34

The back of the hospital stank so badly Corey nearly ran away. He held his breath, hiding behind a dumpster full of hospital waste. This was the only place where no one would see him. The streets of Kurtstadt were still chaotic after the morning’s action.

Corey fished the coins out of his pocket and squeezed hard. He was a little afraid about returning to the present. Leila would be mad at him. But he was excited, too. When he returned to the present, everyone’s memory will have adjusted. They would know who Stanislaw was. Mutti would never have grieved over her beloved brother. Maybe she would not have sunk into the depression that haunted her for so long.

In the meantime, Kurtstadt did not fall to the Nazis. Thousands of lives were saved.

Corey took a deep breath. He wanted more.

He looked for the hundredth time at his hands and feet. He touched his cheek. He had no symptoms at all.

Being a Throwback, he realized, meant helping the world one step at a time. Artifacts were all over the place. You had to keep going back. If you chose where to go, if you knew your limits, you could do it. You could avoid the chaos loop.

Corey knew he was not finished with Hitler.

But he was definitely finished with these dumpsters.

Squeezing his coins, he closed his eyes tight.

Owwww.

Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.

Tight. So tight. Confined like a size two straitjacket on a size twelve body.

This was different.

This was not like any time hop he’d experienced.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to get back to Kurtstadt and try again. What was happening? What had gone wrong?

He felt stuck. His body seemed to disintegrate and then snap together, again and again in microsecond bursts. He was surrounded and stranded, people and cities rushing by. Whirring machines engulfed him and disappeared in nanoseconds, and he spun among vast networks of orbiting globes like molecules. Buildings passed right through him at rocket speed, as howls high and low assaulted his ears. He sensed his brain separate from his nose, his arm light-years away from his chest, his feet in a different era than his eyes. He felt like he could tap a butterfly in the Jurassic Age and kick his feet onto George Washington’s desk.

He felt squeezed in the limbo between past and present, the place where flesh and spirit were never meant to go.

Stop!

He hadn’t questioned time travel. It had always just happened. Papou had described it to him as like bending space. Like closing the gap between distant galaxies. But what if you went too far? What if you were caught at the edge of space-time? What was there—a black hole?

Was this what death felt like?

Like you were exploding out into the universe, spinning away from your own soul, atom by atom?

He didn’t want to die like this. Why wasn’t it working this time?

Corey opened his mouth to scream, but everything went black.