Aliomenti Saga 6: Stark Cataclysm (25 page)

“Let’s move forward in time a bit, Fil.” The voice was distant, one he knew didn’t belong to this time, this memory. It belonged to a man who fixed things, built things… he was called the Mechanic. The Mechanic wasn’t around then, was he? Why was that man speaking to him, then?

“Fil, you’re reliving the Assassin’s empathic push of his murders of the guards outside Pleasanton when you were six years old,” Adam said. “This memory won’t help us. Move forward in time, Fil. Start when Will got to the house.”

His eyes snapped open. Sweat trickled down his back. He was breathing deeply, still reacting to the memory as though it were real. He’d forgotten how overwhelming the experience had been, the intensity of terror the man could project, the utter helplessness felt by his victims. The Assassin killed his victims before he ever raised a sword.

They’d been smart to shake him out of that memory; Adam, who must have arrived after he’d immersed himself, had given him the clarity he’d needed to break free. He thought for a moment. The baseball. He could feel the baseball in his hands…

The Assassin threatened his mother. That wasn’t allowed; no one threatened Mom! He wound up, just like Dad taught him, stepping toward his target, snapping his wrist. The ball whisked through the air and slammed into the nose of the evil man with the red eyes.

The images began to blur—Smokey attacked the Assassin, the deadly blade piercing her side, the Assassin stalking them. He felt the slithering sensation long forgotten, something covering him, something he couldn’t see. He noticed it now, realized that feeling had started the moment he’d woken up from his nap. He felt himself in a protective cocoon in his memory, and he felt safe and secure. He looked up and watched as the Assassin stopped moving toward them, felt the shock and anger from the killer as he realized his intended victims were gone, and gasped as flames erupted from the man and set the walls of the house ablaze.

The cocoon tightened around him. It didn’t hurt, but he knew he couldn’t move. He started sinking through the floor. His head moved down, and he looked back at Smokey and realized at some level that his beloved pet and friend was gone.

His head slipped through the floor and emerged through the ceiling in the basement. The lower level was mostly dark, lit only by the faint glow of the fire burning brightly outside. His mother hadn’t remembered who she was or who her friends were or why the terrible man had stabbed Smokey and tried to kill them. But she started to remember. She remembered about Energy and about Shielding and—

Something was wrong. He pulled himself out of the memory. “Adam, if Mom didn’t know about her Energy during the time I’m experiencing… how did she stay Shielded?”

“That’s a good question,” Adam replied. He could almost see the man frown as he tried to explain the conundrum. “Are you feeling Shielded in the memory?”

“No, not at all,” Fil replied. “But I feel a… an invisible skin covering me. Could that be what hid me? Could the same be true for Mom?”

“A second skin?” The Mechanic seemed quite interested. “If memory serves, Will Stark described a similar sensation in the backyard before being pulled into the ground.”

“You are correct,” Eva replied. “Will did mention such a sensation when describing the experience.”

“Perhaps the same technique used to pull young Will to the basement was used to Shield Hope and young Fil as well,” the Mechanic suggested.

“That was the nanos, right?” Angel asked. “Mechanic, we don’t have anything quite that advanced yet, do we?”

“No,” the Mechanic agreed. “We don’t. We’re making major advances, but… I don’t think we can make Shields of nanos. Not just yet.”

“I also doubt they could pull Will Stark into the ground right now.” Charlie’s voice sounded tinny to Fil over the chair cocoon’s internal speakers. He wondered if that was something he projected on the younger man after watching him make googly eyes at his sister.

“I suspect we are seeing enhancements for the nanos in play, advances we have yet to invent and perfect.” Eva’s voice sounded fine. Perhaps Charlie had a bad connection. “If we add scutarium to the exterior of the nanos, a ‘wall’ of such nanos would provide the equivalent of a Shield.”

“But we hadn’t invented them yet,” Angel noted. “We
still
haven’t invented them. So how did they—?”

The voices disappeared as he slipped more fully into the memory, back into his six-year-old mind.

A spacecraft appeared in the basement in front of him. No, it wasn’t a spacecraft. It looked like a car. A car without wheels. He was impressed. How had someone made a car appear in his basement, especially with a fire going on above them?

The top of the car disappeared. A man with black hair and sunglasses jumped out of the car and started running for the stairs.

A strange idea entered his six-year-old mind.
That’s me.
He didn’t know how he knew it, where the idea came from, but he was as certain of that fact as he was that he was standing there at that moment. He wanted to follow himself, but the ticklish stuff held him still. He watched the car instead and watched two other people get out of the car. A man—wait, that was their friend Adam!—climbed out. He looked at the car as if he thought there was something broken. That made sense; the car had no tires. He wondered if they’d be able to find any.

A woman jumped out of the car as well. She had hair the color of fire and looked very familiar. In fact… she looked a lot like Mom.

My sister
.

He was startled. How could that be his sister? He didn’t
have
a sister. And if he did, she’d have to be younger. But… if the man he’d seen first was
him,
and that man was much older than he was now… well, that made sense. Probably.

While he watched, his sister made a throwing motion toward the back wall of the house. Fil thought the throwing motion was quite good. Dad must have worked with her just like he’d always worked with him, even if he couldn’t really move correctly when Mom had the Shield up.

The back wall of the basement exploded.

Whoa.

The voices intruded once more, shattering his trip into his memory. Charlie asked what Angel was throwing as the wall exploded, covering the basement floor in chunks of drywall and dust and concrete from the foundation. The debris moved continually farther into the basement, away from the wall with the hole.

“It’s not exactly… falling in there, is it?” Angel asked. “So what’s making it move?”

“I think the answer’s the same for all of these questions,” the Mechanic said, his voice thoughtful. “We saw Angel throw
something
in the direction of the wall. It can’t be coincidence that the opening appeared at just that instant. So… whatever she threw is both invisible and can tunnel through drywall, concrete, and dirt.”

Fil’s memory of the timeframe continued, but the conversation had lessened his concentration and the immersive quality of the experience. He could see the memories in his mind’s eye while listening to the conversation. As much as he enjoyed the feeling of retreating fully into his memory, he realized it was best if he stayed present.

“Adam looks worried about something,” he said, letting them know he was listening in again. “I remember sensing that concern from him. He was very worried about the condition of the craft.”

“We have several mysteries to resolve after seeing the memory to this point,” Eva stated. “The meaning behind Angel’s throwing motion, the nature of the invisible material responsible for boring a hole in a concrete wall, and the reason for Adam’s concern about the condition of the craft.”

Fil’s memory shifted back to the debris flowing into the basement, each bit moving the piles further from the hole.

“There’s intelligence at work there,” the Mechanic said. “This isn’t something trivial at play.”

“Energy could do that,” Angel said. “But why would I throw Energy at the wall?”

“What if you’re throwing something, not because you need to throw it, but because you want us, sitting here today, to know that it’s not Energy?” Eva asked. “If you’d done nothing, we would have suspected Energy at play.”

“She didn’t use Energy,” Fil said. “I was there. Yes, I was six years old. But I would have sensed any Energy used to do what she did. And Porthos made note in Dad’s memory that he sensed no Energy coming from the house. There was a door opened and the back of the house was gone by this point. No, Porthos would have sensed Energy had Angel used it.”

“Thus, we must conclude Angel’s throwing motion is a clue to those of us watching this memory today,” Eva said, nodding.

“Why, though?” Charlie asked, puzzled. “Why would Angel make the effort to do something just to give us a clue like that?”

“Without that clue, I would most certainly have used Energy to develop that tunnel.” Angel’s voice was firm. “And as Eva noted, there was no way Energy usage would have gone unnoticed. So… the clue here prevented me from making a critical mistake. That alone makes the clue important. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.”

On the screen, Fil’s memory’s continued. He’d paused the playback of his memory as they discussed the rationale behind the throwing motion. When the memory resumed, he watched future Fil descend the stairs carrying the Assassin, whom he deposited roughly in the trunk of the time machine. Adam climbed into the machine and scooped a small device from a bag resting on the front seat of the machine. He stood on the seat and affixed the device to the basement ceiling. As he stepped back down, Adam glanced directly at the young Fil and flexed his fingers apart, mimicking an explosion.

“Ah, so
Adam
blows up the house.” Angel grinned. “The Assassin will be jealous.”

Fil snorted.

The older Fil moved up the stairs once more, and his six-year-old self returned his gaze to the hole in the wall, just in time to see, not dirt and debris, but the battered body of Will Stark appear. The body floated, held aloft by some invisible support system, and moved to the time machine. Will nestled into the back seat of the vehicle, held upright despite the fact that he was clearly losing consciousness. The older Fil returned to the basement with Smokey—Fil felt a tear slip down his cheek inside his cocoon—and he saw the dog’s tail twitch.

He was already starting to restore his old friend to health before they left 2030.

The three time travelers were there, talking to him, telling Hope to accept the help she needed, urging him to take care of his mother, urging him to let go of his anger. He wasn’t sure if they were talking about his previous obsession with his father’s abandonment, or his continued struggles with guilt over the Cataclysm. In either event, he needed that message.

The messages about his mother’s health, about not waiting too long to correct everything… he began to wonder about those messages. Were they intended for his mother? Or were they directed at the invisible participant in all of the events that day, the man invisible to every human and Energy sense?

Angel looked at a spot above his head, and motioned toward the hole in the wall as she spoke. “Josh, that is something your sister needs to return to take care of. She needs to come back here and claim what’s rightfully hers. You won’t understand this, not yet. But remember my words, and when you do understand them, pass them along to her.”

The thoughts came together. Angel throwing something not Energy based at the wall. Something able to dig holes in walls, something able to fetch his father from the grip of the Hunters. It was something Porthos couldn’t detect.

He shook his head to pull completely free of the memory. “Let me out. I know what it means.”

The cocoon opened moments later, and the cool air aggravated the chill of the sweat he’d generated during the more intense memory sequences. Charlie had warned him of that when they first discussed reviewing his memories, and Eva said Will emerged from most of his immersion experiences drenched in sweat as well.

Fil didn’t care.

“It’s all tied together,” he said. He glanced at the Mechanic. “The advanced nanos in Dad’s memories of our future, things you’re working on now, it all fits. Remember? Adam told Dad that the nanos could do almost anything; they were problem solving, intelligent, operated by specialized versions of the machines in our heads. Just like the machine I was just in
.
That’s what it was. Dad had the ones he got in the future. That’s how he shielded me and my Mom that day. He used them to keep us hidden without Energy, used it to Shield both of us when Mom gave up her memory of her Energy skills and both of us were at risk for Energy exposure. Angel had those same intelligent nanos at her disposal. They’re so small that they’re invisible, but they’re physical devices that aren’t Energy based. Those nanos she pretended to throw dug the hole, pushed the dirt aside, and refilled the hole later.” He paused and saw the looks of partial comprehension. “Don’t you see? They left before the hole was refilled. She left her nanos behind when they returned to the future. That’s what the message meant, Angel. Your nanos are still there at our house in Pleasanton. And we’re supposed to go get them.”

The Mechanic tapped his finger on the table. “If that’s true… then we need to try something with Angel, something we’ve not done before.”

“Which is?” Angel asked.