Hulius was already stepping onto the platform when the transit cops got on the carriage behind the one he was leaving. He kept his eyes down, shoulders hunched. Two more cops waited by the turnstile, heads cocked slightly to one side, listening to their earpieces as they waited for the handful of passengers to leave the platform.
Fuck, it’s a sweep. Mouth dry and heart pounding, Hulius walked toward the barriers. Two on the train at the back to push forward, two on the gates to stop anyone from escaping—it’d be the same ahead, all the way to the end of the line. Subway trains were beautiful things right up until they turned into a killing ground. He mentally rehearsed what he’d have to do, but kept his hands free. Pepper spray in one pocket, drop knife concealed under the cuff of his right wrist. I don’t want to do this, he realized distantly. They were just transit cops, doing a dirty and unrewarding job—
The turnstile buzzed. He walked through. An incurious glance, and they were behind him. Sometimes the oldest tricks are the best: they’d be looking for a man with a bicycle in a green jacket, and here was a guy in spectacles and a blue jacket, no bike. Still. He tensed, and lengthened his stride. If the trains are networked then any moment now they’ll hear that the mobile team found the bike.
Escalator. Legs pumping, Hulius bounded up, shoving his way past an older man with a walking stick, a woman wearing earbuds. The cry came later than he expected: “Hey, you! Stop, police!”
Hulius ran.
They were near the bottom of the escalator, but he was almost at the top. There was more shouting—he didn’t stop to listen—then he saw the emergency stop button. Punched it in passing, and a bright pain shot up his left hand. An alarm bell began to clang behind him, and he heard a loud mechanical grating noise, accompanied by indignant yelling. People falling down: good, under the circumstances.
He made it into the daylight, breathing hard, and kept running.
The surveyed return point was an alleyway that ran between a foreclosed house and a shuttered head shop, just around the block from the station. Hulius took the corner at a run, certain the cops were on his heels: they might be holding fire because of bystanders, but that was no guarantee of safety against New York’s Finest. There was no time to check for witnesses: he was going to burn this site. Hulius ran to the spot beside the fire escape they’d surveyed on a previous mission, pulled on the elastic strap of his wristwatch, and flipped the device upside down, so that the crystal lay against his wrist and the back was visible. Engraved into the burnished metal of the casing was an interlocking knotwork of tail-chasing complexity. He focused on clearing his mind and stared at the pattern that would take him back to time line one, just as the first officer rounded the corner, gun in hand, and opened fire.
Hiatus.
FORT GEORGE, NEW YORK, TIME LINE THREE, MARCH 2020
It took two world-walking jumps in quick succession to return to the Commonwealth from time line two. Normally Hulius would take his time to recover between trips, find a fallen tree or something to sit on: but he was spooked, and took the second jump too fast. Pain spiked through his forehead as he dropped the messenger bag and bent forward, retching, his ears still ringing with the echo of the single gunshot. He stood in the center of a large room, high-ceilinged and with whitewashed walls, his knees wobbling like jelly. That was much too close, he thought numbly. Painted markings on the floor corresponded to the layout of the alleyway. Helpful hands took the messenger bag, while others eased a wheelchair into place behind him. “Easy there, Major. Please sit down…”
“Thanks,” he tried to say, tongue-tied. That was a really bad mission exit, he thought. Just about the second-worst outcome possible. I’m getting too old for this shit. In his late thirties, he was old for an agent—especially a world-walking agent running courier missions into a hostile high-tech surveillance state. The idea of shuffling quietly into a desk job and then a slow slide down to retirement usually lacked appeal, but right now he was experiencing a dizzying perspective shift. Retirement was a welcome prospect, compared with the alternative so recently on offer.
“Medic? Medic?”
He settled into the chair as someone slipped a blood pressure cuff around his left arm and began to inflate it. Home again, he thought. “Blood pressure’s 165/116, sir. If you lie back, we’ll get that down. This won’t hurt…”
Hulius relaxed, feeling the familiar sting of a needle seeking a vein in his left forearm. Over to the left, the Forensics and Biologicals teams were taking inventory of the courier bag, checking for unwanted passengers. Everyone wore surgical masks and overalls. Access to the Quarantine/Arrival Room was via an operating theater–grade scrub and robing area. Nobody wanted to risk importing plagues or parasites from a parallel universe.
The doctor and paramedics crowded around his chair, waiting to slip their latest potion into his bloodstream: a cocktail of potassium-sparing diuretics and a fancy new calcium channel blocker, guaranteed to smack down post–world-walking hypertension within minutes. It was far better than the old prescriptions the Clan’s doctors had fumbled together, back before they had a superpower’s entire pharmaceutical industry to call on.
His arrival and reception had been recorded by the bulky cameras in the corners of the room, while technicians logged everything on the crude locally made computer terminals lined up against the far wall. The Department of Para-historical Research was meticulous about data collection on these runs. Missions to the United States of America were extremely hazardous: nobody could guess in advance what might be of interest to the board of inquiry if a world-walker was lost.
“Open wide, sir?”
Hulius gaped for the dentist’s forceps. A sharp tug and the man held up the false crown for inspection: “All clear.” He transferred the crown to a labeled jar. “Hmm. I’d like to book you in for descaling and a regular check: there’s a bit of plaque developing. Otherwise, you can go whenever Brian is through with you.”
“I want to take another blood reading in five minutes.” Brian, the doctor with the sphygmomanometer and the antihypertensives, was taciturn. “I’ll sign you off for decontamination when it’s back within sight of normal, but not a moment sooner.”
“More than your job’s worth, eh?” Hulius asked, joking. But judging from the medic’s frown, it was no joking matter.