The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

rings of branches, and it’s about as tall as anything in sight. Branch rings equal years, more or less.”
    “So call it seventy years,” Bethany said. “On the other side of the opening, it’s seventy years after the end of the world. Whenever that is.”
    “The rest of it slots in easily enough,” Travis said.
    He was pacing at the windows again.
    Bethany was still sitting in the chair. Still looking numb.
    Travis continued. “Paige and the others turned on the cylinders inside Border Town. Who knows what they saw on the other side, down there. Maybe that far in the future, the place is just deserted. Whatever the case, they took the cylinders up into the desert the next morning, and spent a lot more time there. They took radio and satellite equipment through the projected opening, and set it all up in the future. They wanted to find out if there was anyone alive in that time. If there was anyone out there, on the air.”
    Bethany turned to him. Her eyes looked haunted.
    “I wonder if they heard anyone,” she said.
    Travis thought about it. “One way or another, they learned something. Something specific enough that they thought the president could help them understand it.”
    “The first piece of the puzzle,” Bethany said.
    Travis nodded. “It could have been anything. Some old military transmission broadcasting on a loop somewhere, even decades after everyone was gone. Or something else entirely. Who knows, right? But whatever it was, if they couldn’t make sense of it themselves, who better to go to than the president? He could put them in touch with almost anyone who might have expertise.”
    Bethany considered it. Nodded slowly.
    Travis stopped pacing. He returned to the opening and leaned into it. He stared at the wreck of the city beyond.
    What the hell had happened? Not a nuclear war. D.C. would be an ash plain in that case. There might be trees there by now, grown up in the aftermath, but there sure as hell wouldn’t be girder frames left standing.
    “Paige’s goal was the most obvious thing in the world,” Travis said. “She and the others were going to take the cylinder to some number of sites, go through to the future, and dig through the ruins for evidence. Figure out exactly how the world ends. Figure out how to prevent it. No doubt they explained all that to the president.” He leaned back into the suite and turned to Bethany. “So think about this. Suppose right now, the president is involved in something nobody’s supposed to know about. Something that’s happening, or maybe is about to happen. Paige and the others uncovered some little scrap of it in the future. Not enough that they could recognize its full meaning, but enough that the president could. And when he saw it, he understood the threat they posed to him. Because his secret is well protected in our time, but it’s vulnerable as hell in the future. Someone sifting through the rubble could eventually learn all about it.”
    Travis went quiet. He stared at nothing. “What is he hiding?”
    “Could it just be his own complicity in whatever happens to the world?” Bethany said. “Say the thing he’s involved in right now is going bad. Really bad. Say it’s big enough that it’s over even his head, and when it goes off the rails it’s going to take the world with it. Maybe Paige and the others could have found information in the future to help us turn it all around—something to give us a chance, anyway—but in the process they’d have discovered President Currey’s role in it. Jesus, could it be that simple? Would he rather let the world end than have people find out it’s his fault?”
    Travis thought about it for a long time. “That should be harder to believe than it is.”
    Bethany made a face that was a little too unnerved to register humor.
    “We’re guessing until we know what Paige found,” Travis said.
    He stepped away from the circular opening and returned to the suite’s south-facing windows. He stared down Vermont at the green-tinted highrise in the present day.
    Paige.
    Lying there alone.
    Waiting to die.
    The cylinder, powerful as it was, seemed entirely useless as a means of getting her out of that place.
    Travis leaned against the window, forearms crossed above his head. He shut his eyes and breathed out slowly.
    And then it came to him.

Chapter Eleven
    They worked out the logistics of the plan in a matter of minutes, and then Travis took a four-mile cab ride across the river, into