Paul watched the empty. Alina grew concerned; his eyes were somewhere long ago. He was bending, collapsing. West held him up as silver pattered to the closed lid of a Jud cocoon. He regained his footing, wiped, straightened.
Her hearts—her heart sped a rhythm she resented, but it’s not easy to forget better times and versions.
“You can go home,” he whispered, but it carried. Another staggering ripple, seven million more disappeared. He could feel Maire out there, the grip of a projector marble slicked in blood, the windswept ice of the merge.
“We’re collapsing the Timeline,” Reynald shouted across the metal and dust. “Dismantling this foothold. We’ll use the last resources of Judith Command to fuel one final assault on the Delta bleed. Anyone who doesn’t want to come with us, your time here is done. Go home to your Whens and wait it out. You’ve all made a remarkable sacrifice to be here. We can’t expect more of you. Go home to your families.”
“What families?” A voice spoke out from the mass. “Most of us have nowhere to go!”
A rumbled assent. Paul felt them slipping, all of them innocent, each soul the work product of his madness.
“Then run.” West growled across the plain.
Whispers, multiplied. The middle C of uncertainty, a resounding seiche wave of fear.
“Those of you who choose to go with us,” Reynald continued, “will be loaded into a pattern cache aboard Alina’s ship. Our combined mind-essence will power the largest silver vessel ever…” he looked sideways at Paul, “assembled.”
“Just one ship. Me.” Paul’s chest hitched with his body’s rejection of the silver.
The cries of outrage drowned any hope for hope. Alina gripped herself tighter, feeling it all fall apart.
“We’re taking the war to Maire. One last shot. One ship. As many of us as want to go.” West stepped forward, let the author stand alone as he choked something smoky and snarling back down. “We need to end this now!”
The din was painful. Paul had never suspected such resistance to his plan, but—
“You cowards.” Jud’s knife-edged voice cut through Alina’s tongue. “You fucking cowards!” Her words could have enraged the crowd, but a silent truce sputtered to life across them. “What else do you have to live for? If we lose this, there won’t be much living at all, kids. If Maire breaks through entirely, you think you’ll be safe? She’s erasing both the Alpha and Omega lines. This isn’t the Enemy rewriting history in their image—Maire’s erasing the image.”
“We’ll begin loading the cache immediately.” Reynald scratched his temple; another three lines appeared. “Best of luck to those who stay behind.”
“I’m sorry,” Paul managed as best he could. His hand went to the throb of his cardiac shield. “Please believe that.”
They left the birth fields, the author limping along between Jean and Adam, Alina’s hand on his shoulder.
“Gotcha,” Maire said, and Michael Zero-Four’s body streamered across the steel floor of the launch command center. The city’s trunk shuddered below as Enemy forces quickly put an end to the pathetic civil war between tribes that had necessitated the launch of the zero-four probe.
She gutted him with a mechanical precision, popped his marble into her mouth and bit down. The sweet internals of the device pooled between her teeth and gums, and she knew. She knew.
Dozens of miles away, the probe erupted in its Gauss tube. Maire’s Enemy companions flickered for an instant as their physics attempted to make sense of never having existed. Timesweep. She buffered them. She held them in place.
Which gave her an idea.
She walked quickly, eagerly to a console on one wall of the command, reached into the display and activated the upload link. Somewhere in the bowels of the room, a churning began. The display confirmed: there was a full pattern trapped in the buffer. Someone’s soul hadn’t made it to the probe.
She cooked him.
Hours passed, and she threw the download tank’s hatch open. A tall, gray-eyed man crumpled to the floor with a splash and a thud.
“James Richter.” Her grin was fangs and dimples. “Welcome to my future.”
Richter wretched phased silica onto the floor. He tried to crawl to his hands and knees, but squeaked back down in a weak, naked pile.
He looked up at her. “Hope?”
“Walk with me?”
“Paul…”
“Please?”
Judith Command was being systematically dismantled around them, the billions, trillions of soldats perdus uploaded into a pattern cache that Paul would carry. The bubble around the non-place had developed great cracks on its periphery, and in places, the blackness of the unknown beyond shined down through.
They walked to the edge, the place where they could look down into the Timestream. The Alpha Point sparked an eternity below them. As they walked, his hand was close enough to Alina’s so that she could hold it, if she wanted. We know the distances between us; we test the lines and hope someone crosses.
Theirs was a heartbroken silence built of everything that had gone wrong, all the fights over nothing, the context of them, the place and time out of time in which they lived. They were both machines built from life’s flickers.
They sat on the edge and still said nothing. Their hands were still close enough to hold.
Their feet dangled down over the universe.
He said, “It was good.”
She said, “I know.”
A thousand other lives tried to crawl into that moment, a thousand other faces, but as he sat there dying, Paul looked only at Alina. The angle of her jaw, the patterns of her freckles, the flare of her nose, eyes that smiled, upturned, even when she was crying. A thousand other faces tried but failed to replace her.
We can count down our final moments in the stillness between another’s heartbeats.
We can search for a perfect moment and realize that we’ve already lived it.
We can ravel a ball of silver, wear a filament of it on our wrists. We can hear the music across the water, the stars falling above, and we can dance, reach out for a hand. The world falling apart around us, and none of it matters. Life is a series of moments, of splendor, of misery, the finest line woven between. We can sit on the edge with the love of our lives and not say anything at all.
He reached out, withdrew. They looked down at existence. He coughed.
She turned back to the bubble’s center. “I think they’re ready.”
He looked. Judith Command was empty, except for them. There was wind, and it was cold.
“Are you?”
“No.”
They looked into each other’s eyes for the first time in months. Years. Time had no meaning at the edges.
He held out his hand.
She smiled. Her eyes were wet. He was bleeding metal.
There were echoes.
She took his hand and jumped off the edge.
They fell, but in that scale, they were motionless. Judith Command raced away above them, the bubble’s edges cracking and releasing, great plates of metallish shattering down toward them, the whole of the last fort erupting and falling. And they flew, hands held, eyes open, as shards of Command danced around them. They wove, hands held, between the pieces.
They pulled toward each other, arms frantic, grasping, bodies shuddering to relearn their symmetries, to reseat the way they fit together perfectly. They tumbled, hands held, down into the past, into the deepest night, the places hidden away for lifetimes.
