I can feel something—someone—pinching my nose, forcing air into my mouth. I feel my chest rise with someone else’s breath, I feel my ribs pushed down under someone else’s hands.
• • •
It’s foggy, and I’m alone. The timestream has been a tapestry, spreading out like a blanket over the world, but it’s not that way now.
Right now, it is only two threads, hanging limply in my hands.
• • •
“We’re losing him!” a voice shouts. Someone cuts my T-shirt right in half and pulls it apart, all the way down to the hem. Something sticky is pressed onto my skin.
I hear sounds in the dense fogginess of this world where I exist now. A heart monitor, drowning out all other noise.
Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .
• • •
Two threads.
Two choices.
• • •
A radio crackles. They’re taking me to a hospital. I can feel the needles in my arm and hand. I can hear the first responders talking in hushed voices. The Doctor is here. He’s telling them I don’t have any allergies, he’s calling my parents on his cell phone. Please, he says, please save him.
• • •
I see the girl. I know her immediately.
She’s not tall, but she’s not short. Average. Her hair is to her shoulders, her face is round, her hips are round, her arms long and straight at her sides. Her eyes search mine, a question there, suspended over their brown depths.
She is at the end of one of the threads in front of me.
She does not flicker this time.
She does not disappear.
She is not tantalizingly out of reach.
Instead, she steps forward, her fingers trailing along the thread leading to her. She’s barefoot and silent, her steps like a dance.
• • •
On the other thread, there is a sound.
Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .
• • •
I know what two threads mean.
Other people may not see their choices, but I do. I see the threads of fate. I control them. I have two threads in my hand. All I have to do is let go of one and hold on to the other. The one I keep will become my reality, the only truth I know. The one I let go of will be nothing more than a faded dream, an opportunity I never took.
Time is giving me a choice between which reality I want to live.
I look down at my hands.
In my left hand is the red thread connecting me to Sofía. If I choose that life, I have powers. I have adventure. And I have Sofía.
In my right hand is the black thread connecting me to the sound of my heartbeat. To the Doctor. To Berkshire. To Phoebe and my family. To Ryan and a world where I’m sick, where I don’t know who to trust, where my life is hollow and bitter.
But it’s still my life.
• • •
And it’s still my choice.