Strangelets (28 page)

He shrugged. “No other way out of here, yeah? Maybe Bruder can convince them that he needs us to start the machine.”

“But he said it wouldn’t work,” Sophie said faintly.

“Maybe not, but could anywhere be more god-awful than
where we are right now?” He gestured to the pile of bones on the floor.

“Bruder seemed to think so,” Sophie countered.

“Yeah, but that was back when he had his son with him.” His brow furrowed. “This morning you were the one trying to convince me, remember?”

Sophie’s heart clenched in her chest as they stared at each other. He was right, she had been in favor of restarting the Collider just a few hours ago. But that was before she’d seen Declan dangling from that monster’s back, looking dead. Now, the thought of trying to carve out some sort of a life in this new world didn’t seem as frightening—not as long as he was doing it with her.

But if it worked … then Declan would be back home with his mom and Katie. And Anat might end up with her fiancé. She was the only one who wouldn’t benefit. Sophie took in Declan’s square jaw, the cowlick on his forehead. She was being selfish, putting her own newfound happiness above everything else.

And what did she care, really? She’d be dead either way. At least this would give the others a chance.

Sophie turned away so Declan couldn’t read her face. “You’re right,” she said in a low voice. “We should offer to help them.”

“Grand,” he said, although his voice lacked its usual bravado. “So how do you propose we do it? I mean, without getting killed?”

“They kept us alive this long,” Anat said. “They must want something from us.”

“We do,” a voice chimed in.

Sophie slowly turned.

Yosh was standing in the doorway, framed by a pair of thrinaxes.

Anat lunged forward and demanded, “Why did you kill Nico?”

“We must have struck an artery accidentally,” Yosh said dismissively. She reached out and stroked the nearest thrinax on the snout. It closed its eyes like a cat; Sophie could practically hear it purring. “It was unfortunate, but Dr. Bruder is being much more cooperative now.”

“After you killed his son? Why?” Declan asked.

“The only way to save Nico now is to do what we want.”

“You want the Collider restarted,” Sophie stated. “To send us back. Then Nico will be alive again.”

“Yes.” Yosh smiled slightly. “So you
are
smarter than I gave you credit for.”

Sophie shuddered as the cynog Yosh had been petting suddenly snapped its eyes open and stared at her. It emitted a high pitched clicking noise, and Yosh tapped it playfully. “You’ll eat soon enough. Of course, if it takes a long time to get the equipment ready, I might have to reconsider.”

“What makes you think it’ll bloody work?” Declan asked. “I’ve seen
Dr. Who
. What if you end up shooting us into the center of the sun or something?”

“Then we all die,” Yosh said flatly.

“Brilliant.” Declan ran a hand through his hair. “Until then?”

“Until then, you can help him.” Yosh stepped aside and motioned for them to go ahead of her.

Sophie stepped warily past her into the hallway, doing her best to avoid the creatures, which wasn’t easy since they pretty much filled the small space. She walked back toward the main room.

Bruder was on the catwalk staring blankly at a computer monitor. The decades seemed to have abruptly caught up
with him. He’d transformed into a broken, stooped shell of a human being.

“Are you all right?” Sophie asked hesitantly. She was halftempted to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder but still found him too frightening to touch.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He was muttering to himself as he played with the array of buttons and dials. “Fairly simple, really. Throw the switch, and the linear particle accelerator feeds into the proton synchotron booster. But the calculations, how am I supposed to—”

“So we’re meant to lend a hand, yeah?” Declan interrupted. “Anything we can do that doesn’t involve actual science?”

“What?” Bruder looked up at them and blinked. His eyes were red-rimmed and shot through with burst blood vessels. Sophie bit her lip. The expression on his face was nearly identical to the one her parents wore that final afternoon by her deathbed.

“We’re so sorry about Nico,” she said gently.

“Nico …” Bruder stared past them. “They killed him. After all that, he died anyway.”

“I know. It’s awful.” Sophie bit her lip. The words seemed horribly insufficient. “Is there something we can do to help?”

“You know, I never wanted children.” His rheumy gaze softened. “But that all changed when he was born.”

That seemed like an odd thing to say in light of the circumstances, but maybe he was in shock. “He knew that you loved him,” Sophie offered.

“No, he didn’t,” Bruder scoffed, the old insolence back in his voice. “He thought I looked down on him. I told him he was a fool, that he’d never make his mark on the scientific community. I never got a chance to fully explain what I’d done for him.” Bruder turned his palms upward and
examined them helplessly. “If it wasn’t for my selfishness, none of you would be here.”

“What do you mean, selfishness?” Anat asked, her eyes narrowing. “What did you do?”

“I always end up making things worse for you, Nico,” Bruder continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Your mother claimed that I put my work first, that I was never there. Don’t you see?” He stared past Sophie at Declan. “That was why I did it. This time, I put you above everyone else, above an entire world. More than one world, although that part wasn’t intentional. Surely that counts for something.”

Sophie took a step back. Bruder had fixated on Declan in a way that seriously spooked her. He’d seemed unbalanced before, but he was rapidly veering off into scary crazy.

Bruder’s voice rose as he continued, “All this. The cataclysm. That was me, trying to save you.”

Declan held up both hands and said, “Easy there, mate. Let’s just take a moment—”

“You were in a coma.” Bruder strode forward and grabbed Declan’s shoulders. “For months. Your condition wasn’t improving. And your mother,” he spat, “was about to terminate life support. She claimed that since there was no activity in your cerebral cortex it was cruel to keep you alive any longer. She said you were already gone.”

“Listen,” Declan said, his voice tinged with desperation. He looked helplessly at Sophie, but she was frozen. Her legs seemed to have turned to jelly. “Just take a few breaths—”

Bruder’s words tumbled out in a rush, as if Declan hadn’t spoken at all. “We were hiking, and your foot slipped. You fell into a gully—not a deep one, but you hit your head on a rock. Your mother kept saying it was my fault, that the trail was wet and slippery, that I wasn’t close enough to catch
you. I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Maybe she was right. But she was the one who was going to kill you, Nico. Not me. I couldn’t let her do it.”

Sophie suddenly realized what he was saying. “You started the Collider by yourself. It wasn’t an official test.”

“A previous experiment had produced some astonishing results,” Bruder said. “Proof that we’d shifted time. By just a few seconds, but I calculated that if I recalibrated the machine and increased the strength, I just might be able to take us back far enough.”

“To before the accident,” Sophie said softly.

“But instead …” Bruder looked around. “All this. I couldn’t stop the reaction. There was a power surge, and it rapidly started feeding on itself. I finally managed to shut it down, but by then it was too late.”

“Bloody hell,” Declan muttered. “You destroyed the world? You, alone?”

“I was trying to save you!” Bruder shouted. “I knew we didn’t have much time. Once you were dead, it wouldn’t work. And I took every precaution. I tried to calibrate the Collider to only detect you, Nico.”

“How?” Sophie asked.

Bruder turned to her. She thought she caught a glimmer of sanity in his eyes, the faintest flicker of recognition. But all too quickly his pupils darted away again, refocusing on some inner stretch of memory. Still, she had to try. It was the only question left that mattered.

“How did you set it to only detect Nico?” she pressed.

“Oh.” He rubbed both hands through his hair, shaping it into ragged tufts. “Once I removed you from the machines, it was only a matter of time before … well, before …”

“Before Nico died,” Sophie said softly.

“Yes, yes, before that happened. There was a special set of calculations, I spent weeks on them …” Bruder gazed blankly down at the desk he’d been sitting at. “Special … so that I’d know at precisely which moment to activate the machine.”

He fell silent, still glowering at the desk.

“So you set it to detect someone who was about to die,” Sophie said slowly, working through the implications in her mind.

“It’s hardly that simple,” Bruder growled. “And of course I didn’t want to affect everyone who was about to expire. That would have been senseless, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, possibly even more. But a very distinct energy signature appears right at the moment of death, and it’s particularly pronounced with late adolescents …”

His voice trailed off and he stared at her. Sophie saw that he suddenly understood, too.

“That’s why we came through,” she said in a low voice. “Not just Nico. Declan was right. It’s because we’re all around the same age. And we were all about to die.”

“That would explain it.” Bruder’s voice dropped to a cracked whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

Declan pushed past her and shoved Bruder hard, making him fall back into the chair. He shouted, “What of my mum, eh? And my girlfriend? What about everyone else on the planet?”

Behind them, Sophie could hear the crowd shifting. “Declan,” she warned. “Don’t let Yosh hear this.”

“What, she doesn’t have a right to know?” he said wildly. “Is that why they got sucked in, too? Were her parents about to croak? What about all these lovely dinosaurs?”

“I don’t know,” Bruder muttered. “None of this could have been predicted. I can’t explain why it all went wrong.
Believe me, I’ve tried. For decades, I’ve worked on unraveling what happened, but it … it’s beyond me.” He dropped his head into his hands.

The thrinaxes started shifting and clacking their claws together in an unsettling way. Sophie glanced back and saw that they’d been joined on the platform by Yosh, flanked by two of the creatures.

“What’s going on?” Yosh demanded suspiciously.

“Nothing,” Sophie said. “Mr. Bruder is just a little upset—”

“And a lot feckin’ insane,” Declan said. “Plus, it’s his fault we’re all here in the first place. So there’s that.”

Yosh’s eyes flickered. “What do you mean, his fault?”

“He performed his own bloody little experiment, yeah? Only he mucked it up, and boom!” Declan clapped his hands together. “You, me, and all your little pets landed here.”

“Is this true?” Yosh demanded, turning to Bruder.

“Nico,” Bruder reached a hand out toward Declan. “I was only trying to save you.”

“Well done on that.” Declan slapped his hand aside. “You’re as much of an eejit as your son.”

Bruder’s face suddenly darkened. He lunged forward and grabbed Declan’s throat, clamping his hands around it.

“Let him go!” Sophie yelled. She tugged at Bruder’s wrist, trying to pull him off, but he was too strong. He banged her with his hip, sending her flying. Sophie slammed hard into the nearest computer tower, the wind knocked out of her. Anat pulled on Bruder from behind, but he barely seemed to notice.

Sophie pushed off the machine and lurched back toward them. Declan frantically pushed against Bruder’s chest, trying to shove him away. His face was rapidly turning purple.

“Stop him!” Sophie screamed, turning to Yosh.

Yosh made a small noise and suddenly the thrinaxes were
on Bruder. He gasped and sputtered curses as they held him aloft in front of her.

Declan dropped to the floor.

“Declan!” Sophie raced to his side. “Are you okay?”

He was still gasping, but the color in his face was returning to normal. Angry red fingerprints encircled his throat. He wheezed, “I’ve had a knock on the head, and nearly been strangled. So not really okay, no.”

Sophie’s fingers stopped an inch shy of his throat; if only she had some ice, or ibuprofen. He had to be in a lot of pain. Her concern must have shown on her face, because Declan forced a smile and said, “Honestly, I wanted to choke the hell out of that bastard, too.”

With effort, she kept her tone light as she replied, “It’s good you showed some restraint, then.”

Declan made a strangled sound—after a second she realized it was a laugh. “Isn’t it, though?”

Sophie glanced back. Bruder was still in the grip of the thrinaxes. His chest heaved as he repeated Nico’s name over and over again. She realized with a sinking feeling that he’d lost whatever small shred of sanity he had left.

“So,” Yosh said. “It looks like we waited too long.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have murdered his son right in front of him,” Sophie snapped. “That pushed him over the edge.”

“As I said, it was an accident.”

“What now?” Anat asked.

Yosh’s eyes flicked over each of them in turn. “Did Bruder enter the calculations?”

Sophie hesitated. He’d moved dials and knobs on the panel, but had he finished? It hadn’t sounded like it, from what she’d heard. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Maybe not entirely.”

“Then it’s too much of a risk.” Yosh’s shoulders sagged.
“We were so close.” There was a depth of sorrow in her voice that almost inspired sympathy. Almost.

Sophie was secretly relieved. As she took in the tiny freckles dotting the bridge of Declan’s nose, she couldn’t help but think that this wasn’t the worst possible outcome. Anat seemed to know a lot about survival. Maybe the three of them would be okay. They’d get as far away from Yosh and the thrinaxes as possible and find some other survivors; they had to be out there somewhere. Maybe things were more normal on the mainland, in spite of what Bruder had said. He could’ve just been trying to discourage them from checking it out.