He knelt and looked at the top of the bag. It was closed tight with a drawstring, and the cord was tied in a bow. Two loops tied like rabbit ears, even length on both sides, carefully straightened. Who does something like that? Tom thought. He used the camera on his phone to photograph the knot and then untied it. The top of the bag fell loose and revealed fine, dark hair. He pulled down the cloth and exposed the face. Eyes half open and dark with dilation, corneas clouded, lips slightly parted and tinged blue. The girl whose photo he’d seen. Korrie Fullarton.
A piercing sensation drove into his chest. He despised this world. He reached out his trembling hand and touched her icy cheek. He put two fingers to her carotid artery, knowing there would be no pulse. Just doing it because he had to.
He looked again into those eyes, and he wished he could feel some trace of spirit, almost as if a small bird had been caged there in the cold. As all of his symptoms returned, hammer and tongs, he wished he could shelter her somehow. He felt his heartbeat flickering faster, and he swore to get justice for her if he could.
It drained his strength to have to stand again and step away from her. He used his lapel unit to radio the pronouncement and call for the medical examiner. With all due caution, he retraced his steps back to his vehicle.
The skiers, both of them emotional but determined to be helpful, were college students—Camille Moore and Brandon Evans. Tom gripped his pen and notepad and wrote down their information. They had come to the slope where the trail crosses the old roadway. They’d approached the bag until they were close enough to tell what they were looking at, the outline draped in olive drab and laid out in the white depression beneath the trees. Her boyfriend had stayed at the crossing while Camille skied east on the trail until she got close enough to town to get cell phone service. She called 911 and skied back, and that’s when Tom got there.
“Did you touch anything?” Tom asked.
“No,” the young man said. “We saw it from the trail, and we didn’t know what it was.”
“I knew,” the young woman said. She told Tom she knew the second she saw it—the shape and size, because of the coverage on the news the night before.
Her boyfriend looked at her and nodded. “So we went a little closer so we could see.” He looked at Tom with an expression of miserable disbelief. “But we didn’t touch it.”
Two more police vehicles arrived, and Tom directed the officers to secure the scene. Two detectives and a news crew showed up, and then about ten minutes later, the coroner pulled up in her van. Rebecca and her team got out and looked out over the terrain. Tom was glad to see her. She was the new coroner now, and Tom hadn’t run into her for months. The two of them had gone out a couple of times back in the day, once just for a casual lunch, once to The Bitter Bar where they got sloshed on one Kiss the Sky after another. But nothing had ever come of it, no matter how Tom wished it had.
When she walked up to him, it seemed like a warm greeting when she said his name. “Drake.”
“Beccs,” he answered, and he tilted his chin in the direction of the body. “It’s her.”
The sadness of the fact swept over her face, and she said, “We’ll have a look.”
She and her techs slowly worked the scene, taking photographs, collecting samples, examining the body, and, in the end, lifting the little shape into a body pouch and loading it into the van.
Rebecca returned to him and asked him to sign the chain-of-custody document. Her demeanor was darker now. “I don’t have a cause of death,” she said, “but it was definitely last night.”
Tom nodded. He felt as if he needed to hide, before she could see what he was like now.
“I didn’t see any wounds,” she continued, “but her hands are bound with plastic ties.”
He felt the involuntary tightening of his jaw, and he reached for his sunglasses to cover his eyes so she wouldn’t be able to read him, to see him for what he was.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Day Of: Friday, February 7, 2020 | Valmont and Left Hand Ditch Road
Aidon had already decided fuck it and fuck his pain-in-the-ass job—he had a present to open. He’d been trying for more than an hour to track down his buddy with the best shit, but no luck, so he had to resort to his backup plan. He pulled his truck up on the wrong side of the street and laid on the horn until his cousin came out. Gareth scampered from the crumbling trailer through the unshoveled snow and into the street like a fucking priss. Before Aidon could even get his window rolled down, Gareth said, “You woke me up, man.”
“Tough shit, dipwad,” Aidon said. “It’s one fucking thirty in the afternoon, and I need some party supplies.”
“Where’s the party at?” Gareth said, grinning like a shit-eater, breathing steam as snowflakes landed on his shoulders.
Aidon didn’t want to share any info with him, but he didn’t want him to clam up and hold out on him either. “The hideout.”
“You shitting me? You still going up there?” Gareth pulled his collar up around his bony neck. “What time?”
“No, I need my shit right now.” Aidon tapped his fingers on the outside of the truck’s door. “And you’re not invited. It’s only me and the lady.”
“What lady?” He sounded like he thought it was a lie.
“Fuck you,” Aidon said.
“Fuck you yourself, Aidon.”
He hated the fucking little wuss. “I need oxy.”
From inside the duffel, his little pretty made a low crying sound, and his cousin tried to look into the truck. Aidon blocked his view, turned on some music, and said, “And a bottle of Jack. And some cherry Coke. Chop-chop.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, Gareth waded back into the trailer. Aidon kept checking the road ahead and behind, just in case. It took Gareth a long time to come out again. He finally picked his way through the snow, high-stepping like a fucking faggot, and handed over the bottles, and then he started to squeeze a pill out of a flat, silver blister pack.
Aidon grabbed the whole pack. “I need all these.”
“No way, you asshole.” Gareth tried to grab them back, but he was too slow. “You gotta pay me, man.”
Aidon punched a dent in Gareth’s chest and listened to him cough. “Fuck yourself, you shitpile.”
“You owe me, Aidon!” Gareth rubbed his measly hands over his chest and looked like he was going to cry. “And I want my dad’s army stuff back.”
“One of these days, I’mmona fuck you up, Gareth.” Aidon plowed away from the curb and watched in the mirror how snowy slush splattered back onto his cousin’s legs.
“Prick!” Gareth yelled, but Aidon didn’t care. He was getting everything ready so he could open his present.
He took Pearl to Twenty-sixth, to the drive-through, and ordered himself three double cheeseburgers, some onion rings, and a jumbo Slushee.
“Want anything while I’m here?” he said to his present, but she didn’t give him a straight answer, just whined something he couldn’t understand. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, and he pulled up and paid for his food. He was even nice to the pimply, chubby fleshpot at the cashier window.
Seventh heaven. Those were the best words he could think of to describe how he was feeling. He pulled into a parking spot in the very corner of the lot. The burgers were hot and salty, and the onion rings were crunchy and sweet, his drink as frosty as it was outdoors. He had all the stuff he needed, and he had something great to look forward to for the first time in a long time. He turned up the heat and the music and smacked his food down. If she didn’t want any of what he was having, that was her problem. Nobody could wreck this day.
When he was done, he crumpled up his trash. After he surveilled the lot, he backed up, pulled out onto the road, and turned the wheel toward the nearest gas station. He had to piss like a firehose. He didn’t dare risk filling the tank, getting out of the truck right there out in the open with her in there, but he could pull around the back and go in the men’s ro
om and drain his own fucking tank. That made him laugh. He edged right up to the bathroom door, hauled out the duffel, took her in with him, and held her up over his shoulder while he whizzed. He could feel how she was shivering, and he wondered if she was going to keep that up and whether that would make it feel even better when they got to the hideout and got down to it. He put her back in the truck and made sure her door was locked, and he looked across Seventeenth, past his old high school. The Flatirons were up there beyond, but he couldn’t see them. Still too much snow flying. But the thought of getting up there where they could be together made him smile.
Chapter Twenty-Four
2:00 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Boulder Mountain Park
Erin had driven a long way into the hills above the Flatirons, along the winding hairpins of Flagstaff Road, searching for an intersection with the closed mining road Tom Drake had mentioned. She’d seen it become winter again and then summer again, hot and dusty and the flicker of the sun spiking through the trees and across the windshield. She was tracking how much time was elapsing, and she’d taken note of the minute when winter ended. She could see now that the intervals were getting shorter. And in that other frame, she thought, he’s had her for more than two hours. A chill of loathing ran down between her shoulder blades. There wasn’t a photo of him in the file she’d seen, but after Korrie’s funeral there was an image of him on the news, a slightly out-of-focus, closed-circuit photo of him smiling. Looks happy, she’d thought, with an alarmingly sharp need to crush that face, to cave in that smile with something heavy and blunt.
And what was the plan now? To meet him head-on? With no way to protect herself? What could she possibly do when she found him? Simply convince him to give her child back to her? Threaten him? Make a bargain? She would have to figure something out when the time came. It was that or give up and go back home.
She followed the double yellow lines along Flagstaff Road, but when she passed the reservoir, she realized she’d gone too far. Flagstaff would twist as far as the campgrounds and back to the highway. She was wasting time. She was making another mistake. She slammed the heel of her palm against the steering wheel. She hated that she was in this bind and didn’t know what to do. Her nerves started to rage again. She whipped the car around, veered too close to the fall-off at the far side of the narrow shoulder, and raised a cloud of dust and a spray of gravel. She slammed on the brakes so she wouldn’t send the car and herself down the side of the mountain.
“Erin,” she said, “cool it.” She took a deep breath, nudged the car forward onto the asphalt, and straightened it in the right direction. “There’s still time,” she reassured herself, and she headed back the way she had come.
She slowed the car in front of the Realization Point trailhead at the entrance to Boulder Mountain Park. This was the third time she had scoured this stretch of the road. It had to be here somewhere. As Erin woke her phone to search the Internet for the closed road, she realized she’d traveled into a cellular dead zone within the park. The indicator read “No Service.” But at least the digits still ticked off the seconds on the clock.
She clicked the band of her ring against the smoothness of the steering wheel and searched the side of the road. Brush and rocks, stumps and sand. At last, set back from a gravelly junction, a concrete block sat marked with an aged sign that read “No Entry,” and she noticed what was left of a faded road marker. She had to take the chance that this was the old mining roadway. She turned onto the decaying pavement and edged around the concrete block.
The condition of the road forced her to drive slowly. Ruts, cracks, and potholes littered the surface, as if it had been targeted in aerial bombardment—an unmaintained road no one used anymore, exactly as Tom Drake had described. She rolled forward, searching for a sloping trail, the one the skiers had crossed before they found Korrie.
As she drove, she scanned the dense, dry forest around her, everything rocky and arid, and the trees, either still green or red and gray with beetle kill. She opened her window as the car crept along the pitted road. All she saw was the heavy cover of the woods; the only sounds she heard were dog-day cicadas and the clacks and caws of crows.
When an open path of soil appeared at the side of the road, she pulled over and got out. This could be a trail. She stepped into the soft soil and followed it for a few dozen yards until she saw that it was only a dry creek bed that dead-ended in a small gully overgrown with clumps of sage. She ran back to the car and headed farther along the road.
As the time approached when she expected the interval to change again, she was on the verge of heading back along the other side of the road, until she came upon a narrow trail that led into the trees. The trail was well defined and well worn. A short distance down the slope stood a semicircle of ponderosa pine trees. This must be it. She dreaded the idea that she might get out and stand in the same place where he had stood, where he had discarded what he stole. But perhaps if she were to stand there in winter before he did, she could find a way to undo what he’d done before he did it.
When she jumped out of the car, she searched the ground nearest to where the trail intersected with the old asphalt. Tracks from the wide tires of mountain bikes snaked along the trail and disappeared down the slope below. Tom had said that the skiers came to the junction where the trail crossed the old road and found Korrie some twenty paces away in a semicircle of ponderosa pines. It must have been such a horror for them to realize what they were seeing.
2:15. Twenty paces. She felt rickety and queasy as she counted twenty paces and headed for the pines, for the spot when time would change.
Chapter Twenty-Five
2:20 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | National Institute of Standards and Technology
In the dimmed room, Zac sat forward into the blue light from his monitor. He felt as if every muscle fiber in his body were about to take flight, as if every neuron in his brain were about to fire. He and the guys had continued to push through this day, reconfiguring the simulation again and again, each iteration born of a finer alliance with the incoming data. And now, because of their certainty that the black hole had formed, all of the world’s observatories would search for some hint of its rotation, some ultraviolet glow of its evolution.
He and Mark had validated the data from the wave that had been recorded at 1:32, and they’d sent the packet to Jin, who now worked furiously to transform it into the graphics that might depict what they all hoped to see: the thing that would vindicate their rebellion—not the black hole’s formation of a singularity, but rather its transition into a time-reversed white hole.
Walter heaved out a breath of exasperation. “Jin,” he said, “are we ever going to see this? What are you doing?”
“Perhaps a little light redecorating.” Jin chuckled, clearly pleased to taunt Walter in the mildest way. “What we really need,” he added, “is another time crystal for you. Then we could triangulate you with the sim and the white hole, and you could clock it yourself and stop bothering me.”
“Wouldn’t that be mind-boggling?” Zac said. Something else occurred to him. “Diamonds have been entangled for quantum computing. Why couldn’t we do that? Maybe if two crystals tuned to each other in quantum entanglement shared the same vibrational state over a distance, we could use them to find out what happens to time because of the white hole.”
“That’s what I was saying this morning,” Jin said. “Why does no one recognize my genius?”
“Can we please stop speculating and see what we actually have right now?” Walter said. “All genius aside, we need to get going.”
Jin squinted at the information on his monitor and said, “Okay, a five, six, seven, eight …”
The four men stood and gathered in a row in front of the big screen. Behind the glass, the perturbed gray sea unfurled and reached toward the horizon. In the center of the image, a smooth black sphere emerged out of the gray, and the gray responded by slowly beginning to stretch
into circular bands of reflection around it.
“Lensing,” Walter said. “I like it. Very realistic.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” Jin said, and he returned his attention to the screen. In the far distance, beyond the black hole, two inward-angled waves formed and rose and purpled as the other earlier ones had done, and they hurtled toward their meeting point.
Zac gestured toward the screen and said, “This is where the schemata of the sim will diverge.”
“Yep,” Walter said, as if he’d already known what Zac wanted to say, though he hadn’t previewed the way the sim would section off the two scenes. When Zac paused, Walter said, “Go on—tell me anyway.”
So Walter was humoring him, and he chose to humor Walter in return. He pointed toward the split screen. “The lengths of the waves that skate past the photon orbit of the black hole are weakened by its gravity, but they continue onward, so the sim shows the set after they meet and how they form this chessboard interference pattern.”
Flat squares on the surface of the gray expanse skirted toward the foreground region of the screen, each square bordered with the rolling fringe of beads, mercury throwing off arcs of blue to white, like lightning, at the intersections.
Walter shook his head. “I still think it’s too pretty.”
“In fact,” Jin said, “this is the scaled-back translation. If we let it, it would be even prettier.”
On the screen, as the square waves traveled toward them, the image seemed to slip and skip forward slightly.
“What was that?” Zac turned to Jin. “Did you see that?”
“I saw it,” Mark said. “A stutter.”
“Yeah.” Jin shifted to the other foot. “I don’t know.”
Mark said, “Could it be the monitor? A lag in the refresh rate?”
“Nope,” Jin said. “Shouldn’t be.”
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