Chapter 18
“What do you mean, the ship is going to sink tonight?” Will said.
Emily had to put down the tablet projecting her friend’s confused face as she hid her own face in her hands.
This couldn’t be happening.
Will wasn’t on the Titanic, right? There had to be another ship with the same name. Or she’d heard the name wrong. Or her knowledge of history sucked—nothing new there—and the Titanic didn’t sink on her first voyage, but some other one, and Will and his family would be fine.
“Emily? Talk to me,” Will’s voice prompted her.
She ran her hands through her hair and picked the tablet back up. “Are you absolutely sure your ship is the Titanic?”
“Yes,” Will said, a good deal of confusion still coloring his voice. “What is this talk about sinking? If this is one of your pranks—”
“You think I’d joke about it?”
“I don’t know what exactly we’re talking about!”
“Okay. Okay.” She breathed out, trying to calm herself. No need to panic. Will’s time was running out, but she had all the time at her disposal to figure out a solution. Something. She would get Will out of this.
“The Titanic is a pretty famous ship over here, by which I mean, my time,” she started.
“Because she sank on”—she checked the web article open on her laptop to make sure she had all the correct information—“April 15, 1912, in the early morning hours. She struck an iceberg on its starboard side just before midnight that night.”
For the longest time, Will stared at her. She thought the tablet glitched again, and she shook it, but then he blinked. “That can’t be.”
“Everyone over here would agree to disagree. Well, except for this person who had the theory she was switched with her sister ship …” She squinted at the article.
“Emily!”
“Whatever. Point is, you have to get off! I don’t know how, I don’t know what to do, I don’t—”
“Emily,” Will said again, calmer. How ironic that he had to be the one to soothe her.
She’d blame this one on the pregnancy hormones.
“It can’t happen. It’s impossible,” Will said.
“It’s very, very possible. The Titanic struck an iceberg and didn’t have enough lifeboats to evacuate all the passengers.”
Will’s eyebrows drew together. “That wouldn’t be a problem.
All such ships have fewer boats than passenger capacity.
You wouldn’t use them to evacuate all the passengers at once; you’d use them to evacuate, in groups, to the other ship, then come back for more passengers.
And besides…” He shook his head in disbelief.
“The Titanic can’t go down. She’s the most technologically advanced ship to ever exist. The wireless has the longest reach—if something happened, we could call for help, and other ships would come to our aid. ”
Will spoke with such confidence he almost made her believe him. He was a top-notch engineer. He knew what he was talking about! And he lived in that era—he knew the ins and outs of their technology.
“The wireless would work,” Will repeated, and she wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince himself or her. “There are many other ships around us.”
“Give me a second.” Her fingers shook over the keyboard, leading to several misspellings in her search, but she finally got her results. She skimmed over the new article, her heart beating in her throat. “No,” she whispered.
“Emily?”
“The only ship close enough was the Californian, but they’d turned their wireless off for the night.
They couldn’t hear the signals for help.
The rest were too far.” As she scrolled further down, her eyes stopped on an image of the Titanic’s broken two halves, and another of the ship’s remains emerging from the deep-sea mist, blue and gray and not as much frozen in time as slowly dying, its pointed bow covered in rusted, icicle-like structures that made it look like the ship was weeping metal tears.
A heaviness settled in her stomach. Will could be brilliant; he could claim they’d covered all emergencies, but history still happened. And while she was talking to him, he could also be down there—long gone, forgotten in the depths.
She sagged her shoulders, her voice low as she said, “Whatever you did, whatever you will do, it didn’t work.”
“No.” Will stared at her, fear creeping into his eyes. “No. It can’t sink. They’ve taken every precaution. It can’t.”
“Will …”
“Sylvia and all the children are here.”
“I know!”
They looked at each other for long seconds. Emily sniffled and put a hand to her nose.
“How many make it off?” Will asked, his voice shaking.
She had a vague idea in mind, but she scrolled through the article to confirm. “About seven hundred.”
“Seven …” She wasn’t sure what Will did with the tablet, but it spun, and his face disappeared for a moment. “There are over two thousand people on this ship! Two. Thousand.”
“I know.”
“You’re saying two-thirds are going to die.”
“I know, Will, I know!” She got up and started walking, not that it helped her shake off the nerves.
“I have to do something.”
She leaned her elbows on the kitchen counter and bent her head over the tablet. “Whenever I tried to do that—time travel tricks, to change the past—you were the first to tell me no. To tell me one can’t tamper with events like this.”
“It’s not my past.”
“But it is mine.” He had to know what she meant. The Titanic sank—it was meant to be. But she couldn’t blame him for wanting to try. If she were in his place, she’d do anything she could.
“Okay.” She swallowed. “We’ll figure out something. Perhaps you can travel to the past, just a little bit—”
“I don’t have my watch with me.”
“What?”
“I left it at home. I didn’t want to risk taking it on vacation, in case it got stolen, and it wasn’t as if I was going to do time travel while conducting business …”
“Well, then, you’ll have to work in the present.” Emily went back to the laptop, trying to focus. “What time is it over there?”
“It’s evening. It’ll be seven soon.”
She nodded to herself. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do.
Right now, it’s November 15 for me. In your time, you have about five hours before the ship hits the iceberg.
Call me back before that happens, but make the call to December 8, okay?
That will give me enough time to study the event and give you a briefing on what to do. ”
“All right.”
“Will?” She gripped the tablet tighter, as if that could make her steady him. “Hold on.”
He nodded and ended the call.
Emily deposited the tablet on the coffee table and turned to the laptop. Now that the call was over and she couldn’t hear Will’s voice anymore, tears overwhelmed her, as if the break of connection had somehow secured his doom. She hid her face in her hands and cried out.
For a second, everything around her stilled. The soft humming of her laptop stopped; the car driving past went silent; even the airflow, it seemed, had paused. Emily took a gasping breath—and all returned to normal.
A time freeze? Impossible. She’d been imagining it. It’s been twelve years since she’d last done one, so most likely, she didn’t even remember its signs correctly. But still, she tried—flexed her fingers and tentatively reached out to her old mantra, whispering it in her mind.
Heartbeat, wait. Heartbeat, stop.
Nothing.
“Emily?” James’s voice came from somewhere behind. She looked at him through a curtain of tears, and he ran from the doorway to her, kneeling in front. “Flicker? What’s wrong? What’s happened? Is it the baby?”
“No, the baby is fine,” she choked out. She grabbed his hands to steady herself.
James pulled her into a hug instead.
“It’s Will,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “They’re on the Titanic.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The ship. They’re coming back to the States.”
“I know that, but what’s the problem?”
“It’s the Titanic!” She pushed away. “Oh, of course.” Despite being from Will’s time, James had adjusted so well to her era that sometimes, she forgot he wasn’t born here and didn’t live through the same experiences—and anniversaries of events past—as she did.
“You remember that Valentine’s Day when you planned a date for us, and you were looking for romantic movies to watch, and someone recommended Titanic because ‘the love story was so cute,’ so you chose that one, but you didn’t know—”
James’s eyes rounded as realization struck him. “No.”
“That’s the ship.”
“But … it sank, it was a great tragedy, everyone, almost everyone—” He gaped. “Sylvia—my sister is on that ship.”
“I know! They’re all on it.” She stood and worried her nails. “We have to do something.”
“Can’t we check if they made it off safely?”
Of course. She was so stupid. Put that on the pregnancy hormones, as well.
Thank god she had James. “Yes! You can go check.” Will, Sylvia, and the children would’ve lived in New York at that time, but his parents were still in Connecticut.
“We’re in the right house. You only need to pop back and ask Fabienne if the family is all right. ”
James nodded and, without words, left the living room and ran upstairs. He returned with his watch a minute later.
“Any date after April 15, 1912,” Emily said. “Do a few months, just in case.”
He set the watch, blinked out for a second, and came back.
“Wow, that’s tight timing,” she said.
“I didn’t come back of my volition. I was thrown,” James said. “Got to see the house for a second, and then …” He waved his hand as if shooing someone away. “That’s never happened to me before. Did I do it wrong?”
She knitted her eyebrows. “Maybe the watch is acting up. Try mine.” She retrieved it; James repeated the procedure, even tried several days in that range, with no change in outcome.
“Shit.” Emily took the watch back and sat on the sofa.
“What’s going on?” James asked.
“Significant event,” she murmured. “When you’re trying to change something very important”—she gulped—“like someone’s death, you’ll get thrown out of your travel. You can’t affect the event by time traveling to it afterward. You can only make changes in the now.”
“But I only tried to get back to find out what had happened. Not change anything.”
She shrugged, nausea swirling in her stomach.
“It has to be important. Well, of course it is. It’s the freaking Titanic.
Maybe it won’t let you talk to Will’s parents because Brayden is also a time traveler, and if he finds out his son is in danger—” She shook her head.
“It becomes a tangled mess. He could try to get a rescue started, and who knows what butterfly effect that would unleash. It could be dangerous for everyone involved. Trust me, I’ve tried to do it before. ”
James sat next to her, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. How didn’t you know?”
“They changed their plans last minute,” Emily peeped. “Last time I talked to Will, he said they were coming back on some other ship. And I had the wrong year. I never even suspected.”
“What about him? He’s been here enough times—has he never heard of the Titanic?”
She shrugged. “You know how much care he takes to avoid spoilers for his immediate future. So I don’t tell him anything, either. You should’ve seen his face that time when I accidentally slipped about the World Wars.”
James sighed, resting his elbows on his thighs, gaze lowered. “Do we have any other way of finding out what happens to them? You’re still here. That has to mean something.”
Yes—that one of the kids lived, the one that was her direct ancestor. But she didn’t know which one it was, and even knowing wouldn’t make the situation any easier to accept. The rest of them were still on the ship. Either, any, all of them were in great danger.
“The family tree?” James tried.
“It said Will died much later. But parts of it are wrong. It had Will’s parentage wrong, and Emmeline’s birth year, too. So who’s to say …” She swayed back into James’s embrace. “Just because I’m still here, just because I know one of them will live, I can’t leave the others to their fate.”
“I know.” He caressed her hair. “We have time. We’ll figure it out. Do it the old-fashioned way, without time travel tricks.”
“Or find a way to trick time travel.” She nodded to herself, slowly at first, then more determined, and straightened up and wiped her eyes.
“We’ll split the work. I’ll get all the notes I have on the Watchers.
” Over the years, she’d gathered a ton of info—from Will and Brayden and the connections they used to have, to Ralkin’s research, which Will had recovered after Ralkin’s death.
“You’d studied those notes dozens of times,” James said.
“But I’ve been looking for something that could fix my condition, not tips and tricks on how to get around blocked time travel.
” Regardless, James had a point. She was too familiar with the notes and might skip something important.
“Will you read them over? Look for anything that might help. Maybe someone found a roundabout way to influence events in the past, or discovered a new possibility, but they never explored it—”
“Flicker, I’ve got it.” He held her by the shoulders and gave her a quick peck on the lips. “If there’s a rabbit hole to go down, I will.”
She nodded, only managing a pale smile. “I’ll study everything I can find about the Titanic. We have three weeks to find solutions before Will calls me back.” She put her hands on her hips, a bit of confidence re-surging. “Let’s get to work.”