The Extinction Trials(45)

“That fire pin isn’t a joke to me,” Owen said.

“And that pocket watch isn’t a joke to me either,” Maya said.

“Nor is what I found in my envelope,” Cara said quietly.

“Which brings up a question I’ve wanted to ask since the station,” Owen said. “Why wasn’t there an envelope for you, Alister?”

The older man shrugged. “How should I know? Maybe they figured I wasn’t gullible enough to fall for their tricks?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Will said, staring at Alister.

“Maybe someone stole it,” Alister said. “I woke up in that station the same as all of you.”

After an awkward silence, Owen walked over to the table and took the blank page from Maya and held it up to the sun and studied it as it flapped in the wind. Finally, he handed it back to her. “I’d hang on to it for now. I think it’s interesting that you and I got two items. The rest only received one—as far as I know.”

“Yes,” Cara said. “One for me.”

“And for me,” Will said.

“Me too,” Blair said.

Cara rose. “Speaking of, I’d like to share what was in my envelope.”

She went below decks and returned with a small piece of metal about half the size of Owen’s fire pin. She held the shard up in the sunlight for everyone to see.

“I bet I’ve seen a thousand pictures of this chunk of metal. Since I was a young girl, it has been like a knife at my throat.” She set it on the table next to Maya’s envelope. “To me, it’s also a reminder of how truly precious time is.”

Cara pulled her hair back, revealing a scar that ran above her right ear. “When I was a little older than Blair, I was in a car accident. Cars were going driverless, but the transition wasn’t complete. My father was driving me to school for a dance. I was so excited. In the blink of an eye, the crash changed everything.”

She motioned toward Owen. “I can’t imagine what you went through, but when you described how you felt, I saw myself on that night. The sound of the car crash was deafening. The pain overtook me. I blacked out. When I came to, there was a woman standing over me. Her hands seemed to move at supernatural speed. She tied off the cuts on my legs and my right arm. She whispered to me, ‘Don’t be afraid. You’re going to be okay. I’m a doctor.’”

Cara took a deep breath. “I would have died that night had she not acted so quickly. It was luck. She was an ER doctor driving home from work. She had been at the intersection, simply by chance. She saved my life and my dad’s. I spent two weeks in the hospital. Months in rehab. And I never was the same.”

She picked up the shard off the table and held it up. “This piece of metal was lodged in my brain. They wanted to remove it, but the operation was too risky. The fear was that if it shifted—even slightly—it could cause permanent brain damage. Or death.”

She set the shard down. “Since that day, I’ve lived with this deadly piece of shrapnel in my brain, knowing that at any time, it might shift and take my life. Or reduce me to a vegetable. Like that pocket watch, it was a constant reminder to me of how precious time is, that every moment we’re given is a gift. And that your life can change in an instant. It was the pocket watch for me. And to me, that doctor was like the fireman who saved Owen. She was the change I wanted to be in the world. I made it my life’s mission to become a physician. Before that, I had never been a very good student, frankly. But I applied myself. I had learned the hard way that I might not get a second chance at making the right decisions in life.”

Cara stared out at the ocean for a long moment. “Two things are remarkable to me. One, that ARC Technologies—and The Extinction Trials—were able to remove the shard. It implies a level of surgical sophistication that didn’t exist in the world before.”

“They probably had a robot cut it out,” Alister said.

“Yes,” Cara said. “I would bet on it. Only a robot would have that kind of precision and confidence to perform the operation.”

“Only a robot wouldn’t care if they screwed it up,” Owen said.

“Perhaps,” Cara whispered, seeming to consider the implications. “Whatever the reason or method, I’m free of it now. I have that which I have always wanted: freedom and time. In a strange twist of fate, it’s come when the world is gone and there seems to be no place to spend that time. As fate would have it, I’ve gotten what I always wanted when I no longer need it. But I think there’s a deeper meaning here.”

Cara motioned to Maya and Owen. “Hearing your stories was like peering through a looking glass at my own life. Seeing the same experiences in different lives, as though we are sides of a pyramid reflecting the same light. And I see it now. The shard is like The Change. It wrecked the world like that car crash wrecked my life. Like the fire changed Owen’s life. Whatever The Change is, it’s wedged in the brainstem of the world, always threatening, and it could shift at any moment and finish the patient off. In this case, the patient is the entire human race. We are what that doctor was for me that night: a person at the right place at the right time. What are we going to do? Are we going to run into the crash site and try to help? Or watch as time slips away?”

She nodded. “Before, I thought we should go to The Colony. Now, hearing your stories—and remembering mine—I know we should go to the Escape Hatch location. I feel it at the core of my being.”