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I found Retcon in the basement of a shitty little casino. He’d crashed into it when I threw him; they didn’t have the cash to fix it up quite yet. He turned his head toward me. His thoughts didn’t smell like green apples. They smelled like wild grass and hot stone.
Heya, Jules. I missed you. Don’t hit me too hard.
I hit him. Again and again. Against the dark slot machines, the roulette wheels, the card tables. Harder than any human and most mockingbirds could take. He let me. It all bounced off him. Retcon looked up at me from under the billiards with his ruined eyes and scrawled out another nasty X on the back of his hand.
The casino vanished.
Retcon and I stood in a field of pampas grass and big purple flowers. Massive prehistoric capybaras grazed on the plains. A few mooed in dim Mesozoic alarm. The sun was setting in red splatters.
“Where are we?” I was too stunned to swear at him, or even to finish the punch I’d been winding up.
Retcon turned to me with wide-open, bright blue, unstitched eyes. “We’re about a thousand years back in a timeline where the New World was never colonized. Europe just sort of . . . didn’t happen. Africa’s aces, though. We sho
uld go have a look.”
“Why did you bring me here?” I clenched my fist again.
“Hold on, hold on!” Retcon held up his hands. No tricks. “I brought you here because I’ve always brought you here. I will always have been bringing you here. I’ve met a hundred million versions of you. I know you so well. This is what I do. This is what I did. Back on the ice. I moved us all into a timeline where Crucible wasn’t invulnerable to fire. There’s another one where he never had any powers at all, where no one ever did. You’re still together in that one. You have a baby girl. She’s going to be a programmer when she grows up. In this timeline, our Henry is . . .” Retcon scanned the herds. He pointed. “Just there. Alive and well.”
The Crucible-capybara mooed gently at the rising moon and scratched at his haunches.
“Fine. I’m impressed. So move me back to my timeline. The good timeline.”
“It’s one-way, I’m afraid. But doesn’t it feel better knowing that somewhere, your Henry, the one who called you a boat, is alive and safe?”
No, it did not. But I didn’t say anything. I walked toward the capybaras, soothing them with the tendrils of my mind, singing Bowie into their cozy, hungry hearts. I held out my hand to the Henry-beast. He looked suspicious. He’d never smelled human this close before unless the human smell was very quickly followed by the blood smell. But then he nuzzled my palm and gave it a prim little lick. Somewhere deep, in every timeline, Henry Hart knows me.
Retcon ran his hand over the shaved half of his head. “I didn’t know him. He wasn’t anything to me. Just a job. You’ve had lots of jobs. Your jobs have killed my friends, too, you know. My family. But I knew you didn’t mean anything by it. It’s not personal. When you see all of time and space, you can be very understanding. I hope you will understand too. In that timeline, the one I took us out of, Crucible would have siphoned off some of your power to keep you from—he thought—going mad, and eventually, he would have lit the world on fire with it. Destroyed us all. I was helping. I am helping.”
“I don’t believe you.” Crucible nibbled at my sleeve. “Just take me home.”
“Okay.” Retcon shrugged. “But in your timeline, they’re going to kill you. Well, not kill you. But freeze you and bury you in a bunker. You’re too powerful for her to let you live. Professor Yes doesn’t tolerate mockingbirds she can’t control. Come on, you must know that. You are the knife she uses to cull the flock. She’s done with you. You have to go in the drawer.”
“Fuck,” I sighed. Tears came up in my eyes. The dark spilled out over the long, pale grass. Stars like infinite timelines broke the sky apart into light. “Whose side are you on?”
“Reality’s.”
I chewed on that for a few minutes. “What happened to your stitches?”
Retcon put a tentative hand on my hair. It didn’t feel so bad. Human contact is a terrible drug. Sometimes, you’ll even take the hit you know is tainted. You can’t stop yourself. The need is too strong. “There’s too many people in most timelines. I see all their versions crowding in on top of each other, all trying to happen at once, all fighting to become. But here, there’s just us. Here, I can open my eyes.”
We stayed there for months. Years. Mockingbirds don’t age much. It’s hard to tell. We built a yurt. Capybara-Crucible stayed near me always, looking up at me with big brown capybara eyes, his thoughts as peaceful and wordless as sleep. We ate wildcat and otter and tapir. We drank cold river water. Retcon told me his real name: Lucas Fawn. We flew across the ocean to see the metropolises of Africa once, but neither of us could bear so many other minds so close by. Eventually, we made love under a majaguillo tree. That sounds bad, I know. But Lucas let me roam the whole of his mind. I could see what he saw, time crackling like ice on the surface of an infinite lake. I could understand. I touched him and the X’s on his skin turned into the word REST, written neatly, over and over.
When we finished, I stretched sleepily in the warm summer wind. Lucas and I took the long way round the river to our yurt, holding hands, companionably quiet. Something loosened in me, something that had been clenched tight as a fist since Henry died. I smiled at Retcon and kissed his cheek. It would be good to sleep, for once. I knew I’d have no dreams at all. I lifted the flap of the yurt.
And walked into the white icefield of the Antarctic. The Millennials ranged all around me, screaming, yelling commands, warnings. Bruce slashed at a figure in an iron mask. Paravox was chanting, his eyes filling up with molten glass. And Crucible, my Crucible, my Henry, my heart, alive and whole, threw fire from his hands at a tall young man with X’s drawn over his eyes. Lucas smiled sadly at me, a smile I’d come to know so well and so long.
I thought it was a gift. Make things right. Take it all back.
What could I do? I was such a big fucking problem for all of them. My power, my strength, my lonely body. They’d freeze me and bury me in a bunker. Or Crucible would siphon off some of my power—my soul, as if any of them had the right—and light the world on fire. Any girl who wanted in on Team Millennial after me would have to prove she was weak enough to put the boys at ease. I had no good choices on Earth. So, I picked up Henry in my arms and shot into the sky. I was gone before Lodestone could cry out. I set Henry Hart down in Buenos Aires, by an elegant little casino. I kissed him. He looked at me in confusion, big brown eyes full of love and questions.
I disappeared. Up. Into the black and the white and the cold and the fire. Into space, into crystal flesh and breathless speed. As long and far as I could go. I gave in to the mass of magic and molten physics inside me. The alien, churning thing I’d crushed down inside myself like sorrow. I became the piece of broken irradiated sun that caught me coming home from Mars, the seed of another creature I swallowed in space: Charybdis, a whirlpool of want and need and sacrifice. I remembered a billion years of travel in the shrieking dark. I remembered feasts of worlds before the invention of self-replicating cellular life. I remembered a singularity of hate and fury and hunger.
I forgot who Julia was.
I flew a long way.
• • •
