“Arthur? Arthur? Arthur!”
Hands. Hands shaking me. What the—
And then it comes back to me. The crushing grating agony in my mind. The unspooling of my sanity. The creature. The figure.
“No!” I yell, and kick my legs backwards. I grab at whoever is talking to me, try to drag them back, drag them clear.
“Hey! Calm down! Get him! Grab him!” A confusion of words around me. A smothering blanket of shouted concern and snatching hands. Someone pins my arms, holds them in an iron grip. I buck and yell. They have to get out of here. This is not safe.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey.” A low rush of words, a flutter of syllables against my ear. Felicity’s voice. “It’s OK, Arthur. It’s OK. You’re OK.”
And that grounds me. That brings me back. It’s over. Whatever the hell it was, it’s over.
They help me to my feet. Felicity, Kayla, and Clyde. Clyde rubs at his hip where I caught him with a flailing arm or leg.
“Sorry,” I say.
He shrugs. “Oh no, quite all right. Could have happened to anybody. Probably happening to hundreds of people right now. I mean probabilistically speaking. Seven billion people on the planet. At least a hundred being kicked by flailing friends. Stands to reason. It’s going to happen to you at some point or other. Why complain about it? That’s what I always say. Well not always. Doesn’t happen often enough for me to say, ‘always,’ but you get the gist of—”
“I do,” I cut him off.
Felicity is peering at my face, horror-struck. “What the hell happened?”
And my face does feel odd. I reach up, touch my chin, my upper lip. They are coated with something crusty and dry. I rub at it. Rusty-looking flakes come away on my fingers.
And then I remember the blood. Pouring out of my nose. I look down and see my shirt is soaked.
“We have to get you to a doctor,” Felicity says. “This could have been some sort of seizure, or—”
“No.” I cut her off sharply. Too sharply. My own worry reacting to hers. “I mean… no,” I say more softly. “It’s not that.”
And I explain. When I finish Clyde is rubbing his beard, tracing the line of his chin. “God, that sounds so familiar. I’m sure I’ve read something like that before.” He moves to one of the lab computers, starts clicking. “I wish Tabby was here.”
“Keep it in your pants,” Kayla mutters, but Clyde doesn’t appear to hear her.
“Oh damn, that reminds me,” Felicity says. “I should tell Tabitha and Hannah to stop checking the pubs for you.”
“You had them checking pubs?” That’s not a great default location for people to check for you.
Felicity shrugs. “You seemed out of sorts last night, and we didn’t need everyone searching here. Plus I’d called the hospital and you weren’t there.”
Pubs. Third on the list. OK, that actually sounds reasonable.
“I’m so sorry you were worried.” I take her hand.
“I’m so sorry you almost had your brains bleed out your nose.”
In the background, Kayla makes gagging sounds. I wonder if it’s possible for someone to be allergic to human affection.
“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.”