All Our Wrong Todays(81)

The third woman stops screwing with the spigot and throws the heavy metal tube at Penny. She blocks it with her arm, but it clearly hurts like hell and, more devastating, it distracts her for the moment it takes the woman to lunge across the room and punch Penny in the face.

Dazed, Penny tries to aim the pistol, but the third woman twists her arm until she drops the gun. She slams Penny to the floor, knee jammed into her back to pin her down.

I can’t imagine anything worse than watching the woman I love soundlessly scream for help that I can’t give her because even if I could move I’m 7,800 miles away. But I’m about to find out exactly what’s worse.

The woman with the shattered knee stands, balanced on her good leg, the ruined one dragging behind her. She hefts up her axe and heaves it, blunt edge down, onto Penny’s head.

The lights go out in Penny’s eyes. She goes limp.

There’s no sound, but the silent impact of solid steel meeting hair and skin and bone is like a cloud of razors whirling through my arteries and veins. I try to scream but all I manage is a raspy, guttural moan. I am fear and hate. I am violence and revenge.

The woman lifts the axe for another blow, but the other woman says something that stops her. They both look at the camera on the dresser. She checks Penny’s pulse and gives the camera a thumbs-up. The other woman turns it off.

The screen goes wispy and pixilated. The other two screens show my mom and dad and sister, unconscious, being hauled out of their beds and carried away. I can feel tears well in my eyes but the intense gravity screws with their internal structure. They inflate weirdly until they burst from my eyes like water balloons on pavement.

“I apologize for that,” Lionel says. “No one was supposed to get hurt. These operatives are from a rather peculiar Japanese apocalypse cult, and while they’re eager to please, they can be hard to control. Something a bit too fatalistic in their essential worldview to be truly successful employees. Fortunately, everyone is alive. They’ll be on a private jet to Hong Kong within the hour.”

Clarity rinses out my mind. The fear is gone. The hate is gone. I have no violence, no revenge, no goals, no plans, no hope. It’s almost a relief, knowing that I don’t have to make any more decisions—I just have to do whatever Lionel says.





121


Gravity returns to normal but I can’t seem to peel myself off the floor. Lionel fires up his time machine, gesturing emphatically like the crackpot conductor of an invisible orchestra. He doesn’t seem at all concerned that I might leap up and beat him to death. And he’s right. My whole body is numb, and even if it wasn’t, I won’t do anything to further endanger my mom and dad and sister and the woman I love.

“This is what’s going to happen,” Lionel says. “You’re going to go back to July 11, 1965, so you can stop yourself from sabotaging my experiment. The timeline will return to its proper track. All of this, the last fifty years, will be set right.”

He looks down at me, baffled that I’m still lying on the ground.

“I dialed your gravity back to normal,” he says. “You can stand now.”

In fact, I feel like I could jump high enough to touch the curved ceiling seventy-five feet above me. But I don’t. I just sit up.

“All I want is for you to fix your mistake,” he says. “Every human being on the planet, including the four people you’re so concerned about, is living the wrong life. Once things are the way they should be, their lives will be moot. As well as their deaths. Because in the correct timeline they’ll have another life and another death and this life and this death won’t even exist. If they have to be sacrificed to make you do the right thing, it would hardly even be murder. You can’t murder fiction. And everyone on this planet is living a terrible fiction that has to be rewritten. By you.”

“I just expected so much more from you,” I say.

“The feeling is mutual,” Lionel says. “You seemed so much smarter before.”

“What, two hours ago,” I say, “when I thought you were the greatest human being who ever lived instead of the asshole who kidnapped everyone I love and warped the space-time continuum so he could bang another man’s wife?”

“No,” he says. “Before.”

He reaches into his pants pocket and takes out an old Polaroid photograph with a crinkled edge. He hands it to me.

It’s a photograph of me and Lionel. But not the Lionel who stands in front of me. The Lionel from 1965. And me—I look just as I do right now. I’m even wearing the same clothes.

“This picture was taken on July 13, 1965,” he says. “Two days after the accident, I turned the Engine back on for the first time. And you appeared.”





122


I stare at the photograph. Obviously it could be faked. I’m wearing exactly what I’m wearing, but he did scan me earlier. Lionel built a time machine—he could manufacture a phony Polaroid. But it doesn’t feel fake. It feels old. It feels like a photograph taken fifty-one years ago.

“You’ll go back to July 13, 1965, at 4:38 A.M.,” Lionel says, “the moment I turned the Engine back on. My earlier self will follow your instructions to help you jump the last two days back to July 11, 1965, moments before the accident. My device can manage smaller gaps in time even without the dedicated radiation trail to follow. But it also has a secondary fail-safe, a detection matrix to track any of the radiation still in the atmosphere from your initial trip back in time. You’ll make sure that my experiment succeeds and you’ll return to the present, the world restored.”