There was a stubborn part of her mind that still called him David.
Even now, as her fingers clenched and her inner self screamed with fury, a dizzy little piece of herself remained lost in denial. It clapped its hands with childish glee, welcoming him home as if everything that had happened over the last thirty hours was just a big misunderstanding. Oh, David. I knew you’d never betray us. I’m so glad you’re back.
But there was no mistake about the son of a bitch in front of her. He was Semerjean Pelletier. He’d been lying nonstop from the day they met.
Mia took a moment to process his new look, all the tiny bits of David he’d washed away like stage makeup. His long blond hair was now a short caramel brown. His teenage facial scruff, that fine sheen of fuzz that never quite grew or went away, had been shaved. He’d swapped his modest, rumpled, “can’t be bothered to care” clothes for a sharp red oxford and khakis. Most jarring of all, he sported all ten of his fingers again. His maimed right hand had been completely healed.
Though Semerjean looked at least eight years older (and twice as handsome, Mia grudgingly noted), there was something viscerally repugnant about him, a hard new tightness in his mouth and jaw that vaguely reminded her of someone. Mia was too rattled at the moment to figure out who.
Semerjean’s eyes hovered gravely around the blood on her shirt. “We’ve had better weekends, haven’t we?”
“We?”
“Despite what you think—”
“You don’t want to know what I think.”
“—I haven’t enjoyed a minute of this.”
“Fuck you.” Mia stepped forward, her brown eyes burning with rage. “Fuck you and your whole fucking family, you goddamn lying shitfuck!”
Semerjean blinked at her. “Wow. Mia . . .”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare say my name. You don’t get to say my name, y-you . . .”
Try as she might, she couldn’t hold back her tears. The events of the day had left her utterly demolished. She’d been chained up and terrorized, watched a soldier and two Gothams die right in front of her. She had no idea if the people she loved were alive or dead, any of them. Even Carrie—
Carrie!
Panicked, Mia turned around to check on her. Though the dragonette’s flame had yet to reach her, thank God, it looked slightly larger than it did a minute ago. Time hadn’t stopped. It had just slowed to a crawl.
Mia’s stomach tightened. She shot a wary look at Semerjean. “You shifted us.”
“And then some.”
She finally noticed his accent, a slightly alien version of a cultured British twang. “Is that how you really talk?”
“In English, yes.” He smiled softly. “I was raised in the theater. My mentors were very strict about—”
“I don’t care.” Mia surveyed her surroundings. “Why isn’t everything blue and cold?”
Semerjean showed her his left hand. A two-inch disc of silver had been firmly affixed to the back.
“Stabilizer,” he said. “I wanted you to be comfortable.”
“Comfortable.” She gestured at Carrie. “Can I move her?”
“You’re shifted at a thousand times her temporal velocity. I wouldn’t advise it.”
“We can’t just leave her like that.”
“We?”
Mia squinted at him suspiciously. His expression had turned a few degrees cooler. His smile had become a little smug.
“I can move her with tempis,” he said. “Or shield her. Or teleport her. Or I can simply destroy that metal monstrosity. There are a dozen ways to save her. I can even save her father, if you wish.”
“If I wish?”
“I’m offering you a quid pro quo. You come with me for a couple of minutes, listen to what I have to say. As soon as we’re done, we’ll come back here and I’ll save the lives of both Blooms. ‘Easy peasy,’ as Hannah would say.”
Mia bristled at his casual mention of Hannah. He invoked her name as if they were still chummy, as if he hadn’t betrayed her love and good nature.
“Where would you take me?” she asked him.
“Just around the village. I have some matters to attend to. We’ll talk while I work.”
“Work,” Mia repeated. “You mean ‘kill people.’”
Semerjean plucked a piece of lint from his shirtsleeve. “I have three names on my list. No one you’d know or particularly care about. I also have some people to save.”
“Anyone I care about?”
“Pretty much everyone you care about.”
“Jesus.” She closed her eyes and turned away from him. “Why are you doing this?”
Semerjean sighed impatiently. “Mia, in eighteen minutes and forty-nine seconds, that magnesium fire will singe Carrie’s skin. In nineteen minutes, she’ll be in indescribable agony. In twenty minutes, she’ll be dead.”
“No! Please! Look, just save her and I’ll come with you!”
“Come with me and I’ll save her,” Semerjean countered. “My work is quick. We’ll be back with minutes to spare.”
“Goddamn it.” Mia bounced her anxious gaze between Carrie and the dragonette, then tossed her hands up in surrender. “Okay, fine. Fine!”
“Lovely.”
With a graceful wave, Semerjean created a twelve-foot disc of solid white energy beneath him. Mia thought it was tempis until it lifted him a foot off the ground.
He extended his hand. “Shall we?”
Mia climbed aboard without touching him, then stood as far away as she could. “Go.”
They floated away from Temperance Street, as calm and graceful as a cloud. While Semerjean steered with subtle hand gestures, Mia stood to his side and examined him. There it was again, that familiar tightness in his jaw. She knew exactly who it reminded her of now.
“Gingold,” she muttered before she could stop herself.
Semerjean looked at her over his shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing.” Mia hugged herself, her skin crawling with revulsion. “Just say what you have to say.”
—
The first minute passed without a word being spoken. Semerjean seemed perfectly content to fly a leisurely path around the underland while Mia looked down at the suspended action. The battle had spread well beyond the village square, with Gothams fighting Integrity on nearly every street. Four different intersections had been overtaken by tempic domes. Mia could feel the portals inside all of them. The travelers and tempics were working together to set up evacuation stations, for all the good it did. Dragonettes were already beginning to melt three of the domes with their solic cannons.
Semerjean stood at the edge of his flying platform, his blue eyes fixed on the dragonettes. Every time he got within forty feet of one, he thrust a long tempic arm through the wall of his temporal bubble and touched the hull three times with his “finger.” Tap, tap, tap. If his dainty touch had any effect on the drones, Mia couldn’t see it. As far as she knew, he was playing his own weird version of freeze tag.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Semerjean smirked at her. “She speaks at last.”
“You’re the one who wanted to do the talking.”
“I was hoping to have a dialogue.”
“Fine. We’re dialoguing. What the hell are you doing?”
He tagged another dragonette. “Can’t speak for you, but I’m not a fan of these flying death turtles.”
“You’re destroying them.”
“Thoroughly.”
“They don’t look destroyed.”
“Patience, my dear.”
“Fuck you. Don’t patronize me.” Mia watched a tendril retract into his skin. “All this time, you’ve been a tempic and a swifter.”
Semerjean smiled immodestly. “And a turner. And a traveler. And a thermic. And a solic.”
“And a traitor.”
His humor faded. “A traitor works against his people. I was always on your side.”
“You lied to us.”
“I kept you and the others alive.”
“Yeah, poorly.”
“What are you talking about?”
“All those times we could have used another tempic,” Mia said. “Or a traveler. Or an augur!”
Semerjean frowned at her. “I never said I was an augur.”
“What?”
“As for my other talents, I used them all the time to help you.”
“When?”
He reached out with a split tempic projection and tagged two dragonettes at once. “Last year, when Zack fell off that hotel balcony. You remember that?”
“Yeah. Amanda saved him.”
Semerjean laughed. “She was an amateur at her talent. She didn’t have a prayer of catching him. The moment the tempis came out of her hand, I took control of it and rescued him properly.”
He saw a trio of drones in the sky above Freak Street and flew the platform toward them. “That same day, Hannah took a blow to the head. Her concussion would have killed her if I hadn’t intervened.”
“How?”
“I reversed her back to perfect health while the rest of you were sleeping.”
Mia pinched her lip in thought, her eyes darting busily around the platform. She could vaguely remember David insisting that he stay in Hannah’s room that night. Something about the bed being more comfortable.
“I also healed you,” Semerjean told her. “When Rebel shot you in the chest.”
“That was Zack!”
“It was me. Zack couldn’t reverse a baby deer without killing it. So I manipulated his temporis. Cell by cell, I made sure that you were healed the right way, without permanent side effects. Are you starting to see now?”
He tapped the three dragonettes, then made a sharp left turn. “I had to work night and day to keep you Silvers alive. You could have made it easier.”
Mia crossed her arms and looked away. “You only saved us because you need us.”
“Yes, but you don’t know why.”
“Of course I do. You want us to make babies with the Gothams.”
“That’s the what. I’m talking about the why.”
He lowered the platform to street level, near the scene of a brutal skirmish. Five turners and a tempic were locked in combat with a soldier and two dragonettes. By all appearances, the Gothams were winning. The turners had aged the drones, clouding each and every one of their camera lenses, while the tempic made short work of the soldier.
Semerjean touched each dragonette, then waved his hand at one of the turners.
Mia did a double-take. “Wait. Did you just do something to that guy?”
“Yes. I just ended his life.”
Mia studied the victim, a bald and burly man she’d seen around the village. Like the dragonettes, he seemed no worse for the wear.
“That’s Frank Godden,” Semerjean explained. “One of the three people on my list.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Personally? Nothing.”
“So why are you killing him?”
Semerjean exhaled in Godden’s direction. “In a few days’ time, he would have taken Alma Rubinek’s seat on the elder council. His particular brand of idiocy would have created unpleasant consequences for you and your friends. He was a storm cloud on the horizon. Now he’s not.”
“How do you know all that?” Mia asked. “I thought you weren’t an augur.”
“My wife and son see the strings just fine.”
Hot blood rushed to Mia’s face. For a moment, she wondered if she’d gone mad. The Pelletiers were fighting to save Mia and her friends from future problems, but they hadn’t lifted a finger to stop this invasion. Nothing added up. Not a goddamn thing.
Semerjean turned the platform and flew it west toward the ruins of Guild Street.
“Speaking of augurs,” he said, “I believe Theo needs our help.”
Mia glanced over her shoulder at Frank Godden. He seemed a few inches shorter than he did a second ago. It took Mia a full moment to realize that the man wasn’t shrinking, he was sinking. The concrete was swallowing him inch by inch.
Mia looked at Semerjean in horror. Now she knew exactly what he was doing to the drones and the human targets.
He’s dropping them, she thought. He’s a dropper too.
—
“Prepare yourself. This might be a little unsettling.”
His words trickled like water around the edges of Mia’s consciousness. She was barely listening. Her eyes and thoughts remained hopelessly stuck on Frank Godden. She didn’t even notice when Semerjean thrust his hand and sprayed a cone of black mortis at the tempics’ guild hall. It spread like a shadow across the southern face of the building, dissolving it brick by brick.
By the time Mia turned around, the mortis was gone, along with an entire wall of the structure.
“What just happened? What did you do?”
Semerjean smiled coyly. “Made an entrance for us.”
He maneuvered the platform inside the building, where a violent struggle had taken place. The foyer looked like it had been torn apart by bazookas. Nearly half the second floor had come crashing down on the first. The entry was little more than rubble and burning wood.
Mia noticed a nearby fire and was immediately transfixed. At a thousandth-speed, the flame danced in a hypnotic rhythm, like aquatic weeds swaying in the tides.
She snapped out of her trance and looked at Semerjean. “How much time do we have?”
He shrugged with droll humor. “I don’t know. I gave away my wristwatch.”
“If Carrie dies—”
“Calm down. We still have fifteen minutes.”
Six spindly tempic arms emerged from the edge of his flying disc. They stretched across the foyer, moving heavy pieces of wreckage to one side while smothering the occasional flame. Mia swallowed the urge to ask him what he was doing. She was sick of the question. Sick of his games.
“How old are you really?” Mia asked.
Semerjean kept his eyes on his work. “Depends how you mean it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Time’s a lot more flexible where I come from. We can live a year in a day, spend a month in the God’s Eye, jump back through the strings and relive a past decade. Our experiential age isn’t tied to a calendar. Only the vainest among us try to put a number on it.”
He stared down at his smooth hands. “If you want to know my physical age, that’s easier. I’m just a month shy of seventeen.”
Mia stared at him, dumbfounded. “How is that possible?”
“Reversal’s come a long way in my era. We can keep all our memories, shed years from our age without losing a moment of experience. Our bodies aren’t trapped in chronological degression. We can be as young or old as we want to be.”
“God.” Mia shook her head in astonishment. “You could live forever that way.”
Semerjean chuckled. “You’d think so, but no.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nature is stubborn,” he said. “It doesn’t much like the idea of immortality. So it gave us a new disease, one that only affects the exceptionally long-lived.”
“What is it?”
“There’s no name for it in English. The closest translation would be ‘terminus.’”
Mia eyed him skeptically. “Terminus.”
“It’s humanity’s last illness,” he told her. “A neurological sickness that follows us through the strings. It can’t be cured by any means we know of, and it takes great pleasure in killing us slowly. Some lose their memory. Some lose their sanity. Some, like me, lose their powers one by one.”
Mia balked at his news. Lack of power seemed to be the least of Semerjean’s problems. “You have terminus?”
“My whole family has it.”
He stared at the rubble with an expression that Mia had never seen on him before, a deep and genuine mournfulness. All of David’s grief about the old world and the coming apocalypse had never looked like that. Those were play acts. This was real.
“You’re all dying.”
Semerjean sneered at her. “Don’t get your hopes up. Even if we fail, we still have decades.”
“Fail what?”
“Isn’t is obvious? We’re here to cure terminus.” He cast his steely gaze on a fire. “We have no intention of dying.”
Mia’s knees briefly buckled. She was just a hapless kid from La Presa, a ninth-grade dropout. Now here she was, talking immortality with a twisted cosmic demigod.
“You’re probably wondering what all of this has to do with you,” Semerjean mused.
Mia nodded absently. He conjured a ghost in the middle of the disc: a full-size hologram of a tall and lovely brunette. Mia could easily guess who she was looking at.
“Esis.”
“The one and only,” Semerjean said. “You haven’t met her yet. If you’re lucky, you won’t meet her today.”
“She’s coming?”
“Yes. She . . . has her own business to take care of.”
There it was again, that look of genuine sorrow. Mia was deathly afraid to ask him about it.
“She’s a neurogenetic surgeon,” Semerjean explained. “Decades ahead of her peers. Some time ago, she came to believe, to much derision, that the only way to end terminus is to genetically reengineer our brains.”
Mia blinked at him. “You can do that?”
“Of course. Nearly everyone on my world has a designer enhancement of some sort. But what Esis proposed was much different. She suggested we fashion our brains to resemble those of our earliest chronokinetic ancestors, the so-called Gothams of Quarter Hill.”
“What?”
“Yes, even I was skeptical.” He gestured at the wall, at a grandiose photo of the tempic guild’s current leaders. “We’ve spent two and a half millennia evolving from these idiots. Why would we choose to regress? But their brains do have an extraordinary resilience, something my people have lost over time. For Esis, that was a starting point.”
The tempic arms continued to clear debris. Semerjean paced the edge of his platform.
“For many years, she tried to build a perfect brain from the Gotham template, one that would provide full immunity to terminus without compromising our abilities. But nature proved stubborn once again. Eventually Esis realized that a new genetic element had to be introduced, something that only existed in theory.”
Mia didn’t like where this was going. “You’re talking about—”
“You,” Semerjean said. “You, your friends, and all the other so-called breachers. You all grew up on a world without temporis, yet your brains developed the very same mechanism that allows for chronokinesis. It truly is a wonder. My people were made from the Cataclysm, but you developed naturally. You have no idea how special you are.”
An oily nausea washed over Mia. “That’s why you picked siblings.”
“Yes. The mutation runs strong in certain families, like the Trillingers and the Givens.”
“But not mine.”
His morbid look was all the answer she needed. All this time, she’d been holding on to a tiny flicker of hope that at least one of her brothers had survived. Another pipe dream. Another delusion.
She cleared the choke from her throat. “How did you find us? How’d you even get to us?”
“I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that what we did was unprecedented, the first lateral jump across worldstrings. My son had to invent an entirely new form of temporis to—”
The tempic arms stopped moving. Semerjean peered down over the edge of the platform. “Damn. It’s worse than I thought.”
Mia followed his gaze and gasped at the bloody sight below. “Oh no!”
Theo already looked like one of the dead. The left side of his body was covered in burns. His right arm and leg had been crushed by debris. His eyes were wide open, unblinking. Mia prayed that was just an effect of the temporal shift.
“He’s alive,” Semerjean assured her. “Barely, but . . .”
Puzzled, he tilted his head. Mia recognized the look on his face, the same thousand-yard-stare that David used to get when he was scanning the past.
“What?”
Semerjean blinked at her a moment, then tensely shook his head. “Nothing. Let’s see what we can do for him.”
He pulled a golden coin out of his shirt pocket and tossed it off the platform. It swerved toward Theo with deliberate insistence, impervious to the slowdown that affected everything around him. Mia watched with fascination as the disc landed on Theo’s chest and began burning through his sweatshirt.
“He’ll be all right,” said Semerjean. “Let’s move on.”
“Wait.”
“I thought you were worried about Carrie.”
“Now I’m worried about Theo.”
“He’s healing,” Semerjean insisted. “We want him alive just as much as you do.”
“Then why did you let this happen?”
“You think I control the universe?”
“I think you control his visions. He could have seen this war coming weeks ago, but you stopped him. You wanted it to happen because it helps your plans somehow.”
Semerjean sighed. “Mia . . .”
“All this pain, all this death, and for what? So you and your family can live forever?”
“My family?” A flush rose in his cheeks. “This is for everyone. The minute we get home, we’ll make our discovery available to any living soul who wants it, at no cost or condition. Our gift will spread across the strings, trillions of people given infinite life. Can you understand a feat of that magnitude, Mia? Can you even begin to wrap your mind around the scope of our mission?”
Mia recoiled at his anger. Stupid girl, she thought. You’ll get Carrie killed!
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”
Semerjean’s expression softened. He flashed his palms in gentle accord. “It’s all right. You’re under a lot of stress. I suppose I’m partly responsible for that.”
Her stomach churned. She fought the urge to scream. “Who are you saving next?”
“Well, that depends.”
“On what?”
Semerjean looked through the missing wall, at the lumic guildhall across the street. “On how you feel about Heath.”
—
They had barely pulled out of the guildhouse when Mia closed her eyes and muttered something. Semerjean looked at her confusedly, as if she’d just yipped at him in the secret language of poodles.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“I said stop.”
The disc froze in midair, twelve feet above the asphalt of Center Street. Mia crouched at the edge of the circle, her face racked with sickness and misery.
Semerjean backed away from her. “Are you about to, uh . . .”
Mia shook her head, even as her breakfast threatened to surge back up. He had placed Heath’s life in her hands as if it were a cheap trinket, as if letting him die was even an option. Even more horrific than Semerjean’s “dilemma” was his shrugging explanation. I don’t know, he’d told her. I’ve just seen the way he grates on you.
If there had been any hope left that her good friend David still existed in some form, it was gone now. There wasn’t a trace of him left. No warmth, no charm, no morality she could even remotely comprehend. He’d been an alien this whole time. The parts of him she’d loved were just fiction.
Semerjean looked at the Hilgendorf gates in the distance, then tapped them with a long tempic finger. The portals flickered out of existence. The machines began to sink into the concrete.
Mia climbed to her feet and turned away from him. “Why are we even doing this? What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess I was hoping I could explain myself, give you a better sense of who I am.”
“I know who you are. You’re a goddamn scientist—”
“I’m nothing of the sort.”
“—who manipulated us for his own bullshit reasons.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“If you just wanted babies, there are a million easier ways to get them.”
Semerjean laughed. “You have no idea how true that is.”
“So then why all these games? Why not try something else?”
“We’re trying everything,” Semerjean assured her. “With every group and every timeline, we’re doing something different. This is admittedly one of our more complex efforts.”
“It makes no sense!”
“That’s because you’re thinking in linear terms,” he said. “A to B, B to C. The straightest path isn’t always the best one, especially when it comes to nature.”
Semerjean waved a colorful image into the air: a three-dimensional rendering of a human brain. A yellow bead of light glowed at the base.
“If you want to know why my wife has a bad temper . . .” He pointed at the dot. “It’s this. All we need is one mutation, one tiny twist of evolution right here in the temporal lobe, for humans to achieve immortality. But nothing has worked. The future teases us with glimpses of victory, but it doesn’t show us how to get it. So we experiment. We try a multitude of approaches in the hope that one of them, one of them, will finally bear fruit.”
The image changed to ten floating bracelets, each one a different color. To Mia’s surprise, they weren’t all metal. She saw ruby and jade, multicolored opal, even a plastic-looking purple one.
“In this string, we’ve taken a segmented approach with our subjects. For the Pearls, it’s embryonic engineering. For the Violets, germline editing. For the Golds? A multistage trial of controlled cellular parthenogenesis.”
“What?”
“Cloning,” Semerjean explained. “They’re our clone group.”
A shiver ran up Mia’s spine. She imagined a lab somewhere with hundred copies of Jonathan, Heath, and Zack’s brother. No wonder Semerjean didn’t care about the originals. They were nothing but redundant spares.
Semerjean vanquished all the bracelets but one. It expanded to the size of a truck tire, then rotated in the air.
“Now the Silvers . . . oh, you were a challenge. We knew from the start that we needed to trust one group to the hands of nature—a natural conception, a natural mutation, a natural immunity to terminus. My wife and son looked to the strings and were very encouraged by what they saw. If their forecasts are right, then you represent our best chance for success. The sisters especially.”
Mia felt queasy again. Semerjean eyed her worriedly. She wound her hand, urging him to continue.
“The question was how to get you all to breed with the right partners,” he said. “Azral’s original plan was . . . distasteful, and not particularly effective. Esis and I came up with a much more humane approach, though it involved some deception. It also required a full-time presence in your group.”
He lowered his head with a look of soft contrition. “So I opted to join you as one of your own. I developed a persona that would complement your personalities while masking my cultural differences.”
Mia closed her eyes. “This was all just a game to you.”
“No.”
“That whole trip across the country—”
“No, no, no. That was never part of the plan. If things had gone my way, you’d still be in San Diego, living in comfort in Sterling Quint’s facility. I would have eventually . . . encouraged some Gothams to join us there: Peter and Liam, Mercy Lee, a few potential partners for Theo and Hannah, even one for me. You know, for appearances.”
Mia stared at him, hang-jawed. “Are you insane?”
“Look—”
“You think putting us all together would have gotten us to screw?”
“Well, obviously, my plan was a lot more—”
“You really do think we’re animals, don’t you?”
“I do not,” Semerjean insisted. “I’ve given you credit from the very beginning. Please do me the same courtesy.”
The wrath in his voice made Mia’s heart skip. He took a deep breath, then spoke in a calmer tone.
“All I had to do was convince you that the fate of the world hinged on making children with each other. You would have questioned it, you would have complained about it, but in the end you would have done it. All of you.”
He cast a heavy gaze at the frozen smoke plumes in the distance. “And life would have been so much easier for everyone.”
Mia waited for her nerves to settle before speaking again. “So what happened?”
Semerjean frowned. “You know what happened. Rebel attacked us. Ruined all my plans and forced me to improvise.”
“How did you not see him coming?”
“He had help.”
“You people live off predictions. How—”
“He had help. Ioni guided him through the cracks in our foresight. That fool would be nothing without her.”
Mia wanted to ask him about Ioni, but she suddenly became very conscious of the time. Heath was dying, and there were still plenty other people to save.
“Maybe we should—”
“Yes.”
Semerjean flew their platform to the lumics’ guild building and peeked inside a third-floor window.
“Well, there he is.”
Hesitantly, Mia moved to his side. She could see Heath collapsed at the base of a stairwell, clutching his stomach with bloody hands. Another boy, one Mia had never seen before, lay crumpled next to him.
“Oh my God.”
“Barbaric, isn’t it?” Semerjean dug into his shirt pocket and retrieved more golden discs. “Two unarmed boys, shot by their own government. There’s a reason we call this the Pre-Enlightenment Age.”
“Who’s that other kid?”
“Harold Herrick,” said Semerjean. “The last of Gemma’s disparates. It was rather intrepid of Heath to give him my wristwatch. He’s not usually that bold.”
Mia saw the double coins in Semerjean’s fingers. “You’re healing both of them.”
“Yes. Should I not?”
“Of course you should! I just don’t understand you. I don’t know who you’re here to kill and who you’re here to save.”
Semerjean hurled the discs through the broken window. They curved through the air like guided missiles before landing on the chests of their targets.
“I’m not sure why I’m healing Harold, to be honest.”
He smiled slyly at Mia. “I guess I have a soft spot for lumics.”
Her stomach flipped. If he hadn’t just made a cruel joke about Yvonne, then he was in complete denial about what he’d done to her. Both scenarios were equally frightening. Semerjean had brought Mia on this journey to get to know the real him. It was working, but not in the way he’d hoped.
She threw a nervous look down the street. “Who’s next?”
—
She stood perfectly still at the edge of the platform, her hands dangling limply at her sides. Mia knew from the moment she returned to the village square that she would see some awful sights, things she’d missed the first time around.
But nothing could have prepared her for the scene at Founders’ Path.
A solider lay dead among the flowers, her armor scorched from head to toe. Someone had cooked her alive inside her tactical gear, but that was nothing compared to what happened to her comrade. The other soldier had been bisected diagonally across the abdomen, a slanted half corpse. Where his lower parts went, Mia had no idea. He’d been cut in two by a closing portal. His legs could have been anywhere within a hundred miles of here.
Semerjean scanned Mia’s face as she processed the carnage. She kept so still that she might as well have stepped outside the temporal field, just another casualty of war trapped in still-frame.
“Mia . . .”
“Shut up.”
“They’ll be fine. They’re healing as we speak.”
Semerjean wasn’t talking about the soldiers, who were far beyond saving. Nor was he referring to Mother Olga, who’d taken a bullet to the back and had perished just a few yards up the path. He was only assuring Mia about the two Gothams next to Olga, a father and son who lay crumpled on top of each other, the blood of their wounds converging in a puddle.
At long last, Mia had caught up with the Pendergens.
Semerjean gestured at the gruesome half soldier. “That’s the one who shot them. Managed to put two bullets into each of them before Peter finally retaliated. If he’d been a little more attentive—”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m not the one who did this.”
“You let it all happen.”
Semerjean looked away. “I had to.”
“Bullshit!”
“The government was coming for you one way or another,” he said. “We did everything we could to throw them off your scent.”
“Like what?”
“Those bodies they found in that Staten Island movie theater. Who do you think did that?”
Mia glowered at him. “What’d you do, kill us in another timeline?”
Semerjean shook his head. “They were just lab clones. Mindless. Esis grew them all in a day.”
Mia looked around at the bodies in the square—men, women, and children, more than she could count. At her accelerated speed, she could barely tell the living from the dead. For all she knew, half of them were still alive and flailing in agony, like that sad little spider that Gingold had crushed.
Semerjean eyed her cautiously. “You want to know why I let it happen? The answer’s right there.”
Mia’s whole body tensed as Semerjean gripped the back of her head. He turned her gaze westward, to the second floor of the recreation center.
She wriggled out of his grip. “I have no idea what—”
“Just look.”
With a flick of his finger, the front wall of the building became transparent. Mia saw an armored solider on the second floor, a man who had yet to suffer the Gothams’ wrath. He aimed a long round device at the battlefield, like the mechanical offspring of a spyglass and an airhorn. Mia had been around long enough to know what she was looking at.
“A video camera.”
“And transmitter.” Semerjean pointed at the soldier. “He only pretends to work for Gingold. His real employer is Cedric Cain.”
“Who?”
“You’ll meet him soon enough. Suffice it to say that he doesn’t like what Integrity’s become and, unlike us, he has the power to fix it. He’s with the president of the United States right this minute, showing him live images from that camera. As one would hope, the president’s outraged by the wholesale slaughter of American citizens. By sunset, every top-ranking official in the agency will be removed from power and an interim director will be named. That man?”
“Cedric Cain,” Mia cynically guessed.
Semerjean smiled. “He’s a long-term thinker. He understands the benefits of a cooperative partnership. He’ll immediately extend an olive branch to you and the Gothams. By this time tomorrow, everyone here will be a friend and asset of the United States government.”
He swept his arm around the square. “None of that could have happened without this. It’s unfortunate—”
“Unfortunate?”
“—but that’s just the nature of causality. Sometimes you have to step back to move forward. Sometimes you have to make war to create a lasting peace.”
Mia gritted her teeth. The Pelletiers had done the exact same thing at Atropos, forced a bloody battle between the orphans and Gothams for the sake of the greater good. Their good.
Semerjean read the anger in her eyes. “You still don’t get it.”
“No, I get it. You want to bring eternal life to your people, no matter who it kills.” She jerked her thumb at Mother Olga. “I’m sure she’d understand.”
Semerjean closed his eyes, exasperated. “Shie’tta ju-né. This was always the hardest part of living with you.”
“Me?”
“All of you. I could tolerate your meats and chemicals, your rock-hard mattresses and inane conversations. But what I could not handle, what I still can’t bear, is your linear way of looking at things. You people are myopic to the point of blindness. Even your augur can’t see the big picture.”
Mia scowled at her feet. If she didn’t fear for Carrie’s life, she might have reminded him that Gemma Sunder almost killed him. The mighty Semerjean, felled by a child and her poison fruit.
He thrust a hand at Peter. “Nobody encapsulates that mindlessness more than that man. Look at him. He rushed into a battlefield with two bound arms and a wounded leg. What was he hoping to accomplish?”
“He was trying to save Liam.”
“Yes, and look how well that turned out.” He scoffed. “I should have never brought you to him. Every time I tried to advise him, he brushed me aside. ‘Don’t worry, son, I’ve got this.’ ‘Relax, boy. I know what I’m doing.’ ‘Quiet, lad. You don’t know the full story.’”
Mia was neither impressed nor amused by his pitch-perfect impression. “He thought you were a kid. We all did.”
“That shouldn’t have mattered.”
“Well, it did, and it was your own damn fault. You could have come to us at any age. You could have been our leader.”
Semerjean hung his head. His voice fell to a mutter. “It was a . . . strategic decision.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “It’s not important.”
“Just tell me!”
“I didn’t want to be an adult around Hannah. I was afraid that . . .”
“What?”
“I was afraid she’d fall in love with me.”
Mia’s body went rigid. She kept her wide round eyes on the battlefield.
Semerjean sighed at her. “Look—”
“Don’t.”
“I never meant for you to—”
“Semerjean.”
Mia closed her eyes in a sickly wince. She’d never called him by his real name before. The feeling was hideous, like she’d cast a dark spell in an old demonic tongue.
She forced herself to make eye contact. “Just finish your damn work already so we can save Carrie.”
Semerjean stared at her blankly before nodding. “As you wish.”
The platform rose off the grass. Mia studied Semerjean through a hateful squint. She wondered what would happen if she opened up a portal inside his cold, black heart. Would it work? Would it kill him? Or would it only make him mad? Mia pondered the question over and over as they continued through the underland, toward the second name on his kill list.
—
They were fifty feet above the square when he claimed his next victim. Mia had no idea who Semerjean was dropping. The woman was locked in flying combat with a dragonette, her face concealed behind a shaded black face mask. The moment Semerjean touched her with his long tempic finger, the lights on her speedsuit flickered. Her aeric wings began to lose shape.
Semerjean tapped the drone three times, then retracted his tempis. “Victoria Chisholm.”
Mia looked at him. “Huh?”
He pointed a thumb at his target. “That was Victoria Chisholm. In case you were wondering.”
Mia had indeed wondered, but she didn’t want to ask. She was tired of being horrified by this creature in front of her, with his warped sense of ethics and his unbearable air of supremacy. Were the people of his world just like him? Did their four-dimensional perceptions kill the last of their humanity?
He eyed Mia curiously. “You’re not going to ask me why?”
“I know why. She either got in your way or she’ll get in your way in the future.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah. You love saying that.”
The platform ascended past the broken face of the clock tower. Semerjean studied the cracks in the glass, a branching array of hard, angry angles that looked like frozen lightning.
“Life will soon be very different here,” he told Mia. “There’ll be new orphans, new scientists, new government administrators. Some of the Gothams won’t be able to handle the change. Some, like Victoria Chisholm, would have upset the delicate balance we’ve worked so hard to achieve.”
Mia looked down at her feet. “You want this place to be a big breeding farm.”
“A volunteer breeding farm. Everything we’d hoped to achieve in Terra Vista will be done here on a grander scale. We’ve been building toward this for months.”
“So who’s your third, then?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you had three people to kill. Who’s the third one? Rebel? Mercy? Jonathan?”
“No.”
“Zack?”
Semerjean’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You have no idea what I’ve gone through to keep Zack alive.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, I am not killing Zack. Or Jonathan. Or Rebel. Or Mercy.”
“What about Azral and Esis?”
“I’m not killing them either.”
Mia shot him a dirty look. “You know what I mean. Do they have their own kill lists? Are they coming after anyone I know?”
Semerjean looked away. “My wife and son are their own people.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The disc came to a stop in the upper reaches of the underland, all air vents and roof panels. Mia couldn’t help but wonder if there was some nefarious reason Semerjean brought her here. What if she was the third name on his list?
“What . . . what are we doing here?”
Semerjean sighed with haughty disappointment, as if he had to explain why the Earth wasn’t flat.
“See, this is a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about. You look, you analyze, but you never see the whole picture.”
“What do you mean?”
“Turn around.”
Mia turned around and gasped at the two figures floating behind her. Amanda and Melissa dawdled helplessly above the clock tower, a mere ten yards from impact. Even at 1000x speed, Mia could see the pull of gravity on their bodies. They sank through the air as if it were made of molasses. Their limbs flailed as slowly as minute hands.
“Oh my God!”
Semerjean lowered the platform in measure with their fall. “Yes. They didn’t think their cunning plan all the way through.”
Mia studied them from the edge of the platform. Their skin was scraped all over. Their clothes were a jumble of rips and bloodstains. While Melissa’s eyes screamed in alarm, Amanda’s were closed in pain and exhaustion. She must have pushed her tempis to the limit and then some.
Semerjean scrutinized Amanda with a casual look of intrigue. “Huh.”
“What?”
“Come see this. It’s fascinating.”
Grudgingly, Mia joined him. Her heart jumped in fright when Semerjean flicked his hand at Amanda, but all he did was turn the back of her shirt transparent. Now Mia could see what he was talking about: two scaly white formations on her shoulder blades.
“It’s tempis,” Mia said. “So what?”
“Look again.”
Mia took a closer look. On second glance, they seemed more deliberate in design, as if Amanda’s subconscious was crudely trying to fashion something. The scales weren’t actually scales at all, just a weak attempt at—
“—feathers.” Mia gaped. “She’s trying to make wings. Does that mean—”
“Oh, yes.” Semerjean grinned brightly. For a brief and painful moment, he looked just like David again. “Only ten percent of tempics can biologically generate aeris. Amanda just became one of them.”
Mia reeled at the thought of Amanda soaring through the sky like a swan. It seemed so alien, and yet so fitting.
“Can those save her?”
Semerjean chuckled. “They’ll barely slow her fall.”
“So help her already!”
“I have just the thing.”
He pulled a tarnished bronze disc from his shirt pocket and flung it at Amanda. It affixed itself to the back of her neck, then coated every inch of her in a skin-tight sheath of tempis.
Mia shuddered at her eerie new state. She looked completely inanimate now, lifeless, like an unfinished statue. “Will that keep her from falling?”
“No,” said Semerjean. “It’ll keep her from breaking.”
He studied his handiwork approvingly, then clapped his hands together. “And now at last my work is done.”
The platform descended. Mia looked up at the floating bodies. “Wait! What about Melissa?”
“What about her?”
“Aren’t you going to save her?”
“Why would I? Her situation solves itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?” He motioned to her. “She’s the third name on my list.”
The flying disc sank eighteen feet before Mia found her voice again. “Why?”
Semerjean pursed his lips. “I’ve explained it twice now. There are those who have the potential to cause great harm.”
“But she saved us. She’s a good person!”
“You think this is about good and evil?”
“Yes! She knew there was something wrong with you. She saw it from the moment she met you. We should have listened to her.”
Semerjean snorted dismissively. “It’s listening to her that gets you killed in the future.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Yell all you want, but consider this: if an ‘evil’ man like me can fly around saving lives today, then is it not inconceivable that a good woman with good intentions could destroy many lives in the future? Have I not explained how the strings work?”
Mia fought to suppress her rage. The girl she loved was still in need of rescue. If she pushed Semerjean too hard, it’d be all over for Carrie. He’d probably kill her himself and make Mia watch.
But a voice in her head had been haranguing her for minutes, faulting her for letting Semerjean kill anyone today.
You still have some influence over him, it insisted. He cares what you think. He practically admitted it himself.
“No!”
Semerjean turned to face her. “Excuse me?”
Mia shook a finger at him. “I was there when you first met Melissa. She really got under your skin that night, made you angrier than I’d ever seen you. I don’t think that was an act.”
Semerjean smiled patiently. “Do tell.”
“You lost your cool and then you lost two fingers. You’ve been mad at her ever since. Nobody loses fingers where you come from.”
“Mia . . .”
“They probably don’t even have pain.”
The platform stopped in front of the clock tower. Semerjean stepped forward, his mouth turned down. The lightning cracks of glass loomed behind him.
“You’ve spent eleven months with David and only eleven minutes with me. What makes you think you know me?”
“Because it’s been a long eleven minutes. And I’ve been paying attention.”
Semerjean laughed. “A fourteen-year-old trying to gauge the mind of a three-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old.”
“I thought only vain people put a number on it.”
“I’m plenty vain.”
“I think you are too,” Mia said. “You can lie to me but you can’t lie to yourself. There’s no strategy behind killing Melissa. You just don’t like her.”
Time seemed to stop all over again as Semerjean stared at Mia. While a vengeful part of her took pleasure in his displeasure, the rest of her fell into panic.
This is it, she convinced herself. This is where he kills me.
After a seemingly endless silence, Semerjean fished into his shirt pocket and removed another bronze disc. He threw the object high into the air, his cool blue eyes never leaving Mia.
By the time she dared look up, a smooth skin of tempis had formed around both women. Amanda and Melissa were nearly indistinguishable from each other in their hard white shells. They looked more like sisters than the Givens ever did.
Mia turned to Semerjean, thunderstruck. “You saved her.”
“For now.”
“But . . .” Her inner voices screamed at her, begging her not to push her luck. “Why?”
Semerjean mulled the question, his gaze darting around the clamshell hood of the amphitheater. “It’s not because you were right about me. You weren’t. Furthermore, should you ever be in a position to analyze my wife and son, I strongly advise you don’t. I’m the ‘people person’ in our family. They don’t share my tolerance for fools.”
He paced the platform with a contemplative expression. “But you made a good point. There’s a word that you and the others continually used to describe David, a compliment that never sat well with me. Do you know which one I’m talking about?”
Mia tensely shook her head. She was done making guesses for the day.
“‘Brave,’” he answered. “You thought I was courageous in the face of danger, but can it really be called bravery when I was never truly at risk? I have more strength, more power, more insight than all our enemies combined. You all saw me as David, when I was secretly Goliath.”
He wagged a finger at her. “But you, you risked my wrath over a woman you barely know. You took me on knowing full well what I could do to you.”
A genial laugh escaped him. “If that isn’t bravery, I don’t know what is.”
Mia had no idea whether to be flattered or insulted. She kept an eye on Melissa, half afraid that Semerjean would suddenly change his mind again.
“It’s all right,” he assured her. “You’ve inspired me to take a less drastic approach with Melissa. I will ‘sack up,’ as the men here say, and face her on a more level battlefield.”
Semerjean tapped his chin in thought. “It’s funny. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. You’re living proof of that. But where I come from, my people only have one last mortal threat. What will happen when we destroy it entirely? What will we become?”
Mia’s shoulders drooped with exhaustion. She had finally reached the limits of her tolerance.
“Look, I gave you my time. I listened to what you had to say.”
“Well, that second part’s debatable but—”
“Will you please save Carrie now?”
Semerjean put his hands in his pockets and flashed her a boyish grin. “I already did.”
The platform descended on a quick, slanted path, fast enough to turn Mia’s stomach. The moment it stopped, she moved to the edge and looked down. They were just thirty feet above Temperance Street, right where their journey had begun. Stan Bloom lay miserably on the floor of the alcove, his bloody chest lit with a bright, golden healing disc. Ten feet to his right, Carrie remained petrified at the mouth of the alley. There wasn’t any trace left of the dragonette or its flame.
Mia looked at Semerjean, stammering. “When—”
“Eleven minutes ago. Right after we started.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I’d tell you I did it because I care about you, but you wouldn’t believe me. So let’s just say there’s more to gain by keeping her alive.”
Mia felt like crying all over again—tears of relief, tears of rage, tears of exhaustion and lament. A hundred new questions piled up on her tongue. They all cleared a path for the king of the lot.
“What do you want with me?”
“I want you to make a child with Liam.”
“I know that. I’m talking right here, right now. What do you want?”
Semerjean took a lingering look at the tower. “By external clocks, we’ve now officially spent one second together.”
“So?”
He turned his gaze back to Mia. “I want one more.”
—
While the war beneath them continued to rage in microscopic increments, Semerjean and Mia sat quietly on the edge of the disc, their feet dangling high above Temperance Street. By now, Mia had become so numb that she almost found this relaxing. She could have been kicking her legs off an old country bridge, spending a mindless Sunday morning with her old friend David.
“Who’s Ioni?” she asked without thinking.
Semerjean leaned back on his elbows, an evincible contempt in his eyes. “Even we don’t know for sure. Her powers and technology are alien to us. She’s been on this world for more than a hundred years. She arrived with the Cataclysm.”
He stared out at the perimeter park. “My son believes she was the Cataclysm.”
Mia didn’t even know how to begin processing that. Her mind fumbled for the next question. “Why Liam?”
Semerjean took a deep breath before answering. “He’s a good kid. Smarter than his father. I thought he’d be a good match for you.”
He eyed her carefully. “You could always pick someone else.”
“I did pick someone else.”
“Someone who could get you pregnant.”
“I don’t want to be pregnant.”
“That’s your choice,” Semerjean said. The chill in his voice nearly made her heart drop.
Her fingers tapped a rapid beat on the aeris. “Did you even like us, Semerjean?”
“I like you and Zack very much.”
“But not the others.”
He flipped his hand in a lazy shrug. “The only one of you I actively dislike is Peter.”
“He’s done more for me than you ever have.”
“Perhaps, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in his string theory.”
“Fuck you.”
“There’s no saving this world, Mia, but you can save yourselves.”
“Just leave me alone already!”
Semerjean climbed back to his feet. He flanked Mia’s side and watched the slow, silent action in the village square.
“As I said, things will be different after today. You’ll have peace with the Gothams, peace with the government. And just a few minutes from now, my family and I will make our own peace offering. If you do the smart thing—”
“The smart thing,” Mia mocked.
“—you’ll have a long and happy future.”
Hot blood coursed through Mia’s face. She felt another wave of nausea coming on.
“We’re not asking for anything untoward,” Semerjean said. “Just the opposite. We want to create life to preserve it. That’s all this is about.”
“I told you—”
“I know what you said, and I understand why. But you’re the smartest one of the Silvers, Mia. When all the dust settles and all your wounds heal, you’ll think about everything I told you today and you’ll come to see things my way.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because you’ve met the real me now. You’ve seen me at work. There are people I need and people I don’t, and you’ve seen firsthand how I handle both.”
Semerjean leaned in closer and gripped her by the shoulders. “Think about the future. Be someone I need.”
He walked to the other end of the platform, then brushed the silver disc on the back of his hand. The clock of the world suddenly came unstuck. The underland reverted to normal speed.
Smiling, Semerjean turned to Mia and made a sweeping gesture at the dragonettes, right as they all lost power. They spun toward the ground in whistling synch and then passed harmlessly through the floor of the village.
While the townspeople gasped and whooped in surprise, Semerjean kept his blithe blue eyes on Mia.
“Invasion’s over,” he told her. “We won.”