Threader war, p.2
Threader War, page 2
Holes had been described to him as doorways: you step through and you’re in a different place. He’d always had trouble Seeing them that way. This door led to the Quantum Labs building. His dad’s work. He shook his head, the pain of losing his dad blossoming in his chest as if it had never left. He was still making mistakes like that. Quantum Labs was where his dad used to work.
With the hole completely formed and stable, he took a quick look around. There were only a couple of people in the parking lot. None of them were staring at him. Only other Threaders would be able to see the hole, so they either weren’t Threaders, or just weren’t paying attention. He stepped into it. Cold hit him like a physical force and his breath misted and froze. The moisture on his skin solidified and fell in large flakes. He stepped out the other side, the sweat on his forehead frozen into a sheet. Shaking ice from his hair and clothes, he sprinted toward the black maw of the Quantum Labs building.
As a kid, he’d imagined the black stone entrance as the mouth of a giant beast that would wake at night and stalk the city looking for its prey. Even as an adult, the haunting feeling the entrance gave him had stuck like a bad memory. The fear and foreboding had finally left him when he’d come to this building in a parallel universe—back to Teresa’s Quantum Labs—to save the two women in his life that he loved the most: Teresa and his mother.
He’d seen more of the real dangers the world held to worry about the imaginary one of a stone-encased entrance to a building anymore.
He dismantled the hole with a wave of his hand as he neared the entrance. This close to the newly turned on machine, he could see Threads, gray and tenuous, rushing from the building, spreading into the world at a rate that made his skin crawl. He wouldn’t be the only one who could see them, though the others wouldn’t know what they were or what they could do. Not yet.
A receptionist stood from behind the long wooden front counter—the only natural item in a foyer filled with glass and chrome—as he ran across the lobby. Her smile turned into a frown when he didn’t stop to talk to her.
“Excuse me! Sir!”
He ignored her. When he reached the door to the offices and basement labs, he pulled for the Threads floating through the room, turning them red and throwing them into the keypad that kept the door locked until you swiped your card. The pad threw off sparks and the door popped open, the keypad dangling from blackened wires. He pushed his way through, running past his dad’s old office to the stairwell leading down to the labs.
The last time he’d been here, he’d followed Rebecca and her men down into the QPS lab where Teresa had been held captive. Rebecca had been a Threader and had created a cult that wanted only one thing. More power. They’d brainwashed him, tried to make him one of them, one of Rebecca’s pawns. It had worked, for a while, until Enton’s people had set him free, had shown him the truth. But that wasn’t really here. It was a different world. A different time. And he didn’t want what happened there to happen here.
He took the stairs down two and three at a time, almost falling when his feet impacted the white tiled floor at the bottom. He turned into a short hallway. The first door was the QPS lab. Outside, a handful of people milled as if lost. Only one man banged on the door, his lanky frame leaning into the blows.
“Open this damn door. What do you think you’re doing?”
Garth stopped his banging as Darwin careened around the corner from the stairs. His mouth opened and snapped shut as he stared at Darwin.
“What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?”
Darwin didn’t respond to the questions. “Why is the machine back on? Who did it?”
“It’s Rebecca. Rebecca Henslow. You remember her, you worked with her when you did your internship last summer.”
Darwin just nodded. Of course. Who else would it be?
“We haven’t even done trial runs yet. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. It’s like she’s a completely different person.” Garth turned back to the door and banged on it again.
Masses of gray, translucent Threads raced from the room, moving through doors and walls as if they weren’t even there. Rebecca didn’t respond.
“We’ve called security. They have a master key, but I think she may have barricaded the door as well.” Garth banged again to no response.
Darwin knew there was only one quick way in. He pulled the Threads toward him again and holed into the locked room, the effort easier than before. He barely heard the gasps behind him as he closed it. To them it must have looked like he had just disappeared . . . Magic. Unless any of them could See, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to process what they Saw anyway. That took training and time.
The lab hadn’t changed much. It was still split into two sections, a large glass window allowing those on this side see what was on the other side . . . the newly powered up QPS with its glowing QL logo. Darwin felt its pull, fighting against the power it offered him. He scanned the half of the room he was in.
Rebecca sat behind a computer under the monitoring displays hanging from the ceiling, feverishly typing at the keyboard. Even from the back, she looked frazzled. Her red hair, normally in a tight bun, lay partially undone down her shoulders, and her back hunched as she typed.
He strode over to her and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Rebecca? Rebecca, you need to stop this. You need to shut it down.”
She kept on typing.
“Remember what happened last time. You couldn’t turn it off. Remember?”
Her typing slowed and then stopped. She shrugged his hand off and turned to face him, her index finger resting on the enter key.
Her eyes looked unfocused, and Darwin knew she wasn’t looking at him or any other object in the lab. She was Seeing the Threads. She couldn’t know what they were yet, but if she didn’t, then why was she trying to turn on the machine again? He lunged for the hand hovering over the keyboard. For that split second, her gaze refocused on him and her finger plunged down.
Darwin’s world sheared again.
* * *
• • •
Images piled one on top of the other, each one fighting for dominance over Darwin. The Threads were different than what he remembered and what the Source inside of him generated. Gone was the smooth fluid motion, the textural changes and subtlety of the old QPS. These looked jerky and uncontrolled, like the movements of a newborn calf trying to find its legs and stand. The Threads knew what to do, but didn’t have the control to do it. They changed as he watched.
He struggled to maintain a connection to the real world as the lab morphed into alternate realities. His mind locked on one despite his efforts and showed a place that didn’t exist. In it, his mother stepped across worlds and smiled at him. Behind her was his dad, looking more confused than anything else.
Darwin’s heart lurched and the image faded as quickly as it had come. It wasn’t real. He had just seen his dad’s dream and only wish—the reason he’d built the QPS in the first place. He’d told his dad what had happened the first time, what the QPS had done to the world, how it had changed it. But it was what he hadn’t told him that could have filled a book. He hadn’t told him about Teresa, or about Darwin’s mother. How he had killed her for the second time.
He hadn’t told anyone else about the Threads and what they could do, afraid that even speaking the words would make them come true. But somehow Rebecca knew. She couldn’t know the details, or even that the machine linked multiple worlds. She must have somehow felt the power in the Threads and realized the machine was the only thing that could give her that power.
She hadn’t lived through what he had seen. Not yet, anyway. She hadn’t seen what that power had turned her into, what it had made of her and what she had made of it. She wasn’t evil or cruel now, but she would be.
Another image formed. Rebecca—this one made of gossamer Threads that wove themselves into the image—stood by a running QPS, her hands touching the surface of the machine. Around her stood twelve people, and thick, multi-colored strands spun and shifted between her and the disciples. Smiles formed on their faces as one of the children playing in the corner laughed. Rebecca’s image smiled. His view zoomed out. A small village stood outside the building, full with happy people. He tumbled back into the QPS room.
This wasn’t the Qabal he knew.
Maybe what he had lived through wasn’t the only way things could turn out. One of the disciples turned to pick up the child. It was Darwin’s mother, her face older and wrinkled, with the familiar smile he remembered. He reached for her, wanting to pull her across the distance of space and time, wanting her in this world, in his reality. With him.
Something tugged deep in his chest, strong and sharp, and he tore his gaze away from the images, forcing them into the background. He knew that what he had seen could never be. That joining the worlds would never work. He’d learned that when his mother had tried to kill him in Teresa’s world. What he had done in self-defense, what he’d had to do. The memory was still raw.
In this world—his world—she had died years ago. He had killed her then as well, behind the wheel of a car too far out of control. Trying to bring her back, to steal her from another reality, was a mistake. The image disappeared as fast as it had formed.
The pull sharpened, drawing him in. The golden Thread given to him by the QPS he had shut down so long ago pulsed against its prison of blue, bending the Threads until they stretched thin and translucent. He had lived with the soul of the machine inside of him for so long, he had become used to its quiescence.
It had never done this before.
He could feel it clamoring to get his attention, could almost hear it screaming in frustration. As Darwin struggled to his feet, the pulsing subsided, and with the stillness came the certainty of what he had to do, what he had done twice before. Shut down the QPS. He wasn’t sure if the idea was his own, or that of the Source inside of him. That, too, was new.
Stumbling to the door separating the machine from the rest of lab, he fought the barrage of images that threatened to drown him, fought the sensations and tastes and smells that pressed down on him from every side, forcing themselves to be the center of his attention. He reached inside himself and dropped the prison walls, letting the soul of the QPS strengthen him, help him get into the other room.
Threads flew from his body faster than he could grab them. The few he managed to latch onto supplied everything he needed, and he morphed them into Threads of destruction, turning them deep crimson and shooting them at the door between the rooms, watched as they penetrated the wood and sawdust and glue before expanding them like balloons. The door blew off its hinges, throwing shrapnel into the air. He struggled forward, his shoulder hitting the frame as he went through, spinning him around until he fell and skidded through the fine wood dust that covered the floor.
His back came to rest against the QPS and its power pulsed through his body as the Source inside him fell silent. His heart slowed, syncing with the steady beat from the machine, and the images melted away. He was back in the lab, back in his own world, and the reality rested on his shoulders like an old friend. He twisted to face the QPS, staring into the blue of the Quantum Labs QL logo, his left hand never breaking contact with the machine’s surface.
He rose slowly, sawdust clinging to his pants and hands, filling the air, and opened himself to the Threads the new machine spewed out. The Source inside of him stayed quiet and out of his way. As he prepared to destroy the heart of the machine, it struck him again how the Threads were different. Though they still responded to his touch, they were less soft, less pliable. More robotic, as if the weight of the world hadn’t yet settled into them. Even that wasn’t right. This QPS wasn’t the same as the others he had seen. It didn’t matter. He still needed to shut it down.
Using the QPS’s own Threads, he reached below the machine’s surface, searching for its heart. Past experience had taught him that this machine was too young to have developed its own soul, its own identity. He’d Seen that when he’d turned off the first QPS his dad had turned on. Somehow, it made the task easier.
As he followed the Threads deeper into the heart of the machine he found his mom was still in there, whether because the new QPS still held the old software with her DNA in it, or because the machine had linked with the others in alternate worlds and gotten her from them. But like the Threads, she felt off. It was as though someone had seen pictures and video of her and built up an image without knowing who she was.
He found the heart, enclosing it in a tight blue mesh before weaving black through it. He began to push the black into the heart, to kill the machine.
Pain shattered his concentration. His hands lost contact with the QPS, and he spun to face his attacker. Blood ran into his eye from a cut. Rebecca charged forward, swinging the keyboard she’d been using for another hit. Keys clattered to the smooth concrete floor. As Darwin ducked another swing, he saw the look on her face. Her eyes were out of focus and rimmed in red as though she’d been crying. The skin on her cheeks sagged and drooped, looking like it was melting off, and spittle flew from her flaccid lips. He’d seen her like this before, when the Source had ripped her mind from her.
The keyboard clipped Darwin’s outstretched hand, slamming it into the surface of the QPS and bouncing back off. The brief moment of contact sharpened the Threads in the room for an instant before his back impacted the floor.
In that split second, Teresa’s anguish tore through his heart once more. He smelled her pain and grief as it enveloped him, feeling familiar yet different. His mind translated her pain into another scream that tore at his heart. Without thought, without fully realizing what he was doing, Darwin reached deep inside himself, prodding the golden gift from the first QPS he had shutdown. It woke and Threads poured from his chest, filling the room and exploding out through the walls.
The keyboard spun out of Rebecca’s grip, smashing into the QPS and throwing more shattered keys onto the concrete floor. The haunted look left her face, replaced by shame and revulsion.
It wasn’t enough to pull Darwin from his spiral of pain. All he could think, could feel, could taste, was Teresa’s terror. Underlying the fear was a profound sense of loss. What could make her feel that way?
As soon as he released the QPS inside of him, he felt its power surge and course through his body. He latched onto it, drawing on the strength it provided.
The hole formed behind him almost instantly. This one was different than the one he used to get to the lab. Its colors shifted and it gave off a feeling of depth that pulled at him, the warm honey yellows morphing into vibrant lemon. He didn’t even double-check to see if he’d built it correctly—he knew it was good.
Darwin leaned back and fell into the hole between worlds, leaving Rebecca and the new mechanical QPS behind. As he entered the hole, she lunged forward, missing Darwin’s hand by less than an inch. Darwin watched in slow motion as she stared at the hole, taking a tentative step toward it as he went through.
2
Nothing Left to Give
Ice and cold filled Darwin’s senses. His lungs froze on the first breath and his blood thickened in his veins. The full power of the Source coursed through him. His heart beat faster, struggling to keep pace with it, and the Threads responded in kind. His mind fractured, pulling him along different paths and alternate realities. One stood out from the rest, and he grabbed onto it, desperate for anything to stop his brain from exploding. A faint echo of Teresa’s scream made him drop the stability for madness as he struggled to find her in the maelstrom coursing through him. Forcing himself to concentrate on her panic, he pulled himself together, stitching the scattered fragments into a whole, throwing away what didn’t belong, until he found her. He tasted her fear in the scream, smelled her desperation like coarse cloth on his skin, felt the loss.
It was over almost before it began—a lifetime in an instant—and he landed on his back in a lab much like the one he’d just left . . . a lab he thought he’d never see again.
He stood, wiping the grit that clung to his hands onto his jeans. Sawdust mingled with the grit. A stillness lay over the air like a blanket, as if he was in a hallowed place. Dust coated every surface, and the floor around him was slick from the melted ice that shed from him like skin. A cleaner rectangle about the size of a small car sat in the middle of the floor. The QPS he had killed no longer bolted in its place. Darwin’s heart fluttered. Clusters of footprints disturbed the dirt on the floor and led from the empty space to the doorway.
He looked inside himself once again. The golden Thread the missing QPS had given him sat there, its light almost blinding if he viewed it directly. Even though it was no longer imprisoned in Darwin’s steel blue Threads, it wasn’t generating any of its own. Instead, it sat, pulsing in time with his heart, as if waiting for the right moment to truly come to life, contemplating what to do.
The QPS had been created for a specific purpose, to generate power for the world. But his dad had other motives as well. The embedded DNA was his dad’s desperate attempt to make the quantum device somehow find his wife, to bring her back into his world. Death brought to life.
It had done so much more than that. Darwin had been pulled across worlds, thrust into a place where the Threads created by the QPS had become the only form of power, where a few of those who could manipulate the Threads hoarded that power, controlled the people, and killed anyone who opposed them. Rebecca had been one of those people, and he had destroyed her in order to save Teresa.
Now he was here again, back in Teresa’s world, following the bitter taste of her screams, of her fear. His only plan to find her.
