The Split Second (16 page)
“What about the time you and the Croziers told me I was a loser and wouldn’t let me come sledding with you down at the park?”
“That was all Becker!” The Me-2 wasn’t about to cop to something it didn’t do—but passing the buck didn’t seem to be cheering Benjamin up. “What’s wrong, pal?”
“It’s just . . . I don’t even know who my real brother is anymore!”
The duplicate took another peek up front, then kicked Benjamin on the foot.
“Becker’s your real brother, and I know for a fact he loves you very, very much.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because we talk about it all the time. When he was away at Training, he always called to see how you were doing. And whenever he comes back from a Mission, you’re the first person he wants to see.” The Me-2 gave him another brotherly little shove. “Just because me and you hang sometimes doesn’t mean that any of that has changed.”
Benjamin might have nodded—but he wanted to make the Me-2 feel a little guiltier, so he kept his eyes on the floor mat.
“Is, um . . . my brother okay?”
The Me-2 turned toward the passing landscape, not wanting to betray the look in its mechanical eyes. The truth was that the Memory Bank account it shared with Becker had gone silent over two hours ago, right after he’d jumped into the Frozen Moment pool. At first, the Me-2 had written it off as a typical delay at the deposits window . . . but now it wasn’t so sure.
“He’s fine, B.” The Me-2 turned back to the boy, thankful that it had been quite well programmed to cover for its Fixer. “The Mission’s going great.”
Meanwhile, The Seems
Far, far away from Interstate 95 or even the devastated village of Time Square, Briefer Shan Mei-Lin stumbled through the darkness and cursed the Case Worker who had steered her to this Plan-forsaken place.
“Helpful Hints, my butt!” Shan took a moment to reignite her Flash in the Pan, which was the only thing that allowed her to see her own hands, let alone where she was going. Unfortunately, she was running out of Flashes. “How ’bout throwing me a Bone or a Big Idea once in a while? And I could really use a Shove in the Right Direction about now!”
The only response to Shan’s pleas for assistance from the Big Building was a deep, deafening silence. It was as if her words had been choked before they’d ever left her lips, and soon it was the Briefer herself who began to feel smothered by the blackness around her.
“Hun dan!”
she swore.
“Hun dan!”
When Shan found the footsteps leading off from the waterfall of Frozen Moments, she was convinced that Fixer Drane had somehow preceded her to this location, and she sprinted through the mud to ensure that she would be at his side when the Split Second was captured. But then she realized that the prints were made by someone wearing boots—not Fixer #37’s Speed Demons™—and her pace slowed to a cautious jog. When they abruptly ended midstride, she was forced to stop altogether.
“Briefer Shan to Fixer Drane, come in, sir!” she called into her Receiver, but just as with her previous attempts, static was the only response. Even more disconcerting was the fact that there didn’t seem to be any natural source of light in this place besides the churning waterfall, which had faded to a distant glow behind her.
The prudent thing would have been to return to the falls and wait for help to arrive, or at least try to find a way to climb back to the top. But Shan Mei-Lin had been moving forward for as long as she could remember . . . ever since she was a child, when she had scored so high on her placement tests she’d been taken from her hometown of Dunhuang and sent to live with the other “gifted students” in Beijing. Moving forward (not to mention upward) had led her to become the top-ranked student at every school she’d ever attended, and after she’d been recruited by Human Resources, she had done the same at the IFR. Moving forward was all she knew how to do.
So she raised her last Flash in the Pan, and headed into the black.
Hours later (or was it days?) Shan continued through the darkness, but gradually that word had come to lose its meaning. The Flash had flickered and gone out and when the Teflon-coated Pan slipped from the Briefer’s fingers, she didn’t bother to pick it up. Her Night Shades™ didn’t help her see anything (because there was nothing to see) and even her coveted 7
th
Sense—the beacon that every Fixer and Briefer follows—was faltering as well. Not one hair stood, not one goose bump raised, not one twinge in her stomach told Shan the news that she was on the right track.
In
The Compendium of Malfunction & Repair
(aka the Manual), there is an appendix known as “Places You Don’t Want To Go,” and Shan had studied it all too well. In these pages, there is talk of the Jaws of Defeat, the Point of No Return, and of course, the village of Who Knows Where. But tucked amid the maps and warning signs is the small account of a place where Time does not exist. A prison, with no obvious entrance and no known way out, whose walls shape around the mind of the unfortunate soul who somehow finds their way inside. Briefer Shan felt a cold weakness descending over her body, and for the first time she was forced to face the real possibility that she had stumbled into Meanwhile.
“Central Command, come in!” Shan called out desperately. “Briefer down. Repeat, Briefer down! Requesting immediate backup, please respond, over!” Even the static that Shan had once hated would have been music to her ears, as opposed to the mind-numbing silence.
“Never be afraid to be afraid,” Shan chanted to herself. “Never be afraid to be—” But she
was
afraid to be afraid, and never in her life had she been as afraid as she was right now. Not even the time she had wandered into the Magao caves as a child and couldn’t remember which corridor would lead her back to the light. She’d begun to cry and run through other passageways, but they just led her deeper into the maze. Rescue only came through the ingenuity of her older brother, whose rhythmic knocks on the cave wall drew her from both panic and the damp corner in which she crouched. But today, Bohai would not be coming to rescue her. Nobody would.
“Help!” she screamed as loud as she could, because
someone
had put those footsteps in the sand. But for all Shan knew, they’d been put there years ago and that someone was just as lost in the infinite darkness as she. “Help!”
It was at this moment that she at last grasped the importance of the ancient axiom that she’d always mocked as a pointless exercise in self-trickery. For if she only had a Mission Inside the Mission right now, she would have something small to wrap her heart around—something to help her transcend the fear. But in the place of that small gem, all that was left was the fear itself.
Her heart began to pound, and her mouth felt like it was filling up with sand. Shan curled up in a ball and closed her eyes and did her best to block out the memory of the final entry in the Manual regarding this bleak and terrible place. But the words kept writing themselves across the back of her eyelids . . .
“Those who enter Meanwhile are never seen again.”
Hall of Records, Department of History, The Seems
“Someone’s coming! Someone’s coming!”
Daniel J. Sullivan—or “Sully,” as he was known to the few friends who still checked in on him from time to time— removed his stereophonic headphones and put down his paper and pen.
“I’m sorry, Linus. Did you say something?”
“Someone’s coming!”
A voice that sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard echoed through the room.
“Someone’s coming!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We haven’t had a visitor since the Revisionist stopped by and that was eons ago.”
Sully was speaking not to an assistant or a co-worker, but to the Gray-Headed Lovebird (
Agapornis canus Seemsius
) who was his only company in this desolate corner of The Seems. The brightly feathered parrot (only the head of a Grayhead is gray) was presently in a highly agitated state, shaking the bars of its cage like a rioting prisoner.
“All right, already!” The man with the frizzy hair and bleary eyes put his headphones back on and turned up the volume. “Don’t get your feathers in a bunch.”
Of all the positions in The Seems, few are less coveted than an assignment to the Hall of Records. This crumbling stone depot was officially defunded by the Powers That Be several years ago and claims but a single employee—a position manned over the years by Seemsberian ex-cons, a ne’er-do-well son-in-law of a Power That Be, and a disgruntled nature buff whose insubordination had angered one too many higher-ups. But of all the people who’ve held this lonely, dead-end post, it is safe to say that only one of them truly loved it.
“By the Plan, you’re right!” Sully’s headphones were connected to an enormous Gramophone, on which a vinyl disc six feet in diameter was slowly spinning around. Whatever he was listening to, it seemed to have something to do with what was about to happen. “If I know History—and I do know History—he’ll be here in less than five minutes!”
The hall’s lone staff member jumped to his feet and scrambled into action. A chalkboard was flipped over and the other side erased of all its equations. Handwritten pieces of paper were gathered off the floor and stuffed into desk drawers. Even the two remaining buttons of a collared white shirt were hastily secured, which only served to emphasize the disheveled nature of the pin-striped tie that hung loosely around Sully’s neck.
“Time for the gnomes!”
screeched Linus from inside his cage,
“Time for the gnomes!”
“Quiet, you stupid pigeon!” Sully wheeled and flicked an eraser in the general vicinity of the cage. “No one knows what I’ve been working on and I wanna keep it that way!”
“Time for the gnomes! Time for the gnomes!”
“Fine!” Sully made his way over to the small black-and-white TV that was plugged into the outlet above his work station. “But don’t complain if it’s a rerun!”
As Sully returned to his frantic cleanup, Linus focused his attention on the fuzzy monitor, where another episode of
The
Jinx Gnomes
had just gotten underway. Based on the popular comic strip of the same name, this half-hour animated series depicted the adventures of the crack unit dispatched to The World whenever a person overcelebrated a bit of good fortune. It was now the top-rated show in The Seems, and counted among its many devoted followers a certain ornery bird.
“Rerun! Rerun!”
“Send a letter to the network!” Sully scanned the hall to make sure that all the evidence of his life’s work was concealed, then snuck a peek at the monitor himself. “Is it ‘I’m Just Glad There’s No Traffic’?”
“
‘Perfect Day for a Wedding.’ ‘Perfect Day for a Wedding.
’ ”
But Linus’s joy at watching the blushing bride get her comeuppance was rudely interrupted when the locked and dusty door that Sully had always assumed to be an old janitor’s closet suddenly burst open. Blue light and wind spilled out, followed shortly by a thirteen-year-old boy, with a borrowed peacoat and fraying bandages all over his hands.
“Where am I?” shouted the strangely dressed kid, staggering to his feet. “Am I back in The Seems?”
“Of course you’re in The Seems.” Despite the fact that Sully was rarely in the presence of other humans or Seemsians, he hadn’t forgotten his manners. “Welcome to the Hall of Records.”
Becker Drane pulled the frost-covered Transport Goggles off his face and took in the sight of his new surroundings. It looked very much like the reading room of an old library, with stained-glass windows and shelves stretching from parquet floor all the way up to domed ceiling. What was contained in these stacks didn’t appear to be books, however, but record albums—like the kind his father kept in the “Do Not Touch” corner of their basement—except a whole lot bigger. To make matters weirder, the only two inhabitants of this place seemed to be a frizzy-haired lunatic dressed in rags and a parrot watching TV.
“The Hall of Records?” Becker was still frazzled from the craziest trip through the In-Between he’d ever taken. “I didn’t even know there
was
a Hall of Records.”