Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
BAD AUGUST
AND… AUGUST…
As quickly as the new August registers me, I understand what’s happened. I keep my hands high as I step into the alley, a mirror to my own dear August. “That’s not the August you’re looking for.”
“August, don’t,” my August warns.
“It’s not him,” I insist. “I did it. All by myself. It was me. He’s completely innocent.”
The man’s eyes narrow, working over the strange situation.
“That’s a lie,” my August snaps.
What the fuck is he doing?
“August, don’t do that.” My heart’s in my mouth. I can tell by the flash in his eyes, he’s not about to listen to me.
“He’s lying,” he shouts, sending my pulse skittering. “It was me, all me. I found a particle. The-the Blackthorne particle, I called it. I made an accelerator, and I tore through all those worlds. It was me.”
“Stop it now, August!”
But he doesn’t stop at all. Only yells over the top of me, “If you need to kill me, you can do it. Then send him back.”
“No!” I scream. “No, I don’t want that!” If my August won’t listen, I’ll have to try the new one. “You give me five minutes, and I’ll tell you exactly how I did it. In more detail than he ever could.”
Navy Coat August clacks his tongue, then drops his very first words to me. “You know, I can very easily just kill you both.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be very nice, would it?” my August quips at the guy holding a gun on him.
Fuck, I love this man.
Navy Coat August takes a few steps back towards the wall so he can move the gun easily between us.
He looks way too relaxed with that thing, like he uses it a lot.
“I’m not actually very nice. I’m actually very evil.
Sorry to have to tell you that. I will kill one of you, and if I don’t get the truth right now, I will kill both of you. ”
“I did it,” I try to convince him, not the slightest tremor in my voice. “Kill me.”
“Very well.” At the first movement of his arm, I slam my eyes closed. A shot rings out, and I wait. Wait for the bullet. Wait for the pain.
When neither come, I open one eye, then the other. My gaze falls on my own spectacular August, arm lengthened, with his gun in his hand pointed directly at Navy Coat August. His shoulders are dusted with the chunks of concrete August’s bullet blew off the wall just above his head.
But Navy Coat’s still got his gun on me.
August doesn’t flinch. “Is his life really worth dying for?”
Navy Coat smiles, long and slow. “Not remotely. I’m only doing it for the bounty. He can destroy all the worlds he likes. Just drop the gun, and I’ll let you both go.”
“What bounty?” August asks, his gun steady.
Navy Coat laughs, then tilts his head in a magnanimous way that sets me on edge. “I realise you wouldn’t understand. You’re very… old-fashioned… uneducated…” He twirls his spare hand in the air. “A bit simple.”
“Then explain it,” August grits out.
Navy Coat August fixes sharp eyes on him.
“They saw you coming, whichever one of you has been ripping holes in the multiverse. Some of the more advanced universes sent people for you. But recently, we noted your direction changed. That you were on a direct collision course with this world. So all I had to do was wait.”
“W-why you?” I stutter out. “If there’s a bounty, then how is it an August who intercepts me?”
“Me,” my Augusts argues. “Intercepts me, the criminal August.”
I frown hard at him, but Navy Coat gives him a grin. “Because they don’t have this.” He reaches into his deep pocket and pulls out a small blue device with one big red button on it. “A Particle Stasis Displacement Pulser. I made it myself.”
A what now? “A what now?”
He rolls his eyes. He’s such a dick. “In simple terms, I can lock onto our signal, Augusts only, and freeze anyone else. The police use it to stun suspects in our time, but they don’t have the ability to hone it to such advantage.”
“Or the need to murder for payment,” August sweetly defends the London police force of the year twenty-five twenty-five.
“Perhaps not. But they, and everyone else, missed a trick. Any other bounty hunter in the vicinity, I can take them out. Unless they’re another August, of course.” He chuckles weirdly to himself. “Either way, now the fifty million credits are mine.”
“Fifty million!” August gasps out.
“Is that a lot?” I ask hopefully.
Bottom lip jutting out, Navy Coat informs us, “Not really, no.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
“You’d think they’d take it a little more seriously,” I mutter.
A scuff of boots on concrete echoes up the walls of the alley, followed by a shout behind me that I recognise. “Let me go!” Asshole August comes crashing down a few metres away, and I glance over in horror to discover who threw him.
It’s an August.
Another goddamn August.
This latest one takes in what’s happening lightning fast, then pulls out a gun which he aims at my August. “Put the fucking gun down.”
August’s head gives the smallest shake. “You shooting me won’t stop me shooting him.”
“I really think it might,” he says.
“Are you sure you want to risk it?”
New August’s finger quivers on the trigger.
“Don’t do it,” Navy Coat hisses.
“I don’t see why not,” says the new August. “I didn’t want the money anyway.”
“Because I’ll kill you if you do.” There’s another click of another gun, and an even newer August steps into the alley, his barrel aimed at… Less-New-But-Still-New August.
“Okay, this is getting ridiculous,” I tell them. “We’re all the same person. If anyone should be able to figure this out, it’s the six of us.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” shrugs Navy Coat. “You’ve got to die. He agrees, you’ve got to die.”
“I don’t,” the latest August argues. “Not now there’s three of them at any rate.”
The August with the gun on my August says, “There isn’t another way around it. Someone has to die. So… which one of you did it?”
“Me!” August and I shout at the same time.
They all stare at us a moment, then Asshole August speaks slowly, tentatively. “I thought the same thing as you all. I, um, I was tracking him too. And I was going to kill him. That’s how I ended up here.”
“That’s why we’re all here,” drawls Navy Coat, as if the three of us were somehow supposed to know that.
“But,” Asshole August goes on, “there are other factors involved now. These two, they… they have something special going on. And I think if we work with them—”
“Something special?” Navy Coat mouths, half in disgust. “Something worth fifty million credits?”
“Something better,” Maybe-Not-A-Complete-Asshole August argues. “Something that changes science as we know it. Or at least as we know it in my time. In my world. Which is pretty advanced, actually, compared to—”
“Get to the point,” August with the gun on my August snarls.
“They can open portals,” Maybe-Not-A-Complete-Asshole August says.
“So what?” August with the gun on my August laughs. “We can all open portals. That’s exactly the problem. All the opening portals and the not closing portals. Why do you think we’re here?”
“No, not like that.” Not-A-Complete-Asshole August shifts his position on the ground, holding his hands up like he’s lecturing a class.
“I’m trying to tell you, these two don’t need an accelerator.
They are an accelerator. They have the power, between them, to open worlds.
Naturally. Without any external mechanism. ”
“What are you going on about?” Blue Coat groans.
“That’s impossible,” exclaims the August with the gun on my August.
“Well, how are they doing it, then?” asks the sixth August. “Demonstrate!”
Not-A-Complete-Asshole August’s explanation cuts off right about here. He passes bewildered eyes up to me. Bewildered and possibly a little amused. “Augusts?”
Gunpoint particle-displacement sex education was not on my bingo card for today. I pass my tongue over dry lips. “We can’t demonstrate that right now.”
“You can,” Bit-of-an-Asshole August says, unhelpfully. “I’ve seen it.”
“You have not!” my August cries, aghast.
“I’ve seen the results, I mean.” He waves the embarrassment away with the swish of his hand, addressing the others. “These two are pushing the boundaries of science, I’m telling you.”
“These two?” asks the sixth August. “So they’re working together?”
“You could say that.” Asshole August chuckles.
“They’re experimenting together?” asks the one with the gun on my August.
Breaking into a full cackle, Asshole August sits on the ground, enjoying himself way too much, and says nothing else.
“We, um…” August looks at me like I might be able to help.
I guess there’s nothing else for it… “We’re a sex accelerator.”
There’s a collective chasm of silence so deep I think it might permanently swallow me.
“I was going to say,” my August breaks in, “we can open portals but not close them.”
“No, wait,” says Navy Coat. “Go back to the other thing.”
“Sex accelerator,” Asshole August laughs out, a huge smirk on his dumb face. The bastard.
“You’re fucking?” the August with the gun on my August shouts, the sound ricocheting off the buildings so loud that if anyone but Augusts were awake to hear it, I might actually be embarrassed.
“It’s a bit more than that,” I shout back.
“Wait, you’re together?” the sixth August cries.
“Yes!” I yell at him too. “Is that really so strange, five hundred years in the future?”
“That is completely bizarre,” declares the August with the gun on my August.
“Is that like… incest?” asks Navy Coat, wincing in a wholly unnecessary way.
“Sounds more like masturbation,” muses August Sixth.
“Masturbation on a really grand scale,” Asshole August interjects.
“Jesus Christ.” I smash a hand over my face, dragging it down slowly. “Okay, enough. Enough about our sex life.”
“Sounds like it’s your sex life that’s brought us all together,” August Sixth says. “So, I think maybe we all need to hear more about your sex life.”
“It’s fantastic,” August grins. And fuck, he’s hot with a gun.
“No, not that bit,” August Sixth breathes out tolerantly. Then loudly adds, “How are you a sex accelerator?”