38
“Harper.” His voice is a whisper.
I want to start my interrogation, get right down to which Nick Stone he is, but I can’t help pushing up off the cold marble floor and racing to him, scanning the gashes and bruises all over his body. He’s in bad shape. A gentle touch on his blackened, exposed ribs draws a wince.
“I’m okay.” He smiles, pained. “Harper, this might sound crazy, but there are two of me. The version of myself from this timeline is still alive.”
I have limitations. Lying is one of them. I can’t even play poker.
Here in the steam-filled bedroom, I just try to look confused. At least I’ve had a lot of practice with that this week. I don’t know if he buys it, but he goes on.
“Nicholas, the other . . . me, told me what’s going on here. Yul created a device, a quantum bridge that connects our two worlds. He and Sabrina are going to use it to send us back to 2014. It will be like none of this ever happened. Our world will end up exactly like this one. We have to destroy that device so it can never be reset. But we’ll never go home.”
I nod. My mind races, trying to formulate—
“Do you know where it is?”
Wind blows in through the open balcony, a cool gust that drives the steam back even more. The moon is bright tonight, but my eyes lock on the twinkling lights of the airship hovering out over the Atlantic, waiting to bring the last colonists home.
“Harper.”
I search every micron of his blood-caked face. The hair is the same. The features—
“Harper, come on, we don’t have a lot of time here.”
“Yeah. Yul told me where it is.”
“Thank god.” He starts toward the door, leading me.
“After the crash, you found a glass structure. What was inside?” I ask, trying to mask my nervousness.
He turns, confused. “What?”
I speak softly. “Please answer.”
“Stonehenge.”
“Before you went there, you and Sabrina had a row. What about?”
“She wouldn’t give you antibiotics. You were at death’s door. What the hell is going on here?”
“We can’t destroy the device.”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“If we do, those passengers who died in the crash and in the outbreak after will be dead forever. They’ll never have a chance at growing up or living the rest of their lives.”
“That’s the price of saving our world, Harper.”
“It doesn’t have to be. Yul and Sabrina have another solution. They’re going to use Yul’s quantum device to send our memories back. Flight 305 will return to our time, and the four of us will remember everything that happened here.”
“Why didn’t they tell Nicholas?”
“They did. Nicholas and Oliver betrayed them. Bringing Flight 305 here wasn’t about testing that vaccine. Not for them. That was secondary, a cover.”
“Cover for what?”
“Bringing Grayson and me here. I’m what Nicholas is after.”
Nick turns away from me. Hurt? Confused?
His voice comes out hard, determined. “He’s here for you and the device, right?”
“Yes. What do you want to do?”
“I want to finish this.”
Steam seems to have permeated every square inch of the hotel tower, but Nick and I march through it, descending as quickly as we can. On the first floor, on the landing of the stairwell, a pool of blood surrounds a clump of stacked bodies. I recognize the face at the bottom of the pile. Yul.
Nick steps over him and jerks the stairway door open.
I bend down to check Yul’s pulse, letting my fingers linger even after I feel the cold flesh.
“Harper, come on!”
I glance up, still unable to move.
“He was dead when I got here. We have to go.”
We race through the dark passageway toward the cacophony of gunfire and blasts ahead.
The five towers, fingers of Titan City, meet in an elaborate promenade aptly named the Palm—it’s shaped like a palm, but it’s also dotted with palm trees, both inside and outside.
The Palm I saw before was pristine. Now it’s battered and bloody. Shredded palm leaves and bark cover the previously spotless white marble floors. Scorch marks pock the walls. Half the glass panes in the wall of windows that looked out on the promenade are gone, letting the breeze in from the valley side of the dam. The rush of the waterfall is punctuated by firing, screaming, and occasional grenade blasts. The sound is sickening.
Nick and I pause in the dark corridor, waiting, watching for a break in the carnage. We’re at the base of the little finger. The device is in the ring finger, the hotel tower adjacent to the Titan apartments, so we don’t have far to go. That’s a break. But still four people stand in our way, crowding the entrance to the hotel tower: two colonists, dressed in simple gray garb, and two Titans loyal to Sabrina and Yul. The Titans hold rifles, watching the battle unfold, their faces pained, as if they’re resisting the urge to join the Titans on their side below, who are steadily losing ground to Nicholas’s assault force moving up the Palm.
We edge closer to the corridor’s threshold, the shadows giving way to moonlight through the seven-story wall of glass.
The Palm is actually seven levels of restaurants, shops, and sundry stores, all long since abandoned. Two lavish marble, glass, and steel staircases shaped like DNA helixes flank the open space that looks out on the valley and waterfall.
Suited Titans are fighting their way up the twisting stairwells, shooting and taking fire from combatants hidden in the shops and restaurants on each level. It’s like mall warfare, an elaborate game of laser tag, but these shafts of light draw blood. Occasionally a Titan is shot off the stairwell, plummeting down to the massive fountain on the bottom floor.
“Stay behind me,” Nick says.
I want to ask what his plan is, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Nick Stone is good at thinking on his feet. There’s no one I would rather follow. We just need to reach—
He steps out into the promenade, raises his rifle, and fires point-blank at the Titans guarding the entrance to the hotel tower, catching the Titan on the right with a deadly shot to the head.
The two colonists shield the remaining Titan with their bodies, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of her, but Nick doesn’t hesitate. Two blasts from his rifle. They drop. Two more, and the Titan falls, her rifle still by her side.
Shock and fear consume me. I’m only vaguely aware of him pulling my arm, dragging me to the entrance of the hotel tower.
Down the dim corridor the moonlight fades with each step, replaced by the soft glow of emergency lights. We’re on the first floor, near my room, where I awoke in the white layered garments I still wear, where I finished the outline for Alice Carter, the girl whose decisions determined the fate of her world.
He’s still dragging me, almost forcibly now.
“Harper, focus.”
His face is inches from mine.
“What room?”
I close my eyes. Swallow.
“It was just two colonists, Harper. They have five thousand more—plenty to repopulate the planet. Now where is it?”
I say the word fast, hoping . . . “Two three oh five.”
He lets out a laugh. “Clever.”
We bound up the stairway, my legs burning, but I push, trying to keep pace, knowing what I have to do. The stairway is straight up, but the tower actually curves, the finger curling slightly toward the Mediterranean. I don’t know how many floors it is to the top, but I know the rooms on the first twenty floors all face the Atlantic—as mine did that first morning. Higher up, they look out on the valley where the Mediterranean once was.
At the landing to the twenty-third floor, he stops and pants, smiling at me.
“Room five?”
I gasp for air. “Yeah.”
He throws the door to the corridor open and leans out quickly, rifle first, peeking.
“Clear,” he announces before storming down the hall. I follow slowly, watching him charge into the room the same way. I need to catch my breath. Need every ounce of energy for this.
He’s searched the room by the time I reach the threshold. He stands in the center, just between the bed and desk.
“Where is it?”
“Balcony.” I almost choke on the word.
He glances behind him, to the glass door, the dark, rocky valley beyond it, and then squints, scrutinizing me. “Balcony?”
“So they could pick it up with the airship, evacuate it if needed.”
He turns his head slightly, as if hearing a noise.
Then he takes a step toward the sliding glass door. I follow, my pace matching his. This is far enough. I plant my feet, bend my knees a bit. One chance.
If I’m right, the passengers of Flight 305 will live. If I’m wrong . . . we’re all doomed. I have only one thing to go on: the Nick Stone I know would never have killed those four people in cold blood, not that quickly, not that easily.
He slides the door open, and I take off, running full on across the room.
He turns just in time to see me charging for him. There’s horror on his face.
He opens his arms a second before I reach him, bear-hugging me as I bowl us both over the rail of the balcony.
Time stops.
The air grows colder as we fall, flying toward the jagged valley floor. The hotel tower is just left of the middle tower and the wide waterfall below, but we’ll miss it. We’ll hit the hard, rocky bottom.
He pushes back so he can see me. The shock is gone. There’s no horror on his face. A sad smile spreads across it. Then he hugs me tight. Behind my back, I feel him fidgeting with his hands, tapping his forearm, still bear-hugging me.
We move in the air. The pack on his back sputters, slowing us.
A spray of cold water assaults me, pelting my body. The waterfall. He almost loses his grip, but the pack sputters more, and he pulls me tight. His somber grin turns triumphant.
He’s slowing us down.
I reach back, fighting his hands—