37
Inside the third-floor lab, the screen that displayed the brain scan splits. I watch the two charred airships take off from the base of Titan City and race over the Atlantic. They stop at the three life rafts and hover.
“The colonists,” I whisper, studying the screen. “Why?”
“To protect us. If we can get them to the city, we can prevent Nicholas and Oliver from destroying it and the quantum device.”
She doesn’t add and us, but we’re all thinking it.
The drama unfolds on the screen as Yul, Sabrina, and I watch.
One of our airships recovers the colonists from the first raft and deposits them here at the base of the towers. It heads back to the landing site, but before it can make it there, two more airships arrive. They fire on our returning ship, destroying it before taking fire from the city. Glittering specks spill out of the second ship into the sea. What are they? Then I realize: suited Titans. Nick. Hopefully. But as Sabrina said, I don’t know that. He could already be dead, left at Heathrow . . . replaced.
Yul gets up from the white table. He’s recovered some, the focused look back in his eyes.
Sabrina pulls her left sleeve back, preps her arm, and injects herself with a syringe lying on the raised metal table. Without a word, she hops on the platform, and it starts sliding into the machine.
Yul punches a control panel as the massive machine swallows Sabrina up. The frozen image of Yul’s brain on the split screen gives way to a new set of lobes. Waves of color wash over it.
“The mapping procedure takes about an hour,” says Yul.
The floor rattles below us, and the other half of the screen blinks red.
Overhead, a new alarm blares out.
Yul grabs my arm, pulling me to the swinging glass door, but I throw off his grip.
“Where are we going?”
“To hide, Harper.”
I glance back at the machine that encloses Sabrina.
“We can’t leave her—”
“We have to, Harper. He’s after you.”
“I haven’t been scanned.”
“It’ll have to wait. They’re in the power plant now. We have to hurry.”
This has been their plan all along: cat and mouse. Once Nicholas has me, he won’t hesitate to bring this place down. He has no intention of preserving the lives here. Once he’s captured me, he’ll destroy the dam, the quantum device, and anyone else in the city along with it.
Alarms shriek all around us as Yul leads me to the residential wing—the little finger of the five towers, to the far left of the complex. I explored some of it earlier, but only looked into a few apartments.
“Any preference?” Yul asks.
“Where will we be the safest?”
“At a random place. He’ll probably search my apartment, and Sabrina’s, and his.”
I nod.
As we move through the posh carpeted, wood-paneled halls, Yul places small silver cylinders on the floor.
“What are those?” I ask.
“Mines.”
“For what?”
“Nicholas will send nano drones to make an infrared scan. These will destroy them. Buy us some time.”
He isn’t through buying time. At each apartment we pass, he walks inside and turns the shower on, setting the temperature to max. Steam fills the bathrooms and drifts out into the bedrooms and corridors. Clever. I don’t know if the steam and heat will fool the Titan sensors, but condensation will coat the suits, making them visible. My mind flashes back to the crash site, to that dark night when the rain poured down, revealing the Titans racing to the plane like glass figurines.
Halfway up the tower, Yul pauses at a bathroom. “This is as good a spot as any.”
“All right.”
“One last thing, Harper. Only Sabrina and I know where the quantum device is.” He pauses. “And there’s a chance neither of us, none of the Titans here, will survive the night. But you will. Nicholas wants you alive. I think you should know where the device is and how to activate it. Try to get to it if the worst happens.”
He tells me where the device is and how to reset the quantum bridge. I listen, nodding like I’m being inducted into a secret order, which is sort of true—Yul finally letting me in on his and Sabrina’s circle of secrets.
He moves to the door.
“Wait! Are you—”
“I’m going to finish, then see if I can help with the defense.”
As if on cue, explosions erupt in the adjacent tower, sending vibrations through the floor.
“What’s the best-case scenario here, Yul?”
He glances away. “Best case? We contain the threat tonight, then spend the time we really need figuring out the science to get the memory transmission right. Maybe a few years, a decade, however long it takes. Then we go back to 2014 with a real shot at remembering.”
“How likely is that—winning tonight?”
“Pretty good.”
He’s lying, but I don’t object. The steam in the well-lit marble-floored bathroom engulfs us now, a blanket that hides our faces, allowing us both to lie with less effort.
“Overall, we have the numbers,” he says, now a disembodied voice in the fog. “But the colonists won’t take up arms. Nicholas and Oliver’s team has us two to one in armed manpower, assuming their people survived the trap in the power station.”
“What are their orders? For Nick, if they see him?”
“Nicholas, Nick, there’s no way to know, Harper. It’s shoot on sight for any of the Titans entering the city.”
So that’s containment.
“It’s not so bad, Harper. If this works, you’ll see Nick again in 2014.”
And he’ll be a stranger.
“Stay put. I’ll be back,” Yul says, his voice fading as he leaves the room.
I take a seat on the floor, stretching my legs out on the cool marble. The warm steam feels good, a contrast to the chill on the bottoms of my legs. I run my hands down my calves, over where the infected gash used to be. Closing my eyes, I let my head fall back against the wall, willing myself not to focus on the sporadic blasts or the tremors that run through the floor and walls every few seconds.
The swishing sound of the double doors outside, in the corridor, brings me back to the moment. I wasn’t asleep. Or awake. Rather in a daze, somewhere in between, an unfocused state where I hoped time would pass and everything would be okay.
Through the pitter-patter of the shower, I can just make out boot steps in the bedroom, padding quietly on the carpet.
I sit still, hoping . . .
The footsteps come to a halt. I can’t see the figure through the cloud of steam. Maybe they can’t see me.
More footsteps. Walking away.
I exhale.
A sliding door.
Steam flowing out, being sucked out—onto the balcony. The figure opened the sliding glass door. It marches through the flowing white steam, each step revealing more of its body.
I expected a glassy, semitransparent suit, but the outer shell on this suit is gone. Half the glass tiles are missing, revealing black, rubbery lining beneath, gashed in half a dozen places to expose cut, burned flesh.
But I focus only on the face. Nick’s face. Or is it Nicholas?
Is this the Nick I know, who saved so many after the crash of Flight 305? Or is it Nicholas, the man who caused the death of so many, who came here to take even more lives—just to be with me?