*
In the Absolom holding cell, Adeline showed her father his predicted arrival date. He barely reacted, as if she had told him the weather tomorrow.
“Get your head in the game, Sam. This is a survival exercise now. Don’t just blindly march through this. You need to be studying survival techniques while you’re waiting for departure—and those strategies will vary based on the destination environment.”
It was so strange for her, almost being the parent now. Adeline couldn’t help wondering if that was the way of life: things coming full circle. They certainly were for her.
*
At home, Adeline found her counterpart in the bedroom writing in a notebook. She knew what she was writing. And that her younger self was hurting more than she ever had in her whole life at that moment. She knew what she needed: a firm hand to guide her.
“Don’t you knock?”
“I did knock,” Adeline said.
“But apparently you didn’t wait to barge in here.”
She nodded to the notebook. “Working on something?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“On the contrary. What you’re working on is my only business now.”
Adeline took a step closer and spoke again, her voice steady and calm.
“You’re making a list of the people who might have killed Nora and framed your father.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“True. Nor do I want to. I’m going to help you, Adeline. We’re going to figure it out. Together. And we’re going to get him back.”
Adeline turned and strode out, pausing at the doorway. “But right now, we’re going to have dinner. And we’re going to be civil.”
*
When Adeline’s counterpart left to visit Sam, she texted Elliott, Hiro, and Constance, requesting that they come over.
They met in her basement.
“Let’s start with who killed Nora,” Elliott said. He seemed to be in a perpetual state of being either hungover or slightly inebriated.
“We don’t have time for that right now,” Adeline said.
Elliott stared at her. “I’d say there’s always time to figure out who killed your friend and colleague.”
“We need to focus all of our energy on saving the one friend we can. His name is Sam Anderson, and very shortly, he will be sent back to the Triassic. The only question that matters is how do we get him back?”
Constance squinted. “Well, frankly, forgive me if I’m missing something, but what will we do when we get him back? I mean, he’ll be a wanted fugitive.”
Adeline had never told the group about Absolom Island. She wasn’t about to now. If one of them was the killer, it might be the only place in the world she and her father could escape to.
“I’ll take care of what happens after. How do we get him back?”
“To put it bluntly,” Elliott said, “we can’t.”
“A-2,” Hiro said.
“What does that mean?” Constance asked.
Elliott shifted his head from side to side. “If we transmit him with Absolom Two, we can tag him with entangled particles and use a recall ring—but that’s all theoretical. And A-2 has never been used on humans. And we don’t even have the date and location targeting worked out. Our payloads are all over the map—and timeline.”
“But,” Adeline said, “with A-2, you would know what universe he’s in.”
“Yes,” Elliott said. “We would.”
“What is a recall ring?” Constance asked.
“It’s a prototype we’ve been developing,” Hiro said. “A device that could make the promise of Absolom shipping a reality. You tag a recall ring with entangled particles at an originating Absolom Two machine. Then that machine can use the entangled particles to find the ring—and the mass it’s attached to—in space and time, across the multiverse, and bring it home. You would still have to use drones or human drivers for last-mile delivery, but you could ship something to any Absolom port in the world.”
“Or,” Adeline said, “pull something from the Triassic to the present.”
Elliott exhaled. “In theory. But it’s a long shot—and we won’t be able to send a recall ring with Sam. They’ll search him before departure. It’s far too large.”
“Let’s solve the Absolom Two issue first,” Adeline said. “How?”
Hiro shrugged. “Easy. We tell the government that Absolom needs maintenance. We swap out the control modules with the A-2 modules. No one will know.”