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Portsmouth, Hampshire
As soon as Ari arrived back in 2073, he checked the Registry on his phone. What he saw made him feel sick to the stomach. Michelle had still been wiped from existence. He slumped down on the Guildhall steps and navigated to Albert’s record. Ari had saved Michelle’s father on that Wednesday night, only for him to be killed in a hit and run accident on the following night.
Was this latest failure due to the Predestination Paradox? Ari had stopped Albert from being killed and fate, feeling cheated, had simply moved Michelle’s father’s death to the next day. But surely, if that were the case, then fate wouldn’t have allowed Albert to die because, in Ari’s timeline, he fathered Michelle. Ari hated paradoxes – they were like a hall of mirrors and could send you in all directions chasing ghosts.
Ari had been approaching the problem from the wrong angle. He’d been concentrating on locating the victims’ parents and trying to ensure that they still had the opportunity to conceive their time travel scientist child. He now realised that he needed to target the person who was the root cause of all these timeline extinctions instead – the killer.
Time was running out. There were only two Project Clockwise team members left. Whoever had eliminated the others was getting very close to achieving their goal. He had to find out all that he could about Doctor Katerina Nowaková. She’d be the next target.