Departure(62)

Huh.

At university, I had envisioned Alice Carter as a time-travel fantasy series, an escapist tale, a mix of Harry Potter and Back to the Future. But right now the setup strangely hits home.

I turn the page, and the faded ink ends. New strokes, darker, from a different pen. I resist reading them. It feels almost like cheating, peeking at the answers.

I flip the pages quickly, barely feeling the braille-like indentations on the backside. On a new page, I repeat the mental ritual I developed in college: I write the first line that pops into my head, then the next, until I have ten or half a page. It’s like mental jumping jacks, a warm-up to get the words flowing. It’s not about quality; it’s about starting, which is the hardest part. I usually throw out this initial bit, but occasionally there are nuggets of solid gold, the kind that only turn up when you’re panning with reckless abandon, when you’re writing without editing or judging what’s coming out. To my surprise, I hit the strike of all time. The ideas pour out of me. The outline for book 1 comes quickly, and then the next, Alice Carter and the Dragons of Tomorrow. A setup for book 3 arises naturally—Alice Carter and the Fleet of Destiny. Alice Carter and the Endless Winter. Alice Carter and the Ruins of Yesteryear. Alice Carter and the Tombs of Forever. Alice Carter and the River of Time. Story arcs for seven books, the entire series. My hand aches.

It’s like the ideas were always there, hidden just under the surface, ready, waiting for me to break through that top layer that covered them.

And from the plots, the ideas, the scenes I can’t wait to write, comes a theme: decisions and time. Time, our fate, the future—it isn’t written. It can be changed. Time and again, Alice chooses a new future with her decisions. She chooses to fight the future, to bet on humanity, to have faith in our ability to learn from our mistakes and make better decisions. Today’s decisions are tomorrow’s reality. I like that.

To me, this is what great books are about, revealing our own lives in a way only stories can; we see ourselves in the characters, our own struggles and shortcomings, in a way that’s nonthreatening and nonjudgmental. We learn from the characters; we take those lessons and inspiration back to the real world. I believe that a good book leaves its readers better than they were before. And I think these stories will. That’s why they’re important.

I’ve also realized what I want to do: stay here, remember, make a life with Nick, if that’s possible. But I think the passengers of Flight 305 deserve a chance at their own future. Like Alice Carter, I reject the idea that the future is written, that our world is doomed to repeat the same mistakes as this one.

I’ll let Sabrina and Yul and the Titans here use me, like the cheese in their trap, to catch Nicholas, to buy time. Whatever they need to get everyone home.

I glance once again at the sea through the window. There are three lines of white smoke now, the third glowing ember recently extinguished. The sun will set in a few hours.

I gently close the notebook and move it aside. I will likely never see it again, or remember the work I’ve done. Outside the hotel room my footsteps echo loudly on the marble floors of the lab tower.

In the hall that holds Sabrina’s lab, an alarm rings out overhead, a shocking pulsing sound synchronized with red flashing lights. There’s no announcement, no indication of what’s wrong. It’s like the whole place just turned into a disco, the DJ gone, his last beat on repeat.

I race to the glass door to her lab. It’s empty.

I turn, run to Yul’s lab. Empty.

I pound up the stairway, onto the next level of the lab tower. All empty.

The alarm assaults me now, boring into my head. Focus.

Back in the stairway, through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out at the sea, I spot the two airships at the base of the towers rising, moving away. Heading off to battle?

On the next level, through the fourth glass door, I spot Sabrina, standing, her back toward me. A large machine almost fills the room. It has only a single opening, a round portal just big enough for a body. A metal-topped table extends from the opening, a body upon it.

I throw the door open. A screen on the wall to my left displays the two hemispheres of a brain, lit in a blooming kaleidoscope of color. A brain scan.

“Harper,” Sabrina says, turning.

“What is this?”

“A contingency.”

“For what?”

“In case we succeed.”

Sabrina never fails to offer up a cryptic answer. I struggle to put it together: her future self, lecturing her on neurons, how they don’t change over time, how memories are simply stored electrical charges. Yul’s video, talk of power from the dam being just enough to change the state of linked electrons in the past.

There’s another revelation. It should have been obvious: Why did this faction need Sabrina? If Yul held the key to resetting the quantum bridge and sending our plane back, what’s Sabrina’s role?

This is it. This experiment, which they’ve kept from me.

“You’re trying to send your memories back, aren’t you?”

Sabrina raises her eyebrows. Impressed?

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“For your sake,” she says flatly.

The table finishes sliding out of the machine, and Yul sits up, shaking his head.

“My sake?” I look around at the lab. “This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? For Flight 305 to return to our time and for the two of you to have your memories, to remember everything that happened here, to prevent the Titan catastrophe.”