Chapter 19 The Scientist #2
“You mean it could pull her back.”
“Or tear the connection wider. Or do nothing. Or create echoes—sensory overlap, memory bleed, temporal instability around Miss Hart. I am not a prophet. I am a man with bad equipment and worse data.”
“Then why offer it?” James asks, and there is anger now.
Webb’s gaze stays on me. “Because ten years ago, I would have given anything to tell my brother I had not died in that room.”
The shop goes quiet.
There it is. The human piece beneath all the apparatus.
“Did you try?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
He looks toward the grimy window. “A man in this century died because I could not accept that I had become part of it.”
I wait.
He does not elaborate.
Maybe he cannot.
“So your philosophy is what?” I ask. “Do nothing? Touch nothing? Let people die because the timeline has aesthetic preferences?”
His mouth tightens. “My philosophy is that changing history is not the same as improving it.”
“Charlotte would disagree.”
“Charlotte is alive to disagree because of you. That is a powerful argument, not a complete one.”
“People are not equations.”
“No,” he says. “They are variables with names. That is worse.”
James looks between us. “And you have documented every change?”
“Every one I could find. Some small. Some likely meaningless. Some not. Miss Hart’s work in the East End may shift public health practice. Her royal appointment may alter women’s medicine. Charlotte’s son may alter the throne.”
“May,” I say.
“May,” he agrees. “Time resists clean conclusions.”
I look at the dead phone he has not yet asked about. My phone. Mrs. Finch had kept it wrapped with my strange clothing, hidden away like evidence of a private apocalypse. I sent for it this morning before we came, though I did not know why.
Now I take it from my reticule.
The black glass is cold in my hand.
James looks at it with the same wary dislike he gives firearms, Thornbury, and desserts made with too much aspic.
Webb goes very still.
“That came through with you?”
“Yes. Dead. Useless. Emotionally rude.”
He reaches for it, then stops. “May I?”
I hesitate.
This stupid rectangle contains nothing now. No signal. No battery. No calls. And yet handing it over feels like giving someone a bone from my old life.
I place it in his palm.
Webb handles it like a relic.
“This may be enough.”
James’s voice is low. “Enough for what?”
“To tune the signal.”
“No,” James says.
I turn. “James.”
“No. Not with risks he cannot define.”
“It is not your decision.”
Pain flashes across his face.
I regret the words immediately. I do not take them back.
He steps closer, lowering his voice so Webb cannot pretend not to hear and absolutely can. “I know. That is precisely why I am terrified.”
Oh.
The anger goes out of me.
He looks at the phone in Webb’s hand. “I waited at Carlton House believing I might lose you to death. I had not considered losing you to the life that already owned you once.”
I pull my shoulders back. “It did not own me.”
“Your mother is there.”
There is no answer to that.
Not a clean one.
I think of my mother not knowing. Of her living with the last image of me vanishing. Of reports and searches and guilt folding itself into every day after.
“If I can tell her I’m alive,” I whisper, “how do I not try?”
James closes his eyes.
Webb says nothing.
For once.
I look at him. “Can the message be simple?”
“It must be.”
“Not coordinates. Not instructions. Nothing that tells them how to come get me.”
“Wise.”
“Just enough to say I survived.”
James opens his eyes. “And if that is enough for them to find you?”
The room feels suddenly very small.
I look at my ring. At the phone. At Webb’s ledgers. At James.
Two lives, both real.
The old one did not vanish because I fell in love. The new one does not become less true because my mother exists.
“Then we deal with that,” I say, though my voice shakes. “But I will not let fear make the choice for me.”
Webb nods once, as if he has been waiting for that sentence.
He builds the apparatus on the long table while rain turns the window silver. Copper wires. Galvanic cells. A lens no modern engineer would trust with a flashlight, let alone grief. My phone lies at the center, black and impossible.
James stands beside me, silent.
I want him to argue again.
I want him not to.
Both are unfair.
Webb hands me a pencil and a scrap of paper. “The phrase.”
My hand hovers.
Everything I want to say is too large.
I am sorry.
I miss you.
I did not choose to leave.
I am loved.
I am alive.
In the end, I write the only thing that matters first.
Alive. Safe. I love you. Do not follow.
My vision blurs.
Webb reads it and says nothing. Good. He may live.
He places the paper beneath the phone, adjusts the final wire, and looks at me.
“If anything feels wrong, step back.”
This is such an absurd sentence that I almost laugh.
The galvanic pile clicks.
The air changes.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The hair on my arms rises. The lamps flicker blue at the edges. The shop fills with the smell of ozone so sharp and familiar that my knees nearly buckle.
James grabs my hand.
The phone lights.
For half a second, the dead screen flares white.
Then my mother’s name appears.
MOM.
The room tears open with sound.
Not loud.
Deep.
A vibration under the bones of the world.
Webb swears.
The brass device begins to shake itself apart.
“Step back!” he shouts.
I cannot.
The screen is glowing in my hand now, though I do not remember picking it up.
MOM.
MOM.
MOM.
Like a call trying to connect across centuries.
James’s arm locks around my waist.
The air bends.
And somewhere impossibly far away, my mother screams my name.