He watches Victor roll on the catwalk, his good hand cradling the broken one, undone by a level of physical anguish he’s had no experience with, the novelty almost more debilitating than the pain.
“Jonas.”
The cavern’s thrum is so loud and Jonas’s breathing so rapid that at first he doesn’t hear his name.
“Jonas.”
It’s Eva.
Jonas pivots. He knows he shouldn’t turn his back to Victor, but the way Eva spoke his name contained an unsettling amalgam of fear and weakness. A disquieting echo of the past.
And stranger still, Eva isn’t where she should be. Panic leaks in as Jonas’s eyes dart down to find Eva lying on the catwalk. Her fingers are laced across her midsection, blood snaking through them. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She looks afraid.
The world spins. Jonas’s breath won’t catch. He’s lightheaded. He wants to vomit. He wants to scream. He wants to cry.
“No.” The word is barely audible, the moan of a dying animal. He drops to his knees beside Eva. “Just—try not to talk, Eva,” he says. “Just breathe. Just breathe.”
As Eva does her best to comply, Jonas considers her abdomen. The gunshot wound glistens, spurting blood with each beat of her panicked heart. His hands work to stanch the bleeding, but he feels Eva’s warmth flowing between his fingers.
“Jonas,” she says, each syllable a labor, “I feel cold.”
He starts ripping away at his shirt, tearing strips for a makeshift bandage, but she stops him, raising her hand to his. She looks toward the massive spear of the SLA. “You have to go.”
“I’m not leaving you.” Again. If Jonas knows anything, he knows this.
“I’m leaving,” she whispers.
The words, a reverberation of the past, are a kidney punch, a confirmation that Jonas is witnessing another Eva’s death.
“Don’t be sad,” she says. A smile blooms on her face, an expression of contentment. “There are other realities where I’m alive.”
Jonas tries to blink back tears, but they race down his face.
“And in one of them,” she says, “I’m with . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought. Can’t finish it. But the idea has left her with the hint of a smile, even though she’s gone.
Gone again.
Jonas stays with her, kneeling as though in prayer. His face wet with tears. Her blood on his hands, literally and figuratively. Another death in his personal ledger.
But it was all for nothing, he reminds himself, if he stays. He has to go. He has to leave. Right now. One step at a time.
As he rises, he hears the scream. A single rage-filled, animalistic syllable. Jonas is barely to his feet when Victor tackles him back down to the catwalk. He rains punches down on Jonas with his one good hand, screaming and cursing, an emeritus professor reduced to a rabid dog.
Jonas pours all his anger and rage and hate—plus his grief for both Amandas and both Evas—into his two hands. He balls them into fists and hurls them at Victor. In the distance, the Klaxon still blares, providing a perverse soundtrack to the brawl. Even Victor’s splintered hand gets in on the action, oblivious to the broken bones, his own rage as potent as Novocain. Jonas withers under the assault. Each punch drives the back of his head against the steel catwalk. He throws his hands up, trying to block Victor’s onslaught. He begins to pass out.
And then he sees a tincture of black. A small slab of metal resting on the catwalk above his head. Distant, possibly out of reach. As Victor pounds away with his fists, Jonas keeps one arm over his head as a shield while his other hand reaches for it. It’s far. Too far.
Jonas stretches. Pain isn’t a factor anymore. His fingertips graze and swipe at the object, causing it to pivot farther out of reach. His fingers splay and flail. Please, his mind screams. Please.
Maybe a silent plea is all it takes because suddenly the object is in Jonas’s hand, his fingers curling around it, feeling its solid form.
The security guard’s gun.
Jonas brings it around, startling Victor, who is still atop him but no longer in control. Jonas’s finger pulls against the trigger. He thinks of Eva. He thinks of Amanda, bleeding to death in his arms on a patch of Manhattan concrete.
“You won’t,” Victor says with more confidence than Jonas expects.
“Macon taught me how,” Jonas reminds him.
“I mean you won’t do it.”
Jonas tastes bile, his anger fueled by Victor’s arrogance.
“You’re many things,” Victor says. “A thief. A plagiarist.” Venom in his voice. He shakes his head, lips curled in disgust. “But not a killer.”
“You’re right,” Jonas says, wondering if it’s true, before he smashes the gun across Victor’s head, knocking him over and rendering him unconscious, his arms hanging over the edge of the catwalk. “But I needed the gun to knock you out with.”
Rising to his feet, Jonas is tempted to enjoy the sight of Victor lying on the catwalk, bruised and out cold. But then he hears boots striking metal, alerting him that reinforcements from Hiroshima’s National Police Agency are on their way.
He moves fast, dragging the deceased security guard’s bulk toward the door. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet, and the corpse’s pliability makes it difficult to maneuver. Not for nothing do they call it “dead weight.” The sounds of the police’s approach grow louder. Jonas tells himself that the echo of the tunnel is magnifying the clatter, that he has time yet. He marshals his strength and heaves the guard up so that the corpse is propped against the door, turning the man into a macabre makeshift doorstop.
Jonas leapfrogs over Victor and races down the length of the catwalk toward the Linear Accelerator. His nerves, already humming like a metropolis’s power grid, begin to redline. This is the most perilous moment in his entire plan. His original incursion into CERN was aided by the fact that he had been there multiple times. But the Spire isn’t just foreign to him. Despite the scant details he pulled off this universe’s internet, it might as well be an alien landscape.
Then he sees a small alphanumeric keypad, camouflaged by a tangle of cables and a cluster of circuit boards. He consults his newest tattoo based on Other Jonas’s calculations and compels his fingers to march along the keypad. There is no screen, no monitor, no way of knowing whether he’s entering the right data in the right order.
He punches in what he thinks is the last sequence in a series of necessary commands. He spots a green button in the lower right corner of the pad and whispers a single-word prayer. “Please.”
He pushes the button.
For five heavy breaths and who-knows-how-many beats of his racing heart, nothing happens. Hopelessness reasserts itself, taunting him with the truth that he was always destined to fail. What hubris could have compelled him to think he could swim against the tide of the universe?
The Linear Accelerator answers with an earthshaking drone so loud and visceral that it feels sprung from the Old Testament. The catwalk vibrates. Jonas is gripped by a feeling of majesty.
Behind him, he hears the martial drumbeat of boots on steel, the metallic ballet of automatic weapons chambering new rounds of ammunition. Jonas doesn’t have to turn around to know it’s Tokushu Kyūshū Butai, a Special Assault Team, Japan’s version of a SWAT unit.
“Mashin kara hanarete kudasai! Watashitachi ni wa buryoku kōshi ga mitome rarete iru . . .” the leader commands. When Jonas doesn’t comply, the man switches to English. “Get down. We are authorized to use force.”
Jonas ignores him. If he’s done his job properly, he’s shunted the SLA’s output to the patch he opened through the access panel, creating a “leak” of quantum energy. But if he moves more than six inches from the spot where he’s standing, his body won’t be close enough to absorb the Linear Accelerator’s output.
“Kare no atama o neratte. Watashi no meirei ni shitagatte happō suru junbi o shite . . . ,” the SAT leader says, ordering his men to aim at Jonas’s head and await the command to fire.
The cacophony of the SLA is now close to deafening, a low bass that Jonas feels in the center of his chest, almost loud enough to cover the sound of six military-grade assault rifles disengaging their safeties.
Jonas closes his eyes. He calculates that he has three more seconds until the Linear Accelerator unleashes its full potential. Hopefully, it will take the police longer than that to shoot him through the head. The interior of the access panel and its metal casing are suddenly dotted with tiny red lights, which briefly dance before disappearing into the shadow that Jonas casts against the SLA. Laser sights taking aim at his head and back.
Jonas remains calm. In three seconds—less—this will all be over. He will either be dead in this universe or alive in another, reunited with Amanda.
“Wait for me,” he whispers. “I’m on my way.”
