Adrenaline is an odd chemical. When it floods the system in great quantities your perception of time skews strangely. Every detail is crisp and clear, absorbed and processed. It’s like being Neo in The Matrix. Time slows. You observe.
If only I got Neo’s reaction times too.
Instead, I watch in excruciating detail as the door flies toward my head.
My mind knows how to pull the sword, how to aim it, how to best angle it to break down the door. But the knowledge is useless.
A hundred machine guns track my path. I rotate as I fly, watch them rotate with me. I spin from headfirst to feetfirst. I see Kayla raise her sword. I can even make out her movements for once. I watch fascinated as she slices through the first of the gun barrels.
Then my feet strike the door. And time catches up with me. A compressed blur of movement and pain rushing past me, over me, trampling me.
My ankles feel broken. My head rings. The floor is cold and hard. I’m bleeding onto it.
I’m through a doorway. In the dark. Muzzle flares cast a thunderous strobe light. I wait to die, perforated by sixty rounds a minute. But the guns aren’t firing at me. The guns don’t seem to care.
Kayla dances on the shoulders of the soldiers. Her sword is a line of liquid fire. Shards of metal spiral through the air as she hacks away with a sushi chef’s precision and efficiency.
And the soldiers fire and fire and fire, and fill the whole world with flying lead. And they cannot hit her.
But I am not here to gawp. I am not here to stare. I have to get up, I tell my arms and legs. I have to get up. Now. I have to turn around.
Knees trembling, I make it to my feet. The room I’m in is dark, cool, and larger than I expected. Probably most of the width of the tower. It’s a mess of machinery. Great hulks of painted steel lying dead and cold. Cables and cords thick on the ground. Pipes snake to the ceiling in ropy pillars. There are great panels of dials and meters, unreadable despite the reflected light of Kayla’s firefight.
The lower edge of Big Ben’s clock face breaches the upper half of the opposite wall. A white crescent of filtered moonlight.
I take steps in, try to see past the metal hulks to the Chronometer. Try to make out Leo Malkin in the mess. Surely if you decide to enshrine the device that controls all of time, you actually, well, give it some sort of shrine. It seems implicit in the action.
I go deeper in. Where is he? Where is the bastard? Where is my piece of his goddamn hide?
The noise of the firefight outside seems to drop away too quickly. I glance over my shoulder. The doorway seems small now.
A noise to my left seizes my attention, gives it a good shake. I stoop low, peer around the corner of another metal hulk. Its surface is cold against my hand, gently dotted with condensation.
There, rising out of a tangle of metal cords, is something like a plinth. An industrial interpretation of an ornamental table. Hard steel edges, decorative rivets.
Sitting on it, reflecting the filtered moonlight that slants in through the clock face—a large bell jar. And inside that…
The Chronometer.
It looks like nothing else but a large golden clock, baroque in detail, its inner workings clearly displayed from its case-less back. Tiny cogs whir. Counterweights shift. Around it, pudgy little angels stroke harps.
For one of the most powerful supernatural artifacts in the world, it looks terribly like something my gran would have owned.
However, while it doesn’t appeal to my aesthetic senses in the slightest, apparently Leo Malkin has a mad-on for it.
He stands with his back to me, arms raised, a massive industrial-sized wrench poised above his head.
He brings it down. A great sweeping, powerful arc. And I stare. Too late. Too late by mere seconds.
The wrench bounces off the bell jar with a dull bonk. Malkin grunts with effort. Apparently the Chronometer is protected by more than just an electric anti-magic field.
But there are spider-line cracks in the glass. This is not some impenetrable barrier. Given time, Malkin will get through.
Funny—in the house of time itself, it’s the one thing Malkin doesn’t have.
Behind Malkin hovers something like a heat haze. It’s a barely perceptible shimmer. I’d probably have never noticed it if it wasn’t turning pipes into a fine rust-colored powder.
It’s spreading, rolling gently toward Malkin. He’s got about two minutes before it sets his personal clock back. And I’m guessing that then there’ll be about one more minute before it eats through the glass and sets to work erasing all of reality.
I look down at my left hand. The wires are knotted around my fingers. And I don’t need minutes to spray him across the room.
I point them at him.
“Hey!” I yell. There is a smile stretched across my skull. I’m going to enjoy this. I’m actually going to enjoy the death of another human being. Something is broken in me, and I don’t care. And I want him to know. I want him to know he is reaping what he’s sown.
Malkin turns around, stares at me. His eyes go wide. And he knows.
“Enjoy hell, you motherfu—”
A flash of light.
Oh crap. Why did I have to open my big mouth?