DEC. 31, 1999

It had been months since he’d seen a color other than prison-gray and the orange of his jumpsuit. Fourteen hours a day in the cell, and the punishment continued in the yard where the winter sky loomed sunless and empty overhead.

Perhaps he was going mad. Maybe he already had. Fucking Attica. Fucking Duke Carlotta.

Brooklyn put his arm back under his thin pillow to prop his head up. “You still alive up there, old man?”

The man in the top bunk grunted. “Like you care.”

“Don’t have time to break in a new cellmate, is all.”

“Time.” The laugh was phlegmy. Leon, the man on the top bunk, had been sick for weeks. “Seems like you got all the time in the world, babe.”

“Nah.” Brooklyn raised his head and dropped it back, hoping he and the shitty pillow might come to some kind of compromise. “All kinds of things to do, man. Money to make an’ hearts to break.”

That phlegmy laugh again. “Got any resolutions? New century. New millennium. Make ’em good.”

“Resolve not to get shanked again, how’s that?”

“Good place to start. I definitely don’t have time to get a new–”

“What?” Caliban said. “Everything checks out. No advanced tech. No apocalypse. We even got Bowie off drugs.”

“I can’t leave him behind again,” Andy said. “I won’t.”

The scientist grumbled. “This is going to be harder than making some notebooks disappear. Are you sure you want to go through all this for one man? At least he’s alive this time.”

“Living and surviving aren’t the same.” Andy leaned over the console and used the zoom on Brooklyn’s whiffletree diagram. “We’re not leaving him there.”