When a moment is witnessed the waveform collapses. That’s what Will had said-and Paul. Events cannot be changed once those events intersect with and influence causality.
Jack ran straight at the particleboard barriers around the rear of the library, converted momentum to mantling, swung a leg over, and landed facing the open entry to the rear of the library, stripped of its door.
The room was perfectly square, empty save for limp lengths of plastic like the shed skin of giant snakes, dust and insulation.
The stacks were through the empty door frame to his left and beyond the south door Paul and Will were in the final moments of their futile conversation.
“But we don’t have years for you to come to the same conclusion. We have moments.”
That was it. Jack jagged left…
“Actual,” Paul said. “this is your Consultant. Trigger.” And then warped out.
Jack rounded the corner in time to see Paul go out the main doors. His past self looked on in horror as Paul slammed into him, sweeping him out of the building as the first charges detonated upstairs.
Jack skidded on the smooth black-and-white flooring, fingertips trailing in the dust, and dashed forward as a curtain of debris descended.
Jack kicked into a slide as the top floor came down behind him, colliding with Will’s legs at the same time as he slammed hands into the dust.
The weight of a building fell to earth on the spot where the brothers stood. The collapse kicked out a cloud that swept across the campus, obscuring everything in a thick, rolling shroud of pulverized marble, masonry, and concrete.
Jack coughed. “Will? Will!” He couldn’t see anything. “Will!”
“I think I broke my watch.”
Will was right there, sitting up beneath the flickering bubble of self-contained causality. Alive.
Jack crashed into him, holding on to him with everything he had.
“You, uh,” Will said, with difficulty. “You’re getting quite good at this.” Then he realized: “You’re not Jack. The Jack I met tonight had shaved. You have not.”
Jack let him go. “This won’t last long.”
“I should be dead,” Will said. “Same clothes, more stubble. I’d say you’re, what, two days older? Three? You’ve come back in time. For me, for this. Meaning you thought I was dead. I should be dead.”
“There’s some space outside this bubble. I’m gonna blast us clear. I doubt anyone’s gonna notice at this point.”
“I was dead, to you, but you’ve saved me. The only way that could be possible is if… if between now and when you come back for me the world has every reason to believe me dead-if I never interact with causality between now, and two days from now. Which we can achieve if you and I now travel forward in time, bypassing those two days. Jack,” Will said. “The waveform never collapses. I never die. What a brilliant solution to have formulated. Well done.”
“Cover your ears.” Jack shoved his hands through the bubble, and did to the wreckage what he had done to the two Monarch troopers beneath the time machine.
Tonnage blew outward.
Jack and Will emerged from the wreckage of the library into a world that had stopped moving.
They carved through the chalk-white atmosphere, making their way across the shattered ruin of the library and out onto the campus.
“I completely missed this the first time around,” Jack said.
“Missed?” Will inquired, dusting himself off. They were walking briskly toward the Quantum Physics Building-and their way home.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “She found me. And… oh man.”
“She?”
Jack wasn’t listening. Or walking. He’d seen something, on Founders’ Walk, and was now running toward it. Will called after him, then followed.
Beth was frozen, marching along Founders’ Walk with the unconscious body of Jack’s past self slung over her shoulder. There she was, beautiful and alive. Unmoving. The fighter he’d fallen in love with.
Jack stepped closer to her. Here she was, so very much alive. “You knew her, didn’t you?” Jack said to his brother.
“I’ve known Beth Wilder for seventeen years,” Will replied. “The first thing she did was save my life. Yours, too, actually.” Then, “You can’t save her.”
“You know what happened to her?”
“In 2010? I think so. I returned to my workshop at the dock and the area was ruined. I saw the anomalies, recognized them as the product of a Countermeasure breach. I’d hoped she was alive, had taken the Countermeasure and returned to 2016-but I knew the exposure would have killed her first. Then Monarch bought out the entire area, and set up a chronon-harvesting operation. ‘Ground Zero’ they call it. So, with eleven years of work wasted and Armageddon due, I bought a gun and tried to shut down Monarch’s lab myself. Which brings us here.”
If Jack had heard, he made no sign. “She deserves to live.”
“You have to let her go, Jack. We have a universe to consider.”
Jack couldn’t open his mouth to say a single word. He just leaned into Beth, slid his arms around her, and held her as best he could. Just for a moment.
He whispered something he wished she could hear, but knew she never would.
22
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:55 A.M. Monarch Tower, Time Lab. One minute, local, after Jack’s departure.
Jack and Will clasped each other’s hands as they walked the Promenade, side by side, in lockstep, staying in synch as they walked two nights forward.
“What you’ll see is going to be shocking, Will. Fair warning.”
“I’ve been prepared for this since you were ten. I’m confident I can handle it.”
Arriving at the airlock they opened the seal and stepped into the first hour of Monday morning.
Jack checked through the viewplate. The airlock hissed, the seals depressurizing, and the two brothers stepped out onto the ramp.
The lab was vacant. They were alone.
“Oh,” Will said. “I expected something more dramatic.” Then, “Is that… music?”
What they heard was a lilting series of high notes, as though someone in a distant room were plinking on a xylophone, building from slow rhythm to something faster. Coming in under this simple score, abruptly, was the sound countless girders might make if they were bent and tearing beneath a weight they could no longer support.
The floor shifted alarmingly, betraying them as the far wall detached and slipped away without so much as a sound.
Freezing air rushed in and far below came the sound of hundreds of tons of concrete, glass, and iron waterfalling clumsily and catastrophically into the street.
Riverport-bucking, flaming, dying-laid itself bare to them.
Will walked across the buckled floor, toward the torn-open wall, perhaps drawn by something only he could understand. Something written in the pulsing, wailing, pointillist nighttime landscape spread before him. Or perhaps he was simply a man who was looking upon what he had done, and found himself overcome by the horror of it.
Jack reached for him, pulled him back from the ragged edge, and saw for himself what was becoming of the town that had raised him.
“Will,” Jack shouted above the high-altitude wind. “Can you stop this?” He unslung his pack, opened it, showed Will the Countermeasure. “Can you?”
The sight of the device drew Will out of his shock. He nodded. “I can try. It’s what I built it for. Yes. Yes, I believe so. I need to get under the machine.”
Taking the device from the bag, turning it over in his hands, Will said, “The charge is unusually low.”
“Monarch was shielding the top floors from the stutter with it, running some kind of dampener network. Probably running a bunch of other crap as well. I have no idea.”
Will looked out across that terribly wounded city. “It…” He struggled to find the words. “Causality relies upon an agreed-upon sequence of events. This creates what we understand as the flow of time. The Fracture is inviting other potential realities to the mix. What was once a song is now a violent confusion. This building is falling apart beneath us.”