by Naomi Hughes
“You don’t know if it hurt for the guard, or you don’t know if it’ll be the same for me? Come on, you’re medically trained. Give me your best guess.”
I take a shuddering breath and stab a finger at the dead man. “It took about a minute for him to pass out. Not much longer for his brain to shut down. His heart gave in, and then his capillaries burst from oxygen deprivation. Are you happy now?”
“Are you?”
“Of course not, you jackass!”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t lose you too!”
The words bounce between us. Quint’s expression smooths out and he nods like I’ve just explained a complicated math problem he’s been trying to figure out. I cover my mouth with a hand and think about taking both the words and impossible emotions behind them back, saying I didn’t mean them, not like that, that he’d manipulated the conversation to make me say it—but I don’t. Because even if that’s what he wanted me to admit, it wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been true. If however I feel about him hadn’t been true.
He waits to see if I’ll take it back. When I don’t, his eyes change, lighten. “Good,” he says.
I suck in a breath. “How the hell is that good?”
“I don’t want it to hurt,” he says softly, “but at least I won’t be the only one in pain.”
I swipe a hand across my face and exhale. “I was right before.”
“About what?”
“You being a jackass.”
He breathes out a laugh, and a little more of that terrible devastation eases from his expression.
I hesitate. “Are you—are you still afraid?”
“Oh, I’m terrified. Whatever it is we might be to each other, it doesn’t cure that.”
I stare at him. He gives me a shrug and an ironic half-smile, acknowledging what he’s said and the terrible timing of it all—then, because he’s not a total jackass, he waves a hand at the dead guard. “At least I don’t have a brain that’ll shut down, or a heart that will stop, or capillaries to burst. Maybe it won’t hurt after all.”
It’s a truce, a gift. He’s letting it be just a little bit easier for me, letting me think that maybe he’ll be okay after all.
But I frown and go still. “What did you say?” I ask.
He raises an eyebrow. “Maybe it won’t hurt?”
“No. Before that, the things you don’t have.”
He ticks the items off on his fingers. “Brain, heart, capillaries.”
I turn around and peer at the dead guard between the boxes. Capillaries. Suffocation victims should have burst capillaries, especially in their eyes.
A flashback rises: A hiker in polka dotted sweatpants, grass beneath her nails. The lightning illuminated her face. Her eyes gleamed blue and white.
But not red. Not bloodshot.
My pulse quickens. I squeeze between boxes, leaving Quint where he sits, and kneel over the guard’s body. He’s bulky, Hispanic, late thirties. His eyes are dark brown. The whites gleam, polished in the glow of the stolen flashlight. No burst blood vessels for him, either.
I pick up a hand. His nailbeds are normal, not blue from cyanosis.
He didn’t die from suffocation. None of them could have. This wasn’t an atmospheric anomaly, not one of Matthew’s side effects. Something else killed my city.
My hand tightens around the flashlight. I stand up and back away. Don’t make assumptions, Mom would say. Observe the evidence. Form a hypothesis.
The agents—they’d been so sure I killed the city, so certain it had been an intentional act. And I hadn’t even questioned why. What equation had they put together, whose sum I had missed? What was the evidence? There was the dirty bomb, Matthew’s attempt to get rid of me before he knew he’d need me, though it still didn’t quite make sense for him to spread radiation with it too.
And: Was it you who broke into the power plant? one of the agents had asked me. It had to have been Matthew who broke in, but why—to cut the power? To cause a surge? To trigger something?
Trigger. An electric trigger. Plus radiation.
My breath stalls. I know that formula. Oh God, I know that formula. But one piece of it is missing.
I’m moving toward the empty crate. I’m praying: please be wrong. Please, be wrong.
I pick it up, turn it around, hold the flashlight up so I can see the label. Notebooks, it says. Research, it says.
And at the very bottom, scratched in faint pencil:
Leratonium
The last piece of Matthew’s old equipment. It was here, and now it’s gone, because he’s already used it.
I know what killed my city. I know who killed my city.
I drop the flashlight. It hits the concrete with a percussive crash. The fluorescents overhead blink on, flicker off. “Quint,” I say, my voice distant and dreamlike, “what are the ingredients for a soul transfer?”
He’s still sitting in the same spot. “Leratonium, radiation to activate it, and an electrical trigger to link the patient to the Leratonium,” he says. “You were probably able to use your brain’s natural electricity as the trigger when you drew out my consciousness, if that’s why you’re asking.”
“That’s not why I’m asking,” I say.
He looks at me. Looks at the box. Reads the label and frowns—and then everything snaps into place for him too, and his eyes jerk to mine.
This is Matthew’s other way. This is what he wanted me to see. This is the last piece of the equation, and its sum shines like too-bright silver.
He stole their souls. He stole the lives, the energy, of every single person in my city. And then he told me he’d been taking from power facilities to feed his wormholes, and I’d believed him.
I drop the box. I press my hands to my head. His logic burns through my mind like a lit fuse: everyone will be dead soon anyway, if he can’t fix the space-time continuum. None of the lives he’s taken will matter once he succeeds.
And why stop at one timeline? Why not use every resource at his disposal? He’d have done this again and again, every time he accidentally created a new alternate reality. Every time he failed, he’d kill another version of my city to power his next attempt at changing the past.
Except in his own timeline. Because there, he could be caught. There his mission could be jeopardized. But every other timeline, every other version of my family—gone.
The Kyle who just died was the only Kyle left.
“Did he tell you I was afraid?” asks a voice, and at first I think it’s Quint.
I’m still holding my head. I don’t look up. All I can see is the cement floor, blurry through my tears, and all I can hear is the tiredness and acceptance in that voice, and all I can smell is mint and metal.
I inhale. With the oxygen comes hatred. It sears my lungs, burns away the tears, grips my bones and holds them tight and twists.
I straighten. I drop my hands. When I speak, my voice is even. “Funny,” I tell Matthew. “I didn’t take you for the lurker type.”
He’s standing at the end of the shelves, shadows pouring over him, watching me with those careful eyes. His steampunk gun sticks out of one pocket. Quicksilver metal coils around its barrel, and I finally recognize that shimmer for what it is. The janitor he shot, the trainmaster, their gazes were empty like something was missing. Because something was. Efficient in every murder, Matthew had taken their energy in addition to their lives.
He lifts one shoulder and nods at the dead guard. “You needed to see the other option for yourself. Because here’s the thing,” he says with a sigh, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes, “I was afraid. I was afraid you wouldn’t help me if you didn’t understand, and now that you do I’m still afraid you’ll let me fail. I’m afraid that my only contribution to the world will be to end it, and that I will run and run forever, back and forth through time, and the cost will get higher and higher and I’ll never be able to fix any of it.” His voice is raw by the time he’s finished, and he sounds too much like my
ghost and also nothing like him at all.
Quint is on his feet next to the empty crate. He’s standing, staring, pale and frozen. He looks the same as he did the first time we met Matthew: ghostly and empty, barely a memory. Nothing more than an afterimage.
And then he looks at me. Something comes into his eyes that looks like life, and he draws a breath. He steps forward. He stands in front of me to face his double, so that I have to look through him to see Matthew. And the twisting hatred doesn’t ease, but a sense of safety settles in alongside it. I remember what I thought when Kyle jumped off the cliff after me, when I found him safe in the ocean—that I wasn’t alone anymore. But the truth is I’ve never been alone. Not since I found a boy next to a fountain and accidentally hid his soul in mine.
I look through Quint and speak to Matthew. “He did tell me you were afraid,” I say. “He’s afraid, too. But that’s not the important thing. I think there’s only one difference between the best and worst versions of ourselves, and that’s whether you choose to act on that fear, or be better than it.”
Quint turns his head. He smiles at me, the type of smile I’ve only seen from him a few times before—full, bright, lighting him up from the inside.
Somewhere close by, a door bangs and someone calls out. Agents. My time is up.
Matthew gives me an exasperated look and pulls something out of his pocket. He turns it over in his hand. “Maybe,” he says. “Well, probably. But that better version of me still has energy that’s a hundred times more potent than anything I can scrape together, even with all the souls I’ve taken, and I still need you to give it to me.”
A shadow darts past the end of our aisle. Someone shouts my name and an order to surrender.
With his free hand, Matthew draws his gun and flicks a switch on the handle. It hums and buzzes just beyond the edge of hearing. Then he looks up and tosses me the other thing he was holding.
It careens through Quint. It arcs toward me. I catch it, my cuffs rattling.
It’s a cell phone. Scuffed green case. Chewbacca sticker on the back. The wallpaper is a photo of my family.
Dad hasn’t been answering his phone, Kyle said on the cliff.
There is only one reason Matthew would have this. One reason he would give it to me now. What better way to convince me to change the past, than to strip away all that’s left of my present?
There was only one timeline where my dad was still alive. And now there are none.
The world goes silent. No blood roaring in my ears, no agents shouting at my back.
I look up. Fuzzy and indistinct on the other side of Quint, Matthew nods at me. He flips another switch on the side of his gun.
“See you at the ship,” he tells me, and then disappears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
AGENTS EVERYWHERE. PAPERS BENEATH OUR feet, a carpet that rustles and slides. Quint is in front of me, back still turned, the moment hanging between us—a breathless, quavering thing.
The beginning of a shift coils around my ribcage. It tightens. It waits.
Quint turns his head. I can only see his profile, but his expression is clear and open. “Do it,” he says.
I drop the phone.
The agent in front of me is blonde, short, with steely eyes and hands that don’t shake. She’s the one who killed Kyle.
Except she didn’t. Because it was Matthew who stole the city’s souls, Matthew who sent me here, Matthew’s fault we got caught by the agents, Matthew who gave me an unthinkable choice—
But me who will have to make it.
I have to shift back to his timeline. I have to give him Quint. I have to save my family, even if I can’t save myself.
The phone tumbles end over end, careening toward its own destruction.
The agent’s gun is pointed at me. It won’t jam this time. She’s shouting at me to pull Kyle’s gun out of my waistband—two fingers, no sudden moves, lay it on the ground and kick it toward her.
I pull it out. I hold it aloft, cuffs rattling at the movement. I think about the shift, the current, the riptide that flows around me. I remember how I brought Kyle with me to this timeline. I remember what Quint said: that maybe I could control the energy consciously, with practice.
The gun, I tell it. Not the cuffs. Bring the gun but not the cuffs.
The phone lands on a corner. It cracks. It bounces once, twice. It teeters on its edge and then starts to fall.
The shift curls itself around me but doesn’t trigger yet. I need a life-or-death situation. I heft the gun, take a step forward. I already know she won’t hesitate.
The agent squeezes the trigger.
I’m gone before the phone hits the ground.
Silence comes first. The clatter of hail on the roof cuts to quiet. No thunder, no windows rattling in their frames from the bluster of the last timeline’s storm. In the distance, the faint noise of city traffic blossoms.
Sight comes next. The fluorescents buzz steadily overhead, and a liquid golden daybreak leaks around the edges of the doors. I remember the last time I was here at dawn. A gray sunrise, pierced by skeletons of smoking framework.
Touch comes last. The gun is in my hand, its bumpy grip cool against my palms. The cuffs are gone.
So is Quint.
I push through the doors. I stand in the sunrise. I look to the south, to the swath of ash and char and barbed wire, and think about my ghost. I think about how far I’ve come to not kill him. I think about telling him I couldn’t lose him. I think: I’m afraid of the dark. All I have is you.
Do it.
I tuck the gun into my waistband. And then I run for the ship.
Buildings blur. The sidewalk is cold and unyielding under my feet, and the cool fog of the coast seeps beneath my shirt. Halfway to the gate, a soldier spots me. His eyes narrow and he starts my way. Civilians aren’t allowed here now.
But he’s too far away and no one is stopping me today, not anymore. I crash through a side gate. The soldier fumbles, takes too long trying to reopen the gate behind me, and is soon out of sight.
I begin the long arc around the base.
The candy-bright signs start at the halfway point, where imposing cement buildings give way to debris. They clamor at me to turn back. RADIATION HAZARD. DANGER. NO TRESPASSING. I ignore them. I’ve gotten good at ignoring things during the last few weeks.
The space beside me is still empty, but I keep glancing at it anyway. It’s like reaching for something just out of sight, grasping in the dark, waiting for your fingers to close around a familiar shape that’s no longer there.
I reach the slit in the fence. The agents have put a temporary fix on it, but I kick through and wedge open a hole at the bottom that’s barely wide enough for me to squeeze under. The edges of the fence scrape trenches across my shoulders, my back. Blood wells up. It trickles down my spine and soaks through my clothing. I’m grateful for the pain, the immediacy and simplicity of it, but it doesn’t last long. Within seconds the blood slows and the wounds seal. The anxiety of this place doesn’t vanish so easily, but it’s buried beneath the desperation of what I have to do and it only takes me a minute or two to force myself to stand, to move forward.
The south end of the base is washed out in the dawn, colorless and quiet. I pass a fountain. Sheltered in the crook of two decimated buildings, it’s scorched and cracked but not blown apart. The ash that once filled it is gone now, but I can still taste it. Bitter, thick, choking. Like I will never taste anything else ever again.
The shipyard looms. In the slanting light, one boat gleams a little more than the rest. When I draw nearer I see why. The chains, railings, almost every metal surface of the McKay, they’re all bright as quicksilver. They glimmer until the sun’s angle changes and then they fade into the background again, and the ship is nothing more than another broken down research vessel among a dozen of its counterparts. This is how Matthew has hid his Leratonium: the energy of millions of souls stretched thin over the metal of the agency’s own ship.
I step out onto the plank. I walk over the algae-green water, and the deck creaks when I put my weight on it. There are no pigeons this time, no coffeepot, no feather. And no Matthew. I stand at the prow by myself, face to the sun, and wait.
Behind me, the plank creaks again.
“Will you remember?” I ask Matthew without turning around. “If it works, if the alternate timelines disappear and the world resets around you—will you remember the way it was?”
“My theories predict it,” he answers. “Though I’d be the only one.”
“And what will you do then?”
He steps up beside me, turns to face the sunrise. “Maybe I’ll look you up,” he says after a moment, and a strange sort of loneliness sweeps through his words. He gives me a sideways look and something in my expression makes him exhale. “No,” he amends. “I won’t.”
The railing shines in front of me. It calls to me to touch it, the same way a canyon pulls you to fall when you stand at its edge. I keep my hands clenched tightly at my sides. “How does this work?” I ask him.
“You touch it,” he says, nodding at the glimmering metal. “Anywhere. And channel his energy into it.”
“I can’t control it like that.”
He raises an eyebrow, glancing down at the thin red lines around my wrists where the handcuffs used to be.
I grit my teeth. “And then what?”
“The computers below deck are already set. The wormhole will open as soon as it has enough energy. It sends my consciousness into the past version of myself, and then either I succeed and the world resets or I end up back here again and the space-time continuum disintegrates that much faster.”
I take a breath. I turn. I step in close to Matthew, and the smell of mint and metal wraps us up and muffles the rest of the world. “Do you ever look at them?” I ask. “Before you kill them, do you talk to them? Did you talk to my dad? Did you tell him why?”
“I never look at them,” he answers, and his eyes are the green sky before the storm.
“I hate you,” I tell him. There’s no turmoil, no bitter taste, only the truth.