Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,100
it all feels shockingly normal. The sheep watching them from the pastures. The cold quiet. The smell of wet earth. Moss on the stone walls. Their footfalls on the gravel walking path.
They stop at the entrance to the guesthouse, which they transformed into their lab, both looking back at the home they poured their lives into, which they will never see again. Of all the places they’ve made their home together, of all the lifetimes, Barry has loved this one most.
“We have a plan, right?” he says.
“We do.”
“I’ll come down with you,” he says.
“No, why don’t you go look out over the fields until it’s done. You love that view.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. That’s how I want to leave you in this life.”
She kisses him.
He wipes her tears.
* * *
In the next life, Barry walks with Helena toward the stable. The night air is sweet, and the rolling hills surrounding their valley are shining under the stars.
“Still nothing?” she asks.
“No.”
They reach the door in the timber-frame barn and move inside, through a tack room, and then down a corridor of vacant stalls that haven’t housed horses in more than a decade.
The entryway is hidden behind a pair of sliding doors. Helena punches in the code, and they descend the spiral staircase into a soundproofed basement.
The cell is enclosed on two sides by stone walls, and the other two by sheets of ultrastrong glass pocked with ventilation holes. Inside the cell, there’s a toilet, a shower, a small table, and a bed, upon which lies Marcus Slade.
He closes the book he’s been reading and sits up, staring at his captors.
In this timeline, they made their home in the countryside of Marin County, thirty minutes north of San Francisco, in order to be close to Slade and prepare for this exact moment. They abducted him before he could overdose last Christmas, and brought him back to the ranch.
Slade woke up in this cell beneath the barn, where they’ve held him ever since.
Barry pulls a chair over to the glass and takes a seat.
Helena paces the perimeter of the cell.
Slade watches them.
They haven’t told him why he’s here. Not about the previous timelines or the memory chair. Nothing.
Slade rises from the end of the bed and approaches the glass. He stares down at Barry, wearing sweatpants and no shirt. His beard is unruly, his hair an unwashed tangle, eyes both fearful and angry.
As Barry watches him through the glass, he can’t help feeling pity for the man, despite what he did in older timelines. He has no idea why he’s here. Barry and Helena have promised him on multiple occasions that they have no intention of hurting him, but those assurances undoubtedly rang hollow.
If Barry is honest, he’s deeply uncomfortable with what they’re doing. But between Helena’s prescience and her building of the memory chair with its incredible capability, he trusts his wife implicitly. Even when she told him they needed to kidnap a man named Marcus Slade before he died of a drug overdose in his Dogpatch loft.
“What?” Slade asks. “Are you finally here to tell me why you’re doing this?”
“In a matter of moments,” Helena says, “you will understand everything.”
“What the fuck does that…”
Blood trickles out of Slade’s nose. He staggers back, gripping his temples, his face screwed up in pain, and now a stabbing, pulsating agony hits Barry behind the eyes, doubling him over in the chair.
The timeline anniversary has arrived, and both men groan as the prior lifetimes begin to catch up with them.
* * *
Now Slade is seated on the end of his bed. The fear is gone from his eyes. Even his body language has changed to reflect an inner confidence and poise that wasn’t there before.
He smiles, his head nodding.
“Barry,” he says. “Nice to see you again, Helena.”
Barry is reeling. It’s one thing to have been told what happened on all those other timelines, another entirely to own the memories of his dead daughter and of watching the world destroy itself again and again. Of dying in the middle of Central Park as a shockwave hit. He doesn’t remember the last timeline yet. Helena has told him that it took place in Scotland, which was apparently where he came up with this idea, but the memories are coming in as slowly as an IV drip.
Barry looks at Slade and says, “Do you remember your hotel in Manhattan?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember the night you died there? What you said to Helena right before?”
“Might need a