Crucible Zero

  “He has always been focused,” I said. “And brilliant. I’m not surprised he has a short temper.”

  “Was he . . . was the Quinten you knew the same?” Right Ned asked.

  “Mostly. It’s strange. The whole world changes, and all of us are still mostly who we would be anyway.”

  “Is that why you’re standing up for those two patchworks back there?” Left Ned asked.

  I nodded. “Abraham tried to save my family. Foster tried to save us and the world. Twice.”

  “It is an interesting life you have lived, Matilda Case.”

  I sighed. “You know what I really want?”

  Right Ned shrugged.

  “Life to be a little less interesting and a lot more happy. I want to settle down here or on a farm of my own. I want my family and friends happy and safe, and for the galvanized to be counted as human beings, with all the rights a person should have. I want House Earth free from the other House rules and threats. And I want Slater dead.”

  Left Ned shook his head. “Hearing that sort of thing out of your mouth is strange, strange, strange.”

  I shifted how I was leaning against the wall and dragged my heavy curls back. “Quinten said Evelyn was very kind. I don’t suppose she would ever want to do harm to anyone.”

  “She was kind,” Right Ned said. “Very much so. But she had a spine. Quinten . . .” He frowned, glancing at the basement door. “He took it on himself to be her protector.”

  “Overprotector,” Left Ned muttered.

  “He couldn’t see that she wasn’t helpless,” Right Ned said. “She might not like shooting a gun, but she knew how to. Given the chance, I think she would have done whatever it took to defend herself and her family.”

  “Well, I’m not going to let Quinten stop me from doing what I know has to be done to defend my family either.”

  They pushed off the wall and took a step or two. Right Ned held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Matilda Case.”

  I shook his hand. “You too.”

  Left Ned held out his hand. We shook.

  “So,” Right Ned said. “Don’t let those galvs talk you into anything, you hear? Just because they look like the people you knew doesn’t mean they are.”

  “And when your brother flips his shit over our leaving you alone,” Left Ned said, “tell him you’re not six years old anymore and he needs to stop mothering you.”

  “Can do,” I said.

  “We’ll get that pump patched up.” He walked through the kitchen. I knew when he opened the door because I could hear the warbling hum from one of the lizards, who must have been napping right outside the door.

  “Go on,” Right Ned said softly. “Back it up, Petunia. That a girl.”

  The door shut, leaving me in the quiet of the house, with only the steady dripping tick of the clock in the living room marking the rhythm of time sliding away.

  5

  Finally, a breakthrough. I have in my hands Grandma Case’s journal. The footnotes are fascinating tidbits on a particular experiment: the Wings of Mercury. Still looking for you.

  —W.Y.

  I stood there in the hall, the living room to my back, soaking up the silence. Soaking up the reality that I was alive. I was me, and I was in my home with my family, who were still alive and breathing.

  So this was the outcome of our crazy, untested plan to try to change the results of the Wings of Mercury experiment.

  We’d done it. We’d changed time. And we’d messed it up too.

  Figures.

  I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes for a moment. So much had happened, and all of it too quickly. I felt like I’d been running for years and could sleep for centuries.

  Slater was out to kill us. In more than one timeway. Telling Sallyo we didn’t want to come with her wouldn’t stop him from bombing House Earth or sending more guns to drag us in. Or finding another way to destroy us.

  To destroy me.

  Locked in this struggle until only one of us remains.

  Slater was after Quinten and the cure for the plague, and I knew he wouldn’t stop until he had both. He was going to kill me. He thought he could choose which timeway became reality.

  My head hurt. I didn’t understand the reality-decision thing. But I didn’t need to understand it to know he should not be alive when his only goal was to destroy lives and worlds. In any time.

  That was something I could not abide. He was right to send mercenaries to take us down.

  Abraham didn’t remember me in this time. Didn’t know who we had been together, what we had.

  I’d gained so much—the lives of my family and my friends.

  And I’d lost just as much.

  I didn’t know how long I stood there. Long enough my feet were going a little numb from not moving them.

  It was just nice to not have to worry about anything for a minute or two, to not have to fight or flee.

  I was aware of the sound and vibration of footsteps coming down the hall’s wooden floor, coming toward me.

  Since it was from my left and didn’t sound like a herd of oxen, I knew it had to be Abraham.

  He stopped. I waited with my eyes still closed to see if he’d say something. Decided that was a dumb idea, since the man was a mercenary who carried multiple weapons.

  I rolled my head toward him and opened my eyes.

  * * *

  The dizziness slid over me again, and everything around me went blurry, then shuddered, as if I were looking through a pair of glasses with rapidly changing lenses.

  The scent of roses faded, overpowered by rich, warm coffee.

  Abraham stood there, holding two cups in his hands and wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, which were unbuttoned. His chest had more stitching than I remembered, and a few bullet-hole scars. Over the curve of his left pectoral muscle was a tattoo of the face of a clock with keys for hands, and the words in somnis veritas written below it. He was muscled and lean but not thin, stitched but not wounded, and his dark hair was pulled back in a band.

  He was also giving me a full come-hither grin, three lines of stitching beginning at the corner of his left eye and fanning out to beneath his hair.

  “What are you doing out of bed, love?” he asked. “I was bringing you coffee.”

  “Bed?” I said.

  Love? I thought.

  He nodded. “The thing we sleep in, and do other things to each other in? It’s back there,” he said, twisting to look over his shoulder. “We keep it in the bedroom, with our pillows.”

  He turned back to me and took a drink of one of the coffees.

  I couldn’t stop staring at him. He was relaxed, happy, smiling.

  And I had never been happier to see him in my life. Whichever, whenever this him he was. This couldn’t be the same timeway where the house was destroyed, because it appeared to be perfectly sturdy around us. How many wrinkles in time had we created?

  That question would have to wait for a much more pressing one.

  “Our bedroom?” I said.

  His eyebrows twitched down over hazel eyes devoid of the red of pain. He was still smiling. “Are you sleepwalking? Because I think I could do something to wake you up.”

  He closed the distance between us, the coffee still in his hands, and stepped into my space.

  Oh.

  Every inch of my body felt like it was on fire. And not in a bad way.

  “Good morning, Tilly,” he murmured. “Wake up, love.” He slanted his mouth to mine and kissed me so deeply and lovingly that I went hot and tingly down to my toes.

  I went a little light-headed too. The scent of roses mixed with the taste of coffee and the rich taste of him on my tongue.

  * * *

  And then Abraham wasn’t kissing me anymore. He stood, halfway dow
n the hall, in the shadows, watching me with some amount of caution.

  Except for having removed his jacket and bandolier of bullets, he was still fully clothed and had all his weapons strapped to his body.

  This was not the same Abraham who had been kissing the breath out of me.

  Which, I’ll admit, was a little disappointing.

  This Abraham didn’t have the lines of stitching fanning out from his eye. This Abraham looked exactly like the Abraham who was a part of the timeway where my brother was alive.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “Are you okay?”

  He seemed to make up his mind and walk closer to me. The deeper shadows of evening softened his features and carved tantalizing lines along the stitches that stopped at the corner of his mouth, as if to draw attention to his lips. His red-specked hazel eyes caught the light just enough, they glowed.

  I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t the sexiest man I’d ever seen. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to pick up where we’d left off. That I would be very happy to, right this moment, fold myself against him and let his arms wrap around me.

  But I couldn’t throw myself into his arms. I remembered a life with him he hadn’t lived.

  He wasn’t the same man I’d loved.

  Except that he was. Also, apparently, in some timeway, we shared a bedroom—and a lot more.

  He glanced into the rooms as he passed the open doorways, a hunter searching shadows, and finally settled across from me, where Neds had been leaning in the kitchen doorway.

  “Where’s your brother?” he asked.

  “Dealing with things. Is the room all right?”

  He quirked his eyebrow. “It needed some rearranging. But it’s fine.”

  Lord. How many times would he rearrange that room when he stayed in it?

  “Feng shui?” I asked.

  “Do you know it?”

  “Not at all. You are terribly predictable, Abraham.”

  “Am I?”

  I shrugged.

  “You aren’t, Matilda Case. It was generous of you to offer us the room.”

  “Didn’t seem right for you to sleep in the barn when we have a perfectly good, empty room in the house.”

  He shook his head slightly, then leaned back a bit, crossing his arms over his wide chest. I noticed his left shoulder hitched a bit lower than the right, as if catching on an old wound. I wondered if this Abraham was the same Abraham with the tattoo.

  “I’ve met all kinds of people in my long life,” he said. “No one like you.”

  “Thanks?”

  “You trust too easily for someone raised House Earth.”

  “I don’t trust too easily. I just know whom I can trust.”

  “And you think you can trust me. Why?”

  “We’re both galvanized. . . .” I started.

  “No,” he said softly. “The truth. Tell me the truth, Matilda.”

  “You won’t believe it. No one would.”

  He released one hand from where it was tucked against his crossed arms and spread his fingers, indicating I had the floor. “I’d like to hear it anyway.”

  “All right. Here’s the truth: I’ve met you. Before I ever came running into that jail, before Robert shot the sheriff and tried to kill you, I knew you. This body?” I drew my hand down to sort of wave at all of me. “Not mine. She was born a girl named Evelyn Douglas. I was born Matilda Case. When I was eight years old, I got sick. I underwent an experimental procedure and was implanted into Evelyn’s mind.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  I nodded. “Yes, it is. Except it’s not.”

  I waited. So did he.

  “I, Matilda, was born in 2184. When I was twenty-six, we realized exactly what the Wings of Mercury experiment had done back in 1910. It had broken time, temporarily granting those who survived the experiment’s blast zone—galvanized—long lives. You are more than three hundred years old. So is Evelyn’s body, but she woke up only eighteen years ago, when I was eight.”

  “She woke up when you were sick and transplanted into her mind?”

  “Yes.” I took a breath, and dragged my hand through my hair again, twisting it to make it stay behind my ear. “We realized the Wings of Mercury experiment was about to mend the piece of time it had broken in 1910. So we set out to fix it.”

  “Why?”

  “The consequences of time mending would have killed all the galvanized. And the resulting blast zone of that mending . . .” I shook my head and swallowed back the fear that rose with the memories. “It would have killed billions.”

  “This is . . .” He reached up, scratched at the stubble on his jaw, then bit his lower lip and let it go.

  My mouth watered with the need to kiss him, to feel the rough edges of his skin against mine. I wanted to trace that unfamiliar line of stitches down to the corner of his mouth with my finger, my lips, my tongue. I wanted to know the taste of him. This him.

  “Go ahead. Finish your story,” he said.

  I dragged my gaze away from his mouth and pressed my hand on my stomach, trying to settle the butterflies there. Hadn’t I just decided not to throw myself into his arms?

  I glanced away to compose myself. “So, I went back in time. To 1910. We didn’t have all the calculations figured out for how a person would actually travel through time, but since I was a modern-born person in a three-hundred-year-old body, I rode this body back in time. I was me, but Evelyn was still in her mind, in her body, which we shared.”

  “You went back in time.” He didn’t believe me.

  “You should know,” I said reasonably. “You saw me. You heard me tell you to find Matilda Case in the future. In 2210. I told you the Wings of Mercury experiment was going to happen, because it already had.”

  “Then why aren’t all the galvanized dead?”

  “I found the scientist behind the experiment and gave him the calculations that we thought would change it enough that time didn’t break. It worked. Mostly. Enough that billions didn’t die.”

  “Mostly?”

  “It’s complicated. Have you ever heard of timeways?”

  “No.”

  “Complicated,” I repeated.

  He bit his bottom lip again, then released his arms and tucked one thumb into his belt. “You know there’s no way to corroborate your story.”

  “I don’t suppose there is.”

  “Then why should I believe you?”

  “I didn’t say you should. It doesn’t matter if you do. We have bigger problems to deal with.”

  He watched me for a moment. I didn’t know what was going through his mind.

  “When you were in the jail in 1910, why did you call the boy who tried to shoot me Robert?”

  “He was Robert—the body was Robert. But Slater was in there too, implanted into Robert’s mind. Slater wanted you dead, but Robert . . .” I nodded. “Robert was a nice kid. A good man.”

  I waited to see if he followed the logic of what I’d just said through to the ultimate outcome.

  “Slater traveled back in time with you. The same way you traveled through time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew Robert before Slater was implanted in his mind.”

  “Yes. So did you. He was your friend.”

  “Then why was he trying to kill me?”

  “Slater was trying to kill you because you got in his way. You organized the galvanized, negotiated a peace treaty between the Houses, and could prove he was a murderer who should be removed as the head of his House.”

  “Why would anyone believe me?” he said. “I am galvanized.”

  “You were a hero. Respected. You led people out of servitude and helped establish House Brown—Earth; whatever—as a safe and legitimate place for people to live free. You did great things, Abraham. Yo
u were a great man.”

  “I can assure you,” he said, “I have never been a great man.”

  For a moment, the anger and violence that he wore like a second skin faded away, revealing something that looked suspiciously like regret.

  Then that sparse emotion was brushed away. Gone. “Slater,” he said, snapping back into mercenary mode. “Does he want you dead because you know how to time travel?”

  “No. He wants me dead because I know what he is, and there’s nothing I won’t do to stop him.”

  “Including time travel?”

  “I don’t know how to time travel willingly. I wish I did. I went back on purpose only once.”

  “And?”

  “Things didn’t go exactly how I expected. How any of us expected.”

  “Then why did he put a price on your head?”

  “Well,” I said, “I know what he’s done, and I intend to kill him. As long as I’m alive, he’s wise to be afraid of me.”

  “Have you ever killed a man, Matilda Case?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t start with the head of a House.”

  “That monster put my family through hell,” I said. “He’s still after my family. And I intend to put an end to that.”

  Abraham’s eyes were hooded in shadow, but he made a little hm sound. “Then we have more than one goal in common. I’d love to see his head on a platter.”

  “That won’t be enough to kill him.”

  “I know. But after I get done, there won’t be anything left of him to kill.”

  Well, there we had it. We’d found something to bond over: revenge.

  “I’d like to know one other thing,” he said, moving away from the wall and taking the few steps toward me. He halted just shy of my personal space, then took one step closer. He towered over me. “What did you do to me when I touched you?”

  I tried to figure out what he was talking about, the kiss we had just not-shared still ghosting my lips and making me too warm. It finally came to me.

  “You mean in the kitchen, when you grabbed my wrist and pulled a gun on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think I owe explanations to anyone who likes to point guns my way.”