Novels

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

32. Candace

Sitting in the backseat with Jimmy Haggen was like time-traveling backwards ten or fifteen years. She half expected to look down and find herself wearing the pale gold prom dress she’d somehow convinced herself was the height of fashion in her youth. Except they weren’t in the world’s grossest rented limousine, a soggy boat that stank of other parties, other mistakes, and Jimmy wasn’t already red-faced drunk and disinterested in her, cold and distracted, and they weren’t crammed in with two other couples in equally disastrous fashions and states of sobriety. With her thigh pressing against his, though, the memory was persistent, and she remembered—with incredible specificity and clarity—how badly she wanted Jimmy that night, how determined she was to end the magical evening with him on top of her, inside her, doing everything they could think of.

Adding to the surreality of it all, they were headed to a midnight rendezvous with her old Phys Ed teacher, Mr. Eastman, a man who’d been a rotund, bespectacled pudge fifteen years ago and who was now retired and, she imagined, sitting around Jack’s every night hunting for people who hadn’t heard his war stories about unruly, disrespectful kids, the horrors of the Designated Hitter Rule, and why the federal government technically had no authority to collect taxes.

As she recalled, for a man who never broke a sweat in her eyesight, Glen Eastman had been quite the armchair sportsman, and had often walked around wearing an old fishing vest despite having never been on the water in his life.

She studied the back of Mike Malloy’s head. On top of everything else—remembering things and people that had never happened, a strong feeling that she’d been wasting time and sitting idle for six years and only now were things sliding back into place—she’d never felt so instantly comfortable with someone before. Five years ago—three, if she was being honest—she would have thought something terribly clichéd and boring like love at first sight or soul mates or something awful like that—not seriously, maybe, but sort of. Now she wondered if it was just an alternate reality she could still almost reach out and touch, a life that had been surgically removed from her through, of all things, mathematics.

Fucking math, she thought. I always knew math was out to get me.

She wondered if that was what love was, or at least the soul-matey movie kind people sometimes swore they found. Maybe love was just people who’d shared an aborted reality, suddenly running into each other on the street and realizing that this, this was what they should have been doing all this time.

Whatever else, whether she believed what was happening or not, this much she knew: She was supposed to be in this car with her first boyfriend and Mike Malloy.

One-Eyed Jack’s was lit up and loud when they pulled into the parking lot, which was disorienting. She’d worked there for years and every night had been Tuesday night, largely quiet and empty, with the only music what the old, cranky jukebox provided. But here was One-Eyed Jack’s pulsing with life and noise. As they got out of the car and approached the familiar building out in the middle of nowhere it was achingly familiar and completely different all at once, a place she knew better than any other in the world except maybe her father’s house, and yet it was the polar opposite of her experience.

At the door, they were stopped by a burly guy she didn’t recognize, a shaggy dog of a man wearing reflective Aviator sunglasses at night, wearing various pieces of denim, his long, greasy hair in his face, chains and other unnecessary accouterments hanging from his pants and jacket.

“Sorry, guys,” he said. “We’re at capacity.”

Candace was about to push past Mike and demand to see Jack McCoy when Phil Eastman appeared at the door. He wasn’t wearing his usual fishing vest; instead he had on what looked like an all-black jogging suit, his eyes bulging behind his thick glasses. He moved with an air of assurance, though, that she didn’t remember. Instead of the slightly ridiculous former teacher who’d been the World Record holder for Least Athletic Physical Education Teacher, here was an older man who moved with a confidence and assurance she didn’t recognize.

“It’s all right, Benji,” he said, clapping Denim Man on the shoulder. “They’re with me.”

“Okay, Mr. Eastman,” Benji said, grinning and sweeping his hand towards the door. “Go on in!”

Candace blinked. She knew Benji—Benjamin Louhy. She’d been one year ahead of him in school, and while they’d never been friends they’d had a dozen conversations over the years. She hadn’t seen him since she left town, and as she floated past him between Jimmy and Mike, she felt paralyzed: Certain he would recognize her, unwilling to take the first step.

“Hey, Jim,” Benji said. “Sorry about that.”

“No worries, Benj,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “We’re probably gonna end up burning this place down tonight, anyway.”

Inside, she felt dizzy. The aisles between the wobbly tables she’d once swanned through like a boss were jammed with people. Every table was taken, and people were standing everywhere. A makeshift stage had been built in one corner, a tiny triangle of raised floor, and a three-piece band was knocking out some pretty decent country-flavored rock. No one was dancing. Most amazing of all, there were two waitresses working the shift, something she’d never experienced in all her years living in the area and working there. It blew her mind.

Everyone, she noticed, was wearing black.

Once she noticed it, she couldn’t unsee it: Every single patron, including Glen, was wearing a black ensemble. It was a sea of hipsters, and she had to suppress a sudden urge to giggle at the thought: Somehow, under her radar, Jack’s had become the new hip place, and people were driving in from miles around to check it out. The thought was so hilariously unlikely she didn’t know how to deal with it.

“Come on,” Glen said. “I have a table.”

They sat down at one of the refreshingly familiar old tables, heavily varnished wood that had been carved and water-stained so often it was like a rock formation. One of the waitresses, an unfamiliar woman with bleached hair and a layer of foundation that didn’t quite hide the rash of pimples all over her cheeks, came over and slapped down some napkins.

“What can I get y’all?” she shouted.

Candace had the tingling, buzzing sense of deja vu, and then Mike leaned forward and held out a black credit card. She heard the words 1955 Glenfarclas before he shouted “You’ve got a 1955 Glenfarclas behind the bar!”

She blinked, taking the card with an air of wonder. “We do?”

He nodded. “Bring the bottle, four glasses, a bowl of ice, four glasses of water!”

The band swung into a frenzied climax, and with an A power chord and a smash of drums they were done. There was applause that felt kind of polite and rote, and then the volume dropped to a low roar. She felt drunk. She’d packed up and come home because of a persistent subconscious sense of wrongness in her life. And now she was here with her high school boyfriend and a stranger she wanted to tell secrets to and her old teacher. The least successful bar in history was packed to the rafters and yet as she watched, none of the black-clad customers seemed all that interested. And as she looked around, she noticed something else: None of them were drinking.

They all had drinks. Pitchers of beer, filled glasses, bottles. But no one picked anything up as she watched. No one even touched the glasses, and the beer all seemed flat and warm to her professional eye. She’d spent her whole life monitoring bars, after all. There was so much off in Jack’s she couldn’t even come up with what bothered her the most.

“Glen,” Mike said, “why not fill Candace in on what you’ve been up to?”

Glen Eastman nodded and smiled at her. She blinked, seeing him with his hands ziptied behind his back.

“Candy, how are you, sweetheart?” Glen said, smiling warmly. “I suppose you’re like the rest of us—been feeling and seeing things that seem like they happened, but can’t remember anything actually?”

She nodded, feeling overwhelmed. It was like everything she’d ever known in her life had been changed, flipped.

“Jimmy and I’ve been discussing that for years now. And after a while, we decided we weren’t crazy—believe me, we considered the possibility pretty seriously. But I suggested to Jim, if we’re crazy, then we’re crazy. No harm then in doing a little investigating. We had these … visions, I guess. A life never led, people and events that hadn’t yet happened. So, I suggested we take those things seriously on a contingent basis. Let’s do our research. Find out if the faces we each remembered, the bits and pieces, linked up to something that actually existed.”

“We found it it all did,” Jimmy said.

“For the last few months I’ve been posted up in a deer blind across from that old factory,” Glen said, smiling. “Just me and some binoculars and a phone. And two months ago, this one showed up with a crew.”

He pulled his phone out of his vest pocket, thumbed it, and turned it around for her to see.

She recognized the face. It was in Jimmy’s notebook, an older man, angry-looking, wearing glasses. She knew the face, even though she’d never seen it before.

Glen nodded. “Me too. We all remember him. He showed up with two tractor trailers full of equipment and a swarm of people. They began working on the place like crazy, and a few days later, she showed up.”

He thumbed the phone and held it out again. Candace recognized the woman, too; older, fierce-looking, with a short military-style haircut and a piercing stare.

“You recognize these people, too, I can tell.” Eastman said. “Me and Jimmy, we weren’t sure what to do, and then Mr. Malloy showed up, like an old friend we couldn’t neither of us remember.”

“And Mr. Malloy had a plan,” Jimmy said.

Candace felt her stomach dropping. She looked at Mike. She had a feeling that everything was about to come together and make a little more sense. She also had a feeling she wasn’t going to necessarily like it.

The waitress returned, carrying a tray with the bottle of Scotch, four glasses, ice, and water. Candace admired her technique as she set everything up; the girl had some experience, she thought, and knew how to handle herself. When she’d finished laying everything out she stood up and, to Candace’s amazement, did something that could only be described as a little curtsy, bending her legs and nodding her head.

“Y’all let me know if you need anything else,” she said, and spun away.

Guess she doesn’t see too many black cards in here, Candace thought sourly, then hated herself. Guess you haven’t either.

When the waitress was gone, Mike leaned forward, his eyes locked on her. She liked his eyes, but there was something in his expression she didn’t like, though she couldn’t put her finger on what it was, precisely. Something haunted.

“We’re not going to sit here and wait for it to happen again, for them to come and grab us,” Mike said. “We’re going to take the facility. Pre-emptive. We’re going to take the lot of them, and take possession of their little Reality-bending machine.”

She blinked. Then she shook her head. “That’s crazy. You remember the same things I do. They have soldiers there. Assault weapons. God knows what we didn’t see.” She looked around and leaned forward. “Mike, we can’t take the facility. We don’t have the resources.”

Mike shook his head. “You’re wrong, Candace. Me and Jim and Glen, we’ve been planning for this.”

“Candy,” Jimmy said, picking up the bottle and pouring himself a generous drink. “Take a look around. All these people in here? Every single one of them? Work for our rich benefactor here, Mr. Mike Malloy.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

31. Mike

He stared down into his glass. Bourbon, and not the best bourbon either—though he was probably spoiled on that account. Black credit cards meant you could be one of those people who insisted on his favorite whiskey wherever he went, even if the bar or restaurant or hotel had to send someone on a lengthy road trip to fetch it.

You’re going where? Robbie had asked him. For god’s sake, why? You just got back from the Mike Malloy Finds Himself Tour!

He looked up nervously and realized he still didn’t have an answer that would make any sense to anyone.

“How long have you—” Candace started to say.

Haggen cut her off. “I set this place up three, four months ago,” he said. “This was some Field of Dreams shit, wasn’t it?”

She shrugged, staring at Mike. “I don’t know what it is, frankly. For me, it was all kind of sub-conscious, you know? Feelings. A few images. What about you?”

Mike frowned. “For me it was more coherent, I guess. I spent the last year or so traveling around—it’s a long story. I felt compelled to just keep moving, and I made arrangements with people to learn things, you know? I was restless. And I wanted to be a better person, more in the moment, more capable.” He grimaced. “I sound like an asshole, don’t I?”

“Definitely,” Haggen said, grinning around his own tumbler of bourbon. “Like a rich asshole, though, if that helps.”

“Wait a sec,” Candace said. “You guys know each other?”

Mike nodded. He liked her. She had a Look; it was experience, years, but not in a bad way. Like wearing off some of the tread had honed her, revealed something better underneath. “Like I said, my plan, such as it was, involved driving around and, well, hiring people. A few weeks learning how to hot wire a car, a few days learning how to weld. Anything, really.”

Jimmy snorted. “So one day I get a call from some New York asshat named Rob Kittle, asking me if I want to make some money teaching some other New York asshat to hunt and track and, you know, not kill themselves in the wild,” Jimmy said. “And, seeing as I have the fucking state up my ass about back taxes, it was an opportune moment to relieve Mr. Malloy, Millionaire, here of his cash.”

Mike smiled. “So I came down here and we met at One-Eyed Jack’s, and … it’s hard to explain.”

“You felt like you already knew Jim?” Candace said.

Mike looked at her, smiling. “Exactly. Him and Glen Eastman.”

Candace blinked, her face crumpling into confusion. She looked at Jimmy, and Mike felt a pang of jealousy. “Mr. Eastman?”

Jimmy nodded. “It makes sense,” he said. “Give it a moment. Think about it.”

Mike watched her, and saw her working through it just as he had—though for him it was worse, eh figured, because he didn’t know any of these people. Except he did.

“We started talking, and we’re both freaked out,” he said, and Haggen nodded. “We’re both fighting this weird sense that we’ve met, that this is important, that we’ve been sort of hanging around waiting for this. And then Glen comes up and just sits down and he’s doing the same thing. And we started trading stories—things we’ve been thinking, like mantras. Images that keep repeating.”

Candace nodded. “I keep seeing … that old Dipping Bird from Jack’s,” she said, sounding hesitant, he thought, like this was the first time she’d risked saying it out loud.

Jimmy sighed. “Well, me and Glen … we had this moment a long time ago. I’ve been keeping a journal. Anything that seems related—random thoughts, weird dreams, deja vu—I wrote it down. Glen did the same.”

Mike cleared his throat as Jimmy stood up. “We’ve been comparing notes, and we’ve pieced some things together—things that we all agree on, things we’ve all seen or thought repeatedly.”

Jimmy picked up an old-school marble notebook and brought it over to her. “I tried to make it a little neater.” He turned and looked at Mike and winked. “I always was a kiss-ass in school. Candy will tell you.”

She opened the book. Mike knew what it looked like at first glance: Insanity. Haggen had filled every line with neat block printing that felt like a horror movie prop, occasionally spicing things up with doodles and surprisingly complex and detailed diagrams, and sketches of several people that had been rendered with eerie, lifelike realism, including a hard-faced older woman, a pretty younger woman with bright red hair, and an older man, scowling unhappily. It was disturbing, and if Mike had seen it in a courtroom he would have voted guilty without hearing another word.

But, he recognized most of it.

Not in a literal way. He couldn’t say he’d ever actually met those people, or heard the terms transmorgrifier or Raslowski Field. But the moment he saw them or read them, he realized he was familiar with them. The best way he’d figured out how to describe the sensation was a conversation in the next room overheard as you were falling asleep: Occasionally a phrase or word would carry through to your dreams, and haunt you.

He watched Candace read and sipped whiskey. He’d never seen her before, but yet the moment she’d arrived at the door he’d known her, he’d felt comfortable with her, like something was slipping into place. And now that she was sitting here, he couldn’t imagine her anywhere else.

Her face told a story, starting with skepticism, bleeding into surprise, and finally settling into a mask of intense concentration. When she finished, she looked from Jimmy to him.

“Jesus,” she breathed. “Did any of that really happen?”

Mike shook his head. “Nope.”

“But I almost remember it. Almost.”

Mike waited a beat. He was about to say things he’d been thinking for weeks, for months now, but he knew that on one level they were insane things.

“That’s because they really happened,” he said. “And then they got changed.”

The words hung in the air for a moment, heavy.

“It took me a while, too,” he went on, swirling whiskey in his glass. “Once you think of it, though, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Hell, we’re here because it all really happened. I came here because I’ve been here before, in a sense. Jimmy was here at this cabin because this is where he … ended things before. You came back because you were here when it happened. And Glen Eastman’s been waiting for the rest of us, just biding his time.”

“So you think,” she started, then shook her head. “You believe they invented a way of changing reality, of plugging some numbers into a machine and pressing a button and changing the fundamental facts of existence, came here because our names—us—came up in their simulations or whatever, they detained us at One-Eyed Jack’s, we broke free and killed a bunch of soldiers, stole their magic reality box, and came to The Sprawl where I used to shotgun beers while standing in a horse tub, and Jimmy here hacked the box and reset the last few years of our lives?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, grinning.

“And so do you, or you wouldn’t be here,” Mike added. “And there’s this: It’s all happening again.”

Candace blinked. “What?”

“Like he said, Glen’s been obsessing over this shit for years now. He’s been keeping an eye on the old abandoned factory up the road. He says that six months ago, there was a lot of activity—trucks in the middle of the night, workers, soldiers—but you wouldn’t know it to drive by. It looks dead and empty.”

“But the security system is active,” Mike added.

Jimmy nodded. “Right.”

Candace shook her head. “Look, all right, I’ll admit it: I’m here because of something I can’t quite explain. Okay. I remember things that never happened. I remember some of the stuff in this notebook, for god’s sake!”

She tossed the notebook onto the floor. Opened her mouth, then shut it. After a moment, Mike thought she sort of … collapsed, shrinking down into herself. Then she took a deep breath and looked at him. The shock of familiarity was electric.

“Fine. I admit it. I believe it. I can remember a whole different six years. I didn’t leave town, I didn’t fail out of school, I didn’t get a job at Rudy’s on Ninth Avenue. I stayed here, I buried my father, I worked at Jack’s, and one night you walked in and ordered an expensive whiskey and then we were detained.” She nodded, once crisp. “Fine, I admit it.”

“So, we’re in the same situation,” Mike said. “If they’re set up at the facility again, if we’re all here again, then they’re watching us. Which means our names are still coming up in their model. Which means at some point—”

“We’ll find ourselves at One-Eyed Jack’s and they come busting in.”

Jimmy stood up and pointed at her. “Bingo.”

Mike waited. The Candace he didn’t exactly remember would jump at the chance. she wouldn’t want to be left behind, left out. She wouldn’t want to let fate choose her path. If nothing else, she would want to keep her hand on the stick.

After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. I’m not gonna lie; I’m here because something I can’t explain has drawn me here. Fine. Let’s get to the bottom of it. I’m in.”

Mike smiled.

“So what’s the plan?” Candace asked, looking from Mike to Jimmy.

Mike took a breath, but Jimmy beat him to it, draining his glass and slamming it down on the floor.

“Step one,” he said with a grin, “is go get a drink.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

PART THREE

30. Candace

She startled awake and for a moment didn’t know exactly where she was. The swaying motion, the hot, stuffy air, the soft non-sound of people all around her was all disorienting for a moment.

Jim—

She heard the voice in her head, clear, crisp. Like it had just happened.

She blinked, taking a deep breath and sitting up straighter in the seat. The bus was dim, lit only by the few places where people were using their reading lights. It was hot and it smelled like a soup she’d had once and never wanted to have again.

“Finally awake, huh, darlin’?”

She turned and blinked, memory coming back to her. This guy had gotten on the bus a few miles after her, had stood blocking the aisle for a full minute while he scanned his options, and had lit up like a horny Christmas Tree when he’d spotted her sitting by herself in the window seat. He was forty-ish, jowly and going to fat but not quite there yet, and handsome in a pleasant, unremarkable way. He still wore a class ring, which was all Candace needed to know about him. Literally.

He’d tried chatting her up when he’d settled in, smelling of cigarettes and aftershave, which were strikes two and three against him. She’d managed to feign sleep, and then that had turned into an actual nap. But now she’d tipped her hand and he was eager to continue their non-conversation.

“If you’da told me your city, I woulda made sure you didn’t sleep through it.”

She swallowed, head swimming in a way that was like a migraine without the pain. “I’m good, thanks,” she croaked.

“Where you headed?”

“Home.”

The word satisfied him, and he asked her if it was just a visit or if she was doing something more there.

“Excuse me,” she said, half-standing and indicating the aisle. “Bathroom.”

He smiled and pulled himself out of his seat, stepping aside with a cheery grin to let her past. She imagined he was watching her walking towards the bathroom in the rear, and thought he must be disappointed, because she’d gained so much weight in the last few months she was like a different person. Then again, she also had the feeling he was a guy who wasn’t all that particular.

She stepped into the tight, disgusting bathroom, and shut the door behind her locking it. It was incredibly gross, and not for the first time in her life, she wondered how in the world other people lived. When you couldn’t even manage to pee accurately into a pretty wide target, what business did you have even go out of the house?

Home. She thought about the word. It had been a long time—six years. She didn’t count the trips to the hospital to visit Dad; that had been fifty miles north of what she thought of as home, and she hadn’t come anywhere close to the old house—which she knew needed to be put on the market—One Eyed Jack’s, or the Sprawl on those visits.

She looked at herself in the small, muddy mirror. Thirty-one, and worse for the wear, she thought; New York was supposed to be her reinvention, her big break from the rut. She’d left everything behind—her Dad, all the familiar faces and the safety net of knowing she would be able to work at Jack’s for the rest of her life if she wanted. She remembered the bus trip going the other way, years ago, school enrollment materials stuffed into her backpack, everything she owned in a poorly-packed duffel bag stuffed into the luggage compartment under the bus. She remembered being excited, determined, a little frightened. She remembered being ten pounds lighter and able to fit into the pair of soft jeans she still carried with her everywhere she went as a sort of totem of optimism.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, searching her own face through the tarnish.

She didn’t know. She’d felt it for a while now, the need to go home. She hadn’t consciously made any decisions, even though she hadn’t exactly made New York her bitch. She’d left a job waitressing at a dive bar among people she’d known all her life for a brief stint at school followed by a job waitressing at a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen among people she still didn’t know very well—not the way she knew everyone at home—and which barely paid for her shitty room in the Three Bedroom Walk Up of Madness, where six girls paid various rents for variously-sized rooms, tepid hot water, no air conditioning, and a constantly-changing cast of roommates.

Except her. Candace had become the House Mother: Oldest, longest tenure, not going anywhere.

She’d drifted. She knew it, she could sense it and it filled her with a slow-motion panic. She was four years away from thirty-five, and she suspected that even in New York thirty-five was when you had to stop pretending you were a kid on an adventure. At that point you were an adult with no money and no long-term plan.

Everything had clarified two weeks ago. She wasn’t supposed to be in New York. She didn’t know how she knew, but there it was: She was supposed to go home. She was supposed to go home.

She kept seeing things—pieces of a dream. She’d had them for a long time, persistent images. The old Dipping Bird from Jack’s. McCoy’s old crossbow. Her ancient, beloved Trailblazer. All of these images came to her in flashes at odd times—sometimes when she was trying to sleep or just waking up, but sometimes when she was awake, working, even talking to other people. She saw them real as day, and every time she did she had that feeling: Go home.

So, she was going home. She’d stiffed her roommates on the rent and taken every dime she had, bought a bus ticket, and here she was, in the world’s filthiest bathroom, forty minutes out from the bus station she never thought she’d ever see again, with the world’s least charming pickup artist waiting patiently for her to return to her seat so he could feign interest in her life goals, though she didn’t know what his endgame for her might be unless—and the thought chilled her—he was getting off at the same spot.

The only thing to do is to do it, her Dad used to say. She smiled faintly at her reflection. As usual, he was right.

Town hadn’t changed much. It was still a single block of two lane highway lined by stores, the tiny police department-cum-jail, and a post office. City Hall was the house of whoever happened to be mayor (it took forty-three votes to win). People came to ?town’ to pick up their mail and put in orders, and even that had slowed down in the Internet age. The bus stopped in front of the post office, waited for her to pull her immense duffel out, then roared off to better, more interesting places. She thought she could see her seatmate staring out the window sadly as it pulled off, but couldn’t be sure.

In Herb’s Hunt and Tackle, you can get just about anything. There might have been a time when they were just a place for bait and rods, guns and camping gear, but they’d expanded into general hardware, car and equipment rentals, dry goods, maps, guide services, and anything else that didn’t have a local business servicing it, which was just about everything. She recognized Herb Junior behind the counter, but he didn’t recognize her; he’d been about sixteen when she’d left town, and their families had never been close. She played the role of tired tourist and rented an ancient old Land Rover. Herb Junior tried to steer her towards a newer Tahoe, saying that the Land Rover had seen a lot of miles, but something about it called to her. It felt familiar and comfortable. She paid cash for a three day rental, tossed her duffel into the back, and took off.

She drove by the house, first. She knew it wasn’t hers any more; there was still a mortgage on it when Dad had died, and selling it wouldn’t leave much for her as an inheritance, but despite the mounting tax bill she hadn’t done anything. Nothing had been done. Nothing looked different. Even the rusting, decades-old swing set her parents had erected when they still hoped for another child and envisioned her playing with her sister or brother was still there, slanted just like always, a lawsuit waiting to happen.

She sat in the car for a moment, studying the place. Had she really lived there for twenty-five years? She tried to think of the last time she’d been there. Before she’d moved, before Dad had gotten sick. It probably hadn’t much of a day to remember. Coffee. Packing. Dad moping about, pretending not to be sad. TV. A beer or two, then bed. She wished she could summon the memories, but they were gone like they’d never happened.

She contemplated the irony that she could easily recall Jack McCoy’s crossbow in perfect detail, but the last day she’d spent in her father’s house was lost.

One Eyed Jack’s was lively. She pulled into the gravel parking lot and let the car idle. A sense of foreboding came over her, and she didn’t want to get out of the car. For what purpose? To see Jack McCoy? She loved the man. She smiled as she thought of him, standing proudly behind his bar, laughing at some joke, a big bear of a guy who always smelled like hamburgers. But she didn’t want to go back in there. She realized she never wanted to go back inside, ever again if she could help it.

Music. The sign had always read MAD ONE JACK’S: Food | Liquor | Live Music, but there had never been any music as long as she’d known the place. But as she sat there she could hear the beat and the spark of guitars. Good for you, Jack, she thought. Don’t ever stand still.

She put the Land Rover into gear and hoped it could handle dirt roads and brush, because she suddenly knew exactly where she was going. Why she’d come back.

Was it a love story? She didn’t think so. It was more than that. Different.

The night closed in and the world became her headlights and the squeak of the old suspension. She remembered the way without any difficulty. Some places became part of your DNA.

When the Sprawl came into view, she was surprised for a moment, because someone appeared to have taken some care with the place. Weak yellow light filled the windows, and smoke chugged from the chimney. The area right outside the main entrance had been cleared, and a neat pile of fresh firewood was piled up against one side. The bulk of the insane cabin stretched away into the darkness as ever.

Three trucks were parked outside.

She parked and killed the lights and the engine. Leaving her duffel in the truck, she got out and walked to the front door, liking the familiar crunch of twigs and dry scrub under her boots.

The door opened before she got there, and Jimmy Haggen, looking skinny and old, somehow, his hair graying, leaned against the jamb.

“Well, heck, Cuddyer,” he said. “Welcome back. Come on in. We been waiting for you.”

She smiled. It was good to see Jimmy, she had to admit. As eager as she’d always been to escape him, as happy as she’d been to have escaped him once, she never went more than a day or so without thinking about him. Why hadn’t she called? Or written? Jesus, she could have at least Friended him, she thought.

“James,” she said, pecking him on the cheek awkwardly as she stepped past him. “I have to admit, I have no idea why I—”

She froze. Standing in the front room of The Sprawl, where she’d partied and made out and danced and smoked illicit cigarettes, was a man. He was about her age, maybe a little older. Nice-looking, but unremarkable. He was wearing a leather coat that looked to cost a few thousand bucks, and he had a worried, sunken expression that was familiar to her because, she realized, she’d been watching it gather on her own face for years now. A certainty that she was not where she should be. Not doing what she should be.

He smiled, and she knew him.

“Hey, Candace,” Mike said.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

27. Mike

“You’re certain he’s heading out that way?”

Candace shrugged. “My father would say, Certain’s a word for morons. Nothing’s certain in this world, Candace.” She glanced at Myra. “Guess we didn’t know how true that was. No, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure I know Jimmy. He thinks he’s being smart. A place to hole up for a few days, evade pursuit. Shelter, probably some supplies stashed there because Jimmy’s all about surviving, these days. He won’t go home because he knows they know all about him, his address, he’ll figure they’ll have someone there already. But he’ll think no one who’s not local will know about this place.” She took a deep breath. “I know Jimmy Haggen. He’ll be at the Sprawl.”

Mike nodded and exchanged a look with Hammond, who appeared to be operating at some sort of miraculous level of stress and irritation, visibly vibrating from it. The tall, skinny officer made a face, but nodded, pulling a sheaf of papers from inside her jacket. She unfolded them and turned them over, offering the blank side and a short, stubby pencil. “Can you draw a map? All the detail you can remember. Approximate scale—I don’t need a work of art, I need some idea of what the approaches are like, back and front, sides too, if you can.”

Candace nodded back, and the Colonel stepped out of the room to confer with her remaining unit.

He liked the officer, despite a distinct lack of warmth or humor. Hammond was competent, not cruel or petty, and after what they’d done in their attempt at escape, she appeared to hold no grudges. That more than anything else had brought home to him that this was real: The deaths of her people weren’t important enough to react to, in light of the real crisis.

He watched Candace working on the map for a moment. She was concentrating, and had actually stuck her tongue out like a kid in a cartoon. It struck him, because Julia used to do that. He could picture her now, clear as day, concentrating as she rolled a joint or cooked in an old bent spoon, her tongue sticking out from between her chapped lips. Julia had never worked harder than when she was getting high.

“Hey,” he said softly, looking at Myra, then at Candace. When she looked up, he leaned in closer. She smelled terrible, he thought, but then he was coated in sweat and dirt and dear and panic, too. “Haggen—do you think he can do anything with the … the whatever. The Black Box?”

She pursed her lips and looked down for a moment. Then she looked back at him. “I don’t know, honestly. I mean, this is some next-level shit, here. But what I saw on the screen looked like code—computer programming. Jimmy was always good at that stuff. Really good. Could have designed video games or worked for Microsoft or Apple, if he’d had any discipline.”

He glanced at Myra, who was pretending, he thought, not to hear them.

He considered. Something as godawful complex as this would require … simplification. A layer of abstraction, which was all computer programming languages were. A set of instructions that were slightly easier for humans to understand that would later be translated into machine code. Abstraction made working with computers easier. It made sense that there would be a similar layer of abstraction on this. The only question, then, was whether someone had based their abstraction, their instruction set, on existing programming languages. Whether what Haggen had in his hands right now would be familiar enough for him to figure out how to use it.

“He can’t use it,” Myra said, sounding tired. She was standing at the glass wall, arms wrapped around herself.

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “Because he doesn’t have access to the array. He can’t crunch the variables, the implications. He’d be flying blind, even if he can gin up instructions based on what he can read.”

Mike nodded. “You’re forgetting something. I’ll bet anything Haggen doesn’t care about running the numbers.”

Myra turned and stared at him. The idea that someone might not worry about details seemed to horrify her. One thing—maybe the only thing—he’d learned in his travels over the last year was that people tended to assume everyone else thought along the same lines that they did—at least if you looked like them. If you looked different, they assumed the opposite. But he wasn’t surprised that Myra would assume that they all respected science and causality and the virtue of diligence and thoroughness just because she did.

When Candace finished her crude map, she signaled to Hammond, who came back into the room with her people trailing behind her. She accepted it wordlessly and huddled with her people, studying it.

“All right,” Hammond snapped, looking up at Candace. “Can you get us to that back-trail? We don’t have time to cut all the way down to the dump here,” she jabbed a finger at the map, which Mike could see was impressively detailed and obviously drawn by someone who knew not just the terrain, but the basics of reading a map too. “Can you find it through the brush, straight-line?”

Candace thought about it. “Yes,” she said. “I can.”

Mike had figured as much. She knew the country as well as anyone else who’d grown up there, he thought. She could probably find her way in the dark, blind drunk, in a rainstorm in the same way he’d once been able to navigate the New York City Subway no matter his sobriety or physical condition.

“I’ve done just that plenty of times when heading home from a party at The Sprawl,” she said, grinning at Mike. “So all I have to do is reverse the polarity or something.”

Hammond nodded and turned to the remnants of her unit, running her cold eyes over them. “Rowland, you’ve got babysitter duty. Sit here with Ms. Azarov in case anyone wanders in somehow. You’re authorized to use force on anyone, including Mr. Haggen if he suddenly decides he does want to use the array to vet something. Azarov, get started on the new model. The sooner we know where we stand in terms of causality and the success or failure of this mission, the better.”

Rowland, his black face shiny from sweat, nodded curtly. After a moment Myra, who seemed lost in thought, looked up and nodded crisply. “I’ll start loading in the new data and get the algorithms humming,” she said.

Hammond nodded and glanced at her watch. “Rowland, in two hours, if we’re not back, you follow General Order One, clear?”

Mike considered the words General Order One and thought it sounded ominous. “What about him, Colonel?”

They all followed his gaze through the glass to where Glen Eastman sat on the floor. He looked glum and unhappy. Mike decided he had a right to be. From Glen’s perspective he’d done nothing wrong.

“Secure him,” she said to Rowland after a moment’s thought. “He’s under your discretion, soldier.”

Rowland nodded crisply. Mike tried to get a sense of how the man would react to Glen, of just how much danger Eastman might be in, but the soldier was blank-faced and not easy to read.

“Come on, then,” Hammond said. “Let’s go stop James Haggen from destroying the fucking universe.”

####

The walk reminded him of the night Julia had left him out in the Meadowlands. They’d been driving—shouldn’t have been driving, considering how stoned both of them were—and they’d gotten into an argument. One of those arguments no one had when sober, the kind of argument you only had when you were so fucked up nothing made sense. She’d pulled over and told him to get out of the fucking car, and he’d been stupid-angry enough to do just that. And she’d peeled off and was gone down the highway before he could think, before he realized he’d left his wallet and phone in the car.

So, he’d walked. It had been a humid, windy night in New Jersey. He couldn’t remember why he’d been in New Jersey—he couldn’t remember much—but he remembered the way the wind blew like it was part of some epic storm, but there was no relief. It wasn’t a cool wind. It was just as heavy and wet as the air around him. He’d started walking, sweating and unsteady. A car would occasionally speed past him, but it never occurred to him to try and flag one down. He felt too sorry for himself, and if he was being honest he remembered kind of enjoying the quiet and the vastness of the wetlands and the solitude.

He also remembered wishing Julia would have an accident and die. He remembered imagining the flames, and while he’d told himself it was the drugs and his screwed-up mindset, he—

He stumbled a little, his thoughts catching on something. After a moment he hurried up to where Candace was, her attention on the woods around them.

“Hey,” he whispered, matching her stride.

“We’re close,” she said. “Should be right up here, the trail, and then just a few hundred feet to the cabin.”

He nodded. “Listen, something you said—something about Haggen and his house. You said Jimmy’s all about surviving, these days, something about supplies.”

She nodded. “Jimmy got weird. I mean, he didn’t have much going on. Shitty jobs, he was getting paunchy, drinking too much. He was getting paranoid, kept talking about how he couldn’t catch a break. It was all the government—this was after he got nailed on tax problems, had to cough up a couple grand in fines. Always said that was why he couldn’t get ahead. He started to blame the government for a lot of other stuff, after that. Started stocking up on guns, canned food.”

“Survivalist, kind of,” Mike said. She nodded.

“Sort of. Kind of like a lazy survivalist, you know? Had all the talk and a lot of guns, but still showed up at Mad One Jack’s every night and twice on Saturdays.”

“You think he had security on the house? Like, crazy survivalist security?”

He’d spent two weeks in the Utah desert, to learn about survival living—growing food, building shelters, weapons and other gear. He wanted to see what people did when they went off-grid. At the time, at the height of his wandering, this had seemed like essential knowledge—if the Zombie Apocalypse came, he would have skills.

He’d been put in touch with a man named Todd, and he remembered being driven out into the middle of nowhere, up a trail, and to a hidden drive that led to a massive metal gate where two men carrying AR-15s had patted him down, searched his bags, made a few jokes, and passed them through. The place was an old ranch, running on well water and solar power, and housing about thirty men and women and their kids. Everyone armed, everyone genial and friendly (mainly, he discovered later, because he was white), everyone happy to teach him about the world as if he was a child who’s suddenly realized there was no Santa Claus.

And he remembered the booby-traps.

The fact that the Federal Government would send in troops at some point to take them down and destroy what they were building was a matter of faith at the ranch. It wasn’t a question of if, but rather when the jackboots hit the ground and the FBI or the ATF or black helicopters and wetwork agents stormed the place. The fact that there would be no attempt at arrests or negotiations was accepted as well: The government would come for them and it would gin up an excuse to execute everyone—this was what had happened at Waco, at Ruby Ridge. Those people hadn’t died because of their own illegality and recalcitrance. They’d been executed.

So, steps had been taken. The whole place was a minefield of traps: IEDs in the road, electrified fencing linked to batteries buried in the sandy soil, explosives wired into every building. Nothing was too primitive: The window sills all had broken glass and ragged pieces of tin glued to them, to cut hands hoisting invaders inside, and the floors under the windows always had nails driven upwards from below to catch those jackboots as they slipped inside. Mike remembered wondering how in the world the whole population of the ranch didn’t wind up with Lockjaw.

“Probably,” Candace said. “Yeah, sure, he mentioned a few ?measures’ he’d taken. Some of it sounded kind of crazy, to be honest. Like, I always wondered how he didn’t kill himself when he came home from Jacks’ drunk as hell, in the dark.”

Mike nodded. “You think he might be able to set some traps at The Sprawl?”

She stopped, hesitating in the darkness. “That’s—”

There was an explosion up ahead, the night suddenly lit up orange and red, the noise shaking the ground under their feet, making them both stagger and struggle for balance. In the instant silence that followed, there was a soft rain of dirt and debris.

Candace looked at him and grimaced. “Shit.”

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26. Candace

They took her Trailblazer and Mike’s Land Rover, all of them packed in tight. Only Mr. Eastman—glum, eyes swollen—remained in zipties, everyone else had been released and armed. Candace had a moment of panic when Hammond and the soldiers had stepped over the bodies of their comrades and reclaimed their weapons and gear. If she and Mike had just made the biggest mistake of their lives, that would be the moment. A barked order, and they would find themselves tied up securely, and there wouldn’t be very many opportunities to break free again.

Assuming Hammond and company didn’t just shoot them dead. That would certainly be a way of guaranteeing they didn’t somehow set off the apocalypse.

But Hammond had issued orders in a calm, steady voice, appointing King as her second in command. The soldiers didn’t complain or protest as they geared up. Hammond ordered them to do as she and Mike suggested, and no one protested that, either.

As she drove, following Mike’s taillights, she thought about Jimmy.

Her father had never liked Jimmy Haggen, Bobby and Miranda’s son, for unspecified reasons that sank back into the murky past. Something had happened or been observed long before she herself was sentient and self-aware, and Mr. Cuddyer had carried this dark knowledge about James Xavier Haggen for the rest of his life, but only expressed it through vague disapproval and occasional murmured warnings.

She’d known Jimmy her whole life. When they’d been small, he’d always been around, a dirty boy in torn overalls and long hair who played tag and always shoved her to the ground when he was It. She’d never thought much about him except when he was right in front of her, back in those days.

In high school Jimmy Haggen had somehow miraculously transformed into a Hot Man. Skinny but muscular, he played baseball and smart-mouthed the teachers and was always in trouble in some sense of the word, but he was also funny and confident. He stalked the halls of the school with a perpetual lopsided grin, and his occasional flashes of raging anger and emotional outbursts—at games, where he would throw his helmet and scream, at school dances, where he would sometimes be found sitting in the dark of an empty classroom, monosyllabic and brooding—only served to make him seem tragic, which made him the most attractive boy within ten miles to most of the girls.

And, she admitted, to her. Suddenly at fourteen Jimmy Haggen stopped being the dirty pushy kid her father vaguely disapproved of and became an obsession. She saw him, once, emerging from the practice field with his shirt off, his skin white and sheened in sweat, the muscles moving under his skin with implied power and assurance, and he’d glanced up and grinned at her, tossing his head as if to say what’s up? No embarrassment, no shyness. And she began seeing that torso in her thoughts as she lay in bed at night.

Their romance was a legend of whispered gossip. They never, she realized, officially dated. Jimmy Haggen had always been in her life, and when their games of tag and Running Bases became sweaty make out sessions, it didn’t feel like a new chapter but rather a simple evolution. But they never dated, they never went on a date. Jimmy would show up, and they would hang out. They would kiss or talk for hours on end, and then he would go home. As Senior Prom approached, she realized he’d never once asked her to be anything—not his girlfriend, not anything else. She’d just been there, all his life, and he’d wandered over to her when it suited him.

She thought about pushing him to ask her—officially, publicly—to prom. And he’d been squirrelly about it, and that made her angry, and the gossip started to fly. And then he asked her, and he was very sweet about it, and her father had been glum and just sat there blowing out his cheeks and shaking his head and saying well, if you’re sure, sweetie.

She remembered her dress. She still had it, though it represented a sort of fashion sense she didn’t really ever want to be reminded of.

She remembered driving over to Ronaldos with everyone beforehand, and ordering a big dinner just so they could order wine, because Ronaldos made most of their business off the fact that it was an open secret they would serve a carafe of wine to anyone, even if you appeared to be three kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat, with a beard drawn on your face with a Sharpie.

She remembered looking for Jimmy, and she remembered finding him and Sarah Mulligan’s feet in the air. And she remembered being sick and … whatshername … holding her hair out of her face in the school bathroom. She concentrated, seeking the name of that girl. She hadn’t been her closest friend, but she’d been the one in the bathroom stall with her as her eye liner ran down her face. Big girl, dyed blonde hair, round shoulders. Great skin.

She couldn’t remember.

Over the years after high school Jimmy had gotten weird. His parents died and he worked a series of jobs that involved dirt and sweat, and that was her prevailing memory of him in recent years: Dirty and sweaty, a beer bottle in one hand. He would work for a few months and then quit—or not so much quit as simply stop showing up. He left paychecks behind and never picked them up, and would disappear for weeks, only to reappear working the graveyard shift somewhere or pestering folks for odd jobs and manual labor. When she saw him at Jack’s, he was always friendly enough, but his trademark sarcasm had soured over the years, and he wasn’t fun to talk to any more.

And he got paranoid. His house, which he inherited from his parents, had been converted into an off-grid compound. He’d put up a fence all around the property, and no one got inside any more. You rang a bell and Jimmy came out to you—or didn’t come, more often than not. He talked a lot about being prepared, about not having to rely on money or government services. He installed a rainwater collection system, solar panels, a composter. He collected old computers and took them apart, creating his own systems. About the only times she’d had a decent conversation with Jimmy Haggen over the last few years the subject had been his house and how he was making it so he would be able to retire at forty and never have to rely on anyone else, ever. How he was writing his own automation code to control the heat, the locks, the security cameras. He would hunt for himself and take care of himself, and he would be free to tell everyone and anyone to kiss his ass.

Standing outside the facility, Hammond and her troops checked their guns and equipment. Candace found it hard to believe that she’d been in this exact spot with Dr. Raslowski just an hour before. The moment she thought it, a strange feeling came over her, a nervousness. She hadn’t been here with Dr. Raslowski, had she? She’d killed him, by accident, back at the bar when he ran for it. She’d meant to wound him, but she’d shot him through the chest and his body was still lying there.

She had a headache, suddenly. How had they gotten inside the facility? Dr. Raslowski … hadn’t … been with them to key in the code.

There was a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to find Myra, who had somehow contrived to put her hair into perfect order, who somehow seemed to smell and look better than when they’d initially met.

“I let you in,” she whispered.

“What?”

“You’re having trouble—remembering, right? You think something happened, then you realize it couldn’t have.”

Candace nodded.

“It’ll pass. For the moment, remember that you and Mike arrived here because you found Emory’s ID on his body. I heard the car pull up and came out to investigate, and let you in.”

Candace blinked. That was how it had happened, she suddenly recalled. “Th—thank you,” she stuttered.

“It will all fall into place, don’t worry.”

Candace frowned. “Do I eventually forget the … old version completely?”

“Only if you choose to. You can hang onto the knowledge that things changed, and how they changed, if you put a little effort into it. People doublethink their way through stuff all the time. It’s an evolved survival skill for humanity.”

Candace was glad for that. It was bad enough thinking that reality might be changed around you at any time. Not even being aware that it had happened would be infinitely worse.

“Everyone ready?” Hammond barked, striding to the front. When everyone nodded silently, she turned to look at Candace. “Ms. Cuddyer, anything you can tell us about Mr. Haggen? Anything that might be useful in the next ten minutes or so?”

Candace thought. “He’s paranoid. He likes to set traps.”

Hammond nodded. “Good to know. Thank you. King, take point. Eyes open, be sure of your footing. Ms. Azarov, if you would join her. You’re most familiar with the office layout, and you’ll have a better chance of noticing anything that feels off.”

“All right,” Myra said, and Candace hated the cool way she strolled gracefully forward. She would have thought anyone with legs that long would have trouble keeping her balance, but Myra was like a dancer.

“Let’s go,” Hammond said.

Myra and King went first. Myra keyed in the entrance code, and then led the way. Hammond and the other four soldiers followed, rifles in their hands but aimed at the floor. Finally Mike pushed Glen Eastman ahead of him, and Candace brought up the rear. She had one of the Berettas tucked into her belt, and she hoped like hell she wouldn’t have to use it. She wanted things to go easy: They would find Jimmy trying to do something stupid and crazy, they’d talk him down—or hit him over the head, the long-dormant Ghost of Prom Night giggled crazily in her ear—and then it would just be twelve hours of sitting around with everyone.

She intended to spend those twelve hours getting very, very drunk, then sleeping it off. In a perfect world, she would wake up to find everyone gone: The gear packed, the bodies buried, her Trailblazer waiting. She would leave an anonymous tip for Sheriff Werner, and never look back.

Walking down the corridor was strange; she felt like she’d been there years ago, instead of an hour before. Everything looked the same, but her memory of following Myra into the security office and then into the server farm felt fake, somehow, like the Moon Landings: Staged at great expense. She followed the soldiers with an increasing sense of unease, as if nothing she saw could be relied on.

“We can’t all fit in there,” Myra said when they arrived at the door that led to the tunnel and the Field Room. “Might I suggest Colonel Hammond, Mr. Malloy, and Ms. Cuddyer accompany me inside? Colonel, your people can mind Mr. Eastman.”

Candace was pleased to be named, then resented Myra’s assumption that she was in charge and could make arrangements for her. Then felt silly for resenting someone she’d met an hour before, and who was, in this situation, far more qualified than she was.

Myra entered the key code, and Candace followed Mike down the tunnel and into the familiar room. The moment she entered, she could tell something was wrong. Mike and Myra stiffened, and she followed their gaze to the little desk.

Everything was gone.

The keyboard. The mouse. And the black box—what Myra had called The Transmorgrifier.

“Jimmy,” she breathed.

“Haggen?” Colonel Hammond said quietly.

Mike nodded. “I’m pretty sure now that he followed us here. He probably observed Dr. Ras—Myra here enter the key codes for the doors, then slipped in behind us.” He looked around. “Heard the whole thing.”

Hammond let out a stream of quiet, eeriely calm curses. Then she looked at Mike and Candace. “You keep telling me how crazy it is that you might be worth all this trouble. How you couldn’t possibly be the threat Raslowski calculated you to be. But all I see is a bunch of people who are just a little smarter and a little more resourceful than they ought to be.”

Candace thought, Well, maybe not Mr. Eastman.

Hammond closed her eyes and sighed deeply, then opened them again. “Well, any idea where he went with it? So we can try to stop him from erasing the universe or something?”

Mike shook his head. “I have no idea where he might be.”

“Not his house,” Candace offered. “He always thought of it as his safe haven, but like I said, he’s paranoid. He’ll assume you know where he lives, and that you’ll have ninjas or something waiting for him there.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Myra asked, smiling what Candace thought was an effortlessly charming smile, white teeth and red lips. “He can’t possibly use it. Even if he had access to a power source sufficient for the Field Gen—The Transmorgrifier, he couldn’t possibly know how to operate it.” She looked around. After a moment, her smile faded. “Could he?”

Mike and Hammond turned to look at her. After a moment she realized they were waiting for her assessment of Jimmy Haggen as it related to a device that could manipulate reality itself.

“Well,” she said slowly, “Jimmy’s always been technical.” She shook her head. “But no, I doubt this is at his pay grade.” She hesitated, because she realized she wasn’t sure. Jimmy had been deep into computers and programming and even building his own machines and simple robots. And in the ensuing decade and a half she didn’t know what he’d been up to out at his fortress-like house.

Then she smiled and looked around. “You might be wrong about one thing.”

Mike frowned. “What’s that?”

“I might know exactly where Jimmy would go.”

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25. Mike

“Mr. Eastman—”

“Shut up. Who’s this?”

Mike glanced at Myra and fought the ridiculous urge to apologize to her. She was, after all, part of the team that had—apparently—stalked them all for months, studied them, come to some terrible conclusions about them based on what seemed to him to be some seriously sketchy science, and then sat idly by while soldiers detained him and the others illegally.

“She’s … part of the—”

“One of them,” Eastman said flatly. Mike felt a kind of mental whiplash; Glen Eastman had been kind of an old duffer, a little paranoid—he remembered what Raslowski had said about his politics—but more or less harmless. This Glen Eastman was cold, harder, somehow. Mike thought about Raslowski, tapping away at his keyboard, apparently altering reality itself, and wondered how far the ripples might go. Raslowski found himself dead instead of wounded, and Mike wondered what else might have changed.

“All right,” Eastman said, using the AR-15 as a pointer. “In we go.”

For a moment he was disoriented; the scene inside the bar didn’t seem to have changed, except for Glen Eastman holding an assault rifle on them as he marched them inside. The soldiers all remained ziptied, sitting on the floor. The place was silent, still smelled like gunpowder, and still had a sizzling energy in the air of recent violence. The bodies still lay where they’d been left. A haze still clung to the ceiling.

But something was wrong, and after a moment Mike had it. “Where’s Haggen?”

Hammond glanced up and their eyes met. Hers was steady and clear. The remaining five members of her team stared down at the floor, and Mike thought they looked suspiciously cowed.

Eastman considered before answering, circling backwards carefully to keep the three of them in front of him. “He went after you. You didn’t see him?”

Mike thought furiously over the last hour. He recalled seeing something flashing in the rearview, he recalled a few distant-sounding noises. Haggen, he thought, following them. It fit; Haggen seemed like the sort who didn’t take orders easily, yet he’d accepted Mike’s instructions without a peep of protest. Mike felt dumb for having simply assumed Haggen would do as he’d been told.

“Where’s Dr. Raslowski?” Hammond said.

“Shut up, you,” Eastman growled. Hammond ignored him, looking in Candace and Mike’s direction.

“Ms. Azarov?” Hammond said.

Mike looked at Myra. The assistant looked stricken. “He’s dead, Colonel,” she said. “He didn’t follow safety protocols, and—”

“He tried to use the field,” Hammond finished for her, grimacing. She looked back at Mike and Candace. “Looks like we’re both responsible for some deaths here tonight.”

He grit his teeth, but there was no time for regrets. He thought about challenging her, arguing with her. Pointing out that nothing would have happened at all if they’d simply been left alone. What would he have done? Had a terrible dinner cooked by Jack McCoy in what was certainly an illegal and uninspected kitchen in the back. Had a few belts of expensive Scotch. Gone home with Candace? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he would have found a motel a few miles away and slept it all off, headed for Oklahoma in the morning.

Maybe, as Dr. Raslowski insisted, he’d have started off on a path that led to the end of the world. He wouldn’t know, now; even if Raslowski had survived he probably would have to admit his models had been corrupted by recent events. They were all back in the unknown.

He took a deep breath and ignored Hammond for a moment. “Mr. Eastman—Glen—we need to go back there. Jim doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into.”

Eastman snorted. “Jim, huh? No one ever calls Jimmy Jim.”

“Mr. Eastman,” Candace said, taking a half step forward. Eastman brought the rifle up a little, and she froze, an expression of complete shock passing over her face. Mike held himself very still. He didn’t think the old teacher was a violent man, but he thought maybe he was an unreliable man who might do something stupid, like twitch a finger and kill them all by mistake.

“Mr. Eastman,” Candace said again, and Mike thought that was smart, still using his formal name like he was her teacher, reminding him, “Jimmy’s not going to be prepared for what’s over there. I know Jimmy—you know Jimmy. He’s a great guy, but he’s impulsive and he always thinks he knows more than he really does. What we just saw … Jimmy’s gonna do something stupid. We should go get him back so we can discuss what’s happening here.”

Eastman pursed his lips. “What’s happening here? Jesus, Candace, what’s happening here is dead simple: We’ve been assaulted. We’ve been detained illegally. Now you come strolling back here with one of … of the enemy and you want to discuss things? All we’re discussing is getting out of here, and then calling up some lawyers.”

Candace shot a look of silent appeal at Mike, but he didn’t have any better ideas. He suspected that any attempt to explain what they understood to have happened would sound crazy, and Eastman didn’t seem to be in the mood for crazy explanations. And did he even believe it all? Yes, he’d seen something … inexplicable. And there was still that lingering feeling of the world not being totally real, not being the way he remembered it. But he didn’t think he could explain it, or convince someone like Eastman of it. He wasn’t even certain he believed it either, even after seeing Raslowski vanish, and finding him dead in a parking lot a mile away. All he knew was that spending a few hours holed up somewhere was a small price to pay for avoiding a possible disaster.

“All right,” he said softly, putting up his hands. “All right, Mr. Eastman—Glen—you win. You—”

He watched for the moment of hesitancy, the slight relaxation, and then he surged. Use your enemy’s strengths against them, he heard one of his many teachers say. Use your enemy’s weapons against them.

He aimed his hand, palm out, at the rifle, knocking it up into Eastman’s face. The retired teacher squawked, and tried to twist away, but the gun hit his nose with a wet breaking sound. The rifle clattered to the floor as Eastman staggered backwards, blood dripping from his face. Mike dashed forward and picked up the rifle, training it on Eastman, who was leaning back against the bar with both hands clamped over his broken nose.

“Jebus!” Eastman howled.

Mike backed away slowly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Eastman—I really am. I know this all sounds crazy. I agree. But we saw a man vanish into thin air. And I think … I think he altered something, changed something that had already happened. So I think we have to ride this out. Dr. Raslowski said this was all designed to keep us in the bar over night, to change the course of the future. I think we have to at least do that, based on what I’ve seen.”

He turned and looked at Candace. After a moment she nodded, and he was relieved, and surprised at how quickly he’d come to rely on her and to trust her. Having her back him up gave him confidence. He looked at Colonel Hammond.

“Colonel, your mission was to sit on us and ensure we didn’t leave this bar, right?”

After a moment, Hammond straightened up and nodded. Mike admired how unruffled she looked. Despite being ziptied, despite having lost control of her command and lost members of her squad, she looked pin-neat and completely alert, her face impassive, her blue eyes clear and sharp. “Our mission scope was to contain you—specifically Cuddyer, Malloy, Eastman, and Haggen. Satellite assets were to be contained as well if inside upon arrival. At Ten-thirty tomorrow morning, containment would be lifted. You would all be debriefed and asked to sign NDAs, then released.” She shrugged. “That mission appears to be well and goodly fucked at this point.”

The soldiers around her murmured agreement.

“We don’t know that, do we, Myra?”

Myra blinked in surprise, then cleared her throat. “We don’t know, true. Dr. Raslowski’s model encompassed approximately eleven hours at this location, involving the four specifics. As far as I know, that model did not detail anything similar to the events that have occurred.” She shook herself as if waking up, and looked around. “In layman’s terms, what I mean is I think we’re in uncharted territory. If the four of you stayed in for the rest of the night, it might have the same effect. Or we might already be on an alternative timeline. Whether it’s a better timeline I can’t say without running a full model, which would take some time.”

Candace snorted. “So we might still be on course to destroy the world, or not.”

Myra nodded, altogether too cheerily, Mike thought. “Yes. Or we might have accelerated it. Maybe you four are going to bring on the apocalypse even sooner, because of what’s happened.”

“How long to run a new model?” Mike asked.

Myra thought, her face scrunching up, deep lines forming around her mouth and eyes. “Without doing redundant checks and error analysis? Six hours for a preliminary model. Maybe six more for a second run to confirm everything.” She looked around. “That wouldn’t be totally reliable. Emory spent months crunching his model. But the first few run-throughs were basically accurate in the outlines.” She nodded to herself. “Twelve hours.”

Mike looked at Hammond. “It’s close to midnight. If we get Haggen back here and sit on him for twelve hours, Myra can report back and let us know if the world’s still ending or not. If not, we all walk away. If it is … ” He trailed off, uncertain how to finish the thought.

“If it is, we’ll figure it out then,” Candace said.

Mike nodded. “Right. So, Colonel, what do you say? Can your mission parameters be adjusted? Want to come retrieve Jimmy Haggen and then we find a safe spot we won’t be bothered?”

Candace shook her head. “If this mission is right and truly fucked, why not call your bosses, Colonel? Call this project a failure?”

Hammond twisted herself awkwardly around to look at her remaining soldiers. Nothing was said, no one made any overt gesture or expression, but something passed between them. Hammond turned back. “Unfortunately, Ms. Cuddyer, only Dr. Raslowski had the authority to make parameter changes to the mission. Without him we don’t have a chain of command to appeal to. We were compartmentalized because having more moving parts complicated the models. In order to keep the math on a scale that could be processed in a reasonable amount of time, we had to ensure a small team with no possibility of outside influence. So it’s up to us. It’s up to me. We’ll help.”

“Wait a goddamn minute!” Glen Eastman shouted, his voice pinched-off, droplets of blood sparying as he took his hands away from his face and took a step forward. “You’re gonna trust the soldiers who detained us? Who killed Mr. Simms? Jack McCoy? Seriously?”

Mike nodded. “Think about it, Mr. Eastman. Based on what we—”

“Candace!” Eastman said, turning his swollen face to her. His eyes were blacking up, and his nose was a purple cauliflower in the middle of his face. “Candace, c’mon! This is your bar. They came into your bar without any legal authority and they killed Jack McCoy. You’re gonna stand with them? You’re gonna help them?”

Candace nodded. “Mr. Eastman … yes. I saw something that convinced me these people might have a point. And all we have to do is sit here for twelve more hours.”

Eastman shook his head. “Until their bullshit model comes back—surprise!—saying we all need bullets in our heads.”

Mike thought, maybe we do. He thought of Julia. He thought of everything, all of it. Sometimes, he thought he’d gone on this crazy trip just to outrun a bullet to the head that he’d been waiting for ever since.

“Come on, Mr. Eastman,” Candace said, holding a black plastic ziptie in her hands. “Time for a road trip.”

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24. Candace

She heard her father exclaiming, How about that! He used to do it as an impression of an old baseball announcer, and it was one of his stock responses to things that amazed him or confused him. If he didn’t understand what had just happened, he bought time by doing his impression.

Well, she thought, a strange feeling of mental paralysis seizing her, how about that?

She didn’t know what to do. She was literally frozen, and for a moment she didn’t think her muscles would obey her even if she tried to move. Every thought trailed off into static. A man had been sitting in a chair, and then he was gone, and she felt the world tilt around her, as if the very foundation of reality had crumbled, turned soft.

“No one move!”

Candace blinked and then then slowly turned to look at Myra. Move? She couldn’t even think. She looked at Mike, but he was just staring into space, the gun held limply by his side.

Myra threw herself into the chair and began working the mouse. “Jesus fucking Christ, Em, what the fuck did you do? There’s no way the array plotted out all possible outcomes in that time frame.”

On the big screen, the cursor moved through the code restlessly. Mike licked his lips and blinked.

“What did he do?”

Myra glanced up, then at the screen again. “You’re both experiencing something we jokingly refer to as Reality Lag. You’re in a precarious quantum state as you have direct experience with a state of reality that is no longer true. You remember something that never happened. It will pass. You’ll be a little loopy for a bit, but you’ll feel better. You might retain the memories.” She sucked in breath and blew a strand of red hair out of her face. “To answer your question, for reasons known only to himself, Dr. Raslowski apparently chose to change an aspect of his reality and it either had exactly the effect he desired, or it had completely not the effect he desired.”

“I thought,” Candace said, struggling with her thoughts, which kept skipping back to the sight of Raslowski vanishing. “I thought you said it only worked in this room? Where could he have gone?”

Myra nodded. “You can only affect things in the field, yes, but everything is connected. The reality in this room is part of the reality outside this room. That’s what the cloud is for—to trace all the possible consequences of a change. You change something in here, and it reverberates. It ripples. And if you’re not careful, those ripples can carry you off.”

Candace shook her head, trying to clear it. It was like a bell had been rung somewhere and it didn’t make any noise but she couldn’t stop listening for it, all of her thoughts fraying.

“The past,” Mike said. “You’re saying that when you change one of the equations, a variable in those equations, you can change the past.”

Myra nodded, eyes glued to the screen. “Time doesn’t flow. It doesn’t move. It’s a continuum. It’s a web of interconnected variables related via mathematical rules. Change a variable in this moment, like I said, it reverberates. It ripples back and forth, spreading out, resetting. If you’re not careful, you can do incredible damage. That’s why we have the array: To make certain a tweak doesn’t turn into disaster.” She glanced at him. “And that’s why we couldn’t just tweak y’all out of trouble. The ramifications were too huge, not even the array could calculate everything. We had no choice but physical, real-time intervention because if we altered a variable connected with you to ensure you went down a different path, we couldn’t be sure we weren’t going to blow the whole thing up.”

Candace shuddered, and felt something … click back on inside her. Like a final connection that brought a power grid back online. Her mind cleared. “When you say the whole thing you’re talking about … reality. The universe.”

Myra nodded, eyes back on the screen. “The whole damn enchilada. I kind of suspect that Emory—Dr. Raslowski—came pretty close to doing just that a moment ago—there it is.” She took her hands from the keyboard and leaned back. “He tried to alter things so he’d never been injured. Whatever happened to his shoulder, he tried to erase it.”

“And what happened?” Mike asked. Candace could tell he’d just experienced what she had—a sudden clarification in his thoughts.

“Well, we’re still here,” Myra said, raising her eyebrows. Candace thought she was entirely too cheerful for the situation they were in. Her day had gone from bad to … weird. People were still dead, and now she knew she’d been a rat in an experiment for months, being watched and observed. All because this ludicrous set of computers had told an old scientist and his entirely too hot assistant that she was one of four people who would somehow engineer the end of the world.

I could have saved y’all some time, she thought, and told you that waitressing at One-Eyed Jack’s is soul-crushing, but not that soul-crushing.

That made her think of Jack McCoy, and she felt tears welling up. Jack hadn’t hurt anyone, ever. He’d never made a pass at her, or gotten mad when the count at the end of the day was off and took an extra hour to figure out, or when she’d shown up hungover and grouchy. He’d been kind, and patient, and if he wasn’t the most evolved man in the world there’d been an essential goodness to him she’d loved, and now he was dead. And in a strange way, she was responsible for that.

“Can you … tweak it back?” Mike asked. “Reset it to where we were before?”

Myra shook her head. “First of all, we don’t know what the ripples are. Sure, we seem to be fine. But that’s the thing, that Reality Lag I mentioned—it fades, and after a while you’re not even aware anything’s changed. You slot into the new reality, and it just becomes reality, the way things have always been. So we’re still here, but we can’t be sure what might have been altered. It might be limited to Emory; he’s a genius and no one understands the math better than he does. But it might not. It might have changed everything and not in a good way. And if I tweak it back but not perfectly, I might make things infinitely worse.” She sighed. “In other words, the fact that we’re here having this conversation means we maybe dodged a bullet. Emory might be out there all healed up and fine, and we’re still breathing. I try to change things back and miss a crucial detail, poof! we’re all dead. Or the world ends. Or, I don’t know, the supeintelligent roaches rise up and take over.”

Candace blinked three times hurriedly. “What?”

Myra waved a hand. “Sorry, a private joke among reality distortionists.”

“Well,” Mike said. “Step one, I guess, is to locate the good doctor. If he’s okay, then maybe everything else is, right?”

Myra nodded. “It would be a good sign.”

“So where do we look?”

Candace sighed. “We start at the obvious spot: Where I shot him.”

Myra nodded. “That makes sense. I’ll—”

Mike shook his head. “You’ll have to come with us.”

Myra blinked and cocked her head, making her look, Candace thought, kind of bird-like. “What?”

Candace looked at Mike. “He’s right. You just showed us you can … well, change things, right? So we can’t just leave you here to tap on that keyboard and then, suddenly, we’re dead, or just disappear, or never existed or something.”

Myra frowned. “That’s not exactly how this—”

Mike nodded, bringing the gun up. “I’m sorry, but you’re coming with us.”

The drive back to the bar was silent. Candace felt strange behind the wheel, even stranger knowing Mike was in the back seat holding a gun, and, for some reason, strangest about having Myra in the passenger seat next to her. The woman was intimidating. She was tall and gorgeous and smart and wore the hell out of her cats-eye glasses, and oozed a confidence that Candace had never possessed.

Seriously, you’re jealous? She thought to herself. With everything that’s happened, you’re hate-crushing on Myra?

It was ridiculous … but there it was. She kept stealing glances at her in the darkness, wondering how you learned to just sit so still, to move so easily.

At the entrance to One Eyed Jack’s, she slowed the beaten-up rental and let the headlights play over the parking lot.

“It was close to the tree line,” she said. “He was … the memory’s a little fuzzy—”

“It’s fading,” Myra said. “If you concentrate you can hang onto it, but it will seem like a dream you had once.”

Candace nodded. “By the tree line. He was just taking a straight line from the bar, making a run for it.”

“All right,” Mike said. “Candace, get out and walk around to the passenger side and open Myra’s door. Then we’ll both get out and follow you to the spot. Myra, there’s a small flashlight in the glove compartment.”

“Very glad to have met you,” Myra said, leaning forward and opening the compartment. “You’re just as sociopathic as I imagined.”

Candace took the flashlight and led them into the darkness. Myra followed, her arms wrapped around herself, and Mike trailed behind. He resisted the urge to glance at the bar, although he felt exposed walking right in front of it. He wasn’t sure if anyone peering out would be able to see them, but he hoped they could get through this investigation without being noticed.

They found Raslowski in the gravel.

“Jesus,” Myra said as they stood there, the flashlight trained on him.

He’d been shot in the back, and the bolt had hit him with such force that he’d been knocked forward, leaving a trail in the stones that had cut up his face and arms. He was face-down and had been dead for a while.

“Did I—” Candace said, her voice cracking. “I mean … I did. I can remember it. I didn’t mean to, I meant to warn him or maybe just graze him. But he turned suddenly, and I shot him through the … oh, fuck.”

“You didn’t do this,” Myra said as Mike put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Without thinking, she reached up and put her own hand over his. “Well, I mean, you did, but Emory survived, originally. When he tried to undo the injury—I guess so he’d have his strength back, be able to go against you—he moved too fast. Didn’t check all the possibilities, didn’t let the array do its job. One of his variables went wrong, and this is what he got.” She looked at Candace. “What you did was injure him. And then he changed it. Eventually you’ll only remember it the one way, but remind yourself, if you can.”

Candace nodded. She was touched. This woman she almost instinctively didn’t like, who was an enemy as far as she was concerned, had just gone out of her way to make her feel better. It made her strangely hopeful for the next few hours.

“Myra,” Mike said quietly. “If I believe what’s been said tonight, you all have been thinking of us as terrible people for a long time. I don’t understand anything. I used to think I did, but nothing that’s happened tonight makes any goddamn sense to me. But I saw a man tap on a keyboard and change reality. So I guess we take this shit seriously from now on.”

Candace thought he sounded sad. Defeated.

“So, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to stick with us, Myra. We can’t let you go unsupervised until we have a better grasp on things. You said the original plan was for us to stay put, right?”

Myra nodded, her eyes locked on Raslowski.

“Did that mean in the bar? Or do we just need to not interact with any … outside forces?”

Myra took a moment, and when she answered she sounded distracted, dreamy, and kept her eyes on Raslowski. Candace wondered how long they’d worked together. “The model stipulated in the bar, but I don’t know for certain what the variables read. There may have been a presumption that the easiest thing to do was keep you in the bar, even though the real requirement was non-interaction.”

Mike nodded. “We’ll have to chance it,” he said, turning to look at Candace. “If we stay here, they might come check on us. Send more soldiers. We don’t know what kind of failsafes or procedures they have in place. Based on this,” he turned and gestured at Raslowski, “I’m willing to believe … well, that something is happening. Or will happen. Something I don’t think I understand. So my vote is this: We do as Raslowski wanted, we stay out of sight for the next twelve hours or so. But not here. Do you know of any place nearby we could set up camp—someplace they might not know about? Someplace off-grid?”

Candace thought, feeling his hand on her shoulder. She found herself agreeing with him. The evening had been one head spin after another, and the safest thing to do was probably to find someplace to lay low, wait out the storm.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Yes. There’s a cabin. We all call it The Sprawl—it’s a long story, the place has history. Not sure who owns it, if anyone does. In country, totally cut off. I go there sometimes to be alone. It’s always been a place for local kids to go and party, but it should work this time of year. We’ll have to drive.”

She was impressed at how steady her voice was.

“My car’s low on gas,” Mike said, and gently pulled his hand free. She liked him. There was no pretending otherwise: No matter how crazy things had been, she was oddly glad that everything had gone off the rails when Mike Malloy had shown up, instead of the week before, or the next day after he’d gone.

“We can take my Trailblazer,” she said, thinking she sounded surprisingly calm. “The doors don’t lock and there’s always a key in the glovebox.” He looked at her and she smiled. “What?” she said. “Look where I live. No one’s gonna steal a twelve-year old Trailblazer.”

There was a smoky smell in the air. She watched him nod and hold out one hand towards her, and she considered how calm she felt. Her life had just blown up. She’d experienced more violence in the last few hours than in her entire prior life, and she suspected more was to come. But she felt fine.

She took his hand and for a moment they just stood there, basking, she thought, in a split second of being at peace.

“Come on, Myra,” Mike finally said, turning away and gesturing with the gun. “Let’s go get everyone else. I’m sorry but we’re going to tie you up for a while. No offense.”

Myra snorted. “Oh, none taken. Like I said: Sociopaths.”

They walked towards the bar, gravel crunching under their feet. The night was suddenly quiet and still, just the soft glow of lights in the bar, and the smell of fire in the air, and doom and the end of all things around them like a heavy gas.

“Hold it.”

They froze. Candace turned and squinted at the dark form standing a few feet from them. He was a large, round-shouldered man, holding what was unmistakably an assault rifle.

“Glen?” she said, staring.

“Shut up,” Glen Eastman growled. “Hands up. No one’s going anywhere.”

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23. Mike

He looked at Myra and smiled, trying to look friendly. “Not literally.”

She smiled back, and he was aware, dimly, of being uncomfortable with Candace watching him interact with the other woman. He tabled that disturbing realization for later unpacking, when perhaps he wasn’t being accused of someday destroying the world as he knew it.

“Actually,” Myra said, pointing to a black box about the size of a three car batteries tucked under the desk, “we do have the capability of limited direct variable substitution within a controlled field, generated by—”

“Myra,” Raslowski wheezed. “These people are not cleared.”

Myra closed her mouth with a click and looked flustered. Mike looked at the older man, whose fingers were flowing over the keyboard. He glanced at the large screen on the wall and saw what looked like computer code scrolling down. “So let me get this straight: You can decide we’re going to do something terrible in the future, you can violate almost all of our civil rights and kill one of our friends—” he rolled past the exaggeration of calling Jack McCoy a friend of his “—but we can’t hear about the process that initiated this chain of events?”

Myra smiled again, a fleeting, nervous tic of an expression. She looked at Raslowski, who said nothing. Mike sighed and lifted the Beretta. “Okay, then, point of order, but I have a firearm, and if you don’t explain this as best you can in the next ten seconds, I’m going to go back out to the servers and start shooting.”

Raslowski’s hands paused. “Mr. Malloy, I know you don’t yet believe this, but I know you are capable of terrible things, so I take this threat very seriously. Very well. Myra, give them the layperson’s version while I work. I have agreed to analyze the revised scenario before we make any further decisions.”

Myra nodded and smiled, wringing her hands nervously. “Well, uh … in a nutshell, in this room we can … change things. But that’s it.”

Mike looked at Candace and held her gaze for a moment, wordlessly trying to convey are you buying this?

“Your boss said model,” Candace said. “I didn’t make it to college, but model is kind of a passive word to me.”

Myra nodded, warming to the role of tour guide. “Yes, it is! And generally speaking the data sets are too large to map all the possible variables and their interactions. For example, you Four Horse—well, that’s just an unofficial … anyway, you four at the bar. The model clearly showed your path—from this evening forward you would be on a course that ends with catastrophe, worldwide, global catastrophe. No matter what other variables we changed, it happened, and it involved you four—unless we changed your movements tonight. If we kept you in the bar, it all mapped differently.

“But, we couldn’t change that directly. Let me back up: Dr. Raslowski has been working with this for decades, and he’s developed a way of … harnessing the equations that run the universe. The source code of reality. He can even plug in a new value for a variable, or two, or three. And when you change the value of a variable in reality, there’s a ripple effect. The systems here can analyze a limited data set and predict what a change to the variables will do—but only when you’re in this room, because the Raslowski Box generates an energy field that limits the variables. There are only so many possible futures in here, and so the systems can crunch the numbers in a reasonable amount of time. But outside, reality’s too big. There are too many variables and they interact in a far too complex way to track. So, we had to come to your location and physically, well, stop you from leaving. But in here we can tweak.”

Mike frowned. “How is that possible? Even on a limited scale? Even if I accept that you can model reality itself—which I don’t, especially considering the insane prediction your system gave you—”

“Seriously,” Candace said, watching the code on the screen. It resembled every piece of code Jimmy had ever shown her, excitedly trying to interest her in whatever hack he was working on. “You’re like people who drive into lakes because their GPS told them to. This system says Candace Cuddyer, She is Become Death and you scurry over to murder my boss.”

“—all well and good, but actually altering reality? I know you won’t like this, but that’s not possible,” Mike finished.

Myra shook her head. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks were flushed, and Mike realized she was enjoying herself. Warming to the argument. He supposed she didn’t have a whole lot of people to talk to, with a choice between a bunch of grunts and Dr. Raslowski, who appeared to have the personality of one of those college deans from an old 80’s teen comedy.

“It’s all about scale. The universe—reality—is just particles. In this room, in this limited space, we’ve mapped every particle. Every atom, molecule, element, photon, and everything else. And when we entered, we were scanned and uploaded to the model’s matrix. If you keep the data set relatively small, you can map it.”

“Every particle?” Mike said, racing through his limited physics knowledge.

Myra nodded, pleased. “In a small area, it’s possible. And once we know every particle in an area, we can trace connections, we can extrapolate consequences—and we can change values.”

“Because everything’s math,” Candace said, still watching the code.

“Because everything’s math,” Myra said. “It might imply we’re living in a simulation, a hologram, a matrix. Or it might imply that god is a mathematician. Whatever it means, we’re on the cusp of total control over our environment, our universe.”

She was, Mike, thought, clearly a true believer.

“Mike,” Candace said, pointing at the screen. “I could swear I just saw our names.”

“Names aren’t necessary,” Myra said, still in eager beaver helper mode. “We often used your names as variables in the high-level code, but those are just for operator convenience. You not an individual identity, you’re just a variable—and a variable made up of a nearly-infinite number of particles that conspire together to be your reality, and cooperate with each other to form everyone’s reality.”

Mike studied the screen for a moment, watching the code scroll by. He caught a flash of his own name, Malloy. “I see it,” he said.

“It’s just because you’re in the room,” Myra said. “Those tags are in the system, so you’ve been automatically marked. Again, it’s for operator convenience. No one can keep track of billions of particles, so the system applies easy labels. This,” she gestured at the black box again, “is what makes it possible. It only has a range of a few dozen square feet, but within that cone it can aggregate every particle and trace the values and equation relationships of those particles, and thus within that area, we can alter variables in reality.” She gestured at the door. “We can then use the cloud out there to compute the potential ramifications of those changes. See if something bad or unexpected will happen if we, say, change something that seems innocuous. Early tests, we did things like change the color of a plastic cube. Usually nothing happened. Occasionally there was an … unexpected result.”

“Like a bug in a computer program,” Cadace said slowly.

Myra frowned, then shrugged her eyebrows. “Maybe a little like that.”

Mike leaned down a bit. “There’s a handle on that thing,” he said, noting the sturdy-looking piece of black metal on hinges. “It’s mobile?”

“Everything has to be transported somewhere, Mr. Malloy. When our initial trace-throughs on the Raslowski Equations pointed to you and the others, there was skepticism, of course. Repeated analyses came to the same conclusions forty-seven times. So we decided the best thing to do was move the whole operation here, to be nearer to the Four Ho—you four.”

Mike nodded, straightening up. “But it can be moved.”

Myra nodded. “Of course. And powered on and operated. It would take some time to analyze the new area and generate the Raslowski Field—”

Mike smirked a little. Dr. Raslowski had a fondness for naming things after himself, he thought. But then, if I discovered a way of altering reality itself, he said to himself, I might feel like naming everything after myself too.

“—but it would then be operational, yes.” She smiled. “It’s got a self-contained power source—powerful enough to light up a small city, actually. And it’s designed to be shock-proof and as near to indestructible as we could manage—it’s based on the design of the Black Boxes they put in planes. We could drop it out of one, in fact, and it would bounce when it hit the ground but most probably remain functional.” She smiled. “When you’re messing with reality, it’s a good idea to ensure uninterrupted function. Of course, severed from the cloud array in there, it wouldn’t have the data sets to solve for the ripple effects. That generally takes a long time—for our colored cube experiment, it took the array six days to crunch the numbers just to ensure against Butterfly Effects.”

Candace looked over her shoulder and smiled at Mike. “Sure,” she said. “And even then you had a few unexpected results, you said.”

He grinned, and for a moment he was conscious of a real connection, something he hadn’t felt … since Julia. The thought of her sobered him, but the connection was still there. And now that they appeared to have triumphed over their captors, he was starting to think maybe there was a future there—once they got done with the cleanup. With the prosecutions, the investigations, the lawsuits. He looked at the black box. “Jesus Christ, what do you call it?”

“And if you say The Raslowski Box, I’m going to scream,” Candace added, and he laughed.

To his surprise, Myra laughed too. “Oh no, it has a very technical name, of course, but most of us around here just call it The Transmorgrifier.”

Mike let that hang for a moment. He’d been informed, in short order, that he was one-fourth of the end of the world because of a chain of events stretching twenty-seven years into the future, that the universe was just math that could be changed and molded, and that a humming black box gave Dr. Emory Raslowski the limited ability to alter reality, if only inside a small field it generated. His head ached.

“All right,” he said, turning to look at Raslowski. “You basically collate so much data you can literally model reality. And in a small area you can manipulate that model directly and change things.” He lowered the gun. If there was a secret horde of soldiers in the facility, or if Myra was a Manchurian Candidate-style sleeper agent about to unleash kung fu on them, it would have happened. “It’s a little difficult to believe, actually, Dr. Raslowski. Any chance we could have a demonstration?”

Raslowski ignored him for a moment, his hands swirling over the keyboard. Just before the silence became awkward, he paused and looked at Mike, one hand hovering over the ENTER button.

“Of course,” Raslowski said, and brought his hand down. A moment later, he disappeared.

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