Chapter 33 #2
“Kyle, obviously. Short, easy to say, and works with everything and at every age. Five-year-old Kyle? Yes. Thirty-year-old Kyle? Also yes. He can be a professional footballer; it’ll work.
He can be a politician, although I hope not; it’ll work.
He can go and sell bananas on the street, and it will still work. It fits everything!”
James raised a doubtful eyebrow over his bag of groceries.
“Okay, fine, I don’t want his life achievement to be selling fruit from a stand, but you get what I mean.”
“That we should name him Kyle.”
“Exactly.” She stopped and put a finger to her mouth.
Was that a buzz? Not from her phone, though, from—“The tablet! Will is calling!” She rushed past James, who quickly but carefully dropped the groceries and followed her into the living room.
The glass of the coffee table vibrated as Emily’s time traveling tablet lit up, crawling across the surface as if it had come to life.
Emily jumped on the couch and activated the call. “Will, thank god! We’d been worried—” Will’s frowning, worried face was far from that of a relieved survivor. Behind him was a darkly lit room. “Gramps, that’s not the Statue of Liberty. What did I say to you?”
“Emily.” Will’s voice was heavy, matching the feeling of dread spreading through her stomach. “I’m still on the ship.”
“You—why—I told you—”
James sat down next to her, flashing her a worried glance.
“Sylvia and the children are in the boats,” Will said. “They’re safe, right? They’re going to be fine?”
“Yes, yes, they’ll be fine on the boats. But why aren’t you?” Her hands started to sweat, leaving fingerprints on the brass frame of the tablet as she nervously adjusted her grip.
“Emmeline has gone missing. We searched and couldn’t find her anywhere in first class or on deck. She’s gone to see that boy, Leon. I went to look for her. She’s somewhere in third class …”
Emily’s chest squeezed. Not the third class quarters in the bow. Those were the ones that flooded first.
Her voice shook as she asked, “And did you—where are you—did you find her?”
“No. I’m somewhere on E Deck, near third class. I may be in a bit of trouble.” The camera shook as Will redirected it to the side. In the gloom, Emily barely made out a white-painted pole and Will’s hand, chained to it by a thick metallic band.
Her chest squeezed more, pushing the air out of her lungs. “Gramps. No.”
“I ran into an officer—Kinsley, I saw him earlier on the bridge. He said he’d help, but he ambushed me.”
“Can’t you do something? If you try to focus, like you’re freezing time, maybe you’ll be able to phase your hand through the handcuffs. I did that once. If you just try—”
“I did. I’ve been trying for the past fifteen minutes. I don’t know how you do it, but I can’t.” He readjusted the camera back to his face. “Emily, I’m not calling you to brainstorm ideas.”
Her hands shook. “Gramps, no.”
“I’m up on a cupboard, but the water’s coming in fast. I know …
” His voice got lower, close to breaking.
“That boy has to save Emmeline. He has to. And you’ll figure out how to get back in contact with my family, I know you will.
When you do, tell my parents … tell Sylvia and the children that I love them. You will, won’t you?”
“No.” She shook her head, wilder and wilder. “Not like this, Gramps. You’re not leaving me like this.”
He gave her a pale smile. “Should’ve asked you to give me spoilers about my future, anyw—”
The screen went dark as the tablet died.
Emily stared into it for a solid minute, unmoving. “No. No. No,” she repeated in a rhythm, her voice growing higher and higher, like drops of rain falling onto a metal roof. She scratched at the tablet, not that it could bring it back to life. The battery on Will’s side must’ve gone. “Gramps!”
She looked at James. Without words, he hugged her and held her tight, sinking his fingers into her hair. Over her sniffling, she heard his attempts of trying to hold it back. But how were they supposed to help each other, console each other, when they were both grieving?
Flashes of memories whizzed through her head.
A strange boy in old-fashioned clothes, running up to her, begging her not to destroy her father’s watch—Will, he said his name was—the little crease between his eyebrows that appeared every time he didn’t approve of her actions, which was often—oh, how she’d argued with Sylvia and gave Will grief for kissing her, even though she had no right to meddle—and the first time she’d seen Emmeline, as a little baby wrapped in lacy blankets, Will’s face shining with pride—his firstborn, his darling daughter, Emily’s favorite niece, her Blue …
Blue. Not because of her eyes, although Emily never explained the origin of the nickname, and everyone thought it was so.
No, it was because of that little finger that had colored blue for a second, back when Emmeline was a baby.
It had never happened again, not to Emily’s knowledge, and it could still have been a camera glitch, but it stuck with her because it looked like her own finger did when the blood underneath came in contact with raw almonite.
Emily blinked away her tears as the little detail on the edge of her memory, the one that’s been bothering her ever since James showed her that newspaper clipping, inched ever so closer, begging her to snatch it.
Blue. Emmeline. Leon.
Emmeline and Leon.
She shot up, narrowly missing James’s chin. “Emmeline is not on the ship.”
He frowned at her. “What?”
“She’s—we’re—I’m—” With her mind suddenly in overdrive, she started walking, realized she didn’t know where she was going, and paced from the kitchen back to the living room. “I know why I can time travel again. And I know where Emmeline is. The newspaper, James! She’s a time traveler, too!”
“But that’s impossible.”
“The ripples. The goddamn ripples.” That was what she saw that day when she was speaking to Emmeline on the beach.
Not a camera glitch. A ripple. Emmeline had made it, probably accidentally.
But not all of them were accidental. “We need to go through those notes again. We need the position of every single ripple.”
“For what?”
“Now it makes sense. They were created by a time traveler.” Emily reached her hand to her forehead. “That’s why they’re not entirely random. It’s extremely hard to be precise in time travel, using your body only. We use the watches to help us! But Emmeline doesn’t have one.”
“Emmeline?”
“She’s the one making the ripples.” Sorrow giving way to determination, Emily grabbed the sofa’s backrest and leaned over.
“She’s traveling through time. Will said he couldn’t find her on the Titanic, not because he didn’t look hard enough, but because she’s not there anymore.
She made a ripple and popped over into 1815, or 1816 …
” She scrambled for the folder with the notes and brought out the newspaper clipping with the marriage banns.
“That’s where she is. That’s our Emmeline. ”
James shook his head. “But how can you know? We have no proof …”
“Leon. Will said the boy she has a crush on was called Leon. That boy was on the Titanic, the last we knew. And who is she marrying here?” She tapped her finger on the line.
“That’s not a coincidence. Whenever I discovered new time travel powers, it was usually in a moment of high emotions or distress.
I think she’s done so, too. After the quarrel with Will, emotions would’ve been running high.
She opened a portal, accidentally or not, and she and Leon went a hundred years into the past.”
James only stared at her.
“You’re not gonna try to correct me?”
“Honestly, I’ve learned that with you, I should go with the flow,” he said.
“No, no, you don’t see.” She walked around the couch and grabbed him by the shirt. “Those portals stay open for a bit, in the time they were made in. And if there’s a portal leading from the Titanic to 1815 …”
“That means it goes the other way, too.”
“It goes to the Titanic. Right on the night of the sinking.” She released him and grabbed her phone. “You go pack up. Make sure you grab our watches and almonite clothes, too.”
“And you?”
“I’m getting us plane tickets to England.” She looked up from the screen. “I’m gonna go save my best friend.”