Departure

by A. G. Riddle

  I set out, my pace brisk but hopefully not rushed enough to raise suspicion. I don’t dare risk turning my head toward the labs, and I’m relieved to see Grayson following my lead.

  The first lab passes. Then the second. Through my peripheral vision, I see flashes of what’s going on here. Autopsies. Human bodies laid out on metal tables, split open. Organs in pans around the room.

  The third lab passes.

  Fourth.

  Fifth. Halfway to the doors.

  At the seventh lab, the pattern changes. The body on the table isn’t human. It’s an ape. I can’t help but cut my eyes over. I can’t be sure, but I think the suited figure hunched over its body stops working and looks up. The eyes inside are human—I think. I pick up my pace, hoping he won’t take notice of us.

  We pass the eighth lab. Empty.

  Behind us I hear the sweeping sound of a hinged glass door opening. Footsteps in the hall. I can’t tell if they’re moving toward us or away.

  Ninth row of labs. Also empty.

  I can see through the sliding glass doors ahead now. Rows of rolling tables hold domed plastic tents.

  Just past the last two labs, Grayson reaches out and punches the round, unlabeled button beside the sliding doors. Neither of us look back as they open and we step out of the corridor, into an open space.

  The sliding doors seal off the sound of footsteps behind us, leaving us in total silence.

  The tables are steel, each about eight feet long and three feet wide. There are three rows of seven, lined up neatly.

  I move to the closest and peer inside the rounded, clear plastic chamber. A human body. I don’t recognize the person. I move to the next row. A woman, middle-aged. I’ve seen her before. She was in the main section of the plane that sank in the lake. She was one of the first to jump and swim ashore. The last time I saw this woman, she was shivering on the bank in the dim moonlight, pleading with us to save her husband, who was still on the plane. The next chamber holds a black kid, around ten. He looks familiar, but I’m not sure.

  I scan the final row. Mike. Jillian. All still, eyes closed. What is this? Are they dead, or sedated?

  To the left, a short passageway connects this tent to the next. More of the rolling tables with plastic domes over bodies crowd the connecting section. I bet the other tent’s filled with rolling tables.

  On the far wall to my right a mechanical droning breaks the silence. A conveyor belt. It runs the length of the wall, from a dark tunnel along the backside of the labs to a small, windowless room in the corner. The belt jolts into motion, surging forward unevenly. Grayson and I wait, watching it. Slowly, a plastic-wrapped package emerges from the tunnel. A body. One they’re finished with. And suddenly I know what this complex is:

  A massive assembly line for some kind of experiment.

  An experiment—that’s why they brought us here. I’m sure of it now. And I know what we should do: get out. But I’m not leaving before I find out whether Harper’s here—and if she is, I’m not going anywhere without her.

  The sliding doors behind us open, and Grayson and I freeze. I hope the suited figure will take the next body, wheel it back into the lab section . . .

  It walks past the first row, still approaching us.

  “I think we should have a talk.”

  The voice from the suit’s speaker is human, and it booms inside the space.

  I sidestep away from the table, into the aisle from the labs to the small room on the far side of the tent. Grayson mimics my movement awkwardly in his white suit, but neither of us turns. We march, probably a little too quickly, along the wide path parallel to the conveyor belt, overtaking the plastic-wrapped body.

  “Hey!” the voice yells.

  The sliding metal doors open as we approach, revealing a room that’s empty except for a large machine that runs the length of the right-hand wall: an incinerator is my guess. I bet there’s another at the opposite corner of the tent, serving the labs on that side.

  One look at Grayson tells him what I want to do: set a trap.

  He nods, draws his gun from the loose kangaroo pouch in the front of his suit, and steps diagonally back into the room’s blind spot, beside the door, where the machine meets the wall.

  I draw my own gun, clasp it behind my back with my other hand, and stand my ground, trying to appear calm, as if I’m waiting patiently.

  The doors slide open. The face is human. A middle-aged man. He doesn’t seem alarmed at the sight of me.

  He takes one step inside. “Nicholas—”

  Grayson brings the butt of his gun down on the man’s helmet, sending him to the floor. It doesn’t knock him out, however, and he pulls Grayson down with him. I bring my own gun out, waiting for an opening as they roll around on the floor, wondering . . .

  Before the double doors can close, another figure rushes in, hands raised. I freeze, unable to look away from the eyes.

  His gloved hands slowly reach for his helmet. He pauses, staring at me, waiting for the double doors to seal.

  On the floor, Grayson and the man stop struggling, both looking up in shock. The man standing before us lifts the helmet off, and I’m staring at . . . me.

  Down to the very last detail, he’s an exact replica of me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Harper

  IF I HAD A QUID FOR EVERY TIME I’ve woken up sore, alone, and in the dark in the last six days . . . I close my eyes, hoping for a little more rest. Sleep comes quickly.

  THE SECOND AWAKENING’S MUCH BETTER. At least I can discern the pain’s focal point this go-round: my left shoulder.

  In the dim light I run my fingers across my shoulder, feeling for the source of the hurt. I stop on a round metal device, cool to the touch. Its tiny tendrils dig into my flesh. I instinctively scratch at the edges, trying to pry it free. It’s no use; the little metal insect is dug in too tight.

  My eyes have adjusted a bit, and I take in my confines, which seem like a coffin at first. There’s a ceiling a few feet above and dark walls on three sides. I can just make out a dim light to my right. I’m in a cubby, just big enough for my body, on an incredibly comfortable mattress.

  I push up, but pain explodes in my abdomen, races up my chest, and slams me back into the bed.

  My fingers reach for the pain, gently, afraid to ignite it again. My journal—it’s pressed against my stomach, against the hurt. No, it’s on the outside. The Alice Carter notebook is closest to my bruised abdomen and ribs. Running my hand down the journal’s hard cover, I find the silver spider dug into it. The sharp legs reach deep inside, almost to the back cover, like a staple through a stacked sheaf of papers, but not quite deep enough to get through and wrap around. The journal stopped the first shot at the park outside Titan Hall, and that’s probably a very good thing.

  I hold the small book up and flip it open. The last, unpierced pages are blank. I set it aside and move to Alice Carter. She’s survived unharmed, and I realize that I’m happy about that. I’d choose her over the journal any day—I’m not sure I want to know any more about myself. The first walk down Future Memory Lane was jarring enough.

  The bed vibrates slightly, then shakes a little more violently. It reminds me . . . of turbulence, and at first all I can think of is Flight 305. Then it’s gone, and I can breathe again.

  I swing my feet out of the bunk, onto the floor. Faint light rises from below, illuminating the space. Three double bunks are arranged in a U-shape. Both of the others on the bottom level are occupied, but the row above is empty. They look almost like sleeping quarters on a military ship (I once ghostwrote the autobiography of a British admiral; many ship tours were involved). Maybe I’m aboard the airship I last saw at Titan Hall. The more I think about my situation, I realize it has to be. I lean forward to look at the other bunks. Yul lies to the right. He’s alive and asleep. But the bag he has vigilantly guarded since the crash is missing. Sabrina occupies the other bunk, and I’m relieved to feel a faint pulse in her neck as wel
l.

  The double doors directly ahead slide open, flooding the room with blinding light. I hold my right arm up, squinting, barely able to make out a suited figure. It taps a panel, and darkness overtakes me.

  THE PAIN’S GONE WHEN I wake up, and so is everything else: the cramped bunk, the metal burr in my shoulder, my journal and notebook—and my tattered clothes. I feel a little self-conscious as I sit up in a massive bed, inspecting the tight, layered white garments someone has dressed me in.

  The room I’m in is spacious, spotlessly clean. Across from the bed, there’s a desk against a long wall. To my right, a wide window looks out on the sea. A glass door opens to a glittering bathroom. Beyond the bathroom, another door, solid wood, presumably leads out of the room. It feels like a posh hotel.

  I stare out the window for a moment, searching for clues about where I might be. All I can see is a featureless expanse of blue ocean all the way to the horizon, punctuated only by whitecaps on the surface and birds in the air. My first thought is that I’m on a huge ship, but I don’t sense any motion.

  The outer door hisses open when I approach, revealing a long corridor and similar wooden doors. I step to the first, but can’t open it. Panicked, I move back to my own. To my relief, it opens. Must be keyed to me somehow.

  What to do? Stay and wait, or make a go for it? The stay-and-wait option is unappealing, but hey, the make-a-go approach hasn’t exactly worked lately either.

  I march to the metallic door at the end of the corridor and pause anxiously. It parts, revealing a wider hall that runs perpendicular with a different character: that of an office building. No. A hospital. Still not right—something in between.

  In contrast to the first wing’s carpeted floors and wood-paneled walls and doors, this space is all tile, glass, and concrete, clean and clinical. A series of glass doors lines the walls, and to my surprise, a door on my side of the hall to the far right swings open.

  I inhale, unable to move.

  Two people in white coats stride out quickly, purposefully, fully engaged in their conversation. They turn right, away from me, toward the end of the hall, but their words still carry in the high-ceilinged space.

  “Is there a backup plan if they can’t make it work?”

  “Not really, besides weathering the attack.”

  “So that’s a no.”

  They exit through sliding doors at the end of the hall, letting in a warm gust of wind with a salty tang.

  I venture closer to the nearest glass door and peer in. The room is empty—a lab, similar to what you might find at a university. High tables with black tops and sinks cover the space. Glass cabinets line the windowless walls.

  Two silver tables on casters lie just inside the door, each with a zipped body bag on top.

  I push through the swinging glass door into the lab, closing the distance quickly to the body bags. A device that looks like an air pump sits at the foot. I pull the zipper of the first one back. A plume of frigid, foggy air rises. When it clears, I’m staring down at Yul. I stagger back, panting.

  God.

  I zip the bag shut. I’m pretty sure of what I’ll find in the next, but unable to stop myself, I rush to it and pull the zipper down just enough . . . Sabrina. Also motionless. Dead.

  Outside the lab, I hear the double doors at the end of the corridor open.

  Without taking the time to zip up Sabrina’s bag, I run to the other side of the lab and duck, crouching behind the farthest table.

  Footsteps echo, drawing close.

  In my mind, I can see the fog rising from Sabrina’s body bag like smoke from a signal fire, screaming, “Hey, she’s in here.” Instead, I hear real voices in the corridor.

  “The access log says she just exited her room.”

  “Should have posted someone by the door.”

  I don’t dare look. When I hear them enter the residential wing, I bound up, out of the lab, and down the corridor, pausing only for the doors, which seem to take forever to open.

  The area outside is a vast concrete promenade that looks straight down into an endless canyon, a wide river flowing through the center. Why is this so familiar?

  I can’t tear my eyes away from the drop-off. We must be a thousand feet up. . . .

  I have seen this place. From another angle, from a sandy beach—inTitan Hall. This is the Gibraltar Dam, and that means we must be in the mini-city at the center of the dam. One side looks out on the sea, as my room did. This side towers over the valley the Titans created between Europe and Africa.

  The doors open behind me.

  “Harper! Stop!”

  I know that voice. But . . . it’s impossible. I turn anyway, not believing my eyes.

  It can’t be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Nick

  FOR A MOMENT, THE ONLY SOUND IN THE small room is the low hum of the incinerator to my left. Then the droning cranks louder as the plastic-wrapped body on the conveyor belt reaches the device. The buzzing is a subtle yet vivid reminder that these people are dissecting the passengers of Flight 305 as if they were lab rats and discarding their bodies unceremoniously. My mind rifles through possibilities, plans of action, how Grayson and I can escape this sprawling tent complex at Heathrow.

  My clone stands there, his hands up. On the floor, Grayson and the stranger who chased us from the lab wing release each other, both staring from one Nick Stone to the other.

  “It’s over, Nick,” my doppelgänger says.

  “What are you?”

  “I’m you.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll get to that—”

  “Let’s get to it now.” I raise the handgun slightly so he can see it.

  He smiles, his expression reflective. “Sorry, I’d almost forgotten what I was like at thirty-six. That was over a hundred and thirty years ago for me.”

  He’s almost 170 years old? He doesn’t look a day older than I do.

  “You want answers, here and now, right, Nick?” my clone says.

  “I’d say we deserve some answers.”

  “You certainly do.” He gestures toward the rows of body bags behind him, through the steel double doors. “But this is a biological hazard zone. We can’t talk here.”

  “What kind of biological hazard?”

  “A plague, the likes of which you can’t imagine—an extinction-level force we’ve been fighting for seventy-six years. Unsuccessfully, until six days ago.”

  “That’s why you brought us here? To fight your plague?”

  “That’s only half the reason we brought you here. You’re here to help us cure the plague in our world and ensure it never occurs in yours. We can save both our worlds, Nick, but I need your help. We still have a very powerful enemy standing in our way, and the clock is ticking. I can’t tell you how happy I was when I found out that you had come here. That was very smart.”

  He bends over and picks up his helmet. “I’m going to leave the way you came in. If you want to help us, I’ll be in the closest ship outside. You don’t need that gun—no one here is going to harm you—but you’re more than welcome to keep it if it makes you feel safer.” He turns to Grayson. “And there’s someone who’s very eager to see you: your father.”

  THERE ISN’T MUCH DEBATE ABOUT what to do. If these . . . people wanted Grayson and me dead, we wouldn’t still be alive. We need answers, and medical care, and food. This seems like the only place to start.

  Inside the ship, after I’ve gotten the suit off and some dry clothes on, the future version of myself and I sit down at a small wooden table in a narrow conference room. There are no windows to the outside, but a wide interior window looks out on a sitting area where Oliver Norton Shaw and Grayson sit in navy club chairs, leaning forward, talking, smiling, both crying. The older Shaw looks the same age as he did in the simulations at Titan Hall, mid-sixties.

  “Oliver hasn’t seen his son in seventy-six years. I can’t tell you how happy this makes him. It’s been a long time since any of us
around here were happy. We’ve been . . . hanging on.”

  “For us to arrive?”

  “For any hope.”

  “Let’s back up. I want to take it from the top—but first, what should I call you?”

  “Nicholas,” my future self says. “I haven’t gone by Nick for some time. So, from the top. Give me a minute to collect my thoughts. No one talks about the past around here.” He grins somberly. “We all lived through it. It’s not a pleasant subject.”

  “I imagine. I saw London.”

  “London got the best of it. Most places were much worse. But . . . the beginning. The Titan Foundation. In some sense, you’re the only person on this planet who truly understands the origins of the foundation, how I felt back then. Lost. Confused. All the things I thought I wanted in life no longer made me happy. In fact, I didn’t feel anything, and that scared me the most. More money. Better parties. A growing contact list. Yet every day, life felt a little less interesting, like I was watching it happen to someone else. Every passing day felt emptier than the last. Medication didn’t help. My only hope was to make a change. A drastic one. Joining with Oliver, starting the Titan Foundation, was that change. A big, scary goal. I was willing to try anything, just to see if it revealed a clue about what might make me feel alive again.”

  This is even more jarring than the monologue in Titan Hall. These are my darkest thoughts, the secrets I’ve kept, the fears about what my life would become if I didn’t turn things around. Truths this deep are impossible to fake. This guy knows me. He is me. He pauses, letting me process his words, and when I give a slight nod, he continues.

  “How far did you get in Titan Hall?”

  “To the second chamber. The Gibraltar Dam.”

  “Okay. So you know about Q-net, Podway, and Orbital Dynamics. The opening of the Gibraltar Dam is when things got . . . more complicated. The press and history books called it our great mistake, the Titan Blunder.