The Strike Trilogy (29 page)

She laughed, and they embraced again, holding each other close.

With a brief moment of thought, Tobin realized that he had never really kissed anyone. Not really, not until this moment. And no one had ever really kissed him.

In the Wakefield & Son’s repair shop in the Never-World, Orion and Wakefield were standing in the lobby, looking out the front door. Scott was there, sitting on the front porch; the lost soul was quietly watching the sparse cars and horses travel down the road. It had taken a lot of reassuring and frustrating conversation to get Scott to leave the Midnight Hills, but finally Orion had convinced him that he had a friend who might be able to help.

“He has no idea who he is, or how he got here,” Orion said. “He remembered me eventually, but only as how we were when we were kids. He’s so confused. Just getting him to come here, I thought he was gonna lose it.”

“None of this makes any sense,” Wakefield said. “Look at how young he is: he’s exactly the same age as the day he died. He should be your age, even older.”

“I know. What the hell is going on here, Wakefield?”

“I don’t know. See if you can get him to remember anything else. I’m gonna look through those drawings of his.”

Wakefield stepped into his workshop, while Orion walked onto the front porch and sat down in a chair next to Scott.

“Hi,” the old man said. “Do you mind if I join you?”

“No,” Scott replied. “Did your friend know anything about me?”

“He’s, uh, still looking over some things. He’s your friend, too, you know. Do you remember him?”

“No, I don’t remember...” Scott looked out at the road. “Sometimes I remember...little pieces. A blonde woman, who doesn’t seem like she was from the same place as me. But I loved her very much. And a boy. A baby boy. Is that right?”

Orion nodded.

“And sometimes I remember,” Scott said, struggling with the thoughts. “I remember I had other friends. And we went to all kinds of strange places, and wore these weird costumes. But that can’t be true, can it?”

Orion laughed. “Yes, it can, actually. We had a lot of adventures. You, I, and our friends.”

Scott thought, then turned to Orion. “My wife...did she die?”

“No, she didn’t.”

Scott nodded. “Did I die?”

Orion didn’t know how to answer. Wakefield stepped out of the shop and joined them on the porch. He was holding a pile of Scott’s drawings in one hand, and a thick, hardcover book in the other.

“Scott, what is this?” Wakefield asked. He handed Scott one of the drawings; it was a sketch of a pocket watch with a translucent backside. The watch’s gears and cogs were visible. “Why did you draw that?”

Scott looked at the drawing. “I don’t know. That’s the circle. I see it everywhere. When I’m awake, when I’m asleep. Everywhere.”

Wakefield flipped through the book he was holding. He showed a page to Orion. “Do you know what this is, Orion?”

Orion looked at the page; it contained a photograph of a blue pocket watch on a silver chain, and also an article about the watch. The photo looked nearly identical to Scott’s drawing.

“It looks like a pocket watch that used to belong to Scott,” Orion said, “when we were kids. I gave it to Tobin a few months ago, right before Tobin’s final battle with Vincent. Why? What is it?”

Wakefield pointed to the photo of the watch. “This is the Chrono-Key,” he said. “And it explains everything. We need it right now.”

“Why?” Orion asked.

“Because whoever holds it,” Wakefield replied, “can travel through time.”

At Adrianna’s house on the mountain overlooking Zanatopia, Keplar and Junior had finally fallen asleep, while Tobin and Adrianna had returned from their swim in the hot spring; they were now warming themselves by the fireplace, wrapped in blankets. The walk back to the house had been mostly silent.

“Hey,” Adrianna said, watching the fire. “I wanna say...thanks for trusting me. And not treating me like, ya know, one of them or something.”

“One of who?” Tobin asked.

“You know. A bad guy.”

Tobin laughed. “You’re not a bad guy.”

“No, seriously. Everyone I meet treats me like one of them, you know. And I’m not. I just...I don’t know. I probably sound like an idiot right now.”

“No, you don’t. Not at all.”

Adrianna thought a moment. “What I wanted to say was…Rigel and Nova… when they find out that I left...I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So I’m glad you listened to me.”

“Don’t worry about it. You helped me, so now I’ll help you. Okay?”

A silence. Adrianna leaned toward the fire, with her elbows on her knees.

“Why are you hanging out with me?” she asked.

“Because you’re better looking than the bald guy and the dog,” Tobin replied. “Why
wouldn’t
I be hanging out with you?”

“Well…because of what I do, people like you...don’t usually talk to me.”

“What is it that you do?”

“Whatever pays the most. Robbery, bounty hunting, protection. Usually things that aren’t very nice.”

“Why do you do those things?”

“I’m...I don’t want…I don’t want to sound…”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s...my mother,” Adrianna said, watching the fire. “And my brother. They’re both sick, they have been for a long time. They have a horrible...it’s awful. No one really knows what’s wrong, but the…it costs a lot of money, to keep up with the treatments and everything.”

“Is that why you were helping Rigel?”

“Yes. He said that if I helped him, he would be able to heal them, find a cure. Or at least pay for it.” She shrugged.

“That’s probably a lie, you know,” Tobin said. “He won’t help you.”

“I know. But I’ll try anything. It’s my family.”

Tobin nodded.

“Why do
you
do it?” she asked.

“What? You mean be a hero?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

She laughed. “Oh my god.”

“No, I’m serious. I have these powers for a reason, you know? So, me and my friends...this is what we do. Well, until someday soon when they aren’t my friends anymore, and I never talk to them again, like you warned me about.”

She chuckled. “I’m just telling you, Tobin; everyone leaves sometime.”

“Not this time. I’m still looking forward to proving you wrong on this.”

She shrugged. “Friends come in and out of your life. Even your best ones. People change, lives change...and the friends who were once a huge part of your life are suddenly gone. Your lives go in different directions.”

“The only thing that lasts in this life is family. And even then...that can change, too. It just happens.”

A silence.

“Well, I think you’re wrong,” Tobin said. “I think you just want me to get mad and leave you alone so you can go to sleep.”

She laughed. “No, actually—I like hearing all your naive views on life. I was hoping you’d stay awake a little longer.”

Tobin laughed. “Sure. I just live to entertain you.”

Tobin heard the chirping of crickets. He opened his eyes; he was lying on the couch in front of the fire at Adrianna’s house. It was still night. He must have fallen asleep.

Tobin looked to where Adrianna had been sitting, and saw that she was gone. But there was a note on the coffee table in front of the couch:

HEY, TOBIN, STILL COULDN’T SLEEP. IF YOU WAKE UP, MEET ME ON TOP OF THE WATERFALL. I NEED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING.

After a quick change of clothes into his Strike costume to keep warm, Tobin walked to the top of the waterfall above the hot spring. Adrianna was there, standing at the edge of the rocks, with her back to him.

“Hey, Adrianna. What’d you wanna tell me?”

She turned around. She was crying.

Tobin was confused. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“I’m so sorry, Tobin,” she said.

Tobin felt a burning. He looked down. The blade of a glowing, purple knife was sticking out of his chest, having been shoved all the way through his back. The white-hot burning spread to his arms and stomach as the knife was removed, disappearing back through his ribs.

With his eyes wide and his lungs breathless, Tobin turned to his attacker; Jonathan Ashmore—the pale man in the purple suit, the man who had turned into a bat-creature the first night Tobin had used his powers—was standing there, holding a glowing, purple, bloodied knife. Before Tobin could defend himself or yell for help, his vision went blurry and left him, and he fell to the ground.

Adrianna looked at Tobin’s unmoving body, sobbing, with her hands against her mouth.

“It’s okay, sis,” Jonathan said. “You did a great job. Everything’s gonna be fine. We did what we had to do. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“W
hat do you mean, it can send people through time?” Orion asked, concerned, as he followed Wakefield into the back of the repair shop.

Wakefield was frantic, searching through stacks of books for more information on the Chrono-Key. “This watch—I didn’t think it even existed. There were rumors—legends—saying that whoever held the watch could instantly transport themselves to wherever they most needed to be. No matter if that place was in the present...or the past. This thing was so dangerous, so potentially lethal to time itself, that it was sealed away forever, thousands of years ago. How the hell did Scott get it?”

Orion thought it over. “He found it, when we were kids. I can barely remember…we were on a mission in some remote desert—Scott, myself, Matt, and Vincent—and Scott found it hidden in a cave—just stumbled upon it. He started bringing it with him everywhere we went for a while, saying it was good luck.”

Wakefield slammed a book shut and moved on to another. “Well, isn’t that just goddamn great.”

Orion stared across the shop, remembering. “In Tobin’s battle against Vincent, he said he passed out, and when he woke up, he was...he wasn’t sure, but he thought he was with his mother and father.”

“I remember.”

Orion and Wakefield turned to the workshop doorway; Scott was there.

“I remember what happened,” he said.

Scott sat down at the workbench. Orion and Wakefield joined him.

“It was a July night,” Scott explained. “A thunderstorm was raging, loud and awful. Orion, you needed my help against Vincent, so I was leaving my house on Earth, trying not to wake up my wife as I packed my things in the kitchen. But she did wake up, and we got into an argument. I had to leave, I knew I had to, but I couldn’t tell her why. She didn’t know the truth about my past, and she was angry that I wasn’t telling her anything. I felt awful about it, and I was trying to calm her down, so we wouldn’t wake the baby, too.

“But then…there was a boom. And a blue flash, coming from the baby’s room. Me and my wife, we ran in, terrified, and we saw our three-year-old son, Tobin, sitting up in his bed. He was crying and afraid, but he was okay. And there was something else.

“Near the baby’s bed…there was a teenage boy lying in a heap on the floor, seventeen or eighteen years old. He was bloody, beaten to hell like he was in some kind of accident or something. And he was wearing my superhero costume.”

Junior turned to Orion. The old man was listening to Scott’s story, with his hands clenched in front of him.

“The boy was delirious,” Scott said. “He was out of it...he kept rambling on and on. He was talking about you, Orion. And Vincent. He kept telling me that he needed to go back and help you, needed to help you save the Earth from Vincent. I think I talked to him and sent him back where he came, but that’s all I remember.”

Orion stared ahead, thinking.

“Do you understand what’s happened?” Wakefield said, standing up. “Tobin had the Chrono-Key with him during his final battle with Vincent seven months ago, and just when the boy was at his lowest, just when he thought he was beaten, the watch brought him to the one place he most wanted to be: back home, with his mother and father. But that place only existed in the past! During his fight with Vincent, Tobin traveled back to the night that Scott died, and actually spoke with his mother and father, fifteen years ago!”

“Only Scott didn’t die.”

“No. Apparently not. Because Tobin changed something. By traveling back in time with the Chrono-Key, Tobin created a reality where somehow Scott didn’t die. Something that happened in our time stream…never happened.”

“Hold on,” Orion said. “How can that be? Are you telling me that time travel is actually possible?”

“Yes,” Wakefield said. “Time travel is possible, but it’s not how people usually think of it. The Chrono-Key can’t give you the ability to travel into the future, simply because the future hasn’t happened yet—there’s nothing there to travel to, it doesn’t exist. We are constantly making the future every minute we are here, with every choice we make. It’s impossible to travel to something that is being created every second in front of us. If you asked me to show you the exact future, I couldn’t. There are infinite possibilities, and none of them exist until we create them.

“But, with the Chrono-Key, it
is
possible to travel to the
past
, because there is somewhere to go—the past is tangible: it happened and it existed and it was there. There are concrete places and events to travel to, and people to see, and happenings to relive.

“But even that part isn’t how people think; you can’t travel into the past and change things, change the present. Because anytime someone travels into the past, they create a new timeline—so when they return to the present, things are just the same as when they left. But, by traveling to the past, they have created a new timeline, one that branches off from the moment they arrived in the past and began to change things, began to interact with people.

“By traveling back to the night his father died, Tobin created a new timeline—a new timeline where, for whatever reason after Tobin left, Scott never died on that stormy night, never died battling Vincent to save the Earth.”

“And now that Scott has ended up here,” Orion asked. “But why?”

Wakefield cocked an eyebrow. “The Never-World, the place where lost souls go when they have nowhere else? Where would you end up if you were from an alternate timeline, with no memories and no idea who you were? Seems pretty obvious to me.”

Orion thought it over. He shook his head, frustrated. “What the hell does all this mean?”

“It means,” Wakefield said, “we need to find that pocket watch.”

In the stone pyramid in the middle of the jungle, down a long stairway leading away from the pyramid control room, there was a dark, dank dungeon. It was here where Tobin now found himself, chained to the wall by his wrists. His ankles were also chained to the floor, and his costume was hanging off him in pieces, with his bloody, scarred skin showing through holes in the fabric. As he wobbily held his head up, he opened the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut and saw Rigel. The red giant was rearing back for another swing.

“Where is he?” Rigel bellowed, as his massive fist cracked against Tobin’s jaw. The boy’s head snapped to the side and his mouth spat blood. “Where is he?” the giant yelled again, backhanding the boy across the face.

Tobin’s head hung toward the floor, then he slowly looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Who are we talking about again?”

“The Daybreaker!” Rigel said, grabbing Tobin by his jaw and bellowing in his face. “Show me where he is!”

“Did you try looking in the couch cushions?” Tobin said. “Whenever I can’t find something, it seems like it’s always in the couch cushions.”

Rigel slapped Tobin. The boy grimaced.

“You will show him to us,” the red giant said, inches from Tobin. “You will starve, you will burn, you will endure pain that the universe has no name for. But you will show him to us. We will find him.”

Rigel saw something shining through a hole in Tobin’s shirt, near the boy’s chest. It was glinting with a blue reflection from the sole light bulb that was hanging from the dungeon’s ceiling.

Rigel reached through the hole in Tobin’s shirt and grabbed the shining object, ripping it from the necklace around Tobin’s neck. The object was a blue, translucent pocket watch, about the size of a small seashell, hanging from a silver chain. Its gears, levers, and cogs were visible through its back.

Rigel held the watch up to his eyes, inspecting it. “This is...interesting.”

The red giant turned and walked up the dungeon’s stone stairway and into the pyramid control room. Nova was there, waiting for him.

“What’s the next part of our plan?” Nova asked.

“We use Tobin to figure out how to find the Daybreaker,” Rigel replied, clutching the blue pocket watch in his hand.

“And how are we going to do that?”

“We break him until there is nothing left.”

Jonathan Ashmore—the pale man in the purple suit—approached Rigel as the giant and Nova walked across the control room.

“Hey, guys,” Jonathan said, “this is all well and good, I’m glad we finally got the kid here and all—hooray—but I think it’s about time me and my sister split. We’ve fulfilled our end of the agreement, so how about you fulfill yours?”

Rigel stopped and turned to Jonathan. “There was no agreement, other than the one in which I agreed not to kill you.”

Jonathan was nervous, but not giving up. “We agreed we would get you Tobin, and you agreed to pay us. We’ve only gotten half the money. Now you have Tobin, and we need to get the other half. That’s how this ‘payment for services rendered’ thing works.”

Rigel grabbed Jonathan and pressed him against the wall. “You are lucky I do not rip your head off as you stand here. You and your sister will go nowhere until the Daybreaker is here. That was the agreement. And even then, you will be fortunate if I let you leave here alive.”

“But you said,” Jonathan stammered, “you said you would help us. Help us find the cure. We did what we promised.”

Rigel walked away. “With how immeasurably you failed Vincent and I, this is the least you could do. I owe you nothing, and I owe your sister nothing. Especially since it seems she is much more concerned with the welfare of our prisoner than she is with finding the Daybreaker.”

In the dungeon at the bottom of the stairs, Tobin was barely conscious, his body hanging from the wall, his chin against his chest. He heard something move in the darkness, and looked up to see Adrianna hiding in the shadows. She was carrying a bucket of water.

“Oh great,” Tobin murmured. “Exactly who I wanted to see.”

“I’m sorry, Tobin,” she said, stepping into the light. She was crying. “I’m sorry.” She removed her long black cape and dipped it into the water, using it to clean Tobin’s wounds. He winced each time she touched him.

“So,” he said, “are you here to shove another knife through my ribs, or...?”

She shook her head, tears running down her face. “I had to do it, Tobin. I had no choice. I didn’t know they were going to do this to you, they promised me they wouldn’t. If I knew this would happen, I never would have—”

“Yeah, I know,” Tobin said. “Right.”

“Tobin, it’s my mother. And my brother. They need my help. I only did this—they’ll die if I don’t help them. I didn’t know what else to do.”

She sobbed. Tobin stared at her.

“You are one of them, you know,” he said. “You aren’t any different. Rigel, Nova, your brother...you’re all the same. You’re one of them.”

She cried. “No, Tobin, please. I’ll help you, I’ll—”

She knelt in front of Tobin, wrapping her arms around him. He hung from the wall, silent, his body broken and mangled.

On the cliff overlooking the waterfall near Adrianna’s house, Keplar leaned over and touched the grass. There was a small puddle of blood on the ground. The husky had woken up during the night, only to find Tobin and Adrianna gone. Now what he had feared all along had been confirmed.

Junior was standing nearby, looking at the blood. “I’m sorry, Keplar. She must have turned off my sensors in the forest, she must have—you were right. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming. You were right. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. We made a mistake. It won’t happen again.” Keplar stood up. “Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“We go get Orion. Then we come back here and save my friend.”

Junior held up his hand; his robotic glove grew over it.

“Lead the way.”