The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything (20 page)

Chapter 40:

The caged bird

      Sometimes at night, when the scientists thought she was sleeping, Emily tried to remember life before her capture, probing for memories she knew were there somewhere.
Of her mother. Her house. But blurred, like bleeding newsprint from papers left out in the rain, they remained vague recollections of a time and place that might as well have never existed. There has just always been this life, this place, this cage.

      Though now, it was almost over. She felt her heart swelling, her heart or whatever there was in place of it, the singularity where her heart should be. Will I explode? Emily wondered, listening to the hum of machinery in the shadows. Or will I collapse upon myself? What will happen when my heart of darkness gives way?

      Emily remembered the early years. When she first began to float. Drifting around in swells of her own making inside the bubble, the girl who could fly, the girl who never had to touch the ground. The way Keaton Bohr laughed and applauded. Everything he did to encourage her, to help her control her powers, to enable her to become strong.

      But they wouldn't let her out. Too dangerous, they'd say, too unsafe. You don't know how to manage your energy. You could destroy the world.

      She drowned California in an act of pure petulance. Simply wrapped a bubble of float around the state, digging into the fault line like a human hand peeling an orange, and she allowed the earth's rotation to do the rest. Her captors claimed it was an act of war, a warning shot across bow of the planet, but in truth, it was Emily lashing out, angry and lonely, begging for someone to pay attention to her.

      They began to medicate her then.

      Soon Emily marked time with little acts of defiance. Knocking planes out of the sky, nudging buildings from their moorings, causing earthquakes in places earthquakes don't ordinarily happen. Armed with the power of a goddess and the coping skills of a child, she picked at the world's scabs. But it became hard to focus, difficult to find random acts of destruction she could sink her teeth into.

      The drugs they put into her system had a strange effect. Limiting the reach of her powers, if not the output, making it a challenge to dig her fingers into space and time. She had no idea how old she was, anymore. Maybe I'm a cartoon, she thought. Maybe I'm a comic strip on the page, sitting in a box somewhere, waiting for the artist to finish the story. Maybe I'm Oppenheimer. I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . .

      I'm so bored, she thought. So tired of my own company.

      When she sat quietly still and listened, she could hear the sunlight touching the world above. She could taste the Earth spinning. She could see the moon's pull, changing the tides, the eternal cosmic dance of it all. Sometimes she sat alone, in her cage, and became entertained by the universe's refrain.

      Tonight, though, she heard something else. Another heart in the distance, another being with a black hole where her heart should be, another traveler who never belonged in this world. Their hearts sang the same song of eternity, leading reality around like a dog on a leash.

      Who are you? Emily asked the heart in the distance, pulling on her, taunting her, asking her to dance. Are you someone like me? Are you a monster? A goddess? Or, are you just a dream? Am I simply looking in the mirror at a face I no longer recognize?

      Are you me?

      She heard Keaton Bohr returning, his footsteps familiar as they clanked down the hallway. At first, he wouldn't make eye contact with her, but she could read his body language, could sense his anxiety. He'd been a fixture in her life for as long as she could remember. She knew his moods.

      "Keaton," she said. The scientist startled, his whole body shaking. He walked up to the cage.

      "You're awake."

      "What do you know?" she said.

      Bohr hesitated, his shoulders slumping.

      "We're all going to die, aren't we?" Emily said.

      Bohr studied her, his eyes red-rimmed and shining.

      "It's okay," Emily said. "I've known the ending to this story for a long time. It was easy to read the signs."

      "It didn't have to be this way," Bohr said.

      "Yes it did," Emily said. "It's all in the equations. We picked this path. Or you did. You tried to fix everything. Nothing likes to be fixed. The world prefers to be broken, Keaton Bohr. You can't put a band aid on a burning building and make it better."

      "I'm going to stop it," Bohr said. "There's still time."

      "There's never enough time for the important things," Emily said. "There's always enough time to squander, though. Don't waste your time wasting time."

      "Then what should I be doing?" Bohr said.

      Emily smiled. Aware it was no longer a pretty smile, she watched as Bohr nearly recoiled in discomfort.

      "You're the only one I would want to say goodbye to," Bohr said.

      "Well then," Emily said, again flashing her uncomfortable grin. "If that's the case . . . are there any TV shows you haven't seen the finale of? Because I'd try to watch those soon."

Chapter 41:

Seismography

      Billy visited the Institute of Technology and Mathematics once, when he was younger.
Not for anything good. He and a couple of friends broke in one night to look around. They wanted to trash the place, but Billy was more interested in seeing what all those brainy kids were up to. Expecting robots and space ships, he found a lot of petri dishes and refrigeration units, long black tables with sinks embedded in them, empty classrooms. Nothing that remotely resembled the future.

      He'd been almost as disappointed then as he was now, walking with Annie, Emily, and Jessie in the darkened hallways. Jessie had taken the lead, for no reason other than she'd once been on a tour of the building. The group looked around for some room where they might have possibly study earthquakes.

      The campus was enormous.

      "Will you even know what a seismograph looks like if you see it?" Billy asked.

      Emily waved him off. "I bet there'll be a sign," she said. "Or a pictogram, indicating the earth is shaking or something."

      "An entire timeline is depending on you and you're completely faking it?" Billy said.

      "What I lack in actual know-how, I make up for in earnest enthusiasm," Emily said.

      Jessie raised a questioning eyebrow at Billy.

      "The more she talks," Jessie said, "the more I wonder if we got lucky not having her on our team in this timeline."

      "Wait 'til you see me in a combat scenario," Emily said.

      "Swooping in at the last minute to save the day after the rest of us get beaten half to death fighting the bad guys?" Billy said.

      "Saving my death-defying powers for just when I feel like you need me most," Emily said.

      Annie held up a hand and everyone turned their attention to her when she pointed at a sign. "I'm no genius, 'yo,' but I'm guessing the geology department would be where we'd want to look," Annie said.

      "You take us to the most interesting places, Em," Billy said.

*  *  *

      It turned out, unsurprisingly, that none of them actually knew how to turn the seismograph on.

      "I . . . I have no idea how this works," Annie said, staring at an aging machine involving a lot of paper and few user-friendly instructions.

      "You're from the future," Emily said. "Shouldn't our technology make you feel like you're living among Cro-Magnons?"

      "Well, I mean I don't know how to fix a video cassette player either," Annie said. "Just because I'm from a place with advanced technology doesn't mean I know how to repair all the old technology that came before."

      "I could kick it a bunch of times," Billy offered.

      "Yes," Emily said.

      "No," Jessie said, simultaneously.

      "You gotta admit, this was a great idea at the time," Emily said.

      "I'm not even sure this really is a seismograph," Jessie said. "It could be something else entirely."

      "What would help is an instruction manual," Emily said.

      "What would help is actually knowing what we're talking about," Billy said. "Annie, what do we do?"

      "Look for the instruction manual?" Annie offered.

      "Doc would never say something like that," Billy said. "Doc would offer a solution."

      "A half-thought out solution that would leave his friends stranded in another dimension?" Annie said.

      "Or himself. But there's rarely a need for an instruction manual in Doc's life," Emily added. "Gotta give him props for that."

      "His tattoos are an instruction manual," Annie said, offering no further explanation or detail.

      Emily and Annie continued to putter around the room, neither appeared particularly sure of herself. Billy and Jessie hung back, even less useful.

      "What if we can't find what we're looking for here?" Jessie asked Billy, her body language nonchalant but her tone indicating worry.

      "Try something else? We generally just keep trying something else 'til we find an idea that works," Billy said.

      "Maybe the wolves come away with a plan?" Jessie said.

      Billy sat down in a swivel chair and spun himself around absently. "Y'know, Em, I really did think you were on the right track with this idea," he said. "Hey, Dude? You know how to work a seismograph?"

     
I would not even know where to begin,
Dude said.

      "That's okay," Billy said. "We'll come up with an alternative. Hey Em, does this mean sending Jane after those explosives you asked for is a wild goose chase?"

      "You can never have too many explosives in a post-apocalyptic world," Emily said. "Besides, if we can find the cage they're keeping future me in, I can totes break it. I just . . . y'know, epic fail on finding it."

      Billy turned his attention to Jessie.

      "Hey, fake Straylight," he said.

      "What, deceased Straylight?" Jessie said.

      "That's cold," Billy said.

      "And you're annoying. What do you want?"

      "Serious question," Billy said. "In all these years of fighting the    . . . other guys, has there ever been a location they seemed particularly aggressive in defending?"

      Jessie smiled.

      "You mean if there are places they kept us away from, they may be hints as to where they're keeping future-Emily," Jessie said.

      "Exactly," Billy said.

      Annie chimed in next, pulling up a chair near Billy. "They've fought like hell to deter us from downtown, but I think they just don't want us near locations stocked with more plentiful supplies," Annie said.

      "And we know they keep weapons stockpiles near the Waterfront," Jessie said. "That area's always well-fortified."

      "So we start looking there," Billy said.

      "Easier said than done. But it's not a bad idea, now that we have some clue what they're hiding from us," Annie said.

      "So it turns out you're not a complete idiot, huh, Billy Case?" Jessie said.

      "I'm not without my charms," Billy said.

      All the while, Emily continued to putter and tinker with the seismograph, though from the outside, it looked more like she were trying to break it in the slowest way possible than to activate it.

      "Guys, I almost have this—whoa," Emily said.

      "You almost have it whoa?" Billy said.

      Emily leaned heavily against the nearest tabletop, then slid awkwardly to the floor.

      "Whoa," she said.

      "You okay?" Billy asked, getting up out of his chair to join Emily in the back of the room.

      She latched onto Billy's arm, and he felt her pulling away, floating up involuntarily. His own feet, caught up in Emily's bubble of float, began to lift off the ground as well. Billy grabbed hold of the edge of a table to keep them both rooted to the floor.

      "Guys," Emily said.

      "What's going on?" Annie said, rushing over.

      "I'm going to throw up," Emily said.

      "I can't possibly express in words how thrilled I am to hear that," Billy said.

      "What's happening?" Jessie said, trying to carefully stay outside the drift of Emily's bubble.

      Emily closed her eyes, embracing the bubble and her own lack of control. She took a deep breath, stopped struggling and just allowed herself to float. Like a compass, Emily turned, drawn to a point on the horizon. "Guys, we don't need the seismograph," she said, suddenly looking very alert.

      "Were you just messing with us before?" Billy said.

      "No," Annie said. "I think I understand what's happening."

      Emily and Annie exchanged knowing looks.

      "She knows I'm here," Emily said.

      "Who?" Jessie asked.

      "The other me. She senses an anomaly like herself. She sensed me, and is singing to me," Emily said.

      "Singing?" Billy asked.

      "The songs of the world," Emily said. "The vibrations of the universe."

      "What did you have for breakfast, there, sparky?" Billy said.

      Emily waved Billy off dismissively.

      "I can find her," Emily said, smiling. "I can tell you where she is. She's pulling me toward her. She's calling her missing pieces home."

      "She's calling you?" Billy said.

      "She knows there's another singularity here. She can hear me breathing and wants me to follow her home."

      "Em," Billy said.

      "Billy, I can lead us to her," Emily said. "She wants to be found."

      "Well that's not alarming at all," he said.

      "It's the end of the world," Emily said, spinning in her own bubble of float. "Nothing here is safe. We just have to go with the flow."