Azral emitted a soft chuckle, snugly perched between fondness and ridicule.
“You can’t stop time any more than you can stop a desert or a forest. Time is a landscape that stretches across all things. We’re the ones who move across it.”
Theo shook his head in hopeless perplexity. “I don’t—”
“If it helps, think of all the people of the world as passengers on a train. You travel through time at the same speed and direction, perceiving events through your own narrow windows. The concepts of past and future are entirely human constructs. We formulated them as navigational markers, like east and west. Only now—”
“I got off the train.”
Azral smiled again. “You’re not the first of your kind to achieve this state, though my ancestors only seem to come here by accident. They romantically refer to this realm as the God’s Eye. You’d do just as well to call it the Gray.”
Theo didn’t care what it was called. If he was forever stuck here at the cusp of noon, it was Hell.
“Is there . . . a way back on the train?”
“Of course. You can resume your journey at any time. I’ll show you how, but not yet. Come with me. If you wish to aid your companions, there are things you should see.”
Theo felt a gentle hand on his back. He’d only taken three steps out of the room when a cold force pushed him forward like a leaf in a gale. By the time his dizzy senses returned to him, he found himself outside the building.
“What . . . what just . . . ?”
“A quicker mode of transit,” Azral explained. “Foot travel is a needless formality here.”
Theo’s next question fizzled in the urgency of his surroundings. More than twenty federal agents now flanked the building—all paused in tense and busy actions. A ghost team fixed their imaging towers around the Silvers’ dusty red car while a second group wheeled a large metal device that reminded Theo of a supervillain’s death ray. He shuddered to think what it would do once the clock started ticking again.
“Shit. It’s worse than I thought.”
“Indeed,” said Azral. “In one hundred thirty-two seconds, their crude solic toy will breach the barrier.”
Theo looked to the eight gun-toting Deps in armored black speedsuits. He could only assume they were all assigned to take down Hannah. “We’ll never make it out of here.”
“You’ll escape. It’s the continuing presence of these government agents that troubles me. There may yet be a remedy.”
“What remedy?”
“It’s my task,” Azral curtly replied. “Not yours.”
Theo churned with stress as he recalled Azral’s remote-button slaughter of twenty-one physicists, another so-called remedy. They worked for you and you killed them. Bill Pollock got me sober and you killed him.
“I never wished to slay those scientists,” Azral replied, to Theo’s unease. “I saw the consequences of their continued existence, an elaborate chain of events that would have destroyed you and a great many others. It’s the burden of foresight. Our choices often seem questionable to those around us, even cruel. You’ll know this soon enough.”
Theo saw the dreadlocks dangling from an armored agent’s helmet and struggled to avoid all thoughts of Melissa. If the Pelletiers identified her as the face of their federal problem, she was dead.
Azral put his hand on Theo’s back. “Come.”
In a windy swirl, the scenery changed once more. Now they stood in the vast marble lobby, a place that had seen much violence since Theo left it. Furniture all around the room had been smashed and singed and spattered with blood. Two wet and gory strangers lay facedown in the elevator bank while a third corpse languished on the stairwell.
Theo looked to the inanimate couple at the eastern wall, poised inches from a glowing white portal. Though the alluring Indian woman was a stranger to him, he had no trouble recognizing the bald and brawny thug who’d shot him in Terra Vista. A stagnant curl of smoke extended like coral from the barrel of Rebel’s revolver.
“Goddamn it. It was him, wasn’t it? He shot Mia.”
Azral glared at Rebel. He’d only just now caught up on the battle in the lobby—the savage beating of his mother, the timely intervention from his father. His voice dropped a cold octave.
“You won’t have to worry about him much longer.”
“Why is he trying to kill us? What did we do to him?”
Azral shook his head in scorn. “Beneath all that bulk, Richard Rosen is nothing more than a frightened child. He sees a dark event coming and he can’t bear the thought of it. So his weak mind conjures a theory, an enemy, a brutal solution. He’s hardly the first man in history to blame his troubles on immigrants.”
Theo scanned the room and caught David hiding behind a support pillar, his pistol raised high in frozen readiness.
“Oh no . . .”
Azral bloomed a small grin. “He’ll be fine. The boy’s remarkably capable for his age.”
Theo was all too aware of that. Azral gleaned his flip-side worry.