Recursion(55)

“No, the one up on seventeen. Slade’s chair.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve already lived the next fifteen minutes. The pain of cutting myself just now was a breadcrumb back to this moment. It left me a vivid, short-term memory to return to.”

“So you know what’s about to happen?”

“If we go to the penthouse, yes. Slade knows we’re coming. He’ll be waiting for us. We won’t even make it out of the elevator before a bullet goes through your eye. There’s so much blood, and I start shooting. I must hit Slade, because suddenly he’s crawling across his living room.

“I take the elevator down to seventeen, find the lab, and shoot the door open as Jee-woon is climbing into the tank. He starts toward me, saying he knows I would never hurt him after all he did for me, but he’s never been more wrong about anything in his life.

“At the terminal, I log in with some backdoor credentials. Then I map a memory, climb into the tank, and return to the memory of cutting myself in this room.”

“You didn’t have to come back for me.”

“To be completely honest, I wouldn’t have. But I didn’t know where Sergei was, and there wasn’t enough time to destroy all the equipment. But I am very glad you’re alive.” She looks at her watch again. “You’re going to have an awful memory of all of this in about twelve minutes, and so is everyone else in the building, which is a problem.”

Barry rises from the bed, gives Helena a hand up.

She lifts the shotgun.

He says, “So Slade is in the penthouse, anticipating that’s where we’ll go first—which we did the first time around.”

“Correct.”

“Jee-woon is already heading for the chair on seventeen, probably waiting to hear if there’s been a security breach so he can jump into the deprivation chamber and overwrite this timeline. And Sergei is…”

“Unknown. I say we go straight to the lab and deal with Jee-woon first. No matter what, he can’t be allowed to get in the tank.”

They head out of the room and into the corridor. Barry keeps compulsively touching the extra magazines in his pockets.

At the bank of elevators, he calls for a car, listening to the gears turning on the other side of the doors and holding his Glock at the ready.

Helena says, “We’ve done this part already. There’s no one coming down.”

As the light above the elevator illuminates, the bell dings.

Barry raises his gun, finger on the trigger.

The doors part.

Empty.

They step into the small car, and Helena presses the button for 17. The walls of this elevator are old, smoke-stained mirrors, and staring into them creates a recursive illusion—an infinite number of Barrys and Helenas in elevator cars bending away through space.

As they begin to climb, Barry says, “Let’s stand against the wall. Want to offer the smallest targets possible when the doors open. What weapon did Slade have?”

“A handgun. It was silver.”

“Jee-woon?”

“There was a gun that looked more like yours by the terminal.”

The button for each floor illuminates as they pass through it.

Nine.

Ten.

A wave of nausea hits him—nerves. There’s a taste of fear in his mouth from the adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream.

Eleven.

Twelve.

Thirteen.

He marvels that Helena doesn’t look as scared as he feels. Then again, from her perspective, she’s already waded into the fray once before.

“Thank you for coming back for me,” he says.

Fourteen.

“Just, you know, try not to die this time.”

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

“Here we go,” she says.

The elevator grinds to a halt at seventeen.

Barry raises the Glock.

Helena shoulders the shotgun.

The doors slide apart to reveal an empty corridor that runs the length of the building, with other hallways branching off a little ways down.

Barry steps carefully over the threshold.

The faint hum of lights burning overhead is the only sound.

Helena comes alongside him, and as she brushes her hair out of her face, Barry is overcome by a savage, protective impulse that terrifies and bewilders him. He’s known her barely twenty-four hours.

They advance.

The lab is a sleek, white space, filled with recessed lighting and glass. They pass a window that peers into a room containing more than a dozen MEG microscopes, where a young scientist is soldering a circuit board. She doesn’t see them slip past.

As they approach the first junction, a door closes somewhere nearby. Barry stops, listening for the sound of footsteps, but all he can hear are those lights.

Helena leads them down another corridor that ends at a long wall of windows overlooking the blue Manhattan gloom of this raw evening, the lights of surrounding buildings shining through the misty dusk.

“The lab is just ahead,” Helena whispers.

Barry’s hands are sweating. He wipes his palms on the sides of his pants to get a better grip on the Glock.

They stop at a door equipped with keypad entry.

“He may already be inside,” she whispers.

“You don’t know the code?”