Jane sat in darkness, watching the shape of Matt’s chest rise and fall.
They’d stayed over at Morningstar, in one of the guest rooms normally reserved for visiting dignitaries – a wood-panelled chamber on the highest floor with a four-poster bed, a walnut writing desk and a pale-yellow, high-backed armchair which Jane now sat in. Matt slept soundly; once he’d got back from his walk with Giselle the Acolytes had continued toasting, getting carried away to the point where Matt had been quite drunk. He’d cried a bit too, which always made her heart ache, as had a lot of them, Will and Wally and Giselle, Celeste, Editha and the others. Even Matt’s dad had gotten a bit emotional, though he hadn’t really known anyone they were remembering. There’d been lots of toasts, lots of stories, lots of laughter. Matt had told a great one about Ed, the old Academy genius, lying to Morningstar nurses over some dumb nettle tea. Everyone had been in stitches, and then everyone had been crying. There hadn’t seemed to be much wall between the two. It all tinged Jane with sadness, but it didn’t pull her down like it did the rest of them. Maybe because she hadn’t known the dead as well, so they still kind of felt like strangers. Maybe indulging in grief felt fake, because a lot of them hadn’t really been her friends. But it also just… didn’t feel like they were dead. It was strange. She could still picture them, if she imagined. Death just didn’t seem so… permanent.
Jane reclined into the armchair, staring at the high-arched ceiling and feeling her thoughts drift along the waves of never-sleep. Inside her veins, the power of Dawn hummed its warm, ceaseless tune. But beneath it, she felt now, caressing at the barest fringes… a second song. Wisps of azure starlight. Whispering; wondering. She knew now how to hear it. Heard it coalesce in the spaces between the world.
I am all. I will be. See and know.
Jane opened her eyes, not realising she had closed them, and for the briefest instant saw the bones of the Academy hung through with sapphire spider silk. Then slowly, surely, like a hazing around the edges of her mind, she felt it. And she knew instinctually what was coming, watched as the cobwebs faded, a moment before it happened – as a pressure planted itself inside the back of her head.
Jane’s eyes flicked up. Her pulse quickened. She sat straight against the chair’s hard-backed fabric and turned towards the shadowed corridor, to see what she knew she would. To watch as from the depths of the darkness, peering barely around the corner, came first two cobalt eyes, and then all that remained of the Time Child.
Through the patient night, Jane gazed at him. The blue‑eyed boy motioned. Jane glanced over at Matt in bed, sleeping soundly – and without another word she rose from the armchair and slipped silently from the room, out into the waiting dark.
The child she faced as she rounded the corner, stepping out onto the bare wooden floors of the corridor, was exactly how she remembered him. Small and ghostly pale, with hair like fine white gold and clothes your eyes naturally slid over. He held his hands in front of him as he looked at her, this frail, demure little thing, and for a moment Jane almost found herself feeling sympathy. But then once more she saw his eyes. Oh, those eyes. Those swirling sapphire galaxies, which opened once you stared at them, drawing you in, sucking you down. Everything he was lived within those vortexes – the rest of him malnourished, for those eyes consumed all.
For a few moments, Jane said nothing. Seeing the child there, in the cold, calm dark of midnight seemed surreal, almost dreamlike. But this was no dream. The power of Dawn saw to that.
“What do you want?” she asked. The boy did not reply immediately. For the longest time he simply stared at her, and eventually Jane began to wonder if he’d returned to being mute.
That he’d appeared here, in the middle of this supposedly secure fortress, surrounded by some of the world’s most dangerous superheroes and the best protection money could buy, did not surprise Jane in the slightest. The Child had shown itself unaffected by Disruptances and nearly every other conventional limit. It moved through the back paths, she knew. Through dark places, behind the thread of things.
Once, a few months prior, she’d toyed with the idea of going back in time and attempting to stop the Black Death earlier, attempting to save Detroit or the second Legion. Hell, why stop there – why not save the first Legion? Why not save Africa? Why not strangle the Black Death in his crib? At that moment though, the Child had appeared and warned her not to – given her a taste of the howling eternity that waited outside the sheath of a stable timeline. It had been a harrowing experience, but an educational one. Now the Child was back, when once more she was ruminating on lives that had been lost, on finality.
Could it sense her thoughts?
“Come,” the boy finally murmured, turning slowly on its heel. Jane hesitated to follow, and the Child glanced back at her.
“Where?”
“Away,” came the only reply. Jane looked over her shoulder, into the bedroom and Matt’s sleeping form. He was unmoved; still tucked safely beneath the covers. As though peering through the wall, the Child followed her gaze.
“No harm will come to him,” he said.
“No, it won’t,” she replied, the words cold. The boy tilted his head.
“Yes,” he said. He held out his hand. Jane hesitated only a moment, then took it, feeling the song of cavernous time echoing beneath the skin. Entwined with her own, her mind suddenly swum beneath the weight of twin oceans submerging each other, lapping, consuming, drowned.
The sensation became a cold and sinking throb. The boy stepped into the shadows, and Jane allowed herself to be led.
Nothing. Step after step deeper into the dark, until darkness was all that remained. A jet-black emptiness, unblemished, absolute. Jane glanced around, seeing only herself and the boy, no indication of where they were or breathed or stood.
“Where is this?” she asked. She glanced around, gazing into the blackness. Somehow, though it was everywhere, it was not oppressive, merely… blank. It didn’t scare her like it once might’ve. What could, when inside her burned the light?
“Outside,” the boy replied. He released her hand, allowing her to sink a fraction, and himself rise. “A quiet moment.”
Jane nodded, feeling if not quite understanding.
“How long can we stay here?”
“As long as we like.”
Jane reached out, curious but not wary, sensing not so much resistance around her as simply… lack. She took a few steps, moving without difficulty around the endless darkness. There was no ground, no gravity, the darkness neither firm nor soft. She simply walked and desired to remain upright, and there was no impulse present to resist.
She turned back to face the Child, peering at him with quiet, curious intent.
“This isn’t like last time. Why doesn’t this hurt?”
The Child said nothing, instead seating itself upon a step of shadow, which shaped without resistance into a kind of formless throne. “It is nothing. It took me a long time to find it. Far away from the life‑lines. Where existence is yet to tread.”
“It took you a long time?” asked Jane, “How does that make sense? Can’t you time travel? Don’t you have unlimited time?”
“Yes,” the boy answered, “And no. My existence is no longer linear, but there is still experience. Still failure. Still growth.”
Jane shook her head. “No longer linear? As in it once was?” She paused, sweeping her gaze around, then slowly scowled. “Every time I see you, or Matt sees you, you talk in riddles. Why can’t you just speak clearly? Who are you? What are you? What do you want from us?”
For a few moments the Child said nothing, merely staring at the shadows underneath them, small fingers idly twisting a small trail of darkness rising from his throne. Just as Jane thought he wasn’t going to answer, the boy’s blue eyes flicked up.
“It is not my goal to deceive,” he said, “If I have, it’s because that’s what you needed in the moment.”
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“Like what the psychic said to Matt in Albania?”
“Yes. She spoke my words. I showed her a glimpse of my mind, showed her…” he gestured to the endless dark, “…eternity. True eternity, not this.” He paused. “But her purpose was not to communicate. Her purpose was to stall. I needed to buy the human time, without giving away the game.”
“Distract Heydrich.”
“Yes. Until the right moment. The right sequence of events.”
The Child fell silent, then continued.
“You ask who I am,” he said, “It is the wrong question. I had a name once, but it is just words. You ask what I am. I think you know. I am like you. I am like any of you. And fatally, I am not.”
Slowly the boy closed his swirling eyes, then re-opened them. “A long time ago, in a world that’s yet to be, I was born. I grew. I had a mother, a father, siblings. I went to school; I played. I lived an ordinary life surrounded by ordinary children. Then one day, on the twelfth of September, at nine‑sixteen AM, my powers manifested. I did not understand them. I simply knew, as I sat inside a classroom gazing out at sunlit branches, that if I wanted to I could leave. It was but an errant thought, yet I indulged it. And in that moment I unwittingly untethered myself from time, and hurtled screaming into eternity.”
“You understand, of course,” the Child murmured, “You’ve felt it, the enormity. Infinite information, possibility, where you see not only all that is and ever could be, but all that you could do. Your actions, your reactions, fractals ever breaking, and from every one of them flows infinite change, infinite consequence. An endless, burning vortex. The human mind cannot comprehend eternity, everything everywhere and always. I was no exception. I was ten.”
“For a million years I fell,” he continued, “Detached from time and space, unable to age or sleep or scream. I went mad, of course – but after an infinite number of lifetimes I grew bored of that and went sane again. My mind adapted. I learned how to let time flow through me; learned how to move, how to drift. How to think. To interfere.”
“You interfered with the Black Death.”
“Yes,” the child replied, “Once restored to something approaching sanity, I surveyed the tapestry of superhuman existence and found it fraying, infested and rotten. A plague named Klaus Heydrich stained all futures, horrific, intolerable. I could not abide.”
“Unfortunately,” the boy continued, “As you will soon discover, there are rules. Immutably fixed points, nails in the weave which would collapse the whole tapestry if removed. Where I walked, before my manifestation – my life before I could move through time – none of that could be varied. It cannot change. To do so would create a paradox, which would swallow creation whole.”
“Yeah right, so, avoid that,” muttered Jane. She glanced around at the dark, then back to the Child, still seated on nought but void-mist. “So the Black Death came before you were born.”
“Yes. Africa was already broken, the Legion dead. I could re-watch their deaths, experience it, but I could not interfere. So much was fixed in my birthright.”
“So many died.”
“The least of infinite evils,” the Child replied, and though his voice retained its same ethereal presence it tinged perhaps with loss, “My hands are bound. We are reduced to terrible choices to forestall horrific fates.” The boy paused, tilting his head slightly, staring at her. “I killed my own grandmother. Did you know that?”
Jane felt a slight tinge of revulsion. “No.” Hesitation. “Why did you do it? How?”
“Indirectly. I did not kill her with my own hands, merely put her in a position to die. But there is no distinction. Not for those such as us.” He paused. “It had to be. Without her death, the path would have frayed at a critical juncture.”
“Do you regret it?” Jane asked.
For a moment the Child was silent. “It was the worst thing I have ever done,” he told her, the answer soft.
He turned his head as Jane looked at him, staring out into the endless dark.
“I am a slave to duty. Do you see it?” The boy pointed out into the nothing. “In the distance, very far. Even now, though we seek nothing, it pulls at us. While we sit here. Its weight draws us back in.” Jane followed his finger, and as she squinted she realised he was right, that he was actually pointing to something – a miniscule pinprick of light.
“The life threads,” the child told her, “Humanity, all who were and are and ever will be. We can shape them. We can guide them. They must be preserved.”
As Jane stared, the pinprick grew larger. Brighter, like it was coming towards them. Or maybe they were hurtling towards it. Captivated, yet feeling a sudden thudding terror, Jane half-turned back to the Child, but found herself unable to look away.
There was a pressure, a pain building inside her skull.
“So what…”
“Yes,” the boy murmured, and though the panic in Jane’s chest mounted his voice remained small and calm, “What now? What do I want from you? Why am I doing this? What is my goal?”
The light was growing blinding now, the size of a TV screen against the dark walls, growing, growing ever bigger but faster, faster, never stopping, getting wider and wider until it consumed the pitch blackness. And still it came. Jane opened her mouth to scream but found her voice had fled her. The Child stepped calmly off his formless throne, and quietly took her hand.
“I will show you,” he whispered, and in that moment they were engulfed by life.
Light. Endless pulsating threads of colour, splitting and crossing and weaving and intertwining, stretching out into infinity from every moment, every choice. Instinctively her eyes tried to follow one, to trace a beginning, an end, but there were no sane paths to follow, no extractable life or line. The intensity of it was blinding, every colour imaginable, everywhere, never static, for the threads were not threads but chains of moments, infinite – trillions upon trillions, a kaleidoscope of windows into the world. And then with a surge of absolute terror Jane remembered she was there. She could touch things, she could know things, she could change them. She could interfere. And suddenly a howling fire ignited inside her consciousness, and she was seeing shattering fragments not only of her actions but her thoughts, her reactions to her thoughts, change upon choice upon thinking, a million, billion possibilities erupting in an impossible causal fractal cutting into the depths of her very soul.
Yet either through practice, terror or the Child’s presence, some piece of self-preservation prevailed. Jane stopped moving, stopped breathing, forcing herself desperately not to think, curling foetal into a ball. The Child’s tiny hand clutched hers firmly and she allowed herself to be moved, small and useless, unable to shut out the hurricane of knowledge, staring quaking through transparent lidless eyes.
If the Child had at that moment let go of her, Jane had no doubt that her mind would have disintegrated. She would have fallen, endlessly, with no way out and no way home, her sense of self torn apart until she was nothing but breath and gibbering. At the edges of her vision, beyond the weave, she saw something move, and Jane wondered then, in a rush of terror, whether there were others who had shared this fate before her – beings whose minds had touched eternity, stripped defenceless into broken, howling monsters, destined to writhe forever in the void. What terror could they wrought, could she bring, if she descended like this. She gripped the boy’s hand as tight as she dared, almost scared that she might break it. But the Child never wavered, and it never loosened its grip.
Through clenched, crystalline eyes she watched them drift through the twisting universe, through singing threads engorged on moments too dense for comprehension, light and colour on every side. The Child floated, a leaf on the wind, flowing through the gaps, the dark spaces between stormfronts, somehow knowing, somehow seeing where to go. Again, Jane struggled to make herself invisible, to touch nothing, to be unobtrusive; to shut out the burning, the blinding, the roaring she worried now was not just sound and memories pouring through the interwoven threads but something hungry, something worse. Eventually, somehow, it felt like they were rising, the cacophony growing dimmer – and finally, through the life‑threads still pulled at her, Jane felt a tiny cloud of sanity condensate, a fingernail of mental space. She opened her eyes, or allowed herself to see, having never really closed them. They hovered beneath the tapestry, above it, around it somehow, in the middle. A small, dark pocket. A gasp of stillness in this terrible, wonderous world.
“We don’t have long,” the Child warned, “I must return you.” Jane made no words to reply, just gurgled a whimpering groan. “But I will show you my purpose. I need to. Time is running out.”
“What…?” Jane gasped. It was as if all moisture had been sapped from her body, blood swirling on her tongue. “Where…?”
“Follow my eyes,” the Child commanded, and he pointed with a finger that neither is nor was, “Step back. Look at the greater pattern. There is a flow, irreversible.” Jane tried to do what he said, to follow. “Beginning, middle, end. The lines flow always in one direction, from birth to death. Try not to see them but follow the path they make. All of them. Step back. All of it.”
Heart thundering in her chest, Jane tried to. She blurred her eyes, or what she thought were her eyes, like staring at a patterned painting, trying to see the true picture behind. Through painful gasps she saw the stars refocus.
“I see it.”
“Good. See how it moves, the great twisting cord. See how it starts, how the light flows, swift and sure in one direction. Cause and effect. Cause and effect.”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Good. Now follow the flow. The entirety of human life.”
Again, Jane pulled back, drawing away from the detail of each individual lifeline, letting her mind collapse until she only saw patterns– until the web of fate was only light. He was right. The threads all moved in one direction, twisting, intertwining, an infinitely complex rope. A pathway, a river, flowing onwards, flowing right. Flowing towards-
Darkness.
Yearning, gaping darkness. Not the absence of light, not the calm nothing in which they had just loitered. This was… destruction. Malevolent, empty. A blackened pit, larger than all the stars in the universe, gaping and churning at the end of the pathway, swallowing everything whole.
More and more, unaware, the lifelines flowed into it. Irreversibly consumed, leaving nothing on the other end but dark. No song. No joy. No life.
It was a yearning void that screamed at her more terribly than any cacophony of mind-destroying thought.
“What is that?” she whispered.
And beside her, in the world between the walls, the Child looked at her, and his blue eyes spiralled into infinity.
“That is a choice,” he told her, “A choice you make. Someday, soon, you will have to make it. Someday soon, you will have to choose between Matt Callaghan and eternity.”
No.
“I cannot guide you,” the child said, “I cannot stop it. Just know that if you choose wrong, Jane Walker, heir to all creation, you will doom not only us-”
His words became a whisper.
“-but the entire world.”