After a few seconds, Ayers grabbed the soft underside of his forearm and let out a yelp. He lay on the ground now and moved his head between his legs. “Please make it stop!” He was crying, his body writhing in pain.
Allaire and Kyle looked at each other. She pulled her karambit from its holster and looked around.
Kyle grabbed her wrist, laying the rippling silk blot on a metal rod at his side. The blot shook more and more violently, like something inside of it was trying to get out. “No!” Kyle said firmly.
“He’s in pain,” she said. “Let me help him.”
Kyle shook his head, and whispered to her through gritted teeth. “He’s not a stray dog, Allaire. You’re not going to just put him out of his misery.”
“Do you know what he’s capable of?” she asked. “He would slit my throat without a second thought. Yours too if he didn’t think he needed you to never.”
“Nevering!” Kyle said, the word coming to him like a revelation. “How much do you actually know about it?”
“Not much,” she answered. “The Seres always talked about it like this mythical thing. They thought that if you nevered, you’d live forever.”
“That might be what’s happening,” Kyle said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Kyle held the blot and pulled it over Allaire, who cringed as she moved her body inside. Then he held it for Young Ayers to climb into. When he saw Ayers was in too much pain to even notice, Kyle picked him up and sat him on his lap, pulling the blot over both of them at once. Ayers still grabbed at both sides of his head, right over his ears, whimpering now from the intense pain.
“It’s gonna be okay, kid,” Kyle said, having no idea if it really would be. Nothing about Young Ayers seemed dangerous at all, but assuming they could get him through whatever was happening, there would be a moment of reckoning. As much as Kyle didn’t want to face it, there was more than a bit of logic to the fact that it didn’t make sense to kill the tree, only to leave the seedling around to take its place. The question they needed to answer was whether it was inevitable that this Ayers would grow into that monster.
CHAPTER 3
April 12, 2005
* * *
Moments later
The normally placid tunnel vibrated like a washing machine.
The loud reverberations shocked their ears, and they had to get used to the audible assault for a couple of minutes before they could even attempt to hear each other over the noise.
“Tell me this has happened before?” Kyle yelled to Allaire, even though their faces were only inches apart. He held the silk blot to her face for light, since their eyes hadn’t adjusted yet to the tunnel’s darkness either.
She shook her head “no.”
Young Ayers looked slightly less critical now. He’d taken his hands from his ears, and just held onto the inside of his forearm, pushing down on it as if he were applying pressure to a wound. “Hurts a lot,” he whined, slowly removing the hand and looking at it.
Kyle looked and saw an old looking scar. “Where’d you get that?”
“It’s new,” Ayers said. “I’ve never seen it before. Hurts so bad.”
Kyle felt Ayers’s arm and noticed that there was an indent under the skin, behind the scar. It was as if someone had scooped out a piece of his bone. “How do you never, Allaire?”
“I didn’t think it was real,” she answered. “None of the Seres knew for sure.”
“Could it explain his arm?” Kyle asked. The loud rumbling stopped suddenly, leaving the tunnel in its normal quiet.
“The two people nevering need to fuse a piece of their bones together,” Ayers answered, still wincing. “And their parents need to be dead. And, if they also have the special mutation, like Kyle and me, then they can live forever. Mr. Ayers talked about it all the time. When you never, you don’t belong to one timestream anymore. You belong to all of them.”
Kyle looked at Ayers. He hadn’t considered that the kid would have important answers for them, and he also didn’t understand how a younger version of Ayers could have a scar from something the older version did. In fact, Kyle’s I Don’t Understand list was long at this point because relying on logic just didn’t help him much these days. “And what about the shaking in here?”
“I don’t know,” Ayers answered.
“It might make sense,” Allaire said. “People aren’t supposed to live forever. If nevering is real, and the older Ayers did it, he might’ve set off something in the universe. Like an alarm, maybe.”
“He’d be immortal,” Kyle said, feeling defeated.
“Remember, we don’t know anything for sure,” Allaire answered. “Even Ayers doesn’t have all of the answers. But, if he found your dad and nevered, he doesn’t need you for anything anymore. I don’t know how we’ll ever find him if he doesn’t want to be found.”
“My father,” Kyle said. “Ayers must have him.”
Young Ayers still held onto his forearm. The look of pain on his face was less than before, but still there.
“The tracker,” Kyle said, referring to the tiny device he had managed to attach to Ayers’s hand before he escaped through his silk blot in the apartment above the Chinese restaurant. “I put the tracker on Ayers.”
“You did? When?” Allaire asked with a smile.
“Before I let him slip away,” Kyle responded quietly. Everything in the apartment had happened so quickly, but Kyle knew they’d let a big opportunity pass when Ayers got away.
“Well, we need to go to 2060 for the tracker’s receiver then,” Allaire said. “If he didn’t take the tracker off, the receiver should tell us where he is, and hopefully lead to your father as well.”
“What if we go back and stop them from nevering before it ever happens?” Kyle asked.
“That’s the whole point, Mr. Kyle,” Ayers said. “Once you never, it can’t be undone.”
“He has my father,” Kyle said. “We don’t have time to go to 2060, Allaire. We need to find them now and get Sillow away from Ayers.”
“We have no idea where to go, Kyle,” Allaire answered. “We have no idea what year they nevered in. And we may not have much time anyway. The tunnel has gotten shorter and shorter since Ayers started time weaving years ago. If it gets too much shorter, pretty soon, you and I will just be erased from history.”
“I don’t like that my father got dragged into this,” Kyle said.
Allaire shrugged and nodded. “Then let’s go get the receiver for the temporal tracker and we’ll find them.”
Kyle’s heart thumped in his chest. She had so much knowledge, and he needed and wanted her help. But Kyle was the Sere. It had to be his call from here on out, and the idea of going to 2060 right now just seemed wrong. He felt a strange sensation that he had trouble ignoring. “I feel like we’ll just find them,” Kyle said. “Like the tunnel will tell me.”
Allaire smiled at him. “I’ve definitely never seen that before.”
“But I feel like I’m gonna know,” Kyle said.
“At the Silo, in 2060, even if the tracker doesn’t work, we have surveillance of the factory going back to the 1980s,” she said. “If Ayers brought Sillow there, we’ll have the tape, and it’ll be time-stamped. There’s surgical equipment at the factory. If they nevered, that’s got to be where they did it. It’s a sure thing, Kyle. The answer we need is there . . . Plus . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she looked at Young Ayers.
Kyle nodded at Allaire. How could he put this strange new sensation he was feeling over the logic Allaire was providing? he wondered. It felt strange to ignore it too, though. The feeling that he could get them to Sillow without the tracker was so strong, but difficult to comprehend, since he didn’t actually know. Allaire had called it a “sure thing.” He put his hand on Young Ayers’s shoulder and gently nudged him forward in the tunnel toward 2060.
Logic was going to win today. But, almost suddenly, this new sense of intuition filled Kyle’s mind with certainty about things he couldn’t ac
tually know. He was positive, for instance, that Ayers had nevered, and that since Kyle had denied him, Ayers had found a way to get Sillow instead and make it possible. It was one of the first times in his life Kyle had felt so sure about something he couldn’t touch, or see with this own eyes. Was it learning that he was a Sere that brought this out in him? Or, Kyle wondered, was he finally learning to tune into a part of him that had been there all along?
CHAPTER 4
August 28, 2060
* * *
Fifty-five years later
Like a mother sending her children to bed, Allaire banished Young Ayers to one of the upper platforms of the Silo almost immediately after they arrived. She sent him up with a cup of ramen noodles and asked him not to bother them.
Once his arm began to feel better, Young Ayers had been an able traveling companion, deftly making his way through the tunnel. He was quiet, but not creepily so. Kyle was actually impressed that a twelve-year-old handled himself so well around two adults. Kyle was only seven years older, but his time in prison had put an abrupt end to what was left of his childhood.
Kyle took a much-needed shower and then grabbed a Pop-Tart and a granola bar from the Silo’s supply pantry, a deep well of non-perishables. For the first time, he didn’t move through the Silo as if he were a guest. If he was a Sere, then the Silo was his.
Kyle headed up to the tech platform with all of the different monitors and computers. Allaire was already there, set up at a workstation. She nodded to him without taking her eyes off the screen.
“Bad news,” she said, pointing at a map of New York City on her screen. “Temp tracker’s not working. I don’t know if maybe it’s not sealed to his skin well, or if the receiver is being finicky, but I can only get a geographical reading, not a temporal one. I can see he’s in the factory building. But I can’t get anything on what year he’s in.”
On another screen, she has paused surveillance footage of the factory’s entrance. The current image on the screen had a timestamp from 2033. Her karambit and holster were laying on a small table close to the edge of the platform. It was the first time he could remember seeing her without a weapon at arm’s reach. He sat down and watched as she scanned through video for a few minutes.
It was hypnotic to watch weeks zip by on the screen without a single person entering or exiting the factory building. Kyle thought about how little he really knew about Allaire’s life with the Seres behind those walls. He imagined it was a fairly limited life, but since Allaire had barely spoken about it, he really had no idea.
“How long do you think it’ll take to go through all of this video and find them?” Kyle asked. “I’m worried about Sillow.”
Allaire sighed. “If we work in shifts? One of us sleeps while the other scans, maybe two days to get through it all. Hopefully, we see something sooner.”
“I can look too,” said a voice coming from the doorway. Kyle looked up and saw Young Ayers. He walked toward them holding two cups of ramen noodles. He had a Rubik’s Cube tucked under his arm. “If all three of us take turns, it’ll go faster,” Ayers said.
Ayers handed both noodle cups to Kyle, and Kyle put one down next to Allaire.
Kyle took a slurp of noodles from his cup and grimaced at the salty broth. “Two days is a lot of ramen . . . ”
“I’m too tired to eat,” Allaire said. “Ayers, please go to bed.”
One of the things Kyle did know about Allaire’s past was that she’d taken care of Ayers when he was very young. He imagined she’d said those words many times before after so many years caring for the Ayers from her original timestream—the Ayers who wanted her dead now.
Young Ayers backed out of the room slowly. “I know Mr. Ayers is a bad man . . . So, I want to help.” They heard him bound up the stairs and watched across the Silo as he got into bed on the second-highest platform. Kyle couldn’t understand how this gentle young boy could ever grow up to be an unrepentant killer. It just didn’t make sense.
Kyle put his hand over Allaire’s, which was holding the mouse. “You go rest too.”
Allaire looked up at him with bloodshot eyes. “No. We have to—”
“I’ve got this,” he said. “At least for tonight. I’m too wired to sleep anyway.”
She kept fiddling with the mouse and the keyboard, scanning through full days in only a few seconds, slowing down on the rare occasion when someone on the screen entered the factory building. “I’m fine.”
“You just had a building fall on you,” Kyle said. “Go rest.”
“I’m fine,” she said, not looking up at him this time.
“I know what’s at stake here, Allaire,” Kyle said. “He has my father.”
She stood up. “I know you do.”
He hugged her.
“I’m sorry for being a bitch,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”
She pressed her forehead into his chest. “I’ve never had a person before. Someone who was my person.”
Kyle pried her head away from his chest so he could look her in the eyes. There was too much still ahead of them that it didn’t feel right to fantasize about making a life together. If Ayers was really immortal, there might be nothing they could do except watch as their timestream evaporated and the world ended. “Your person’s right here,” he said to her, leading her to the stairs that led to the bedroom platforms above them.
“I want to tell you everything,” Allaire said. “I want you to know about the life I’ve led.”
Kyle touched her face with his hand. “I want to know everything, but right now, you need to rest.”
“No,” she said, sitting down on the stairs. “I almost died, and everything about me would’ve vanished. Everything about me before I met you, at least.”
Kyle saw how urgent this was to her—in the moment, way more important than getting the rest she needed. He sat down next to her.
She told Kyle everything—from her happy early memories with Dr. Browning to her life with the Seres. About her friend Demetrius, and her adversary, Rickard, who killed Dr. Browning to protect the Seres’ secret. Kyle also learned exactly how taxing her altercations with Ayers had been, weaving behind him through the tunnel to different eras, but never having the license to use lethal force. At the same time, she needed to defend her own life from his attacks. Kyle had only seen a glimpse of Ayers’s brutality, but Allaire had lived it day after day, chasing the boy she helped raise through the tunnel as he committed horribly vicious attacks.
She finally got to explain her marriage, and how Everett was someone she’d known for only a short time. He had been brought into the factory by Yalé as a potential replacement when he began to mistrust Allaire. Yalé had twisted Allaire’s arm to marry Everett so he could get his green card and not risk deportation to Australia if he was ever detected by authorities. While Everett had taken an immediate liking to Allaire, she had only begun to trust him at the time he was killed by an oncoming car after nearly killing Kyle on the side of the New York State Thruway.
After a while, Kyle noticed Allaire beginning to nod off, her head falling forward during brief pauses in the conversation. He took her hand and walked her up the stairs. He helped her under the covers and kissed her forehead before heading back down to the tech platform.
After four hours of scanning surveillance video of the front entrance to the factory, Kyle’s eyes felt like they were coated with salt. He hadn’t seen anything of note on the screen in front of him, and watching the repetition of the security footage became almost meditative. Without even letting go of the mouse, his eyes began to close, but he awoke with a shudder shortly after. He felt like he’d only been asleep for a few seconds, but his dream was so vivid, he didn’t know for sure. The horrific images jarred him back to full consciousness:
Young Ayers stood over Allaire as she slept. Her karambit blade in his hand, he smiled with the same demented grin Kyle had seen on the older Ayers when he sprayed bullets from his machine gun into a crowded store. Young Ayers
lifted the blade over his right shoulder and drove the knife into Allaire through the white sheet covering her, opening a gaping, diagonal hole in her torso from her shoulder down to her hipbone. Allaire’s eyes opened for just a brief second with a terrified look as she watched her blood turn the sheet into a wet, red mess.
The dream felt real, and Kyle tried to take a few deep breaths to slow his heartbeat. He looked at the table across the room and was happy to see Allaire’s holster there.
He looked back at the screen, which was running surveillance tapes at regular speed now that he’d stopped jogging forward at a faster speed. For a moment, he absentmindedly watched the street traffic pass by outside of the factory in footage from 2038.
Wait, he thought to himself. Allaire’s blade wasn’t in its holster!
His adrenaline already on high, Kyle leapt to his feet and bounded from the platform to the stairs. He raced toward the bedroom platform where Allaire slept right above him, hoping that he hadn’t let something horrible happen while he dozed off.
CHAPTER 5
August 28 & 29, 2060
* * *
Seconds later
Kyle let himself exhale when he saw the crisp, clean white sheet covering Allaire, no sign of blood anywhere. She was sleeping on her back with her hand under the pillow.
The dream had felt so real to him. He gently pulled off her sheet and examined her sleeping body. He put his knee on the bed and gently lifted her shoulder to make sure there was no blood underneath her. As soon as he touched her, Allaire’s eyes quickly popped open. As she sprung up to a sitting position, she pulled her arm out from beneath the pillow and Kyle saw her blade coming toward him.
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