Mark, Jin, and Zac, all three of them sobered now and grim, nodded yes as the sim replayed.
Zac mulled the implications he couldn’t put into words. Something about the stitched nature of lifetimes, fragments of human lives, splices ripped away without anyone ever knowing it.
“If this is true …” Walter said, “I’ll have to think about how to bring it to Schacht.” He shook his head, and his shoulders drooped in a posture of defeat. “This is not what she was expecting to hear from us.” He put his hands in the pockets of his coveralls and lowered his head. When he looked up, he said, “And this will look like shit in a press release.”
“Unparalleled shit,” Zac said.
Jin reset the graphic loop. Then, as it replayed in slow motion, he extended his hands in the sweep of an imaginary headline. “‘Universe Edits Human Existence—All Advised to Take Longer Vacations.’” He chuckled to himself, and the others contemplated silently as the gap appeared, the mirrored interior revealing the frenzied urgency of the mercurial beads, until it all disappeared beneath the gray.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
5:30 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Boulder Mountain Park
Erin stormed back and forth across the cracked road a short distance beyond the leading wall of the fire. Why? Why was this happening? The fire kept her from where she had to go. She had tried to hike around it to get back to that building, but the surge ripped through the dull grass and beetle-killed trees and up the lichened rocks in a hiss of crackling vermillion. It was spreading so fast that it had driven her back to the road. Shreds of flame leaped up and disappeared black into the umber clouds of smoke. The wind had a sweet and fiery itch, and her eyes stung. Sparks skittered toward her and glowed in the seams of the pavement.
Her veins thumped with desperation to find a way to get through the fire, to get back to that building and find out if Korrie was inside.
That truck. The driver who’d leaned over to look at the children. If she had known then.
She woke her phone again. It was 5:30 now, but she had already reached 5:30 before, when she was in winter. She wondered how much later it would be with the next shift. The only thing that seemed predictable was that it would happen at thirty-two minutes after the hour, whatever hour she would be thrown into. She was going to have to conserve what little battery power she had left. It was draining away, even though she had no service.
As the hot wind changed direction, sirens keened from a distance behind her. She turned and looked down the unburnt road. Fire trucks? Her first impulse was to run to meet them. But what could she tell the firefighters? That she needed them to create a firebreak so she could climb that slope, get back into the center of the blaze, back to the building at the heart of it? No. If a fire crew found her here, they would probably make her leave the area, set her back even farther from where she needed to be. Either in this time frame or the other, she had to get back to where she’d seen the black truck. She crept closer to the yellow surge of fire billowing across the paving. The air crackled around her. She pleaded for it to happen, the shift. Send me back, she thought. Let me find out. The sirens quieted and then grew louder again with the curves of the road, and she approached the pulsing diagonal wall of fire that blocked the way back.
“Now,” she said. “Please now.” The intensity of the heat drove into her skin. “Please.”
And instantly she inhaled the frozen atmosphere of a winter’s late afternoon. Feathery flakes gusted around her in the wind. She zipped her hoodie up to her neck and scanned the frozen road. The tire tracks were sharper now, fresher. She ran in their wake, pulling her phone from her pocket. 4:32. It was shifting earlier, not later? The sequence of the intervals had reversed? Why? And if so, how much time did she have?
She searched for the hill where she’d seen that incandescent light. There was no glow to head for; there were no footprints from her trek earlier. Or was that later? She followed the tire tracks a long way until they turned where another road forked up the hillside. A wide depression in the snow showed the moment when the vehicle had pushed a plow up the road earlier in the storm. The truck. At the junction sagged a worn metal sign: “Three Dog Knight Mining Mill Co.”
The first thing that swept into her mind was ore dust. The autopsy report had indicated patches of ore dust on Korrie’s skin.
Furious energy flashed down Erin’s legs. She ran up the plowed trail.
The shape of the building emerged from the snow. There it was—the slight radiation of yellow from the windows, the black silhouette of the truck. She’d found it. She scanned her surroundings. No one. No movement.
One boot in front of the other, she advanced forward, each footfall too loud. She wanted to rush to the windows, but she slowed herself. She approached the truck, heavy-duty, the plow, the hunters’ flashers, the bumper sticker on the back. Unbelievable. The same one. All of her awareness heightened, she peered through the driver’s window. Nothing but some trash on the seat.
Beyond the truck, the windows of the building were opaque with condensation. She would have to get closer to see anything. As quietly as she could, she rounded the front of the truck and stepped across a depression where drifting snow had settled into a line of large footprints leading toward the door. Old planking skirted the front of the building, and she tested it before she stepped up onto it, then crouched close to the first window frame.
Holding her breath, she inched toward the clear center of the pane. She peered inside. Was he in there? Would it be him? The smiling face? At the far end of the room, indistinct old equipment sat piled in dusty decay. As she leaned farther for a better look, an old cabinet cleared the frame, the hot orange pulse of filaments in a space heater, the star-shaped light coming off a low-hanging bulb.
Then she saw Korrie. Erin’s heart bucked against her ribs. Her vision flashed blank for a second. She clapped a hand over her mouth, silencing the shock.
Korrie. Alive. She sat in her underwear on the surface of a desk, her hands behind her back. Sitting in the chair in front of her was that man. Clype. He gawked up at her face. He had his hands on her bare legs.
Shafts of terrible anger shot through Erin. She strangled the need to yell. Her body wanted to launch into the room. Both hands over her mouth, she made herself stay mute. Do something. Thoughts jammed themselves in front of each other. Do something. Do something!
With the effort to stand, she slipped on the icy plank and thumped her forehead on the edge of the window frame. Clype’s head whipped around.
She ducked backward and held her breath, waiting to see if he was coming, if she would have to face him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
3:44 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Three Dog Knight Mining Mill
Incendiary heat exploded and sucked the air from Erin’s lungs. Flames burst over her, and the blazing building howled. She shielded her eyes and ran, expecting to encounter the same firestorm as before, yet she cleared the fire in a matter of only seconds. It was so much smaller now. She realized the pattern of the reversed sequence was continuing. Out in the open air, she scoped the extent of the fire and then turned and faced the burning building and the ferocity of the heat. Swirls of orange flame leapt up into bright scraps and dissolved into smoke. She hadn’t had to face Clype, but now Korrie was left there with him. The flaring sea of red and yellow plumes devoured the grasses and the planking where she’d just crouched, no more than fifteen feet away from her child. She wanted to shout Korrie’s name until the world complied and brought her out.
But she’s not here now, she told herself. She’s in winter.
Alive.
There was a chance. There was hope. She battled the furor inside her. Korrie’s head had been bent forward so Erin hadn’t been able to see her face, only her profile, her hair draped over her shoulder and the slope of her back. Her Korrie.
Erin needed to put her arms around her, to shield Korrie from that monster, and the need was overpo
wering. She had to get back into this building. A bulge of fire swelled toward her from the front of the structure. Disoriented, reeling, she looked at her phone to try to center herself. June 20. 3:44. Time intervals in reverse order. She had clocked herself at 5:30, at 4:30, and now 3:44. But also shrinking time. Each interval shorter. So a longer stretch before she could see her again and less time when she did.
Have to get back to her. Have to be ready. Find some way to get close to her, get her out of there.
Erin took off amid the smoke and blowing dust, rounded the corner of the building. Back windows? No windows. Only the unbroken walls of the structure. Farther on, though, a door at the very back. She ran to it and yanked on it. Unlocked, but stuck. She pulled with her full weight until it gave, and she stumbled backward. She scrambled into the doorway. Inside was a small vestibule. Empty. Another door on the opposite side of the square room. She took a step inward. From the crack under the opposite door, brown smoke pushed its way in. How long would she have to wait for the shift?
A single pin of fire licked upward. Then, spreading toward her, a thousand flecks of dust ignited along the pine planks like a rush of miniature fireworks. Ore dust. The air in the room seemed to suck inward, and Erin turned and threw herself back outside into the open light. With a loud whomp, the doorway filled with roiling gold flame. The percussion caught her and shoved her off her feet. She picked herself up and backed away. The grass at the foot of the doorway crackled with fire, shriveling and blackening toward her.
She rushed around to the front of the building, searching again for a way to hide herself until she could see how to get to Korrie and then get her out safely. As she faced the burning frame, the wind came from behind her and whipped flames and sparks upward in a funnel, and then the current changed direction and blew burning cinders toward her.
She backpedaled, and her boot came down on something that gave with a snap, like cardboard breaking. She looked down. A box of her matches. She stooped and picked them up. The last box of the special ones. She reached into her pocket. The matches she’d put there were gone. Her mind stumbled. How could her matches be here?
On the ground in the blackened area stood a pyramid of short branches, carbonized, still smoking. They were arranged the way she’d laid a fire when they used to go camping. And my matches. How was this possible? It was as if she had started this fire, but she didn’t remember doing it. Had she set the blaze that was destroying the place where she’d seen Korrie?
“I have no memory of this,” she said aloud.
Why would she have done it? She examined the matches again. Their three faces looking out from the front of the box. She paced the outline of the growing fire front, and the wind sent another shower of sparks raining down from the heart of the blaze. A sense of déjà vu flashed in her mind, as if she’d stood in this spot and asked questions before, but then, just as quickly, it was gone.
She had come all this way, through each of these mystifying shifts. She had found this place and she had found Korrie. She was in position now, ready to do whatever she had to do to take back her daughter when the interval shifted. But now it seemed she had taken another step at some point she couldn’t recall, the destructive step of setting fire to this building.
“Erin, what did you do?” she whispered.
Chapter Thirty
3:44 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | National Institute of Standards and Technology
Zac needed his old notebook. He wanted to look back and remind himself of his thinking from when he’d first visualized the math. Maybe if he could see his handwritten notes, sketches for the sculpture of his original model, he could discover something he’d missed. He’d wracked his mind and come up empty-handed in the search for anything that would miraculously heal the rip in the sim, anything that could prove his math wrong and show conservation of the wholeness of time. But his notebook was in a drawer in his office.
And he needed to talk to Erin. He felt stripped of the scaffolding that held him up, and he wanted to hear her voice, feel the old certainty of the good years they’d had together, the comfort of the one person who knew him through and through. Where could he find her again, that woman he was remembering?
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
All three men wheeled toward him as if he’d set off a firecracker. “Where are you going?” Mark asked.
“Just to my office,” Zac said. “I’ll be back in one minute.”
“Are you kidding?” Jin said, his expression dead-flat serious.
“Don’t panic, guys,” Zac said. “I swear I’ll be back in a minute. I need my notebook.” He slipped through the glass doors before anyone—Walter—could object. Once he began to peel off his coveralls, it was easier to breathe.
Outside, the air was hot, and it smelled of pine and earth and dust. As he jogged toward the office building, he glanced up at the Flatirons, red and clear and seemingly so close that he felt as if he could just walk home. With a longing that gripped him hard behind his ribs, he wished he could go there. Go back home. He let the smells of the house rise from the depths of memory, some mixture of clove and brown sugar and melted butter. Erin in front of the oven. Erin of old. The girl with heatproof hands. Old-fashioned enough to wear aprons, but the white aprons of elite chefs. A sixth sense about taste and ecstasy. Every little thing a delicious invention. Intricate weavings—braids almost—of flavors. Delighted by her own presentation. And now she was up there, in those hills they’d hiked a thousand times together, in the home they’d put together to please each other, where they’d once conceived a hypervelocity star. Up there still. Starving.
Inside the research building, he opened the door to his office and hurried over to his desk. He unlocked the drawers and reached into the second drawer down, pulled out his notebook, and tucked it under his arm. He opened the top drawer and took out his phone. When it illuminated, the phone icon lit with the red dot of a new voicemail. He pressed the square to take a look and saw it was from Erin. Her picture looked out at him from the small screen, and he tried to remember when she’d looked like that, unburdened, the girl with a thousand expressions, who loved surprises, who lived for delight; how delighted she’d been all those years ago with the ring, with his time crystal; and how she guarded it, even now that the marriage was in ruins.
With a tap, he selected her call. The strange thing was that the voicemail had nothing attached to it. Nothing recorded. So strange. Why would she call and not leave a message? He’d asked her to.
The voicemail had a time stamp of 10:42, but the log read that it was from February 7, 2020. Not today, but February 7, last year. Which was the day Korrie died. Which was impossible.
He called Erin’s number, but it went straight to her voicemail.
“Erin,” he said. And then he couldn’t say anything. Tension tightened within his throat, and he struggled against his loneliness for her. He swallowed hard and said, “Did you call me? Please call and leave me a message.”
When he returned, he stopped outside the entrance to the Clean Room and flipped the switch on the intercom. “Mark?” He peered through the glass, and Mark looked up at him. “Could I have a second?” he said. The heads of his friends swiveled as they checked in with one another.
“Sure,” Mark said. He got up and came through the doors. “What’s up?”
“I want to show you something.” Making the effort to slow his breathing, Zac held out his phone, opened to the empty voicemail.
Mark examined it for a moment. “Oh,” he said. His eyes rose to meet Zac’s. “The date.”
“Right,” Zac said. “I talked to Erin this morning, and then this came in just a few minutes ago.”
Mark looked at the display again. “With the wrong date? And isn’t that about the date …”
“The exact date.”
A twinge narrowed Mark’s eyes and then faded. “Did you try her?”
“Went to voicemail.”
“Weird,�
� Mark said. “Bad retrieval?”
“No, I don’t think it’s that.” Zac met Mark’s gaze, and he could see him rolling the situation over in his mind like a kid who’d found a peculiar rock. Zac hoped hard that some sensible solution would occur to him.
“I can’t see how all this”—Mark waved a hand toward the Clean Room—“would have any bearing. I’d call customer support tomorrow,” he said. “That’s uncanny.” He gave Zac a brief smile of apology.
Zac took the phone back. Not what he’d hoped for. “Yeah, I’ll do that.” And to let him off the hook, he added, “Thanks.”
Mark shucked off his coveralls and patted Zac’s arm. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” Zac said, despite his pulse chattering faster.
“We better get back to it.” Mark stepped into fresh coveralls.
“Right,” Zac said. “I just need a minute.”
After the doors slid shut behind Mark, Zac decided to make a quick call to his brother. Next level up of people he trusted.
Dan had been the one who, in the days before the funeral, had been responsible for phoning the part of the list that included Korrie’s classmates. Zac had been able to hear him, his whispers carrying from the other room. “Hello, this is Dan Fullarton, Korrie’s uncle …” followed by the inevitable moment, and then Dan’s reply. “Thank you,” and “I know. It is hard to imagine.” He would go on to give information about the date, time, and place of the funeral, the burial, and the reception.
During one call, he leaned into the room where everyone else sat. He put his phone against his chest and whispered, “Zac?” When Zac looked up, he saw the loss on Dan’s face. Redness, furrows, exhaustion. “This guy, Brennay’s father,” Dan whispered, “wants to know what he should tell her.” Zac looked around the room for help. He sought someone else to give an answer. He looked at Erin, her parents, his parents, Maggie. They all had the same look on their faces, the mystification a child feels when asked an impossible question. It was a room full of kids faced with a task meant for priests.
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