New Decameron Ninety-Four: Megan E. O'Keefe (Patreon)

Burn Long Into the Night

Megan E. O'Keefe

The frame’s construction was plain, the empty outline of a simple door, and in truth it was not necessary. Yet still the talisman of it brought Detra comfort. Purpose. She pressed her palm against the slick surface, rested her forehead to it and closed her eyes. The chill did not sooth the thump of her heart in her head, the pin-prickles of eyes against her skin.

She'd thought she’d never see it again, let alone stand alongside it full-suited. Waiting to jump.

“My timeline is exhausted,” she insisted, taking her face away from the frame to regard her handler. Janie glanced at the smartscreen strapped to her wrist, shuffled documents and data points, clucked her tongue against her teeth and sighed.

Detra could not help but notice the lines around her old handler’s eyes, the withering of her lips. She wondered if Control had summoned Janie out of retirement for this, too. She wondered if she looked quite as sunken as Janie did. Detra had carried her habit of never looking in a mirror into her silvered years. Knowing what one looked like made it more difficult to slip free the inertial frame and jump.

“It was. You know we can always call you back into service.” Janie forced a smile.

A tendril of fear snaked its way through Detra’s muscles and sprouted thorns. She had led a quiet life since retirement, keeping away from any exciting world-events, staying far from major city centers and traveling only when necessary. There shouldn’t be anything interesting in her recent timeline worth doubling back on.

She’d made sure of it.

#

Her first jump had been one of terror, as it was for most. She could still feel the splinters of the barn-wood against her back, smell the sun-warmed hay, and see the foamy slavering of the rabid dog. If she closed her eyes and day-dreamed, she could recall the out-of-body lurch, the lightning-strike air. And then she was standing outside the barn, in the moments before the dog had cornered her. Somehow, she had found presence of mind enough to throw rocks at the dog, drawing it off. And then she had snapped forward, melded with the present. The dog was gone. There were rocks scattered all around the barn door.

The black sedan came for her the next morning.

#

“Well?” Detra prompted, fear making her temper short. “What am I needed for?”

Concern shifted the fallow lines of Janie’s face, and her voice softened. “Oh honey, you know what for.”

Fingers of ice clenched around the throb in Detra’s head, stilling the pain. Her body sought numbness. It was safer that way; not to feel. To grow as cold and immovable as the frame.

“Heng.” She said his last name. It was safer. “What are the event points?”

Janie spoke as if she were reading from her smartscreen, but Detra knew she’d have memorized all of this ahead of time. It was easier to avoid eye contact when you had to pretend to read. “A series of arsons around your present community.”

I haven’t heard of any arsons, she wanted to say, but bit back her words. Of course she hadn’t, they hadn’t been committed to her timeline. The very fact that she was standing here, ready to jump, meant that she would go back. Would be successful. If she failed, well—only then would she remember the fires.

If she couldn’t remember the fires, then Heng was gone. She’d completed her mission already. The only thing left was to carry it out.

He was gone. She’d counted him lost the moment he’d doubled-back, all those years ago. You couldn’t jump to a point preceding one you had already jumped to. Just couldn’t.

Sure, you could pop back and blow out your candles at your sweet sixteenth all over again. But then forget about keeping yourself from falling off your bike at nine. To fold-over your own node points was to lose yourself. To flit endlessly forward and back.

Heng had folded-over. Twice.

#

His smile was all Detra remembered from her first day at the academy. Teeth like the pearl buttons her mother used sew into her Sunday best, glittering in the frame of his dark face.

Primal in his joy. Rugged and sparkling and home. She’d loved him, just for that, though she hadn’t known it then. Retrospective was every jumper’s harsh mistress.

She’d used that smile later, as her anchor-image, when it turned out that next door to the school that day an insider deal had gone down that avalanched into some rather unsavory legislation. Heng’s flash of teeth drawing her into the past.

#

“I haven’t been tracking anchors,” Detra confessed, embarrassment seeping into her cheeks. “Not since I retired.”

Janie licked her lips, her eyes flicked to the roundhouse of one-way mirrors surrounding them. The simulation of isolation was key to a successful jump—but Janie and Detra’s big bosses were never far away. The frame, she supposed, helped to defray the sensation of eyes creeping across her skin. If only a little.

“The arsons have been increasing in frequency. Mostly scattered over the last decade, but, just yesterday we logged one on the day of your retirement, later in the evening, nearby the House. This is a fairly strong series of anomalies. Control has labeled the new timeline emergent. Some elements are already bleeding over into this one, though we can’t be sure which.”

Detra’s skin went cold, her palms clammy. How long had Heng been skipping like a stone through time, trying to get her attention? Why did he want her attention, anyway? Did he crave an end? Had the folding-over driven him mad?

She swallowed through a clot in her throat. What kind of man would she find, wearing Heng’s smile?

“Objective?” Detra asked.

“Eliminate the anomaly.” Janie’s voice was flat, mechanical. Detra wondered how many times she’d practiced those words. Probably watched herself in a mirror, getting the subtle movement of her lips just right. Erasing the twitch of pain from the corner of her eyes. Detra sighed. Janie had also been Heng’s handler. The knot of pain in her chest eased, just a touch, knowing it was a shared burden.

She stepped into the frame, let its edges obscure her presence. It was thick as her waist, angled so that no one peering into the room could see her. Not even the watchers behind the mirrors.

The little red light on the security cameras blipped out. A soft rustle of cloth as Janie excited the room. She was as unobserved as she could ever be. She checked her smartscreen-watch, queuing up the arsons Janie had sent her.

It was time.

Detra closed her eyes and drifted in her mind, shutting doors on thoughts until they had drained away. Her breaths came evenly, slow and steady enough to be forgotten. She pictured herself as an ant on the back of a great balloon, too small to see the curvature beneath her, thinking all the world around was flat. Slowly, carefully, she reeled her mind back from that ant, hovered above it, saw the curve for what it was—and more, beyond. The emptiness which was not empty, the weave beneath the weft.

She jumped.

Her sense of self lurched, her breathing lost its rhythmic pattern. She tangled in the other-fabric, felt the impossibly smooth suit she wore protest leaving its inertial frame. Her will held.

Detra opened her eyes in the back hallway of the House on the day of her retirement party. Singing voices, all out of tune, greeted her, and she had to shove her knuckles between her teeth to keep from laughing. Closing her eyes, she leaned against the oak-paneled wall, inhaling the familiar aroma of cheap pine cleaner.

“Who—?” A voice crowded her thoughts, wrenched her eyes open.

Clive stood across from her in civilian clothes, his sandy hair mussed and his lips stained by blue icing.

“Sticky?” She breathed, unable to keep the wonder from her voice. He grinned, giving her a once-over glance that took in her jumpsuit, her silvered hair. She probably had a little extra padding, despite continued training. The suit had seemed tighter.

“Oooh, this is good.” Sticky grinned at her, pitching his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Thought you were retiring today.”

“I did,” she murmured, schooling her face to calm.

Sticky. He’d walked out halfway through her party, claiming he needed a piss, but she’d never seen him again. The others stayed in touch, sure, but for some reason young Sticky had kept away. She’d always thought it was because she’d grown too old to interest him, or she’d done some incomprehensible thing to offend him. She never got her answers. He never returned her messages.

It was hard on her when he died.

Radiation poisoning. It didn’t affect them all, and there was no sure way to tell who was going to get it, but they didn’t call him Sticky for nothing. He’d always had trouble making the jump. He’d even left his belt behind once.

“You all right?” he asked, stepping forward to get a better look at her face in the low light. With an effort she smoothed her expression into what she hoped looked like gentle amusement.

“Just surprised.” She grinned. “Didn’t expect you.”

“You’re surprised? Lady, I just ate your retirement cake and here you are, hard at work.” He pursed his lips. “Why? What’d they pull you back for?”

She didn’t need to say anything, he saw it written in her eyes. That much, at least, she could not smooth away.

“Heng,” he said.

She nodded.

“Okay.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “I’m here. Let’s do this.”

“You can’t jump,” she blurted, then bit her tongue. She couldn’t be responsible for adding to his radiation sickness. Just couldn’t.

“Whoa, Ms. Rules. I won’t jump without an assignment, but you’re here, so I’m guessing he’s close. No jumping required, right?”

She smiled, almost chuckled with giddy relief. “Right.”

#

The first time Heng folded it was to save her. Of course. They were warned about it from the moment they joined. From the first time they all sat in class together and glanced at each other from beneath lashes, shy and anxious, knowing that they sat amongst their peers.

You will see each other hurt. You will see each other die. You cannot change this.

Why risk the stability of the timeline?

Why turn one casualty into two?

Heng had heard, but not listened.

Detra could feel the bullet sometimes, if she closed her eyes. Shredding her up from the inside. All hot fire and cold shock.

She could still feel it; the moment her timeline twisted. When a Heng that shouldn’t have been there tackled the shooter to the ground, turned the bullet meant for her on her aggressor.

The memory hurt more.

#

Control kept them in the middle of nowhere, hidden amongst spiderwebs of dirt roads branching through endless empty acres, in a compound they called the House. Wheat and corn had been left to go to seed, to climb high and shelter them with solitude.

The public thought they were in some chic city building, under layers and layers of biometric security backed up by big men and bigger guns. Detra allowed herself a smile, taking a deep breath of the early summer air rich with dust and dried grass. She glanced up at the big blue Kansas sky, empty of even the thinnest streak of cloud, and wondered just what old Dorothy would think of the people working in her backyard.

The public, it seemed, liked their conspiracies too much to consider what it took to make a jump. The middle of nowhere was prime for jumping—the center of a million urban eyes, not so much.

Detra and Sticky followed the blip of her smartscreen to the anomaly site, an old grain silo gone to rust and rot. Didn’t look like a wise place to start a fire. Long grasses haloed all around it, high enough that Detra had to keep pushing them aside so she could see straight on. The earth cracked and crunched beneath her feet, the irrigation system long since dried up.

“You sure this is right?” Sticky asked, clearing a fan of space outside what had once been the silo’s door. “A fire here would burn down the House, too.”

Detra followed, eyes glued to her smartscreen. “This is it, but we’re early.”

She caught Sticky looking over her shoulder and swatted him back with a laugh. “Hey! No peeking at future tech.”

He held up his hands and patted the air. “Sorry, sorry, can’t help it. Looks sleek.“

“It is. Now hush.”

The air hung heavy on her skin, the scents on the breeze sharpened by something brighter and greener than anything that had ever grown here. She tensed, saw Sticky do likewise from the corner of her eye. As she scanned the horizon she saw Sticky reach for his sidearm, a black 9mm scarcely larger than the palm of his hand. She swallowed. It wasn’t time for that. Not yet.

The wild grasses rustled, shifted, whispered their stalks against one another. She held her breath. Could be a ground squirrel. Could be the wind.

But of course, it wasn’t.

Heng parted the long grasses, stepped into the clearing. He was suited to jump, his eyes sheltered beneath sunglasses. Detra breathed deep, not thinking, just wanting to catch the scent of him. One last breath of comfort.

From his shoulders shadows twisted, flickered, shades of his own face—different times, different ages. Younger and older than she’d ever seen him. The air warped around him, like heat waves off asphalt, the very fabric of the timeline offended by his presence. He took the glasses off. Smiled his home-coming smile.

“Hey, Bright Eyes.”

#

The second time Heng folded… She couldn’t remember. Must have only been once.

#

Her old codename cut her, pushed her back a step. They’d stopped using it the day he’d folded. Stopped calling her anything but Detra, and retirement had come soon after. They’d needed her to be Bright Eyes.

She’d needed to be anything else.

“Heng,” she said, because his codename would cut even deeper. “You’re an anomaly.”

And the job of a jumper is to excise anomalies from the timeline.

The unspoken words hung between them, thickening the air. His easy smile caught, the shades of his other-selves cycled faster and faster. With a deep breath, he hung his sunglasses from his collar and held his hands out wide. Whether in supplication, or simply to show he was unarmed, she couldn't tell.

Eyes sharp as cracked ice regarded her, anchored her to the spot. Detra searched them, seeking some glimmer of madness, some hint of the unhinged mind that must have grown behind the eyes of a man unmoored in time.

It wasn’t there. He was still just Heng.

“Sorry, Big Bear,” Sticky said, and brought the gun up.

Heng didn’t move, so Detra did.

She leapt, wrapped her arms around him, around Big Bear. His extended hands coiled around her, her cheek collided with his—the muscles of his jaw flexed, a smile?—and then the air split, thunder roared by her ear and her next breath smelled gunpowder bright.

Sticky yelled, the words meaningless, as the world wrenched around her and he—they—jumped.

#

They landed on grasses slick with night-dew, thumped and grunted and rolled all tangled up together under the glare of the stars. When the tumble ceased she pulled away, scrambling backward through the broken reeds, palms slipping in the dirt. Heng reached out, touched her receding foot, and she froze.

“Your ear,” he said.

She reached up, cupped her torn earlobe in one hand and felt the sticky dribble of her own blood, smelled the new-penny stench.

“He feels badly about that for years.” Heng smiled, shook his head as he pushed to his feet. The shades around him flickered.

“When are we?” she asked.

Heng blinked at her, then tipped his head to her wrist. “You’re the one with the watch.”

Fighting down nausea, she glanced at the smartscreen and had to choke back a relieved laugh. They’d gone forward—only a few hours. She had not folded back. But… None of them could jump while observed. Certainly not while touching another person.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured.

Heng extended a hand to her and she took it, because she did not know what else to do. She lurched to her feet, stood staring at him in the dark. He looked away, up toward the crescent sliver of a moon. She drank in the sight of him.

She wouldn’t have the chance for much longer.

“We’re tangled,” he said eventually, cleaving the silence. “When I folded, I folded over your timeline, too. You and I…” He turned, gave her a half-smile as thin as the moon. “We can move back and forth, endlessly, so long as we’re together. You just have to complete the circuit.”

His hand was in hers, though she had not seen him move. The rough, familiar pad of his palm was as warm and firm as the day she had last touched it. His hair, she realized, was as dark as that day—the corners of his eyes free of the scars of the arrow of time. Detra glanced to the dried-lake texture of the back of her hand, thought of the way her hips ached with the rising of the sun.

He reached out, gathered the end of her silver-grey braid in his hand and ran his fingers over it. Brought his cheek to hers and breathed deep, exhaling her own perfume against her skin. She shivered. She could not help herself.

I don’t remember the fires. He’s already gone.

“We should go to the House, they’ll know what to do.”

He jerked his head away, and she tensed, fearing he would flee. After a few frantic heartbeats he sighed, rested his forehead against hers. 

“You already know what to do, Bright Eyes.”

He jumped.

#

The night yawned empty, the heat of him against her fading with every breath she took. Detra swore, glanced at her watch and flicked to the variant timelines, to the other anomalies—the bait fires. One beacon burned bright, its coordinates familiar. A little barn a few miles outside her retirement community. Not far from here—but two years into the future.

Detra closed her eyes, centered herself, and jumped.

#

Daylight speared her pupils, causing her to stagger on hard ground. A horn blared at her, bright and angry, and then she was falling, the cushion of another body breaking her fall.

“Jesus, Detra, watch where you jump!”

Sticky’s voice. She squirmed her way free and pushed to her feet, holding out a hand to help the poor kid upright.

But he wasn’t looking much like a kid, now. His face was pale and sallow, cheeks harboring cruel shadows. She looked away.

“How did you know—?”

He cut a hand through the air. “You told me.”

“What?” Exasperation weighed heavy on her nerves. She hefted herself to her feet, cursing that aching hip. “Never mind that.” She sighed, ran her fingers through her hair and frayed the braid. “Where is he, Sticky? I… I’m sorry I interfered before.”

She would not admit he was right. Would not admit that Heng’s mind must have come undone to think the way he did. Sticky shook crumpled leaves from his hair.

“You were right to interfere. I was an overeager kid.”

Her jaw hung open. She snapped it shut. “No. You were right. I was too sentimental in my old age.” She tried on a rueful smile. “He’s… not right. He thinks our timelines are tangled, that the anomaly will stabilize if I...” She bit her lip, shook her head.

“... complete the circuit,” he finished.

“How do you know that?”

“He told me. It sounds right, Detra. I… Well, I remember some things and—”

"He folded twice, Sticky. He's gone to us. His mind... it's broken."

"Once. He only folded once."

She slashed her hand through the air. “Enough. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Detra took a half-step back, scanning the area. She’d jumped onto the interstate that connected the House to her retirement community, nothing but ragged fields splayed out in all directions. A barn stood a ways behind her, its red paint flaking and its door half-off its hinges. She glanced at her watch. That was it.

She drew her sidearm and stalked toward it as fast as her sore knees would let her, cursing her ineptitude the whole time. Cursing her sentimentality and slow wits. Her lack of conviction and her hope and that damned ache yawning in her chest.

Cursing the warm saline sliding down her cheeks.

Damn physiological responses.

“Detra, slow down!” Sticky called. She charged ahead.

Systematically she worked the perimeter, declared it clear and slipped inside, Sticky padding along at her heels the whole time, telling her it was pointless. He wasn’t here.

When her search proved him true, she dropped her back against the barn wall and closed her eyes.

“I don’t remember the fires,” she said.

“Detra.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “There haven’t been any fires.”

She shoved him back, guilt warring with anger as he staggered and coughed. She turned on her heel and strode out into the mess of the field, hid herself behind the barn. Checked for the next anomalous node.

Jumped.

#

This one was a warehouse, twilight making the crumbling concrete appear streaked with blood. She circled it. Searched it. Worked the protocols. All the while ignoring the sting of salt crusting on her cheeks, the dull throb expanding throughout her chest as if a stone had been dropped in her heart.

Heng was not there.

Sticky was. His ribs showed through his t-shirt and the whites of his eyes had gone yellow. Mild surprise raised his thinning eyebrows as she stepped before him, but they soon settled, his expression smoothing to calm. He raised a hand, waved, the lighter in his palm glinting like a captured firefly.

Detra remembered the last fire—the barn fire. Sticky turned away, leaving her unobserved as he stalked toward the warehouse.

She jumped.

#

She remembered the warehouse fire. 

Jumped.

#

Dawn crept above the river in front of Saint Anne’s hospice, casting the turgid waters in blush-hued light. The same hospice she’d come to for Sticky’s funeral; an anchor-image kept firmly in mind. Detra dragged herself along the riverwalk path, her body thrumming with exertion. She found Sticky sitting on a bench, watching the slow seep of the current, his frail body dwarfed by an oversized tweed coat.

She sat beside him, holstered her sidearm.

“Do you remember the fires?” He asked. His voice was feather light, as if the very weight of the air leaving his lips pushed him down, and so he must be careful with how much he exhaled.

“Yes,” she said. “All but two.”

He nodded, lifted a gnarled-root finger and pointed across the river. An old house hunkered there, isolated in the heart of a damp lawn. Yellow phantoms danced in the windows, twitched at the dust-laden curtains. Glass groaned, cracked. It was a small house, abandoned long ago. The flames would not spread far.

“He needs you.”

She sucked air between her front teeth. “You’ve been talking to him. All this time.”

“Every so often. He can’t stay long, he’s not stable. He warned me, you know. About the sickness.”

She turned to him, but he was still watching the flames.

“You believe him. Believe there’s a circuit.” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, couldn’t bring herself to admit she was considering folding.

“I don’t need belief. I know it’s true. See, I recognize you.”

Detra snort-laughed, her voice edging on delirium. Had Sticky gone senile? He wasn’t old—just sick. “Of course you do.”

“I didn’t know it for sure until the warehouse. I suspected in the hallway, at your party, but…” He shrugged. “I’ve always been skeptical. That’s why it was so hard for me to jump.”

“Sticky…”

“You saved me. When I was twelve.”

A lump swelled within her throat, she swallowed it down. “That’s not possible.”

He chuckled. “Of course it is. I was on my way to a ballgame, but I was late, so I cut across a park my parents always told me to stay away from. Two older kids jumped me, would have killed me then and there if an older couple hadn’t come out of nowhere and scared them off. The crazy old lady had a gun… I’ll never forget the way her hair framed her face, sticking out of a wild braid. Like lightning was about to strike.

“They walked me to the game. Stayed and cheered the whole time. Afterwards, I could never find them. I wanted to thank them properly, but…”

Sticky trailed off, reached over and squeezed her knee. “Thanks, Bright Eyes.”

“That can’t be right.” She touched her half-tugged braid as if it would vanish the moment she acknowledged it was real.

“I’m going to die today, no matter what choice you make. Go back, and I die here. Old enough—” He grinned. “—and content. Don’t go back, I die at twelve. Never thought I’d have to wait my whole life to see if I survived puberty.”

“I don’t remember the first fire,” she said, though the protest felt weak on her lips. "I don't remember the silo burning."

He dropped his lighter into her palm, closed her fingers around it, and covered her first with his own cold hands. “You will.”

#

She found Sticky sitting on a crate by the silo, flicking his lighter on and off between his fingers. He glanced up when she let her feet drag over the grass, his eyes bulging with shock. A smile twisted her lips. She hoped it would make up for the shades dancing around her shoulders.

“Hey, Sticky.”

“Hey, Bright Eyes.”

She held the lighter up—his own, the metal tarnished and battered, but the engraving distinct. His codename, and the parallel straight lines of the jumper crest above it. He grinned, and her tired joints went weak with relief.

“Easy.” A familiar arm looped round her waist, and she gave her weight over to Big Bear, let him help her the few steps to the silo. The ground had been cleared, the long grasses cut down and the earth tilled up and broken. She glanced sideways at Sticky, and he shrugged.

“I had some time. It took you long enough.”

#

They watched the silo burn long into the night, all three huddled together beneath a blanket Sticky had pilfered from the House. He’d told the others he was doing an experiment. Told them to leave him alone for the night.

And so they sat through the hours of the dark in a silence punctuated only by the crackle of the flames. When the last embers died, Sticky rose, stretched toward the stars.

“Sticky,” she began, but he cut her off with a familiar sweep of an arm.

“Keep it to yourself, Bright Eyes. Don’t worry. We’ll be seeing plenty of each other in the future.” He winked, and ducked off into the night.

Big Bear nuzzled his face against the crook of her neck, huffed her scent and sighed, his breath warming her more deeply than the fire ever could. Detra pushed him back, held him at arm’s length, and watched the shades of his past and future settle, calm, around his shoulders like a mantle.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Do we need anchors?”

He grinned, pearl-button teeth bright in the night. “No. Not ever.”

“Then I want to see a baseball game.”

They folded, together, for the second time.

******************************************

"I love time travel," Maya says. The cat yawns and stretches then settles down again.

"I really like how the hero is a retired woman," he says. "That's really neat. Also, it's a very clever story."

"And sometimes you have to choose to break the rules and run away," Maya says.

"Ah," he says, raising his eyebrows.

The cat jumps off Maya's lap. "I think I'm going to go for a walk and look at the pictures on the other floors," she says. 

"Just in case?"

"Just in case."

He stays where he is, and Maya makes a circuit of each floor, looking at the frescoes and the framed paintings on the walls. None of them are Brunelleschi's first perspective painting, though some of them are very interesting. She stands for a while looking at a painting of the Coronation of the Virgin. In the background are hills and the sea and a distant magical city that seems full of adventure. At last she comes back to their seats.

"It's not here," she says.

"It isn't quite time yet," he says. "Let's read."

"What's next?" Maya asks, sitting down.

"A real treat. A new story by Kari Maaren."

"Oh wow! Is it a sequel to Weave a Circle Round?" Maya asks, reaching for it already, bouncing in her seat. "I loved that book so so much."

'No," he says. "Not a sequel. It's something even better. It's called The Girl Who Had No Story."

Maya opens the book. And they read.