“You mean that the Others work for you?” I say. I hadn’t expected that. I’d known they were connected, but this seems insane.
“Oh, most of them don’t know it,” Hammond explains. “They just know that they have a benefactor who supplies them with money, information, and occasional bits of technology.”
“And in return, you just make a few requests?” Jack guesses.
Hammond laughs. “Hardly. By supplying the right information, I don’t
have
to ask for anything. The Others do what I want them to, and they think that it’s their own idea. It’s a far more effective way to run an organization like that, in the long run. If I tried to control them directly, they would only fight against me. Like you.”
“We’re trying to save people,” I say. “President Hammond, I don’t care what happens to me and Jack here. This isn’t our time. I know though that if you take office, a great disaster will occur in this time, and the knock on effects
will
affect our time. People will die here, but in the future…” memory floods back to me. Memories of the sick and the dying, the comatose and the faces of the doctors who can’t help.
“In the future,” I say, “there aren’t many of us left. We’ve developed so far, we can do so many things, but we’re sick.” More memories come to me. Memories of visiting the hospital. Of seeing the children dying. “There’s a fever, and we can’t stop it. All we could do was look back for the cause, hoping to prevent it at the source. The cause is this moment. The moment when you become president. You bring about changes.”
“What kind of changes?” Hammond asks.
I shake my head. “I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to risk giving you a blueprint to follow. The point is that you have to stop this.”
Hammond stands there and shakes his head. “It’s too late for that.” Then he reaches down to the sleeve of his gun arm, unbuttoning it and pulling it up. There, on his forearm, sits an elaborate tattoo. It’s of a dragon, coiled around his forearm like it’s clinging to him. “My course has been set for a very long time. It’s in me, and I know what I am. For a long time, I wanted to stop it, but now? Now, I know the truth. There is no stopping it. Things are going to be how they were always meant to be for me. But you…”
He stares at me, and I don’t know what he sees there, but there’s something almost terrifying about his gaze. It’s not that it’s mad, or evil, or anything like that. It’s that it’s so calm. So utterly calm as he shifts to point the pistol at me.
“It’s not too late to stop you. I think you’ll be even more dangerous than I am. I’m sorry.”
He pulls the trigger.
As he does so, Jack is already moving, but even he isn’t fast enough to stop the bullet that slams into me. I feel the moment when it hits me, passing through flesh like it isn’t there. I fall to my knees, pressing my hand over the wound to try to stop the blood that is already coming from it. In theory, if I don’t die, then I’ll heal, but how quickly? Quickly enough to stop the blood?
Jack is on the new president in an instant, grabbing the gun and twisting it aside, his hand going over the top in a hard punch. Hammond, amazingly, doesn’t go down, but starts fighting back, wrestling for the gun while swinging punches with his free hand. Jack has to duck his head down behind his shoulder to stop them, coming back with knees and elbows.
One gets through, a vicious upward elbow strike that catches the former senator on the point of the jaw. He crumples as the blow thuds home, and Jack wrests the gun from him, hitting him with the butt of it so that Hammond falls to the floor, unconscious.
Jack looks over at me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “I think… I think the bullet went straight through, and I haven’t died, so I should be able to heal. What about Hammond?”
Jack cocks the gun and points it at the new president’s recumbent form. “I came here to do a job. Whatever it takes.”
I know in that moment that I can’t let him do it. I thought that I would be able to, but here, with him standing over Hammond’s unconscious body, I can’t. I just can’t.
“Jack, wait!”
“Why?” Jack demands, his surprise obvious. “This is what we came here to do, Celes. This is the only way to stop the Apocalypse from happening.”
I shake my head. “It can’t be. It isn’t a solution. You saw Hammond. You heard him. The Serpent is a part of him, but it isn’t
him
. Kill him, and how do we know that it won’t just move on? How do we know it won’t just move on to someone else and use them to take over the world? Hammond is just another pawn here, Jack.”
“That isn’t what we decided back home,” Jack says. “Whatever the Serpent does afterwards, it’s in Hammond now. We can’t worry about anything else.” He sighs. “I’m tired, Celes. I just want to do this and go home.”
A thought occurs to me then. One so terrible that I can’t bear to think of it. “What if there’s no home to go to, Jack?”
“What?”
I swallow as the implications of Hammond’s death start to sink in. “Are we sure that I came back to help you? Are we sure I didn’t come back to stop you?”
“What?” Jack sounds confused. I can’t blame him. “Why would you do that?”
“Because… what if we do change the future, Jack? What does that do to you, to me? To the future we come from? Does it cease to exist? All those people we’re trying to save in our time. What if we aren’t saving them? What if we’re making it so that they never exist?”
“So we just let all this happen?” Jack asks. “Celes, you can’t be serious. You’re saying that unless we let the Apocalypse happen, you’re worried about whether our time will still exist?”
“I thought I came back just to follow you,” I say, “but doesn’t this make sense too? Are you saying I’m wrong?”
Jack hesitates, but then shakes his head. “It could be a better world in the future though,” he says. “One with plenty of people. One where they don’t
have
to adapt the way we have.”
“One where everyone we’ve ever known is never born,” I point out.
“I know that!” Jack replies hotly, but then stops himself. “This is what we sent people back for, Celes. Are you telling me that you don’t want me to do it now? If you are…”
“Yes?”
Jack nods. “I’ll do what you want. Whatever that is. I trust you.”
The question is, what do I want to do? Jack puts the gun down on the table, and while he does it, I try to think. Does the Apocalypse in this time have to happen? If it does, doesn’t that mean the inevitable destruction of our world anyway? The sickness? Maybe someone like me will be born in the future anyway if we change things. Maybe someone like Jack will, too. The trouble is, I can’t see a way that they’ll meet there. Not the way we did.
Is that what this is? Is it not about the lives of all the people who won’t ever exist if Jack shoots Hammond after all? Is it really just about the fact that I love him, and I don’t want to create a world where he and I might not exist, let alone meet? And if so, am I really willing to accept the destruction of this past world to keep him? Can I have that on my conscience? Can I have
my
world on my conscience?
This was supposed to be so simple. Now it’s anything but. Especially when men burst into the room.
“Get your hands up,” one of them orders, making sure his two colleagues have us covered before moving over to Hammond and helping him to stand. “We got your message, Sir.”
Message? I realize he must mean Hammond’s phone call. It wasn’t to his wife after all. Being ‘late for dinner’ must have been some kind of emergency code. Hammond brushes off the other man and steps over to me.
“You should have let Jack take the shot, Celestra. Leaders can’t afford to let their hearts get in the way. They must always do what needs to be done. Like now. Take them please.”
One moves over to grab me where I am on the floor, bending over to do it. He gets too close, and I reach up, the power jumping through me as I touch his face. Even wounded like this, it’s easy to do. He screams, the bright power of it consuming him.
The other two stare at me, shocked, and Jack moves in that moment. He hits the guard nearest to him, knocking the man to the ground while Hammond reaches out for me. Why would he risk that? Why would he try it when he’s just seen what I can do? I don’t know, and Jack obviously doesn’t want to find out. He moves between us, so that Hammond’s reaching hand touches him rather than me.
Energy flares into life around that hand. Bright energy.
Familiar
energy. Somehow, he’s doing exactly what I do. I’d thought Hammond was just normal, but he’s different. He’s like me. Which begs the question of where he’s from, because he can’t be from this time if he can do that.
Can he?
TWENTY
H
ammond’s burning energy slams into Jack, but it does not hurt him, any more than mine would. Jack absorbs the power, and Hammond just clings to him in shock, like he isn’t expecting Jack to be able to do it. That’s obviously one aspect of Jack’s powers his surveillance didn’t tell him about.
While he’s clinging to Jack though, it’s easy for the remaining guard to move up behind Jack and strike him with the butt of his gun. Jack might see it coming, he even starts to turn into the blow, but with Hammond holding onto him, he can’t do anything about it. As he collapses, Hammond tosses him aside like he doesn’t matter.
I throw myself at the guard, my burning power coming to the surface, the pain of my wound easy to ignore now that I’m angry. I reach for his face, but he’s smarter than the other one. He grabs my hands, keeping me off him while Hammond wrenches my arms behind my back. From there, it’s easy for the guard to cuff me.
“Haven’t we proved enough times that these won’t hold me?” I say.
Hammond throws me to the ground beside Jack. “They’ll hold you long enough.”
“What do you want to do with them?” the guard asks. “I can make sure no one finds the bodies. After what they did to Phil, I’d be happy to.”
Hammond looks down at me then, and what I see in the next few seconds… I wish Jack were awake, because I just can’t believe it. He glows with the power within us, but it’s more than that. He actually seems to grow until he’s almost touching the ceiling. For a moment or two, spikes of that light form horns above his head, while the glow in his eyes pulses a deep, angry red. His voice shifts too, becoming something deeper, something utterly inhuman.
“The human side of me is foolish. It wanted you dead quickly. I want you to see. I want you to watch everything that happens to the world next, and know that you were not able to do anything to prevent it. I want your arrogance in thinking that you could to bring you to despair.”
“You really are the False Prophet, the Serpent,” I say, swallowing in my fear. The guard beside Hammond looks at him like nothing is happening. Can he not see this, or is he just so used to it that it doesn’t make a difference to him? How could someone see this, hear this, and still work for Hammond?
Hammond smiles then, as though I’ve managed to amuse him. “
The
Serpent? Oh, I’m just one of them, Celestra. There are many more. We’re in the time of deception now, and soon it will be the time of destruction. After that, there will be peace and prosperity for a time, but the destruction that follows that will be even worse. It will seem like the end of the world.”