Three days later, forty stories above the city streets, a little girl swayed atop a grey tiled ledge, alone save for the wind. Her feet, black leather school shoes with clean white socks, hung out over nothingness, her frizzy brown hair not properly tied or brushed, dried tearstains down her freckled cheeks. Her eyes were red – she wore a soft blue cardigan pinned with a brooch of a bee. She couldn’t have been more than twelve.
Jane descended slowly, floating down until her golden boots touched concrete. Up here, the sounds of the city faded into nothingness – a muffled, windswept hum punctuated only by distant sirens. Jane took one audible step forward, then another. The girl spun around, her expression a mixture of horror and grief.
“Please,” she whimpered, “No. Stay away.”
“It’s okay,” Jane murmured. She edged forward, holding out gold-gloved hands. “It’s okay. You can’t hurt me.”
The girl’s face crumpled, twisting from fear to incalculable sorrow – then she broke, and once more collapsed into tears.
Jane took another, cautious step towards the child. There was a slight pressure all around her, as if the air was sticky, invisibly so, like a hot, thin mist – but the sensation evaporated when it met Jane’s barrier, sizzling away in an almost imperceptible hiss. Azleena had been right.
“It’s okay,” Jane murmured, trying to make her voice… calm? Kind? The girl turned away, staring once more out over the edge of the building, over the four-hundred-foot drop. Jane moved slowly forward, keeping her steps firm and deliberate. Finally, when she reached the girl’s side, she crouched on the ledge beside her, and sat maybe a foot away.
They stared out across the waiting city, Jane saying nothing, the girl shaking with silent sobs.
“What’s your name?” Jane asked. A few moments passed. Through short, shallow breaths, the girl finally found the words to respond.
“Melissa.”
“Melissa. Nice to meet you. I’m Jane.”
“I know.” The girl turned to her, her jaw clenched, tears and snot intermingling beneath her nose. “Why has this happened? What’s happening to me?”
Jane hesitated. “You’ve got your powers,” she eventually answered.
“Oh God,” Melissa gurgled.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“My Dad,” she sobbed, “My Mom.”
“It was an accident.”
“Why… why can’t I… I just… how?”
Jane stared at the girl, unsure what to say, unsure how to respond. How did anybody deal with this? How did you explain to a child they were the reason their parents were dead?
Luckily, the voice in her ear didn’t hesitate.
“When you’re upset,” Jane repeated, word for word from the earpiece, trying to keep her voice as gentle as possible, as factual, as calm, “Or angry, or scared, your skin puts out this… mist. Like little bits of dust. Have you learned about acids and bases in school?”
The girl gave a small, miserable nod.
“This dust… it sticks to living things. And then it turns very acidic. It’s very rare. Very unusual. It’s really unlucky it happened this way.”
The technical term was Idiosyncratic Manifestation. According to the genetic analysis Azleena had run on the victims, the girl’s power should have been the ability to voluntarily secrete a chemical coating. It could have been protective, maybe poisonous, sometimes as mundane as glue. But it should have been voluntary, it shouldn’t have been aerosolised, and it definitely shouldn’t have been lethal to organic life.
Usually these sort of abnormalities occurred when the person had some kind of genetic disorder. Usually, they were harmless, even beautiful.
Usually.
Yesterday, Melissa McKenzie was a normal girl with a loving family. Today, she’d killed sixteen people. Unwittingly, Jane felt her fists clench. One day earlier and this all could have been prevented, but now this girl’s life, her entire family – all of it, forever ruined. One day, and now only pieces. Now a question of not how many could be saved, but how many were dead.
“Why?” Melissa whimpered, “Why did this happen? What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing,” Jane answered sharply, then winced as Melissa recoiled. She tried again, more gently. “This isn’t your fault.”
“It should’ve been me,” the child whispered. She hugged her legs to her chest, rocking precariously on the edge of the building, eyes leaking fresh tears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean…”
Her voice trailed off and slowly her shoulders sagged – too exhausted, it seemed, to endure fresh grief. The girl's movements grew still.
“Are you going to kill me?” she whispered.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“What?” said Jane, flinching, “No.”
“I’m a murderer.”
“It was an accident. Look.” Jane reached into the bag she was carrying, pulling free a bundle of cloth. “We- the Legion- analysed your power. We can fix it. This suit, it’s got-” Jane hesitated, struggling to remember what Azleena had said, “-it’s got little like fans all built into it. Really little. And they can suck the dust in and then it’s like... bicarb soda... and stuff.” Jane could almost hear Azleena sighing. “It neutralises the acid,” she assured her.
The girl looked up, her expression miserable. “I’ll be safe?”
“Yeah. I promise. One hundred percent safe.”
“Ninety-eight percent,” Azleena corrected in her earpiece. Shut up, Jane corrected in her head.
Melissa’s eyes watered. “And my Mom? My Dad…?”
“They’re gone,” Jane mumbled; then: “I’m sorry.”
And for the second time since she’d got there the little girl well and truly broke. Jane sat beside her, helpless in the gap of distance, a horrible tightness in her chest, not knowing what she was supposed to do.
“Give her a hug,” Azleena demanded, “It might be the last time anybody can.”
Jane hesitated for a moment, her arms stiff, uncomfortable. Then a memory flickered in her head. A funeral. A deep, shaking sadness—but in the middle a tiny hand, seeking comfort in a bigger one. Twin sorrows, nesting together for warmth.
On the roof of a forty-story building, looking out over nothing, the white-gold woman leaned over to the little girl, and held her close between shaking sobs.
*****
I cannot kill a time traveller, Matt Callaghan concluded. It was all he could do not to cry.
It had been almost three weeks now; three weeks of restless nights, of distracted thoughts, of too much time on Bluin, of churning the same problem over and over. Now, at 10am on a Wednesday morning, as Matt sat at the dining table in his apartment pretending to read Constitutional law cases while Wally Cykes sat opposite pretending to be babysitting, the slow-moving processor that was Matt's brain finally crunched the last of its computations and printed out a result.
It couldn’t be done. It simply couldn’t. Not by him, not with his resources, not in any way which had even the slightest chance of succeeding. It was simply an issue of causation. The Time Child could see what was coming. Therefore any trap – literally any trap – which Matt or any other temporally-linear being concocted, the Child could see coming. The best plan – the absolute best plan in the world, completely flawless, split-second precise – was still at its core dependent on the Child being too rushed, too lazy, too arrogant or (let’s face it) too negligent to look where it was going and blundering straight into a trap. Expecting that wasn’t feasible. Relying on it was nuts.
Get a psychic to trap him? Well great, all we needed was a guarantee the psychic wouldn’t go all Albanian Cassandra eye-gouge-y from one whiff of time-brain AND the Child not already taking Psy‑Block AND them luring the Child somewhere AND the Child not seeing it coming.
Make some kind of anti-time-travel field or escape-blocking Disruptance? Fantastic, so long as it’s taken as a given something like that is even possible AND he could find someone way smarter than him to create it AND Matt could explain everything to them without the Child realising AND them luring the Child somewhere AND the Child not seeing it coming.
Beyond that, what, a bear trap full of time berries? Matt was annoyed at himself for how often his brain kept returning to this ‘solution’, but he supposed that’s what he got for spending his childhood watching too many cartoons.
The thing was, even if Matt hypothetically had unlimited resources – which he didn’t – and even if he’d personally been some kind of Black Death-esque empath multi-tool– which he wasn’t – the task still would’ve been incredibly difficult. Sure he had Jane, who’d beaten the Black Death, and sure she could time travel. But as much as Matt loved his girlfriend, he’d also seen firsthand how things had gone when she’d went mano-a-mano in the realm of a nonphysical power. A battle between her and the Time Child wouldn’t be a battle of blowing stuff up, it would be a battle of time travelling, and Jane just wasn't proficient. It wasn’t even a possibility. The Child would shred her alive.
Plus, unfortunately, their latest interaction had left Jane seemingly less sceptical of the Child and more concerned about its latest ominous warning. Matt struggled not to visibly scoff. A big nebulous paradox at the end of space and time? One that just so happened to require him dying? Sure. Sure, you little rat bastard, there was absolutely no way that wasn’t legitimate or in any way related to your numerous attempts to have someone put bullets inside his head. Please. Give me a break.
So he was screwed, essentially. Three weeks spent in furious rumination and Matt was right back where he’d started. The Time Child was (possibly) trying to kill him. And no matter how much he strained his brain, it simply seemed impossible to return the favour.
What the heck did he do?
Leaning back in his chair, careful not to let his Wally-facing face show any signs of anxiety or disappointment, Matt shut his eyes, trying to shift his brain away from circular thoughts of murdering a time traveller and towards some other workaround. Why, he found himself thinking; why did these hyper-complex problems keep falling to him? Why did he have to be the one to solve this nonsense, he wasn’t that clever, why couldn't the geniuses figure it out? Ed, he thought into the cosmos, if you’re out there, buddy, I could really use a hand. That of course only caused a twinge of sadness to blossom in Matt's stomach, but he forced himself to take a deep breath and push the feeling aside. What would Ed do? Mope? Sit on his computer a lot? Play video games?
Well screw it, thought Matt, let’s try thinking about this like a video game.
There is an enemy you cannot beat. You lack the power to do it harm, and any attempt to defeat it results in immediate untimely death. What are your options? Well normally, Matt reasoned, anything which was unkillable would have been deliberately designed that way by the programmers, because the player wasn’t supposed to beat it – they were supposed to sneak past or find a way around...
Okay then, Matt thought, straightening up slightly. Across the table Wally glanced over; Matt paid him no heed. Another angle. Sneak around. Break things down, peel back to the most basic facts.
His existence was a threat to superhuman-kind.
The Time Child (possibly) wanted that threat neutralised.
So long as Matt existed, that threat remained.
He did not want to die.
Want to die…
Die...
Holy-
Suddenly Matt sat bolt upright. This time Wally actually leaned his head around his computer, looking concerned.
“You ok?” the psychic asked. Matt fought to keep a handle on his thoughts, struggling not to leap up out of his chair.
“Yeah, fine,” he assured him. With difficultly Matt forced his butt the inch or so back down into sitting, struggling to not cackle or punch the air in manic glee. Instead, after watching for a few seconds to make sure Wally’s attention had returned elsewhere, Matt reached over and shuffled through his mess of law textbooks, finally finding and extracting a notebook and pen. He flipped the book over, his hands electric with jitters, disregarding the notes at the front and opening the blank pages at the back. Then very carefully, bending over the page to make sure Wally couldn’t possibly see what he was doing, Matt leaned down and wrote:
‘Faking My Death.’