Lost Time (12 page)

Chapter 18

Lani: Pickup Lines

A
fter Shannon stomps out, Diego and I stand there staring at each other. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together in a couple of week
s—
since I pronounced him strong enough to take care of himsel
f—
and I can tell that he’s uncomfortable.

Because of this absurd idea about Shannon leaving? Or because he doesn’t want to be alone with me?

Ever since that night in his apartment, we’ve been spending more time together, but as soon as things get physical, he backs off. When I finally got up the nerve to ask about it, he said,
Give me some time
, and left it at that.

Still, not a day goes by that he doesn’t find a minute to put his arms around me, whether it’s a hug first thing in the morning or an all-too-fleeting embrace after he walks me home at night. And I live for those brief moments in his arms.

But there’s no way I’m letting him take Shannon away from me.

And Bella wouldn’t let you in C-Bay if her life depended on it.

“You could have backed me up a bit better than that,” I say.

Diego shifts his weight and then shuts the door. “It would be good for Shannon to get out and meet new people, Lani, get a formal education, and have an opportunity to widen the gene pool.”

I stare at his profile, all the warmth drained out of me.

“And from the sounds of it,” he says, “C-Bay would be the perfect place for her to do that.” He looks up at me, asking with his eyes why I’m being so unreasonable.

“I can’t, Diego. I can’t let her go. It’s too dangerous. What if something were to happen to he
r—
happen to both of you?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to us, Lani.” He takes my hand and pulls me into a hug.

“You don’t know that!” I squeeze my hands into fists. “You haven’t been Outside since you fell out of that damn tree.” I look up at him, irritated that he won’t let it go. “This world is not like yours, Diego. Too many things can go wrong, and small mistakes can be lethal.” I turn away. “At least for those of us who don’t have nanobots floating around in our blood to protect us.”

“That’s why we have Madders. He’s the best pilot in North Americ
a—
you said so yourself.” He glances down at my face and then pushes a lock of hair behind my ear. “And Shannon says he’s flown the route hundreds of time
s—”

“More like three or four trips in twenty years.”

“—so there’s no reason to believe he won’t get us there safe and sound.”

“He’s had some close calls: emergency landings and a cracked propeller.”

“But he still managed to get there and back just fine.”

I rest my forehead against his chest, my thoughts racing. The voices in my head have been mostly silent since I told Diego about Sam, but now that he’s planning to leav
e—
and god forbid, take Shannon with hi
m—
they’ve returned to haunt me.

What will you do if he never comes back?

“Once we get there,” he says, “Shannon can start on her engineering degre
e—
and also help with the rebreather masks. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Lani, and when she graduates, every biodome in the world will be begging her to go live there.”

The thought makes my chest hurt.

He gives my braid a gentle tug. “Maybe it’s time you let her spread her wings?”

I bite my lip, fighting back tear
s—
but failing.

He watches a tear roll down my cheek. “Shit, I’m an idiot,” he says and pulls me back against his chest, stroking my hair. “Look, I’m sorry, Lani. I shouldn’t have said anything. If you think it’s too dangerous, then it’s too dangerous. Whatever you think is best, I’ll support you one hundred percent.”

His admission makes me cry again.

Because you know he’s right.

“Hey?” he says, waiting for me to look at him. When I don’t respond, he tips my chin up. “Shannon can stay here and take courses on the computer. Once we get back from C-Bay, Madders can take her flying for real, and the three of us can help her with the her classes. We’ll figure out a way to make it work, okay?”

I snuggle against him, unable to speak.

He holds me for another minute. “You okay?” He releases me but keeps his hands on my shoulders.

I nod half-heartedly, my emotions a train wreck.

“Did you want me to talk to her about it?”

I press my lips together and then shake my head. “No, I’ll do it.”

“Okay.” He kisses me on the cheek and reaches for the door. “See you tomorrow morning?”

The prospect of being alone terrifies me, and the words tumble out before I can stop them. “S-stay with me?” My heart is pounding in my throat. “Please?”

He freezes with his hand on the doorknob. “The store kept trying to sell more furniture, but all she wanted was one nightstand?”

I stare at him, not understanding.

“Get it?” He smiles sheepishly. “Sell more furniture…one night stand.”

“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

He laughs and closes the door. “So what did you have in mind? A sword fight? Or maybe a battle-to-the-death game of Scrabble?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of bedroom furniture.”

He raises one eyebrow. “The nightstand, is it?”

I nod, my face getting hot.

“And Shannon?”

“Sleepover at Mindy’s. They’re testing recipes for dog biscuits.”

“Ah. Good for her.”

I swallow. “I was hoping you’d stay the night, actually. I know you wanted some time to think things over, but maybe we could talk and…” I’m unable to finish the sentence.

“Right.” He rubs his hand across his mouth, and I fight down the urge to run away.

You need this man in your lif
e—
all of hi
m—
and you should do whatever it takes to make that happen.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Lani? Given that I’m leaving in a few days and won’t be back for a while? Shouldn’t we wait unti
l—”

“Does that mean you don’t want to?”

“No,” he says. “It means I’m worried about you.”

“I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine,” I say, knowing it’s true. “The question is: What about you?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure I can answer that.” He moves his gaze across my hair and face. “I know it’s time to move o
n—
long past time to move o
n—
but I can’t seem to let go of her.” He looks down. “When I’m tired, when I’m alone, when I’m in bed at night, I still see her, think about her, miss her.” Dark clouds move across his face. “And it hurts. Sometimes it hurts so much I don’t want to go o
n—”

“Shh. Don’t say that.”

He opens his mouth and then shuts it again. “I just want the pain to stop, Lani. And sometimes when I’m with you, it does. I know you deserve more than that, but it’s all I’ve got to offer right now.”

I stroke the side of his face, blinking back tears, and meet his gaze. “If it means you’ll stay tonight, I’ll take it.”

He smiles self-consciously. “Sorry, that wasn’t much of a pickup line, was it?” He turns his head, pressing his lips against my palm. “I guess I’m a little out of practice.”

I take his cane, lean it against the wall, and put my arms around him. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

Chapter 19

Diego: Drowning in Hope

I
’m packing what few things I have when there’s a knock on the door.

“Come.”

I’m expecting Lani to stop by, so I’m caught off guard when a man walks through the door.

“Evening, Diego. Sorry it took me so long to stop by and introduce myself. Been spending more time in the air than on the ground lately.” A fit, sixty-something black guy strides across the room and offers me his hand. “Shannon’s been telling me all about you, but it’s great to finally meet you.”

“Matt?” I stare at him, mouth agape.

“At your service.” He waits for me to recover and then shakes my hand. “Actually, most people call me Madders. Shannon started calling me that when she was knee-high to a ladybug, as she likes to say, and it sort of stuck.”

“
You’re
Madders?” Words cannot convey how shocked I am to see him.

“Surprised you, did I?” He pulls up a chair. “Mind if we have a little chat? And I think you might want to sit down too.”

“Sure,” I say, feeling like I’ve seen a ghost. “Sorry. I was expecting Lani, and you look a lot like someone I used to know.”

He sets a shoebox down on the bed next to me. “So do you.” He studies my face. “Only your hair’s a lot longer. Which, by the way, looks good on you.”

“Uh, thanks. Who’s my look-alike with the crew cut?”

“James Nadales. He used to live down the street from me before everything went pear-shaped. I never heard of anyone else named Nadales, even before the shite hit the fan, and when Lani told me about you, I figured you must be related. His son maybe?”

I shake my head. “Who told you my last name was Nadales?”

“Lani, of course. She and I go way back, and she wouldn’t have broken your confidence unless she thought it was important.”

I shrug. “I guess she knows what she’s doing.”

“She’s convinced your arrival here wasn’t an accident, and she thought I should know the truth. But don’t worry, I won’t spill the beans on how you got her
e—
and Lani hasn’t told anyone else, not even Shannon.”

“And you believed her?”

He chuckles. “Back before the pandemic, I was a research physicist. My team was looking into wormholes connected to singularities, and I knew people who thought black holes could be used as shortcuts across space-time. Seems they were right.”

We sit in silence for a minute, both of us staring at our hands.

“So tell me about James?”

“Be glad to, but I don’t remember much,” he says. “He disappeared before Doomsday hit. Bad times, thos
e—
chaos everywhere. Panicked people were trying to get Inside, and when they couldn’t, they tried to take down everyone else with them. It’s a wonder any of us survived.” He leans forward, his elbows on his thighs. “James is the English equivalent of Diego, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I’ve never used it myself. Do you know if James had a wife? Isabel maybe?”

“Nope. Never married as far as I know.” He shifts in the chair. “He had a woman living with him when we met, and he managed to get her into the Bub. But she and the kids were killed when some idiot set off a bomb outside the biodome, happened the day after we closed the doors.” He shakes off the memory and glances over at me. “But her name was Sophi
e, not Isabel—
real cute and spunk
y—
and her kids were just toddlers.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. There was a lot of that flying around back then.”

“So what happened to him?”

“Don’t know. He wasn’t in the biodome when we sealed her up.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” I say. Sophie was Isabel’s roommate when we first met, and I’m left wondering how my parallel self ended up living with her.

Christ, he must have known Isabel too.

“Bloody hell.” Matt’s mouth falls open.

“What?”

“You’re James, right? Only younger?”

I look away, uncertain how to answe
r—
and then decide on the truth. “I’m his parallel from another universe.”

“If that’s the case, then you should be my age.” He looks me over. “And you don’t look a day over forty.”

“Yeah. I’m twenty years behind you.”

He narrows his eyes. “You’re not just from another universe, you’re from another time?”

“I left my universe right before Doomsday mutated. I was supposed to travel twenty years into the past, but the time machine’s targeting mechanism failed, and I ended up here.”

“Crikey. Time
and
space travel.” He’s quiet for a bit, rubbing his hands together. “That’s a lot to swallow.”

“It gets better. In my world,
you
built the time machine.”

“I did?” He laughs. “Sweet Fanny Adams. No one ever took my research seriously here.”

“We were in a place called the Magic Kingdom, a government research facility hidden inside a hollowed-out mountain somewhere in the Rockies. There were a hundred people analyzing two other high-tech gizmos they found inside the Einstein Spher
e—
along with the time machine plans.”

“The Einstein Sphere?”

“Basketball-sized tungsten ball. Weighed a couple thousand pounds. It materialized above Denver going at supersonic speeds, and the resulting impact started a firestorm that took out half of downtown. Never happened in this world?”

“No. What was in the sphere, besides the time machine plans?”

“Instructions for building a quantum-computing device that allowed us to peek into other universe
s—
we called it the Peeping Tom. And designs to create the custom biotech gizmos in my blood.”

“Shite,” he says. “Seems you’re the man of the century.”

“More like failure of the century. I didn’t actually
do
anything. My name was inside the Einstein Sphere. That’s it.”

“So
did
you come here to help us?”

I shake my head. “Like I said, the time machine malfunctioned. The people in my world don’t even know your world exists.” I exhale. “So what about Isabel? Do you know anything about her?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He points to the box on the bed. “That’s for you. I’ve been holding on to it for going on twenty years.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Go ahead. Open it.”

Inside the shoebox is a folded sheet of paper, a hardwood jewelry box that looks exactly like the one I left on my dresser in the cabin, and an envelope addressed to
Diego Nadales.

“Christ,” I say. “Where did you get this?”

“It appeared in my refrigerator the night the biodome was sealed.”

“Was there anything, uh, odd in there with i
t—
like maybe an old sock?”

“Nope,” he says. “No dirty laundry. But if the note hadn’t warned me about the bomb, everyone in the biodome, including me, would have been killed the following day.”

I unfold the note and hold it up to the light. The heavy paper has a Kirkland Enterprises watermark in the middle.

Dave.

The words on the stationery are scrawled in black in
k—
and it’s signed with a stylized capital D.

That bastard. How did he get hold of the time machine? And how did he manage to send something to THIS universe?

I read the note:

Hudson-

Keep this in a safe place until Nadales shows up (and keep your damn mouth shut about it!) Tomorrow morning, run tests on all the contamination sensors. Do it first thing in the morning.

D-

I set the note down and pick up the wooden box. “So what happened after you found the note?”

“I showed it to David Kirk, but he thought it was a fake: The handwriting looked like his, but the watermark had his company name misspelled.”

“Kirkland Enterprises.”

“Yeah. Still, I didn’t see any harm in following the instructions, so the next morning I spent an hour running the tests. The system was new, and I discovered that the sensors in the new sector hadn’t been turned on. I fixed them and was getting ready to leave when the bomb exploded right outside the west end of the biodom
e—
blew the bloody wall to bits. Fifty-seven people died, and if I had been in my apartment, I would have been killed to
o—
and with the sensors offline, the whole biodome could have been exposed to the virus.”

“Christ.”

He rubs his face. “Just wish I would have thought to hand out masks before I started running the tests…”

“Whoever sent that note to you, didn’t
want
you to hand out masks, Matt. He wanted to make sure
you
didn’t die, but he couldn’t risk changing anything else.”

“God Almighty. So who sent it?”

“Dave Kirkland. He’s David Kirk’s parallel in my universe. How he managed to get all this into your fridge, I have no idea, but I’m betting it involves a time machine.” I set the note down and take out the small wooden box. “This was in the refrigerator too?”

He nods. “I hope you don’t mind. I opened it to see what was inside.” He rubs the back of his neck. “And I read the note to
o—
the envelope wasn’t sealed.”

“No worries,” I say. “Twenty years is a long time to resist opening the cookie jar.” I slide my hands across the smooth carved wood, my heart pounding in my throat. “It contains an orange seashell?”

“Bloody hell. How’d you know that?”

“Lucky guess.” I open the case and take it out. “I had one just like it in my hand when the time machine dumped me in that pine tree. Shannon found it on the ground next to me and liked it, so I gave it back to her for her birthday.”

“Why’d you bring it with you?”

“It showed up in the glove box of my ca
r—
with a note telling me to.”

“Damn,” he says. “This is making my head hurt.”

“Believe me, I know the feeling.”

“Any idea what the connection between the shells is?”

“No, but I think they’re all identical, possibly down to the atomic level. I bet James had one just like it. And I think this one is from yet another universe.”

“Just like you.”

I nod. “So why’d you wait so long to tell me about all this?”

He exhales. “When I helped bring you in through the airlock, I thought I recognized you. But you were in no shape for visitors with crazy messages from the past, so I let it go. By the time you were better, I knew Lani had feelings for you, and I wanted to give you a chance to get to know her before I wrecked everything…” He glances down at his hands. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure you were the right guy, and after holding on to it for decades, I didn’t think a few more weeks would matter.” He looks up. “But when Lani told me your last name, and that you claimed you were from another universe, I couldn’t rationalize it any longer.”

I unfold the note that was in the box with the seashell and read it:

Hey Tarzan-

Isabel’s alive, but if you don’t get your sorry ass back here pronto, she won’t be.

D-

∞

“Oh my god,” I whisper, barely able to breathe. “She’s alive.”

Lani walks in carrying a stack of my clothes. “Who’s alive?” She glances at me, then at Matt, and then repeats her question.

“Isabel,” Matt says, not meeting her gaze. “She’s alive in Diego’s universe.”

Lani turns to me, her face ashen, and squeezes her eyes shut.

“Lan
i—”
I say.

She drops the clothes and rushes out.