
# FROST: A RUIN SAGA NOVELLA

Harry Manners

# 1

Steel grey Manhattan avenues fizzed by in a blur of concrete, greed, and drizzle. It was rush hour, bumper to bumper, and the air was alive with honking; thick with sewer overspill, reconstituted hotdogs, and the gamey tang of sweat. A chaos of bustling commuters, taxi drivers, subway trains and business types, each wrapped in their own lives and worries.

_None of them know it's all about to come crashing down_ , thought Milton Harper, eyeing Fifth Avenue through his limousine's tinted windows. _All these little critters scurrying around like it's all a given, like it'll go on forever. It's a wonder they haven't been squashed already._

"What's the hold up?" he snapped, eyeing the driver. That somebody as important as him could be held up by these fucking ants, with their mortgages and screaming kids, iPhones and Netflix accounts; none of that could insulate them from what was coming.

And he was close, now. So close. In minutes they would arrive and he could set to work.

"Sorry, sir. We're slap in the middle of it, here." The driver cursed. Somehow his Queens accent made it easy on the ear. "Some asshole trucker just flew off Twenty-Sixth Street and blocked the intersection." He cleared his throat when Harper eyed him sharply through the mirror, and sat up straighter. "I mean, sorry Mr Harper. We'll be en-route momentarily."

You sound ridiculous. I hope you know that. You and your dumb accent will never be anything more than scum off the bottom of my boot.

Harper looked out through the windshield. No bones about it: there was said asshole, blocking up all of Fifth. Overlaying the normal colours his eyes picked up, Harper also watched undulating ribbons of light surrounding each person, myriad colours reflecting each thought and emotion.

Those farther up the street were surrounded by black halos. Not anger—that had always had a hint of purple and red to Milton's second eye—but a feckless flavour of glum frustration. The driver wasn't lying. But that wasn't Milton's problem.

He smiled, a practised, perfect charm sliding onto his cheeks. In his long years, precious few had ever been able to stand against it. "Let's be clear. I'm due to be at my drop-off point in seven minutes. You're going to make sure I make it on time."

"Of course, Mr Harper."

The guy was a professional, cool and collected as a picnic-day cucumber, but Harper could see right through the neat little partition between them, see the flaming effluvium emanating from his black cap and pressed suit. He'd been dim enough when he had first picked Harper up from the airport, but now there were slivers of iridescent red and orange licking up off his shoulders.

Underneath, the poor sap was afraid.

_And why shouldn't he be?_ Harper thought, allowing a trickle of pleasure to drip down behind his eyes. _The poor son of a bitch doesn't stand any more of a chance than any of them. Sure, he's been_ promised _he'll be fine, but he knows. He's just like the rest. They sense what's coming, feel the end creeping up on them, but they don't seem to be able to do shit about it. This will be a kindness, putting them out of their misery._

"I know a few shortcuts. We'll be able to make up the time as soon as we get out of this jam."

"A few shortcuts? What kind of bullshit excuse is that? Remember the number of zeros on that pay cheque we cut you. How about you start _earning_ a few of them?"

"We're boxed in, I—"

Harper didn't hear the rest, sensing movement in the rear-view mirror. Dozens of cars retreated in single file towards the rain-sodden haze hanging over Downtown. Shoppers darted between fenders, and tourists gawped wherever they stood at passing curiosities.

Weaving between it all, sliding forth with feline agility, was a sleek pair of black motorcycles. They bore two leather-clad riders apiece, dressed in full leathers, bent horizontally to cut out drag. They moved like salmon swimming upstream, pulling through gaps that would make a motocross rider wince.

Looks like somebody's going to stand up for this hell-hole, after all.

All the way from the safe house in London without a hitch, and now he was going to be interrupted on the home stretch. He wasn't going to be stopped now. They had been planning this too long.

Harper launched from his seat and pressed flush against the partition, hot breath fogging up the tinted glass. The rage came on so fast his top lip peeled away from his teeth for just a moment, and he saw the look of panic on the driver's face—

He saw them. Saw the fangs.

—a childish, amorphous, base fear. These backwater-worlders always threw a damn hissy fit when Harper showed a sliver of his true self.

"This is what's going to happen," he uttered, enunciating each word with venom, his tongue snaking out and tasting the air. "You're going to get me out of here. You're going to drop me off at the target coordinates and then you're going to drive upstate along the route we've given you. You're going to dump the car at the exact spot we specified. Then you're going to take the Greyhound out west to the rendezvous point. We picked you for your specialist skills, because you know how to move unseen. But fuck this up, and you're going to find doors closed at the end of the line. Then you're up shit creek with the rest of these losers," he hissed, jerking his thumb out the window at the crowded sidewalk.

"My family," the man stuttered.

Harper glanced out the window, picked out the riders zipping back and forth, powering their way through the congestion without a hint of trouble.

Another faint lurch tugged at Milton's ancient chest.

Time to move, Harper. They're beat hands down, but don't fuck with destiny—the Web doesn't pick favourites.

He turned back to the driver. "If you've been smart, they'll already be on their way." Harper watched the red flashes coming off the man's shoulder ease up some, and smiled. "Good, you are smart."

The driver's cool was gone, but his eyes hardened. "They passed through Cleveland an hour ago."

"Good." Harper resumed his seat, brushing imaginary flecks of dust off his Saville Row jacket. These creatures might be the scum of the Web, but they had good taste. "They'll be fine. That means you get to focus on the job. Now, get me out of here."

The engine roared a moment later, and the limousine leapt up onto the kerb. Harper watched the look of dawning horror on the faces in the crowd, and he grinned as they bounced along the sidewalk around the traffic. For a moment his eyes lingered on the divider between him and the driver, now sporting a set of punctures in the leather, where his hands had been. Claw marks.

_I must keep my temper_ , he thought. _At least a little while longer. It wouldn't do to scupper things now._

No, it wouldn't do at all. He and the master had put decades of work into setting all the dominos in order, and finally it was time to kick-start the shitstorm, and tear All Where a new one.

"That's better," he called as they bounced past the intersection at Twenty-Sixth Street, and careened back onto the asphalt amidst a hail of honking horns and screaming pedestrians pouring out of Madison Square Park. "Don't stop for anything, or I'll eat your little girl with eggs over-easy when this is done."

The tiniest groan escaped the driver, now hunched full over the wheel, and the engine growled louder still as they careened to and fro, cutting a swathe through the lumbering midday traffic. He looked a little green.

Poor darling.

Harper drew his tongue over his teeth at the sight of all that delicious terror shooting off the driver's skin in magnolia florets. Not long now, and billions would be aglow with it—right before they all vanished into the ether.

I can't wait to drink it all in. It's going to be one hell of a feast.

He sat back and hummed _Blue Danube_ as they swerved and jounced along, scraping paint and chipping bumpers as they clipped passing Yellow Cabs and Priuses. He tittered as a handbag ricocheted off his window. He didn't look for the owner; it was more fun to imagine what might have happened to her.

All the while he kept an eye on the motorcycles behind them. They hadn't had a problem getting around the intersection, and they were gaining fast.

_No matter how much power you get or who you work for, you get the same flies buzzing around your head_.

His cell phone trilled in his jacket, and he pulled it out with a frown of distaste. He had to hand it to these people, they really knew how to bastardise their every creation.

Transmitting microwaves through the air, microchips, and telecoms networks. All that money and research, software and circuitry, just to communicate with somebody a few thousand miles away. If only they knew the kinds of distances over which he could communicate with a single thought, back in his own domain—where he could turn some poor sap's mind into a pile of goo without leaving his chair.

Every one of them, backwards, blind to everything going on around them.

He stabbed at the touchscreen, careful not to press too hard—he'd gone through half a dozen of the damn things already, cutting clean through them whenever he tried to tap out an email—and put it to his ear.

The last call, right on schedule.

"Are we ready?" he said.

The voice on the other end was gruff and toneless. "We're set."

"How many vaults are sealed?"

"Fourteen."

"The other seven?"

"Waiting on arrivals."

"I trust they're all stocked and manned? The full outfit?"

"All set."

_Somebody's been reading too much Lee Child_ , Harper thought, rolling his eyes. _I'm sick of this monosyllabic bad-guy talk. Where do we get these people, anyway? There must be an evil henchman agency, somewhere._

"Do me a favour and make your next sentence more than three words long," he sighed, rolling with the limo as they swept in a spectacular arc around a gaggle of people crossing the corner of Forty-Fifth. "Who are we waiting for, and what's the ETA on the stragglers?"

"Hong Kong, Dubai, New Delhi, St Petersburg, Strasburg and London. There's been some trouble with tails, but the last of them have been rerouted. They'll be on-site inside three hours."

Harper sat bolt upright. "What?" he roared, wincing as his grip crushed the cell phone's shell. The connection crackled, but held, just. He took a deep, steadying breath, aware that his manicured nails were stuck fast in a heap of transistors. He took another look out the rear window, watching the motorcycles closing in behind. "That's unacceptable. We have less than two. I can't wait. You're sure they're being tailed?"

"No question. Two convoys were taken out before we could redirect the others."

"For the love of... Fine. Now listen to me. You get those arrivals underground before I call you back, or once everything gets real fucking quiet, I'm going to hunt you down and suck your eyes out through your nose."

Harper bit back a formless bellow as the limo screeched to a halt on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Sixth, and he was thrown forward off the leather seat. "What now?" he cried, slamming his free hand up against the divider.

If his answer isn't perfect, I'll open up his neck right here. I can drive myself, for all it goddamn matters.

But the driver wasn't listening. He was staring off through the passenger-side window with his mouth hanging open like a groaning zombie. His eyes were alive with fear—not the distant respectful kind he'd shown Milton, but something deep and primal.

Harper turned to follow his gaze, grunting at the sight of the sparkling street-displays of the _Barnes & Noble_ store beside them.

It was packed out downstairs, with people squeezing to get in the doors. A normal drizzly day for casual readers to get their fix of _Dean Koontz_ or _George R. R. Martin_. But the upstairs windows were clouded over entirely with a spreading milky haze, filling not just the air but crawling over the walls.

Ice, and mist. Moving outwards in a thrumming, roiling mess that didn't belong. Not in this world.

Harper groaned aloud.

_Sons of bitches have found an Exit._ _Tails on seven convoys, two assholes at my back, and now I've got company._

Harper kicked the door open and leapt out, ignoring the cries of dozens of people across the street as they stopped to gawp at the freakery playing out over their heads. The ice spread fast, dripping down the side of the building like water, moving outward from the upstairs sci-fi section, where—

Damn it!

—something was glowing.

There wasn't time for subtlety now. The motorcycles' whining engines were almost on him. One hand still embedded in his cell phone, he tore the driver's door clean off its hinges and cast it aside, hauling the driver out and dragging him across the street. A thrumming noise blasted from the direction of the _B &N_, mixing with the crowd's manic cries. Harper pressed the cell phone hard to his ear, shouted, " _Get the others inside, now. It's game time!_ " then crushed it into a ball of composite and glass, tossing it aside.

"What the hell is going on?" the driver gasped.

Behind them, an explosion of shattering glass and falling masonry rang out. Screams erupted from all around, and suddenly people were running. Amidst the chaos, Harper marched with the driver in tow, striding along with his lip curled and his jaw twitching.

He glanced over his shoulder at the motorcyclists, and hissed when he saw them a mere fifty feet away. As he watched, the rear riders hauled a pair of sawn-off shotguns into view, and took aim.

Harper threw the driver forward onto the floor and took a headlong dive behind a hotdog cart. The world blurred. He was still mid-air when the air ripped with the sound of thunder, and the cart detonated like a bomb, sending a few stinging splinters into his leg.

Rolling to his feet, he took the scrabbling driver by the hair and dragged him in his wake like a sack of potatoes, crouching behind a steel information stand. In his peripheral vision he noticed the top floor of _Barnes & Noble _had been torn open, the running crowd oblivious to the gunfire and the leather-clad pursuers.

_Typical_ , Harper thought. _One hint of the real world, and they lose their freaking minds._

"Get the hell off me!" the driver bawled, scrabbling at Milton's fingers. In all the excitement, Harper's manicured nails had stuck fast in the poor sap's scalp. Blood ran down Harper's wrist and into the driver's eyes. "I said _get off me_!"

Harper jerked his hand away, distantly amused by the bleeding welts he left behind in the driver's buzz-cut, and pulled him up to stand straight.

The motorcycles would be on them in moments. Harper cursed and took a peek around the corner, grunting when the metal panel exploded beside his head in a puff of shrapnel.

Okay," he sighed. It seemed they were in for a chase.

This might take some work, after all. Better get rid of this idiot, for starters.

He turned to the driver. "Sorry, my good man, looks like this is the end."

Clutching his bleeding scalp, the driver looked up at him. "Who the hell are those people?"

"Thorns," Harper said, leaning over and plucking the driver's Gloch from its holster. "Thorns in my side."

The driver glanced at the pistol. "I thought you said this was the end."

Harper smiled and patted the driver's shoulder. "I meant for you." He pressed the muzzle against the driver's chest and squeezed the trigger—twice, just to make sure the bastards didn't get any information out of him. "Shh, shh, that's it," he said, lowering him down, gritting his teeth against the urge to dive headfirst into the pulsing stream pouring out of the guy.

With a fizzing whine the first motorcycle shot onto the pavement, and Harper was firing before the riders could move an inch, sending the passenger flopping to the ground with a weighty crunch.

He grinned when the second bike kept coming, knowing his tapered fangs were showing, and threw his arm around in a bear swipe as the rider flashed by. Even through the thick leather, Milton's fingers touched bone, his hand momentarily wrist-deep in hot intercostal muscle. Then the bike was hurtling towards the staring crowd, rolling end over end in a hail of aluminium and torn leather. Harper didn't stop to watch the fun, ripping the door off the _Build-A-Bear_ store, and ducking inside. 

# 2

Jack Shannon hated his name. Apparently it had a certain ring to it. People always expected him to be a certain kind of person—a kidder, smooth and easy going.

All through his childhood the other kids had tortured him about it. He once made the mistake of admitting he thought it sounded like the name of some 1950s detective from a B-movie.

They had never let him forget it. Right away they had started forming their hands into finger pistols and cocking one eye, whining in that signature detective twang, "Jack Shannon, private eye. _Nyah!_ "

In truth, it didn't take him long to disappoint people. He was the quiet type, a little awkward, with a habit of saying the wrong thing.

As a kid he had been too bright for his parents and teachers, dressing up as knights and princes and charging into the woods to find magical creatures. His father had reserved a keen disapproval, and his mother had been wont to turn a shoulder to him at parties; preferring not to be associated with the oddball who had appropriated a striped canvas sack for a cape, and a tinfoil-covered rolling pin for a longsword.

_A little over imaginative,_ his teachers had warned. _Head in the clouds. He'll never amount to anything if he doesn't buck up._

Certain controversial books vanished while he was at school, and playdates were organised with dead-eyed kids whose mothers forced them to play faultless piano all day. Slowly, patiently, they sucked all the colour out of the world, and Jack withdrew, settling into life's dreary pace.

Things hadn't changed until he moved to Manhattan. By twenty-seven, some solid sales experience, a nose for people's tastes, and a lifetime with his head in books, landed him a job at _Barnes & Noble_.

He had a small apartment on the Lower East-Side. Actually it was tiny—a lopsided box that leaked and had walls thinner than one-ply toilet paper. But the neighbours were close-knit and sweet, and he had plenty of free time to read. On Saturday afternoons he watched anime re-runs— _Ghost in the Shell, Pokémon, Naruto_. He had a growing _Firefly_ figurine collection, and by night he worked on his great American novel—two years of work had resulted in a few stuttering fragments that petered out after a few pages, and endless notebooks of angst-ridden poems. But that was okay.

His charge was the science fiction and fantasy section on the upper floor of _B &N_, wedged into the back corner by the plate glass windows. He wouldn't have had it any other way. Jack was all too glad to steward and safeguard those shelves, a little pocket of fantastical whimsy, for those who also found refuge and solace in lands of faeries, space aliens, and dragons.

He preferred living in fantasy worlds to living his real life.

The section saw a lot of loiterers, of an afternoon. Stuffed in the back corner, flanked by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bustle of Manhattan and the Public Library, it was the perfect place for nerds to bed down and lose themselves.

A few were regulars. None of the bastards ever bought anything.

Jack criss-crossed the aisles every now and then and cleared out the ones who were getting too comfortable, but besides that he was content to let them stay. He would never admit it to his supervisor, but in his mind this place belonged to them, anyway.

And the truth was, he was one of them; their man on the inside. He loved the smell of books, the tactile feel of them between his fingers—the glue, the binding, the sheer scale of thoughts and tales and characters that populated their shelves. There was no better hangover cure than hunting down some obscure half-remembered title for an old biddy who, ' _was sure it had a green cover, and that the author was French... or maybe Italian_ '.

So he didn't save any lives, but it gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Manhattan was the perfect place to work in books. There was always something going on.

Jack jerked as a sharp snap rang out beside his ear. He'd been dozing with his elbow on the counter, staring at a young girl crouched in the far corner with her head in a copy of _The Wizards of Earthsea_. "Huh?" he muttered.

Mr Schneider took the thick hardback away from his ear and leaned in close. "Get rid of the geeks, we're closing early," he said. He eyed the girl, and his lips curled. "That loser's been here over two hours. I want her gone in five minutes."

Jack straightened, clearing his throat. "I usually give them three before I turn them out. I think she's going to pick up the trilogy."

"She's a browser if I ever saw one."

"She'll buy. My nose says so."

"I don't care if she's planning on buying the whole section. While you and your nose have been daydreaming up here, the rest of us have been setting up for the Peter Knight signing. He'll be here first thing in the morning—there won't be room to turn your head in here, soon as we put the signs out before opening. We're closing up early this time. I don't want us unprepared again because somebody got the damn flu. Now put on that winning nerd smile of yours, and clear out the trash. And tomorrow, make sure you grab a coffee before you show your face. You've looked like crap all week."

Jack swallowed the urge to defend his fellow nerds' honour, and set off for the shelves. "Yes, sir."

He'd been planning to ask _Earthsea_ girl to dinner. He was a sucker for gawky glasses.

Why do we have to dress up the whole store every time some best-seller blunders in? I met Knight last fall. He wouldn't even let me get a picture with him. Asshole.

Sighing, he made for the back of the store. He was so wrapped up in bitter thoughts that when some of the shelves froze solid before his eyes, he carried on walking.

His eyes registered the icicles spreading, hopping from one spine to another, emitting puffs of diffuse white mist as they went. Spreading out from the paranormal fantasy section—

_No shit_ , a distant part of Jack's mind jabbed.

—it blossomed into inch-thick sheet ice. By the time the first of the readers noticed, a low rumbling noise from the ether rose up, and from somewhere—everywhere—blue light throbbed, periodically emerging from and retreating behind form of the everyday world.

Jack's mind simply blanked out, unable to process. He just kept walking. A small part of him even went so far as to continue sulking that he was going without a date tonight.

Then _Earthsea_ girl screamed, scrabbling away from the shelves with a look of blank, unbelieving disgust written onto her face. She scurried into Jack's heels and wrapped her arms around his legs.

"What the—?" Mr Schneider barked from afar. He sounded a million miles away.

Jack blinked at the girl at his feet, then looked back to the icy shelves, which now twinkled like Central Park at Christmas, having turned a snowy white, even the floor. The mist was billowing up from a few hundred volumes now, pooling against the ceiling and spreading downwards, showering the entire upper floor with stage-show drama.

"Oh," Jack said finally. That was all he could muster.

It was funny what he learned about himself in times of crisis. Apparently, Jack was the kind of person who looked at a book-store turning into a slab of ice, pulsing with electric blue light, and said, "Oh."

The rumble was unmistakable now, and the whole upper floor had paused, people open-mouthed. Dozens of books thumped to the floor, dropped from limp hands. The stunned unified gape lasted around ten full, long seconds, seconds that could have been hours.

Then Jack felt it snap like twine cut with scissors, and panic arrived in earnest.

The world seemed to spool up into furious action in the time it took him to reach down and wrench _Earthsea_ girl up from the ground by her elbow. Screams rang out from all directions, coupled with the sound of tumbling shelves and the clatter of scrambling limbs. People downstairs joined in moments later as the stairways filled with wailing customers and staff. Somebody screamed _bomb!_ Another cried _terrorists!_ The fire alarm tripped, barely audible over the shouting and the eerie hum. Then the hum strengthened to an all-consuming rumble, building from nowhere and yet from all directions. Blue throbbing light pulsed faster amidst the paranormal section, blinding and yet without source.

All the while, the icicles continued to spread.

"Come on, we have to get out of here," Jack yelled.

But _Earthsea_ girl didn't seem to hear him, china white and limp in his grasp, her gaze fixed on the insanity.

The feral piece of his mind seemed intent on dropping her and running, willing him to turn, but he gripped her anew with a grunt of frustration, and started hauling her back towards the escalators. "If I die because of you, our date is off!"

Half blinded by the blue light pulsing every other moment, he watched Mr Schneider hesitate at the top of the stairs, catch Jack's eye, then shake his head and vanish downstairs with a grunt.

Fucker.

"Ma said I should'a stuck with the therapy," _Earthsea_ girl said distantly.

"Move your ass!" he bellowed in her ear.

The viciousness of his voice seemed to reach her, and her eyes cleared. She glanced at him and then the spreading ice, now only a few feet away from them, a white carpet flowering constantly with fresh crystals, crawling towards them like waves climbing a beach.

An unfeminine, guttural moan escaped her and she stiffened. "Oh man!"

Before he could react she scrambled from his grasp and ran screaming for the top of the stairs, leaving him momentarily stunned, gripping thin air.

"Oh," he said, blinking stupidly.

That's all I got. Funky blue lights and creeping icicles, and all I've got in me is, "Oh".

It was hard to see the spreading ice through the heavy mist as it descended over his shoulders and enveloped him. The store vanished from sight and panic bubbled up in his stomach at the thought of that ice spreading, unseen. Tumbling onto his hands and knees, he scrambled back towards the escalators, praying it didn't catch him. The rumble had become a wailing honk that hurt his ears and pressed on his skin with physical force.

As he crawled it reached a crescendo, and the blue light throbbed with a final, blinding flash. With a concussive force that seemed to unzip the air, something exploded from the paranormal section.

The mist was blown against the walls, the carpet of icicles vaporised in a single heaving puff. Jack was blown clear across the store, tumbling end over end in a rain of paperbacks.

_God, it's a bomb, it's a bomb, it's a bomb!_ he thought as he hurtled into the biography shelves, cowering as a shower of books cascaded down onto his head.

He was a mere ten feet from the escalator, and now he could see the last of the people downstairs bursting, screaming, into the streets. Mr Schneider stood at the base of the escalator, his eyes wild and his body frozen in mid-flight. Their eyes met.

"Come on, Jack!" he cried. He tensed as though to scale the steps, then hesitated again, and turned on his heels.

_Double fucker_.

Jack was on the verge of getting to his feet when he caught movement in his peripheral vision. Half the shelves were gone, blown to splinters by the force of the explosion. The carpet of ice had thrust up in a halo around the epicentre in a fringe of spiky stalagmites, two-feet-high and throbbing that same ethereal blue.

Striding from the chaos was a man dressed in oxblood leather, rivulets of that self-same mist trailing from his shoulders.

Jack gasped as a blast of cold unlike any he'd ever felt stole into his bones—something no Arctic blizzard could muster.

_The cold of somewhere else_ , whispered a distant part of his mind.

Where did that come from? He didn't know, but somehow he knew the inner voice spoke the truth.

Half paralysed and in spasm from shock and pain, he rolled behind the nearest shard of ice. Too late. Before he could come to a stop, the man stood over him.

His eyes twinkled a fiery crimson—actually seemed to undulate with conflagrations alight behind his pupils.

"Ahoy hoy!" he said, a gargling, thick lilt, the accent almost Scottish, yet also not.

Jack could only blink in reply. "Hi," he said at last.

The newcomer tongued the inside of his lip, scanning the room, and drew a deep sigh. "Listen, this is going to get crazy real fast, but I need a hand. You feel like going for a bowl of crazy?"

Jack swallowed. A dull throbbing in his fingers bubbled up as the intense cold ebbed. He had gripped the icicle hard enough to cut into his palms.

The man glanced at the bloodied ice. "Yello!" He clicked his fingers in front of Jack's eyes. "Stay with me. What is this place? Has it started yet? Speak!"

"I..." Jack swallowed.

The man rolled his eyes. "A dribbler. Typical. Never mind, laddie, you can tell me on the way." Without hesitation he gripped Jack's collar and tore him up from the ground with inhuman strength, and proceeded to drag him toward the emergency escape. "Honestly, you people are so _fragile_. First sign of the real world and you roll over like bloody punch-drunk donkeys."

Jack could only utter a wordless squawk, his heels thudding over the threshold, leaving the frozen shattered book-store amidst a hail of settling snowflakes and shredded paper.

It had all happened in under a minute.

Jack's mind roiled and his hands bled, but everything around him seemed fuzzy, unreal. It was beyond reckoning, beyond madness.

The back of Jack's mind spat feebly, _I only had an hour left on my shift_.

The crimson traveller laughed. "I know, mate, it's bloody loony. Don't worry, you get used to it... eventually," he said, hurtling along the emergency escape passage.

It took Jack a moment to realise he hadn't spoken aloud, careening along in the man's wake, bouncing off concrete and scraping his cheek.

_This can't happen. I have plans! It's Mexican night_ , he thought miserably.

"Stop your whining."

Jack sobbed.

The man in crimson kicked the steel service door at the end of the passage and it buckled around his booted foot like tissue paper, flying off the hinges and clattering into the street.

Jack flapped like a rag-doll as they raced along the street, passing white-faced bystanders running or pointing, stupefied, crying out at the wreckage of the store. Amidst the dozens of blurred faces he found himself looking for _Earthsea_ girl.

Kidnapped by an inter-dimensional maniac, and I'm still on the prowl. That's desperate.

"What the hell do you want from me?" he yelled, a moment before slamming his arm into a newspaper dispenser. Howling, his vision blurred by tears, he wondered when he would wake up.

Any moment, now. No more cheese before bed.

But that wasn't right. The calloused hand wrapped around his collar was no conjuration of his subconscious. He knew it, just like he had known about the cold. That same strange inner voice, one that hadn't spoken for a very long time.

They left the bystanders behind on Forty-Sixth and moved into calmer crowds. Jack's rear-view perspective provided him with an endless procession of frowning men and women, looking over their shoulders at him as he bounced along helplessly.

They were moving fast, faster than any man could move with another in tow. Jack's stomach quivered as they rounded a corner and fled down an alley, heading out from view of the crowds and into the murk and stench behind some restaurant's garbage.

Skittering to a stop with a metallic clang, hyperventilating and snivelling, Jack flung his arms up over his head and ducked, waiting for the end.

A sharp twinge in his scalp drew a piggy squeal from his lips. Fresh tears touched his cheeks. He looked up into the newcomer's face and screamed, " _What?_ "

His kidnapper smiled. "Spunk. Good. You'll need it, Jacky Boy." He stood up straight and surveyed Jack a moment.

Jack cowered. _How does he know my name?_

The man was barrel-chested and bearded, looked around forty, wrapped in a knee-length torn duster over a simple, ancient tunic, boots that looked as though they had seen many a desert, and oiled leather chaps. All of it the same shade of rich, marbled oxblood.

_He looks like the world's freakiest cowboy cum circus performer_. _What the hell's he going to do with me? Eat me? Rape me?_

A look of disgust crossed the man's face. "Rape you? What messed up kind of city is this?"

Jack screamed internally, _He's reading my freaking mind!_

"Well, stop thinking so loud, then!" the man said.

"W-what's going on?"

"Like I said, this is going to get crazy, fast. Sorry, m'boy, but the rules of this merry land don't apply today. Sorry to rock the boat and all, but some pretty big gears under the universe's hood are about to go _properly_ cockeyed."

"What are you?"

The man grunted. "A long way from home."

Jack found himself staring up without a mote of emotion left in him. Now the adrenaline drained out of his system, all that was left was his stunned, lucid mind, too shell-shocked to produce anything other than resigned acceptance. "You messed up my section," he said. "I just finished restocking the shelves this morning."

"Not my fault you put them over an Exit."

"They were nowhere near the exit! They were at the back of the damn store!"

"Not that kind of exit, you idiot."

Jack resisted the urge to scream. "What are you talking about?"

"You're a bookworm, working in a place like that, so you've read enough rosy crap about _doors to other places_. Why don't we skip the little chinwag on the hidden reality behind the world, yada yada? I don't have time, today." He picked at a piece of loose skin on his hand as he muttered. He glanced at Jack and heaved a long sigh. "I can feel a heap of stupid back-and-forth welling up, anyway, so I'll take care of it." He counted off on his fingers, "There's a door to elseplace in All Where on the second floor of your bookshop. About a thousand people saw somebody come through it. No, I'm not here to probe your ass. Yes, I'm here to help. Who sent me? None of your damn business. All you need to know is that I'm not the only one, and that all that hoo-hah back there was _nothing_ compared to what's coming."

He swooped down until he was a mere inch from Jack's face, exhaling hot sweet breath from between teeth inscribed with Delphic runes. "You people are about to have a very bad day," he muttered slowly.

Jack mouthed openly for a few moments, looking down the alley. It was getting dark already, but in New York nothing ever slowed. Crowds milled to and fro up there, normal people going to dinner or to some club or café, unthinking in the embrace of routine.

_They don't have to deal with this shit_ , he thought.

For a moment he thought about crying out for help. Somebody would call the police, and this lunatic would get locked up like he deserved.

But if they did that, then what the hell did he see back there? He would be just as loony. They'd lock him up in a moment.

What about door number 2: this is all legit. God, please don't let that be true.

"Sorry, champ, it's true," the Scot-but-not said, swooping back up and stepping out from behind the garbage dump, pulling Jack with him. "Now stop your yammering and get your head on straight, because I need you."

"What?" Jack squeaked. " _What?_ Me? When the hell did I start figuring in your... your... freaky... shit!"

"First person I saw out of the Exit, friend. You're important, all right."

"Why me? I'm a damn bookseller. I collect _Firefly_ figurines!"

A spark of panic arced in his chest. His Wash bobblehead was in the mail. He couldn't die now, not with that to live for.

"You're a creature of destiny, laddie. I'm no Brother of Solstice, but I know one when I see one."

Jack made to speak, found he had no words, and collapsed back against the dumpster. "I see." He shrugged helplessly. "Suppose you're wrong."

"Not possible. The rules are the rules."

Jack cursed under his breath, realising he was about to go along with whatever this mad fool wanted. He squeezed the bridge of his nose.

No way left to go but forward now, Jack. Go along with it until you see a chance to run. Just pray you don't lose the last of your marbles before it's over. Or get your guts ripped out.

Is he hearing this? He read my mind before.

He waited a beat, but the man merely waited.

A selective mind reader. Who is this freak?

"Who you calling a freak?" the man growled.

Jack scowled.

"Why are you here?" he groaned.

The man slapped him on the back, with such force that all the wind was pounded right out of him. "The first good question you've asked, because now I get to sound like a real badass." He grinned, revealing his tattooed teeth in all their otherworldly glory, set against tangled masses of beard and glowing crimson eyes. "I'm here to save the bloody world."

He held the pose for a moment, and Jack nodded slowly, grinning a smile he felt obliged to pull, lest the head-case get upset.

"What's your name?" Jack said.

The man's eyelids fluttered, and his dramatic pose disintegrated. An irked twitch in the corner of his mouth. "Barry."

"... Barry?"

His face twitched more violently. "What, you think that because I'm from another world, I've got to have some stupid nonsense name? I hate that crap. Go ahead and call me _Jaeverick_ or something, if you want. Whatever. But Mum had a wicked sense of humour, so it's Barry."

I touched a nerve.

"Sorry," Jack said lamely.

Barry shrugged, turning to survey the alley. "We done with the frickin' introductions and exposition, now?" he said, eyeing the people at the end of the street with frank curiosity. Arms akimbo, he cocked his head. "You people... blind to the world around you. None of you have a clue in all hell what's coming. Now, you tell me, anything weird happened today around these parts? Freaky stuff?"

Jack resisted the urge to laugh hysterically in his face. "I might have seen a thing or two, yeah."

Barry grinned and Jack's will broke. They laughed together for a single, insane moment, two men from two worlds.

Then the moment was over, and Barry's fist connected with the side of Jack's head in a hail of stars and singing pain.

Jack's vision blurred and melded like melted ice cream. Threads of crimson light mixed with bleak concrete-grey. A demented groaning blared somewhere amidst a high-pitched ringing. As his vision settled and the ringing died down, he realised the groaning came from between his own lips.

_The bastard nearly killed me_ , he thought wildly. A bolt of fear tugged him back to reality, and he scrabbled back against the dumpster. _He's strong, too strong. No man could do that. He could have taken my head clean off._

Another voice answered from deeper down in his mind: _He dragged you through the streets like a tote bag full of marshmallow, after appearing in a cloud of ice and blue glowing light from another dimension, sweetie. He's probably not a man._

Jack fought a bought of nausea, checked his head for blood, and gasped. "What the hell did you—"

"We ain't got time for you to be a smartass. You've been sent to give me a hand, and by god you're going to play your part, or I'll have you hanging upside down from your danglies before you can say ' _Oopsie daisy_ '. The Weaver might have sent you, but that don't mean I have to leave you in one piece. So let me ask you again. _Did you see anything freaky, Jacky Boy_?"

"No! I was busy being a pathetic loser, like always, before you showed up. Happy?"

"There we go, some progress. Nothing at all? No news on your TV, your internet, your gossipy old ladies at the salon? Whatever? Nothing strange at all?"

Jack gritted his teeth. "No!"

Barry's brow twitched again, more violently than last time, a full half-inch, such that obscured his eye. "Every time, they send some blubbering idiot who doesn't know a damn thing. Why can't I get a bonafide hero, for once? I like a bit of Hollywood." He huffed, blowing a stray strand of twisted beard from between his lips. "Why do you people always have to be so _normal_?"

"Sorry to disappoint you," Jack muttered. He decided he didn't want to know how the other-worlder knew about Hollywood. He thought of running for it again. "So I'm not any good to you, why don't you just let me go, and get on with... whatever it is you're doing."

"I'm on a mission," Barry said distractedly. "Saving the world and all. Y'know."

"So I can go?"

"Nope. You couldn't even if I wanted to let you. You're awake now."

Jack sighed, sagging, defeated.

What's the point? I'm probably hallucinating, anyway. Why won't it stop?

"Like I said, creatures of destiny," Barry said. "The crazy stuff I said was coming? Sorry, kid, you're bound to it, and that's that."

"I don't want any part of any crazy. I want to go home."

Barry laughed again, a huge, roaring guffaw. "There it is!"

Jack flinched as Barry slapped him on the back, but still the air sailed from his lungs.

Barry wiped a tear from his cheek. "Gets me every time. Funny; no matter where you go, everyone starts out from the same place. We all just want to go home."

The laugh died with a sudden bitter note, and his face descended into a haunted grimace. "Now what do you say we get out of this alley and get on with it? If they haven't showed their faces yet, they'll be around here somewhere. Destroying worlds is addictive."

# 3

Milton Harper waited for the last of the stock-room staff to run screaming out into the street, then slammed the door marked STAFF ONLY and tore off the handle. For a moment he sighed and leaned against the frame, cursing under his breath.

Fools. Incompetent idiots. Everything was set up, it was perfect. All they had to do was follow the plan. Now everything might go to hell.

There was no stopping what was coming. That much was for sure. But there was a hell of a lot that could go wrong. If all the vaults didn't receive full complements, the logistics would be all off. And if they weren't sealed, they'd lose all the equipment, the weapons, the supplies. All of it.

Once the Frost took care of all these vermin, this world would be theirs. But there might be survivors, and Harper needed to be able to scrape away any stragglers.

He unsheathed twin five-foot claws on each of his forearms, thrusting out from just below the elbow.

The whine of the motorcycle outside died. The Build-A-Bear shoppers were long gone. The guy was probably ex-special forces, moving over the store-front floor like a leaf drifting down-river. But to Milton's ears, each clack of his boots was signposted in reverberating glory.

In any case, he didn't need his hearing. He could see the hunched figure outlined in shimmering light through the door, slinking between stands and displays, an automatic rifle tucked tight against his shoulder.

Harper lurked behind the door like a heron poised over an unsuspecting perch, then thrust his clawed hand clean through the door so fast his flesh became a blur. Hot wetness enveloped his wrist. Harper smiled as a watery gasp reached his ears, the glowing aura visibly shifting colour.

Green. Pain, and fear.

Patiently, Harper peeled the door away in splinters with his free hand, and greeted his pursuer with a curt nod.

It was an impressive specimen, a solid two-fifty-pounder with shark-like eyes and a neck as thick as a tree bough. There was no shock in that gaze at the sight of Milton's hand embedded in his abdomen, nor his clawed arms. He had known what he had been chasing.

A fellow predator. Harper felt a glimmer of kinship with the pathetic creature hanging off his wrist.

Urgh. Is that how long I've been here? Sympathy for this... thing?

The man was wide-eyed and pale already, with Milton's hand gripped around his spine. To his credit, Harper was impressed to see him still trying to raise the muzzle of his rifle.

"I'll take that, thank you," Harper said, plucking the gun from the man's shoulder and pinching the barrel through ninety-degrees with a flick of his index finger. He cleared his throat and lifted the man through the doorway, bringing them face to face.

"Give me a little information and I'll make it fast," he said.

Lies. He never let them go easy. But the humans always turned into little children when you made them hurt. They became naive, hopeful, calling out to gods and angels. No matter how tough they got, they were all the same underneath. If only they knew what kind of creatures the divine really were.

They would never stop screaming.

"Go to hell," the man gargled, then wrenched himself upon Milton's arm, pivoting to impale his shredded torso further. Something vital spewed hot blood onto the floor.

Before Harper could scowl, the man's eyes glazed over, and his light winked out. Harper rolled his eyes and let the man slump to the ground.

Son of a bitch could have ruined my suit. This thing is cashmere.

He massaged his forehead and grated his teeth. How many decades had he spent outcast here, sliding his fingers into governments, organisations, criminal networks, everything—without once indulging himself in all that power. He had kept hidden, a name, a shadow, a rumour to all but a handful.

Billions of dollars, decades of work—entire lifetimes to these short-lived rodents—had all come down to this one day. And now it was all about to go down the drain.

A low growl emerged from deep in his throat. He had to deal with this before any more damage could be done. In any case, he couldn't do his work here until the other vaults were locked down.

Something had come through the Exit, delivering some meddler just across the street. A playmate come just for him.

Despite his rage, he felt a thrill rustle in his chest. So long had he been here, alone, a castaway on this lonely barren island at the edge of the Web. Now, finally, he sensed a glimmer of All Where peeking through the curtain of this thin, bleak reality.

At last he felt power close by. Real power, rich and glimmering, filling the air with technicolour. Through the concrete wall he could make out a faint vapour trail of glowing crimson, heading off down the street.

Harper licked his lips slow and steady, sweeping across the storeroom floor amidst hundreds of staring beady-eyed Teddy Bears. He imagined them cheering him on, his minions, all screaming " _Kill them. Kill them all!_ " __

_Yes, evil teddies,_ he thought, giggling. _Thy will be done._

He stepped back onto the street, smoothing the creases of his suit. Despite his anger, there was a skip in his step as he followed the glowing trail. "Let's see who's come to play."

# 4

"What was that back there?" Jack called. He and Barry cut through the crowds on Fifth Avenue, weaving back and forth between people heading for shows or a couple of cold ones. The sun had fallen below the skyline, and the clouds began their long decline through the spectrum towards pink and purple.

Barry turned to speak over his shoulder. "Eh?"

"The ice, the light... you."

"It's called the Frost. It's a mark, like a fingerprint."

"Of what?"

"Of something that don't belong in these parts of the Web."

Jack put on a spurt, side-stepped a scowling tramp, and drew level with Barry with some effort. He seemed to cover more ground than each step should have taken him, almost hurtling over the sidewalk. It sent Jack's head spinning.

"You want me to go along with this? Fine. But you're going to tell me why you're here."

Barry's eyes twinkled with something not quite amused, maybe dangerous. "Am I now?"

Jack hoped being so public would save him from that predatory glint. It wasn't a strong hope. "Considering what I just swallowed, I think I deserve a bone."

Barry squinted sidelong at him, then shrugged. "Fair. I gotta say, most of your lot go stark raving bonkers when they catch sight of us."

"So?"

Barry stopped so abruptly that Jack ran ten feet ahead before he could dart from the crowd and join Barry at the edge of the sidewalk. Barry was already gesturing to the city with a sweep of his arm. "Imagine all this, _all_ of it—everybody you've ever known, loved, met, or passed in a hallway—gone." He snapped his fingers, somehow louder than the hubbub of the crowd, and Jack flinched. "Every person on this poor little rock just suddenly... not, vanished in one blink of your eyes."

Jack shivered, a full body jerk that welled up at the base of his spine. "That's coming?"

"The end of the bloody world, like I said. Today."

Jack swallowed with difficulty. His throat suddenly arid as a desert. "Shit."

"Yeah. Shit. So let's get going, what do you say?"

Jack mouthed wordlessly for an instant, then groaned. "Fine, let's go."

Then they were moving again, walking this time, but still Jack had to jog to keep up with Barry's striding pace. Every step of the way, Barry's gaze swept the streets, the skyscrapers, the sky, the pavement, his eyes darting back and forth ceaselessly, apparently seeing things Jack was blind to.

Looking for something.

"What do we do?" Jack said.

"Shut up and keep a lookout."

"For what?"

"Whatever's there to see."

"All I see is a lot of people."

"Do you ever do anything but ask stupid questions?"

"How the hell am I supposed to—" He stopped dead, a lurch rising in the base of his stomach. "Wait."

Jack loved _Loony Tune_ s, especially the little curved hook that snaked in from off-screen and snagged Porky Pig during the credits. ' _That's all, folks!—whoosh!_ '

The tug in his stomach was just like that; like some intangible shepherd's staff had looped around his insides and tugged them three feet to the right. His body reacted to it even as his mind processed the sensory oddity, as though on autopilot.

It was knowledge of some other place. Something he couldn't know or sense or feel—shouldn't—yet did.

"Up there." He heard his own voice from a great distance, but it didn't sound anything like him, breathy and rumbling. He sounded almost like Barry. He turned to his inter-dimensional compadre, shocked not only to find his hand wrapped tight around Barry's bicep, but also by the Scot-but-not's uncertain expression.

Almost as though he wasn't quite sure of being able to shake Jack off. A moment ago, Jack was sure Barry could have peeled the skin from his bones if the Scot-but-not hadn't been careful.

"What is it?"

"There's something over that way. Moving fast. I can... I can't see it, but something else. Ugly and... bad and _not there_ , like a void in the world."

"Stop talking pretty and tell me what the bloody hell's happening to you."

Jack frowned, squeezing his eyes shut, focusing hard on the odd new sensation.

"I don't know," he muttered.

"Come on, out with it!"

"I don't know what I feel... It might be gas."

"It's no gas."

"Reading my mind again?"

"No... I can't see a thing right now." Barry sounded a little uncomfortable. "Looks like you've got a touch of something extra, after all. Told you, the Web always sends the right ones for the job. Creatures of destiny."

That tug lurched once more, stronger this time, evolving in constant flux. It seemed to filter in from all of his senses, yet none of them. Dark sludge filled his pores; rancid horse manure ran in his veins.

"Let it in. Don't fight it," Barry sighed, his voice laced with thinly-veiled impatience. "What do you feel?"

"Like I'm a human divining rod for something that shouldn't be here."

"Not the worst trick I've heard of. That's it, then: you're my guide."

Jack swallowed hard, opening his eyes and expecting to see the world turned inside out. Instead, the bustle and honking and crowd-weary faces tumbled past just like before.

"Come on, let's go," Barry said, taking a bounding step forward.

_I just saw something without seeing, felt it without touching_ , Jack thought wildly. _What's_ happened _to me?_

Not only did he feel the ugly new sensations, but also an all-pervading chill deep in his bones, identical to what he'd felt back in _Barnes & Noble_. The same power that had brought Barry here.

_The Frost_.

"It's not possible," he breathed.

Barry's lips grew thin, his gaze caught somewhere between exasperation and intrigue. "And why the bloody hell not?"

Feeling childish, Jack muttered, "There's magic in the grown-up world."

Barry whistled. "Life's broken you, Jackie Boy." He shook his head, genuine disappointment filling his gaze. "I admire this place. You people get a bad lot. But this world has a nasty habit of standing all over its own power. There's magic in you people stronger than any I've got here, if you'd but bloody embrace it."

He stepped closer and bowed his head to look Jack in the eye. "Now, if you're done with your little existential crisis, we've got a monster on the loose trying to end the world. How about we do something about it?"

Just like that, the ice drained from Jack's bones, and the ugly sensation fizzed out. Fresh air gushed in over his skin, and he could breathe again. In the same moment, Barry seemed infinitely stronger, and jerked from his grip with a wry smile. "You'll get the hang of it." He twitched his head over his shoulder. "That way?"

Feeling numb, Jack nodded. "It's moving fast."

_Whatever it is. He. Whoever_ he _is._

Barry's grin framed his bearded face, his eyes twinkling with madness. "Then we better catch up."

His beefy hand closed around Jack's collar, and he hurtled along the street again, Jack ever the rag doll bobbing along in his wake.

# 5

Harper stepped into the phone booth and smoothed the creases from his jacket, gritting his teeth at the black slick of drying blood on his lapels. Grimacing with displeasure at the primitive tick-tock machinery of this world, he put the receiver to his ear and dialled.

A rapid series of clicks and whirs followed as the line was re-routed and scrambled all over the world, then a dull voice said, "Yes?"

Harper slammed a hand against the booth wall, ignoring the gaggle of obese Australians who leapt back, squawking at the spider-web of splintered glass that blossomed from his palm. "Just _what_ the hell is going on? Last I heard, some of the vaults were waiting on incoming."

"Sir."

He waited, but the booth rang with silence.

" _Well_?" he screamed.

"There are... problems. Four more teams have been taken out. Two are cornered. Some of the VIPs are missing."

Harper closed his eyes and prayed to the master for strength. He spoke very carefully into the receiver, cradling it lest he crush it in an instant, uttering every word with a shaking voice. "The countdown is already fixed. We're on the clock, here. Need I remind you what happens if everything isn't perfect?"

"No, sir. I understand."

"You do? Because it sounds like you're reporting on the stock market. Now, why don't you use that wonderful piece of machinery inside your skull for once, and try doing something about it."

"We're doing everything we can."

Harper took a five-second-long inhalation, diffusing a spark of rage that could have blown the whole street to atoms. "If I have to call again, I'll kill every last one of you. I worked too long putting everything in place to watch you people fuck it up in one afternoon."

How did they know? How could so many know so much about us—know without me sensing something?

Milton's rage rippled and parted in the wake of something he hadn't felt in aeons: a black widening deep in his chest, a kind of vomit-inducing vertigo. Fear.

These idiots faced death at his hand if they screwed up, but if he failed, something far worse awaited him.

He swallowed, grinding his teeth at the fact that he could feel so weak and degraded, and fumed, "Tell me they're ready for me."

"They're ready. You just have to make your way to the rendezvous and activate the Beacons."

"Fine. Fix this."

He slammed the receiver back onto the bracket, but in his anger the whole assembly imploded and clattered to the floor. More worried looks flooded in from passers-by, and it took everything he had not to burst through the glass and gut them all.

"Unbelievable." He stepped out of the booth and looked at the book-store across the street, cordoned off by the bomb squad. But there was no bomb here. The entire place was frozen solid, one big icicle.

# 6

Barry paused at a red light, caught by speeding traffic on both sides of the street.

"Get your hands off me, I can move on my own," Jack snapped.

Barry let him loose, watching him with narrowed eyes.

Jack splayed his hands. "What can I do? Run away? Where would I go?"

"To put your head between your legs." His hand still hovered close to Jack's collar.

"After the crap I've just seen? I'm not letting you out of my sight."

"Uh huh."

Jack gritted his teeth. "Look, if the world's about to go down the toilet, and I'm some kind of destiny child, what else can I do?"

"If you cared about being a hero, you'd have said that first."

Jack blinked as the traffic cleared and Barry set off again at his same crazy speed, striding on legs that seemed to propel him with the power of a racehorse. Jack sprinted for all he was worth, just about managing to keep pace. "I'm no damn hero," he grated.

He realised their quarry's location had taken them in a big loop. They were moving back towards Fifth, and the book-store.

_Back to the scene of the crime_.

But what were they going to do when they got there? He was a divining rod, some kind of walking map, but so what?

For a moment he faltered and his legs twinged beneath him. He seldom hit the gym, and already his stamina was running dry. In that single moment he dropped back over ten feet, and the gap between him and Barry suddenly seemed a gulf only set to grow.

"Wait," he called. "Wait!"

"Move your arse, lad!" Barry cried from up ahead. "We're almost there."

"Exactly. You need to tell me the plan," Jack answered, trying to ignore the startled looks from people he left in his wake.

Barry made a noise somewhere between a guffaw and a giggle. "Plan? Kill 'em."

"I mean a way to do that."

Barry said nothing.

Jack cursed, and kept up the sprint. With a thrumming in his throat he realised that he _did_ want to turn tail. Where he would go, he had no idea. To his box apartment, and his anime collection, and his PJs. For the nearest psych ward. Mexico.

Barry had been right to hold onto him.

But Jack wouldn't let the bastard have the satisfaction.

_And, you know... that_ saving the world _stuff, too._

He kept running, right until the world seemed to rush up through the base of his stomach. Ice poured down his spine from the base of his skull, the same feeling that had filled him before, only tenfold. He jerked in a full-body flail, and lurched sideways uncontrollably into a store-front window.

Darkness took him, welling up at his flanks and engulfing him. But somewhere far away he felt hands on him, steadying him and guiding him gently to the ground. A bearded figure danced somewhere in the vaguest distance.

"Easy, easy."

You knew. You knew I'd fall. That's why you tried to keep hold of me.

"Why me?" he muttered, fighting nausea as the world span.

Jack swallowed. He held his hand up in front of his face, twirling the fingers before his eyes. All his life he'd never felt much more than a queer species of embarrassment, one of not quite fitting the curves of his own life, sitting askew and awkward in a world pitched to sneer at him.

Now he was between two possibilities. Either he actually sat in a pool of his own foamy saliva on his bathroom floor with an empty bottle of pills beside him, or this was really happening. And if this was really happening, then that meant the feeling now welling up inside him was also real.

A feeling of knowledge, of certainty, and power.

_An Itch. That's what it is,_ he thought. There was no doubting it, an iron rod of immutable knowledge come down from the ether.

Whatever black power had come through before Barry, one with evil intent that stained the world-behind-the-world, was slowly revealing itself to him through this blinding new second sight; a syrup-like clot hanging far behind all the physical matter between them.

_The S-Man's X-Ray vision, with an extra step towards freaky_ , he thought. He saw through thousands of tonnes of concrete and steel, bodies and parked cars, watching it squirm like a black maggot. But there was another dimension to this new sense, something visceral that he felt deep in his head, and along the surface of his skin: that maggot wriggled in the deep flesh of his body, an ugly thing that shouldn't be.

He resisted the urge to shudder.

"What is it?" Jack said.

"A pain in my arse."

"Are you going to kill it?"

A glassy film passed over Barry's eyes for a moment. "If that was possible, it would have been done a long time ago."

"Why can't you?"

"It's against the rules."

Jack frowned. "There are rules?"

Barry smiled, but it was a thin expression devoid of humour. "Don't make the mistake of thinking we're the ones holding the keys. We're just more bit players in a game much bigger than any of us can imagine."

Jack thought of the Frost, of Barry's superhuman strength, his talk of other worlds. "You seem pretty powerful to me."

Barry's face tightened. There was no trace of that smile now. "We might live long and travel far, and worlds rise and fall by the wars we wage, but we're still bound to the fabric of All Where as much as anyone else. Powers much bigger than us are turning all the cogs."

Jack nodded slowly. "How far up does the ladder go?"

Barry shrugged. "Dunno."

"You never wondered?"

"'Course I did. Can't live as long as I have without taking a few centuries off to play Great Sage in the mountains somewhere. I've been many men before this charming Casanova." His eyes twinkled with the gazes of a thousand men, the experiences of as many lifetimes. "I've seen wonders that would melt your face, crimes that would crush your heart, I've watched my friends die one by one. Every step of the way I've asked what it all means." He stood up, and offered Jack a hand. "Not once have I ever had so much as a whisper in reply."

Jack shook his head. "Then why keep fighting? How do you know you're on the right side?"

Barry nodded down at him. "That feeling inside you right now, can you look me in the eye and tell me it comes from a place that's fighting on the wrong side?"

Jack looked at him for a few moments as Manhattan and all the Earth buzzed around them, oblivious, and then said, "No."

"Then come on. This place might be backward, but it's a hell of a lot better than some other places. It's worth saving."

Jack hesitated a moment further, then gripped his arm, and got shakily to his feet. "How? If we can't kill it—him?"

He felt that too, now. Whatever it was, it was male.

A mote of amusement crept back into Barry's glistening eternal eyes. "Just because he can't die doesn't mean he can't hurt." A snide grin touched the corner of his mouth. "You can make anything hurt, if you know how. And if you squeeze hard enough, everything screams in the end."

# 7

"Jesus, he's on fire," Jack said. They were back on Fifth and _Barnes & Noble_ lay directly ahead. Night had fallen in earnest, and the city had become a glistening Christmas tree, a million store displays and streetlights and neon flashes. Jack was almost close enough to see their quarry, but he barely noticed the visual information his eyes transmitted. His new sight had taken over.

The dark smudge had grown close enough to resolve into focus. The silhouette of something man-like—close, but not quite—rippled with undulating, licking flames of purest black. Jack's first description of it had hit the mark: an absence in the world.

He felt it just as much as he saw it; not hot, yet his skin burned. The raw power of something elemental searing his pores and the light down upon his skin.

Traffic lay between them, zipping back and forth. Between the blur of taxis and SUVs he could just make out the police cordon around the store, and the relative emptiness of the sidewalk. The crowds had dispersed.

Jack grew giddy with the ugly intensity of the black thing, which faced the store and looked up with its head cocked to one side. It would have looked innocent and child-like, were it not for the curved sickle-like claws trailing from each forearm.

He shivered, glanced at Barry, and steeled himself.

The lights changed, and the traffic ground to a halt.

Jack blinked. His vision flickered, melded; his true sight overriding the otherworldly glow. Briefly there was no sign of rippling darkness, nor claws. A lithe, immaculate young professional stood there instead, beautiful and manicured. Dressed in a tailored double-breasted pinstripe and Gucci loafers, he had swept back hair that seemed to defy gravity, and a jaw-line that had clearly sent plenty of panties gliding down as many ankles.

Jack read about double-takes all the time. But people didn't really do that. Life was more disordered and subtle.

But right then he performed a perfect double-take. He even had time for a cohesive, treacherous thought to well up from the back of his mind.

What a beautiful man.

"Harper," Barry growled.

The Adonis turned to face them, nose twitching with feral independence, and hissed. Hissed, like a six-foot viper. His lips retracted, revealing rows of needle-pointed teeth.

"Too late!" he roared. The air itself rippled with the tenor of his voice. "Always a step behind."

Barry seemed to swell beside Jack, a blinding heliotropic light in the corner of his eye. "Wanker," he muttered.

_This would be so cool if I wasn't about to die_ , Jack thought.

Then the two creatures from another world were flying at each other in the night, screeching in tones foreign to any living ear, and met in a burst of blinding black light.

The impact was a clash between titans. A rumble cut through Jack, one that didn't come via the air or ground, but one that seemed to ripple through the inflexible substance of space itself.

Half blinded by some intensity he couldn't fathom, he saw sharp canines bared, Barry's great beefy arms swinging, and claws—no mere pair of talons; no manicure could fix this; but claws, foot-long spears protruding from those immaculate cuffs, two to a hand.

They moved at inhuman speed, ducking and diving and cursing. Blows were struck and parried, earth-shaking impacts that split the windshields of nearby taxis.

Screams were erupting all around from onlookers, but Jack barely heard them. It was as though a bubble had slammed down over the three of them, him and the two titans, and the rest of the world had faded into unreality.

It all happened in the space of moments, a war waged in the time taken to blink. In those precious few seconds, Jack realised something was very wrong. It was no battle between a pair of immortals.

Between the flashes of otherworldly blackness that burst forth with each blow, Jack saw the expression on the face of the Scot-but-not. No hero's thin-lipped determination. His lips were pulled back in a wide simian grin of shock and pain.

Barry was fighting for his life.

They reached the centre of the street, flailing to and fro. There was no doubting the fanged monster had the upper hand, bearing down on Barry with relentless barrages of those talons.

With enormous effort, Jack hauled his gaze away from them, and gasped, sidestepping a blossoming stalagmite. The ground under his feet and in a twenty-foot radius around the warring other-worlders erupted with shafts of ice. At least a hundred people stood beside him, and all of them wore the same expression.

The look of people confronted with a simple choice: accept what they were seeing, and go insane there and then; or shut down, and stare.

A snarl of pain drew his eyes back to the brawl. Barry wind-milled his arms, skidding backwards, heels tearing up the asphalt, and collapsed against the hood of a Prius. The fender folded with a groan, like putty around his shoulder.

His coat had torn along the lapel, shocking as an open wound, the thick oxblood leather cleaved as though a mere sheet of cotton. Blood coated his beard and hands, but from where Jack couldn't see. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, unmistakable childish surprise written onto his face.

Christ, he's on the ropes.

Barry struggled to rise then slumped back onto the crumpled Prius. Barry's whispering voice carried clear as the ice blossoming at Jack's feet: "Shit."

Jack started forward despite himself, then laid eyes on the suited man, and froze.

The man hadn't moved from the middle of the street, standing in the dignified repose of a business professional awaiting the end of some tiresome pleasantry. He wouldn't have looked out of place in any boardroom, were it not for the bloodied sabres trailing from each hand.

He was looking right at Jack. "So he's got himself another fool sprinkled with pixie-dust." He spat the words, as though they were sour in his mouth. Then, a sibilant sigh that slackened Jack's bladder, "There's always one."

Jack could only look back at him. He felt he should say something, anything, stall until Barry could right himself. But nothing came, not even a whimper. He just stared.

The ghost of a smile flashed on the suited man's lips.

_What's the point of getting special powers if they get you ripped open five minutes later?_ The thought throbbed in the forefront of his mind, and then the man in the suit was walking towards him.

Jack had never been one to act first and think later. Two decades of being the proverbial deer in the headlights left him expecting to stand there frozen in place, as the monster crossed the street to disembowel him.

Yet he moved. Without any input from his consciousness, his body sprang to life, and he bolted from a standing-start like a racehorse out of the box. After the headlong run through the city, he couldn't believe his unexercised muscles were capable of such a feat. He had no idea where he was going, even in which direction, only that he was moving.

Dozens of faces flashed past and he vaulted the halo of ice, hurtling into the safety of the crowd. He came closer to losing control of his bladder then, than he had in memory, driven by a livid screaming dread. He could sense the clawed monster, not just behind him, in pursuit; but feel him, up close, as though they stood but a hair's width apart.

An ugly, jelly-wet digit lapped at his nape, and he almost screamed with the unpleasantness of it. Then that sighing voice spoke once more, echoing inside his skull. "Dear me, dear, dear, dear... Whatever shall we do with you?" The minutest titter. "I think I'll start with flaying that pretty face off."

Jack rounded a corner, bright spots of colour exploding before his eyes, giddy with nausea, then screeched once again as yet another ugly prod thrust into his head, this one familiar.

His newfound second sight told him that he was being followed, an internal sonar blip that throbbed in his bowels. But he didn't dare look back, not once. If he did, and saw that smouldering smile behind him, he would die. Die before he hit the floor.

"Get back here and finish what you started, worm!" roared Barry, a disembodied echo in the eternal space inside Jack's head.

Jack flashed past a convoy of NYPD squad cars barrelling down the street back towards Forty Sixth, ignoring the still-scrabbling masses of fleeing people around him, and clutched at his ears. "Stay out of my head!" he screeched aloud.

The pandemonium around him was such that nobody paid him any attention.

He kept going, placing one foot in front of the other, slowly regaining control of his limbs, feeling the raw screaming agony of his muscles, begging to stop, not caring for his fate. His lungs were ablaze, each breath a battle.

All that kept him going were the creeping shivers that climbed his back, as though the suited man were brushing the nape of his neck with his fingertips, caressing, as a serial killer might in a B-movie before getting to work with the knife.

"What was the old fool's plan? Save the world and be home in time for apple pie? I can't believe they sent him, of all Highcourt's goons. Not only is he far too weak for the likes of me, the stupid goat never does his homework. He's far too late to save you now."

Jack groaned, certain his brain would implode from the strain. Each intrusion, each prod, stretched and tore the unseen fabric holding him together, a fleshy twine not meant for meddling.

"Come now, don't be so shy. Talk to dear old Mr Harper." The voice took on an ethereal banshee wail. " _I've so many questions!_ "

He was being played with. He knew the man could have been on him in a moment and dispatched Jack before he could turn around, if his pursuer had wanted. These men, other-worlders, whatever they were, moved too fast to be matched by even Olympic athletes.

It wasn't until he heard the squeal of rending metal behind him that he finally stopped, and turned. For a moment he couldn't process what he was seeing, a vast mass of twisted aluminium and glass in the distance, catapulting through the air in a shower of blue and red light.

Then he realised that one of the squad cars had been cut to ribbons, still travelling at forty miles per hour as four razor-sharp claws tore it and its occupants like gift ribbon. The shower of metal and glass hurtled into the masses of stupefied bystanders back on Forty Sixth, revealing the clawed monster in the middle of the street, a murderous sneer on his lips, claws splayed out to either side.

The other squad cars screeched to a stop before him and the officers leapt out behind the open doors, pistols drawn. Each bellowed for him to put his hands on his head and "Drop the knives!"

Jack had time to notice the suited man roll his eyes and fix them with a withering stare. By the time the man had surged forth in a blur of red and black, and the shooting started, a hand gripped Jack roughly by the collar.

"Wait, wait, wait!" Jack yelled, hands over his head.

The hand jerked him roughly. "Shudap, you idiot, it's me!"

Jack blinked and caught sight of Barry slumped beside him, white-faced and panting. He looked like death itself.

"How did you—?"

"He's playing cat and mouse, but I'm not out for the count," Barry wheezed. He staggered, and Jack caught Barry in his arms, all the wind knocked out of him by the Scot-but-not's shocking weight.

"Yeah, sure," he said. "Now what?"

"Run."

"Run?"

"Bloody run, you fool. I was wrong. We've got to re-think this."

"What happened to ' _saving the bloody world_ '?"

Barry shook his head, gripping Jack's shoulder so hard he winced. "He's not supposed to be here. Not him. And he's... so strong. This is all further ahead than I thought." He cursed. "We're in real trouble here. A clock's ticking down somewhere."

"Where do we go?"

"Anywhere. Away."

They both snapped their heads up to the sound of screaming. The gunfire had stopped abruptly. Jack saw a blur of squad cars covered with streaks of red and gristle, and a glimpse of those wide staring eyes. Yet more sirens were approaching from all directions, under a minute away.

A strange, retarded sound escaped Jack's mouth as he felt that other presence withdraw from his mind, like fingers abruptly yanked free. He fought collapse one last time, and hauled Barry to his feet, ignoring fresh pain in his back as something popped. Together, they staggered away into the anonymous depths of Manhattan, away from the carnage.

# 8

Harper wiped a shower of freshly-cleaved cop from his face and sighed. Those stains would never come out.

All around him were littered the remains of two of the squad cars, cut clean along the longitudinal axis like engineer's cross-section blueprints. Half a human, sliced just as cleanly, still sat in one of the passenger seats, an expression of slight surprise on his face.

Harper pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and spat into it, dabbing daintily at his Armani shirt, t then rubbing with more vigour.

Vaguely he perceived the hundreds of stupefied fools, fixated on him as he stood there amidst his work. But as usual, they seemed so far away, so far beneath him—so much less _real_ than him—that it was hard to pay them any mind.

So had it been for, what, half a century? All this time planning, moving the pieces into place, waiting for the signal to start the process; every moment had required immense reservoirs of patience.

It had been slow, but so very easy, to rise above the masses, to manipulate and build an unseen empire. A few payoffs, some wise investments, a handful of strategic threats, and the deal was done.

If it hadn't been for the meddler and his trusty new sidekick, it would be over by now. A few hitters he could manage, but this... maybe the humans had found out the plan somehow. The Web did strange things, after all, and took no sides. But if Kaard was here, that meant the game was up. Something had sent him.

Harper would have to act fast.

He shook his head at the sight of the unmoved spots of blood on his shirt.

Definitely stained.

Rolling his eyes, he strolled around the side of the remaining squad car, ignoring the scattering flocks of people ahead of him. More sirens were almost upon him, but he would make time to take a little pleasure.

One of the officers was crawling back from the shrapnel that had once been the passenger door, his arm reduced to a ragged slab of meat. Shaking with shock, blubbering as a child looked upon a creaking bedroom wardrobe at night, his pathetic shuffling sent a shiver running along Milton's spine. He unsheathed his claws as he approached.

It was a gruff ox of a man, mid-fifties with a bushy salt-and-pepper moustache and pot belly to match. The kind of unshakable pillar that kept on ticking over during school shootings and national disasters because it was their duty.

There he lay, open mouthed and weeping, covered in his own urine.

Harper didn't wait for the begging to start. That always ruined it. He struck in a single downward slash, and let his claws do their work. He didn't do it for the bloodshed, but for the fear and pain; the delicious momentary pulse of abject horror that tasted so good, so good.

It was interesting to hear an entire human body unzipping. They almost seemed to burst, sometimes. The sound was that of two giant pieces of Velcro being wrenched apart.

Harper closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment to savour the spray against his cheeks. If his apparel was already stained then he might as well loosen up a little. He groaned with the succulence of it.

Then the sirens came sharply to his attention. He had seconds left before they rounded the corner.

Lucky these ants can't see but an inch in front of their faces.

With the kind of speed that would have made him a blur to the remaining bystanders, he left the middle of the street and the rubble field of twisted metal. As soon as he crossed over two blocks he sensed the crowds resume their same old drudgery, and with each step thereafter he slowed his pace. When he met a gaggle of tourists on a night-tour of the sights, he fell right into step with them.

For a moment he held his heels aloft, ready for flight, but then the first back-up NYPD cruiser blared past him, heading for Forty Sixth.

Blind as moles.

He kept walking until he no longer heard any gabbling about "something _freaky_ over at _Barnes & Noble_" _,_ or "terrorists carving people up around the corner", then ducked into another payphone booth.

Despite himself, he patted his jacket and pants in search of change _. I've been here too long_ , he thought, grimacing. What was he hoping to find in his pockets, anyway? You didn't carry a lot of quarters when you were in the top one-percent.

He flexed his index finger such that the fingernail slid forth into a slot and immediately heard an electronic sizzle from the receiver. Closing his eyes, he scoured the primitive cyberspace, found the connection he wanted, and got a dial tone.

The call picked up to the sound of the same dead-pan voice from earlier. "Yes?"

"Well?"

A pause. Perhaps a glimmer of nervousness. "No progress. We're meeting resistance everywhere."

Harper took the receiver away from his ear and drew a long, steadying breath. "I don't care about the VIPs anymore. We can afford to lose a few."

"But we're still missing more than half—"

"I said forget it. They can vanish for all I care. What matters is getting things in motion. Tell me the other Beacons are ready."

"Like I said, you just have to pull the trigger. You're there, right?"

Something loosened in Milton's black heart. "I got my own problems." He wasn't inclined to blubber like the humans, but even demons had their boogeymen. "Keep things together."

"For how long?"

"As long as it takes!" Harper spat, and threw down the receiver. He stepped from the booth and headed south. He no longer cared for cops. They would never find him.

Yet, despite himself, hating the compulsion and snarling all the while, he couldn't help throwing a cautious look over his shoulder.

Those bastards are still out there.

# 9

"Stop here," Barry gasped, pointing through a ratty chain-link fence, indicating a dumpster spilling over with cardboard.

Jack groaned with the effort of stalling their forward momentum. Barry's hulking form seemed to possess some greater inertia than ordinary matter, resisting impetus, as though Jack were pushing against an engine gunned in the opposite direction.

Together they stumbled against the dumpster and slumped, wheezing and spluttering.

The sirens still wailed in the distance, but it seemed that they had failed to track the suited man; no more shots had been fired.

With time to finally breathe, the bubble of thoughtlessness in Jack's head popped, and all the fear and outrage and confusion came crashing back.

He burst out, "What the hell was that? Why take us running right up to that monster if you knew what he was? If you know he was just going to tear you a new one?" His voice broke. "I almost died."

He swallowed hard, feeling the gravity of the words hit him like blows to the stomach. "I almost died."

He blinked to stop the world spinning, and looked angrily to Barry, who had done nothing but pant across from him like an old dog. His retort died in his throat when he got a better look at him.

The Scot-but-not was pale as marble, his eyes baggy and his cheeks touched with an ugly fractal pattern of purple capillaries. Blood had coagulated in clots of dark jelly upon the side of his beard, hanging in wobbly strings, and the tear in his jacket gaped like a mortal wound. The thick leather had saved him, but still Jack could see bare flesh torn underneath, oozing blood steadily.

"Oh."

The ghost of a smile touched Barry's lips. "Yeah," he muttered.

Jack leapt onto his haunches and leaned forward. "Are you... okay?"

"Been better."

Jack swallowed. "Did you know it would be... whatever it was?"

Barry shook his head fractionally. "Harper." A long pause. "Bad."

"Who is he? It?"

"Bad..."

Barry took a long breath suddenly, his eyes bulging.

Christ, he's going to have a heart attack.

For a moment, Barry's face remained frozen in a comic 'O' of surprise, then he slumped back against the dumpster and breathed easier.

Jack wheeled away and gave a strangled yelp as something black, tar like, dribbled from the wound under Barry's jacket, pooling on the floor. The puddle twitched and undulated on the concrete, as though alive.

He resisted an absurd urge to touch it—somehow he knew that it would destroy him—and drew a sigh of relief; the other-worlder's cheeks were reclaiming their flushed vigour. Before Jack's eyes he rejuvenated from cadaver to something more like his old self.

After a full minute, during which Jack wished to all heaven that he was back in his apartment, splayed upside down on the sofa and buried in some _Atwood_ paperback, Barry shook himself with a boisterous guffaw, hammering his chest with a bunched fist.

"Bloody hell, that was close," he said, blowing out his cheeks and wiping away the clotted jelly from his beard.

Jack slid slowly back against the dumpster and hugged his knees.

Any moment now I'll wake up on the ward. I'll be in my pyjamas like the rest of the patients. It'll be time for my walk in the garden. I bet I like walks in the garden.

He peeked one eye open, half hoping he'd see whitewashed walls and a smiling nurse.

Nope. Still in the alley.

He drew a ragged sigh. "I thought you were done for."

"Ah, dying's not my style. We don't go in for that." He sniffed. "Not all it's cracked up to be. All that poetry, all those songs, just for that great load of nothing."

Jack let it pass. "Answer my question, or I'm gone."

"Yeah, yeah, all right. Keep your knickers on." He hocked a few times, muttering, "Lucky I still need your sorry arse," then straightened. "Let's get this one out of the way: I'm sorry, kid."

Roused by surprise, Jack looked round at the frank regret on Barry's face.

"I didn't know how bad it would be. The bastards weren't supposed to be this far along. Harper's no goon. He's first-class evil minion, mate. Kind of above my level, to be quite honest."

"What, you get league tables? Good versus evil, flyweight to super-heavy?"

A twitch on the Scot-but-not's brow. "That'd be funny if it didn't cut so close."

"What _is_ going on? Why do any of you care about us? Why couldn't it be someone else?" Suddenly the world seemed so far away. It was only him and Barry, and the strange black blood dribbling between his fingers. "Why only now? I'm nothing special, never have been. Look me up in the dictionary; you'll find me under 'mediocre'."

"It's always been there, just quiet."

Jack shook his head. "I don't believe in that mystical crap."

"Sure you do. You're a nerd."

"Just because I like fantasy doesn't mean I believe in the impossible."

"Who said anything was impossible?"

"A man appearing in the middle of a book-store in a cloud of ice is impossible."

"Apparently not." Barry shuffled closer and cleared his throat. "Something inside you is awake now, because the Web needs you. You're here for as much a reason as anybody. You just have a bigger role than most, so you get a few... perks."

"What the hell is this Web?"

Barry gestured around them impatiently. "Y'know, the Web of All Where. Everything. All the worlds connected to one another, cosmic enormity, infinite planes coexisting, yada yada."

Jack rubbed his tired eyes. "Your name's not really Barry, is it?"

The Scot-but-not's pain-dulled, inky eyes flickered with the gazes of a thousand men in one, all looking at him from across vast reaches of space and time.

"I've had more names than there are people in this city," Barry muttered. Jack felt that he would never have received so straight an answer before. Something in the injury and pain had sloughed off Barry's outer brashness.

"What are you? A man or a... a god?"

Barry's lips twitched, not a sneer but a soft gentle smile. It was the first genuine sign of humour Jack had seen in him. "Neither. Somewhere in between."

"If you have the power, why don't you wave your magic wand and fix this?"

"I'm a lot closer to man, believe me."

Jack fumed, pressing too hard with the gauze. Barry jerked with a grunt. "Don't give me that bull. You could take my head off any second. You read my damn mind."

"Just a bag of tricks." Barry's glassy eyes tracked over Jack, and a hint of regret filtered into his gaze. "It's you who have all the real power. Creatures of destiny. I come from a place called Highcourt. I suppose you could call us self-appointed guardians. We gather creatures like you up like playing cards."

"Why?"

"We need as many as we can get."

"There are more of you?"

He nodded, then cocked his head. "Maybe not for long. You'd never know it, but there's a war going on out there. We've kept the Web safe for a very long time, but Harper's lot might have finally turned the tables on us. We can't fail here. We _have_ to keep everything spinning."

Jack said nothing. There wasn't much he could have said.

He had Barry's wounds staunched for the most part, and it was a matter of waiting for the last of the bleeding to ebb. In time, Barry sat straighter, his breathing less ragged.

"I didn't know I had the healer's touch," Jack said.

"Don't flatter yourself. You're okay." Barry flexed his shoulder and winced, wind-milling the arm in its socket. "There's more to those claws than sharpness. They don't just tear flesh. It goes a lot deeper than that."

"You look all right."

"If he'd touched you, you'd be in a right state. Your body might survive, but your mind..." He mimed shooting himself between the eyes, flexing his fingers on the other side of his head to represent brain splatter.

"Then why did you get so close?"

"When I came, I knew somebody was screwing around here, but I never expected Harper. He's a vulture, preys off pain and fear and death that others bring." He looked sickened. "If he's got his fingers in this deep, he must have been here a long time. Years. Maybe longer."

"What happens if we can't stop him?"

"Our little mission to keep the Web in one piece gets harder. A lot harder." He was much stronger now, and mettle laced his face, a temerity and fire far more terrifying and radiant than the unreasoning panic he'd showed moments before. "It all pulls apart like wet fucking tissue, and then everyone on it..." He juggled an imaginary handful of dice and threw them into the air. "All bets are off."

Jack resisted the urge to swallow, but something hard and round had lodged in his throat. "This Harper, this thing, whatever he is, he's here to end the world. How?"

"Like I said: every man, woman and child you've ever known, seen or read about in the tabloids, gone. Poof. Taken. This world will be wiped clean like a slate tablet. One second, they'll all just be gone."

"Where?"

"Taken. To a place far from here."

"Where?"

Barry blinked slowly. "I don't know."

Jack jerked. "What?"

"I don't know. I'm no all-father, mate. I don't have all the answers. I'm just as much a pawn as you. But I do know what I need to know: somebody's trying to tip a balance that _can't_ be, not without destroying everything—and I mean everything, all places, all times, all of All Where."

"Why?"

Barry shrugged. "Above my pay grade. I'm just a soldier."

Jack's second sight piqued, sensing a lie, but he let it go. "If he... Harper... if he's here, what does that mean? Can you stop him from doing whatever he's doing?"

"Dunno. Probably not."

"Then what? That's it?"

Barry gave a small laugh and rocked forward onto his haunches, whooping at the sight of his own shaking knees. "It's been a while since I had my arse kicked like that." He clapped Jack on the shoulder "The Web always gives a way. You're part of it." He pulled Jack towards him. "I messed up, Jacky Boy."

"Jack." Jack gripped him with all his strength, knowing it was a feather touch to the other-worlder but giving it all he had anyway. "My name is Jack."

Those eyes, somewhere in all their inky depths, softened a shade. Barry's lips tightened. "Jack. I made a mistake. By the Brothers of Solstice, I swear I didn't know what I was getting you into.

"You _are_ a creature of destiny, and I still need your help. I can't make you do anything. Say the word, and you're free to go. But All Where is calling on you." He gave Jack's shoulder a squeeze, managing a gentle pressure this time, less vice-like. "Will you help me, Jack?"

_No. Say no. Spit in the bastard's face and run_.

Jack mashed his teeth together, bunching his fists. Despite himself, a mental film reel flashed before his eyes: his parent's house in Minnesota, his classmates at college, Manhattan's skyline at night, all those faceless crowds he passed every day, even _Earthsea_ girl.

He deflated like an old balloon. "Yes."

That squeeze tightened again, and he cried out with renewed pain. "But you have to quit that!"

Barry wasn't listening. He grinned, clapping his hands together. "It always gets me. You people live such short lives, so fragile, but you're always the ones to outshine the rest." An odd severity invaded his countenance. "Reminds me that I know I'm fighting on the right side."

Jack hesitated, then said, "How many like me have you used?"

He phrased it deliberately, and it had the effect he'd hoped not to see: Barry flinched.

For the first time, the Scot-but-not seemed unable to meet his eye. "If I told you, you'd never stop running," he muttered. With a visible paroxysm of will, his eyes lurched up and fixed on Jack's. "Are you still with me?"

"For my sins. Where to?"

Barry smiled thinly, yet his eyes seemed ever more haunted, and Jack saw his name being added to a list upon parchment that ran away into dark and forgotten ancient times; those who had flung themselves upon an eternal pyre for the chance to do some good in the world.

"Like I said, the Web always gives a way. Let's give the Man in Purple a call."

Wondering how Barry managed to make that sound ominous, Jack followed him away from the dumpster, nursing a trembling gut.

Over the edge, then.

# 10

"Got change, Buddy?" Kitty the Wino grumbled, waggling dirt-stained fingers under the nose of a pinstripe-clad thirty something.

With a disgusted grimace, he fished a dollar from his pocket and waved her past.

Grunting with satisfaction, Kitty moved on, hovering over the seats of middle-class types, using her grubbiness and cultivated stench to secure her dues.

_Goddamn heathens, with all their careers and mortgages and_ stuff. _None of them deserve a bit of it._

The hand God had dealt her entitled her to a slice of the money pie more than the rest of these losers put together. So desperate were they to be rid of her, pretend she didn't exist, that they always paid. The sting of that flavour of rejection dried up long ago. Money was the cure-all.

She was going Karma's work, anyway. Evening the balance, taking from the rich and giving to the poor (or some other bull crap)—and the poorest person around just happened to be her.

Besides, it never failed to bring her a sliver of pleasure, watching them squirm. To boot, the booze wasn't going to buy itself. Pangs of conscience were hard to come by when you were on the clock until the shakes came back.

Each of her marks ignored her studiously, sending furtive glances around the subway car in search of escape. But there was nowhere to go except farther down the car. They all coughed up.

Setting her best dead eyed stare, one that promised to stick around unless some green was dropped, Kitty shuffled down the line, stuffing cash into her Vodka-stained pants. Faces flashed by amidst the wads of cash: a work-shorted teen, a snooty hawk-faced woman who Kitty almost slapped across the mouth for the look she gave her, a pretty ginger who had her cash ready before Kitty even got to her.

Kitty reached the end of the car satisfied, and held out her hand out to a man wedged on the last seat. She hadn't given him much thought until now—in fact she was sure he had just appeared out of damn nowhere—but now that she got a good look at him, a base stirring in her loins accompanied the urge to utter a hearty _oof_.

He's a looker. What I wouldn't give to have that pretty face between my legs for five minutes.

She placed her feet wider and flapped her jacket to loosen some of her stink, getting ready to cackle at her own coarseness— _I crack me up_ —when the man lifted his head and locked eyes with her. His Wall Street air, and suit that looked more like a piece of art, suddenly vanished from her attention; his eyes seemed to take up her entire field of vision.

Kitty had taken her fair share of E, Ket, anything worth having. She knew the feeling of warping unreality and the rending of the basic elements well enough to be on first name terms with the A&E nurses.

What she felt then was like taking every trip of her life at once, like being turned inside out and put through the spin cycle of an industrial washing machine. The world dropped away, replaced by darkness, eternal darkness. She flew, hurtling over a carpet of screaming, filthy, writhing bodies—and she was cold, so cold she knew she must be dead.

And those eyes, hanging in front of her, told tales without form, without a single word or image, but altogether changing, whittling, maddening.

Kitty's retinas screamed as the subway lights came crashing back, and she uttered a bile laced _urgh_ as though winded by a punch to the gut.

_Oh God. Oh God, he's going to kill us all_.

The terrible knowledge. The undeniable visceral truth. It was coming—the end of the freaking world. And right in front of her was the demon sent to bring it upon them.

Mammon, the devil incarnate.

A tiny, insane smile crept into the corners of his mouth, and she heard his voice inside her head, whispering, "Kill? No... no... not that. Death is nothingness." A pause, and she once again flew over the screaming, stinking, naked things. "Look at them. Look at your fate. Do they look dead to you?"

Kitty tried to scream and fight her way back to her body, but all she managed was internal thrashing. The subway could have been the most distant memory of another life.

That voice continued slithering in her head, an ugly, oily slick upon her mind. "I want at least one of you to know what's coming. Congratulations, Katherine Genie Bates. You have a choice nobody else has: how to spend your last hours on earth."

"Dear Lord in heaven, hallowed is thy name," Kitty muttered, drooling with the horror of it, the nauseating fear and cold—so cold.

He knows my name. I pray thee, Lord, save me.

The subway car crashed back into place around her, but those eyes remained. In desperation she searched her alcohol-obliterated Sunday school memories for more scripture, but came up blank.

She spat, "Christ, help me!"

That voice again, a sigh that brought her out in goose-flesh: " _What do you know of God?_ "

The demon held out his hand. For a moment she glimpsed foot-long claws protruding from the wrist that would have put Freddy Kruger to shame. He waved a hundred dollar bill in the air. "How fast can a person drink themselves to death, I wonder?"

Kitty swayed on her feet, gurgled, and turned to grapple with the door to the next car. Crashing through into the midst of a fresh cigar-tube of marks, she tripped and stumbled her way along until she hit the next car, and the next, and the next, until at last she hit the end of the train, where she pressed herself against the rear door, hyperventilating.

"Dear god, god, god. Help. Help."

He's on his way to do it right now. Going to end it all.

The train pulled into a station and she lurched out onto the platform, sucking lungs of air in an attempt to stay conscious. As the train pulled away, she couldn't help glancing through the glass, and screamed aloud at the sight of _him_ , splayed claws outlined in red tendrils of unearthly light. He waggled his fingers in farewell, and then the train pulled out and vanished into the dark tunnel, heading south towards Queens.

But she knew where he was heading. Somehow she knew. In her mind's eye she saw something, a long dark hole in the earth that led... somewhere else.

When the tunnel behind her brightened, heralding the arrival of the next train, she stepped up to the platform edge and shook her head. "I'm not going there. Not to that place."

They were all going to be taken to that frozen darkness to work, to _labour_ , to carry the weight of—what?

Somewhere on the edge of her perception, a swinging shadow, a rhythmic tick-tock. A bob on a string, beyond any scale imaginable. They were being taken to carry the weight of that swinging behemoth, and free something terrible. The source of all the pain, cold and fear ever felt. A winged, shining whiteness, wide eyed and holy and beautiful, underneath all tar and blood and wailing agony.

She tittered as the lights ahead resolved into two headlights, and she bobbed on the balls of her feet.

The vanguard on the train, the demon, had been her saviour. He had given her a choice, an escape.

Oblivion.

"I choose," she muttered, and cried a silent thank you as she threw herself forwards. She fell towards the tracks amidst wailing horns, screeching brakes, and all consuming, rancorous, black laughter.

All the while she smiled, covered head to toe in flakes of ice.

# 11

"You're pretty spry for a guy full of holes," Jack said.

Barry spared him a glance. "A man with a plan always looks that way... even if he's blagging every step of the way."

"What?"

"Keep up, we're almost there."

Jack didn't bother asking where. There seemed to be no reason to Barry's rapid twisting and turning, between blocks and through underpasses, none he would ever understand.

However, he _felt_ they were going the right way. Somehow they were going forwards despite roundabout turns and re-crossing their own tracks over and over. His inner divining rod flipped and turned in synch with Barry's ducking and diving.

He hadn't felt the clawed man's ugliness for a while. He might have been out of range... or whatever the equivalent limit was on the secret mojo.

Barry stopped so suddenly that Jack collided with him at full speed, receiving a mouthful of oxblood leather. Scowling as he rebounded, he clocked Barry's grunt of triumph. His divining rod span in circles.

_There's something funky about this spot_ , whispered a hidden part of his mind.

They stood outside a turn-of-the-century apartment block, cracked and blackened by long years of low maintenance and the rigours of housing generations of tenants. The ground floor, however, was a pleasant and frilly affair, entirely at odds with the grubbiness above, as though it had popped into existence from the ether, spliced into place by some clumsy supernatural craftsman.

It was a teashop, twee and bright, and ramshackle.

The sign read: _Laurent's_.

"Well..." Jack couldn't think of anything pithy to add, and so gestured for Barry to lead on.

Together they passed a row of rickety floral-legged tables outside, at which a dishevelled man in a clichéd Hollywood-bad-guy khaki trench coat nodded to them, adjusting a pair of sunglasses on the bridge of his nose.

"He in?" Barry said over his shoulder.

The man riffled a newspaper up in front of his face, clicking his tongue. His teeth were the colour of stained sandalwood. He picked his nose, looked as though he meant not to answer, but then said under his breath, "Be fast. You shouldn't be here."

Barry grunted and pushed his way inside. "There's a lot of that going around today."

A high pitched, delicate bell tinkled above their heads, and they left Manhattan behind. Jack followed, feeling a heavy weight press down on him, like a small child being led into an alley meant for scoundrels. Yet what met his eyes was somewhere between fairy tale and middle-class bliss.

_Laurent's_ was a large oblong room that extended away from him towards a glass-topped delicatessen counter, in which there lay not meats or cheeses, but tea-leaves and cakes and scones, breakfast rolls and buns. There was such a selection of each that they vied for space, stitching a rich patchwork rainbow across the back of the large room.

The air heaved with aroma, laden and weighed down with soupy citrus and spicy undertones, on top of which sat delicate transient whiffs of lavender, coconut, and vanilla. Between the door and the counter lay a spew of the same character of table as those outside, topped with red and white checked tablecloths, made treacherous by heavy compliments of eccentric cutlery and bone china.

Only a few customers were seated, murmuring amongst themselves, their faces hidden in private, hunched repose. As one they presented a humble hubbub that, accompanied by the steady tinkling of forks on plates and cups upon saucers, both terrified and charmed.

Jack's eyes told him it was a delightful scene.

His mind, meanwhile, rang like a bell to a single tone: _Fuuuuuccc—_

He had seen _Chucky_ once. This was like that, but a thousand times worse: something dressed up as cute and cuddly that, quite simply, wasn't and would never be; was in fact dripping with something that set the heart racing, and the skin prickling with fear. Things breathing and hungry lurked behind hidden corners, just out of sight.

Barry leaned towards him and spoke from the corner of his mouth. "Keep yer wits about you in here. All's not as it seems." He made a noise of satisfaction, and Jack knew he had looked into his mind. "Keep thinking that way. It'll do you good. Now stay close."

"The guy out there was right, wasn't he?" Jack said, grabbing at Barry's sleeve. "We're not supposed to be here."

Barry looked back at him, stony faced. "People don't usually come to this place, they're brought here. We're about to toe a line I'm bound not to cross, so be ready."

"For what?"

Barry headed away towards the counter.

Jack huddled so close on his heels that he was sure he might rob Barry of a shoe. He tried to keep watch about himself, but the room seemed to loom over him and press his gaze to the tiled floor, as though sensing that it was not for his eyes; an organism rejecting a foreign body.

Barry strode a little too purposefully, like a man whistling in the dark, and pulled out a chair at a table close to the counter. He sat with a deliberate air and pressed Jack down into a seat beside him, folding his hands and looking at the menu.

Suddenly he seemed very interested in the selection of tea. "Get reading," he said. "And choose well."

He silenced Jack's retort before it could start forming in his head with a sharp look, and they both fell to reading.

_Good god, it's endless_ , Jack thought, perusing dense palette descriptions and serving suggestions of myriad artfully-named teas.

The gentle tinkling became the screech of claws on a blackboard to his tortured ears. It was hard to see straight, let alone read. Yet amongst the menu's items, his eyes fixed on one close to the bottom, leaping out from the blur to grab him by the lapels.

Autumn Jasmine: a charming infusion of Jasmine and Ginger, with adventurous notes of sarsaparilla, white chocolate cookies, and a hint of spring-time Minnesota.

Jasmine and Ginger... his grandmother's house had always smelled like that. Sarsaparilla: the thought of it brought flashes of his father cracking open a few beer cans in their darkened living room, his flabby face illuminated by the blue glow of the TV. Those flashes gave way to the sight of half a white chocolate cookie in his lunch box one spring... back then, they had lived in Minnesota.

There had been a post-it stuck to the cookie: _Don't get beat up again. Love Mom x_

Guess I know what I'm having. At least, what I'm meant to have. Christ, I sound like a loon.

Jack shivered as a rush of something cold passed by. The primal sense that told somebody they weren't alone piqued, and cloth rustled close over his right shoulder.

"Does anything catch your eye, perchance?" sighed a smooth and musical voice.

Jack caught a squawk of surprise between his lips, just.

A tall man dressed in an extravagant purple coat stood over them, lurking between their shoulders and peering at the menu with a critical aloofness. He turned his eye on Jack, revealing an aquiline face studded with enormous bushy, grey eyebrows that extended up in rigid shafts almost to his hairline. " _Ginger? Sarsaparilla?_ Strange, wouldn't you say? Almost like it was made for you."

His eyes twinkled, not encouraging nor frightening, somewhere lost between friend and foe. Jack started as, for an instant, his irises might have illuminated in a flash of violet. The Man in Purple winked.

Barry's rumble struck up from the other side of the man's head. "Stop being an arse and sit down."

The Man in Purple's eyes narrowed in an instant. "You should not be here, Kaard," he said, staring blankly.

"Well we're here." His voice was rough cut as ever, but the slightest edge of uncertainty—almost pleading—crept into it. "I need your help."

"I talk with whomever I must. I council those who are meant for it. You are not among them."

The Man in Purple straightened, once again loomed at their backs. Jack could sense his hand resting upon the back of his chair, delicate yet enormous, radiating waves of weirdery that threw Jack's divining rod into another retarded spiral. He fought dizziness, watching Barry closely.

"I'm not leaving until I get answers. This world is on the bloody knife-edge."

"That is not my concern." The Man in Purple's voice throbbed with unearthly bass. "I swore neutrality long ago. The Web takes no sides."

"Don't give me that horseshit! Highcourt is hanging by a thread. You can swear all the oaths you like, you'll always be one of us.

"Anyway, nobody can find this place unless they need to, so don't look at me like I snuck in the back door with the cat. I need your help, and you're bloody well going to give it. I'm not leaving until I get what I need, even if I have to smash every teeny weeny cup and saucer in this joint."

Jack sensed the slightest shift, and risked turning his head.

The Man in Purple stared at Barry with the remnant of that harrowed gaze. Slowly, the light crept back into his eyes. Perhaps they flashed violet once more—trying to see straight in here was like trying to hold onto a wet bar of soap; Jack couldn't quite grasp any single moment, fluid and undulating, as though everything might suddenly melt and reform.

The Man in Purple flickered his eyelids and gave the slightest bow of acquiescence, then lifted a hand and signalled to the counter, pointing to the table.

Jack leaned across to Barry and whispered, "Kaard?"

"It's his name," the Man in Purple said airily, straightening his jacket and stepping around the table.

"One of them." Barry cleared his throat. "I went through a phase."

"Thought he needed a more _fantastical_ title."

Barry sent a tiny shake of the head in Jack's direction; _keep your trap shut_.

Jack was all too willing to oblige.

The Man in Purple sat with one leg crossed over the other, slouching back, eyeing them both anew. "So."

Barry visibly relaxed and laced his fingers in front of him. He suddenly looked very tired. "Please, please, keep the crap to a minimum."

The Man in Purple didn't move, nor give any indication he'd heard, just stared.

"You knew it was Harper that would be here, didn't you?"

Again, nothing.

"I'll take that as a yes. And you knew that I'd be sent alone?"

The Man in Purple arched a brow.

Barry scowled. "I'll take that as another yes. So that means I've been shafted by my own side, and the brass have already written this world off."

A dumpy waitress dressed in a flowing summer dress and apron appeared beside the Man in Purple, a silver tray held above one shoulder. Taking a nod from him, she sprang into action, placing three steaming teapots and a plate of fresh muffins before them, sliding them into place with the skill of an Olympic curler.

Jack wasn't surprised to receive a heady waft of ginger, and notes of white chocolate. "You must be joking," he muttered despite himself.

"I never joke about tea," the Man in Purple said. "Try it."

"I'm fine."

The fate of the world in our hands, and he wants me to try the tea.

"Try it," Barry said distractedly, ignoring Jack's gape of surprise. "Can we get on with it?" As he spoke, he set a mug more like a tankard before him and poured from his own teapot. Jack smelled peat, and fiery notes of something warming. He suspected whiskey.

Barry made a show of pouring from a height, holding the lid fast to the pot with a daintiness that made him look ridiculous. He drank slowly with his pinky raised, working his mouth, tasting deliberately.

All the while he kept his eyes fixed on the Man in Purple.

Jack followed suit hurriedly, pulling his pot towards him and copying Barry's little ritual. He reeled when the taste hit him, morphing and evolving as it made the trip from his lips to his throat, rolling velvet waves that shot up into his brain and teased out ribbons of memory, sharp and vivid as the day they had been laid down.

The cookies on the tray as his Mom pulled them from the oven. His Dad's lined face, lit up by the set— _Letterman_ interviewing Robbin Williams. Then he was running, out on the soccer field in PE class, taking a ball to the face as Cathy O'Brien watched with her friends, giggling and pointing.

She had been his crush all through high school. He hadn't thought about Cathy in years. Yet now he could have drawn every detail of her face on his napkin.

The Man in Purple watched them both critically, eyes narrowed. Jack put his cup back on his saucer, swallowing and making an effort to let it all show on his face. He guessed that was the point.

The Man in Purple considered him, then smacked his lips and nodded. Suddenly his cold air evaporated and his face illuminated into a radiant, goofy sheen. Clapping his hands, he sat forward and set to his own pot, performing the same ceremony, tasting and savouring.

Barry and Jack waited, and Jack struggled with internal screaming pleas for answers. Judging by Barry's tightening jaw and twitching fingers, a similar war waged in his own head.

Finally, the Man in Purple sighed deeply. "You've been royally screwed, my friend."

"You don't say," Barry said. "I'm no match for Harper."

"If you had a scrim of brain matter left"—he eyed Jack with an expression that said _doubtful_ , then rounded on Barry—"you'd get out of dodge before things get ugly. Highcourt may really fall this time. They could use you. But this is a fool's errand."

"Hey!" Jack cried. "You can't just leave us. We came here for your help, not—"

Barry cut a hand through the air and Jack fell silent, mouthing wordlessly.

"I'm not going anywhere. I've never run away from a job. Impossible odds are my speciality." A note of pride crept into his voice, his nose slightly upturned.

The upturn vanished just as fast as it had come when the Man in Purple muttered, "Your track record says otherwise."

Barry's face twitched. He pressed his index finger onto the table, glowering. "You want to drop playing nice? Fine. Just tell me what I have to do so that I can get away from this creep-show."

The Man in Purple said nothing. The angle of his teacup, poised halfway to his lips, alone, brought Jack out in chills.

They sat there glaring at one another for a few seconds, seconds in which the absurdity of it cut at Jack like a hot knife. Before he knew what was happening, he had jumped forward to plant his hands on the table, ignoring Barry's protests. "Look, all I wanted to do was go home and veg out today, but all I've had is crazy after crazy. This guy appears in a blizzard and tears apart my bookstore, okay. He kidnaps me and hauls me off to fight a demon in a three-piece suit. Fine. I suddenly realise I have magical powers to home in on anything that would drive a normal person nuts. Okie dokey."

He gritted his teeth, seething through them, red spots dancing before his eyes. "But I am not going to be told that my entire planet is being thrown down the plug hole by some trussed up dandy in a fucking tea shop! Now are you going to help us or not?"

The Man in Purple's enormous frizzy eyebrows raised, half vanishing into his thatch of glossy hair, and he looked at Barry. For a moment his teacup hovered, trembled, the contents beading on the rim.

Then he huffed. "I like him."

Barry stared back, blinked once. "Yeah, he's okay." A pause. "You're not an idiot. You know how important this world is. It's a piece of shit, sure—"

"Hey!" Jack started, but Barry ignored him.

"—but it's a pressure point we can't let them press. If we lose this fight, it could be the start of the last big crash that tears All Where apart."

The Man in Purple took another sip of tea, and drew a long breath through his nose. "You shouldn't be here," he muttered under his breath, as though to himself, looking between them. "I'm a mediator, not a bloody spirit guide."

"Funny, you could have fooled me."

"Must you make a habit of antagonising those from whom you seek help?"

"When it comes to you, absolutely."

Jack took a gulp of tea and stifled a coughing fit, half blinded by the intensity of flavour saturating his pallet. It was all he could do to keep from senseless screaming.

They're debating the fate of the world over a mug of Earl Grey and taking cheap pot-shots. Do I laugh or cry?

The Man in Purple tapped a finger on the table. "You shouldn't be here."

"I got that. I _am_ here."

"You are." The Man in Purple addressed Jack. "What's he told you?"

"Enough."

"Doubtful. If you only knew..."

"Knew that I haven't a hope in hell of getting out of this with my marbles, let alone my life? That if this gets any weirder then I'll be singing my merry way through a very early retirement?" He checked himself. "That if I turn and run, something bad is going to happen? I don't understand. I don't. I don't have a clue what's going on, and I'm on the edge of holding it together. But for all his crap," he glanced at Barry, "I don't think he's a liar. I feel it. We're in trouble. Will you help us?"

The Man in Purple remained impassive momentarily, then nodded. "You found your way here. I couldn't turn you away if I tried. I'm bound to help those who reach my doors."

Jack slumped. "Then why all the song and dance?"

"You were right when you said you don't understand—most importantly, you fail to grasp the magnitude of the scales that are about to tip; the long ages for which the status quo has stood. There's no going back from this."

"That's bull." Barry leaned back in his chair and threaded his fingers along the great tear in his oxblood jacket. "Here's your balance. They've already set us on the path. Those scales, that precious balance of yours? It's a lie. They've already set things swinging."

The Man in Purple finished his tea, wiped his lips delicately, then sat forward and steepled his fingers. "You've made your point, Kaard." He glanced at Jack one last time. Jack thought he caught a note of apology somewhere in that eternal blank stare.

Then he nodded, as though to himself, and he began speaking in a voice altogether foggier, and undulating and threaded once again with that same strange bass.

"We live upon a Web, the web of All Where. Infinite worlds, woven into a single tapestry spanning the fabric of reality. Most form connecting threads, right beside one another for all the eternal distance between them. But some worlds are different, nodes to which these threads converge, preserving the structure of all the worlds to which they are connected, and, together, the stability of the Web." The Man in Purple nodded to Jack. "You are right about Kaard: he does not lie. Your world is one such node, and it has been earmarked for a one way ticket to crazy town by some very unfavourable creatures."

"Why us? Why this world instead of others?"

"Because it is but one drop in an ocean, but even the great tending powers of All Where cannot stretch so far. Some worlds slip between their—our—" he nodded between himself and Barry, "fingers."

"He's trying to say we plum forgot about you," Barry said.

"Perhaps not so simply, but close enough."

"I don't understand. What good does it do, destroying this place, if we're so unimportant and forgotten?"

"It is not the destruction of this place that matters, but the subsequent imbalance it will create in those to which it is _connected_. You see, the universe is a place of laws of conservation, balance, and physical absolutes. Nothing can breach them, no power, no hand-wavey voodoo. The laws are the laws. The biggest ally of both the light and the dark has always been one in particular: cause and effect. If something goes awry here, things must do so elsewhere, and so begins a wave of entropic decay that may propagate forever on."

"We've seen it happen before. They've been trying to turn things for the worse for... a long time." Barry scoffed at his own words, as though _a long time_ could never encapsulate the breadth that he described.

Jack's divining rod piqued, and he felt, not understood but felt, some distant twinge of exactly what Barry _did_ mean, and found his mind reeling away from a great well of enormity, memories of countless lives and battles and losses.

"It's been slow," Barry continued, "and we got careless. You have to understand that Highcourt isn't the gatekeeper. We're not all powerful, and we don't have a clue what the hell's going on in terms of the big picture. We're just messengers, soldiers, part of a hierarchy that has so many rungs, we don't have a clue what lies at the top."

The Man in Purple cut across him. "But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that Highcourt has already failed. The Web is sick. Whether by some secret malice or the slow encroach of many an unseen meddling, they have kindled a sickness in everything. We had power once, far greater than we have now. We saw so far, stood so tall. No longer. Our powers are waning. Our best have fallen over time."

"I thought you couldn't die."

"I do not speak of death. I speak of _falling_."

Jack shuddered as, behind the tea shop, in his mind's eye he caught a glimpse of something white, human in form but divine in nature, winged, and terrible. Again his mind recoiled from the image, ensconcing itself in a protective ball.

He had no idea what he saw, but he knew it was not meant for him, nor perhaps even Barry or the Man in Purple; for they seemed to have sensed something strange in the air, shifting uncomfortably, as though Jack were a speaker picking up a screech of electronic feedback.

"Fine," Jack said, clearing his throat. "Great. So what? I don't see what this has to do with stopping Harper."

The Man in Purple straightened his coat, recovering from his shuddering reverie. "One last stretch of purple prose, and we shall arrive at our destination. I shall tell it as it is written in the Solstice Scrolls, our most ancient, sacred texts." His eyes glazed. " _All Where is endless, timeless. Levels higher and lower, forward and back, and between. Silken strands interwoven in perfect harmony, the tapestry of all reality. Each place touches another, leading forever on, and all converge upon the blessed Beacons._ "

He pointed through the window, at Manhattan, which seemed to Jack a light year distant. " _In sets of seven, the blessed Beacons gather; seven threads coming together on chosen Earth, seven threads that hold up as many worlds. Seven Beacons connected to elsewhere. Host Earths, No Man's Land, backwater and base. Yet in hands conniving and impure, even blessed things may do great evil. For each Beacon has a purpose: some are Conduits, some are Prisons, some Exits, and some are Doors that must remain forever,_ forever _, sealed._ "

He spread his hands, as though in apology for the archaic tongue. "That is what's written."

Jack worked his jaw, easing a mouthful of cotton. He jostled upon his seat, feeling both their gazes on him. "Scrolls? Like some kind of freaky bible?"

"I suppose you could say that," the Man in Purple said.

Barry grunted. "Don't be fooled, there's one thing my life has taught me: there ain't any such thing as sacred in All Where. There's scrolls, I know that much. From way before our time."

Jack looked between them. "Before you? I thought you were..." he cleared his throat, "you know, immortal, or timeless or... something." He looked at his hands.

"To you, maybe," Barry said, a wry smile in the corner of his mouth. "It's pointless trying to explain. Imagine describing the Grand Canyon to an ant—no offence."

"None taken," Jack said glibly.

The Man in Purple waved a hand dismissively. "Don't dwell on it. Take it as read that we're just a rung up the ladder. We have beginnings, and ends, in knowledge and life. And we certainly have our faults."

"Speak for yerself."

The Man in Purple ignored him.. "The scrolls are all we have from a primordial time that might have been but one previous age in an endless chain that goes back forever. All we know is that we learned the Web's ways from their writings, but even now there's much yet to be interpreted, foretelling of happenings yet to pass, secrets that remain a mystery."

Barry turned to Jack with a withering look. "It's real simple. These scrolls are weird as all hell, but they're almost always right. And they drone on and on about these Beacons, and the Fall of All Where."

The Man in Purple tolerated Barry's interruption with pursed lips, then raised his enormous brows and polished off the last of his tea, watching Jack as though a proprietor awaiting a customer's judgement on his wares.

Jack looked down at the table, hands tumbling and fidgeting, his mind turning over and over. A great slab of nebulous sludge sloshed around inside him, as though his veins had been infused with the burden of deep time and awful knowledge of those beside him.

It's too much for one person to take like this, over tea.

His throat felt stopped up, as though an apple core had lodged there, the broiling nonsense incarnate.

All the while they sat across from him and watched, exchanging minute glances, not urging, just watching.

Eventually, Jack found himself laughing.

"What's so funny?" Barry said, frowning.

Jack grinned, though doing so made him feel all the more unstable. "It's just that I don't know any more now than I did before. So there's Beacons and prophetic scrolls and other worlds. It still doesn't tell me what I can do to help stop the monster running around out there."

"That's why we're here." Barry motioned to _Laurent's_. He rounded on the Man in Purple.

The Man in Purple pressed his hands together, considering a moment. "There is something out there that has been locked up for a long, long time. And now it's found a way out. Your people," he nodded to the street, "are going to take its place in that prison, if we can't stop it."

"You mean if I can't stop it. And brilliant as I am, I've got no death wish," Barry spat. "I didn't sign up for this. Where's my backup?"

The Man in Purple shook his head. "The others are too far away, and they are fighting with all they have to keep more of Harper's ilk at bay. Be thankful you only have one of them to handle."

The Man in Purple's face, for just a moment, grew pale. "They're fighting on every front right now. They hit Highcourt all at once." A glimmer of something awful flickered through his radiant exterior. "If I had known it would hurt so much, when I took the oath, to watch... to watch my friends..." He shook himself. "Nowhere is safe. Believe me, you're not alone in this fight." He paused. "But they are so strong. We might lose. Lose big."

"Is Highcourt holding?"

The Man in Purple said nothing.

"Jesus."

"Hold him."

"He's too strong for me."

"Maybe so." Then, astonishingly, he turned to Jack. "But maybe not your companion."

A stunned silence followed.

"Me?" Jack stammered.

The Man in Purple smiled. "There's a lot more than a compass rattling around in that head of yours." He glanced sidelong at Barry. "He's bright. It's locked away deep, but he has it in him."

Barry stared hard at Jack, burning into the side of his head.

The Man in Purple spread his hands. "It's not fair—it's not. But it was you, or nobody, Kaard."

"You should have told me I was getting into this," Barry said.

"Would you have come if I had?"

"Yes!"

They shared a look. The Man in Purple blinked with an apologetic grimace.

Barry watched him for a long moment that seemed to stretch out like rubber, then snap back into place "Fine. That'll have to do. Thanks for the tea." He turned to Jack. "Come on. We've got a job to do."

They stood, and Jack became aware once more of the sheer strangeness of the room, the murky undulation of space itself, everything turned a rosy hue, as though he viewed it through frosted glass. His legs twitched, urging him toward the door, eager to be gone from this place.

The Man in Purple remained seated, and tapped a finger to his forehead in mock salute. "I may not be the shining knight in armour, but you're wrong about me, Kaard," he said. "We all have our parts to play and our own skills to bring to the fight." His androgynous, ephemeral face grew dark and serious, and Jack caught a glimpse of something more ancient than any woodland or mountain or fossil in the ground. "This isn't a fight you can win. There's no tricking fate." He locked his gaze fast on Jack. "And you, Mr Shannon, will forfeit your life, should you follow this path. People who help our kind... it seldom ends well for them."

Jack, rubber legged, could only stare back at him. "If I walk, we all die. Isn't that right?"

The Man in Purple's mouth drew into a tight white line. "Good luck, Mr Shannon." He turned once more to Barry. "I'm sorry, Kaard. I truly am."

"Sorry ain't going to grow me a new head." Barry grunted, bull like, and then pulled Jack along in his wake, heading away from the table.

Jack recalled Barry's dramatic pose just after he had arrived in _Barnes & Noble_.

_That feels like it could have been a hundred years ago_...

They didn't have a hope in hell. He knew that now. That was what coming here had really been about; hitting home the reality of what they faced.

"Make it up as we go along, then?" he said.

"Mmhm."

"How often do things end up like this?"

Barry smacked his lips and nodded. "Pretty much always."

"I had a feeling you'd say that."

They reached the doorway and Barry pulled it open. The tinkling bell above their heads didn't sound pleasant now, but almost jeering, a spiteful farewell from some giggling pixie. Stale Manhattan air blew in across Jack's face, but to him it seemed the purest air of a mountaintop gale, sharp and rejuvenating in contrast to the soupy atmosphere of _Laurent's_. Burned out lights popped back to life in his head.

He looked over his shoulder at the Man in Purple, still sat at the table. He gave Jack a cursory wave, nibbling on something round and doughy. A white chocolate cookie. Then a customer passed between them, shuffling by. When she had passed, the table was empty, the teapots gone, the cloth neat and fresh; no sign of the Man in Purple, save for a faint shower of falling snowflakes.

# 12

Harper slunk from his seat and made his way toward the back of the train. If people had been a little less blind to his presence, they might have frowned at his wicked leer of pleasure, brought on by an echo of pain and confusion that filled the air for one brilliant moment. The wino had thrown herself upon the tracks and exploded like a sack of tomatoes.

The echo propagated along the tunnel and cut through him as loud and clear as a shriek in the night. Delicious, succulent pain. With it came a cascade of blurred images, snippets of a life torn to shreds in a single moment. As he passed from car to car, Harper chewed on them like jerky.

A young girl running through a cornfield, soft and bouncy with youth, dressed in a scarlet poncho that made her look like Little Red Riding Hood. She had loved chasing the boys, then; they had screeched about cooties all summer long.

The same boys who forced themselves on her on prom night. Flashes of a moonlit parking lot, the frayed back seat of a beat up Ford Pinto. Grunting shadows, the tinkle of a loosening belt, and all the while, her thrashing and kicking and screaming.

The drinking. The endless parade of bottles, vodka and tequila, mostly. The ire of her family, the swell of shame at being labelled whore and slut. The long Greyhound ride east, and the years of bumming booze money since.

Harper took it all, filling his veins with it, nourished by all that repressed shame and fear.

The fiction of this world was something awful. The vampire myths had missed the truth of it. Come close, but no dice. Harper fed on people, to be sure, but nothing as crass and base as their mere blood; he fed on their very lives, the sum of their parts, their hopes and memories and secrets.

Long ago, when his masters' orders had seen him prowling the dark forests of a world backwards compared even to this one, they had called him _Graknia._ Soul Eater.

That was close enough for him. Certainly better than _vampire._

Even their own nightmares are but pale shadows of what's out there.

Harper reached the back of the train, jostling with its rocking upon the tracks, and put his hand on the glass of the rear door. A thread of excitement shot through him: it was close.

A quick glance over his shoulder told him that the car was almost empty. His only company was a head-bobbing East Indian, and a young woman snoring to high heaven under a newspaper.

Satisfied, he held his palm flat against the door, head down in concentration, and waited until the moment came, his innards thrumming like a tuning fork.

Harper peeled the back door open with a cursory flick of his wrist, rending steel and shattering glass so fast it came away like citrus pith, and stepped out. He landed on the tracks in a skittering series of bounces and came to rest amidst a shower of safety glass, brushing himself off, smoothing the creases in his jacket.

Then he remembered his stained suit, and suppressed a growl.

_No matter_ , he told himself, _there'll be plenty lying around soon enough. I'll have my pick among millions._

His rage vanished with a _poof_ , and he proceeded along the dark stinking subway tunnel, letting fly a reverberating cackle.

# 13

Jack yelped like a dog when he saw the guns.

Half a dozen figures dressed head to foot in black leather stood by the pavement, astride Ducati motorcycles. Each had looped over their shoulder, or holstered at their side, an automatic rifle, sawn-off shotgun, or large-calibre pistol. Despite their reflective visors, there was no doubting the riders were staring, waiting.

Their hands wavered close to their weapons' grips, hovering, fingers dancing.

Jack backed against Barry and looked over his shoulder.

_Laurent's_ was gone, replaced by mossy brick wall. Only the trestle tables remained, though they now seemed made of glass, half there and half somewhere else. The man with the newspaper, still sat at the diaphanous seat under him, rifled the pages and gave a small old-man laugh. "Looks like they mean business, boys."

"Don't run," Barry muttered beside him.

Jack had no plans to do anything of the sort. He was pretty sure the guns wouldn't do squat to Barry except tear up his jacket some more, but what about Jack?

I'd still bleed like a stuck pig, and die squealing like one, too.

The closest of the riders dismounted with liquid grace, leather glinting in the afternoon light, and stepped onto the sidewalk.

A long moment stretched out in which everybody remained motionless, just staring, and the bustling city itself seemed to grow still and watch, holding its breath.

It'd be a real shame to die now, after all that mumbo jumbo—now that I might have a clue of what I have to do.

He flinched when the lead rider lifted their bulbous helmet. Dirty blonde locks of hair tumbled free, showering down around an angular face, revealing a thin-lipped mouth, and green eyes that seemed to scintillate with intensity.

The woman eyed Jack, then Barry, then Jack again. Her eyes narrowed a tad, as if she might jar them into fight or flight. When they didn't move, she nodded to the other riders, and they relaxed back upon their cycles, dropping their hands to their sides. She cocked her head and took a breath, holding it, assessing them with an air of a parent deciding the fate of errant children caught out after dark. "Idiots," she said at last.

A beat passed. Barry clicked his tongue. "You know us! Good, that's lovely. But we don't know you. A bit unfair, don't you think?" His tone was even, if a little sour.

The woman cocked her head further to the side and squinted until her eyes were mere slits. "Did you really think you could save the day with an afternoon brawl in the street?"

"Wasn't part of the plan." Barry pulled Jack's hand from his shoulder and stepped forward. "Funny, I don't usually have people pick me out of a crowd. I usually fade into the background, if you get my drift."

"Don't play games, Kaard. Mr Purple warned me about you. We don't have time for any shit," the woman snapped, cutting across him.

Barry's face slackened.

Despite it all, Jack bit down on a laugh.

The other riders removed their helmets and looped them under their arms, eyeing Jack and Barry with the same measured expressions. One or two gave loose salutes, diluting their hostility a shade.

Barry cleared his throat. Coming from him, it was the most uncomfortable sound in the world. "Fine, you're in the loop. Let's skip the song and dance. What do you want?"

The woman took another step towards him, such that the two of them stared into one another's eyes. Barry was a head taller and had at least a hundred pounds on her—not to mention him being an inter-dimensional quasi-immortal demigod. Yet in that moment, with her defiant chin angled skyward and her eyes glinting with a fire that crackled to the tune of _Go fuck yourself,_ Jack would have put his money on the mystery woman.

"The question is, what do _you_ want?" she said. "You're the ones who are new to the party. We've been following Harper for years." She rounded on Jack. "I hope you know what you're in for, kid. If you're any kind of smart, you'll take the chance and get out of here."

"I'm fine right here," Jack said.

"Take it from me, you're better off getting as far away from here as you can." She rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath, "For all the good it'll do you, if we fail."

"I said I'm fine."

Her brows furrowed, and she looked from him to Barry. "What do you need the kid for?"

Barry laid a hand on her shoulder. "Like _I_ said, we don't know you. There ain't going to be any more questions from you until you answer a few of ours."

She turned that gaze on him again. "We don't have time for a pissing contest." She gripped his hand and pulled it from her shoulder, as though flicking away something slimy. Jack knew Barry let her move his paw, that if he had resisted then it would have been tantamount to her lifting Thor's Hammer. "Touch me again, and I'll scoop your eyes out of your head and shove them up your—"

"Are we done?" Jack yelled.

Scot-but-not and mystery woman glared at each other a moment longer, then she took a small step back. "He's on the move. We haven't much time. Come with us, or it's game over."

"We'll be fine without you," Barry snapped.

"You don't get it. He set us on this path as much as he did you." She pointed to the brick wall behind Jack, where _Laurent's_ had stood not a minute before. "He knew you'd need our help."

"That slippery son of a bitch," Barry hissed over his shoulder. He met Jack's eye. "Neutrality, my shitty arse."

Jack shrugged. "I'm not complaining."

Barry scowled.

The woman seemed nervous now, looking up and down the street. "We're not alone in this. Harper has people too. His fingers are in everything. We've held them off until now, but this is the last play. You have to come with us." She searched them both, her stance softening a touch. "Please, come with us, now."

Jack licked his lips. "You got a name?"

Another measured pause. Jack felt himself being scanned down to the last hair by that cold, calculating gaze. "Kat."

He tried to say, "Nice to see a friendly face." In the wake of her dragon-like stare, all that emerged from his mouth was a flaccid, "Goo... uh."

A glint of something that might have been tempered contempt lanced in Jack's direction, and Kat grunted. "We better get off the street. You freaks might be invisible to most people, but we sure aren't. People tend to notice a bunch of people screaming around New York, armed to the teeth." She headed back to her cycle. "Climb on. We're set up nearby."

"That's not going to happen," Barry said

"Not until we get our answers," Jack said.

She gave them both a withering stare. "You'll get your answers. Now come on. We're on the clock." She nodded to the other riders, and they gunned their engines.

"Tell me about it," Jack muttered. He exchanged an uncertain glance with Barry, then they were heading for the motorcycle.

Barry was so heavy he needed a cycle to himself, displacing its rider onto the back of one of his companion's. Ungainly and disgruntled, Barry fingered the controls gingerly, but within the minute he was ready. "It's just been a few millennia, that's all," he roared.

Jack climbed on behind Kat. He half expected something stupid and cliché, like catching a whiff of rosy perfume from her hair, maybe a quiver in his chest. Instead, all he caught was a sharp, blue pain in his groin as he sat on himself.

Eyes watering, he glanced back in the direction of where _Laurent's_ had been. The brick wall remained, but now even the trestle tables had vanished, taking the old man with them.

# 14

They rode hard in the night, and several times Jack's underwear came in danger of getting a fresh coat of shit. Clinging to Kat's leather-clad waist, struggling with the urge to dig his fingers into her side, he concentrated on matching the rapid swing of her torso as she threw them into insane slaloms and pirouetting skids around corners.

The city passed by in a blur, a liquid slurry of neon ribbons and endless Yellow Cabs, interspersed with faces caught in mid-action, a tapestry of frowns and smiles and high-strung scowls.

Somewhere nearby the other bikes whined like a swarm of wasps in pursuit, dark shadows that occasionally overtook or were overtaken, otherwise hovering somewhere on the edge of his narrowed perception. They, too, punched through the heart of the city without regard for traffic or pedestrians. Half the time they mounted the pavement or dived down into underpasses, or launched over low brick-walls and into parks, scattering pigeons and gaggles of squawking night-strollers.

More than once he heard Barry's disembodied voice above the drone of the engine, the honking protests of car horns and the screams of diving bystanders: an unbroken stream of pseudo-Scottish babble, lost between wordless fury and swears strong enough to make Jack's eyes water.

For a brief moment, Jack was laughing, a full-body roar that he felt might shake him apart.

_Down, down, into the fires of hell_.

They pulled off the road without warning, swooping down into an underground garage that popped open seemingly of its own volition, all half-dozen of them screeching into a murky greenish concrete shell in quick succession. The engines died and the riders dismounted, stripping off their helmets and unzipping their leathers.

Jack was left sitting atop Kat's bike, blinking under harsh halogen lights and the roar of sudden silence. Beside him, Barry dismounted his own bike, which bounced up several inches on its suspension once free of his weight. He looked shaky, his beard hilariously windswept into a devil-may-care quiff, like a proud bird of prey ruffled after a close call with a freight train.

The garage door banged shut behind them. Jack exchanged a glance with Barry. An unspoken question lanced between them.

You good?

Satisfied, Jack lifted himself free of the bike, wishing for grace and receiving none. His groin was so numb that, for an irrational terrifying moment, he worried that he would thereon be known as Miss Shannon.

Kat and the others had gathered in front of them. Her companions, free of their gear and standing there in black vests, took him by surprise. Jack had expected a snarling squad of ex-Navy SEALS, or skin-headed goons.

Instead they were disarmingly... normal. Two men and three women, Kat included, ranging in age from early twenties to somewhere in their sixties, their eyes frank and alert, markedly undisciplined. There was nothing military or hardened about their pose or countenance. They slouched, standing in a rag-tag bunch.

Kat and one of the older men, a round-shouldered silverback with a long braided goatee, looked like they could hold their own. But the others could have passed for any group of strangers on the street: the other man was bald and sweaty-faced, almost certainly a banker; the young girl's face was riddled with acne and was pale enough that Jack was sure she was a student of something that meant spending a lot of time indoors. The other two could have been anything from middle management to greengrocers.

Before him, they visibly withered. Their collective stance shifted with discomfort.

Kat seemed to sense his thoughts. A wry smile spread over her face, lost somewhere between amusement and derisive satisfaction. "Not quite what you thought we were, are we?"

"Not quite."

Barry took it upon himself to display his mastery of tact. "You look like shit!"

The silverback gave a muted grunt befitting a true gorilla, and started forward. "Who you callin' shit, you piece a' shit!" He held up a fist the size of Jack's head, his Bronx accent touched by the kind of slur that came with decades of heavy drinking.

"Ah, a poet," Barry sang in mock delight. His face became sour as he looked down the line of them. "No wonder you played dress-up. Look at you. You can't be serious."

Kat's hazel eyes flashed. Jack could have sworn a blast-wave of heat washed over him, born of her sour intensity. "If you knew anything about us, you'd never stop thanking us," she said quietly, and with that quietness came a gravity that brought Jack's skin out in goose-flesh. "You have no idea what we're capable of."

Barry considered her carefully. "I'm sure."

Her lips twisted into an ugly tangle.

"Show us," Jack said.

They all looked at him.

"Show us. We're on the clock, right? Either you can help, or you can't," he said.

"We can help," Kat said.

"Then let's get to it."

The others looked at him with undisguised surprise, though fell short of appreciation.

"Fine," Barry said. He took a heavy breath, and Jack felt Barry send a displeased gaze in his direction. "Show us."

Kat regarded them, then motioned to the others, who filed towards a door set at the rear of the garage. The group vanished, leaving the two of them standing in ringing silence beside the bikes.

Jack made to follow, but Barry put out a hand to stop him. "These people are a joke. You're wasting our time."

"And you're still trying to save the world on your own."

"I took you on board, didn't I?"

Jack leaned close, for the first time stabbing at Barry's chest, ignoring the doom that would befall him if Barry retaliated. "Dragged me. You dragged me into this insanity. You might have some pithy quips about _creatures of destiny_ , but you're just holding onto me like some damn totem. Well, I'm not! You said it yourself: you can't win this. You're going to need my help." He nodded to the room ahead. "And you're going to need theirs."

A beat passed between them, Jack's finger pressed precariously to the Scot-but-not's chest, the latter's beady black eyes ablaze with the fire of ages, and wrath that in ancient times, on some far-away forgotten world, might have levelled forests and mountainsides.

Then, before Jack's eyes, chocolate mirth trickled in to fill the void. Barry looked down at Jack's finger, not threateningly but with new respect. A small smile invaded the undergrowth of his ginger beardscape. He nodded. "You're right."

Jack stepped back, took a deep steadying breath, and nodded in turn.

For the first time in his life, Jack Shannon felt strong.

# 15

They filed into a much larger room beyond, a hulled out booming space, dusty and ancient and mildewed. Jack led the way, guarded, feeling exposed with Barry behind him instead of ahead. But he wasn't playing sheep any more. If he was important, if he had a role to play, fine. He was going to play this his way.

As he proceeded over creaking floorboards and a freshly-laid tarpaulin floor, he realised it wasn't a room, but the atrium of a grand town-house. A sweeping marble staircase spiralled up to a shadowed upper floor, echoing and hollow. Every recess sparkled with decayed, decadent furnishings. Wealth lay slathered over it all like paint. Somewhere high above, a chandelier caught odd glitters of light through a carapace of rust and wear.

A fine rain of dust showered down, sticking to Jack's sweat-stained shirt. This place was old, too old and undisturbed to have been forgotten. Manhattan didn't leave such valuable real estate to rot like this.

No, somebody had bought this place up, and kept it closed to the world, even if they had let its innards run to ruin.

But for how long?

Judging by the inch-thick slabs of dust atop lampshades and armchairs and ancient chaise-lounges, it had been many decades.

"It might have seen better days, but it's what we need," Kat said from the centre of the atrium. Amidst the antiquity lay a nest of modernity: an encircling mass of monitors, snaking cables, banks of servers, cabinets of weapons and rails of clothing.

"Looks like Q's workshop," Jack said glibly. He came to a standstill in the centre of the parabola of glowing screens alongside Barry, and shrugged heavily. "Who are you people?"

Kat jerked a thumb over her shoulder, indicating silverback and the acne-ridden young woman. "Joblonsky and Gant." Then she pointed to the other two, who had sunk into chairs by the terminals. "Hartree and Forman."

"No. Who _are_ you?"

She seemed ready for that. Without a word she threw him something dark and small.

Jack caught it and took it into both palms, squinting in the poor light.

Beside him, Barry made a noise of bitter amusement.

Jack ignored him and held it up to the light of the nearest monitor. By the harsh blue glow he picked out a smooth dark stone, around the size of a marble but longer, flattened. It looked much like obsidian, only more reflective, sparkling almost like diamond, though it was black as total darkness; it almost seemed to emit light of its own making.

"Is this supposed to mean something to me?"

"No. But it will."

"I'm getting tired of all the vague references."

"Get used to it," Kat said. "Something we all learned a long time ago is: once you get close to the truth, straight answers dry up fast."

"Try."

She smiled, a coy yet long-suffering expression. "Eighty years ago, a couple of people who had nothing in common, had never met, never had any contact with one another at all, woke up one day and realised something was different. They _knew_ things. Bad things."

Jack's internals thrummed, a resonance of every cell, stemming that strange inner power that had awakened in him since Barry's arrival, as though his inner divining rod had been pinged by some aberrant RADAR.

Kat continued. "A few ended up in asylums, screaming about cold and darkness, and a great black spider. They didn't last long. A few weeks later they all killed themselves."

"And the rest?"

"They kept seeing things. Every night, something new. Soon they started believing they might be seeing something real. Slowly, they found one another. It took years to come together. By then, they were all sure that they'd be warned. Something terrible was coming."

"So, what? They were chosen?"

I think some people are sensitive somehow. They can see more than most people." She shrugged. "To be honest, I have no idea. None of us ever have. I'm pretty sure it's almost impossible to tell any of us apart from the rest of the crazies who talk about alien abductions and the rapture and faking the moon landing."

She pulled a wry hitch to her mouth. "A few of our forerunners were rich or had influence. They put together a small underground movement, a sleeper cell, of sorts, just in case. Awaiting instructions. Even when the years went by and their efforts seemed wasted—they kept watch.

"But the years kept going by, and as they died off, they chose replacements. Roll the clock forward a hell of a lot of years more, and you end up with us." She gestured above Jack's head, and he saw that the largest bank of screens had been filled by webcam feeds, a dozen people of as many races. They all eyed him silently. "You're looking at their legacy," Kat finished.

The others' faces tightened with a flavour of stubbornness. Their combined stares coalesced as a single solid slab of willpower.

"You've been waiting, all this time?" he said. "What the hell kind of torture is that?"

Kat smiled, a strained and painful glimmer. The intensity of her gaze bored into him. An odd stirring in Jack's gut urged him to look away. "I have seen you two in my dreams," she breathed, "for so long... I'd started to think you'd never come. I don't know you. But I _feel_ like I do."

If this were a movie, we'd kiss now. Isn't that how it goes?

A part of him expected her to draw close with a coquettish wink, then.

Instead her gaze lingered on him only a fraction of a second, then she sighed. The disappointed slump to her shoulders burned like acid.

Jack could only stare. Entire lifetimes, waiting with that knowledge, unable to do anything about it. One night had been enough to stretch him to the limit.

Barry waved an impatient hand. "That's really bloody tragic, but can we skip the sob story?"

"Hey!" Jack said. "Lay off."

"This bunch of jokers don't know squat. So they saw things. It's like she said: some creatures are just a little bent that way; they pick up things, like a car radio catching longwave from Korea or some bloody place. It doesn't mean they can help us."

The group started up. Barry squared his chest, baring his teeth. "Easy!" he growled. "I mean no offence. It's nice that you're playing super-spy and all, but we've got a mission to get to. We can't afford to team up with amateurs." He cast a pointed finger around at them. "Look at you. Dressing up with all this gear, like it can make up for what you really are. Anybody with a pair of eyes can see the truth. You're just..."

"Normal," Jack finished.

The two parties squared off for a tense moment, ugly glares lancing back and forth.

"What makes you so different?" Kat said.

"The fact that we _are_." Barry clapped Jack on the shoulder. "Even this one. Don't let the wrapper fool you."

"Less of that," Jack muttered from the corner of his mouth.

Barry ignored Jack, spreading his hands. "Like I said, I mean no offence. But we don't have time for this. If you can help us, prove it."

In response, Kat nodded to the gorilla with the goatee, who punched a few commands at a terminal.

Jack and Barry turned to a bank of monitors hanging behind them. At least twenty video feeds popped to life.

"You say we don't know what you know? I doubt that. If you knew They were everywhere, I bet the powers-that-be would have sent more than the pair of you."

"What are you talking about?" Barry's voice was low, his eyes squinted.

"They're everywhere. Harper's not just a monster, he's a puppeteer of monsters. He's been here a long time, before the first of us. Our influence stretches pretty far, but him... he has an army."

Jack felt the strength drain out of his legs. He waved his hand blindly at his side until he made contact with an empty swivel chair, and dropped into it.

The feeds were blurred and obscured in places by foliage or buildings, clearly being filmed from hides and hidden crannies. But there was enough information for him to guess that each showed a different country. The shadows fell differently in each, indicating a different local time, and the architecture was different; some in tundra, some temperate forests, others semi-arid.

In most, hives of figures buzzed back and forth busily. Encampments of tents, motor pools and tonnes of scaffolding surrounding central depressions in the ground, leading towards what seemed to be glistening metal caps.

In a few, however, the story was altogether different, and stalled the breath in Jack's throat. In these there were but a few people working upon great towers of scaffolding, submerged almost totally in deep, excavated pits. The scaffolding was riddled with tarps that obscured what lay beneath, but between a few wind-loosened flaps, Jack caught glimpses of obsidian, sparkling yet totally black, blacker than nothingness.

His throat tightened, took on an ache akin to one experienced after a bad scare.

He swept his eyes across all the monitors, counted the ones with scaffolds.

"Seven," Jack muttered. "Sets of seven." He kept on saying it, quieter each time, under his breath. Each time it was like a hammer blow to his inner divining rod. "Blessed Beacons. Set of seven." He looked with effort over his shoulder at Barry, whose face had been cast into an unflattering blue hue by the monitors, highlighting a network of scars criss-crossing the length of his face.

Barry looked back at him, speechless. The Scot-but-not turned weakly to Kat. "I don't understand."

Her lips tightened. She chose not to gloat, something Jack thanked her for. Instead she stepped in front of the monitors. "He holds reserved clientèle, to be sure, but you're not the only ones to get a visit from the Man in Purple." She held up a hand to stall Barry. "I know, impartial. All I know is he's toeing some kind of line." She shrugged. "I don't pretend to understand. Like you, I'm just following orders. All I need to know is this: we've been preparing for this for eighty years, and now it's here. We get one shot to stop it."

"Do you know what's coming? Have you seen it?" Jack leaned forward in his seat.

Her throat worked visibly. "No. But when I was a girl, I felt it." Her eyes glazed. "Cold. Cold that burned like fire."

The others fidgeted uncomfortably, writhing in recollection.

Jack nodded, tight lipped.

Kat turned to Barry. "You need our help."

"The magic fairies tell you that, too?"

"No. I just know it. We saw you face Harper."

"Listen, lady. This is all very impressive, but none of you is worth shit in a fight against him."

"Knowledge and influence are our weapons."

Barry snorted. "Quaint."

"It got us this far. And like it or not, we've been told more than you. Looks like the universe screwed you over."

Barry hissed bitterly.

Jack frowned as a question occurred to him. "Who sent you here, anyway?"

"Doesn't work that way. It's not like there's a cosmic job centre. I just kind of... know. I know what I need to know. Always have."

"Doesn't look like it's worked out for you, pal," Joblonsky guffawed.

"Laugh again, and I'll break it off and stick it up there," Barry said without looking at him. "Don't forget, you're still ants, and I'm the anteater."

"Looks like you got royally screwed, and we know a hell of a lot more about this than you do," said Joblonsky.

"Enough," Kat said, casting a stern look in Joblonsky's direction. "This isn't a pissing contest. We start working together now, or bringing you here was pointless—and we're all dead."

Barry waved her on impatiently. "All right. Fine. You made your point. Get on with story time so I can get out of here."

A muscle leapt in her jaw, but she pressed on. "Most of the feeds show underground complexes Harper's organisation has been building. They go deep, big enough to hold over a hundred people for at least a month. We have sleeper agents inside."

"Fallout shelters? He's planning to nuke us?" Jack said.

"No. There's no radiation shielding. But there is something else. Some kind of next-gen integrated circuitry built into the walls."

"What does it do?"

"No idea. We got a sample, but nobody could make heads or tails of it. It doesn't seem to do anything; a bunch of junk, wires and strips of exotic compounds. Some don't even make electrical contact. But it means something."

"Maybe it's a decoy? Maybe they know you're onto them."

"It's no decoy. They've been filling the vaults with people for three days, rushing them by airlift from all over the world. Most are already sealed."

"Eleven confirmed," Gant said from her terminal.

"Bastard must have given them a way to hide from the Frost," Barry muttered. He shook his head. "This isn't right. It's against the rules. Everyone has to play by them. Everyone."

"So what's this?"

Barry made to speak, but faltered. "I don't know."

"Comforting." Jack nodded to the monitors again. "What about the others? The scaffolds?" He bit back the urge to mutter, _Seven, seven, seven_.

Kat nodded to the rock in his hands. "That right there is a part of an object uncovered in the seventeenth century, during an exploratory in a place called Radden Moor in England. It's made of some material that doesn't correlate with any known geology on the planet." She held up a hand to staunch his retort. "It's regular old matter. No little green men, sorry."

_At this point, I would have welcomed Martians_ , Jack thought.

"But it's not from around here."

"The Beacons," Barry said. "They bind your world to others in the Web. If Harper tears this place apart, the others will start decaying, too."

Kat and the others shared an incredulous stare. From the look in their eyes, Jack guessed this was new to them.

They're just like the rest of us. Duped into doing things they don't understand.

Kat finished with an impotent gesture towards the monitors, then returned to her companions. As a group, they turned their attention to Jack and Barry. "So, now you know us. And you know the score."

Jack expected some pithy retort from Barry. Instead, ringing silence filled the void between them.

"So," Jack said, looking between them, "we're totally screwed. Now what?"

# 16

Harper walked in total darkness with the surefootedness of one who followed a brightly-lit corridor. While no ordinary light reached down here, far beneath even the deepest subway tunnel or water pipe, every surface glowed with that strange aural otherness that emanated from the people above. The same radiant rainbows, dripping off the walls, pooling on the floor. Lighting his way.

Descending with every step, the tunnel narrowed gradually, transforming from a long-forgotten exploratory channel, to something altogether different; low and jagged and twisting, scarcely large enough for even his svelte body to pass.

_Good thing my suit was already ruined_.

Still, he hated to think what the sharp spurs of rock and slicks of mossy gruel were doing to his jacket. Several times he was forced to stop and manoeuvre inch by inch, slipping through gaps no wider than the span of his hands, a strange dance upon his toes even, his torso pivoting, angled to an absurd degree.

A silent creeping in the dark, malleable as shadow, Milton Harper poured himself down into the earth. Descending ever deeper, he moved on determined, not a thought passing his mind, until even the most distant shudders of overhead trains had faded, the rocks grew warm, and the effervescent light dripping off the walls shone like the surface of the sun.

Then the lights in his ancient, wicked mind blinked to life, gears machined by cruel insane hands chugging to life in his skull. A grin spread over his face, the stretching of his cheeks driving him forward.

This world's time is done. It's time to free the master.

Somewhere, from no particular direction but at the same time everywhere, he felt hands pulling at him, pinching and tugging, questioning and watching; a thousand creatures across All Where, sensing him for the first time, and the chaos he prepared to rain down upon this place.

But they were all so far away, scattered and already dwindling.

Fools. Of all the Great Weaver's legions, all that had been sent against him was a band of piss-ant humans, and that slick of bearded scum. There was nothing any of them could do to stop him.

A few of them might have noted something amiss when Harper had arrived here, so long ago, and set their own plans spinning (to his chagrin, there was no denying that his carefully laid scheme, everything he had built, teetered on the brink of ruin), but to most, he had slipped under the RADAR.

They had grown prideful, blind.

It's time for the Pendulum to serve its real masters.

From that same not-but-every direction as those thousand pairs of eyes, came a single presence. Not quite a voice, yet deafening; not there, yet all-consuming; intangible and more unreachable than any world in the Web, forcing ugly fingers into the meat of his being and threatening to tear it asunder with the merest jerk.

_Yes. It's time. Too long have I held the Web together. It's time to make the first tear._ A gentle, silky sigh, threaded with peaceful dulcet tones upon the surface. Yet underneath it all, permeating each angelic syllable, an emotionless, white malice. _There is no room for error. Such a shame it would be, should you fail me._

Harper froze a moment, swallowing a full-body shudder with difficulty. Almost swaying, he wiped a sliver of drool from his lip with the back of his hand.

Yes. Yes, master. Soon you will be free.

Harper kept descending, using his hands now, moving forward with hunger and, somewhere under all the tarry sludge of his soul, a childish and mewling fear.

# 17

"The subway?" Jack said, leaning close to the monitor.

On the screen, a shimmering bag of air floated amidst weaving tracks of tourists, parting them like a stone in a river, heading up the street. Nobody seemed to notice what they were doing, sidestepping as naturally as though avoiding a streetlight.

But there was nothing there, just an undulating pocket of air, like a heat wave.

A heat wave that stopped in front of the stairs to the subway—Jack thought he might have momentarily caught a glimpse of a polished loafer or freshly-pressed jacket—and then headed down.

"We can get you close, do what we can," Kat said. "The others will stay here and coordinate with our people across the world. We have a plan: we're going to crack the vaults open."

"How?"

"Explosions. Big ones."

"And the other Beacons?"

"They're not the same as this one." Kat looked to Barry for help. "I don't pretend to understand, I just follow Mr Purple's word. It seems this one, the one Harper's going after, is the key. Without this one, without him, it's a no-show for doomsday." She arched her eyebrow, inviting Jack to join her in incredulity.

Jack resisted the urge to oblige.

Barry pointed a beefy finger to the monitor. "You have him on tape?"

Kat nodded. "We had people tracking him the moment he arrived in the city. A few tried to take him down—they really thought they knew what they were up against." She shook her head bitterly. "All this time, preparing, and I couldn't stop the very people I helped train from throwing themselves onto a bed of knives." Her brow tightened. "But at least it helped us find you."

She looked to Barry. "We saw you go against him."

He cleared his throat gruffly. "Didn't exactly go down how I had planned."

"We know he can't die. Not how we think of it. Bullets, incendiaries, chemical or biological weapons—nothing we have can touch him. What was your plan?" She stood up from the monitor, arms akimbo. "No offence, but it looked like you just kind of ran at the guy, wind-milling your fists."

"What, you were expecting me to pull out my magic wand and challenge him to a duel? I might be from another part of All Where, lady, but that doesn't mean I graduated from Hogwarts."

"Well?" Jack said, eyebrows raised.

Barry rolled his eyes. "Like I said, at the time, I didn't know who he was. I thought I could handle it. I'm used to dealing with thugs a few rungs down the ladder. It's easy enough to cart them back off to where they belong."

In reply, Kat pulled up a recording from a security camera, showing an elevated view of Jack standing on the sidewalk. Before him, and the staring, screaming crowd, two shimmering slabs of air raced towards one another, figures without form or shadow, before the entire street erupted in a mayhem of flying shrapnel and ice. The recording cut to static.

Barry cleared his throat, his eyes darting back and forth, as though embarrassed to be speaking in front of Kat. He nodded to Jack. "It was because of you."

"That's sweet."

"Don't get cute." Barry took a small step closer. "You know what I'm going to say?"

Jack squinted, pushed through a great slab of consciousness, as though lifting a cover stone from a tomb, and broke through into Barry's head. " _Creature of destiny?_ "

Barry nodded. "I need you. You have power, and the Web always gives us a way to set things right."

"So you've said."

"Right. What I haven't said is that it works both ways. He can use you too. If he gets to you, that power inside you will work against us."

Jack felt Kat's eyes on him, searching and hostile, as though he had suddenly revealed himself a double-agent with a flash of cape and a tweak of moustache. "And if he does?"

"Then we really don't stand a chance."

Jack felt the attention of the entire room fixed on him. His throat dry, he said, "I thought I was just a compass?"

"Like Purple Toes said. That's just the start of it. You've just woken up. There's a lot more to come. You just have to wait for it to surface."

"If I live long enough."

Barry said nothing.

After a long moment, Kat's gaze softened a little, and she rested back on her heels. "Okay, so we don't let Harper get to him. Jack can hang back and help us. We can't go in after Harper, anyway."

Barry shook his head immediately, as though he had been ready for it, his face a picture of regret.

"No?" Jack said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I already told you, I can't stop him. Not alone." His eyes turned meekly on Jack. "Maybe you can. If we're going to beat him, it's going to be both of us in there."

Jack swallowed thickly. "Where he can get to me."

Barry nodded slowly. "Where he can get to you."

_Great_.

The others moved forward and arranged in a parabola around them, waiting. Kat cleared her throat, and Jack noticed, just for a moment, a hint of something amateur and unsure underneath all that bravado and hard-ass poise. "I'm taking Gant and Joblonsky with me down there. We're going to get these two as close as we can and clear the way, if Harper has any people to put between him and us. Hartree, Forman, you stay here, coordinate the others. What's our progress?"

Joblonsky said, "We have teams waiting on our signal. They'll blow the charges on the vaults when we give the go ahead."

"Do we have every site covered?"

"All but three."

"Not good enough!"

He shrugged. "It's all we got. They beefed up security once we made the run on Harper earlier. A few of our people on the inside got caught trying to plant their charges. There's no way we could fight our way in. Those places are more secure than military fallout shelters."

Kat turned to Barry. "If we can't take them out, and we can't stop Harper, he'll have free rein. Even if only a few of those vaults survive, there's enough organised firepower to take down anything that will be left."

Her eyes glazed, her lip twitching. "Cold. Mist. And... Nothing. All over the world, just silence. They'll all be gone. Gone to that dark place. You've seen it, haven't you?"

Jack nodded.

"I can't let anyone be sent there. I won't."

"None of us will," Joblonsky said, arms crossed.

The others tightened in a display of solidarity that didn't quite dispel their motley-crew appearance.

_We're saving the world on a shoe string_ , Jack thought. _Oh well. At least I fit in._

"Nice," Barry said with a strained smile. "Go team. Now can we get moving?"

Kat nodded. "Five minutes. Then we go."

# 18

Jack and Barry waited for the others to gear up, standing aside in collusion. Barry had his foot on a swivel chair, propping up a hand stroking his beard. "I hate being kept out of the loop," he muttered.

"Yeah, sucks," Jack said absently. "What's up with that?"

"Just a soldier," Barry muttered. He cursed, shaking his head. "When this is over, I'm going to bang that bloody Jester's head against a wall."

"What jester?"

"Never mind."

Jack let it go, his tired imagination too stretched to bother conjuring what kind of other-world place needed a jester. He watched Kat, Gant and Joblonsky pulling on Kevlar combat gear in lieu of their bike leathers. He half expected them to pull out rocket launchers and high calibre magnums, but instead they picked up scoped M4 carbines, holstering no-nonsense Gloch 9mm pistols. They handled them well, moving without a second thought.

There was no denying Kat's people were out of their league, but now that they all stood on the precipice, Jack was glad to have them, even if they couldn't face Harper. He needed somebody else to know that they had tried.

He cleared his throat. "How long do we have?"

"Why?" Barry said.

"I'm feeling kind of funny."

Barry grunted. "Yeah. I feel it too."

"It's like I'm late for something, or I have to take a piss, or something." Even as he spoke he resisted the urge to dance on the balls of his feet, a building anxiety and impatience, stemming from the same hokery pokery as his divining rod, slicking the base of his cranium. "It's getting close now, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Barry picked at the spaces between his teeth with his thumbnail, looking off into the middle distance. "Real close. Few hours, maybe." His brow furrowed. "Stop that."

Jack forced himself to be still. "Sorry."

"You sure you're ready for this?"

"I've got nothing better to do."

"No, no bullshit. No hiding behind facetiousness."

"That's a big word. Don't strain yourself, you'll pull something." Jack couldn't help himself. Hiding behind humour was all he'd ever had.

Barry laughed, not his usual rough ironic bark, but almost soft, warm. He made to clap Jack on the arm, halting his speeding hand just before he made contact, and turned it into a gentle prod. "You're all right."

"Don't. If you start crying then I'll start crying, and we'll never get ourselves together again."

Barry rolled his eyes, still smiling under all that beard. Then the genuine upward curve drained away. "We're probably going to lose, Jack."

The warm fuzz of the previous moment vanished, replaced by the clacking of keyboards behind them, and the ruffling of combat gear. "I know," Jack said.

"Even if we win, I don't know what will happen. You've got a lot of strength in you. At first I thought you were a throw-away. No offence. But I did." His head fell a little to the side. "But you ain't. And that's a blessing and a curse. We might just have a shot against him. But there are always consequences."

Jack attempted several replies, but they all failed. He settled for another nod. "It'll change everything. Harper's run-in with the cops must have made the news. People saw him. And the bodies..."

"Nobody would remember."

"I'm pretty sure I'd remember those claws."

"Don't forget, only we can see him for what he really is, claws and all. You saw the recording. We're different somehow." He gestured to the screen, frozen mid-frame, showing the two shimmering figures upon Forty-Sixth. "There, but not."

Jack couldn't help wondering what he must have looked like, if nobody but him could see Barry: hurtling backwards along the street, dragged in the wake of a pocket of shimmering air. In his mind's eye, everybody was decked out in sunglasses and carried walking sticks; blind to everything around them.

Barry picked the thought out of his head. Jack felt him wheedle his fingers in, but let him take it.

Barry snorted. His brow flickered. "You all right?"

Jack shook his head. Every day of his adult life had seemed ill-fitting, misshapen and, quite simply, wrong. The boy who had dressed up in scraps of spare carpet and searched for other lands had retreated to a place deep within. A place he could reach only sometimes, through books, when night was total and the apartment was quiet, and he was so lost in a story that the words vanished, and he lived the lives of all those heroes and villains.

"All this, what's happened today, you, this place—it's crazy. It's all _crazy_. But I feel... right," he said slowly. "This is right." He nodded, then reinforced it with another. "This is what I'm meant for." He looked to Kat and the others. "They've been waiting all their lives for this. I think I've been waiting for it too."

"Creatures of destiny. You're all the same."

"I never had a choice in this, did I? This was set in stone since my Mom went into labour?"

"Messed up, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"You get used to it."

"Really?"

"No."

Jack found himself smiling again. A moment of contentment blossomed between them, just two men—

_Well, close enough_ , Jack thought.

—enjoying one another's company.

Maybe we'll pull through. Maybe I will see it.

That golden thought twinkled in his mind's eye, a shining light in the murky fuzz that lay ahead, a dream so potent it threatened to rip his heart out through his ribcage.

But underneath all that lay a calm accepting certainty that he would never see the endless bounty of adventures lying out there across the reaches of All Where.

He sighed. "You're reading my mind again, aren't you?"

"You can feel it now?"

Jack nodded, looking away, at the others as they settled down into silence, tapping away at terminals, coordinating with the teams across the world.

"It's coming to you fast. It's been a long time since I've seen anybody light up like you."

"You going to tell me I'm some lost prince, the all-powerful Chosen One?"

"Sorry, no dice. Like I said—"

"I know. The Web always gives a way."

"Now you're reading my mind."

Jack hadn't done it consciously, it had just happened, a mental pinch high in his head similar to a tightening muscle. Yesterday it would have frightened him, suddenly having that power. Now it was as natural as plucking a pebble from a stream.

Kat, Gant and Joblonsky stood before them, kitted out in full. Even their hefty complement of gear couldn't quite make up for the memories flashing through Jack's head: flying shrapnel, caterwauling through the air; shrapnel that had once been police cruisers. And claws, and a pair of unforgiving, glowing eyes.

Kat's gaze lingered on Hartree and Forman and the others on the monitors for a final moment, then her face hardened. "We're ready."

Jack and Barry nodded. This was it, the last moment before the plunge. Every step from here was a step towards Harper. And they would go, to whatever end.

"Okay," Jack said. Forcing that one word from his lips was like pushing a gobstopper out from between his teeth.

Then the moment was over and they were moving back towards the garage, leaving the atrium behind.

"What are you going to do, when you get in there?" Kat said under her breath.

_No damn idea_ , Jack thought.

# 19

The tunnel changed once again, its walls made not of dark rock, but of glittering crystals. The temperature had been rising steadily as Harper descended into the earth, reaching the stifling heat of a coal mine, close to fiery innards of the earth. But then it had started getting colder again, a gentle cooling at first, then a sharp decline, until now ice condensed on Harper's jacket.

In a thin halo around his body, it snowed in the darkness.

Harper wondered how far he had descended, but then chastised himself for such foolishness. He had lived too long in this simple, linear, featureless place, where distances and times were regular and unchanging. But not this place: the Beacons were true links to All Where. That meant he could have been a few hundred yards down, or several miles.

There wasn't even any guarantee that he was still beneath Manhattan.

"I've missed things being interesting," he said, pulling himself forwards, relishing the silky sensation of the frozen crystals against his skin. A slice of home.

Soon I'll finally be out of here. I'll get my reward.

The tunnel's claustrophobic airlessness eased. Wind touched his dead, plastic cheeks. Wind, underground, far under all the world's tunnels and drains and the deepest bore holes. Cold, biting cold, touched with notes of odours that hailed from other places.

A few steps more and the tunnel peeled back, opening out like some great icy maw. The glowing crystal became unbroken and uniform, taking on a constant radius of curvature, bending up so high that even the hawk-like acuity of Harper's second sight couldn't quite make out the ceiling. The sphere, a vast bubble in the earth, could have housed a football stadium. Utterly closed off in the deep impenetrable blackness, it had its own clouds, strange formations too thick to be mere water vapour, too thick and stodgy, like marshmallow floating in oil.

From their depths floated whispers, raining down in pattering showers, some human, some not. Old things moved just out of sight, amongst the spaces between places, shifting through queer impossible angles.

Harper turned in a full circle, arms out, trying to breathe it all in, subsume the strange charge of the atmosphere into his pores.

Yes, indeed. A slice of home.

The vast glittering geode, so deep and lost under the earth that no man could reach it even if he dug straight down from the surface, throbbed with Harper's sharp intake of breath.

Centre stage, thrusting up into the clouds, stood the eternal obsidian bark of a gargantuan tree.

Milton Harper took another long drag on the sweet winds, which flowed outwards from its branches. Amongst those smells he caught scintillating flashes of lives lived long ago, worlds fallen and yet to dawn, and amongst it all, power.

Harper began his approach. It took him some time to notice his claws, extended of their own accord, quivering at the extent of their reach.

The strange, wicked creature giggled in the dark. He sang to himself, " _Mr Harper, are those steak knives, or are you just pleased to see me?_ "

# 20

Manhattan stopped for nothing. In all its long bustling life, the metropolis had not slept a moment, even in the wake of depression, war, and terrorist attack. It seemed the same rule extended to invasion by quasi-immortals hell bent on ending the world.

Under the cloak of darkness, the city seemed busy and content. There was no knowing whether those who had witnessed the madness had locked themselves away at home, or whether the crowd had rebooted to a clean slate, erasing the chaos from its collective memory.

Yellow tape cordoned off destruction, reporters interviewed witnesses. Yet there was no mention of the other-worlders, almost as though nobody had quite seen them, really _seen_ them, at all.

Though the crowds seemed blind to it, Jack could still see signs, the mark of powers that didn't belong had scarred the streets. Something welled up from somewhere lost inside him, formerly locked away in that secret place he once could only reach through books.

The motorcycles whined like a trio of wasps, taking a route through the pre-dawn traffic that felt oddly choreographed, a sick and lethal dance that would end in pain and disfigurement, should a single door open unexpectedly, or brake pedal be pushed at the wrong moment.

They flew at sickening speed along Forty-Sixth. When they left the garage, Jack had nursed the taste of bile in his mouth. But now the strange other sight captivated him, and he felt nothing but wide-eyed alertness, every nerve strung, every neuron firing.

The city zipped by. Here Scot-but-not and vampire had gone toe to toe; here _Barnes & Noble _had exploded into a giant ice crystal; here, three police cruisers had shattered into twisted piles of police officers and scrap metal.

Fear slipped away like gruel down an unblocked drain. Jack Shannon, the real Jack, so long buried under a feckless apologetic exterior, poked his head above the surface for the first time, and breathed deep.

Kat's body moved under him and he went with it, leaning and pivoting with her. The rigid terror that had before only exacerbated the bike's instability melted away, and they moved smooth as silk through the early morning traffic. He grinned like some maniacal baboon, hurtling toward certain death, but also life—the life he was always destined for.

When the subway stairs came in sight, Jack prepared for the bike to stop, relaxing his grip a little. He almost toppled off the back when Kat gunned the engine and mounted the sidewalk.

"Hold on!" Kat said, and Jack felt her thighs tense around the bike. He followed suit with a wordless cry as his stomach fluttered, and the bike nosed down onto the staircase. Teeth chattering and vision humming as though a bee had taken flight behind his eyes, Jack surrendered to her skill and let her guide them down several flights of grungy old steps.

It was a hard ride, but they stayed vertical, bumping down into the dank subway until they reached the barriers. The others buzzed down beside them as Kat brought the bike to a jarring stop and killed the engine, whipping off her helmet and dismounting before a guard could do so much as utter a startled bray.

The guard was a rotund man in his late forties, sunken masses of flesh hanging under his eyes. A white shirt pulled tight around his apple-shaped belly sat atop squat little legs that looked comical as they worked busily. "Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?" He fumbled at his belt for his baton.

Kat clutched the butt of her MP4 and pulled it round, not pointing it at him, just giving him a better view. The others pulled up beside them and the engines cut out. Gant and Joblonsky had stopped so that their own weapons were in full view to cap off the effect.

The guard's face twitched and his fingers stilled. A strained grin. His palms opened and went up into the air. "You're on camera, you got maybe two minutes before a whole lot of trouble comes your way," he said.

"Jack, get going," Kat said without taking her eyes off the guard. "We've got this."

"I mean it, lady!" the guard barked, his pudgy jowls wobbling. "Put 'em down now, lay 'em nice and flat, and maybe they won't shoot when they get here."

"Sorry."

"I mean it. They going to kill you all!"

A young man in a sports tracksuit bopped down the stairs, nodding along to his MP3 player and whistling, sweaty from a morning jog. He almost made it to the bottom of the stairs before he saw them. His lips paused in a perfect 'O' as he caught sight of the hold up, one foot balanced on the bottom step. He held there a beat in suspended animation, then tipped an imaginary cap in a manner that said _carry on_ , span on his heels and jogged back up to the street.

The guard cursed him.

Kat flicked a hand at the guard and backed him up against the wall, clearing the path toward the turnstiles.

Jack looked off deeper into the subway station. He'd never thought of the subway as ominous before, but right now it looked pretty spooky. The echo of distant trains squealing and droning through the maze of tunnels reached his ears, ghostly wails in the gloom.

"Come on, let's go," Barry said. "They've got this."

"Go, do it," Kat said.

"You sure you'll be okay?" Jack said.

"Sure." She handed him a walkie talkie. "Take this. I'll try to keep in touch as long as I can."

The guard cried out. "You don't get it. You pull out guns down here? You never saw that little snafu on 9/11, huh? Storming public transport—they're gonna be shooting to kill, people, and they comin' right now." In the few seconds he'd been against the wall, his pits had soaked through and his forehead had begun streaming with milky rivulets of perspiration. He looked a decent enough guy, genuinely scared. "Go on, now, jus' lay down and put your hands on your heads. Go on, now."

Jack looked to Kat. "He's probably right, you know. I don't think they're going to take kindly to this."

She looked at him angrily a moment, but then she checked herself. "You're so new to this it's not even funny," she said. "Why do you think we rode in here like that?"

"Coolness factor?"

"He's no guard, he's Harper's man. You can count on every subway station on this stretch of the line being in his pocket. Whoever is coming, they're nothing to do with the law."

The guard grinned, more of a leer. "What you talkin' 'bout?"

"Shut up." She cast a withering glance his way.

His face relaxed slowly into a mild pout. He shrugged, then, to Jack's surprise, relaxed back against the wall in a lazy slouch. Despite the guns trained at his chest, he started picking his teeth. "Worth a try." His voice had none of the honest-man about it now. "He'll be down there by now."

Kat gestured her rifle to the man's closed fist. After a moment, he opened it up, showing a small metal cube. On top, a red light winked. A silent alarm.

She arched an eyebrow wryly at Jack.

"Ah."

The guard turned to him. "Don't bother, kid. He'll tear your balls out through your nose and use them to gag your mouth, while he eats your dreams. This world belongs to him now."

"He's a colourful one," Barry muttered.

Yesterday, Jack would have locked his gaze on the floor, skirted around such a man, mumbled apologies. But not today. Today, he looked the guard in the eye and said, "We'll see."

Kat flicked her head in the direction of the turnstiles. "Go. They're going to throw everything they got at us. We'll give you as long as we can."

Barry was already on the other side. Jack hesitated a moment, then pushed his way through. He felt the moment of separation, like Velcro tearing. And then they were two groups, them out there standing guard, he and Barry on the inside.

Gant and Joblonsky had vanished into the station to take up position, their footsteps nearby but their bodies melted into the walls.

Kat, alone with the guard, was smiling. For a moment Jack wanted to scream _What's so funny?_ but then he saw all the long years she had waited for this. Like him, she was finally at home, doing what she was meant to do.

"Go, now," she said. "Make it count."

He nodded and followed Barry deeper into the station, heading for the platform. Just before they turned the corner, she cried out, "Jack!"

He skidded to a halt and arched his neck back to catch sight of her, half obscured by the turnstile.

"Thank you," she said.

He paused a moment on the step, a swimmer taking one last gulp of air before diving into the abyss. Then Barry was calling him from the platform, and Jack descended.

"I hope you're picking up a good signal, skipper, because we need a heading."

Jack said nothing until he stood beside Barry. He felt nothing at all until that moment; no twinge of shame or panic, trusting it would come, believing it would come.

And come it did, a dizzying pulse of certainty that crashed down over him with the force of a jack-hammer. His internal compass span around and locked quivering to his right. He pointed down the northbound tunnel. "That way."

"All right." Barry popped his collar, gauged his stance, and jumped down onto the tracks. His solid footfalls echoed long and hollow, seeming to spiral down in infinite regression; ever quieter, ever farther away, but never ending.

"What if a train comes?"

"You want to wait for one instead? Maybe we can share a copy of the morning paper and a cherry latte."

Jack looked up and down the platform. Another pulse in his head, and he knew there wouldn't be any more trains coming down this stretch of the line. Not for a while. Maybe not ever again.

I wonder if anybody else feels something amiss.

In his mind's eye he saw all across the city: the multitudes of lives subtly shifting to give them this brief window; those who decided to have another beer before heading home, realised they did want that second lap-dance, or looked at the glittering city lights and decided to take the two mile walk home instead of taking the train.

The Web always gives a way.

Jack stepped up to the edge. "You don't have to be a smartass." He hopped down clumsily.

"Try and stop me," Barry said, catching him to stop him sprawling onto the electrified line.

They started off down the tunnel, Jack in the lead, guided by humming mojo spilling over like a stopped fountain behind his eyes. He could feel every part of this place, now, taste it. The way ahead couldn't have been clearer if it had been signposted in neon and dancing girls.

"You good?" Barry said behind him.

"Never better. I'll take that latte, though."

"Win or lose, Jacky Boy, you'll get your latte."

"Win or lose?"

"If we fail, they'll be plenty of them lying around."

# 21

Harper kept his arms out to the side, embracing the obsidian tree in all its splendour as he approached. Looming above him, it thrust straight up such that its canopy was far above his field of view, only the girth of the trunk and its bulbous principal branches visible.

The cold chewed at the space around him now. Any of the pitiful creatures up on the surface would have been reduced to a mewling wreck of twitching nerves if they strayed this close. But Harper breathed deep, filling his lungs with air turned silky and thick as soup.

Static pressed upon his thick hide, arcs of plasma leaping the cracks between his clothes, dancing between the splintered bark of the tree and upon its perfectly formed—yet equally black—leaves, together producing an eerie subsonic hum akin to power lines.

"Did you miss me? I hope you hadn't started to wonder if I might not come," he crooned.

He felt it, then: the first tug at his back, trying to peel him away, to halt his progress.

It only excited him. It was against rules more sacred than any mere sacrilege, his being here—laws laid down when the first stars had yet to coalesce, and the cosmos on this plane had been a seething ocean of quark-gluon plasma.

In aeons past, even he would have quivered at the thought of breaking such laws, and the retribution that would be sought by the Weaver's servants. But all things came to an end, even the reign of gods.

A sliver of fear twinged somewhere down in his broken soul, but it was just a flicker, serving only to heighten his excitement. So long had he waited for this, to feel the power, to hold it in his hands and know that he had reduced the hold of those unworthy over All Where.

"You don't seem pleased to see me," he sang, still coming, pushing against the strange resistance, a blustering wind, crackling with static and the Frost. Underneath it all, a wailing unlike anything else in the Web: snatches of angry screaming, as the tree and this hell-forsaken ball of rock jarred to momentary awareness of him, and thrust him away.

It wasn't enough. Milton Harper approached.

He was still fifty feet from its base, yet still he held out a hand, reaching for it, hungry to touch it. Nothing could stop him now.

One foot in front of the other.

Then, pain. A sound lost between a howl and a roar of protest escaped his mouth, as every cell in his body trembled, vibrating with such temerity that for a moment he was sure he would shake apart. His feet left the floor, suspended an inch off the ground, limbs splayed. The Frost crept down onto his skin, a little of his own light fading as though a candle flame plagued by a sudden gale.

"No!" He grunted, struggling. It was no use. He couldn't move an inch. "You can't."

A voice emerged from the tree, deep and soft and ageless. "No one may enter this place, vermin." It uttered the latter word with contemplating aloofness, as though considering it, tasting it. Yes, _vermin_. "You cannot interfere. You defy the Old Laws by desecrating this temple."

Hidden somewhere underneath a great weight of placidity, Harper sensed contempt, endless and seething.

He grated his teeth, wrestled against the seizing force, and snarled, "You can't stop me. Not for long!"

That deep booming voice emerged from the tree, not from any mouth or orifice, but seeping from the bark itself. "Such is not necessary. We need only forestall you, vermin."

Harper clenched his teeth. "Do not call me VERMIN!" he screamed, saliva spraying from his mouth. With immense effort he staunched the flow of rage flaring along his veins and closed his eyes, focusing his energies, expanding his sights to beyond the cavern. It hurt, the pain intense and nauseating—fighting against the Frost and the cavern's many-layered protective shielding.

But in time, held there with his arms dangling at his sides and his legs slightly bent, a sad puppet abandoned mid-act, he found something. Something coming, for him, and for this place.

The signal popped as the rage afresh. "Kaard," he hissed.

And something else. Something radiant, powerful, and sweet. He had sampled that sweetness before. The boy had been so much dimmer then, a mere fraction of the blinding beacon he had become—but it was him.

_So bright has he become so fast. Dripping with delicious power_.

A crooked smile contorted his face as he stared at the tree, staring it down. "You want to play? Fine, let's play. Let them come." He bit his lip, savouring the echo of that sweet, sweet power. "Come closer."

# 22

Running the subway line felt like taking a treadmill session with the lights off and the neck of last week's trash bag held to his mouth. Jack heard rats, a lot of rats—after a while the _clickety-clack_ of claws was so prevalent, so close, that he found himself thankful for the dark.

_Serves me right for reading so much_ James Herbert _,_ he thought.

Barry's heavy footfalls followed close behind, his breathing wet and wheezy.

Jack was glad to have Barry at his back, dwarfed by the distance he sensed ahead of them. They had a long trek and not a lot of time, and if Jack took a single wrong turn—if his little weather vane deviated off course even for a moment—there was no telling where they would end up.

He couldn't explain it even to himself, and had given up trying to make sense of things, simply accepting them as they came, but he knew that where they were heading was somewhere _else_.

"If I had run down here yesterday, I wouldn't have been able to get here, would I?" he said. "Even if I had taken the same steps."

"Nope. Not in Kansas, any more."

"You're a walking cliché, Kaard."

"Bite me. And it's still Barry to you, earthling."

Amongst the rats and the rails and the power lines, Jack felt everything shift in some queer manner, a translation through some extraneous space, and knew they had left Manhattan behind.

"Talk to me," he said into the dark, his voice a phantom of itself.

Barry's reply didn't come immediately. For an agonising moment he just puffed along to the beat of his own steady plodding. "About what?"

The ground sloped down, a gentle gradient that would have been undetectable, were it not for Jack's supercharged senses. "Doesn't matter."

"Got nothing to say."

"I am running toward something that'd gut me as soon as lay eyes on me, I'm following a compass unaccountable to any kind of sense, I have the whole damn universe on my shoulders, and I hate fucking rats! Now talk to me, please."

Amongst the huffing, a sigh. "Give me a seed."

Jack said the first thing to enter his head. "Why _Barnes & Noble_?"

"Barney and who?"

"The book-store. My section. Why there?"

"That's the Exit. One of the places the Frost can touch and poke a hole through from other places."

"Like a chicken laying an egg?"

"There's something wrong with you, Shannon."

Jack smiled in the dark. "Does it hurt? When you... travel?"

"You have no idea."

"What's it like?"

"Like somebody dipped your bones in ice water, and punched you in the guts, at the same time."

The gradient suddenly became precipitous, and Jack skidded to a halt, fearing Barry was too close on his heels and would come careening into him. But the Scot-but-not stopped short, in step with him, as though they were a three-legged race team, bound together by an invisible bungee.

He couldn't see, not with the kind of light his eyes could pick up. But all the same, the opening before them was outlined in vivid detail, ten feet away, an orifice in the subway wall that jerked almost straight down, a sickening angle that almost seemed to suck him in.

"What's down there?" Barry said at his shoulder.

"You don't know?"

"From here on, I'm flying blind."

"I thought you saw what I saw."

"Not even close. I, we... nobody is supposed to come here. Not ever."

Jack strained, that same internal flex from within, and felt his second sight tip into the chasm before them. He had to squint, push his way down as though digging with clawed hands. "It's far," he heard himself saying. He sounded a long way off. "Real far. Away from... here."

"Already told you that."

"No, right now we're between places. But down there..." He couldn't finish. There were no words to express what he felt. It was just different. "It's tight. I don't know if you'll fit."

Barry clapped Jack's shoulder, a deep reverberating boom that made him jump. "I'll fit. Under this handsome, rugged exterior is the lithe figure of a jungle cat."

"Uh huh. And what do I do when you get stuck?"

"Butter me up. I'll slide right down like a witchetty grub.

"Thank you for that mental image."

The radio crackled at Jack's belt. Garbled static emerged from the speaker. He grabbed at it with the desperation of a castaway and held it to his ear.

"Jack?" Kat's voice.

"I'm here."

Static. A garbled curse. Gunfire. "They're here—many—can't hold them—"

"We're getting close!" he yelled into the mouthpiece. "Just hold on."

"—ound—far away."

_We are_ , he thought grimly. _So far I could never describe it to you._

"Hold on, Kat." He returned the radio to his belt, and stepped up to the wall.

They breached the hole, boosting themselves through the ragged edges in the brickwork. Immediately they were sliding down. Jack's stomach fluttered as his boots skittered on loose dirt, accelerating so fast that he was almost falling. He thrust his arms out to the side to brace himself, and came to a juddering halt.

A hail of stones rained on his back and shoulders from above as Barry also ground to a stop. The Scot-but-not had almost crashed into him and sent them both plunging down.

"Well, this is perfect," Jack hissed.

"Don't stop. There's no time."

Jack ambled down, skidding and slipping, gritting his teeth as spurs of rock sliced his palms and shins. He established a grim compromise between almost falling, and a crushingly gradual descent.

The rocks felt wrong, tainted, slicked with the scent of something that made Jack's skin crawl. "I can feel him. Harper. He passed by here."

"Yeah. Try to hold on to your dinner."

It wasn't the ugliness of the feeling that bothered Jack, but its faintness. He had felt the blazing intensity of the creature when Barry fought him. This was an afterglow, one fading fast.

"We're so far behind," he gasped, ambling awkwardly on splayed limbs. A slime trail might as well have lain in their wake.

"We'll make it," Barry groaned. Jack could feel the tension of Barry's weight projected through his voice. "We'll have to fall."

"What?" Jack barked.

"We can't do this all the way down. You know we can't."

Jack pushed ahead in his mind, saw the gulf that separated them from their destination, and scowled. "I can't just let go. Jesus, even if I survive the fall, you'll land on top of me."

"We won't die. We'll just fall. We have to fall. It's the only way to catch up."

"They have gravity where you're from, you freaking fruitcake? We'll be slime on some rock down... down there." But was it down? Really, quite, down?

Suddenly he didn't know. They weren't in Manhattan, after all. He resisted thinking about being in a place that wasn't a place. Logic would only somersault.

He would have to trust Barry. "How do you know?"

"I don't." Barry's voice was trembling from the strain of holding himself.

Jack almost screamed with incredulity. "If you don't know, how could you—?"

" _Jack! Let go!_ "

Fuck it.

Yelling at the top of his voice, cursing Barry/Kaard, the Man in Purple, Kat and all the rest, Jack pulled his arms away from the walls and shut his eyes tight. Tucking himself into a ball and pulling his head in towards his chest, Jack fell.

Tumbling end over end, the fluttering in his stomach went crazy. For a moment his hair flew, buffeted by a whistling wind. Then there was no air. He was well and truly lost, truly _between_.

A force took hold of him and pushed him down, some super gravity that had plucked him from the air and yanked him into the void. He risked taking a peek. His second sight picked out black rocks barrelling past at impossible speed. He almost vomited as he tumbled every which way, sideways, up and around impossible twists and turns, through crevices small enough to crush his ribs, his body rolling and pivoting of its own volition, pirouetting in space. Heart hammering, mouth ajar, all he could do was observe.

Somewhere above, he heard laughter; deep, manic roaring that seemed to echo in eternal fractal regression. The stupid mirth of the Scot-but-not, falling in his wake.

Somewhere amidst the madness, Jack had time for a single truly cogent thought to pass through his mind.

Who am I? Dorothy, or Alice?

Then his mind was struck utterly blank, for the tunnel widened, straightened, and ahead appeared something different. He accelerated still, the force insistent, urgent, tearing him and Barry onward toward what he now perceived as a speck darker than darkness, blacker than black.

The tunnel vanished, and at impossible speed a crystal floor rushed up toward him.

He hit solid ground hard enough to knock all the air from his lungs. Squirming like an impaled beetle, struggling to draw breath, he moved clumsily, the same awkwardness under gravity that comes after jumping on a trampoline.

Not far away, Barry stirred.

It was dark here, too, but Jack saw as clearly as if a bank of floodlights stood around him. Everything ached and twitched as though electrocuted, but he also felt powerful. The fall had awakened one last flood of whatever lay locked inside him.

Air trickled into lungs and he spluttered, wavering as he stood. Once he felt able, he took a single, deep breath. The very space around his body rippled, expanding with the walls of his chest.

_I'm different now_. The thought escaped unchecked into his head, scampering about and jostling childhood memories.

It wasn't just the odd thrumming, not the clarity of his second sight. He felt strong, his arms and legs pent up with sudden vigour, the feeling of infinite possibility that comes with the buzz of a stiff drink.

With it, he saw everything. They had fallen into a vast cavern, perfectly round and capped by a layer of shifting, amorphous mist.

No, clouds. God, they're clouds. Down here?

_Wherever_ here _is._

He tried his mental flex again, reaching back into the subway to Kat, hoping to check on her and the others.

Nothing. Beyond the great crystal bubble, he got nothing but a vague static. A busy signal.

On cue, the radio at his belt crackled. Kat's voice had before been broken, but now sounded entirely unlike her, inhuman, warped and deep, as though she spoke from underwater. "Jack, hurry. The other—acons are waking u—hurry!"

"Kat." Jack's voice was raspy from the fall. "Kat, we're getting close. Can you hold them?"

"—everywhere."

"What? You're breaking up."

"I said they—everywhere." Gunfire, interspersed with scratching static. "We can't hold them!"

Barry's paw slapped down on Jack's shoulder.

"Kat, you still there?"

"Jack," Barry said.

Jack threw him off. "Kat!" His heart bounced around in his chest.

I don't know her. I don't know any of them. Why do I care so much?

Because they're my last tie to the world. All this craziness has pulled me so far from home. They're all I have left.

"Kat!"

From the radio, more gunfire, a thousand tiny wasps in the palm of his hand. "Gant i—down."

Barry tugged him. "Jack."

"Kat, hold on. I can't hear you."

"Jack—" Kat's voice cut out, and Jack's ears exploded. The radio screamed in his hand, a wail worse than a thousand nails on as many chalkboards, crawling into his skull and hulling out his brains.

Kat's voice reverberated amidst that endless screech, vanishing down into wailing oblivion. Jack dropped the radio and clapped his hands to his head. The scream died as the radio shattered on the crystal floor.

He blinked, the sound of his own breathing suddenly deafening. His hands wandered from his ears and he looked to Barry, whose outline flickered with tendrils of light, set against the vast subterranean jewel. "What was that?" he whispered.

Barry opened his mouth to speak, shaken and battered, his jacket torn again by the fall. Then his eyes widened and his entire body dimmed, great chunks of light sloughing off him like dead skin. He stared blankly at the ground, his breath coming in shuddering gasps.

"What is it?"

"Highcourt..." Barry blinked. "They're gone. They're all gone."

Jack felt it, too. Just standing near him, he felt it. A lancing pain so much worse than heartache, the grief of a thousand deaths all at once. Somewhere out there, a great many things of power had screamed as one, and winked out.

Disturbance in the Force. I think they just hit Alderaan.

"Barry. Kaard! What _was_ that?"

"My people." Barry's mouth worked, the expressionless stare of an infant.

The answer came from another, a voice that sent the hairs on Jack's whole body standing on end. "It is the End," hissed the creature suspended in the air, fifty feet ahead of them.

Echoes returned from the far reaches of the cavern, somehow stretched, as though he couldn't have reached the other side if he walked for a month. In its centre stood a giant black tree, its limbs split off into so many branches that it looked like the profile of some delicate sea anemone.

Its radiance almost blinded him. His mind reeled at having to hold his arm to shield his eyes, for all the absolute blackness of the cavern; an oppressive dark so deep, yet lit up so bright.

Suspended before the tree, ten feet off the floor, surrounded by filaments of that strange un-light, hung the creature.

When Jack had last seen Harper, his second sight had been but a glimmer. He had seen Harper as a suited, pasty-faced millennial, only the outermost hull of his true self showing through. Now there was no sign of the parted hair, the high cheek bones, or the thousand-yard stare. In its place, though still draped in the tailored jacket and the five-hundred-dollar loafers, was a beast of shadow: foot-long claws thrusting from the crook of each elbow; a pair of freight-train headlights for eyes, emitting beams of cold fire; a head ablaze with a halo of nothingness that permitted neither air nor even un-light to penetrate.

Around him the air undulated with ropey tendrils stemming from the tree's branches, diaphanous and ever-moving, tied around Harper's wrists and ankles and neck.

As the last traces of the radio's screech faded, Jack became aware of the whispers emanating from the great obsidian tree. Voices of deep time. The tendrils that held the creature shifted to the rhythm of those voices.

_Whispers, it's the whispers that bind him_.

The crucified terror hung limp before the great tree, one dark sliver against the blinding light, one terrible voice above the thousands that imprisoned it. Upon it all, basted on top without grace or ceremony, a biting chill that might have sent any ordinary person mad.

"Subtle," Jack said.

"All Where doesn't do subtle," Barry said.

Harper giggled, a quiet and constant tickle that seemed to crawl up between Jack's legs and shrivel his particulars. "You feel it?" Harper turned his head skyward to the strange shifting clouds and breathed deep. "Sweet wonderful Frost. I have waited so long, so long, but finally, it's time. At last, Highcourt lies in ruins." His fangs protruded through the smiling lips. "The End is coming."

Jack twitched as a mental prod came from Barry's direction. Together, they began their approach unto the monster and the thousand-limbed tree.

The quasi-vampire hung aloft, watching them approach with childish interest written onto its face. "See the warriors of light, come to save the world," Harper announced to the cavern, his sibilant tongue cutting through the swaddling whispers.

_Will they hold him?_ Jack thought, finding it easy to push outside his own head, now, projecting in Barry's direction.

Barry looked at Jack, a flaming purple firefly in the dark, but Jack got no transmission in return. All the answer he needed.

"Sorry that you came all this way, but you're too late." Harper's face, a paper-thin mask of youthful skin intermittently visible over the leering devil's jaws, stretched into a hideous pout. "The party's already started, Barry and Sally."

Jack focused on the tree, following the tendrils of ectoplasmic goo back to the tips of the branches. Something was wrong, the strands' glow tainted and riddled with threads of darkness as they drew close to their prisoner. Before Jack's eyes, the darkness spread.

"He's done something to it," Jack said.

Harper bared his teeth in a great cheesy smile, an expression caught between comical and blood curdling. "You _guardians_ always think you're outsmarting us, stalling us with your boxes of tricks. You always underestimate the power of the light."

Jack guffawed. "The light? You're the good guy, now?"

"Oh, dear me. You people have your heads so stuck in your own culture, you're blind to the truth. The fool beside you—the _Good Guys_ —they're the creatures of the night. It's us who follow the light."

Jack caught a glimpse of something through the monster's eyes, a bright and insane, staring radiance he had seen before. Something once divine and fair, fallen. Eternal laughing insanity.

They stopped ten feet before the monster. Suddenly, the binding threads of light around Harper's limbs didn't seem half as secure. This close, there was no denying they faded and darkened further by the moment.

"What have you done?" Barry said.

"What nobody had the gall to do before. I _used_ it." The contempt in Harper's voice could have melted lead. "The greatest crime your kind ever committed was to turn your back on the power right in front of you. And now your people are gone. You're nothing now, one of a handful of scattered survivors. Just like anyone left in his world will be," he jerked his head in Jack's direction, "once I'm done."

"Our job is to safeguard it, not use it. We could never use it. It destroys all it touches." Barry spoke with defeated resignation, the unchanging rhetoric exchanged by two sides since time immemorial.

Jack cut in. "What was that sound? From the radio?"

Harper's brows twitched in affirmation. "The End. As soon as this is done, it will cover all the world. I might have been stationed here a long time—too long—but it had its benefits. When all this is done and the two of you are bled out on the ground, I'll have an army waiting out there for me. This world will be ours."

"We'll fight you. Even if we can't stop you. Whatever's left, will fight you," Jack said.

Harper pulled a mocking baby face. "Without their precious gizmos? All those computers and radios and television sets, turned to dust? With that sweet song you just heard whiting out every channel?"

"You're lying."

Harper's laugh came suddenly, with the force of decades' pent up malice, possessing the great underground geode and magnifying it a hundredfold.

Jack pushed it away. _Think of Kat and the others. The rigged vaults. He'll have no army._

It gave him the strength to stare Harper in the eye, just.

Harper sighed, the satisfied whistle of a diner after a succulent meal. "All that planning finally paid off. Beautiful harmony."

The threads binding the monster frayed, falling away one at a time. Harper closed his eyes, smiling, as the darkness effusing from his body rotted the whispering threads.

"I'm sorry, boy, but things haven't played out in your favour. With Highcourt gone, this little munchkin here doesn't stand a chance," Harper said, shaking his head with feigned sadness.

Jack couldn't help turning his inner eye on Barry. The Scot-but-not was right. Something was missing, as though a roaring flame had been beaten down to a cinder by some great, merciless gale.

The monster floated closer to the ground, his toes approaching the crystal floor.

Jack reached out to Barry desperately. _What do we do?_

This time, the reply came immediately, as loud as if Barry had spoken right into his ear. _Get to the tree._

_And do_ what _?_

What you were made to.

Jack tentatively moved to the side, making to sidestep Harper.

Harper's brow twitched in Jack's direction, his lip curled upward subtly. His eyes were still closed, but he too saw everything.

Jack swallowed, turning back to Barry. _What about you?_

Barry's glowing form shrugged. A look of sadness that scared Jack more than anything else. _I'll hold him._

You said...

Barry's voice from earlier that night, loud and clear in his head: "He's above my level, to be quite honest." Then, another snippet from beside the dumpster. "Dying's not my style. We don't go in for that."

Barry winked at him. _Hurry._

Jack hesitated a moment, then said aloud, "Hold him."

The monster's tiptoes touched ground at the same moment the Scot-but-not roared, "GO!"

Then Jack was sprinting over smooth crystal, and the air was full of the reverberating hiss of a serpent unleashed.

The cavern blurred. Jack's footfalls fell silent as panic took hold, and he pumped his legs for all they were worth. Behind him a calamitous roar chased at his heels. Through a mayhem of jeering voices, the slap of his feet on the ground and the whistle of breath in his lungs, he heard Harper's loafers tap over the ground.

The nape of his neck crawled, the primal sense of having a predator at one's back.

Somehow he squeezed more from his legs, ignoring the tearing in his chest. He had been sure the tree had been close—so close he could have reached out and touched it. Yet as he ran, it drew no closer.

He passed spurs of crystal, jumping over forks in the nucleated floor, weaving his way toward the great obelisk. Yet, while his feet ate up the yards, and the roaring voices of Barry and Harper lost their deafening volume of proximity, the tree seemed ever distant, as though space itself warped to keep him at arm's length.

Puffing, he reached out from within, and found the source: a strange push at his shoulders and shins, unseen and unfelt by any bodily sense. He ran into a ghostly wind.

It's a skin, a shield, to keep things out. The same thing that snared Harper.

Nobody was supposed to be here. That much was obvious. Not Harper, nor Jack, not even Barry.

This was a place for no living thing. And it had its defences. He ran, never once stopping, yet still he made no progress, held in place by invisible hooks.

Yet he knew he could break those barriers, just as Harper had done. The certainty came along with the urge to _flex_ , to _open up_ , to let it see him.

_See me. See me_.

A momentary repulsion, a reluctant extra push, then he stumbled forward as the intangible resistance vanished. The tree grew closer.

Behind him, Barry roared in the manner of some Homeric Ajax. With each grunt came a percussive crunch as the reverberations of a great impact made Jack's eyes shake in their sockets. Jack didn't dare look back. He didn't need to. It was clear Barry fought for life or death.

It would have been comforting, were it not for Harper's absolute silence.

Jack stumbled to the base of the tree, gut trembling with strange resonance. Power dwelled here, so rich and potent he felt suddenly fragile, like a glass in danger of shattering from an opera singer's voice.

Groaning, Jack went against every instinct and looked over his shoulder.

Jack's light-starved eyes watered at the flashes of very real light erupting from points of contact, as Barry blocked Harper's barrage of blows with unveiled distress etched onto his face. Harper had become a mere blur, claws and snarling jaws. Jack watched two battles; one of top-level flesh, fists and sweat and nails flying, in the manner of some furious bar fight in pitch darkness; and that of their true selves underneath, where the real battle raged. A battle of wills.

Harper's steak-knife claws moved so fast the air made a sound like tearing cloth, missing Barry's torso and neck by inches. Jack had run for over a full minute to reach the tree, yet now he stood amidst its roots and looked back, he saw he had covered a mere twenty feet. If Barry's luck ran out, and the beacon could do no more to keep the monster at bay, Jack would have moments.

He had power, sure. But being handed a bazooka wasn't any use when he had no idea how to use it. Maybe he could match Harper, in some way at least, but how to do that? He had no idea.

"Jack, hurry!" Barry bellowed, backing away a bounding step with each blow Harper unleashed. "I can't hold him. Hurry!"

Harper let fly a sound not merely serpentine, but saurian and primal, caught between the hiss of an alligator and the burner of a hot-air balloon. He landed blows with his fists upon Barry's forearms, uttering a booming roar with each word. " _This—place—is—MINE!_ "

"Jack! Now!" As he spoke, Barry stumbled back, gasping, sent sprawling upon the floor. He scrabbled in the direction of the tree, avoiding being disembowelled only by rolling clumsily on his stomach. "NOW!"

Shaking, Jack returned his gaze to the tree. It wasn't black, he noticed, nor obsidian, or even of the cavern's crystal. It was just _not_ , a tree-shaped hole in space. Yet when he put out his hands, braced for pain or death or worse, his palms touched cold, rough bark.

I have no damn idea what I'm doing...

... yet his body and mind operated independent of him. His arms stiffened to iron rods as current thrust into his body, and he became aware of another presence, something more than random chaotic power, something thinking, alive, distinctly female. Far more ancient than the squabbling demigods behind him; elemental, and angry, and afraid.

Something unrolled him laying him out flat and scrutinising him; some titanic, irresistible hand. At the same time his field of view expanded, the floor falling away and the crystal walls shooting back, plucking him from mere corporeality and lifting him to something else.

Somewhere far away, music played, ever shifting, soft and scratchy.

"What is this?" He no longer knew if he spoke aloud or in his mind—whether he still had a mouth, or indeed, a mind. He no longer cared.

The answer came from the deep feminine voice. "You should not be here."

"No. No I shouldn't. I should be at home nursing a hangover."

A brief pause. "You should not be here."

Jack let the words come, not resisting, just speaking, trusting. "I had to. You're in danger."

"I cannot be harmed."

"But you can be used, can't you?"

Silence.

Jack tried to look around, but there was nowhere to see, an infinite mash up of many places, what seemed like dozens of places all over the world. Together, they bent into a hyper-dimensional avatar of the tree itself. But as to where he, himself, stood... to think of it suddenly made no sense.

I'm nowhere.

"Everywhere is somewhere," the voice answered.

A ringing echo punctured the din of eternal silence, that of two warring creatures. At a great distance, yet only feet away. Barry cried out, the naked pained sound of a brute shocked to feel true pain, like a grizzly bear stuck with a spear. Harper's echoing laugh followed, high pitched and jeering.

Barry's time was running out.

"He's coming. Harper," Jack said. "You know what he is, don't you? What he wants?"

"I see everything. That is my purpose."

"Help me stop him."

"I can do nothing."

"Then help me help you."

"I can do nothing."

"Then what good are you?" he yelled.

Silence.

Jack took a steadying breath, trying not to wonder if it was air he breathed, or nothingness. "The Web? All Where? Kaard? You know those words?"

The silence almost held, then the voice uttered, "Yes."

"If that thing gets here, it's all over, isn't it?"

"The beginning of the end of a great age."

For the first time Jack caught a glimmer of emotion in the voice, a fear as strong as that he had felt when he had put his hands on the bark. "You have to let me help you. Help me stop him."

"I do not see you."

"I'm here."

"I do not see you."

Jack tried to tear at his hair, but there was no hair to be gripped, nor hands with which to grip. Not here. "I don't have time for riddles!"

The music played still, shifting away from formlessness toward an amalgamation of song lyrics and notes he recognised, dredging up long forgotten memories.

A hopelessness stole over him and he fell away from that voice, turning instead to images appearing all around him. His apartment, empty and bleak in semi darkness, the curtain pulled. All his things, his DVDs and books and video games. His awful mess of unwashed cups and dishes, opened packets of chips strewn on the floor.

Yesterday it had meant everything, his sanctuary from the world, where he had been able to find some peace. But now he saw it for what it was: empty and uncared for, the sad hovel of an owner desperate to escape it. Because that was the truth: he hadn't ever really lived here, he had lived inside books, crawling into the pages to reach the part of himself that all this madness had finally released.

I don't care about this place... This isn't my home.

Had he ever really had a home?

Music again, this time distinct. The punk rock of his youth, then the coarse head-nodding metal of his emo years.

The picture changed, shifting, travelling. Passing a brick wall where a strange tea room had so briefly stood, the cordoned off street where Harper massacred the police. Faces watching, people who might have seen what had happened but had now forgotten, or perhaps never quite understood what they saw. The insanity of the last few days would forever be a smudge in the narrative of their lives, protecting them from the absurdity of something better off lost.

If they lived. If Jack didn't fail.

Travelling again. More music: _Strauss, Verdi, Chopin_ : performances of his university philharmonic. Down into the subway to Kat, crouched in a huddle of shattered tiles and plaster, her hair turned white with dust and her cheek grazed by a stray bullet. Behind her, Gant lay in a bloody pile, and against the far wall, Joblonsky breathed in great heaves, staring wide-eyed at a sucking chest wound.

Kat fired bursts around the corner, holding shadowed forms pinned down on the stairwell. Harper's people. Converts in the employ of his vast empire. Street merchants, clerks, bankers. Hiding in plain sight.

Tears dripped from Kat's nose, but she didn't sob. Her teeth gritted and her eyes like twin pyres in the subway gloom, she held the station.

Jack reached out to her, ignoring the fact he had no arms here, needing to let her know that he saw her, that he was almost there. But as he did so he was whisked away, his sight expanding once more, multi-layered and elevated far above the ground.

It was like looking at all the feeds back at Kat's town house all at once. The Beacons lay spread out before him, along with subtly concealed complexes built into mountainsides and beneath cities. The vaults belched slivers of black smoke, spilling from ragged tears in the ground nearby.

Kat's people had done their work. The vaults were breached.

The music shifted once more: Arabic strings, eerie and smeared. The memory of buskers' tunes from all the nights he had sat drunk on the last train home.

Around the Beacons' bases, men and women stood in wide circles, hands linked together, their eyes closed. What had Harper told them? That they would be saved when the End came?

The End... It's really here. One bad step, and I lose. We all lose. It all goes away.

"See me, you have to see me!"

Barry. Fighting for his world, for fallen Highcourt, for All Where. As Jack looked upon him, Barry felt Jack watching. It showed on his face, a flicker in his brow. Skidding back from Harper's blows, he looked right at Jack, into him.

The defensive edge to his stance slackened in that moment, as though some revelation had come over him. He stood straighter, smiling. _It's on you, Jacky Boy._

Barry, Kaard, the Scot-but-not, smiled right until Harper's clawed arm sank through the oxblood leather over his back, and plunged into his torso. Barry's eyes bulged in their sockets, his mouth falling open in a blank gape. A terrible tearing sound came from inside him and he jerked as Harper skipped almost daintily up to stand at his back, canines working in a glistening grin.

"No!" Jack struggled to get back, to leave this non place and return. Screw the universe.

But it was like trying to move an amputated arm. He was trapped. He could only watch.

Harper whispered in Barry's ear, something so quiet Jack knew he shouldn't have been able to hear. But he heard very well. "Did you tell the boy what you tell them all? That we don't die? That we live forever?"

Another minute tug, and a tiny gurgle whistled from Barry's throat.

"I bet they all believed you, even this one. He's a bright spark. Power like that will come in handy. I'll enjoy taking him apart piece by piece." Harper peered over Barry's shoulder to look Jack in the eye. Black liquid dribbled from Barry's lips. Harper smiled. "We live forever, huh? Let's see what happens to an _immortal_ when you take away his heart."

With a ruthless lunge, Harper tore his arm back, coming out glistening red and black. Barry fell straight forward, a lifeless mass, slamming full length upon the crystal floor.

Jack felt him go. The last transmission he got from Barry almost destroyed him.

I'm afraid.

Everything faded, a grey curtain cascading down from the heavens. Barry's prone body, lying in a pool of spreading black tar on the crystal ground, sank into a grim fuzzy blankness.

It took everything Jack had to resist, and no small part wanted to surrender and go to that blissful nothing.

But Barry's last thought refused to fade like the rest, echoing down along with him. _I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid._

Each iteration brought a gnawing in Jack's heart ever more bitter, and with it, the realisation that he was gone. The Scot-but-not, his captor, his nuisance, his comrade and protector, was gone.

Jack alone remained against the monster.

"No!" he grated, pulling himself back. Fear threatened to overwhelm him if he delayed, but he would not, could not. With an internal bellow he threw everything he had into the darkness.

See me. See me. SEE ME!

Some lumbering attention high above his perception shifted, a vast eye turning on him.

The music changed again. Familiar now, familiar enough to pull cords in his chest. Billie Holiday, _My Man_ , so smooth and sweet that his mother appeared before him as though she had stepped from the ether in flesh and blood. This was her song, had always been her song. She had danced to this while doing the housework when Jack had been a young boy—young enough that his memory's perspective was only two feet off the ground.

The great eye blinked, watching. Jack felt it move over him, inside him, pulling out strings of memory and reading him like a book. All the while the music changed.

Since the madness had started, power had leaked from some hidden place within. By the time he hit the cavern floor, he could _do_ things, things even Barry could not. Yet right now, pinned in place like an insect under a collector's magnifying glass, he had never felt so powerless.

_No, that's a lie_ , he thought. He had felt like this, once. Another memory popped into his head. The summer of '95, the year they moved to Minnesota. His first week at school had been hell, a maelstrom of taunting gaggles of kids, Chinese burns, and taking soccer balls to the head.

"Don't give them anything to use," his father had said from behind the morning newspaper. "Don't stand out. Just fit in for once, won't you, Jack? Try, at least, for your old man? Seeing you get your ass handed to you every week is giving me an ulcer."

He had taken a great slurp of black coffee and the end of that little speech. Jack had sat across from him, nibbling his toast, nursing grazes from his latest pounding at the hands of Harry Bentmann's gang. He remembered every detail, because the music now trickling from the ether was the very same record that had been playing on the radio. Pink Floyd's _Another Brick in the Wall._

Jack wondered if his father ever got the irony.

His mother stood at the counter, frying eggs. She had looked at him with a softness in her eyes he had never seen before or since, a moment when perhaps she showed a hidden part of herself underneath, wanting more for him. Her lips parted, then closed.

She never said anything.

Voices in the void. The whispers that had bound Harper, now speaking as one, screaming song titles seeded throughout his life: _Blue Moon, Paradise City, I'm Alive, Suspicious Minds, Summertime!_

Images came fast, rolling together like a spliced reel of film. Running from Harry and his gang, shielding a copy of _Fahrenheit 451_ from the eggs they pelted at him. All those nights hiding under the covers in a cloud of dragons and sorcery, while his friends tried for second base. Leaving Minnesota behind, stepping on the Greyhound to head out East.

_See me!_ he screamed into the dark.

One Day I'll Fly Away, I'm a Believer, I Will Survive!

All his life, it had been wrong. But now it was right.

A life spent living for one moment. And that moment was now.

He stared down a deep dark well at a small boy. Himself. His inner, real self, the over-imaginative little kid he had been in '95, who he had so long tried to forget. In his palm, little Jack held a bob on a string, swinging back and forth. Hanging from the pendulum, a tiny black spider, spinning a delicate, intricate web.

SEE ME!

Swirling, tumbling, the whispers became a wail, stretched cackling undulating between pinhole squeak and leonine roar. "Hit the road, Jack _—HAPPY JACK—Jack Daniels, if you please!—_ JUMPIN' JACK FLASH!"

With a deafening _whump_ , silence exploded into the void. Then, the deep voice spoke a final time. "I see you, Jack Shannon."

A tug yanked at his spine, pulling him in a direction that human beings could not be pulled. Elation filled him.

I've done it!

Then another grip, cold and crushing, upon his wrist. Agony lanced up into his chest. Bones snapped. Then, Harper's voice in his ear. "Yes, you have. Congratulations. Now let's go for a ride together."

A scream kicked up all around him, and Jack knew it was the tree. He had come so close, so very close. But things had just gone very, very wrong.

Nononononono!

But it was too late. Black and white exploded from the space between spaces, and Jack was torn, body and mind, somewhere altogether, elsewhere.

# 23

Reality itself fractured and Jack Shannon flew, through space beyond spaces. Bent through impossible angles and cast across a gulf that could not be traversed by any mortal in a million years, he flew. His screams warped, his body tortured by deathly cold, he fought a viscous struggle with the demon that had seized his arm.

As he and Harper tumbled and clawed at one another, lights screamed overhead. Stars, entire worlds complete with landmasses and oceans and clouds, glorious nebulae light-years across. Great multitudes passing in cascades so great they blurred into one continuous stream, all the while turning, rending.

"Stop it, stop it, take me back, let me go!"

Jack heard the voice only on the periphery of his perception. It took a moment to recognise that it was his own, the mindless bawling of a lost child.

The fireflies in the night whipped by only faster, a screeching hail of cosmic enormity so great that his mind simply gave up, ceased counting or even seeing. Jumbled sensory bilge passed before him in meaningless flux, faster and faster, until the lights finally grew farther apart, the screaming quieted, and Harper's rattling breaths consumed the void.

Then, suddenly and absolutely, all was still, and at peace.

Frost covered Jack's skin in a suit of snowflakes. His wrist was whole, and Harper stood on the other side of the tree, which had appeared once more—a much smaller version of the black thing in the cavern, no larger than a Bonsai, made of a single piece of glowing purple crystal.

They observed one another, two entities with the fate of worlds in their hands. Harper wore none of his outer skin now. Before Jack stood a naked, milky-skinned creature akin to a deep-sea fish, an agent of the unbeing.

"So," Harper said.

"So."

A smile, perhaps. It was hard to tell. Harper no longer had lips. "How does it feel, to stand there and know all you can do is watch—"

"We blew the vaults." Jack let his words work their way into the holes in Harper's head that served as ears. The smarmy sneer vanished. Jack went on. "We took down your people at the Beacons, too. All that talk about your new world order? There won't be anybody left. They'll go along with the rest of us."

Jack was already on the way to folding his arms in triumph when Harper started laughing.

"You have no idea what you've done, do you?" His laugh doubled when Jack failed to answer. "You have no idea where you've led me!"

Jack searched inside his head, trying to _flex_ , to reach out to something, the tree, anything. But there was nothing here, nothing to help him. He was on his own.

"I have power that makes the fools of your world quake in their little cotton socks," Harper hissed, taking a single step to the side. Jack took a counter step in the opposite direction. "But you... you're one in an age. I could never get to this place alone. I can't thank you enough for bringing me here."

Jack's knees tried to buckle. Only by thinking of Kat's tear-stained face, and Barry's lifeless corpse, did he keep standing. He and Harper circled one another, one foot passing over the other.

"I'll stop you. You said it yourself, I have the power." He glanced at the tree. "I won't let you do this."

Harper tittered, feinting a little to the right, laughing with spite when Jack jumped. "You don't have _that_ kind of power." He moved again, and Jack was ready for another feint, but this time Harper's body became a blur. Like liquid poured from a glass, he rushed around the tree in a smear of limbs and appeared snarling, a vision of hell-fire, in front of Jack's face. "This is _my_ power." His hand closed over Jack's throat, and tore him towards the tree.

Jack gargled. There was no pain here, not in this place, but he felt himself grow fainter, dim just like Barry had done. The throbbing little crystal tree floated closer despite his struggling, so pathetic and futile against the unbreakable clamp around his neck.

"Now, it's time to do what you were made for: serve my master." Harper paused, considering playfully, and turned Jack's head to face him. " _Our_ master. Isn't that right?" He nodded Jack's head and the two of them were joined in horrific pantomime, puppet and puppeteer; a sad show on the edge of the universe.

I'm totally alone, now.

Harper arched an eyebrow, hearing every note. "Yes. You are." He turned them both back to the tree. "Now let's clean up that nasty infestation we have back home. Too many people, _tsk tsk tsk._ It just won't do."

He gripped Jack's hand and forced it out in front of them.

Jack struggled desperately, and for a while he was indeed able to resist, a fact that caused Harper to snarl with unfettered fury, all his suave charm stripped away along with his pretty mask. They wobbled precariously, joined like lovers, hands clasped, reaching and leaning.

But there was no stopping it. Inexorably, his fingertips inched down onto the sparkling branches.

Jack shook his head. "No, I don't understand. Why me? Tell me. You owe me that!"

"Uh huh. And this is the part where you stall me, and I tell you my evil plans until you find a way out. Sorry, kid. The real world doesn't play nice."

Jack's hand touched the tree.

Cold more intense than any flame lanced up his arm, filling his body. With it came knowledge, the whole story, unveiled and bare, laid out like a book. A place of eternal darkness lay spread before him, the source of all the blackness of All Where. Somewhere nearby, something swung back and forth, back and forth, a steady rhythm driving every clock's gear wheel, every moment that ever was.

Something lurked in this space, filling it yet lost amongst it, imprisoned in this placeless nothing for so long that even divine things of purity and light had become tyrannical, twisted, and insane—even angels.

"See your people's new home," Harper said joyously. "My master has held the pendulum's swing for far too long. Now its burden will be theirs, slaves to its weight for all time."

"This is where we're going, where you're sending us all."

"Sorry, boy, there was never any stopping me."

Jack shook his head, only a little at first but then vehemently, enough to jar them both. "No. You're a maggot." He saw so far, finally saw the forces at play; like the vast eye that had turned on him, he felt the attentions of entities that dwarfed the stars turn upon him. "You're nothing. That's why you could only tip the scales and kill my world."

Harper grunted, close at Jack's shoulder. "I am doing this, you hear? I am doing this to you and everyone you ever met. I am taking everything, from all of you." A hungry growl rattled deep in his chest. "And with your help, now I can do so much more. Like you say, before I could only tip the scales. With you, I can cut out the middle man. I'll tear it all down at once."

Jack knew it could happen. He had that power inside him. If Harper had brought the End down over the Earth, it would have destabilised things, thrown out of balance a precarious peace.

But Jack's connection to the Web had taken him to this place, a place nobody should ever be able to get to. And Harper had followed. That meant all bets were off. None of the rules applied. The slide that might have been started by Harper's work would become a crashing cascade.

The entire Web, all places, all times, All Where, would fall.

Then Jack was laughing. "No. No, you're nothing. They'll cast you aside as soon as your work is done."

He had eyes only for the tree. Its voice was mute here, but he heard it all the same. It spoke to him through the light. There was a chance. But it meant big sacrifices.

The tree's radiance throbbed ever more powerful, leeching into Jack's flesh, consuming it. His arm had started to crystallise, becoming one with the tree. And as it did so, it whispered to him, and he knew what he had to do.

"I see now," he said, knowing that nobody heard him. It didn't matter. He said it anyway. Countless lives rode on these moments, and though nobody would ever know what happened here, it was right that somebody had spoken.

Harper flinched back from the encroaching crystal, almost losing hold of Jack. He hissed.

Jack laughed harshly in his face. "I see you." He nodded to the tree. "We both see you very well." He leaned close to a set of teeth that could have stripped the meat from his bones in a flash, and said, "I see your fear."

Harper didn't move. "Enough of this. Enough!" He took hold of Jack harder, pressing Jack's hand back down. "Now you realise what you are," he whispered. "Congratulations, boy, you get to end not just your own world, but all worlds."

Jack waited.

Barry was wrong. It was never about winning or saving the world. It was bigger than that.

"I'm sorry for what you are," Jack said at the last moment before the crystalline growths reached Harper's fingertips. Then the creature squealed, smoke rising before them, the crystal shrinking back from him like water around a rock.

"What is this?" he screeched.

"You didn't know when you followed me, did you?"

Shock beamed out from those cold beady eyes.

"The reason you could never get to this place is that you can't touch it directly, not without it destroying you."

Harper jerked fitfully beside him. "No, no!"

Jack held them. Harper had pulled him within reach of the tree like a rag doll, but now the balance of power shifted. He knew now, and with knowledge came power. Coupled with the creature's very mortal fear, he held their hands but inches from the crystal.

"I see it all, now."

" _Let me go!_ "

Jack's mind shimmered with untold leagues of images, each as clear as the devil beside him.

All across the world, people woke or turned in, worked in fields and laughed on beaches, screamed and cried, fought and died, were born and made love, read and imagined, destroyed and created. They would never see it coming.

It was he who would make it happen, to save countless more. His world was doomed either way. But, somewhere, things would go on.

Harper fought like a wild animal, clawing and biting and spitting. But not one blow made a mark. "What are you doing?"

"What I'm meant to."

"It'll destroy us both, fool!"

"I know."

Jack's fingers drifted closer, stopped and trembled, then approached once more. The battle for entire worlds, concentrated through a single hand.

Harper's breaths came ragged and feral in his ear. "You cannot do this. You cannot. I forbid it." The voice grew enormous, lost between the nasal protests of a toddler, and hurricane gales. "I was young when the first slime crawled from the oceans. I commanded legions of shadow. You will not be the end of me. I FORBID IT. I COMMAND YOU!"

Jack smiled, and wishing upon all the people about to lose their lives, looked into Harper's eyes. "Go fuck yourself."

His fingertips touched the crystal. "Forgive me," he whispered.

Then it all went away.

# 24

The same scream that had wailed from the radio blared from the ether, pressing in so hard Jack was sure his eardrums would perforate. But he couldn't move, held frozen in place, his body one with the crystal.

Harper screamed, a naked high-pitched sound that would never end. His pale skin fell away, exposing muscle and tendon, steaming and blackening as the crystal spread, spinning him all the while, combusted dust drifting up, twirling and vanishing.

In Jack's mind, a film reel spooled to life, and a green witch wailed in tandem with the agonised creature. _I'm melting, melting!_

Milton Harper's ashes were scattered by some unseen, disgusted power, to the far reaches of All Where. His screams, the terrible conscious knowing of coming oblivion, didn't stop until the last fragment of bone puffed away.

Sweet silence reigned in his wake, and All Where grew an infinitesimal shade brighter.

Then with infinite sorrow, that same presence turned upon Jack, a great and noble creature of compound eyes and many giant, furry legs. It laid a gentle touch upon him, and did the duty to which it was bound, bringing ruin down upon the Earth.

*

The End struck at 04:15 EST, on June 3rd. Jack watched through an infinitude of hidden windows, saw the apocalypse from enough perspectives to see every expression, every surprised gasp. The world over, seven billion people paused, caught in a momentary paroxysm of bone-chilling cold, and pain. Then, as one, they vanished.

The Frost did its work.

In its wake, the world was left silent, broken and scattered. Harper had told no lies: every piece of digital memory had been erased, every radio frequency consumed by the ethereal scream of the crystal cavern.

From a single impossible step away, Jack Shannon watched the Earth purged of life. He was somewhere else yet again, the tree gone, all sources of light, gone.

He was back in that place, the awful dark place where the swinging behemoth oscillated, unseen. Carpeting its surface, stretching away into infinity, naked and writhing and screaming, billions of people roiled before him.

They held it now, the terrible weight of the cosmos.

But it was nothing to his burden, the guilt of having put them there. His family were out there, Kat and all those who had fought against this for so long. It had all come to nothing.

Jack wept against unseen walls, suspended above them in a transparent cage, his prison, condemned to watch them slave under the awful strain. "Forgive me!"

# 25

The balance was broken.

Harper hadn't lied about that. Jack might have stopped the Fall, for now. But something was wrong. That much was obvious.

Seven billion souls had been shackled in place of something out there, something that, while still bound to this place, now knew some measure of freedom for the first time in the age of all the stars in the heavens. And it was angry—a rage that permeated every inch of this place, choking him.

He watched the writhing bodies for a long time. He didn't bother to gauge how long. Somewhere between seconds and years. Yet no matter how long he stared in his little box and watched, it grew no less painful, the guilt raged just as strong like hot lead through his veins, and it seemed no less weird that this could have happened.

Even here, stripped of the very Earth itself, slaves transported to labour a colony at the end of the universe, it was weird. Some things just were.

He couldn't help them, couldn't even be among them. His punishment was to watch them struggle under the unbearable strain.

For evermore, he would watch.

"Not quite, forever," said a voice.

Jack whirled to the darkness. For a moment, nothing. Then a figure emerged from the shadow as a magician steps from behind a curtain. A man, slim and tall and pale, his face a chimera of benign benevolence and predatory leer. Under each eye, dark streaks like ruined mascara marked his cheeks.

He bowed majestically.

"Who are you?"

"A friend. Call me Fol."

"What kind of name is that?"

He smiled. "A bad one. Such is the nature of Highcourt—was." A note of pain passed his face, fracturing his refined theatricality.

"You're from Highcourt?"

A nod.

Jack waited.

"It's all gone, now. Only a handful are left, hiding... out there." He gestured skyward—what had been skyward, before the darkness.

Jack watched him for a long time, unmoving. "Leave me alone," he said at last.

He turned to the writhing Vanished.

Footsteps behind him like pebbles plopping into a well.

Jack put a hand against the invisible wall separating him from his parents, family, childhood friends, everyone in all the world. "Who are you?"

A flash of something reached him, not spoken but thought. A transmission from the newcomer.

I still have it. Even now, I still have the power.

He glanced at Fol. "Jester? You're a jester?"

Fol cocked an eyebrow. "You heard that?"

"I hear a lot of things." Jack blinked. "You let this happen."

"We had to. I'm sure you know by now, there are rules to abide by, unbreakable rules. Kaard was the only one close enough to get to you in time. But a lot of what happened could have been avoided. This has been a long time coming. We made mistakes, we grew lazy." He paused. " _I_ made mistakes."

Jack turned away.

I don't care. I don't care. Just leave me be.

"I can't help them," he said hollowly.

"No."

"I put them all here."

"You saved so much more."

Jack swallowed audibly, a golf ball blossoming in his throat. "I don't care."

Ponderous footsteps behind him. "What would you say if I told you there _was_ a way...? A way to undo all this, to stop them for good?"

"I thought it was done?"

"You know they've changed things. The End was just the beginning."

A long silence. "What can you do?"

" _We._ We can fight this. It'll be a long road, and dangerous, and we'll likely fail. But there is a chance."

Jack sat slowly, crossing his legs, suddenly feeling very old. "I'm done being a pawn. He warned me this would happen, before it all started, he warned me that we never last. Us," he spat out a bastardised laugh, " _creatures of destiny._ "

Fol gestured to the nothingness around them. "Yet here you are."

"And where might that be?"

"Besides the point. The point is that you are. And the Web needs you just as much as it always has."

"I saw what's out there when I touched the tree. I didn't understand, but I felt it." He shook his head. "I don't think even you really know how deep this goes. I can't do anything against that."

"None of us can ever do anything alone. That's why I'm going to bring you together."

"Who?"

"The End wasn't total. The world goes on." The man strolled around to his side, peering down with his head cocked to the side. "The ones we need are out there, somewhere. Like you said, Jack: creatures of destiny."

Jack grunted, almost turned his back. Then an echo on the edge of audibility flickered way down in that secret place, where he had once travelled amongst the pages of so many books; the whispering echo of a bearded fool.

The Web always gives a way.

Jack turned his back instead on the Vanished. "What do we do?"

Fol took a step closer. In his sparkling lupine eyes blazed a flame Jack recognised. He recognised it well.

The Jester of Highcourt smiled wide, and leaned in close. "We're going to save the bloody world."

# THE END WAS JUST THE BEGINNING

The story doesn't end here. _The Ruin Saga_ is a post-apocalyptic fantasy trilogy that follows on from where _Frost_ left off.

Decades after the apocalypse, a heretical group of intellectuals, hell-bent preserving civilization and fighting the advance of a new dark age, inadvertently spark a war with a country in the grips of famine, and encounter supernatural forces that may destroy what remains of the Old World forever.

Get ready for post-apocalyptic mayhem, supernatural horrors, and a classic battle between good and evil.

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# RUIN SAGA BOXSET

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# COPYRIGHT

Frost

by Harry Manners

First published 2015 by Radden Press.

All characters in this novel are entirely fictitious, as are the events portrayed. Any resemblance to persons living, dead or imaginary is coincidental.

All rights reserved. This ebook is for personal use only; whilst the author's works are published DRM-free, it is hoped that readers will purchase their own copies, and will not resort to unlicensed usage. Sharing books without purchasing may deprive the author of owed royalties.

Copyright © Harry Manners 2015.

Cover design by Levente Szabo.

Edited by Red Adept Publishing

# ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Harry Manners lives in Bedfordshire, England. When he's not writing, he studies science at university, reads anything he can get his hands on, and generally nerds out—for which he is staunchly unapologetic.

Website: www.harrymanners.com

Facebook page: www.facebook.com/OfficialHarryManners

Twitter: @harry_a_manners
