10

Cam & Liz

When Nico was finished stitching up Squirt, he dropped his instruments in a bowl and shuffled toward the shower without uttering a word. Hal could see his exhaustion in the way he moved and carried himself. He looked down at Squirt. “We need to move him into one of the bedrooms.”

“I’ll do it.” Trixie floated him out of the kitchen and into the hall.

They all took turns sitting with him. Hal grabbed a couple of restless hours of sleep, not the full recharge he so desperately needed, then woke and went into the kitchen to fix everyone breakfast, lunch, dinner, he had no idea what time it was.

Cooking distracted him, calmed him, forced him to be fully present. He popped whole grain bread into the toaster, then brought out two frying pans, poured avocado oil into both, laid out strips of vegetarian bacon in one, and dropped chopped vegetables into the other. The container of eggs on the counter held something he’d never seen before—real eggs, brown eggs. On the side of the carton of Happy Eggs! it said the chickens that had produced the eggs were cage free, fed fresh organic grain, and had happy lives.

Good sales pitch. He sampled a bite of an omelet. It tasted extraordinary. Combined with the toast, slathered with butter and blueberry jam, the fresh strawberries, he felt he could just nibble away for hours, savoring every bite. He called the others into the kitchen and they all eagerly started helping themselves to the food.

When Red had eaten everything on her plate, she said, “Squirt needs something to eat.”

“It should be really soft food,” Nico said. “Or liquid.”

“Liquid with fruit in it.” Red got up, went over to an appliance on the counter. “This blender will do the trick.”

“How do you know that’s what the appliance is called?” Hal asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I did my homework, Hal. I think we’ve had this conversation before.” She sliced up bananas, apples, papaya, strawberries, poured in milk, dropped in cubes of ice, and flipped the switch. The grinding noise drowned out conversation and got on Hal’s nerves. “And what I’m making him now is called a smoothie.”

The air in the kitchen abruptly turned ink black, a fine mist that quickly thickened.

“Wow,” Trixie said softly. “Here comes someone.”

An elderly man and a teenage girl stumbled out of the mist and across the kitchen. Red turned off the blender and ran over to them. “Cam! Liz!” she squealed, and threw her arms around them.

Trixie tore toward them and did the same thing. “We didn’t think you were going to make it.”

Cam sucked noisily at the air and held onto Trixie to steady himself. Hal pushed a chair over to the old man and he sank into it. Liz, only a year older than Squirt, eyed all the food on the table and made her way toward it in a kind of trance. “My God,” she whispered, and grabbed a fork and stabbed a piece of toast slathered in butter and jam and devoured it. “Incredible.”

Hal saw Nico quickly dish up eggs, bacon, chopped vegetables, and set them on the table. He filled glasses with freshly squeezed orange juice. Cam and Liz guzzled down the juice, Liz devoured the food sloppily, and although Cam ate ravenously, his movements were measured, tidy, precise. Then Cam sat back, rubbing his face.

“Incredibly delicious,” he whispered.

Where’s Wind? Hal thought. Each time one of his Crows arrived and Wind wasn’t with him, a piece of Hal’s heart broke away. “Was Wind with you?”

Cam shook his head. “I don’t know where she was.”

“Tell us what happened,” Hal said.

“Total bedlam at the end.” Cam’s hands fell to his skinny thighs. The overhead light made his bald head shine. “There were only fifteen of us left. We could barely hold the past around us. So we tore toward the image simultaneously and…”

“And we don’t know where we went,” Liz finished. “We, like, flashed in and out of different places, I think.”

“Different times,” Cam added.

“Did anyone else make it through?” Trixie asked.

“I don’t know,” Cam replied. “But we know who has died.” His appearance abruptly morphed into Stoner, Lightning, Weather Wizard, and dozens of others in Hal’s group, his tribe.

With every familiar face, Hal died a little inside.

“Is Wind dead?” asked Red.

“If you didn’t see her, then she isn’t dead,” Cam replied.

Relief coursed through Hal.

“Did Squirt make it here?” Liz asked.

“Yeah.” Trixie nodded. “But he, uh, got shot. He’s in the other room. Nico worked on him.”

“Shot?” Cam sounded alarmed. “Here? How?”
Now the others joined them at the table and they filled in Cam and Liz about what had been happening. Liz’s condor wings suddenly unfolded from her shoulders, beating the air, knocking things off the counters, and Trixie leaned toward her, grabbed her hands before they turned into a condor’s legs. “Liz, it’s okay. The seven of us made it.”

“Seven?” Her wings vanished into her shoulders. “We’re supposed to be thrilled by seven? Seven of us can’t take on a whole island. Seven of us can’t take on armed soldiers, airplanes, bombs, grenades… What the fuck, Hal. You told us we would number in the hundreds, that we…”

“I didn’t understand the effect the travel would have.”

Red sat forward. “Personally, I think we should just try to blend in here. Establish lives. I keep saying this. We’ve all got gold, cash, ID. We could do it.”

Hal slammed his fist down so hard on the table the silverware rattled, glasses fell over. “That’s treasonous, Red.” He could barely control the anger in his voice. “I told you that before. Seizing this island is our mission. We can’t fucking blend in here. We…”

“Not so fast, Hal.” Cam patted the air with his hands, his fingers long, like those of a pianist. “I think Red and Liz may be on to something. The seven of us—seven assuming that Squirt survives—aren’t equipped to fight an army. And frankly, I’m tired of fighting. I’ve spent my entire seventy years in the dome fighting the Normals for some semblance of a life.”

“Yeah,” Red said. “Forty years for me.”

“Thirty-eight,” Trixie said.

“Thirty-four,” Nico said. “Thirteen for Squirt and…”

“Fourteen for me,” Liz added.

Dissension. Hal felt the mission sliding away from him and knew that if he didn’t say something fast, all his planning and strategizing, all the sacrifices he’d made over the years, would collapse into this lame dream that they could integrate into a normal twenty-first century world. It would be a repeat of the horrors they’d lived in the dome. They eventually would be herded up, corralled, drugged, imprisoned, killed.

“I have a plan,” he said. “But we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Right now, we all need to recharge. There’s plenty of room for everyone. Find a bed, sleep. We’re safe here.”

“I don’t need much sleep,” Liz remarked. “I’ll watch over Squirt.”

“Liz, no offense,” Nico said. “But you don’t know anything about medicine. I’ll take this watch. It’s still iffy with him.”

“You’re a doc, Nico?” she snapped back.

“Five years of med school before the gov figured out what I really was.”

“Oh.” She looked shocked. “I didn’t know. Sorry. Look, if at any point it seems hopeless, just remember that I might be able to change him so he does what I do. A blood transfusion could do it.” She paused. “I think.”

“I don’t have the equipment for that and I don’t think we’ll need to do it,” Nico said. “But I appreciate the offer.”

So polite, Hal thought. “That’s good, Nico. Thanks. And hopefully by morning, more of us will be here.” It sounded optimistic, but Hal didn’t believe it. Right now, he just wanted to distance himself from all of them. “Or the herbs will have done their magic.” Or both.

“Whoever stays up with him can feed him this.” Red poured her blended fruit concoction into a glass.

Hal cleared dishes from the table, set them in the sink, ran water over them. He found comfort and solace in small tasks that inadvertently revealed the marvels of the twenty-first. Hot running water that poured out clear of smudge and dirt. A dishwasher that he now loaded with plates, glasses, silverware. A growling garbage disposal deep inside the sink that ground up leftovers. A television that Cam turned on and fiddled with until he found news. An Internet connection that was fast enough to deliver entertainment twenty-four/seven. Shelves in the bedrooms loaded with real books. They had real beds, real food.

A kernel of a plan began taking shape in his head.

Liz came over to him as he finished up loading the dishes. “I need to move around outside, Hal. Get a sense of this place. I’m not asking your permission, okay? Let’s be clear on that. Red told me how you’re trying to control everything, like a dictator, like…”

“That’s bullshit. I just want everyone to stay focused. And safe.” He dried his hands on a dish towel, slammed the door of the dishwasher, and examined the controls, trying to find a way to start the damn thing. “How do I start this, anyway?”

Liz pointed at the pile of dirty dishes that remained in the sink. “What about those?”

“They don’t fit.”

“Oh.” She examined the buttons and punched START and the dishwasher started churning.

They looked at each other and laughed, an acknowledgement of the differences between this century and their own.

“I’ll take off from the back porch. Darker there. I’ll bring info.”

“I’ll walk out with you. They’re headquartered in the airport terminal. Take a look there.”

She nodded and as they walked toward the back door, her unfurled wings fluttered in anticipation of her flight. Hal envied that anticipation. Liz was one of a kind among the Crows, a shape shifter with incredible vision at heights that would render anyone else comatose in minutes. He had recruited her when she was just nine or ten, a drugged captive of a couple of Normal soldiers who were about to chop off her wings. He had melted both of them and taken her home and his parents had protected her just as they had protected Wind and all the others. She was loyal to him. He never had doubted that. But he disliked the way she had seemed to side with Red about blending in. Of them all, she was least likely to blend in.

Outside on the back porch, her wings unfurled, eighteen feet from tip to tip, and she exhaled softly, deeply, almost a sigh. She dropped her head back, taking in the star-strewn sky, the moon rising in the distance. “They have so much here in the twenty-first, Hal. Where the hell did we go wrong?”

“I don’t know. Nature tried her best to compensate, but there were never enough of us. Or if there were, if there was ever a point where Crows outnumbered Normals, those numbers were drugged and killed quickly.”

She looked at him then, Liz with her young, strangely beautiful face, eyes already turning to topaz, feathers replacing the hair on her head. “Do you really have a plan, Hal?”

Did he? Maybe.

Would it work? Maybe.

Was it solid? No.

Would she remain loyal regardless? Yes, yes.

“I think so.”

She held his gaze a moment longer and he hugged her, Liz, the only shape shifter in existence, rescued from their sordid past, her feathers now tickling his face, his arms. “Find out what you can. I love you, Liz.”

“Ditto. Bigger than Google. That’s their concept here of really big, Hal.”

With that, she stepped away from him, her head transforming, her legs melting into her body, her long wings flapping so rapidly that he moved farther back. Then she lifted away from the porch, into the starlit sky, and he watched until he couldn’t see her anymore.

So many emotions scrambled around inside him that part of the porch railing melted. He felt like weeping. This mission was supposed to have been simple. After the early arrivals had accomplished what they’d been sent here to do, hundreds of them were supposed to sweep in and conquer the island within a few hours. But he hadn’t factored in the deterioration of the dome, the collapse of the dome walls, and the destabilization of their collective vision of Tango Key in the twenty-first century. He hadn’t considered that anyone in his tribe would be trapped somewhere in time, rendered nuts, or killed in the travel process. All he had focused on was getting the fuck out and taking his tribe with him.

The idea of trying to blend in here was preposterous. These twenty-first century people weren’t so different from the Normals in his time. They feared outliers, anything and anyone who was different. In this century, the groups of outliers ranged from people with brown and black skin to people of certain religions and those who spoke languages other than English. They included immigrants, the poor, uneducated, chronically ill.

And even if they succeeded at blending in, at least initially, what would they do here? He hadn’t thought that through, either. It hadn’t occurred to him to do anything other than seize the island and make it theirs. But even if they succeeded at doing that, the question remained. What would they do then? And who would they be as a group?

None of them knew how commerce worked here, Red was right about that. Would they look for work? They didn’t have to; they had enough gold and cash among them. But. How else could they integrate into the society? None of the women in his tribe could have children, but some of the men—himself, Nico, Cam—had escaped sterilization. In order to grow the tribe, they would have to partner with those outside of it. A beginning of integration, he thought. And then what? Would their offspring attend school? Would that be a way to get to know people, to blend in, to integrate?

How could someone like Liz integrate into the twenty-first? Or an albino like Nico? Or Trixie? Or Squirt? Red might be able to do it because she was attractive, personable, and seductive. But she couldn’t conceive. Cam would be able to integrate, too, a thin old man who looked harmless, benign, and could appear as virtually anyone, living, dead, imaginary. Even though he hadn’t been sterilized, there was the issue of his age. What woman in this time would want to have sex with a seventy-year-old man? For that matter, would any woman in this century desire him?

Hal knew he might be able to integrate for a while, perhaps even meet a normal woman, develop a relationship that might evolve into something deeper. Whether he could have children of his own or become a stepfather to someone else’s children, at some point in his integration, something would set him off. He would melt an object or person and others would see it. And that would be it.

He would rather marry Wind.

Fuck integration, he decided. He wanted this island. And he suddenly knew that his plan, which had seemed so stupid earlier, now struck him as brilliant. He would take Mira hostage.

2

Mira stood in the doorway of One World Books, eyes wandering through the destruction. In the morning light that streamed through the shattered windows, the store looked like the aftermath of a violent earthquake or a cat five hurricane. For only the second time in her life, she couldn’t speak. The first time, in 2005, also had involved her store.

After Danielle had devastated the island and moved on, Mira had returned to the store to remove the shutters and take stock. She’d found the first floor submerged in four feet of water, most of the inventory destroyed, and the second floor in ruins because part of the roof had collapsed. She, Sheppard, Annie, and Nadine had boxed up and moved hundreds of books before the storm, all their collective favorites, and stored them at their house. Those books and several hundred more that had been stored in a back room, had survived the hurricane.

Even though the store had been heavily insured, she’d been facing bankruptcy. Her relationship with Sheppard had also been ripped apart during that storm and she remembered standing where she was now, feeling abandoned and utterly alone.

But what she felt right now was rage. The ceiling sprinklers had gone off during whatever had happened here, so water had soaked through everything. The front windows were shattered, books were strewn all over the place, shelves had been overturned, scorch marks marred the ceiling and floor, one of the four registers had melted, another lay in pieces on the sidewalk. Part of the checkout counter had melted, the cafe was mostly rubble, all the chairs had been reduced to splintered wood. Just a single table remained intact, and it was on its side, filled with bullet holes just like the walls, the ceiling, the front of the cafe counter. Overhead lights had shattered.

Mira made her way across the wet carpet of glass to her favorite aisle in the store, where the visionary books had been shelved. Most of the bookcases lay on their backs or sides, some of the books still wedged on the shelves, others on the floor. She rushed around, gathering up the books that had gotten wet and set them on an empty cart. She took them back to her office and opened them randomly to dry. Eventually, she would have to take a hair dryer to them and maybe some of them could be salvaged.

She returned to the front of the store to salvage more books, but Blanca and Carmen had arrived with Annie. They looked like a professional cleaning crew, carrying vacuum cleaners, brooms, hand vacs, mops and buckets, dust pans, garbage bags, tools, several cans of paint and brushes, caulking to fix the holes in the walls, replacement light bulbs. A team of carpenters came in behind them with a load of wood to rebuild the front counter. Sheppard, Gutierrez, Delgado, and Rincon arrived next with new appliances and supplies for the cafe. Then Keel and some of his soldiers drove up in a truck loaded with furniture.

Mira stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “You and your troops aren’t welcome here, Frank.”

He no longer wore fatigues, just jeans and a Tango Key t-shirt and running shoes. A regular dude. “It was my fault your store got trashed. So the National Guard is replacing everything.”

“Yeah? And three months from now I’m going to get a bill for twenty or thirty grand?”

“No. We’ve paid for it.”

“I’d like to see the receipt and get a copy of it.”

She could tell her request rankled him. “I figured.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced the receipt and a copy of the bill from an upscale furniture store here on the island. $11,111.01. The numbers shocked her. To her, all those elevens meant he was telling the truth.

“Oh, wait. And this one.”

From the front pocket of his jeans, he withdrew two receipts from another upscale place for $13,700. This number—137—had been described by one author as the DNA of light and had haunted Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli for his entire life. When he had entered the hospital in his late fifties for what was believed to be minor surgery and learned his room number was 137, he’d said that he would never get out of there alive. And he hadn’t. But for her, this number was magic because Pauli himself had been a telekinetic. He would walk into a lab and equipment stuff would break, shatter. This phenomenon was so well known among his colleagues that he eventually was banned from labs.

This number, 137, was what had happened to her when she’d jerked down the bully’s gym shorts in third grade without touching her. It was what had happened the evening on the rise when she’d moved pebbles without touching them. And it had happened with the napkins and paper plates that night on the rooftop of her home in the preserve when she was with her daughter and the other women. Her number for now. Pauli could have it back if and when she lived up to its promise.

“Interesting numbers, Frank. I’ll take my receipts and please come in.”

So he did.

3

At one point during the long hours that everyone cleaned and worked and rebuilt, Keel pulled Mira aside. “I’m so deeply sorry for what I caused here, Mira. I… I was an asshole at the Tango Market, and earlier and…”

“Yeah, c’mon, Frank. Going for your weapon out there in the road. Is that the kind of tactic you used on your ex and your autistic son?”

As soon as she’d said the words, she regretted them. She shouldn’t have done that, peeked inside him that way and then weaponized it. He looked startled that she asked, then laughed uneasily, a chopped up sound. “Maybe… I did.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I thought… you had to touch someone to…”

“Not always. Look, I don’t want people to be pitted against each other. That undermines our strength as a group. Truce, okay?”

He held up his right hand and she slapped it with her left, a high five that might have yielded additional info about him but didn’t. She stepped back, relieved that she hadn’t picked up anything new about him. “How’re your guys who were injured?”

Such pain showed in his expression that she wished she hadn’t asked. “Lexington died at the scene. Gustavo bled out, both his legs were severed at the knees. Blake… is in critical condition. But he’ll pull through. In his daily life, he’s a fireman. He knew what to do.”

“Christ, I’m so sorry, Frank.”

“Here’s something you need to know, Mira. There were five of these Crows. They were invisible. One of the five has the power to render people invisible. We saw them because we wore thermal visors for the first time.”

“I’ve seen the security footage—the ferry, the market.”

“Hal melted all the shit in here. The redhead set fire to Blake. The chubby kid threw something at Gustavo that severed his legs. Those three were known quantities because of what they did on the ferry. Then there’s the black woman and the albino. She’s the telekinetic so that means the albino is the one with the power of invisibility.” Keel ran his hand over his face, as if to contain whatever he felt just then. “I thought… they wouldn’t be a match for our weapons. But, fuck, five of us armed to the hilt against five of them… they took out three of my men within fifteen seconds, Mira. If there are hundreds of them, we don’t stand a chance in hell. I don’t care how much artillery we have.”

She heard the despair and fear in his voice and sensed he wasn’t a man who felt either emotion often. “Any ideas about where we should go from here?”

Keel looked around the bookstore, at the cleanup and renovation underway, and shook his head. “Not in a physical sense. But there’s a central question we need to answer that may be the clue to all of it. Like I said to Ian, if they can pull the past around them and walk into it, then they could have gone anywhere. So why are they here on Tango in the twenty-first? What or who drew them here?”

Mira suddenly knew he had sensed she felt a psychic connection of some sort to Hal. She wasn’t in the mood for games. “No idea. What’s your theory?”

“The stone woman asked for you and O’Hara by name. Why? The weather guy chose the front of your bookstore for his Armageddon. Why? They returned to your bookstore today. Why?”

“It’s not like they were invited, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m just trying to connect the dots. Is there a link between you and Hal?”

“Jesus, I’d rather have a connection to the clown in IT, Frank.”

He laughed but it sounded phony. “I’m back to work here. We’ll have your store functional by sunset.”

Mira finished gathering up books from her special section, loaded them onto another empty cart and pushed it into her office. She shut the door and leaned back against it, her heart drumming, sweat seeping from her pores Please, she thought. Give me some answers. I need to know what the fuck is going on.

She hoped that Tom or Nadine would appear and offer guidance, insight.

They didn’t.

She pushed a cart loaded with books ready to be shelved and walked over to an empty shelf and started removing books from the cart. She paged through each one, making sure it wasn’t wet or damp. If it was, she placed it open on her desk so the pages would dry naturally or because she used a hair dryer. But when she did this with 1984, she found handwriting on the blank pages at the back.

My mother was in charge of the dome archives, one of the most important government positions. She was appointed to that position when her older half-brother, my corrupt uncle, became president. He has held that position for twenty-one years and is—was?—our last elected president. When he dies, his younger brother will become prez. He’s even worse. Most of the archives are digitalized—books, movies, magazines, music, art, newspapers, websites. We had copies of many of Jon O’Hara’s columns in the Tango Gazette, which was how we kept tabs on the success or failure of the early arrivals. There was also a small collection of physical books, real books, the ones you can hold and smell and page through, like this book. And sometimes my mother brought those home for me to read. These books came with the early climate refugees and were preserved so they didn’t fall apart. It was how I read physical copies of The Hunger Games, Carrie, Watchers, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Running Man, Harry Potter, how I first heard about Tango Key.

My mother got away with treating me like a normal kid because of her relationship with the prez. But I think that even if there hadn’t been a connection between them, she would have done the same. She was a rebel. She hated the way we Crows were discriminated against and always believed we could be integrated into Normal society if we were treated like everyone else. She gave me—and the rest of those we rescued—an antidote for the drug that kept our abilities subdued. For the longest time, I never did anything to violate her trust. But then I witnessed, a Normal soldier trying to rape a young Crow woman, and I melted him and took the girl home with me. Her name was Wind and she became the first member of my group. I fell in love with her. My group eventually grew into hundreds. My dad moved us into a warehouse he owned. My parents were like Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad.

Mira snapped photos of the pages, then set the book open on her desk, and flipped through every book on the cart. Hal had scribbled notes in other books, too, and had crossed through entire sections of some books and jotted notes about how his future had evolved. She snapped photos of these notes as well and devoured every word, every detail.

Hal had been born in 2106, long after his parents, grandparents, and extended family had reached the dome. This fact didn’t negate Keel’s ideas about how environmental changes triggered rapid evolutionary changes in a species in a matter of generations instead of millennia. Instead, it made it more likely those changes had continued to occur throughout the migration and long after the dome had been reached and that they still occurred. Had someone else in Hal’s family line had abilities? A parent? Grandparent? A relative farther back?

The only environment he’d ever known was the dome, and he had questions about it. Who had built it? When had it been built? Who had arrived there first? How had something so large been constructed at all and how had it stood for so long? Had it once been a government facility built as a refuge for politicians in the early days of climate change? The speculation among Crows was that it had been built by NASA engineers as a prototype for the eventual habitation of the moon, Mars, or an asteroid. If Hal had ever found the real answers to the dome’s origins, he hadn’t included it in the notes she read.

Mira finally set aside fourteen books from the cart in which Hal had scribbled notes or rewritten paragraphs and pages to reflect the reality of life in the dome. It was as if he’d written in a kind of fever to set the record straight.

In the front and back of The Shining, he’d drawn a complicated family tree that began in 2144 and worked back through time to 2025. But many entries were missing or lacked names and places that could be cross-checked. Under the years from 2025—2050, he’d jotted extensive notes:

In the early years of the migration by climate change refugees, many people lost partners and forged new relationships that produced children. Some of those children were born with abilities and as the migration continued, they grew into teens who partnered early, and had children of their own. My exact lineage lies somewhere in this mess of possibilities. But I still believe I’m related to Mira, Nadine, Annie and Jon.

Mira read that last line over and over again, bile rising in her throat, nearly choking her. She snapped pictures of this section, a part of her hoping it magically would change, that she wasn’t reading it correctly, that the names belonged to some other Mira, Nadine, Annie, and Jon O’Hara. Maybe he’d written it figuring she would see the scribblings eventually and would be tricked into believing a lie, that it would freak her out, make her careless. But if Hal was their descendant, if that much was true, then it explained the psychic connection she’d felt when she first had seen the video of him.

It explained a lot.

His mere existence meant she had come face to face with her own failings. Hal didn’t hesitate to use his ability whenever he could; her ability had snoozed for six years until she’d read the Crow who had tuned to stone when she died. Hal wasn’t just her nemesis and descendant, he was also her catalyst.

But if it any of this was true, it also meant that Annie and O’Hara would be part of that early climate refugee migration inland from the Florida keys and the East coast of the U.S.

Mira glanced again at the dates Hal had noted: 2025—2050. In 2025, her daughter would be thirty. By 2050, she would be fifty-five. So if she and O’Hara had kids, it probably would be on the early side of those dates, 2025 to 2035, when Annie was between the ages of thirty and forty. O’Hara would be between the ages of thirty-six and forty-six. By then, Mira would be between fifty-two to sixty-two. Sheppard would be a year older on either side.

“Fuck,” she spat.

Did it mean they should all uproot themselves and move well inland before this migration started? Would that prevent Hal from being born? And how far inland? Kansas? Wisconsin? Minnesota? The Canadian wilderness? Should they use Chet Snow’s map in Mass Dreams of the Future, the map Hal had redrawn, as a blueprint of where to move? Should they sell everything this week and get out?

And is Annie going to marry O’Hara?

Such extreme panic poured through her she could barely breathe. Then the door to her office slammed open and her daughter rushed in. Mira stood there, staring at her, fists pressed against her chest, trying to quiet the awful pounding of her heart.

“Mom, the…” She stopped. “Wow, what’s going on? You’re wearing that expression that screams, oh my God, we’re fucked.”

Mira’s arms dropped to her sides. She had no idea what that expression looked like. “Annie, how serious is this relationship with Jon? Are you two getting married? Are you…”

“Married?” Annie burst out laughing. “What’re you talking about?”

Mira stammered, “So you’re, uh, just, involved?”

Annie shut the door, came over to the cart, glanced at the books on Mira’s desk, read a couple of the scribbled entries, looked at Mira. “There’s some sort of big psychic download happening here, right?”

“Or some big mind fuck, I’m not sure which.” Mira provided the condensed version of Hal’s notes.

Annie’s eyes widened, but this time she didn’t laugh. “Wow.” She sank into the nearest chair. “Okay, honest answer. Jon and I get along really well. He’s the first guy I’ve been with who isn’t freaked out that I set places at my kitchen table for dad and Nadine. He’s awed by you, by what you do. Awed, Mom, not freaked out. He likes Shep. He’s an evolved Shep who got past skepticism a long time ago. He…”

“Annie, I’d feel a lot better about all this if the two of you evacuated Tango until this plays out.”

“Evacuate for where? My job is here. My life is here. Same for Jon. We…”

“Suppose someone in Hal’s group wants to prevent this invasion from ever happening? If it’s true that he’s our descendant, all they’d have to do is kill you and Hal wouldn’t be born.”

“Isn’t that like, you know, the grandfather paradox on steroids?”

Mira plucked 1984 off her desk. “Read this. You’ll understand something about the evolution of his group.”

Annie took the book and read through the entry Hal had scrawled. “Incredible. His parents were like Tubman? How does he know about her?”

“Probably from historical info from the dome archives.”

“Look, Mom, Tango is as much my home and Jon’s as it is yours and Shep’s. I’m staying. And after all this is over, we can talk about relocating. If he’s really our descendant, it explains why you felt a psychic connection to him, why it triggered this other latent ability in you.”

Mira wasn’t convinced that anything they knew would explain what had happened.

“C’mon, let’s gather up the rest of the books in our favorite section and find out if he scribbled notes in any of the others,” Annie suggested. “We’re making progress out there.”

“Maybe all of us should stay here tonight,” Mira said. “Just in case.”

Annie threw out her arms. “Nowhere to sleep, the place is a wreck, but hey, we’ve got plenty of food and coffee and new furniture and tons to read.”

“Actually there’re cots and bedding in the storage room we can use. I’d just feel better staying here. And for now, keep this descendant stuff to yourself. And what you ladies saw last night.”

“Why? Why keep any of this secret?”

Mira didn’t know. “It just feels right for now.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

Mira grabbed the empty basket and followed Annie out of her office.