Departure(61)

“And before you get any wild ideas, let me stop you: time travel to the past is impossible. Even under the new paradigm, matter can only travel into the future, as your plane did. We can, however, change the state of linked particles that exist in both times. The problem is power. The more massive the particle, the more power you need. The dam only generates enough power to change the state of very small particles, those with a minute amount of mass. Electrons are the most useful, for our purposes. That’s how I sent the messages via the Q-net. Here’s where it gets tricky . . .”

What follows is the balance of the lecture I caught the end of, again, in a language wholly foreign to me, spoken in English but in the vernacular of mathematics and physics.

After a few minutes of listening, I come to a conclusion: we’re screwed. I mean, why didn’t the Yul of the future just program an off switch on the thing? I guess to ensure his safety. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that. It certainly sounds like it. Or maybe the task at hand isn’t related to the quantum bridge at all. Maybe it’s another experiment completely—possibly related to Sabrina’s work. I feel like a revelation is just out of reach, a piece I haven’t connected. Once again, I feel like there’s something they aren’t telling me.

I peer around the doorframe. Inside the lab, Yul’s head rests on his crossed arms on the raised table in the center. He’s not working. Or is he . . .

I push the door open, and he looks up at me with bloodshot, watery eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I ask quietly.

“I can’t figure it out. He’s right.”

He shakes his head.

“And I’ve got a migraine. It’s killing me.”

“Sabrina can’t help?” I ask.

“We’re not . . . speaking right now.”

“You have to, Yul.”

He sets his head back on his arms. “I’ll die first. We’re all probably going to anyway.”

I back out of the lab, pace out of the wing, returning to Sabrina’s lab. I pause outside, waiting for the deeply personal part where she talks about the tech in her lab to pass, then push her door open.

She turns, surprised to see me. Her hand moves quickly to the table, and the screen blinks out.

“Harper . . .”

“Yul needs you.”





34





After the Yul-Sabrina intervention, I wander around the lab tower a bit more, then the Titan apartments, which are lavish in the extreme. The guardians of humanity weren’t exactly slumming it. Then I make my way back to the hotel tower, to the room where I awoke. I guess this is home. Maybe forever.

I’ve turned the decision over in my mind until I’m ready to scream. Stay here, doom the other passengers, possibly save our world. Go back, and all the passengers will live. We’ll disembark. Maybe Nick and I will pass by each other, strangers. Maybe he’ll help me get my bag down, just another anonymous person he shared a flight from JFK to Heathrow with. Then . . . history repeats itself. Possibly. Or maybe not. Is the future already written? I suppose it comes down to that question.

I have realized one thing, why the antibiotics decision was so easy, back at the nose section of the plane: it was only my life I had to decide about. I was willing to sacrifice myself to save those others; I still am. When I was at the lake, that was another easy decision, made without a second of hesitation. Yeah, I’m a good swimmer. And that’s how it’s been my whole life—when others are involved, when my actions help somebody else, it’s easy. I never realized that before. But when it’s just me, my career, my love life, I fall apart. I know what I want: to stay in this ruined world with my memories and everything I’ve learned about myself, to stay here with Nick. But if I do, I’ll be sacrificing those 121 lives. They will stay dead. Perhaps that’s the only certainty in this whole thing.

I’m caught in a mental loop. I need to get away from it for a bit.

I sit down at the wood table under the picture window that looks out on the seemingly endless Atlantic. In the air, the burning streak is gone, just a line of white smoke now. Next to it, a new, slender line of crimson is forming. What is it? I was so lost in the videos at the labs that I forgot to ask Sabrina. I consider returning, but something else calls to me more powerfully: the Alice Carter notebook.

I flip it open, and a loose piece of paper falls out. It’s my handwriting, a note, apparently to myself.

It’s never too late to start, never too late to finish. And I will. I’ve worked far too long on others’ dreams, put off my own love, this one and the one I can’t speak of. After all this time, I realize that it’s like Tennyson once said, ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ I know that now. I know that I would have rather tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

I gently place the note on the table and flip the pages, reading my old scribblings for a story about a girl who receives a letter on her eighteenth birthday . . . from her future self. In the letter, Alice tells her younger self that she alone holds the keys to the Eternal Secrets, three ancient artifacts that allow its owner to control time. Hunted by a shadowy cabal with technology almost indistinguishable from magic, Alice descends into a strange world where her decisions will determine the course of history and the fate of everyone she loves.