I scrambled for the gun that flew out of his hand, dug it out of the brush, then turned it on Slater before he regained his feet.
“Just stay down,” I ordered.
Foster stood above him, rain soaking the hat Welton had made him wear and sending rivulets down along his stitches, his scars. His fists were locked at his sides. Hatred burned in his eyes.
“Thanks, Foster,” I said. “Is Welton around?”
Right about then I heard footsteps. Welton walked up the path at an even pace, his breathing more labored than it should be, a slap of red spreading from his cheeks out across his wet pale face.
“Was coming to get you,” I said. “Quinten needs you at the house, quick.”
He nodded, then stopped just behind and to the side of Foster, looking down at Slater.
“So, you found a way, didn’t you?” he asked, searching Robert’s face for signs of the transplanted Slater Orange. “A way out of that death-trap body of yours you filled with chemicals to keep alive. But this solution is cruel. You murdered a man when you implanted Robert Twelfth into your dying body.”
“Galvanized aren’t men,” Slater said.
“I’ve never agreed with that,” Welton said. “But you know the laws. Galvanized can’t rule. You will never be the head of a House. Reeves Silver is just using you. He will kill you and take over House Orange the moment it suits him.”
“I will be the first galvanized to rise to power,” Slater said. “I am immortal. I have all the time I need to make the world mine.” He stabbed at his chest. “I will continue long after you mewling mortals are dust and forgotten.”
Welton’s eyes flicked up to me. “Did you tell him about the time break?”
“Yep.”
“Did you tell him he’s about to be dead?”
“He had too much megalomania in his ears to hear me.”
Welton flashed me a bright grin. “He’s always been a little tight-screwed.”
“Well, right now he’s in my way.”
“Oh?” Welton waved a couple fingers toward Foster. “We need him to be quiet.”
Slater pushed back, trying to get his feet under him, real terror on his face as Foster grabbed hold of his shirt in one hand and pounded him in the face with the other until he was unconscious.
“Will that do?” Welton asked.
“Perfectly. I have rope at the house. Let’s talk and walk.”
Welton patted Foster’s shoulder. “I’ve wanted you to hit Slater in the face for years,” he said. “I’m just sorry it’s your friend’s body he’s wearing. Are you okay, buddy?”
Foster looked like he still wanted to pound something, but he gave Welton a grunt and a rusty nod.
“Good,” Welton said. “How about you pick him up and bring him along?”
Foster bent and picked up Slater as if he didn’t weigh any more than a wet kitten.
We headed back to the house as quickly as Welton could walk. Which wasn’t nearly fast enough for my spinning thoughts.
Less than an hour left.
“I was coming your way for a reason,” I said. “Quinten wanted you.”
“Do you know why?”
“Reeves destroyed our equipment.”
“Reeves? As in, Head of House Silver Reeves?”
“He was here. You were right: those guards were his. He held our grandmother hostage.”
“Where is he now?”
“Gone. With Grandma and Abraham.”
“Reeves Silver has Abraham?” Welton stopped talking for a short distance so he could get his breathing under control. “Why did he leave you here?”
“He wants us to sign House Brown over to him.”
I didn’t know if Welton was taking a little time to think that over or if he just didn’t have any extra breath. We were nearly to the house when he spoke again.
“I always thought he had his thumb on House Brown,” he said. “All the smuggling rings and so on.”
“Nothing official that I’ve heard about,” I said. “All the Houses use members of House Brown to get what they want. Mostly none of us care, since House Brown is just folk trying to get by on their own. If a House hires them for legal or illegal work . . . Well, I can understand doing something because you need to keep food on the table.”
“Still . . . odd,” Welton said.
“To negotiate with us and tell us to step down from running House Brown?” I said. “Not that odd. A lot of people trust Quinten and me to give them good information. With the Houses currently in such chaos, a lot of House Brown is going to hole up, pull stakes, and hide away until things sort out. Those who remain in contact with the outside world will be looking for clean information from us. Reeves wants to be in control of what information we give them.”
“There’s more,” Welton said. “Must be more that he wants.”
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” I said. “Right now, I don’t care.”
We’d finally made it to the house, taking a good ten minutes for a walk that shouldn’t have taken more than half that. Ten minutes we didn’t have to spare.
I glanced at Slater, who was still unconscious in Foster’s arms. I didn’t think he’d wake up before we handled the time situation, but just in case, I wanted him tied down tight. Slater might not be a man who knew how to physically fight, but that body he was wearing was just as uncommonly strong as mine was.
I pushed open the kitchen door and nearly walked into Ned’s shotgun.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Neds asked, the barrel of the gun notching toward Slater.
“Taking over the world, apparently,” I said. “Drop him in a chair, Foster. We’ll truss him up.”
Foster pulled a chair out with his foot and dumped Slater unceremoniously into it.
“Neds, get the rope,” I said. “The strong stuff. And remember he’s galvanized and can snap that chair if he flexes right. So don’t be shy with the knots.”
“I know how to keep a man still,” Left Ned said, “stitched or otherwise.”
“Good.” I measured Welton’s breathing. It seemed a little less labored. “Think you can handle some stairs?”
“Up?” he asked with a little dread.
“Basement.”
“Lead the way.”
Foster took a step to follow us, but Welton shook his head. “Stay here and watch him.” He pointed at Slater. “I’ll be fine with Matilda.”
Foster frowned, and his pink eyes flicked up to meet my gaze.
“I’ll make sure he sits and rests,” I said. “We need his brains more than anything else right now. I can do whatever repair work needs to be done on the equipment.”
Foster reluctantly moved back closer to Slater, positioning himself within punching range. Between Foster’s obvious dislike of the man and Neds’ shoot-first-and-apologize-never attitude, I wasn’t sure what kind of shape Slater was going to be in when we came back upstairs.
If we came back upstairs. Time was falling away, faster and faster. We had—what—thirty minutes?
“And tell Neds to frisk him, okay?” I said to Foster. “If Slater was stupid enough to bring our grandmother’s journal out with him, it’d be all kinds of useful.”
I led Welton down the hall and through the open door to the basement.
He took a deep breath at the top of the stairs and then walked down them at a steady pace, his hand gripping the rail.
“How’s it going?” I asked, following Welton.
“Just fine,” Quinten said. “I should have it up and running in a month.” He was crouched in front of the crate-sized timetable he’d made. It seemed to be in one piece, though it canted slightly to the right, one wooden foot on one corner broken off. He didn’t seem concerned about the casing that surrounded the invention.
Instead he’d pulled out yards of wires, bits of metal and glass, and thin, flexible tubes filled with liquid. I had no idea what any of it did or was supposed to do, and wouldn’t begin to guess which parts of it might be bro
ken.
Gloria stood next to him, a cloth packet of tools spread out on a table next to her. She had a calm but sort of grim expression, as if she knew the patient wasn’t going to pull through but the doctor hadn’t figured that out yet.
“This is, well, this was impressive,” Welton said, stepping out into the rubble of our dreams. “I knew you had your hands on most of the modern communication and computing technology, but a telegraph?” He walked over to the huge wooden desk that was demolished, where the telegraph key lay on top of the debris. “And is that a . . . shortwave radio?” He chuckled and clapped his hands together. “Delightful!” he declared. “What other old tricks did you have up your sleeves? Smoke signals and lanterns in the night?”
“All we have right now,” Quinten said, “is a problem. How much research did you really do into the Wings of Mercury experiment?”
Welton walked over to where my brother was systematically soldering wires into a network of plastics and crystals and rare metals he had carefully balanced on a tray across his lap.
I jogged over to the broken bank of screens over the curved desk and picked up a chair. I brought it over for Welton.
“I scoured every record and lead I could find,” Welton said. “It was the beginning of Foster’s experimentation, and I wanted to know the source of it. Before I gave him any modifications, I wanted make sure I wasn’t doing him any harm.”
“So, you know how time broke?”
“No, not at all.”
I offered him the chair, and Welton nodded his thanks and sat. “You do know it’s mostly myth and legend, that experiment? The records, the real hard evidence, has been lost, and the scattered mentions and notes that survived in the histories are suppositions and hearsay.”
Quinten didn’t stop, didn’t even pause in what he was doing. “The journal was the records,” he said.
“We don’t have the journal,” Welton said.
“I understand the situation,” Quinten said, carefully placing a thin glass tube with wires attached at both ends back into the cabinet. “And I’m as certain as I can be that my calculations will change the event so that we all don’t die in a few minutes.”
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, we all don’t die? You told me when the break in time mends, it will just be the galvanized who die.”
“I omitted some details,” he said.
“You lied to me?”
“No, I just didn’t tell you all of the outcomes.”
“That’s called lying.”
“What,” Gloria said, “is going to happen, Quin? If you don’t fix that? If time mends without us doing anything about it?”
He carried on with what he was doing, steady hands, steady progress, like a man who had only moments to defuse a bomb. And I supposed that was pretty close to what he was doing—only the bomb was time, and his wire cutter was a pile of broken junk on the floor.
“The blast will kill everyone in an hundred-mile radius. Maybe a thousand.”
A thousand-mile radius would wipe out most of the big cities on the eastern seashore, and everything between here and the Mississippi.
“Thousands,” I breathed.
“Millions,” Welton said. “Millions will die.”
“How much time do we have left?” I asked.
Gloria looked at my brother’s pocket watch. “Eighteen minutes.”
24
I didn’t want to tell him. That I remember the infinity bell. That I remember time breaking. That I know he gave up everything to change the world.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
“Quinten, you have to get out of here,” I said.
“No.”
“I can make you leave.”
“No, you can’t. And there is a chance, a small one, that if we are close enough to the time event, we might survive.”
I did not believe him. “How?”
“Think of it as the eye of a storm,” Quinten said. “Time will mend around us, but the repercussions from that event will radiate outward. Destroying half of the people on this side of the country.”
I didn’t know where Reeves had taken Abraham and Grandma. But it hadn’t been enough time for them to be thousands of miles away.
Which meant Grandma and Abraham were in the blast zone too.
And so were all the people—families—who were a part of House Brown, and all the other people who worked for the Houses and were trying to make their way through the world as best they could.
Billions of peoples will die.
Unless he went back in time to try to change the experiment.
Except I was the one who was going to go back in time. I couldn’t let him die. But we weren’t going to have a chance to fight about that if we didn’t get the device of his up and running.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Here,” Welton stood stiffly from the chair and walked over to kneel next to Quinten. “This will be faster.” He reached into the cabinet and adjusted something while Quinten nodded and continued soldering.
“Is there something I can get you?” I asked. “Either of you?” I hated standing here with my figurative hands in my figurative pockets, while the world not so figuratively came to an end.
“Nothing,” Quinten said.
“Now, if you had the journal . . .” Welton said.
“Or our grandmother,” Quinten said.
“For what?” Welton asked. “Cookies and milk?”
“No. It’s her journal, and since she wrote it, we thought we could get the information from her.”
“Your grandmother had the equation all along?” Welton asked. “Why didn’t you just stay home and talk to the woman?”
“She’s very old,” Quinten said. “Her memories are scattered. We’d hoped . . . well, it doesn’t matter.”
Except that it did. We needed the journal or someone who had read it. Quinten and I had never read it, but Slater owned it. He must have read it. Somewhere in that head of his might be the information we needed.
“Slater!” I said, running for the stairs.
I rushed into the kitchen, where Foster stood in the exact same position, staring at the unconscious Slater as if waiting for him to wake up so he could punch him out again.
Neds rested one shoulder against the wall where he could see into the living room and out the kitchen window at the same time, shotgun still in his hands.
“Touch him,” I said to Neds. “Touch Slater and see if you can get the vision of what he read in the journal.”
Right Ned frowned. “I don’t think that will work, Tilly. I can’t pick and choose what I see.”
“Try. Please try. All we need is the calculations, so Quinten can check his against them.”
“Which could be pages and pages of formulas,” Left Ned said.
“Please.”
They held my gaze for a moment, maybe as surprised as I was at the desperation in my voice.
“Get a piece of paper,” Left Ned said.
“Thank you.” I opened a drawer, the wrong one, then opened two more before I found paper and a pencil. “I know you don’t like doing this. I know what I’m asking you. If we get out of this somehow, I want you to know I’ll pay you back.”
“And if we don’t?” Right Ned said, taking the pencil.
“I want you to know that I’ve always considered you my friend even when I was angry about you spying on us.”
He smiled and set the paper on the table, switching the pencil to his right hand so Left Ned could write, and then reaching out with his left hand to touch Slater, who was trussed up tighter than a ham hock, his eyes still closed.
Neds touched Slater’s hand. I knew skin-to-skin contact worked best for him to see the visions in other folks’ minds.
Right Ned jerked his head back and grunted, scowling like he’d just caught a whiff of something rotted and foul.
Left Ned swore under his breath and clenched his fingers around the pencil, not looking at Slater, not l
ooking at anything but the visions in Slater’s mind.
“Are you okay?” I asked, but he wasn’t paying attention to me.
A loud crash from outside the house had me running to the window, Neds’ shotgun in my hands. Lizard?
Not Lizard. There was an army coming this way, fronted by vehicles that crashed over our fences like they weren’t even there.
The vehicles were black. The soldiers wore black.
Dozens of trained fighters moved out to surround the house with more weapons than I’d seen in my life. Reeves Silver hadn’t called off the troops. The lying bastard had called them in.
Shit.
“We have company,” I said, glancing at the clock on the wall. Five minutes left. “Neds,” I said. “Anything?”
“It’s . . .” Right Ned said in a strained voice, “impossible to sort a mind in seconds.”
“Keep trying.” I ran into the living room and gathered up all the guns I could carry. Then I ran back to the kitchen and handed Foster the semiautomatic. “You know how to use this, don’t you?”
His expression didn’t shift, but he handled that weapon like he’d been born with it. All those wars he’d fought, all the lives the Houses had made him take had left their mark on him. His hands and his eyes were steady as an assassin’s.
“I’m going to flip the house locks, if they haven’t been cut yet,” I said. “That will take care of doors and windows.”
I ran back to the pantry on the far side of the kitchen, where one of our main lock stations was set up. There was another control in the basement and one in Dad’s lab below the pump house.
Abraham had said he’d never seen scramblers and blockers like those my father, genius brother, and Neds had built, improved, and installed on our house.
I just hoped they’d be enough to buy us five minutes.
I triggered the locks, then the emergency feeds.
A blast my dad called dark static, which had something to do with cosmic physics and good, old-fashioned nuclear electromagnetic pulse, exploded about thirty feet out from the house.
That blast disabled weapons and weapons systems, and would knock a man unconscious for a good five minutes.