Her body spasmed, but the spasms were only from the waist up. Holding her, he could feel her shattered spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down. Blood and fluids poured from her wounds, soaking his hands.
“No, no, no,” he murmured, brushing her hair to one side and inadvertently smearing blood on her forehead. “It can’t end like this. Please, don’t let it end like this.”
“Don’t you see,” she gasped, squeezing his hand. “This has to end. You have to break out of the time loop.”
“No,” he whispered. “I can’t leave you.”
“You have to,” she said, closing her eyes as she whispered, “Run!”
Like Lachlan before her, Lily’s body went limp in his arms. Her eyes flickered open, but they stared blindly up at the vast ceiling of the reactor dome.
“Nooooo!” he screamed, arching his back and tensing every muscle in his body in a futile bid to roll back time, but there was nothing to be done for her.
Run!
Lily’s last word seemed to echo in his mind.
Run?
Sitting there, he trembled, trying not to collapse beside her lifeless body. Jason was shaking uncontrollably. Standing seemed impossible, let alone walking or running. Here he was, sitting on a time machine, unable to roll back just one minute to save the young woman. He couldn’t explain the connection he’d forged with Lily over those past few days, but it had been severed violently and abruptly, tearing at his heart.
Soldiers dropped onto the edge of the UFO. They were shouting, waving, firing their rifles. Bullets whipped by his head, passing just inches from his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, resting her head gently on the thick hide of the interstellar beast. With two fingers outstretched, he closed her eyelids. It seemed only decent and proper. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t care. He couldn’t pretend that just moments before, her body hadn’t been animated, radiating a life he found deliriously intoxicating. The realization that Lily was dead caused a knot to form in his chest. A knife through the heart couldn’t have felt more painful, he thought.
Run!
Again, her soft admonition reverberated through his mind. She was right. He had to run.
Jason grabbed the pickaxe and ran. His legs felt weak, drained of strength, but he forced them on. Bullets whizzed by, cracking through the air as they shot past him at supersonic velocities.
Jason ran on blindly, but he was running around the center of the UFO, not away from it. If he wanted to escape, he should have run toward the walkway. His mind felt drugged and lethargic, still reeling from shock.
He climbed into the shattered dome on top of the vast creature.
Immediately, the alien animal responded to his presence. Light began pulsating out from the center of the craft, running in ripples across the immense hide in much the same way as a cuttlefish displayed a variety of colors. The soldiers were thrown backwards, as if hurled outward by a massive electric shock.
Jason got his first good look inside the vast cavity that was the head of the creature. That the beast was organic was not readily apparent because the outer skin was transparent, like a massive windscreen. From the outside, the central dome had appeared dull grey, but from inside the view was clear. There were controls, at least they looked like controls. Row upon row of lights lit up on a bank in the craft, but the far side of what could be mistaken for a cockpit had an earthy feel. Severed roots and crushed rocks lay in complex matrices, interlaced with each other, connected by thin, sinuous veins. The contrast between the two hemispheres of the dome was stark, giving the impression that they didn’t belong together.
The rear half of the alien skull appeared to be sectioned off. A series of hurriedly scrawled formulas scarred the wall. These were the most advanced calculations he’d seen. They were complete. He recognized several portions from the photographs he’d seen in the RV.
The creature throbbed and pulsated. He could feel her lifting into the air. Outside, scaffolding fell away, crashing to the ground. Soldiers were yelling and firing, but where Jason was, there was only silence. They appeared to be acting out some part on a stage without any sound to accompany them.
Jason turned back to the scratches on the rear wall. He fought with his legs to stay upright as the craft swayed in the air.
Lachlan was right. What seemed like a single strand of time to Jason was in fact a time stream that repeated thousands and thousands of times. Each time the outcome had been the same. The only difference was those etchings. Among the chaos, they were all that mattered. They were the fleeting efforts to steer a new course.
These were messages he’d left himself.
The scratches outside had been from previous iterations of both him and Lily as they fought to understand what was happening to them time and again, but inside this dome, the only handwriting was his.
Standing there, he realized he had a plan. Jason still hadn’t quite comprehended what that plan was, but he knew why he went back in time. He couldn’t run. He was always going to go back for her. He had to save her. That’s what this was about: love.
Jason had gone back innumerable times out of his love for Lily and her father. And he had a plan, he knew he had a plan, a plan that had been formed over thousands of cycles, a plan carved here on the walls of this vast creature, only he had to figure out the messages he’d been sending himself.
The animal continued to pulse, increasing in its frequency and the brightness of the light it emitted.
“I know,” Jason said softly. “I understand the pain you’ve been in for so long. You want to be set free, too. I can do this. I can change this. I can bring about the end. Stay with me, my old friend. Together, we are going to change this and bring you release from the torment and pain.”
Jason stepped back, his eyes focused on the back wall, intently wanting to understand the message he’d sent himself.
He knew in past iterations he would have turned because he would have wanted to see the spectacular sight of the creature bursting through the dome over reactor one. He’d have relished the vision of time and space warping around him and the majesty of traveling a wormhole through space-time, but to escape he had to ignore all that. He had to knit the threads of a plan being passed down through time. The answer was right there in front of him, he just had to see it, he had to see it just as he had in times immemorial.
And that was when it struck him. Finally, he understood. He’d never seen these words. If there had been photos taken of these words, they never made it to Lachlan. Perhaps they hadn’t been deemed important, but for some reason this message only ever reached him now, although portions of the calculation lower down made it back to him in the RV.
Jason closed his eyes, picturing the photos scattered on the floor of the RV. They’d fallen out of sequence, scattered in a seemingly random pattern, but they’d formed coherent words.
Opening his eyes, he ran his fingers over the thick hide of the animal as it rose thousands of feet above the Earth, readying itself for a jaunt into the past.
There it was. He recognized the letters, if not the order.
To anyone else, these letters would be nonsense, but the first three fe’s were there as markers, slowly lining up those two letters over several iterations so they appeared in precisely the right spot within the photograph. Whoever had taken the pictures must have resolved never to show him anything that appeared unsettling, or they hadn’t seen any significance in these letters and so ignored them, but either way, this was the only means by which he could talk to himself across the gulf of time.