“What was that for?” he asked, pulling away from the kiss after a few seconds.
“For coming back and saving me,” she said.
Her face was very close to his, and he moved back a few inches. “Promise me something,” he said.
“What?” Allaire asked.
“The next time you want to kiss me, make sure you’re ready to tell me the real story of how we met,” he said. “The whole story.” It was hard for him to view anything between them as real, since she’d basically admitted that she already knew he was time weaving when they first met.
“It’s not what you think,” she said. “But, okay.”
“Are you feeling well enough to get moving?” he asked.
Allaire nodded. “I think so, but I don’t even know where to start. Ayers could be anywhere.”
“Yalé wanted us to go back to ’89 so you could recover somewhere safe,” Kyle said.
Allaire shook her head, groaned and started moving through the tunnel, even though they didn’t have a destination yet. “No need for that.”
“What do we do, then?” Kyle asked.
“Close your eyes,” Allaire said. “Ayers once told me that he could feel the tunnel pulling at him.”
Kyle smiled. “Ayers is a psychopath.”
“Try it,” she said.
Kyle closed his eyes, expecting to feel nothing. “I’ve been in this tunnel enough times, Allaire . . . I think I’d know . . . ” He trailed off, not really knowing whether the feeling he was having was real, or if he was conjuring up some “pull” because of what Allaire had just said. “Whoa, that was weird.”
“Not another word,” Allaire said. “Just lead the way.”
CHAPTER 14
April 12, 2005
* * *
Sixteen years later
Somewhere around the rung labeled 2003, it became clear to Kyle that they needed to go to 2005. Until then, it had just been this feeling, which got stronger the more he looked for it, that they needed to travel forward in time. It was an incredible development, but after almost four hours of moving through the tunnel, Kyle’s focus had shifted back to finding Ayers.
“I don’t get it,” Kyle said. “Why can’t we kill him?”
At first, Allaire didn’t answer.
“Can we kill him?” Kyle asked.
“No,” she said. “He’s the last Sere with the ability to reproduce, which means he needs to procreate to keep their bloodline going.”
Kyle exhaled loudly. “Who cares about their bloodline? He’s a murderer. He’s trying to kill you, and you said that with this nevering thing he’s trying to get me to kill my parents. You ever think this bloodline belongs in the past?”
“I know it doesn’t make sense to you,” she said. “It’s hard to understand.”
“Then help me understand,” Kyle said, crawling along slowly enough to keep the conversation going.
“The Seres have been the keepers of time weaving for ages. They were the ones who discovered this passageway. When the last Sere dies, the secret of the silk dies with them,” Allaire said.
“What about Yalé?” Kyle asked. “He’s a Sere.”
“Yalé is more of a steward,” Allaire said. “He’s sterile.”
Kyle’s eyes practically bugged out of his head. “You mean . . . ?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s fixed, so he’s not really part of the bloodline. And, he can’t time weave either. Nearly every Sere is genetically disposed to handle the tunnel, but not him. He’s an unusual case, but he’s there to support his family members however he can, and to keep silk blots spinning. If the production stops, Seres legend says the tunnel will close.”
“And where the hell are the rest of the Seres?” Kyle asked. “How are there only two left?”
“Seres have a single heir,” she said, “who marries, and gives birth to another single heir. So, unless something happens to the first heir, there’s only a single member of each generation. Yalé is an exception, which is why he was . . . ”
“Snipped,” Kyle said.
Allaire shrugged at the crude, but accurate, description.
“I just don’t get why you’re trying so hard to protect this thing that seems more trouble than it’s worth,” Kyle said. “Why not blow up the factory, kill Ayers, and be done with it all?”
Allaire stopped and grabbed Kyle’s hand. She started to lean in for a kiss, but stopped, probably remembering the promise he’d asked her to make. She raised the back of his hand to her lips and kissed that instead. “Hope,” she said. “Hope that Ayers is wrong and it all does matter. And that we can find a way to use our silk blots to undo some of what he’s done and buy humanity some more time on Earth.”
CHAPTER 15
April 12, 2005
* * *
Thirty minutes later
Kyle and Allaire entered Yalé’s small office in the factory building. Everything looked exactly the same as it had in 1989, except Yalé, whose crew cut had much more gray in it.
“Where is he?” Allaire asked.
“Just be calm,” Yalé said.
Allaire pounded on his desk with her hand.
“You’re very agitated,” Yalé continued.
“No shit,” she said. “Your calm and gentle approach with Ayers is part of the reason we’re in this mess. You want the entire universe to get swallowed up? Where’s my car?”
“What are you planning to do?” Yalé asked. “Please don’t be rash.”
“Is the car in the normal spot in Brooklyn?”
Yalé looked almost mournful. “What is your plan, Allaire? We’ve tried subduing him. You know that doesn’t work for long.”
“This time he’s not going to have a choice,” she said.
“Why don’t you check the tunnel again?” Yalé said. “Perhaps there’ll be a pleasant surprise and we’ll have gained some years back.”
“Is the car gassed and in the usual spot?” she asked again, firmly. “You know there’s no happy ending here, Yalé. It’s time to put an end to this, once and for all, before it’s too late.”
Yalé looked away, troubled. Kyle could tell by Yalé’s reaction that they’d chosen the correct year, simply by Kyle tuning himself into the way the tunnel was “pulling.” It was another piece of evidence that he was meant to be exactly where he was.
Allaire walked around to Yalé’s side of the desk and pulled a set of keys out of the top drawer. “Is the car at Kings Plaza, Yalé?” she asked. “I need you to answer me.”
Yalé nodded.
“Sometimes I think you forget that you weren’t born into this, Allaire,” Yalé said.
“It’s my job to protect that sonofabitch,” Allaire said. “And I’ve done my job too well.”
“Wait, what?” Kyle asked. “Protect him?” Allaire had never spelled out exactly how she’d gotten involved with the Seres. And while he knew she didn’t want to kill him, she certainly hadn’t told Kyle her job was to protect that psycho lunatic.
“I’m concerned by the way you’re talking, Allaire,” Yalé said. “You know the importance of keeping him alive and mating him.”
“I’ll find a way to bring him in,” she said. “We’ll get him help. Even if we have to lock him up to do it.”
Yalé shook his head slowly, an observer to something he didn’t like.
“Bye,” Allaire said, turning toward the door. Kyle stepped toward the room’s exit as well. He looked back and saw that Yalé had gently pulled Allaire aside and they’d moved a few feet away, out of Kyle’s earshot. They spoke for less than a minute.
On their way downstairs in the elevator, Kyle asked Allaire what Yalé had said to her.
“He asked me, if it came down to trading your life for Ayers’s whether I would do what I was supposed to,” she said.
“What are you supposed to do?” Kyle asked.
“I’m supposed to bring Ayers back here alive,” she said. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
<
br /> Kyle didn’t love her answer. “But—?”
“Let’s go end this right now,” she said, walking out of the elevator ahead of Kyle.
CHAPTER 16
April 12, 2005
* * *
Later that day
An hour and a half later, they were in Brooklyn, entering the King’s Plaza shopping mall. The Plaza was loud and busy and smelled like popcorn. Ever since they met with Yalé, Allaire had been quiet, and all business.
Kyle sniffed the air and was transported back for a second to his life before the bus crash. “Wouldn’t you kill for a lazy afternoon at the mall, with a corn dog and a lemonade?”
Allaire shrugged. “I’ve never had an afternoon like that.”
Kyle tried to keep up as she strode quickly down the aisle on the first floor of the mall.
She stepped up onto an escalator, and Kyle followed her. “They leave your car at the mall? All the time?”
Allaire turned to him. “Top floor of the parking garage here is the only place it’s ever worked to leave it for months, or even years, at a time. Yalé moves it every couple of weeks, but no one’s ever towed it. So anytime I can get to Brooklyn, I know I have a car at my disposal.”
“Where are we going to take the car?” Kyle asked. “We have no idea where Ayers is.”
“I have some places we can try,” Allaire answered. “I’ve been following him a long time.”
When they were about halfway up the long escalator, Kyle looked down at the first floor. There were mothers with strollers, one of those small trains for toddlers to ride on, and some kids who must have been cutting school hanging out and sucking on their Orange Juliuses. Then Kyle made eye contact with a woman on her phone and had a flash of recognition. Immediately, she turned the other way, and brought a finger to her other ear. She looked like she was listening intently to the person on the other end as Kyle tried to place her. Her face was both distant and familiar . . . His photographic memory had been nowhere near as reliable since he began time weaving.
As Kyle and Allaire nearly reached the second level of the mall, he watched the woman pull the phone—which looked like an iPhone—from her ear and touch the screen before she put it in her back pocket, where the curved rectangular shape stuck out a bit. He craned his neck to try and see her face again, and it clicked. But she ducked into Forever 21 before he could get a good look to confirm it was her. “I think that’s Samyra,” he said.
Allaire gave no sense of recognition. “Samyra?”
“The girl who works with Yalé,” Kyle answered as they stepped off the escalator.
“What girl?” she asked, tugging Kyle’s arm toward Macy’s.
“When I visited him in 2016,” Kyle said. “She was the one who gave me a silk blot to come find you. She acted like she was sneaking it so Yalé wouldn’t know.”
“You mean that bitchy little assistant?” Allaire asked. “She always hid in the back when I came around. If he wasn’t fixed, I’d think that she was his little girlfriend.”
“I think that was her,” Kyle said. He stopped for a second. He wanted to be sure, but he wasn’t. He’d only met her once. Maybe he was imagining it.
“If Yalé was going to send someone else back, I’d know about it,” Allaire said, heading decisively toward Macy’s. “Your mind’s playing tricks on you. Try to relax.”
Kyle felt very unsettled ignoring what he’d seen. “Maybe we can just go check that store she—”
“You see that I’m not stopping, right?” she asked, as he trailed behind her through the Macy’s cosmetics section. Even if Kyle had said he was positive that it was Samyra, it might not have stopped Allaire’s forward progress.
He remembered their conversation from 2016. “Samyra told me she couldn’t time weave,” he said. “But that could’ve been a lie.”
“Or . . . It’s just not her,” Allaire said, not breaking her stride.
Samyra had been instrumental in getting Kyle to this point. He wondered if perhaps she was here to help them again.
They exited through Macy’s into the parking structure, and Allaire race-walked up a ramp toward the rooftop level. “It’s three levels up from here,” she called back to him, without even bothering to slow down and wait. She was like a different person from what he had seen only a few hours ago. From near-death to handling the uphill ramp like a world-class athlete. Kyle had trouble comprehending the idea that something in his blood was strong enough to heal her that fast.
Things had been moving too quickly for Kyle to really just stop and think about everything. But, he as he trudged uphill behind Allaire, toward her car, his brain began to take stock. There was no question anymore that he had this mysterious mutation. He was special, but didn’t really understand anything more than that yet.
He watched this beautiful woman he’d both just met, and known for years, as she walked ahead of him up another ramp in the parking garage. Now that her wounds were healed, Kyle thought she might be reverting back to lone-wolf mode. But it was clear to Kyle that stopping Ayers was now his own mission as well.
A couple of minutes later, they reached the rooftop. Allaire walked toward the only car on the entire level—a late 1990s silver Honda Accord. By now, she was a good forty feet ahead of him. He watched her pull the keys out of her back pocket. Her pocket! Kyle thought. The image flashed in his head of the iPhone sticking out of the woman’s pocket on the mall’s lower level, the one he’d thought might be Samyra.
Allaire ducked into the car and kept the door open while she buckled herself in.
Kyle ran now toward the car. “Wait!”
Allaire stuck her head out and gave him a look like he was crazy.
“She had an iPhone,” he said, catching his breath.
Allaire’s face was a combination between annoyed and perplexed. “What? So? Let’s go, Kyle.”
“Just fucking wait!” he said. “It’s 2005, Allaire. There are no iPhones. She might’ve been able to connect to a cell network of some kind with an iPhone she brought with her from 2016, but everyone else here is still using flip phones.”
Allaire finally stopped moving for a second. “You’re right.”
“We need to know why she’s here,” Kyle said, sensing an opening now. He would show Allaire he could do more than follow her.
“I don’t understand why Yalé would send her here,” Allaire said.
“Maybe he doesn’t know she’s here,” Kyle said.
“He knows,” she answered.
Kyle shrugged. “It didn’t sound like he wanted you going after Ayers. You think he sent her to make sure things didn’t get out of hand between the two of you?”
Allaire looked at her keys in the ignition and carefully pulled them out. Kyle could see a look of concern wash over her. “Back up from the car.”
“What?” Kyle asked. “Why?”
“Just back up,” she said.
As Kyle stepped backward, Allaire laid down on the ground, just behind the back tire on the driver’s side.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Making sure Yalé isn’t trying to kill me,” she said.
Kyle wished he’d trusted his instincts and chased after her as soon as he saw Samyra. “We need to find out why she’s here.”
“That little bitch,” Allaire said, shaking her head as she slid out from under the car.
Allaire walked around to the trunk, put the key in and popped it open. She reached inside and carefully moved a blanket aside, revealing a small package of explosives, wired through the bottom of the trunk.
“Looks like we need another car,” Kyle said.
“If Yalé’s trying to kill us,” Allaire said, “he’s not going to stop just because we didn’t blow ourselves up . . . C’mon.” They both jogged down the ramp in the parking garage in the direction of the mall, retracing their steps from just a few moments earlier.
CHAPTER 17
April 12, 2005
* * *
&nb
sp; Moments later
They’d nearly made it down the first ramp leading from the roof of the parking garage to the mall when Kyle heard the engine of a car roaring toward them. Kyle spotted the white Mercedes coming at them with just enough time to grab Allaire’s arm, and pull her backward, as he dove out of the way. As Kyle rolled across the concrete of the parking garage, he saw the car brake suddenly, and gun a U-turn, before coming back toward them.
They didn’t need to go looking for Samyra anymore since she was the one behind the wheel of the car. They’d managed to sidestep the bomb she’d planted in Allaire’s car, but now they needed to find a way to avoid being run down by the Mercedes.
“C’mon,” Kyle said to Allaire, reaching down to help her off the ground.
They ran back up the same ramp they’d just come down, trying to put as much space between the car and themselves as possible. Kyle turned back as they reached the top of the ramp and saw Samyra turn the car toward them, revving her engine as she headed their way.
Kyle and Allaire purposely ran away from her Accord when they reached the rooftop, and Allaire pulled out her gun. They saw a blue dumpster across the roof from Allaire’s car and ran for it.
As Samyra raced her Mercedes onto the roof, she skidded to a stop a few feet from Allaire’s Accord. Peeking out from behind the dumpster, Kyle could see that she was holding a gun as she popped out of her car.
“Shhhh,” Kyle said, peeking around the side of the dumpster.
Allaire shrugged, looking around. There weren’t many places to hide. She put the gun down on the ground right next to her, keeping an eye on Samyra. Allaire grabbed her wrist and winced, trying to bend it back and forth.
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