Chapter 34

  The Scientist

  He scratched at the stubble of his beard and stared at a peeling plaster wall. He rested his head back against the cool metal of a filing cabinet. Waiting.

  He raised a blue rubber racquetball in his right hand and with a deft flick bounced it: floor, wall, back to hand. Floor, wall, back to hand. A steady pattern. He could do it with his eyes closed. But he didn’t dare close his eyes. He might sleep if he did that. The ball might keep bouncing on its own if he fell asleep, but the plans he had set in motion might not. It all might fall apart. Things were balanced on a razor’s edge already. Too much had already gone wrong, despite all of his foreknowledge and all of his careful preparations. The native Nicholas Carter, killed before he could be brought into the plan. That had been a sore loss for everyone. Isaac and Kaitlyn’s earthbound bodies were already dead–and out of all six, why did it have to be those two? He had refused to look at the photographs. The treachery of the Three he’d brought in from the Museum he had long foreseen, yet somehow they had managed to threaten all he had worked for by sneaking in Abraham Black, hitching a ride for him on the energies of the Breach that he had so carefully organized. And not just any Abraham Black, but some kind of monster with both an angel and a dark key inside of him. Where the hell had that come from?

  Floor, wall, hand. Floor, wall, hand.

  A computer beeped behind him. He rose to his feet, wincing at the aching and popping of his joints, stretched to work out the kinks in his back. He took his thick glasses from the desk, flicked them open, and put them on as he sat down before the computer. A message from Riley. He had made it into the Museum. That place was an element of chaos in all his plans, but a necessary one. McFinn might be waiting for weeks with regards to his own perception of the passage of time, or he might be seeing action already.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The man at the computer rubbed the palms of his hands into grainy, sleep-deprived eyes. He swirled the lukewarm and equally grainy dregs of a mug of coffee close at hand, then drained it with a grimace. He’d never really been a coffee drinker, but he was pretty sure this stuff was terrible by any standard.

  Behind him, the ball kept bouncing.

  Another beep, another message. It was one of his agents on the field, a loyalist within October Industries that still reported to him. Ezekiel had escaped Abraham Black in Nevada. Ezekiel was almost certainly back in the Museum. The man at the computer would have preferred him on Earth. At least on Earth he could have kept track of that slimy egomaniac.

  But on the other hand, that only left Jordan and Shadrach to put a wrench in things here on Earth. Alan, Rebecca, and all their new friends could handle those two. Probably.

  The ball bounced behind him as he worked, sometimes varying its rhythm. He wrote instructions to those pieces on the board he still controlled. He sometimes used aliases. Some of his agents did not even realize they were his. Several October Industries employees believed incorrectly that they were reporting to Ezekiel or Shadrach. He signed a certain set of instructions as “Christmas.”

  He paused in his work as something moved somewhere up above. Probably just the fog. He checked the makeshift security system he had set up here in the basement of a foreclosed tenement building, not far from the central offices of October Industries. The cameras picked up nothing but fog.

  He made sure of the defenses around his dim, dank workplace, making sure he had weapons at the ready. He detested weapons. Violence, he had always said, was for those who lack imagination. There was always a better way for the thoroughly informed, the thoroughly prepared, the sufficiently creative. But he had to admit, although he knew more about what was happening than anyone else on this world, he felt neither sufficiently prepared nor informed. And he had to remain alive. At any cost.

  The noise came again from somewhere above, closer. Innocuous or malicious? If the latter, human or fog-born figment? The scientist took hold of the weapon on the desk.

  “The sun,” he reminded himself, “is rising somewhere.”