All the while, that nineteen-year-old girl Adeline had once been grew more suspicious of the woman she knew as Daniele Danneros—the woman she would become.
Adeline prepped the two items her younger self would need. The first was the California driver’s license. It was buried beneath the Absolom Sciences intern ID, in plain sight, but unrecognizable, just like Adeline herself, thanks to the cosmetic surgery.
The other was the diamond earrings Nathan had given her. They were a link to a life she had left behind. They would be her younger counterpart’s only hope of survival in the world after Absolom.
*
During that period, when her younger self was searching for answers she would never find, Adeline had challenges of her own. The biggest was how to transmit the recall ring to her father in the past.
There were two problems.
The first was size.
By government agreement, Absolom Sciences could transmit up to twenty-five grams without approval. The recall ring was significantly more massive than that.
In Adeline’s basement, she, Elliott, Hiro, and Constance discussed whether they could make it smaller. Hiro insisted that they couldn’t. But they could separate it into pieces.
Adeline remembered this moment from nineteen years ago. She walked to the stairwell, saw her younger self standing there listening, and stared until the young woman retreated up the stairs.
In the privacy of the basement, the Absolom scientists settled on a solution: they would break the recall ring into parts and transmit them back. To do that, they arrived at the only path Adeline could see: they embedded the parts of the recall ring in Absolom prisoners and sent them to Sam’s timeline.
Constance was against operating on the prisoners. She felt it was morally wrong to do something to someone without their full knowledge. Adeline knew that she was right. But there was nothing she could do about it. She either sent the recall ring back embedded in the Absolom prisoners, or she lost her father forever. The prisoners would be exiled to the past one way or another. Being operated on gave them the chance to save an innocent man, one Adeline cared about a great deal.
The second problem was ensuring the prisoners—and the pieces they sent to the past—arrived at the right time and near enough to her father for him to find them.
They spent months in Death Valley running tests, trying to ensure that the payloads arrived at the right location and time. With each tuning bar they found, they edged closer to perfecting Absolom Two.
Adeline lobbied the government for permission to operate on the prisoners—and received it after some cajoling.
She couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if one of the prisoners arrived at the same time as her father. They were the worst of humanity. And time in the Triassic, alone, probably wouldn’t be good for their mental health.
But there was nothing she could do about that.
The final worry the team had was simply about causality. Would sending the prisoners to Sam’s timeline cause it to cease to exist? They were, after all, disrupting a timeline that had been created from their own, technically changing the past before he arrived. That discussion led them to the conclusion they had arrived at before: the past could not be changed. If they had already sent the prisoners, then his timeline would be preserved. They were simply doing what they had to do, what time and space required to exist. If they were right, when Sam arrived, the prisoners they were sending after he departed would have already been there a long time.
*
One night, Adeline set her alarm for 3 a.m.
When it went off, she rose and walked down the hall to her counterpart’s bedroom. The door was closed, but she was gone. The photomosaic blanket was spread across the bed, a reminder of the past.
Adeline knew where she was. At that moment, she was in the basement of Hiro’s home in Las Vegas, talking with Elliott and Hiro, slowly becoming convinced that Daniele Danneros was planning to use Absolom Two to get rid of her and kill Nora.
Once again, she wondered if it was true.
She knew it was half true—she would indeed use Absolom to send her younger counterpart nineteen years into the past. But what would happen after that? That was the real question, the true challenge ahead.
She knew by the time her younger self got back home, she would have decided to trust Elliott and Hiro and spy on the woman she knew as Daniele.
It was all happening as it had, the way it had to happen.
*
The next morning, at breakfast, there was a change in the air, a tension between Adeline and her younger self. Even Ryan sensed it.
But it was necessary.
Adeline went upstairs to prepare for the day, knowing her counterpart was hiding a burner phone with a listening app in her study.