Ethan kept feeling his gums, worried a tooth was coming loose. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the guest room they were crashing in, watching Gene pace. Well … not pace, exactly. He was moving about the room, packing things, or reorganizing them. Gene knew he couldn’t be here. Or shouldn’t be. His viral bits had done their job, but that didn’t mean the radiation of time travel was good for him.
Ethan would rather not risk it.
His practical thoughts felt almost foreign. This undead version of him had its own way of organizing information during a crisis—clean, and unsentimental. More accepting and open than calculating. He used to admire people who were decisive in pivotal moments. He used to think that, were he in their place, he would never be able to think so clearly.
Gene crossed the room again, faster this time, like momentum alone might do something. He didn’t look at Ethan.
“You’re going to wear a groove into the floor,” Ethan said.
“Don’t go too far,” Gene snapped, which was not an answer to anything.
Still, Ethan smiled politely at him. “If I don’t go far enough, I won’t kill all of it.”
“I know.”
He seemed more nervous about this than he was about killing Ethan in the first place. Not that Ethan remembered much about that. He remembered it being more violent than he expected—Gene’s grip clutching him so tightly that his nails dug into Ethan’s shoulder. That was scary. This was not scary—at least, not for Ethan—but it had the same desperation. Because in the same way, chickening out at the last minute could be disastrous.
Ethan pressed his tongue once more against the back of his tooth. Still there. Still solid. He exhaled through his nose. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen…
Gene stopped. The room held a kind of stillness that felt like the furniture might be bracing itself for impact.
“You’re going to open that door,” Ethan continued. “You’re going to step out into the hallway, closing the door behind you, then you are going to count to three and come back in.”
“That’s it?” The innocence that occasionally drifted into Gene’s voice was back. He wasn’t asking because he didn’t believe. He was asking because this plan was too much of a relief. Just one step outside. Just three seconds. What could go wrong in that period of time? What could go wrong when he was so close?
“I’m going to rewind time. Three seconds is an eternity.”
“I suppose so.”
Then Gene huffed out a breath, running a hand back through his hair and shaking his head. “You don’t get to suddenly be the reasonable one. That’s not how this works.”
“Feels like an upgrade, honestly.”
Gene’s reply was a frustrated sound—half laugh, half protest—as he turned away. The anxiety had shifted. It wasn’t gone, but it had… reoriented.
Ethan felt the absence of a heartbeat in his own chest. Behind his ribs—or where his ribs insisted something should be—like he’d been hollowed out. Even though everything was technically still there. It didn’t frighten him the way it should. It was just… weird.
“Okay,” Gene said. “I’ll count to three.”
Ethan could already feel time brushing against his fingers. A current in the air, neither hot nor cold, a rhythm without pattern. Like it was moving around him and if he stopped paying attention for a moment, it would go back to moving through him.
The edges of things—Gene’s shoulder, the line of the door, the seam where wall met ceiling—felt slightly doubled, not visibly, but conceptually. Each had several alternative versions hovering a breath or two out of alignment.
Ethan flexed his fingers.
Time always felt like water to him. Submerged in it, it was weightless. He only felt it when he tried to move within it. And like water, sometimes it had a force that was beyond his ability to control. Gene’s movements slowed and stuttered as he closed the door and Ethan tried to pull time back, only to have it drag him forward with it.
He could feel it gather, threads tightening around his wrist, twisting around him. There were no directions to it. Not left or right, up or down, only before and after layered so closely over one another that they became interchangeable. Underneath it all, an insistent hum.
Then a sudden jerk forward and the turbulence felt like it opened a hole through time that he was falling through. Like quicksand, the more he moved, the faster he sank. The tips of his fingers started to burn. The white heat moved up him in a flash and then he hit the floor. Face first. Hardwood. It would hurt if he wasn’t distracted by gagging and choking, gasping for air.
As his vision cleared, he realized he wasn’t in Clint’s guest room.
Sunbeams brushed across his face as his vision blurred and then refocused. Wait … sunlight? Had he gone back too far? He knew he’d be more powerful now. Maybe he hadn’t realized his true strength?
And yet… that had not felt like strength. He gave the tiniest little tug and time seemed to collapse right out from under him. Like a rotten out floor board had finally given way.
Below his hands was a Persian rug. Geometric patterns of purple, navy, and rust red. The sunlight filtering through the tree branches left shadows in camouflage patterns that spilled onto the wood floors. He coughed and gagged again, then felt a hand against his back.
“Ethan,”
He sat up fast enough to make his head spin—Onneli—her accent rattled him. Now he knew where he was. Where, but not when.
“What time is it?”
She looked confused but not surprised. “8:35.”
What time was that in DC? It was daylight here, and the difference wasn’t that great.
“What day?” He gasped.
“February 18th.”
Not back, forward. He had fallen forward … though perhaps not by a lot.
He had never tried to move forward before. To see the future, yes, but not move into it.
Not to mention that he was also in a completely different place.
“What happened?” He asked.
“Ah… I’m not sure—“
“Can I have your phone?”
“Huh?”
A million thoughts were popping off in his brain all at once. He was supposed to go back only 15 or 20 minutes, but instead he fell forward and was in Finland…
“Your phone. I need to call Gene.”
He had fallen forward onto the other side of the world, which meant Gene had waited three seconds and opened that door to—what? An empty room?
“Oh, of course,” Onneli said. She sounded nervous. “Yes, let’s do that first.”
She was dressed in a loose robe and her feet were bare. Had she even been awake when time unceremoniously dumped him on her floor?
God … the air burned. His stomach had grown fingers and was reaching up and clawing at the back of his throat. His eyes were tearing up. The light was too bright. His nostrils felt like they were breathing microscopic shards of glass. There was a film on his tongue that, when he rubbed it on the roof of his mouth, the taste of garlic and chillies flooded his senses.
Was this what it had been like for Gene? This raw intensity?
Onneli returned with her phone and handed it unlocked to Ethan. She had it opened to Ethan’s own number in her contacts.
“He might be too panicked to take a call from me,” she reasoned. “I assume your phone is with him?”
Ethan nodded. In any case, he didn’t remember Gene’s phone number off hand, so there wasn’t any other option than to call himself and hope Gene was around to answer.
The phone rang one and a half times. Sure enough, it was Gene’s panicked voice on the other end. “Onneli, can you—”
“I’m here,” Ethan said.
The two beats of silence that followed felt like an eternity.
“Where?” Gene whispered. “And … how?” But really: “Where did you go?”
“Something went wrong, but I think I’m okay. I’m with Onneli—”
“In Finland?” Gene shouted.
“…Yes.”
“You’re in Finland right now?”
“Yes.”
“How the fuck did you end up in Finland?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan admitted with a sigh. “I was only going to pull back a few minutes. It felt like time just collapsed right out from under me.”
“What the fuck?”
Yes … exactly, Ethan thought. He looked up at Onneli and watched her process this information. It seemed that this was not a common occurrence. Not an occupational hazard for timekeepers.
“Can you come back? Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so. And … I think it’s probably better to come back through conventional means. I don’t even know if it was something that I did—”
“Fine.” Gene’s response was clipped. “I guess this is what I get for making you immortal. I’ll have to cover for you … which is going to suck. But—” The hesitation came back into his voice. It was soft, uncertain and made Ethan’s heart ache, “Come back safe, please.”
Marcella had been wrong, he thought. She’d said that timekeepers give up their families to remove any bias. They recuse themselves from any meaningful connection to the world, from living and undead associates, to remove the temptation of manipulating time for personal benefit.
But she was wrong.
That wasn’t it. It was so that all those loved ones only needed to grieve once.