The End Of Everything

“What are you doing here!” said Leura loudly.

“Keep it down would you, there could be others watching the house,” said Bowen Aeros, doing a quick sweep of the deserted street behind him, then pushing his way inside. “Better to talk undercover, and as fast as possible, I don’t think we have long.”

“You’re that madman, from the skyport,” stammered Tony, “how did you find my house? You can’t just come barging in here!”

“It’s okay dad, this is Bowen, he used to work with mum.” At Leura’s words, Tony lost what little colour was left in his face.

“So it’s true… are you here because of Raya? Has something happened to her?”

“Yes on both counts,” growled Bowen, “I’m here on her orders. She wants to see the twins.”

No one spoke. No one moved. Leura could hardly tell if she was even breathing anymore. All her suspicions about why Valkyr was here, and what she was looking for, had just been confirmed.

Then Wentworth spoke, almost too faintly for them to hear. “She’s not… still in Jotunheim?”

“No kid, she’s free as a bird,” answered Bowen with a grin. “Got her hands on some valuable contraband while locked up, wasn’t sure how it happened at first, but once she was out it didn’t take her long to access the memory banks of those pretty little nanobots.”

Sol gasped, and from inside her robes Stardust appeared, taking its usual spot on her shoulder and transitioning through different jagged and rough shapes, clearly distressed.

Bowen’s grin widened. “Don’t worry, your missing piece is safe and sound. In fact, it’s waiting to reunite with you, right now. Just as Raya is.” He surveyed the Fall family, from Tony’s confused and anxious face, to Wentworth’s astonished one, and finally to Leura’s.

Leura had not thought about the zero point blade, or the nanobots that covered it, since the day she lost them in Jotunheim. They hadn’t been much use to her, so she never imagined they would be much use to Raya either. It was the dice of serendipity that had saved them that day. But if what Bowen said was true, then everything she’d done, everything she’d risked, hadn’t been for nothing. She’d failed to rescue Raya, but she’d given her the tools she needed to rescue herself.

Bowen watched as Leura’s face transitioned through shock, disbelief, and finally into a grim and fiery determination.

“Take us to her. Now.”

Bowen chuckled, “that’s the plan kid.”

“Wait!” said Tony, struggling to process all this. “We can’t just follow him off to lord knows where… how do we know this isn’t some sort of trap? What proof do we have that Raya’s really free?”

“She thought you might say that, and she said to tell you she’s sorry you never got the time together you always wanted, but to remind you that sometimes, you have to make the time. So what’ll it be Tony, you making it now or what?”

A look of understanding spread across Tony’s face, like a memory long buried had suddenly made its way to the forefront of his mind. “Okay, we’ll go with you,” he said in a trembling voice.

“Excellent! And you better come too little Solarius, can’t leave a loose end like you waiting around here for the CI to find.” Bowen went back to the front door and peered outside. “Still clear, but for how long it’s hard to say. We’ve gotta get out of here, and fast. Stay right on my heels, and don’t take anything with you.” With that he slipped out into the night, with Leura right behind him and the others scrambling to catch up.

Leura’s thoughts were racing by so fast she could barely make sense of them. The blade - Jotunheim - Bowen - it was all a blur, and she struggled desperately to grasp the one thought that actually mattered… her mother was free… and she was going to see her… but was she ready to hear what Raya had to say? Suddenly the same pain that had driven her recklessly into Jotunheim came flooding back. What if she just confirms everything Bowen said? What if she really had chosen her mission over her children?

Bowen led them straight past Tony’s car and out onto the quiet road.

“Aren’t we driving?” asked Tony.

“Course we are, but not in that thing,” answered Bowen with a judgemental look at Tony’s old Ford Focus. “Mine’s much faster.”

About halfway up the street, they came to a large and oddly shaped car covered in a thin grey sheet. Bowen pulled it off to reveal a sleek looking passenger drone, made from a shiny black material. It had two sets of propellers at the front and back, sitting low to the ground with the main body of the drone resting between them. Bowen opened up the door and they piled inside to find a comfortable seating area with two long lounges facing each other, and windows on all four sides.

As soon as they were seated, Bowen hit a few buttons on a wall-mounted screen, and the propellers powered on, making surprisingly little noise. Then the drone shot upwards, disappearing amongst the darkness of the night sky.

“It’s not a long journey,” said Bowen, as they all felt the tilt of the drone telling them it was now moving forwards rather than straight up.

“Are we going to Dials, Springs & Pendulums?” asked Wentworth.

“Course not,” growled Bowen, “that’s a CI time capsule, they log everything and send the data off to the Board, we’d be much too easy to track. Besides, we don’t need a time capsule where we’re going. We just need the right coordinates.” He looked back at the screen which was showing a complex sequence of numbers that kept changing and clearly meant something to Bowen who gave a satisfactory grunt. “We’re getting close. This journey isn’t so much about distance through space. It’s the distance through time that’s the problem.”

Suddenly the drone came to a halt. The numbers on the screen stopped changing and turned green. It was hard to tell in the dark, but Leura thought she could see the ocean far below them.

“Right then, we’re going to be doing this in a few phases,” explained Bowen. “I’ve mapped out our route, this point should be free and clear for us to pass through without the risk of coalescing.”

“Without the risk of what?” asked Tony, alarmed.

“Arriving somewhere that isn’t empty,” said Leura grimly, and left it at that.

“Alright, brace yourselves, we’re taking big leaps here.” Bowen closed his eyes and a fierce look of concentration came over him. The drone collapsed all around them with a deafening crunch and when the world sprung back they were all temporarily blinded by the light.

“Sorry, should’ve warned you about that,” said Bowen, shielding his eyes from the bright sunlight streaming in through the windows. Leura blinked the tears out of her eyes, then gazed in wonder at the view all around them.

They were clearly in the Expansionist era, though much further ahead than Leura had ever been before. To their left was the city, spanning endlessly as far as her eyes could see. It rose out of the water like a single landmass, made from beautiful glass towers of every shape and size imaginable. The air was filled with flying crafts, far more advanced than their own, though none were as far out from the city as they were. In the sky above them, Leura could see colossal shapes in the atmosphere, and realised with a burst of wonder that they were space stations, orbiting earth like artificial moons.

“Alright, phase two,” said Bowen as he finished adjusting his timedial, then the beautiful city disappeared with another thunderous crunch.

The light was coming from behind the city now. It was still daytime, but felt like late evening. Even though the sun was very low, it had a piercing brightness to it, and seemed to cover too much space over the horizon. But no one was looking at the sun.

The city they’d seen standing so tall and beautiful just moments ago was now a ruin. Black smoke was still billowing out of many places among the broken remains of the buildings. It looked like the scene of a recent battle, on a scale that Leura couldn’t quite imagine. The ocean below them had greatly receded, and had a green tinge to it that made Leura think of disease and rot. Looking up, she saw nothing in the sky. The space stations had either left, or been destroyed.

“One more to go,” said Bowen softly, and the ruined world vanished.

The first thing Leura noticed was the sky.

It was tinted a deep shade of red, making everything look like it was too hot to touch. Then she realised just how hot she actually was. Even inside the drone, the air was suddenly so dry and warm that it hurt to breathe. She was used to hot days growing up in Australia, but nothing like this.

“Welcome to the end of the world,” said Bowen.

The drone began to move again, heading to the left and down, although what it was aiming for Leura couldn’t tell. There was no city anymore, and no ocean either. There was nothing but a barren desert in every direction. Nothing left in the world but sand and dust.

Still, the drone seemed to move with a purpose, and they landed on the dry earth a few minutes later.

“Come,” said Bowen, “we’ll need to move quickly, you don’t want to spend too much time out here. The sun is far less friendly than you’d remember. Old age, you know, happens to us all.” He leapt out of the drone and the others followed. Leura felt like she was standing underneath a roaring furnace. Bowen only needed to walk a short distance before a pair of sliding doors opened on the ground in front of him, revealing a stairwell that went straight into the earth. “Much cooler underground,” he said as he disappeared down them.

With every breath getting more and more painful, no one hesitated to follow.

As soon as they were inside the entrance closed back up, and the temperature immediately dropped to something comfortable. The stairwell was lit by bright points of light along the ceiling, and the stairs themselves began to move like an escalator, bringing them down into the depths even faster.

Leura had seen animations of bunkers like this, in the Hall of Creation. She knew they must be one of the last places humans could still live in the entire solar system, now that the dying sun had scorched the surface of every planet and moon. She thought of how Raya had escaped from being buried in ice, just to come here and be buried in sand. Would she still look like the half starved woman in that icy pit? Had she simply traded one type of hell for another?

Leura gave her head a shake, trying to clear away the thought. Whatever this place was, it was far better than Jotunheim, because here she would actually be able to speak to Raya. To finally hear her story. She could feel her nerves rising. The anticipation of gaining all she’d ever hoped for, since the day she first held Raya’s timedial, was becoming unbearable. Her mother would not let her down, not after everything they’d been through to find her. She pushed all doubt and fear into the back of her mind. She was moments away from having her mother back. She would not let anything stop her now.

The stairs led them to a large hangar, almost as large as the atrium of the Great Library. It was filled with all sorts of machines that looked like they hadn’t worked in years. But on the far side of the hangar, a large space had been cleared. A group of people were busy working around a strange looking machine. It sat on a steel platform about three feet above the ground. It was a perfect sphere made from a pale silver material, and about as big as a truck, with powerful looking rocket thrusters embedded evenly across its entire surface, giving the impression that it could move in any direction.

One of the people working on the machine looked across the hangar and noticed Leura and the others. They stopped what they were doing and ran towards them, sidestepping the broken objects that littered the hangar, their long silvery-blonde hair flowing behind them like a cape.

Leura realised she was holding her breath but couldn’t seem to take in any air. Her heart was beating like she’d just finished one of Istros’s hard training sessions. There was a white noise ringing in her ears, almost like tv static. She was vaguely aware she was having some sort of panic attack, but all she could do was stand there, gripping Wentworth’s arm so tightly her fingers turned white, and watch as her mother came sprinting towards her.

Raya skidded to a halt on the metal floor a few metres in front of them. Her eyes danced between Leura, Wentworth, and Tony. She was crying silently. Not sobbing, but letting streams of tears run down both sides of her face. Her hair was shorter and cleaner than Leura had seen it in Jotunheim, but her face looked a little more aged, mostly because of how tired she seemed. She had large dark bags under each eye, like she’d been working non-stop for many weeks. She was wearing a thick grey trench coat and sturdy workers’ boots.

Tony was the first to break the silence. “Raya.” He said it almost like he was asking her a question.

Raya just nodded, her tears flowing even heavier. Then she leapt forward and threw her arms around all three of her family at once, drawing them into a cramped hug, the first they’d had since the day the twins were born.

At first, they were all too shocked to respond, but the longer Raya held them, the more they gave in to the moment, and soon they were holding onto her as tightly as they could, tears streaming down every face and leaving wet patches all over Raya’s coat.

It was the single happiest moment of Leura’s life. She felt like she’d plucked it straight from one of her fantasies, and turned it into reality. Even her father seemed a changed man with Raya by his side. She was the missing piece that made each of them whole. Without her they’d always felt fractured, just individuals who happened to share a home. With her they felt united, greater than the sum of their parts. Raya made them a family.

Leura wasn’t sure how long they stayed like this. It could’ve been mere seconds, or it could’ve been a lifetime. Being held by someone you love so deeply and missed so terribly can interrupt the flow of time in ways no one understands.

Finally, Raya pulled herself away, and gazed teary-eyed at her family. “I suppose I owe you all an explanation,” she said. Leura soaked in every word she spoke like she was dying of thirst and her mother’s voice was a drink of pure spring water. “Come with me, and we’ll go somewhere we can sit down. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Raya led them across the hangar, past the people working on the silver sphere, and through a set of doors that led to a long hallway. There were many doors running along either side of the hall, but Raya took the first door on the right. Inside was a small living space. There were some couches and a bed, a little kitchen area and even a bathroom through a door in the corner. Everything looked old and weathered, but it was comfortable enough.

They took a seat on the couches. Leura, Wentworth, Sol, and Tony sat on the largest one, and Raya took an armchair across from them. Bowen stayed standing, closest to the door.

Raya still had tears in her eyes as she looked at them all, but when she spoke, her voice was much steadier than before. “I’ve dreamt about this moment for so long, but now that it’s here, I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe how big you both are… my little Leura, and my sweet Wentworth…” More tears ran down her face, and she took a long, deep breath to steady herself. “It’s nice to meet you too Sol, Bowen told me all about how you won the Temporal Tournament, you sound like quite the rider.”

Sol seemed stunned to be singled out like this, but quickly recovered. “It’s nice to meet you too. Sorry we couldn’t break you out of Jotunheim, we tried but, there was this bear…” She trailed off, but Raya laughed, a sweet and bubbly sound that filled Leura with warmth.

“You did more than try. I’m free, thanks to all of you.” Raya reached into her trench coat and pulled out the zero point blade. It no longer had the golden sheath of nanobots. Instead the blade was covered by a thick, dark substance that looked like a living sludge. “This blade proved very useful in getting past the bear, and through the locked doors, but it was these clever little things that opened my cell for me, and dug the handholds I needed to climb out of that pit.” From within a second pocket, Raya took out a small clump of gold.

Sol gave a squeal of delight, and Stardust emerged from within her robes, bouncing up and down on her shoulder like an excitable puppy. Raya laughed again and held out the nanobots towards Sol, who took them eagerly, and watched with elation as they reunited with Stardust in her open palms.

“Take good care of those nanobots. I’ve worked with many over the years, but none with quite as much… life, as those,” said Raya, watching Stardust return to Sol’s shoulder with a loving smile.

“I’ve got something of yours too mum,” said Wentworth eagerly, reaching into his robe and pulling out the flickering crystal.

Raya stared at it for a full few seconds, a look of shock on her face that caused Wentworth to recoil as if he’d done something wrong. But she recovered quickly, smiling pleasantly at Wentworth. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you found that, since you found so many other things of mine. But that crystal belongs to… someone else… I thought they might be able to help me, but they couldn’t. You hold onto it darling. Maybe, after today, it’ll be useful again.”

A distant look came over Raya, and Wentworth tucked the crystal back into his robe, a little worried he’d upset his mother, but Leura also noticed a subtle look of relief on his face. He hadn’t wanted to give up the flickering crystal, any more than Leura would’ve wanted to give up the dice of serendipity. She felt them now, buried in a deep pocket within her robe. As always, they made her feel braver.

“How did you escape from Jotunheim?” Leura blurted out. She realised too late that these were the first words her mother had ever heard her say, and wished she’d said something better. “It’s just, we barely made it out alive and we had loads of help.” Her hand closed protectively over the dice.

“Well, they noticed someone had broken in quick enough, I guess you didn’t exactly leave everything the way you found it,” said Raya with a sly smile. “They came into the cell block. They wanted to search everyone to make sure we didn’t have anything we weren’t supposed to. I had nowhere to hide the blade, but those little nanobots came to the rescue. They burrowed right into the ice wall and sealed the hole back up again behind them. When the guards found nothing, they went back to ignoring us. I waited a little while, then I had the nanobots dig me a ladder in the ice, and unlock the grate. Getting past the bear was the real problem, it wasn’t what I wanted, but killing it was my only option. I made it quick at least, buried the blade right between its eyes. I used the nanobots to scout out the tunnels ahead of me and they guided me safely through to the outer wall. Jotunheim is protected with dampeners, so prisoners can’t time travel from inside, but once I was out I could travel freely again.”

Raya paused, a look crossed her face like she was remembering a great hardship she’d rather have forgotten. “Being on the run from the CI is not a pleasant thing. It wasn’t until I managed to make contact with Bowen here that I was finally able to rest and recover. And when I found out he’d been carrying on my work, well, it seemed like fate had handed me a second chance. Then I learned the full story, about how Bowen had got his hands on my hollow pad, and how the blade and nanobots really ended up in my cell, and I knew that fate had nothing to do with it… It was you. It was my children.”

Silence fell over the group as Raya looked lovingly between Leura and Wentworth. It was almost too much for Leura to bear. She’d fantasised about this moment more times than she could count, but actually being here, showered in affection from the mother she’d never had but always wanted, was overwhelming. Leura asked the first question that came to her mind, simply to break the silence.

“A second chance at what?”

Raya seemed taken aback for a moment. “What darling?”

“You said, you thought fate had given you a second chance. At what?”

Raya looked over at Bowen and gave him a nod. He reached into his rugged jacket and pulled out the hollow pad, turning it on by holding it up to his face. Then he handed it over to Raya, and she turned back to her family. “Well, that’s a bit of a long story… and I’ll need to start from the beginning.”

The surface of the hollow pad was emitting a faint blue light, and began projecting dozens of files a few inches into the air above it. They spun in a slow circle, the one at the very top of the screen expanded along with its title, before shrinking back down and being replaced by the next one in line.

Raya touched one of the files and it expanded to fill the whole screen, then opened to reveal lots of different documents inside. “Before you were born, I worked for an organisation called Continuum Intelligence. It was my dream, since my first day at Alexandria, and I’d worked my way up until I was put in a special team, run by the Director herself, Frey Thorisdottir. Our job was to protect the Final Fall, to preserve it, just the way it was, because we were told that if it ever changed, the world of the time travellers would end.” She paused while she opened up one of the documents. It floated in the air above the screen, like a glowing piece of real paper. “So you can imagine my surprise when I was ordered to shut down a small science lab during the early days of the Expansionists, nowhere near the Final Fall.” She held out the hollow pad towards Leura, who was sitting in the middle. Leura took it, and they all leant in for a closer look at the projected document above its surface. The twins and Sol read eagerly, but Tony was too distracted by Raya to do much more than stare at her with glassy eyes.

“What’s exotic matter?” asked Leura after a brief few moments of scanning the document.

“That… is exactly what I asked them,” said Raya. “What is this stuff you’re experimenting with, and why does the CI want you to stop? Well, they showed me, and what happened next changed the course of my life forever.” She paused again, and Leura caught the sadness behind her tired eyes. “It’s a type of matter you see, but unlike everything else in the universe, it has a negative mass instead of positive. Where everything else attracts, it repels. Kind of like anti-gravity. But the exotic matter itself wasn’t the important part, it was what they were doing with it.” She reached over and opened up a new document on the hollow pad. “They were running experiments to see what would happen if you sent exotic matter through a blackhole. The densest objects in the universe, where gravity is so strong it collapses into a singularity. But what happens if you throw some anti-gravity into it? Could it make it back out again? And where would it appear if it did?”

“What’s so dangerous about that?” asked Leura.

“Because,” said Wentworth, his eyes wide with excitement, “they were trying to turn blackholes into wormholes, weren’t they mum?”

Raya beamed at Wentworth. “Exactly. They thought exotic matter might be the key to travelling safely anywhere in the universe in an instant. A singularity collapses space in on itself, so going through it must mean that you’d end up in an entirely new part of space than where you started… They were inventing teleportation.”

A silence fell. Wentworth was poring over the document with feverish interest, but Leura was still struggling to grasp the bigger picture.

“Sooo, teleportation would be bad because…”

Raya leant forward, and spoke as gently as she could. “The Final Fall happened because our solar system was dying, and we had no way of leaving it. But this technology could’ve saved us. It could’ve let us spread out to other systems, to colonise the whole galaxy, maybe even beyond.”

Leura spoke slowly, scared to say the wrong thing. “So, this is why they sent you to Jotunheim?”

“Well, you’re jumping a little ahead, but this was certainly how it all started,” said Raya with a haunted look on her face. “But first, I did what I’d been sent there to do. I shut the lab down, and confiscated the research. I knew they must have failed anyway. Otherwise the Final Fall would never have happened in the first place. But I also knew that they must have gotten close, close enough that Frey wanted their research destroyed. She was afraid of them, and what they’d learned. More afraid than I realised. If I’d known…” Her hands began to tremble. It was subtle, Leura doubted anyone but herself even noticed. “When Frey saw their results for herself, she didn’t just destroy their research… She destroyed them. All of them… Every scientist who ever worked in that lab, every family member that lived on the compound with them. Every single person who’d been exposed to the research in any way… It was an order… I was still new and I… I couldn’t say no… we couldn’t say no…” Raya fell silent, and shared a tormented look with Bowen, who hung his head in shame. Her hands were trembling violently now. Hands that Leura had spent her whole life longing to hold. Could she still find warmth and love in them, knowing what they’d done on Frey’s orders?

“After that, I was never quite the same. That lab, and the work they’d done there, had burrowed itself deep into my mind, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get it out again. I was having doubts about Frey, the CI, the Board, all of it. I mean, what were we doing? Stopping the very people who might save humanity, instead of trying to help them? How could we justify what we’d done, what we were still doing, whenever we found a threat to our world?”

Raya reached out and swiped on the hollow pad, bringing up a different document. This one looked like blueprints for a huge spherical machine. They recognised it instantly.

“That’s the machine they’re working on in the hangar, isn’t it?” said Wentworth.

Raya nodded. “All of the original research was destroyed, but one copy survived. The one I made inside my own memory, when they showed me everything they’d been working on. And I used it to design this… It’s a vehicle. Built to take someone through the most dangerous place in the universe. A way to travel through the singularity of a blackhole, and make it out alive.” She stopped now, and looked at Bowen. Neither of them spoke, but a silent message passed between them, and when Raya continued, her voice had become strained. “I started building it, and slowly recruited some help. But I trusted the wrong person. Bowen tried to warn me about her but I didn’t listen. She was my friend, the closest one I had. But she had other loyalties, older and deeper than ours.” Raya’s voice wavered and the pain that clearly lingered was easy to see. Leura didn’t need her to say the name out loud. Somehow she knew she was talking about Valkyr. “I showed her what I was trying to accomplish, and she turned me over to Frey. But I had enough sense not to reveal who else I was working with, and Bowen was never caught. Since you helped him get his hands on our research again, he’s gotten closer than we ever were before. The vehicle is nearly ready. We’ve named it the Casimir, after the leading scientist from the lab. And very soon, it’s going to save the entire human race from extinction. That’s why I had Bowen bring you here. I wanted you with me. I wanted you to understand why I haven’t been there for you all these years, and I wanted you to see me succeed, to know that everything we went through was worth it. None of this would’ve been possible without you. You helped Bowen, and you freed me. You’ve become smarter and braver than I could’ve ever imagined.” She smiled at the twins, and they basked in the feeling, soaking up her approval like a desert soaking up the first drops of rain.

But a creeping feeling was working its way through Leura’s mind. She remembered the gruff voice of Bowen himself, when he told her that even if we could save humanity, we’d be dooming ourselves in the process. She still had not learned the one thing she wanted to know more than anything else… Her heart began to race as she looked at her mother, desperate to hear the truth, but terrified of what it might mean.

“But, I thought… It’s dangerous, isn’t it? I mean, what will happen to all the time travellers? What will happen to you?”

Raya and Bowen shared another knowing look.

“I wish Bowen hadn’t said as much as he did, I would’ve wanted to explain it to you myself, but he had no way of knowing I’d ever get that chance,” said Raya, her voice falling softer with each word, and Leura’s hopes fell along with it. She felt like her heart was being squeezed by an invisible hand inside her chest. “He told you the truth. If this works, if we save humanity from the Final Fall, it’s likely that the world of time travellers will end. Whoever comes next will be advanced in ways we can’t yet imagine, and they will see us for what we are… an existential threat that must be removed.”

Leura felt like the ground beneath her feet was crumbling away. So it was all true. Raya knew this whole time… She knew what she was sacrificing to stop the Final Fall. She hadn’t brought them here to be a family… She’d brought them here so that she didn’t have to face the end alone.

Raya looked from one pair of eyes to another, desperate to see understanding, even forgiveness. But all she saw was confusion and pain. She dropped down off the couch and onto her knees in front of them, reaching out and grabbing a hand of each of the twins. “Listen to me, time travellers should never have been made in the first place. It was selfish, and cowardly to hide in the past when they should have been trying to save the future. Countless lives could be saved. Humanity could live on until the end of the universe. All we need is a way to leave our solar system. To spread out further. Sacrificing the time travellers for that future is worth it. Our lives are not more important than the lives of all those people who’ve never had the chance to live. The truth is, we don’t know for sure what will happen, but whatever the price, we’re willing to pay it.”

“And now you must decide whether you are too,” said the gruff voice of Bowen from the doorway.

Raya flashed him a warning look. “Leave us for a moment Bowen, I need to talk to my family alone.” Bowen gave her a stiff nod and left the room.

Raya turned back to them, but before she could say anything, Tony spoke in a hoarse whisper, having finally snapped out of his stupor. “Risking your life is one thing, Raya, but risking our children’s lives…” Words failed him, and Raya’s face dropped in shame.

“Tony, I’m sorry I got you involved in all this. I wanted to stop, I really did. I wanted to give all this up. To forget the things I’d done… I came so close… the day we found out about the twins…” Her voice broke and her eyes lingered on Leura and Wentworth, until she forced them back to face Tony. “But this isn’t your world, and you don’t understand how broken it is. Time travellers act like we’re gods when we’re nothing more than cowards and thieves. We exploit the apocalypse for resources, make deals with the same corrupt trillionaires whose greed and laziness caused the world to collapse in the first place. We take over whole cities in the past, living off them like parasites, all while refusing to even try and fix the future. I’m so sorry for how much I’ve hurt you. You and the twins. But this is bigger than that. Bigger than us.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t understand, I know exactly how unfair the world is. It’s always been that way. All I have is my family. That’s what matters. There’s nothing bigger than that!”

“Stop, please.” Wentworth had his hands clamped over both ears. Raya and Tony moved at the same time to put their arms around him.

“I’m sorry little one. None of this is fair on you, I know that,” whispered Raya.

“Then let’s get them away from this, you and me,” said Tony frantically. “We’re their parents, they need us. Both of us.” Tony looked into Raya’s eyes and saw her willpower draining. “We need you Raya, and I know you need us too. That’s why you brought us here. Not to help you… but to stop you!”

“Tony, I…”

The sound of heavy footsteps interrupted them and Bowen strode back into the room. “Raya, they’re about to run a final diagnostics test and if it’s green lights across the board it’ll be ready. I thought you might want to be there for the results.”

Raya swayed a little where she knelt, like a boat lost at sea being battered by a storm on all sides. She looked back at her family. All eyes were on her, wide and afraid. She spoke to them, and each word seemed to bring back more and more of her resolve. “If this works, it’ll be the most important thing ever invented. It will eclipse the creation of time travellers in every single way.” She stood up and reached a hand down towards them. “Are you coming with me?”

Leura wanted to take her hand so badly she felt her own start to twitch. Instead, she put it deep into her robes, feeling the two small dice. She had a powerful desire to take them out and roll them, but something held her back.

Everything Raya had just told her was crashing around inside her mind. The endless future among the stars, a future that humanity had failed to reach, was still possible. Her mum had made it possible. And now humanity was going to get a second chance, and whether or not they deserved it, Leura wanted to give it to them. She knew it was the right thing to do. But like smoke slowly filling up a room, working its way into every available space and forcing her to her knees, Leura felt fear take hold of her. It wasn’t for herself, not even for Wentworth or Tony. It was for Raya.

She wanted to hate her mother for not choosing her family. To hurt her, and abandon her, just as she’d abandoned them. But she couldn’t. All she wanted was to stay by her side. In Leura’s mind, there was no cause in this world, no matter how good, that was worth losing her mother over.

When no one reached for Raya’s hand, it began to drop. “I understand,” she choked out, barely forming the words. “I hope you do too.”

“I won’t help you, Raya, but I won’t try to stop you either,” said Tony, his voice just as choked up. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out the pearly-white earphone that Valkyr had given him. “Here, take it.”

The atmosphere in the room was suddenly so tense that Leura instinctively held her breath.

“I told you not to take anything with you,” growled Bowen like a dog before a fight.

“Who gave you that?” asked Raya, her voice tremoring in a way that made Leura’s skin crawl.

“Valkyr did. But I’d never use it, you know I’d never -” Raya snatched the earphone out of his hand and threw it on the floor, stomping on it with all her strength. Then she crouched down and picked up the shattered remains, and held it out to Bowen.

“It could be any second now.”

“Not likely,” said Bowen with forced calmness, “Hard to trace a signal over that kind of distance. They’ll be off target by a fair margin, I’d wager, otherwise they’d be here already. But we need to move quickly.”

Raya nodded.

“What’s happened?” asked Tony in a muted voice.

Raya looked at him with the same fierce determination he’d seen on her face the night he lost her, all those years ago.

“They’re coming for us.”