Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,102

brightest midday. So blinding Barry can’t help but look away. When he turns back, a shockwave is spreading across the bay and the Presidio, expanding toward the Financial District.

As a second warhead bursts over Palo Alto, Barry looks at Slade. “How many people do you think just died in that split-second flash? How many more will suffer an agonizing death from radiation poisoning over the next few hours if Helena doesn’t reset this timeline? What’s happening to San Francisco is happening all across America. To the major cities of our allies. And we’re unloading our arsenal on Russia and China. This is where your grand dream has taken us. And it’s the fifth time it’s happened. So how do you just sit there knowing the blood of all these people is on your hands? You aren’t helping humanity evolve, Marcus. You’re torturing us. There is no future for our species after this.”

Slade’s face is expressionless as he watches two towers of fire climb into the sky like torches. The light grids of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose have gone dark, but the cities smolder like the remains of a dying fire.

The concussive blast of the first warhead reaches them, and at this distance, it sounds like a cannon echoing off the hillsides. It makes the ground tremble beneath them.

Slade rubs his bare arms. “You have to go back to what happened first.”

“We tried that. Multiple times. Helena went back to 1986—”

“Stop thinking linearly. Not to the beginning of this timeline. Not even the last five or six. You have to return to the event that started all of this, and that’s on the original.”

“The original timeline only exists in a dead memory.”

“Exactly. You have to go back and restart it. That’s the only way to stop people from remembering.”

“But you can’t map a dead memory.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

“It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You’ll probably fail, which means you’ll die. But it is possible.”

“How do you know?”

“Helena figured out how to do it on my oil rig.”

“That’s not true. If she had, we would’ve—”

Slade laughs. “Try to keep up here, Barry. How do you think I know it works? As soon as we discovered the technique, I used it. I went back into a dead memory and reset the timeline just before she figured it out.” He snaps his fingers. “And, poof, it erased her memories of the discovery. Hers and everyone else’s.”

“Why?”

“Because anyone who knew could do just what you’re proposing now. They could take the chair away from me, make it so it never existed.” He looks Barry in the eye, the firelight of burning cities glinting from his pupils. “I was nothing. A junkie. My life wasted. The chair made me into something special. Gave me a chance to do something that would change the course of history. I couldn’t risk all that.” He shakes his head, smiles. “And there’s a certain elegance to the solution, don’t you think? Using the discovery to erase itself.”

“What’s the event that started all of this?”

“I killed Helena on November 5, 2018, on the original timeline. Go back as close to that date as possible…and stop me.”

“How do we—”

Another blink of light, a hundred miles to the south, lights up the entire sea.

“Go,” Slade says. “If you don’t make it to Helena before she dies in the tank, you won’t remember what I just told you until the next—”

And Barry is up and running, sprinting back down the hill toward the main house, digging his cell phone out of his pocket, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, finally dialing Helena’s number.

He holds the phone to his ear as he runs toward the lights of their home.

Ringing.

Ringing.

The sound wave from the second blast reaches him.

The phone still ringing.

Going to voicemail.

He throws it down as he reaches level ground, sweat stinging in his eyes, the house straight ahead.

Screaming, “Helena! Wait!”

The house is a massive country home built alongside a stream that meanders through the valley.

Barry runs up the porch steps and bursts through the front door, yelling Helena’s name as he races through the living room, knocking over an end table and spilling a glass of water that shatters on the tile.

Then down the east-wing corridor, past the master suite, toward the end of the hall, where the vault door to the lab has been left open.

“Helena, stop!”

He tears down the stairs toward the subterranean lab that houses the memory chair and deprivation tank. They have the answer.