He chose one where he didn’t.
“… Countermeasure.”
He shot forward. Paul wasn’t there. Jack knew where he was, feinted, counted on Paul making a bad choice from the futures he was seeing. Failed.
The game became one of seeing who could see deepest into the mesh of move and countermove and take action accordingly. Jack had far less experience, but Paul was being reassembled from the inside out.
Jack zipped toward him, failed to intercept, feinted, failed, swung for him, failed, outflanked, failed. Paul flashed for the stairwell, Jack moved to intercept, Paul saw it coming and jagged left and swung over the railing. Jack was already there, waiting. Paul swung, Jack grabbed for the Countermeasure, Paul was gone.
“You said we die here?” Jack gasped.
Paul nodded.
“Got a time on that?”
Paul warped forward, bringing down one flash-skinned hand, missing, following through on the momentum, and swinging the Countermeasure like a bowling ball into Jack’s chest. Jack flew six feet and hit the deck hard.
“No!” Will scrambled toward them. “You’ll breach it!”
Paul looked at the device in his hand as though he had never seen it before, an expression of animal confusion on his face.
“Paul?”
He glanced at Will, then, as if hoping to see understanding in another’s eyes. “Wars, calamities, plagues, they were all prices paid to cause and effect, to lead us to this moment.” He slung the silver bullet about his neck, beheld it. “I miss the little things.”
He let it go. Looked away as it fell against his strobing chest.
Paul Serene shuddered, cried out, as the sickness extended farther up his throat, into his skull, and touched his brain.
Jack kicked off against the diagnostics, used what energy he had left to flash the distance between them…
… which Paul countered by warping at him, a half foot to the left, swinging an extended forearm into Jack’s face. Jack went down, and the thing that had been Paul Serene followed up, driving a booted heel downward. Jack flinched aside, the boot cracking the floor near his head, pressed his hands to the floor and…
Paul dropped a knee into Jack’s back. Jack buckled, smashed to the floor, realizing almost immediately that he could feel nothing below his waist.
Paul stepped backward. “You die here so that Monarch can succeed.” He pointed toward the stairwell. One level up, phasing and flickering, was a Shifter. The Shifter. The Shining Palm. “That kills you.” Paul drew out his handgun. “This… here… is the last vision… I ever had…”
He was almost gone. Shifter Paul clutched for the bullet about his neck, tore it free, focused on it-the reminder he had carried for over twenty years: of friendship, his humanity. A reminder that nothing is to be taken for granted and that time is finite, so better get on living. It seemed to grant him some cohesion, some peace, some focus.
The sickness surged, Paul screamed. Jack pulled his handgun and fired. Agonized howls rolled out of the Shining Palm as potential actions condensed to singular realities, moment to moment, lacerating it. The bullet passed through empty air, sparked off the diagnostics.
“You’re not all gone, are you?”
Paul was by the breach; Jack fired. Retargeted back, fired. The Shining Palm kept screaming, writhing, staggering, and flashing in microbursts down the stairs. Jack dumped his last magazine, tossed the gun aside, rolled.
The Shining Palm flashed across the space.
“You”-Shifter Paul gasped, tearing himself apart through the act of keeping himself together-“waste… time…”
Jack flipped on his back. The Shining Palm reached down and opened its flashing hand toward Jack’s face.
“Not really.” Jack gasped, rolled, flipped to his feet, and cannoned shoulder-first into Paul. The Countermeasure flew free from Paul’s hands. Jack flashed, intercepted it, skidded to a halt, spun toward Paul.
Jack had the Countermeasure.
And realized the Shining Palm was now directly behind him.
Jack had dumped his entire chronon reserve in the warp-fight, and replenished just enough to snatch the Countermeasure from a rapidly deteriorating Paul. Now he was back at zero.
Paul came for him. Jack spun, hand over the Countermeasure’s release.
“I’m pretty sure I can pop this. And I’m pretty sure that if I do it’ll take out you and this thing behind me.” Jack backed up, keeping an eye on both Paul and the Shifter. “Did you see this?” Jack said. “Can you see how this plays out?”
Paul, or whatever was left of Paul, was beyond language. It just held out one hand, reaching for the Countermeasure-a complex mind reduced to the last thing that drove it, perhaps.
The Shifter took one heavy step forward.
“I will do this. Will,” Jack said. “Get behind something.”
The Shifter roared, flexed that open palm, and lumbered straight for Jack-screaming.
Jack spun, Countermeasure extended in both hands, catch ready to pop. “Stop!”
Unexpectedly, the Shifter did exactly that. Its phasing, shining palm hovered two feet from Jack’s face.
It did not move. It only growled, in a thousand voices, and strained its hand toward him.
Beth had done the same thing, in her final moment. “Trust the villain.”
Jack looked. Beneath the distortion, resting within that palm that phased constantly through a thousand variations of itself, one thing remained constant. The flash of light at its center.
A single silver bullet. A reminder to take nothing for granted, that time is finite.
The Shifter made a sound, like a hundred abandoned dogs very far away.
“What…,” Paul croaked, horribly, “are you… doing…?”
The head of the Shifter was a flashing fractal mess. This close to it, Jack could make out the face of the person it used to be. Had always been.
He lowered the Countermeasure, and stood aside.
Paul and the Shifter locked eyes.
The Shifter crossed the space between them with purpose.
Paul, human enough to be panicked beyond reason by this thing he had feared for seventeen years, brought up one useless, shifting hand as the Shifter’s shining palm accepted Paul’s, palm to palm, bullet to bullet, and Paul Serene met the thing he was fated to become, the thing he had always been-four-dimensional-existing at once across all times, midwifing the cause and effect that led to all things being as they are.
Including his own rebirth.
The sickness took him completely, his eyes locked with his Shining Palm self, and in that moment the two became one.
The Shining Palm, existing four-dimensionally, embraced Paul-embraced itself-at the moment of his/its own re/birth.
The Shining Palm had saved him in Monarch Tower. This was the same creature that had tunneled Jack through time, from 2010 to now, thereby ensuring that he would be here. That events would play out as they had.
That Paul Serene would become the Shining Palm.
Paul’s ability to perceive and explore multiple oncoming timelines… all part of himself becoming four-dimensional. Of growing closer to this thing he was meant to become. Had always been.
Things play out as they must. The universe won’t be bargained with.
Both forms were lost in a corona of light as Paul’s sickness took him completely.
Paul Serene was gone. The Shining Palm remained, but was changed. Uncertain.
Newborn. Flickering, phasing. It looked to Jack, studied itself, at the shining point of reflected light it held in its hand, threw back its head, and…
The stutter broke.
Rain and wind poured into the shattered lab with renewed ferocity.
“Jack!” Will ran across the expanse.
Jack was staring at the spot where his friend had been. “What just happened?”
“I’ll explain later,” Will said, gently taking the Countermeasure. “But if we’re going to do this, it has to happen now. The next stutter that hits may well be the last.”