Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

In a way, that response was almost as surreal as finding Paige here at all. Travis shook his head. "How is that possible? I created the Whisper, Paige. All the deaths in Zurich were my fault. All the deaths in Border Town. Your friends."

"I took it well because I understood things you didn't. Things about the Breach, and what it would take to send something back in time through it. Tangent knew, long before we had the means to actually do it, what would be involved in the process. Dr. Fagan had it all worked out, like the Manhattan Project scientists had the bomb yields calculated before they ever set one off. The machine that would transfer something into the Breach-an injector, Fagan called it-would be unstable almost to the point of uselessness. And there's no way to engineer around that. A person trying to operate it would have to position it right in front of the Breach, then stay there with it and shepherd the process to the very end. There's no practical way to automate it, or even to do it remotely. You'd have to be there. Right there."

"None of this matters," Travis said. "Some other version of you, in the original timeline before anything changed, decided I had to be killed. She sent the note back. And some other me sent back the Whisper to block that note and save his own ass. He could've given the Whisper strict limits-like don't kill anybody-but he didn't. He didn't give a shit about anyone but himself-myself."

"The Whisper was a computer beefed up with Breach technology. It would be very unpredictable. It's likely the other Travis had no idea how ruthlessly it would do its job."

"That's a guess at best, and it absolves him-me-of nothing. I sent that thing back out of selfishness, simple as that."

"You're wrong. Selfishness couldn't possibly account for it."

"How can you know that?"

"Because anyone sending something back, standing with that machine in front of the Breach, would have to still be there when the injection actually happened. And it's a violent reaction. Hyperviolent. The temperature in the receiving chamber spikes to over four thousand degrees, and stays there for about a minute and a half. You see what I'm saying? To send something back in time through the Breach, you have to die."

Travis stared at her. Whatever he'd meant to say next, it was already gone from his mind. He considered her words, and their implications.

Paige went on. "The version of me that sent that message back must've really believed it was necessary. She gave her life to do it. But when you countered her move, you gave your life too. That couldn't have been selfishness. So whatever I thought was worth killing you for, whatever it was you were doing, there must have been more to it than I knew. Like it looked evil from my point of view, but you knew better. Maybe you just couldn't share it with me. Maybe it was that bad. But necessary."

Travis looked down, his eyes going to the cylinder at his side. The soft blue lights, like stair treads up to a gallows platform.

"I'm telling you this because it matters," Paige said. "You have to go back to Tangent. You're supposed to be there. That other version of you, acting on better information than any of us have, died to put you there."

"Then why didn't he have the Whisper tell me everything? Just lay it all out in steps?"

"I've had seven decades to think about that. My guess is, if the Whisper had told you what you're expected to do someday… you wouldn't do it. Your future self could've guessed that even more easily."

The information seemed to churn around Travis, like the smoke had done minutes earlier.

"Can we just seal the Breach?" he said. "It worked for you guys."

Paige inhaled sharply. "No. Jesus, I would've forgot. Do not seal the Breach."

"But it worked. It's still sealed now, after seventy-three years."

She was shaking her head, eyes wide. "The seal held, but it's been a disaster. The best we can tell, entities that build up in the tunnel get destroyed by the pressure, over time. In some cases, the destruction releases energy, and that energy still makes it out into the world. A lot of energy, for some of them. Radiation. Strange kinds we can't even identify. We get the effects even this far away."

Travis looked around at the empty city, and began to understand.

"Yes," Paige said. "This place is all but dead because the Breach is sealed. Most of the world would've been, by now, if it hadn't ended already. Don't seal the Breach."

At the bottom of his vision, Travis saw movement. He looked down. One of the blue lights had just vanished.

"Christ," he said.

"Go back to Tangent," Paige said. "I don't know what's coming, but you need to be there when it hits. It probably matters more than either of us realizes. Go."

He nodded, leveled the cylinder, turned it on, and hit the delayed shutoff. Black smoke churned from the iris.

In the seconds he had to wait for the light cone to vanish, Travis faced Paige again. He stared at her eyes.

She was beautiful.

She always would be.

He'd known that the day he met her.

He wondered now if he would ever see her this age again. In their own timeline, however it might play out, what chance did they have of growing old together?

He saw the reflections in her eyes sharpen. She blinked at a sheen of tears.

Then the light cone vanished, and he turned away from her and didn't look back. He sprinted for the opening and vaulted through into the smoke plume. S irens. Shouting voices. Blue and red flashers strobing through the smoke. He held his breath and ran, and came out into clear light beside the gutted husk of the jet. Fire crews were laying streams of water and foam into it. Travis hardly noticed them. He scanned the onlookers gathered at the periphery of the scene, most of them near the terminal. He saw Garner, and sprinted toward him as fast as he could move.

Paige stacked the pine boughs close to the fire. Hopefully they'd dry within a few hours. The fire was hard to keep going. Everything was waterlogged.

The night had been hell. From Garner's building they'd gone south as quickly as possible, which wasn't very fast through dense trees and over broken concrete, all in perfect darkness. For the first fifteen minutes Paige had told herself that everything could still turn out okay. They would hear a series of shots from the Remington far behind and above them, and then they would hear Travis calling, and with any luck at all he'd have the other cylinder when they met up.

It was a lot to ask for, and they didn't get any of it.

By the second hour, still making their way south, both she and Bethany had stopped saying anything hopeful or encouraging. Then they stopped talking altogether. Neither knew what the hell to say.

Occasionally they passed by places in the darkness where the rainfall seemed to be splashing down into deep water. They had no idea what the places might be, but the thought of accidentally stepping into one was terrifying. They were wet enough from the rain, though at least the trees kept them from being completely soaked. To fall into standing water and be drenched to the skin, with no means of drying off or getting warm, would be serious trouble.

Finally they just stopped. They had no idea how far south they'd gone, or even if they'd held to their intended path. They felt out the lower branches of a thick pine, made their way up ten or twelve feet, and found a raft of boughs spaced tightly enough to serve as a platform.

They lay in the darkness a long time, trying to fall asleep. They heard animals moving through the forest below, sometimes passing directly beneath where they lay. Maybe just deer. There was no way to tell.

Paige slept. She woke sometime later, the city still pitch-black, the rain still coming down. She heard Bethany crying, trying not to make any noise, but failing. Her breath was hitching and her body was shaking hard enough to move the branches. It was as terrified and lonely a sound as Paige had ever heard. She pulled Bethany against herself and held on tightly. It seemed to help.