34
After the Yul-Sabrina intervention, I wander around the lab tower a bit more, then the Titan apartments, which are lavish in the extreme. The guardians of humanity weren’t exactly slumming it. Then I make my way back to the hotel tower, to the room where I awoke. I guess this is home. Maybe forever.
I’ve turned the decision over in my mind until I’m ready to scream. Stay here, doom the other passengers, possibly save our world. Go back, and all the passengers will live. We’ll disembark. Maybe Nick and I will pass by each other, strangers. Maybe he’ll help me get my bag down, just another anonymous person he shared a flight from JFK to Heathrow with. Then . . . history repeats itself. Possibly. Or maybe not. Is the future already written? I suppose it comes down to that question.
I have realized one thing, why the antibiotics decision was so easy, back at the nose section of the plane: it was only my life I had to decide about. I was willing to sacrifice myself to save those others; I still am. When I was at the lake, that was another easy decision, made without a second of hesitation. Yeah, I’m a good swimmer. And that’s how it’s been my whole life—when others are involved, when my actions help somebody else, it’s easy. I never realized that before. But when it’s just me, my career, my love life, I fall apart. I know what I want: to stay in this ruined world with my memories and everything I’ve learned about myself, to stay here with Nick. But if I do, I’ll be sacrificing those 121 lives. They will stay dead. Perhaps that’s the only certainty in this whole thing.
I’m caught in a mental loop. I need to get away from it for a bit.
I sit down at the wood table under the picture window that looks out on the seemingly endless Atlantic. In the air, the burning streak is gone, just a line of white smoke now. Next to it, a new, slender line of crimson is forming. What is it? I was so lost in the videos at the labs that I forgot to ask Sabrina. I consider returning, but something else calls to me more powerfully: the Alice Carter notebook.
I flip it open, and a loose piece of paper falls out. It’s my handwriting, a note, apparently to myself.
It’s never too late to start, never too late to finish. And I will. I’ve worked far too long on others’ dreams, put off my own love, this one and the one I can’t speak of. After all this time, I realize that it’s like Tennyson once said, ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ I know that now. I know that I would have rather tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
I gently place the note on the table and flip the pages, reading my old scribblings for a story about a girl who receives a letter on her eighteenth birthday . . . from her future self. In the letter, Alice tells her younger self that she alone holds the keys to the Eternal Secrets, three ancient artifacts that allow its owner to control time. Hunted by a shadowy cabal with technology almost indistinguishable from magic, Alice descends into a strange world where her decisions will determine the course of history and the fate of everyone she loves.
Huh.
At university, I had envisioned Alice Carter as a time-travel fantasy series, an escapist tale, a mix of Harry Potter and Back to the Future. But right now the setup strangely hits home.
I turn the page, and the faded ink ends. New strokes, darker, from a different pen. I resist reading them. It feels almost like cheating, peeking at the answers.
I flip the pages quickly, barely feeling the braille-like indentations on the backside. On a new page, I repeat the mental ritual I developed in college: I write the first line that pops into my head, then the next, until I have ten or half a page. It’s like mental jumping jacks, a warm-up to get the words flowing. It’s not about quality; it’s about starting, which is the hardest part. I usually throw out this initial bit, but occasionally there are nuggets of solid gold, the kind that only turn up when you’re panning with reckless abandon, when you’re writing without editing or judging what’s coming out. To my surprise, I hit the strike of all time. The ideas pour out of me. The outline for book 1 comes quickly, and then the next, Alice Carter and the Dragons of Tomorrow. A setup for book 3 arises naturally—Alice Carter and the Fleet of Destiny. Alice Carter and the Endless Winter. Alice Carter and the Ruins of Yesteryear. Alice Carter and the Tombs of Forever. Alice Carter and the River of Time. Story arcs for seven books, the entire series. My hand aches.
It’s like the ideas were always there, hidden just under the surface, ready, waiting for me to break through that top layer that covered them.
And from the plots, the ideas, the scenes I can’t wait to write, comes a theme: decisions and time. Time, our fate, the future—it isn’t written. It can be changed. Time and again, Alice chooses a new future with her decisions. She chooses to fight the future, to bet on humanity, to have faith in our ability to learn from our mistakes and make better decisions. Today’s decisions are tomorrow’s reality. I like that.
To me, this is what great books are about, revealing our own lives in a way only stories can; we see ourselves in the characters, our own struggles and shortcomings, in a way that’s nonthreatening and nonjudgmental. We learn from the characters; we take those lessons and inspiration back to the real world. I believe that a good book leaves its readers better than they were before. And I think these stories will. That’s why they’re important.
I’ve also realized what I want to do: stay here, remember, make a life with Nick, if that’s possible. But I think the passengers of Flight 305 deserve a chance at their own future. Like Alice Carter, I reject the idea that the future is written, that our world is doomed to repeat the same mistakes as this one.
I’ll let Sabrina and Yul and the Titans here use me, like the cheese in their trap, to catch Nicholas, to buy time. Whatever they need to get everyone home.
I glance once again at the sea through the window. There are three lines of white smoke now, the third glowing ember recently extinguished. The sun will set in a few hours.
I gently close the notebook and move it aside. I will likely never see it again, or remember the work I’ve done. Outside the hotel room my footsteps echo loudly on the marble floors of the lab tower.
In the hall that holds Sabrina’s lab, an alarm rings out overhead, a shocking pulsing sound synchronized with red flashing lights. There’s no announcement, no indication of what’s wrong. It’s like the whole place just turned into a disco, the DJ gone, his last beat on repeat.
I race to the glass door to her lab. It’s empty.
I turn, run to Yul’s lab. Empty.
I pound up the stairway, onto the next level of the lab tower. All empty.
The alarm assaults me now, boring into my head. Focus.
Back in the stairway, through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out at the sea, I spot the two airships at the base of the towers rising, moving away. Heading off to battle?
On the next level, through the fourth glass door, I spot Sabrina, standing, her back toward me. A large machine almost fills the room. It has only a single opening, a round portal just big enough for a body. A metal-topped table extends from the opening, a body upon it.
I throw the door open. A screen on the wall to my left displays the two hemispheres of a brain, lit in a blooming kaleidoscope of color. A brain scan.
“Harper,” Sabrina says, turning.
“What is this?”
“A contingency.”
“For what?”
“In case we succeed.”
Sabrina never fails to offer up a cryptic answer. I struggle to put it together: her future self, lecturing her on neurons, how they don’t change over time, how memories are simply stored electrical charges. Yul’s video, talk of power from the dam being just enough to change the state of linked electrons in the past.
There’s another revelation. It should have been obvious: Why did this faction need Sabrina? If Yul held the key to resetting the quantum bridge and sending our plane back, what’s Sabrina’s role?
This is it. This experiment, which they’ve kept from me.
“You’re trying to send your memories back, aren’t you?”
Sabrina raises her eyebrows. Impressed?
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“For your sake,” she says flatly.
The table finishes sliding out of the machine, and Yul sits up, shaking his head.
“My sake?” I look around at the lab. “This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? For Flight 305 to return to our time and for the two of you to have your memories, to remember everything that happened here, to prevent the Titan catastrophe.”
“Yes.”
Incredible. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s too dangerous, Harper.” Sabrina glances over at Yul, who looks haggard, almost like he’s hungover. “We aren’t sure it will work. We could awaken in 2014 with brain damage, or not wake up at all. If I told you, I knew what your decision would be. It could be a death sentence.”
There’s the whole picture. Either Sabrina and Yul wake up in 2014 with their memories, or they turn up vegetables. Either way, they figure the immortality therapy will never be completed. Our world will be saved. There’s something oddly heroic about Sabrina not telling me. She wanted to save lives back in 2014, including mine, and she and Yul are willing to risk theirs to do it. I like that.
The mysterious machine looms before me; a way for me to remember everything that’s happened here, what I’ve become, what I’ve learned about myself . . . who I’ve met. I wouldn’t be risking others’ lives; just my own. That has been my breakdown point, I’m unable to make decisions where only my fate is at stake. When someone else’s life is on the line, I’ll risk everything. But when it’s just me, I descend into decision paralysis. But here and now, my thinking is so very clear. I’ve seen what my life becomes down the road I chose, a road I might choose again. I want to change my life, make a different choice, take a risk. I want to pursue my dream. That path is uncertain, but hey, certainty is overrated. I believe it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.
“Put me in the machine.”
“No, Harper. It’s too risky.”
“I’ll take that risk. I want to remember.”
“It’s not worth it.”
“It is to me. This is the deal, Sabrina. You and Yul have kept me and Nick in the dark since that plane crashed. We’re all grown-ups, old enough to make our own decisions. You have to start trusting us if you want our help. You want me to help you contain and capture Nicholas? You make me part of the plan. If I don’t wake up in 2014, so be it. And you’ll give Nick the same choice—the same chance—when he gets here.”
Sabrina shakes her head. “We couldn’t be sure we had the right Nick.”
“I’ll know. Now what is that incessant alarm?”
“They’re here.”