Broken Hero (21 page)

“Yes! There it is!” Clyde says from his computer. He turns to us, beaming. “Tabby would be very proud of me. Normally I’m horrible with her databases. Though they were much easier when I was an AI. But anyway,” he shakes his head, “future echoes.”

A quick glance around the room assures me that I’m not the only one who has no clue what Clyde’s talking about.

Clyde seems to reach that conclusion around the same time as me. “Oh,” he says, “right. Well, they’ve only been theoretical up to this point.” He rubs the side of his head, mussing the hair.

“Wait,” he looks at me, “Arthur, did you hurt yourself in any way just before the thing appeared?”

I think about it. “Erm, well,” it feels silly, but usually withholding information leads to supernatural horrors trying to eat my spleen, so I say, “I did get a papercut.” I show him my thumb. Kayla makes gentle scoffing noises.

“On what?” Clyde is intent. “This is very important.”

I shrug. “I was just checking some of the stuff we had on Lang. And I found some stuff about the Uhrwerkgerät, and, well… then, I suppose.”

“Oh.” Clyde doesn’t look very happy. “Oh poop sticks.”

I want to question the curse, but his expression keeps me focused.

“Why?”

“Well,” he says, “like I say, future echoes have been theoretical up until now, though there’s been some pretty solid math to describe them. They’re this rather odd feature of composite realities. Like ours, for example. Pretty obvious example to go with, I admit. But they only happen when there’s a fairly massive disruption to multiple realities within the composite. An event so large that it distorts other realities in the composite. An act of violence that extends beyond the realities initially caught up in the mess. In other words echoes, or ripples spreading out from the disruption, moving forward and backward through time and space.”

“That doesn’t sound feckin’ fabulous,” Kayla puts in.

Clyde shakes his head. “Not at all. Sort of frog in a microwave sort of bad. If you assume the frog is a large portion of reality that you’re generally quite keen on continuing to exist. But it does make sense given that Lang was an expert at manipulating realities.”

“What’s Lang got to do with it?” I wish Felicity’s face would go back to neutral. Her absence of calm is beginning to leak into me.

“Well, a future echo is usually triggered by something related to the main event. In this case it was Arthur hurting himself while doing something related to the Uhrwerkgerät.”

I almost don’t want to ask. But I have to. For my job. For my sanity. “Which means?”

“Well…” Clyde shrugs, a violent spasm. “This is all theory, you realize. Best guesses and all that.” His face twists. “But the most obvious inference is that the Uhrwerkgerät is going to go off, and when it does it’s going to kill you.”

Oh.

Oh shit and balls.

The silence that greets Clyde’s utterance grows. And grows. A crushing eclipsing vacuum of sound. And I need someone to fill it. To stop it. Because I…

I…

I…

“We find it and we stop it.” Felicity rescues me. Pushes against the crushing gravity of it all. “That’s our plan. That’s what we’re going to do.”

“Erm…” Clyde clears his throat. “God, this is the bit where I hate having read about this stuff, but it was a Friday night and it was late and there was nothing good on TV, and I was sort of a bit down about the recently-having-been-a-supervillain thing at the time, and there was a sort of grim fascination thing going on. And please understand, I really don’t want this to be the truth, it just happens to be the theory supported by pretty much all the evidence.

“You see, if the echo has arrived then that means that the Uhrwerkgerät
has
to go off.” He stares about, looking for someone to nod and say it’s OK. No one does. He plows on anyway. “It’s like a ripple in a pond. If you see the ripple then you know someone threw a stone. Here we saw there was a future echo, so we know there was a detonation. We can’t have had one without the other. So basically the manifestation of the echo means the detonation is sort of, well, one doesn’t really want to use the word ‘unavoidable’ but pretty much it’s unavoidable.”

I sit down. My legs just go out from under me. The floor comes up and smacks me in the arse. My death. Predestined. Signed, stamped, post-marked, and delivered love and kisses from the universe. Reality is conspiring against me.

There is chaos around me again. Felicity is shouting something again. Clyde is backing up, hunching his shoulders defensively. Kayla has her sword drawn for some reason and is eyeing the closet door.

I can’t hold onto their words. I can’t hold onto anything. Not even my own fucking life.

Jesus.

I am going to die. I mean, I was always going to die. Death and taxes and all that crap. But… I mean, soon, right? Before my time, I suppose. I am going to die young and I don’t even have a good-looking corpse to leave behind. Felicity might disagree, but…

God, Felicity. She’s…

Actually she’s going to die too. This bomb is going to go off. Clyde just said it. It’s predetermined. It’s already happened. We just have to catch up to it. A detonation powerful enough to distort reality. Felicity’s not going to survive that. No one in MI37 is. England isn’t. Hell, Earth might not.

What do we do? What the hell do we do, when there’s nothing we can do?

“Ephie.” The name cuts through my fug. Felicity has rounded on Kayla. She grabs her by the lapels of her flannel overshirt. “This is reality magic. Get Ephie. She’s a Dreamer. She determines what’s reality. She is reality magic. Get her here. Make her fix it.”

“That wee bitch?” Kayla’s expression is incredulous. “She can’t do shite for this.”

“Get her!” Felicity’s voice breaks slightly.

“It’s not like that. I can’t just go to her. I just call her and if she’s not being an uppity wee shite she feckin’ comes.”

“So fucking call her.” Felicity still hasn’t let go of Kayla’s shirt.

“She won’t come.”

“Call her!”

Kayla hesitates, then sighs. “Ephie,” she says loudly. “Ephie!”

Nothing. I sit in the lab soaked in my own blood and misery and Kayla’s call goes unheeded.

“Again,” Felicity demands.

“Ephie!”

Nothing.

“Again.”

Kayla looks miserable. It’s so unexpected and unguarded a look, I almost turn away. This is Kayla’s pain. Pain she can’t stab or hack away. Pain she’s so defenseless against she’s trying to bury it under another pregnancy.

“Ephie!” Her shout is hollow in the room.

Nothing.

“Again.” Felicity is merciless.

Kayla’s expression twists. She finds her anger. “The wee bitch isn’t listening to me!” She’s almost shouting. “She’s got her head shoved up her reality-bending arse so feckin’ far she can see out of her own eyeballs. She can’t do shite for us. Forget her.”

Then Kayla seems to notice that she’s breathing hard, takes a moment to steady herself, rests a hand on Felicity’s arm. “We’ll go to the Himalayas. Clyde and Tabitha will find something feckin’ there.” She nods at me. “We’ll fix him. It’ll be all right. You ken?”

Felicity holds her for a moment, not relaxing a muscle. Then she sags. Kayla catches her with her other hand, props her against a lab table.

“It’s all theory and shite,” she says. “Thaumaturgical bollocks. We’ll kick them there, make ’em squeal, and all this shit will be sorted.” She looks to Clyde. “Right?”

“Well,” Clyde retreats to the far side of the computer. “I mean, I suppose if we’re going to learn any more about the Uhrwerkgerät anywhere it’s going to be there. And Lang seems to be the expert on this stuff. Maybe if he made theory into practice then… well, I don’t know… I think the fact that I don’t know is sort of the point. So I need to find out. Could totally be a way to save Arthur. And the world. And everything.” For a moment he looks like he actually means it. Then he glances down at the papers he pulled up on the computer. The sight of him blanching gives me less confidence.

“It’s what we do,” I hear Felicity mutter. There are a few lines of hope drafted around her eyes. She looks down at me, takes a breath. “It’s going to be alright,” she says.

I start laughing. I don’t know what else to do. I see it again. The figure of night and stars standing before me, destroying my mind.

“Of course it is,” I say. “Yeah. Totally.”

“You’ll be OK,” Felicity says. “I promise you.”

They’re words divorced from their meaning by the absurdity and cruelty of the world.

But what is the other option? Curl up here? Maybe I can use those words. At least for a little bit. And then denial will kick in and I can coast on that.

Coast on it up until the moment when I am violently blown up.

Oh Jesus.

I take Felicity’s hand, hold on tight.

“It’s going to be all right,” she says.

“It’s going to be all right.” I repeat the words back to her. I even try out a smile. It’s not so hard to fake. I feel I’ve been practicing it the past few days.

“Yes. It will be.” I think Felicity’s smile might even be genuine. She may really believe me. “Now,” she says, “let’s go to Nepal and sort this shit out.”

Clouds roll in as we make our way south to the RAF base just outside Brize Norton. Rain spatters the car windows. Felicity drives. Tabitha and Clyde sit in the back of Felicity’s minivan trying to hide the fact that they’re holding hands.

Someone on the radio jokes at the Prime Minister’s expense. Felicity laughs. She is sunshine despite the rain. It’s as if everything is already fixed for her. She was quiet earlier. But then after a few miles she coughed and made some quip about Kayla and pregnancy. Something about needing a man with balls of steel, and how composite metals typically had a low sperm count. It’s been smiles since then.

Maybe it’s genuine. Maybe it’s denial. I’m just glad she seems better than she did back at the lab.

We approach the air base. It is large and fenced off. We start to trace its circumference, finding our way to the gate.

“What the hell?”

Felicity’s tone makes me look up from contemplating my own navel. Two massive figures stand by the road, their shapes barely discernible beneath heavy brown cloaks.

Volk and Hermann. How the hell did they get here?

“Careful,” Tabitha says from the back seat. “Could be anyone.”

And actually she’s right. Those cloaks conceal the figures’ true identities. They’re too small to be Friedrich, but that’s about the only robot we can rule out.

“Should we keep driving?” Clyde asks. “It seems a little impolite and all, but, well, we can’t be completely sure that they’re here for us. Well, that said, I suppose if one starts down that road, well it’s very difficult to be completely sure about anything, isn’t it? I mean one is constantly reliant on one’s own senses, and there’s just so much evidence demonstrating how they really aren’t as reliable as we’d like to think. What if one has gone mad in the night and doesn’t realize it? I might not even be in a car on my way to the Himalayas right now. I might be in my kitchen talking to two watermelons and a spatula and hallucinating wildly. I mean when that’s a possibility, what is certainty?”

I’m not sure if that’s rhetorical or not, but it’s definitely a pause. “I’ll see what they want,” I say to Felicity. “You keep the engine running.”

“I’ll come too,” she says. “Tabitha—”

“No.” I put my hand on her arm, practice my smile. “The one good thing about knowing a bomb is going to kill me is that I can be certain that these guys won’t.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Felicity says. It sounds like a reflex.

“Actually—” Clyde starts from the back seat, but the car is already slowing. I open the door as we roll to a halt, hop out into the rain.

The two hulking Uhrwerkmänner turn to face me. The gravity of their movements makes me feel small and fragile and full of extremely squishable organs. My pistol feels unhelpfully small. I need to find some sort of missile launcher I can carry around without raising eyebrows.

“You are leaving without us.” There’s no mistaking that grating resentment. These are my guys.

“Hello, Hermann,” I say. “Lovely to see you too.”

I can’t tell if he grunts or slips a gear. “You abandon your task,” he says.

He is buried deep in his cloak again. The thick cloth is sodden, clinging to his angular frame, yet it still obfuscates more than it reveals. Volk, on the other hand, pokes his head forward, round glass eyes protruding, rain dripping down their surface.

“You have found something?” He sounds hopeful, eager even. The
yin
to Hermann’s despondent
yang
.

“Maybe,” I say. “We’re not sure. We want to check it out.”

“See, Hermann!” Volk slaps his companion on the back. “I told you it was so. They are coming closer to the solution we all search for.”

Another grinding grunt from Hermann.

“How did you know we were going to be here?” I ask them. If I can find that out, I might be closer to working out how Friedrich and his mechanical posse intercepted us at Lang’s apartment.

“You mean so you can keep us out of the loop next time?” Hermann spits. “So you can keep whatever secrets you find close to yourself and share them with no one else? We shall tell you nothing.”

Seriously—does he act like a jackass on purpose?

“I ask,” I say, starting to wish I’d brought an umbrella, “because last time we told you where we were going, your friend Friedrich turned up and tried to endurance test our spines, and I want to know if the leak is on our end or yours.”

“You accuse us?” Hermann’s voice is a knife blade being sharpened. “You dare? With no understanding? With no concept of our sacrifice, our battle? You say we are betrayers?” He straightens, limbs unfolding beneath his cloak. He looms over me, ten feet tall or more.

The bomb will kill me. Not him.

“I’m saying it’s a possibility,” I say, looking up into the overhanging darkness of his cloak. I put no malice into the words, just let them hang.