“GRAB HER! TRY to hold her down,” someone whispers. A hand clamps over my mouth and suddenly I’m on the ground. More hands and body parts quickly lock me down, like at Hanover—only now it’s Kyung doing the gagging. And astride me, like a cowboy on a roped calf, is Ethan, his Arctic Monkeys hoodie close enough that I can make out the tiny cracks in its fading decal.
I see trees high above Kyung and Ethan—we’re in the woods again, in the middle of a thicket of overgrown bushes and trees. But this time there is daylight.
Nearby I spot a familiar beech tree charred and split by lightning, and I know exactly which woods these are: Glover Park, a narrow ribbon of woods, miles long but barely a thousand feet wide, that runs alongside Georgetown University all the way down to the Potomac.
Both nerds keep checking the trees. Something’s got them spooked. Kyung brings a finger to her lips.
I nod, and the two release me. As Ethan helps me up, he says softly, “You need to know you’re not Dorothy Frasier. Your real name is—”
“Bix, short for Beatrix, Parrish. I know now,” I whisper back, and pull up my sleeve, show them my freshly restitched wrist.
Grins appear on their faces, and without warning Ethan’s ambushing me with a hug. “Thank God!” he says, pouring all his words and raw emotions into my shoulder. “Jeez, you’re so thin!” he says, and the intensity of this stranger’s concern—it’s all too much. I push him away, and now he and Kyung are eyeing me with fresh concern.
“Are you … all right?” Ethan asks softly. “We know about Sherman’s research in the Unit. What you’ve been going through there.” The guy knows jack shit. “It’s okay. You can trust me, Bix.”
Can I? Trust a twin brother I remember less than Paul?
And look how that turned out.
I’ve currently had my fill of loved ones foisted on me, demanding my affection. My faith.
“Here,” Ethan says, offering me a protein bar. “A time jump does a number on the metabolism. Quickens the appetite.” He does not lie. I barely get the wrapper off before I’m shoving the thing in my mouth. It’s a little chewy but edible.
While I’m wolfing it down, I notice Kyung watching me. Observing. Like Sherman, she’s on the lookout for any chinks in my mental armor. Can’t really blame her. She’s seen me at my worst in those quick trips I made here weeks ago. Probably thinking I might not be all there. She’s in need of reassurance. I pull the link from my pocket to show I got it back, made the trip here of my own volition, and now relief floods even Kyung’s face.
“Your battery symbol’s flashing. Almost at zero,” Ethan says. “You’re lucky you made it back here, didn’t end up lost somewhere in between.”
That’s a possibility? To be lost in between?
“Now that you’ve got the link back,” Kyung says, “and we know you’re not suddenly going to wink out of here, we’ve got time. We’ll recharge it as soon as we reach safety.” She starts to shove the black lunch box–looking object I saw on my last jump here into her backpack.
“What is that?” I ask Ethan.
“We call it the football,” Ethan answers. “It’s a remote beacon that lets us recapture you or some other traveler outside the lab.”
“Why would you need to do that?” I ask Ethan.
Kyung answers instead. “It’s just good to have the flexibility.”
“Speaking of other travelers. There’s something important I need to tell you as well, about what’s happened in ’54—” I start to say.
“You can tell us all about it later. When we get to a safe—”
A twig snaps somewhere in the woods nearby, and the nerds’ eyes flick nervously to the trees again. “What’s out there?” I whisper, but before either can answer, a guy in a hoodie emerges silently from the thick undergrowth. He’s Black, no more than twenty, lean but built. Slung over his shoulder is a backpack—
And a semiautomatic rifle.
I grab the hunting knife from Kyung’s belt and push her and Ethan back, brandishing the blade at the armed man-boy in a woefully outgunned attempt at defense.
“Fuhhhhck,” he whispers, lowering his gun and watching me. “Nerds weren’t kidding, you really are wiped. Bix, it’s me. Kofi.”
“It’s okay, Bix,” Kyung says, nervously eyeing her knife in my hands. “Kofi’s one of your men.”
“My men? Why do I have men?” I ask, handing Kyung back her knife.
“From what’s left of the Child’s Army,” Kofi says, his eyes continuously sweeping the area as he speaks.
What’s left of it? Is the Child’s Army some kind of failed weekend warrior group? An unpopular militia? Maybe I was just some crazed doomsday prepper whose boasts about drinking her own urine and refusal to share her Bisquick drove all the others away. Would explain some of my skills.
“Those Reckoners’ll be doubling back soon, so we need to get moving,” Kofi says. “We’ll use the woods then skirt along the border of campus to avoid them. Once we’ve gotten past campus, we can cut over to the safe house.”
“What are ‘Reckoners’?” I ask.
Kofi opens his mouth to answer, but Kyung beats him to it. “Shouldn’t we be going, Kofi?” He nods but he’s clearly pissed at Kyung. Interesting. “When we get to the safe house, we’ll explain things, Bix. And you can tell us your news.”
She’s right. I’ve got the link now. I’m not going anywhere. Neither are they. My news about Paul, a fake husband I somehow knew here in 2035, is big, full of implications and unanswered questions—like how the hell was Paul able to send himself back to ’54 in the nerds’ machine right under their noses? And why?
It’s way too much to unpack while being chased through the woods by an unknown enemy. My news will need some quiet and calm to digest.
“Can you run?” Kofi asks me, and I nod. “Then let’s go,” he says, and the four of us take off through the woods.
It must be April or May. The leaves on the trees still have that bright yellow-green of new growth, and the place is teeming with wildlife. A wild turkey mother and her chicks scurry right across our path, fearless.
Glover Park is shaped like a cattle chute—and we’re the cattle. As we head south down it, I steal an occasional glance behind me for any signs of the mysterious Reckoners but see nothing.
Soon we’re coming up on Reservoir Road, an east-west connector on the northern end of Georgetown University’s medical complex that bisects the park. It could use some repaving; I can see weeds sprouting through cracks in its asphalt here and there. We pause a moment behind the cover of bushes just short of the road while Kofi scopes out the trail on the far side of it that winds through a field of shoulder-high grass.
Reservoir Road is oddly devoid of cars—but not people. In the distance to our left, a steady trickle of them is crossing the road like army ants on the march.
“Who are they?” I ask, and swear I see odd looks passing between Ethan, Kyung, and Kofi. Or maybe I’m just imagining it, my mind still in paranoia overdrive after those last tense hours in 1954.
“They’re members of the Tabula Rasa,” Ethan finally replies.
Tabula Rasa. I remember the name from earlier trips here. “The religious cult?” I ask, and feel Kyung’s eyes on me, once again observing.
Ethan nods. “They’re cutting through the med complex to get to campus for a gathering on Healy Lawn. They call it a Reclamation.”
“The Reckoners chasing us are the Tabula Rasa’s security guys,” Kofi says, “there to ‘protect’ the Tabula Rasa flock from its enemies.”
“Us?”
He nods. “They almost caught these two earlier,” Kofi says, pointing at Kyung and Ethan. “But I got them away, and now the goons are combing the area.”
Suddenly there’s a whoosh in the air: a dozen birds taking flight from somewhere deep in the woods we’ve just come from. Something’s disturbed them.
Kofi and I look at each other. “Time to go,” I say.
“This way,” he says, and the four of us streak across the dusty road and lose ourselves in the tall grass.
Minutes later, we’ve climbed a wooded embankment out of Glover Park, up to a narrow drive that skirts the backside of the Georgetown Medical Center—
Or what remains of it. The buildings near us have been torched recently, their brick outer structures still standing but their insides all blackened and hollow. None of the charred ruins have been fenced off yet.
As we jog south down the drive, I spot an old face mask on the ground. Then another one, and another, more and more till we’re walking over dozens littering the drive. And not just masks. All around us lie the faded pastel remains of discarded PPE and surgical gloves. Whole piles of them have been blown by the wind up against a giant white medical tent we’re approaching. The tent looks like it’s been set up for patient overflow but the thing is empty except for a few stripped-down cots, some abandoned equipment, and more discarded PPE.
I see a squirrel jump onto the branch of a tree that is literally growing up through the inside of one of the charred buildings. That tree is at least five years old. These aren’t freshly gutted buildings awaiting safety fencing and demolition. They’ve simply been abandoned.
“What the fuck has happened here? Where are they, all the doctors, nurses, patients?” I ask, and everyone halts. “And the police—why aren’t they out arresting those Tabula Rasa thugs? I’m sure the cops have their hands full dealing with all the issues caused by the Guest, but they should at least be—”
“You haven’t told her?” Kofi asks Ethan and Kyung.
“We thought she knew,” Ethan says, and Kyung nods.
“Know what?” I ask, and feel a sickening dread spreading through me at just how grim the answer will be. Could Sherman have been right? That my subconscious has played a role in my memory block, protecting me from bad news with its shoddy recall.
“There are no cops, Bix,” Kofi says. “Not anymore.”
“Why? What happened?” I ask.
“The Guest happened,” Kyung says.
“Come, we’ll show you. Up ahead,” Ethan says, and the four of us jog down the drive, picking our way through heaving chunks of pavement overrun with trees and shoulder-high grass growing right through them. A wall we pass is covered with graffiti, phrases like: “the Chosen shall inherit,” “#TabulaRasa4life,” “New Covenant= Salvation,” “#Timeoftesting,” “Areyouworthy?” And a final one someone’s tried to get rid of: “the TR should STFU.”
Soon we reach the end of the driveway near the observatory and I get my first look at Georgetown’s campus. It’s in worse shape than the medical center. Ivy, sprouting up through cracks in the pavement, has overtaken it. Most buildings, even the burned-out ruins, are covered in the vegetation. They look like enormous chia pets, and I can’t take my eyes off the sight till Ethan calls to me.
He and the others are gathered around a woman seated on the bench. As I approach them, a foul stench hits me.
“This is the Guest,” Kofi says, and steps aside, allowing me to see the woman. She’s dead. And it wasn’t a good death: pale skin covered in pocks, eyes open wide, bright red with blown capillaries. The blood around her mouth hints at last moments spent in a battle for oxygen. A fly lands near a pink mark on her neck that resembles a hickey, crawls over it, then up her jaw and into her mouth.
Without warning, the remains of Worthy’s meatloaf and Ethan’s protein bar come hurtling upward.
I finish puking and straighten up to find the others eyeing me with an odd mix of shock and dismay. Ethan hands me a water bottle, and as I rinse out my mouth I’m mulling which of the fifty or so questions piled up in my brain to ask first—but then I hear the sound of an engine. It’s coming from the thick, overgrown hedges encircling nearby Cooper Field.
The smell of more death is overwhelming by the time I reach a break in the hedge. The artificial turf of Georgetown’s football field has been rolled back like a sardine can lid, revealing the bare ground beneath it, now studded with dozens of fifteen-by-thirty-foot mounds and one open pit. A dump truck backs up to the pit, and a boy holding a pole waits as it tilts and releases its load.
At first I don’t realize what it is I’m seeing fall from the truck. Or I don’t want to realize.
Bodies. At least a couple dozen drop into the pit. They don’t lie neatly. Don’t behave. Rigored arms and legs stick out, akimbo, in whatever position they landed. The boy’s been tasked with smoothing out the pile and prods a body poking up too high with his pole till it slides to the bottom.
There must be thousands buried here.
Crows fly out a broken window of Kennedy Hall at the far end of the gridiron graveyard. One bird peels away from the group, swoops down, and lands on the pile. Begins to walk over the bodies till the boy shoos him away with his pole.
It’s a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life.
“Newcastle Virus was the Guest’s official name,” says Ethan, now at my elbow. “Named for the Seattle suburb where it first appeared in early December of 2025.”
Kyung joins us at the hedge break. “Nobody knew where it came from. It was like no virus scientists had ever seen.”
“All over the world, they scrambled to understand it enough to develop a vaccine or treatment,” Ethan says. “But the Guest was too fast. Within weeks it was everywhere. It spread through the air, so it was off-the-charts contagious.”
“Airborne?” My body instinctively backs away from the field. “We were inches from that woman. Unmasked! We’ve all been exposed—”
“You don’t need to worry about catching it,” Kyung says.
“I don’t? Why?” I ask her.
“You’re already infected.”