Quantum Break (17 page)

Jack found a pair of dark safety goggles that made him look like the Terminator. Paul took the bait and a firefight erupted. Imaginary bullets bounced off Jack, so Paul grabbed one of the loose lenses, screwed it into his eye (painfully), and declared he was a cyborg. Jack fell on Paul. The lens fell into the dirt and a ’borg-on-’borg grapple-fest kicked off. This eventually segued into an unfair advantage to the Terminator when he resorted to tickling.

Paul got loose, bounded backward with a two-handed
blam blam blam
 …

And then Will had been there, white as a sheet. What he beheld was Jack and Paul frozen mid-combat, like raccoons in a spotlight. Lenses and beam splitters scattered in the dirt, safety goggles hanging off Jack’s left ear. The madness passed, and Jack realized just how much trouble they were in.

Will transformed. Shock transmuted to rage, a rage that made him unrecognizable. Jack had no words. Paul actually screamed. Paralyzed with fear they were easy pickings and within seconds Will had seized both of them by their collars.

Jack’s voice evaporated. Paul whimpered and started to cry.

Will had dragged them bodily to the door, screaming like a demon. Jack said nothing, his shirt cutting into his armpits, sneakers scrabbling in the dirt. Paul kept whimpering, stammering excuses. At the threshold, Will tossed them both out into the night. Jack caught the fall on his bare hands, gravel tearing the skin of his palms. Paul rolled.

A heaving silhouette in the doorway, a nightmare made flesh. With a final animal shout Will slammed the doors, banishing the boys to darkness. Then the thrashing of chains: Will locking the barn, violently, from inside.

Paul was sobbing. Jack’s heart was taking up too much space, stopping his lungs from being able to do their job. Cries came from inside the barn as Will discovered each new disaster.

“I wanna go home,” Paul had said.

“Go. I’ll … I’ll…”

“You’ll be okay?”

As Will discovered some new horror fresh cries reverberated across the yard, echoed back from the treeline.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Back in the present, Jack stood outside the barn looking in. The doors were cracked open, the dark interior illuminated by morning light spearing through missing shingles and gaps in the planking. Teasing the door open with one hand, he slipped inside.

Empty.

The gear was gone. Every last bolt. The feed room on Jack’s left and the tack room on the right were unlocked. The floor of the room on the left had been dug out and wooden covers fashioned for the six-foot depression. The wooden covers had half circles sawn out of them at the edges, presumably for cabling. Similar gaps were cut in both the interior and exterior walls of the room.

“Generators,” Jack mumbled. The interior of the hole and the underside of the cover had been padded. Soundproofing. He remembered crates of fuses, the mornings when nothing worked. Whatever Will had been doing in here had required juice. Lots of it. That wasn’t a small hole.

The room on the right had been concrete-floored and air-conditioned. A window was fitted to look out on the barn floor. A control room, maybe.

“‘A spaceship,’” Jack said, in his best little-kid voice. “If only we’d known, huh Will?”

Something crashed on the porch. Nick cried out. Jack ran from the barn, skidding on the gravel and banking hard toward the house. He found Nick immobilized facedown on the boards, his left arm held painfully backward and aloft by someone in a jacket and baseball cap. A fireplace poker had skittered down the steps.

“Let him go!”

Nick’s attacker complied, bouncing upright and straight backed. “He started it.”

Jack hadn’t been sure it was her he’d seen, and if it had been he mostly expected he’d never see her again. But here she was, and six years of anger, heartbreak, and unanswered questions all pressed tight in his throat, wanting out all at once.

Instead Jack marched up the steps, helped Nick to his feet. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” he said, working his arm. “Who’s this?”

“Zed,” Jack said. “This is Nick. Nick, Zed. Zed, what the fuck?”

“He spooked me.”

“I mean ‘what the fuck’ in a more all-encompassing sense.”

“Wanna know how I found you?”

Jack closed his eyes. “The Breathalyzer. You tracked the camera and Breathalyzer.”

“No. I asked myself what the worst place for you to go would be and went there.”

Nick glanced nervously at the tree line.

“He gets it,” she said.

It was uncomfortable, but Jack had to admit: he wanted Paul to come after him. “Things have changed.”

“I know.”

“Monarch can walk in here but they won’t be walking out, I’ll tell you that.”

“You mean troopers.”

“Yeah.”

“And not snipers, who are a mile away and invisible.”

Jack had no answer.

“Let’s go inside.”

Nick twirled his keys. “Not me. I’m outta here. Also: fuck you for not telling me about your death wish.”

“Nick, wait. It’s not like that. Monarch … they’re not going to just let this go. They know you were there.”

Zed agreed. “Monarch’s been deeply preoccupied for the last few hours. Real pants-on-head behavior from management. Even so they’re probably organized by now. I can’t stop you going, but you need to know they could pick you up at some point.”

“Dad needs his meds. I’m all he’s got.”

Jack understood. “Take care, Nick.”

“Yeah.” The cabbie twirled his keys—“frickin’ namaste”—and headed for his car. Jack and Zed watched him pull out of the drive and disappear past the flaming sycamores.

“My name’s not Zed,” she said.

“And you work for Monarch.”

“And I work for Monarch.”

“So who am I speaking to?”

“Beth Wilder.” She touched his arm, placed a brief kiss on his cheek. “And she’s glad to see you.”

Beth went inside. Jack followed.

*   *   *

Zed—“Beth”—took Nick’s cold cup of coffee and locked it in the microwave. While she set it humming, Jack cataloged the changes: her drugstore-black hair was now a natural red. Her tattoos were gone, and the piercings. Seeing her changed left him desperately missing who she had been. The changes time had wrought on her told him how much history he had missed. She carried herself differently now, straight backed and crisp where once she had been both loose-limbed and economical with her posture and movement. “Beth” brought the cup to the table and sat. Zed would have had one booted foot on it.

He missed the glittering thread of her suicide chain running from nose ring to earring. Between the parkour, skateboarding, and general getting into trouble it could have ended badly. She hadn’t cared. Fate had backed down and her twinkle-eyed fearlessness had left Jack no recourse but to lift his game. The world had gotten him down less and seemed brighter when she was around.

“Different hair,” she said. “Different skin tone, bearing, vocabulary, hair color, hair style, no piercings, no tattoos, a breast reduction. Working out reshaped the bod a little. Dental work shaped the face just a touch. Lost the Jersey accent.”

“So which one was real?” He pulled out a chair, turned it toward her, sat. “The Jersey accent or this one?”

She hitched that Bruce Willis smile he recognized so well, dental work or no. “This one.”

“Why do all of this? Why did—”

“Jack.” She leaned forward, her hand on his knee derailing him. “We can’t do this here. We don’t have time.”

“You’ve got time for coffee.”

“While you were overseas I’ve been here, working for Monarch. Making connections, getting inside their operation. I couldn’t risk either Paul recognizing me—the young one or the older one.”

“The older one’s been here the whole time?”

“For over a decade, behind the scenes and off the books. He’s got himself an apartment on the forty-ninth floor of the Tower. Very few people can get to it. When he leaves the building it’s always via helicopter to a private airfield. Never seen, never heard. All records say Paul Serene was the twenty-seven-year-old coordinator of Project Promenade, and that last night he died in an act of domestic terrorism. Killed by a group called the Peace Movement.”

“If he’s a ghost how do you know so much about him?”

“My buddy Horatio is deep in their system. He’s high up in one of Monarch’s side projects. Being where he’s not wanted is one of Horatio’s hobbies.”

“I think he was a friend of Will’s. Hacker, moustache, boutique muffins?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “That’s him. Clearly Horatio and I need to have a conversation about security hygiene. Anyway, listen: this is the important part. What happened last night at the university was a disaster, and I’m not talking about the dead kids. The Monarch time machine initiated a small but lethal entropic feedback loop within the Meyer-Joyce field that will eventually result in a complete breakdown of causality.”

“That explains a couple of things.” Stutters, powers, and visions among them.

“Help me save the world. It’ll take a day. Two, tops.”

“Zed…”

“Beth.”

“I spent four years looking for you.” Jack said, shaking a little now. Seeing her again was becoming physiological, made it difficult to keep his voice steady. “I wasn’t sure you were even
alive.
I thought … I thought Aberfoyle’s…”

“I’ll be blunt,” she said. “I knew what my disappearing would do to you, and I did it anyway.”

What a fucking day.

“You don’t fully know it yet,” she said. “But we’re involved in something that’s so much bigger than anything else.” Then, again with that smile: “This might not mean anything anymore, Trouble, but I’ve
really
missed your stupid face.”

“You…” The air felt a little thinner. He tried to breathe. “You have no
clue
how far I went, trying to find you.”

“You got close, in Arizona. I was in the compound when you rocked up. I don’t say this to torture you. I’m telling you because I appreciate your sticking by me. I don’t take that for granted. You looked good on that bike.”

“You
saw
me?”

“As I left. Then I was under the wire.”

“I rode that thing across the entire country. Those fuckers trashed it and left me by the interstate.”

“They had to. Couldn’t risk you working out I was there and coming after me.”

“You could have left a note and saved me four years.”

“What did you find in the back garden of that house I was squatting in?”

“You know what I found. Everything you owned. Right down to the jewelry. ID. Clothes. I freaked the fuck out, Zed.”

“Beth.”

“I thought Aberfoyle’s goons had murdered you.”

“What made you decide they hadn’t?”

“Nobody came after me, or Paul, or Will. Had to figure you’d just vanished like the ghost you always were.”

“They say ghosts are the presence of an absence. I’m right here, Jack.”

“And who are you?”

She was going to give one of her usual sleight-of-hand answers, he could tell. His expression said
don’t.
Something like sadness flitted across her features. In the end, she just shrugged:
I don’t know what to tell you.

“A note wasn’t an option. First rule of a good disappearance is take nothing with you, leave nothing behind.” She leaned forward, probing his expression for some small understanding. “I’ve been preparing for this moment, right now, since I was eight years old.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

It should have been matter/antimatter having her there, at his family table, a piece of another world sitting real in this one. The whole planet should have exploded because she was drinking coffee in the house where he had grown up. Alive.

“Come on,” she said, standing up. “Show me around. If there are answers here I want us to find them first.”

They hang around because we can’t let go of them.

*   *   *

Upstairs they stood outside the door to what had been Jack’s bedroom for twenty-two years.

“If there was anything here Monarch would have it by now,” he said. “They shot up a university. They’re not going to think much of a little breaking and entering.”

Jack had walked along this hall every morning at 5:00
A.M
., then down the stairs, the low sun painfully bright through the windows as he padded to the kitchen, bare feet on cold floor. He’d fire up the stovetop, prep breakfast for two. Cereal. Coffee. Toast. Eggs. Will’s would go in the microwave, to wait for when he woke up in a few hours.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you hear anything I just said?”

“Uh…” He blinked hard, smelling scrambled eggs. “Sorry. No.”

“Monarch had Will under surveillance for a few years, but by then he had moved or destroyed most of his work. He kept nothing Monarch would be interested in.”

“They got everything they wanted out of Will.”

“Will designed more than a time machine. He pioneered an entire field of science.”

“A field that was universally discredited, yeah, I know. It’s how we almost lost the house.”

“It was intentionally discredited. Your brother was an unusual dude, but he wasn’t wrong about much. It’s essential to Paul’s plans that nobody else has this technology—or even gets curious about it. Monarch’s very effective. Shit, they managed to get a constitutional amendment passed allowing their paramilitary to operate inside our
national border.
They’ve insinuated the company into the fabric of pretty much everything that’s holding society together: medical, technology, weapons, charity, city planning, national policy. Freaking
child care.
”

Child care. “What do you mean you’ve been training for this since you were eight?”

She shook her head. “When Paul went through the machine last night, he went to the end of time, but not for good. Eventually he went back to 1999. That’s seventeen years in the past. The young man you knew lived every one of those years, right up to this point. So understand: Paul has those seventeen years on you now. Seventeen years of getting good with the powers he has, plus foreknowledge of the future has gotta be how Monarch rose so quickly.”