by Naomi Hughes
I’d been lying to myself when I said I didn’t care anymore whether she was guilty. Because I do care, I care so much … but with the knowledge of her innocence comes the certainty of my guilt.
It is my fault. She died because of me.
There’s something I need to ask. Time travel. I need to ask about time travel, about alternate realities, about saving Mom. The words are there but I can’t get them out, can’t stop thinking about what I’ve done—
And what he’s done.
Half my family. Matthew Lerato has killed half my family.
He’s still talking. “The agency has been searching for me ever since the explosion. Not because I’m responsible for thousands of deaths, but because they want to force me to rebuild my destroyed research. They’re about to get shut down by the investigations unless they can prove they’re valuable enough to keep around, and Leratonium is their ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. In your timeline, they were using you for the same purpose—planning to reverse engineer the element based on your medical data, planning to get you to cooperate no matter what it took. Once I started to suspect that, I kept an eye on you until you stole that tablet and I could use it to verify my suspicions, and then I set the bomb to kill you and stop them—but that was before I knew what you could do, before I knew how much more versatile the element is when it’s bonded to human cells.” His voice is low, his eyes bright with fascination. “You’re a new thing, Camryn. You drew out my—Quint’s—consciousness just by touching him. You can instinctively wield it as energy in life-or-death situations. To shift between timelines. To heal yourself. To survive an un-survivable explosion. I bet he’s probably fading, right? Every time you use him up?” He’s leaning forward now, too interested in his own damn science to even acknowledge what he’s done.
“Go away.” My voice is hoarse.
He frowns and pulls back, switching gears too late. “I’m asking for a reason. The timelines—”
But it’s too much. I drop the mug. It hits the deck with a dull thunk and breaks clean in half, showing its white ceramic insides wormed through with cracks. “Go AWAY!” I shout, and the words roar in my ears and bounce into the night and send the pigeons flying. They jostle and shove, a jumble of flapping wings. A feather spins down to balance on the rail a few feet away.
I close my eyes.
Matthew exhales. He retreats. Footsteps, a muttered curse, the deck creaking in the night.
Quint is sitting next to me. I can feel him there even with my eyes closed: miserable, hollowed out. “This is what you didn’t want to remember,” I say. The mistakes he’s made. The monstrous weapon he gave the agency, and the lives it cost to stop them.
He breathes. “I think so,” he answers at last, and his despair vibrates between us like a plucked string.
I open my eyes. In the faint starlight, the charred earth of the base is pocked and shadowed, an alien planet. The feather is still balanced on the railing. A breeze whispers across the ship and ruffles it, but it settles back in the same spot. I reach for it, intending to knock it over the side and out of sight.
“I’m not him,” Quint says, but the words are flat and desolate like he can’t quite manage to believe them.
The feather tickles my palm. I curl my fingers tighter and it crinkles in my grip. All this time I’ve wanted the truth about the explosion that destroyed my life. And all this time it’s been standing right next to me.
But still—
I’m not sure I’d like myself.
Don’t make me remember.
All I have is you.
“Right now, all I have is you too,” I tell him at last. “And I need you to be Quint.”
“I’m sorry,” he says to the stars, because he can’t be Quint. Not really. Not anymore. Not after this.
I let go of the crumpled feather. It drifts down to the algae-coated water and, slowly but inevitably, sinks.
“So am I,” I say.
I bring the coffee pot with me when I go to find Matthew. He hasn’t gone very far. He’s standing on the opposite side of the deck, hands in his pockets, peering out at the ocean. It’s frothy and restless tonight, churning itself into a bruised green and brown beneath the storm clouds that flicker in the distance. Beyond the tiny beach outside the shipyard, toward the northern end of the base, two distant yellow figures bob between piles of rubble—agents in hazmat suits, checking for intruders. They probably heard me yell earlier. I could yell again right now, let them know exactly where we are. It should make me feel safer. It doesn’t.
I stop a few feet away from Matthew. Just over his left shoulder, a hundred yards inland, is the outline of a demolished building. In the corner, where my mother’s office used to be, a single jagged pillar is still standing.
My nails dig into the coffee pot’s handle. It’s so unfair. So unnecessary. There were so many ways she might have lived: if I’d picked her up on time, if Matthew had recalibrated sooner or more carefully, if the agency had waited until the day they were supposed to do the trial. But everything went exactly wrong and now she’s gone. She’s gone. I make myself think the word, make it hard and clear in my mind, because it’s true. Whatever happens next, there’s very little chance that will change. I should leave now, go home to Dad, let myself grieve and work through my guilt like a normal person. I shouldn’t be talking to her murderer on the slim chance that whatever he hasn’t told me yet has something to do with the possibility of bringing her back.
But still—time travel. Alternate realities. Not exactly dead.
I square my shoulders, step to Matthew’s side, and set the empty coffeepot on the railing next to him with a clank.
“The storms are getting worse,” he says mildly, still looking at the ocean.
“You led me here on purpose,” I say without preamble, jerking my head at the coffee pot. “Tell me why.”
He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, which flops right back down over his glasses. The lines in his face are deep and tired and make him look ten years older. “I should have led with this, but I’m sorry for what I’ve cost you, Camryn. Everything I’ve done, everything I wanted to base my whole career on, it’s all to save lives. That’s still all I’m trying to—”
“Don’t,” I cut him off. “Just tell me the rest of it.”
He looks back out over the ocean and, after a moment, obeys. “When the base exploded I was just outside the blast range, still writing down the calibrations. Afterward, I was …” He taps his fingers against the railing. “Devastated.”
In the distance, the ocean churns.
“And desperate to find a way to fix things,” he goes on. “One of my team’s other projects involved time travel, through wormholes mostly. We were closer than anyone had ever gotten. But it takes an astronomical amount of power to keep one open for even a millisecond, so we ended up scrapping the project without ever getting past the theoretical stage. After the explosion, though, I was uniquely motivated.” He gives me a wry smile. “I stole from power facilities across the whole coast.”
My gut tightens. “So it is you who’s been screwing with the universe.”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds. Normally, there’s no way of securing a wormhole on the other side—in the past, or the future, wherever. So even if I could power it, there was no way to control when I’d end up. But then I found out that the radiation released at the moment the experiment started, it created a sort of marker in space-time. An anchor for the wormhole.” He motions at the base. “Traces of that radiation still linger here. I discovered that if I opened the wormhole from the base, I could set it to go back to the exact moment the experiment started. It was my chance to fix things. Fix everything.”
His words burn fierce and bright with a dangerous sort of desperation, and my hand tightens around the coffeepot handle in response—because I know that burn, I know that despair. Fix everything. It’s all I could ever want. But …
“You can’t,” I say, because here we are.r />
The light in his eyes goes dim. “No,” he says, “I can’t. The power requirements are enormous. And the more I steal, the greater the chances the agency will track me down before I can open the next wormhole. I’ve tried again and again with as much power as I can scrape together, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough. I go back, inhabit the past version of myself for one second, two seconds. Enough time to create a few miniscule changes in hopes that they’ll cause a ripple effect that will end in the explosion never having happened. Instead, it happens over and over again. Over and over again, I end up back here.” His hands grip the railing.
“The grandfather paradox,” I say numbly.
He sighs and nods. “Every time I go back and change something, it creates a new alternate timeline. I developed a way to travel between them, though it costs me more energy than I can spare, and that’s how I found out about you.” He pushes off the railing and looks at me, and just like that the conversation shifts, turns and tightens like a funnel cloud touching down—because he’s coming to the endgame now, coming to whatever his reasons are for telling me all of this, and his eyes are burning again in a way that tells me I’m not going to like them.
I take a step back.
His gaze follows me, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t have to. He’s got the gun, and he’s got the information, and I’m a hostage to them both. “Yours was the last timeline I created,” he says. “Before a few days ago, your version of Camryn Kingfisher didn’t exist. You were dead in the explosion, every time. Your survival was an unintended ripple effect and it only happened once.”
My stomach roils. I shake my head.
He cuts me off before I can protest. “Oh, your timeline is real. Your experiences are real. Everything you’ve been through in the last three weeks is exactly as valid as the original version of reality. That’s the problem.” He motions at the horizon, at the storm off the coast. “Each new timeline I create competes with the rest. The space-time continuum wasn’t meant to branch off like that, wasn’t meant to bear so many different versions of reality. Soon it’ll start causing bigger side effects than just the storms. There will be atmospheric anomalies that suffocate cities, gravitational instabilities that swallow the stars. Eventually it’ll be catastrophic.”
He says it simply, like he’s said it a thousand times before. Side effects. Instabilities.
Catastrophic.
And here it is: the endgame. I can see its corners and edges, its purpose and its potential, but the biggest part is still hidden. He’s used energy he can’t afford to track me down, put himself at risk to give me all this information, and that can only mean he wants something from me.
“Tell me,” I demand, and I hate that my voice shakes.
The corner of his mouth twitches up in that familiar, humorless half smile. “I already told you. I need your help.”
“For what?”
“For him. Quint.”
A terrible suspicion tugs at my mind, a riptide in the dark. I take another step back.
This time, Matthew follows. “For the version of me that’s dead, that’s tied to your cells, that despite being partially used up to heal you and shift timelines still has enough energy left to power a continent for months.”
At my side, Quint turns his back. He knows. How far did we get into this conversation before he guessed its outcome? How long has he been trying to figure out a way to keep me from this moment, this choice?
I bump into the railing. It digs into my spine. Nowhere else to go, except overboard.
Matthew stops. “Or,” he says, “a wormhole, for just enough time to fix the biggest disaster in both our lives.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MY THOUGHTS ICE OVER, CRYSTALLIZE. My mind glitters cold and bright with all the things I shouldn’t be thinking.
Cherry rhubarb sauce, bright like blood against shattered glass.
A fountain. A boy huddled at its edge, knees drawn up and back turned.
… one day you get your wish and I’m gone completely. And what happens to me then?
I’m afraid of the dark.
“You want to use him up,” I say. “You need me to use him up.” Because otherwise, Matthew wouldn’t be asking. He’d have taken Quint’s energy by force and left me where I fell, one more casualty of his greater mission.
I meet Matthew’s eyes. He sees the ice in mine.
He tries again. “He’s already dead anyway. If I succeed, you won’t even remember him. And if I fail …” he motions at the storms off the coast. “Then it’ll all be over soon enough. Please, help me fix this. I can save your mom. I can save everyone.” He holds out his hand—an invitation. An offer.
And all at once I can see it, this thing he’s offering me. It leaks through the ice, seeps into my mind like a spreading inkblot: the undamaged base rising all around, crowded with scientists and soldiers and researchers. My mother in her office. My brother at our home. My world would be therapy and homework instead of hallucinations and funerals and terrorists.
And all I’d have to do is kill Quint.
The vision vanishes and a crashing silence fills the space it left behind. I close my eyes and try to bring it back, but there’s only one way to do that.
Panic claws its way up my throat. I turn to my ghost because he always knows what I should do, but he’s staring at the sky with an empty gaze. “I’m still afraid,” he admits, and his voice twists into something that’s almost a laugh. “I thought if we got this far, if I found out everything, there would be nothing left to be afraid of.”
And then he turns his head and meets my gaze and those cut-glass eyes are deep and dark and bottomless. He’s looking at me like he’s expecting betrayal. Like he’s expecting me to make the decision Matthew would make, the decision he’s already made: one life for the greater good. One life for my family.
But another image flashes through my memory like a lit fuse—a trainmaster with empty eyes, his gaze locked on mine as he fades out of the world. Not killing is an easy choice when you never have to make it, Matthew told me afterward.
I’ve found out who my mother was. Now, I get to find out who I am.
I pick up the glass coffeepot and turn back to Matthew. “Find another way,” I tell him and, before he can stop me, I smash it to the deck.
The sound shatters against the night. On the north end of the base, someone shouts. A flashlight beam sweeps toward us.
Matthew whirls on me. “There is no other way!” He curses, reaching for his gun as he peers at the agents.
I back toward the plank.
Matthew hesitates—and then his shoulders slump and something like regret sweeps across his features. He turns to me. “Fine,” he says. For a second his tone is flat, resigned, and then he leans forward and the fire comes back, low and savage. “There’s one other way, Camryn. Go to your timeline. Find my old equipment. And then come back, and tell me again that using Quint up is the wrong answer.”
I inhale. He smells like mint and metal, cool and bitter and wintry. I take a long step back. And then another. And then, like I said I would never do again, I turn and run.
My feet pound on the plank and it shivers and creaks. I hit the blackened ground and the dirt feels crunchy, dry.
“Hey!” One of the agents who was searching nearby spots me. His hazmat suit glows a blinding yellow against the charred earth as his flashlight beam swings my way. A gate closes behind him and he breaks into a run, but I’ve got a hundred yard lead and tonight no one is going to catch me.
Past the warehouse. Around the fields of barrels. Through the fence, festooned with candy-bright warnings. The agent falls behind and gives up, shouting a few half-hearted threats before I’m beyond the range of his light and fleeing down the street, past the empty houses and the vacant offices, the shuttered windows and gaping darkness.
My legs are jelly. I can’t go any farther. I stop in the middle of the abandoned road, gasping, clutching my stomach. And then, finally, i
n the shadows and the silence, I allow myself to think about what I’ve done.
Mom is gone. My version of Kyle is gone. The whole universe is fading out like a guttering candle. I could have paid a price and saved them all, but I didn’t, and does that make me noble or a coward?
I press my hands to my eyes. The shaking starts low, somewhere in my gut.
Quint steps up beside me. All I can see are his feet. He’s silent for a moment, and then he squats down at my side. I wrap my arms around myself and turn away and try to breathe. At the edges of my vision his lab coat rises and falls. He doesn’t say anything, because what is there to say? Sorry, your mom is still dead, and now it’s your fault even more than it was before?
I clamp my jaw. I will not break down in the middle of the abandoned street like a lost little girl. I choke in another breath and try to think, try to summon up some memory of Mom’s coaching, try to remember some technique that might bring me back from the edge of the massive panic attack that’s starting to sear the corners of my mind.
Grounding. I need to ground myself. Focus on the here and now, keep myself from spiraling. I look up, searching frantically for anything that I can use as an anchor.
Quint’s left hand is on his knee. I focus on it, forcing myself to list as many of its characteristics as I can, trying to keep myself from getting lost in my own head—but all at once everything feels strange and unfamiliar and alien and wrong.
Derealization. This is just derealization, just another symptom, just my brain flipping a switch and making everything feel weird and off. It’ll go away after a minute, it always has. Focus. Concentrate.
Slender fingers.
Wide, square nails.
Slightly transparent skin.
Quint doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. I risk a glance upward. He’s watching me. His expression is unreadable, but he nods like he’s guessed what I’m doing and wants me to keep going. My concentration teeters—looking at him reminds me too much of the truth, of the impossible choice I’ve just made—and I yank my gaze back down to his hand. I wonder what it would be like to be able to hold it, to have someone real to anchor me. To have him be real.