What to do? The chip in my wrist caught my attention. I could reach them. Maybe. It depended on how long that transmitter worked. But I knew that they had quite a range. Melissa’s husbands had found her planets away with one. Was this the same kind? It was all Artemis.
I pressed it. What could it hurt to try?
“Waverly?” It was Jackson’s voice. “Oh thank fuck. We thought you might have just blown up.”
It was so ridiculously good to hear his voice. I hiccupped a cry, and it nearly killed me in pain. “Jackson, I’m in trouble.”
“Baby.” Ari’s voice. They must all be together. “What’s wrong? You don’t sound right.”
“I’m shot. The bullet entered my side, somewhere near my hip. I can’t really look. By feeling I think it has transversed upward, maybe sideways. It’s burning. I think… I think it’s somewhere near my rib cage. There’s blood. A lot of it. I can feel my toes. I can move. Sort of. It’s hard to, um, focus.”
“Wavey.” Rohan sounded calm, but I knew what that deception was. “I’m tracing you. The shuttle, the small one near the debris. That is you, correct?”
I nodded although no one would see that. “Yes.”
“Okay, hot stuff.” Ari never called me that before. The thought made me snort. “You get in the med machine and let it do what it does. I’ll get there and make adjustments. This is manageable.”
I wished it was that simple. Hearing their voice was incredible but it was also… a sweet torture. “It’s damaged. There’s no med machine.”
The line fell silent. They obviously didn’t like that anymore than I did. Canyon answered. “Waverly, listen to me, we are dead in the air right now. I am going to get it fixed. As fast as I can. I am running to do it now.”
“How dead, Canyon? Tell me the truth.”
“We will get there, my love.” That was his only response, and it spoke volumes. They weren’t going to get here.
I full-on started to cry, letting the tears travel down my face. Ari spoke again. “I want you to put pressure on the wound.”
“Ari, you and I both know people don’t live through this without a med machine or a surgeon on hand immediately. Bleeding out might be kind to myself.”
All three of the ones left spoke at once. I couldn’t make out a single thing they said. “Guys,” I interrupted them. “I killed my father. He’s dead in here. Ro, I pointed and clicked.”
He sucked in his breath. Or at least I thought it was him. It could have been any of them. It was Ro who answered. “Good girl.”
“Thanks.” I laughed. “I… I love you. All of you. Can Canyon hear me?”
“I can.” He sounded more like he was in an echo. He was probably hearing me through a speaker.
“That’s good. I love all of you.” This was a gift. Getting to say goodbye. I was lucky, so damned lucky in my life. “Most people don’t get to really realize in the moments that they’re happy that they truly are. I knew it. Every second I was with you. I love you. And I got to be your wife. I never thought to have that. You guys are my time soldiers, my bringer of dreams.”
“Baby,” Ari’s voice choked. “Don’t do this. Listen to me. There are still things to do. There are. I…”
A pop sounded, and I gasped. What the heck was that? It took me a moment to register what I was seeing. Jackson spoke over the line. He was trying to distract me, something about the house he was going to build us. Yes, I loved those thoughts.
Yet standing in front of me was Jackson. And not just Jackson. But Ari. And Canyon, too. The Jackson in front of me shook his head, bringing his finger to his mouth, indicating I should be quiet. The Ari in front of me bent over to me and clicked the transmitter in my wrist. It shut off.
Canyon looked at me. “Waverly.” He exhaled loudly.
I tried to concentrate, but the pain was excruciating and getting worse by the second. My guys looked different. Ari’s hair was short. Canyon’s was longer, wild, and everywhere. Jackson had a nose ring in, something I’d seen him do at The Farm half a dozen times but not lately. They had lines on their faces, and Jackson had some gray in his hair.
I blinked as realization dawned on me. “You’re not from now.”
Ari shook his head. “No, baby. Not from now.” He leaned over, planting a kiss on my cheek so gently while he removed my hand from my stomach, putting his own there. “The ones who are here now can’t get to you in time. They don’t make it.”
I had known that was true, but hearing it didn’t make that any easier. “You came back in time. To say goodbye?”
“We came back in time to save you,” Canyon supplied, walking over to the medical machine while Jackson took my hand and brought it to his lips. He planted a kiss there.
“That’s not possible. You don’t mess with timelines. You just observe. And where is Rohan? Did he not approve of this craziness?”
Ari took a long breath like he was bringing me into his lungs. “In our current timeline, Rohan dies shortly after you do.”
I cried out. It was like he’d put another bullet in me. Rohan died? No, that couldn’t be. The universe couldn’t… be… without all four of them in it.
“Easy,” Ari whispered. “Everything can change. Time… we know a lot more about it now. Things aren’t necessarily cut and dry.”
“Plus,” Jackson said, squeezing my hand again. “Lady, things are so bad out there that you living can’t possibly make it worse. Trust me. And even if you can, I don’t care. I don’t. Fuck the universe. This version of me that lives here now gets more time with you. I’m selfish like that.”
“Come on.” Canyon stepped back. “It’s done. All these years I knew it was a fast fix. I never got over how quickly I could have made the machine work again.” Canyon bent over, and when he kissed me, it wasn’t a peck, it was a claiming. “I love you, Waverly. And I’m giving myself a chance I never had.”
Time travel was so confusing. “You can’t change the universe just for me.”
“Yes we can. Call it a perk of the shit we went through.” Ari lifted me up in his arms, placing me down in the med machine. He suddenly grabbed his head, a slight smile coming to his face. “We wondered if it would hurt.”
Jackson groaned but leaned over to kiss me. “He’ll never know how much he would have hated every day after. He thinks he knows but he doesn’t.”
He was talking about himself? I kissed him back. “Why are you in pain?”
“We’re disappearing.” Ari kissed me once more, too.
“What?” I tried to move, but I couldn’t and Ari made a tsk sound. “Disappearing as in permanently?”
My heart raced, and Ari hit a button on the machine. “I’m going to give you a little sedative. It’s hours and hours before they get here. I don’t want you to have bad dreams for all that time.”
“Ari.” I took his hand. “You’re just going to what… vanish? Is the whole universe from then going to vanish?”
Canyon shook his head. “Almost the whole universe is gone Waverly. Everyone you knew. The three of us are pretty much what is left. Evander enslaved everybody. It’s very bad. Yes, we’ve changed the whole universe for you. And I don’t feel bad for it at all. Don’t blame yourself either. You didn’t do this. I did.”
Tears streamed down my face, and Canyon kissed them away. “Time isn’t as linear as I understood it to be. There will come a time in the not so distant future when I will fix the scanner. I may not be as consumed with it because you won’t be dead. But I’ll do it, and when I do, you’ll have to decide if you want things to stay the same. Or if you don’t. That’ll be up to you.”
I shook my head. “I’m not changing the future.”
“But you do, Waverly. I’m sure of it. Just like I’m sure there is a timeline out there where this moment already happened. I know it. I can see it. And so will this version of me. You won’t have to tell him what happened. He’ll already know.”
He bent over, pain showing on his face. “I love you.”
“Oh God, I love you guys.” I didn’t know what to say. How did I process this at all? My gut ached, it burned, there was a bullet deep inside of me that had to come out and…
“One more thing.” Ari cleared his throat. “Tell Rohan when the lights go out, he needs to duck.”
What?
“Marrying you was the best thing we ever did.” He lifted his hand. “We never took them off, our rings. We always knew we’d see you again.”
Ari closed the machine.
I dreamed of colors. Of floating. Of voices. Of death. Of things I couldn’t understand. Water rising, drowning the worlds. Explosions. Disease….
And then the machine clicked off. My head spun. Dizziness made me nauseous, and I closed my eyes, trying to wake but not wanting to. Where was I? What was happening? I didn’t have pain, but I wasn’t right yet. My hand went to my stomach, searching for the hole.
A hand linked to my own, and I blinked trying, to see through the blur in my eyes. “No hole left. All gone. And you’re likely feeling like hell because you were injected with a sedative that isn’t quite gone yet. I wanted you to do the rest of your healing outside of the machine.”
I loved the sound of Ari’s voice but it reminded me… reminded me… reminded me of what? “Oh Ari. You saved me.”
“I didn’t.” His voice was a stroke near my ear. “But somehow you are in a machine that was clearly broken. Even I can see it was hacked back together to work. When you’re really awake you’re going to tell me, okay?”
I sighed. “You saved me. The other you. The one from the future who came back.”
“I knew it,” Canyon shouted from somewhere else in the room. “I told you guys that I saw the particles.”
“Holy shit,” Jackson hissed. “This is big stuff.”
It was. They had no idea.
An hour later, I sat in a chair on an almost dead Artemis. I could feel the sway of the ship. It was off. Canyon was fixing it. I stared out the window. We were back, but nothing was better. Tears slipped from my eyes even as Ro walked toward me.
I put out my hand, and he took it. “This might not make sense just yet. But in the future you were dead.” I could hardly speak the words.
He cupped my face in his hands. “If you were dead, it would be my preference. Don’t be sad.”
I shook my head. “Ari said to tell you when the lights go out you need to duck.”
He furrowed his brow but nodded. “Really bizarre to be given fighting advice from Ari from the future, but I promise to listen to it.” He brought his lips to mine. “My Wavey.”
I let him hold me in his big, strong arms. Every day I got from this point on was found time. What was I going to do with it? “I killed my father.”
“He deserved killing.”
Rohan had a way of putting things that was so direct it often floored me. I had to explain. “I put a bullet right between his eyes.”
“Wavey, he shot you first.” He put his hand on my stomach. “You should be dead right now. In some timeline, you were.”
I burst into tears. “Rohan, there is no way I am worth altering the universe for. There is no way that…”
He kissed my lips. “If I had lived, I would have been there, too. You are the only thing worth altering the universe for. Jackson, Canyon, Ari, they don’t do things lightly, and it sounds like a lot of years passed. They had plenty of time to consider things. All will be well, and you are right where you are supposed to be, with me.”
I put my arms around him and held on. “He did shoot me. Right in the stomach, and I knew I was going to die.”
“I wish I could have killed him. I would have made it hurt more. Like he made you. Like he made so many. You put an end to part of this war. The Sandler Cartel is over. We just have one enemy now. You saved lives.”
I let him hold me like that in the quiet for a while. The others were leaving us alone, and as I woke up more and more from the treatment, I knew that had to be on purpose. The two of us were supposed to be dead and now we got to digest that together.
Or maybe there wasn’t any supposed to at all. Maybe there just was what there was.
11 Back Home, At Last
We crawled into port at The Farm in the most jarring landing I’d ever participated in. I wasn’t sure why my bones didn’t crack from impact alone but somehow we all made it through. Ari came into the med bay to check on me. I had my knees pulled up to my chest, my head between them while I tried to breathe.
“Well, I’d think space sickness, but we are officially on the ground. Readjustment? Do you suffer from the sudden onslaught of gravity? No, wait. We’re still on the ship. You’re not off of Artemis’ gravitational pull yet.”
I raised my head to look at him. “What does everyone out there know about what happened to me? I mean, starting from the beginning. We can’t tell people I was pulled through time.”
Ari sat down next to me, his hand on my knee. “So we just have some good old fashioned anxiety. I think the story I heard before we left—and granted I wasn’t all that focused on whatever bullshit my cousins were spinning—was that you were kidnapped by Sandler Cartel, and we were looking for you. That will hold with what they also know—which is that you killed your father.”
I sighed. “So they do know that.”
“Why is that not a good thing? Half the universe is celebrating the death of your dad. I mean… I’m not entirely sure how to approach you about Uncle Garrison’s demise. On one hand, you hated him as much as the rest of us. The other he was your father. And I’ve maybe not been…”
I held out my hand and took his. “I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad he can’t hurt anyone else. I’m glad I killed him, and I’m conflicted about that.”
He put his head on my shoulder, his blond hair falling slightly over my chest. The scent of Ari—the clean essence of him—wafted through me. I could suddenly breathe again. “It’s okay that you are glad you killed him. It doesn’t speak ill of you or make me worry you’re suddenly about to become a maniacal dictator of the universe.”
I snorted, before I full out laughed. He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “It’s all going to be okay, baby. The one thing no one knows about is the change in the timeline. That’s up to you, but we didn’t report it to Diana when we spoke to her.”
I nodded. That made sense. “I guess it’s time to go debrief.”
“It is. Then a hot shower. A good meal. And Jackson wants to talk about starting to build the house.”
I supposed there was no time to waste in that matter. “Getting shot probably stopped any pregnancy that might have just started, right?”
Ari side-eyed me. “I don’t know. I never got to examine you before you were in the machine. And my future self didn’t think to leave me any notes.”
I shook my head, jumping off the table. “You had short hair.”
He raised both his eyebrows. “Did you like that look better or worse than now?”
“I didn’t really have time to dwell on it, seeing as I had a bullet lodged in me and I was trying to digest the fact that three of you changed the entire future of humanity based on saving me. Or maybe not. Maybe I die tomorrow and the universe corrects itself.”
He shook his head, taking my hand. “Expect a visit from me from the future to set that right.”
“No.” I rounded on him. “Once is enough. I want a promise from you. From all four of you. That this stops now. We don’t go time altering every time we don’t like what happens. I can’t do anything about what you did, and it’s not you who did it, so I’m not even really yelling at you since I can’t yell at your future self. See how disturbingly difficult this is? I want a promise. No traveling back to save me, Ari. Promise.”
He put his hands on his hips. “Would you make me that promise? If I died? You’re coded in that machine, somehow. Would you tell me you wouldn’t do it?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Fuck, Ari.”
“And she curses.” That
made him laugh? I stormed out of the med bay down the hall.
This was so complicated. Of course I would want to save him. It would be miserably hard to make that promise. I turned back to where he followed me, still chuckling. “I would make that promise if you wanted me to. It would make me sick to promise it, but I would do it if it was important to you. The same way I would decide to discontinue life support if that was your preference—if you had a disease you were never going to get better from.”
There was a long list of things we couldn’t cure. That was bound to get longer now that Evander had weaponized illness.
“I mean, how far back do we take this, Ari? Do you go back and, I don’t know, stop the nuclear bombs on Earth? Don’t you think that would be more useful than saving your wife?”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay, my love. I’ll promise. I won’t come back and save you. I can’t undo what happened, and I wouldn’t want to. But I won’t do it again, or in my case for the first time, if that is what you prefer.”
“That is what I prefer. I can’t stand the ramifications. I mean, what if there aren’t babies born because I’m here now?”
He leaned forward, kissing my lips. “What if there are babies born because you are? What if none of it changes much of anything? I mean, what if it really only alters the lives of the small amount of people we know and continue to know?”
He was right. I might be overthinking this. I might be placing too much on myself in terms of how much my living or dying mattered to the fate of things. “I can’t really control any of this, can I?”
Ari shook his head slowly. “No, and that would be why it’s making you nuts. You Sandlers don’t like to give up control.”
I groaned. “You’re baiting me today. Which I guess is getting me off the ship and onto The Farm.”
Jackson rounded the corner, taking my hand. “Sorry, heard some of that. Another way to get you off this ship is to take your hand, as I am doing.” He brought it to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “And tell you that we need to get Artemis repaired and they aren’t going to be able to do it with us on it.”
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