Hourglass

  I doubted seriously there’d ever been a theoretical physicist and housemother in the history of the world who looked like this one. She appeared to be in her late twenties, tall, with delicate features and wide eyes. When she turned her head to smile at me, her tiny nose ring caught the light, taking me by surprise.

  “Lovely to meet you, Emerson.” Something about the lilt of her voice made me think of warm rays of sunshine and tropical breezes. “Are you visiting?” she asked, puzzled.

  I didn’t know how to answer, so I looked at Michael. He checked the grandfather clock in the corner.

  “It’s almost midnight,” he said to me. “You should probably call Thomas.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Please? I don’t want either one of us in trouble.”

  “I’ll call, but we’re not finished here. I’m going to tell him not to expect me until tomorrow morning.” I stood to retrieve my cell phone from my bag, silently daring him to contradict me, at the same time shocked by my own defiance. “Is that a problem?”

  “It’s your life.”

  Dr. Rooks smiled as I excused myself.

  Michael didn’t.

  I stepped into the hallway to make the call, my hands shaking as I dialed. Thomas didn’t answer. Relieved, I left him a quick voice mail. Better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission and all that. Dr. Rooks and Michael were whispering furiously when I reentered the room.

  “Um, we were just discussing where you could sleep,” Michael explained as they stepped apart, but the flush creeping up his neck told a different story. “Dr. Rooks is going to set up an air mattress in her room.”

  “Upstairs.” She gestured to my bag. “Are you ready now?”

  I looked at Michael. I didn’t want to pitch a fit, but I wasn’t above it.

  “Go on,” he told her. “I’ll bring her up in a while. We have some things to discuss.”

  Chapter 22

  Here.” Michael handed me a tall glass of ice water he’d gotten from the kitchen, then sat down on the couch beside me. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

  “Stop procrastinating. All I want are answers.” I rested the bottom of the glass on my thigh, watching the condensation drip down the sides to form a cold, wet ring on my jeans. “You were getting ready to tell me something about Kaleb.”

  “Yes, Kaleb.” He blew out a deep breath. “His last name is Ballard. He’s Liam Ballard’s son.”

  It took me a second to connect the dots. When I did, my jaw dropped. “The same Liam Ballard who founded the Hourglass?”

  “The same. Liam Ballard was my mentor. He’s the one who died six months ago.”

  “Michael,” I breathed out. I didn’t tell him I was sorry. It never helped when people apologized for something they had no control over.

  His eyes tightened, and the same mix of sadness and anger I’d seen on his face when he’d first told me about losing Liam reappeared.

  Dropping his head back to stare at the ceiling, he fed me facts instead of feelings. “Years before Bennett shut down their parapsychology department, an offshoot formed.”

  “I read about the Bennett lab closing down.” I ran the tip of my middle finger around the rim of my glass. “Not enough funding or respect.”

  “Liam opened the Hourglass to serve the private sector. For a moral purpose.” He raised his head but didn’t meet my eyes. “It had one until he died. You know what it’s like to have an ability with no idea what it is or how to use it. Liam wanted a safe place for people like us to get help. A place where we could figure out a way to make a difference in the world instead of doing damage to it.”

  “You left. You aren’t part of the Hourglass anymore,” I realized.

  “When Liam died, Jonathan Landers took over.” Even Michael’s profile displayed anger. “As much as I want to be loyal to the Hourglass and Liam’s memory, I refuse to be part of it with Landers in charge.”

  “Why?”

  “For starters, he’s obsessed with getting to Liam’s research. Kaleb’s been keeping it under lock and key, trying to smuggle it out of the house when he can, but Landers or his minions are always in the way. There’s something specific he wants. He has an agenda. I can feel it.”

  “Why didn’t you stay at the Hourglass house to keep an eye on him?”

  “I had other things on my plate.” He looked at me, and I felt remarkably like a hamburger with a side of fries. “Besides, Kaleb has a better reason to be in the house than I do. It’s his.”

  “If the two of you are friends, why were you so worried about being seen there tonight?”

  “Because Landers doesn’t know where I am or what I’m doing, and I don’t want him to know. I’ve been trying to keep you off his radar.” He raised his fingertips to his temples, rubbing them as if he had a headache. “And you practically walked up to his front door and knocked.”

  I didn’t mention how close I’d come to doing just that.

  Michael leaned his head from side to side, stretching his neck. I wondered if his muscles were as tight as mine, and what he would do if I reached out to massage his tension away. Instead of touching him, I bit the bullet and apologized.

  “I’m sorry. For going to the Hourglass, and for not trusting you, and spying on you.” I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “All of it.”

  “I’m sorry for acting like some kind of overprotective freak without giving you a reason. But we’re invaluable to someone like Landers. If he could, he’d use me to travel to the future to manipulate the present—find cures for diseases, the economy, the energy crisis.”

  “Is that why you were worried about his finding me? Did you think he’d send me back in time to … buy Google stock or something?” Surely that wasn’t what caused Michael to be so secretive. Or so angsty. “Did you think I’d go along with it?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that at all.” Shifting on the couch, he leaned his body toward mine. Close enough to make my heart skip a beat. “It’s a sense I have. The guy’s obsessed with the past, and I was afraid he’d persuade you into seeing things his way. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case, but I couldn’t be sure until I’d met you, spent time with you.”

  I looked into his eyes, wondering what he saw when he looked back at me. Turning my head away, I worried my bottom lip between my teeth before asking my next question. “And what’s the verdict?”

  “I trust you,” he said. “Enough to ask you for help.”

  “How can I possibly help you?”

  “I need you to stop Jonathan Landers.”

  “Stop him from what?”

  “From murdering Liam.”

  Chapter 23

  You need me to do what?”

  “I need you and your ability to travel to the past so I can keep Jonathan Landers from killing Liam. I can’t do it without you.”

  I sat back, taking a pillow from the couch and holding it over my chest like a shield. Tremors started in my legs, working their way up my body, through my stomach, out to my arms, and to the tips of my fingers. “I don’t understand.”

  “If we can keep Liam from dying, Landers can’t take his place as the head of the Hourglass.”

  “How? It’s already happened. If we tried to change it—wouldn’t that create like a … a paradox or something?” I knew nothing about time travel except what I gleaned from Back to the Future marathons on cable and Lost reruns, but paradoxes seemed basic. And, up until now, fictional. I clutched the pillow more tightly. “How can you stop someone from dying—especially if he’s already dead?”

  My chest ached at the possibility.

  “There’s a theory, called the Novikov Principle. It’s a scientific loophole that would allow us to save Liam without altering time. No paradoxes. Liam was killed when there was a fire in his lab. It burned everything in the place beyond recognition.”

  “When you found the search pulled up on my computer …” I stopped. I never would’ve found the facts I needed in
a news article. “I’d just finished reading about it.”

  “Did you read how thoroughly the building was burned? No identifiable body parts were found.” The tendons in his knuckles protruded against the thin skin of his fingers. “Just a few charred bones.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. How terrible, to die that way. “I didn’t get that far.”

  “The Novikov Principle wouldn’t allow us to change the past, just affect it without producing any inconsistencies.”

  “I’m not following. What kind of inconsistencies?”

  “Everyone believes that Liam’s dead. To keep him from dying, we go back in time. Before anything happens to him we get him out of the lab.” His hands relaxed as he explained. “To keep up the appearance that he’s dead, we replace him with someone else. Then he goes into hiding and stays out of sight.”

  I swallowed furiously but nausea won out, rising in my throat. I couldn’t have heard him correctly. “Are you suggesting we let someone else die in his place?”

  “No!” He faced me. “Since Dr. Rooks is a theoretical physics professor, and she’s part of the science department at the college, she has keys, which gives me access to cadavers—”

  “Stop.” I took a moment to breathe. When I was sure I wasn’t going to lose the contents of my stomach, I motioned for him to continue. “Why do we have to keep up the appearance that he’s dead?”

  “So that nothing changes. There will still be bones for evidence. And as long as Liam stays completely hidden for six months, until the exact moment in time that we go back to save him, the fact that he’s actually alive won’t affect the timeline. Probably.” I caught a faint glimmer of hope in his voice.

  “So if there were ever an event that could be altered without some sort of cosmic world-changing side effect, this is it?” I asked, trying not to think about the cadaver part.

  “This is it. Especially since no one was ever able to prove conclusively that the few bones found in the lab were his.”

  Reaching out for my glass, I took a slow sip of water, thinking. “Saving Liam isn’t just about stopping Landers. Is it?”

  “Liam was like a father to me. The only father I’ve ever really had.”

  “I can see why you’d want him alive.” Michael’s real father abandoned him, and then his surrogate father had been murdered. I’d want justice, too.

  “I don’t want to do it just for me. It’s for his wife, his son, all the people at the Hourglass he’s helped, all the people who he had the potential to help. I never knew until I met him how much good one person could do.”

  “I understand.”

  He tilted his head and looked at me through his dark lashes. “I know. The future you understood, too. Who do you think told me about the Novikov Principle?”

  Even though I did understand—probably better than most people—why he wanted to save the life of someone he loved, I couldn’t make my brain process his words. I exhaled, the tremors running through my system causing my breath to come out shaky.

  “You wanted answers. You just got them,” he said with concern, leaning closer, not helping my breathing at all. “Are you sorry you asked?”

  “You’re talking about bringing someone back from the dead,” I said softly.

  “I know it’s unbelievable.” Michael took my hands in his. “But it’s true.”

  “And I thought the concept of time travel was strange.”

  I tried to think clearly but found it impossible with his hands on me. Encircled in an electrical current, I looked up at him, and a thousand unspoken words passed between us. The longer he held my hands, the more intense the connection.

  “I need to think about this.” I pulled away and scooted to the far side of the couch, exhaling deeply and closing my eyes. My brain had stretched so far in the past couple of days I didn’t see how it could hold anything else.

  The possibility of altering time kept circling my thoughts. Bringing back someone you loved from the dead. Wondering if even the idea flew in the face of the universe and tempted it to a crueler fate than ever.

  Exhausted and overwhelmed, I fell asleep.

  Chapter 24

  The glass revolving door spins, faster and faster, bringing with it arctic air and the smell of pine. I watch as it detaches from the building, still spinning, transforming into a snow-covered sled drawn by horses as black as death. As quickly as it appears, it pitches over the side of the mountain, leaving nothing but the sounds of screams hanging in the air and the mustard-yellow smell of sulfur. Beside me stands a figure, a body with no face, only holes where eyes are supposed to be, replaced with burning coals.

  “No! No!” I jerked upright, and the sweat gathered at the base of my spine went cold. Michael still sat beside me. I crawled into his lap, shaking furiously, too scared to be embarrassed. The electrical current returned. This time it was comforting instead of unsettling. Concentrating on breathing instead of gulping for air, I forced my gasping to subside to something manageable enough to allow me to form words.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed to choke out. “I’m okay.”

  “Liar.” Michael rocked me back and forth, consoling me. For once he didn’t seem to care how close we were. I knew I didn’t.

  I rested my forehead on his shoulder. He rubbed my back in small circles as I concentrated on regulating my breathing. The grandfather clock in the corner sounded twice, echoing into the room.

  In the silence that followed embarrassment replaced the fear.

  “Don’t.”

  “What?” I pressed my face into his chest, hiding.

  “I can tell you’re self-conscious, and I don’t want you to be.” He lifted my chin. “I’m pretty sure you’ve had that dream before. What was it about?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, I just … I can’t.”

  “Em?” My hair had come out of the elastic. He brushed it over my shoulder before resting his fingers on the back of my neck. “If you need to talk, I’m here to listen.”

  My pain reflected back to me from the depths of his eyes. The emotional part of our connection grabbed me by the throat. I had the feeling he already knew what I was going to say.

  “My parents. The day they died.”

  He tucked me securely into the curve of his arm, and the electricity between us calmed to a subtle hum.

  I took a deep breath, shuddering as I released it. “We were on vacation, a ski resort. I’d started seeing the rips a couple of months before we went—my parents didn’t know what to do. I think they wanted to get me out of town to see if things would stop.”

  He was listening, watching me carefully, maybe wondering if I was going to break.

  I wondered the same thing.

  “We were hurrying to catch the shuttle bus to the expert run. I couldn’t find one of my ski poles. I told my mom to go on with my dad, that I was old enough to ride a shuttle by myself.” I winced as I remembered the tone of voice I’d used. “She’d been in overprotective mode ever since her only daughter started showing signs of losing her mind.”

  “You don’t seem like the kind of girl who’d go for overprotective.” He took my hand in his.

  “I hated it. But she wouldn’t leave without me. We were still arguing when we walked through the lobby. I wasn’t paying attention, and someone slammed into me. I dropped my backpack. Stuff went everywhere. My mom was frustrated, and I told her to go ahead. She did.”

  Almost as if it was yesterday, I could feel the cold wind as the revolving door spun. I could see my mom stepping into it, her blonde hair blowing around her face, her expression somewhere between pity and disappointment.

  “Best the authorities could figure was that they either hit a patch of ice or someone ran them off the road. The shuttle bus went over the side the mountain into a half-frozen lake.” My lips started to tremble. “Crashed through the ice. Took three days to recover all the bodies.”

  Michael said nothing, just held my hand more tightly. I rested my cheek o
n his shoulder. But I didn’t stop talking.

  “The last thing I said … The last thing I said to my mother … was that I didn’t need her. I told her I didn’t need her to hover, that I could take care of myself. I said I didn’t need her. I’ve never told anyone that. Not even Thomas.”

  It had been too horrible to say out loud. Sharing it meant reliving it.

  “But you loved them,” he said. “And they loved you.”

  “I know.”

  We sat, motionless—the only sound in the room our breathing and the ticking of the clock. I could feel his chest rising and falling.

  “Oh no, Emerson.” Michael sat up straight. His skin went pale underneath his olive coloring. “I’m such an idiot … Liam … if anyone ever had the right to change something in the past, it’s you.”

  “Stop.” I shook my head.

  “We could try to find a way …”

  “Is there?” My voice broke. “Is there a way?”

  “I don’t … I don’t know.” I could tell by his eyes that he did know. He knew it was impossible.

  I swallowed hard, biting the inside of my cheek, willing the tears not to fall. “If you changed that path it would change others, too. Paradoxes can’t happen, right? Besides, there were funerals.”

  Bodies.

  I tried to make my tone light and failed miserably. “Unless there’s some other theory up your sleeve?”

  “No.” His thumb brushed a lone tear from my cheek. The care behind the gesture almost did me in. “I wish it could be different. I wish I could change things.”

  “I told you because I wanted to, not because I want you to help me change anything.” I gave him a small smile. “Besides, I can take care of myself. Been doing it for years.”

  “Emerson, you just shared your deepest secret with me. I value that. Don’t make light of it.”

  If he wasn’t already holding my heart in the palm of his hand, I would have taken it out and given it to him right then.

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath.

  I wished things could be different, too.