Crucible Zero (28 page)

The world stayed steady beneath me and around me. I felt like crap, but I was standing, and I was pretty sure I could walk.

“When did you and I meet?” I asked Abraham. I needed to know he was the Abraham in the reality that I wanted to thrive.

“In my recollection, we met back in the jail in 1910. More recently, at your kitchen door.” He frowned. “Why do you—”

I held up my finger. “You came with Foster and Sallyo. You met my brother, Quinten, and Neds, whom we left at House Earth Compound Five, which we also might have just saved from being bombed. Is this correct?”

“Yes.”

Oh, thank heaven. I really was in the right timeway. “Gold. I can't touch that watch again, so I can't break it.”

“We noticed,” Sallyo said.

“Someone else is going to have to take care of that,” I said.

The hall filled with a light so bright, I thought I'd gone blind.

“Did you think I would let you walk into my House?” Slater's voice rolled out over the speakers. “Did you think I wouldn't know you were here? That I haven't known all along that you were here? You gravely underestimate my intelligence, Ms. Case.”

“The door!” Sallyo ran for the door at the end of the hall, but it was locked. And before Abraham or Foster could break it down, before we could pull a gun, the room was flooded with a gas that tasted like grape seeds and motor oil.

Sallyo collapsed, gasping. My vision narrowed down. The hallway tilted as I fell.

And everything went black.

I
woke to the sound of gunfire. Again. Five measured shots rang out, impossibly close. Impossibly loud.

My head and all the rest of me hurt, but I forced my eyes open. I was chained to a wall, manacles around my wrists above me, ankles shackled, waist pinned.

It was a small, clean room. Metal walls, concrete floor. One door, locked and bolted. No windows. It was cold in here, as if the person who spent the most time in the space worked hard enough to sweat.

Abraham sat, shackled, in a chair that was bolted into the floor. He was unconscious.

Foster lay on the ground next to me, bleeding from the bullet holes in his chest. His eyes were open, fixed on some distant vision between the floor and ceiling, his breathing labored and drawn.

Slater, wearing a dark, tailored suit, stood next to Foster's prone body. The gun in his hand—my gun—was aimed at Foster's head. He must have heard us talking in the hallway. He knew exactly what those bullets held: Shelley dust.

I'd heard five shots. There was only one left.

“Don't,” I said, trying to make my voice heard over the ringing in my ears. “Don't kill him.”

“Ah, Matilda,” Slater said, his back still toward me, his head tipped down as if he were hypnotized by the bleeding man below him. “You still think you can tell me what to do.”

He turned. The shadows of the fluorescent lights revealed a madness in him that time had only cultivated.

He was not a man I'd ever thought would listen to reason. He had always been self-important, conniving, vicious.

But now I knew there was nothing I could say that would make him do anything other than exactly what he wanted. There was nothing human left of him.

“Do you have the watch?” he asked with the lullaby softness of a man just warming up to the pain he knew he was going to put a person through.

“No,” I said.

“You are lying to me, Matilda Case. You have always lied to me. But your friend Welton didn't lie to me when I tore out the wires of his guts and left him bleeding on the floor. He told me about the watch. He said you must have it. So. Where is the watch?”

“I don't have it,” I said again. “I don't have to have it to kill you.”

“More lies. It is a wonder I don't just end you forever. Now.” He lifted the gun, leveling the barrel at my head.

Galvanized can live forever. We are endlessly repairable, as long as the majority of the brain is not destroyed. But that bullet was filled with Shelley dust. One of those, in my brain, would do more harm than a dozen bullets.

It would be the end of me.

“Shoot,” I said. “It won't kill me as long as the watch is intact. Nothing you can do can kill me.”

The smile pulled his lips away from his teeth and tightened the corners of his eyes. He gripped the gun a little tighter, and his breathing quickened.

Shoot me,
I thought. It would hurt like hell, but that would be the last of the Shelley dust bullets. If he used it on me, he couldn't use it to finish off Foster. Foster already had too many bullets working to kill him. But none of them were in his head. Maybe Foster would survive.

Slater held his breath, and I held mine.

But then slowly, slowly, he lowered the gun.

He strolled toward me in measured steps, shoes a solid
thump
against concrete. He stopped so close, I could feel his breath on my cheek as he whispered in my ear. “Do not think you can tell me what to do.” He shifted the gun and shoved it up under my sternum so hard, I grunted from the pain.

“Do you feel that?” he asked. “That is your death. I will pull your guts from your body with my bare hands. And I will end your agony only when your wretched screams please me. You and I are locked in this game,” he said, “locked in time together. But I will hang you by your bones and bathe in your blood.”

He slammed his fist into my stomach, and I yelled as ribs cracked.

“Where—” He slammed his fist into me again: the same damn place. “Is.”
Slam.
“The.”
Slam.
“Watch.”

I was dizzy with pain. Blood covered the back of my throat and dribbled down my chin and from my nose. He'd broken more than ribs. I was bleeding inside.

Even if I could get enough air into my tortured lungs to give him an answer, I wouldn't give the bastard the satisfaction.

“No?” he whispered close to my cheek again. “Then let's see what will loosen your tongue.”

I tried to pull myself up straight, but my stomach and ribs were throbbing with pain. Bones felt like broken glass shifting around inside of me, catching and cutting.

I was strong. But, holy shit, so was he.

“Is this the thing you want, Matilda Case?” he asked.

I blinked until the sweat cleared from my eyes. I expected him to be standing over Foster again. But he was beside Abraham, one hand gripping Abraham's hair tight, yanking his head back, the other pressing the gun against his temple.

“This man, this collection of old flesh and spare parts? Is that what you will risk your life for?”

Abraham's eyes were open and fixed on me. He didn't appear to have any new injuries.

“Do you love him, Matilda?” Slater asked. Then yelled, “Do you love him?”

That was a Shelley dust bullet pointed at Abraham's head.

That would be enough to kill him.

I'd seen him almost die from Shelley dust before.

I couldn't do that again.

“No,” I said.

Slater's eyes narrowed, and he bared his straight blunt teeth. “Then I could shoot him, and you wouldn't care?”

I didn't say anything. Abraham's gaze held mine.

Abraham knew I was lying. He knew I was trying to save his life.

But maybe nothing I said could.

“Slater,” Abraham said.

“Shut up!” Slater yelled.

And then Slater pulled the trigger.

Abraham jerked, trying to duck the shot, but the gun was too close.

I yelled as blood sprayed back, covering the floor. Abraham slumped sideways in the chair. Slater yelled and fired again and again, even though the chamber was empty.

There had been only six bullets. He'd unloaded five of them in Foster and the last in Abraham.

Abraham wasn't moving. The left side of his face was a mess of blood and muscle and bone.

That son of a bitch had killed him.

Rage fueled a fire in me. I yanked the cuffs, straining to break the shackles. But Slater was no fool. He knew just how much restraint was needed to keep a galvanized pinned.

This wasn't how it was going to end. I wasn't going to let Slater rule this world or any other world.

No.

Not again.

Never again.

A motion on the floor caught my gaze.

Foster shifted his hand. His eyes begged me to stay silent. In his hand was the watch. His body was full of Shelley dust, and I knew it was undoing him, dissolving his stitches, destroying his organs. But he closed his hand around the watch, asking me.

I nodded.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

He summoned the last of his strength. His massive hand was pale and shaking, his breathing ragged. Foster squeezed the watch, crushing it until metal collapsed and gears ground down.

The world swayed.

Then reality exploded and fractured into a thousand different shards, shattering me with it.

A great bell tolled like thunder, driving rose-scented rain over me and the sound of my screams. I didn't know if destroying the watch would work to change the world. I didn't know if I would be lost in this chaos of times, or if I would ever find my way home again.

But right now, all that mattered to me, the only thing I wanted, was to kill Slater.

In this timeway—for however long it lasted—in this brief space between time, I was free, the shackles gone.

A thousand views of the room, the world, spun around me: broken, bloody, empty, rubble, burning, torn. A thousand different times slipped past me like spinning disks.

I didn't even try to make sense of them.

Slater was the only other fixed point. And he was the only thing I was fixed on. He stood across the room, his back toward me.

He turned.

I pulled the syringe out of the breast pocket of the leather jacket Abraham had given me, tucking it into my palm. My movements were nightmarishly slow; every action I took seemed to fill a thousand years.

I ran for Slater. I ran to end him. To kill him. Now and finally.

Each step was a struggle, as if time dragged against me, pulling like gravity, as reality shattered and shattered again, dragging me toward the bell that echoed its own peal, a cacophony of forevers.

Slater lifted a different gun.

The watch was broken. If it was the relic, I could kill him. He could kill me.

I heard him yell as he squeezed the trigger, felt the hot agony of the bullet strike my chest. Once. Twice.

I kept running, would never stop running, anger and hatred pulsing through me.

He had killed my family. He had killed my friends. He had destroyed my world and destroyed the only time and reality I could call home.

Abraham was bleeding, dying. Foster was breathing his last breath.

I would not abide living in any time, in any world where Slater was still alive while they were not.

Breaking the watch should have severed the circuit of time pouring between Slater and me. But maybe Welton had gotten that wrong. Maybe the circuit would be broken only when one of us was dead. Or maybe the watch wasn't the key. Maybe it was my grandmother's life.

I would never sacrifice her. I could never hurt her. This had to be the answer. This had to work.

And so I ran.

“Matilda!” A voice called out over the bell, my name echoing and repeating into a song I could not escape.

Slater must have heard it too. He turned to look at the same moment I did.

And there, standing at a distance and a simultaneous nearness my mind refused to comprehend, was a small, white-haired woman. Grandma. A great wind blew her hair behind her like a wing, and in her hands was a knitted scarf.

In my time, my reality, she had been able to stitch up bits of time into a scarf I had used to freeze time. If Welton's theory was true, her ability to do that suddenly made more sense. It wasn't the little pocket sheep that gave her time, but the fact that she had been at the very heart of the time experiment, at the crucible zero of when time had both broken and mended.

She pulled on the scarf stitches, unraveling the cloth. If that scarf was anything like the one she'd given me in my timeway, it would pause time.

“Now, my sweet,” she said, her voice softened by distance and yet so near, it was startling. “Now.”

Slater wasn't moving anymore. He was frozen in front of me, the gun still raised.

All time, all chaos, was frozen, still and silent. The only things moving were me and my grandmother, whose hands steadily ticked away each stitch like the second hand of a clock, the pulse of the universe captured in the thread of her life.

I ran. My feet were no longer trapped and hobbled by time. I was wings. I was freedom. I was death.

I stopped in front of Slater. Stood squarely in front of him.

“This is for Robert, whose body and life you stole.” I stabbed the syringe into his carotid artery. “This is for the innocents you killed.” I forced the plunger down.

Then I pulled the gun out of his hand. “And this,” I said, pressing the barrel against his forehead, “is for me, you son of a bitch.”

I unloaded the clip into his skull.

The bell pealed, an infinite sound that filled me with the scent of roses.

Slater convulsed and fell to his knees, dead before he hit the ground.

I spun, looking for my grandmother. Was his death her death?

She was gone, whisked away by the swirling chaos of times streaming by fast. Too fast. Just like I would be whisked away.

I threw myself toward the reality I had fought for. The reality so many had died for. Before I knew if I had reached it or not, the world drained down a great hole, and I was gone.

*   *   *

I was standing, a gun in my shackled hand. Across the small, cold room where we'd been imprisoned, Slater lay on the floor. He was not moving. He was not breathing.

A pool of blood spread in a wide circle around him. The syringe of Shelley dust was buried in his neck.

I didn't know if he was dead. Didn't know if that small amount of Shelley dust and the bullets to his brain would kill him. I strained against the shackles, afraid he'd rise again.

The bone in my left wrist snapped, and I yelled. But the shackle broke free from the concrete. I threw my weight into it, and broke the right shackle free.

I fumbled with the other restraints at my waist and feet, my broken left hand tucked against my ribs. Abraham was slumped, still chained in his chair. Foster lay unmoving on the other side of the room.

I wanted to go to them to see if they were still breathing, but I had to know that Slater was dead.

I limped over to him, the bullets, shattered ribs, and broken wrist sending shots of pain through me with every step.

I didn't have a weapon to kill him with.

But I didn't need one.

I crouched over his prone body. He lay facedown. He might be dead. Well, I intended to make sure.

I gripped the gun in my right, unbroken hand, and slammed it into his head, pounding until bone cracked, until blood and brains stained my fist.

Galvanized could be revived as long as enough of our brains remained intact.

I methodically made sure there wasn't anything left of Slater.

“Hold it right there,” a man's voice said. “Put down the gun, and step away from the body.”

The voice broke my grim thrall, and I blinked, suddenly aware of the gore around me.

“That,” I whispered, “was for Welton and Oscar and Abraham, and all the other people you destroyed, you sick bastard.”