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Prologue: To Fear a Painted Devil
Her face is an open book. For all that, it is not easily read. Anger is implicit in the downwards slash of the eyebrows, the knot in the freckled throat, and of course the clenching of the fist. But the remarkable eyes stare out past the onlooker. Whatever she sees, it is not he.
The rest of the composition yields no clues. Indeed, the artist has made of the pale woman a compelling formal study in absences and vacancies. The central blank, the thin oblong shadow between her teeth, is taken up, as the observer’s eye moves outward, by the spiky void of the long dark hair. This, in turn, arrows attention to the furthest corners of the canvas, from which it returns frustrated, none the wiser as to what provoked her anger, or whose blood marks her hand.
Across the studio, framed by the sky, sits the man with the empty Modigliani eyes. His gaze is turned upon his work – an interior scene, black ink on white paper. At the centre of this picture, another woman leans over a table. Her gaze is turned upon her work – a slender cylinder, its outline wavy with wires.
“She is cute, but she looks sad.”
The artist started, and dropped his brush.
“You draw good tech, Peter Petrelli. Like Pérez, in Crisis on Infinite Earths. You know Crisis?”
Peter scratched his head, and glanced ruefully at the small man who was peering through thick glasses over his shoulder.
“I think one crisis is enough, Hiro.” Peter picked up the brush and wiped it. “Don’t you ever knock?”
Hiro Nakamura looked abashed. “It is not easy to knock on the spacetime continuum.”
“I guess not. How’s Molly holding up?”
“OK, I think.” A frown scrunched Hiro’s face. “We have let her get too good at being brave for us.”
Peter sighed. “Yeah, we kinda have.” He looked down at the roll in Hiro’s hand. “Could she Find them?”
“Yes. They are…” Hiro braked sharply to avoid a looming phoneme, and scurried to stand by a world map on the wall.
“…there.”
Peter rose to join him, and looked at where he was pointing.
“That’s… unexpected.”
“These are strange times, Peter Petrelli.” Hiro nodded in what he hoped was a sage-like fashion. “I have crossed the Earth, since it began. Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, Buenos Aires… Everywhere it is the same.”
Peter continued to stare at the wall. “The clocks?”
“Everywhere.” Hiro shivered. “The world is broken.”
The taller man gripped his shoulder. “Then let’s go find the people who can fix it.”
Silence again in the empty studio. Even the open window admits no sound. The streets of New York, far below, are deserted.
No one wants to be outside when the Folding starts.
1. Best of Strangers
The fleeting giddiness of the jump passed. Hiro opened his eyes. Then he opened them some more.
He was standing in a cavernous room. Not just a room – a Base. A real, honest-to-God Base. Hiro was no stranger to covert installations now; he had seen Primatech’s most secret vaults. This was what Primatech wanted to be when it grew up.
There were convolutions of enigmatic tech, some of them almost as high as the ceiling. There were computer consoles, displaying a Cool Blue Squiggly Screen-Saver of Coolness. There was an entirely gratuitous water feature.
Hiro decided that he could die now.
“This place is coo…”
A palm clamped down on his mouth. Hiro briefly glimpsed Peter using his free hand to make a shushing gesture. Then he disappeared.
For a confused moment Hiro thought that his companion had teleported, even though bending spacetime, a talent Peter had not really mastered, was a matter usually left to him. Then he realized that the grip on his jaw was unabated. Hiro looked down, and was not surprised not to see himself.
On the other side of the room, an enormous cog-wheel door, which he had almost failed to spot in the general Geek Chic overload of his surroundings, rolled to one side. A suited man and a woman cradling a cell phone to her ear walked in. Peter’s unseen hold tightened at Hiro’s start of recognition.
“… a star for putting up with this, Andy. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s sorted. Bye.” The woman snapped her phone shut and kneaded her forehead. “Tell me we have some good news, Ianto.”
The suited man, now standing at a terminal, looked up. “In a word: no. We do, however, have sixteen messages from UNIT.” He glanced back at the screen, frowned, and scribbled on a pad. “These are the contingencies they want to activate.” He shoved the pad across the table, and stalked across the room. Hiro cringed backwards at his passing.
The woman scanned the paper, and whistled softly through her teeth. “I see what you mean.” She looked up. “I thought we already told them that we’re not responsible for this.”
“We did.” The man had started rummaging around in a cupboard. “The general tone of their messages could be characterized as ‘sceptical’. One might even go so far as to say, ‘incredulous’.”
“I can see their point. It’s not like our track record inspires confidence.” The woman bit her lip. “We didn’t do this, did we, Ianto? It’s just… The whole world’s going to shit… all at once… and then there’s the thing with the clocks… It just feels like this ought to be something to do with the Rift.”
“I know.” The man grunted with satisfaction, as if he had found what he was looking for. “But all the readings say it isn’t. Besides, Emergency Protocol One doesn’t happen by accident. You probably noticed the distinct absence of Great Old Ones eating Cardiff.”
“True. Anyway, first things first. Where are they standing?”
“Next to the fern.” The man called Ianto, now modelling a rather unusual looking pair of goggles, was aiming a gun at Hiro’s head. “Welcome to Torchwood, gentlemen. I’m sure that this thermal imaging equipment doesn’t do you justice, so I’d be obliged if you slipped into a more comfortable spectrum.”
“Do as he says.” The woman was also pointing a gun in the general direction of Peter and Hiro. “And keep your hands where we can see them. Er, when we can see them.”
Peter faded into view, his hands raised. Hiro hastened to follow suit. The woman walked slowly towards them, the gun dropping unheeded to her side.
“You…”
Hiro smiled nervously. “Um, yes.” He straightened his back. “My name is…”
The two travellers had just enough time to share a moment of déjà vu before Gwen Cooper punched Hiro hard in the face.
*****
Being decked, unlike, say, eating fugu, is not an experience that improves with repetition.
Scary Picture Lady was now looming over him. Hiro wondered groggily whether Peter would try to finish this quickly. Things which Peter finished quickly often featured words like “half-life”, “fallout”, and all the other creepy kennings of the Nuclear Age on their end credits. This in mind, Hiro struggled back to a sitting position.
“Why did you hit him?” demanded Peter. Gwen continued to stare wordlessly down at Hiro.
“She’s angry,” said Ianto.
“Why did you let her?”
Ianto shrugged. “Did I say that I’m not?”
“Please, you must listen.” Talking worsened the pain in Hiro’s jaw, but he persevered: “My name is Hiro Nakamura and I can…”
“… bend space and time?” Ianto moved back into the middle of the Hub. “We know.”
Gwen’s eyes were searching Hiro’s face. “But you don’t know we know…” she murmured.
“…which means that this could be complicated.” Ianto frowned. “I may have to draw a diagram.”
Peter looked from one Torchwood operative to the other. “How do you know who he is?”
“‘Who you are’, you mean, Peter Petrelli.” Gwen heaved a sigh, and then held out a hand to Hiro, which he warily accepted. “And don’t go thinking I’m any happier with you. I just knew that his face would stay broken.”
“The attention to such details is why we love her.” Ianto extended his own hand to Peter. “Ianto Jones. The lady with the lethal right is Gwen Cooper, acting head of Torchwood Three.”
Peter raised an eyebrow. “’Acting’?”
Ianto’s face darkened. “Our Commanding Officer is… missing. Presumed not dead.” He exchanged glances with Gwen, then cleared his throat. “What brings you to Torchwood?”
Peter swallowed. “You knew who we are, what we can do, and where we were standing when we arrived. I’m kinda surprised you have to ask.”
“We didn’t know it was you two when you turned up, actually.” Gwen hauled Hiro to his feet, and perched on a desk. “That was down to the Hub’s motion detectors. Ianto saw that we had a pair of intruders when he checked his terminal.”
“But how did you know we were here?” Hiro asked, shuffling with elaborate nonchalance away from Gwen.
“Ianto wrote me a note, didn’t he? Never underestimate the power of stationery.”
“I see. Could I have some ice, please?”
“All in good time.” Gwen drew her knees up in front of her. “You still haven’t answered Ianto’s question, Mr. Petrelli. Why did you come to Cardiff?”
“Pictures.”
Gwen looked puzzled. “I’m sorry?”
“You don’t know about the pictures?” Peter studied Gwen’s expression. Her surprise seemed entirely genuine. “There was an artist, Isaac Mendez. He was different - like me and Hiro. Everything he painted came true. I… knew him for a while, before he died. So, because of the way I am…”
“… you can paint things that come true as well.” Gwen nodded. “I think that I see where this is heading.”
“When the trouble began, all across the world, I started painting. No one knew what was going on; it seemed like the only thing that I could do to help. But the things I was painting made no sense.”
“Shall I show them?” asked Hiro.
“Please.”
Hiro reached behind himself and untied the long tube that was strapped to his back, beside the scabbard of his katana. Relieved to see that it had suffered no damage from his fall, he took off the lid and extracted a roll of canvas. The Torchwood two craned to see as he smoothed out the painting on a desk. Gwen’s eyes widened.
“No. Oh Jesus God, no.”
“It adds up.” Ianto’s voice too was low and distracted. “Chaos and destruction… Mere anarchy loose upon the world… The clocks… But how’s he doing it? The Rift is steady, so how the Hell’s he doing it?”
The canvas had disclosed an urban scene. The palette is heavy with greys and blacks, relieved by the white uplifted face of the woman on the left. The other three figures stand in shade. For the most part, the artist has been content with the merest hints at their features: the red blob of a knotted tie on one of the taller men; the curve of a sable eyebrow on the other; the jagged hair of their short companion, who shows the viewer a sword-encumbered back. The hilt of the sword draws the gaze up, to the shop-sign above the fourth figure’s head. On this, for all the congregated shadow of the scene, the lettering is clear:
A Stitch in Time
2. Between the Ticks
“His name is Bilis.” Gwen looked up and down the darkening street. “Bilis Manger. We aren’t sure what he is. Apart from a psychopathic reality-warping little piece of shit. We know for a fact he’s that.”
“There it is,” Ianto pointed.
Gwen shaded her eyes against the setting sun. “Good spot, Ianto. It had to be somewhere along here. You can tell from where the Castle is in Peter’s picture.”
“I thought that you had seen this shop before.” Hiro was trotting to keep up.
“We did. It was somewhere else back then.”
“He changed premises?”
“He moved the shop. It’s the kind of stunt he pulls.”
“Why do you think he’s behind the Folding?” asked Peter. “Why would anyone want to make that happen?”
Gwen glanced back over her shoulder at the young American. “Say ‘peppermint’, Peter.”
“Huh?”
“Humour me here.”
Peter eyed her narrowly. “OK… Peppermint.”
“Now say it again, ten times, fast.”
“I don’t see what…”
“Do it, please.”
Peter shrugged. “Fine… peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint peppermint.”
“Starts sounding weird, doesn’t it? As if the word stops meaning anything when you say it too many times.”
“Kinda.”
“That’s what I think it’s like in Bilis’s head. He’s been around for so long, seen so much, that somewhere along the line all the meaning sluiced straight out of his world. Apocalypse just got easy. Does that make sense?”
Peter shivered. “Way, way too much.”
“I thought it might. Here we are.”
Hiro, looking up at the sign above his head (on this, for all the congregated shadow of the scene, the lettering is clear), was assailed by a moment’s vertigo, and clutched at the canvas between his hands. Odd to think that that black scabbarded back hid the view of another picture, in which the black scabbarded back hid the view of another picture, in which…
“Don’t.” Gwen’s hand, the knuckles still barked and bruised, was surprisingly gentle on his arm. “That’s the way Bilis gets to you. Has you running circles in your head, wondering what would have happened if… Second-guessing yourself to death.”
Hiro squared his shoulders. “I am ready.”
“Good man,” said Ianto, drawing a gun. “Right. Gwen and I are armed, but you two are…”
The bloody light of the dying sun pooled on the blade of Hiro’s drawn katana. Peter stroked a thought of malice and let Elle’s lightning crackle between his fingers.
“… really armed, so I say we go for the classic frontal assault. The most tooled-up ever visit to a clock shop.”
“Works for me.” Gwen hefted her own gun. Standing to one side, she pushed open the door.
*****
Hiro could not help but feel that the bad-assed SWAT assault vibe the four of them had got going here was not assisted by the jingle of the small bell above the door.
The dim chamber beyond looked densely packed. This was annoying. The katana, as Hiro well knew (less from his training in swordplay than from his exhaustive acquaintance with Kill Bill: Vol. 2) is not optimized for fighting in confined spaces.
Then he saw what objects packed the room. The shop was full to the rafters with clocks. And at that point it was hard to look at anything else, because the clocks here were like every other timepiece now on the face of the Earth.
The clocks were melting. Those that did not droop from the walls lolled languidly on tables or the floor. As Ianto closed the door, Hiro saw them ripple for a moment, before their prior limpidity was restored.
“Ms. Cooper. A pleasure, as always. The bloom of matrimony becomes you, my dear.” From the back of the room, a slight suited figure moved into the light. “I trust that Mr. Williams is still in fine fettle?”
Gwen looked stonily at the old man in the opulent cravat, then surprised Hiro by flashing a smile. “Rhys is fine, Bilis. Still spending all our hard-earned lolly on groceries, mind. Speaking of which, I hear Tesco’s is doing a special offer on clapped-out demon gods. You want to head down to the Roath Metro sharpish and see if you can fix yourself up with a new one.”
“You’ve brought friends.” Bilis’s eyes darted over Hiro and Peter. “How delightful. Would they be the new recruits? Torchwood has such trouble holding on to staff these days. Why, now even the dashing Captain Harkness is…”
“What’s your game this time, Bilis?” The strange accent these people had, which Hiro had previously noticed more in Gwen’s speech than in Ianto’s, broadened in the young man’s voice as his gun-hand inched higher.
Bilis regarded him with pursed lips. “And what, Mr. Jones, makes you think that this game is mine?”
Ianto’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll tell us now, you creepy little bastard, or so help me I’ll…”
Bilis vanished. Hiro, more as a reflex than anything else, put the universe on pause. Peering around, in the sacral hush of the world between the ticks, he was very glad that he had.
The old man now stood, his right arm outstretched, some paces behind Ianto. Between them, a throwing dagger hung suspended. Its blade glinted a scant six inches from the Welshman’s back.
“Nice catch, Hiro.” Peter pulled the knife out of the air and laid it carefully on a table. “I don’t know about you, but these people are really starting to freak me out. If it wasn’t for the pictures, I’d…”
Peter saw Hiro’s expression, and heard the sound of slow, measured applause from behind him. He turned around.
Bilis stopped clapping and peered at the two men with his head cocked on one side. “Delicious. After so very long, something entirely new.”
“What’s going on here?” Out of the corner of his eye, Peter could see Hiro assuming a defensive stance.
“Again, this curious assumption that I have a monopoly on secrets.” Bilis perched himself primly in a leather armchair, and folded his hands. “Torchwood are fine ones to talk. Though for now, at least, they are struck mercifully dumb.”
Hiro looked round the room. Once again, he saw how inept was the metaphor of frozen time. There was nothing glacial about Gwen’s sideways squint of concern at the expression on Ianto’s face. They were not frozen, just… suspended. No matter how often he did this, he never got used to the blank intensity of people’s intercepted gazes.
“And then there’s you, Mr. Petrelli. How trustworthy can your new allies really think you? After all,” Bilis smiled thinly, “they don’t know you from Adam.”
“But you do know what’s going on.” Peter raised his hand. “Don’t make us make you talk.”
“Even you are ill-placed to achieve that, Mr. Petrelli. But I am disposed to offer a trade.”
“You want to cut a deal with us?”
“Not with you, Mr. Petrelli. With Mr. Nakamura.”
Hiro gazed impassively at the figure in the chair. “What is your ‘deal’?”
Bilis leaned backwards. “I shall give you the information you desire. In return, you will perform a task for me.”
Hiro frowned. “A task?”
“In the Boardroom, at the heart of Torchwood’s Hub, there sits a flower, a lily, to be exact, in a glass vase. You will take this lily, Hiro Nakamura, and you will carry it with you, until you meet the first woman (our dear Ms. Cooper excepted), who says my name in your presence. Then you will give it to her.”
Hiro’s frown deepened. “Just that?”
“Just that. I should add, however, that this errand demands absolute discretion. Neither you nor Mr. Petrelli must breathe a solitary word of what you are doing to a living soul. Are we agreed?”
Hiro glanced at Peter, who shrugged his acquiescence, and stepped forward to Bilis’s chair. “I agree.”
“Swear on your sword that you will keep your word.”
Hiro inverted his katana, and knelt behind it. “I swear by the sword of Takezo Kensei that this will be so.”
Bilis’s thin smile widened. “Then I will bid you both good day, gentlemen. What you seek is in an envelope on the writing desk.”
“But how…” Hiro looked up at the empty armchair, and swore in Japanese. “Am I that annoying?”
Peter laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Maybe. Sometimes. But if it helps, you wear it well.”
3. Shadow Play
“…ram that cravat right up… your… and he’s gone again.” Ianto lowered his gun. “One day, I swear, he’s not going to pull that disappearing trick fast enough.”
“It was a long shot, anyway.” Gwen started to move through the shop, taking care not to disturb the clocks. “Perhaps he’s left something, though. Proper bugger for his little clues and taunts, Bilis is.”
“Something like this?” Hiro waved a white envelope above his head. “It was on the desk”.
“Bingo.” Gwen took the proffered envelope, and carefully prised it open. She scanned the sheet of paper inside. “Let’s see who the lucky winner is… ‘17 St. Boniface’s Road’. That’s over near Butetown. Quite close to… Oh.”
“Gwen?” prompted Ianto.
“It’s three streets down from where the last murder happened. The one when Jack…”
“I see.” Ianto swallowed. “Looks like we know where we’re going next then, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Could be a trap, of course, but it’s not like Bilis couldn’t spring one of those whenever he liked.” Gwen folded the envelope, and put it in her pocket. “St. Boniface’s Road it is.”
Back in the Torchwood SUV, a vehicle substantially closer to the Batmobile than Hiro had ever expected to get in real life, a companionable silence soon descended. It was some minutes before Gwen broke it:
“Alright, then. Ask away.”
Hiro raised his eyebrows. “Pardon?”
“You’re just itching for some answers. I can tell. What do you want to know?”
“How did you find out that I can…”
“Apart from that.”
“The man in the shop… Bilis… He spoke of a ‘Captain Harkness’. Is that your Commanding Officer? The one who is missing?”
“Yes, he is. Captain Jack Harkness.”
“What happened to him?”
Gwen shot a look at Ianto, who kept his eyes on the road. “We aren’t sure. There’d been a spate of killings, across Cardiff. Not usually our kind of thing, but the M. O. was starting to get it classed as ‘spooky doo’.”
Hiro looked politely blank.
“Official Cardiff Police Force code for ‘Torchwood’, in case you’re wondering. Anyway, we asked them to contact us if there were any developments.” Gwen stared out of the window for a moment. “They phoned through to the Hub late last Thursday night. Ianto and I had already called it a day…”
“I should have been there,” said Ianto in a level tone. His eyes had still not left the road.
“You were exhausted. So was I. The Hub’s a handful with only three.” Gwen seemed on the verge of saying something else, but changed her mind. “Anyway. From what we gathered afterwards, Jack got the call, and decided, big action hero that he is, to leave us sleeping and go it alone. My mate Andy says that he appeared just as the SOCOs were packing up and asked if he could take a look. So they left him to it.” She bit her lip. “No one’s seen him since. And then, the next morning, this thing they’ve been calling the Folding started. Since then, Ianto and I have barely been keeping our heads above water.”
Peter looked up. “The Folding… the clocks… your boss’s disappearance… do you think that they’re all connected?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Jack’s a serial world-saver. When something like the Folding goes down, he’s usually there on the front lines. It’s just that he doesn’t always get round to telling us where the front lines are, first.”
Peter shifted in his seat. “But how would…”
The SUV shook and skidded. Ianto slammed on the brakes, then craned back to look at his passengers.
“Everyone still in one piece?”
“Pretty much.” Peter looked down at his seat-belt. It had been Nathan who insisted that he went on wearing them: just because he was indestructible (his brother had said) didn’t mean he wouldn’t hurt other people if he crashed. Peter had affected to believe that they were talking about road safety.
Ianto pulled over and got out. “Uh-huh. Just as expected.”
Gwen slipped out of the other door. “The jolt was it happening again?”
“Yes. Look at that house. Good thing this street was derelict.”
Hiro and Peter joined them. Hiro’s eyes widened. “Is that...?”
“The Folding? Yes.” Ianto was holding up a small console, about the size of a palm-top, and frowning at what he saw on the screen. “Haven’t you seen what it leaves up close before?”
“Only on CNN.” Hiro’s gaze had not moved from the street. “What could do something like that?”
The house was an undistinguished two-up, two-down. It was also neatly sheared in two, along its vertical axis. The left-hand half of the building now stood a scant half inch or so further forward than the right. Along the juncture, brick that had not seen the air for decades glistened raw like a wound.
“We don’t know for sure. But I can give you my best guess.” Ianto returned the console to his pocket. “For unknown reasons, zones of temporal stasis have started manifesting. They only last for a fraction of a second – but a fraction of a second is all it takes. Unlike most kinds of temporal manipulation we are familiar with, they don’t compensate for things like the turn of the Earth. So, if half a building is caught in one and half isn’t, part of the structure is carried forward and the other is ever so slightly left behind. That’s the Folding. It’s bad with a building. You wouldn’t want to see what it can do to a person. Time cuts cleaner than the sharpest katana, Mr. Nakamura. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.”
Ianto looked over at Gwen, who had just finished talking into her mobile. “Fire Brigade coming?”
Gwen nodded. “They said they were on their way. Houses that’s happened to don’t stay up for long.” She snapped the phone shut and looked again at the street. Her jaw tightened. “Let’s see what St. Boniface’s Road is hiding. No one plays origami with this town and gets away with it.”
*****
To judge from the outside, 17 St. Boniface’s Road was another derelict house. A lot of the surrounding area had looked pretty grotty to Hiro, whose sensibilities had been formed by a childhood in the swisher parts of Tokyo. However, it was clear from the reactions of his hosts that they too thought this level of dinge to be out of the ordinary.
“Quiet neighbourhood,” commented Ianto.
“Uh-huh. The kind of place where people ‘keep themselves to themselves’. Murder bloody Alley, spots like this.” Gwen shivered. “Someone could get raped on their doorstep and they wouldn’t lift a finger.”
“Good place to hide, then.”
“Good place to run, as well.” Gwen advanced to the front door. It yielded at the touch of her hand. “OK, guys. Same formation as before. Maybe a bit easier on the electric front unless something kicks off, though.”
The door disclosed a narrow corridor. A peeling banister ascended beside it. Gwen moved to the foot of the stairs and peered up it.
“Nothing I can….” She glanced back towards the front door. Hiro, standing at the back, saw a look of utter elation and relief bloom in her face. “Jack! Where the hell have you… Jack?”
Hiro turned. A tall dark-haired man in a weird long coat was advancing down the corridor towards him. There was an archaic gun in his outstretched hands, and a look on his face which betokened no rooted objection to using it. Hiro gulped.
“Um. Hello. Captain Harkness? My name is Hiro Nakamura and I…”
The tall man walked through him.
“… can… bend…” Hiro stuttered into silence, as he watched the stranger stalk down the passageway in the direction of Gwen. His progress was unimpeded by the interposed bodies of Peter and Ianto. At the bottom of the staircase, however, it was interrupted.
A flicker of movement from above was the only warning, before a long, sharp section of wood flew down the stairs and slashed across the tall man’s neck. He fell, blood spurting thickly from his throat.
Hiro shut his eyes against the nausea, only to feel Peter’s hand tighten on his arm. When he looked again, the man was scrambling back to his feet. He was still bloodied, but his skin was now entirely unmarked.
Hiro frowned up at Peter’s rapt expression. “Another? Like you? And the cheerleader? And….”
The tall man suddenly lurched backwards against the far wall. His hands scrabbled at his throat as he stared up the stairs. The four watchers followed his gaze, to where another shape stood silhouetted on the landing. This second form, features still in shadow, began to descend. Hiro gasped, and reached for his sword.
“Don’t worry,” said Gwen sharply. “It’s another ghost. No noise, see? This must have been who Jack was chasing.” She wiped the hand that was not holding a gun across her forehead. “What kind of person watches someone resurrect like that and walks towards him?”
Hiro cleared his throat. “Gwen Cooper, this serial killer you were hunting…. How did the victims die?”
Gwen kept her eyes glued to the figure that went on walking slowly down the stairs. Beside her, out of her carefully averted gaze, the tall dark man in the long bloodied jacket continued to claw silently at his throat. “The victims? Always the same M. O. The skull was cut open. And the brain…”
The other had reached the bottom. In the instant before the silent duo disappeared, Hiro and Peter glimpsed his face. Neither was surprised.
“…the brain had been removed.”
4. The Aurelian
Peter looked up at Hiro’s approach. “Was it where he said?”
Hiro nodded. “Yes. Look.” Turning his back to the body of the Hub with exaggerated caution, he displayed a small white blossom cupped in his hands.
Peter’s lips thinned. “I still think that we should tell them. You saw what that little creep tried to do.”
“I swore on my sword, Peter Petrelli. A warrior knows no higher oath.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean…” Peter looked up and cleared his throat. “Is there any news, Gwen?”
Hiro withdrew in a cloud of murmured deprecation. Gwen smiled at him as he headed to look at the Rift Manipulator again. Peter did not think that she had spotted him slipping the blossom into his pocket as he did so.
“Ianto has a theory.” Gwen slumped into the sofa at Peter’s side, and leaned across to snag a slice of pizza. “He’s just running some approximations from the readings we took. Should be ready soon.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Staying out of his hair till he’s done would be champion. He… needs some time to himself.”
“So I gathered.”
“Oh. You heard the shouting?”
“Along with about half of Cardiff, unless this place of yours has industrial-strength sound-proofing.”
“Good.” Gwen wiped her hands on a napkin. “You have no idea how difficult it is to get him to do that.”
Peter eyed her narrowly over the pizza. “You wanted him to shout at you?”
Gwen sighed. “Ianto bottles things up. He needs to let it rip sometimes, but he won’t. He’ll never lose it with someone who’s just sarky to him, because he thinks it’s demeaning. He’s probably correct.”
She leaned back against the sofa. “Right now, it was either cry in each other’s arms because the most astonishing man we’ve both ever known may be gone for good, or get Ianto proper angry and productive. So, I had to stage a ‘Gwen moment’. Blunder straight into his personal space, all wide eyes and concern, and give him the chance to go absolutely bloody ape-shit.”
“That’s… kinda cold.”
“Empathy has to be cold, Peter Petrelli.” The Gwen of the other picture was sitting opposite him now. “You especially should know that. They may think that being good with people gives you this warm fuzzy glow at the back of your head, but that’s just bullshit, and no damn good to anyone to boot. Either you can keep it sorted and make it work for you, or the backwash from everyone else’s worries just boils up inside you until you…”
“Explode?” Peter nodded. “Yeah, I can relate to that.”
“I thought so. Need me to get you a napkin?”
“I’m on it.” Peter looked at the pile of napkins, which was a few feet out of his reach, and focussed his will. As the top one flew into his waiting hand, the lights in the Hub dimmed, then brightened once more. Peter looked at his hand in consternation. “It’s never done that before.”
Gwen shrugged. “Maybe it’s a glitch in the system.”
“My systems,” Ianto was advancing across the floor of the Hub towards them, “don’t glitch. I’ll have to check the diagnostics when I get a moment.”
“Have you worked out what’s causing the ghost images?” asked Peter. “Of your Captain Harkness? And Sylar?”
“I’m afraid so.” Ianto picked up the empty pizza-box and absently started folding it for disposal. “I’ll need you and Mr. Nakamura to join me and Gwen in the office. We have a lot to discuss.”
*****
“It’s a chrysalis. 17 St. Boniface’s Road is, for want of a better word, a chrysalis.”
Ianto was standing in front of a terminal in the office. The others were craning around him. A geometrical model, which it hurt to look at, span on the screen.
Hiro squinted at the rotating shape. “If it is a chrysalis, then what will come out of it?”
“That takes a bit of explaining.” Ianto puffed out his cheeks. “OK. The images at the house, the ones we couldn’t touch or hear or interact with, looked a lot like what we call time-shift ghosts. Because of the Rift, local spacetime in Cardiff can get a bit frayed around the edges. Every now and again, the fabric gets so worn that bits of old patterns start to show through.”
“So, these ‘ghosts’ are just sights of things that happened long ago?” Hiro averted his gaze from the screen.
“Usually, yes. The problem is that time-shift ghosts don’t behave like what we saw at St. Boniface’s Road. For one thing, they aren’t on a loop. You see them do something once; if you see them again, they’ll be doing something else. They don’t just rinse and repeat.”
“But the scenario in that house did repeat,” said Peter slowly. “You made us stay until it had run through ten times.”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“The other problem,” Gwen hastily picked up the expository ball and ran with it, “is more of a CSI: Cardiff thing. If that encounter between Jack and Sylar had happened, we would have expected it to leave some mark on the way the house is now. But there’s nothing. That long piece of wood which… which we saw was actually lying at the top of the stairs with a film of dust on it. No recent footmarks or fingerprints. Not one drop of blood. It’s like nothing ever happened on Thursday.”
“Because nothing did happen on Thursday.” Ianto resumed. “At least, not yet. If I’m right, and I usually am, what went on at St. Boniface’s Road that night had consequences that made the Universe try to censor it.”
Peter frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Think about what we saw.” Gwen leaned forward. “Jack had run Sylar to earth in the derelict house. From what you two have told us about him, I doubt if he would see a man with a gun as much of a threat, but I imagine that he wanted to sort it somewhere away from prying eyes. With me so far?”
Hiro nodded.
“Right. Sylar hides upstairs. When Jack comes in, he uses that telekinesis trick to take him down. There’s no way the splinter could have got that trajectory if it had just been thrown. Jack falls, but then, Jack gets up again. And that’s when your Mr. Sylar starts to get interested. What would he do if he saw that, Peter?”
Peter’s throat was dry. “He’d try to see… how it works.” He swallowed. “But it doesn’t make any sense. If Captain Harkness is a Special, all that would do is make Sylar indestructible. That’s no walk on the beach. From what Hiro’s told me, it’s a power he craves more than anything. But it shouldn’t have done… what it did.”
“The thing is,” Ianto resumed quietly, “Jack isn’t like you. Whatever brings him back, it isn’t in his DNA. If your friend could crack that, the force that returns a normal man from death again and again and again, Sylar wouldn’t just be a Special. Potentially…”
“Sylar would be God.” Gwen shuddered.
“But you say that this did not happen?” Hiro’s voice sounded a little more quavery than he would have liked.
“Not exactly. If Ianto is right, the fabric of spacetime tried to reject that sequence of events. Basically, physics doesn’t like the sound of its new boss, so it’s got its fingers in its ears and singing ‘la la la, I’m not listening’. The Universe is fighting the reality of what happened. Problem is…”
“The Universe is losing.” Ianto pointed at the screen. “Time is already starting to splinter. That’s what’s been causing the Folding. And, as we found out, every time the loop repeats, you see a little more at the end. Sylar gets a bit closer to Jack before it resets. My guess is that, as soon as the loop loosens to the point where he… sees how Jack’s immortality works, then that shape of events reasserts itself for good. And the Universe gets a serial killer as its new Demiurge.”
“That’s insane.” Peter turned away. “It can’t be happening.”
“Can’t it?” Gwen looked up. “Remind me, Hiro: what did Gabriel Gray do before he turned into Sylar?”
“He mended clocks.” Hiro’s eyes widened.
“Exactly. Clock-maker. Clock-breaker. He’s already leaving his ego signature across the Earth. Imagine what he could do when he gets out of that chrysalis.”
Hiro’s jaw was set. “We must stop this.”
“Easier said than done.” Ianto’s attention was back on the screen of the terminal. “This is a model of what’s going on at St. Boniface’s Road. It’s a hermetically sealed temporal loop. Even you can’t just sashay into it, Mr. Nakamura. The dimensional flux would rip you apart and chew you up.”
“What if Captain Harkness did not follow Sylar?”
Ianto nodded. “I can see where you’re going, but it’s still too risky. Because of its ramifications, the loop itself has become what we call a Fixed Point. If you try to prevent it from initiating, you’ll most likely put a hole in spacetime that would make the Rift look like a cigarette-burn. Even to stop Sylar, that’s not a risk we can take.”
Hiro’s shoulders slumped. “Then all is lost.”
“Not necessarily.” Gwen exchanged looks with Ianto, and sighed. “Ianto thinks that there might be one chance.”
“Yes. If my model is right, there’s a way into the loop. A single moment at which the connexion between its pocket history and the outer universe is strong enough for someone to slip through. Someone who can bend space and time, that is. If we could calculate that point, before the loop collapses, than Hiro might be able to jump into it and save Jack.”
Hiro beamed. “Excellent!”
“The problem is, we can’t.” Ianto tapped at the keyboard for a couple of moments, and then stood away from the screen to let the others see. “To give you some idea, that’s what we would have to solve.”
Hiro looked at the screen, mouth slightly agape. He was reminded of a particularly vivid nightmare from his childhood, in which Darkseid was chasing him for the Anti-Life Equation.
“We’ve only ever known one person who could solve something like that.” There was an odd kind of tension in Gwen’s posture now, Peter noticed. Somehow twitchy and resigned at the same time.
Hiro cocked his head on one side. “Where is this person, then?”
“Third locker along, second one down, on the west wall.” Ianto shut off the terminal with a click. “Her name was Toshiko Sato, and she died four months ago, making sure the sun came up. There was a lot of that going around. Can you guess what we haven’t been telling you, Mr. Nakamura? I’m afraid that we were slower to work it out ourselves than we should have been. The past is a foreign country…”
Hiro lifted his chin. “… but I have a visa.”
5. Nine Months Ago
Once again, the giddiness passed. Once again, Hiro Nakamura opened his eyes on the Hub.
It was a slightly different dialect of Hub, though. Hiro lacked the eyesight or the inclination to read a building with much attention, but still he spotted the changes. The work surfaces were less austere; their edges vague with communal clutter. Insofar as the statement made sense for a Lair, it looked more lived in.
Peter, too, was eyeing his surroundings. “Looks like you got us to the right spot.”
“Yes, I…” Hiro staggered. He grabbed at a freestanding piece of tech to steady himself.
Peter hurried back to his side. “What’s wrong?”
Hiro’s forehead was beaded with sweat. “Can’t you feel it?”
So many senses on the menu now, it took a moment to scroll through to the one he needed. Peter plunged anew into Hiro’s perceptions of spacetime. He rocked back on his heels.
“Whoa. Where’s that… pressure coming from?”
“The decay has grown too great. Time bears down upon us, Peter Petrelli. I think that we are being pulled back to our present.” Hiro wiped his hand across his brow.
“Can you hold us here, Hiro?”
“For a while, perhaps.” Hiro had drawn his sword. His eyes were focused on the blade. “But we must hurry.”
“Fine by me. So where are…”
“Put down the katana, and step away from the sub-etheric resonator. I still can’t believe I’m in a job where I have to say things like that.”
Hiro lowered the blade, and slowly turned. Some way across the floor of the Hub, a quite small woman had a quite large gun trained on him. Déjà vu was probably, at this point, a less than accurate description of the case, but the French participle had not really been built to handle time-travel.
“Gadget Lady!”
The woman from Peter’s ink sketch looked puzzled, but kept her firearm steady. “I’m sorry?”
“Whoever he is, he’s got your number alright, Tosh.” A wiry man, also holding a gun, had taken up a position beside the woman. “OK, gents. Pretty neat trick you pulled, getting into the Hub like that. Care to share?”
Peter started to walk forward. “Listen, I know this looks…”
The newcomer scowled at him. “Did I say that you could move, sunshine?”
Peter glared back, and kept walking. “We really don’t have time for thi…”
The wiry man shot him in the thigh. Gadget Lady winced.
“Owen!”
“Look, I gave him fair warning, didn’t… I…” The gunman’s voice trailed off, as he watched the bullet work its way loose from Peter’s leg and roll away across the floor. He eyed his weapon in bemusement. “Do I always get given the joke ammo, or something?”
“That,” said Peter evenly, “was rude. And I’m bored with this.”
He stretched out his hand. Telekinesis yanked the guns out of the grips of the pair facing him and deposited them at his feet. The lights in the Hub, he noticed, had not dimmed this time.
“My name is Peter Petrelli, and I’m quoting Protocol 4572 oblique A.”
The wiry man frowned, and squinted at his colleague. “Did he just make that up?”
“No, Owen,” a familiar voice spoke from the upper level, “he didn’t. 4572 oblique A means they’ve been sent by Torchwood.”
Owen looked sceptical. “I know I’m a bit shit about keeping up with the paperwork, Ianto, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember a memo about Darth Vader dropping by for a biscuit.”
“Future Torchwood, Owen,” Ianto had moved down to the floor of the Hub. “4572 oblique A is the code we use if we’ve got someone in the past and want to guarantee them a cordial reception there.”
“We run a protocol for that? And you’re sad enough to have it memorized?”
Ianto shrugged. “The Institute likes to be prepared. And I know everything.” He turned to the short woman. “Can you validate their status, Tosh?”
The woman picked up a bulky handheld device from a nearby desk and started fiddling with it. “Residual radiation on their bodies is consistent with recent time travel. I’m picking up some peculiarities in the signature, though. I don’t think they did it by any of the usual means.” She looked up curiously. “How did you get here?”
“I brought us.” Hiro stepped forward and gave her a bow. “My name is Hiro Nakamura, and I can bend space and time.”
The woman smiled, and nodded in return. “Toshiko Sato. Judging from these scans, and from what we’ve seen you do, I take it that you’re Specials.”
“You guys already knew about people like us?” Peter frowned. “We thought that only the Company…”
“Ah yes,” Owen smirked, “The Company. The ‘so bleeding covert they don’t need no stinking adjective’ Company. We like to keep an eye on what they’re up to.”
Peter raised an eyebrow. “I thought their firewall was supposed to be impenetrable.”
Toshiko beamed. “We love impenetrable firewalls. People who think they’re behind one get so indiscreet.”
“Does that mean you know…”
“Peter Petrelli,” Hiro was sweating again, and his hands were clenched on the hilt of his sword, “we do not have much time.”
“Then let’s get to work.” Ianto stepped forward and scrutinized the two travellers appraisingly. “You’ll be aware that the Protocol prevents us from asking too many questions about why you’re here. On the other hand, we retain right of veto over anything you suggest, just in case…”
“… we stole the knowledge of the Protocol. Or we’re agents who’ve gone rogue. Or future Torchwood itself becomes compromised.”
Ianto blinked. “That’s pretty much everything I was going to say.”
Peter smiled. “The guy who gave us our instructions was just as well informed as you.” He reached into his pocket, and produced a thumb drive. “Here’s the problem…”
*****
“Are you holding up OK, Hiro?”
Toshiko’s eyes were still fixed on her screen. Across it unfolded baroque elaborations of code which Hiro knew he would not be able to unravel even if he held back history for a subjective century.
“Yes,” he lied. The temporal pressure against which he now had to exert himself was, in truth, already pretty close to intolerable. But that was not the real problem.
Hiro thought about his sister. In particular, he thought about the particular deftness, a sort of prestidigitatory competence, that Kimiko brought to what she did, and how invisible people that adept too easily become. The dark-clothed juggler in the centre of the flaming torches. Efficiency ninjitsu. In comparison, his own stage-management of reality was a coarse and lumbering thing. As Toshiko’s fingers danced across the keyboard, he thought about the things it was not given to him to change, and his grip tightened on his katana.
“How did you hurt your face?”
“I was in a fight.” Which was true enough, after a fashion. “That ice which Mr. Ianto brought me before he left helped a lot, though. Thank you.”
“There must have been something awfully wrong in the future, if you needed to come back here to crack this equation.” Toshiko was speaking in the quiet, ruminative tones of someone thinking aloud, but Hiro did not miss her quick sideways glance at his face.
“Everything is fine. Will be fine. Your Hub is just… inaccessible right now. Right then.”
“I see.” Silence fell for a few seconds, with only Toshiko’s key-strokes for punctuation. “Are there a lot like you and Peter?”
“We are many. So are our gifts. A child who can find anyone. A woman who can bend steel with her bare hands. A girl who remembered everything.”
“Perfect memory, huh? That’s quite a talent to have.”
“Yes, it was. Charlie was killed for it.”
Toshiko’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t understand.”
“There is a very bad man. He wanted people to know that he was special. But all he could do was see how things worked.”
The technician smiled, a little sadly. “There’s nothing very evil in that.”
“So he killed people, like Charlie, and took their gifts. He can move objects with his mind, like Peter Petrelli. But he can do other things as well. He can hear every heart-beat in a room, or freeze what he touches. All of this he uses to kill, and take more.” Hiro frowned. “The power made him a monster.”
Toshiko nodded. “We know a lot about monsters here. And whatever creepy Mr. Bilis Manger may say, the worst ones always have a human face.” She frowned, and looked at Hiro again. “Sorry, did you say something?”
Hiro shuffled from one foot to another. “No.”
“But anyway, your powers don’t have to be that way.” Toshiko’s face brightened as she turned back to her screen. “What you two have shown us opens up so many possibilities! The readings I took from Mr. Petrelli’s telekinesis are really quite astonishing, and I’m pretty certain that the Rift Manipulator could be programmed to emulate your temporal suspen…”
“Naughty, naughty, Tosh.” Owen had sauntered back across the floor of the Hub. “You promised only to perv over one piece of techno-porn at a time, remember? How’s the solution coming?”
“Nearly there. Just a few more minutes and…”
Hiro winced and buckled to his knees.
Peter hurried up. “… Hiro?”
Hiro’s face was creased with effort. “Worse… a lot worse… can’t hold on… much longer…”
“Shit.” Owen’s eyes darted over the screen. “Is there any way you can speed this up, Tosh?”
The technician’s long fingers were a blur on the keys. “I’m going as fast as I can, Owen.”
“I don’t think that’s fast enough.” Owen sucked his teeth and stared at Peter. “Is there anything you can do?”
The American shook his head. Owen’s face darkened.
“From what you’ve been saying, you’re supposed to be a super-hero one-man band, mate. The Reduced Avengers. There’s got to be something in your bloody Rolodex of mojo that can help us here.”
“Maybe there is.” Peter turned to the terminal. “Toshiko… if this works, you should be able to talk directly to your mainframe. Would that speed things up?”
Toshiko blinked up at him. “I suppose so, but I don’t see how…”
“You’ll to have to bear with me.” Peter inhaled deeply. “This is going to be complicated.”
Keep it sorted and make it work for you. Gwen had been (would be?) right. Empathy needs organization. Without that, it is gush at best, or a mushroom cloud at worst.
Peter flicked through the file cards in his head, and pulled out one in which the world was big and shiny and four-coloured and new. Micah Sanders’ cyberpathy blossomed at the front of his mind. He reached out and…
“Ow!”
“Sorry. Didn’t realize for a moment what you were doing.” Owen reached across to another terminal and tapped in a command sequence. “There we go. Anti-cyberpath measures disabled. Once bitten, twice shy, if you know what I mean. Back to you, maestro.”
“OK.” This was the tricky part. Like holding a node in a cat’s cradle, while the string flips round and over. Peter kept the cyberpathy in place, but began to think about law and justice and right and wrong and the twisted threads of guilt and motive and intent and… hope Captain Floppy-Fringe can pull some sort of rabbit out of his hat. Poor old Cato over there’s looking none too clever.
Peter glared at Owen. “I do not have a floppy fringe.”
Owen harrumphed defensively. “Never said you did, mate. How… oh, I see. Very clever. Cyberpath output…”
“Telepath input.” Peter held out his hand to Toshiko, as Matt Parkman’s mentalism stirred the thoughts of others into his mind. She looked at the hand gravely for a moment, then gripped it firmly. Peter gasped as an information superhighway diverted through his brain. “Hang in there, Hiro!”
“Trying…” Through squeezed eyes, Hiro squinted down at his hand. Superheroic Power Over-Exertion Nose-Bleeds, he decided, looked a lot more fetching on Sue Storm than they did on him.
“Just another few seconds… there!”
Toshiko slumped back in her chair. On the screen, the numbers had skittered to a halt.
“That,” she said breathlessly, “was quite something. I’ve downloaded the solution onto your thumb drive now. I hope that your computers can make sense of it.”
Peter pocketed the drive. “Thank you. I only wish we could tell you how important this is. Ready to go, Hiro?”
“Yes.” Hiro scrambled to his feet. Despite the pain in his head, he bowed deeply again to Toshiko. “Thank you.”
She smiled. “It was my pleasure. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said Hiro. And because history is a crusted scab of mistakes and misfortunes and unnecessary griefs that you can never, ever, prevent yourself from picking at, he added, as he and Peter vanished, “Be careful.”
“OK, do I want to know why the first thing I see when I get back to the Hub after my thrill-a-minute meeting with the Mayor is a samurai and his plus one disappearing into thin air?” Gwen dropped her handbag on a desk, and looked enquiringly at Owen and Toshiko.
“It’s complicated.” Toshiko had her nose buried in a white flower, which she was pretty certain had not been beside her terminal this morning. Maybe one of Ianto’s little thoughtful gestures, she thought.
Owen stretched. “Long story short, future Torchwood were stuck with their maths homework, so Tosh had to shag the mainframe.”
“Owen!”
“I call it how I see it, princess. It certainly brought a blush to your cheeks. I suppose we’re going to have to delete the sordid evidence, though.”
Toshiko nodded. “I’m afraid so. The operations they asked us to perform fall under the Protocol black-out.”
“Shame. You getting down and dirty with the Hub was pretty damn…”
Gwen cleared her throat. “We can deal with that later. Ianto’s up top moving the SUV round. We need to investigate some reports of joyriding.”
Owen looked sceptical. “Since when is Torchwood interested in…”
“By a blowfish.” Gwen picked up her bag. “Coming?”
6. Echoes
“‘Everything is fine.’” Hiro hung his head. “I see now why you hit me.”
Gwen sighed. “You were put in an impossible situation. Tosh shouldn’t have said what she did. The Protocols explicitly forbid talking about the future. But she wouldn’t have been Tosh if she hadn’t been curious.”
“Still, I lied. It is not the warrior’s way.”
“I was wrong to hit you, Hiro.” Gwen bit her lip. “It’s just… everything’s been falling apart, these last few months. Tosh gone… Owen as well… Jack disappearing… I was at the end of my tether. And then you and Peter popped up in the Hub again like a pair of bad pennies, and it was so bloody obvious that everything hadn’t been fine and I… lost it. I’m sorry.”
“No apology is needed.”
Gwen pushed out her chin. “Take a free shot. Hard as you like. Not with the sword, mind.”
“‘A true warrior knows too well the cost of a blow, and the worth of a friend, to sully one with the other.’”
Gwen smiled. “Nice. Who said that?”
“Takezo Kensei.”
“He had some good ideas, that man.”
“Some, yes.” Hiro looked up as Ianto and Peter approached. “Is it done?”
“Uh-huh. Ianto’s mapped Toshiko’s solution onto the co-ordinates. I’ve used my cyberpath abilities to absorb them. When you’re ready, I’ll drop them into your mind.” He frowned. “I wish Matt was here to do that bit. His active powers are almost as hard to control as yours.”
“I am ready.”
Peter hesitated. “Hiro… you have to know that if there is any error in these calculations, any error at all, the jump into the loop will most likely rip you apart. Do you still want to go ahead with this?”
Hiro looked at him.
“I had to ask. Good luck.”
Ianto nodded. “Good luck, Mr. Nakamura. Remember you’ll probably only have a couple of seconds to rescue Jack before Sylar gets to him.”
Gwen hugged Hiro. “God-speed.”
Hiro squared his shoulders, and glanced at Peter. His friend closed his eyes, took a deep breath and…
Hiro knew where he had to be. And he knew too (as time and space melted into their usual drunkard’s blur) that Ianto and Toshiko had made no mistake.
The dust of the tiny passage was dry in his mouth; the coppery tang of blood heavy in his nostrils. At his side the tall man in the strange coat writhed against the wall and now there was sound. Hiro could hear the gasps as Jack Harkness fought for breath, the creak at the top of the stairs…
Hiro looked up, and saw those dark familiar eyes widen in surprise. The man at his side dropped as his enemy’s concentration faltered. The eyes glared again in Hiro’s direction, a glare that would have sheared through bone and flesh like a saw…
If there had still been bone and flesh there for it to shear through.
Hiro and his burden collapsed on the floor of the Hub. The assembled three rushed to their side.
“Hiro! Jack!” Firm hands were pulling them both upright. Hiro staggered; two jumps in quick succession after the gruelling trip to the past had taken a lot out of him. The tall man at his side stood rubbing at his bruised throat. “You were gone for hours. Are you both alright?”
Hiro focussed blearily on Gwen’s concerned face. “Fine. But we must…”
The lights in the great room dimmed. Hiro barely had time to turn before he was hurled head first against a wall. One of the larger consoles wrenched itself into the air, to plummet with crushing force on the bodies of Peter Petrelli and Jack Harkness.
“Tech falls;” Sylar stepped out on to the floor of the Hub, and smiled. “Everyone dies.”
******
“Your… base (is that the word?) looks nice.”
Sylar smiled benignly at the bullets fired from Gwen’s gun, which took fright and scattered. A flick of his right index finger pinned her against a wall.
“And so very clandestine as well.” A twist of his left hand swept Ianto’s feet out from under him as he charged; a presented palm rammed the Welshman into a terminal. “Why, I had to ask literally four little old ladies for directions before I could find it.”
Gwen strained against the invisible pressure that held her, to no effect. “How… how could you…”
“… get into this fortress undetected?” Sylar strolled forwards, through the shadows of the dimmed Hub, to stand in front of her. A glance back at Ianto slammed him down as he attempted to rise. “A stupid little street-thug in your Butetown used to be able to slip past some kinds of security sensor, as long as he was concentrating. I wouldn’t worry about him causing any more trouble, though. It was my pleasure to take that problem off Cardiff’s hands.”
“Quite… the little civic hero, aren’t you, Gabriel?”
Sylar’s eyes narrowed. Gwen winced as the grip on her body tightened a notch. “Don’t call me that.”
“Or what? You’ll lose your rag and top me by accident, same as you did your old mam?”
The killer’s face was inches from her own. “You know nothing about me.”
“I know everything about you, Gabriel. That’s my gift, see?” Gwen licked dry lips. “I know what makes people tick.”
Sylar stared at her. “I think you’ll find that’s my talent.”
“I think you’ll find you’re talking shit. The only way you can discover what makes someone tick, Gabriel, is to see to it that she’ll never tick again. Because you’re a vulgar little man, who only looks on people as important for their party tricks.”
Gwen’s eyes darted across the room, then locked back on Sylar’s.
“You couldn’t grab the sheer admin wizardry of Ianto over there. You couldn’t have grabbed Owen’s rage, or Toshiko’s intelligence. But how many people have died so you can make a Slush Puppie without a fridge?”
Sylar frowned. “Time to shut that smart mouth for good, I thi… Why is he laughing?”
“What, Ianto?” Gwen looked over Sylar’s shoulder, and smiled. “Perhaps he’s laughing because you’ll never win. Because you can’t take anything worth having. But mostly I think he’s laughing because he can see a computer screen you can’t.”
Ianto beamed. “I’m glad you approve of the Hub’s décor, Mr. Sylar. We do aim to please. But myself, I’ve always thought, ooh, this place could be…”
Charging Complete
Contingency 2344 sj8/a (tsato18) Initializing
Modulator Enabled
Sylar staggered backwards from Gwen, his hands on his ears, as the keening knifed through the air of the Hub.
“… a little more sonic.” Ianto adjusted his tie, and walked forward. “Tell me, Mr. Sylar: do you know how Torchwood was founded?”
Sylar clawed desperately for Gwen’s dropped gun, which Ianto kicked out of reach.
“I appreciate that it’s impossible for you to concentrate right now, but the story’s really rather diverting, and worth your attention.” Ianto stamped down on Sylar’s wrist until he felt something give. “You see, a remarkably clever man foresaw a time when it would be necessary to fight a monster. A beast that scooped out a man’s soul and sat in his heart.”
Sylar tried to get up. Ianto kneed him in the stomach, adjusting his trouser leg afterwards to avoid compromising the crease. “Now, this man knew that he couldn’t fight the monster himself. After all, he was only human. So he turned his house into a trap. A trap that outlasted his own death. A trap, in other words….”
The next kick broke Sylar’s nose.
“… a lot like this one. Tosh’s sonic modulator is quite something, isn’t it? She clearly reconfigured it so that it’s harmless to normal humans, but for a man with, say, enhanced hearing it must be utterly excruciating.”
Somehow, from reserves he had not known he possessed, Sylar summoned a wild flailing burst of telekinetic force that knocked Ianto flat on his back. By the time the Welshman scrambled to his feet, his foe was already scrambling through the entrance to the Hub. Ianto frowned and turned.
“Couldn’t you have shot him while I was keeping him busy?”
Gwen, unrolling another bandage, looked up. “I had to get to Hiro quickly. He was losing an awful lot of blood. Sorry.”
“Will he be OK?”
“Now he will. What about Jack and Peter?”
Ianto looked at the huge chunk of downfallen machinery. “The bad news is that they’ve almost certainly been crushed to death. The good news is that it couldn’t have happened to a better-qualified pair. The tricky news is that the man with the telekinesis we need to shift that sort of bulk easily is currently squashed under it.”
“Bugger. Anyway: priorities. Can you work that Public-Address System magic of yours? Ultrasonic frequencies this time, I think. After all, we know our target audience can hear them.”
“Right.” Ianto tapped at a terminal, then looked up. “I’ve patched it through to your Bluetooth. The next things you say will be broadcast in the ultrasonic through every PA system in the greater Cardiff area.”
Gwen nodded, and picked up her Bluetooth. “Hello, Gabriel. I bring glad tidings of great joy. Be sure to put them in that perfect memory you nicked. You won’t get another chance.
“This is Torchwood’s city. You come back to our town; we play you our music. Through every PA system like this one, anywhere in Cardiff, 24/7, until your brains come out through your nostrils. This is your first and only warning. Over and out.”
She turned back to Ianto. “Could we actually do that?”
Ianto shrugged. “Probably not.”
“Never mind. He’s none the wiser. And technobabble always goes down smooth after a good kicking. Now, about this bloody hunk of metal.”
“I’ll go and fetch the Magna-Clamps.”
Epilogue: The Möbius Lily
To: Hiro Nakamura
From: Toshiko Sato
Dear Hiro,
this e-mail will be sent automatically if your “monster” ever turns up in the Hub. He should have a nasty surprise in store. My only regret is that I probably shall not live to see it. You are a very good man, with a very bad poker-face. It was an honour to have met you,
Yours,
Toshiko.
PS Thank you for the flower. It is beautiful.
“So, it was a good thing I didn’t do a lot of telekinesis, then,” said Peter, looking up from Hiro’s print-out.
Ianto nodded. “Tosh must have set up the system to start charging the modulator as soon as TK was detected. But she made sure that only extended use of it would actually trigger the response. Presumably she guessed from her conversation with Hiro that it was Sylar’s signature trick and that he would be using it heavily if he ever turned up in the Hub. But it wouldn’t have hurt you, anyway, unless you had picked up hyper-hearing in the meantime. Tosh knew from talking to Hiro that you didn’t have that. Only the combination of the two powers would put anyone in danger from her contingency program.”
“One scary smart lady.”
“That she was.” Gwen examined the postscript, and frowned at Hiro. “Hang on, does this mean you gave Tosh that lily? We all thought that it was a present from Ianto.”
“She asked me about it, actually,” said Ianto. “I told her it wasn’t. Then she blushed. I thought it must have come from Owen.”
“Where did you get it?” asked Gwen.
Hiro looked at Peter, who shrugged. “Since you did what he asked, I’m guessing it’s OK to break confidentiality now.”
Hiro nodded. “We made a deal with Bilis, when I stopped time in his shop. He told us where Captain Harkness was, but I had to take the lily from your Boardroom and give it to the first woman I met who said Bilis’s name. Which was Toshiko.”
Ianto’s brow wrinkled. “But… the Boardroom was where we put Tosh’s lily after she died. It never wilted. Which means…”
“It was a Möbius Lily.” Jack walked over , and laid a hand on Ianto’s shoulder. “The rarest of all flowers, and the hardest to cultivate. A blossom so delicate that the least gust of real time will wither it, so it can exist only inside its own closed temporal loop. They say that the Trickster Brigade plait them into wreaths, to deck out the Halls of UnHistory. No wonder Bilis couldn’t resist the chance to grow one.”
“He’d break the Universe for a perfect bloom?”
Jack smiled. “Most of us would break a Universe for something. Are you guys ready to leave?”
“Uh-huh,” said Hiro, a little wistfully. His gaze continued to dart around the room.
Ianto sighed. “I suppose that I could give you a very limited guided tour around the less secret bits of the Hub first.”
Hiro’s face shone. “Cool!”
“My pleasure. Have to do something with that ‘sheer admin wizardry’ of mine.” Ianto glared in the general direction of Gwen. “Remind me to say ‘you couldn’t grab Gwen’s gappiness’ when I’m being menaced by a supervillain.”
Gwen blushed. “I was under a bit of stress, in case you hadn’t noticed. And your admin skills do border on the uncanny.”
“I was at least hoping," said Ianto, as he shepherded Hiro towards the Rift Manipulator, “for ‘brooding sexual magnetism.’”
FINIS