Fragment Mirror. Time collapsed through shrinking rings, a swallow throat spiral into some notional basement place. There were maps on the wall, autopsy pictures. You had to step out of time and the causal line in order to see where you might want to jump.
Equal and opposite actions can build structures if they occur regularly enough at the right frequency – they hit against things, and a shape is delineated The architecture begins to reflect the buried music, and the people walking through the convoluted archways, and across the nightingale floors, begin to reflect the place in which they live.
Some structures escape time, folded out through the tesseract skin that scums across their surface, as the quantum foam from the tidal eddies of the Chronon Sea push and pull all things in the physical universe.
Peg holds up his hand and moves it in imitation of the motion he has has seen Chanticleers use to identify themselves to each other. He knows how to greet Reality Engineers too. He has worked with Headitors too; has fed Bloop Hens.
He lights his cigarette and takes a long slow drag, savouring the menthol taste, thinking how this smoke is like a ribbon of matter tied around the cold compressed acreage of condensing time in this sector. It is the special ability of Turners to come and read the landscape, unlock it from the chains that The Constables would hold it down with.
Today, he is here by design, not washed up on the shore by the whim of others, as has been the case throughout a lot of his career.
A shot. A camera. A shot – a shotgun. Two barrels aimed and unloaded.
He is not here to prevent a death – he is here to insure one. There are many like him out there in the universe – doing Temporal Wetwork, with bullets that never have names etched into them, aimed at people whose place in history is stolen from them.
Peg is a line from him to another; he is a motion; he is a journey ended. And after ever single death he has crafted he leaves a poppy. When did he first know he had a talent for this? He didn’t. Doesn’t think he does. He falls in love with the nobility of each of the people he shoots. He sees them as part of the architecture of his life; their rapid deterioration and fall to ruin, when he drops a Gravedirt Protocol on them. He has heard of the First Shot, the prophesied assassin travelling with the Reality Engineer who first did what must be done. He does what must be done. Another pegged.