The Show Must Go On
The call came while Dale Yorkes was cataloguing a shipment of Gallé vases from one of their European brokers. He was seated at a small clerk's desk—from the inventory of a long-defunct British shipping company—tucked in a corner of the dimly-lit, cluttered basement. Stacey disdainfully called it his "dark cubbyhole", but he found it much easier to get work done down here, surrounded by the amassed spoils of their travels, with only the steady murmuring of half a dozen antique clocks as accompaniment.
At the sound of a muffled, intermittent trill, he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a slim notebook. It was bound in red Moroccan leather, a pattern of entwined leaves and vines, intricately hand-tooled and embellished in gold-leaf, on its surface. Dale ran a finger appreciatively over the exquisite design.
It was the work of a 17th century Italian craftsman, a provenance Dale could authenticate as he had purchased it from the artisan himself. One of the peculiarities of being a time traveller whose cover was dealing in antiques was that anything you brought forward from the past would appear to be a new, authentically- made forgery, lacking the patina of elapsed time. Pieces that he and Stacey procured with the intent to sell had to be stored in the past, to be retrieved—from a location that would hopefully still be in existence—in the present. Things they kept for their own collection, on the other hand...these could be appreciated in their pristine state.
The notebook trilled again and Dale flipped it open. The book consisted of a single sheet of smart paper, mounted between the marbled endpapers by a Malaysian technician in 2043. Victor Stein's avatar blinked persistently on the page.
Dale sighed heavily. He had been dreading this call since he and Stacey had returned from the year 1907. The trip was supposed to be routine—leave in the morning, spend two weeks in the past, return ten minutes after they had left—but it had all collapsed into a bit of a fiasco.
They had been there before, setting up connections, amassing intelligence, making strategic purchases and manipulating the rivalries between the various factions of the meta-humans of the time, who amusingly referred to themselves as "Wonders". This time, though, the situation had rapidly deteriorated as the conflicts between groups erupted into a pitched battle. He and Stacey first tried to control and direct the combat, but they had been forced to reluctantly employ their contingency plan, a bomb large enough to eliminate all three groups at—
Dale winced as a sharp pain stabbed up from base of his skull. He sucked in a breath through gritted teeth, letting it slowly out as the pain faded to a persistent, dull ache. He shook his head. Just thinking about being grilled by Victor over the details was giving him a migraine.
It was Victor who had first approached him, less than a year after their first Rite of Thunder, seeking to forge an alliance against the other members of the Pride. It was logical, perhaps even inevitable that their two families would plot together against the others. The Minoru's magic was antithetical to their own philosophies, and both the Hayes and Deans weren't even human. As for the Wilders, Dale felt that Victor would never consider them anything but glorified gangbangers, no matter how high they had risen.
Stacey of course loathed both Janet and Victor, but then, that was how she felt about nearly everyone. The magnitude of her contempt for most people was one of the things about her that first attracted Dale. It had taken a fair bit of cajoling to convince Stacey that an alliance with the Steins was both beneficial and necessary. Unfortunately for Dale, that meant he was the one stuck with having to deal with them.
Best get this over with, he thought sullenly. He composed himself to a semblance of poise before tapping the avatar.
"Hello, Victor."
Stein was in his lab, as usual, a clutter of complicated devices in various states of dis- and reassembly piled on the workbench in front of him. He stopped his intent study of a circuit board and looked up at whatever no doubt overly complicated contraption he was using to communicate with Dale.
"Yorkes. You're back."
Canny observation, Dale thought. "Yes, we got back about a few hours ago," he said, instead. "I was planning on contacting you, but I thought you might be busy. How's that tesseract coming along?"
Dale was rewarded with an annoyed scowl from Victor. The pocket universe generator was something Stein had been fiddling with unsuccessfully for years now. Victor picked up an inordinately large soda and sucked noisily from the straw before answering.
"I take it your little visit didn't turn out well, then," Victor said, refusing to take the bait.
"Why would you say that?" Dale replied evenly.
"Because while waiting for your call I had a certain safe deposit box in New York checked, and it seems to be oddly lacking in hundred year old deeds."
Dale ignored the tightening vice of pressure in his head. "Yes, well, we had a spot of bother with the native population and had to leave sooner than we expected. Playing the local factions off each other can be a tricky thing sometimes."
"Hmmm…What about that other matter? This supposed Minoru ancestor. Did you find out anything from these Shining Path people?"
"Upward Path," Dale corrected. He shrugged. "Rumors. Nothing concrete. If she was there, she was underground and determined to stay that way. More likely the stories were just speculation."
Victor considered a moment. "Well, we can always try again, I suppose. Maybe a few decades earlier?"
"Ah, I'm afraid we won't be going anywhere for a while. The Portico was...damaged." A quick scrap of memory, of a hand throwing a lever and the Portico shimmering and disappearing, flashed across Dale's mind and was instantly obliterated by a sudden, momentary stab of pain. He winced again.
Victor leaned forward slightly, but his voice feigned nonchalance. "Really? If you'd like, I'd be happy to take a look..."
No doubt, Dale thought. Victor had been itching to get his hands on the Portico for as long as they had known him.
"Oh, don't worry, you know Stacey and I enjoy the odd bit of tinkering ourselves, I'm sure we'll have the old girl up and running in no time," Dale said, struggling to smile graciously despite the steady, dull throbbing in his head.
"How did it get damaged? I thought you said all those superhero-types back then were strictly bush league." Victor's mouth curled in a sardonic grin. "Don't tell me you let some antique crusader get the better of you two…"
Dale slammed his fist down, rattling and nearly toppling the Van Erp lamp from the desk. "Damn it, Stein! Is there some point to this…this interrogation?!"
Stein held up both hands in placation, the smile vanished. "Fine! Fine! No need to get testy, Dale."
Dale swallowed, instantly regretting the outburst. Of course now Stein was now watching him through the screen with suspicious intensity, no doubt filing the incident away as some sign of weakness. Despite their covert pact, he knew that Victor and Janet would abandon them to the rest of the Pride in a heartbeat if they thought it would be advantageous.
"Ah, sorry old man," Dale said, attempting to sound jovial. "Bit out of sorts over the whole…situation. And I'm afraid we let some of our work pile up…I really need to get back to it, so if there isn't anything else…"
"Well, we haven't had a chance to coordinate strategy for some time, Yorkes. Rite of Blood's coming up in less than two months, too."
"Of course, of course." Dale said. The pounding in his head was slowly receding to a dull ache and he shifted back in his chair. "Was there anything in particular…?"
"I thought you might be interested that the Deans have been poking around. Leslie insisted Janet go with her to some fool charity banquet thing in Hollywood last week."
Dale raised an eyebrow. "Really? Hobnobbing with earthlings now? Do you think they're trying to feel you out for an alliance?
Victor shrugged. "Maybe. Janet says it was mostly innocuous; hardly anything to do with business...Oh, there was some nonsense about one of the Avengers actually being a Skrull in disguise. You know Leslie; everything is off-world intrigue with that woman."
Dale barely heard Victor's last sentence. A strange feeling of disconnected dread had passed through him, and he swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.
When he looked back at notebook's screen, Victor was once again staring intently at him. "Are you all right, Yorkes?"
"Fine. I'm fine. I just...," he tried to chuckle and forced a smile. "How does that saying go, 'someone walked on my grave'?"
There was a muffled sound from the screen and Victor glanced to his left, a look of consternation on his face. A woman's voice was barely audible in the background, although Dale couldn't make out what she was saying. Victor's scowl made it clear it wasn't good, whatever it was.
"No!" Victor snapped angrily. "I told him if something like this happened again he could kiss lacrosse goodbye! He doesn't need coddling, Janet, he needs...look, I don't have time for this right now!" He gestured toward the screen. "I'm busy! We'll talk about it later!"
Dale smiled inwardly, his headache easing slightly. It was heartening to see Victor squirming in his stead and an end to the man's interminable questions. Victor turned back to the screen, shaking his head ruefully.
"Trouble on the home front, Victor?" Dale tried to keep from sounding too jocular.
"Gah! That idiot son of mine is going to be the death of me...Janet got a call yesterday that Chase hasn't been at school for the last three days! Seems we emailed their nurse an excuse…without our being aware of it." Victor sighed heavily. "Tell me, is it too much to expect a little gratitude considering what—"
"I'm sorry Victor," Dale blurted. "I...I've got to go..."
Stein's protest was cut off as Dale blanked the screen and then set it to block all calls. He closed the notebook and gripped the edge of the desk with both hands. His heart thrummed alarmingly fast against his ribs and he felt a dizzying jolt of adrenaline coursing pointlessly through his limbs.
He ran a hand across his brow. A cold sweat dappled his skin.
What in blazes is happening? The same unfocused, fleeting sensation of unease and panic had swept through him for a second time, all the more distressful because he couldn't put a cause or name to it. He forced himself to breathe slowly, his eyes closed.
He concentrated on the ticking of the clocks scattered throughout the basement, a relaxing steady whisper. After a few moments, Dale slowly stood from his chair, half uncertain that the inexplicable feeling of anxiety wouldn't suddenly return. He switched off the lights and went shakily up the stairs.
In contrast to his basement workspace, his wife kept her office in a bright, well-appointed room just off the foyer. Dale found her behind her Art Deco desk, afternoon sunlight streaming in from the French doors leading to the side yard. Stacey had her own notebook open atop a stack of papers, tapping and manipulating icons on the smart paper with one hand while the other was punching the Bakelite keys of a mechanical adding machine that spewed a curling ribbon of paper to the floor.
She barely glanced up as he entered. "Have you seen these figures Wilder sent me? He expects me to believe that drug sales in the Inland Empire dropped 14 percent in one quarter?"
"Stacey."
"They've got to be joking. 'Don't worry about the accounting, Stacey; I've got a man in the Barbados who'll handle everything.' Ha! You have to watch these people like hawks!"
"Stacey," Dale said, louder. "I have to ask you something. It's important."
His wife sighed heavily and looked up, her hand still poised over the adding machine.
"This morning. Why did we leave 1907?" Dale asked.
"You know very well, why," Stacey said. When he didn't reply she made a vague dismissive gesture with her hand. "The Sinners became uppity. Too much bad blood with the Upward Path. The situation was simply too volatile to control."
Dale felt the fierce pressure building once more at the base of his skull as he forced himself on. "Right. So we set them at each other's throats. And then…then we had to go to the contingency measure. The bomb. And then…"
Stacey winced and rubbed her eyes. "Dale, this is giving me a headache. Can we not do this right now?"
"You can't remember any details, can you? I can't either. I think something happened back there, something that's affected our memory."
She shook her head. "No. It's impossible."
"Stacey. I want you to listen to something," he said. He leaned forward, fists on the desk, his eyes studying his wife intently. "Chase Stein."
She looked at him blankly. "Dale, I don't have time for this nonsense. I want to get this accounting done before—"
"Skrull."
Something passed across Stacey's face and her lips parted in a silent gasp. That's exactly how I must have looked, Dale thought.
"But what...what does it mean?" she asked, her voice quiet with trepidation.
Dale shook his head. "I don't know."
"Some kind of temporal fugue? Or a…a paradox! If we somehow—"
"No," Dale said. "The Portico's damping field would prevent—"
"But you broke the Portico!"
"Did I?" Dale demanded. "Do you actually remember me breaking it, Stacey? Or how it was damaged? I certainly don't..."
He rubbed his fingers across his left temple and sighed in exasperation. "Gad! It's like...like when a word's at the tip of your tongue; you know something's there and you just can't..."
The front door slammed.
"Dammit!" Stacey hissed. She quickly closed her notebook and swept it and the stack of papers into a desk drawer. "We'll have to figure this out later...!"
Dale turned around as the door behind him opened and their daughter Gertrude walked into the room and
And he remembered. A tumbler slid into place and the vast implacable weight of his memory slammed down in an instant, in numbing clarity: An improbably older Chase Stein, accompanied by a shape-shifting Skrull, assaulting them in their rail car and telling them that she was dead, their beloved Gertrude was dead, and later Nico, no longer that quiet, mousey girl who came over to do her homework with Gertrude but an almost unrecognizable, full-fledged sorceress holding her own Staff of One, her eyes full of murderous rage as she cursed them. Cursed them to know…
Of course. Magic, with all its wretched unpredictability and vague rules that weren't rules. She had cast a blasted spell on them and it had travelled up with them through the decades, coiled and hidden, somehow blocking their memories until Gertrude triggered it into full effect.
We'll run, Dale decided in an instant. To hell with the Contract, to hell with the Pride and the Gibborim. There was a safe house in New Zealand, and a hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamonds in the lining of a suitcase upstairs. They couldn't touch the funds in the account the Wilders knew about, but they had others, hidden throughout the world. Victor would be suspicious after that cut-off call, but out of fear of exposing their alliance it would be at least several days before he would risk telling the other members of the Pride that they were incommunicado.
"Mr. Franklin is a total Fascist!" Gertrude declared, dropping her button-and-patch-covered backpack to the floor with a melodramatic flourish. "He wanted an essay on recent American history, right? So I turned in a report about trying Henry Kissinger for war crimes and he said I have to do it over!"
He barely heard his daughter's voice as his mind churned furiously through possible stratagems. The Portico was useless now, so they couldn't escape through time. A commercial airline would be too easy for the Pride to trace. Get in the car then, lease a private jet at a smaller airport. The important thing was to get away, to explicitly break the timeline that led to all of their deaths. They would have to tell Gertrude about their true identities, the secret they had hoped to keep from her until her eighteenth birthday, but all of that no longer mattered. They had to run. Now. He had to grab his daughter and—
"Gertrude, Mr. Franklin is a teacher at a private school in Malibu; I doubt he's even a Republican, let alone a Fascist."
With a stab of mounting alarm, Dale realized that the calm, reasoned voice that had just spoken was his own. He tried to raise his hands, to step forward and seize his daughter by the shoulders, to move.
He couldn't. And he understood then the configuration of the trap that had closed around them, the extent of Nico's curse. His mind was closed off, imprisoned and helpless, a spectator in his own body as someone else, some other Dale Yorkes walked, spoke and moved them haplessly, inexorably toward their doom.
Gertrude crossed her arms and glared at her parents. "I should have known you'd take his side!"
"Honey, it's not a question of sides," Stacey said. Dale felt a queasy vertigo as his head turned, without his volition, toward his wife. She was looking at Gertrude with an expression of long-suffering placidity. Of course, Dale thought, she's trapped in there too, just as I am. An onlooker.
Gertrude snatched up her backpack. "Fine!" she said, flinging open the door theatrically. "I'll be up in my room. Redoing my stupid report so it conforms to the official narrative!"
There were other memories in Dale's head now, memories of things that hadn't happened yet. Not his own, but theirs, memories from the minds of their disloyal children, implanted by the curse. He and Stacey had to know what was coming, the full measure of what they couldn't prevent.
The Pride's own children, discovering their parents' secret, daring to betray them, to actually fight against them. The Rite of Thunder sabotaged, their sacrifice destroyed. The Gibborim abandoning them. He could see his own death with Stacey and the rest of the Pride, the shell of the Vivarium exploding beneath the sea and then collapsing under tons of cold, black water.
And then, worst of all: Gertrude—their legacy, the child they had built an empire for—bleeding to death, dying in the arms of that loutish Stein boy, surrounded by flames.
The final memory was Nico, standing over them in that filthy alleyway in 1907, talking to her fellow traitors as if he and Stacey were no longer even worth addressing:
They won't be able to change anything they do. Or say anything. Not even to each other. For all the world their short, useless lives will play out exactly like they did before...
Stacey came up and stood by him, and he felt his arm move, draping itself around her, his fingers gently grasping her shoulder. Again, the disturbing sensation of his head turning, without his input.
"Teenagers…" his wife said. "What are we going to do with that girl, dear?"
Dale studied her face. She was smiling with wry exasperation, but there, in the corner of her eye...wasn't there just a hint, a suggestion of desperation, of the real Stacey, locked and mute inside her skull?
His body chuckled, an idiot automaton he no longer controlled. "Ah, well...she'll come round eventually, you'll see. Good breeding will always tell."
"I suppose…" Stacey said, shaking her head. "I just wish she appreciated all we've done for her."
He sighed, turning to look at the brilliant southern California afternoon outside. "Don't worry, love. It'll work out. How can she not help but see how fortunate we are?"
He barely heard the words, a distant echo spoken by someone else. He struggled to control his mind, to keep it from collapsing into a pit of panic and madness. There had to be a way. Nothing was immutable. It was difficult to tell with the older children, but the Hayes brat had appeared to be eleven or twelve years old in that alley. So a year from now…perhaps two. At least a year to plot an escape, to find a way out of this prison before they died.
... For all the world their short, useless lives will play out exactly like they did before...But inside they'll never stop screaming.
No, Dale thought. No, you damnable little witch, I will not scream.
I will not.