His mind churns, working the problem, trying to think of a way out of this mess. Dozens of excuses and explanations and apologies flood his consciousness, but he doesn’t even know if these men speak English. He contemplates overpowering them, using surprise to his advantage, but the guard’s grip is too strong.
Three gunshots ring out, echoing in the tunnel, made louder by its confines. Jonas’s heart jumps. Did the other guard shoot Eva? He looks over, panicked, but she’s okay. His relief is quickly pushed aside by confusion. If the guards didn’t fire, then who did?
The man pressing Jonas against the wall uses his free hand to trigger his shoulder mic. “Chūō, are wa nanideshita ka? Jūsei ga kikoemashita . . . ,” he says with a frightened urgency, apparently as unnerved by the gunfire as Jonas is.
The only reply is a fourth gunshot, this one filtered through the radio, and the sharp crackle of static. The man shoots a worried look at his partner. Jonas can see that they’re both scared. The Spire is a scientific facility. Their presence is for insurance purposes only. Their guns are for show. They would see more action guarding a cathedral.
With the guard distracted, Jonas throws his head backward, the back of his skull striking the guard in the face. He staggers back, dazed, and Jonas headbutts him again. A pinwheel of tiny fireflies crosses his vision, but he stays conscious. The guard does not.
As the man drops, his partner bulldogs toward Jonas, instantly forgetting Eva and, apparently, the fact that he has a gun. Eva is screaming at Jonas—“What are you doing?”—but his focus is on the guard hurling himself at him. Macon prepared him for this, taught him to turn an opponent’s inertia against him, to use his environment as a weapon. Jonas grabs the guard by his uniform and uses the man’s momentum to send him careening into the wall. He might as well have hit the guard with the tunnel. The man falls, unconscious, inches from his partner.
“Oh my God,” Eva repeats over and over.
Klaxons begin bellowing, and the overhead lighting unexpectedly changes, instantly bathing the entire tunnel in red.
“We have to move,” Jonas says.
But Eva seems rooted in fear and confusion.
“Eva,” he reiterates, “we have to go.”
She turns to retrieve her gun, but Jonas stops her. “There’s no time.”
Almost on cue, more gunshots ring out. Louder this time, which means closer. Jonas darkens. Fear challenges him. He wills himself to avoid its grip.
“How many Macons could he bring here?” Eva asks.
“I don’t know,” Jonas says. “As many as he could construct tethers for, I suppose.” He grabs Eva’s wrist. “It doesn’t matter. We have to keep moving.” As he pulls her, he sees one of the guards clambering to his feet.
Jonas virtually drags Eva down the long corridor, hearing the guard’s footfalls—the machine-gun steps of a man in better shape—closing in. As they run, the tunnel begins to slope away, the path corkscrewing downward. Gravity is a wind at their backs, pushing them on.
Then a door appears to their right. Steel, with a metal push bar. Jonas throws himself into it, hoping it’s not locked. It isn’t. Thank heaven for small favors. It swings open, and he explodes out onto a narrow steel catwalk, one of several that spiral out from the towering SLA to connect with the Inner Ring’s corkscrew, like spokes on a bicycle wheel.
A low frequency thrum greets them. It’s not generated by the power surging through the SLA but by the air flowing through the massive cavern more than two thousand feet above ground. The catwalk feels as slender as a tightrope, and the shaft beneath them appears bottomless. With a drop greater than one hundred miles, it might as well be.
The view reminds Jonas of those precious hours spent on rooftops with Amanda, tempting fate, embracing vertigo. Without that experience, he’d be gripped by nerves and nausea right now, frozen by panic. He offers up a silent prayer of gratitude to his wife.
With Eva right beside him and, he imagines, the guard not far behind, Jonas surges forward, faster than is sensible, given the altitude. His footfalls tap out a cadence as he flies down the catwalk.
Then his momentum stalls at a pair of shoes in front of him. He follows them up and sees the gun. The same one that shot Amanda. The sight of it resurrects the memory and conjures anger. His gaze continues to rise, but the face he sees doesn’t belong to a Macon.
It’s Victor.
Whatever humanity his nemesis once possessed has vanished like a mirage. In its place, Jonas sees nothing but acid. Hate. A man devoid of mercy and thriving on vengeance. A man not only capable of committing murder, but hell bent on it.
THREE YEARS AGO
The note from Amanda was one page in her precise handwriting marching down the paper. Blue ballpoint ink dug little divots through to the opposite side, which Jonas could feel beneath his fingers as he held the instrument of his heartbreak.
There were details, of course, but they seemed insignificant. Amanda had been feeling every emotion that he was. The mystery of why they had never discussed children before. The riddle of why the topic should be so important now. Jonas’s penetrative staring and Amanda’s remorse for being bothered by it. The feeling that the train of their relationship had been derailed. Amanda articulated his own emotions with greater precision than he had been able to. How ironic, Jonas thought, that they would remain in sync even as they grew apart.
The letter ended with Amanda informing him that she was moving out. It didn’t disclose where she would be staying.
About a week before, Jonas’s editor had begun tempting fate. The name “Nobel” kept coming up in their exchanges. If the magnitude of Jonas’s work held up under scrutiny, she said, a Nobel Prize in Physics was inevitable. Jonas remembered shuddering on the phone when she said the word. Inevitable. It was a unique kind of torture that as his professional life rose, phoenixlike, from the ashes of Victor’s smear campaign, his relationship with Amanda would rupture. But maybe, he thought, that was how life was, that there was an equilibrium to its highs and lows. The universe favors certain outcomes. Who’s to say the corollary isn’t that the universe imposes homeostasis on one’s fortunes?
But Jonas refused to accept the will of the universe. He violently rejected the idea that he could only be “so happy,” that fate set limits on it. He railed against the thought that he had to choose between a Nobel Prize and Amanda. Even if he did, he would choose her without hesitation. The Nobel was just a slab of metal without her. The existence of a multiverse was a hollow discovery without a world in which they were together.
NOW
“Hyōketsu!” The scream comes from behind Jonas. He glances back to see the guard advancing, his service revolver held in a tenuous two-handed grip that reeks of training. “Hyōketsu!” the guard repeats before resorting to English. “Freeze!”
It’s unclear which of the other three people on the catwalk he’s addressing, but Victor is the one who brings up his gun. He fires twice. Jonas feels the bullets blur past. He turns sharply around, fearing one or both might strike Eva, and he’s punished for the quick movement by a reassertion of vertigo. The world sways.
The metal door sparks, and the guard flies back, his gun tumbling out of his hands. The dead man and his gun hit the catwalk at almost the same time, producing a metallic clank and a muscular thud, a perverse call and response. The gun dances on the steel pathway as the guard rolls off the catwalk and plummets in silence. Jonas hears the wet sound of the body ricocheting off one of the lower catwalks and then . . . nothing.
He swivels his head to Eva, needing to reassure himself that she’s safe. Apparently intuiting this, she bobs her head slowly, keeping a cautious watch on Victor.
Jonas turns back to him. His entire body feels tight. Cables under tension. Every muscle taut. Every cell screaming. He wishes he hadn’t stopped Eva from going back for her gun.
“This isn’t personal,” Victor says with a pathological failure to appreciate that his vendetta is nothing but personal. His voice barely rises above a whisper, and Jonas almost can’t hear him in the din of the massive chamber. Victor’s tone is distant. His body is here, but he sounds as if he’s speaking from millions of miles away.
Jonas thinks to speak, to reason with his former friend. But all he can think of is the gun in Victor’s grip. All he can see in front of him is Amanda bleeding onto the sidewalk, her eyes filled with tears and a sad confusion about what was happening to her. Jonas swallows, and he tastes metal. Anger. Adrenaline.
“I told you to accept the judgment of the universe,” Victor says. “I told you that, remember?” He sounds plaintive, almost wounded.
Jonas measures the distance between himself and Victor, calculating whether he can close it before Victor can raise and fire his gun. His own wrath, his need for vengeance and justice for Amanda, eclipses any survival instinct, and he would throw himself at Victor right now but for the chance that an errant shot might strike Eva.
“I told you to accept the judgment of the universe,” Victor repeats. He sounds disappointed, as though this is for Jonas’s own good. And then his voice grows cold and hard, with a terrifying ferocity. “But then I realized . . . I am that judgment.”
Jonas watches, transfixed, as Victor raises the gun, his finger coiling around the trigger. The barrel levels straight at Jonas’s heart. From someplace far away, some distant country, a part of Jonas rages and commands him to do something, anything. It can’t end this way. Not like this. He reminds himself—his mind bellowing a primal scream—that Amanda is waiting for him in another reality.
Without thinking, Jonas drives headlong at Victor. Victor’s finger is squeezing the trigger, but Jonas wills himself to believe that he can get to Victor faster than Victor can fire.
He can.
Jonas collides with Victor, angling so that his shoulder, bone under a thin canopy of muscle, drives into Victor’s sternum. On impact, he hears the air rush from Victor’s lungs. The sharp crack of the gun stings Jonas’s ears—Victor’s managed to get a shot off—and at this range, it’s as loud as the end of the world.
Pressing his advantage, Jonas pushes all his weight down on Victor, forcing them both down to the catwalk. They land hard, but Victor gets the worst of it, the catwalk slamming into his back, punctuated by Jonas falling atop him.
Victor lets out a scream of either agony or rage. Jonas can’t tell which. The gun, still in Victor’s grip, arcs up toward Jonas’s head. Jonas catches Victor’s wrist with both hands and jerks it back as hard as he can. Once. Twice. Three times. He scratches at Victor’s wrist hard enough to draw blood, but Victor does not relinquish his hold.
Jonas jerks his body slightly so that the next time he yanks Victor’s arm, Victor’s hand is positioned to strike the catwalk’s steel edge.
Victor wails in pain. Jonas is sure he hears the crack of bone. But all that matters is that Victor let go of the damn gun, so Jonas drives his arm down again. And again, the bones in Victor’s hand snap, sounding like popcorn popping. Victor howls once more, and this time the gun falls from his shattered hand and plunges down the shaft.
Victor moans in a paroxysm of agony. Jonas pushes himself off and tries to stand. His head feels light. His chest heaves and falls, and he realizes he’s hyperventilating. He commands himself to slow his breathing, but his lungs rebuff him. Too much adrenaline. Too much rage.
