Hourglass

“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.