“Okay.”
*
Hiro helped Adeline drag the two bodies into the lab and place young Adeline in the Absolom machine. He set about programming two recall rings for Adeline—for the next phase of the plan—and then began prepping the machine for the first departure.
“Date, time, and location?” he asked.
“Monday, March 17, 2008. Around 10 a.m. Stanford. Lomita Mall, right next to the machine shop.”
Hiro typed on the keyboard. “Okay. Ready.”
Adeline peered inside the machine. Her younger self was waking up, looking around, confused.
A fist pounded on the door, and Elliott’s muffled voice called into the room. “Daniele! I’m calling the police.”
“Sorry,” Adeline whispered as she swung the door to the Absolom chamber closed.
She stepped closer to Hiro. “Send her.”
Adeline watched as Absolom hummed to life and transmitted her younger self to the past.
One down. Two to go.
“What now?” Hiro asked.
“Now we get Dad back.”
SEVENTY
Elliott pounded harder on the door, screaming.
Hiro stood at the computer terminal next to the Absolom prototype. “We should tell him.”
“It’s too risky,” Adeline said. “He could try to stop us. We tell him after. Help me get the body in the machine.”
When the black bag was inside Absolom, Adeline closed the door, and Hiro keyed in the departure sequence.
As the machine hummed and the bag disappeared, Elliott stopped pounding on the door. He was leaving. Adeline didn’t like that—he could be going to the police. But she couldn’t let him in. She couldn’t take the chance that he had a gun—and could stop her. The past had to happen as it had.
She would deal with him after it was over.
Adeline felt nervousness growing in her stomach. The next thirty minutes would determine everything: her future, her father’s future, and the fate of the universe itself.
No pressure.
She walked over to the metal table and put the large envelope of photos Tesseract had found back in her pocket and then slipped the recall ring on her wrist. She put the other ring in her pocket. She would need it soon.
Hiro stared at her. He was nervous too. This would be the first time a recall ring was ever used. What they were about to activate would reach across universes—time and space—back to Pangea, to a place where her father had either lived or died.
“Activate it, Hiro.”
He typed on the keyboard and turned to her. “Ping was successful. Ring is active.”
“Pull it through.”
The next few seconds were the longest of Adeline’s life. Would her father arrive as a mangled mess? In pieces? In a haze of particles and dust?
The Absolom machine hummed and flashed. In the middle of the chamber, her father appeared.
He looked like death.
He was skinny, his hair grungy, his face streaked with blood and dirt. But it was his eyes that shook Adeline. They were hard and hollowed out, like an animal. Someone who had been fighting for his life—and had the life driven out of him.
But he was alive.
When his eyes came into focus, and he saw Adeline through the machine’s glass door, his gaze softened. A smile formed.
Seeing her and the lab and the world he knew seemed to bring him back. Almost instantly, his eyes morphed back to the man Adeline had known in the two eras of her life: as a child, when she was Adeline; and as an adult, when she was Daniele.
She knew that he was seeing Daniele—his business partner and friend and the woman who had been so kind to his dying wife, and then the guardian who had taken in his children when he had been banished from this world. Adeline wanted to tell him who she really was. And if things went right, she would have that chance. If not, leaving that unsaid would be the greatest regret of her life. The next few minutes would determine whether that opportunity came.
To Hiro, Adeline said, “Have you rekeyed his recall ring?”
“Yes. It’s entangled with this universe now.”
Adeline opened the door. “Welcome back.”
Sam’s eyes welled with tears.
“How?” he asked, his voice breaking with emotion.
“We’ll get to that. But we need to do something else first.”
Sam nodded, and didn’t say any more.
Adeline closed the door, motioned to Hiro, and the machine hummed again.
The government would launch a full investigation into the power and Absolom usage tonight, but that was a problem for the future. Right now, Adeline had to ensure there was a future.