The clocks were moving about four or five times faster than they should have
been. Leona started tapping on her cuff to see if there was any way to fix
that. “That pause button you pressed,” she said after apparently discovering
no remedy. “It has a wider range than we needed. We’re all frozen now.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jeremy pointed out. “Angela is frozen from
our perspective. Time is moving even slower for her?”
“Because I pointed the remote directly at her I guess?” Mateo said.
“Well, we have about six hours before our jump to...” Aeolia began.
“To 2153, Leona filled in. If we don’t break free of this by then, we’ll
miss whoever it is we’re meant to transition. We may have already missed our
chance.”
“I can’t press this button again,” Mateo said. “Angela is hurt. We need time
to help her. More time than we have. We gotta find a way to unpause only
us.”
“I can try a few things,” Danica revealed. “Miss Sarai, could you please
assist me? The rest of you just keep an eye on her.”
Once Danica and Aeolia were gone, Leona knelt down, and pulled the mask off
of the intruder. “I know this man. He’s younger, but it’s definitely him.”
Bran unmasked the other intruder. “This one isn’t younger. He’s about the
same age that he was when we last saw him.”
Mateo peeked over at the older version. He never met the guy himself, but
Leona and Bran had a hostile encounter with him in 2161. They were trying to
retrieve the Escher knob, but he was hoarding it, along with several other
temporal objects, under the false belief that they would protect him from
the Deathspring.
“The scar on his hand,” Bran noted, “it’s where I shot the lockbox out of
his grasp. Why does the younger version have the same scar? That makes no
sense. It doesn’t happen for another fifteen years.”
Leona stood up, and checked the older version. Then she went back to the
younger one, and cross-checked them a few more times. “It’s not exactly the
same. It’s very similar, but...oh my God, he shot himself.”
“Excuse me?” Jeremy questioned.
“He came back in time, found his younger self, and shot him so they would
match,” Leona posited, knowing how weird that theory was.
“That’s insane.”
“Uhh...yeah,” Leona agreed. “We don’t know who he is, or what his deal is,
but it was clear from the start that he is not well.”
The older version started waking up, so Bran shot him with his stunner.
“What are we going to do with him?”
“Can we take him to that time traveler prison?” Jeremy suggested. “Beaver
Heaven?”
“Beaver Haven,” Leona corrected. “I’m not sure they would take him. As far
as we know, he never threatened to expose us all to the world. The Warden
doesn’t care about time criminals unless they risk the secret of the
underworld.”
“They made an exception for Reaver and Ulinthra in an alternate timeline,”
Mateo reminded her.
“Yes,” she concurred. “But they didn’t place them at the facility. They each
got their own special prism, far removed from everyone else.”
“They had to,” Mateo realized. “Because it was against their code. And
technically, none of the staff ever worked there. They outsourced the entire
thing to distance themselves from it.”
“What does this all mean?” Jeremy asked.
“If we want to keep these two locked up,” Leona decided, “we’ll have to do
it ourselves.”
“How do you lock up someone that no one can remember?” Jeremy asked. “Who’s
gonna feed them, maintain their cell, or cells?”
“We’ll do it,” Bran decided. “We’ll stay with them until...well, they’ll
both die eventually, right? Aeolia and I don’t seem to age, so what’s a few
decades?”
“Kallias...” Mateo urged vaguely.
“Don’t worry about it,” Bran urged, less vaguely. “We’ll see each other
again at some point. Time ain’t nothin’ but a thang. You may not even
remember us.”
When he first started jumping forwards in time, Mateo realized he would have
to say goodbye to everyone he loved. This truth has held despite the fact
that half his friends are time travelers, and the other half are immortal.
Everyone leaves eventually. Leona is the only one who has stuck by him. “If
he’s in prison,” she began, “he won’t grow up to attack us in 2161. Even if
we let him go, we wouldn’t have even been able to see him. This is a new
reality, it has to be. We’ve changed things. What is the world going to be
like in the future?”
“That’s not the biggest question,” Mateo said. “The real question is, how do
we deal with our alternate versions when we run into them? If they’re not
predestined to one day turn into us, what will we do?”
Like an ominous answer from a mysterious God, the lights all shut off at
once, following that familiar thump from the main power switch. The darkness
lasted about thirty seconds, at which point Mateo discovered Bran to be
gone, along with the two versions of the man. Danica walked in from the back
alone, and showed no signs that she should have been anything but. No one
else seemed to have the sense that they were missing two members of their
group. When Mateo checked the stash of Cassidy cuffs, he found all five
extras. Not even Danica was still wearing hers, for she only needed it so
she could interact with the retgone coiners. Why was he still able to
maintain his memory of their friends? What had changed in him that didn’t
change for Leona, and for that matter, why not Nerakali?
“Thanks, everyone,” Danica started, “for helping me fix the power.” They did
what? What did these people think just happened?
Angela sat up on the couch. “What happened? Why do I feel both energized and
tired at the same time?”
“The answer is...don’t think about it,” Mateo said to her. They all seemed
cool with this nonexplanation.
Their cuffs beeped. “Well, this was a nice break,” Jeremy said. “We have to
get back to it, though. It’s not far from here.” A break?
“Beaver Haven Penitentiary,” Leona noted. “Oh, it’s 2150.”
“What’s the significance of this year?” Mateo questioned.
Danica took this one. “The prison is designed to hold those they deem guilty
for the duration of their entire lives, and these people are taken from all
over time and space, both the past, and the future. So it doesn’t need to
exist throughout all of time. It just needs to be big enough to contain all
those people until they die out. Based on minimal turnover, a hundred and
sixty-three years is that figure. It will soon be shut down, if it wasn’t
already earlier this year.”
“We’re already in the main sequence,” Angela pointed out, “so let’s just go
find out what’s happening. I’m not a huge fan of prisons, so I wouldn’t mind
seeing one close forever.”
The four of them left Danica and the dimensional destroyer behind, so the
former could help the latter get back to wherever it was she belonged. Mateo
was the only one acutely aware that they never needed her to do anything for
them. The others only had a vague recollection that they recruited her to
stop some disaster in The Constant, which apparently never took place. They
didn’t know why, and they didn’t wonder about it either. While they were on
their way to the prison, Mateo felt like there weren’t enough people in
their group, and not just because they suddenly lost two of them. Four was
too low a number, but they only ever had more than that for organic reasons.
Never before had they attempted to recruit anyone else into the mission, so
this was liable to be their current maximum, at least for a while. Again,
the three others didn’t seem bothered by this.
They arrived at the prison to find it eerily empty. All the cells were just
left open, and it was mostly silent, except for some noises coming from the
offices above. They headed for them, and walked into the Warden’s lobby
area. “Oh, God,” she said. “What are you people doing here?”
Jeremy checked the time. “Someone is about to be transitioned to an
alternate reality from here. Know anyone whose life needs saving?”
She plopped herself on her chair, amongst all the half-packed boxes, and
small piles of trash. “There’s one. Have you ever heard of a man by the name
of Ambrosios?”
“Yeah.” Mateo looked at his wrist. “He’s dead.”
“Not quite yet. He will be come midnight.”
“You’re executing him?” Leona questioned.
“I can’t keep doing this,” the Warden explained. “I can’t keep the prison
open forever. I certainly can’t keep it open for only one immortal.”
“So you’re just gonna kill him?” Leona pressed. “For convenience?”
“He doesn’t wanna be trapped forever. This is best for everyone, including
him.” The Warden leaned forward, and rested her elbows on the desk. “Unless
you have some way around it? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Who are we talking about?” Jeremy asked.
“A true immortal,” Leona answered. “At least, he should be. They’ve come up
with some way of making his power wear off. We never found out how.”
“There’s only one way,” the Warden said. “It has nothing to do with making
his immortality wear off.”
“That’s how it was done in the reality where I come from,” Mateo explained.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I saw his body,” Mateo replied.
The Warden nodded. “Did you see it just once, or did you check in on it
after a few years?”
“Wull...I guess it was just once,” Mateo revealed.
“Then he probably wasn’t really dead. There are ways to suppress some
aspects of true immortality, but not all of them, and they will eventually
come back and survive. Unless...”
“Unless what?” Leona was suspicious.
“Lucius Carlisle has agreed to help us in this matter,” the Warden finally
said.
Leona scoffed and shook her head. “You’re gonna make him do that.”
“Like I said, he agreed.”
Leona was in the mood to fustigate. “Lucius Carlise is a good person who
does everything he can to do that right thing. And people like you keep
exploiting him, and ruining his progress!”
“He agreed.”
“Stop goddamn saying that!”
“It’s okay, Leona,” Lucius said from the doorway. “I’m okay.”
“No!” Leona continued to fight. “We’re not doing this! We’ll take Ambrosios
to The Parallel, where they will help him in their own ways. They can
probably treat his mental issues.”
“We can’t keep relying on the natives to fix everything for us,” Angela
reluctantly reminded her. “They’ve made too many exceptions to their
noninterference policy already.”
“I don’t care!” Leona went on, her voice still raised.
Mateo didn’t want to listen to this anymore. He turned around, and took
Lucius by the hand. “Come on, we need to talk.”
No one followed them, either because they didn’t guess what Mateo was
planning to do, or didn’t notice. He led Lucius down the steps, and into one
of the empty cells. Once they were there, he retrieved one of the extra
Cassidy cuffs, and handed it to Lucius. “You’re going to teach me how to use
your power.”
Lucius regarded the cuff, but didn’t reach for it. “You don’t have to do
that. I really am fine.”
“You say that now, but every time you kill someone, a little bit of your
soul flakes off. I’ve seen it in your eyes.”
“And that won’t happen to you?”
“I’m an alternate version of Mateo Matic. No, my soul doesn’t matter.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“It does in my case. I know what my options are. At some point, the real
Mateo and I are gonna have to make a decision about how to proceed, and I
fully intend to...just die.”
“You say that now,” Lucius echoed.
“People always make excuses for me, so when I kill, it’s an aberration. When
you kill...” Mateo placed the cuff on Lucius’ wrist, and was met with no
protest. “...it’s Tuesday, and a little racist. So you have to avoid it
every chance you get. Besides,” he said with a smile. “I can erase people’s
memories if I want.”
“Thank you,” Lucius said. “I owe you a favor.”
“This will be the last we see each other.”
“How do you know?”
“I just feel it. You have your destiny, and I have mine. They’re in opposite
directions. Now. How do I molecularly teleportize someone?”
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