I TRY TO BE succinct.
Tell Kyung about my loving husband, Paul, appearing one day at Hanover.
It’s fair to say her mind is blown.
The shocked and, for once, silent Kyung listens as I unspool the details: the slow spiral down into the depths of regression and muffled despair in Sherman’s Unit as the doctor tried to remold me. Then I tell her about Paul bringing me “home” and all that followed, ending with this: “My ‘husband,’ Paul, in ’54—it’s Stokes.”
Kyung’s gone almost as pale as Ethan, her eyes now making twitchy little movements back and forth as she takes it all in. “Jesus,” she says, and puts her arms around me. Her movements are tentative, a little clumsy. Comforting each other is clearly not a thing we do—which makes her awkward gesture all the more powerful.
So, of course, the tears start.
I wipe them away with the sleeve of my sweater, while Kyung begins parsing out all the implications of my news. That the Tabula Rasa didn’t just confiscate the machine as forbidden tech, that they’ve been using it with the forced labor of Gideon and the other prisoners. “So, shortly after they invaded and took over the lab, Kameron Rook and Stokes learned about the mission—and your memory loss—in ’54, and forced Gideon and the others to send Stokes back in the machine, posing as your husband,” she says as she starts to cut away Ethan’s shirt with the scissors. She looks up at me. “So, Kameron Rook wants Mary Pell’s viral sample.”
The two of us say nothing, dumbstruck by all the implications and our own conjecture.
But our shell shock is soon interrupted by Ethan. “No! Don’t, Kyung!” my brother cries weakly. He’s only semilucid, batting away Kyung’s scissors while pleading with her. “Don’t ask her to do it … Bix can’t be your guinea pig…” he says before slipping deeper into unconsciousness. I take his blood pressure. It’s just slightly lower. Still stable.
“Why did I volunteer to be your guinea pig in that iffy machine?” I ask Kyung. She doesn’t answer. “Kyung, cut the crap,” I say, and at last she relents.
“When you returned to Georgetown, you were dead set on opting out.”
Opting out—what that ginger selling his death pills called suicide. So I did intend to kill myself. Before my quarter hour. Before time travel. It’s why suicide felt so believable in Sherman’s office that first day.
“Why did I want to die when I got back here from Baltimore last July?” I ask.
“Not July. You didn’t return till this March.”
“I was gone a year? Where the hell was I?”
She shakes her head. “Don’t know. All you told me when you got back was that you intended to surrender to the Tabula Rasa. Which would’ve been pointless. They’d have killed you—very painfully—and it wouldn’t have changed a thing. But once you heard about the mission, you decided that risking a long-shot trip in the machine—”
“Was a far more meaningful way to end things,” I say, and she shrugs. I chose death by time machine. “You still haven’t told me why I wanted to die. Pretty sure conning a couple of grifters in Baltimore wasn’t keeping me up at night,” I say, then catch her eyes flicking back to the dead Sub-Zero and its photos.
When I start to walk over to it, Kyung tries to stop me. “You need to get your gloves on, Bix…”
But I ignore her, eyes busy scanning the haphazard keepsakes and photos of my forgotten past for whatever Kyung was looking at.
Then I spot it, a printout of a selfie. In it are four people: Me, Stokes, Kameron Rook, and a boy on the brink of his teens. Shit-eating grins on all our faces, beers in our hands. Not the kid. The kid’s drinking a Coke. Behind us are the familiar trees and far wall of the quarry.
This was taken that same day at the quarry.
And my true north memory floods back into my mind:
My feet feel wonderfully warm. The late afternoon sun has baked the rock we’re standing on. Below us is the quarry, filled with deep emerald-green water.
Stokes, behind me, is kissing my shoulder. I pull his hand to my lips and kiss the crescent-moon scar on his palm.
“Ew, gross!” I hear the boy exclaim, before breaking into those familiar peals of laughter.
Stokes tugs on my earlobe, and I turn to face him. “Next time we go naked, in front of both of them,” he says, winking at someone, then tilts my chin up, and we kiss.
“No!!!” the boy shouts at this newest PDA assault on his senses, then giggles again. I turn to the boy, sitting on a nearby log, sipping his Coke. The kid grins at me, his toothy smile beaming from a sun-kissed face unspoiled as yet by adolescent hormones—and I’m awash with the same feeling of boundless love I’ve experienced with this memory these last few weeks.
It was for this kid—the love I thought all this time was for Stokes. My time travel–damaged brain conflating and confusing the two.
How colossally messed up is that?
Arms wrap around both Stokes and my shoulders. They belong to Kameron Rook, now standing in between us. “Yes. Must we watch while you two make a lunch of yourselves? At least spare the boy!” Rook says, running his fingers through his hair as he winks at me. He opens three bottles of deliciously cold beer and hands one to each of us. We clink them together and are taking our first pulls when a Reckoner approaches on the path.
It’s Green Hat, the one who shot Ethan. “Brother Kameron, Brother Stokes,” he calls to them, and the men leave to speak with him.
I sit down on the log next to the boy, keeping one eye on the men.
“Tomorrow, can you teach me how to shoot?” the boy asks me.
I muss his curly golden-brown hair. I can feel a certain desperation in my gesture, like I’m trying to ward off his looming adulthood. “Not yet,” I say. “You’re too young to be pulling a trigger.”
“You said that last month.”
“Because it was also true last month,” I say, smiling, then steal another glance at the three men talking. Green Hat is handing Rook some papers. He glances briefly at them before slipping them in his back pocket—
I bring the photo over to Kyung, now swabbing Ethan’s chest with Betadine. She’s not happy to see that picture. “Tell me about this photo. Who’s the kid?”
“This is not the time to get into this—”
“Stop fucking with me, Kyung. Just tell me who the kid is!”
She frowns. “Kameron Rook’s little brother, Theo.” Theo.
The name makes the hair on my arms stand up. “We were going to tell you everything, once your mission in ’54 was over. Given the state you were in, all that you’ve been through, we just didn’t know if you could handle it and still carry out the mission, get the information from Mary Pell in time—”
“What exactly is the it that you don’t think I can handle, Kyung?”
Kyung can’t meet my gaze, eyes going anywhere to avoid me. And when they finally alight on my brother lying in front of us, she gasps. “Shit. Bix!” she says, scrambling to pump up the blood pressure cuff.
I look down and see what she’s talking about. The veins on my brother’s neck are now distended, his ghostly white forehead clammy, his lips bluish. It’s a tension pneumothorax: air is escaping from the hole in his lung into the chest cavity, crowding his heart and damaged lung.
“His BP’s down to sixty-eight over forty!” she says. “Heart rate’s one thirty.”
Fuck.
“Bix, do something!”
I grab a pair of surgical gloves, snap them on, and pray that forcing a chest tube into your brother without puncturing anything vital is also just like riding a bike.
I breathe deep and let my hands take the lead, counting Ethan’s ribs as I feel my way down his side. I stop at his fifth, take the scalpel Kyung is holding out to me, and make a small cut through the layers of skin, muscle, and sinew above the rib. Then I swap the scalpel for a pair of surgical scissors Kyung is offering, slide them into the incision.
Don’t know how I know to do it. Like hot-wiring a car, handling a balisong, or shooting a pistol, I just do.
When I open up the scissors in the incision to widen it, the sound of air escaping the cavity accompanies the sight of blood gushing out onto the counter, my sweater, and then down onto the floor. It looks bad, but there’s also an audible change in Ethan’s breathing. Longer, deeper breaths. So, I think that’s good. I hope that’s good. I gingerly probe the hole I’ve made in Ethan with my finger till I reach his pleural cavity. He’ll need the tube, or the pressure will build back up.
Maybe I can actually do this. Save Ethan … from an injury he wouldn’t have if I’d just taken the damn shot.
Just don’t make the same mistake again.
I grab a clamp and tubing, about to feed it into the incision, when I feel it. The slightest hint of buzz in my toes.
That can’t be right.
I’m so tired, it’s got to be my imagination.
But when I glance at the chandelier above, each of its lights has a rainbow halo. No, no, no!
“Kyung, it’s happening!”
She looks up from the bloody battleground of Ethan’s chest. Immediately sees it in my eyes. “Shhit!” Her hands dive into my pockets, frantically searching.
“But I’ve got the link,” I say. “This shouldn’t be—”
Kyung’s hand emerges with the link, now glowing blue. “Someone set it to auto return after one hour,” she says. “Which is—”
“Now.” Dorothy and her sticky fingers must’ve reprogrammed the thing. “How can we stop it?”
But Kyung’s expression as she shoves the link back in my pocket says it all: nothing can be done.
Because I’ve felt the vibrations. I’m past the fail-safe. Going to travel—and with a battery at close to zero. Will I make it to 1954, or be lost somewhere in between?
And what about Ethan?
“Kyung, douse your hands!”
She immediately understands. Pours some moonshine over them. “Tell me what to do.”
The roar is building fast now.
There’s no more time. I grab her gloved finger and push it into the incision. “Feel it? The pleural cavity?”
She nods, and I place the clamped tube in her other hand. “Don’t screw it up,” I say, and kiss my brother’s forehead as the roar rips me away.