Frost (13 page)

“How?”

“Explosions. Big ones.”

“And the other Beacons?”

“They’re not the same as this one.” Kat looked to Barry for help. “I don’t pretend to understand, I just follow Mr Purple’s word. It seems this one, the one Harper’s going after, is the key. Without this one, without him, it’s a no-show for doomsday.” She arched her eyebrow, inviting Jack to join her in incredulity.

Jack resisted the urge to oblige.

Barry pointed a beefy finger to the monitor. “You have him on tape?”

Kat nodded. “We had people tracking him the moment he arrived in the city. A few tried to take him down—they really thought they knew what they were up against.” She shook her head bitterly. “All this time, preparing, and I couldn’t stop the very people I helped train from throwing themselves onto a bed of knives.” Her brow tightened. “But at least it helped us find you.”

She looked to Barry. “We saw you go against him.”

He cleared his throat gruffly. “Didn’t exactly go down how I had planned.”

“We know he can’t die. Not how we think of it. Bullets, incendiaries, chemical or biological weapons—nothing we have can touch him. What was your plan?” She stood up from the monitor, arms akimbo. “No offence, but it looked like you just kind of ran at the guy, wind-milling your fists.”

“What, you were expecting me to pull out my magic wand and challenge him to a duel? I might be from another part of All Where, lady, but that doesn’t mean I graduated from Hogwarts.”

“Well?” Jack said, eyebrows raised.

Barry rolled his eyes. “Like I said, at the time, I didn’t know who he was. I thought I could handle it. I’m used to dealing with thugs a few rungs down the ladder. It’s easy enough to cart them back off to where they belong.”

In reply, Kat pulled up a recording from a security camera, showing an elevated view of Jack standing on the sidewalk. Before him, and the staring, screaming crowd, two shimmering slabs of air raced towards one another, figures without form or shadow, before the entire street erupted in a mayhem of flying shrapnel and ice. The recording cut to static.

Barry cleared his throat, his eyes darting back and forth, as though embarrassed to be speaking in front of Kat. He nodded to Jack. “It was because of you.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Don’t get cute.” Barry took a small step closer. “You know what I’m going to say?”

Jack squinted, pushed through a great slab of consciousness, as though lifting a cover stone from a tomb, and broke through into Barry’s head. “
Creature of destiny?
”

Barry nodded. “I need you. You have power, and the Web always gives us a way to set things right.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Right. What I haven’t said is that it works both ways. He can use you too. If he gets to you, that power inside you will work against us.”

Jack felt Kat’s eyes on him, searching and hostile, as though he had suddenly revealed himself a double-agent with a flash of cape and a tweak of moustache. “And if he does?”

“Then we really don’t stand a chance.”

Jack felt the attention of the entire room fixed on him. His throat dry, he said, “I thought I was just a compass?”

“Like Purple Toes said. That’s just the start of it. You’ve just woken up. There’s a lot more to come. You just have to wait for it to surface.”

“If I live long enough.”

Barry said nothing.

After a long moment, Kat’s gaze softened a little, and she rested back on her heels. “Okay, so we don’t let Harper get to him. Jack can hang back and help us. We can’t go in after Harper, anyway.”

Barry shook his head immediately, as though he had been ready for it, his face a picture of regret.

“No?” Jack said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I already told you, I can’t stop him. Not alone.” His eyes turned meekly on Jack. “Maybe you can. If we’re going to beat him, it’s going to be both of us in there.”

Jack swallowed thickly. “Where he can get to me.”

Barry nodded slowly. “Where he can get to you.”

Great
.

The others moved forward and arranged in a parabola around them, waiting. Kat cleared her throat, and Jack noticed, just for a moment, a hint of something amateur and unsure underneath all that bravado and hard-ass poise. “I’m taking Gant and Joblonsky with me down there. We’re going to get these two as close as we can and clear the way, if Harper has any people to put between him and us. Hartree, Forman, you stay here, coordinate the others. What’s our progress?”

Joblonsky said, “We have teams waiting on our signal. They’ll blow the charges on the vaults when we give the go ahead.”

“Do we have every site covered?”

“All but three.”

“Not good enough!”

He shrugged. “It’s all we got. They beefed up security once we made the run on Harper earlier. A few of our people on the inside got caught trying to plant their charges. There’s no way we could fight our way in. Those places are more secure than military fallout shelters.”

Kat turned to Barry. “If we can’t take them out, and we can’t stop Harper, he’ll have free rein. Even if only a few of those vaults survive, there’s enough organised firepower to take down anything that will be left.”

Her eyes glazed, her lip twitching. “Cold. Mist. And… Nothing. All over the world, just silence. They’ll all be gone. Gone to that dark place. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

Jack nodded.

“I can’t let anyone be sent there. I won’t.”

“None of us will,” Joblonsky said, arms crossed.

The others tightened in a display of solidarity that didn’t quite dispel their motley-crew appearance.

We’re saving the world on a shoe string
, Jack thought.
Oh well. At least I fit in.

“Nice,” Barry said with a strained smile. “Go team. Now can we get moving?”

Kat nodded. “Five minutes. Then we go.”

Jack and Barry waited for the others to gear up, standing aside in collusion. Barry had his foot on a swivel chair, propping up a hand stroking his beard. “I hate being kept out of the loop,” he muttered.

“Yeah, sucks,” Jack said absently. “What’s up with that?”

“Just a soldier,” Barry muttered. He cursed, shaking his head. “When this is over, I’m going to bang that bloody Jester’s head against a wall.”

“What jester?”

“Never mind.”

Jack let it go, his tired imagination too stretched to bother conjuring what kind of other-world place needed a jester. He watched Kat, Gant and Joblonsky pulling on Kevlar combat gear in lieu of their bike leathers. He half expected them to pull out rocket launchers and high calibre magnums, but instead they picked up scoped M4 carbines, holstering no-nonsense Gloch 9mm pistols. They handled them well, moving without a second thought.

There was no denying Kat’s people were out of their league, but now that they all stood on the precipice, Jack was glad to have them, even if they couldn’t face Harper. He needed somebody else to know that they had tried.

He cleared his throat. “How long do we have?”

“Why?” Barry said.

“I’m feeling kind of funny.”

Barry grunted. “Yeah. I feel it too.”

“It’s like I’m late for something, or I have to take a piss, or something.” Even as he spoke he resisted the urge to dance on the balls of his feet, a building anxiety and impatience, stemming from the same hokery pokery as his divining rod, slicking the base of his cranium. “It’s getting close now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Barry picked at the spaces between his teeth with his thumbnail, looking off into the middle distance. “Real close. Few hours, maybe.” His brow furrowed. “Stop that.”

Jack forced himself to be still. “Sorry.”

“You sure you’re ready for this?”

“I’ve got nothing better to do.”

“No, no bullshit. No hiding behind facetiousness.”

“That’s a big word. Don’t strain yourself, you’ll pull something.” Jack couldn’t help himself. Hiding behind humour was all he’d ever had.

Barry laughed, not his usual rough ironic bark, but almost soft, warm. He made to clap Jack on the arm, halting his speeding hand just before he made contact, and turned it into a gentle prod. “You’re all right.”

“Don’t. If you start crying then I’ll start crying, and we’ll never get ourselves together again.”

Barry rolled his eyes, still smiling under all that beard. Then the genuine upward curve drained away. “We’re probably going to lose, Jack.”

The warm fuzz of the previous moment vanished, replaced by the clacking of keyboards behind them, and the ruffling of combat gear. “I know,” Jack said.

“Even if we win, I don’t know what will happen. You’ve got a lot of strength in you. At first I thought you were a throw-away. No offence. But I did.” His head fell a little to the side. “But you ain’t. And that’s a blessing and a curse. We might just have a shot against him. But there are always consequences.”

Jack attempted several replies, but they all failed. He settled for another nod. “It’ll change everything. Harper’s run-in with the cops must have made the news. People saw him. And the bodies…”

“Nobody would remember.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d remember those claws.”

“Don’t forget, only we can see him for what he really is, claws and all. You saw the recording. We’re different somehow.” He gestured to the screen, frozen mid-frame, showing the two shimmering figures upon Forty-Sixth. “There, but not.”

Jack couldn’t help wondering what he must have looked like, if nobody but him could see Barry: hurtling backwards along the street, dragged in the wake of a pocket of shimmering air. In his mind’s eye, everybody was decked out in sunglasses and carried walking sticks; blind to everything around them.

Barry picked the thought out of his head. Jack felt him wheedle his fingers in, but let him take it.

Barry snorted. His brow flickered. “You all right?”

Jack shook his head. Every day of his adult life had seemed ill-fitting, misshapen and, quite simply, wrong. The boy who had dressed up in scraps of spare carpet and searched for other lands had retreated to a place deep within. A place he could reach only sometimes, through books, when night was total and the apartment was quiet, and he was so lost in a story that the words vanished, and he lived the lives of all those heroes and villains.

“All this, what’s happened today, you, this place—it’s crazy. It’s all
crazy
. But I feel… right,” he said slowly. “This is right.” He nodded, then reinforced it with another. “This is what I’m meant for.” He looked to Kat and the others. “They’ve been waiting all their lives for this. I think I’ve been waiting for it too.”

“Creatures of destiny. You’re all the same.”

“I never had a choice in this, did I? This was set in stone since my Mom went into labour?”

“Messed up, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You get used to it.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Jack found himself smiling again. A moment of contentment blossomed between them, just two men—

Well, close enough
, Jack thought.

—enjoying one another’s company.

Maybe we’ll pull through. Maybe I will see it.

That golden thought twinkled in his mind’s eye, a shining light in the murky fuzz that lay ahead, a dream so potent it threatened to rip his heart out through his ribcage.

But underneath all that lay a calm accepting certainty that he would never see the endless bounty of adventures lying out there across the reaches of All Where.

He sighed. “You’re reading my mind again, aren’t you?”

“You can feel it now?”

Jack nodded, looking away, at the others as they settled down into silence, tapping away at terminals, coordinating with the teams across the world.

“It’s coming to you fast. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anybody light up like you.”

“You going to tell me I’m some lost prince, the all-powerful Chosen One?”

“Sorry, no dice. Like I said—”

“I know. The Web always gives a way.”

“Now you’re reading my mind.”

Jack hadn’t done it consciously, it had just happened, a mental pinch high in his head similar to a tightening muscle. Yesterday it would have frightened him, suddenly having that power. Now it was as natural as plucking a pebble from a stream.

Kat, Gant and Joblonsky stood before them, kitted out in full. Even their hefty complement of gear couldn’t quite make up for the memories flashing through Jack’s head: flying shrapnel, caterwauling through the air; shrapnel that had once been police cruisers. And claws, and a pair of unforgiving, glowing eyes.

Kat’s gaze lingered on Hartree and Forman and the others on the monitors for a final moment, then her face hardened. “We’re ready.”

Jack and Barry nodded. This was it, the last moment before the plunge. Every step from here was a step towards Harper. And they would go, to whatever end.

“Okay,” Jack said. Forcing that one word from his lips was like pushing a gobstopper out from between his teeth.

Then the moment was over and they were moving back towards the garage, leaving the atrium behind.

“What are you going to do, when you get in there?” Kat said under her breath.

No damn idea
, Jack thought.

The tunnel changed once again, its walls made not of dark rock, but of glittering crystals. The temperature had been rising steadily as Harper descended into the earth, reaching the stifling heat of a coal mine, close to fiery innards of the earth. But then it had started getting colder again, a gentle cooling at first, then a sharp decline, until now ice condensed on Harper’s jacket.

In a thin halo around his body, it snowed in the darkness.

Harper wondered how far he had descended, but then chastised himself for such foolishness. He had lived too long in this simple, linear, featureless place, where distances and times were regular and unchanging. But not this place: the Beacons were true links to All Where. That meant he could have been a few hundred yards down, or several miles.

There wasn’t even any guarantee that he was still beneath Manhattan.