PART V
ABSOLOM ISLAND
SEVENTY-THREE
I? n the lab, Adeline stepped out of the Absolom machine and joined Elliott and Hiro at the computer station.
“Ready for us to bring them home?” Hiro asked.
Elliott had clearly filled him in on what had transpired at Nora’s house in the past.
“Not yet,” Adeline said.
Using her phone, she disabled the cameras in the lab and told the two men her plan.
Elliott just shook his head. “You’ve been two steps ahead the whole time.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know how all the pieces fit until now.”
To Hiro, she said, “Go ahead. Bring them home.”
The Absolom machine hummed, and Adeline’s father appeared in the chamber.
Adeline opened the door and held up a hand. “We need to transmit you again.”
“Why?”
“There will be an investigation into this prototype’s usage tonight. They’ll know from the power consumption. We can’t have your DNA here. And you can’t stay here.”
He nodded. “Where exactly am I going then?”
“It’s a place called Absolom Island. And it’s the future. Nora will be joining you there. So will I. All of us will. Eventually.”
Adeline closed the door and watched her father disappear. When Nora arrived, Adeline told her about Absolom Island and watched her depart.
Elliott pointed to the computer screen. “We’re already getting a ton of emails about the power usage. What are we going to tell them?”
“The truth. We had to use the prototype to avoid a temporal disaster. And that it won’t happen again. We’re shutting down all further development of Absolom here. We’re moving everything to the island.”
Elliott bunched his eyebrows. “What exactly are we going to be doing on the island?”
Adeline drew the envelope from her pocket—the same one she had shown Hiro. She handed it to Elliott and watched as he flipped through the photos the Tesseract program had found. He paused on one that showed Adeline standing in Nanking in late 1937. The next photo was of her and her father in a village in northern Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004. The next page showed Elliott and Charlie in Cambodia in 1975.
“How long have you had these?” he asked.
“I found some photos that had me in them years ago. I only thought to look for the rest of you after Dad mentioned it the night you showed us Absolom Two.”
“Charlie’s in these pictures. How?”
“I couldn’t exhume his body—not without your permission—so I couldn’t confirm that he was replaced with a Syntran replica. But I knew we’d get him back when I saw these photos.”
“You could have told me.”
“I could have. But I didn’t know what you would do. I couldn’t risk you disrupting the past until I knew how it all fit together.”
“And how does it fit together?”
“Absolom Island, Elliott. It’s the key. It’s a place to do what we did here tonight, with Nora: rescue people who are lost in time. People who are going to die but deserve a second chance. People like Charlie.”
She reached out and gripped his shoulder. “In fact, he’s the second one we’re going to save.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
A? top a high dune, on an island in the Pacific, Sam stood and watched the waves crash into the beach as the sun set in the distance.
He reached out and intertwined his fingers with Nora’s.
Neither said a word. They simply watched the sun slip over the horizon and the dark curtain of night spread across the sky, the stars shining brighter than he had ever seen them—at least in this world. The night sky reminded him of Pangea, an island much like this one—uninhabited and full of wonder. But he was safe here. And he wasn’t alone. This was a home. A place for a second chance.
He and Nora walked along a crushed stone path back to a small cottage overlooking the sea. An empty, newly made village spread out around it, waiting for its residents to arrive. To Sam, it almost felt like he and Nora were the only people in the world. And that was sort of perfect. It was what he needed. He sensed that she did too. They had been here for a week, and in that time, without all the pressures and worries of the outside world, they had both decompressed. And gotten to know each other, in a way he thought they never would have before, in the normal world.
As much as he loved the little bubble he now inhabited with Nora, Sam wondered what the date was. He knew Absolom could only send matter to the past. How far back had the machine sent them when it transported them to the island? A week? A month?