The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

plaza of some kind, where the airport had been in the present.
    Finn’s eyes narrowed. They didn’t quite leave Travis, but they moved a little, like the man was reading a list of options in his own head. Looking for some way to salvage his plans. He took another step back. Nine or ten feet away now. Travis saw the risk of getting hit by a reflexive shot begin to drop. He kept the MP7 sighted for a head shot.
    “I’m sorry about your friends,” Finn said. “I mean that. But I can’t just let you take this thing.”
    He retreated a step further. Maybe he thought he could make a run for it. Put some distance behind him and cross back into the present, somewhere else in Arica. Then try to call Audra and warn her.
    The MP7 required four ounces of trigger pressure to fire. Travis applied two.
    Finn backed up again.
    And then the wind shifted.
    Whichever way it’d been blowing before, the boxes in the plaza had spun it in circles. Now it came on dead straight from behind Travis, its speed seeming to double, and in the span of five seconds the smoke drew away like a veil.
    Finn took a sharp breath.
    Travis felt his own eyes widen involuntarily.
    They might as well have been standing in Midtown Manhattan. The Arica they’d seen in the present was long gone, and in its place reared a skyline of concrete and glass and steel, some of its towers standing to a height of seventy stories or more. Broad avenues crisscrossed at their bases, complete with traffic lights and crisp white lines. Along the length of the nearest street, Travis could see the downtown district snaking up the coast for over a mile, and the height and density of the structures held consistent for most of that distance.
    None of it lay in ruins. The skyscrapers’ glass faces looked like they’d been washed yesterday. The sidewalks were immaculate. Vehicles stood parked at curbsides, 2011 models or earlier as far as Travis could tell. Wooden benches framed the plaza, their green paint gleaming in the desert sun.
    Yet nothing moved. Beyond the filled parking spaces, the streets were deserted. Through ground-level windows, every visible lobby sat vacant. The traffic lights were dark. The tires of every vehicle were flat and beginning to crumble. Arica was imposing and beautiful and pristine, but it was also abandoned. For how long, Travis couldn’t guess.
    “It worked,” Finn said. He looked around at the place while keeping the gun on Travis. “The survivors flourished here. They made it.”
    “For a while. What does it matter? They’re dead now.”
    “We don’t know they’re dead. We don’t know what happened here.”
    “Couldn’t have been good.”
    Finn looked at him. Some kind of new hope flickered in his eyes. “It’s enough that it worked at all. And if I search this place for even a few hours, I can probably find out what happened to it. Find out how to avoid the problem.”
    “We could’ve found this place bustling and it still wouldn’t be worth killing the world for it,” Travis said.
    “The world’s going to kill itself sooner or later. Why shouldn’t at least some of us live?”
    “Neither of us is going to convince the other. If you want to stay here, feel free. But I’m taking the cylinder with me. I’m going to New York to get my friends.”
    “You’re not,” Finn said. “I really am sorry, but you’re not. You don’t have time, anyway. Look.”
    He held the cylinder toward Travis, showing him the side opposite the row of buttons. In the harsh light it took Travis a few seconds to see what the man was talking about.
    Along part of the casing’s length ran a line of blue lights, pencil-eraser-sized and spaced at centimeter intervals. They shone softly and diffused from just beneath the black surface, and extended to a little over a third of the cylinder’s long dimension.
    “They appeared last night,” Finn said. “Right after your friends broke the other cylinder. At that time the lights covered the whole length, but they’ve been disappearing steadily since, like a countdown. Whoever built these things must not have wanted anyone using one without the other. My guess is, when the last one of these lights goes out, this thing becomes a paperweight.”
    Travis’s mind was already doing the math. The other cylinder had broken maybe nine hours ago. If that amount of time had burned not-quite-two-thirds of the countdown, he had something like five hours left.
    Five hours to reach New York and find Paige