Paul Hughes - Broken - A Plague Journal

“Any luck finding your ship, Jean?” Alina had pulled Honeybear from his seat. Her arms were around him, stroking his sweatshop plush. His cardiac shield barely contained his broken heart.

Reynald’s code burns flickered and rearranged across his temple. He barely noticed anymore; Maire’s siege of the Timeline rewrote histories faster than they could be lived. “We’ve not been able to survey deep enough. With all the traffic in the stream, we can’t get into the target Whens without Maire knowing. Hope was a close reader.”

“You don’t need Maggie.”

“She was part of the deal.”

“The deal doesn’t matter now.” Paul lit a cigarette and let the smoke cloud the stillness between them. “They’re gone, Simon and Maggie. Hunter and Lily. We all know that. We would have found them by now if they were integral to the calculus. That leaves two possibilities—either Maire’s found them already, or they were never really the focus to begin with.” He ashed.

“We’ll need as many ships as we can—”

“We’re taking one ship.”

Smoke drifted, not enough to conceal the shimmer.

“Have to be a hell of a ship.” West reached to steal a smoke. Maybe it would help the moment.

“It will be.” Inhalation, exhalation through words. Paul wiped a line of argent blood from the corner of his mouth. “Trust me.”

“What are you planning, son?” Reynald took the cigarette from West’s offer, coughed through. He knew already. “I see Sam’s not here.”

“He’s here.” An instant, a stark flash of reveal, and they saw Sam pressed into Paul’s eyes. An illusion, a lie, it was gone before it registered.

Alina fumbled with the box of Marlboros. The battered gold Zippo ignited. She smoked as if she had before. Jud looked through her eyes but said nothing.

These veils of dream we weave around ourselves, never knowing for certain, but knowing enough: this is all we have.

“I’m flying. Al’s my pilot. Everyone else, you’ll be there for the show. Don’t worry.”

He lit another smoke. Eventually, they all did.

“You can go home. All of you. If you want.”

The birthing plain pods were retracted, the sea of openings now closed forever, the expanse not worthy of a pin drop: a million or a billion, more, a trillion, more, everyone, everyone was there, all the possibilities he’d written, everyone who was left. Some near him sat. The shifts from foot to foot in anticipation alone was deafening, added to the murmur, but when he spoke, they heard.

He shook. Wracked with coughs. The silver blood, once a trickle, was now a torrent. He wrote a faded blue handkerchief into the dream and mopped the corner of his mouth.

West and Reynald flanked him. West’s hand rested in wait on his back.

Another ripple passed through the assembly and a few thousand characters screamed away in bursts of silver. Somewhere out there, Maire’s army was reaching for them. The spaces filled in.

Paul watched the empty. Alina grew concerned; his eyes were somewhere long ago. He was bending, collapsing. West held him up as silver pattered to the closed lid of a Jud cocoon. He regained his footing, wiped, straightened.

Her hearts—her heart sped a rhythm she resented, but it’s not easy to forget better times and versions.

“You can go home,” he whispered, but it carried. Another staggering ripple, seven million more disappeared. He could feel Maire out there, the grip of a projector marble slicked in blood, the windswept ice of the merge.

“We’re collapsing the Timeline,” Reynald shouted across the metal and dust. “Dismantling this foothold. We’ll use the last resources of Judith Command to fuel one final assault on the Delta bleed. Anyone who doesn’t want to come with us, your time here is done. Go home to your Whens and wait it out. You’ve all made a remarkable sacrifice to be here. We can’t expect more of you. Go home to your families.”

“What families?” A voice spoke out from the mass. “Most of us have nowhere to go!”

A rumbled assent. Paul felt them slipping, all of them innocent, each soul the work product of his madness.

“Then run.” West growled across the plain.

Whispers, multiplied. The middle C of uncertainty, a resounding seiche wave of fear.

“Those of you who choose to go with us,” Reynald continued, “will be loaded into a pattern cache aboard Alina’s ship. Our combined mind-essence will power the largest silver vessel ever…” he looked sideways at Paul, “assembled.”

One ship? The unspoken concern was tangible.

“Just one ship. Me.” Paul’s chest hitched with his body’s rejection of the silver.

The cries of outrage drowned any hope for hope. Alina gripped herself tighter, feeling it all fall apart.

“We’re taking the war to Maire. One last shot. One ship. As many of us as want to go.” West stepped forward, let the author stand alone as he choked something smoky and snarling back down. “We need to end this now!”

The din was painful. Paul had never suspected such resistance to his plan, but—

“You cowards.” Jud’s knife-edged voice cut through Alina’s tongue. “You fucking cowards!” Her words could have enraged the crowd, but a silent truce sputtered to life across them. “What else do you have to live for? If we lose this, there won’t be much living at all, kids. If Maire breaks through entirely, you think you’ll be safe? She’s erasing both the Alpha and Omega lines. This isn’t the Enemy rewriting history in their image—Maire’s erasing the image.”

“We’ll begin loading the cache immediately.” Reynald scratched his temple; another three lines appeared. “Best of luck to those who stay behind.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul managed as best he could. His hand went to the throb of his cardiac shield. “Please believe that.”

They left the birth fields, the author limping along between Jean and Adam, Alina’s hand on his shoulder.

“Gotcha,” Maire said, and Michael Zero-Four’s body streamered across the steel floor of the launch command center. The city’s trunk shuddered below as Enemy forces quickly put an end to the pathetic civil war between tribes that had necessitated the launch of the zero-four probe.

She gutted him with a mechanical precision, popped his marble into her mouth and bit down. The sweet internals of the device pooled between her teeth and gums, and she knew. She knew.

Dozens of miles away, the probe erupted in its Gauss tube. Maire’s Enemy companions flickered for an instant as their physics attempted to make sense of never having existed. Timesweep. She buffered them. She held them in place.

Which gave her an idea.

She walked quickly, eagerly to a console on one wall of the command, reached into the display and activated the upload link. Somewhere in the bowels of the room, a churning began. The display confirmed: there was a full pattern trapped in the buffer. Someone’s soul hadn’t made it to the probe.

She cooked him.

Hours passed, and she threw the download tank’s hatch open. A tall, gray-eyed man crumpled to the floor with a splash and a thud.

“James Richter.” Her grin was fangs and dimples. “Welcome to my future.”

Richter wretched phased silica onto the floor. He tried to crawl to his hands and knees, but squeaked back down in a weak, naked pile.

He looked up at her. “Hope?”

“Walk with me?”

“Paul…”

“Please?”

Judith Command was being systematically dismantled around them, the billions, trillions of soldats perdus uploaded into a pattern cache that Paul would carry. The bubble around the non-place had developed great cracks on its periphery, and in places, the blackness of the unknown beyond shined down through.