THIRTY-FOUR

The seconds moved with slow-ticking fury as David watched the last two Gothams stagger toward the exit. While his maimed right hand felt light enough to float away, his other wrist was burdened with a .40 caliber pistol and a vintage silver watch. It had been forty-four ticks since Rebel’s last gunshot echoed through the eastern arch, ample time for David to envision all the worst scenarios. The thought of Mia with a bullet in her eye—just one shade darker than the current reality—made his gun arm twitch with a vicious life of its own. Tick, tick, tick.

The hands on his watch hit 11:57 when he leapt out from behind his pillar and summoned a line of ghostly duplicates. Eight Davids aimed their pistols in synch, speaking with one firm voice.

“Stop.”

Rebel and Ivy turned around at the portal, freezing at the sight of the one-man posse just forty feet away. Ivy jumped in front of her husband.

“Don’t shoot us! We’re leaving! We’re going!”

“Try it,” David hissed. “See how well that works for you.”

Sixty feet above, Amanda wrung her fingers in screaming tension. Just let them go, David. You’ll get yourself killed!

Rebel dropped his empty gun and heel-kicked it through the portal. He tried to speak but could only groan a pained garble.

The eight Davids cocked their heads. “I’m sorry. Was that English?”

“He can’t talk,” Ivy explained. “Look at him.”

“Yes. I can see someone already had their fun with him. What’s he trying to say?”

“He’s asking you to let me go.”

“Does he expect me to believe you’re innocent in all this?”

“No. But our child is. Look at me.”

David narrowed his cool blue eyes at her bulging stomach. “What’s your name?”

“Krista.”

He raised his gun. “Try again.”

“Ivy! My name’s Ivy!”

“Well, Ivy, tell me something. Why should I care about the innocent lives in your family when you clearly don’t care about the innocent lives in mine?”

Rebel leaned forward in growling defense. Ivy held him back.

“You think we like doing this? We’re not assassins. I’m a network engineer. My husband’s a security consultant. Freddy was a college student.”

“Who’s Freddy?”

“The boy you shot in the face.”

David balked at her knowledge before hardening again. “You sent him to kill us. I was only defending myself.”

“That’s just what we’re doing! We’re defending ourselves and everyone we know! You have no idea what’s at stake here!”

“Nor do you,” he said, as he peered through the arch. “See, your man just fired seven gunshots and I’m anxious to know where they went. So we’re going to walk in that direction and find out together. I swear to you, if any of my people—”

A distant shriek echoed through the chamber, filtering down from the fifth floor. While the trio in the lobby looked up, Amanda turned her white gaze down the hall.

“Hannah?”

Seeing his chance, Rebel wrapped his arms around Ivy and threw them back through the portal. David aimed his pistol at the white liquid pool as it shrank closed. He muttered a curse, then waved away his mirror selves.

The door to the maintenance hall flew open with a kick. David watched Theo with blank-faced puzzlement as the augur bolted through the lobby like a champion sprinter. His urgent expression filled David with dread.

“Theo, what happened? What did you see?”

A second scream rang out from the fifth floor. David launched his troubled gaze back and forth, up and east, before forcing a hot decision.

“Goddamn it.”

He ran after Theo. His wristwatch ticked to 11:58.

—

Theo had no idea how long he’d been in the God’s Eye. For all he knew, he spent days on his backtracking path through time, analyzing every twist and turn of their impending escape. He knew how precarious these next few minutes would be. He didn’t have an inch of room for error.

He rushed past the reception desk of Nicomedia Magazines, over the broken glass, and into the cubicle where Zack cradled Mia in his arms. The two of them breathed the same shallow breaths in synch, wore the same bombshelled expression. Only Zack looked up and noticed Theo.

“Where’s Amanda?”

“Zack . . .”

“Where’s Amanda?!”

“She’s all right. Listen—”

Zack shook his head, venting all the notions that had stacked up in his mind like greasy dishes.

“I think the bullet missed her heart. If we can keep her from slipping into shock, she’ll have a chance. Amanda will know what to do.”

“I know what to do, Zack. You have to listen to me . . .”

They both turned at the sound of hurried footsteps. The moment David reached the cubicle, his jaw went slack and his gun fell from his hand.

“Mia . . .” He dropped to his knees and clutched her arm, his bloody face twisting with grief. “No. No!”

Mia kept her glazed stare on the ceiling, her consciousness swirling at the bottom of a deep, dark well. She could hear David’s voice far above her. She could feel Zack holding her dying body in his arms. Strange how she came into this world buried six feet underground and was now fixing to leave it like a nestled newborn.

From grave to cradle, she thought. I did it all backwards.

David brushed the bangs from her forehead. “You stay with me, Mia. You hear me?” He turned to Theo. “You said the Deps were coming.”

“They’re already here.” He glanced at the wall clock. “They’ll hit the lobby in eighty-two seconds.”

“If they’re storming the building, they’ll have revivers outside.”

“No, David—”

“I’ll bring her to them! They’ll fix her!”

“And then take you both,” Zack said.

“You’ll get us back, just like we got Amanda and Theo back.”

“You think Melissa won’t expect that next time? You think she’ll make it easy?”

“Zack, you have to trust me—”

Theo kicked a file cabinet. “NO! She’s going to die in seconds! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! You’re the only hope she has, Zack! You’re the reviver!”

The cartoonist drank him in through saucer eyes. It had been five days since his last healing attempt, one that had gruesome consequences for a poor young fawn. The thought of trying again on Mia, a much larger creature, seemed as safe as closing her wound with dynamite.

“It won’t work,” he insisted. “It’ll just kill her quicker.”

David nodded darkly at Theo. “He’s right. You didn’t see what happened last time.”

Theo was all too familiar with the risks. He’d stopped at this very place in the God’s Eye to view the alternate outcomes. Zack only managed to save Mia ten percent of the time at best. In nearly all other instances, she ended up a pristine corpse or a desiccated husk. Most horrific of all were the riftings, the times Mia woke up screaming in agony as her distended stomach exploded in a torrent of blood and gases.

Theo had spent long, painful hours analyzing the details, looking for some identifiable factor that separated the wins from the losses. In the end, it all came down to timing. There was a three-second window where Zack succeeded more often than not. It was almost here.

“Zack, I’ve seen it. I’ve watched you bring her back to life. But you got to get ready. You have to do it exactly when I tell you. Please.”

David gripped Zack’s arm. “Let me take her to the agents. It’s her only chance.”

“David, shut up! You’re killing her!”

“You’re killing her! You have no idea what you’re doing!”

Zack tuned out his friends, his addled gaze drifting around the cubicle. He was stunned to find a recent issue of Wonders with his own image on the cover, the famous photo of his plummet from a hotel balcony. Once again he saw his face contorted in purple agony as Amanda’s great tempic hand squeezed him from above. In cropped context, it looked like God Himself had reached down to smite him. Now the bastard’s cruel hand was coming for Mia.

No, thought the cartoonist. You will not.

“David, get back.”

“Wait. Listen to me—”

“Get back!”

Theo pulled David to his feet. Zack lay Mia flat on the carpet, then joined the others at the cubicle entry. The augur fixed his stare on the wall clock, his finger raised tensely.

“Wait.”

Suddenly Mia wheezed a loud and broken gasp. Her eyes fluttered to a close.

“What was that?” Zack asked.

“Her last breath,” Theo replied. “Go.”

Zack clenched his fists and squinted in nervous concentration. Mia’s limp body shuddered. Her skin lit up with a gauzy incandescence. Zack gritted his teeth, struggling to hold the temporis that bucked and swerved like a rickety spotlight. He knew that if any part of Mia fell outside the glow, even for a moment, she’d be lost forever.

Four seconds into his battle, the magazine cover penetrated his thoughts, shaking his focus and plaguing him with an overwhelming sense of futility. He shot his rage upward at the malignant forces of the universe—the ones who took his world, then yanked his brother away on a short rubber string. Now they teased him with a flicker of hope for Mia. He could already see the punch line coming.

Suddenly, Amanda’s lovely face bloomed in his thoughts like a sunrise. Her lips curled in a wry and canny smirk.

Oh Zachary, you schmuck. You cynic. You think I wasted time cursing the heavens when you fell from that balcony? Uh-uh. I ran right to the edge and caught you. That’s not God’s hand smiting you in that photo. That’s Him and me saving you.

Warm tears spilled down Zack’s cheeks as his inner Amanda stroked his face.

It’s so easy to believe, after everything we’ve seen, that we live in a cold and senseless universe. But as long as we have a world to live in, as long as we have people to love, we are the lucky ones, Zack. We are the blessed.

Now go catch our little sister. Bring her back to us.

With a last cry of strain, Zack engulfed Mia in a cool blinding flash. David and Theo unshielded their eyes to find Mia motionless on the floor. Her feet were bare and her hair was damp from the shower. Her clean silk blouse was unbuttoned all the way to her navel, revealing a perfectly unblemished sternum.

The men stood as frozen as statues while they waited for her body’s response. They knew this was the crucial moment, the point where Mia would scream or explode or merely die quietly. Or . . .

She sat up with a lurch, gasping with urgent breath. David and Theo flanked her sides.

“Mia!”

She looked around the cubicle with frantic eyes, and then screamed in bewilderment. This Mia was nine hours younger than the one Rebel shot. She’d only just slammed the bathroom door on the sisters in Quinwood. Then suddenly her whole existence screeched like a yanked vinyl record and she felt the vague sense of drowning. Now here she was in some strange corporate office that looked like it had been through World War II. Zack and David were both marred with bloody gashes. Theo never looked healthier.

Mia glanced down at her open shirt, then anxiously covered herself. “What’s happening? Where are we?”

David wrapped his arms around her, hugging her with a gushing relief that scared her as much as it thrilled her. She feebly returned the embrace. “You’re bleeding.”

He croaked a soft chuckle. “I’m all right. I’ll be fine.”

“David, what’s going on?”

“We’ll explain it,” Theo promised. “But right now we have to go. David, can you carry her?”

He nodded at Theo, his young brow curled in gentle contrition. “What’s the plan?”

“There’s a hatch in the generator room. It’ll take us underground. We have to move fast.”

“I heard someone screaming upstairs. I think it was—”

“We’ll deal with that.” Theo looked to Zack. The reversal had left him even more shell-shocked than Mia.

“Zack . . .” Theo shook his shoulder. “Zack!”

“Huh?”

“I know that took a lot out of you, but we’re not done yet. This is the hard part.”

Zack’s absent stare turned sharp with worry. “Amanda. Hannah . . .”

“I know.”

“We have to get them.”

“We will. I promise. Come on.”

While Zack regained his footing, Theo avoided David’s suspicious leer. It seemed like weeks ago that Azral warned the augur about the burden of foresight. Our choices often seem questionable to those around us, even cruel. You’ll know this soon enough.

“Soon enough” had come far too soon for Theo. There was no way to prepare his friends, no time to explain why they had to leave Hannah and Amanda behind. Even the best strings turned in bad directions. The sisters had to suffer just a little bit more.

—

The law office shook with loud orchestral drama. Evan had cued Hannah’s iPod to the original Broadway cast recording of Les Misérables, thirty-ninth track. Now he danced around the reception area in his security guard uniform, a puckish smile on his face and a cone-shaped gun in his swinging hand.

He minced his way to the dismal corner where Hannah wept, strutting with operatic pomp as he marched to the final battle song.

“Ohh, would you listen to that drama? I’m all tingly. Aren’t you tingly?”

The actress lay fetal on the floor of her cage, her hands pressed over her eyes. Evan had drawn three screams from her with his handheld jolter, a weapon legally restricted to riot police. Though its static electric charge could clear a small crowd without causing injury, the blast was far less gentle to those who couldn’t flee. Every inch of Hannah’s skin throbbed with hot needle stings.

Evan paused the iPod, then heaved a bleak sigh.

“Tragic. The only surviving music from our world and it’s all showtunes and crap pop. Typical Hannah. Bouncy, flouncy, mispronouncy. It kills me to think of all the great minds who died while you just keep on jiggling.”

She pulled her hands away, only to flinch at his sickening leer. It bore through her clothes and skin, making her feel worse than naked, worse than the dumb animal he’d trapped so easily.

“Bet you’re itching to know how I got my hands on your little pink jukebox.”

“Go to hell,” she croaked.

“Yeah, that’s right. Azral gave it to me. He knows I’m a sucker for old-world gewgaws.”

“Why?”

“Hey, I have a sentimental side.”

“Why would he give you a gift?”

“Oh.” Evan’s grin deflated. “I guess he has a sentimental side.”

His last encounter with Azral and Esis had been a tense, mystifying affair. He knew they were mad about his hotel prank, the spiked mimosa cocktails that triggered a near-fatal brawl between Amanda and Hannah. And yet instead of venting their ire, the pair took Evan on a portal jaunt to Amsterdam, treating him to a sumptuous lunch at a five-star floating restaurant.

At dessert, Azral presented Evan with a book bag full of treasures rescued from Terra Vista—Zack’s original sketchbook, Theo’s Oakland A’s cap, Hannah’s iPod and Entertainment Weekly. The unprecedented bounty had left Evan speechless. After fifty-four lifetimes, he still couldn’t figure out the Pelletiers. They operated with the convoluted madness of a Rube Goldberg machine, shaping all their actions on complex calculations and byzantine prophecies.

Once they returned to Indiana, Azral acted more in line with expectations. He’d gripped Evan’s arm, chilling him to the bone with his harsh blue stare.

“You will not jeopardize Hannah again. Not until she serves or fails her function.”

Esis made it clear, in her own loopy way, that the same applied for Amanda.

As the days passed and his purpose on this world grew muddier, Evan convinced himself that there were still plenty of ways to strike at the sisters without risking their precious bodies. If anything, the challenge made Round 55 a hell of a lot more interesting.

He plucked his handtop from the reception desk. An empty view of the hallway filled the tiny screen. Christ, sister. Hop to it. We’re on a clock here.

“You know, it wasn’t easy bringing your iPod back to life,” he boasted to Hannah. “They have none of the right cables or batteries here. I had to jury-rig a solution. And hey, speaking of Jury . . .”

“Fuck you.”

“Whoa ho ho! The man’s a sore spot already. And just from a driver’s license photo. Good thing you never saw his biceps. You’d be inconsolable.”

Hannah shot him a murderous glare. From the moment Evan showed his cruel and juvenile face, she sensed an odd frustration behind his loathing. He wanted to do so much more to her than he was currently doing. Clearly it wasn’t his conscience holding him back.

“My iPod wasn’t a gift,” she speculated. “It was a bribe. Azral doesn’t want you hurting us.”

Evan narrowed his eyes in pique. The woman could be jarringly sharp when she wanted to be. He scrambled for cover behind a sneering grin.

“Nice thought, Giggles, but Azral didn’t care when I killed Jury. He won’t shed a tear over you. By the way, I have to know. Are you still carrying his license? You can tell me.”

“No.”

“Liar. Come on. I know you’re keeping Jury near your naughty bits. Show me.”

“Would anyone shed a tear if you died, Evan?”

“You would.”

“I’d cry with joy.”

“That counts.” He raised his jolter. “Now are you going to empty your pockets or do I need to make you fork over your pants?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? That’s what this is all about.”

“Getting in your pants?” Evan cackled with scorn. “Oh sweet Jesus. The ego on you. If I wanted that, hon, there are easier ways. Spreading your legs is the fastest thing you do.”

“For men like Jury,” she seethed. “Not like you.”

“Amazing how you’re proud of your shallow standards.”

“Is that why you killed him?”

“Don’t play detective, Boopsie. You’re out of your element.”

“You told Zack you used to be part of our group. You and Jury both.”

Evan sighed with ennui. It was always so tedious to watch the Silvers play catch-up.

“In times undone,” he told her. “Days gone bye-bye. Don’t mistake my wistful look for nostalgia. The memories aren’t fond.”

“What did I do to make you so angry?”

He checked the screen of his handtop. All right. Finally.

“The question you should be asking right now . . .”

He pressed a button on his console.

“. . . is what did she do?”

Hannah spun around in her cage, just as her sister collapsed in front of the open door.

“Amanda!”

Forty minutes ago, Evan had stashed a video camera and an electron chaser in the planter outside the law office. The moment Amanda hobbled into range, he remotely activated the weapon’s charge. In an instant, the widow’s world went red with pain and her muscles turned to jelly.

Evan dragged her inside and closed the door behind them. Hannah shook the bars of her cage. “Stop it! Leave her alone!”

“Hush now, darling. Screaming time is over.” He snickered derisively. “I swear, you two are so easy to trap. Just a shame it took Peter’s Cotton Tail so long to hop her way over here. We’re a little behind schedule.”

His synchron watch beeped its noon chime. Evan adjusted the handtop to access his lobby cameras.

“Yup. There it goes.”

Hannah eyed him confusedly. “What are you talking about?”

“The barricade,” he replied, with a savage grin. “The Deps are storming the castle.”

—

At the stroke of noon, the tempic sheath around the building fell to the government’s solic drill. The glass doors shattered at the edge of a metal battering ram.

Rosie Herrera shouted a staccato barrage of orders as she led the charge to the lobby. Her motormouth zeal was fueled half by adrenaline and half by fear that Melissa would try to seize control of the operation. To Rosie’s surprise, the eccentric agent from L.A. followed the crowd in demure silence. Once she reached the first bloodstain, Melissa uttered a single word.

“Shift.”

Eight armored speedsuits lit up with a crosshatch of bright red lines as their wielders jumped to maximum velocity. A temporal voice converter in each helmet allowed the team to communicate with their unshifted brethren, though Melissa had quietly disabled those devices nine minutes ago. The speeding elites were now isolated in their own headset network, Melissa’s to command by default rank protocol. Sorry, Rosie. It’s easier this way.

“Fan out,” she ordered them. “Search every corner. You see a fugitive, shoot them in the gut, even if they raise their hands in surrender. These people are never unarmed. And I assure you they have no intention of coming quietly.”

The men dispersed in streaking blurs. Melissa moved to the elevator bank and studied the two young corpses on the floor. They looked like they’d been gored by rhinos. No sword or lance could have killed them this brutally.

Tempis, she thought, with sinking dread. God help you if you did this, Amanda. God—

—

—help me.

Amanda lay chest-down on the carpet, her slender frame convulsing with shudders. Her wall-hugging hop down the hallway had been the single most agonizing experience of her life, until Evan’s chaser set every nerve ablaze. Now she was a prisoner of her own fractured body, a tiny creature in a cage of screaming flesh.

She had a moment to register Hannah through a sideways glance before Evan crouched to eclipse her view. He chuckled at her bug-eyed recognition, the long pink fingers that wriggled helplessly like earthworms.

“The tempis you’re trying to call is currently unavailable,” he teased. “Please try again later.”

“P-please . . .”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t cork your weirdhole. That was the cute Asian solic you met downstairs. Her name’s Mercy Lee, but you can call her the Future Mrs.—”

“Leave her alone!”

“—Trillinger.” He spun around to glare at Hannah. “Don’t step on my lines.”

“She never did anything to you!”

“BAAAP! Incorrect.” Evan squinted venomously at Amanda. “She’s done plenty.”

Though Amanda didn’t know it, she and Evan carried centuries of animosity between them, dating back to his first days on this world. Even when he’d tried to be a good little Silver, the sharp-faced bitch never trusted him for a moment, never liked the way he looked at her sister. He, in turn, hated the gooey hold she took on his one true friend. She ruined Zack every single time.

As a full-fledged adversary, Amanda was even worse. Just months ago in his recollection, on a cold and rainy night near the end of his fifty-fourth lifetime, the widow came looking for blood in the wake of Hannah’s murder. She took Evan by surprise on a Boston rooftop, swooping down from the sky on her mighty wings of aeris. Before he knew what was happening, Amanda’s cold tempic sword burst through his chest. One inch to the left and he would have died instantly.

Instead, Evan spent sixty-two of the longest seconds of his life on the wet concrete, sobbing and pissing and begging for mercy while Amanda looked down at the wretched creature she’d made of him. Though her disgusted pity allowed him enough time to concentrate on a rewind escape, the phantom pain followed him for weeks. The memory still tortured him at night.

Now he walked a slow preening circle around his nemesis, basking in their reversal of fortune. Amanda didn’t piss herself, as Evan had hoped, but she was just a few pokes away from full emotional collapse.

“You know, I learned a long time ago why Tits McGee over there is such a train wreck. I know why all your husbands grow to hate you. You just have that effect on people. You beat them down with your high-and-mighty know-it-all-ism until they just want to stab a hobo. Godmanda, Judgmanda, Reprimanda. Hell, even now if I asked you to beg for your life, you’d beg for Hannah’s instead. And it’s not because you love her. You don’t. You just have to be the noble one.”

“She is the noble one,” Hannah snarled. “Compared to you, she’s Jesus in drag.”

“What part of ‘don’t step on my lines—’”

“—do I not understand? I get all of it, you weasel-faced shit geyser, just like I know your threats are worthless. You’ll either kill us or you won’t. Nothing we say will change that. So why don’t you shut your mouth and—”

“‘—do what you came here to do,’” Evan said, in perfect synch. He shook his head at her, chortling. “One of these days, you’ll come up with new dialogue. As for your ‘tough girl’ bit . . .”

Evan pulled a snub-nosed .38 from his holster and aimed it at Amanda’s head. In a sharp instant, all the bravada left Hannah’s face. She lurched forward in her cage.

“Wait! Stop!”

He balked in mock bother. “But . . . I thought my threats were worthless.”

“Please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Don’t!”

Evan chuckled scornfully. “You always were a shitty actress.”

He checked the countdown timer on his synchron. Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds until Melissa’s speeding bloodhounds reached the fifth floor. He rooted through his duffel bag and placed two gas grenades on the reception desk. Evan had all the right lies and credentials to walk out of this building a free man, but he’d have to send the sisters to sleep so they wouldn’t rat him out. That came last, after the fun.

Hannah watched with furious perplexity as Evan donned a mortarboard and glasses from his bag. Now the young security guard was a professor from the neck up.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked him.

“What I came here to do.” He stooped down to poke Amanda. “Hey, honey? Snookums? I know you’re on the verge of passing out, but if you don’t want me to shoot your sister through her all-access fun tunnel, you’ll need to pay attention to what I say now. It’s very important. Will you listen?”

Amanda dug her taut fingers into the rug, nodding tensely.

Evan smiled. “Smart girl. Keep it up, A-Cup, and you just might hobble out of here.”

He cleared his throat, his brow crunched with scholarly gravitas. Behind his satirical expression, Evan glowed with rapture. This was his favorite part of the show, the absolute high point of his looping existence.

“There’s a crucial bit of information you gals have been missing, a piece of the puzzle that ties everything together. Now the Deps won’t tell you because they don’t know about it. The Pelletiers? Eh. They don’t care if you know or not. But the Gothams? Ah, this is where it gets interesting. You might have noticed they’re a little . . . edgy about something, some future event that has them all soiling their short pants. They might have even said something about it during their many attempts to kill you. Any idea what I’m talking about, class? Anyone? Bueller?”

Hannah looked to Amanda and noticed a quarter-size spot of tempis on the back of her hand. At long last, the solis was wearing off. Her heart leapt with anxious hope. Don’t let him see it. Keep his eyes on you.

“A second Cataclysm,” Hannah replied. “Peter mentioned it in a letter.”

Evan snapped his fingers. “Aha! Yes! Except . . . no. That doesn’t add up. The Gothams don’t give a crap about anyone outside the clan. If they thought their Habitrail hamlet was going tempo-nuclear, they’d simply pack up and move. So then what’s the real issue? Why are they freaking out?”

Hannah kept her tense stare on Evan. Look at me. Look at me, you worm.

“What? You’re saying Peter lied to us?”

“Through his big Irish chompers. Excuse me a moment.”

He aimed the cone-shaped jolter at Amanda and pulled the trigger. Hannah screamed as her sister convulsed in fresh pain. The tempis vanished from her hand.

“You’ll have to try better than that, girls. This isn’t my first day teaching.”

Hannah cried through the bars. “Stop it! Stop! Turn it off!”

“You know if you just paid more attention, you wouldn’t be here in remedial class. The answer’s been out there. You’re just not connecting the dots.”

“Then just tell us! Tell us! Stop hurting her and tell us!”

“You tell me, Hannah.”

“I don’t know!”

“Get it right and I’ll stop hurting your sister.”

“I don’t know!”

“Think harder! This is the lightning round! Take a Hail Mary, shot-in-the-dark, wild-guess stab at the answer! What horrible event do you think is coming?”

“IT’S THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD!”

“YES!”

He turned off the jolter. The three of them breathed in heavy gasps. Evan took on a new and somber sincerity that Hannah found utterly frightening.

“This world ends,” he announced with a heavy breath. “In four years and seven months, it all goes to hell in exactly the way ours did. The sky comes down. The air turns cold. The buildings go crinkle and the people go crunch. This time no one gets a bracelet. No one gets out alive except the Pelletiers and me. They go forward to their own adjacent future. I go back. Back to the beginning. Back to Nico Mundis and his crappy little store. This is now my”—he brandished the numerical tattoo on the back of his right hand—“fifty-fifth trip through the same time period. I’ve danced this dance over and over again. Sure, I mix things up, just for shits and giggles, but it always ends the same.”

The Givens fell to abject silence, staring ahead in bleak dismay. Evan crossed his arms and studied Amanda. A hard smile returned to his face.

“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Oh that Evan. Such a meanie. He’ll say anything to upset us.’ Well, an hour from now, Peter will confirm everything I just told you. And while you’re all sobbing into your teacups, he’ll falsely assure you that all is not lost. See, just like Rebel, Peter’s got a plan to save the world. You’ll believe it, of course, because you want to. You have to. But the spoiler twist? It doesn’t work. I’ve seen the non-result for myself, again and again and again. You try to stop what’s coming every single time. You fail, every single . . .”

He stopped in the wake of Hannah’s low chuckle. It began as a mirthful rumble, then rose in volume until her giggles overtook the office.

Evan cocked his head at her quizzically. This was new. “You don’t believe me.”

“Oh, I believe what you’re saying, Evan. It makes perfect sense in its own sick way. What I don’t believe is you. You went through all this trouble, you risked life and limb just to give us the bad news before Peter did. You had to see the looks on our faces.”

He slit his eyes as she rolled with pitch-black laughter. Hannah wasn’t sure if it was a Method act or a sign that her mind had finally snapped for good, but it seemed only right to rob this sick little demon of the one thing he came for.

She wiped her eyes. “God, Amanda. You missed it earlier, when he told me why he hated me so much. You won’t believe this.”

“I didn’t tell you anything.”

“You told me everything.” She laughed. “You drew all the dots. I just had to connect them. You see, Amanda, he used to be one of us. In times undone, days gone bye-bye, Evan lived with us in Terra Vista. Then one day I made the awful mistake of being nice to him. I rubbed his arm. Maybe gave him a hug. Though he creeped me out with his constant eyefucks, he’d lost his world just like the rest of us. I felt sorry for him.”

Evan scoffed with forced amusement. “Nice try, but that’s not even—”

“And yet instead of realizing that I’m touchy-feely with everyone, Sad Sack over here convinced himself that something hot and heavy was brewing between us. In his twisted little mind, I was one tender moment away from becoming his devoted love cushion.”

“Your ego’s truly—”

“Shush, now. I’m talking to my sister. Anyway, one night he’s walking the grounds, looking for me as usual. Maybe he went by the pool house, or the garden shed, someplace without a camera. And then he heard it. The sounds of my screwing, my melodious oohing. He looked through the door and learned that while he was picking out china patterns, I was spreading my legs for Jury Curado.”

Evan’s fists clenched with trembling rage. Though the details were off, the gist of her tale was painfully accurate. Her lips curled in a vengeful smirk.

“Oh, how that must have stung him, Amanda, to learn that this brand-new world was just like the old one, where the boys with the biceps got the girls with the tits. Nothing changed. Except—”

“Shut up.”

Hannah’s smile flattened. Her eyes cracked with grief. “Except it got worse. As time went on, this little shit came to realize that what Jury and I had wasn’t all that shallow. He saw the way we looked at each other and he knew we’d developed something strong, something that had eluded me my whole life.”

“You don’t know that! You don’t know anything! You’ve never even seen the guy!”

“I saw him, Evan. You didn’t erase all of him. I glimpsed him with my own two eyes and I know why you killed him. It’s because deep down you knew that Jury wasn’t just the better-looking man. He was the better man.”

Hot blood rushed up Evan’s neck. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Hannah grew a teasing sneer.

“I bet you even tried a round without him, just to see if you could get me on your own. I’m sure that worked out really well for Theo.”

“That’s because you’re a goddamn whore!”

“Right. Hannah Banana, Always-Needs-a-Man-a. Except that man was never you. You stopped trying a long time ago, but you never got over it. So this is how you spend your days. This is what you do between Armageddons. Jesus Christ, Evan. You have got to be the single most pathetic—”

The gunshot shook every wall and window, rattling teeth. While his thoughts and ears rang with clamor, Evan studied the large new spatter of blood on the wall behind Hannah, the trickling hole in her forehead. The two of them traded a wide look of horror before the actress fell dead to the floor of her cage.

For a short hot moment, Evan wondered if perhaps someone else in the room had shot her. He didn’t remember aiming his .38 at her head or pulling the trigger. And yet there was the smoking gun in his hand, still raised. Strange. He’d killed Hannah so many times before but something, something, something about this didn’t feel right. Something—

He shrieked when a cold white blade cut into his calf. Before he could register Amanda on the ground, she jammed her tempic knife through the back of his knee.

Screeching, Evan swung the pistol down and fired a bullet through the top of her skull. Her face splashed down into her own exit blood and she fell still. He only just now realized that Amanda had been howling along with him. She’d been screaming the whole time between gunshots.

Wide-eyed, bleeding, Evan stumbled against the wall and pondered the consequences of his actions. The Deps surely heard the blasts. They’d be here in seconds now, but they were the least of his problems.

“Oh no . . .”

The sisters were dead.

“Oh shit. Shit . . .”

Trembling, he closed his eyes and struggled to concentrate through the ringing in his ears, the pain, the fear of what Azral would do to him.

Two speedsuit agents appeared outside the door, cracking the smoked-glass pane with their armored fists. Evan pressed his fingers to his temples and yelled in desperate torment. His skin tingled with bubbles as the clock of his life spun back forty-nine seconds.

Now he found himself once again standing at the reception desk, the cool .38 back in his hand. He looked to Hannah—unmurdered, unsilenced. She continued to rail at him in all her gorgeous fury.

“Right. Hannah Banana, Always-Needs-a-Man-a. Except that man was never you. You stopped trying a long time ago, but you never . . . you never . . .”

Hannah trailed off, thrown by the sudden change in Evan’s demeanor. A moment ago, he looked ready to bare her throat with his teeth. Then his head snapped back as if he’d woken up from a nap. Now his face was white with inexplicable terror. Gemma Sunder, a girl who shared Evan’s talent but not his impression of it, would have said that he was being possessed by a future self.

To Hannah, it looked the very opposite of possession. It appeared the devil inside Evan Rander had finally fled.

He dropped his gun and raised his palms in trembling acquiescence.

“Okay. Okay, look, we’re all good here. I went too far, but it’s all right now. You’re okay.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’ll be fine. You and . . .” He suddenly remembered Amanda and nervously jumped away. His unstabbed leg screamed with phantom pain. He didn’t want a repeat of the real injury.

Hannah eyed him incredulously as he limped across the room. “You’re insane.”

Evan crowed a grim and broken laugh. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve seen the world end fifty-five times. At the very least, it’s made me cynical.”

“Then hate the universe, not me.”

“I hate the universe through you,” he told her, with a sorrowful shrug. “It’s just the way it is.”

A round white portal opened up on the northern wall, stretching from rug to roof. Evan’s stomach dropped. His pants trickled with urine. He’d been carrying a ray of hope that his transgression would go unnoticed. Of course not. Of course they knew.

He kneeled on the ground, raising stretched and shaky fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I screwed up. I know it. But look, they’re fine! They’re both alive! I undid it!”

The portal continued to ripple with the quiet serenity of a spring pond. Evan’s eyes darted around in frantic thought.

“All right, listen, listen, I’ll leave them alone. I promise. Not even a phone call. I’ll . . . I’ll go to one of your facilities. Breed with whoever you want me to breed with. Just give me a chance to make things right. I’ve helped you before! You said so!”

The sisters stared at the portal with the same white horror as Evan. No one was coming out.

“Azral?”

A colossal hand of tempis burst through the surface with terrifying speed. Amanda and Hannah screamed as the man-size fingers engulfed Evan like a chess rook. As quick as it arrived, the monster arm retreated, pulling its shrieking victim into the shimmering white depths.

The portal shrank closed, leaving two siblings alone in devastated silence.

Soon the tempic bars of Hannah’s cage flickered away. She fell to her knees and scuttled awkwardly across the rug. She ran her quivering fingers through Amanda’s hair, her mind painfully perched between aching concern and the utter futility of asking her if she was okay.

As emergency lights flared outside and a speeding Dep began his thermal scan of the fifth floor, the daughters of Robert and Melanie Given wept in soft harmony. Neither of them were okay. No one was okay. Not a single damn thing in the world was okay.