Several seelos bounded in the air, their claws catching the bones, and propelled themselves forward, landing in the sand and sinking as if it was mud, their hind legs disappearing almost to their torsos.
A few feet away, a small dinosaur slammed into the croc skeleton. Its head stuck through the ribs, and it screeched before drawing back and charging again, this time breaking through before it scurried out the end.
Sam stood as still as he could, his body aching from the first volcano blast. He waited, watching the herd move past.
Above, the thick dome of dark clouds kept pushing down. The smell of sulfur filled the air, and the sound of the carnage was its symphony.
Soon, it was as dark as night, and the heat from the fire warmed the air.
Another boom swept across the desert, throwing Sam into the ribs across the way, the spear flying from his grip.
The shockwave hit the herd like an invisible hand sweeping across the sand, rolling the animals over. It stirred a dust cloud in its wake, the sand in the air seeming to fight a war with the smoke above.
Sam squeezed his eyes shut and crouched down low.
All around him, he heard a spitting sound. Curiosity got the better of him, and he cracked his eyes enough to see the desert rippling where super-hot rocks were landing. They were volcano bombs, and where they touched the sand, green rings of glass spread out.
They would have been beautiful if they weren’t so deadly. If one hit Sam, he was finished. The super-hot rock would go through him like an oversized bullet.
He lay still, listening, waiting, feeling like a man in a deadly dunking booth, hoping one of the bombs wouldn’t land on his back.
Behind him, he heard a screech and something stirred in the sand. He turned. Just beyond the skeleton he was hiding in, a seelo was struggling to get to its feet. It had been trampled by the herd but only maimed. A deep gash ran down its left hind leg.
It took a step forward on shaky legs, then another, more steadily.
It stopped and shook its head as if trying to clear it. Slowly, it turned until its eyes fixed on Sam. He exhaled as the beast opened its mouth and charged at him.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I? n the basement of Hiro’s home in Las Vegas, Adeline said to Elliott, “I want to hear what Daniele is lying about, but first, I want you to tell me what you’re doing in Death Valley—what you’re digging up out there.”
For a long moment, both Elliott and Hiro were silent.
Finally, Elliott said, “What has Daniele told you about Absolom Two?”
“Vague generalities that only create more questions. I believe you know that routine.”
“Here’s a straight answer, Adeline: Absolom Two allows us to transport matter back to any timeline we want. Including our own. But there’s a problem.”
“Which is?”
“We’re still not able to send things to exact times. Or locations. My breakthrough was figuring out how to target Absolom to specific universes—but they have to be universes created from our own.”
“Why?”
“Entanglement. It’s the only bridge between the universes, otherwise they’re completely separate. We’d have no way to even know they existed. In my experiments, I used entanglement like a tracking beacon, as a string pulled between the separate timelines, a string we could use to guide something else to that universe. All I needed was matter that was already entangled with the target universe to tag the payload. That breakthrough is what I showed the other Absolom scientists the night Nora was killed.”
Elliott inhaled sharply. Adeline sensed regret on his part.
“Of course, they instantly knew what it meant—that Absolom was now capable of changing our past. Nora and Sam thought it was the most dangerous thing ever created, that it would be the end of our reality. Nora even thought it was the answer to the Fermi Paradox—that Absolom Two was how all sufficiently developed universes ended, in causality failures.”
“But you wanted to use it, didn’t you, Elliott?”
“Of course.”
“For Charlie.”
“Yes, for Charlie,” he said, turning away from her. “But Daniele was also in favor of using it.”
“Why?”
Elliott turned back to her. “We have a theory now. We believe Daniele knows that Absolom Two has already been used.”
“How? When?”
“We don’t know yet. In fact, you now know as much as we do.”
“No, I don’t,” Adeline said. “Tell me how it works. Absolom Two.”
“No,” Elliott replied, studying her. “You tell me. This is a good exercise for you. Go ahead. You’ve been working at Absolom Sciences, studying how the machine works. You know we’re working on the time and location delivery for Absolom Two. You know we’re testing it in Death Valley. How do you think we’re conducting those tests?”