It occurred to him that they hadn’t been alone with each other at any point since she’d stepped through the iris from Finn’s office yesterday. It’d been the three of them, hardly more than an arm’s length from one another, every minute of the way. Until now.
The silence was suddenly harder to take.
“So you spent a lot of time here?” he said.
“Yeah. Every summer. And Thanksgiving or Christmas, every other year, that kind of thing.”
“That must’ve been fun. Hanging out here as a kid.”
She shrugged. “I liked it. Plenty to do.”
It felt like talking to someone’s sister-in-law at a graduation party. Like he didn’t know that she liked to sleep on her side, naked, and that she preferred someone’s shoulder to a pillow. Like he didn’t know what her earlobes tasted like, among other things. Like none of it had ever happened.
It would’ve been better if it hadn’t. The past two years would’ve been easier. He would’ve gotten more sleep.
She turned from the window. Met his eyes. Looked away again.
“Obviously, this won’t take anything like four months to resolve,” she said.
Travis nodded.
“A few weeks at most,” Paige said. “Finn might have a lot of the top people, but Garner will get everyone else. However it shakes out after that, whatever it looks like on the news, that’ll be the end of it. I’m sure Tangent will be involved, but as far as the three of us shouldering the whole thing . . . I guess that’s over with, now.”
“My part is, for sure,” Travis said.
She looked at him again. “If you want, we can set you up with another identity, wherever you want to live, whoever you want to be.”
“Anything like the last one will do,” he said.
“Okay.”
Neither spoke for a while. They watched the city. Far below on the opposite sidewalk, a college-aged couple went by. The girl turned to face the guy, grabbed each of his hands in hers and drew his arms up overhead, bouncing up and down on her feet. Happy as hell about something.
“You could come back,” Paige said. “You know that.”
For a moment Travis didn’t answer. He turned and found her staring at him. Saw in her eyes everything she wasn’t saying. Saw an invitation back to more than just Border Town.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She held the stare a second longer. Whatever hurt she felt, it was buried deep.
“Okay,” she said.
She turned from the window. Went to a big leather chair and sat. She leaned back and closed her eyes.
“If I could explain it, I would,” Travis said.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I would anyway.”
She said nothing more.
Travis crossed to the couch. He set Bethany’s backpack on the floor. Heard the clink of the SIG 220 inside, among all the shotgun shells. He’d left the shotgun itself on the other side of the iris, a couple stories down in the skeleton of the building. He’d leaned it out of the rain under an intact metal panel a few yards from the stairwell. It hadn’t seemed like a good idea to step into the president’s living room with a twelve-gauge in his hands.
He lay on his back on the couch. Sank into it. Shut his eyes. Listened to the keystrokes of the computer in the next room, and the murmur of the city.
He wondered what it would be like to just tell her. He could do it right now. He even had the note folded up in his wallet. A message from some future version of Paige, which she’d bounced in and out of the Breach so that it would emerge in the past—Tangent didn’t know how to do that yet, but clearly they would, someday. Paige’s message to herself had arrived two summers ago, with a specific instruction: kill Travis Chase.
Some future Travis had countered that move. Had created the Whisper—that wasn’t its real name, of course—using Breach technology, and bounced it much further back: to 1989. The Whisper had then gone to work rearranging everything, stacking the deck to put Travis—his present self—in place to intercept Paige’s message when it emerged.
Even now Travis could only make passing sense of it. It was like watching a snake eat its own tail. Why hadn’t there been a counter-counter-move from the future Paige? And then the future Travis? Could those versions of themselves even exist anymore? Wasn’t everything on a different track now? He didn’t expect to ever understand it.
But he could tell her.
He could sit up right now and look her in the eyes and say it all. He could show her the note.
He’d feel better then, though it wouldn’t mean he could accept her invitation. However she responded, he was never returning to Tangent. It simply wasn’t an option, so long as he remained in the dark about what had corrupted the other Travis there, along the track of that original future.
And he would always be in the dark about that.
He didn’t sit up.
He lay there and listened to her breathing. Remembered what it’d sounded like from an inch away.
“You want to know the real reason I’m against sealing the Breach?” Paige said.
Travis opened his eyes and looked at her. Hers were still closed.