31
I can’t believe my eyes. It’s impossible. Sabrina inches toward me, her arms held at her sides. I saw her lifeless body in the lab not two minutes ago, yet here she is, living and breathing.
I instinctively take another step back, toward the edge of the platform at the top of the Gibraltar Dam. I glance over, down the thousand-foot drop off to the rocky basin where the Mediterranean Sea used to be. For a moment the only sound is the waterfall crashing into a pool far below. The building—or is it a city?—before me must lie at the center of the dam, because I can see both sides of the straits: Africa, what was Morocco, to my left, and Europe, what was once Spain and the city of Gibraltar, to my right. Two battered, burned airships sit on the platform at the base of the towering buildings. I briefly consider running, but both sides are miles away. I’m trapped.
More people pour out of the building, but I focus only on the two I know, or at least recognize: Sabrina and Yul.
I squint, searching their faces, but I can’t find a single difference between them and the bodies I saw in the lab. How?
“It’s me, Harper,” Sabrina says, taking a step closer.
I edge back. “I saw your body.”
“That wasn’t me. I’m the person you met on the plane, after the crash.”
I shake my head. A cool gust of wind blows my hair across part of my face. I’m six feet from the precipice.
Sabrina steps forward. “You injured your leg during the rescue at the lake, when you and Nick and the others saved all those people. Your leg got infected. It was bad. Nick insisted I give you antibiotics. He was very angry with me when I didn’t. You helped me, agreed with me that we should conserve the antibiotics, use them to save more lives. It’s me, Harper.”
I don’t know if it’s the fact that I saw the other body with my own two eyes or simply all the surreal stuff I’ve been through in the last few days, but I just can’t believe her. Paranoia is getting the best of me. Maybe they interrogated Sabrina before killing her and cloning her. I’ll issue a test. “After the crash, I became suspicious of you and Yul. Why?”
Sabrina answers without hesitation. “You heard us talking in the cockpit, arguing about what might have caused the crash and whether we were involved in it. We didn’t explain that conversation until Titan Hall, right before the battle began”—Sabrina motions to the people around her—“right before these Titans rescued us.”
Rescued.
“Step away from the ledge, Harper. We’ll explain everything.”
My head is going to explode. For the past hour Sabrina has conducted a one-on-one history lesson and Q & A session with me about what in the world has been going on.
Quite a lot, it turns out. And to top it off, there are two worlds—the one we left in 2014 and this one, where we crashed six days ago. It seems I’m involved in a conspiracy that spans space and time and a conflict whose outcome will determine humanity’s fate in two separate universes.
I’m never flying again.
The bottom line is that the passengers of Flight 305 are test subjects for a vaccine, a vaccine the Titans created so they could bring the orbital colonists home to repopulate Earth. The plan was for our plane to land at Heathrow, where the passengers would be evaluated, hopefully proving the effectiveness of the vaccine.
“That’s where the issue arose,” Sabrina says, sitting on a stool before a raised lab table.
“Issue?” I ask.
“The plane crash.”
A plane breaking in half and crashing in the English countryside might constitute more than an issue in my book, but I let that one go.
Sabrina continues her history lesson as I perch on the stool across from her in the empty lab like a bad pupil at detention.
“But the plane crash wasn’t due to a technical fault,” she says. “Yul’s devices—the one built in the past and the one here in the future—performed as they should have. It was the Titans who caused our plane to crash.”
Now that surprises me.
“Shortly after our plane crossed into this universe, a civil war between the Titans broke out at Heathrow, and they’ve been fighting ever since. The battle at the crash site and Titan Hall are just the two we’ve seen.”
“War over what?”
“Over whom. To put it simply, they’ve been fighting over us, the passengers of Flight 305, two in particular. After Yul proved he could connect to Q-net in the past, the Titans debated what to do with the passengers once Flight 305 arrived. Oliver and Nicholas—”
“Nick?”
“I’m told that the Titan in 2147 goes by Nicholas.”
“Oh.”
“Oliver and Nicholas wanted to keep the passengers of Flight 305 here. They thought that extracting Nick, Yul, and me from our world would prevent the Titan Foundation from achieving its goals, in particular derailing the immortality cure and thus preventing the subsequent plague.
“The other faction, led by Yul and Sabrina in 2147, wanted to reset the quantum bridge between the universes after the passengers were evaluated and the vaccine was verified. They believed that the Titans had no right to take two hundred lives from the other universe, half of whom wouldn’t survive exposure to the virus. This universe’s Yul and Sabrina favored nonintervention, but the Titans felt they had a moral obligation to prevent the pandemic in our universe. They wouldn’t approve any plan that didn’t include saving our world. Yul arrived at another, even more incredible solution. The original plan was for the quantum bridge to be reset and for all the passengers of Flight 305 to return home after the vaccine was verified. What Yul and Sabrina didn’t realize until our plane crossed into this universe is that Oliver and Nicholas never had any intention of following the plan—of letting the quantum bridge be reset. In fact, their primary objective wasn’t even testing the vaccine. That was all a cover for their true goal: ensuring that the passengers of Flight 305 remained in this universe forever.”
“Why?”
“Love. Oliver and Nicholas choose Flight 305 because it carried two people they loved very much, at crucial points in their lives.”
“Grayson.”
“Yes. Oliver wanted to fulfill his last desire: to give Grayson a second chance at life. Flight 305 was perfect—it took off at a turning point for Grayson, right before he would throw his life away.”
“And for Nicholas?”
“Love of a different sort. Flight 305 was his only chance to see the love of his life again, a woman who died in the aftermath of the outbreak. For seventy-six years he’d dreamed of the day he could bring her here, start over with her, the woman he could never be with in his time, not as long as he was an immortal Titan, and she wasn’t. For Nicholas, the object of bringing Flight 305 here was you.”