The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

had been more than familiar. Much more. He felt his balance falter.
    Paige stepped closer to him. She raised a hand and touched his face, gently. Her thumb traced his cheekbone, feeling the texture of his skin.
    He saw the obvious confusion in her eyes, mixed with some fragile understanding, and thought he knew what it was. Paige—the other Paige—had described it to him last night in Garner’s living room. Getting it without getting it. The Breach had taught her to do that.
    Still, there had to be a thousand questions. He thought he saw those in her eyes too, along with a reflection of the thousand he wanted to ask.
    How the hell had she gotten here? Not on board one of the flights from Yuma. No way would she have taken part in any of that, ELF effects or not. She couldn’t have left all those people behind to die.
    She must’ve come here later on, long after Bleak December had gone. If anyone in the world could’ve survived Umbra without going to Yuma, it would’ve been Tangent personnel at Border Town, with all their exotic resources. And no doubt Bethany had been right: Paige had found him before the world had ended. Had found him and kept him alive.
    Those thoughts echoed in his head for maybe three seconds, and then they were gone—drowned out by the only thing he could afford to think about now.
    The cylinder.
    The line of blue lights.
    And time—draining away like blood from a nicked artery.
    Every minute he stayed here might be the one that doomed Paige and Bethany in New York.
    The thumb—shaking now—retraced its path across his cheek. He raised his hand and closed it softly around hers.
    “I have to leave,” he said. “I have to leave right now. I’m sorry I can’t explain any of this.”
    She shook her head, dismissing the apology, and took her hand away from his face. “Go.”
    He held her gaze another second, in spite of his urgency, then turned and crossed to Finn’s body in two running steps. He lifted the cylinder and aimed it to put the iris just shy of the fallen shell casings where he’d come through before—where the smoke from the burning plane would hide his arrival in the present.
    He put his finger to the on button.
    “Wait.”
    He turned. Paige was just behind him. She put a hand on his shoulder.
    “I can’t wait,” he said. “I might not have enough time as it is—”
    “There’s something you need to hear. It’s more important than whatever you’re on your way to do.”
    “If I’m thirty seconds late, people are going to die. One of them is you.”
    If that news affected her, she didn’t show it.
    “That’s a necessary risk,” she said. “Listen to me. It’ll take more than thirty seconds, but I’ll go as fast as I can.”
    Her eyes were as serious as he’d ever seen them. Scared, too.
    He withdrew his finger from the button, and faced her.
    “I know about the message I sent back through the Breach,” Paige said. “And I know you created and sent the Whisper.”
    Travis felt his grip on the cylinder weaken. He pushed it against his side.
    “You told me everything,” Paige said. “The other you told me. The one I just talked to on the radio. You explained it the same day we sealed the Breach.”
    Travis stared. He’d never imagined a scenario like this, in which he could learn exactly how Paige would react to the news he’d been keeping from her.
    She seemed to read the question in his eyes.
    “I took it better than you expected,” she said.
    In a way, that response was almost as surreal as finding Paige here at all. Travis shook his head. “How is that possible? I created the Whisper, Paige. All the deaths in Zurich were my fault. All the deaths in Border Town. Your friends.”
    “I took it well because I understood things you didn’t. Things about the Breach, and what it would take to send something back in time through it. Tangent knew, long before we had the means to actually do it, what would be involved in the process. Dr. Fagan had it all worked out, like the Manhattan Project scientists had the bomb yields calculated before they ever set one off. The machine that would transfer something into the Breach—an injector, Fagan called it—would be unstable almost to the point of uselessness. And there’s no way to engineer around that. A person trying to operate it would have to position it right in front of the Breach, then stay there with it and shepherd the process to the very end. There’s no practical way to automate it, or