Chapter Four

Owain tapped his finger against his leg as he paced the aisle. He was keeping time while pretending to be researching Caledonic burial traditions. That was the aisle of the library he found himself in, and he couldn’t be in any other, so he had to look like he knew what he was doing. In order to preserve his cover he had spent the night before doing some surface work on the subject, in case a friendly staff member came to ask him about it. He’d even started an essay. If he was caught, arrested, and put on trial, it would hardly help him, but it might confuse matters long enough to let him escape.

These were the considerations necessary when you were a Clock agent behind enemy lines. The city of Rei had been under enemy control for twelve years, and that wasn’t going to change overnight, so a long view was a valuable asset. Rei was the capital of the European district, and had changed hands plenty of times since the Concord, centuries past. Novus Ordo Seculorum were the current rulers, though intelligence suggested that the faction had neglected the city these past decades. They had pumped more resources into the space race and other areas of conflict, getting lazy with their “safe” assets. Therefore, Clock cell leaders had seen fit to send agents in to sow discord and destabilise the Novan leadership. It was standard practice, and no doubt each other faction was doing something similar. Even yesterday there had been news of Os Cavaleiros agents executed after trying to do what Owain and his fellow agents would do today. Their trial had been bypassed following executive privilege invoked by the Rei Minister. The same fate awaited Owain if he failed today. He kept time.

He would have preferred a less morbid topic than burial rites – despite his line of work, he wasn’t a morbid person. But individual tastes often got lost in the machine of the factions, not always to their benefit. Mostly he enjoyed what he did. It was dangerous at times but deeply boring at others. Even on the slowest days there was always an undercurrent of adrenaline at being discovered. Most people forget that their world can implode at a moment’s notice – Owain never forgot. He had little choice over that fact now, just as he had no choice over his reading material. This was the only aisle he could be in at this moment because Captain Gwendolen Thomas would be striding down the corridor to Owain’s immediate left in two minutes’ time.

He knew this because he had watched her do it before. She did so every Firsday at exactly the same time on her way to lunch with her Roderick Tannen. He was her husband, and also the library’s director. She was always on time, as a fan of a regulated schedule. The couple had had many disagreements on the subject – Captain Thomas preferring a more flexible way of living – had seen a couple’s therapist who had helped them. That therapist was an undercover agent – not for the Clock, but for Nox Canister, a faction briefly under the thumb of Owain’s people. In that time, Owain had learned what he needed to, and cut Nox Canister loose. That was the smarter choice. No faction could be eliminated entirely; they were all too big, and too well-hidden. It was something like trying to disperse city-wide fog with a leaf blower.

Owain still kept time. Only a minute, now. He heard the library door swing open and he stood stock still, listening for the Captain’s voice. He heard her greet the receptionist Ailis, as she always did, and heard her footsteps pass the aisles ahead. Owain had given serious thought to turning the receptionist. Ailis didn’t seem aligned to a faction as it stood, and it would have been useful to stall the Captain for as long as they could manage. That in turn might have led to a more perfect timing; the goal of any Clock agent, regardless of sector. Ultimately the risk was too great. If anybody else was interested in the Captain at this exact moment, they might have had the same thought to turn Ailis, and revealing himself to another agent would undermine the operation entirely.

The Clock had been a cult when it was formed. That was pretty well understood by all its members, though history was not a generally respectable subject anymore. Nobody could say exactly what they were focused on when they formed – whether it was an ancient religion or an altogether less divine concern, it hadn’t mattered once the virus began to spread. What mattered was that the Clock’s members, led by a charismatic man (a name now forgotten, as far as Owain knew), were safely secluded away until the disease died out. When the majority of the population were gone, and for a few years after, the Clock were deep underground. All the governments – the aristocracies, democracies, plutocracies, theocracies, monarchies, oligarchies, and republics – were dead. All that remained were the Clock, and those like them. Every faction had a similar story – not all were cultists, but they were invariably born of groups who had seen fit to hide away from the world. The mother of all power vacuums had opened, and human nature took over. The new way of living had reportedly been chaotic and bloody to begin with. Nowadays people were used to it, and at least it was not so chaotic.

Owain tapped against his leg again as the Captain strode down the central aisle, past shelves and desks, mostly unoccupied. This was a good week; witnesses were few, though if he did his job it wouldn’t matter who saw him. He watched her through a gap he had made in the books, and through the gap of every shelf between the two of them, giving him a clear line of sight. She wasn’t walking any faster or slower than usual, and he allowed himself to exhale. The only thing that would have ruined his choreography would be if she were late and panicked, or unusually relaxed. Not that he wasn’t above improvising if it came to it, but the message was what mattered. Timing was everything.

From elsewhere in the city, now ten paces apart, a bell struck the hour. On the other side of the world, a man called Gordon Kayne had been stabbed in the throat on his way home. Three. Captain Thomas came closer, barely seeming to register the sound. The bell struck again. In Washenton City a southern diplomat had been shot and lay bleeding on the street. Two. Owain kept time. The third bell struck, and somewhere else a third man whose name and purpose Owain had already forgotten was hit by a car. At the same time, Captain Thomas stepped into his eyeline. He leapt at her, razor in hand, and struck. One.

She was fast, and had good instincts, but in his simulations he had anticipated her tilting her head towards him just so. She found herself blinded by the lamp lights he had pointed in her direction, obscuring her view of his shape. She fell to the ground with a crash and scrabbled at his chest as he slit her throat, right on time for the fourth bell. Blood poured from the wound, spurting in pulses. He rolled out of the way, but she grabbed his arm as he did so. Her waning strength wasn’t enough to pull him back, but it spun her towards him as he rolled, and the still-spurting wound sprayed his button-down blue shirt red. He heard a scream, and behind it, another sound. Ailis, the receptionist, stood above him. They aimed a bright white Novan-made pistol at his head and fired. He was able to bring the body of the Captain (still choking and gurgling, but now more a body than a Captain) between them, and the bullet slammed into her back. Her eyes went wide and she spat more blood at Owain.

He didn’t even have time to register satisfaction that he had been right to not trust Ailis. He had to get out. Civilians (he hoped) were running to and fro, and one knocked into Ailis as they aimed another shot. Owain was now soaked in blood but he saw the pistol tilt away from him, and he made his move.

With a grunt he hurled the Captain at Ailis’s legs. He had guessed that they were actually a librarian and not a planted agent – their background check was solid – so wouldn’t have had much in the way of special training. It was therefore unlikely they’d done much work improving their natural reflexes. His guess proved right; they tripped and fell. Now free to move himself, he leapt to his feet and knocked the pistol out of Ailis’s hand. They gasped and Owain didn’t hesitate to shoot them in the head. They went limp over the body of the Captain. Another avoidable death.

Owain didn’t mourn the loss of the receptionist. They had made their choice by joining up with the enemy, and it had been a long time since he was disabused of the notion that there was anything like an innocent life. But he was troubled; even though the receptionist was a Novan (the pistol proved as much) he couldn’t imagine that the Captain had planted them. If she had, that meant she had foreseen this happening, and if that was true she simply wouldn’t have come to lunch today. That could only mean a second cell had recruited Ailis. Were they supposed to protect Captain Thomas, and failed, or was their motivation somehow parallel to his own? And if that was true, why had they tried to shoot him?

By now the library was almost empty, and Owain slung a few more bullets into the wall to speed along the last few escapees. The screams faded. Now alone, he looked at his options. The front entrance was no good, as he’d suspected – there was no way to do this quietly, and the police would be in place in minutes. Novan police were not light on their feet, but their vehicles could really move when they needed to. Sure enough, sirens were already audible on the horizon. Owain turned and considered option B. A back entrance usually used by staff, it was not difficult to unlock. The issue was, a security camera (of Novan design) was pointed right at it, and there was no way he wouldn’t be seen. He still wasn’t worried about being identified – his cell would extract him after this job anyway. But if the Novan security systems were as extensive as the Clock’s back home, they could trace him straight back to the hideout. It would be hard to disappear in a crowd while he wore a shirt dripping with blood.

He started a new internal timer. Four minutes until the police arrive. Maybe three. He began to tap his fingers against his leg again, an instinct he found both comforting and focusing. Option C was the roof, which was a traversable route back to safety – five easy leaps, four hard ones, and one that he wasn’t certain he could make. At this point in Owain’s career, uncertainty was perhaps the only fear he had left. It was, however, the only choice now. So dropping the gun (it would be no good on the roof, the range was too short), he made a run for the stairs.

Every plan had blind spots, of course. Even with advanced simulations nobody could capture an entire reality before it had happened. But that wasn’t the way of the Clock – he had always been taught that all things are predictable. To embrace the chaos, or to even concede that there are things which cannot be predicted, was antithetical to his entire being. Owain scolded himself as he ascended to the empty third floor of the library, and into a maintenance corridor. Novus Ordo Seculorum contended that humanity was unique in its ability to be unpredictable – that physical objects, plants, and animals lacked the spark of creativity that doomed them to a life of inevitability. It was rot, of course. There was nothing inherently special about people. The Clock understood that.

Humanity’s only real gift was cognition, and even that could be predicted – behavioural analysts knew that all too well, which is why most of them worked for the Clock. Decision-making is not mystical. It follows an invisible line whose arcs and tangents can be foreseen. This fact should have comforted him – but what of his own mind? If a small sliver of NOS philosophy could invade his mind, however briefly, he had to fight it, to stop it from eating him inside out. He had seen it happen before Rei, in a different cell. Every faction was paranoid (a word that used to imply irrationality, its meaning had evolved subtly over the years), and a hint that you were anything but committed to the cause could mean the end.

Philosophy wasn’t the only thing to separate the Clock and the NOS, and every other faction for that matter. Centuries of stalemate, back-and-forth trading of territory and assets, stealing secrets and the almost traditional weekly assassinations all contributed to the moment he now found himself in. The path he took was not his own – it belonged to every agent who had come before. Philosophy was the sleek veneer on a brutal, unforgiving landscape.

Owain snapped his mind back into the present. Two minutes. A tendency to unfocus – that was also a Novan trait, and a deeply undesirable one for anybody to hold. The sirens were closer now, and he risked a peek out of an arched window to see the vehicles racing down the avenue. Crowds were gathered around the front entrance – they didn’t look armed, but when he saw the discreet NOS badges worn by two calmer onlookers he knew that he was right not to take that option.

The short-razer was a relatively new invention, and had so far been exclusive to Novus Ordo Seculorum and Nox Canister. It could stun a target from fifteen paces, and while it wasn’t suited to deadly blows it allowed an attacker to take their quarry into custody, where much worse things could be done. Owain had been on the receiving end of a short-razer once in his life, and had no desire to do so again. He continued to the door that led to the roof, safe in the knowledge that at least the agents below wouldn’t be able to hide a long-range weapon on their person. Foldable rifles were the Clock’s domain, and if he’d had one now Option C might look very different. One minute.

If he lingered on any of the roofs he needed to traverse, he would be giving the police a chance to take a shot. He had to come out the gate running, and not stop. With one deep breath Owain burst into the air. Catapulting along the concrete, he didn’t see the figure hiding behind the door until it was too late. Roderick Tannen, the husband of the dead Captain below, was crouched in his blindspot, and now reached out and grabbed his leg as he ran. All momentum lost, Owain was knocked to the floor just inches from the edge of the roof. His face hit the concrete hard, and he felt a bludgeoning pain as his cheek split open. Roderick, a man of some years, tried to push him over the edge, but wasn’t strong enough to lift Owain’s bulky frame. Owain’s training finally, finally kicked in, and with a swift kick to Roderick’s most sensitive regions their positions were reversed. He gave his assailant a shove and watched him tumble to the ground below with a scream and a series of cracks. More blood for the day.

The tussle had lasted less than twenty seconds, but that was all the time the police needed. They had already arrived and hauled out their rifles, and now Owain was a sitting duck. Gunfire hailed all around him and he dropped flat to the floor, blood still pouring from his face. He couldn’t get up without the Novans below taking their shot. He certainly couldn’t cross the gap. He was totally exposed. Option C was out. No minutes. New clock. Five minutes until the first police make it to the roof. Owain kept time – he had to keep time.

The husband. Owain was genuinely shaken, not just from his injuries, but from his own foolish actions. He had outright forgotten that the captain was going to meet her husband, whose private office was on the first floor. Perhaps he had assumed that he was among the running crowd. He still should have checked the office as he ascended. He had failed to account for the husband, and now he paid the price.

There was an Option D, but in terms of how much he wanted to take it it was closer to Option Y, as in Y on earth would you think this is a good idea? He wondered if he was starting to become delirious. Trying not to focus on the stinging pain of the wind against his face, vision blurred by blood, he pulled the communicator from his pocket and pushed the great black dial on the side to its maximum strength. Owain spoke, his words coming out spluttering and slurring. “Lightning, Exhibit, Roof.”

He couldn’t hear anyone inside the building below him – no stomping of steel boots against the floorboards coming to get him. Perhaps they didn’t fancy their chances against him. He laughed at the thought of a troop of Novan police cowering from him, while he cowered from them. He was laughing – another sign of delirium. But now extraction was coming, and while a great big copter descending onto the relatively tiny roof was risky (not to mention intensely visible) it was his only way out. He waited for the communicator to spring to life. After twenty seconds, his call still hadn’t been acknowledged. He repeated the codewords. “Lightning. Exhibit. Roof.” Still no reply. Now he could hear the police coming for him. There was no way he was getting out of this without taking down some more people. He kept time. Eventually, when he estimated that they had made it to the third floor, the communicator crackled. He pulled it closer to him, still prone on the roof, still bloody and broken. The voice of his cell leader, Powell, delivered three words.

“Not today, Owain.”

He barely had time to wonder what that might mean when the first short-razer latched to his skull. It fried him in seconds.

***

Colonel Powell threw the dummy communicator to the ground and picked up her real communicator. She activated it and reported to her leaders that the Clock agent was out of the picture. Then she swung the copter away from the library, where she had been silently observing the scene, and back to home base.

She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Owain, but quickly reminded herself that he wouldn’t have felt anything like empathy for her if he had known the truth. The Clock were so dispassionate and rigid that trying to act like one of them was as hard a challenge as she’d had in the field. Anything other than total conformity was a quick route to self-flagellation. As she flew she reflected that at least Novus Ordo Seculorum allowed the capacity to think differently. And really, if the Clock would insist on sending spies into their capital city, it would only be right to respond in kind.

All the same, she had wondered about Owain. In the recent months leading up to this mission she had noticed changes in his demeanour that indicated his time with their false cell (Novus Ordo Seculorum operatives, briefed to pose as Clock) was having an effect on him. They had never intended to turn him, but something about the essential nature of spending time with Novans (even unknowingly) had done something to him. There was potential in him, potential she was sad to see lost. But the mission to kill the captain was by far a cleaner solution; there was no way to take her out without also losing an agent, so why not trick the Clock into killing each other before he had a chance to go through with defecting?

Some time later Powell descended the copter onto the landing pad at Silver Bay, her primary operations centre. While she waited for the rotors to slow she could already see that the base was in a serious state of excitement. Juniors were running back and forth through the glass-pane windows, and tracking their movement Powell could tell that the area of most activity was the space travel department. As she dropped out of the copter her assistant Private Griffin ran over from the landing-assist controls to meet her.

“Colonel,” Griffin said by way of greeting.

“What’s happening?” Powell asked. They strode towards the complex, its great glass windows reflecting the bright sunlight into her eyes. The silhouettes broke through the blaze occasionally, still scurrying every direction, like ghosts with a deadline.

“Something went wrong. Is it true that Owain’s dead?” Griffin said.

“What went wrong?”

“One of the space racer’s experiments. They were testing some kind of bomb, and something happened. Is it true?”

The “space racers” were the unofficial term for Silver Bay’s scientific research team. News out of that wing was either excellent or disastrous. “Something happened?’ Can you give me more than that?”

“Not at my clearance. So did he get killed, or what?”

“That’s not your clearance either. But yes. There’ll be a brief later. Who knows what’s going on?”

“With Owain?”

“With the bomb.”

“Sergeant Graves has the details.”

“Okay. Everyone knows already, I guess.”

“Yeah, on base at least.”

“Call Lloyd, see if he’ll ground air traffic coming out this pad. Tell him I asked nicely.”

Griffin smiled. “But you didn’t.”

She laughed. “Go on, get.”

Griffin split off to find the base controller, and Powell stepped through the automatic doors to the Novus Ordo Seculorum base. Powell was starving. Food first, or secret bomb first? Food first.

She turned right, and missed the world turning upside down by about three minutes.