The Paradox Initiative (27 page)

“You tried to have me killed,” Wolfe accused. Jakiv nodded.

“Yes, at first,” he acknowledged, shrugging. “I’ll admit that I panicked. I thought you would damage space-time beyond repair. That was before I truly understood the principle I have just explained to you.”

“What does this have to do with me
now?”
Wolfe pressed.

“When you survived the hit, I realized I was not dealing with an ordinary man,” Jakiv said. “And the more I found out about you, the more I realized that
you
were the warrior I wanted—
needed—
to complete the Initiative.”

“And what’s that?” Wolfe asked.

Jakiv smiled.

Kestrel’s blood
congealed.

“Here is my proposal,” Jakiv lay his palms open. “There is a man in the senate at this moment named Jason Talbott. He is fifty-five years old. When he entered law school at age nineteen, he began building an army of supporters that never stopped growing. He has been the driving force behind all anti-cloning legislation, and he blocks it to this day. Just five years ago, months before Marianne contracted the disease, Talbott joined with
Ian Conrad’s Project Unfettered and his power doubled. The Medicinal Cloning Movement has no chance at success with him in power.”

“What do you want me to do?” Wolfe asked. Jakiv regarded him plainly.

“I want you to kill him.”

Wolfe’s breathing unsteadied.

“I’ll send you back to the night before he went to law school,” Jakiv explained. “He will be eighteen—a legal man. You needn’t shoot or stab him in the back. You may turn him around, let him see you. Tell him what you’re doing. You may even give him a weapon if it appeals more to your sense of honor. I don’t care—as long as you succeed.” His voice grew hard. “And you
must
succeed. If Jason Talbott dies before he even enters school, his anti-cloning army shan’t rally. It shan’t
exist
. And Conrad’s underground resistance will not be able to gain enough influence in the government to stop the Medical Cloning Movement—not without exposing all of their own illegal activities. Human cloning
will
pull through without Jason Talbott. I am absolutely confident of that.”

“You want me to kill a boy,” Wolfe clarified. “Before he’s even a threat to you or anyone else.”

“Exactly,” Jakiv nodded. “And I will hold Miss Evans and her family here as collateral while you’re busy. Once you’re finished, I will have the machine programmed to travel back to my home, at this very time.” He pointed at the ground. “You will enter it and find me. I am recording this conversation, and it is transferring into the memory banks of one of these machines as we speak. You will show me that recording, and if my wife is alive and well, then we shall have an accord. Then, I will send you back on a one-way journey to perhaps three or four hours
before
our machines ever arrived on your homestead.” Jakiv’s voice gained warmth—he almost smiled. “You will find your wife
alive.
Your livestock, your possessions intact.” He gestured animatedly. “And in order to succeed completely, you must find yourself—your
former
—self, what I call your Foundation Existence, and kill him.”

Wolfe stared at him.

“What?”

“That particular step
is
absolutely
necessary,” Jakiv assured him. “Unless you simply wish to divert him and your wife from the impending danger—in which case, afterward, you would have to give up your wife to your former self, or
share
her with him. And I can assure you, your Foundation Existence is an entirely different man from the man you are now, and
neither
of you will be interested in that arrangement. You would end up forcing your wife to choose between you.”

Kestrel watched Wolfe go pale.

“That’s what I assumed,” Jakiv nodded. “You will probably want to shoot him in the back, from a great distance, if you can. You will not want to fight him hand-to-hand. He may kill
you
instead. Once you’ve shot him, hide his body. Take your wife and your animals away from that place for a while. The machine will deactivate on its own. When you’re able to come back to that place, dismantle the machine and smelt it, so it will not cause you any problems in the future.” Jakiv grinned. “Once you have done that, and prevented your Foundation Existence’s first time travel, you will have made a loop in time’s weaving, and you will tie back into your original thread. You will live in the thread you were meant to live in, you will have your land and your house and your dreams back. You will have the woman you love back. And I
will have
mine
back. Or rather…” His voice quieted. “Neither of us will have lost them at all.”

Wolfe stayed silent for a very long time. Kestrel couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

“What about…” Wolfe began, his voice unsteady. “What about Kestrel?”

Jakiv glanced
at her.

“This little thing?” He turned back to Wolfe. “If you do everything I said, you will create an entirely new thread: one in which cloning is legal so my wife will live, but your in
itial time travel never occurs. Miss Evans will go on with her life as it would have been without your intrusion. She’ll never know you at all.”

A chasm opened in Kestrel’s heart.

Wolfe met her eyes.

His gun hand drifted down.
He drew in a long, strained breath, and considered Jakiv.

“Let her go,” he said. “Then we can talk.”

“I’m afraid not,” Jakiv answered regretfully. “She’ll stay exactly where she is until the machine’s door closes behind you.” He halfway smiled. “It’s safer for her, you know.”

Kestrel fought to twist her foot—but it didn’t budge. Wolfe never shifted his attention from Jakiv.

“How am I supposed to know if you’re telling the truth about all this?” Wolfe asked.

Jakiv held out his hands.

“Why would I lie?” he asked, then pointed to himself. “I
need
you, Wolfe. I drove you
to
me. I caused the self-destruction of your time machine so you couldn’t get away from me. I sent my men to Miss Evan’s house, knowing you had tracked her down,
knowing
that if I took her parents you would ally yourself with her and therefore have help getting to me. And I sent those men after you in the tunnels to gauge you, to see if your skills were still up to par—and they were!

“
You’re the reason I boarded the
Exception
—I knew that, because of the outlawed weapons discharged on your house, that you’d contract Viridi Carcinoma, and I refused to let you die of that. I paid for all your treatment, oversaw your progress myself. And I tell you all this now because no one else is so suited to be my soldier through time. I
cannot
risk sending you off without your knowing what will and will not happen, and what
has
happened. It would be ridiculously dangerous.” He leveled a look at Wolfe. “I am telling the truth, Lieutenant. I am too desperate and too certain to do anything else.”

“So the guys I saved in ‘Nam,”
Wolfe said slowly. “They’ll die. Because I won’t be there.”

“In the new
timeline, yes,” Jakiv confirmed.

“And I…I helped
start
Project Unfettered,” Wolfe said. “That won’t even exist.”

Jakiv didn’t answer, but he arched an eyebrow and glanced down.
Wolfe’s left hand closed to a fist.

“
And Kestrel...”

Hot tears trailed down Kestrel’s cheeks.

“It won’t
matter
,” Jakiv insisted, recapturing Wolfe’s attention. “You will be long dead before Vietnam or cloning or any of that ever occurs to anyone. It will be distant and irrelevant to you. Moving pictures will be ridiculous, flight will be madness and spacetravel will be fantasy. And you can live the life you were
meant
to live. Simple. Quiet. Finally at peace.” Jakiv searched him. “Don’t you
want
that?”

Wolfe heaved a deep, shaking sigh, and lowered his gun
all the way. He stared at Jakiv a moment, his eyebrows drawn together. Then, he turned toward the Time Machines.

Jakiv stood away from the table,
intent on Wolfe.

“Just do as I ask,” he murmured
, his voice fervent and fiery. “And you can fix
everything
. You can right the terrible wrong turn we’ve
both
taken.” He took a small step closer. “You’ve already done so much,
sacrificed
so very much, to get back to your home. And you are mere inches away from it, Jack.
Inches.”
He edged even nearer. “Just one more detour. One more simple task—and it will all be over.” His voice deepened with certainty. “I know your heart, Jack. I know what you’re willing to do to
finally
get what you want—what you deserve. In fact…you’ve already made up your mind. Am I right?”

Jakiv held out his right hand
to Wolfe.

Wolfe sighed again—as if a needle were being pushed through his flesh. His brow twisted.

Kestrel’s chest hollowed out.

Wolfe stared at the machine before him for a long, breathless moment.

“Yes,” he finally whispered. “I have.”

And he
turned, lifted his handgun, sighted—

And shot Jakiv through the head.

Kestrel had no time to register.

Jakiv toppled—

T
he floor beneath her feet disappeared.

She plunged.

Blackness swallowed her.

No breath
made it past her throat to scream. She flailed, reaching up, to the sides—

Her hands hit metal. Screeched as her skin slapped the smooth surface. Wind rushed through her hair and clothes.

She sensed the tube curve—

Her knees banged into the bend, then her hands, elbows and head.

She skidded downward, on a steep, slick slide. She kicked out, trying to slow down—

Glimpsed a flash of light ahead…

The tube forked!

She twisted,
shoving to keep from crashing into the center—

She knocked most of her bod
y out of the way—the side of her head clipped it—

She yelped.
Pain seared through her skull.

K
ept sliding, gathering speed…

She shook her head, trying to clear it…

She rolled over, sliding on her stomach, and made herself stretch her arms out in front of her…

The slide leveled
out.

Her feet
slammed into a sheet of metal—

Broke through it.

Her lower half shot out into abyss.

Sh
e dug her fingers into the slide—

Flew out over
nothingness
—

Her fingers caught a lip. Jerked her to a halt in mid air.

Her body
fell
…

Swung wildly forward. She squeezed the lip with all her might…

Wrestled control of her momentum…

And dangled
by her fingertips over a limitless void.

“Gah!”

Her sharp gasp echoed tenfold. She bared her teeth as she tipped her head forward to see down.

The vent she had kicked loose fluttered like a leaf as it tumbled into the depths of a bottomless circular shaft. A line of square blue lights on the wall behind her marked the descent.

The muscles in her arms screamed. She grunted again, firming her hold—the sound hissed like a whisper in a cathedral. She glanced up.

The smaller shaft she had come out of wasn’t very big—maybe four feet by four feet. If she could heave herself back
up into it, she’d have to crawl back up the vent…But she remembered how steeply she had fallen. And without tools of any kind…

Her chest constricted and she gasped. It would be better than falling, though—

She looked down again.

One of those blue lights
glowed right in front of her.

And beneath it stood a door-shaped indentation.

“I believe it may be a vent into an elevator shaft we haven’t finished. Whatever it is, it’s a long drop…”

Kestrel braced herself, then painfully slid her hands toward the right, until she met the edge of the vent. She eyed the side of the door—found the emergency button.

She swung her legs back, then forward—

Stretched
her right foot toward the button—

Missed.

Swung back…

Her sweaty fingers slipped…

Kicked the button.

It lit up.

She swung backward, her hands nearly coming loose…

The door slid open.

She threw her lower body forward—

Let go.

She flew through the open door into a white hallway—

Crashed all over the floor and rolled.

Panting, icy shivers racing all over her skin, she fought a wave of faintness and clambered to her feet. She brushed a strand of hair out of her face and took a look around.

A
long, all-white hallway. Like a hospital. It smelled like antiseptic, too.

And the noise of running footsteps battered all up and down the corridor.

Kestrel glanced to her left to see a dozen people, all dressed in lab coats like Dr. Jakiv, carrying tablets and racing pell-mell back and forth, in and out of the rooms, shouting to each other. She hesitated, listening.

“I don’t know—something’s combusted in the main lab—” one yelled.

“Combusted?” a woman cried, spilling her coffee.

“Exploded, okay? Didn’t you hear that boom?”

“I thought it was in one of the test tanks—”

“No, it’s in the
main
lab! Where Dr. Jakiv is!”

“What’s the order?”

“Evacuate!” called an older man with a beard as he hurried away. “Erase the memory banks and sound the alarm! Seal all the toxic containment chambers and open all the doors! We don’t want anybody to get trapped down here!”

“Yes, sir!” a younger man said, and darted off.

Moments later, red lights flashed on everywhere and a repeating ascending howl reverberated through the halls. The next instant, every single door sprang open, and more people poured out from them, wide-eyed, toting small machines and dragging wires—none of them even looked at Kestrel.

Her heartbeat stuttered.

An explosion right where
Jakiv
was…?

BOOM.

The walls rattled. Beakers in the neighboring rooms rattled. The scientists shrieked and barked more orders. And they fled.

Her legs going weak, Kestrel turned and hurried down the hallway, fighting not to call out…

She skidded to a stop. Frowned at the sign above a doorway.

LEVEL TWO

GENETICS

Her attention darted to the door next to it. It read “2.”

“Level two, room ten,” Kestrel gasped, suddenly remembering. She broke into a run.

Numbers flashed by on either side, ascending as she went. And then—

“Room ten!” she realized…

And stopped.

Her mother, father and two brothers stood right inside the open doorway.

As if they had just jumped to their feet, but had halted, uncertain, on the threshold. They wore the same clothes she remembered from the last time she’d seen them: casual, loose-fitting, after-work clothes.
Her brothers’ hair looked unkempt, her dad hadn’t shaved, and her mom’s hair hung loose.

They stared at her, their eyes wide.

“Mom!” Kestrel yelped, her chest bursting—

And threw herself into her mother’s arms.

“Oh,
sweetheart!”
her mom cried as her dad and brothers broke into wild exclamations and crowded desperately in to touch her. “Oh, are you okay?”

For a breathless moment, Kestrel collapsed into he
r mother’s soft, familiar form, submerging in her warmth, the safety of her embrace.

Then, when she drew another breath of that antiseptic scent, Kestrel forced her mind back to reality.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine!” Kestrel answered, drawing back and ignoring the tears on her cheeks. She searched their faces—all of their bright eyes. “Are you? Are you guys okay?”

“Are you
sure
you’re fine?” her dad fiercely took hold of her shoulders. “Your head is bleeding!”

“Where
were
you?” Marcus demanded.

“How did you find us?” Aidus cut in.

“We have to go,” Kestrel drew back out of her dad’s strong arms but gripped his shirt sleeve. “There are explosions going on upstairs, people are evacuating—” She swiped her tears away with her sleeve so she could see clearly. “We’ve got to find Jack—”

“Who’s Jack?” her mom asked. Kestrel tugged on her parents, pulling them out of the room.

“He’s the one who helped me get here,” she explained. “But it was a trap for him—Dr. Jakiv set a trap for
him
, and now I’m afraid he’s—”

BOOM.

Kestrel looked up. The light fixtures shivered.

“That sounded close,” Aidus muttered.
Kestrel turned on her brothers.

“Do you guys know the layout
of this place?”

“Yeah, they’ve walked us back and forth a hundred times,” Marcus answered.

“How do we get to the main floor?” Kestrel asked.

Aidus raised his eyebrows.

“You mean where all the
explosions
are coming from?”

“
Yes
,” Kestrel shot back.

“We’ve been there a few times,” her mom said. “When
Dr. Jakiv was asking us questions.”

“Know the way?” Kestrel wondered.

“I do,” Aidus said. “Come on.”

And he and Marcus jogged forward, in step. Kestrel and her paren
ts instantly followed.

They darted down a handful of abandoned hallways and around several corners, which made Kestrel’s head spin. Then Aidus shoved through a door.

“Figure we’d better not use the lifts!” he said as he began leaping up the winding staircase, his feet pounding. The rest of the family barreled up after him single file, never hesitating, hauling on the railing to help them climb.

They raced upward, occasionally feeling the whole building shudder. Kestrel bit down, battering back any stray thoughts except for
step, step, step, step, step
…

“Main level!” Aidus called down. Kestrel paused, glanced back at her dad who was last, then hurried on up. Aidus flung the door open and leaped out—

Marcus jerked backward, her mom ran into him—

Kestrel slammed into her mother’s back.

Aidus swore.

“Don’t move.”

A different voice.

Kestrel’s heart stopped.

She slipped in past her mom, peered over Marcus’ shoulder…

Jack Wolfe stood outside the door.

And he held a gun point-blank at the side of Aidus’ golden head.

His clothes were torn, part of his hair had burned away, blisters rose on his left forearm, and bright blood trickled down his forehead. He breathed raggedly, his gray eyes
vibrant and deadly.

“You work here?” Wolfe growled, his
face vicious and terrible.

Aidus twitched. Wolfe pressed the gun into his head.

“There’s a shaft that opens up into this level, where the Time Machines are,” Wolfe bared his teeth. “But forks midway down. Where does the other pipe lead?”

“Jack?” Kestrel whispered.

Wolfe’s head came around.

Kestrel pushed out past Marcus, but gripped her brother’s elbow.

Wolfe stared at her.

She stared back.

He transformed.

His gun went slack. His expression sharpened and softened all in the same instant—and his eyes gained a sudden brilliance she’d never seen. His eyebrows
pulled together. He opened his mouth and pulled in a breath that seemed to hurt every length of his frame.

Kestrel’s heart panged so hard that literal pain shot to the ends of her fingers.

“What is going on?” Marcus hissed.

“This is…This is Jack,”
Kestrel choked, unable to take her eyes from Wolfe. “Jack, this is my mother and father, and my brothers Marcus and Aidus.”

“It’s an honor,” Wolfe breathed, his gaze flickering, never looking away from her.
“Beg your pardon.”

BOOM.

The walls shook—Kestrel
saw
it. And the floor vibrated up through her bones.

“We’ve got to go,” her dad decided. “You guys remember where the hangar is?”

“Yes, I do,” Marcus nodded, eyeing Wolfe coldly.

“Let’s go then,” Kestrel’s mom urged, grabbing her husband and Aidus with both hands and tugging. Marcus skirted Wolfe, looking him up and down, then hurried
on down the corridor. Kestrel stayed where she was, rooted to the floor.

“Kestrel—” Wolfe tried, gulping.

“Wolfe!”

Wolfe spun around—Kestrel’s dad motioned to him.

“You’ve got the gun—we want you in front!” her dad ordered.

“Yes, sir,” Wolfe nodded
quickly, glanced back at Kestrel, then ran to catch up. Kestrel convinced her legs to move. She began to run, right on her mom and Aidus’ heels. All together, they careered through the corridors, never encountering anyone—but the whole place now constantly trembled. As if the ceiling might fall down at any second.

“Right up here!” Marcus called—and Kestrel caught sight of the glowing signs marked “Hangar Bay.”

CRASH.

Kestrel tripped, threw her hands out and caught herself on the wall, twisted back to see—