Plunge
It was 3am and Jane was awake.
The night was cool – still and quiet, the sky devoid of clouds and the air moving with only enough whisper not to be stifling. Matt, like usual, slept soundly. Despite recent events, despite his own constant vulnerability, despite… everything… he always slept deeply, content and at ease. It was reassuring to watch, in a way, though it did make her a little jealous. Jane couldn’t remember ever sleeping that peacefully in her life.
She slipped from their bed and out the front door without waking him, into the calm and restless night.
Jane wandered on foot – not headed anywhere or in any particular direction, not familiar enough with the nearby streets to do anything but drift. Walking for the sake of walking, quiet and with her hood up so as to keep her peaceful anonymity undisturbed. It was strange, almost, to be walking – she knew these streets far better from the air, but tonight flying felt ungracious. Disturbing a precious calm and darkness with heat and light and noise.
The power of Dawn thrummed through her, singing in her chest and fingertips in constant, ceaseless song, but she didn’t fan the furnace; it would wait its turn tonight.
Jane meandered intersection to intersection, opting vaguely downhill more often than not, and before long she found herself trailing along a steady downward slope. She stuck to dimly lit streets and alleyways, mostly, drifting along the city’s darkened capillaries like a black spot in the blood. Eventually the buildings fell away, the skyline opening up into a stretch of grassland sinking low beneath the moonlight and a field of stars shining above a silver lake. Jane crossed the road and wandered over, with a quiet glance both ways for traffic. There was none and it couldn’t hurt her, yet she did it anyway – force of habit, perhaps, or respect for order. These were the ground world’s rules, and tonight she deferred to them so as not to make a scene.
The meadow shuffled softly beneath her footsteps, and halfway down the hill she stopped to kick off her shoes. Grass spread between her toes and she wandered on, sneakers in hand, towards a jetty reaching out across the moonlit lake.
Silent, empty and straight in front of her – as good a place to go as any. Her feet stepped softly across the wooden boards, unconcerned by creaks and roughness.
It was not a night of splinters, in one’s feet or in one’s mind.
She reached the jetty’s end. Beneath the planks, waves lapped with soft abandon, breaking foam over black-green glass. She crouched, dangling her feet over the water a foot or so below – and there she sat, staring across the gentle waves, into the waiting, silent night.
Go, hummed the power of Dawn. Rest, said her own quiet mind. Neither seemed to sit right with her at the moment; with this sleeplessness that wasn’t restlessness, with this patience that wasn’t calm. She closed her eyes and tried to feel the wind, the gentle breathless cooling – and beneath it all, beneath her world she heard it, calling as it ever did.
The universe between her ring and little finger. The swirling, singing marble, spinning infinite and alone. The invisible bump beneath Dawn’s enveloping warmth – the tiny stone within her shoe.
It whispered things she could not hear; not words, or not to her. It was not Dawn’s ceaseless, all‑encompassing power, calling loud and shining and awake. It was a pebble beneath the mat, yet immovable, infinite, impossibly dense – and waiting, waiting for her to know…
What if some of it was different?
“It’s not somewhere you want to go.”
The voice came from beside her, and without surprise Jane turned to see a child sitting next to her on the jetty. His pale skin glowed slightly in the moonlight, and his eyes shone the deepest sapphire blue. She hadn’t planned for this, but somehow his appearance wasn’t unexpected; she’d unconsciously seated herself to the side to leave space for him, and now the two sat in silence, perfectly abreast atop the pier.
There was no rush towards the words that followed.
“Could it have been different?”
“No.”
“None of it?”
“No.”
A silence.
“So many died.”
“So many lived.”
“If you’d told me earlier…”
“You were not ready.”
“If you’d stopped Matt from-”
“No.” For the first time, the child’s voice turned sharp, and to Jane’s surprise when she glanced at him the boy’s face was crossed with something close to irritation. It was the first time she’d heard him say anything that might have come from a child’s mouth.
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“Every other path led to disaster. To death. To cataclysm. You saw what he did, but it was nothing. An ice-tip. A knife-blade pressed against the heart of this world, and through a thousand woven cobwebs I tugged its plunge into a scar.” He stared forward. “There was no other way.”
The pair fell silent; Jane looking curiously at the child, and the child staring unblinking across the water. She frowned and chewed her lip – then, perhaps against her better judgement, she pushed again.
“There’s really… nothing that could’ve gone better? Nothing we could’ve prevented, nothing anyone could’ve done? Surely if more people had known, if there’d been more time, more… I don’t know, preparation, we could’ve… we might…”
Her voice trailed off. The boy’s face remained impassive and for a long time, he didn’t respond. Finally, the child simply sighed.
“Come,” he said, “You cannot understand.” He held out his tiny hand, “Let me show you.”
For a moment Jane hesitated – years of instinct, distrust and fear mixed with the rational knowledge that ultimately, she had no idea who this person was. Yet once again, when she truly looked at the child, there was the same inherent kindness – the same familiarity.
She hadn’t touched the power since that first day outside Detroit. Hadn’t disturbed it before now.
She hesitated.
Then she drew a deep breath and took the boy’s hand.
And the sky exploded.
“ARGH!”
Instant, throbbing, debilitating pain. A cacophony of light and colour and voices and suddenly she was being sucked down, smothered and ensnared by a howling, freezing void, falling and falling in every direction but somehow through, through her own thoughts and words and what she did and how it changed things, and how that changed her, and how she changed to meet that change and on and on and on into infinity, every action to her reaction, every potential choice…
“ARGH!”
She hurtled back, scattering threads of pulsing colour, churning nothingness, a broken bird thrown mercilessly through a hurricane, and there was nothing she could do but crumple, nothing she could do but fall-
Then a tiny hand squeezed around hers and the boy pulled her back from the endless fall.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered. Desperately, she tried to obey, to shut out the drowning terror. Yet still, somehow, she could see it – as if her eyelids were transparent, like a child hiding from a nightmare, as if fever gripped her mind. Lines stretched out in front of her – endless lines of pulsing colour, splitting and crossing and intertwining and stretching out and back and forward into eternity, infinite, threatening to consume her, impossible to follow, impossible to comprehend…
Yet somewhere inside her mind, a sense of self-preservation prevailed. She stopped moving – stopped trying to move, stopped trying to understand, stopped trying to find a way out, or through, or away. Stopped everything, except for her slow and shaking breathing, and allowed herself to be dragged by the boy’s small and steady hand.
Through unseen eyes she watched him drift through the twisting universe, between the looming singing threads engorged with knowledge too dense to comprehend. He flowed through gaps, the dark spaces between the storm, and Jane struggled to bunch her shoulders, to make herself narrow, unobtrusive, discreet. Finally, somehow, they seemed to come to the edge of it, or the middle – to a quieter space outside of four dimensions, part of the blinding tapestry yet just beside. Jane took a breath and just sort of hung there, trying to shut out the still-endless symphony as like a winemaker tending his vines the boy began leafing through the string-like prisms, every one a neon rope that pulsed with twisting, shining light. His fingers flitted through them, shuffling and discarding, until finally his free hand grasped a single, shining line, which spun around his fingers in a knot.
“Here,” he whispered, “Listen. Watch.” And like current through a wire it flowed into him, through him and into her, until she was no longer standing, until she was no longer breathing, until she was only seeing-
*****
In a cold and sterile room, a man the world had forgotten lay on life support. His body sat unmoving, drips in his arms, surrounded by monitors and machines. Cameras gleamed above him, watching every second. The thin man gave no signs of life save for bare, rasping breathing and his chest’s ragged rise and fall.
It was into this room that the boy stepped, from a place none of them could see. He knew, without needing to know, that at that moment the cameras were unmonitored – that he walked between lapses in attendance of the guards. It was 2:34am, and the world inside ADX Florence was unmoving. The child clutched in his palm a ball of silicone and scraps, the third of many gifts.
He reached for the Mindtaker’s hand, knowing full well what was to happen, but this time letting it occur.
As the child neared, the old man twisted. His arm shot out, his hand snatched, and claw-like fingers closed around the child’s wrist.
The cell filled with cold silence. The seconds passed. Neither moved.
“Who,” Mentok whispered. His eyelids remained closed, his lips barely moving. His fingers closed tighter. The boy did not resist.
“One who would buy you seconds.”
“How. Disruptances.”
“Those are not the walls I walk through.”
A pause.
“Time traveller,” the Mindtaker whispered, “Theorised. Never proven.”
“By saner men.”
“Time knows my sanity.” There was the barest hesitation. “You’ll speak perfect words.”
“Would you hear them?”
Hesitation; then: “Yes.”
“It was never for the greater good,” the child murmured, and as always a strange, twisting echo wove throughout his words, “Despite everything you told yourself. It was grief. You spent so long worshiping at the altar of your own intellect that when your humanity caused you hurt you abandoned it, and considered nothing lost. Taking control was your weakest moment. Your greatest was when you gave it up.”
The old man’s fingers fell limp. His arm dropped, and his frail chest let out a shuddering breath.
For a few moments, neither spoke.
“Why?”
“To prevent the end of things.”
“Then you know.” The words drifted listless in the cold. “Help me.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“I cannot.”
“Then why?”
This time it was the child who hesitated.
“To play it out,” he finally answered.
Still unmoving on the bed, the old man’s lips trembled, and a single tear leaked from his eye.
“Please,” he whispered, “Let me try.”
For a long time, the boy said nothing. Then, finally:
“It is not your fate.”
“Damn fate,” pleaded the Mindtaker, “Give me hope.”
“It will destroy you.”
“Then let me burn.”
Once more, his fingers clasped around the child’s wrist – and for a moment, the boy seemed to turn back, to glance over his shoulder at something unseen behind him, from the nothing where he had come.
The abyss waited in watchful silence.
“Let it occur then,” he murmured, “Let him try.”
And for the first time in ten months, Viktor Mentok opened his eyes.