Jane was five feet away from them. Four.
All around her the greyness pressed, smothering her, howling, but the light inside Jane blazed its fierce defiance, almost blinding as it burned, a boiling golden storm. Somehow, though she advanced step by agonising step within a forty‑foot ball of shining fire, the two men did not notice her. They just kept fighting. Fighting and fighting and fighting. And with each word they screamed, each fist they struck into the other’s face, another surge of power raced out, crashing into the other’s body, who like an echoing bell then pulsed in turn, the twin waves merging and amplifying in endless corrupting horror.
Twins. They were twins.
“STOP!” Jane shouted, but they could not hear her, or did not want to. She clenched her teeth and forced another step forward, the wind around her so violent now it threatened to bring Jane to her knees.
“STOP!” she cried again, but it was hopeless. Even as she watched, the brother with eyes consumed by white sunk his teeth into his ebony‑eyed sibling, and a fresh wave of desecration ricocheted off them.
They could not hear her. But Jane didn’t need words. The light of Dawn burned inside her, and its relentless hum soared above the pulsing, screaming shadows, thundering to be heard.
“ARRGGHHH!”
Jane roared, pushed almost flat against the ground – and then with a wordless shout the light around her exploded, brighter than it had ever been, and in that moment’s space she lunged upwards-
And grabbed both men by the neck.
Suddenly their gazes fell upon her. Abruptly the twins stopped shouting and as one their heads turned, moving despite the strength of her grip to level inhuman stares at her, one set of eyes unbroken white, the other seamless black. Their faces twisted in unblinking fury, identical, flawless opposites, and as one she felt them rise, glaring down at her with utter contempt as if gods torn from some predestined war. They snarled and it was as though her fingers clutched around primal forces, the people they once were consumed by whatever power raged inside them, hellbent on nothing but isolation and the other’s death. In an instant the full force of the grey, the impossible tempest, descended on her, reverberating one off the other, no longer reeling haphazard around the men’s conflict but focused entirely on Jane, howling to destroy her and no other.
The horrible sound, the hurricane shrieking, grew impossibly louder. Suddenly, though the light of Dawn still burned, it was a flame flickering against the wind. Slowly, the twins stepped forward, their mouths open into voiceless maws, and inch by inch, Jane sank to her knees. For the first time, around their necks, her barrier wavered. Suddenly, the wave of obliteration swept through the golden energy and disintegrated her gloves.
And suddenly, she felt them.
And it was as if all time had stopped.
A pool. A pool of deepest black in an endless hall of white. Utterly unbroken, bottomless, a perfect circle of ink sinking down into eternity. Yet was it a pool, or a reflection of a pool? The inside of an eye or the darkness surrounding one? Was the white outside the black outside the white outside the black outside the-
And suddenly Jane’s mind was hurtling back an impossible distance, to the dawn of time, to the edge of eternity. And from this distance, feeling them both simultaneously, twin screams swirling and echoing off each other, she saw it. Black coming from white coming from white coming from black. It looked grey, because from a distance the distinction blurred, so close it grew impossible to separate. But the powers were not grey. They were black and white, they were opposites, and divided their song was agony, anger, annihilation. Yet as Jane felt them here, together, synchronised in concert, she knew they were two halves of the same whole. Death and Life. A shattered circle, never meant to be divided. They belonged together. Only fate had torn them apart.
And suddenly Jane knew what to do. As the searing pain of life and death and creation boiled through her fingertips, as her flesh blackened and greyed and sparked, she moved in her mind a coin she had not rolled for eons, letting it slip between her fingers, down disintegrating into the abyss. Electromancy, one of her two remaining mortal powers, abandoned into nothingness.
And with her bare hands clenched around both men’s necks, Jane Walker took.
And suddenly, the wind stopped howling. The twins blinked, and the grey circling energy stuttered as suddenly the storm fell quiet. In the centre of Times Square, Jane’s eyes turned black. Black as the depths of midnight.
She snarled.
And the brothers collapsed.
*****
The soldier leaned over the side of the building where Matt dangled, and his lips twitched into a smile both bloodthirsty and wry.
“You gave me quite the run around.”
“Screw… you…” Matt answered. Droplets of blood were trickling down his right hand, and his left, the one holding on for dear life to the wall climber, screamed as though it was going to pop out of its socket.
Beyond them, the city roared. The wind whipped. There came distant gunfire and explosions. But in this tiny space between them, on this rooftop, none of that seemed audible. They had two feet of emptiness. Two feet of peace.
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“You were great,” the man called Jackson smiled – because suddenly Matt knew his name, knew things he hadn’t realised, visions he’d never stopped to sort through. The psychic, it must have been. Memories echoing down the line. “If it’s any consolation. Honestly kid, I’m actually going to be a bit sad to kill you. If I had ten guys with your balls, hell, I’d be unstoppable. But, well; the bill comes due.”
“Bill these… nuts…”
Jackson sighed and pulled off his helmet, shaking free his short brown hair. It clattered on the concrete. “You sure you want those to be your last words, little man? You sure you don’t want to beg for something more?”
Matt’s teeth bared, his vision swimming. His left hand was in spasm around the climber, the tendons in his arm shrieking. His entire right side was numb.
“Who,” he managed to gasp. The words fell from Matt’s mouth and tumbled twelves stories to the asphalt below. “Who… did this? Why?”
“Ahh buddy,” the killer sighed, “This isn’t one of those tales. This isn’t the part where I tell you everything, and your friends shoot in, and you make some heroic getaway. I don’t even know, to be completely honest. I do a job, and then I get paid. Everything beyond that’s just dressing.” He lay the tip of his rifle on the building’s edge, casually facing Matt’s forehead. “I’m going to shoot you. And you’re going to fall. And nobody is going to save you, and I’m going to walk out of here and go home and collect my payment. With seven more shares than anticipated.”
“You… talk a lot… for a man… who almost… lost.”
“Well,” said the soldier, “Just so happens you’ve caught me in a loquacious mood. I don’t know, maybe it’s the fact that on the ride home I’ll have no one to talk to. I don’t quite know whether to thank you for that. Eight shares is far more than one, to be certain, but at the same time I didn’t mind some of those kids. They had their uses. Once you got past the stupid.”
“You’re… wasting… time…” hissed Matt. Tendons in his arm clenched and strained.
“Oh, I’ve got time aplenty,” Jackson smiled, “I know things no man should be knowing. I knew where you were going to be. What you were going to do. And I know that up until the moment that grey bubbling bullcrap-” he pointed to the distant field, “-disappears, I have all the time in the world.”
All of a sudden, the ground beneath them shook. The wind suddenly changed directions, rushing in towards the centre of the grey sphere, and it was all Matt could do to hold on for dear life as he was buffeted against the side of the building. Jackson crouched, swinging an incredulous stare towards the dead zone, letting the wind rush over his shoulders.
There was a moment’s pause, a breathless hesitation, as if all the air was sucked into the centre of the bubble, reduced now to a single city block.
And suddenly, the grey disintegrated. A shockwave, visible even from this height and from this distance, rippled out in a perfect circle from the centre of Times Square, rushing through the streets and cars and the thousands of abominations slowly shambling between them. All of a sudden, from the city below, the cacophony of chaos fell silent – leaving no screaming but the pain in Matt’s shoulder, and no wails beyond the whispering winds of death.
Matt stared over the city with watering, disbelieving eyes. The patchwork grey field had vanished, leaving only a single, solitary force in its centre – a ball of shining light.
Matt and the mercenary glanced at one another, Matt still dangling there, one shot away from death. Jackson’s hard‑jawed face was blank. Matt’s lips curled into a savage grin.
“You…” he hissed, “Lose…”
For a moment, nothing happened. Matt swayed from the embedded climber, one arm hanging useless, suspended in mid-air on the side of a twelve-storey building, unable to climb up, unable to swing down, struggling for consciousness and breath. Below him, the wind whipped through the city streets, swirling leaves and paper and clouds of dust. For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath. Jackson could only stare, gazing shocked off in the distance at the sudden silence, the sudden absence of doom.
“Yeah,” he mumbled blankly, “Guess I do.”
Then he threw his rifle to the side, reared up to his full height, raised his arms, and slammed them down into the rooftop.
*****
It took three hours, but eventually they found his body in the rubble. A broken corpse amongst a city of broken corpses, though this one not ruined by undeath’s ebb and flow. Two of them, a pair, the muscle‑bound soldier and the pale, brown‑haired boy. Both dead, their bodies shattered, crushed under twelve stories of falling concrete as the entire building collapsed around them.
Jane Walker stared numbly down at Matt’s lifeless, ashen body. His bones were cracked, his limbs limp; the back of his head split open like an egg. Somehow though, his face had survived unbroken. Powdered in white dust, his features painted as if in some ancient ritual – a peaceless corpse in a nameless, urban tomb.
Nobody said anything as they brought him to her, as they laid him at Jane’s feet. Suddenly, the Legion’s victory seemed muted – their triumph over the inhuman monstrosities soiled by the blood drying behind Matt’s skull, the dust on his tiny broken corpse. Jane stood over him, gazing down at him, her mouth closed, barely seeing.
She had done what the Time Child wanted. She had sacrificed Matt Callaghan to save the world. Even now, as her vision swayed, she could feel the timelines floating around her, silk threads spinning into alignment. A strange calm pooled beneath her eyelids, an otherworldly, tearless peace. Two Divine halves were unbroken. She had crossed some invisible threshold. She could not undo.
She didn’t have to.
“Heal him,” she commanded. Jane turned to the assembled Acolyte crowd, directing her gaze at Editha, the small mousy‑haired medic who once a thousand years ago had tended her mortal wounds. Not anymore. Nothing remained to hurt her.
The healer paled and she glanced at Jane, staring there in her white and flowing gold, her unyielding eyes blue-grey. They could burn with other colours now, though Jane did not share nor use them. But they had all seen.
“I… Miss… Jane, there’s no point. He’s gone, there’s-”
“Just do what I say.”
Reluctantly, the small woman conceded. She shuffled forward, knelt by Matt Callaghan’s corpse, and pressed her palms into his flesh.
Slowly, as the minutes ticked by, Matt’s wounds knitted together. Bones shifted back into place, gashes sealed over. After a time, the body was whole. Pale, silent, unmoving – but whole.
Editha stood. “There,” she said, her voice for once lacking its usual authority, “He’s healed. I’ve done it.”
“Good,” Jane murmured. She stepped forward. “Now stand aside.”
The circle of dusty, bloodstained maroon and gold soldiers stepped backwards, not one of them saying a word. To her right, Jane saw out of the corner of her eye Giselle clench Will’s hand.
“Jane-” their leader mouthed.
“No,” Jane simply replied.
And then her eyes turned white.
On the shattered streets of New York City, surrounded by ash and rubble, Matt Callaghan woke, gasping for air, his back seizing forward, fingers clenching, colour rushing back into his cheeks. He awoke to a grey-blue sky and a legion of crimson warriors standing over him, staring down at him with expressions of mingled horror. But his eyes beheld only the towering, imperious being at their centre. The shadow of white and gold that loomed over him, her face drenched in darkness, hair swirling bronze in the sun.
Matt stared up at Jane and whispered.
“What have you done?”