Departure

by A. G. Riddle

  Huh.

  At university, I had envisioned Alice Carter as a time-travel fantasy series, an escapist tale, a mix of Harry Potter and Back to the Future. But right now the setup strangely hits home.

  I turn the page, and the faded ink ends. New strokes, darker, from a different pen. I resist reading them. It feels almost like cheating, peeking at the answers.

  I flip the pages quickly, barely feeling the Braille-like indentations on the backside. On a new page, I repeat the mental ritual I developed in college: I write the first line that pops into my head, then the next, until I have ten or half a page. It’s like mental jumping jacks, a warm-up to get the words flowing. It’s not about quality; it’s about starting, which is the hardest part. I usually throw out this initial bit, but occasionally there are nuggets of solid gold, the kind that only turn up when you’re panning with reckless abandon, when you’re writing without editing or judging what’s coming out. To my surprise, I hit the strike of all time. The ideas pour out of me. The outline for book 1 comes quickly, and then the next: Alice Carter and the Dragons of Tomorrow. A setup for book 3 arises naturally—Alice Carter and the Fleet of Destiny—and more after that. Alice Carter and the Endless Winter. Alice Carter and the Ruins of Yesteryear. Alice Carter and the Tombs of Forever. Alice Carter and the River of Time. Story arcs for seven books, the entire series. My hand aches.

  It’s like the ideas were always there, hidden just under the surface, ready, waiting for me to break through that top layer that covered them.

  And from the plots, the ideas, the scenes I can’t wait to write, comes a theme: decisions and time. Time, our fate, the future—it isn’t written. It can be changed. Time and again, Alice chooses a new future with her decisions. She chooses to fight the future, to bet on humanity, to have faith in our ability to learn from our mistakes and make better decisions. Today’s decisions are tomorrow’s reality. I like that.

  To me, this is what great books are about, revealing our own lives in a way only stories can; we see ourselves in the characters, our own struggles and shortcomings, in a way that’s nonthreatening and nonjudgmental. We learn from the characters; we take those lessons and inspiration back to the real world. I believe that a good book leaves its readers better than they were before. And I think these stories will. That’s why they’re important.

  I’ve also realized what I want to do: stay here, remember, and make a life with Nick, if that’s possible. But what I want to do and what I need to do aren’t always the same thing. I think the passengers of Flight 305 deserve a chance at their own future. Like Alice Carter, I reject the idea that the future is written, that our world is doomed to repeat the same mistakes as this one.

  So I decide:

  I’ll let Sabrina and Yul and the Titans here use me, like the cheese in their trap, to catch Nicholas, to buy time. Whatever they need to get everyone home.

  I glance once again at the sea through the window. There are three lines of white smoke now, the third glowing ember recently extinguished. The sun will set in a few hours.

  I gently close the notebook and move it aside. I will likely never see it again, or remember the work I’ve done. Outside the hotel room my footsteps echo loudly on the marble floors of the lab tower.

  In the hall that holds Sabrina’s lab, an alarm rings out overhead, a shocking, pulsing sound synchronized with red flashing lights. There’s no announcement, no indication of what’s wrong. It’s like the whole place just turned into a disco, the DJ gone, his last beat on repeat.

  I race to the glass door to her lab. It’s empty.

  I turn, run to Yul’s lab. Empty.

  I pound up the stairway, onto the next level of the lab tower. All empty.

  The alarm assaults me now, boring into my head. Focus.

  Back in the stairway, through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out at the sea, I spot the two airships at the base of the towers rising, moving away. Heading off to battle?

  On the next level, through the fourth glass door, I spot Sabrina, standing, her back toward me. A large machine almost fills the room. It has only a single opening, a round portal just big enough for a body. A metal-topped table extends from the opening, a body upon it.

  I throw the door open. A screen on the wall to my left displays the two hemispheres of a brain, lit in a blooming kaleidoscope of color. A brain scan.

  “Harper,” Sabrina says, turning.

  “What is this?”

  “A contingency.”

  “For what?”

  “In case we succeed.”

  Sabrina never fails to offer up a cryptic answer. I struggle to put it together: her future self, lecturing her on neurons, how they don’t change over time, how memories are simply stored electrical charges. Yul’s video, talk of power from the dam being just enough to change the state of linked electrons in the past.

  There’s another revelation. It should have been obvious: Why did this faction need Sabrina? They already have the vaccine. If Yul held the key to resetting the quantum bridge and sending our plane back, what’s Sabrina’s role?

  This is it: the experiment they’ve kept from me.

  “You’re trying to send your memories back, aren’t you?”

  Sabrina raises her eyebrows. Impressed?

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “For your sake,” she says flatly.

  The table finishes sliding out of the machine, and Yul sits up, shaking his head.

  “My sake?” I look around at the lab. “This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? For Flight 305 to return to our time and for the two of you to have your memories, to remember everything that happened here and prevent the Titan catastrophe.”

  “Yes.”

  Incredible. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s too dangerous, Harper.” Sabrina glances over at Yul, who looks haggard, almost like he’s hungover. “We aren’t sure it will work. We could awaken in 2015 with brain damage, or not wake up at all. If I told you, I knew what your decision would be. It could be a death sentence.”

  There’s the whole picture. Either Sabrina and Yul wake up in 2015 with their memories, or they turn up vegetables. Either way, they figure the immortality therapy will never be completed. Our world will be saved. There’s something oddly heroic about Sabrina not telling me. She wanted to save lives back in 2015, including mine, and she and Yul are willing to risk theirs to do it. I like that.

  The mysterious machine looms before me; a way for me to remember everything that’s happened here, what I’ve become, what I’ve learned about myself . . . who I’ve met. I wouldn’t be risking others’ lives; just my own. That has been my breakdown point, I’m unable to make decisions where only my fate is at stake. When someone else’s life is on the line, I’ll risk everything. But when it’s just me, I descend into decision paralysis. Here and now, though, my thinking is so very clear. I’ve seen what my life becomes down the road I chose, a road I might choose again. I want to change my life, make a different choice, take a risk. I want to pursue my dream. That path is uncertain, but hey, certainty is overrated. I believe it’s better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

  “Put me in the machine.”

  “No, Harper. It’s too risky.”

  “I’ll take that risk. I want to remember.”

  “It’s not worth it.”

  “It is to me. This is the deal, Sabrina. You and Yul have kept me and Nick in the dark since that plane crashed. We’re all grown-ups, old enough to make our own decisions. You have to start trusting us. You want me to help you contain and capture Nicholas? You make me part of the plan. If I don’t wake up in 2015, so be it. And you’ll give Nick the same choice—the same chance—when he gets here.”

  Sabrina shakes her head. “We couldn’t be sure we had the right Nick.”

  “I’ll know. Now what is that incessant alarm?”

  “They’re here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY
-FIVE

  Nick

  OH, YOU KNOW, JUST A TYPICAL TUESDAY AFTERNOON here in 2147, waiting for my buddy Mike to wake up. Apparently it takes a few hours for the bodies to thaw out.

  I’m losing it. Really cracking up. The weight of what I’ve done and am about to do hits me all at once. This is crazy. The whole thing.

  Sitting in the small airship conference room where my future self debriefed me a few hours ago, I rub my temples, trying to focus. I’m clean-shaven and showered, and this is the first moment that I’ve really had alone since Flight 305 crashed nearly a week ago. Against my will, my mind replays the events of that week. But mostly I think about my decisions, calls that at every turn meant the difference between life and death for my fellow passengers. The bodies in the large tent outside this ship, lined up on the rolling metal tables—they’re alive or dead because of me. At the crash site, by the lake, I could have focused more. Could have made a better plan. What if we had thrown out the luggage in the overhead bins first? Would the plane have sunk slower? Probably. Those precious seconds, minutes maybe, would have saved lives. How many? Two, three, half a dozen? Maybe we should have barricaded the belly section, keeping the water out. That would have added minutes. The whole thing went under fast after the water breached the bottom lip. I should have seen that—

  The door swishes open, and Nicholas strides in. Now that my wounds are cleaned and my six days of scruff gone, we’re mirror images, in appearance if not in thought: his cheeriness strikes a sharp contrast to my anguish.

  He sets a single white pill on the wood table and hands me a bottle of water. I glance from the pill to him, unable to hide my hesitation. He’s me, I’m sure of that—but I’ve also only known him for a few hours, and it’s been a weird, weird week.

  “Stim tab,” he says. “It’ll clear your mind. Right now you’re replaying every moment since the crash, your decisions, pondering whether any of those metal tables could hold a living body instead of a dead one, if you’d just done something differently.”

  I pick up the pill, scrutinize it one last time, and swallow it down. This feels like it could turn into a therapy session, and I’m not even remotely up for it. I attempt to change the subject. “I take it coffee’s out of style?”

  “No, we love coffee around here; just can’t afford the beans.”

  It’s a dumb joke, but I laugh anyway.

  “Don’t worry,” Nicholas says, “I hold the all-time record for mental replay and what-if syndrome. I sat in a room slightly bigger than this one and stared at the Atlantic all day, every day, for over sixty years, regretting, plotting to set things right, seeing the faces of the people my actions killed, one in particular. We don’t have time for survivor’s guilt, Nick. You did the best you could. You’re innocent. At least you have that. I’m not. I got past it, and Oliver and I killed everyone we ever loved. Everybody else, for that matter.”

  He waits for my response, but I just take another swig of water. What do you say to that? And what would that much guilt do to a person’s mind? How would it change him? Maybe in ways I can’t imagine.

  “We get it from Dad, you know. The replay obsession. When he was in the moment, in the thick of negotiating an agreement or managing a diplomatic situation, he was as focused as a laser beam. Total blinders. After that he bounced around his study, pacing, talking on the phone with everyone who had been involved, going over every second.”

  He’s right. I never thought about it before.

  “How did you get over it?”

  “I didn’t. I got past it. I made this deal with myself that I would focus only on making it right, and that in return, I would allow myself only a single reward for the rest of my life. I stopped allowing myself to think about what had happened. Told myself that every moment wallowing in my guilt was one moment stolen from making it right, from redeeming myself. Since that decision, I’ve focused only on the next step in bringing humanity back to Earth, on starting over. That was the key to my survival, pouring it all into that one goal. We’re close to that goal, Nick. When we destroy that quantum device in a few hours, we’ll be home free.” He walks to the door. “You ready? Mike and the others are almost awake.”

  WE AGREED THAT I SHOULD be there when the passengers awoke. They were captured after Nicholas and Oliver drove the other faction from the crash site, so this would be a bit jarring for them. Given my role at the camp, Nicholas thinks they will respond to me, that seeing me first will put them at ease.

  After our first talk, we strolled through the three-tent complex, leaning over the tables, surveying the faces, slightly obscured by the plastic sheets, selecting the passengers who would join us on the raid of Titan City as if we were at a farmers’ market picking out steaks for tonight’s barbecue. How about him, Nick? Sure, add him to the list. He looks strong, what do you think? So weird.

  I originally came up with eight people, passengers who had received the vaccine and who I had seen perform under pressure at the crash site. Nicholas prodded me, insisting we needed more. We settled on eleven. Mike is among them, and so is one of the other strong swimmers from the lake, a half dozen people from the line that passed the bodies along, and three of the guys I sent on the scouting missions before the camp was invaded. I couldn’t bring myself to include Jillian; she’s been through so much, and this will be intense (weapons and diving training is next up on the agenda).

  The first of the bodies are starting to awaken, and Nicholas and I stand in one of the twenty labs Grayson and I saw earlier, waiting. Mike sits up on the metal table, rubs his sleepy eyes, and shakes his head. He’s still wearing his green Celtics T-shirt.

  “Nick . . .” His voice comes out scratchy, sounding like it hurts to speak.

  “Take it easy, Mike. We’ve got some catching up to do.”

  Not to mention the weapons training.

  IT’S LIKE A SCI-FI SUMMER camp. The eleven passengers and I sit in a makeshift training room inside the third tent, the eleven Titans and Nicholas by our sides, helping us learn the suits and orienting us to their technology.

  The glass-tile-covered suits that make their wearers invisible are even stranger inside. Holographic images inside the helmet display everything from biometric data to infrared scans and video feeds from the other team members. Panels on the forearms of the suits control it all. The Titans can use their eyes, but according to them, that takes more practice time than we have.

  After the suit orientation, the talk turns to the assault plan.

  Nicholas stands before the group, a large screen behind him flashing images and schematics in sync with his words. I wonder if he controls the screen with some neural link, or if one of the other Titans is assisting. Just one more mystery.

  It’s actually a pretty simple plan, but simple plans aren’t necessarily easy to execute.

  We’ll suit up and drop into the Atlantic, a few miles from the dam. The suits were designed for total containment, to avoid another mutation in the event the Titans ventured from their stronghold in Gibraltar. The oxygen will last far longer than we need.

  We’ll use backpack diver propulsion vehicles to reach the dam, entering Titan City through the massive water intakes in the power plant. Things get dangerous at that point, but the plan accounts for the contingencies, so assuming we survive, we’ll split up and fight our way up the dam, then into the five finger-shaped towers, searching for the quantum device.

  Nicholas is fairly certain it will be in the middle, tallest tower, the one that houses the labs.

  The screen changes to photos of Sabrina and Yul.

  “Most of you have seen these two individuals, Sabrina Schröder and Yul Tan. They have been deceived by members of the other Titan faction and are working against us. They will likely be close to the device and may be able to activate it on short notice. We can’t allow that to happen. If you encounter Schröder or Tan, shoot them on sight. After we’ve neutralized the device, our priority will be preserving as many lives as possible.”
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br />   The words hang in the air for a moment as Sabrina and Yul’s enlarged faces stare out at us. From across the room Grayson’s eyes meet mine, a mix of concern and sympathy on his face. I feel the same. Yul and Sabrina lied to us, kept things from us, but I hope they don’t lose their lives in what’s to come. Grayson agrees. His father sits beside him, his Titan mentor. The time they spent training with the suit was the happiest I’ve ever seen him, though, to be fair, he’s been either drunk, hungover, ticked off, or somber for all six days I’ve known him. Maybe this really is a new chance for all of us.

  Nicholas is wrapping up the briefing now, detailing the backup plan, which is even simpler: placing explosives in the power plant. If we think the other faction is on the verge of resetting the quantum bridge, Nicholas will detonate the charges, bringing down the dam and Titan City, destroying the device—ideally after we get out.

  He calls for last questions and comments, and I stand facing the two dozen people in our assault force, half passengers, half Titans.

  “There’s another person we need to look out for: Harper Lane. Many of you know her. She’s another passenger. Late twenties, early thirties. Slender. British. Blond hair. She was recovered along with Yul and Sabrina at Titan Hall, and we assume she’s in Titan City with them as well. She’s an innocent bystander here, a hostage, and we should do everything we can to save her. She may also have information that could help us find or disable the device. If anyone spots her, notify both Nicholas and me.”

  The group breaks up, the eleven passengers and Grayson returning to their Titan mentors for more suit training. We’ve got another hour and a half before sunset, our launch time.