Yone gave her a helpless shrug and his quick smile. With his scraped-up face, he looked frightening. “After you,” he said, and swept a hand at the doorway.
“Oh, for crying in the sink,” said Wennda. She brushed by him and stalked into the room.
Just inside she stopped. She stood in the center aisle of a small auditorium, molded chairs facing a stage with a sleek black lectern. A red-curtained backdrop bore a large design in black and white.
Farley stood transfixed before the stage. He was staring at the curtains.
“Do you know,” he asked without looking back, “who they sent my bomber after, a couple hundred years ago? Who half the world sent millions of planes and tanks and ships and idiots like me to fight?”
Wennda eyed the curtain apprehensively. The design showed a stylized bird of prey looking to the left with wings outspread. Its talons clutched a wreath that surrounded a stark symbol made of four bent arms joined together.
“No, Joe,” she said. “How could I?”
Farley climbed onto the stage and stood before the curtain. “These bastards here, that’s who.” He pointed at the Reichsadler clutching its swastika.
She glanced at Yone as he came into the room. He stayed by the door, staring at Farley on the red-curtained stage.
“We all keep saying that the war will be over in a year,” Farley said. “But it won’t. Not in ten years. Twenty. It’ll grow until everyone has to pick a side. Until the entire planet’s at war.” He made a disgusted sound. “Man-made plagues, right, Yone? Fighting machines that think for themselves. Bombs that wipe out cities. Weapons that tear holes in reality itself. That think for themselves.” He looked at Wennda. “Hammers that decide what to hit.”
He pulled at the curtain. The gesture oddly like a child tugging at its mother’s clothes. “These evil sons of bitches will hold out till there’s nothing left to hold out for. And when they see they’re going to lose, they’ll take everything with them. The entire goddamn world.”
He turned toward Wennda. “What do you think this building is?” he asked, unnervingly calm, as if addressing a seated audience.
“I don’t really know,” Wennda said. “But I think we should go. There’s something wrong with this place.”
“A facility this size,” Farley pressed on, “underground, hardened against attack, chock full of gear, with an entire division of typhons guarding it. And all of it at the very center of the blast that ended the world.” He brought his fists up to his head and ground them by his temples. “Do you see it?” he asked. The hands lowered. “Do you see it now?”
“No, I don’t, Joe,” she said. “It was two hundred years ago.”
“It was last week,” he said.
He held up a placating hand. He looked like he was fighting for control.
Yone’s voice came from the back of the auditorium. “This isn’t where the weapon was meant to be used,” he said.
Farley nodded. “It’s where it was built,” he said. “And something went wrong. Somebody pressed the wrong button, or forgot a decimal point. Or probably they all just bit off more than they could chew. And the rest is history.” He looked at Wennda and laughed bitterly. “Your history,” he said. “My future. They’re the same thing.” He was shaking.
“But the people who built the device were the only ones who survived it,” Yone said from the back. He seemed reluctant to come farther into the room. “Because they were in the most protected structure in the world. And after the device was activated there was no more war to fight. No more enemies left, or allies either. Only a dying world.”
“But they still wanted to live,” said Farley.
“So they built the Dome,” Wennda said numbly. She looked at the fierce black eagle on the red curtain. “Your enemies built the Dome.”
“The Dome and the Redoubt,” Farley said. “They were the only ones left, and the only place left on earth where they could survive was at the bottom of the crater their own weapon had made.” Farley shook his head. “And I’m fighting like hell to get back so I can help make it happen.”
Wennda saw that he was struggling not to cry. He isn’t angry, she realized. He isn’t crazy. His heart is broken. She tried to think what to do.
“But now you know what happened,” Yone told him. “So perhaps you can make a difference when you go back.”
“But it happened,” said Farley. “So I didn’t.” He smirked. “Or maybe the difference I try to make is what causes all of this in the first place.”
“Or you not going back is what lets it happen,” said Wennda, walking toward the stage.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Farley said. “Here we are. Cause and effect.”
“Captain Farley.” Yone’s voice sounded very flat across the room. “If you know the outcome beforehand, then you share responsibility for it if there is even a chance you could have prevented it and you did nothing.”
“Cause and effect,” Farley said again. “There’s no getting away from it.”
“Listen to me, Joe,” Wennda said, feeling desperate. “It’s not inevitable. Time’s not an arrow. It’s a shock wave. It spreads out in all directions at once. All possibilities. All outcomes.”
“If everything happens, then what I do still doesn’t make any difference.”
“I’m trying to make you see that actions matter. What you do, or don’t do, makes a difference every bit as much as chance or complexity. The future’s nothing but potential.”
He shook his head. “Not once you get there, it isn’t.”
“You are a stubborn man, Joe.”
He snorted. “Maybe there’s a world where I’m not.”
“Then I don’t want to go there. I want the world with the Joe Farley who said that no one ever made a flight by giving up. That’s the one I want to be with.” She climbed the steps to the stage and stood in front of him and set a hand on the curtain. “We can go back and try to prevent this. And if we can’t prevent it, then we can live. The way everybody lives, even though they already know the end of everything is waiting somewhere up ahead.” She took the bloodred curtain in both hands and pulled. The centuries-old fabric tore loose from its hooks and crumpled to the stage. A cloud of fine dust rose.
Wennda dropped the fold of curtain onto the soft red pile and looked at Farley. “We’ll have time for all the things we don’t have time for now,” she said.
Farley cocked his head and looked at her as if she were a slumming angel. “Time,” he said. Suddenly he felt oddly giddy, drunk with possibility, more capable because she was here with him.
“Time,” said Wennda.
Farley gave a slanted grin. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try to save the world. And if we can’t, then we’ll hold hands on the beach.”
Her eyes were very bright. She had begun to sweat. “I’d like that,” she said. “What’s a beach?”
Farley’s pulse quickened. He felt like he was running. “Something God made for people to hold hands on,” he told her. “I’ll show you.”
“I look forward to it.”
“Backward,” he corrected. His palms were slick.
Wennda laughed. “I look backward to it, then.”
Yone’s voice made them look out at the auditorium, both of them suddenly feeling like actors playing a love scene on a stage. “I think we must be very near the energy source,” he said. “I think it is affecting us in some way. I don’t feel entirely rational.”
“I feel….” Wennda frowned. “I don’t know. But it’s good.”
“Invincible,” said Farley.