“THIS WAY. NOW,” Kofi says, and the three of us follow him up the last couple steps, then off the path to an alcove hidden behind overgrown bushes under the staircase of a nearby building.
The ground inside the alcove is strewn with random items left behind by previous tenants: a couple cans of peaches, a dirty blanket, a stuffed bear.
I peer through the bushes and thirty seconds later see the Reckoners reach the top of the steps. There are four of them, all armed and wearing leather jackets, each with a different image painted on the back: a dove, a hammer, a flame, a tree.
They look rattled. Scraps of conversation come over one of their walkies: “Negative. Not in the woods…” One of the Reckoners gestures for the others to follow, and they move on.
“What now?” Ethan whispers to Kofi.
“I’ll go find out what the security situation is up ahead. Stay here,” Kofi says.
Once Kofi leaves, I turn to Ethan and Kyung, whisper, “You were at the part where you sent me to 1954 because of an item in a tabloid. Keep going.”
“Actually, the NSA in 2025 took the Weekly World Post piece quite seriously,” Kyung says. “Searched the government’s deepest vaults for anything connected to the rat virus or Project Gambit.”
“What did they find?” I ask.
“A brief mention of the project in a redacted report and a requisition sheet for it with the whistleblower’s signature—proof Project Gambit existed, and the whistleblower was a part of it.”
“And the samples?” I ask.
“None—of the rat virus or its killer spawn,” Ethan says.
“But, you see,” Kyung says, “in 1954, those samples still existed, along with the whistleblower who knew of their location. So we used the time machine to send you to just outside of Hanover in ’54, but the glitch screwed up the landing coordinates.”
“And I ended up on a patient bus.”
She nods. “Pretty much killed the plan for you to secure a job as a nurse at Hanover, then find a way to contact Dr. Pell in the Unit.”
“Pell, that’s the name of the doctor?” I ask.
“Yes,” Kyung says.
Could Pell have been that coal-eyed doctor I saw in the Unit? I can’t remember ever hearing his name. Once I get back to ’54 I’ll find where he lives, go to his house, and convince the shrink to reveal the location of the sample. “How did a Hanover psychiatrist end up with the whistleblower’s virus sample, anyway?” I ask.
They’re both staring at me, incredulous.
“Dr. Pell wasn’t a psychiatrist at Hanover,” Ethan says. “She was a patient there. She was the whistleblower.”
The doctor was a patient? And a she?
I’m floored by the lazy-ass, sexist assumptions my 1950s-addled mind has been making.
“Here’s a picture of her,” Kyung says, and hands me a black-and-white photo. A still of the same woman walking down the street in the video clip that played on the tiny LCD inside my wrist. And for the first time, I can clearly see her face.
It’s Mary.
All that time, and the motherfucking mission was right in the next bed. “Dr. Pell is Mary Droesch?”
“Droesch, yes,” Kyung says. “For a time she was married to a man named Stanley Droesch.” The philandering ex-husband Mary talked about. Figures Hanover would admit her under his name.
“Shortly after the article came out,” Ethan says, “Mary Pell was arrested—”
“—on a trumped-up charge of assaulting a coworker she’d supposedly become obsessed with,” I say, finishing his sentence. “She was soon declared insane and committed to the Unit at Hanover. Mary told me.”
The nerds break into hopeful grins. “You two have spoken!” Ethan whispers excitedly.
I think about Mary saving me from electrocution by soup, about those evenings she coached me during the night nurse’s smoke breaks, somehow managing to teach me in those slivers of time how to fake a seizure to get myself out of the Unit. Who knows where I’d be now if Mary hadn’t intervened. Dead? Overtreated? Still being repatterned to Sherman and Paul’s liking? Have spoken doesn’t quite cover it.
“We know Dr. Sherman’s research was covertly funded by the CIA,” Kyung says, “part of their MKUltra project to identify procedures and drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people, force their confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.”
Ethan examines a can of tomato sauce he’s pulled from a pile in the corner. “So Dr. Pell presumably underwent enhanced interrogation.”
By the people Mary said really ran the place … That panic I felt seeing a man on TV who looked like the coal-eyed doctor from the Unit—I thought it was my illness causing it, making me worry over not completing my “fictional” mission. But maybe there was a different reason for it: maybe the coal-eyed doctor was a CIA agent. One of my interrogators. Mary’s as well.
All Mary’s talk about the mysterious “them” framing her to get her sent off to Hanover, her pretend catatonia to avoid any more of “their” questions—I dismissed it as just the crazed behavior of a paranoiac, when all along she was the sanest among us. What a little shit I was. “Mary was definitely interrogated,” I say. “By the CIA, I think. She told me ‘agents,’ so at least two. I think one was posing as a doctor.”
“Okay, so definitely steer clear of them when you return to ’54,” Kyung says. Sure, no problem, Kyung. “But you’ve got to get Mary Pell to give you the name of the person she entrusted with the viral sample before the night of December twenty-ninth.”
“But that’s tomorrow!”
“It’s all the time you have left,” Kyung says.
“But we’re rolling in time—we’ve got a time machine! Give me a do-over. Have the machine send me back a few days earlier—”
“Can’t,” she says. “Password-protected code Dr. Corbett installed in the machine prevents anyone from traveling back any earlier than November twelfth, 1954. It also won’t send a person back further than the most recent moment in the past they occupied. No do-overs.”
Dr. Corbett, what an asshole. “Why the deadline of the twenty-ninth?”
“Dr. Pell dies that night,” Kyung says.
“Mary dies?… How?”
“According to her death certificate, she slipped and fell in the shower the evening of December twenty-ninth. Died of a cerebral contusion.”
“No. There’s got to be a way to stop that from happening,” I say. “I could warn her. Better yet, I could find a way to get her out of Hanover. She could help from outside—”
“You cannot save Pell!” Kyung whisper-shouts. “It could have a profound effect on the fabric of our timeline—”
But Ethan shushes us—there are footsteps. Close. The three of us flatten against the wall. I grab a can of peaches from the pile. Hold it overhead, waiting. Someone steps through the entrance and I start to bring the can down.
Kofi stops it inches from his skull. “We’ve got a problem.”