6

4:38 A.M.

So many stars hung over Rett that the sky seemed to press down on him. He felt its chill through his jumpsuit. Heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing.

He knew this hollow well, knew a curtain of green light would unfurl overhead even before it did so.

I’ve come to the future.

Six years in the future.

He turned, searching the hollow for Bryn. Did I come here alone?

“Bryn.” He whispered it, reluctant to break the spell cast by starlight and silence. The weight pressing on him made breathing a struggle. Please be here, Bryn. Please don’t leave me alone … “Bryn?”

The muffled scrape of shifting dirt answered him. He turned to see a shadowed mass split in two—Bryn stepping out from behind a boulder.

She slid her arms around his waist and he pulled her shoulders close to him. I’m not alone, he thought, and the weight lifted from his chest.

He looked up at the light dancing in the sky. Something about this moment … The quiet, the calm, the endless stars and flexing sheet of light. He felt like anything he wished might come true. Like he might close his eyes and find himself lying on his stomach in the middle of his living room, marveling over the comic book panels of a boy who wished his way to magical adventures and home again. The one his mother had read aloud to him, her voice pushing away all thoughts of darker days.

Under these stars, under this magical dance of green light, that one wish might come true: come back.

And now he finally understood: this moment was the heavy stone pulling down the fabric of his reality, so that every moment in his life circled this one.

“Rett?” Bryn spoke into his shoulder. “What are we going to do?”

They’d left Scatter Labs behind—left locked doors and secrets and isolation and lies.

But they’d also left everything else. Rett ached at the thought of the money he’d held in his hands, enough money to finally help his mother.

He lifted his face to the stars, to the shimmering fall of green light. Time will fold like a curtain, and we’ll be back together.

He eased out of Bryn’s arms and turned to where he knew he’d find the shadow of Scatter 3 rising over them. “We have to go back in there.”

Bryn shook her head. “That guy’s going to be in there. He had the gun last time. He pointed it at you.”

Rett saw the scarred barrel in his mind, green in the light of a glow stick, and wondered where the image had come from. He pointed the gun at me, Rett thought. I remember. The spiky feeling of panic came back to him.

But I gave him that money. He recalled the surprise on the man’s face back in Scatter Labs when Rett had stuffed hundred dollar bills into his hand. “I don’t think he’ll be here this time around. I think he might have left Scatter Labs. I gave him some of the money they paid me, which means he probably wasn’t desperate enough to come out to the wasteland this time.”

Bryn didn’t respond. Rett turned to find her marveling at him like he had at the curtain of light hanging over them. He ducked her gaze.

“Six years older,” he said. “Is that why you’re staring? All that ‘wisdom’ showing on my face?”

“Wisdom and stubble.” She drew her fingers over his jaw and he could have sworn he felt his skin sizzle.

“I thought it was grit before.” He rubbed his own hand over his face and startled at the unfamiliar rasp. And where his sleeves had been baggy six years ago, his arms now strained against the fabric. “Guess I ate pretty well in Scatter Labs.”

“And wasted all your time on push-ups when you could have been working on more nightmare comics,” Bryn said, squeezing his shoulders.

“Actually, I think I did both.” Rett thought of the sheaves of paper in his desk drawer at Scatter Labs. “A lot of both. Come on, it’s cold out here.”

“Wait.” Bryn caught his hand. “We know how to get back to the time we started in: the passphrase, plus a little adrenaline.”

Rett recalled the kiss she’d given him in the hallway of Scatter Labs and thought, More than a little. “But that’ll only take us back to Scatter Labs. We’ll be stuck there again.”

“You found someone to help you sneak out of your room. Do you think he’d help us sneak out of the Labs altogether? If we paid him?”

Rett nodded, thinking. “We can go back, try it all again. Pretend like we don’t suspect anything, ask for the money like I did last time. Wells will pay us, she’ll ask us to stick around, we’ll pretend to agree. And then—we find the guy who helped me last time, pay him to help us get out of there.”

Bryn was frowning. She moved her fingers through her hair. “But our mechanisms. Scatter could find a way to use them against us, maybe use them to hurt us until we agree to come back to them and do what they want us to do.”

A twinge of remembered pain went through Rett’s head. Last time he’d been in this wasteland, he’d suffered through the worst headache of his life.

“I saw you when your mechanism went haywire.” Bryn smoothed her fingers over the side of Rett’s head, and he leaned into her touch. “It was terrible—the pain made you lose consciousness.”

Rett didn’t want to think about that. He’d rather focus on the warmth of her hand moving over his head.

“We can’t get away from Scatter.” Bryn let her hand fall back to her side. “We’re tied to them as long as we have these mechanisms in our heads.”

“Wait. Wells said … When I asked her whether we’d be allowed to leave, she said she’d give us a code to say aloud that would turn off our mechanisms for good.”

“She was probably lying.”

“No. I don’t think she was.” Rett’s mind raced. “When I first told her that we’d found Scatter’s device, she asked me if I’d seen some ID codes on the display. She said they’d be a string of numbers next to our names. Do you think those could be the codes we need? We say them out loud, and our mechanisms will die?”

Bryn gripped Rett’s hands in hers. “I remember seeing those on the screen.”

“You don’t happen to remember what they were, do you?”

“If I told you that yes, I’d memorized two random strings of numbers whose significance I didn’t understand at the time, how much would you love me?”

Rett’s heart thudded. His hands suddenly felt heavy in Bryn’s, like he’d never noticed that his hands existed before she’d held them. “I…”

“You know that’s not possible, right?” Bryn tugged his wrists. “Although it’s nice to know you didn’t immediately doubt that I could hold that level of genius.” She gave him a wry smile that he couldn’t return.

“Bryn…” He brushed his thumbs over her palms. “I…” He didn’t know how to say it.

But Bryn seemed to understand. She looked down. “When we first showed up here, I didn’t know if you were here. I was confused, and … I’m glad I’m not alone.”

But it’s not just that, Rett thought. It’s not just that I’m glad I’m not alone. He tried to find a way to say it—

“It’s cold out here,” Bryn said. “And you and I both know there will be a creature heading this way soon. We better go inside.”

Rett nodded. “We need to get the supplies together and get out of here as fast as we can if we want to avoid the bug.”

“We’ll dig up the device one last time, get those codes.” Bryn started up the slope, leaving Rett to feel the cold and darkness in a way he hadn’t before. She stopped to look back at him, a little unsteady on the incline. “And then we go back to our time for the money Scatter owes us. Say the codes out loud. And we’re free.”

Free. The word drummed in Rett’s head.

He wanted to be free of Scatter.

But not of Bryn.

She has someone to go back to, he told himself. Just like you do.

She had said her boyfriend wouldn’t be waiting for her, but would she go look for him? To give him the money she felt she owed him?

“Rett?” She had noticed his hesitation. She stepped back down the incline to take his hand. “At least we’ll be working together this time.”

The weight of cold and darkness lifted a little.

She pulled him up the incline after her.

At the top of the slope, the door to the depot stood cracked open. “Are we sure no one’s here?” Bryn whispered.

“Maybe it’s been open like this for a long time,” Rett answered.

He peered in through the opening. Only darkness.

The edge of the door raked his jumpsuit as he slipped inside. No way a big guy like the one in Scatter Labs could get through an opening this narrow, he thought. If he were here, he’d have opened the door wider than this.

Even so, Rett ducked into the changing room first thing. Bryn crept in after him, and then they were breathing in the dark, waiting for their nerves to calm.

“There’s a fire extinguisher here somewhere,” Bryn whispered. “I can’t see it in the dark.”

Rett furrowed his brow. “Why—”

“It’s our only weapon.”

“Against a possible gun?”

“We need those GPS units,” Bryn said. “And water, and a compass.”

Rett leaned out of the room, straining to hear any sign that they weren’t alone. He took a few timid steps into the corridor. The grit underneath his boots made his footsteps crackle.

“Rett, what are you doing?” Bryn whispered.

Rett could just make out an empty room under a skylight, and an open doorway yawning black at the other end of the depot. “I don’t think anyone’s here,” he said over his shoulder.

Muffled sounds from the closet told him Bryn was putting on boots, and a moment later, she appeared in the corridor with another pair for him.

“Last time, the guy who was here didn’t exactly announce himself,” Bryn said in a low voice.

“What exactly happened last time?” Rett asked.

Bryn fidgeted next to him. “I think he came out of the room at the back of the depot. He pointed the gun at you, made you walk to the depot’s main door.”

She trembled and Rett pressed his shoulder against hers in the dark. “Walking doesn’t sound so bad,” he said. “What else?”

“You both went outside. I grabbed the fire extinguisher, hit him on the head.”

“I thought it would have been more exciting. You sure I didn’t kick him or anything?”

“You felt bad for him after I knocked him out and you tried to pull him back inside.”

Rett shook his head with mock skepticism. “Doesn’t sound like me.” He took a few more steps down the corridor and peered around at the empty space. “I’m pretty sure he’s not here this time.”

Bryn came up and pressed a plastic tube into Rett’s hand. “Then I guess it’s okay if we use this.”

A glow stick. Rett cracked it. “I feel like a superhero with this thing glowing.” He held it out in front of him like a wand. “The Time Master.”

“Great name,” Bryn said flatly.

“How about Clock Breaker?”

“Okay. But the jumpsuit is ruining the effect.”

“Scatter doesn’t issue capes.” Rett swiped the glow stick through the air, illuminating dust and metal. He came to the dark doorway, and his pulse pounded. No one’s here, he told himself. I’d have heard them by now.

The glow stick shook as he held it out in a trembling hand and inched forward.

Its light fell on a familiar desk. And atop the desk, a dark lump.

What is that?

He held his breath, as if that might make him invisible to whatever lurked there.

Inched forward.

The backpack! He let out his breath and scooped up the pack.

“Bryn, I found the pack.”

He turned back to where she waited and passed the pack to her. He couldn’t figure out why she moved so stiffly to take it, why she wasn’t happy to see that the devices and the water pouches were now safely in their possession.

“It wasn’t in the supply room,” she said.

“Why would it be the supply room?”

“Why would it be in the office unless someone—”

The lights came on.

Rett threw his arm over his eyes to shield them from the sudden brightness.

Someone’s here. His heart all but burst from his chest. “He’s in the power supply. We need to seal the doors!”

He wrenched up the wall over the lounge and reached to slap the button on the wall, to set off the chain reaction that would shut all the doors and seal them when the place flooded—seal the power supply where someone must lurk even now.

But Bryn moved to block him from the button. “The GPS units aren’t in the backpack!” She had jerked open the pack and now held it out so he could see: only the water pouches lay inside. “We need them to find Scatter’s device. We can’t flood the place unless we know they’re safe.”

Rett shot to the supply room and stomped on the wall. It lifted and he dove underneath. The sight that greeted him made him pause. No mess of strewn supplies, like last time. Instead, neat rows of equipment sat in organized sets.

Someone came through here. Someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.

One glance told Rett that the GPS units weren’t here. He ducked out of the room.

And lightning went through his heart.

In the dark doorway to the office stood a man in a white jumpsuit with a black Scatter cap, pointing the flare gun at Rett’s chest.

“Wait,” Rett said, as the man lifted the gun. “Wait, don’t shoot.” He was numb all over with fear.

“I wondered if I’d see you here,” the man said.

Rett couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. The man tightened his grip on it, and that’s when Rett noticed something odd: the man’s crooked fingers overlapped. As if his hand had once been broken and never properly healed.

Rett peered at the face under the grimy cap, a leathery face more lined than Rett remembered, but still unmistakable. “Garrick?”

“You shouldn’t be surprised to see me,” Garrick replied, one corner of his mouth lifting in a smug smile. “You told me six years ago that Scatter’s security systems would go offline today. The day of the solar storm.”

Bryn shifted in surprise, and Garrick gave her a fleeting glance. “Figured you’d be here too,” he said.

Rett caught Bryn’s eye. I only told him about the solar storm to warn him away—I didn’t mean to invite him out here. He tried to say it with a look. Bryn seemed more concerned with the flare gun pointing at Rett’s chest. Her gaze darted between it and Garrick’s shadowed face.

“The solar storm was all over the news,” Garrick went on. “They said it’d be the biggest one in decades. And I remembered what you’d told me that day in Scatter Labs. All I had to do was get close to this place and wait for the light show to start. I guess I should thank you.”

I’m not so sure about that, Rett thought, as visions of a bloodless corpse flashed through his head. “You shouldn’t have come here, Garrick. It’s dangerous—”

“I know about the bugs,” Garrick cut in, his hand shaking so that the flare gun trembled. “I worked for Scatter for years collecting meteorites. I lived in this depot.” He gestured with the gun at the wall over the supply room. Rett remembered what he’d found scratched on the wall: G. W. was here.

G. W.

Garrick Ward.

“Can’t say I’m glad to be back,” Garrick said. “I’ll take what I came for and get out of here. In the meantime, I know how to drown any bugs that might wander in. Oh yeah, and I’ve got this.” He twitched the gun upward and then aimed it at Rett’s chest again.

Rett tried to remember to breathe. The flare gun was like a black hole sucking all his attention. He forced himself to think, to look around.

He realized Garrick held a nylon backpack in his other hand, identical to the one Bryn clutched. Rett made a guess about what it held. “You can have whatever you want from this place. Just leave a GPS unit for me and Bryn.”

Garrick lurched forward, and Rett pressed himself back against the wall. “I’m not giving up anything,” Garrick growled. “Scatter owes me. They ruined my life when they hired me to collect those rocks for them. They said it’d be better than enlisting, said the army wouldn’t take me anyway with my hand like it is.” He held the gun up to show his crooked fingers curled around the guard. “It never did heal quite right. I have you to thank for that.”

Rett swallowed. Get him to think about something else. “Scatter ruined your life?”

“I got so sick working out in this wasteland I almost died. Scatter paid me just enough to get treatment. But in the meantime, my sister—” Garrick tightened his grip on the pack. “Everything in this place belongs to me. Got that?” He shook with agitation.

Rett eyed the pack in Garrick’s hand. The GPS units are in there. They must be. “Please, Garrick. My mom’s sick. If I don’t get back to her, she’ll—”

“She’ll what? Die?” Garrick’s gaze turned cold. “And then you’ll be no different from the rest of us who grew up in Walling. Shame.”

Rett felt sick. He needed those devices. And Garrick was going to do everything he could to make sure Rett didn’t get them.

I could start over, try this again. Reach back in time, find that cool, calm place under the stars …

But Garrick would still have the backpack with him in the power supply. If Rett couldn’t get it from him now, he wouldn’t be able to get it from him on another attempt.

He started to shake. I can’t do this. “One GPS unit from your pack. What do you want for one GPS?”

“I want my life back,” Garrick spat. “I want to forget about the things I saw when I was working in this hellscape. I want my sister to…” He dropped his gaze for a moment and Rett almost lunged for the pack, but then Garrick broke free of whatever emotion had seized him. “You think you have anything I want?”

Think. The rock in the power supply, the dark round one veined with silver—“There’s a meteorite here, I can show you where it is.”

“You mean this one?” Garrick dropped the pack to dig a rock out of his pocket. “I found it myself, thanks.”

Rett eyed the pack.

“It’s got some of that alloy,” Garrick went on. “Not enough to be worth much.”

“How about water?” Bryn said from where she stood in the lounge area. “I’ve got eight pouches of it in this pack. You’re gonna need it since there’s no rainwater to come through the trap.”

Rett looked up at the last word. Bryn shot him a meaningful look. We’ve got to trap him so we can get out of here, Rett thought. I know that. But how?

Garrick pulled at the strap of his hydration backpack. “Nice try. Got my own.”

Rett’s chest might burst with his heart racing the way it was. “What do you want, then?”

Garrick didn’t take his gaze off Bryn, but when he next spoke it was clear he spoke to Rett. “I want you to tell Bryn how you got this assignment.”

“What?” Rett said. What’s he talking about?

Garrick smirked. “Tell her why Scatter picked you.”

“They picked me because … because they knew I was desperate, that I need the money. They knew I’d say yes, no matter what.” Bryn already knows that.

Garrick slowly turned to regard Rett with cool indifference. “They picked you … because no one cares if you never come back.”

Rett wiped sweat from his brow. “That’s not true.” My mom …

“Then why have you been in Scatter Labs for the past six years?”

“I haven’t.” Confusion clouded Rett’s brain. “Bryn and I left.”

Garrick cocked his head. “You mean you jumped forward in time.”

“I…” Rett braced himself against the wall, suddenly dizzy. I was in Scatter Labs with Bryn. Now I’m here in the depot. But what happened in between?

“You jumped into some future point in your life,” Garrick said, “but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t live your life in Scatter Labs in the meantime. You might have hit the fast-forward button on your life, but you still lived it.”

A flurry of images went through Rett’s brain: Bryn coming close to kiss him in the hallway of Scatter Labs. The black-clad security guards hurtling toward them. The door shutting on Rett’s room, where he sat alone in the dark.

And now it all came flooding back to him.

He’d lived in Scatter Labs for six years after that kiss. Spent his days hooked up to machines while Dr. Wells studied the interaction of his brain with his mechanism. Spent his nights thinking of Bryn and what he’d do to get her out of that place. They stole moments together in the garden, in the lab rooms; they shared looks in the hallways when security guards marched them past each other. She managed to teach him Morse code so they could use the light switches in their rooms to shine messages into the garden at night. They had a plan: get back to the wasteland, to that dark hollow beneath a sky of endless stars. And it had worked—

Because here they were.

Bryn had kissed Rett in that hallway six years ago, and they’d both left that moment and arrived at a moment beneath the stars.

But Rett also remembered a life lived in between those moments, even if he’d skimmed over it.

Rett clutched his stomach. The strange paradox of it all made him feel sick.

“Remember now?” Garrick let out a small chuckle. “Is it coming back? Time travel isn’t quite what they sold it as, is it? You didn’t jump from one point to another—you rushed through your life, skimmed over it like a bird over water.” He stepped closer. The gun dangled from his loose fist, forgotten for the moment.

Rett slid along the wall, away from Garrick. “I’ve been in Scatter Labs for six years?”

“Yes. And then you left the Labs the same day I did. Dr. Wells drove you out here and dumped you. Got sick of trying to convince you to play the game her way and decided it’d be easier to get rid of you.”

No, that’s not what I remember. Maybe that was the way it had happened before—maybe that’s how he and Bryn had ended up in the wasteland last time.

But this time had been different.

This time, Dr. Wells had started having second thoughts. She’d asked Rett again and again about the future he had visited—the spreading wasteland, the unchecked ruin. Scatter’s mission is to make the future better, she told Rett. We’re going to make things better. But guilt hung like a weight around her neck, bowing her frame, slowing her steps.

Finally, late one night, she’d taken Rett and Bryn from their rooms, smuggled them into her car. I wish I could give you the codes that would turn off your mechanisms forever, she’d told them as the car had hurtled down the interstate in the dark of early morning. But I don’t have access to them. There’s no way Scatter will just let me cut you free after you’ve proven you can visit the future.

They’d reached the wasteland just in time for the solar storm. Rett could still hear the last urgent words she’d said to him before she’d left him and Bryn alone in the starry hollow: I can’t help you. There’s only one way left to do this. You’ll have to find it …

Rett pushed himself away from the wall, though he still felt he might collapse. “It doesn’t matter,” he told Garrick. “When this is over, Bryn and I are going back to when this all started. We’ll leave Scatter Labs for good. Go back to living our own lives.”

Rett looked to Bryn, but she wasn’t standing in the lounge anymore. She had circled behind Garrick, who had forgotten the pack he’d dropped on the floor.

“When what’s all over?” Garrick’s sharp laughter echoed off the walls. “Scatter’s got no use for you anymore. They dumped you out here because they don’t want you. They’re done with you.”

Rett inched back along the wall, drawing Garrick with him.

“They’ve got a hundred other operatives now who can do what you can do,” Garrick said. “Scatter owns Walling Home now. They own all of the boarding facilities. Direct recruitment.”

Rett wavered for a moment, caught in the thought that Scatter was now doing to hundreds of orphans the same thing they’d done to him.

But he couldn’t think about that now.

“We’re not here to do Scatter’s work.” Rett tensed, readying himself.

Garrick smirked at him. “You don’t believe me. So tell me—what are you doing out here?”

“We’ve got our own plans.”

Rett launched himself at Garrick, sending him sprawling back into the lounge area. They fell together onto the metal floor. Rett scrambled to his feet, but Garrick landed a kick on Rett’s ankle. Rett just managed to grab the ladder mounted to the wall to keep himself from going down. He lashed a foot at Garrick and got only air as Garrick recoiled.

The button, Rett thought wildly. He slammed his hand over it. The alarm screamed at Rett to get out before the wall closed, and he found himself tumbling forward, his bones jarring as he hit the metal floor again. Garrick scrambled to follow him, but Rett put his boot to Garrick’s chest and shoved him back.

The wall sealed shut, with Garrick behind it.

Rett lay on the floor a moment, panting, and then the shock of cold water sent him to his feet. Bryn grabbed his arm to help him up. In her other hand, she held the pack Garrick had left on the floor. Mineral-laced water poured past their boots to run out through the cracked-open front door.

“We don’t have long,” Bryn shouted over the noise of the alarm. “Once the water stops, we’ll have maybe ten minutes before that wall opens and lets him out. We need to get the rest of the supplies.”

“What else do we need?” Rett shouted.

“More water, a compass.” Bryn’s face fell. “The shovel! It’s in the power supply room.”

Rett turned to face the door that had shut them out of the back rooms.

Bryn looked from the door to the wall closed over the lounge, which shuddered as if Garrick were pounding on it from the inside. “If we wait for the door to open…”

“Then he’ll get out, too. And he still has the gun.”

“What do we do?”

Rett raked a hand over the back of his neck. “I don’t know.”

“We need to charge the GPS units, too,” Bryn said, nodding at the backpack. “And there are only eight pouches of water in the other backpack. The water spigot’s locked away in the lounge, and anyway we can’t get more water from it until it rains.”

This isn’t going to work, Rett thought.

Bryn looked at him and he knew exactly what she was thinking: We have to start over.

“No.” He shook his head as misery welled up inside him. “I can’t do this again. I can’t—” I can’t face the gun again. He’d barely been able to do it this time.

Bryn slid her arms under his and pulled him close. The feel of her against him dampened his panic. He thought, Have we been missing each other for six years, locked away in separate rooms in Scatter Labs?

Before we found ourselves in that starry hollow, had it been years since I held you?

And when she let go, he thought, It’s always years, always ages. Time always slows when we’re apart.

“Rett,” Bryn said, wonder in her voice. She strode to the front door and traced the logo of overlapping jagged lines on the metal and then the number three inside the circle. “This is Scatter 3—there are other depots.”

A hazy image came to Rett’s mind, a poster of the three depots he’d seen in Scatter Labs.

“There’s another depot along the river—I saw it on a map,” Bryn said. “And it’s closer to the spot where Scatter’s device is buried. We’ll go there, get some more supplies, and head out.”

Rett tried to remember the map she was talking about. But he could only think about how it had felt to have her so close to him. How much he wanted to make sure they could do things right this time. I can’t spend another six years locked away from you.

The lounge wall shuddered again, and Garrick’s muffled shouts followed.

“We have to go. Before that wall unlocks.” Rett hitched the backpack’s strap over his shoulder. Garrick’s going to be angry. He might even come after us.

He slipped the backpack off again.

“What’re you doing?” Bryn asked.

“I’m going to leave him some of the GPS units. I need to put them in a dry spot.” He couldn’t look at her when he said it. Garrick had held a gun on him not moments ago, but Rett needed to do this. “It’s my fault he came out here. It’s because I told him about the solar storm taking out Scatter’s security.” And I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. I don’t know if he’ll even make it out of here alive to sell these GPS units or do whatever he planned to do with the gear in this place.

He went into the supply room and jerked open the pack to dump four of the six GPS units onto the dry counter.

Bryn came in behind him, but she didn’t try to argue. “Let me plug one of these in,” she said, ripping a power cord out of a cabinet. “Just for a minute, just in case.”

Rett started to say that they didn’t have time, but Bryn spoke first.

“Your ankle’s hurt,” she said. “Stop trying to pretend it’s not. You need to wrap it.”

The pain throbbing in Rett’s ankle finally claimed his attention. He’d hardly registered it when Garrick had kicked him, but now he realized his other leg bore all his weight.

He grabbed a first-aid kit from the neat rows on the floor, which were now drenched with water, and sat on the cabinet top to pull off his boot. A minute later, he eased himself back down, ankle wrapped, mind shut to the fear that he wouldn’t be able to get far with his ankle throbbing the way it was.

Bryn transferred the water pouches into the pack they’d taken from Garrick. Then she unplugged two GPS units and slid them in alongside the water. “Is your ankle going to be okay?”

Rett ignored the question. “We need to get out of here.”

They ducked into the main room, where water still poured over the floor. Rett followed the stream to the door.

“Bryn?” Rett turned to see why she hadn’t followed him.

“When he made you go outside last time, something bad happened,” Bryn said, plodding toward him. “Something that erased your memory.” She cupped her hand over his scar in a way that made his heart leap. “What if it happens again?”

“I don’t understand. What happened?”

“I don’t know. Whatever they put in your head went haywire. I think it was because of the solar storm that caused the aurora.”

Rett put his hand over hers. “We were just outside a minute ago. I saw the aurora. Nothing bad happened.”

Bryn shook her head, her face lined with confusion. She pulled her hand away. “But last time … I don’t know. We were scared, is that it? The man had just pointed a gun at you and we were scared.”

“So the solar storm stressed the mechanism in our heads, and then we made it worse with adrenaline. Overloaded it.”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“Well, we can’t stay here. We’ll go out one at a time. Okay?”

Bryn nodded, her face blank but shoulders pulled in tight.

Rett slipped out the front door. The rocks and dirt were blue in the predawn light, the towering buttes cold and distant. A poisoned sea, Rett thought, remembering what he’d told Dr. Wells.

He touched his fingers to his scalp, where he thought he felt a tingle of electricity. “I’m okay,” he called back. “No brain trauma, promise.”

Bryn slid out through the door and stood just outside it, poised for danger.

“You okay?”

She let out a breath and nodded. “Let’s go.” She led the way around to the back of the depot. Here the slope dropped away more steeply, and a wide swath of white water churned at the bottom, catching the brightening light.

“We’ll follow the river north to the second depot,” Bryn said. “Scatter 2.”

Rett settled the pack over his shoulders. “You said you saw the depot on a map?”

Bryn froze midstep. Then just as suddenly, she picked up her pace again.

“What is it?” Rett asked, struggling to keep up, hobbling on his sore ankle.

“Nothing. Just … we need to go fast.”

“Bryn, what’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. Rett caught her arm. Her face was a grim mask as she met his gaze. “Garrick said he came here to scavenge Scatter’s equipment.”

“So?”

“So now he knows where the device is buried. We locked him in the room with the map.”

8:48 A.M.

Rett’s left boot was a vise for his swollen ankle. Every step brought a flash of pain. He leaned on Bryn for support as he limped along, conscious of the dirt and sweat that covered him.

“We should stop for a minute,” Bryn said, easing out from under Rett’s arm. She rummaged in the pack and brought out a tube of painkillers they’d discovered during their last break.

Rett swallowed two of them dry while his gaze flicked toward the top of the ridge where he’d last spotted a scuttling shadow. “We’ve stopped too many times already.”

He didn’t think Bryn had seen what he had. She seemed to believe they’d be okay if she just kept her voice low.

“There’s no water left,” Rett went on. “We need to get to the depot.” The air hung heavy with dust and warmth. The rain had long ago stopped falling. The rush of the river below was maddening. Someone might have left the rain trap open at Scatter 2, Rett told himself. There’ll be more pouches of water anyway. He’d told himself that so many times that the words came automatically now.

He scanned the horizon again.

“You see something I don’t?” Bryn turned to peer in the direction he was looking.

“I’ll feel better when we get inside the depot and close the door behind us.” He kept walking, even though Bryn had stopped, even though his left boot squeezed his swollen ankle.

“You can hardly walk,” Bryn said. “We should rest, just for a minute.”

A shadow moved at the edge of Rett’s vision, but it was gone before he could turn to look. “Maybe you don’t remember what those bugs can do.” The image was sharp in Rett’s mind: a mangled corpse with white, bloodless flesh. And another scene: a dark form lunging for Bryn with serrated mandibles.

“It’s not just the bugs, is it?” Bryn said behind him. “They’re not the only reason we have to hurry.”

Rett turned back to find her worrying at her sleeves, which were still damp from the rain.

“We have to get to Scatter’s device before Garrick does,” she said. “He’s probably heading for it right now. He won’t even bother looting the rest of the depots. Scatter’s device is a thousand times more valuable than GPS units and meteorites.”

“You’re sure it was marked on that map?”

She frowned.

“What?” Rett prompted.

“It’s not exactly labeled on the map. It’s marked with a skull and crossbones. Not what you’d call tempting.”

“Why a skull and crossbones?”

Bryn shook her head. “I don’t know. But he might realize that it marks the spot where Scatter’s device is buried. The guy we met in the depot last time knew Scatter had buried something valuable in the wasteland, so Garrick probably knows, too.”

“So he could already be out there digging it up.” Rett’s stomach twisted.

“The alloy it’s made of is worth a fortune. Garrick will probably break the device apart and sell the metal to the highest bidder.”

“And then we’ll be stuck here.”

The sound of the churning river floated to them from the ravine below. The noise of it mixed with the roar of anxious thoughts in Rett’s head.

“He had only his hydration backpack for water,” Rett said. “Maybe he waited for the rain so he could collect water from the rain trap. He might not even have started out yet. If we get to the other depot, we can get our supplies and beat him out there.”

Bryn glanced at his ankle, and Rett bristled.

“My ankle’s fine,” he lied. “We can do this. We just have to hurry.”

Bryn pulled his arm over her shoulders again and they started off in silence. Rett was happy to concentrate on the dust in his throat, the pain in his ankle. It kept him from darker thoughts.

Then another question came to mind, one that hardly seemed important, almost not worth asking. “Who drew the map in the depot?”

Bryn squinted against the light reflecting on the pale dirt. “It must have been…” Her voice trailed off and Rett could feel her confusion in her bunching shoulders.

“Do you think it was Scatter?” Rett said.

Bryn shook her head. “They wouldn’t have wanted just anyone to find their device. It must have been one of the people they hired to find meteorites years ago. Those workers are the ones who lived in the depots.”

“But how would they have known that Scatter’s device would be buried there?”

His question hung in the air with the dust. Neither of them could answer it.

Another shadow flicked at the edge of Rett’s vision. He turned his head. A bug hunkered on the nearest rise, not five hundred meters away.

“Let’s go faster,” he told Bryn, his mouth dry.

And then—

A jagged shape came into view over the edge of the slope: the depot, Scatter 2.

It was all wrong.

Rett’s breath came in shuddering gasps. “No,” he choked out.

The depot before him was a metal carcass. One wall wrenched outward. A ragged hole in the gaping roof. Rust-colored smears along the edge of the open door. Blood. Rett’s throat constricted.

Bryn scrambled for the door, which hung open at an odd angle. Rett hobbled after her. The smell almost drove him back again. Metal and blood and rotting eggs. It filled Rett’s mouth, left a taste like death.

He pushed himself into the cloying space, his heart flooding with dread. Shafts of sunlight showed the dust in the air, the rust-colored stains on the walls. The bones littering the floor.

Rett nudged a broken rib cage with the toe of his boot. Knelt to inspect it, his legs shaking. Clumps of fur clung to the bones, matted with blood. “Dog.” His gaze met Bryn’s. She trembled.

“They let them loose for the bugs,” she croaked.

She helped Rett to his feet. They crept farther down the corridor, picking over broken skeletons. Rett winced at the snap of bones under his boots.

“What is that?” Rett whispered.

In the main room, a huge papery orb glowed in the sunlight. Not just one orb, Rett realized as he stepped out of the tilted hallway. A dozen thin brown paper shells towered, each almost as tall as he was and each cut open with some jagged tool—the mandibles of a bug. “Eggs,” he said into the quiet space. Some were dusty and ragged. A few, dark and oily. Fresh.

Bryn made a noise behind him. Rett turned to find her gaping at the orbs in horror.

“Something hatched here,” Rett said, nudging aside another dog skeleton with the toe of his boot as lead filled his veins.

“Bugs.” It came out in a whisper. Bryn looked around, and Rett suddenly felt that the creatures that had hatched from the eggs might still be lurking. “We’re in their nest.”

Rett turned and took in the sight of the bloodstained walls, the splintered furniture showing in the open lounge, the cabinets wrenched to pieces in the supply room.

No supplies. No water. The rain trap long ago made useless.

His muscles seemed made of stone. He crept between the eggshells to peer into what had once been the office, his senses alert for any sign of movement. The back wall had been peeled upward and lay curled to the sun. Open to the bugs that were headed their way even now.

He turned back to find Bryn standing frozen in shock. The same thoughts going through her head as through his: There’s nothing here for us. No weapons, no water. And the bugs could be on us at any moment.

“We have to go back,” Rett said. “We have to start over, back at Scatter 3. We have to—”

Bryn fell against him and pressed her lips to his. Heat exploded under Rett’s skin, speared his heart. He put his arms around her but she was already pulling away, and his stomach sank with the realization of why—

“It didn’t work,” she said.

Rett prayed for the pull on his consciousness, the sweep of blackness that meant a return to safety.

It didn’t come, even after Bryn’s adrenaline-inducing kiss.

Rett touched his scar. Why isn’t the mechanism working?

“He dug up the device,” Bryn said, voice trembling. “He must have figured out a way to turn it off. He knows Scatter’s keeping tabs on this place. He doesn’t want to risk the device giving off some signal that it’s been moved.”

Rett’s stomach threatened to send up what little water he’d drunk in the last two hours. Garrick has the device. “We have to get it from him.”

“How? He has what he wants—we’ll never see him again.”

Rett pictured Garrick trudging through the wasteland, hauling the device with him, heading toward whatever break in the perimeter wall had let him into Scatter’s pale desert. Gone forever, the device—and their codes—with him …

“No,” Rett said. “He needs water. He must not have used the rain trap if he’s already hiked to the dig spot. He can’t make it all the way out of here without getting more water first.”

“Do you think he’ll go back to Scatter 3?”

“I don’t think we can make it back there to meet him if he does. We’re out of water. My ankle’s no good. And…” Should he tell her he had spotted bugs not far from here, that he was listening for them even now? Every scrape of their boots over the floor set his nerves aflame.

“Then we have to make him come here.” Bryn fumbled with the backpack and pulled out a GPS unit.

“How?”

Bryn turned on the display and tapped at the screen. “I’ve used units like this one before. We can ping him with our location. And if we do it just right, we can use it like Morse code. We’ll tell him we have water.”

Rett looked at the red light on the GPS unit. Low battery. His chest went tight. “Does he know Morse code?”

“You didn’t hear it? When the other guy banged on the door to get us to let him inside Scatter 3?” She imitated the sound: “Bam-bam-bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam-bam-bam.”

“SOS.” One of the many patterns Bryn had taught him while they’d been locked in Scatter Labs, using the light switches in their rooms to shine messages into the garden at night.

“They probably all learned Morse code,” Bryn said. “Part of their training for defying death by bug and wasteland.”

Rett didn’t tell her what he was thinking: Everybody knows SOS. It doesn’t mean the man knew Morse code. And it doesn’t mean Garrick knows it at all.

He looked out through the curled back wall while Bryn tapped away. The sun beat down on the rocky slope, on the ridges that loomed beyond, ragged and sinister. “They’re coming. I’ve seen them—while we were hiking.”

Bryn twitched toward the doorway. “There’s got to be something here that can help us. Some way to fight off a bug.”

Like what? Rett thought. A row of cabinets still hung in the medical room, but nothing lay inside except the shattered glass that had once fronted the doors. This place is gutted.

“We have one flare in the pack,” he said. “But no gun.”

Bryn had gone to the supply room; he could hear her searching through the splintered remains of the cabinets on the floor. Rett turned to follow, gaze darting from the blood on the walls to the hole in the ceiling, watchful for any sign of danger. A glimmer of silver among the broken glass caught his eye: another of Scatter’s meteorites. Like a charm among the ruins. He pocketed it.

“I found these, at least.” Bryn held up a pair of binoculars. “We can keep lookout.”

“We’ll hide in one of the upper bedrooms and hope Garrick gets here with the gun before any bugs find us. At least if we can convince him we need to save the flares for the bugs, he won’t use the gun on us.”

“But how are we going to get the device from him?”

“We’ll offer a trade. We’ll give him the extra flare if he’ll let us turn on the device and get our codes from it. He’ll need the flare for the bugs if he’s going to get out of here alive.” He picked his way over the littered bones, heading for the ladder that led to an upper room.

“Rett.”

He turned. Bryn made a ghostly figure in the gloom, shrouded in white, standing amid the boneyard. “Do you remember?” she asked. “Living in Scatter Labs? Did it really happen?”

Rett moved to put an arm around her shoulders.

“Six years. We were trapped there for—” Bryn broke off, face lined with misery. Her gaze roved their shattered shelter. “And now—are we ever going to get out of here?”

“We’ll figure it out. We’ll get home.”

She winced at the word home. Neither of them said it: They didn’t have a home to go back to.

Rett half closed his eyes, and for a moment, the sun flooding in through the broken back wall was the early morning light flooding the apartment he shared with his mother. He imagined green leaves brushing window glass, leaves that had eventually turned black on withered branches. He heard his mother’s chiming laugh, felt her fingers ruffle his hair.

She left me, he thought. She left me, and now I’m here.

The papery orbs looming over them gave off a putrid smell that made Rett clamp his sleeve over his mouth and nose.

Bryn had gone for the ladder, and Rett followed her, eager to get away from the smell. Bryn started to climb, but then she turned. “Rett? I remember something. From Scatter Labs.” Her gaze traveled to his abdomen.

He looked down, half expecting to find the red-brown stain of someone else’s blood.

“Comics in your pocket,” Bryn said. “You used to draw them for me.”

Rett’s hand wandered to the pocket of his jumpsuit. He almost thought he’d find Scatter stationery there, covered in sketches of his adventures with Bryn in a quarantine tank, in a haunted warehouse, in a zombie prison. “I remember, too.”

“Is that why you dragged me back out here?” A smile played at the corners of her lips. “Trying to get new material?”

He wondered if when she’d kissed him earlier she’d been thinking only of escape, of triggering the mechanism in his head. “See, that’s the problem. You make me want to draw a thousand comics.”

She reached down and brushed her fingers over the side of his face.

He thought, What a strange place to feel at home.

“Come on,” she said. “We better find a spot to hunker down.”

9:39 A.M.

In the silence of the dim upper room, Rett listened for the sound of claws picking over rocks. Sunlight angled in through a gap in the damaged roof panels. Rett imagined bugs pouring in through the wide crack, scrabbling over the walls, mindless and bloodthirsty …

He huddled farther into the recess of the bunk bed, the only stick of furniture left in the place. The room had been closed off when they’d found it, a panel shut tightly over the ladder. Except for the opening in the ceiling, it seemed a safe place to hide and wait for Garrick.

No place is safe, Rett told himself. Not once those things realize we’re in here.

The bed frame creaked as Bryn shifted on the top bunk, where she was keeping watch through the gap. “Anything?” Rett asked her, his voice tight.

“No.”

Rett pulled his collar away from his throat. “Garrick will come.” Secretly he feared that Garrick had encountered more bugs than he had flares for. We might be stuck here forever, he thought.

Unless we go out there and find him.

He shuddered.

“I hope he makes it here before the bugs do,” Bryn said from above.

Rett shifted, trying to get his injured ankle into a better position on the bed. His hand brushed something half covered by the pillow, and he looked down to find a photo there. He slipped it out and leaned into the light to get a look at it. It showed a woman holding a baby, a family snapshot left behind by one of Scatter’s workers.

Rett stared at it without knowing why he should be interested. It was something new to think about, anyway. Something other than the bugs and his thirst. The woman’s gaze went off to the side, as if Rett didn’t concern her. The baby in her arms was an awkward bundle she seemed ready to shift.

A creak of wood told him Bryn was looking down from the upper bunk. “Where’d you get that?”

Rett flushed, suddenly self-conscious, as if it were his own family photo she was spying on. “It was here.”

“Someone’s family, looks like. Wonder if the worker who left it behind ever made it back to them.”

Rett wondered the same thing. The thought hollowed him out. “I left my mother on her own. Sick, no money, workhouse closing. If I don’t get back, I don’t know what will happen to her.”

He waited for Bryn to say, You will get back. But there was only the creak of the bedframe again.

Rett thought about the wasteland that separated him from his mother. And all the other things that separated them: sickness and poverty and time.

But maybe even more than that had come between them: Maybe she didn’t want him. Didn’t need him the way he needed her. Could that be? Mothers didn’t need their children as much children needed their parents.

Is that true? he asked the photo, silently.

Or why else didn’t you come back for me?

“Bryn?” he said, because she hadn’t spoken in so long. “Do you think there’s a way to prevent the awful things that happened to everyone—the crops dying and people getting sick?”

“If there is, Scatter’s not interested. It’s giving their shadow government a nice excuse to invade other countries for the resources we don’t have.” Bryn was quiet again, maybe listening for the patter of bugs over rocky soil, like Rett was.

“Wells said it’s not possible to go back to a time earlier than when they started implanting mechanisms in people’s heads.”

After a moment, Bryn said, “But don’t you think there must be something Scatter can do to keep it all from getting worse? I bet there are groups out there who could help us come up with something if we shared what we know with them. Dark Window, for one.” Bryn’s voice dropped low. “If we get out of here.”

Rett stood and leaned over the edge of the bunk to take Bryn’s hands. “We’re going to get back. We’re not going to be stuck here.”

Bryn wouldn’t look at him. The light streaming through the broken roof illuminated her face, and still Rett couldn’t read her. He let go of her hands. “I shouldn’t have left those GPS units for Garrick,” he said.

She caught his sleeve. “No, you were right to help him. Scatter hurt him as much as they hurt us. I just wish that helping Garrick didn’t mean screwing us over.”

“We’ll get those codes.”

“And then what?”

“And then we go back, pretend like nothing happened. Let Scatter pay us. Then we run. With those codes we’ll be free from them. I can go back to my mom and you…”

Bryn squinted into the sunlight. “And I don’t have anyone to go back to.”

“Your boyfriend.”

“Don’t you remember what I told you?”

The pain in her voice sparked some memory. “About your boyfriend?” Rett looked away. “How you wouldn’t give him any of those things you stole.”

“I…” She made a quiet sound low in her throat. “I was scared to. I thought he might take everything and disappear.”

“Maybe he would have.”

Bryn didn’t seem to hear him. “I’ve been telling myself that I’ll find him, and that he’ll be happy to see me. But the money won’t be enough, will it? He probably feels the same way I do: it’s better to be on your own.”

“Is that really what you think? That you’d rather be on your own?” Rett reached to touch her arm, but she leaned away.

Bryn dropped her face into her hands. “I keep getting this feeling,” she said, voice muffled. “A premonition. That something is going to happen to one of us, and the other won’t be able to get back.”

Rett started to speak, but Bryn cut him off.

“The mechanisms in our heads are synced.” Bryn lifted her face, her eyes dark with worry. “If one of us dies, the other might be trapped here.”

“We don’t know that.” Rett’s mouth went dry. “And neither of us is going to—”

“We have to get that device turned on. Before something happens that gets us stuck here for good. I might not have anyone to go back to, but your mother’s waiting for you.”

Rett sank away from the bunk. The photo he’d left on the bed caught his eye and his throat went tight.

“Rett?” Bryn slid to the edge of the upper bunk and leaned over him. “She is waiting for you, isn’t she?”

Rett flicked his head to the side, brushing off her question. The air in the close space was stifling. Rett imagined he could still smell the putrid debris downstairs, even with the panel closed over the ladder. “She doesn’t know I’m trying to meet up with her,” he admitted. “She told me I shouldn’t come for her, that I should take care of myself and not think of her.”

He’d sent her those emails—he’d written terrible things: I’m better off without you anyway. Because he’d been angry that she wouldn’t come for him. But after that, he’d told her he was sorry. He’d said he would come for her, no matter how many times she told him not to. He’d said it over and over.

But she’d stopped responding.

Rett moved his hand over his chest, tried to will his heart to calm. His bitterness was like a crazy food for it. The smell of the abandoned eggs below was like the smell of rotting corpses. Rett put a hand over his nose. You’re imagining it, he told himself.

“Rett!” Bryn’s sharp voice pulled Rett out of his thoughts. “Garrick’s out there!”

Rett pulled himself up onto the bunk with shaking arms to look through the broken roof.

“He’s near those boulders,” Bryn said, pointing. “He’s got the device.”

Rett’s heart jumped. He’s here—Bryn’s plan worked.

“He’s stashing it behind some rocks,” Bryn went on. “He’s heading for the depot now.”

“He’s not stupid. He knows we’ll try to take it from him if he brings it in here.”

Bryn lowered the binoculars. “I’m going to go out and get it.” She jumped down from the bunk, and the thump of her boots hitting the floor sent another jolt to Rett’s fluttering heart.

“Bryn…”

Bryn ignored him and kneeled to pull open the trapdoor. “He doesn’t know we’ve seen him hiding it. I’ll go around that ridge while he’s heading here. Just keep him distracted until I can turn on the device and memorize our codes. Then I’ll say the passphrase that will take us out of here.”

“Bryn.”

She paused. “You have a better plan?”

The open trapdoor gave Rett a keyhole glimpse of the chaos below: littered bones and splintered wood. All he could think was, What if we don’t both make it out of here?

I don’t want to go back alone.

Bryn interpreted his silence her own way. She dropped down through the opening and vanished from sight.

Rett grabbed the box with the flare and followed Bryn down. He’d get the gun from Garrick. Then he’d go after Bryn and make sure nothing hurt her.

The sound of Bryn’s boots crunching over bones gave way to scrape of the depot’s door as she headed out into the wasteland. Rett flew to the other end of the depot, where the wall was wrenched upward. Garrick was a dark figure in the distance. If he turned as Bryn ran out to the ridge, he’d see her.

“Garrick!” Rett screamed.

It worked. Garrick turned all his attention to Rett standing under the wretched awning of misshapen metal. He quickened his pace.

Rett drew back into the ruined depot, searching for something to put between himself and the man with the gun. The tilted floor gave him the feeling he was staggering through a demented funhouse.

“No tricks,” Garrick barked as he came close to the opened back of the depot. “I just came for water.”

“There isn’t any.” Rett eased out from behind the rotting orbs, holding the case with the flare out before him. “But I’ve got another flare.”

Garrick stood in the office doorway, gun held out like a talisman more than a threat. His troubled gaze moved over the towering eggs, the debris covering the floor, the smashed furniture. “You can give that flare to me. It’s no use to you without the gun.”

Rett stood close to the cluster of eggs, even as he doubted they’d provide much protection against a flare. “It’d be dangerous to try to get out of this wasteland with only one flare in your gun.”

The gun dipped uncertainly.

“Or maybe you already used a flare,” Rett said. “I bet you ran into a bug at the dig site.”

Garrick didn’t answer, only lowered the gun to his side.

“So that gun’s useless to you now.” Rett stepped away from the eggs, the case holding the last flare still clutched in front of him like a shield. “Might as well give it to me.”

Garrick gave a short laugh. “Why would I do that?”

“Because by now Bryn is at the rocks where you hid the device.” Or anyway, she’s close to there.

Garrick jerked toward the open back of the depot.

“If you want the device back, you better give me the gun,” Rett said. “And you better do it before any bugs get close, or we’re all screwed.”

Garrick swiveled and lunged for Rett. For a moment, Rett was a scrawny kid bracing for a blow he knew he couldn’t fend off.

And then he felt the power in his flexing muscles as he swung his fist. His knuckles glanced off Garrick’s jaw, sending Garrick reeling out of surprise as much as pain. Garrick steadied himself against the wall, hand to his jaw, testing for injury. The crooked joints of his fingers sent a stab of guilt to Rett’s gut.

The distraction was all Garrick needed. He lunged again. Rett stumbled toward the broken cabinets and snatched up a jagged piece of wood for a weapon.

Too late. Garrick had the case, snatched from Rett’s hand.

He opened it and took out the flare. Loaded it into the flare gun while he frowned at the wooden stake Rett held out like a weapon. “I need that device,” Garrick said.

“You can have it when Bryn’s finished with it.” Rett tried to judge whether the end of the wooden stake was sharp enough to cause serious injury. “We just need some information from the display. Then you can have it. Take it out of here and sell it, or whatever you’re going to do.”

“I’m not going to sell it.” Garrick seemed to forget the stake. “You think that’s why I came out here? I heard rumors Scatter’s precious device was buried somewhere in this wasteland. I came to get it. To make a trade.”

A trade?

“Your sister,” Rett said. “She grew up in Walling, too?”

Garrick glared at him. But then he gave a short nod.

Direct recruitment, Rett thought, remembering what Garrick had told him earlier. “And now she’s an operative.”

“I need that device to exchange for my sister. I have to get Cassie away from Scatter.”

Rett looked at the stake in his hand and suddenly felt sick. The crack of breaking knuckles went through his mind, and he felt even sicker. We all just want to get away from Scatter.

Garrick watched Rett drop the stake. He slid the flare gun into his pocket. “We’ll go out there together. You’ll tell Bryn to give me the device. No one’s going to give anyone trouble.”

“Fine.” But we’re going to get our codes from it first.

He edged around Garrick, making for the open back of the depot. “Might want to get that gun out, though. In case there are any bugs around.” He couldn’t believe he was saying it, considering how relieved he’d felt when Garrick had stopped waving the gun at him. But he was more afraid of bugs than of Garrick at this point.

“Wait.” Garrick’s voice trembled.

Rett turned back to find Garrick’s face shadowed with misery. “I saw something on the device’s display. My sister’s name.”

The phrase rang through Rett’s head again: Direct recruitment. His heart sank. Scatter had put Garrick’s sister through the same program he and Bryn had suffered through.

“What does it mean?” Garrick asked. “Why is her name on the screen of Scatter’s device?”

“It means she’s traveling in time. Just like me and Bryn.”

“She…” His face twitched. Rett couldn’t stand to watch him realize the horror of what Scatter had done to his sister. Garrick must have seen, over the past six years, what Rett and Bryn had gone through. At the very least, he had a full view of the scar running along the side of Rett’s head. “She can’t be…” Garrick’s voice hung in the air for a moment, and then he said, “I have to get her out. I promised her.”

His desperation made Rett think of another girl locked in Scatter’s grip, the new operative he’d met in the rec room at Scatter Labs. Bryn and I aren’t the only ones who need to get free.

“I can’t take care of her, I’m too sick,” Garrick said. “I’m—I’m not going to get better. But she has a mother to go back to. Not my mother—Cassie’s my half-sister. It’s too late for me, but Cassie could still go home.”

Rett wrestled with what Garrick had said—He’s sick? He’s not going to get better? An image flashed through his mind, but he couldn’t hold on to it long enough to understand it.

“Some of the names on the screen disappeared while I was looking at it,” Garrick said. “That’s why I turned off the device. I wasn’t sure if—” His face crumpled.

“It doesn’t mean they’re dead,” Rett said quickly. Not necessarily. He couldn’t help but feel pity for Garrick. “It just means they’ve returned back to their origin time.”

Garrick’s eyes flashed. He turned toward the open back of the depot, face lined in thought. “So if I wait until her name disappears from the screen and then destroy the device, she won’t be traveling. She won’t ever travel again.”

Rett jerked forward and grabbed Garrick’s arm. “You can’t do that. Bryn and I will be trapped here.”

Garrick looked at Rett’s hand on his arm, moved his shadowed gaze up to Rett’s face. “Trapped? Like my sister’s trapped now?”

“We can figure out how to—”

“Scatter’s taken everything from me,” Garrick snarled. “For once, I’m taking something back from them.”

Then he yanked free from Rett’s grasp and hurtled through the ruined back of the depot.

Rett ran after him.

The sloping landscape was an ocean of dirt, the ridges colliding at angles like storm-tossed waves. The glare of sunlight on the pale rocks blinded him as he staggered for the boulders where Bryn was hiding with the device.

She has to have gotten the codes by now, he thought. Say the words that’ll get us out of here, Bryn!

Would she even be able to do it? It seemed to them both that Rett had been the one pulling them through time when they did so. He was the one who could grab on to that starry hollow, those thoughts of home, and of wishing things better.

Could Bryn do it? By now, could she figure out how on her own? If so, she only has to say the words and pull us both out of here.

But as he drew close to hiding spot, he saw why she hadn’t yet finished the job.

Bryn stood atop the largest boulder, staring down at a monstrous bug picking its way up the side of the rock.

“Garrick, shoot it!” Rett cried.

Garrick stood still as a stone just a few meters ahead of Rett, transfixed by the sight of the bug.

“Shoot!” Rett cried again, and this time his voice called Garrick out of his shock.

Garrick aimed the gun—

A second dark mass darted out from behind another boulder and eclipsed Garrick before Rett could call out.

Garrick screamed as giant mandibles locked around him. His shot went high, the blue flare exploding in the air over their heads.

He screamed again.

Rett scrambled away, searching madly for some rock large enough to fight off the bug that was attacking Garrick. But then Garrick was silent, and Rett knew it was too late to help him.

Bryn! Rett picked up a rock—too small, he knew, but there was nothing else. He hurled it at the bug climbing Bryn’s boulder.

But Bryn had done better. He saw that she had pried a piece of the boulder away from its crumbling top, and now she dropped it onto the creature. There was a wet crack, and then the bug lay shuddering in the dirt, a spiky black mass soon veiled by a cloud of dust.

The second bug scuttled away from the reverberations, heavy with the blood it had feasted on, and crept toward the depot in the distance. Garrick lay sprawled in the dirt, dead. Rett scrambled away from the gruesome sight, his stomach lurching, his chest caving under the weight of pity and regret.

“Bryn.”

She stumbled toward him, scraped and bloody from climbing down from the rocks, and he wrapped his arms around her.

“The device is over here,” she said, and broke away to pull him into the shelter of the towering boulders.

Rett knelt near the bulky block of Scatter’s device. The brittle hinges creaked as he opened the lid. The screen underneath was dark, powered off. Rett fumbled for a power button and finally found a slide-away panel covering a switch. “Here goes.” He flipped the switch and the box seemed to hum under his fingers as the screen glowed to life.

Bryn, crouching in the dirt next to him, put a hand over her stomach.

“You okay?” Rett asked her, but he realized that underneath the shock and pain and adrenaline, he also felt a pang of nausea that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “It’s the device—I felt this way last time, when we were digging it up.”

“I did, too. Maybe it’s the signal this thing is giving out?” The list of names and numbers on the screen claimed all of Rett’s attention now. “So many Wards.” He ran his finger over the list. “All kids who went straight from Walling to working on assignments for Scatter.”

A fresh wave of nausea seized Rett. “Because of us,” he realized. “Because I gave Scatter the coordinates that proved I could travel through time. And then they had six years to study my brain and work out how I’d done it.”

Bryn touched his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know what you were doing when you gave them those coordinates.”

Rett scanned the list again. “One of these is Garrick’s sister. That’s why he came out here—to try to use this device to bargain with Scatter. Scatter’s using her for an assignment.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Bryn said, and her hand on Rett’s shoulder trembled.

Rett put his arm around her waist. “Let’s move away from the device for a minute.”

“We need our codes. We have to memorize them.”

Rett found his and Bryn’s names on the list and read the codes silently, trying to score them into his mind. The nausea made it hard to concentrate. “I wish we had some water.”

Bryn turned and lifted something from the dirt: Garrick’s hydration backpack. “There’s a little in here. Not much.”

Rett reached for the pack—and then stopped with his hand halfway to it.

Garrick had used a chalky rock to draw a map on the pack, complete with the skull and crossbones marking the former location of the device.

“Skull and crossbones,” Rett murmured to himself. “Poison.”

“Rett?”

Rett’s hand shook as he traced the symbol. This is what I thought of back there in Scatter 2 and couldn’t quite grasp. “What if the workers Scatter hired to find the meteorites drew that map in the Scatter 3 depot after all? They drew this symbol because they realized that this certain spot in the wasteland was making them sick. They didn’t know about Scatter’s device; they didn’t know it was sending signals through time. They only knew something was making them sick, and they wanted to warn each other.”

Bryn was silent. She leaned against the side of a boulder as if she needed to steady herself.

Rett turned to her, his head full of lightning-hot ideas. “Garrick said he got sick working out here.”

“But that was from whatever went wrong with government’s experiment. Whatever made this wasteland. Not from the device’s signals.”

The lightning spread through Rett’s veins. “Bryn…” The whole of the surrounding wasteland seemed to press in on him, the weight of crumbling canyons, the stench of poisoned rivers. Is it true…? Is it possible it wasn’t some experiment that caused all of this after all?

Rett finally managed to say the words: “The signals from the device created the wasteland.”

Now he felt sicker than ever. He touched the device. The strange silvery metal was safe enough—he’d handled the meteorites without a twinge of sickness. But the signal the device gave off—that was a different story. He imagined it pulsing through him, and it was all he could do not to empty his stomach into the dirt.

“Scatter didn’t bury their device in a wasteland to keep it safe,” he said. “Their device caused the wasteland. Or at least the signals from it did. Scatter said the signal can reach into the past, to a time even before the device was created. To a time even before the meteor shower that provided the metal this thing is made from. It spread and spread, poisoned our food, made everyone sick. It wasn’t some ecological experiment that did that. The signals from this device started it all, and it’s getting worse.”

He expected Bryn to argue with him. Tell me I’m wrong, he thought. And he couldn’t even figure out why he wanted to be wrong, until—

“Then we have to destroy the device,” Bryn said, her voice hollow.

Rett turned sharply. “We’d never be able to go back. We’d be stuck here.”

“You can go back,” Bryn said, her gaze trained on the dirt. “I’ll stay and destroy the device.”

Her words were a vise tightening around his lungs. “No. I’m not going to do that.” Rett gripped her hand and tried to fight off the horrible hot feeling smothering him.

“I told you already,” Bryn said, pulling free and kneeling at the device. “I have no one to go back to. You do. If only one of us gets out of this, I want it to be you.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Rett scanned the boulders, the rocky crawl of dirt, the distant horizon, searching for some way out of this. There’s always something. The static-and-boil sound of the distant river called to him. “The river—we’ll throw the device in just as we say the passphrase. We’ll both get home, and Scatter’s device will be destroyed. They won’t even know exactly what we’ve done. They won’t know pieces of their device are being eaten away by corrosive water until it’s too late to get all those pieces back.”

Bryn trailed her fingers over the device’s display, her expression uncertain.

“We’re both going back, Bryn.”

In the silence that followed, Rett thought he could hear a faint echo from the flare Garrick had shot still reverberating in the hollows of the wasteland.

Then he realized it was the sound of a helicopter’s blades cutting the heavy air. He looked up. A dark smudge showed against the bright sky.

“They saw the flare,” Rett said. “They’re coming for us.”

Bryn followed his gaze, her face lined with dread.

Rett lifted the device from the dirt. The lid fell away, its brittle hinges finally breaking.

“Rett, what’re you doing?”

“We’re going back,” he said, his voice grating against his ragged throat. “I’m going to say the passphrase right as I smash the device, and you and I are going back.”

He ran.

The broken-glass sound of the rushing river met him. Rett stopped at the edge of the cliff, the device cradled in his tired arms, and looked down at the white water running in a wide swath below. He lifted the device, ready to smash it on the rocky side of the ravine, ready to make Scatter’s invention disappear forever in the wild currents of the river.

But something stopped him: a cold, trickling realization.

He slowly lowered the device. Dropped to his knees with it in his hands.

“Rett?” Bryn said breathlessly behind him.

“It won’t work,” he said, so exhausted with the weight of disappointment that he felt he might tumble forward, into the river. “If either of us goes back to the past, it’ll be like rewinding time. The device won’t be destroyed anymore.”

Bryn sank down next to him.

“Haven’t we come to this wasteland over and over again?” Rett said. “And every time, don’t we find a different future? Not completely different. We find the same depot, same supplies. And a scavenger, someone who always shows up to take what we most need. Someone who…” A lurch of deep regret. “Someone who—no matter how we try to help—always ends up dead.”

Bryn trailed her fingers down his arm and slipped her hand into his.

“But still,” Rett went on, “every time we go to the past, we reset the future. If we destroy the device now and go back to the past, the device will still be built, will still send out its poisonous signals. We won’t have destroyed it.”

The distant beat of helicopter blades grew louder now, competing with the churn of the river for Rett’s attention. “It won’t work.”

Bryn squeezed his hand and then slipped her fingers free. “So we’ll both go back,” she said. “We’ll go back to Scatter Labs, six years in the past. And you’ll get out, like we talked about. Go back to your mom. Say the code that’ll kill the mechanism in your head—”

What is she saying? “Bryn—”

“And I’ll come here alone. After you’re safe in the past, I’ll come here and destroy the device.”

“No. You can’t do that.” Rett gripped her wrist like she might vanish right before him. “You don’t know if you’d even be able to get here to the wasteland on your own to destroy the device.”

Bryn lifted her eyebrows. “You don’t think I can manage it? How about we put some money on that bet?” She nudged his shoulder, but he didn’t much feel like joking around. He leaned closer, pressing his arm against hers.

“There has to be another way,” Rett said.

“There is no other way.” Bryn leaned her forehead against his. “I have to come back here on my own. You have to stay in the past. You have someone to go back to—I don’t.”

“You have me.”

Bryn brushed her lips against his, and it was all he could do to stay rooted in the moment.

“You’ll go back to your mom,” Bryn said. “Then, six years later, you’ll come find me. You’ll help me get out of this place. Okay? Hey, maybe that’s you in the helicopter.” She put her hand on the side of his face. “I can picture you stealing a helicopter.”

The device’s display flickered at the corner of Rett’s vision. He pulled back to look at the names blinking on and off the screen—operatives moving into and out of the field. Time traveling, and returning home to their own times.

His gaze snagged on a name: Cassie Ward.

Garrick’s sister.

“I have to get her out,” Garrick had said. “I promised her.”

Rett sank. Sank like the dirt could turn into lightless ocean depths and let him go on sinking forever. She promised, but she never came back for me. My mother never came back.

He curled his fingers underneath the device. Anger and grief roiled in his veins, churning like the water below.

“She never came,” he said to the hot, nerveless air. “She took everything from me when she left me.” His anger crested like a wave and he shuddered with the pain of it. “Took everything I needed, because I just needed her.”

Bryn wrapped an arm around his shoulders but he shrugged her off.

“I want to go back,” he said. “Just once, I want to have what I need.”

“We’ll go back. You can go back.”

The blinking display called Rett’s attention. Flashing names—appearing, disappearing.

So many Wards.

Scatter took everything from them, too.

And I was going to smash the device and leave them stranded. They would never have gotten home to their own times.

They’d be like me, no home to go to. No one to care for them. No one to care for.

He thought of Garrick’s sister, and the mother who waited for her. The brother who had died trying to save her.

He thought of his own mother, who had never come for him. Who wouldn’t even answer his frantic messages. Who had been silent for …

Years.

Not just since he’d gone to Scatter Labs. Before.

Before he’d ever gotten the offer to leave Walling. Before he’d asked if he could leave the facility early.

Before any of this had started, he hadn’t heard from his mother in …

Three years.

The putrid smell of the rotting eggs came back to him, pushed on the wind whipped up by the helicopter blades.

No, he was imagining it.

Because he knew.

He knew why his mother had gone silent. Knew why she had never come for him.

He knew what had happened to her. And he knew that it had happened a long time ago.

The names flickered. Blinked onto the screen, blinked off. Suddenly there was a moment when all the Wards, except for Rett and Bryn, vanished from the screen. When all the children Scatter had taken from Walling were home in their own times.

Rett flipped the power off.

Ensuring that all those Wards were safe.

Safe until the device turned back on.

But it never would turn back on—

Rett swung the device, smashing it down onto the cliff’s edge. Splinters of silvery metal exploded outward, flashing in the sun. A mass of sun-brightened wires erupted from the metal casing. The box hit the rocks again, tumbled and spun, a bundle unraveling. A moment later, all vanished beneath the churning surface of the river, lost forever in the currents.

Rett felt Bryn at his back. He turned and fell wearily against her, almost surprised to find her in his arms. His voice came out ragged in the wind that buffeted them: “We can’t go back.” And then, with a sob, “She’s dead. My mother’s dead.”

10:12 A.M.

The square building that made up Scatter’s outpost seemed mostly to be an excuse for the helipad on the roof. The helicopter pilot and a man in another Scatter uniform led Rett and Bryn down into the dust-muted building and ordered them into a pair of folding chairs facing a metal desk. The pilot pushed paper cups of water into their hands and leaned against the desk to inspect her guests (—prisoners? Rett wondered). The pilot’s face was brown with dirt and sun, eyes puckered as if with surprise at this sudden break from boredom. Her partner, the one who had earlier directed them into the helicopter, stood swaying in the doorway as if he might run back up to the roof the moment another flare went up. Both wore black uniforms with Scatter’s logo showing in white.

Sunlight struggled in through the dust-coated windows. Beyond, the wasteland fell away in every direction, so that Rett felt as if he were still riding in the sky above it. His cup was empty already. The pilot took it and Bryn’s empty cup and refilled them at a cooler.

“You said you shot that flare? Just the two of you?” She held the cups out of their reach. Her uniform was rumpled, the cuffs frayed—a change from the pressed uniforms and starched lab coats of Scatter’s past.

“Just the two of us,” Rett agreed, glancing at Bryn. The pilot and her uniformed friend hadn’t seen Garrick’s body. The less they knew, the better.

The pilot handed over the cups of water. Rett drained his immediately and the woman refilled it again while Rett tried to figure out why her first question hadn’t been, What the hell were you doing in the middle of our wasteland and how did you get past our walls?

The other uniformed man fidgeted in the doorway, biting his nails.

“Found the flare gun in the depot?” the pilot asked.

Rett nodded. Bryn tried to shake the last drops of water from her cup into her mouth.

The pilot settled against the desk but her feet wouldn’t stop moving, scraping over the gritty floor with nervous energy. “People try to sneak in here from time to time. See what we’ve gotten hidden away.” She gestured toward the windows. “Lots of dirt.”

The pilot’s eyes flicked from Rett to Bryn, waiting for some cue. “Against the law to get anywhere near this place. Serious business.”

She’s not angry, Rett thought. She knows we wouldn’t break into this wasteland without more supplies than we’ve got on us. She knows something’s up.

“Got those clothes from the depot?” the pilot asked Bryn.

“Flare gun, too,” added the man in the doorway, earning a glare from the pilot.

“We’ve established that,” the pilot said.

But did the flare gun come from the depot? Rett wondered. They’d gotten it from Garrick. He stole a quick glance at the man in the doorway, whose nervousness was written all over his face. What’s he so nervous about?

“Take off your boot and Sanders will have a look at your ankle,” the pilot told Rett. “Nasty limp you got.”

“I already wrapped it,” Rett said.

“All right. We got some painkillers here—Sanders, go get those.”

Sanders disappeared from the doorway and then reappeared with two white pills for Rett. Rett swallowed them without hesitation, draining the last of the water in his cup.

“How about you?” the pilot asked Bryn. “Could swear I saw you limping, too.”

Bryn tucked her feet under her chair. “I’m fine.”

The pilot studied her for a moment, then Rett. “I’ve seen my share of strange things around here. Never thought I’d see Scatter’s own operatives.”

Rett felt the hard pills stick somewhere in his chest. He stopped breathing.

“You get lost somewhere along the way?” the pilot asked. “Don’t think you’re supposed to be out here, are you?”

Bryn lowered her head to look at Rett from out of the corner of her eye. Rett glanced at her, tried to breathe.

“You got stuck here?” the pilot asked. “Had to shoot off a flare for us to get you? What happened?”

Rett stared into his empty cup.

“The mechanisms in our heads malfunctioned,” Bryn said.

It wasn’t exactly a lie, even if it wasn’t the reason they couldn’t get back. They’d never get back now, with Scatter’s device smashed and swirling in the river currents. These two didn’t seem to know what Rett had done to the device, though.

The pilot moved her tongue along her teeth, thinking. “That kind of thing happened a lot in the early days. When they were still working out the bugs.”

Rett flinched at the last word. The pilot didn’t notice.

“Hell if I’ll ever let them try to put one of those things in my head.” The pilot looked to Sanders for confirmation, but the man only stared out the window, his face pinched.

“Lucky you’ve never been desperate enough to have to,” Bryn said under her breath. Rett reached for her hand and squeezed it.

“Network’s been down all day,” the pilot said, oblivious to Bryn’s annoyance. “Solar storm. The sun’s been pushing huge flares our way, scrambling signals and putting satellites offline. Never thought you could see an aurora this far south, but it was showing half the night. I’ll try again to connect to the system, ask HQ what to do with the two of you.”

She straightened. Rett studied the floor so his nerves wouldn’t show.

“If your”—The pilot gestured at her head—mechanism—“isn’t working, looks like you might be stuck here. Won’t be able to send you back to your own time. Can’t guess it matters much, though. Isn’t that why they use orphans? Won’t matter to you which place you’re stuck in.”

Rett’s anger flared, but he kept his mouth shut. The pilot waited a moment for an answer she realized she wouldn’t get, and then she went out through the doorway opposite Sanders.

Sanders jumped to refill Rett’s and Bryn’s cups again, then hovered as if expecting something in exchange. Rett thought he knew what Sanders wanted.

“He’s dead,” Rett told him.

“What?”

“The man you were waiting for,” Rett said. “The one who shot the flare. Garrick. The bugs got him.” Rett’s stomach twisted. As much as I hated Garrick, he didn’t deserve that.

Sanders froze, alarm showing on his face.

“He told us he had a contact,” Rett explained. “Someone who helped him get in here? Someone who was going to help him get out?”

Sanders shot across to the other doorway and peered through it, anxious to make sure the pilot hadn’t overheard them. Bryn caught Rett’s eye, and he could see that he’d surprised her.

Sanders turned back. “He was just a scavenger,” he said in a strained voice that made Rett wonder if he were lying or just nervous. “Just wanted some of Scatter’s old stuff. I didn’t see any harm in letting him take it.”

“You mean, for a price.” Rett dug something out of his pocket and held it out on his palm: a small, dark rock, marbled with more silver than any of the other meteorites Rett had seen in the wasteland. He thought it must be worth a fortune. “Did he promise to give you some of his loot? Any rocks like these that he might find? He said the alloy inside it is worth a lot of money. What will you do for us if I give it to you?”

Sanders glanced through the doorway again, then darted toward Rett like he meant to snatch the rock. “What were you doing at the depot?” he said in a low tone, ignoring the rock.

“I told you, our mechanisms—”

“Did Wells send you here?”

Rett blinked at him in surprise.

“She did, didn’t she?” Sanders bit a thumbnail. “Some of us, we’ve seen what Scatter can do, and we don’t like it.” His gaze shifted to the wasteland outside the window. “But you can’t take down a goliath like Scatter without first finding a chink in its armor.”

Rett’s thoughts buzzed. A distant memory floated to mind: Wells, sorry at last for the part she had played in their misery. She’d driven them to wasteland, left them in the starry hollow. There’s only one way left to do this. You’ll have to find it …

“Scatter’s armor is gone,” Rett told Sanders, and pictured silver shards swirling in river currents.

Sanders stared at him for a long moment. He pushed away the hand that held the rock out to him. “There’s a boat. Half a mile south. You can ride the river out, the wall doesn’t go across it. Cameras might be out, too, because of the solar storm. So you don’t even have to wait for nightfall.” He glanced at the door the pilot had gone through, and then smiled at Rett and Bryn as if they were sharing a joke. “Better go now. Won’t it be a surprise that you two have vanished? Like those mechanisms in your heads just decided to send you off to who knows where?”

That’s not how it works, Rett thought. But if he and the pilot didn’t know, Rett wasn’t going to tell them. It was as good a story as they were going to get, and it might just be enough to keep the pilot from looking for them.

Rett jammed the rock back into his pocket and pulled Bryn up as Sanders slid a window open for them. “There’s water and ration bars in the boat,” Saunders told them. He grabbed Rett’s arm. “Don’t tell anyone I did this.”

Rett nodded. He and Bryn climbed out into the sunlight, sending up dust when they landed. They skidded down the embankment toward the wet dirt along the river.

“Stay close to the embankment,” Bryn said. “Maybe it’ll cut off the view from the windows, and the pilot won’t see us.”

She pulled his arm around her shoulders so he could lean on her while they walked. They turned along the bend of a river, and the boat came into view in the distance, humped with the supplies Sanders had mentioned. Drinking water, food. Rett felt properly hungry. The churn of nausea and dread had finally calmed.

“Scatter will find out, sooner or later, what we did,” Bryn said. “Let’s hope that by then, everyone who’s working against Scatter is ready to deal the final blow.”

The clouds moving behind the distant ridges left streaks like white flags, like banners. Rett stopped to admire the sight. “It’s over. The wasteland, its poison. It won’t spread anymore.”

He pulled the rock out of his pocket. The sun flashed on veins of silver. “I bet I know a conspiracy theory website that will want a look at this.”

“Dark Window?” Bryn stopped in surprise. “Nice of you to join in my hobbies.”

“We’ve got enough people taking Scatter down from the inside. Maybe this will take them down from the outside.”

“The rock that kills Goliath? I like it. But right now I just want to get down that river, find the interstate, and get as far from this place as possible.”

“Maybe if we write to Walling they’ll send us a bus ticket,” Rett joked.

In answer, Bryn leaned down to reach into her boot. When she straightened, she had in her hand a thick shard of silvery metal. “It came off the device when you smashed it on the rocks. I hid it in my boot when they were coming for us.”

Rett stared, transfixed by the shine of the metal. “It’s got to be worth thousands.”

She held it out to him. “We’ll find out.”

He slipped it out of her hand to marvel at it, bright against the dirt of his palm.

“I want to share it with you,” Bryn said. Her eyes were gray, shadowed with uncertainty.

Uncertain about what? Rett wondered. That we’ll be okay? Or that I want to be with her?

He leaned close and kissed her. She kissed him back. It came with the same jolt of electricity it had last time, but this time Rett knew for sure she didn’t do it for any reason other than that she wanted to.

He broke away, shot through with a feeling too close to the panic he had felt at Scatter 2. When those two dark hungry shapes had loomed. When he had held that device over the sharp canyon rocks and had forever destroyed his chance of going home.

“All those kids are safe now,” he said, as much to himself as to Bryn. “Scatter can’t make them time travel anymore. They can go back to their families.”

His voice caught on the last word.

Bryn circled his waist with her arm. “That’s all thanks to you.”

“Thanks to both of us.” Rett managed a smile that must have looked awful on his weary, dirt-streaked face. “Anyway, it felt good to smash something.”

Bryn smiled back, and Rett’s heart fluttered. So rare, that smile.

He leaned on Bryn and they made for the boat, the sky overhead stretching endlessly in every direction, bright ocean blue.