
Men gathered, carefully, nervously, at the corners of her vision. She saw the surviving technician reach down to take the Countermeasure from her, eyes full of fear and misery.
She heard Paul howl. He staggered into view above her, all messed up, his arm and the side of his body a flashing, fractal mess. “What have you done to me?”
An aftershock pulsed. The world reinvented shockingly as something else, something alien, for just a moment. Returned to normal.
The technician took her prize and ran toward a waiting security team. The Countermeasure was gone, and with it any hope of repairing the M-J field.
One of the security team ventured to speak. “Sir, we should get you to a doctor immediately.”
Paul ignored him, fell to his knees, got in her face, screamed again, “What have you done to me?”
Beth smiled, her teeth backlit, her left eye going nova. “Oh buddy,” she said, with many, many soft voices. “I have not yet begun to fuck with you.” She unzipped her jacket, with a strange ping-snap sound, showing Paul what she carried beneath: five one-pound bars of C-4 wrapped in Gorilla Tape, attached by nine inches of rubberized fuse to an M60 igniter. “This is just the load screen.”
The fuse popped and hissed, throwing smoke in Paul’s eyes.
So many futures ran to meet Beth, so many possibilities revealed themselves to her starlight eye. So many Jacks.
Jack ordered misfiring limbs to action, hauled himself off the ground. One of the security grunts had Tasered him in front of their vehicle, and Beth was too far away to reach. His heart died the moment he realized he had failed her again.
Paul leaped back, folded into a moment, and fled. His men were less fortunate.
One future in particular shone brightest, clearest.
Beth whipped her head to look at Jack, one last time. “Hey, Trouble? Trust the villain.”
The first rule of a good disappearance: leave nothing behind.
“Beth!”
Supernova.
The C-4 kicked off. The three men gathered about her had no chance. The corners of both warehouses blew inward, top levels collapsing into lower. Beth’s car bucked upward, the hood blown off, tires blown out, a ton of brickwork sloughing down onto it from both sides. Every window for a block blew out. The soldiers milling about thirty feet away went blind, deaf, and were blown off their feet. The technician, running for the third unit, tumbled to the ground, clutching the Countermeasure-then got up and kept running. Debris rained down for two blocks. Somewhere in the docklands a car alarm started wailing. The air was choked with atomized dust and brickwork.
Jack lowered his arm from his face, his ears ringing. Beth was gone. The men who had gathered around her were gone. The second unit were laid out: two of them clutching their heads and screaming, eyes destroyed, eardrums burst. The remaining three were motionless. The third unit had fled for the cover of their vehicles, sheltering behind their window-smashed truck.
Clouds of dark orange haze rolled across the scene, obscuring and revealing. Here men screamed, then they were gone. There bricks tumbled from the smashed face of a warehouse… and were taken away.
No sound, save the ringing in Jack’s ears.
A dust-curtain breathed aside and there stood Paul Serene, some fifty feet away, his arm a shifting, sliding, starlight mess, his face fixed in a caught-red-handed little-boy expression of “what have I done?”