Olivia shook her head. “If the machine is here, that proves the future exists.”
“No. The future exists because the Society is here.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, not me.”
“I know what I know.”
Olivia thought: It doesn’t change anything. She still had to destroy the damn machine. The fact that it existed right now did prove the future survived. Or, she thought, it proved she was about to fail at destroying the probability machine—or, rather, the probability weapon.
They continued walking until a weird silvery glimmer, like a migraine aura, appeared in the distance, reflecting on the walls.
Alvaro stopped and turned to her. “What you’re going to see, only a small number of people have ever seen.”
“Let’s keep moving.”
He pointed at her 9 mm. “The gun isn’t necessary.”
“I’m relieved to hear that.”
Behind them, footfalls came rushing down the tunnel. Before Alvaro could react, Olivia shoved him aside and ran toward the glimmer of silver light, encountering waves of almost unbearable heat. It baked against her face, drew sweat streaming out of her body, as if she were melting through her clothes. Behind her, Emilio shouted, “Stop her!”
“Keep back!” Olivia fired into the tunnel behind her, the reports, slapping off the rock walls, painfully loud. She aimed high, not wanting to hit Alvaro. A pointless consideration, in light of what she was about to do. The explosion would probably kill them all. She dropped the now-empty gun and kept running.
The tunnel turned and dipped suddenly. She lost her footing and went sprawling, sliding into a high-ceilinged cavern, like a base runner trying to steal home. She pushed herself to her knees. A buzzing vibration in the air made her skin tingle. The silver-white light and buzzing sound emanated from a pit sunk in the middle of the cavern. Olivia scrambled to her feet, approached the edge, and peered over. Twenty feet down, a halo, like a ring of burning white magnesium, encircled a globe the size of a wrecking ball. The probability machine was a finely detailed miniature of planet Earth wrapped in clouds, with oceans and continents visible beneath. An artifact from the future somehow floating here beneath the ancient city. Olivia stared, open-mouthed.
A myriad of spokes glimmered between the halo and the Earth. So many spokes they became uncountable. The link stirred in sympathy, tingling inside her mind, and Olivia knew that here, contained in this fantastic machine, all the decision end points of all the human probability machines across time still existed—including the Shepherd choices Jacob had made over a lifetime of apocalyptic brinkmanship.
Including Olivia’s own broken alternative worlds.
Below the machine, like an optical illusion, the native rock walls of the pit blurred into the shimmering walls of a shaft plunging to infinity. Olivia felt dizzy, and caught herself swaying at the edge, overwhelmed by the heat and the unreal quality of what she was seeing.
The halo distorted the atmosphere in rising waves of heat. Spokes glimmered with uncounted probability choices. The heat throbbed and burned. Through the link, the buzz resolved to granular detail—billions of voices speaking in billions of minor and major variations of lives lived and lost and lived again across countless probabilities. If she destroyed it, what would happen? The Society could be right: Destroying the machine might undo the world. She could be standing at the brink of her biggest mistake yet.
Olivia backed away from the edge, the twenty pounds of C-4 weighing heavily on her shoulders.
She heard them coming, Alvaro and Emilio, their voices arguing, getting closer.
Olivia shrugged the satchel bomb off her shoulders. Without knowing why, she said, “I’m sorry,” and then she ripped a Velcro flap open and clocked back the delay timer to three seconds.
Emilio was the first one out of the tunnel, coming at her with his pistol leveled, yelling.
Olivia toggled the detonator and flung the satchel into the pit.
Thirty-Eight
The first time Olivia had ever witnessed, close up, the explosion of a barrel bomb, a shock wave had torn through her body, lifted her off her feet, and dropped her flat on her back. She had blinked grit out of her eyes while a yellow cloud drifted across the sun, depositing a hissing rain of dust. She hadn’t really been close up, of course. Any closer than fifty yards and she would have been obliterated by shrapnel, burning oil, and flying debris.
Terry Simms, a New York Times reporter who had been escorting her to a hotel in eastern Aleppo where journalists gathered, had bent over her. “Are you all right?” he’d shouted. Shouting was necessary or else she would not have been able to hear him through the ringing. “Yes,” she had said, and he pulled her to her feet and hastily brushed the dust off her clothes. Later he had admitted he had just been trying to cop a feel, and Olivia hadn’t known whether he’d been joking. It probably didn’t matter, since by then they were in bed. But out there in the aftermath of Olivia’s first big explosion, shouting through the dust and ringing bells, Terry Simms had said, “Things go boom around here a lot. You’ll get used to it.”
She had been in Aleppo less than three hours.
Terry had been half right. Things did go boom a lot, but no, she did not get used to it; she only pretended to. The same way she pretended to be immune to the small “d” disasters in her own life.
But no barrel bomb, missile strike, or IED had prepared her for what happened when twenty pounds of C-4 plastic explosive went boom not twenty feet from where she stood.
The pit roared and the ground shuddered in violent upheaval. Olivia threw her arms in front of her face. Scorching heat crackled her skin . . . and then abruptly withdrew. Silence filled the vacuum. At first she thought the explosion must have blown out her eardrums. Then she resumed breathing and heard the rasp and drag of air in and out of her lungs. Why wasn’t she dead?
Olivia lowered her arms. Invisible fingers plucked at her shirt, mussed her hair. Dust whooshed by her and joined the rubble churning in white light, held contained by some force, and funneling back into the pit—an explosion do-over. It was like watching a perfect 3D projection run in reverse. Olivia forgot about Emilio and Alvaro, forgot about everything but the spectacle before her. They all should have been blown to pieces. Instead, this. Feeling drawn to it, she stepped closer, and the invisible fingers seized her hard—the same force that was calling back the explosive power of the C-4 now yanked her off her feet. She hit the ground face-down, and the force dragged her toward the funneling debris.
Olivia planted her hands and tried to shove herself back, but the force was too strong. The rough stone scraped the skin from the heels of her hands. She shouted, “No!” Someone grabbed her ankle. She looked back. It was Emilio, and behind him Alvaro held on to Emilio’s arm, hauling back, jaw clenched, his hair flying around his face. It was as if a pressurized cabin had been breached and they were all being sucked toward the hole.
Olivia’s head and arms crossed over the edge of the pit. Emilio’s fingers dug painfully into her leg, holding on. Maybe all he wanted to save was the link, but if he could see what she now saw, he would know that possessing the link had become pointless.
Like water down a drain, the pulverized debris swirled into the shaft. The probability machine, a fractured globe bleeding light, was caught in the middle of the swirl. The machine plunged into the depths, falling until it winked out like a blue spark. The force of depressurization, or whatever it was, released Olivia. Her arms dangling into the pit, she watched the infinity shaft flicker and collapse into itself.
And then everything went dark.
Not simply dark, but the utter, seamless blackness of an underground cavern. In the next moment a deep rumbling surge came up from beneath the bedrock. It sounded like a charging herd of elephants.
Behind her, Emilio said, “Oh, my God.” He released her ankle. Olivia pushed herself away from the pit and started to stand up. The ground shuddered, and a great roll
ing quake knocked her down again. She shouted, “Fuck.” The solid rock bucked and rolled and bounced her. With a sharp cracking of stone breaking away from stone, pieces of the cavern thudded down all around her. She covered her head with her arms, tried to draw her knees up to her chest, even while the quake bounced her violently. It went on and on, the way all disasters seemed to when you found yourself in the middle of one. A man—she couldn’t tell if it was Emilio or Alvaro—screamed, and then the scream cut off abruptly. After that, the shaking finally stopped.
The dry sound of grit sifting down.
With trembling hands, Olivia dug out her cartridge light and twisted it on. A slender bar struck through the haze of suspended dust. She took a deep shuddering breath, coughed, spat, and stood up unsteadily. She twisted the cartridge, fanning the light, and swept it over the pit, which now bottomed out after twenty feet. The shaft, the corridor between past and future—if that’s what it had been—was gone.
Olivia turned away from the pit. The earthquake had largely deconstructed the cavern. Massive chunks of rock lay all around her. She worked her mouth, tasting the gritty dust on her tongue. Her light fell on a man’s foot. She moved the beam along the leg, the torso, and arrived at a jagged puzzle-piece of rock where the man’s head should have been.
Somebody coughed. Olivia swung her light. Alvaro blinked and held up his hand. His hair had gone gray with dust. He looked stunned.
“Alvaro. Are you all right?”
“What happened?” He sounded dazed.
“Earthquake,” Olivia said. “A big one. We’re lucky the whole cave didn’t come down on us.”
“No,” Alvaro said. “What happened?”
“I destroyed the probability machine.”
He stared. “It’s gone?”
“Yes. But we’re still here, and we need to get out of this place.”
“Wait.” Alvaro knelt beside his cousin’s body. He lifted his limp hand and held it. “I knew him his whole life.”
“I’m sorry.” She gave him a moment, then said, “But we have to go. Now.”
She was worried about her cartridge light. If the battery ran down, they’d be lost—maybe permanently.
Alvaro looked up. “Go?”
“Yes. Go—back to the surface.”
“I don’t see the point.” Alvaro sounded hopeless.
“Come on. We can’t help your cousin, but we can help ourselves.”
“It isn’t about Emilio. You’ve destroyed the probability machine.” Anguish had crept into his voice. “There’s nothing waiting for us up there but the end.”
Olivia wanted to shake him. “You have to get up. Now.”
He didn’t say anything. He had gone back to dazed and defeated. Slowly, he got to his feet.
They scuffed and shuffled through the dark, led onward by Olivia’s light striking through the haze. For every yard of forward progress, they lost half a yard. The earthquake had destroyed large sections of the tunnel network. With each step, Olivia feared the aftershock that could bring tons of rock and earth down on them. Hours dragged by without any sign of hope. Their field of vision was so narrow, and what they could see did not look familiar. The cartridge light began to dim. When it was gone, they would be finished.
Olivia stepped on something hard that rolled under her shoe. She stopped and redirected her light. A long bone, yellow with age. A human tibia.
“Wait.” Olivia moved her light until it found the bed carved into the rock wall. She reached up. Her fingers trembled over the chiseled Latin. NOSTRUM PASTORIS. “I know where we are.”
Alvaro grunted. He’d barely spoken since they left the cavern where the probability machine had been. Olivia put her hand on his shoulder.
“Come on,” she said gently. “It isn’t much farther.”
At last they came to the passage into the madrassa. The stone block that had moved aside when Olivia pressed the brick pressure switch into the ceiling had detached from its rail and fallen inward, barricading entry into the chamber. Daylight shone through the gap, which meant the ceiling had tumbled down, and probably the madrassa’s dome, as well.
“Help me,” Olivia said.
Together they got their hands on the stone block and tried to muscle it aside, to widen the gap. It scraped a few inches but no more. Olivia let go and dusted her hands off on her pants. She worked her lips, her tongue coated with gritty dust. Her throat burned for water. She crawled onto the block and wriggled through the gap, emerging into a hazy shaft of hot sunlight. She knew the hardest part for Alvaro was coming up. She had left Dee wounded and incapacitated. If the bullets hadn’t killed her, odds were high that the earthquake had. Olivia crawled, blinking and squinting, into the chamber and stood up.
Dee was gone.
“Hey.”
Olivia turned. Alvaro was stuck halfway through the gap. She bent over, grabbed his forearms, and pulled. He came through, and she stumbled back, almost landing on her butt. Alvaro stood, derelict, head craned back, in the burning shaft of sunlight.
“This way,” Olivia said, following a blood trail to the stairs.
Large, irregular sections of the madrassa’s dome had broken off and fallen into the school, crushing desks and chairs. Olivia and Alvaro pushed through the green copper door. Outside, a civilian vehicle, a big Suburban, was parked in the square, a red cross fixed to the hood and the rear passenger door. Two men carefully loaded a woman, her left arm supported by a sling, into the back: Dee. She saw Alvaro and called out. It seemed to snap him out of his gloomy stupor, and he ran to her. Olivia’s chest tightened with sympathetic emotion. She tried to push thoughts of Brian out of her head, but they had nowhere else to go. After some pleading, the medics let Alvaro climb into the back of the Suburban with Dee. Olivia was still standing in front of the madrassa, feeling a little stunned herself, when the vehicle drove away.
“Êtes-vous bien, mademoiselle?”
Olivia turned.
The woman, dressed in khaki, wearing dark glasses and a safari hat, regarded her. The round lens on the left side of her glasses possessed a polychromatic shimmer, indicating personal technology. She also wore a concerned look.
“Yes,” Olivia said. “I’m fine.”
“Pardon me,” the woman said, switching to English. “You don’t look fine. Is that blood? Would you like some water?”
“Water, yes.”
“My name is Adriel.” The woman unclipped a water bottle from her light utility belt. “What’s your name?”
“Olivia.” She took the bottle, filled her mouth, swished it around, and spat it out, then drank half the remaining water before returning the bottle and wiping her lips on the back of her hand. “Are you Red Cross?”
“No.” Adriel pointed at the patch sewn onto her blouse: APC. “Aleppo Preservation Corps. My partner and I are assessing the earthquake damage to historical sites. As if the war damage wasn’t bad enough. Are you quite sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.”
Adriel pointed at a man dressed similarly to her, including the same personal-tech sunglasses. Olivia hadn’t noticed him until now. “My partner can get us transport if you need to see medical.”
Olivia didn’t reply. She was staring at the man. It was Jodee Abadi. He was alive, despite having died in Jacob’s original probability choice, the one Olivia had reluctantly deferred to. Jodee was alive. What did that mean? If Jodee were alive, then Brian . . .
“Jodee!” Olivia ran toward him, waving. “Jodee, it’s me!”
She stopped, as if she’d run into a zone of zero atmospheric pressure that deflated her lungs. The man had turned toward her and removed his glasses. He wasn’t Jodee. The resemblance was only superficial. Olivia had filled in the physical contradictions with wishful thinking. It wasn’t the first time.
“I’m sorry?” the man said.
“Never mind.” She felt wrung out.
The man looked puzzled.
“I thought you were somebody else,” Oli
via said.
“Ah.” The man looked to Adriel, who had joined them.
“She’s a little rattled by the quake,” Adriel said.
“Oh?” The man looked at Olivia with concern. “Were you inside when it hit?”
“Yes.” She nodded at the madrassa. “I was in there.”
“Then you are fortunate to be alive.”
“Yes, I’m very fortunate,” Olivia said, not sounding so. Her contradictory tone drew a probing look from the man. To forestall any further questions, Olivia asked, “Did the quake cause much damage?”
“Very much,” Adriel said.
“With that on top of the war, how do you keep going?” Olivia asked the question perfunctorily, wanting only to be on her way now, out of the city, out of the Disaster, and this time for good.
“In Aleppo,” the man said, “we have a proverb. I made it up myself. ‘The act of destruction is the beginning of restoration.’”
* * *
Olivia was at the Atatürk airport in Istanbul when her phone began trilling like a baby bird trapped in her pocket. She took the phone out. An incoming call notification sprang free, a blue neon holo of Toria Westby’s name. Olivia almost turned it off and put the phone away. She was in no mood for conversation. But after a moment’s hesitation she flicked the notification and brought the phone to her ear. “Toria?”
“Olivia! I’ve been trying to get in touch for days.”
“Sorry. I’ve been a little out of it.” In fact, she had spent two days making arrangements to have Brian’s body returned to Oregon, and another week holed up with all her devices turned off in a tiny hotel room on the western side of Aleppo, enjoying an extended dark night of the soul. Once during that week she had started to call Captain Burnley, and a feeling of self-loathing came over her. The part of Olivia that might have taken any shred of comfort out of the captain’s arrival was dead.
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