“Well, actually,” Jack said, “it’s a little of that, and a little of me throwing a train through the reception area.” He shrugged. “It was locked.”
Will took the Countermeasure and headed for the time machine, when a voice said:
“Jack.”
Jack scanned around: the corners, the control room above, no one was here.
Will didn’t seem to have heard it, examining the Countermeasure as he walked to the machine.
“Jack?”
“Paul…?”
Jack stopped cold. Paul was in the airlock, standing on the ramp, looking into the room with terror on his face. This wasn’t the Paul whom Jack had seen drop a building on his brother; this was Paul as he had been the night he had first traveled through the machine.
Will carefully put the Countermeasure down near the story-high platinum-cased chronon reserve Monarch used to power the machine and began an examination of the power’s routing to the Promenade.
As Jack moved toward his friend-who-had-been, a second figure materialized-standing at the bottom of the ramp. Martin Hatch.
This wasn’t real, Jack realized. It was a vision, like the ones he experienced back at the house.
“You and I are destined to be great friends, Paul,” Hatch was saying. “It is the honor of my life to provide all that you need to play your singular role.”
Hatch opened an arm toward three men and women, waiting to escort Paul out of the room-toward a future that turned him into the man responsible for all that was happening to the world at that moment.
Jack watched young Paul Serene-baffled and lost-get shepherded away. Hatch took a cleansing breath, with the air of a man who had just crossed a major milestone.
Who the fuck are you? Jack thought. You monstrous son of a bitch.
Hatch moved to leave… and then stopped. His back straightened, curiously.
Martin Hatch glanced behind himself. Turned fully. Then took a step toward Jack.
Martin Hatch-years into the future-stood five feet before Jack Joyce, and appeared to look him right in the eye. Jack stepped back.
Slowly, carefully, Martin Hatch looked Jack up and down… and smiled.
“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said.
Hatch clicked his fingers… and the vision ended.
Jack was alone.
The stutter hit without warning. The intercom overloaded and exploded in sparks. The glass walls of the control room shattered, rewound, remained intact. For a vertiginous microsecond the floor vanished, sharing a moment with a world where the entire building had collapsed, before native reality reasserted itself-the spasm between what is and what could be knocking Jack and Will off their feet.
Across Riverport the skies bucked, energy flashed, shock waves kicked down streets and thrashed the river. Whole blocks lit up or went dark, most often vacillating between the two. The chorus of car alarms was a background song to whole streets opening up along their length, to spot fires and infernos. Jack had no idea what was happening on the ground. If this could happen to steel and concrete, what was happening to people?
“Jack.”
“What is it, Will?”
Will looked up from his examinations of a rack of connectors on the corridor-ring. “Did you say something?”
“Didn’t-”
“Jack!” The voice was wrong: layered, skitzing, fucked-up.
Paul Serene stepped off the stairwell to the control room, fifty feet from Jack. Broad-shouldered, and almost entirely consumed by the chronon sickness that was remaking him into something monstrous. Starlight flashed beneath his clothes. The flesh of his hands and neck was a shifting play of fractal light. When he spoke illumination poured from his throat. “Are you ready?”
“Jesus.”
“Close enough.” Paul spasmed, a flurry of multiple Pauls all at once. He was phasing from humanity to whatever the Shifters were. “You and I die here,” he rasped. “But in doing so save a universe.”
“Will, get that thing hooked up, and fast.”
“I have it connected to the primary chronon flow. I think we’re ready.”
“Then do it!”
Paul snorted. “It makes no difference.”
Will socketed the Countermeasure into the battery’s main outflow and… nothing.
“Don’t fight me, Jack.” Paul was having a hard time keeping it together. “We stick together, right?”
It was then that Jack noticed the silver chain dangling from Paul’s balled, luminescing fist: the chain attached to the bullet.
He raised that fist. “We’ve known each other all our lives… the universe… fate… arranged it just so…” Paul shuddered. Multiple Pauls flashed and rioted for control of his friend’s identity, and were beaten back by an excruciating force of will. “I know this because I’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen things, too, Paul.”
“We are here now because my futures make themselves known to me… and I choose the futures into which I take the world. And I know, Jack, that this is where you and I end… because I’ve never had a vision beyond tonight. Beyond now. They all narrow to the same inevitable point. You fail, you die, I die, and Monarch triumphs.”
Paul straightened up, then marched toward Will. “Give me the Regulator.”
Jack warped to intercept. At the last second Paul wasn’t there and Jack went careening into the diagnostic bank against the wall.
Paul stopped. “As I near my end the visions don’t stop. The less time I have, the clearer they become, as potentiality narrows. You may attack as you wish…”
Jack warped, and again Paul wasn’t there. Jack skidded, stopping short of tumbling into the maintenance recess.
“… but I am beyond surprises.”
Will ripped the Countermeasure from the machine, held it before him like a weapon. “I’ll breach this before I let you take it. It almost killed you once, it can-”
The Countermeasure vanished from Will’s grip, leaving him yelping and clutching wrenched fingers.
Paul held it, unconcerned. “This is meant for Martin Hatch, and the future.”
Jack took a gamble. “In all those visions, Paul, do you ever see Hatch?”
Paul said nothing for a moment, then, “Martin has always been with me.”
“And?”
Paul didn’t say anything.
Jack smiled, didn’t enjoy it. “That’s what I figured. So what is it? What’s off about him?”
Jack warped, Paul had moved, appeared farther down the lab, toward the breach.
“You know what I’m going to say, you know what you’re going to say. Flip ahead. Tell me how this conversation plays out.”
“Lives… are messy,” Paul said. “Martin’s… is not.”
Jack blinked. “Meaning what?”
Will stepped up. “In all the futures you can see and choose from, Martin Hatch’s actions never deviate?”
“He is the most focused man I have ever met. My life, all that I am, I owe to his clarity.”
“Think about that,” Jack said. “And…”
Paul’s outline flickered, wavered, but not in the way that Shifters spasmed out. This was more of a superimposition.
“… give me…”
The room tunneled and slowed, as a crowd of Paul Serenes-like ghosts, like after-images-stepped, moved, gesticulated, swung, ran…
“… the…”
Not after-images: fore-images. Jack saw his own image dashing out, intersecting with Paul’s. A million potentials exploding from all three men present to form a chaos of moment-to-moment potentiality. Too much to make sense of, so Jack narrowed focus down to what he needed: the device Paul now held.
Ghosts faded. The futures in which he made a play for the Countermeasure solidified. Paul intercepted or avoided him in all of them. In some of them Jack went flying out that breach.