40
When the countdown on the tablet stops, I toss it away and roll onto my side, the only part of the suit that isn’t coated in jagged glass. Blood oozes from a thousand places on my body. At any moment I expect my guts to spill out on the white marble floor like the contents of a pi?ata that’s finally popped.
Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for—the easy way out.
I stare up into the barrels of the rifles pointed at me, into the hatred on the faces of the Titans holding them. They circle me, glancing at each other, no doubt silently debating: shoot all at once, so no one knows who fired the killing shot, or conduct a more orderly execution? Or wait—after all, I’ll die soon either way. That’s what’s next. No words I can say will change it.
I wear the face of the Titan Civil War. When they look down at me, they see Nicholas Stone, the man who destroyed this world and set the Titans against each other. They see the villain who betrayed humanity time and again, slaughtered his fellow Titans at Heathrow, and planned and executed this final assault.
As I wait for the end, I can’t help contemplating what Nicholas became, how all his extraordinary achievements changed him, made him arrogant, how his guilt at his mistakes ate away at his moral compass, drove him inward, to a selfish and ruthless place where he longed only to taste happiness again. I guess I felt some of that desperation, the fear that I would never feel whole and happy again, before Flight 305 took off. He was me. He is me. I’m capable of everything he did. I guess we’re all capable of evil, under the right circumstances.
Movement. The Titans around me shift, form up, getting ready.
A sound track of death and destruction plays behind them. Blood-reddened water gurgles in the battered fountain below, the statue of Nicholas and Oliver that broke the fall of so many Titans, crushing them, each body chipping away more of the stone. Behind me, shards of glass fall to the store’s floor like wind chimes blowing on a lazy day. I focus on the sound of each little piece falling, wondering if it’s a piece of my face or that of another Titan. I imagine them settling on the floor, indistinguishable in the sea of shattered glass.
Footsteps, loud on the grand helix stairway. The Titans part.
Sabrina.
“Hello, Nick.”
I’ve never been so glad to hear her voice—or my own name. Just Nick. I’ll never use the name Nicholas.
She bends down toward me, a syringe in her hand.
“Wait.”
“Your injuries are urgent,” Sabrina says in that mechanical tone, the sweetest sound I can imagine right now. “We must—”
“How’d you know?”
“Harper.”
“How’d she know?”
Sabrina arches her eyebrows. “That may remain a mystery.”
“She’s . . .”
Sabrina nods, genuinely sad. That’s new. She starts at me again with the syringe, but I hold my hand up, the movement accompanied by a grunt of pain. “You have a plan? To send a warning to 2014 when we go back?”
“Yes. Memories.”
“Memories?”
“A detailed brain scan that maps the position of every electron in every neuron. Yul was working on the science, using the Q-net to transmit the data back, but he didn’t complete his work.”
So Yul’s dead as well.
Her syringe still at the ready, Sabrina goes on. “I believe, however, that the colonists can complete his work. Yul was scanned before he died, so we have his memories to transmit.”
“And Harper’s?”
“No. I’m sorry, Nick.”
“Scan her.”
“We can’t—”
“I saw her fall. Is her body intact?”
“We don’t know. It’s in the water.”
“Get her out. You have one airship left. Go get her and scan her right now.”
“Nick, we can’t be sure—”
“Do it, Sabrina. You owe us. Please.”
I don’t know how long I’ve been in this lab with Harper’s corpse. I can’t seem to leave. There’s so much left unsaid between us. How do you get over someone passing too soon? Someone with so much life left to live. I thought seeing her might . . . help. But it hasn’t. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow. Or maybe that will only make things worse.
I run my hand through her blond hair, kiss her cold forehead, and walk out of the lab.
For the past hour Sabrina has lectured me on the likelihood that Harper’s memories won’t make it to 2014, the chances that any of ours will. That Harper was dead for almost half an hour before her brain was scanned complicates matters, apparently. The key to the whole thing is having the same neurons present in both timelines. Sabrina thinks it would be better not to attempt to send her memories back. Sabrina was scanned during the assault on Titan City, Yul right before.
I’m due to be scanned in an hour. She says I won’t remember anything that happens here after that; the memories transmitted back—if it works—will stop after I slide into the machine.
She’s run off a list of possible physical calamities, everything from brain damage to stroke to schizophrenia. It’s like the warnings during a pharma commercial, except Sabrina talks slower, and this one lasts for sixty minutes (I’ve been told to hold my questions until the end).
As she plods on, I try to sort through what to do. I think about what I want: the Harper I’ve come to know. But that’s the selfish choice, the choice Nicholas made. And then I think about what Harper would choose, if she were sitting here. That’s the key: ignoring my desires, focusing on what she would want. Who am I kidding? That’s really impossible. Facts. What do I know? Harper risked her life time and again here in 2147 to save others. At the end, when she knew she was the only person who could stop Nicholas, she gave her life to do that. The journal she found in her flat, what she read, it changed her. She didn’t like the choices the version of herself in this world made. I know she would want to do things differently. But she may never have that chance if any of Sabrina’s dire warnings come to pass. It comes down to this: leave her the way she was in 2014 and guarantee she lives, or send her memories along with ours, and roll the dice with her life.
“Questions?” Sabrina finally asks.
“How sure are the colonists that they can make Yul’s science work?”
“Not sure at all. Yul’s mind was far ahead of his time. But time is one thing we have.”
“What does that mean?”
“Whether the colonists solve the quantum aspects of the memory transmission tomorrow or a thousand years from now, it makes no difference to us. If the memories do make it back to 2014, we’ll remember nothing after the scan. The passage of time in this timeline will have no bearing.”
I rub my eyes. Still so hard to wrap my head around all this.
Sabrina’s tone softens. “I have a suggestion, Nick.”
“Yeah?”
“Decide Harper’s fate—whether you want to attempt transmitting her memories or not—after your scan.”
I nod. “So I won’t remember my choice. No guilt.”
“Correct.”
She’s right. Guilt can be a dangerous thing. Nicholas proved that to me.
And I have time to decide. Maybe years or decades, if the science here takes that long.
“All right.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
Sabrina and I walk to the lab with the massive machine in silence.
Inside the lab, she runs through the details of how it works, how groggy I will feel after the procedure, but I barely hear a word, my mind still consumed with The Decision.
Finally I hop onto the frigid white table and wait as the machine spins up, the hum growing louder each second.
To my surprise, Sabrina takes my hand in hers and looks down at me on the table.
“See you in 2014, Nick.”