Starr’s family had lived in Riverport for two years by this time. Her folks had said Dad was moving where the work was. But almost as soon as they moved to Riverport the work dried up, the docks closed, and now Dad was away as much as he had been when they lived in Phoenix. It was cool though; if he’d been home all the time it would have felt weird.
Their home was a little two-bedroom place from the fifties, on a corner block. High wooden fence, big back garden. She had her bus pass and house key on a loop around her neck. Fishing it out she let herself in, dropped her bag by the door, closed it behind her. She fished the Discman out of her jacket pocket…
… knocked down, but I get up again…
… and clicked it off. Looped the cords around the steel-gray plastic body, put it on the kitchen counter. Made herself a sandwich. Raspberry jelly and cheese. Held it on one hand, walked to the TV. Stopped. Noticed the door to the back porch was open. Someone’s shadow stretched on the wooden decking, someone on the porch.
Starr padded over and peered up at the person leaning on the wooden railing. Dressed in dirty jeans, a pocketed old canvas jacket. Made her think the lady did the same work her Dad did: construction. Concreting. The railing’s flaking paint pressed beneath her palms, the sun on her face.
The lady smiled at Starr, but Starr could tell she had been crying. Starr guessed the lady was doing that to her face-smiling-to make her feel better. Just like Starr did with other people. The lady had red hair, like Starr, and looked like family.
“Hello?” Starr said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The stranger turned around properly and got down on her haunches-eye to eye with Starr-and her smile felt more real now. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the swipe of a thumb. Laughed at how silly she was being.
Starr reached out and touched her arm, and tears fell from the lady’s eyes anyway.
“Hey, me,” the lady said. “It’s you.”
Friday, 18 August 2000. 6:07 A.M. The following morning.
Will woke up every morning at 5:55 A.M. The paper was deposited in the mailbox by the road at 6:00 A.M. Will walked to collect it, with his coffee, at 6:05 A.M, while oatmeal warmed on the stove.
That morning’s edition of the newspaper ran with the story of a local girl-Starr Donovan-missing from her home, believed abducted. Her mother was frantic and her father was believed to be flying back from the Gulf where he had been working on an oil rig. The girl had been missing less than twenty-four hours.
Will snorted, sipped his coffee. That passed for news in a flyover town.
There was something extra with that morning’s edition: a handwritten note.
Will,
I unplugged the core. Don’t know if I did it right, don’t care. I’ll be back in two weeks. Strip the Promenade, the whole thing. We’re moving it. No more arguments.
The bleach stain at the bottom of the stairs was me. Don’t blame Jack.
September.
PS: I’ve wired the house to explode. Instructions on your desk.
The missing girl looked back at Will from the front page, redheaded and blue eyed. It felt awfully cold for that time of year.
Thursday, 18 June 2009. 10:00 A.M. Nine years later.
Randall Gibson had wondered what it’d be like to go back in time. What it’d feel like to be inside that corridor once it charged up. Turned out he had been well prepared: it didn’t feel so different from a stutter. Over the years he’d racked up about two hundred hours in simulated zero states, but this week he found there was something about the real thing he liked a whole lot more. Everything got real quiet. He could go anywhere, do anything. It was a powerful feeling, being the only person in town with agency and will-maybe the only person in the entire world.
Inside the time machine, he kept his assault carbine tucked tight into his shoulder as he moved steadily around the loop. Nothing and nobody in here except him. Wherever his team was, that wasn’t where he was going. They were gonna find that Joyce kid, and they were gonna kill him, just like Mr. Hatch ordered. But the thing Gibson wanted more than anything else was to find Beth Wilder and hurt her till she died. He hoped Voss or IR hadn’t beaten him to it.
His face hurt. His face never stopped hurting. The Monarch medics said he could keep his eye, but it wasn’t what it was. In his pockets were enough high-grade painkillers to keep him going for weeks.
He wanted-needed-Wilder dead; the bug in his brain wouldn’t stop wriggling unless he knew she’d died screaming… but he had a family to think about. So he sent himself through last, made sure he came out later than his crew. 2009. If one of his squaddies managed to smoke her, he’d just have to live with that.
The exit door came into view around the corner. Gibson slapped the release plate and stood back as the hatch opened. Then he crossed the threshold from zero state to causality, moving into the airlock, scanning left to right, up and down. Clear.
He slung the carbine, snatched a quick look out the grimy viewplate. Looked like the machine was set up inside a concrete room, basement maybe. Some kind of signage was sprayed on the opposite wall. Standing lights provided stark illumination. Gibson worked out how to release the hatch and crank it open.
The stench hit him like a physical blow: stale and rich and sweet. His wife’s huevos rancheros belted up and out of him in a single wave. He recognized that smelclass="underline" it was the stench of pits, execution chambers, and abattoirs.
With one arm pressed tight against his nose and mouth, Gibson moved down the ramp, carbine slung, sidearm in hand.
The standing lamps were bright in his face, so bright that he almost tripped over Voss’s body, gone black and leathery, curled up on the ramp, recognizable only from insignia and name tag.
Gibson’s vision adjusted and the rest of the cramped room came into focus. The room had been built up around the machine, built to enclose it. There was barely enough room for the machine, the ramp and the lights.
There was a body on the ramp. From the haircut he knew it was Chaffey. Half his head was missing, his sidearm still clutched in one bony black hand.
What was left of Dominguez sat on its knees, lonely behind a standing lamp, head pushed into a corner. MRE and candy bar wrappers lay scattered here and there.
Leave the laws of the universe to me, Hatch had said. Bullshit. His plan was rolling and C-1 knew all about it. They’d been sent here because they were now on the wrong side of Hatch’s cost-benefit analysis. Gibson gave the tiniest laugh, because this wasn’t real. But just the one.
There was another body, this one at the foot of the ramp.
Propped against the wall, at the base of the ramp, was what had to be IR: half-skeletonized and collapsing into her bloodstained uniform, carbine resting across her lap.
They were all dead. He was the last of Chronon-1. Gibson wheeled around, frantically scanning the machine. The controls had been removed. He spun back looking for any advantage, anything he could use, any-
Behind him the airlock hissed-Gibson threw himself at the door-and it smooched shut.
He bellowed, red with fury and frustration, knowing beyond doubt he and his crew had been set up. Wilder had gotten there early and sealed the machine inside a fucking sarcophagus. They had all landed here, greeted by IR’s corpse, and slowly starved to death. How long had they sat here, making their rations last, with corpses for company and knowing they was looking at their own future?
This would not be his fate! He would not die here. Not like this.
The words spray painted on the wall at the base of the ramp said otherwise.