Fractures Read online

  At least, that was the plan. An aura of crackling green and blue energy flared around me, freezing me in place. A similar aura appeared around Treggen. I strained against the bonds, trying to break free, but to no avail. Two men appeared in front of me. The first was a burly fellow with a shaved head, wearing a trench coat. The other was about my height, with salt and pepper hair and neatly trimmed beard. He wore a black leather jacket and jeans.

  I knew them. Webb and Wheatson, respectively. Chroniclers.

  “Corinthos,” Wheatson whispered, staring at me. “What have you done?”

  “He’s ruined the time stream, that’s what he’s done!” Webb barked. “Don’t be soft, Wheatson, let’s just end this quickly.” Webb produced a handgun that looked like a steampunk flintlock pistol. A chronopistol. It’s a fun little weapon that shoots bullets made of time. And like normal bullets, you’ve got different varieties. Some will just freeze a person in time, effectively removing them from combat. But others will erase you completely from time itself. I had a pretty good idea what Brother Webb was packing.

  Now, whatever this imprisonment aura was, it kept me from moving. Thing is, when you have telekinetic powers, you don’t need to actually move to do anything. And when you’re a god who can manipulate the world around you with a thought, well, that’s hands-free, too.

  Triangular walls of solid diamond erupted from the ground all around the Chroniclers, boxing them in. Wheatson and Webb both calmly pressed buttons on their chronometers, the oversized watches that let them travel through time and space, and reappeared outside the walls.

  Damn.

  “You think you’re so damned clever,” Webb growled. “Well it ends now.” He raised the chronopistol again, its wide barrel just inches from my head. I latched onto it telekinetically and forced it down. The chronobullet struck the ground to the left of my feet. I bound Wheatson in telekinetic bands while keeping my grip on Webb’s gun. I twisted it in his grip, and he strained to resist me, but hey, I’m a god here, and he was just an asshole with a fancy watch, so I had a distinct edge. A moment later, Webb was holding his own gun against his temple.

  “Now,” I said through my teeth, since I couldn’t move my jaw. “Wheatson, I’m going to count to three. You explain what the fuck is going on, or your pal pulls his own trigger.”

  “Corinthos, you have to understand—”

  “One,” I said.

  “Stop!” A new voice called. I remembered that voice. It had monologued at me before, in a place outside of time and space. The Tempus, the leader of the Chroniclers, stepped into my field of vision, his purple robes flowing around him. Two more Chroniclers had come with the Tempus, and moved to flank Treggen. The Tempus stood over Treggen for a moment and regarded my foe. “I always wondered when we’d finally cross paths again,” he said. “It was one of the few things I couldn’t see.” To the Chroniclers flanking Treggen, the Tempus said, “Bind him. Do not let him out of your sight.”

  The Tempus’s expression darkened as he regarded Webb and me. “Corinthos,” he said, “enough of this. Brother Webb is out of line and will be disciplined, I assure you of that.”

  I released my telekinetic hold on the gun. The Tempus looked at Webb. “I have told you, under no circumstances is Corinthos to be harmed.”

  “He’s changed the time stream,” Webb said, obviously trying to keep the anger from his voice. “Sir, can’t you feel it?”

  “Of course I can feel it,” the Tempus snapped. “But Corinthos didn’t do this alone. Corinthos couldn’t do this alone. There’s no way he would’ve known about what was supposed to happen to the Urisk unless he had help.” The Tempus turned his gaze up to the sky. “Courageous!” he shouted. “Show yourself! You have done something very foolish, something that will have catastrophic repercussions. You need to answer for that, or I will have to do something unfortunate to…”—he paused for a moment, as if considering his words—“to Corinthos, here.”

  There was a moment of silence, then a portal of sizzling green energy appeared in the sky twenty feet above the ground. Commander Courageous flew through and the portal winked out. My childhood hero hovered there in the air, his cape billowing out behind him, his clenched fists at his sides, the confident smile gone, replaced with an expression of grim determination.

  “Tempus,” he said.

  “You idiot!” the Tempus snarled. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I saved the Urisk from extinction,” Courageous replied.

  “You have changed the time stream!”

  “It will heal. It has to adapt to what Vincent does.”

  The Tempus had gone purple in the face. “You have fractured time and reality itself! Yes, it will heal, but do you know the potential ramifications? You’ve changed the future for him in dramatic ways. He will have powers now that he’s not supposed to have anymore. And every action he takes with those powers will further fracture time and reality.”

  “I weighed the options, Tempus,” Courageous said, floating down until his scarlet boots touched the ground. “It was worth it.”

  “You complete and utter fool,” the Tempus breathed. “You selfish, righteous bastard. You knew how much damage this could cause, and you did it anyway.”

  “The Urisk didn’t deserve to die,” Courageous snapped. “I prevented that. As I should have before.”

  Before? Wait, what? Did I miss something?

  “I hoped you would recover from that,” the Tempus said. “That was naïve on my part. I will not make that mistake again.” The Tempus touched his own chronometer, and yellow light entered the aura that enveloped me. The energy constricted around my chest. I gasped, and felt something slip between me and my powers. Suddenly, I couldn’t access my followers’ faith. “You will not interfere,” the Tempus said to me. “You will watch and remember.” I found I could move my head, which let me see a dozen more Chroniclers teleport into the area around me, but that was it. I was frozen in place, no psychic powers, no kobold tricks, no portals, and unable to bend the Bright Side to my will. It was a horrifying feeling. It got worse when the Tempus pointed at Courageous and said to the newcomers, “Take him.”

  What happened next was like watching a comic book come to life. Yes, there had been live adaptations of Commander Courageous’s adventures: cartoons, movies, a TV show back in the ’80s. But seeing it first hand, and knowing that it was real, not choreographed, knowing that the powers that Courageous was displaying weren’t special effects, made it both amazing and terrifying.

  Commander Courageous gets his powers from the Anisa Amulet, an artifact that his archeologist alter ego, Rex Arkwright, discovered while on an expedition in South America. When studying the amulet, Rex found that it could tap into the things its wearer and the people around him or her were afraid of, and then allow the wearer to take those fears and turn them into strengths.

  Rex himself had always been afraid of heights, so the amulet bestowed him with the ability to fly. If a bystander was watching a burning building and was afraid the fire department wouldn’t make it in time, Commander Courageous was bestowed with super-speed and would be fireproof. The catch was a person had to be genuinely afraid of what was happening in order for the amulet’s powers to trigger.

  Like most heroes from the Golden Age of comics, Courageous would employ fisticuffs against his foes before he resorted to anything else. And watching him wade into the small army of Chroniclers was nothing short of incredible. He shot forward, delivering right crosses and uppercuts the way only a comic book hero can. A group of Chroniclers drew their weapons and fired chronobullets at him. Courageous snapped out tiny portals of green extradimensional energy, which the bullets flew through and struck their shooters in the back. The portals weren’t one of Courageous’s stock powers—maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to dodge them and so the amulet was
enabling him to redirect them?

  As I pondered this, Courageous caught one Chronicler under the chin with an uppercut, sent the man staggering backward, then spun in time to catch the leg of another Chronicler who was aiming a kick at his head. Courageous dropped to one knee, sucker punched the man in the crotch, then sprang backward and up into the air to avoid a savage overhand strike from Brother Webb, who had joined the fray.

  Courageous hovered there for a moment, the twin suns shining behind him, his cape billowing out, like he was posing for some unseen cover artist. Then he shot forward, driving Webb back with blow after blow. He stayed airborne the entire time, adding the momentum of his flight to each punch. Webb went on the defensive, barely able to keep up with Courageous’s strikes. I could see that Webb was doing his best to keep his emotions in check. The second he felt fear about any part of Courageous’s attack, whether that he wouldn’t be fast enough to block or that he wouldn’t be able to dodge, Courageous would get stronger and faster, and the fight would be over.

  It happened just a few moments later. Courageous’s attacks became an onslaught of green-gloved blurs, and one of his punches got past Webb’s guard and crunched the Chronicler’s nose. Webb staggered backward, and Courageous delivered an uppercut that sent him sailing. The smile on Courageous’s face was something straight out of issue number 27, when he singlehandedly defeated every member of the Unholy Alliance. But as my hero enjoyed his moment of triumph, the Tempus produced a sundial from beneath his robes and held it out before him like a talisman.

  I yelled to the Commander. I tried to hit the Tempus with telekinesis or to force the ground to swallow him, but whatever this field was that they had surrounded me with, it was blocking every one of my powers.

  A beam of sickly yellow light surged toward the Commander from the sundial, striking him in the back. The beam didn’t knock him off his feet, didn’t blow a hole through his billowing green cape, but his shoulders slumped as if he were suddenly weary.

  “You have gone on like this for far too long,” the Tempus said. There was no malice in his voice. No satisfaction at whatever it was he was doing. He sounded resigned, almost regretful. “I let you continue as you did out of respect for your father, out of consideration for what you’d endured, out of the hope that perhaps, this time, things may be different.”

  Courageous collapsed to his knees. His dark hair turned gray and wrinkles formed on his face. His bulk withered beneath his costume, and he fell to all fours, just a few feet in front of me. I watched his skin pale and then yellow as liver spots formed on his face and his graying hair turned white, then fell out.

  The Tempus’s sundial was aging Commander Courageous at a phenomenal rate. Mere moments later, Commander Courageous gasped out a single, final word, then he collapsed to the ground. My childhood hero died on the Bright Side, under the light of twin suns, right before my eyes, and there hadn’t been a thing I could do to help him.

  The Tempus kept the sundial’s beam on Courageous’s body for a few moments longer, and his skin withered away, leaving a skeleton behind. The skeleton collapsed into ash, and the Commander’s once bright uniform was nothing but faded red and green rags. The Tempus finally shut off his sundial and tucked it back in his robes. Then he stepped over, knelt down next to Courageous’s remains, and fished out the Anisa Amulet. The once-gleaming metal was now tarnished, and the cord that had held it around Courageous’s neck was gone. The Tempus regarded the amulet for a moment, then crushed it between his fingers. The sundial must’ve weakened the artifact, too, because the Anisa Amulet crumbled like chalk.

  I was stunned. I didn’t have words or actions or anything. It was one thing when Commander Courageous had died in the comics; there was the Darkest Phobia story arc where Señor Fear figured out a way to corrupt the Anisa Amulet so that it made Courageous afraid of things instead of using them as strengths. Courageous had died beneath a horde of demons and monsters of all shapes and sizes, screaming in terror. I cried when I read that story. It had come out when I was in junior high, and while seeing the Commander fall in the comics had brought tears to my eyes as a kid, it was nothing compared to the feeling of complete and utter loss that filled me now.

  My mind spun. In the comics, Ms. Infinity had restored the Anisa Amulet to its normal state and, with cameos from nearly every other hero, had battled across dimensions to bring Courageous’s spirit back and resurrect him. And while the fanboy in me had been ogling the treasures in Courage Point not that long ago, I knew deep down that the Table of the Defenders I’d seen was just for show; Ms. Infinity and the rest weren’t real, and they weren’t coming to the Commander’s rescue this time.

  He was gone.

  And his last word had given me a clue to his real identity. I was trying to process that right now, too, and I couldn’t. My brain was shutting down, focusing on anything and everything to avoid dealing with the revelation.

  The energy fields around me vanished, and I collapsed to my hands and knees. The Tempus came over and helped me to my feet. “Corinthos, I am sorry it came to this. But I want you to remember what you saw here today, lest history repeat itself.”

  I staggered away from the Tempus, and Wheatson caught me before I fell again. Webb and the other Chroniclers were back on their feet, and several of them were casting dirty looks in my direction. Webb placed his hands on the sides of his nose and twisted the bone back into place. He shuddered, then glared at me. The bastard had the audacity to crack his knuckles.

  I took a step forward. Wheatson grabbed my arm. “Don’t,” he whispered in my ear. “Look, I know it’s fun to beat him up. Truthfully, that’s the reason I bring him along every time we meet, so you’ll hit him rather than me. But this isn’t the right time for anything like that.”

  I took a deep breath and clenched and unclenched my fists. As I let the breath out, something occurred to me. “Where’s Treggen?”

  I looked around, as did the other Chroniclers and the Tempus. “Shit,” I heard one of them say.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I snapped. “Do you know who that man was? Do you know how dangerous he is?”

  The Chroniclers began fiddling with their chronometers and blinking away, maybe they were tracking Treggen, maybe they were just bugging out. The Tempus turned to me, and his face was a hard mask of barely contained anger.

  “Oh, yes, I do know who that was, Vincent Corinthos. I know him much better than you do. And when I find out how he escaped, believe me, there will be hell to pay.” With that, he began adjusting his own chronometer. But before he left, he raised his eyes and looked at me one more time. His expression had calmed. No anger, no condescension, none of the attitude he’d demonstrated toward me the last time we’d fought. This was just… pity.

  And then he was gone, too.

  I looked at the ragged cloth that was all that remained of my advisor. I rubbed my eyes. I felt numb. Thoughts of Courageous flooded my mind: advice he’d given me, conversations we’d had, that time I’d found him playing Uno with Katrina Grady. And now he was gone. I bottled the feelings up, pushed them to the back of my mind. I couldn’t think about this now. Not yet.

  I checked my watch. I had about an hour before the octahedron started sending out extradimensional pings. One of the perks of being a god on the Bright Side is I can conjure anything I want over here. So I’d conjured a replica of the octahedron and slipped it into Wheatson’s coat when I’d stumbled from energy field that had held me. In about an hour, it would give me a fix on Wheatson’s location, and then I was going to force some answers out of him. In the meantime, I was going to figure out how the hell Treggen had gotten his hands on the Black Flash podlings.

  Chapter 5

  Had an extraordinarily close call with the Tempus today. If I hadn’t been able to abandon my clone body and collapse it into dust, they would have had me. This was the first t
ime in a long time that being forced to use temporary bodies has been an advantage. That said, Xavier’s gotten Croatoan out of mothballs, and that gives me an idea. I’ll need to have Maxwell Roberts do some digging into the Codex’s classified archives.

  —From Treggen’s personal journal

  I portaled back to the office and ran into Medical. “Doc? Mrs. Rita?” I found Doc on the floor of an examining room, out cold. The dismembered Black Flash was on an autopsy table, sans the podlings. I put a hand on Doc’s shoulder, tapping the kobolds’ faith to send a healing probe into him. The pulse of magic told me he’d suffered a bad blow on the back of the head, but nothing too serious. I sent healing energy into him, then levitated him onto one of the beds so he’d be more comfortable while he woke.

  I triggered my Glimpse and focused on Doc. I concentrated, willing a vision of his recent past into my mind. I started where I found him, then rewound from there. It was like watching a movie in reverse. Doc had only been out for a few minutes, so it didn’t take long for Treggen to come into view. I slowed things down and let the Glimpse play out normally. Doc had been hunched over the autopsy table, digging around in the Black Flash’s innards, when Treggen had walked into Medical, produced a blackjack seemingly from thin air, and clonked Doc over the head.

  Holy shit, he’d just walked in? I shifted my Glimpse to follow Treggen, and he scooped up the Black Flash podlings and placed them in that sack I’d seen him with on the Bright Side. The certainty and speed with which he moved implied a person who knew exactly what he was looking for, where it was, and how to get it. But how was that possible? Gearstripper would know if Treggen had somehow managed to smuggle cameras back into the office.

  Still focused on Treggen, I put the Glimpse on reverse again. I wanted to see how the hell he’d gotten into the office. I followed him as he un-knocked Doc out, and walked backward out of Medical. He came down the hallway from the lobby, just out of sight of Jake’s desk. I continued following him for two more steps, and then he was gone.