by Michael Rigg
My shoulders sagged as I looked over Thorne's petrified adventure party. Bryce nodded. "Agreed. Let's go. If you still want to."
I lifted my chin slightly. “I have to, Bryce. I have to know.”
He nodded and bowed slightly. “Then let's find you some answers.”
I led the way out of the peanut-shaped room and followed the slopping corridor down to our left, a long octagonal hallway that seemed brighter than the other alternatives. I also remembered that the center chamber of the city was an enormous amphitheater set deep within the structure's center. It was essentially their "town square" surrounded by a vast honeycomb of interconnecting passages sculpted with artistic renderings of historic events, not all of them real to everyone.
We eventually made our way to a wide corridor that was lit by cracks of illumination in the walls and ceiling around us. It didn't seem like the phosphorescent moss from the water-level chambers. This was channeled from somewhere else, the main room, as I remembered.
"We're getting closer."
Bryce nodded to the gun. "Maybe you should get rid of that, show them we mean peace."
I looked down at Thorne's revolver in my hand. I had forgotten I was carrying it. Bryce had a point. In fact, I recalled Ray Simcoe saying the same thing as we entered the main chamber, just before the rest were frozen.
I wondered what happened to them. Ray and I were transported into different times in this reality. I wondered where they ended up, if they'd returned to whenever or wherever they were from. I still didn't remember the simplest details. I didn't remember their names and only vaguely what they looked like.
I shrugged and tucked the gun into my pants. "I don't think it'll matter much. I think I was armed when I was here before."
Our hallway opened into an enormous round room with steps ascending all around. The ceiling collected into a dome carved into a starburst pattern, a single beam of light shining down onto something that reflected back, filling the room with radiant yellow-white illumination. It was as though the sun penetrated the depths of the Atlantic Ocean to reach down into this room. In the center of the domed room were steps ascending to a pedestal where the light collected in a recessed area.
Seated half-way up the steps of the amphitheater were the two Clockwork Carpenters I had seen before, the man and the woman. Both watched us with their dark eyes and pale faces framed with silver hair. Both were dressed in period finery, the woman idling twirling a parasol on her shoulder and the man nodding slightly with his fingers on the brim of his top hat.
Bryce gasped and held out his hands. I motioned for him to move slowly. "No. It's all right."
"But they... They..."
I only nodded and stepped into the room. As I stepped in, Bryce followed. The pair stood up and smiled at us, the man leading the woman down the steps toward us. A chill shuddered up my spine as Bryce and I stopped. Then we walked slowly toward the base of the steps leading to the center pedestal.
Bryce leaned forward and whispered—though the acoustics of the room made secrets impossible and his whisper echoed throughout the entire chamber—"Were they here before, when you were here?"
I answered by barely shaking my head.
“Welcome,” the man said. “I'm Adam.”
The woman curtsied slightly. “And I'm—”
“Eve,” Bryce finished.
“Jeanette, actually,” she smiled at him, her dark eyes tracing his contours, “but rather investigatively perceptive of you, Captain Landry.”
"What is it you want?" Bryce said.
Adam said, "It is you who have intruded into our sanctuary. It is you we should ask."
Bryce bowed slightly. I can't say that I blamed him. For all intents and purposes, we were standing in a room that was the center of all creation—as far as Bryce's reality's history was concerned. He was treating them with the same reverent behavior, I imagined, that he would show the Holy Trinity.
"I've been here before," I said. Then I motioned to Bryce. "He accompanied me, to help me regain my memories. That's all."
The couple's eyes shifted slightly to focus on Bryce though Adam continued to speak to me. "You weren't welcomed here before, and you are not welcomed now."
"I know. I am sorry, but you took my memories." I found myself sneering. “Maybe you should have left the memory that we're not welcome here.” Then I remembered more. Portions of the dreams came into focus. The pain. The prodding. Then the memory wipe. "If you didn't want me to come back here, you shouldn't have erased that simple fact from my mind," I repeated.
"They would have come," Jeanette said. She nodded toward the hall that led up to where Thorne and his men were frozen.
“How do you know that?”
“It is you,” Jeanette said as she pointed her closed parasol at me, “You who offset the order. It is you who moved the lines into chaos.”
“The lines?” Bryce asked.
Adam said, “The lines of time and being, the reality of all living things.”
"I'm sorry," Bryce said. "...If- If I may ask? How do I address you?"
They said in unison, "You may call us God. We are the orchestrators of the universe, the carpenters of the clockwork of time and reality."
As Bryce stared, disbelieving, I spoke up. "No, you're not."
Bryce looked at me. "Alice! What are you saying? They're obviously—"
"Obviously playing with us." I stepped forward and gestured to them. "Look. You have shown you have great power and tremendous, um, talent. But do you expect us to believe that you are God?"
Jeanette said, "Who else would we be?"
Adam smiled. "How would you define God?"
In a silent lightless flash, the couple stood before us, transported across the theater from where they stood to appear right in front of us without even moving the air.
Bryce moved quickly behind me, grabbed me by the arms and held me back to his chest as if he could pull me out of harms way. Then he positioned himself so that he stood between me and the strange couple. "Don't you touch her!"
"How would you define God?" Adam repeated.
I shouted past Bryce, "God is all-knowing! God is compassionate, the creator of everything. He loves us despite our faults, despite our sinful ways. At least... that's what I recall from Sunday school."
The Carpenters both smiled and Jeanette shrugged. "You have described us."
Adam repeated, "Therefore, we are God."
I shook my head. "No. No, this doesn't feel right."
"How should it feel?"
"It should be, I don't know, more angelic. I should feel the love coming off of you, not some detached scientific monstrous glare like we're lab rats or something." I stepped around Bryce and pointed out the parasol and top hat. “God wouldn't dress like a Victorian nightmare.”
Bryce looked at me, his eyes wide.
I thought I saw Jeanette's mouth twist into a smile. She looked at Bryce and spoke to him, ignoring my protestations. "Captain Bryce Landry of Louisiana."
Bryce nodded, glanced back at me, then to Jeanette.
"You brought her here to save your world, didn't you?"
He shook his head. "I brought her here to send her back home, in the hopes I could find where she came from and send her back to her loved ones. I-If that was even possible."
Adam said, “In truth, you hope it is not.”
Bryce reached out and pulled me close to him. He held me tight against him. “I won't lie to you. I care deeply for this woman. And... it's because I care that I want to see her fully restored no matter the cost to me.”
I looked back at Bryce and saw the sincerity through the hurt in his eyes. I shook my head. No. No, this isn't right. This isn't right at all.
The Carpenters looked at me. "Did she not tell you? That is how she came to you in the first place."
And then it happened.
The floodgates opened.
I remembered. Everything.
I pressed my hands to my face as tears bur
ned the rims of my eyes. I shook my head. "No... No, no." I backed away from them. "Oh, my God, no."
"Alice? Alice, what is it?"
My eyes still locked on the strange couple before us—or “aliens” as my strike team called them—I told Bryce what he needed to know.
I said, "My name's Jennifer."
Jeanette nodded slowly. Adam clapped quietly like a spectator at a golf tournament. "Tell him, Jennifer, how you came to be in his company."
"No," I shook my head. I turned to the steps and started up toward the light. “Oh, God, no.”
"Alice— Jennifer!" Bryce called out. He turned and started after me but I was already on my way up to the opening, the gateway. I had to see it the way I remembered it.
There, set in the stone floor at the top of the pedestal, was a mirror so polished and clean it looked like an undisturbed pool of mercury. The bright light from above bounced off its surface and bathed me in its intoxicatingly warm glow.
"Wait!" Bryce called out again. He came up next to me and reached out, but I pulled away. "...Jennifer?"
I looked from the mirror pool, to Bryce, to the darkness outside the light. The beam was so bright, the reflection so warming, I couldn't see anything beyond us. It was like being on center stage with a spotlight in my eyes. I could no longer see Adam or Jeanette—if that really was their names—but I could feel them watching us.
I turned to Bryce who searched my face for answers. So I told him.
"Josh was our translator. He translated the runes around us. He told us that there was some kind of gateway at the center of all this." I pointed to the rectangular pool. "Ray... He..." I shook my head as the memories came flooding back. I didn't know how to place them. It was as if I was given a box of puzzle pieces, then shown a picture of what the puzzle was supposed to look like. I didn't know where to start.
"Slowly," Bryce said. His smile was kind, but I now felt like I hardly knew him.
"I'm sorry, Bryce." I looked into the quicksilver and told him, "It was the anniversary of 9/11—the day I told you about when the terrorists attacked. It was September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary. While the nation mourned and honored those who were killed, our team was loaded aboard a chopper and brought out to an undisclosed location in the Atlantic where a carrier waited for us. We all thought we were going to stop another attack." I looked into his eyes. "Everyone was afraid they'd use the anniversary as a reason to strike again."
My lower lip puckered. I bit it to fight back the swell of emotions that came with the puzzle of memories.
"It's okay," Bryce said. "I'm following you."
"It wasn't a terrorist lead. It was some kind of subterranean energy signature.” I shook my head. “The president re-opened the Black Budget—the one used specifically for UFO crashes and stuff like that—things no one could explain. It was our job to capture data and debunk what we found." I looked at Bryce's frown. I knew he didn't know what I was talking about, but I pressed on anyway. "No one knew what this was all about. We didn't realize until we'd set foot inside Atlantis why this particular team was assembled. I was the project lead, the one given the most intel—but that was only at the last possible second.
"Everyone saw the president on TV, laying wreaths and saying words. All of that was recorded the day before." I stared down into the silver. "He was actually talking to us through a closed SAT-COM from a safe location." I shrugged. "We didn't know what it was. An alien artifact, a missing Russian sub from the cold war, a strange and lost civilization, or a terrorist weapon. No idea."
I looked at the darkness outside the beam of light. "We didn't know! We still don't!"
No reply came back. Bryce motioned for me to continue. "Please..."
"Ray was obsessed with 9/11 because... Because his father was killed in the attacks." I sniffed. "When Josh figured out we could affect time with this thing, Ray got it in his thick skull that he could jump in and change it all." My laugh was shaky as I wiped the tear from my eye. "He sure did."
Bryce stepped closer to me. "But how did you...? Because he was part of your team? You felt responsible? Is that why you followed him?"
I turned and stepped up to Bryce. I put my arms on his shoulders and peered deeply into his eyes. "Because I'm Jennifer Simcoe. Ray wasn't just a member of my team, Bryce. He wasn't just the most brilliant computer tech in the world. He was my husband."
As this cascaded over Bryce like a dam bursting, his eyes widened and he looked out into the darkness all around. His mouth moved but he didn't say anything.
I said, "I'm sorry, Bryce. I didn't know until just now."
He shouted to the room. "How could you do this to her!? Why didn't you give her back her husband, let her join him?"
Adam's voice came back from all around us, an echo we couldn't trace. "We took no one. He stepped through. She stepped through."
"You marked her!"
Jeanette said, "It was necessary to track those who do not belong, so that we may repair reality."
"Repair reality!" Bryce's voice rose. The veins on his head throbbed. "What do you think happened! You knew she would do this, so you marked her! If you knew it, you could have changed it!"
Adam: “No. It would have upset the order.”
Bryce raised and lowered his hands. “It did that anyway! This is all your fault!”
I reached out and touched his arm. “Bryce, no.”
He ignored me and continued to shout at the inky black around us. "Change it back!"
Jeanette: "We cannot."
Bryce looked at me, then to the mirror, then back to the room. "What if she went through again? Could she go back?"
I reached out with both hands and squeezed Bryce's shoulders. "No. No, Bryce. I can't go back. I can only change things again."
"What if I went in?"
I held him tighter. "No, Bryce!"
"What if we both went in?"
"The effects would be indeterminate," Adam said. "Chaos would occur and we would need to create order again."
It was my turn to rage at 'God'. "How can you call yourself the all-knowing, all-mighty when you can't tell us what would happen if either of us went through?"
Jeanette laughed. "We create order from chaos. We do not create chaos." Adam added, “That is your doing. You were born to create chaos. We were born to create order. It is how it's always been.”
Bryce shouted at the darkness. "She's right! You're no God! You're not angels! You're demons!"
As his voice echoed around the dome, I looked at him, searched his profile. This was killing him. He really had fallen in love with me, but it's not where this all started. It started with him wanting to save me, to send me back to Ray though neither of us knew it at the time. In the short time we'd had together, Bryce had fallen in love with me and now he knew he had to let me go. He also knew that letting me go would be no guarantee I would end up where I belonged. If the Clockwork-aliens-Gods were even only slightly on the level, there was no telling what would happen if either of us stepped through.
I touched his cheek to pull him back to me. "Bryce."
Our eyes met. His were as moist as mine.
He spoke softly. “I'm sorry they did this to you.”
I smiled. “I'm not. To get to know you, to live in your world even for a few days, was...” Then I took a deep breath. “Take me home.”
“What?”
“Out of here, back to Seven Orchards. Take me home.” I don't know where it came from. Maybe it was the realization that stepping through that damn looking glass would only start this whole mess all over again. Maybe it was finding something new and realizing I could never get Ray back.
He slowly shook his head. “It's not right. You don't belong here.” He nodded toward the pool. “You belong with your husband.”
I wrapped my arms around him and felt my eyes burn with tears. I couldn't stand to look in his eyes and see how much this was killing him. And I didn't want him to see in my eyes that I saw that he was right. I love
d Ray. I dove into the unknown after Ray. Ray was the love of my life and I either had to decide that he was gone forever, or make another futile attempt to find him.
"I-I'm not sorry we ever met," he stammered. "But if there's even a slight chance that you could be reunited with your husband, you should take it."
"But—"
"But nothing, ...Jennifer. You can go anywhere through time and space with this thing. Now I ain't sure how it works, but if you concentrated hard enough, I'll bet you could go back in time to stop him from coming through. If not, maybe you and he will end up together in some jungle somewhere fighting dinosaurs."
My lip twitched at Bryce's attempt to make me smile in all this. It nearly worked. "There are no guarantees," I whispered.
His smile was as gentle as it was sudden. "Then we defy them."
"What?"
"We either both go or neither of us goes."
"Bryce?"
"I'm serious." He held me in his arms and whispered to me, "I may be a fool at times, but my life has changed so greatly in the past couple of days that I'm practically in the same cauldron with you."
"No you're not, Bryce. Don't do this. You have Lucien and Adeline and mother."
"I have you."
I blinked. Tears rolled out. "No..." I shook my head. "Bryce... I don't. I can't."
"I would gladly give it all for you." It seemed like too much of a sacrifice, but this truly was the apex of Bryce's reality. I could see that now. War, a broken country, a destroyed family, all—as I'd said before—because of me.
"But you don't have to. I don't belong here. I'm the one who doesn't fit! I may never be able to go back to what it once was, but I can't stay here. I shouldn't stay here."
"But—"
I pressed a finger to his lips. "You said so yourself. Maybe there's a way I can find him. Maybe I'll just keep looking for this place everywhere I go and jumping through until I find him again."
"Alice."
I know it was another slip, but it was proof enough that he didn't recognize me for who I truly was. I was a commando, a technician, a highly trained operative in a reality where terror cells and nuclear warheads and cyber espionage existed. This was not my world, and Ray or no Ray, I couldn't stay here.