“You could have left a note and saved me four years.”
“What did you find in the back garden of that house I was squatting in?”
“You know what I found. Everything you owned. Right down to the jewelry. ID. Clothes. I freaked the fuck out, Zed.”
“Beth.”
“I thought Aberfoyle’s goons had murdered you.”
“What made you decide they hadn’t?”
“Nobody came after me, or Paul, or Will. Had to figure you’d just vanished like the ghost you always were.”
“They say ghosts are the presence of an absence. I’m right here, Jack.”
“And who are you?”
She was going to give one of her usual sleight-of-hand answers, he could tell. His expression said don’t. Something like sadness flitted across her features. In the end, she just shrugged: I don’t know what to tell you.
“A note wasn’t an option. First rule of a good disappearance is take nothing with you, leave nothing behind.” She leaned forward, probing his expression for some small understanding. “I’ve been preparing for this moment, right now, since I was eight years old.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
It should have been matter/antimatter having her there, at his family table, a piece of another world sitting real in this one. The whole planet should have exploded because she was drinking coffee in the house where he had grown up. Alive.
“Come on,” she said, standing up. “Show me around. If there are answers here I want us to find them first.”
They hang around because we can’t let go of them.
Upstairs they stood outside the door to what had been Jack’s bedroom for twenty-two years.
“If there was anything here Monarch would have it by now,” he said. “They shot up a university. They’re not going to think much of a little breaking and entering.”
Jack had walked along this hall every morning at 5:00 A.M., then down the stairs, the low sun painfully bright through the windows as he padded to the kitchen, bare feet on cold floor. He’d fire up the stovetop, prep breakfast for two. Cereal. Coffee. Toast. Eggs. Will’s would go in the microwave, to wait for when he woke up in a few hours.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Uh…” He blinked hard, smelling scrambled eggs. “Sorry. No.”
“Monarch had Will under surveillance for a few years, but by then he had moved or destroyed most of his work. He kept nothing Monarch would be interested in.”
“They got everything they wanted out of Will.”
“Will designed more than a time machine. He pioneered an entire field of science.”
“A field that was universally discredited, yeah, I know. It’s how we almost lost the house.”
“It was intentionally discredited. Your brother was an unusual dude, but he wasn’t wrong about much. It’s essential to Paul’s plans that nobody else has this technology-or even gets curious about it. Monarch’s very effective. Shit, they managed to get a constitutional amendment passed allowing their paramilitary to operate inside our national border. They’ve insinuated the company into the fabric of pretty much everything that’s holding society together: medical, technology, weapons, charity, city planning, national policy. Freaking child care.”
Child care. “What do you mean you’ve been training for this since you were eight?”
She shook her head. “When Paul went through the machine last night, he went to the end of time, but not for good. Eventually he went back to 1999. That’s seventeen years in the past. The young man you knew lived every one of those years, right up to this point. So understand: Paul has those seventeen years on you now. Seventeen years of getting good with the powers he has, plus foreknowledge of the future has gotta be how Monarch rose so quickly.”
“And you knew all this six years ago. That’s why you were here. But why get involved with me?”
“Was this your room?”
“Uh…” Oh shit. “Yeah, but there’s nothing in there that-”
“You haven’t been here in six years. You have no idea what could be in there.”
“Wait, there’s really nothing…”
Beth turned the handle and swung the door wide. It thunked hollowly against the wall. “Well,” she said. “This is a development.”
“I liked that show. So did you.”
“We both know that’s not what I’m referring to.”
The bedroom was a cozy affair, small, with a single picture-book window looking out over the back garden and the tree line beyond. A slim bookcase held novels, a lot of them with Dewey decimal system stickers on the spines. As a kid Jack had gotten a lot of his reading material from library clearances and secondhand stores. Leaning against the weathered spines were action figures of the two of the four main Team Outland characters, the plastic turning yellow with age. “September,” the thin sniper guy, and the Team’s cute pink-haired hacker.
Beneath the window was Jack’s childhood bed, neatly made and topped with a Team Outland comforter. Pink, featuring Digit-the hacker-winking and giving an ostentatious two-handed “time out” signal. Time Out. T.O. Team Outland. There was always some message at the end of each episode about being true to yourself, taking time to think, or something.
“I still say she was the best member of the team,” Jack said, defensively.
“How did I never see this room?”
“She had smarts. She was funny. The others just swaggered and got a free pass.”
“So defensive. Gimme a skinny weirdo with a sniper rifle any day. September got all the best lines.”
“She may be the reason I make bad decisions about redheads.”
Beth cocked her hip and did a spot-on Digit impression: “Time out! Think before you act!” Wink.
“Gross,” Jack said.
Will’s old stuff had invaded corners of Jack’s room. Cabinets, coffee cans full of receipts, Post-it notes rubber-banded together with dates and labels. Stacks of Carl Sagan VHS tapes. Abstract models of things that could have been molecules made out of toy store construction kits. A twelve-sided sphere weighing down a stack of handwritten papers. Polaroids of laboratories, labeled with the names of South American universities. Jack didn’t remember any of that stuff.
He wandered over, picked up the sphere, turned it over in his hands. The papers beneath it had hand-drawn representations of it, and screeds of calculations.
“So you liked September,” Jack said.
“Huh?”
“The skinny weirdo with the sniper rifle.” Jack put down the sphere. Flipped through the photos.
“Oh, yeah, of course. He was lean, wore a lot of black, had that cool voice…”
A couple of photos looked like shots of a laser focusing on a tiny lead ball bearing. He put them back with the rest of the junk.
“… did things solo,” Jack finished for her, “nobody knew where he came from, vanished all the time, turned up at the last minute…”
“Hey, don’t be glum, chum. September may have been a loner oddball with a thin backstory but he got shit done, right? Pretty soon you’re going to appreciate what a valuable character trait that is.”
Jack wasn’t having any of it. It had been six years. Twenty thousand road miles. Fear. Grief.
She touched his hand. The contact was shocking. “Hey. I was Zed. I am Beth. If I could have spared you pain I would have. In fact, more than a few times, I did.”
Man, she had great eyes.
“C’mon, your brother was no ding-dong. There has to be something Monarch didn’t get a look at. Holy crap is that you?” Beth made a beeline for a stack of boxes in the corner, on the top of which was a framed black-and-white of the whole family. All four of them. Jack must have been about eight when it was taken. “Nice haircut.”