A Question of Will (40 page)

“Yes.” Fil said. His mother told him this on a regular basis. Time would tell how well a six-year-old boy truly understood such words.

“Remember, if you use a lot of Energy — either of you — the people who did this to your house will find out, and they will come after you. They are not happy that they failed. And Phoebe...I think you are wise to assume that they’ll figure out who you
truly
are as well, if they haven’t already.” The woman merely nodded.

He looked at the two of them. “Since I’ve been asked to keep an eye on you, I’m going to move into your house. I will age myself and become your father-in-law, Phoebe. Adam Trask, at your service.” He bowed low, and despite the seriousness of the situation, Hope found herself laughing. “I’ll be a quiet old curmudgeon in public, but I can watch Fil when you need to go out alone, and can help with his training. And I might even be able to help correct his homework.”

“What’s that?” Fil asked. Adam laughed.

Phoebe looked at Adam, her newly-narrowed face displaying a look of curiosity. “You sound very familiar, Adam. I feel like we’ve met before, before we started planning everything that needed to happen on that night, and felt that way even back then. Do I know you from somewhere?”

Adam shook his head. “Not some
where
, Phoebe. Some
when
.”

XXIX

Waiting

2219 A.D.

Joshua Phillip Stark, known for many decades as Fil, sat at the edge of camp, his back against one of the giant trees forming the perimeter. He pulled his knees close and wrapped his arms around them.

It was something he’d seen his father do on a regular basis.

It had been an incredibly challenging two months, starting when they’d made the decision to rescue Will Stark from the pages of history, a history that said the man had vanished and was presumed dead following an explosion and inferno that consumed his home, and everyone in it.

Their conversation had been much like the staged conversation held to convince Will that he was the one who had rescued Josh and Hope from the house. Everything had been staged to get the man into the time machine, because they had all known he wasn’t going back to the house. History said Will Stark would emerge from the time machine much sooner than that. They weren’t sure that even Will would choose the path he would need to follow. If Will had known that his son was already here, he might never choose to leave. And if he’d learned that the morning of the fire, Hope Stark had discovered she was pregnant, and that the daughter he’d never known existed was in this camp...would he ever, willingly, go?

It was too risky to leave such an important element of history to chance in that fashion. And so they’d neglected to tell him about those details.

As for him, Fil’s story had been completely true. He
had
viewed his father as a selfish man, perhaps embarrassed of his son’s disability, a man who had no doubt decided that he’d simply give up on the boy and walk away. It didn’t mesh with his memory of the man those first six years of his life, but when Hope had said his father needed to go and stay far away from them for their own protection...his young mind couldn’t fathom that. He especially hadn’t been able to fathom that the choice to stay away would be far more painful for Will than for his son.

He’d been somewhat more accepting of that reality when he’d become a father himself. The thought of being separated from his little girl was devastating, and yet if it was necessary for her survival he would have done so. The Hunters and Abaddon made sure that it was no longer necessary to speculate, however. He wished he had had the opportunity to punish Abaddon, but a few kicks at his predecessor, The Assassin, would have to do.

Over the decades that followed, he’d had plenty of time to forgive his father and himself for their self-imposed views of failure. Seeing the man again, just as he remembered him from nearly two centuries earlier, had brought back his old emotions and memories. He’d need to keep Will from getting close; the man would recognize his own son for certain if given the chance. He’d grown to be a man, and his sandy blond hair was now the jet-black color of Will’s own, so he was somewhat camouflaged. His eyes, though, hadn’t changed, and he knew his father would recognize him through his eyes. He’d fashioned the sunglasses to ensure that his father would never see the eyes that would expose the truth of his identity, and thus make Will’s choice to go back in time —
far
back in time — even more difficult. Why leave to save what was already there in front of you?

And so he’d gone along with the subterfuge, treating his own father as an unwelcome stranger, planting the idea in his mind repeatedly that Will would destroy his new family, that he’d lead to their destruction as well, for he knew Will Stark would do anything to avoid being a risk to anyone he even remotely cared for. In reality, all he truly wanted was to spend time with the man, before his father and his hero began his incredible journey. For he knew he might never see the man again.

Fil glanced at the backpack sitting on the ground next to him, the same bag he’d used to retrieve items from his childhood home on the trip back in time to rescue his father from death at the hands of the Hunters. He chuckled, noting the irony that Fil, the son, had rescued his father from punishment for the crime of enabling Fil to exist.

Inside the bag, he found a baseball. It was the ball he’d used to play catch with Smokey that morning all of those years ago, when his Energy stores had grown so immense that his mother had no longer been able to Shield them — or him. She was already too weakened from her early term pregnancy with Angel, who brought another set of Energy abilities for Hope to deal with.

Angel. His wonderful little sister. Her joy at seeing their father had been quite touching, and made it so much more difficult for him to maintain his negative attitude. Angel had never met her father before, had never even seen him. She was so fearful of slipping up, of calling him Dad, that she’d insisted on the formal “Mr. Stark” for address, rather than “Will.” She’d further changed her natural platinum-blond hair to red, trying and succeeding in fooling Will from seeing his wife’s near-twin in his own daughter. Angel had learned of their father solely through the stories that their mother, along with Adam and others within the Alliance, shared, and though at times Fil thought they were embellishing a bit, he now wondered if perhaps they hadn’t been restrained in their praise. Will Stark was a man who knew what he stood for, a man who knew the price he was willing to pay to support those principles and those he loved. The hero he’d worshiped as a six-year-old boy was even more mythic now, after he himself had grown, married, had a child and watched those loved ones die. When Will stated he was willing to stake his own life for even a chance to help Josh and Hope live, it was too much for him to take. He wished he had been given such a choice, for he knew that, like his father, he would have accepted any offer that would have altered the horrific outcome.

Adam sat down next to him. “We’ve done our duty, Fil. Now Will must do his.”

“I know,” Fil said. “The question is, when do we find out if he succeeded?”

“You’re still here. So is Angel. That’s the proof we need, and Will would say it’s the only outcome that matters.”

Fil rested his chin on his knees. “I know that that’s
his
definition of success. But I’d still like to see him again, when he knows the entire history of what we’ve all been through. That’s my definition of the success of this mission. Seeing my father again. No acting, no drama...and no crazy sunglasses.” He tapped the accessory.

“You do know that you don’t have to wear those any more, right?”

Fil pulled the glasses off of his head, glanced at them, and put them back on. “Of course. I’ve grown rather fond of them, however. It’s how my father knows me now. So, they stay. For him.”

Adam said nothing.

“They’ll still come after us, you know,” Fil said.

“Who? The Hunters?”

Fil nodded. “They’ll eventually stop waiting for Dad to do something stupid so that they can track us. They tried that the last time, gave it about twenty years, and then officially decided that he was dead. Now that they know he’s not...it can’t be good for your credibility for a man you’ve declared dead to show up, be hauled in for questioning, and then break his way out and possibly kill a Hunter in the process. No, they’ll come after all of us as accomplices. And truth be told, we’re just that.”

Adam glanced at him. “You know, you could simply go to the island and eradicate them.” It wasn’t a question.

Fil nodded. “I know I could. Yet that would make me no better than them. Sometimes, the easy thing to do, the emotional response, is exactly the wrong thing to do. I know that if I did what you suggest, I’d not only get the Hunters and Abaddon and the Leader. I’d end up wiping out all of the Aliomenti there who are simply enjoying their lives, who don’t truly wish us to be destroyed, but who simply lack the will to stand up and tell the Leadership to stop. Worse, I’d kill the humans working there. It would make me no better than The Assassin, who thought it fine to kill two good men that night to come after my mother.” He sighed. “There are many easy solutions, simply none that I like.” He glanced at Adam. “And it’s not without precedent that my emotional responses, outside the faked ones the last few months, tend to turn out very poorly for a lot of innocent people. No, I’ll make sure anything I do is targeted at those who come after me and my family directly.”

The Mechanic, clad in his orange bodysuit, came over to them. “I take it the machine got away without fail?”

Fil and Adam nodded. “Everything went as planned,” Adam said. “I wonder how long it took Will to forgive us?”

“Immediately...and yet never, I’d imagine,” the Mechanic said. “No doubt he’d understand the reasoning behind it and appreciate it. Yet I imagine he’d take a very long time to wonder why it was he was never given the chance to make an informed choice, to prepare himself for his journey.” He glanced at Fil. “Or to say a very long goodbye to his son and daughter.”

Fil nodded. “I know. Trust me, I’ve often wondered that as well. Yet when I got the chance these past two months to see my father as he truly is, I couldn’t help but fear the long goodbye might be one he’d never finish. That decision would have been rather complicated for my actual existence.” He smiled. “Now, though? I’m pretty sure he would have left no later than he did, and I do wish we’d altered the plan. With the time machine gone, there’s no chance to go back and change that decision, though.”

“Will has his own difficult decisions to make in what will become his future, our past,” the Mechanic noted. “He will understand that sometimes, just as the easy choice isn’t the correct choice, sometimes the most difficult one is.”

“I wish I knew what happened to him,” Fil said. “Before he was, well, born.” He chuckled. “That statement would get me institutionalized in many societies.”

Adam laughed. “We’d be right there with you, since we’d nod right along. But yes, the disappearance of the historical Will Stark, shortly before the birth of the man we just sent back in time, is quite the mystery.”

The Mechanic glanced at him. “I don’t know if I’ve heard this one.”

Adam nodded. “As you know, Will Stark was well known among our kind for centuries. He eventually clashed with the leadership over the establishment of roles for Hunters and Assassins, and that led him to leave the society he’d helped build to establish the Alliance, which believed that controlled assistance in human development of technology was not only acceptable, it was a moral imperative.”

The Mechanic nodded. “This part I know.”

“He became a hunted man, of course, and as such he’d disappear from any contact with Aliomenti — Alliance or otherwise — for years or even a decade or longer. But he always did come back, except the last time. He vanished in roughly the year 1994, a year or two before the man we went back in time to rescue was born. The newborn Will Stark lived and grew following his birth in the year 1995, and that Will Stark was lost to history in the year 2030, the year we pulled him
forward
in time to send him
back
in time. The mystery is this: why has that historical, pre-1995 Will Stark never reappeared, after the year 2030?”

“We can be fairly certain that if the Hunters or Assassin had gotten him, it would have been loudly trumpeted,” Fil added. “His continual escapes were the source of great embarrassment, and probably encourage a third of our membership to follow their convictions and move to the Alliance. Capturing or even killing him would be an emotional blow they’d want to celebrate. He’s not vanished by their doing, that’s for certain.”

“Perhaps,” the Mechanic mused, “he became so proficient at hiding that he simply stayed hidden.”

“Perhaps,” Adam agreed. “And if that is the case, then we must simply remain in waiting for him to choose to show himself again.”

“I think he knows that the Elites are going to mount a large scale attack on the Alliance at some point,” Fil said. “And so he remains in hiding, letting them grow overconfident, and then he’ll appear at a time that tilts the battle in our favor.”

“Indeed,” Adam replied, as the Mechanic nodded, thoughtful. “Yet they must know that
you
are still out there as well, Fil. And they can’t underestimate your abilities. And Angel, though not quite as powerful as you...she’s a total mystery to them.”