“There now,” he said. “Marie Antoinette’s head has been saved.”
Brocco clapped his hands. “Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? Very kind of you to save her head like that.”
“Yeah, but what about her husband’s head?” Wiley asked. “You gonna save his head too?”
The captain turned to the short man hiding behind Marie Antoinette. The captain cocked his head, considering. “No, I think I’d like to try something different with him.” He pulled out his time tapestry from his stomach (both Brocco and Wiley made disgusted faces) and then the captain took his sword and slashed through it in all directions, shredding it so the strings and fabric went all over the place.
He stood back to observe his handiwork. The pieces of the material hovered in the air for a moment, but soon they started to move and find their way back to one another, and the pieces wove themselves back together just as they had been before. The captain frowned. Santiago felt his disappointment.
“How about some guns, Your Majesty?” Brocco asked. “Sometimes a gun can do what a sword can’t, eh?” He reached beneath his red tuxedo jacket and pulled out two pistols. The captain took one, cocked it, and shot at an image of the man’s head in the fabric. Brocco and Wiley both ducked down as the bullet hit its mark. The tapestry absorbed the bullet like water. It rippled outward, distorting and scattering the images. The captain studied the effects, watching the people move and interact like characters in a play. He shot it again, experimenting with different angles or shooting it after slicing with a sword. “It’s not quite the desired effect,” the captain said, “but perhaps a move in the right direction.”
“I don’t get it,” Wiley said. “Why don’t you just travel back in time and shoot him in real life? That is what you are trying to accomplish, isn’t it? To kill that Hudson man so you can steal his wife?”
Santiago twitched as a dozen different thoughts and emotions rushed through him at once. Triumph and loss. Desire and repulsion. Joy and rage. So many feelings clawed at each other. Too much, too much. Humans felt too many things at once. It made Santiago want to chew on his own tail.
“I could kill him,” the captain said. “But that doesn’t solve everything. I want him gone. Erased. I want him to never have existed. Only then can everything truly be set right.”
“So why do you gotta deal with all this time tapestry stuff?” Wiley asked. “Why not just go back in time and kill his mother or his grandmother, make it so he’s never born at all?”
“It’s not that simple,” the captain said, and he pulled more of the short man’s time tapestry out of his stomach. “A person’s life is hundreds of thousands of little threads, all woven together, and those threads are also woven into others’ time tapestries, all of them connected, even if just by one little thread. I can go back in time and kill someone, but it doesn’t erase their existence, and it doesn’t necessarily erase the existence of their unborn children. They’ll just be born to someone else, see, and their time tapestry might still play out in a very similar way as before, which is unhelpful to my mission. No, in order to truly erase Matthew Hudson, I need to destroy all the threads in all the time tapestries he’s ever touched. It all needs to unravel completely, and the more connected they are to others, the harder it is to make it all come apart, see? So I can’t just go back and kill Matthew Hudson. I need something more powerful than swords or guns.”
“Well, the guns worked better than swords, didn’t they?” Brocco said. “Maybe we should try some stronger stuff?” He opened his jacket to reveal an array of objects attached to the insides. It all looked like a jumble of balls and bundles of sticks to Santiago, but it seemed to unnerve Wiley. He backed up from Brocco a step or two.
“Ain’t it a bit dangerous to be walkin’ around with all that stuff on your person?”
Brocco shrugged. “You never know when it might come in handy. Better on me than at me, yeah?”
“Indeed,” the captain said. “Go ahead, Brocco. Give it a go.” He motioned to the fabric of the short man.
Brocco rubbed his hands together with childlike giddiness. “How about a grenade, eh? One of my favorites.” He took out an egg-shaped object from his pocket. He pulled a pin and tossed it at the time tapestry. The tapestry absorbed the grenade, much like the bullet, and a moment later there was a muted explosion that reverberated throughout the ballroom. Santiago felt his bones rattle and his fur stand on end.
The tapestry swirled with a smoky substance. A sizable chunk of the fabric looked to be destroyed, but then the particles started to come together, weaving and knitting itself back together. They reorganized themselves in a haphazard fashion so that when it was complete the picture was blurry and jumbled, but nothing had been erased completely.
“Hmm,” the captain said. “Not quite. What else do you have?”
Brocco reached inside his pockets and pulled out what looked like nothing more than a bundle of sticks. “Firecrackers! We can put on a show with these!”
And it was a show, but that was about it. The tapestry erupted in sparks and emitted some loud bangs, but it otherwise did very little to alter anything.
Santiago could feel the captain was getting bored, losing patience. Brocco seemed to sense this too and take it as a sign of danger. Perhaps the captain would see it as a failure if Brocco did not get something to work, and he was less forgiving of failure now. Immortality had the odd effect of making you less patient, rather than more, despite having all the time in the world.
“Wait!” Brocco said. “I got one more, saved
