Departure

by A. G. Riddle

  Mike, Oliver, Grayson, and I reach the sixth floor and retreat into an abandoned shop. Glass trinkets—molds of the Gibraltar Dam, the faces of the first hundred Titans—line the glass shelves. It’s weird, seeing glass replicas of my face in all sizes staring back at me. I took a shot to the arm on the third floor, but I’ve tied my arm to my body, and I think I’m okay otherwise.

  For the last hour, it’s been a deadly game of hide-and-seek. We make a move up the grand, helix-shaped stairway, take a floor, then recede into the shadows of the dark shops, hoping they’ll come after us. We harass them with fire until they do, or until we think they’ve retreated enough to take another level.

  We’re a distraction force. An attempt to buy time.

  Everything changed in the power plant. We met heavy resistance. We lost four of our twelve-person force down there, two to booby traps, two to enemy fire. We finally broke through, but it was clear we weren’t going to reach the towers.

  Nicholas, however, caught a lucky break. He’s cleared the tunnels and should be close to finding the device by now.

  In case he can’t find it, he and Oliver devised a backup plan. We placed bombs at key locations in the power plant. If we can’t make it to the device, we’ll set them off, bringing the entire dam down, destroying the quantum bridge with it. It’s a high price to pay, but it’s worth it to ensure the other faction can’t reset the bridge and send Flight 305 back to 2015, dooming our world to repeat the mistakes made here. Those are the stakes.

  I hope Nicholas finds the device soon, and we can get out of this place. We can’t leave the way we came in, via the power plant, not without functioning suits and oxygen. When we make it to the top, to the promenade on the Atlantic side, we’ll jump and swim to safety. It’s a bit of a drop, but we’re assured we’ll make it. Besides, it’s our only shot. Once Nicholas has what we came for, we’ll make a run for it. We just have to hold out, distract them a little longer, wait for the signal from Nicholas.

  Oliver has a handheld device, a backup link that shows Nicholas’s location. Oliver checks it every few minutes, letting us all follow along. Nicholas finished the search of the apartments a half hour ago; now he’s moving up the hotel tower, hopefully closing in on the device.

  I slump behind a counter, let my back fall against it, and lay my rifle across my legs.

  Grayson collapses next to me. “How you doing?”

  “Peachy. You?”

  “Been better.” He lets the hand he’s been holding against his stomach fall forward, revealing a deep gash. Blood fills his palm in the few seconds it lies open.

  Crap.

  Pings. Metal on marble, like a ball bouncing.

  “Stun grenade!” Mike yells.

  Unfortunately we’ve all become quite familiar with stun grenades and a few other choice combat weapons in the last few hours. Oliver, Grayson, and I duck our heads and cover our ears. I squeeze my eyes shut, but the blast is still overwhelming, a wave that slams into me, pulverizing my hearing and sight.

  I’m vaguely aware of Mike reaching up, plopping his rifle on the glass-topped counter, and pulling the trigger, his head held below, firing indiscriminately, hoping to repel any forces rushing in after the blast.

  Twinkling sounds, faint, like someone playing a tiny piano at the bottom of a well. It’s the glass from the shelves and the tall window panels shattering, falling on the marble floor, a sea of shards from us to the open area and stairwell. My hearing normalizing, I can just make out shots raining down on us. Mike keeps firing, and I push up, ignoring the pain from my wounded arm. I lay my rifle next to his and fire wildly as well. We keep shooting until their fire subsides, no one connecting. These rifles seem to have an endless supply of electric charges—they don’t use projectiles as far as I can tell, and there’s no magazine.

  We settle back against the counter, once again in darkness and quiet, everyone saving up energy for the mad dash to freedom, to the promenade, which has to come soon, for our sake.

  A soft, pulsing alarm rings out from Oliver’s oblong tablet. He draws it out, holds it up. Nicholas’s location beacon is sailing out of the hotel tower, down the Mediterranean side, toward the basin. Why? He should be on the other side.

  His pack activates, steering him into the waterfall, but it’s too late. His velocity. There’s no way he’ll survive the fall. Fear fills Oliver’s face.

  “Did he send the signal?” I ask. “Does he have it?”

  “No. He sent no signal,” Oliver says, punching his thick fingers on the tablet.

  The view switches to a video feed of the outside of the dam. A drone. That was smart.

  There’s no sign of Nicholas.

  Oliver works the tablet, backing the video feed up. A speck—a body—flies up from the dark pool at the bottom of the dam to high in the hotel and back inside. He pauses the feed, zooms in, moves forward. It’s still too dark, and he adjusts the settings, making it lighter. It’s grainy, but I can just make out the figure of Nicholas inside a hotel room on a high floor. The moonlight casts just enough light through the sliding glass door for me to see him searching the room. Maybe he found the quantum device and decided that jumping was the only way to destroy it.

  An errant shot hits the shop’s floor, sending a spray of glass shards into the back of the counter.

  Mike throws his rifle up on the counter and squeezes three rounds off.

  Silence.

  We all lean in, focusing on the video.

  It creeps forward.

  Nicholas pauses. He seems to be talking to someone. He pulls the sliding glass door open and scans the empty balcony. Confusion.

  He turns his back to the passing drone and focuses on something in the room. His arms spread. Another figure, rushing out of the shadow.

  Blond hair. A face I thought I might never see again.

  The video inches forward.

  Harper slams into him, driving him the few feet to the rail, then over. Oliver works the feed, panning, zooming, following them down. They’re freefalling, then suddenly they veer into the waterfall and thread in and out of the white stream. Nicholas holds Harper tight while working the control panel on the forearm of his suit behind her back. Their descent is slowing. A small shred of hope emerges inside me. Maybe . . . But Harper twists, reaches for his arms. She’s fighting him. Stopping him. Why? My mind burns, trying to unravel it.

  Whatever she was trying to do, she did it. The slow descent becomes an unstoppable plummet.

  They hit the surface of the water at a deadly speed, disappearing into the black abyss.

  My mouth goes dry. My heart pounds in my chest.

  Oliver lets the panel fall to the floor. A shadow passes over his face, and then his features grow hard. He taps the panel angrily, calling up the remote detonator for the array of explosives we planted in the power station at the base of the dam. He activates them, putting the main array on a timer, set to five minutes, with a few peripheral charges set to sixty seconds.

  The numbers fill the screen, ticking down.

  My God.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I yell at him.

  “It’s over, Nick.” He slips the narrow panel back inside the sleeve of his suit and begins to pull on his glove, but I reach for him, grabbing for it.

  He shoves me back, pushing me to the ground. Pain from my arm racks my body.

  Oliver pulls Grayson up and drags him toward the door, speaking quickly, his voice low. “When the charges go off, we’ll run up to the next level, shoot out the far windows—they overlook the Atlantic. Jump and don’t look back.”

  Grayson looks back to me, lying there at the base of the counter.

  Through the pain, I try to piece the puzzle together.

  Oliver couldn’t care less about the thousands of colonists—or any of the lives in Titan City—at this point. He’s focused only on Grayson. That’s what this was about for him. And his loyalty to Nicholas. Harper killed Nicholas. Why? It’s over, Nick. I go through wha
t I know, what Nicholas said to me. His guilt. Oliver and I killed everyone we ever loved. Everybody else, for that matter. I’ve missed something—something crucial. Think. Oliver stole the immortality therapy for Grayson, the prodigal son he wanted to give one more chance, the confused boy in a thirty-one-year-old body who peers back at me now, his father’s arm around him, the father who never loved him in his time.

  But why did Nicholas help Oliver steal the therapy? His words: I’d met someone, someone very near death. Like Oliver, I was terrified, unsure what life would be like after she passed. I had made my own proposal to save her, but it had been defeated as well. Oliver and I were desperate to save our loved ones . . .

  My mind runs through every moment with Nicholas. He knew me, coached me. Worked me. He needed the passengers for this assault, but what did he come here for? To destroy the quantum bridge? They would do it at any cost—to keep the passengers here. So why risk an assault? Why not just bomb the place as planned?

  What had he become?

  The power of seeing the world he created, the arrogance. And the sorrow of seeing it ruined by his hubris, killing the only thing he loved. The only person he loved.

  Focus.

  The question I need to ask is: Why Flight 305?

  Nicholas’s words run through my mind again. We had an incredible opportunity: a flight where the key people involved in the Titan Foundation and our great mistake could be taken out of your timeline. But they told Yul and Sabrina to board that flight—they were not originally supposed to be on Flight 305. They weren’t on that flight in this timeline. Only Harper, Grayson, and me . . .

  For Oliver the objective was Grayson. A second chance to do something about his one true regret. Which meant for Nicholas . . .

  Harper.

  It has to be. The love of his life. And she stopped him, knew it was him somehow. That’s why he pumped me for information, for an account of every second I spent with her.

  She must have known something I don’t. She gave her life to stop Nicholas, to keep him away from the device. She took away the one thing he would stop at nothing to possess: her life. And if she was willing to do that, then something is very, very wrong.

  “Stop!” I yell, sitting up.

  Grayson turns back to me, but Oliver keeps his arm around his son, corralling him, whispering to him.

  “He came here for her, didn’t he?”

  Oliver turns, an amused smile on his face.

  “Grayson, get the tablet! Stop the countdown!”

  The floor booms below us. All the glass figurines and trinkets rattle and shake, falling, shattering. It’s a sickening sound, accompanied by a shower of sharp pieces, debris and dust from the ceiling mixing with it, burying me behind the counter.

  I feel Mike’s arms around me, pulling me up, around the counter. We stumble over a sharp blanket of broken glass, toward the door and stairway, where Oliver is practically dragging Grayson.

  “Help us, Grayson!” I yell.

  Oliver turns, fires a shot that catches me in the shoulder, blowing me back into the store. I slide over the bed of glass. The shards cut into my back, a million agonizing slices, jabbing deep, cutting me to shreds.

  Mike stands and fires, but Oliver catches him with a shot to the head. He’s dead before he lands at my feet.

  Grayson grabs his father’s arm, forcing the rifle out of it. Our eyes meet, and I see the pain in his, the sadness, the struggle. His moment of hesitation allows his father to trap his arms at his sides. Oliver leans in, speaking, but Grayson frees his right hand and jerks the tablet out of his father’s sleeve, tossing it clanging on the marble floor. It settles halfway between us, and Grayson lunges for it, but his father restrains him, pulling him back.

  With far too much force.

  I watch in horror as they both crash through the glass rail. A second later, I hear the sickening sound of the fountain’s granite breaking, more pieces of the Titan statue crumbling away, splashing in the water.

  The tablet’s screen is cracked, but still lit, displaying the countdown.

  I try to sit up. Every movement pushes the glass deeper into my skin. I crawl, the shards grinding into my knees and elbows through my tattered suit.

  Footsteps. Boots on the marble. Titans and colonists descending the winding helix of the grand stairway.

  My hand reaches the tablet.

  “Stop!”

  I minimize the countdown.

  “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”

  I work my fingers, pulling up the access program for the array of explosives. There’s no pass code, just a fingerprint verification, keyed to only two people in the world: Oliver Norton Shaw and Nicholas Stone.

  A shot hits the floor three feet from me. I wince, close my eyes, and press my thumb to the screen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Nick

  WHEN THE COUNTDOWN ON THE TABLET STOPS, I toss it away and roll onto my side, the only part of me that isn’t coated in jagged glass. Blood oozes from a thousand places on my body. At any moment I expect my guts to spill out on the white marble floor like the contents of a piñata that’s finally popped.

  Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for—the easy way out.

  I stare up into the barrels of the rifles pointed at me, into the hatred on the faces of the Titans holding them. They circle me, glancing at each other, no doubt silently debating: shoot all at once, so no one knows who fired the killing shot, or conduct a more orderly execution? Or wait—after all, I’ll die soon either way. One way or another, that’s what’s next. No words I can say will change it.

  I wear the face of the Titan civil war. When they look down at me, they see Nicholas Stone, the man who destroyed this world and set the Titans against each other. They see the villain who betrayed humanity time and again, slaughtered his fellow Titans at Heathrow, and planned and executed this final assault.

  As I wait for the end, I can’t help contemplating what Nicholas became, how all his extraordinary achievements changed him, made him arrogant, yet his guilt at his mistakes ate away at his moral compass, drove him inward, to a selfish and ruthless place where he longed only to taste happiness again.

  As much as it disgusts me, I don’t blame him. Because I guess I felt some of that desperation, the fear that I would never feel whole and happy again, before Flight 305 took off. He was me. He is me. I’m capable of everything he did. I guess we’re all capable of evil, under the right circumstances.

  Movement. The Titans around me shift, form up, getting ready.

  A sound track of death and destruction plays behind them. Blood-reddened water gurgles in the mangled fountain below the statue of Nicholas and Oliver that broke the fall of so many Titans, battering them, each body taking with it a small piece of the sculpture. Behind me, shards of glass fall to the store’s floor like wind chimes blowing on a lazy day. I focus on the sound of each little piece falling, wondering if it’s a piece of my face or that of another Titan. I imagine them settling on the floor, indistinguishable in the sea of shattered glass.

  Footsteps, loud on the grand helix stairway. The Titans part.

  Sabrina.

  “Hello, Nick.”

  I’ve never been so glad to hear her voice—or my own name. Just Nick. I’ll never use the name Nicholas.

  She bends down toward me, a syringe in her hand.

  “Wait.”

  “Your injuries are urgent,” Sabrina says in that mechanical tone, the sweetest sound I can imagine right now. “We must—”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Harper.”

  “How’d she know?”

  Sabrina arches her eyebrows. “That may remain a mystery.”

  “She’s . . .”

  Sabrina nods, genuinely sad. That’s new. She starts at me again with the syringe, but I hold my hand up, the movement accompanied by a grunt of pain. “You have a plan? To send a warning to 2015 when we go back?”

  “Yes. Memories.”

  “Memories?
”

  “A detailed brain scan that maps the position of every electron in every neuron. Yul was working on the science, using the Q-net to transmit the data back, but he didn’t complete his work.”

  So Yul’s dead as well.

  Her syringe still at the ready, Sabrina goes on. “I believe, however, that the colonists can complete his work. Yul was scanned before he died, so we have his memories to transmit.”

  “And Harper’s?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Nick.”

  “Scan her.”

  “We can’t—”

  “I saw her fall. Is her body intact?”

  “We don’t know. It’s in the water.”

  “Get her out. You have one airship left. Go get her and scan her right now.”

  “Nick, we can’t be sure—”

  “Do it, Sabrina. You owe us. Please.”

  I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I’ve been in this lab with Harper’s corpse. I can’t seem to leave. There’s so much left unsaid between us. How do you get over someone passing too soon? Someone with so much life left to live. I thought seeing her might . . . help. But it hasn’t. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow. Or maybe that will only make things worse.

  I run my hand through her blond hair, kiss her cold forehead—our first and only kiss—and walk out of the lab.

  FOR THE PAST HOUR SABRINA has lectured me on the likelihood that Harper’s memories won’t make it to 2015, that none of ours will. That Harper was dead for almost half an hour before her brain was scanned complicates matters, apparently. The key to the whole thing is having the same neurons present in both timelines. Sabrina thinks it would be better not to attempt to send her memories back. Sabrina was scanned during the assault on Titan City, Yul right before.

  I’m due to be scanned in an hour. She says I won’t remember anything that happens here after that; the memories transmitted back—if it works—will stop after I slide into the machine.