Lost in Time(93)
But this time, Adeline didn’t just toss and turn in bed. She stared at her phone, at the video feed of Nora’s bedroom, where she slept peacefully, not a care in the world, completely unaware that it was her last night on Earth.
She flipped to the other feeds.
Hiro and Elliott were talking in the lab, empty coffee mugs on the table, a stack of metal tuning bars scattered like an overturned box of toothpicks.
Sam was up late, reading a book by the fire, two empty beer bottles sitting on the raised hearth.
No matter how hard she looked, Adeline couldn’t find the missing piece that would solve this mystery of past, present, and future. And it was driving her crazy.
Sometime just before morning, she drifted off to sleep.
*
Adeline’s buzzing phone woke her.
Groggy, half awake, she fumbled through the covers and found it and raised it and squinted against the bright Nevada sun blazing in through the windows.
Nora was calling.
This had to be it.
Adrenaline shot through Adeline’s veins as she answered, her voice scratchy.
“Hi.”
“Hey. Can you come over?”
“Everything all right?”
“I don’t know.”
Nora sounded scared.
Adeline jumped out of bed. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
When the call ended, she checked the time.
4:38 p.m.
She had slept almost the entire day.
She opened the app for the camera feeds and clicked on the group for inside Nora’s home. She saw only black boxes. They were offline.
Why?
Fear rose inside of her. She checked the wireless access point they were connected to near Nora’s home. It was online.
They should be working.
She pulled the feeds from the cameras outside. Nora had gone for a run that morning with a friend. She followed the two women around the city, to the little café where they ordered smoothies after the run, watched them chatting and sipping as they strode home. Nora was inside almost an hour, then took a car to work, and left at lunch.
Adeline pulled up the history of the cameras inside her home. Nora fixed a sandwich, read a paperback book at the kitchen island, and went upstairs and napped. When she got up, she went to the bathroom, and when she came out, she marched directly to the camera in the bedroom, peered into the lens, pulled it free, and jerked the wire out. She repeated that throughout the house, depositing the cameras on the dining room table.
They were waiting there when Adeline arrived.
“I found these cameras hidden all over my house!” Nora yelled, pacing in the hall outside the dining room.
“How?”
Adeline knew she had said the wrong thing as soon as it left her mouth.
Nora cocked her head. “Did you know? Did you do this? Please don’t lie to me, Dani.”
“Yes.”
“You knew, or you did it?”
“They’re my cameras.”
Adeline expected Nora’s anger to explode. Instead, she deflated. Hurt replaced her fury.
Nora’s voice was a whisper.
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Is it because of Sam?”
“No.” But that wasn’t entirely true. It was because of her father. And Nora.
“Please tell me the truth. It’s all I ask.”
“The truth is complicated.”
“We built a time machine to an alternate universe together. I think I can handle complicated. Tell me. You owe me that.”
“I can’t.”
“Then get out. And don’t come back until you can.”
Adeline walked out and stood on the front stoop, trying to find the words that would heal the rift between them. She knew that if she didn’t, she wasn’t coming back—not before Nora died. Unless, she was, in fact, the one who had killed her.
But she couldn’t find those words. She stared at the door, feeling her last chance being washed away by time.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Adeline pulled it out and read the message from Elliott. It had been sent to the group: Nora, Sam, Constance, and her.
Hiro and I need to see you in the lab. It’s urgent.
It had begun.
Again.
SIXTY-THREE
When all of the Absolom Six were present in the lab, Sam said, “Why all the cloak and dagger?”
Elliott pointed to a prototype for Absolom Two, which was sitting in the center of the room.
“You’ll see, Sam.”
Elliott reached in his pocket, took out a small tuning bar, and walked past the group, letting everyone see the Absolom Sciences serial number.
He placed the metal bar inside the Absolom machine, closed the door, and moved to a computer terminal nearby. He typed the departure sequence. The machine hummed and flashed, and the bar disappeared.
The room was utterly quiet as Elliott walked to a metal table, picked up a hard plastic box, and opened it so the group could see the contents.
It was a tuning bar that was discolored and pitted with age. But the serial number was still readable. It was the same number as the bar that had just been sent to the past.
It was clear to everyone present what the bar meant: Hiro and Elliott, during their time in the lab and digging in the desert, had figured out how to make Absolom Two send payloads to our universe.