Adeline knew that everyone lied to themselves at some point in their lives. It was part of preserving one’s ego. Maybe it was more than that, but the task for Adeline was somewhat different. She actually had to lie to her younger self. If she didn’t, the past wouldn’t occur as it had. The universe would cease to exist.
So she did.
Adeline watched as her younger counterpart spun her wheels, searching Constance’s home for clues about whether she was the killer. Then Elliott’s residence. And finally, the empty home Hiro owned in Las Vegas, with the tunnel that led to the high-roller room beneath the strip.
All the while, that nineteen-year-old girl Adeline had once been grew more suspicious of the woman she knew as Daniele Danneros—the woman she would become.
Adeline prepped the two items her younger self would need. The first was the California driver’s license. It was buried beneath the Absolom Sciences intern ID, in plain sight, but unrecognizable, just like Adeline herself, thanks to the cosmetic surgery.
The other was the diamond earrings Nathan had given her. They were a link to a life she had left behind. They would be her younger counterpart’s only hope of survival in the world after Absolom.
*
During that period, when her younger self was searching for answers she would never find, Adeline had challenges of her own. The biggest was how to transmit the recall ring to her father in the past.
There were two problems.
The first was size.
By government agreement, Absolom Sciences could transmit up to twenty-five grams without approval. The recall ring was significantly more massive than that.
In Adeline’s basement, she, Elliott, Hiro, and Constance discussed whether they could make it smaller. Hiro insisted that they couldn’t. But they could separate it into pieces.
Adeline remembered this moment from nineteen years ago. She walked to the stairwell, saw her younger self standing there listening, and stared until the young woman retreated up the stairs.
In the privacy of the basement, the Absolom scientists settled on a solution: they would break the recall ring into parts and transmit them back. To do that, they arrived at the only path Adeline could see: they embedded the parts of the recall ring in Absolom prisoners and sent them to Sam’s timeline.
Constance was against operating on the prisoners. She felt it was morally wrong to do something to someone without their full knowledge. Adeline knew that she was right. But there was nothing she could do about it. She either sent the recall ring back embedded in the Absolom prisoners, or she lost her father forever. The prisoners would be exiled to the past one way or another. Being operated on gave them the chance to save an innocent man, one Adeline cared about a great deal.
The second problem was ensuring the prisoners—and the pieces they sent to the past—arrived at the right time and near enough to her father for him to find them.
They spent months in Death Valley running tests, trying to ensure that the payloads arrived at the right location and time. With each tuning bar they found, they edged closer to perfecting Absolom Two.
Adeline lobbied the government for permission to operate on the prisoners—and received it after some cajoling.
She couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if one of the prisoners arrived at the same time as her father. They were the worst of humanity. And time in the Triassic, alone, probably wouldn’t be good for their mental health.
But there was nothing she could do about that.
The final worry the team had was simply about causality. Would sending the prisoners to Sam’s timeline cause it to cease to exist? They were, after all, disrupting a timeline that had been created from their own, technically changing the past before he arrived. That discussion led them to the conclusion they had arrived at before: the past could not be changed. If they had already sent the prisoners, then his timeline would be preserved. They were simply doing what they had to do, what time and space required to exist. If they were right, when Sam arrived, the prisoners they were sending after he departed would have already been there a long time.
*
One night, Adeline set her alarm for 3 a.m.
When it went off, she rose and walked down the hall to her counterpart’s bedroom. The door was closed, but she was gone. The photomosaic blanket was spread across the bed, a reminder of the past.
Adeline knew where she was. At that moment, she was in the basement of Hiro’s home in Las Vegas, talking with Elliott and Hiro, slowly becoming convinced that Daniele Danneros was planning to use Absolom Two to get rid of her and kill Nora.
Once again, she wondered if it was true.
She knew it was half true—she would indeed use Absolom to send her younger counterpart nineteen years into the past. But what would happen after that? That was the real question, the true challenge ahead.
She knew by the time her younger self got back home, she would have decided to trust Elliott and Hiro and spy on the woman she knew as Daniele.
It was all happening as it had, the way it had to happen.
*
The next morning, at breakfast, there was a change in the air, a tension between Adeline and her younger self. Even Ryan sensed it.
But it was necessary.
Adeline went upstairs to prepare for the day, knowing her counterpart was hiding a burner phone with a listening app in her study.
After the shower, she found a text message waiting on her phone, a short note from Hana Kim, the CEO of Syntran, again requesting a meeting. She was even in town and willing to come to Adeline’s home. The woman was extremely persistent. It was the reason she had gotten to where she was.
Adeline sent a quick note back, letting her know that she could meet for a few minutes but had meetings all afternoon. She was meeting Hiro and Elliott out in the desert then, to search for more tuning bars.
She also knew that they would be sitting in Elliott’s office that morning, listening to the conversations in her study via the app on the burner phone Adeline’s younger self had hidden under a chair.
*
Constance came by shortly before lunch and informed Adeline that she was going to Germany to meet with a man from her past whom she believed might be infected.
Hana Kim arrived about an hour later, and Adeline could tell she was excited about something.
They sat in the study, speaking Korean, the CEO giving a wide-ranging update about the company. When she was done, she opened her laptop and pulled up a picture of a dead body.
“Did I ever tell you how my father died?”
“Yes. While waiting for a transplant.”
Hana nodded. “That’s true. He was waiting for a transplant. He was very sick at the time. He had gone to America, to New York City, for an experimental treatment. But he actually died in a plane crash. I was a year old at the time—on September first, 1983. His plane was en route from New York to Seoul, but it had stopped in Anchorage, Alaska, to refuel before continuing on the Pacific leg of the flight. At some point, the plane got off course and drifted into Soviet airspace. It was shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor. About ten years later, we learned that the wreckage crashed into the Sea of Japan, but the details were kept secret back then. The downing of the Korean Airlines aircraft was one of the tensest moments of the Cold War. We knew my father was sick, but I thought I would see him again. His death was hard, but it was compounded by the fact that there was an empty casket at his funeral.”
Hana motioned to the laptop screen, at the body. “At Syntran, I believe we have an opportunity to right that wrong as well. And we can do it with our existing technology. In fact, we’ve already created several successful—”
Adeline held up a hand, stopping the woman from saying another word.
She stared at the screen, feeling her body go numb.
This was the answer. The piece she had been missing. If her theory was correct, it would solve everything. But not if the woman continued describing what she was working on.
“I’m afraid I need to cut our meeting short,” Adeline said.
Hana bunched her eyebrows. “This is a significant expansion in our product offering. It’s a small market size, but we think it’s a valuable market. We’re envisioning selling this to governments around the world. In instances where a government employee was lost in the line of duty—and a body can’t be recovered—this would allow that nation to provide the family with some closure. Same for large multinationals. I can also see a use case for Absolom. This would give the families a body to bury. That’s the other reason I wanted to meet with you, to see if you could facilitate an intro for me. The publicity would put it on the radar of—”
Adeline took a pad from the table and wrote the address of a roadside diner outside of town and a short message:
Meet me here in 30 minutes
Hana scrunched her face at the note.
“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” Adeline said. “But I’m afraid that’s all the time I have for now.”
*
Thirty minutes later, she was sitting in a booth at the back of the small restaurant, Hana across from her.
“What was that about?” Hana asked.
“The venture capital industry is getting very cut-throat. I’m concerned someone might have bugged my home.”
“Really?”
“It’s a crazy world out there. Now, about this new service, what would you need to create a body? And does Syntran place any identifying marks on the replicas? Like a serial number or something?”
*
That evening, Adeline sat on the back patio, an empty wine glass on the table, staring at the sun hovering over the mountains beyond the sea of glass.
She heard the door open, and her counterpart marched in.
“Tough day?” the younger woman asked, motioning to the wine glass.
“No. I’m celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
“A discovery. One that could change everything. A very unexpected discovery.”
“In the desert?”
“No. I knew what we would find in the desert. This… this I didn’t see coming.”
*
The next morning, Adeline started the process to exhume Nora’s body. There was some red tape. She needed approval from the cemetery as well as Nora’s next of kin—a cousin in Pennsylvania. Getting consent was easier than she had expected.
“As you know,” she said on a call to the cousin, “Nora worked for my company, on Absolom. We believe she may have been exposed to subatomic particles during a recent experiment. We need to test her body to see if others she worked with might be at risk.”
Two days later, she was standing in the morgue, staring at the body. She knew the private investigator Elliott had hired to follow her was on the other side of the glass, watching, making a video he would later send to Elliott, who would share it with the younger Adeline.
It didn’t matter. They weren’t seeing what she was seeing. She bent down and confirmed her suspicions.
Finally, it all made sense.
The missing piece was on that table.
The future wasn’t what Adeline had imagined.