“You’re right,” he said. “I know it is.”
His eyes started to roll up in his head, and it seemed like he might drop on the spot. But he gave his head a vigorous shake and stayed on his feet. With what seemed like a great effort, he took an uneasy step backward, then another one, his feet leaving a trail of blood.
“Del?” I called out, not wanting to spook him, but concerned that he was moving toward the expanse of open sky behind him.
“I’m sorry, Leo,” he called out, smiling now, not sarcastic, but for real. It was a little-kid smile, one I hadn’t seen on him in years. Rex looked up, confused. “I’m happy for you two, you know that? Seriously. Jimi…I’m glad you’re with him. He probably loves you more than I ever could have.” He staggered back another step, closer to the ragged hole in the wall.
“Del!” I said more forcefully. “Be careful now.”
“Do you remember that day in the playground, Jimi?” he asked. “Out in the zurbs, when we were little. Those big kids came and messed with us?”
“I do,” I said, soothingly. “And you led them away from me, so they’d leave me alone. You saved me, Del.”
It was true. We were seven or eight, visiting family friends, when a bunch of teenage bullies attacked us at a park. Del and Leo were both beaten up pretty bad; in fact Leo ended up in the hospital, then his parents moved him away. It was the last time I saw him until I met him again as Rex. I had been knocked unconscious, but it could have been a lot worse for me if Del hadn’t led the bullies away from me.
Cronos glanced over at Rex and smiled sadly. “I didn’t save you, Jimi. Little Leo Byron did. I ran away, but tiny as he was, Leo went back and drew them away from you.” He shook his head. “Even then he was a better friend to you than I could ever be.”
It was a defining moment of my childhood, and it had become part of the bedrock of my friendship with Del. I tried not to think about this sudden revision of personal history right then, tried not to be distracted by it, but it shook me deeply.
I looked at Rex and our eyes met, and I just wanted to run to him and hold him. But I turned back to Cronos.
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “We were kids. What matters now is stopping Howard Wells and getting you to Doc Guzman. He can fix you up. It’ll all be okay.”
He looked down at his blood-soaked chest, the three glistening bullet holes. “No,” he said softly. “It’s too late for doctors. Too late for salamander splices and regeneration. But you’re right.” He smiled. “It will all be okay,” he said, repeating my words back to me in a singsong voice as he swung his leg back again. But he’d run out of floor, and this time, his foot was through the window, dangling in the open air. I moved toward him, but he put up a hand. “Stay back!”
He coughed, and a cascade of blood fell from his mouth. He wiped it with his forearm, then he gazed across the room, at Ogden’s Wellplant setup. “Do what you’re going to do, Jimi.” He steadied himself with a gloved hand on the raw brick edge of the opening as the breeze tugged at his clothing. “It’ll all be okay,” he said again, this time almost tauntingly, throwing it back at me, such an obvious falsehood.
His eyes closed, but I got the sense it was less the effects of the dart or the enormous loss of blood from the bullet wounds, and more the crushing weariness of his life in this world—his lives in this world, each of them filled with betrayal and disappointment and alienation. He opened his eyes halfway again, and I saw something in them, something alien and unfamiliar. It took me a second to recognize it as relief. “It’ll all be okay,” he said once more.
“Del?” I said, then I realized what he was doing. “No!” I screamed.
As I ran to him, he looked me in the eye, and then he stepped back, out into the empty space. He spread his arms and fell. He dropped from sight for an instant, but as I ran up to the opening and slid to my knees, we regained eye contact one last time as he fell.
He got smaller and smaller, as if he was shrinking away to nothing. But he didn’t. He hit the rubble hard, with a heavy thud. Then he was still.
“Del, no…” I said, shaking my head, horrified, retching but unable to look away. Maybe subconsciously I expected him to get up and disappear, so he could return one more time. But he didn’t.
Rex appeared at my elbow, looking aghast. “Jimi, I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice hoarse. He put an arm around my waist, solid and reassuring, holding me back from the edge.
I hugged his arm to me, holding it in place as he eased me away from the window. I turned in his embrace and wrapped my arms around him, squeezing as tight as I could.
I’d said goodbye to Del so many times, mourned his death so many times, it felt like his actual passing was somehow overdue. I was crushed with sorrow, but as much as I felt the pain of his passing, I also felt that, in some way, we had just exorcised his ghost, had freed his trapped spirit to go on to whatever comes next.
I’d never much believed in an afterlife, but I wanted so badly to believe in one right then. And I wondered, if I ever got there, and Del was there, too, which Del would it be? The Del I’d grown up with? Or would it be Tamil, or Cronos?
Ogden groaned, and Rex and I both turned to look at him.
“Oh, Jimi…I…” Claudia said, looking small and vulnerable. She put her hand over her mouth.
I nodded as she came over and hugged us both. The tightness in my throat rendering me silent, as well. After a few seconds, I managed to ask, “How’s Ogden?”
“He’s holding up,” Claudia said, wiping her eyes, pulling herself together. “Needs a doctor but I think he’ll be okay for the time being.”
Ogden gave me a feeble thumbs-up.
“Good,” I said, wiping my eyes, too. “Then we better get to work before we run out of time.”
“Actually,” she said, pointing at the apparatus, “there’s a problem.”
The four metal arms that had been holding the Wellplant in place were wildly out of place, each one of them still holding a tiny piece of the Wellplant.
“Oh no!” Rex said, running over and looking helplessly down onto the bits and pieces of circuit boards and crystals and housing that littered the floor.
I turned to Ogden. “Can we upload the malware without a Wellplant?”
Ogden winced as he lifted himself up onto one elbow. “I don’t know. We need some kind of node to access the network, but I don’t know what else would work, other than a Wellplant.”
“Then we need to get one. Where did this one come from?”
He shook his head. “It was defective. A reject. I stole it when I was working at Wellplant, brought it home and fixed it. The only way we could possibly get another one in time would be to rip it out of someone’s head. But apart from killing them, that would also damage the Wellplant.” He thought for a second, then said, “Wait, I do know where there’s another node, a computer we can use to access the network.”
All three of us responded simultaneously: “Where?”
Ogden pointed, out through the jagged hole in the brick wall, at Wells Tower.
FORTY-NINE