He turned the pins, and the red light turned to yellow, then green. He spun it again, and the color changed. Slowly, he twisted them, watching the colors change. They were more than just quantum entanglement trackers. They were some kind of locator device, pointing him to something in the forest—or where the forest had been before the fire.
Sam looked around at the smoke, and a plan formed in his mind.
FORTY
A? deline paced in the dark basement, turning over what Elliott had told her.
Since the moment she had seen her father disappear inside the Absolom chamber, she had hoped that they would simply be able to return him home, to reach out and beam him back to this timeline.
But that wasn’t going to be possible.
“Then what’s the plan?” she asked Elliott.
“We have to send your father a device that allows Absolom to lock on and pull back. We call it a recall ring.”
“At Daniele’s house, when the four of you met in the basement, you were talking about miniaturizing it.” She looked at Hiro. “That was your job.”
He squinted at her. “You heard?”
“I was eavesdropping.”
“Good for you,” Elliott said quietly. “Yes, that is the plan. The recall ring essentially uses entanglement to remotely activate Absolom. The machine then uses the entanglement connection to pull the tagged mass across space and time back to Absolom. The problem, as mentioned before, is the mass of the recall ring. Our agreement with the government limits us to using twenty-five grams for testing purposes. Our second problem is time. We don’t know when Sam is—so we can’t send the ring directly to him. But we’ve solved the mass problem.”
Another piece fell into place for Adeline. “Prisoners. I heard Daniele telling a senator you wanted to operate on them.”
Elliott nodded, his face pained. “There was no other option. We’ve been implanting pieces in them and sending them to Sam’s timeline.”
That shocked Adeline. “That’s—”
“Not ideal,” Elliott said simply. “But necessary. Our working theory is that they will arrive long before your father. He simply needs to survive long enough to find the pieces and assemble them.”
“So, piece of cake. Prehistoric Absolom Easter egg hunt on Pangea.”
Elliott eyed her. “If you have a better plan to get him back, we’re all ears.”
Adeline exhaled. She was tired. And frustrated. She had finally gotten her answers. Some of them, anyway. She had hoped they held the key to her father’s safe return. As it turned out, the master plan amounted to a quantum physics Hail Mary.
“What can I do?” Adeline asked.
Elliott studied her. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“The problem,” Hiro said, “is Daniele.”
“How so?”
“She seems to be working with us to get Sam back. But we’re not sure what she’ll do when he returns. Our best guess is that she’ll kill us, the way she did Nora. Or simply send us to another timeline via Absolom. She may have the same in mind for you.”
“How sure are you that she’s the killer?” Adeline asked.
Elliott spoke slowly. “If you eliminate all other possibilities, what remains must be the correct answer. We know Constance didn’t kill Nora. And neither Hiro nor I killed her. We also know Daniele had a motive—her love for Sam. And finally, she had means and opportunity. Ergo, she killed Nora.”
Adeline shook her head. “Her whereabouts were accounted for that night.”
Elliott and Hiro were silent. Both avoided eye contact.
Adeline pressed her point. “That seems like a pretty big hole in your theory.”
“We can explain that,” Elliott said, not looking at Adeline.
“How?”
Elliott shook his head.
“Tell her,” Hiro said. “She can handle it.”
Elliott eyed the other man, then let his gaze drift to the ceiling, the floor joists hanging down. “Our working theory is that Daniele hasn’t killed Nora—yet. But she will.”
Adeline’s mouth ran dry.
“With Absolom Two,” Elliott said. “That’s the other reason she wanted to build it. And the reason she knew it would be used—because she wanted Nora dead and that night she saw the experiment, she thought about doing it, just like we think about sending those tuning bars back to the past and then go find them.”
Elliott put his hands on Adeline’s shoulders. “As I told you before: I think there’s a very good reason why your father wanted you to live with Daniele. You may be the only one who can stop her from using Absolom to kill Nora.”