Hiro stared at her. He was nervous too. This would be the first time a recall ring was ever used. What they were about to activate would reach across universes—time and space—back to Pangea, to a place where her father had either lived or died.
“Activate it, Hiro.”
He typed on the keyboard and turned to her. “Ping was successful. Ring is active.”
“Pull it through.”
The next few seconds were the longest of Adeline’s life. Would her father arrive as a mangled mess? In pieces? In a haze of particles and dust?
The Absolom machine hummed and flashed. In the middle of the chamber, her father appeared.
He looked like death.
He was skinny, his hair grungy, his face streaked with blood and dirt. But it was his eyes that shook Adeline. They were hard and hollowed out, like an animal. Someone who had been fighting for his life—and had the life driven out of him.
But he was alive.
When his eyes came into focus, and he saw Adeline through the machine’s glass door, his gaze softened. A smile formed.
Seeing her and the lab and the world he knew seemed to bring him back. Almost instantly, his eyes morphed back to the man Adeline had known in the two eras of her life: as a child, when she was Adeline; and as an adult, when she was Daniele.
She knew that he was seeing Daniele—his business partner and friend and the woman who had been so kind to his dying wife, and then the guardian who had taken in his children when he had been banished from this world. Adeline wanted to tell him who she really was. And if things went right, she would have that chance. If not, leaving that unsaid would be the greatest regret of her life. The next few minutes would determine whether that opportunity came.
To Hiro, Adeline said, “Have you rekeyed his recall ring?”
“Yes. It’s entangled with this universe now.”
Adeline opened the door. “Welcome back.”
Sam’s eyes welled with tears.
“How?” he asked, his voice breaking with emotion.
“We’ll get to that. But we need to do something else first.”
Sam nodded, and didn’t say any more.
Adeline closed the door, motioned to Hiro, and the machine hummed again.
The government would launch a full investigation into the power and Absolom usage tonight, but that was a problem for the future. Right now, Adeline had to ensure there was a future.
For the third time in her life, she watched Absolom send her father to the past.
Then, for the second time in her life, she stepped into the machine and felt it hum and vibrate and she joined him in the past.
SEVENTY-ONE
Adeline arrived in the foyer of Nora’s home.
Hiro’s targeting was good but not perfect. She was about two feet off the floor when she snapped into existence. She landed awkwardly, feet thudding on the floor as she reached out to brace herself on a wall with her hand.
“Hello?” Nora called from the kitchen.
She stepped out into the hall and stared at Adeline. “I told you not to come over.”
Nora’s gaze drifted to the front door. The locked door. “Wait. How did you get in here?”
Before Adeline could answer, the air next to her crackled and began to hiss.
She stepped aside and watched as her father appeared, also a few feet off the floor.
He landed with more grace, in a crouch.
Nora’s mouth fell open. Adeline could only imagine what was going through the woman’s mind. She had just seen this man leave her home—dressed in normal clothes, at a normal weight and well-groomed. Now he was wearing what Nora would instantly recognize as an Absolom departure ensemble, and he was slightly emaciated and completely dirty. He smelled terrible.
“What is this?” Nora asked.
“It’s Absolom Two,” Adeline said.
“I got that far. Why are you here?”
Adeline could see that Nora was scared now. It was the sight of her father that had done it. The fact that he had been sent via Absolom for some crime in the future. She could almost see Nora putting it together.
Nora took a step back, as if she was going to run. Her foot crunched on the broken glass on the floor.
Adeline glanced around. The package should arrive any second.
“Nora, it’s not what you think.”
The air between them in the hall crackled again. Adeline expected to see the black bag emerge.
Instead, Elliott appeared.
His foot slipped on the rug as he landed, crashing to the floor, but he scrambled to his feet, raising his right arm, a gun held out, trained on Adeline.
“Don’t move!”
Adeline’s heart hammered in her chest. This wasn’t part of the plan. She expected the universe around her to shatter, to dissolve like an oil painting exposed to heat: the view bubbling into blisters that peeled and flaked away. But reality held. For now. So far, this had already occurred.
Elliott didn’t look back at Nora. He took a step toward Adeline. “She’s here to kill you, Nora.”
Adeline’s father cocked his head. “Is that true, Dani?”
“No.”
“Activate your recall ring,” Elliott said. “Leave this time, right now.”
Adeline ignored his command. “How did you get here?”
“I broke down the lab door and tied Hiro up. He told me the lies you used on him.”
“They’re not lies, Elliott. I can prove it.”
As if on cue, a crackle emanated from the edge of the foyer, just inside the dining room.
The black bag snapped into existence and dropped to the floor with a thud.
Elliott’s eyes went wide.
“Open the bag,” Adeline said.
“What is it?”
Adeline turned to her father. “Unzip it.”
He stared at her and then at Elliott and finally Nora. He stepped toward the bag.
Elliott held out his other hand. “Stop, Sam. It’s probably a weapon.”
He was too late.
Adeline’s father reached down and unzipped the bag, revealing the body that looked exactly like Nora. He reeled back at the sight. Elliott froze, gun still held on Adeline.
“How?” Sam asked.
“A long time ago, I funded a company called Syntran. It grows organs for transplant. Along the way, they figured out how to grow human bodies from a DNA sample—even how to use telomere trimming and epigenetic manipulation to age the specimens. They grow the replica, age the organs so that they’re the right size, harvest them, then provide the remaining body to families for burial in cases where their loved one couldn’t be recovered.”
“The morgue,” Elliott whispered.
“Yes,” Adeline said. “That’s why I had Nora’s body exhumed—to verify that it had the Syntran serial number. To verify that a Syntran replica had been buried.”
Adeline pointed to the body on the floor. “This is the corpse the police will find. It will be buried. Not Nora.”
For a long moment, it was utterly quiet. “We made an assumption,” Adeline said. “We assumed that Nora was murdered tonight. That assumption was wrong. She wasn’t. She was replaced—and made to look like she was murdered so that we would complete Absolom Two. So the future would take place. There’s a far larger process at work here.”
SEVENTY-TWO
Nora looked from Adeline to the body on the floor. “Hold on. Did you just say murdered?”
Adeline nodded. “It’s a long story. The happy ending is that you’re not going to be murdered.”
Her gaze drifted over to Elliott, who was still holding the gun, staring down at Nora’s replica. Adeline wondered what he was thinking. What had his plan been? Had he imagined himself stopping Adeline from killing Nora, and then traveling back to the future until he could take the time to develop his own replica for Nora? It was the only real solution that Adeline could see. If that was Elliott’s plan, what then? Saving Charlie was his real objective. For him, Absolom Two had always been about the son he had lost.