The Time Roads

Síomón took his sister into his arms. “Hush, Gwen. We’ll get Paul back and try again—after we check the numbers more thoroughly.”

She made an involuntary noise. Warned, Síomón took a step backward and studied his sister’s expression. “What? What else happened? Tell me.”

Gwen opened and closed her mouth. “Time fractures,” she said with obvious difficulty.

Síomón drew a sharp breath. He’d read about the theories and discounted them. And yet, the concept of time fractures was no more fantastical than his and Gwen’s own theory that said time lines followed the curvature of space, bending gradually over vast distances and meeting themselves again at different points.

“I’ll have to go back myself,” he said.

Gwen’s mouth tensed. She was speaking again, but Síomón could not make out the words. Something about patterns overlaying other patterns and creating chaos in the time streams.

“Too late.” Gwen’s voice was a disembodied whisper. “We were too late to save them.”

“How do you know?” Síomón asked.

Of their collaboration, only he, Gwen, Ó Dónaill, and Evan De Mora remained. Nicolás Ó Cionnaith had followed Paul Keller through the time lines, never to return. Lost, Síomón told himself. Reluctantly, he’d allowed Úna Toíbín and Li Cheng to launch an expedition to recover their colleagues, but, instead, they were the next to vanish—their existence blotted out when two time lines reconverged. At that, Síomón ordered the equipment locked up, and the experiment shut down. To his dismay, Maeve defied those orders, convinced she had the key to their problems. When Susanna, mad with grief, chased after her friend to prevent another death, she too died. Time had fractured, and the paths no longer ran true.

“We cannot do nothing,” he said to Gwen. “I must go—”

“But Síomón—”

“I’ll take the same path as Paul,” he said, speaking over her. “I’ll find him and do whatever is needed to remove the fracture.”

Gwen pressed her hands against her cheeks. She made no objections, however, and when Síomón indicated for her to assist him in preparing their apparatus, she did so, albeit silently.

One moment of inspiration, Síomón thought, as he tapped the keys rapidly. Decades of necessary research and experimentation had followed, but it was that initial insight that counted most. Strange to think that that same moment intersected so many other time lines. It had taken the best minds in Éire’s universities to invent the necessary formulae for traversing those lines, and more complicated formulae with ever higher primes to calculate all the factors involved in shifting those lines to alter the past.

Gwen injected the cocaine and counted until the drug penetrated his bloodstream. Síomón waited until she gave the signal before he pressed the last digit and set the last control. His gaze met Gwen’s. She managed a smile, however unconvincing. Then Síomón pressed the switch to connect the electrical current.

Darkness. The scent of raw earth and pine needles crushed underfoot. He walked by instinct, having made a brief essay with the machine before, when they had first tested its capabilities. Even so, he found the lack of physical indicators unsettling. The vivid scents, the cold prickling his face, the pinpoint stars, were all trace memories, Professor Ó Dónaill claimed. Perhaps that accounted for the sensation of being doubled, as though another presence existed within his mind.

It did. It will. It does.

He paused and looked back the way he had come. A short distance behind him, the path split in two, each branch leading to a different fu

ture. With a chill, Síomón could make out threadlike strands beside each branch, signaling further confusion in time.

I’m not too late, he told himself. If he intercepted Paul before the crisis, time would heal itself, or so Gwen had insisted. Even now, the worst would be a blurring of the past. Events doubled. Contradictory memories. Nothing fatal.

His pulse beat an irregular rhythm. Down each strand of time, another of his selves existed. He was doubled and tripled, each self bound to the other through a tenuous connection. When he glanced back, he could swear the strands grew more numerous. Was time unraveling toward the future and Gwen?

He hurried on. With every step, the air turned thicker, pressing against his lungs. Voices whispered in the paths beside his. No, it was a single voice, speaking different words, depending on which direction Síomón tilted his head.

Time fractures.

He could reenter time at the next intersection. Ó Dónaill’s calculations predicted a narrow crack, corresponding to the prime number pair. Twin primes, he called them.

But Ó Dónaill had stolen his theories. Borrowed them for his own research, he called it. Or had he simply refined the formulae and shared them with Síomón and Gwen? Síomón found it harder to remember which version was true. The voices distracted him, and the pressure had grown almost unbearable, drilling into his temples.

Panicked, he stumbled forward. He heard a roaring ahead, a cataract of time, spilling through the cracks into the world. If only he could reach it before he died from the agony. That was how Úna had died. And Paul. And …

He fell through the tunnel’s diaphanous walls into a muddy clearing. A cold wind swept through his clothes. His hands stung from the fall. Strange noises and images assailed him. Raucous cries echoing overhead. Misshapen shadows blotting out the sun. Then, in the midst of strangeness, a human voice.

“Síomón? Is that you, Síomón?”

Síomón twitched and spun around. He saw her as a stranger might, a fair young woman, so lean that her bones seemed visible through her skin, her hair a tumble of gold, her eyes like the bluest of summer skies. She took another few steps toward him and spoke again, but all Síomón could think was that her skin must be warm to the touch. He wanted, needed that warmth, more than he could express. With an inarticulate cry, he rushed toward the young woman and tore at her clothes. She fought back, tearing at his face with her nails, but he was stronger than she was.…

Gwen. Oh dear God and Mhuire and Gaia. What have I done?