Quantum Break by Cam Rogers Page A

anything.
    Will was hyperventilating, scrambling to his feet, but something was wrong. His feet wouldn’t take his weight. Jack’s own feet and legs were a riot of tingling excruciation. His bones burned. Facedown as he was, pressed to the glass dome, he saw what was happening below: a smiley-faced squad taking cover behind a curved information desk and a bare-headed trooper with a six-shot rotary grenade launcher, eyeballing Will with the happiest expression Jack had ever seen on a human face.
    *   *   *
    Cordite stench and hot glass particles settled into the atrium. Gibson rolled his shoulders, cricked his neck, and sighted up a second shot.
    Gibson called out his next shot to Donny. “See if I can pinball him off the roof.”
    “Damn, boss. You know I could just shoot ’em from here.”
    “Don’t you dare. I got me five shots left.”
    Foonk.
    *   *   *
    Jack struggled to his aching feet.
    “Will, get up.”
    If Will’s body was pressed to the surface when the next one hit it could scramble his organs.
    “Get up!”
    Will did, sort of. With a desperate heave he got his body off the glass as a section of panels to his left took the hit, knocking him sideways. Jack watched his brother flail, collapse, and slide, his fingers dragging across the glass. He was close to the curve—it was gentle, but another blast like that would send him flying over the edge, three hundred feet down to the university lawn.
    *   *   *
    Gibson hitched his lip, dissatisfied. “I got a better idea.” He switched targets.
    Foonk.
    *   *   *
    Jack got halfway to Will when the shock wave hit—blowing him backward.
    *   *   *
    Gibson retargeted.
    Foonk.
    *   *   *
    Both brothers shouted as the panel section behind Will that had taken the first grenade hit took a second. Thick, reinforced glass volcanoed upward. The ejecta from the explosion tinkled delicately as it rained in heavy, jagged fistfuls across the dome.
    Punch-drunk and battered, Jack struggled to interpret the world around him through senses that had traded places with one other: he smelled pain, felt brightness, heard fear. The world was two images skating atop one another. His head was an endlessly sounding dial tone. He stood on a hot crystal moon that sweated dollops of melted polycarbonate. The atmosphere was sharp and poisonous. His eyes didn’t work.
    His brother was on his feet, back on top, away from the curve, away from Jack. Will was also standing on unreliable feet—low and unsteady.
    Jack said his brother’s name. Will seemed to realize that he was not alone in this place, and recognized his brother. He extended a hand, like a child wanting to be lifted from dock to boat.
    The fifth round struck exactly between them. Jack flew one way, Will toward the freshly blasted hole in the dome.
    *   *   *
    Gibson hooted, long and loud, as the body flipped a low arc through the night air, and through the ragged wound in the double-dome. “Hole in one, son!”
    *   *   *
    Jack’s perception of time slowed. He reached for Will, futile as it was, wanting him back and safe more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. His boots gripped the hardened polycarbonate, braking his backward flight, and he kicked off, launching himself toward Will, crossing the space between them—impossibly—in a heartbeat.
    The world stopped, Jack ran, and the world restarted a moment too soon.
    Inches from Jack’s grasp Will’s body fell through the jagged maw of the dome’s wound. Watching him fall Jack’s every thought became singular: No.
    The air around his brother’s limp body buckled. Inverted? And snapped.
    Jack skidded, stumbled, kept his footing.
    Will floated twenty-five feet below the wounded dome, suspended inside a ministutter of Jack’s creation.
    *   *   *
    “Ah … Monarch Actual. This is Senior Operative Gibson at the Quantum Physics Building.”
    “What the fuck am I seeing, boss?”
    “Shut up, Don. You