Surface

The girl who had forgotten her name fell through the surface of the sky’s great darkness, and in doing so remembered who she was.

“Urgh!”

Jane’s head snapped back, her lungs gasping at the fresh air, reality suddenly lurching back to normal, free from never-ending blackness and twisting threads of light. She shook, suddenly feverish, suddenly cold, feeling memories of a life she’d never lived leech away like colour melting in the rain. Memories of another place… of another time.

She clutched her legs to her chest, feeling the darkness still pulling at her, tensing her arms as if to grip tight to this reality or to desperately stay afloat. A figure shifted next to her, his skin pale in the moonlight, and she turned to see the child, his blue eyes staring out over the lake.

“Now,” the boy murmured, his words soft and sad, “Now you understand.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jane whispered, body trembling, hands locked, “Jesus Christ.”

They sat there then, for a while, the boy who was not a boy and the girl who was nearly lost. Jane clenched and shook her fingers as if trying to wring them out of water, and when she finally managed to string together a sentence it was through a chattering in her teeth.

“I was him,” she stammered finally. She clutched her head with her hands. “I was them. All of them. I felt them living; I felt them die. I knew I could change it, yet everything seemed so predetermined, and I was… I was…” Her voice fell to dust.

“You were the water that flows through rock,” the child continued for her, his words swirling into the space where her own had failed, “You were the churning ocean, and the bottle atop. You saw what could have been and realised nothing is meant to be, and that everything already is. You saw that you are scraps of chance and destiny. And now you know true fear. Because either all of it is real, or none is.”

“Yes,” Jane whispered. She turned to look at him, eyes wide in the night. “How do you do it?” she asked him, “How do you exist there? How do you survive?”

“A conversation for another day,” the child answered, his voice echoing but even, “But for tonight, let this suffice.” He turned to look at her, his own eyes swirling with twin galaxies of sapphire. “You will not go back there.”

“Never.”

“No. Not never. But only eventually. Not soon.”

“No.”

“You will cease thinking of ways to change it. What could have been.”

“I-” Jane caught herself, taking pause – inherently disinclined to be dishonest. The child’s eyes narrowed, and it tilted its head.

“Do not mistake optimism for plausibility.”

“No, I’m not but… it was only one path.”

“Yes,” the time child replied, “And it was a highly illustrative one.” He paused. “Viktor Mentok. The Mindtaker. The greatest genius the world has ever known. With all the time that could be given, all the help he could receive – and still, failure. Still, the world burned.”

“Yes, but…” protested Jane. She struggled to find the words. “But the change was so drastic. Why can’t we, I don’t know, save him? Why couldn’t he have escaped or been forewarned?”

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“Because his death,” the boy explained, “Bought Matt Callaghan a moment, and in that moment destiny changed. Do not underestimate the value of a moment. A second preserved is better than an eon wasted.” He paused. “And in the end, in this time, he died to save someone. Not chasing vengeance. In the end, he died doing good.”

“Okay,” Jane pressed on, “But… but that was just one option. What about… other things? What if you’d… what if you’d appeared to me before Ed was murdered?”

“You would have fought Heydrich and you would have been unready. He would have destroyed you. He would have scattered the world with your ash.”

“Later then; if you’d appeared to me just after he destroyed the Academy.”

“You would have returned with the power of Dawn and took your place at the head of the Legion. Heydrich would have fled to orbit and rained death upon the Earth. You saw it. The Legion would have had no choice but to scatter. And then he would have destroyed you, and taken the broken world over your corpse.”

“But maybe with Matt’s blood, we could have-”

“Could you? Do you know that for certain?” The child’s sapphire eyes burned; then his expression softened. He took her hand.

“Victory was not just about power. You saw that, with the Mindtaker. There was no flawless answer; no trap Heydrich couldn’t endure. Too many tools at his disposal.” He paused. “He needed to be lured. You needed to be led. To fatal error. To perfect form.”

“It was hardly perfect.”

“Strong enough to make him desperate. Flawed enough to entice. So much of it was mentality, seeding doubts within his mind. His deception is revealed, and he’s torn abruptly from hiding. He burns the Academy to the ground, yet still the Legion walk free. He tramples the Legion, yet then his powers waver. He hears Matt’s secret – sees that everybody knows – and then at this bleakest, most frenzied moment you return, after he left you alive, wielding the power of his greatest foe. Do you understand? In that instant, at the moment, he felt such terrible fear, such stifling, unmitigated panic, that when you fought him down he turned in desperation to the one thing he would have never otherwise attempted – a psychic link. Inside the mind, all men can be equal. And there, in that connection, you trapped him, and Matt held his mind in place while his body was destroyed.”

“This was the only way. If the psychics hadn’t given their distractions, Heydrich would have turned loose before you were ready. If the genius hadn’t left his breadcrumbs, the truth would not have been uncovered before it was too late. So many times, he struck while you were untrained or divided. So many times, he was pushed too far. His fear destroyed continents just as often as his greed. The minute he sensed defeat, the moment his powers wavered, he would turn to destroy the Earth. Save for this timeline. Save this narrow, narrow path.”

The child fell silent and resumed gazing at the lake. His cheeks, usually so pale, were slightly coloured, and Jane got the impression that that might have been the most he had ever spoken, at least in a long, long time. After a few seconds, she hung her head.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, “For… wondering. For doubting.”

For a moment, the boy was silent. “Curiosity is a virtue,” he said eventually. He glanced at her and gave a small smile. “As is trust.”

The pair lapsed into silence; Jane still hugging her knees, the child sitting with his small back up straight, staring across the stars. Beneath them, the water lapped; the eddies swirled and the wind wicked. Leaves drifted across the surface; stars shone against the night. None of it gave any impression that there was another world waiting, just beyond it; none of it gave any impression that at any moment it could all be erased and disappear.

Jane drew a deep, shuddering breath and tried in vain to steady herself. She breathed out, drawing the power of Dawn inside her, letting it suffuse through, tinting her air with tiny golden mist. I am here, the light said, steady; I will be ever at your call.

Somehow, that felt reassuring.

Jane let her knees drop down. “What happened, then, in that timeline?” she asked the child, “How did everything go?”

“Life endures,” the boy answered, dispassionately, “In spite of everything, despite Heydrich’s rule. And in the end – the very distant end – mankind is victorious. There are children born, in secret, who bear powers he is unaware of, and his sanity is eaten by the fear Mentok planted so indelicately in his mind. One day one of them rises up; one day Heydrich is cast down. But it takes so many years and so many lives to get there, that once it finally occurs Earth is but a shadow of its former self. This path-” he said, glancing around at the clear air, the calm city, the moonlit sky, “-is much, much better.”

And in that moment, for the briefest of seconds, Jane thought she caught something in the way the time child said it; some glint, some momentary glance at her from the corner of his eye.

Then the moment passed and the look faded and he was simply once more a child, with his pale feet dangling above a star-spun lake. She forced aside the feeling, trying her best to ignore her niggling doubts.

Soon, she reassured herself. Soon she’d understand everything.

Sometimes it was a virtue to trust.