Upstairs, she heard the sound of laughter. Ryan’s laughter.

  Adeline ascended the stairs, following the sound. The two sets of glass pocket doors that led to the library were closed. Through the closest one, Adeline saw Daniele and Ryan sitting on a banquette, a wall of books behind them, a color e-ink tablet sitting on the long table. Ryan was writing with a stylus, eyes down, concentrating. Daniele was leaning over, watching. She said something. He smiled. She continued, and he laughed, and she put her arm around him in a quick hug.

  Adeline’s cheeks flushed with rage.

  Daniele looked up and spotted her through the glass pocket door. Adeline turned and stalked down the hall to her room, where she closed the door with a little too much force and plopped down at her desk.

  She was still stewing when the door opened. Daniele stood at the threshold, studying her for a moment. “Where were you?”

  Adeline didn’t look up. “I went for a walk.”

  “See anything interesting?”

  Adeline’s heart beat faster—from either the fear or anger rising up inside of her. Or maybe both. Her next words came from a place of hurt. And the strength of her voice surprised even her.

  “You’re not his mother.”

  Daniele gently closed the door, but she lingered close by, keeping her distance.

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  Daniele’s response caught Adeline off guard. “What?”

  “You lost your mother. Then your father. It wasn’t fair. Neither of those things. In the case of your father, it was a wrong very few ever come close to in a lifetime. You feel betrayed, Adeline. You feel alone. Ryan is all you have left. Now, you’re scared to death of losing him.”

  “You don’t know how I feel. You can’t even imagine.”

  “I can.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “When I was young, someone helped me. In the darkest chapter of my life, she was there for me. I wouldn’t have made it without her. I want to be that for you. So give me all the hurt you’re bottling up. Blame me. Shout at me. If it helps you, give me the hate you feel for this unfair world.”

  “Get out.”

  *

  That night, Adeline lay in bed, checking her messages. She opened the BuddyLoc app and once again found Hiro at the home in Las Vegas.

  What was he doing there?

  Through the closed bedroom door, Adeline heard the faint sound of talking. Daniele talking.

  Adeline checked the time. It was after 10 p.m.

  At the window, she drew the curtain and scanned the street. There were no cars parked outside. No one had come to visit. Daniele was talking on the phone.

  Adeline exited her room and padded quietly across the landing to the rail that looked over the staircase. She could hear Daniele clearly now. Her voice was raised.

  “You’ll simply have to be late for dinner, senator.”

  A pause. Daniele seemed even more frustrated when she resumed speaking.

  “No. You listen to me. If we can’t perform these surgeries on the Absolom convicts, we’ll have to pause the program. What do you think will happen then? To crime? To law and order? Who will they blame, senator? It won’t be us. Because Absolom Sciences is going to issue a statement saying that above all else, we must ensure the safety of the program, and to do that, we need to tag these inmates before departure to ensure they don’t arrive in our universe. Because if they do, it could end everything. And when they ask why we can’t tag the prisoners, we’ll simply tell them that the Senate subcommittee with oversight never acted on our request.”

  Another pause. Daniele laughed.

  “I don’t make threats. I’m telling you what’s going to happen. You have forty-eight hours to amend the Absolom operating resolution. I want it passed by both houses and on the President’s desk by the time that inmate is prepped for surgery. If not, there will be no surgery and no departures until we can do so.”

  Adeline heard a cabinet open, a bowl being placed on the marble countertop, and the freezer door open and close with a swoosh. Soon, the clink of a spoon on the glass bowl echoed up the stairwell. Daniele was eating ice cream, if Adeline had to guess.

  As quietly as possible, Adeline returned to her room and lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Why did Daniele want to operate on the Absolom convicts? What would that accomplish? Was she trying to send them to her father’s timeline? If so, why? The people sentenced to Absolom—besides her father—were dangerous individuals. Killers. Mass murderers. Psychopaths. If one came into contact with her father—even if they were the last two people on Earth—what would happen?

  The larger question was why Daniele would even want to send them there? There was only one rational explanation: to kill Adeline’s father.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Outside the cave, Sam crouched, a spear in his hand, waiting as the ground shook.

  The earthquake came in waves. Every time Sam thought it was over, the ground rumbled again.

  By morning, the world was quiet again, as though the disturbance had simply been night terrors. But the damage was real.

  In the forest, the canopy was broken. Trees were felled as though a giant bowling ball had rolled through. Sam’s small cave was also wrecked, the entrance nearly covered in crumbled rock.

  The world around him popped and creaked as fallen trees and branches surrendered to gravity.

  Sam set about gathering his morning meal of earthworms, but in the forest he found the fern fronds dry, the rainwater from yesterday’s storm shaken to the ground. The dinosaur skull rain barrel had also capsized in the night.

  One thing was abundant: wood. In short order, Sam had a fire going. Using a tooth from a seelo skeleton, he sharpened another spear, replacing the one that had impaled the crazy man (and was still buried inside him). Sam hadn’t mustered the courage to check on his body. He had bigger fish to fry. And frying fish was exactly the thing on his mind. The thought of it made his mouth water.

  The man’s attack—and the Earthquake—had taught him how dangerous being trapped here was.

  He needed to make a new camp, one by the stream, where he had access to fresh water at all times, and food, assuming he could learn to fish.

  He needed to move. The thought of moving brought back a memory, of moving from San Francisco to Absolom City, of taking a risk, of moving on with his life.

  In the memory, he stood in Nora’s office, staring at the posters on the wall: one of Einstein, his hair standing on end, the other with a UFO hanging in the air and the words I WANT TO BELIEVE printed in white across the trees under it.

  “I hate moving,” Nora said.

  “Same,” Sam replied.

  Nora began chewing the end of a pen. “It’s Dave’s stuff. Even after all these years, I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.”

  “I know what you mean. Sarah’s things are still in boxes. I tried to give some to her sister, but she didn’t want them. Sarah would want me to donate them to Goodwill or a women’s shelter, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “It feels like you’re getting rid of them, the memories too.”

  Sam nodded. “Yes. It feels wrong. I keep telling myself Adeline will want those clothes—because her mother made some of them—but deep down…”

  “You’re hanging on to her.”

  “I am.”

  “Me too. I can’t throw Dave’s things away. Or sell them. I donated his guitar and video games, but I regretted it that night. I was sick over it. But I also can’t take them to the new house in A-City. It’s like bringing his ghost with me or something. And I can’t imagine packing his stuff up. Going through it again.”

  “Let’s make a deal.”

  Nora looked up at him. “I warn you: I’m a weak negotiator.”

  “Luckily, so am I. Tell you what: we’ll do it together. I’ll come over and help you pack. We’ll take everything to A-City. But not to our houses. We’ll rent a storage unit. Two of them. So that they’ll be with us, there when we’re ready to sort it out.”

  “I like that plan.”

  That night, they packed Nora’s deceased husband’s things into boxes. They made two groups—those bound for the storage unit and those Nora couldn’t bear to part with, even if they were locked up a few blocks away. The box that would go to her new home was filled with pictures and notebooks with songs Dave had written, a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses he had once bought on vacation, scanned boarding passes from their honeymoon, and a hundred other things that, taken together, wouldn’t bring a nickel at a pawn shop. But as she packed the items in the small box, they brought a slow release of tears from her.

  Sam thought that separating the things that represented Dave from the items he had merely owned was cathartic for Nora. She was getting rid of her husband’s things, but she was keeping him in her heart, holding on to things that were so uniquely him.

  They ordered Chinese and drank wine from a box, and despite working for hours, Sam thought they had probably said only a dozen words that night. It wasn’t awkward, though sorting through the boxes was a difficult, emotional task. It was simply that it was that easy for the two of them to be together. They were good at working together. Sam knew that. Absolom had proved that. But as the night wore on, he realized they were good at simply being together, when the work was simply their lives—and their lives shared a common thread, a painful, rare one, that few would understand. They were linked. That night, for the first time, Sam felt that link. He wondered if she did too.

  In the living room, they sat on pillows on the floor at the coffee table, the plastic cartons of Chinese food and half-filled wine glasses between them. Music from Pandora filled the room, a station seeded with Natalie Merchant. “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star was just starting up.

  Nora took a sip of wine. “For months after Dave passed, I was in denial about what happened. It was so sudden. It wasn’t real. Not for a long time. And then it was and life hasn’t really been the same since. Not really. People talk about their greatest fears being public speaking or heights or snakes. For me, it’s none of those things. It’s something like Dave’s death happening again.” She tipped the wine glass up again and swallowed hard. “He would be irate if he knew that.”

  Sam reached over and took her hand. He had done it to comfort her, but when she turned and looked at him, he knew she was feeling what he had felt earlier. Half of him wanted to hang on to that because he hadn’t felt it in a long time. The other half of him felt guilty. Because of Sarah. Because, like Nora, he was still holding on. It was the guilty half that let go of Nora’s hand. And he knew Sarah, like Dave, would have been irate about that.

  Sam knew he was still a wreck. He couldn’t bring Nora into that. At least, that’s what he had told himself that night. That’s how he had rationalized his pulling away.

  Back then, he was a lot like the Triassic looked now: battered but still alive, ready for another day.

  With the spear in one hand and a burning torch in the other, Sam set out from the ruined camp. At the tree line, he stopped and decided to take one last look at the prisoner who had tried to kill him, just in case he saw something in the light of day that had been shrouded in the darkness of night. The crazy man’s presence here was still a mystery to Sam.

  He walked across the rocky ground, weaving through the green pod bushes to where he had left the other prisoner. His body hadn’t been picked clean, but something—perhaps several somethings—had taken bites out of him. Bugs were already making camp around the corpse, digging in.

  Sam was about to turn away when a glint of metal caught his eye. He leaned in, the torch held out, sending the bugs scurrying away. Attached to the prisoner’s femur were three small pieces of metal, like toothpicks. Sam didn’t think they were pins that might have supported his weight. They were too small.

  Using the spear, Sam pried the metal pins loose. Tiny letters were printed on each, starting with “ASI.” As in Absolom Sciences Inc. Were they some sort of quantum tracking tag? To make sure the prisoner arrived in the right universe? If so, it had seemed to malfunction. Or, if the intention had been to send him here, it had worked perfectly.

  Sam scanned the rest of the body but didn’t see any other pins. He slipped the ones he had found in his pocket and trekked into the woods, toward the pond and stream he had seen before.

  The going was slower today. The woods were a thick mess of fallen trees and limbs. He really needed a machete. Among other things.

  At the stream, he set up a basic camp, with stones in a circle and a fire crackling in the midday sun, which he lit with the torch.

  Under the blazing sun, Sam stood in the stream with the spear and jabbed and cursed and came up empty until he remembered a scene from one of his favorite novels, Hatchet. Like Sam, the young protagonist in the book is all alone, trying to survive in the wild. His first attempts at fishing are unsuccessful until he starts accounting for the refraction of light underwater. With that adjustment, the hero from Hatchet, Brian, is able to catch fish and feed himself.

  Sam knew he should have accounted for that on the first visit to the stream. But he wasn’t exactly in top shape then. Days of hunger and thirst have a way of dulling in the mind. Even for scientists.

  Sam slipped the end of the spear into the water and waited. Soon, he jabbed the stick down and jerked it out of the water, a fish flopping on the end.

  Finally, a real meal. With the protein from the fish, he could get back on his feet. Maybe even figure out what was going on here.

  Whoever thought books didn’t save lives was so very wrong.

  On the riverbank, under the afternoon sun, Sam cleaned the fish and grilled it and ate every last morsel. It was the best meal he had eaten in ages.

  The satisfaction brought by the earthworms had been a fullness of necessity, a sort of carnal relief that his life had been extended. The grilled wild-caught fish was absolutely luxurious, the taste and contentment lingering as he used a fishbone to pick the pieces out of his teeth and swallow them down.

  Shelter was the next task, but that was as far as Sam got with the thought.

  Across the pond, thunder rose, a slow rumbling. But the sky was clear.

  Sam took the bone torch from the fire and walked to the stream edge. The treetops swayed. But there was no wind.

  What’s happening here?

  The river filled with fish. They were swimming to the sea.

  The forest burst then, dinosaurs and large reptiles charging forth, a Triassic stampede barreling toward him.

  Not toward him—away from something. Whatever it was, Sam couldn’t see it. And he didn’t want to. If they were running from it, that thing could hurt him too.

  Sam didn’t bother to pick up his spear. Or extinguish the fire.

  He turned and ran.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  For a few weeks, life fell into a routine for Adeline. She rode with Ryan to school—until he told her he was fine (“really, I’m fine, seriously, quit hovering over me like I’m a hurt animal or something”).

  Each morning, she went to work at Absolom Sciences and soaked it all in. She was fascinated by the Absolom machine.

  She sat in on the seminars for the new scientists joining the company. There were a lot new terms, which she had to look up. And concepts that online definitions couldn’t convey in a few seconds. She didn’t understand it all, but like a mountain she was climbing, each step she took got her closer to seeing the whole picture.

  Every day, the ground she had covered before built on itself, and the task ahead seemed smaller. Eventually, she developed a basic understanding of how Absolom operated and the history of how it had come into being. Unlike the others in the auditorium, she knew the behind-the-scenes details her father had shared with her, the history only the Absolom Six knew.

  But Absolom wasn’t what she really wanted to learn about. It was the next version of the machine that would change the world. Absolom Two. On that subject, information was nonexistent. She searched the company intranet. It was never mentioned by anyone working at the company, and she never asked. She sensed that would be a mistake.

  Absolom Two wasn’t the only mystery haunting her. Each day, she checked the BuddyLoc app and watched Hiro’s movements. Every morning, he drove out to Death Valley and stayed until early afternoon. Daniele was with him, or so Adeline assumed. She wasn’t at work. And the two times Adeline had ventured out to the desert to spy on him, she had seen Daniele there. It seemed that it was the four of them—the remaining Absolom founders—digging in the desert and refilling the holes.

  But what were they looking for?

  Almost every night, Hiro left the dig site and drove directly to the modest home in Las Vegas. Was he taking what they had found there? That seemed a reasonable assumption to Adeline.

  And then there was the room in Constance’s home, with the photos from the past, of people and their locations, spread across the wall like a murder board.

  Elliott’s home had a similar room, in the basement, where videos of the night of Charlie’s death played on repeat and photos of that evening hung on the wall.

  Were the two connected?

  What did it all mean?

  Adeline sensed that there was a piece that would tie it all together. Her gut told her that Absolom Two was that piece. And that Daniele was the only person who would give her answers. Getting those answers would be tricky.

  She was sitting in the library of Daniele’s home, contemplating what move to make, when the older woman stuck her head in. “I’m home.”

  Adeline beckoned for her to enter.

  Daniele eyed the finance books on the table. “You’re making progress.”

  “I am.”

  “Riveting, isn’t it?”

  “Mind-numbingly boring.”

  “True. And that’s why I appreciate you sticking with it.”

  Adeline eyed the dirt and sand on Daniele’s clothes. She sensed this was her opening, the right time to ask the questions burning inside of her. She made a decision then: to lead with the truth.