and tell yourself elaborate stories.”
He stops and looks back at her.
She continues, “While you were devastated when your mother died, you were also grateful, because you knew when her time was coming, and you had a proper chance to say goodbye. To make sure she knew you loved her. You didn’t have that with your father, who died suddenly when you were fifteen. You still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, wondering if he knew.”
* * *
He’s shivering by the time they reach his Crown Vic. Helena gets down on her knees on the wet pavement and runs her hands across the car’s undercarriage.
“What are you doing?” Barry asks.
“Making sure there’s no tracking device on your car.”
They climb in out of the rain, and he turns on the heat and waits for the engine to warm the frigid air blowing through the vents.
On the forty-minute walk down from Fiftieth, she told him a crazy story he isn’t completely sure he believes, about how she accidentally built the chair on a decommissioned oil platform in a previous timeline.
“I have so much more to tell you,” Helena says, buckling her seat belt.
“We can go to my apartment.”
“It isn’t safe there. Marcus Slade is aware of you, of where you live. If, at any point in the future, he realizes you and I are working together, he’ll use you to get to me. He could use his chair to return to tonight and find us in this moment. You have to stop thinking linearly. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
* * *
The lights of the Battery Tunnel stream past overhead, and Helena is explaining how she escaped Slade’s oil rig into her own memory, and fled to Canada.
“I was prepared to live out the rest of my life under the radar. Or kill myself if Slade ever found me. I was totally on my own—my mom died in 2011, my dad not long after. Then in 2016, the very first reports of a mysterious, new disease started surfacing.”
“False Memory Syndrome.”
“FMS didn’t come into the full public consciousness until recently, but I knew right away it was Slade. The first two years I was in hiding, he would’ve had no memory of our time together on the rig. In his mind, I had vanished after Jee-woon approached me with the job offer. But when we returned to 2009, specifically the night I escaped using the chair, Slade gained all of the memories of our time together. They were dead memories, of course, but—and here’s where I miscalculated—they contained enough information for him to eventually build the chair and all its components himself.
“I came to New York, which seemed to be ground zero for the FMS outbreak, figuring Slade had built his new lab in the city and was testing the chair on people. But I couldn’t find him. We’re almost here.”
Deep in Red Hook, Barry drives slowly past a row of warehouses along the water. Helena points out her building, but she makes Barry park five blocks away in a dark alley, backing into the shadows between a pair of overflowing dumpsters.
The rain has stopped.
Outside, it’s unnervingly quiet, the air redolent of wet garbage and standing puddles of rainwater. His mind’s eye keeps conjuring his last glimpse of Meghan—lying on the dirty sidewalk in front of her building, her bare feet sticking out from under the wet sheet.
Barry chokes down the grief, pops the trunk, and grabs his tactical shotgun and a box of shells.
They walk broken sidewalks for a quarter mile, Barry on alert for approaching vehicles or footsteps, but the only noise comes from the distant drone of helicopters circling the city and the deep-voiced horns of barges on the East River.
Helena leads him to a nondescript metal door in the side of a waterfront building that still bears the brewery signage of its former occupant.
She punches in the door code, lets them inside, and hits the lights. The warehouse reeks of spent grain, and the echo of their footsteps fills the space like a derelict cathedral. They move past rows of stainless-steel brewing tanks, a rusted-out mash tun, and finally the remnants of a bottling line.
They climb four flights to a sprawling loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river, Governors Island, and the shimmering southern tip of Manhattan.
The floor is tracked with cables and a maze of disassembled circuit boards. There’s a rack of custom-built servers humming along an old brick wall, and what