Ten thousand deaths, my beloved. Let me fall before you. Let my death be the one that wins you life anew.
~ excerpt from the poem “A Living Death” by Jorge Sabio I2–2068
Wednesday April 2, 2070
Fort Benning, Georgia
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
Sam parked her car behind a charging station down the street from the main research facility and left the windows cracked and the keys lying on the driver’s seat. There should have been a storm brewing in the distance. Big thunderclouds boiling in the atmosphere promising a torrent of rain and shattering thunder. The wind should have picked up, gusting around her or howling down the street like the song of a damned soul. Birdsong and a gentle afternoon zephyr seemed wholly inappropriate.
It was a metaphor for her life, really. Every grand plan with which she set out fizzled into obscurity. Not failure, she didn’t fail. But all her efforts were swept away in the great rolling tide of time, lost, forgotten, erased like footprints on the sand.
She parked her car in the back and made her way to the station bathroom to freshen up. The woman in the mirror was a stranger. Sleepless nights had left bruises on her cheeks. Stress had thinned her, sharpened her features, and left her wan. Aside from the faint heartbeat fluttering her neck, she was already a corpse.
“Why are you doing this, Samantha?”
The woman in the mirror stared back with unforgiving eyes.
“What do you think this will get you? Another year? Another decade? Everyone dies in the end.”
Ten thousand deaths, wasn’t that what Mac had said? There were ten thousand deaths needed to make a life. The machine would take ten million. Everyone here would die if Emir and Loren had their way.
“I swore an oath,” she told the woman in the mirror. “I promised to sacrifice everything if that’s what it took to defend the nation. Everyone else is blind. I’m the only one who sees the danger, so I’m the only one who can prevent the destruction.”
Saying it aloud almost made it possible to believe all that.
Or maybe she really was delusional. Maybe Loren and Petrilli were right.
She had to wonder how many other Sams had repeated that in other iterations? She wondered if they’d reached this point, too. If the detective who chased Gant had hesitated, then run into the vortex, telling herself she had to stop Gant before anyone else did. Maybe Juanita’s last thoughts were of how she was dying to protect her people.
Or maybe they were all as selfish as she. Wanting to keep themselves away from the nightmares of crossed timelines and greedy men.
There really was no way of knowing.
Fort Benning. Talk about ghosts. He’d done basic training there, and Ranger school, and airborne school. Most his life between nineteen and twenty-five revolved around the ancient army post. Somewhere in his wallet, he still had the ID they’d issued him before his last deployment.
By the time he’d sobered up and started thinking straight, the brown card was little more than a souvenir, a memento of a shattered lifetime. He’d kept it out of misplaced sentimentalism. The lockdown was an annexed portion on the southwest side of Fort Benning that UNATBI had taken over in 2066. Part of the old training grounds outside Jamestown off Blueridge Road.
He recharged the car at a rest stop just inside Georgia before turning north on 520 as the sun set. Sam was bureau-trained. She would wait until it was late, and the guards were tired, before she tried anything. He tried to take some comfort from that.
Knowing that Sam was an absolute rookie charging in to steal a device that had already been involved with six deaths and more than one murder attempt made him drive faster. At Cusseta, he pulled over at a pawnshop. They sold him a small gun and ammo with no questions. Insanity all around. He wouldn’t have handed a weapon to a man who looked like him.
Maybe they just wanted to get me out of their store.
He didn’t blame them.
A quarter to eleven, he abandoned the rental in the woods outside the lockdown. He wiped it down for prints, left the keys in the driver’s seat, and Cole Clary’s driver’s license on the dashboard. Hopefully, the guy had a decent alibi.
Now, where would his errant senior agent be? He scanned the tree line around the lockdown as he secured his new gun. There was a darker pocket of shadow under a thick layer of broad-leafed vines. Something glinted in the yellow light from the building. Amateur—she hadn’t taken her jewelry off.
He smiled as he melted into the brush in the way only a Ranger could.
Lying on her stomach, Sam crawled forward, timing the cameras on the outside of the lockdown. A hand covered her mouth, and she was pulled forcibly backward, landing on something warm. Her nose told her who it was even before Mac hissed “Be quiet!” in her ear. She was wrapped in his arms, sitting on his lap in a tent of vines
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, turning so she could look at him.
“That’s my line.”
She tried to wiggle free, but Mac just tightened his grip, pulling her closer. Her heart rate picked up. “I don’t have a choice, Mac.”
“You’ll break it, they’ll rebuild it. You aren’t going to accomplish anything. Let’s go back to Florida. Agent Edwin is sitting on your resignation. We can think of something else.”
“I already have. I’m not breaking the machine.” She froze as a guard’s flashlight swept the foliage. Someone standing behind them and looking at the light might have seen their profile, but the guard standing by the building could only see vines. He moved on.
Sam lowered her voice. “I’m not breaking the machine,” she said again. “I’m removing it from the timeline. Emir said that all timelines eventually collapsed back into one, didn’t he?”
“Phased back into balance,” Mac corrected. “I remember.”
“So I remove the machine from the timeline, and it will eventually be removed from all the timelines.”
He shifted position, his five o’clock shadow grazing her face. “How?”
“Take the time machine through the time warp.”
Mac held her in silence. It seemed he was holding her tighter. She could smell his soap and hear the high-pitched buzz of mosquitoes.
“I have to go, Mac. This is the only option I have. There’s nothing for me here. I’ve lost everything. I have nothing.”
He kissed her cheek. “You have me.”
“But I don’t. Not like this. Not with my head already in the guillotine.” She bit her lip, trying not to cry. “You should leave.” She couldn’t keep pushing him away. She wasn’t that strong.
“I can’t lose you.”
“Thank you.”
She could feel Mac swallow hard. He gestured toward the lockdown. “You have a plan for this?”
“The director’s keycard, running shoes, and a couple of prayers.” She’d managed to get a tour of the outer labs, but even her sunny smile and a bureau badge hadn’t been enough to get her near the machine. Thankfully, the lab director was the careless sort who left her badge sitting on her desk when she went to the break room for lunch.
“I would have preferred a fragment grenade.”
In the distance, someone shouted.
“Ah, they found the car,” Mac said.
She glared at him, a look he probably missed in the dark.
“Call it a distraction,” he said. With a light push, she was crouching. “Time to run.”
They waited for the guards and cameras to move, then sprinted for the side door. Sam slid the director’s card in, and the lock turned green.
“This is way too easy,” Mac breathed.
“Tell me that in five minutes. This is after hours.”
“So, what, six minutes before the lockdown turns this into a pretty mausoleum?”
“Three.” Bureau security didn’t believe in second chances. Once lockdown was initiated, vents would flood the halls with a knockout gas that would leave them incapacitated.
She ran headlong down the tiled hallways, following the map in her head. Two lefts, a right, the third right . . . and there it was. Bastard. The machine that would ultimately kill her. Emir’s theory meant she could take the time machine out of play, but it also meant Jane Doe would still get buried in 2069. She would be buried in a pauper’s grave after months of hideous torture finally killed her.
Mac’s hand rested on her back. “Sam?”
“I hate this machine.”
“Two minutes and counting.”
She unlocked the door. The buttons were easy. She’d watched the remote video presentation with the taste of bile in her mouth, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need to know how to work the thing. Ironically, Petrilli had sent her the video because he hoped it would win her over to the bureau’s way of thinking.
“When are we going?” Mac asked.
“If it’s still the same setting from the lab, we’ll move back in time a year. April of ’69. We might jump a few miles.” Thirty seconds for it to power up. “My math might be a bit off, though.”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t drop us in a live-fire range out on the post.”
“Let’s hope our bones aren’t twisted like a wrung-out towel.”
Mac grimaced.
Forty seconds more for the machine to rattle to life. A claxon sounded in the building. Red lights flashed.
“We begin losing oxygen in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”
Sam hit the button. “One.”
A blue-green mist swirled as she held the button down. Time slowed. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She clutched the machine to her chest and leaned in for a kiss. Mac wrapped his arms around her, and they fell into the portal together.