“Hey, it’s working again,” Dr. Donati said, still eyeing his watch.
Something told her that it had been actually working all along, that what just happened had transpired somehow between the passage of seconds. Or perhaps the destruction of the particle accelerator that would have opened the wormhole on this side had frozen time for the briefest of moments, the world, or at least this part of it, needing to catch its breath.
“My head,” Alex said suddenly.
“Is the pain bad again?” Donati asked him.
“No, it’s … gone. I mean really gone. No trace at all.”
“Meaning…,” Sam began, and they all turned back toward the empty patch of ground where Alcatraz prison had stood. She realized the humming in her ears was gone, but the air still felt strange, like poking at it might give her finger a shock.
“Do you know what that was?” Donati said, almost squealing in excitement. “Do you know what we just saw? A black hole! A black hole, I tell you! It’s the only explana—”
Donati stopped short, the brakes slammed on his sentence. Then he fell over like a severed tree, straight down to the ground.
Raiff rushed to him, hand pressed against the head wound from which the blood was spilling. “There’s a first-aid kit back in the life raft,” he called out to Alex and Sam. “Get it.”
But Alex moved toward him first. “Let me borrow your whip thing. Just in case.”
“You won’t be able to make it work.”
“I just saved this world, Raiff. I think you can trust me.”
Raiff handed his stick over reluctantly.
Sam and Alex started off, moving as fast as they dared. They took a circuitous route to keep them as far as possible from the empty, dead patch of ground that had been Alacatraz prison.
“Did that,” she murmured, clinging to him, “did we…”
Alex didn’t answer, just held her close and felt her breathing return to normal. His, too, as they neared the dock, the lights flickering over the San Francisco skyline showing him the world was, in fact, intact, and whatever hole punched deep below the island must have closed.
Then he felt Sam stiffen against him, heard her mutter, “Alex.”
And saw the gunmen holding pistols to the heads of Sam’s parents.
*
“You’re coming with me, boy,” said an older man standing slightly in front of them, his eyes rooted on Alex. “You’re coming with me or the girl’s parents die.”
Alex shoved Sam behind him, thinking fast. Read and react, just like on the football field, where decisions were made in the time between seconds.
He eased Raiff’s stick from his belt and held it low by his hip. “Tell your men to lower their weapons.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear what I said.”
“I heard. But let me repeat what I just said: tell your men to lower their weapons and let the girl’s parents go.”
“And if I don’t?”
Alex snapped the stick forward and up, felt it turn into a snake in his hand, slithering out through the air, following the picture he made in his mind. It twirled through the air, finding the gunman holding Sam’s father and then the gunman holding Sam’s mother. Impacting with a snap against both their skulls, their legs left to crumple as they dropped to the ground.
He retracted the whip and walked straight toward the man who could only be Langston Marsh, as Sam rushed to her parents, the three of them clutching each other in a tight ball.
“Leave,” Alex told Marsh.
But Marsh stiffened instead of moving. “This isn’t over. Not even close. You’ll regret not killing me when you had the chance, when I exterminate the rest of your kind, Alex.”
“Call me Kit,” Alex said to him, again using the name of Anne Frank’s imaginary friend to whom her diary was written. “And you know who you remind me of?” And when Marsh remained silent, Alex snapped his free hand into the air. “Heil, Hitler!”
Marsh snarled, starting to back away now. “You, your kind, killed my father. And someday you’ll all pay, each and every one of you.”
Alex made sure Marsh could see him raise Raiff’s stick again. “Remember how you said I’d regret not killing you?”
Marsh moved faster and lumbered down a rope ladder leading into a Zodiac raft. Alex heard him fire up the engine and watched the raft speed out into the bay, where it disappeared into the darkness. Sam was back by his side by then. She pressed up against him, holding him tight.
“You can ace history now. I really mean that.”
Alex held his gaze on the bay, so she wouldn’t be able to see the sadness in his eyes. “Guess we’ll never know, Sam.”
EPILOGUE
THE ROAD AHEAD
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
—WALT WHITMAN
SAM KNEW SHE HAD to go home with her parents, just as she knew she couldn’t explain all that had happened to them. Impossible. When they pushed, she kept her answers just vague enough and never said a word about Alex’s true origins.