The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

buildings looked different from ground level than they had from the high vantage point of the presidential suite. Some of them were leaning at angles that looked impossible from below. They looked like they wanted to come down. Many had.
    Travis let the inevitable question into his mind: did the breakdown of the world have anything to do with what he’d learned two summers ago, during his time with Tangent? In the two years since, he’d gotten good at not thinking about that, but there was no dodging it now. The bullet points all but lined themselves up in his head, and he considered them in careful order.
    The summer before last, he’d been drawn into Tangent’s business by what seemed, at the time, like chance. The organization had been in panic mode then, in the last days of a conflict over an object they called the Whisper. The Whisper was like a crystal ball out of some plague-era fairy tale. It knew things—impossible things—and shared them with anyone who held it. In the end Travis had found himself alone with the Whisper, on the deepest level of Border Town. The thing had revealed for him a few jagged edges of his future: his culpability in the deaths of 20 million people, and Paige’s desire to see him killed. All of that lay waiting, somehow, along one possible track of his life to come. Somewhere out there in the darkness, years and years ahead, something was set to trip him up. To turn him into something objectively evil.
    That was why he’d left Border Town and consigned himself to a life at minimum wage. It was the one way he could be sure to avoid whatever was coming. If he spent the next forty years stocking shelves, he could never cause the kind of disaster the Whisper had described. He’d be in no position to influence events on that scale, for good or bad.
    And that answered the question: this was not about him. This was something else entirely. This was 6 or 7 billion deaths, not 20 million, and they’d happened without his help. Simple as that.
    He and Bethany reached the junction where Vermont met the traffic circle. They halted for a moment at the cafe on the northeast quadrant, where they’d sat earlier. The patio’s marble tiles lay canted and broken around the trunks of pines and sugar maples that’d punched up through them. Travis recalled the smell of sausage and the jumble of conversation as they’d studied the green building across the circle. That memory was barely an hour old, but in this place that moment was decades and decades gone.
    Just off the patio, a few feet in from what remained of the curb, stood a row of corroded husks that’d once been newspaper boxes. Their tops were rusted to Swiss cheese and their doors had all fallen off. If any newspapers had been left in these containers at the end, they were long gone now. Paper wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years against humidity and mildew, even when the doors had been intact.
    “Wonder what the headlines were,” Bethany said. “I wonder what was on the front page of the last USA Today.”
    Travis had no answer.
    They stared at the scene only a few seconds longer, then turned and moved across the circle, toward the standing ruin of the sixteen-story office building.

Chapter Twelve
    The plan was straightforward enough: all Bethany needed was a name. The name of someone who worked inside this building in the present day. A loose thread to start pulling on, and they might have the FBI involved within the hour.
    Among these ruins, paper files and computer drives would be long lost, but an office building had other storage media that should have survived the intervening years just fine. Specifically, Travis was thinking of office door nameplates. They tended to be made of either plastic or bronze, and the names and job titles on them were usually deeply engraved—sometimes they were cut fully through the plate. A plastic nameplate could probably sit out in the elements for a million years and still be legible, and even bronze should be good for a long while. Longer than most other metals. Corrosion resistance was one of the advantages that had made bronze such a big deal, way back in the day.
    A single name. It was all they needed.
    They rounded the cluster of birches and got a full view of the highrise. It’d borne the years better than most of the other structures they’d seen. Its frame, though heavily rusted, was still standing whole and straight. A good portion of the concrete flooring at each level