by Naomi Hughes
I lick my lips. “I didn’t kill the city, but I know what did. I’ll give you the information in exchange for Dr. Matthew Lerato’s old equipment.”
Kyle is seated at the kitchen table. The window behind him is open and the storm beats against the screen like a wolf at the door. He’s typing on his old computer, hacking into security systems and video surveillance from the train station, searching for evidence at the agents’ request. I wait for him to see himself, to see that this world is different from the one we left, but his eyes never change and he never looks up.
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” says the agent without blinking, dragging my attention back to him. “Especially ones who set off dirty bombs in the hearts of major cities.”
Riiip. The last cushion spills its feathers and slumps, gutless, to the ground.
Quint raises his head. He looks at me. Dirty bomb: an explosive device engineered to spread radioactive debris. So that’s what Matthew did at the train station. It couldn’t have been what killed the city—radiation sickness would take longer and have more obvious symptoms—but even if I got away from the blast, he must’ve wanted to make sure I wouldn’t last for long.
A crooked smile stretches my lips. He didn’t know he’d need me then. Joke’s on him.
My mind wobbles, slower and slower. Kyle’s fingers click against the keyboard.
“You must’ve had accomplices,” the agent is saying now. “Give us some names, and maybe the judge won’t try you as an adult.”
The lights flicker. They’re out for one second, two seconds, three seconds, then the room flashes back to bright. The bulb over the sink pops and goes out, rebelling against the power surge. My brother sits back, lips tight, hands in his lap as he waits for the Wi-Fi to reconnect.
The agent opposite me lifts his eyes to the ceiling. “Was it you who broke into the power plant, too?” he murmurs. “Did you think the surges would slow us down, that we wouldn’t catch you?”
I’m twisting my wrists in my handcuffs now, back and forth, wearing thin red lines in my skin. They moved the cuffs to the front when we got here. I wonder if it should make me feel less helpless. “I didn’t kill the city,” I tell him again.
Kyle’s fingers resume their tapping on the keyboard. The female agent crosses the living room to start pulling down wall hangings and checking behind them, for hidden safes, probably. Mom’s antique Celtic cross jangles against the floorboards, and Dad’s Star Wars posters end up in a torn heap next to the door.
I look away. Dad would’ve been at work when it happened. I won’t have to see his body. But somehow, the posters are almost as bad.
My mind teeters and sways. I jostle it into motion again. The equipment. I have to get the equipment.
The agents’ walkie-talkies crackle. Reinforcements are twenty minutes out, unless the storm gives way sooner. My agent eyes me, letting the silence stretch, giving the deadline time to sink in. Then he turns and calls to Kyle. “Find anything yet?”
My brother stands up. His gun peeks out from beneath his jacket—it’s still unsnapped. “Yeah,” he says, eyes on the screen. “Warehouse 3 on the north end of the base. East quarter.”
And then he raises his eyes. He looks at me. He smiles that old sharp-edged smile, like he’s laughing at himself and laughing at the world and also not laughing at all, and a giddy sort of fear shoots down my spine. It feels like premonition. It feels like a burning city, too quiet in the night.
The agent frowns. He starts to ask a question, but I don’t hear him because my brother isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s looking at the agent, and he’s reaching for his gun.
The gun is in his hand. It lifts up and snaps down. Crunch. The agent turns too slow. When the butt of the gun meets his skull he jerks forward and then slumps to the floor.
Kyle pivots. The female agent isn’t fast enough either. He’s already across the room, snatching her cuffs from her belt. A scuffle. The power flickers out again, plunging us into the dark.
One.
Two.
Three.
Crack! Muzzle flash singes the air.
The lights come back on. Another bulb pops. Kyle is next to the window, gun aimed at the agent. Her walkie is gone. One of her hands is cuffed to the table. The other holds her own gun, steady and outstretched, aimed at my brother. A standoff.
I’m on my feet, frozen, staring, breathless—and Kyle looks at me. It’s only for a second, not long enough to give the agent an advantage, but in his eyes something shifts again and this time I recognize it. It’s his decision.
He has no reason to trust me. He has no idea about timelines or Quint or the failing space-time continuum. All he knows is what he’s seen: me, meeting with a terrorist. Me, jumping off a cliff. Me, threatening him with his own gun. The agency calls me dangerous and he thinks they might be right, but it doesn’t matter—because my brother has finally made his decision, and he’s chosen me anyway.
Warehouse 3, east quarter. He wasn’t hacking into video surveillance. He was searching the agency’s databases. I told him I needed Matthew’s equipment, so he found it for me.
“Kyle,” I say, but can’t get anything else out past the lump in my throat. Damn it, this is not the time to cry. We need to get to that warehouse. I can tell him everything after I save the world.
“Reinforcements are still eighteen minutes out,” he tells me, “but you’d better take the fire escape to be safe. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.” Then he blinks a little, and with his free hand pats his jacket’s breast pocket like he’s looking for something. “Maybe not all that long,” he amends, with a rueful note that wavers at the end. He drops his hand.
His palm is painted a slick, bright red, and the world stops turning.
Later, I will think: I should have stopped the bleeding. I will think: I should have been faster.
I will think: I shouldn’t have picked up the gun.
His eyes don’t fade like the trainmaster’s. He closes them too soon. I’m kneeling above him, screaming his name, hands pressed uselessly to the wound—left of the sternum, right over his heart, blood spurting weakly between my fingers—while he dies. Again.
I don’t know how long it took me to cross the floor and get to him. I don’t remember when he fell, whether I caught him. All I know is that my palms are red like his, and that he’s lifting his hand, he’s touching my face. He’s smiling. No sharp edges this time: all soft and dim and fuzzy, because he’s in shock.
“Careful, kid,” he says, eyes opening to slits. “You’re in danger of looking affectionate.”
The bleeding slows. His eyes close again, and stay shut.
Mom always believed in Heaven. Dad believed in the possibility of an afterlife with the skeptical sort of optimism most people reserve for buying lottery tickets. I believe in God, and in hope.
I don’t know what Kyle believed. I never bothered to ask him.
In my peripheral vision, the agent is staring at me. Her hand twitches around her weapon. I wonder if she’s killed anyone before. I wonder if she’s felt this: a raging in her blood, a truth, a wanting. I can’t feel anything, I can’t see anything, I can’t think anything except—
My brother is dead. It’s my fault, again. But it’s also hers.
I pick up the gun.
She doesn’t hesitate because I’m a minor. She doesn’t give me a warning. She tightens her finger around the trigger and fires, point blank.
Click. Nothing. The gun’s jammed.
She curses. Yanks the magazine out.
I stand. I aim Kyle’s gun. My brother is gone, my whole family is gone, and she could stop me from saving them. She could stop me from saving Quint, the only person I care about who’s not already well and truly dead. Warehouse 3, east quarter: she knows where I’m going. When the reinforcements arrive, she can send them after me—and that’s if she doesn’t shoot me before I can escape, if she doesn’t get out of her cuffs and find her walkie and tell the agency
how to head me off.
She murdered my brother. I could make her pay.
Just in this timeline. Just for now. When I fix everything, it never would’ve happened. I won’t even remember.
My blood burns, and the wanting blisters against it.
Not killing is an easy choice when you never have to make it. I glance at Quint. He’s watching, hands at his sides, eyes dark and waiting. I wonder if Matthew’s thoughts are running through his head too. I wonder if he’s felt this kind of fury, if he’s been this overwhelmed, if he’s felt so absolutely helpless and then suddenly, breathtakingly, not. If Quint were holding the gun, would he justify this death the way I’m trying to? The way Matthew would?
No. Because he wants to be better.
A trainmaster with empty eyes. That emptiness, I’d told Quint afterward. That’s the thing I hate. I hadn’t understood how one person could do that to another. And now I do understand, and what am I going to do about that?
My hands are slick and sticky on Kyle’s gun. The storm is beating against the window at my back. The agent is shoving the magazine back in, and I have one heartbeat to make my decision.
I ran from Matthew because I refused to be like him. I jumped off a cliff. I turned myself in. I let my brother follow, and I watched him die—all because I wouldn’t be a murderer.
I choose the storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY
TWO STEPS. I’M OUT THE window. The screen was already torn. My exit tears it wider.
Gunshot cracks behind me, a second too late. The agent misses. Splinters explode off the window’s frame, shrapnel that slices into my cheek and my shoulder.
Thunder rattles the fire escape beneath my feet. Cuffed hands make the ladder impossible. I jump from the last landing instead, letting myself dangle first to soften the impact, but I still roll my ankle.
By the time I get to the end of the block, the pain in my foot starts to disappear. I try to make it stop, try to hang onto the white-hot ache, but it’s like trying to make a waterfall flow backward. The ache fades. So does Quint. And I didn’t kill the agent, but isn’t this just as bad? Aren’t I just as bad? I can’t stop using him up, piece by piece. His soul for my failures. His life for my family’s.
Another way. I’ll find it if it’s the last thing I do.
I run. In my mind, the top is still spinning, spinning, and I’m afraid of where it will land. Hail skitters beneath my steps. Rain drives down in sheets. The mental pictures are back, old mixed with new, flaring to life between flashes of lightning.
A tunnel in the dark.
Sixteen minutes before the reinforcements arrive.
A hiker with polka dotted sweatpants, grass beneath her nails.
Ten minutes. I can see the base.
Forty-weight oil and expensive aftershave. Torn posters heaped on the ground. Chestnut hair and a chewed-up pencil.
They’re not dead, not really.
Careful, kid. You’re in danger of looking affectionate.
The north end of the base is littered with dead agents. One of them lies in a gateway, preventing the lock from engaging. I squeeze through the gap, step over him without looking at his face. Warehouse 3. East quarter. Warehouse 3. East quarter.
Shelves. Crates stacked haphazardly, leaning into the aisle. A guard’s body sprawled across a box. Labels gleaming dimly in the light of the dying flashlight I took from his belt.
I have six minutes.
One crate is sandwiched in a tall stack. Physics Department, reads the label. And beneath that: Dr. Matthew Lerato.
I yank it out. The moment is clogged, slow, and it takes forever for the crate to fall.
It crashes. Papers fan out, spreading like a stain across the concrete. I stare for a long moment. Then I’m digging through the box, shoving aside tattered notebooks and loose pages—but there’s no equipment. No machinery. Nothing but old research.
I turn back to the shelves. I search, scanning the labels. I had to have missed something.
“Cam,” Quint says from behind me.
“No.” I cut him off, because I know what he’ll say, and if I don’t listen it won’t be true.
“Cam,” he says again. “There is no equipment.”
And in my mind, the top finally falls.
My cheeks are wet. I don’t know when I started crying, and I don’t know who I’m crying for. My father, dead in his hospital across town. The lost versions of Kyle, who I couldn’t save. Quint, who I used to hate and then might’ve fallen for, and soon won’t remember. Because if there is no equipment, then there is no other way. I’ve used Quint for nothing. Kyle died for nothing. And despite everything, this is how it will end: with everyone I love dead and me a murderer to bring them back.
I close my eyes. “Tell me to run.”
“Run,” Quint says, like the word is wrung out of him.
I think about the sliver of a moon. I think about the empty sky. “I’ll find a way to save you,” I tell him, but even I can’t believe myself anymore.
The lights blink on. I turn around and open my eyes even though the brightness burns, because if this is the truth then the least I can do is see it. Useless papers at our feet, useless crates at our backs. The look on his face is devastation.
The lights go dark. I sink down and papers rustle beneath me. I kick them away and then, because it feels good to lash out, I kick them again. They scatter and crinkle underfoot.
One page drifts across the pile, face up. My mother’s signature is at the bottom.
Gently, I lift it. It’s a cover letter addressed to the court, referencing unethical use of scientific research. It’s dated the day before the explosion.
If the agency had waited a few more days, a week, two weeks, she would’ve had enough time to gather all her evidence. She would’ve had time to stop them, or Matthew would’ve had time to recalibrate his sabotage properly. I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to anyone else.
I set the paper back on the ground, softly. The edge is traced in watery red fingerprints. I turn my hands over, cuffs tight around my wrists, palms rusted with my brother’s blood.
“Do you believe in the afterlife?” I ask Quint.
He drops his hands in his pockets and gives me a twisted smile. “Considering you’re about to kill me, I should get to pick the topic of our final conversation. And I think I’ll choose something cheerier than what’ll happen to me after said death.”
My jaw clenches. “Quint,” I say, and it’s a struggle to get the word out because it’s not what I want to say. What I want to say is forgive me and don’t leave me and I think I could have fallen for you, but it’s too little too late, because we’ve been on opposite sides of life and death ever since the day we met.
His smile goes flat. “I don’t know.”
I curl my fingers over my palms. “I want … I want to believe you’d go to Heaven. Or somewhere. God, anywhere.” Not the dark. Not nothingness. Not forgotten.
He sighs and pokes at a paper with his toe. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “I don’t think it’s my soul you’ve been using up.”
I stare at him. Something like hope flutters in my stomach, painful and precious.
“I don’t think souls are divisible,” he says. “You’re not using up my consciousness a little bit at a time. I’m fading, but only my appearance. The real me, my thoughts, who I am, that hasn’t faded at all. Which makes me think that consciousness and a person’s energy are two different things.”
I look down at the papers he’s still nudging with his shoe. “You remembered more research,” I say.
He shrugs. “I think it might’ve been your mom’s theory, actually, after Matthew took his data to her.” He nods at the bloodstained paper. “Looks like she spotted some measurements he took of end-of-life patients, how their energy spiked when they were dying and then suddenly dissipated. She hypothesized that the energy tethers our souls to our bodies—or to Leratonium, in my case—and then after we die, that sudden dissipation sl
ing-shots our consciousness … elsewhere.”
Mom’s voice echoes in my head. They dance like falling stars, twisting through the night, and then gather all their energy to launch themselves in a final brilliant flash into Heaven.
My throat closes. “And what happens if all your energy is used up before it can send your consciousness away?”
He looks up and gives me a sardonic smile, but his eyes are shuttered. “I don’t know. I drift, maybe, or sink. Or just … disappear.”
The dark. The nothingness. The boy with no happy ending.
I remember him sitting on the fountain, knees drawn up and back turned. I remember cool quicksilver in my hand and waking up with him tied to me. “I wish I’d never met you,” I tell him.
He hears the lie and gives his own. “Me too.” He slides down to the ground, feet splayed out, hands in his lap. “Do you think it’ll hurt?”
My heart twists hard. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying and failing to make my voice come out level. “I thought you wanted to talk about something cheerier.”
He ignores me and motions at the dead guard, visible in the other aisle from between the boxes. “Do you think it hurt for him? Was it fast? Will it be that way for me, since I don’t have a body?”
My hands curl into fists. “Stop.”
His gaze snaps to me and his eyes go dark. “If you have to do this to me,” he says, “it should be hard. You shouldn’t get to only wonder about the afterlife because you want to imagine everything will still turn out okay somehow. You should have to think. You should have to decide. You should have to remember, too, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”
I jolt to my feet, hands still clenched. “You think it’s easy for me? You think I want this? You think I want you to—to …” I can’t even finish.
“Will it hurt?” he asks, implacable.
“I don’t know!”