Four. This is the moment I was so proud of, when I displayed cool under pressure. Except now I know that it’s John who snaps Tom’s cognitive paralysis and animal terror. Which makes sense. Tom was never brave. He was reckless and, in certain circumstances, recklessness can appear courageous. But Tom was never the kind of guy who’d pull it together in the clutch and save the day. I don’t trust John, but he’s the one who gets Tom moving.
Three. Tom shoves Lionel away from the Engine. Or, really, John does. Victor goes ballistic with rage. But why isn’t John pulling the lever and ending this? Why is he relishing the deranged adrenal surge that gushed in when he shoved Lionel? And then, because we’re all in this mind together, I get it—John doesn’t care about stopping the meltdown. He just wants to hurt Lionel for what he did to our family. I didn’t realize John felt that kind of intense, protective loyalty. But if I don’t stop him, he’ll murder Lionel Goettreider in the past so he can never become the man who threatens our loved ones.
Two. A plume hits Tom dead on, frying the time-travel apparatus and triggering the emergency return protocol. I have one second left to pull up the lever. And I finally understand what I have to do. Tom’s crime, erasing a whole world and everyone in it, is incalculably worse than anything Victor or John ever did. I can never forgive myself for that. Even now, it presses down on me, the mountain of regret. I don’t want any of them in me. I don’t want Victor’s viciousness and desolation or John’s arrogance and detachment, but I also don’t want Tom’s glum passivity and callow nonchalance. I want to be purged of all of them. I want there to be nothing in me that isn’t light and pure and good. But of course that’s not real. That’s what happens when you’re a statue in a city square, stripped of any human adornment that can’t be cast in bronze. What knits together all my memories of Penny is the overwhelming feeling that there’s someone who doesn’t need me to be anything except who I am. That’s what love can do for you, if you let it—build a person out of all your broken pieces. It doesn’t matter if the stitches show. The stitches, the scars, just prove you earned it. And so I stop trying to keep all these versions of myself apart. Instead, I make us whole. I let Victor out, but instead of fighting him I pull us together. John doesn’t see it coming until it’s too late and he’s already been drawn into us. Tom has no idea what’s happening in his head but we don’t need him to. We’re in control.
One. We pull up the Engine’s activation lever just as we’re boomeranged back to the present. The only present there will ever be.
132
I get a frigid spear of anxiety that I’m going to wake up in the hospital, having just collapsed on John’s building site, and be forced to relive this entire sequence again and again and again in an endless loop. But I’m spared that particular existential horror. This final trip through time is with my father’s instantaneous apparatus, so I’m not thrust into fifty more years of paralytic self-examination. With a sharp flash of light and a thrumming whoosh of sound, I’m back in 2016. It took until just now to truly appreciate my father’s genius in comparison to Lionel’s.
From the perplexed expression on Lionel’s face, standing right in front of me, it’s clear that almost no time has passed. Everything is just as it was when I left, except I’m not holding the time machine.
“It didn’t work,” Lionel says.
“It worked,” I say.
“You went back?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m still here,” he says.
“That’s right, Lionel. We did it. We saved the world.”
I embrace him. His body goes rigid as I press myself against him, enveloping him in my arms.
“No,” Lionel says. “You’ll try again.”
Obviously I didn’t hug Lionel because I missed him. I did it to get close enough to pinch a nerve in his elbow, sending spikes of radiating pain up to his neck, while I tear the device from his wrist that he uses to operate the facility’s systems, drop it to the floor, and stamp down on it, smashing its delicate circuitry under my heel.
There must be a built-in alarm because as soon as it’s off his wrist the security door hurls open and Wen, the thick-necked driver, hurries in with his semiautomatic pistol drawn.
I whirl Lionel in front of me as a human shield and give him a little shove in Wen’s direction, so he takes a wobbly, involuntary step forward to keep his balance. Wen flinches, unsure if his primary source of income is about to pitch face-first into the floor.
I use the moment’s hesitation to lunge at Wen, sideways to make a smaller target. I have no idea how I know to do that. Wen shifts his aim, but it’s too late for him.
My hand grasps his hand on the gun’s grip, twisting the weapon away from me, breaking his trigger finger, while jamming an elbow into his nose, crushing the cartilage.
My other hand wraps around to the back of Wen’s neck and, with a sharp twist, I cut off muscular access to his spine.
Wen’s legs give way and, conscious but temporarily paralyzed, he collapses to the ground, leaving me with his pistol. Blood pours from Wen’s broken nose, but he can’t move anything below his shoulders, so he just twitches like a trapped spider.
I place the muzzle of the pistol against Lionel’s forehead.
The whole thing takes, like, two seconds and, even though I’m the one who did it, feels impossibly badass.
It turns out that integrating Victor into my consciousness gives me access to his feral postapocalyptic survivalist military training. Which opens up some interesting possibilities in terms of my future life choices, but right now I care about only one thing—making sure Penny and my family are safe.
I have my shoe on Wen’s neck, the gun pressed firmly enough against Lionel’s forehead that it’s leaving a mark.
“Wait,” Lionel says. “It was your idea. Do you remember? You told me to make it look like I’d kidnapped them. You said you’d need the motivation. They’re safe and unharmed. Even Weschler, the woman, Penelope, it was fake. I hired a Hong Kong action director to shoot the whole thing. He thinks it’s for a Japanese reality show.”
“The other timeline is gone,” I say. “Permanently. I barely saved this reality.”
“No,” he says, “this can’t be my life.”
“It is,” I say.
“But I wasted it all,” Lionel says.
“You built a time machine, Lionel,” I say. “You’re the greatest scientific mind that ever lived.”
“I didn’t build it,” he says. “I copied it.”
He gives a cautious nod to a small alcove in the wall. I twist my shoe into Wen’s throat until he loses consciousness, and then I gesture with the gun. Lionel hobbles over—that wrist device monitors proper operation of his leg braces, so without it his steps are shaky and off-balance. Inside the alcove is a small metal case with a genetic scanner that opens only for Lionel.
Nestled inside it is the time machine.
“You left this with me on July 13, 1965. I don’t know if you meant to but . . . you did. I understood that I couldn’t just use it myself. That it would be catastrophic for reality as we know it. But I was in no position to build a time machine from scratch. It was impossible. So, I took this one apart. Piece by piece. And I figured out how to fabricate all the components. I did my best not to cheat. I didn’t manufacture any of the pieces until it was technically feasible with contemporary science. When I hit an impenetrable obstacle, yes, I guided the world’s technology to where I needed it to be. That’s why I sold my inventions when I did. Not for money. Out of necessity. You never told me how long I’d have to wait for you.”
“You never told me how long it would take to travel back. Fifty-one years, Lionel. I was trapped for fifty-one years.”
“Yes,” he says, “well, I suppose we both could’ve given the other a bit more information. To avoid some pain.”
“So the loop is closed,” I say. “And we never open it again.”
“No, if you won’t try again,” Lionel says, “I will.”
“You don’t know how close we came to destroying everything. This life you think you wasted, this is what saving the world looks like.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” he says. “I copied myself. I’m a fraud.”