AND NOW I have a new choice.
New Bix lets this guy go. Keeps her clean slate, her second chance. Her potential for a life with Worthy.
But what about the person whose name is on the scrap of streamer? Stokes will come back to 1954, torture the rat virus sample out of them, then return to 2035 triumphant. And if we’re lucky, very, very lucky, and the nerds can somehow manage to construct a cure, Kameron will decide who lives and who dies. Absolute power.
Then Stokes will move on to hunting down my remaining loved ones. I believe him on this point.
I don’t realize I’ve made the decision till I’m already charging at him. I thrust the switchblade into his side, as deep as it’ll go. A wound to the gut is surely fatal in 2035.
Stokes’s eyes flare wide for a moment with pain. Shock.
But then he smiles. “There she is. There’s the Beatrix I know. Welcome back, darling.”
I hold tight to the knife and shove Stokes out the window.
His eyes stay on me as he plunges to the frozen ground—
But right before impact, he blinks out of sight, disappears from 1954. Poof. Gone.
The only proof he was ever here—that I killed him—is the dripping knife in my hand.
I shove it in my pocket. Wipe my shaking hands on the uniform.
I’m aware of distant footsteps getting closer, but it’s like it’s happening in some other reality. Not this one where I just killed a guy.
New Bix just killed a guy.
You killed him for a reason. Don’t make it for nothing. Go. Get out of there with what you came for—
The name.
I grab the gun off the floor, add it to the growing arsenal in the front pocket of my nurse’s uniform, then clamber down the metal ladder and out of the noisy clockworks room.
I fly down the narrow tower stairs, taking them three at a time, then sprint down the hallway, through the door, and have just started down the grand, caged stairs—
When I hear someone charging up the steps from two floors below me. I edge to the banister fencing and peer down. See through the mesh an arm in a white doctor’s coat, using the railing to propel himself powerfully upward.
Not a doctor. This can only be one person: Coal-Eyes. About to intercept me. Shit.
In the dwindling seconds before he clears the third floor, I look madly around for somewhere to hide. But there is nothing.
Fuck.
I duck back through the fourth-floor hallway door. Flatten myself into the corner behind it moments before it slams open and Coal-Eyes charges down the hall. Once he disappears into the tower, I slip back out and bound, as quietly as I can, down the steps, not stopping till I reach the bottom.
When I ease open the stairwell door, I’m half expecting Hanover’s entire staff to be waiting in the lobby for me.
But it’s still empty—though shouts echoing through nearby halls are growing louder. I’m heading for the front door when I spy a familiar gray flannel overcoat hanging on a nearby coatrack. Stokes’s coat. Sherman must’ve met him here in the lobby when he arrived earlier, bloodied and full of his woeful tale of a broken wife. I can see a spot of blood on the collar.
I grab the coat, then throw open the still-unlocked main entrance doors and sprint down the big steps out onto the snowy grounds.
It isn’t till I’ve rounded the men’s wing and am almost to the fence that I see the flashlights, hear the distant voices of staff beginning to fan out over the frozen expanse.
Keep going. Get to the fence.
It’s just like I remember it from November: chain-link, about ten feet high, topped with coiled barbed wire. I throw Stokes’s coat around my neck, then take a running jump at it. My pointy loafers help, their narrow toes fitting deep enough in the diamonds of fence wire to get a foothold. Momentum and some serious scrambling get me inches from the top—where I spread the coat over the barbed wire and drag myself over to the other side, then yank the coat free and jump to the snowy ground. I take a last look back through the fence at Hanover as I put Stokes’s coat on. More flashlights now. One surely belongs to Coal Eyes. And another to Gibbs. She’s probably already perfected her story of the crazed ex-Unit patient attacking Mary Droesch in the showers.
I scramble down the hill to the road below. It’s deserted, just woods on the other side. I hide myself in a clump of bushes, shiver, wait—and hope that Joe, whoever he is, will be here soon. Before the search parties. The police.
Worthy.
I know he’ll have been monitoring the police radio for any signs of trouble at Hanover. That was part of the plan. Has he heard? Have they even notified the sheriff’s department?
We had an arrangement: if I escaped, I’d find a way back to the Rosslyn Motor Inn and he’d meet me there with my link.
A pair of headlights soon appears, belonging to an ancient truck coming slowly down the road. As it approaches, I recognize Joe in the driver’s seat.
I run out of the bushes into the icy road, waving my hands, and he comes to a stop. When I open the passenger door, a rattled-looking Joe takes my medical file, lying open on the passenger seat, and closes it. I can see his hands shaking as he slides it onto the floor. The last half hour has taken its toll on the custodian. I don’t think the guy’s cut out for this kind of activity.
“Thank God! Do you know how many times I’ve circled this stretch of road? Where on Earth have you been? Get in,” he says. I take a seat, and the custodian tears out of there—as much as an ancient truck can tear. He looks over at me. “So, were you able to get it from her, in the dining room? I couldn’t tell.”
“Get what?” I ask.
“What we’ve both been pursuing. The name of Mary Pell’s contact.”
Like a shot, the bloody knife is out of my pocket and up against his neck. The truck veers wildly back and forth before Joe manages to put on the brakes.
“Who are you? Tell me now!” I yell.
Joe eyes me nervously as he slowly unbuttons his cuff and rolls up his shirtsleeve. Then he turns his hand over, revealing a scar like mine on his wrist. I lower the knife.
“You came here in the time machine, too?”
“I invented the thing,” he says, and holds out his hand. “Dr. Cyrus Corbett. Pleasure.”
The asshole inventor with all the rules and the password-protected code? That tracks. I shake his hand. “Bix Parrish.”
“I know,” he says, and looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. I guess that makes two of us.
“I did get the name from Mary,” I say, then gesture to the road, “so, we should probably…”
“Right you are,” he says, and we continue down the road.
I clock Cyrus’s gray hairs, his wrinkles. “You’re at least forty. You’d be dead in the future. How could you have come from there?”
“I’m from the future. Just not 2035. I’m from the year 2025,” he says, then his eyes spot the brand-new stains on my nurse’s uniform under the coat. “Is … is that blood?” he asks, and I nod. “Whose?”
“Mary Pell’s. I tried to save her, but everything seemed to work against me. Maybe she was always going to die, no matter what I did. Maybe the universe is always going to self-correct and we can’t change anything that’s going to happen. To Mary. To those women still trapped in Sherman’s Unit. To the human race…”
Cyrus stops at the intersection we’ve reached. “Not so. The man pretending to be your husband, he’s changed plenty. Just ask the actual Paul Frasier.” So Stokes did kill the real Paul Frasier. “It seems we can affect things. At least some things … Alter someone’s fate. I already have,” he says, looking at me, serious as pox.
I’m about to ask what he means when we hear a siren growing louder. Behind us the road is empty and dark. But red lights are emerging from the thick veil of snow to our right: a patrol car speeding toward us. Its left blinker is on and as it slows down to make the turn onto our road, I see Worthy at the wheel, his eyes laser-focused ahead. My heart starts beating like a drum at the sight of him.
I remember sitting in the car with him this morning, which feels like years ago, just before I reentered Hanover, kissing him, imagining our possible life together after all of this was done. Barbecuing hamburgers, him in the obnoxious apron, me with the tall glasses of lemonade.
But now I have thoughts … hopes … fears for another future:
This one with Ethan alive—saved by Kyung that day in my house.
And my twin is old, his face blessed with wrinkles that crinkle in the corners of his eyes when he smiles. Some bits of gray have begun to appear in his hair and there’s just the barest beginnings of a middle-aged paunch to his belly. The two of us are sitting on a couch, surrounded by friends and family. And laughter. Even Gideon, now portly and bald, is laughing.
A little boy with Ethan’s floppy hair runs up and jumps into my brother’s lap as everyone begins singing “Happy Birthday to You.” Kyung, long silver hair woven into a single braid, wedding ring on her finger, approaches us carrying a cake with two lit candles. She places it on the table in front of us. Large, sloppy letters of icing spell out Happy Fortieth.
A future where life contains more than mere survival.
I remember waking that November day on the patient bus, looking out the window at that fence of spears passing by, not a clue who I was, why I was there. My purpose.
I’m still not sure who exactly I am. Where Old Bix and the voice leave off and I begin. Or end.
But I do know my purpose: get hold of Mary’s sample and the promise it holds of a long, full life for all of us. Give mankind back the gift of time, paunches, and wrinkles. Of children and the promise of rekindling civilization from its still-glowing embers.
Will I be able to pull it off? Find Mary’s friend before Stokes’s replacement can? Get the sample to the future and find a way to deal with Kameron Rook? Don’t know. But I am sure of one thing now: Kyung was right. It’s going to require my old skills, my old proclivities.
By the time it’s all over, will I be back where I started? Reversion to the mean … to Old Bix?
Worthy turns onto our road and Cyrus gets a look at him. “Hey, that’s your deputy friend. He dropped you off at Hanover—so he was in on your scheme?”
I nod.
“Then shouldn’t I flag him down?”
It would be so easy. Lean on Cyrus’s horn, get Worthy’s attention. The three of us could get out of here, start making plans for how to approach Mary’s friend, how to steer clear of Gibbs and Coal-Eyes.
Then I look down at the bloody front of my nurse’s whites. The knife still gripped in my hand. Worthy deserves more than Old Bix. Deserves more than joining the list of my loved ones on the Tabula Rasa’s radar. I need to do what you do for the people you love … or could have loved: protect them. Protect Worthy.
And not just from Stokes and the Tabula Rasa.
From me.
“No,” I say. “Go right.”
Cyrus stays in the car while I quickly slip around to the back of the house and lift up the pot near the door where Worthy showed me the spare key. I make my way through the laundry room to the kitchen—this place where I imagined my afterlife with Worthy.
I grab the link off the windowsill, then pull the folded note addressed to Worthy I wrote from my pocket. Put it on the yellow table, then head out the door.
I think Worthy will understand the choice I’ve made to keep him safe. He won’t like it, but he’ll understand it.
At least I hope so.