“It’s not over, Elliott.”
“What do you mean?”
“The night Charlie died, in his apartment, you walked out into the living room and told me never to speak of that night until we met at Nora’s house—and that I would know when. And that when the time came, to tell you that everything was going to be all right.”
Elliott cocked his head. “I didn’t see you that night.”
As soon as he said it, comprehension dawned on him.
“Not yet,” Adeline said. “Not yet.”
Elliott let the gun fall to his side. A tear rolled down his face. “Not yet,” he whispered.
To Sam, he said, “It’s good to see you again.”
His old friend nodded.
Elliott turned back to Nora. “You too. It’s been longer for us than for you.”
“I want to hear about that.”
“You will,” Elliott said. He reached down to the recall ring on his wrist. “But I need to get back to the lab before I contaminate this crime scene with my DNA. And I need to apologize to Hiro.”
He pressed the button and the air crackled and he was gone.
“What happens now?” Nora asked.
“Now,” Adeline said, moving to the black body bag, “we recreate your murder.”
Sam helped Adeline lift Nora’s replica and move her to the kitchen. They placed the body with the head protruding out into the hallway so that it would be seen from the front door the next morning.
“We need to make the incision,” Adeline said. “Syntran left the organs in and simulated a time of death, but the body still needs to bleed.”
Adeline watched her father walk to the kitchen and take the knife from the butcher block. She swallowed, heart beating faster, waiting for the moment that had been nearly two decades in the making, a moment that would change everything for them.
He paused, looking at the knife, his back to her. “We have a problem.”
He turned to the two women. “The knife was hidden in the toilet compartment, and Adeline’s DNA was found on it, but she never touched it.”
Adeline walked over and took the knife from him. “Her DNA is on it now.”
Her father stared at her, confused. Slowly, comprehension seemed to dawn on him.
“Hi, Dad.”
He reached back and put a hand on the counter, bracing himself. “How?”
“Absolom Two.”
His chest rose and fell faster as his breathing accelerated.
“How far back?”
“All the way to 2008. I was there when Mom gave birth.”
“You… you were that Adeline? The TA she told me about?”
“I was.”
He reached out and touched Adeline’s cheek. His hand was still dirty, but Adeline didn’t care. She pressed her face into his fingers. “I had surgery,” she whispered. “A few years before I met you as Daniele.”
Her father studied her face and shook his head. “I thought I was the hero. But it was you, all along. The price you paid. All those years you gave to this. Half your life. Most would have given up.”
“It was a small price to pay to get you back.” Adeline turned to look at Nora. “And to save you. That’s why I hid the cameras. I was trying to figure out what was going to happen.”
“I understand,” Nora said.
“What happens now?” Sam asked.
“Now,” Adeline replied, “we start living the part we’ve all been avoiding. The future. A wise person once said that time heals all wounds. But it won’t work if you don’t give time a chance. I think we’ve given the past enough time. Our wounds are healed. It’s time to do what we were always meant to do, the real reason Absolom Two exists. It’s time to give the future a chance. And to start helping others.”
PART V
ABSOLOM ISLAND
SEVENTY-THREE
I n the lab, Adeline stepped out of the Absolom machine and joined Elliott and Hiro at the computer station.
“Ready for us to bring them home?” Hiro asked.
Elliott had clearly filled him in on what had transpired at Nora’s house in the past.
“Not yet,” Adeline said.
Using her phone, she disabled the cameras in the lab and told the two men her plan.
Elliott just shook his head. “You’ve been two steps ahead the whole time.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know how all the pieces fit until now.”
To Hiro, she said, “Go ahead. Bring them home.”
The Absolom machine hummed, and Adeline’s father appeared in the chamber.
Adeline opened the door and held up a hand. “We need to transmit you again.”
“Why?”
“There will be an investigation into this prototype’s usage tonight. They’ll know from the power consumption. We can’t have your DNA here. And you can’t stay here.”
He nodded. “Where exactly am I going then?”
“It’s a place called Absolom Island. And it’s the future. Nora will be joining you there. So will I. All of us will. Eventually.”
Adeline closed the door and watched her father disappear. When Nora arrived, Adeline told her about Absolom Island and watched her depart.
Elliott pointed to the computer screen. “We’re already getting a ton of emails about the power usage. What are we going to tell them?”
“The truth. We had to use the prototype to avoid a temporal disaster. And that it won’t happen again. We’re shutting down all further development of Absolom here. We’re moving everything to the island.”
Elliott bunched his eyebrows. “What exactly are we going to be doing on the island?”
Adeline drew the envelope from her pocket—the same one she had shown Hiro. She handed it to Elliott and watched as he flipped through the photos the Tesseract program had found. He paused on one that showed Adeline standing in Nanking in late 1937. The next photo was of her and her father in a village in northern Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004. The next page showed Elliott and Charlie in Cambodia in 1975.
“How long have you had these?” he asked.
“I found some photos that had me in them years ago. I only thought to look for the rest of you after Dad mentioned it the night you showed us Absolom Two.”
“Charlie’s in these pictures. How?”
“I couldn’t exhume his body—not without your permission—so I couldn’t confirm that he was replaced with a Syntran replica. But I knew we’d get him back when I saw these photos.”
“You could have told me.”
“I could have. But I didn’t know what you would do. I couldn’t risk you disrupting the past until I knew how it all fit together.”
“And how does it fit together?”
“Absolom Island, Elliott. It’s the key. It’s a place to do what we did here tonight, with Nora: rescue people who are lost in time. People who are going to die but deserve a second chance. People like Charlie.”
She reached out and gripped his shoulder. “In fact, he’s the second one we’re going to save.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
A top a high dune, on an island in the Pacific, Sam stood and watched the waves crash into the beach as the sun set in the distance.
He reached out and intertwined his fingers with Nora’s.
Neither said a word. They simply watched the sun slip over the horizon and the dark curtain of night spread across the sky, the stars shining brighter than he had ever seen them—at least in this world. The night sky reminded him of Pangea, an island much like this one—uninhabited and full of wonder. But he was safe here. And he wasn’t alone. This was a home. A place for a second chance.
He and Nora walked along a crushed stone path back to a small cottage overlooking the sea. An empty, newly made village spread out around it, waiting for its residents to arrive. To Sam, it almost felt like he and Nora were the only people in the world. And that was sort of perfect. It was what he needed. He sensed that she did too. They had been here for a week, and in that time, without all the pressures and worries of the outside world, they had both decompressed. And gotten to know each other, in a way he thought they never would have before, in the normal world.