Fractured Tide

by Leslie Lutz

  Mom’s eyes were wide, as if she’d just heard whale sharks could walk on land. “What does—or did—the machine do?”

  “I never found out, but the white coats, they’d bring out a prisoner, and they’d ask him questions and point at stuff, and the guy would shake his head and frown and be quiet. And then the MPs would threaten him with a gun, and then the person would talk. Same thing, every day. Always took shouting and threats to make him ease up.”

  “Was that your job?” I asked. “To beat him?”

  Graham shook his head. “No, just had to carry stuff for the white coats. Keep my gun handy. Look over their shoulders in case something happened. Like I said, they didn’t tell me squat. All I knew was it was useful to the war effort. So I did what they told me. Just another way to serve my country that doesn’t want me to, I guess.”

  His expression darkened, as if he wasn’t so sure about whether that had ever been a good idea. “So one day, they call us in from the Andrews, and when we get down into the lab, one of the scientists they’d captured is slumped by the wall, all beat up to hell, worse than what Baby Doll did to me”—he nodded once at Steph, whose face flushed—“and the white coats are standing by a big crate the size of a car. They tell us we gotta put it on the ship. So we picked up that big boy—took five of us—and got it out of there. Got it on our little skiff to take it out to where the Andrews was anchored, and . . .”

  He trailed off.

  “And then what?”

  “We got a hundred yards offshore, and I felt something weird happen. This feeling, never felt anything like it.” His gaze shifted to me. “Till today. You felt it, Sia.”

  My hand automatically went to my stomach.

  “A kind of stretching, like your stomach’s become saltwater taffy and some kid’s pulling it apart. And my brain felt crushed. All of us felt it. One of the other guys in the brig with me, he spewed over the side. And then the feeling went away, and we were fine. We hauled that box up on the Andrews and put it in the hold. The white coats radioed to have us come back for another. Halfway through what they were saying . . .” He trailed off again and picked up a stick, dug his fingernails into the cracks on the side, worrying it. “The enemy found us.”

  Graham dropped the stick and rubbed his face. I got the feeling the memory was too much for him.

  “Big Japanese destroyer. Boom. Boom. Boom. Everything shaking and tilting. A lot of guys screaming. Burning. Jumping off into the water or blown to bits. And the captain called for us to abandon ship.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then stared into the middle distance. “And I did. Swam toward the island. And when I crawled up onto the shore and looked back, no one was left. I don’t know where they went. Maybe all of them drowned. All of them. Everyone I knew.” His voice broke on the last bit, and he cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Graham.”

  When he met my eyes, he didn’t look angry or bitter, just had a sort of raw sadness in his young farm boy face. He threw his stick into the fire and straightened his shoulders, letting out a big, old man sigh.

  “I made my way to the middle of the island, to find somebody and radio for help. But the building was gone, and there was the sinkhole in its place.” He smiled at me, a humorless smile. “The whole time I been shipwrecked here, I always wondered where it went.” He looked out into the ocean. “Now I know. Leads back to her.”

  The affection in his voice was so thick, I knew he meant the wreck. The Andrews. It might not be much, but for him, even in the brig, it was home.

  “Took me this long to wrap my mind around things,” Graham said. “And now I know whatever was in that crate caused this. I think it was a piece of the machine the white coats were poking around in. And maybe the scientist they’d been grilling found a way to mess us up. ‘Yeah,’ he’d say, ‘this is how you take it apart, this is how it works. Yes, this is the right piece to take with you.’ And all along, he was just sabotaging us.” He stared into the fire. “One thing I learned out here in the South Pacific: the enemy might be afraid of losing control, but they ain’t afraid of death.”

  Ben had been lying on his side in the sand, drawing in the grains with his finger. “Occam’s razor,” he said. Steph stared at her hands, lost in thought.

  Phil shifted in his seat. “Occam’s what?”

  “He’s asking for the simplest explanation,” Steph said absently, half lost in thought. “The one with the fewest assumptions. Which means we need to think about the evidence. Make a list.”

  With nothing better to do, I thought about it, listing all the weirdness in my head.

  “One: the light show we watch every night,” I said.

  “That was the Andrews,” Ben said, “Sinking over and over, like it was on a loop. Went on for at least four hours.”

  “I’ve seen other things here,” Mom said. “Things happening over and over on a loop.”

  Ben continued, ticking off the evidence on his fingers. “Two, we’ve got this weird machine in the middle of the island.”

  I nodded. “Looks weirder than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Everyone was nodding except for Felix, who just looked scared.

  “And three,” Ben said. “Graham here. Unless he’s operating on some sort of delusion—”

  “Whatever that means, I ain’t operating under it,” Graham said.

  “So if he’s telling the truth, he’s from 1943.”

  We all went silent, thinking. Phil held a can covered in Japanese writing in his hands, turning it over and over and staring at his wrecked charter as if it had answers. I looked up at the sky, the stars so bright with no light pollution to block them out. The moon was gone, so the Milky Way spread out over us, thick, like a highway leading somewhere I would never go. Or maybe we were there already.

  “Number four,” I said. “I’ve had this weird feeling.” I stopped. It felt strange to say it out loud. The Sense had become so personal to me, like an infected wound I didn’t want to show anyone. “Felt it first when our charter boat anchored above the Andrews. And I’ve felt it all over the island. Like all this has happened before. Or some version of it.”

  No one looked at me, but all of them were nodding, even Steph. I wasn’t alone in this.

  Ben put his hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. “Do I even have to say it?”

  “Yep,” Phil said, “you gotta.”

  Ben took his hand off his face. “Time machine.”

  Steph started laughing. And not a polite laugh. No one tried to stop her or talk over her. We were all too tired to argue. I braced for the complaints, her whining, her stubborn insistence none of this was happening. That we were all irrational.

  “No, Ben, it’s worse than that,” Steph said, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. “It’s a broken time machine. And there’s no one to shut it off.”

  ENTRY 29

  IN THE MORNING, Felix and I walked down to the water to play with fiddler crabs. He squatted in the wet sand, his toes digging deep, looking for bubbles. Then when the tiny crab emerged, waving its little claws wildly at him, its legs all in a panic, Felix would scoop him up with a large clamshell and play with him.

  We did this for hours while Steph laid out her big plan to the others. Turns out people who build things are really good at destroying them. I was relieved to let someone else be in charge for a while.

  Felix played his game over and over, like I used to play with the little Captain Neptune figurines you brought back from the trinket shop near the beach, lining them up just to knock them down. Again and again. Strange how kids don’t seem to get tired of their favorite game, as if they’re on an endless loop, stuck seeking out the pleasure of the things they love.

  Steph wandered over with a bottle of water and handed it to Felix. While he drank his ration, she crossed her arms, her gaze set on the horizon. For the first time since I’d met her, she looked calm.

  “What are you so happy about?” I asked.


  She shrugged and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “It’s a machine. That’s something I understand.”

  “You understand a time machine. Really.” I took the water from Felix and drank my ration slowly. “I’m surprised you believed us.”

  Steph shrugged. “Occam’s razor.”

  “Really? You got ‘broken time machine’ out of Occam’s razor?”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but yes. Fewest assumptions and all that.”

  “If you say so.”

  She took the bottle from me before I finished screwing on the cap. “So are you ready for the big finish?”

  I held a hand out and looked at Felix. “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “Told me what?” Felix said, looking up from the fiddler crab he had cupped in his hands.

  Steph’s face softened, and she put her arm around Felix. “Don’t worry, little dude. We got this.” As Steph turned to leave, for once I was grateful she hadn’t ended up at the bottom of the ocean. We needed a little unearned confidence right now, just to make it through.

  Felix and I sat in the sand, the waves reaching out long white fingers to brush the tops of our feet, and talked about the time machine. I saw no point in lying to him about it, although I left out my suspicion that the monster and the machine were somehow one. Connected. Fueling each other. I know just about as much as you do about the theory of time travel, so I wasn’t about to put my crazy ideas out there.

  I pulled a clean page from the journal out of my sleeve, then drew two dots on either end. “You see these dots? One is our time, the one you and me and Mom and Dad come from. The other one is Graham’s time, over seventy years ago.” I folded the paper so the dots came together. “This is what the machine did at first—it folded space-time. At least that’s what Ben says.”

  “Can’t we just press a button and make everything go back?”

  “The machine broke, and now we have this.” I wadded the paper up into a ball. “Lots of little time crumples.”

  Felix wouldn’t look at the paper anymore, instead squinting into the sun that reflected off the waves. I threw it into the sea and watched it flatten and expand in the water, until a wave swept it under.

  I reached over and brushed Felix’s hair out of his eyes. It was longer than I’d ever seen it, a tangle on his forehead and lying in a curve on the back of his neck. He didn’t seem to notice what I was doing, his gaze set somewhere on the horizon.

  “Is that why I have the dreams?” he asked.

  A chill went down my arms. “What did you see?”

  “Lots of things.” He looked down at his feet, digging little trenches in the sand with his toes. “Some scary. Some good. Sometimes I’m not asleep when I have them.”

  “I have those too.”

  “They make my head hurt.”

  “Me too.”

  “If we stay here, will we ever grow old, or will I stay little forever?”

  “You mean like Peter Pan?”

  He smiled, the first real smile since I’d tried to explain what was going on. “Yeah, like Peter Pan.”

  “No, I don’t think it works that way,” I said, although I really had no idea.

  “Maybe that’s why there are people walking in the forest,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  He turned to me, his intelligent eyes shining in the sunlight. “If time is broken, then you can’t really die.” He looked back over the ocean. “I guess that’s good. I don’t want to die. I don’t want you or Mom to die.”

  I put an arm around him. “It’s good to not die.”

  His eyebrows came together. “But I don’t want to wander around like that in the palm forest either, not talking.” He looked up at me, fear in his eyes. “Are they zombies? Will they eat us?”

  “No, that’s just a silly story. Dead people don’t eat.”

  “Why are we afraid of them?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that. I just was. My insides recoiled when I got close.

  I squeezed his shoulder. “We’re going to be fine. Nobody’s going to die or wander around in the palm forest.” I nodded toward where the others were still huddled, next to the blackened remains of the signal fire. Steph hadn’t bothered to relight it, finally accepting the Coast Guard wasn’t out there. “Mom and Phil and I are going to fix everything. They’re working out the details now.”

  “What are you going to do?” Felix asked.

  “Blow up the time machine. Easy peasy.”

  Felix turned to me and his eyes went wide. “No, I don’t want you to do that.”

  “Graham says the barrels down in the Andrews are depth charges, and—”

  He shook his head, putting his hands over his ears. “No, no, no.”

  I raised my voice. “And everything will go back to normal. The Coast Guard will find us.”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  “Felix, it’s okay.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes filled with tears. “I saw it. Out there.” He pointed to the white buoy, the one that marked the wreck. “It blows up and you don’t come back.” He started rocking and crying. “You don’t come back.”

  The waves of the now-rising tide washed around us, soaking me to the waist, and I pulled him up to sit in the dry sand. Shushed him until he got quiet. “Felix, in your dreams, did I come back sometimes?”

  His rocking slowed. After a few seconds, he nodded.

  I didn’t know to explain it to him, that all of this had happened before, a thousand times, in a thousand different ways. There were a thousand other Felixes and Sias and Moms and Bens out there, living this over and over. I didn’t know which one we were. But if I had to be any of them, I would be the Sia to get us all home. Turn a thousand Felixes back into one. Pick up the pieces of myself that had been scattered through some weird multiverse and patch me back together until I felt whole again.

  I rubbed Felix’s back. “I want you to think about the good dream, the one that brought me back to you. Really hard.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes swollen with tears, and nodded.

  “Good. Now think about it over and over. Stay in that spot for me. I think it will help us. Can you do that?”

  He nodded, the panic faded, and he wiped his tears with the back of his hand, a little hope flaring in his eyes.

  I’d wanted him to be calm, so you understand why I said what I said. You would know. You remember what you did when they took you away. When the deputy was about to usher you out of the courtroom in your cuffs, and Mom held so tight to the edge of the wooden bench her knuckles were white, and Felix grabbed hold of your leg and wouldn’t let go. Crying and saying “Daddy” over and over again. And I saw the struggle in your eyes, saw the moment you decided which way to go. “Felix, I’ll be home for dinner,” you said. And Felix looked up at you and nodded, so trusting, believing you’d be home for dinner, and he let go, took Mom’s hand, and waved bye-bye. How much I hated you at that moment. Because I was old enough to understand that when people panic, they lie to the ones who rely on them, who need them.

  And there I was, sitting next to Felix on the beach, telling him Mom and I would be okay if he just thought about it real hard, like a kid clapping his hands to prove fairies are real.

  I hugged him tight, my face buried in his bony little shoulder.

  “It’s alright, T,” he said, patting me on the knee. “Everything’s gonna be alright.”

  The next day, we moved bombs.

  Down in the machine, in that honeycomb of water and blackness, Phil and I swam past the people who died when the place flooded. They lay in the hallways. Floated near the ceiling. And they moved. Reached for you when you nudged one out of the way, in slow motion, like a jellyfish’s filament reacting dumbly to fish that strayed too close.

  Even you, with your steel cage heart, would flip out diving in a place like that.

  We moved the depth charges one by one. Graham said they won’t explode unless they hit the two-h
undred-foot mark. So at ninety-five feet, we’re safe. I kept telling myself that. We’re safe. Me and Phil, rolling two-hundred-pound barrels full of explosives through a flooded pitch-black labyrinth. Sure, that’s safe. And then there’s the creature that attacked our charter. No way something that big can get in here, I whispered to myself. And then I remembered Marshall, and how he died.

  As we made our way through the hallways, I spun theories about the creature and what it really was. Some part of me knew, although it felt like a childhood memory, all fuzzy around the edges and half-forgotten. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster and the machine were a part of each other somehow.

  Phil and I got four bombs out and into the hallways before we redlined and had to head up to the world of light and air. As we made a slow ascent, I was feeling pretty good about our plan to blow—as Graham put it—the whole tomato. Ben and Steph, who’d both taken some electrical engineering summer course at some fancy university, would show us how to rig them to explode. And boom goes the machine, and pop goes the bubble.

  I kicked my way up, fantasizing. What it would be like to step on board a Coast Guard vessel. Take a shower. Wear something other than a bathing suit. Stand at the bow of our rescue ship and lean into the wind, Key Largo growing on the horizon. And then I’d drive my truck—God, I miss that beat-up truck—to Pine Key Prison and give you the biggest hug in the history of hugs. Yeah, I thought, everything’s going our way now. Finally.

  When I broke the surface of the sinkhole, the clearing was quiet. Everyone stood under the shade of the tall palms, huddled around a piece of paper. They all turned at once to look at Phil and me. If a stare could have weight, theirs weighed a ton. They’d decided something. I could already tell I wasn’t going to like it.

  While the others moved to the edge of the sinkhole to help, Graham stayed next to the pile of scuba tanks, watching the perimeter of the trees, waiting for shadows to change and something to emerge. Only the rustle of palm leaves high up in the canopy broke the stillness.