each of the robot’s torsos, the spinning red disc of their fusor reactors flashed white as the machines entered their destruct sequences. The hum of the torus increased; above the reactor’s control panel, the mechanical digital display flipped over with a clack.
The countdown began.
Rad blanched. Sixty seconds. Sixty seconds until the robot army detonated.
“She’s going to destroy the world here?” Rad scanned the room. “I thought she needed to get her army into the Empire State.”
Nimrod’s face fell. He walked towards Evelyn, stepping over Kane’s prone form. “No, this is different. She is falling and needs the energy just to stay in the world.”
Forty seconds.
Nimrod turned back to his friends. Rad looked around at the robots, their spinning lights now flashing in time with the glow of the torus reactor, in time with the digits flipping down on the clock, marking time until the end of the world.
Thirty seconds.
“We need to get out of here,” said Rad, knowing even as he said it that it was a naïve thought. Nimrod shook his head.
Twenty-five seconds.
“Each robot has a reactor inside it. There are enough here to destroy the East Coast of the United States. There is nowhere to run.”
Fifteen seconds.
Rad looked at Mr Grieves, but all the agent did was take off his hat and shake his head, like he’d just lost a bet on his favorite baseball team.
Ten seconds.
Rad looked at Soma Street. It was dark and cold but it was home. Rad missed it.
Five seconds.
FIFTY-FOUR
Kane pushed himself up from the floor. As he moved, the lines of power connecting him to Evelyn snapped tight, sending white-hot pain flickering across his whole body. He gritted his teeth, focused on the pain, concentrated on the tugging sensation at the base of his spine.
The power of the Fissure, the power he had nearly exhausted defending his friends in the Empire State – it was here, now, in this room, in the portal to his home city open behind him and in the wraith floating in the air in front of him. And she was falling, slipping away from the world.
Kane reached out towards her. He understood the power, understood how to control it, to make it his, to wield the blue light of the gap between universes, shaping it, molding it for his own use. He had disturbed the balance, coming here; he was an unexpected guest, a future she could not see. Because they were alike, the two of them. No longer people, just parts of the Fissure, two sides of the same coin.
Kane summoned his strength, pulling energy from the window to Soma Street, pulling energy from Evelyn McHale’s quantum event horizon. It was like flying in the air above Grand Central, as easy as pie.
But he needed more, a lot more. Evelyn did too, but she was going to kill millions of people to do it, just to stay in the world, a place she didn’t even want to be.
There was another way.
Kane stood and Evelyn screamed. He saw fear on her face, desperate and cold and black; it was bottomless despair, the expression of the damned.
He turned, and saw Rad and Mr Grieves and Captain Nimrod, frozen in time.
No, not frozen. Time moved on, but Kane had sidestepped it, jumping off the track. Kane had all the time in the world, the countdown to destruction paused at four seconds forever.
Kane looked into the workings of the fusor reactors that powered the army. Despite his being outside of time there was still movement within, the quantum states of the subatomic particles flipping back and forth, back and forth, like they couldn’t quite decide which state was best. It was the Fissure and the two universes, the Pocket and the Origin, slammed together in the underground chamber, Kane knew that. Each universe was incompatible with the other, not enough for anything cataclysmic, but enough to make things difficult.
Kane cancelled the countdown and stepped back into the time track. The fusor reactor in each robot flashed white and then the red spinning power within was slower, calmer, duller.
One.
The countdown clock clacked to zero, and stopped. There was no explosion, no atomic end of New York. The torus reactor hummed, and the robots stayed exactly where they were.
Evelyn flickered and she wasn’t quite there, not anymore. Kane watched her face, watched the fear. Then the factory flared blue as he was pulled by her gravity back out of time, into the interstitial nothingness.