Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,61
the kitchen at ten p.m., asking him where he’d been. I remember the redness on his face and the smell of bourbon on his breath and his watery eyes
Helena closes the journal and goes to the window, sweeping aside the curtain.
Anemic light creeps in.
Peering eight stories down onto East Forty-Ninth, she can see Barry’s car a little ways down the block.
The city is wet, dreary.
The woman is crying in the bathroom.
Barry walks over, says, “I don’t know if we’ve been made. Regardless, we should go after Slade right now. I say we take our chances with the elevator.”
“Do you have a knife?”
“Yeah.”
“May I see it?”
Barry reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folding knife as Helena removes her leather jacket and rolls up the sleeves of her gray shirt.
She takes it from him, sits down in one of the armchairs, and opens the blade.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Making a save point.”
“A what?”
She inserts the tip of the knife into the side of her left arm above the elbow and draws the blade across her skin.
As the pain comes and the blood begins to flow—
BARRY
November 7, 2018
“What the hell are you doing?” Barry asks.
Helena’s eyes are shut, her mouth hanging slightly open, perfectly still.
Barry carefully pries the knife out of her hands. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then her bright-green eyes snap open.
Something in them has changed. They exude a newfound fear and intensity.
“You OK?” Barry asks.
Helena surveys the room, glances at her wristwatch, and then wraps her arms around Barry with a startling ferocity.
“You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive. What happened to you?”
She leads him over to the bed. They sit, and Helena removes one of the pillowcases and tears off a strip of cloth, which she begins to tie around her self-inflicted wound to stop the bleeding.
“I just used the chair to return to this moment,” she says. “I’m starting a new timeline.”
“Your chair?”
“No, the one up on seventeen. Slade’s chair.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve already lived the next fifteen minutes. The pain of cutting myself just now was a breadcrumb back to this moment. It left me a vivid, short-term memory to return to.”
“So you know what’s about to happen?”
“If we go to the penthouse, yes. Slade knows we’re coming. He’ll be waiting for us. We won’t even make it out of the elevator before a bullet goes through your eye. There’s so much blood, and I start shooting. I must hit Slade, because suddenly he’s crawling across his living room.
“I take the elevator down to seventeen, find the lab, and shoot the door open as Jee-woon is climbing into the tank. He starts toward me, saying he knows I would never hurt him after all he did for me, but he’s never been more wrong about anything in his life.
“At the terminal, I log in with some backdoor credentials. Then I map a memory, climb into the tank, and return to the memory of cutting myself in this room.”
“You didn’t have to come back for me.”
“To be completely honest, I wouldn’t have. But I didn’t know where Sergei was, and there wasn’t enough time to destroy all the equipment. But I am very glad you’re alive.” She looks at her watch again. “You’re going to have an awful memory of all of this in about twelve minutes, and so is everyone else in the building, which is a problem.”
Barry rises from the bed, gives Helena a hand up.
She lifts the shotgun.
He says, “So Slade is in the penthouse, anticipating that’s where we’ll go first—which we did the first time around.”
“Correct.”
“Jee-woon is already heading for the chair on seventeen, probably waiting to hear if there’s been a security breach so he can jump into the deprivation chamber and overwrite this timeline. And Sergei is…”
“Unknown. I say we go straight to the lab and deal with Jee-woon first. No matter what, he can’t be allowed to get in the tank.”
They head out of the room and into the corridor. Barry keeps compulsively touching the extra magazines in his pockets.
At the bank of elevators, he calls for a car, listening to the gears turning on the other side of the doors and holding his Glock at the ready.
Helena says, “We’ve done this part already. There’s no one coming down.”
As the light above the elevator illuminates, the bell dings.
Barry raises his gun, finger on the trigger.
The doors part.
Empty.
They step into the small car, and Helena presses the button for 17. The walls of this elevator are old, smoke-stained