The Bureau of Time (13 page)

Cassie drew a deep breath, fresh and sweet. The rest of Clockwork came running from the factory, Ryan at their head, Natalie talking quickly on her comm device.

“Thank god you’re alive,” Ryan said, out-of-breath when he stopped just in front of Cassie. “Your hand,” he said, his voice urgent. “You’re bleeding.”

She looked down. Her palm had been shredded by the glass, and snowflakes still clung to her skin and clothes, melting rapidly in the warm air. The cut itself was gone – healed by Shaun’s ability, leaving only a white scar and sticky blood.

“I’m fine,” she said. She realized that the buzzing in her head had disappeared, replaced with a calm silence. “The Temporal Spike. It’s – it’s gone. I wonder why?”

Tallon looked both Timewalkers over, his dark eyes lingering on her wound, and on the melting snowflakes.

“The
real
question,” he said, shaking his head. “Is where the hell did you two go?”

Cassie looked up at the sky, the dark clouds looking strangely like the ones she had seen moments before. Rain – rather than snow – struck her face, but she could still feel the cold wind, still taste the ash in her mouth. An involuntary shudder passed through her body, and she heard the man’s words again:
“There are some things best left unknown.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered to the clouds. “I just don’t know.”

THE PAST

The debrief was long and tedious.

Shaun answered the same questions three times over – first to Captain Tallon on the flight home, then to General Lehmann and the senior-ranking officials of the Temporal Operations Division, then finally to Director Anderson himself. Anderson’s questioning took the longest, and after almost an hour alone with the Director of Time, it had begun to feel like an interrogation.

The wording changed, but the questions remained the same, the answers unchanged. “What did you find in that facility? Where did you and Timewalker Wright disappear to? What did you see when you went there?”

Every time, his answer: “I don’t know.”

He had his own questions – dozens of them.
What is White Tower? Why were there documents written about Timewalkers? Where was I taken to, and how did I return?

But his questions were sidestepped with political rhetoric, until it felt like he was arguing with a Presidential candidate a week before an election. Again and again, the answer came back,
“We’ve never heard of an organization called White Tower.”

How can they
not
know?
Shaun wondered, as he stood under the shower, letting the hot water sluice the grime and blood from his body.
We have an entire division dedicated to researching Timewalkers and Adjusters. That organization had been attacked by Adjusters, I know it. So why is the Bureau lying?

A muddy pool of concrete dust swirled down the drain, turning into a disgusting sludge with the Adjusters’ black blood. Steam rose up around him, engulfing him in a white haze. He closed his eyes, pressing his forehead against the wall.

He felt immensely tired. There was a dull ache in his muscles, an exhaustion that even his regenerative powers could not fix. His Affinity was still active, sending sharp zaps of electricity along his hairline. He could sense Cassie as a fiery beacon in his mind, her Temporal Signature slowly drifting through the Ranch, wandering without apparent purpose.

Shapes formed on the back of his eyelids. He saw the other world, the landscape of ash and snow. He had seen the ash before, countless times. Almost every time the Adjusters attacked, they were followed by some kind of abnormal weather event. More mysteries, but he knew better than to ask anybody at the Bureau.

The water started running cold – the agency’s way of telling him he’d been in the shower too long – and turned the faucet off.

He dried himself, throwing the towel into a hamper – he was alone in the men’s bathroom. Opposite the showers were four rows of steel lockers, each secured with a standard number-based padlock. His own locker was already open, and he changed into a fresh pair of underwear and standard black-and-gray camo pants. He was about to pull on a shirt when a sharp knock came from outside the bathroom door. Cassie’s signature bloomed sharply in his mind – he had almost missed her arrival entirely, distracted by thoughts of the Bureau’s secrecy.

“Shaun?” Cassie’s voice called out. There was a distinct waver to her voice. He didn’t blame her.
Her first field deployment, and we’re attacked by Adjusters – that’s too much to ask for anybody.

He fumbled in the locker, searching for a shirt. “One minute!”

“Shaun? Are you alone in there?”

“Yeah,” he answered, absent-mindedly. He rifled through his locker, pushing aside a few toiletries and balled-up socks. He saw a flicker of motion out the corner of his eye and jumped when Cassie appeared. He banged into the locker, his heart pounding.

“Christ!” he exploded, one hand on his chest. He sucked in a deep breath and flashed her his most reproaching scowl. “What if I hadn’t been dressed?”

“You almost died twice today, and you’re worried about that?” Cassie replied, but he didn’t miss her blush. Her hair was damp and loose around her shoulders, drawing his eyes to the soft curve of her cheeks. In the bright fluorescent light, he could see her slightly freckled complexion better.

He forced himself to turn back to his locker. “I’m just saying, there are rules about this. If anyone finds out–
where the hell is my shirt?”

He saw Cassie step around him, gazing in open horror at his bare chest, as though she had just realized he was shirtless. Then he saw what she was looking at.

“There’re so many of them,” she gasped, one hand over her mouth. The other stretched out halfway through the air, as if she wanted to touch him, but was afraid to. His body was riddled with white scars, some thin and barely visible, others jagged as though they had been carved out with a hunting knife.

“I don’t even notice them,” he said, which was partly the truth. It was the cost of staying alive, and a cost he would gladly pay.

“I thought you could heal anything?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She sank down onto a low bench, unable to tear her eyes away from his body. He suddenly felt very defensive, like an abused dog at a shelter, something to be pitied. He
hated
pity.

“Not perfectly.” He finally seized the gray T-Shirt shoved in the back corner of his locker. He repeated the same thing that Doctor Sharma had once told him: “My Timewalking only repairs organs and muscles, the internal stuff. I can regrow skin, but there’s still scar-tissue there, and I can’t get rid of it.”

He slid the shirt over his chest, hiding the worst of his scars. He closed the locker and leaned back against it. His white hair, damp and formless without gel, fell down in front of his face. Regulations in the Bureau weren’t as strict as many other agencies – or the army – and somehow he had always been allowed to keep his hair gelled and dyed. It was comforting, his own mark of identity, so he could never become lost in the sprawling entity that was the Bureau.

As if I needed something else to make me stand out.

Cassie lowered her gaze, staring at her lap.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice low and timid. “I – I should have pulled the trigger. I should have killed that Adjuster. I wanted to,” she added, her voice breaking. Tears streaked down her cheeks. “I – I just couldn’t…I froze…”

She drifted off, wiping her face with the back of her hand. Something inside Shaun broke, and he sat beside her on the bench, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “We’re alive, and that’s all that matters.”

“That was only because of Natalie. You could have died. I – I should have done something.”

“You
did,”
he said, squeezing her tighter. “Hey, look at me. Look at me.”

She did, her eyes puffy and red. He realized how close he was to her. He was able to count her eyelashes, close enough that he could see the amber flecks around her irises.

“You found me in the snow,” he told her. “If you hadn’t found me, I might have frozen to death, or been stranded there forever. You saved my life, right then.”

“But I couldn’t shoot the Adjuster.” She looked away from him again, but didn’t shrug off his hand. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s
nothing
wrong with you! They’re asking so much of us here, more than they have any right to. We’re supposed to come to terms with what we are; with some
freak
genetic anomaly that lets us do impossible things. They want to turn us into human weapons – but we’re not like them.”

“You’re better at this than me,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re a soldier. I’m…I don’t even belong here. I want to go home, to my family. Don’t you want that too?”

Her words stung, and he dropped her hand. He looked at the locker opposite them, his mood as gray as the steel. An icy silence permeated the tiny gap between them.

“I don’t have a family,” he said, his voice quiet. “They died when I was two. They worked in the World Trade Center. They were in the towers on 9/11.”

Cassie turned to look at him, her face crumpling. “Shaun, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—”

“It’s fine,” he said, shrugging, as though it didn’t bother him. As though it hadn’t haunted him for his entire life. “I never knew them. I lived with my grandparents, but then my grandfather developed Alzheimer’s, and I was put into a foster home.”

He wasn’t sure why he was telling her this, except that it felt
right
. The longer he talked, the easier the words were, and suddenly he was telling her his life’s story – as short and painful as it was.

“I was in and out of foster families, always in trouble with new schools. By the time I was living in Manhattan, I started dying my hair white – I thought it would make me look tougher. Instead, it just made things worse.”

He lowered his voice again, barely above a whisper. “I didn’t know anything about my powers. I could heal myself when I’d been in a fight – and I’d had a lot of those – but I didn’t know anything else. Things were so bad with my foster parents that I ran away, slept rough on the streets. There were a few local gangs causing trouble, so I moved on, tried to find somewhere to sleep around Central Park.”

“My mom has an apartment there,” she blurted out. “She lives on the Upper West Side—” she cut off, blushing again. “Sorry.”

He laughed under his breath. She had the most adorable blush. The thought came quickly to him, sending an uncomfortable flutter through his stomach. He forced himself to look away again, and continued his story.

“After a few days, this guy started following me. I couldn’t see his face well, but after he’d been tailing me for a few blocks, I realized he didn’t
have
a face. It scared the hell out of me.”

He stared at a cracked tile on the floor, buried memories flooding out of the depths of his mind.
That moment. When my life changed forever.

“There were three of them. Three Adjusters. They cornered me in an alley. I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t have anything to fight with, but I found a piece of broken glass.”

He wasn’t in the bathroom anymore. He was in the alley, his back against the rough brick wall, the Adjusters bearing down on him.

“It was me or them, that’s what I kept telling myself.
Me or them.
I didn’t think of them as people, I didn’t think of them as humans or nonhumans; at the time, all I could think was that they would kill me unless I fought back.”

Shaun twisted his fingers through the air. Over a year later, he could still feel the Adjusters’ grip on his throat, their fingers clawing at him, choking the life out of his lungs.

“I let them grab me, and I was close enough that I could smell their breath. Foul, like rotting garbage. It was right there, right on that threshold between life and death – that was where I found the courage I never thought I’d have.”

He mimed a neck-slice with one finger. Cassie’s piercing blue eyes stared up at him with an unreadable emotion on her face. Was that admiration? Fear? Understanding? He couldn’t tell.

“I realized that they would gladly kill me, no questions asked,” he whispered. “And I wanted to live. I had a crappy life – my parents were dead, I hated being tossed around foster homes…I was living on the streets, and it sucked. But dying wasn’t a way out. Dying wouldn’t stop my life from getting worse, it would prevent it from ever getting better. As long as I was alive, as long as I could keep putting one foot in front of the other, I could
survive.
And to survive, I had to fight.”

He trailed off, his throat dry.

“What happened after that?” she asked. Her eyes traveled over his face, studying him intently.

It was a third voice that answered, scaring them both.

“Good old Clockwork Unit came in and saved my
hermano’s
ass over there,” Diego Fuentes had entered the bathroom unnoticed. The greasy-haired Latino smiled broadly, his teeth perfectly white. “Shaun, what’d I tell you about bringing your lady-friends into the bathroom, eh?”

“What lady-friends?” Cassie asked in mock-indignation.

“Ignore him,” Shaun said, standing up. “This is Diego. He was on field duty with Clockwork that day, hunting for a Temporal Spike in Manhattan. I owe him my life,” he added.

More than that,
he remembered.
He helped me survive the Bureau. The same way I need to help Cassie survive the Bureau.

“Don’t get all soft on me,
hermano,
” Diego grinned again. “You know I barely fired a shot. It was Carl who saved the day.”

“Yeah, but Tallon’s devoted the last year to making my life a misery,” Shaun countered. “So I think we’re even on that one.”

Cassie was on her feet now, edging toward the door.

“C’mon, let’s leave Enrique Iglesias here,” Shaun said, shaking his head. “He sings when he showers. I swear it’s like a cat getting run over.”

Diego laughed and said something in Spanish that didn’t sound like it should be translated. The Timewalkers left the bathroom, Diego’s crooning chasing them down the long hallway.