The world wasn’t the only thing Absolom had changed. As the months and years slipped by and the machine in the Nevada desert hummed with departures, the Absolom Six changed. Adeline didn’t know if it was simply growing older or the death of Charlie and her mother, but the six scientists who had aided world peace seemed to find only war within.
Adeline felt it inside of her too. She saw it on the video feeds inside the homes of the other six.
She had this unrelenting sense of time slipping away, and she still had no idea who Nora’s killer was.
But she began preparing for the event.
She ordered furniture for the guest bedroom and arranged it just like her room had been at the home she shared with her father and brother. She stood in the room, studying the placement. Yes, it was just as it had been when she had come here.
She was sitting at the kitchen island, pouring a glass of wine, when a text message arrived from Nora: Busy?
Adeline activated the video feed of the inside of Nora’s home. She felt a twinge of guilt for invading her privacy, but she rationalized it as a simple safety precaution. Nora was going to be murdered, and she needed to know who did it. For her father’s sake. She couldn’t prevent him from going to Absolom, but she could clear his name before she got him back.
On the video feed, Nora was sitting at her kitchen island, a glass of wine towering by the phone.
Now they were ships in the night.
No. Everything ok?
Yes and no. Can I come over?
Sure.
Adeline watched on the video feed as Nora downed the glass of wine, grabbed a sweater she draped over her shoulders, and walked out. Ten minutes later, they were sitting in Adeline’s living room with full wine glasses.
“You ever wish,” Nora began, “that we could go back to Palo Alto? Before it all started?”
“I do.”
“I mean, Absolom has been good for the world, but everything has changed. I miss us.”
“Me too.”
“Life was so much more simple then.”
Adeline said nothing, only took a sip of wine, thinking about how much more complicated it was about to become.
Nora downed half her glass. “I have a secret.”
Adeline’s heart beat faster. “You do?”
“Sam and I have been seeing each other.”
Adeline swallowed, relieved that the secret was one she was well aware of.
Nora squinted at her. “You knew.”
“I knew.”
“I guess I should’ve figured that. You don’t miss anything. And I should have informed you. As my employer, you should know about workplace relationships.”
Adeline held up a hand. “First of all, I’m not your employer—”
“You are, Dani. It was different in Palo Alto. Before. When the company was small. Now, with…”—Nora motioned with her hands, all around—“with all this, the city, the machine, what it’s become…”
“It’s different,” Adeline said. “I’ll give you that. But within these walls, at home, what do you say we go back to Palo Alto, to the way things were?”
Nora drank the rest of the wine. “That sounds good to me.”
Adeline refilled the glass, and Nora seemed to relax a bit.
“We’ve been going slow, Sam and me. Like, middle school speed.” Nora laughed and shook her head. “We’re both scared. We’re both still hurt. And lonely. We’re like two porcupines trying to mate.”
Adeline laughed then, but she was crying inside because she knew how it ended. At least, she thought she did.
SIXTY-TWO
In the days leading up to Nora’s death, Adeline grasped for clues as to who would kill her. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any.
Elliott and Hiro spent day and night in the lab. When Hiro wasn’t there, he was in Las Vegas.
Constance was almost always away for medical treatment or to search for people from her past. She had a sense of her own time drawing to a close. She was racing against the clock too.
Nora and Sam were nursing a nascent romance that would soon die with her.
And Adeline couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about all the clues, all the pieces that never seemed to add up. She sensed that there was still a missing piece here, but try as she might, she couldn’t see it.
It wasn’t just the mystery of Nora’s murder that loomed ahead. It was the loss of her father. As with her mother in Palo Alto, Adeline felt her time with him slipping away, and she couldn’t help but try to hold on.
At a lunch with him the week before Nora’s death, Adeline said, “You should start working out again.”