Malice, page 24
…
That evening, Bandit and I sit cross-legged inside our unit, a woven mat all that separates us from the cold, cold earth. Our furnishings are simple, utilitarian. A single mattress on the cave floor, a small sink carved into the rock. Our dinner consists of a bit of rice and even less potato. I think of the bento boxes I made for Archie, once upon a time, and my hands shake.
I can’t eat. My stomach growls, but I can’t bear the thought of putting any food in my mouth, not when my brother will never take in sustenance ever again.
The six-month-old on my lap doesn’t have the same problem. Hope, we named her. Ironic for the offspring of parents called Bandit and Alice. Fitting for the cramped, desolate conditions in which we live.
Hope wraps my hair around her fists, and tears spring to my eyes. Not because it hurts. But because she never met her uncle. And now, she never will.
Bandit scoops up a spoonful of rice and feeds our daughter.
“He was a bad man, an evil man.” I test out the words in the air. It’s what everyone’s been saying about the Maker. “He killed millions of people. Is it…wrong…of me to mourn him?”
“He was your brother,” Bandit says simply. “You loved him.”
“Still do,” I whisper, patting Hope’s mouth with a napkin. I bury my nose against her hair and breathe. She smells like everything that’s fresh and clean. Laundry blowing in the breeze, a pot of flowers on the front porch. But those are analogies from the old world, the one we lived above the ground. Try as I might, I can’t conjure up an equivalent in our new, tunneled life.
“I wish there was something we could’ve done,” I say. “Maybe, if Mom never abandoned us, things would’ve turned out differently.”
“Maybe if he never met Charlie,” Bandit offers.
“Maybe if Lalana hadn’t broken his heart.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t married me.” Bandit picks up my hand and holds it against his heart. The familiar thump-thump, the one I’ve been listening to for five years, almost makes me break down again. “Maybe then, our world wouldn’t be what it is today.”
“No,” I say fiercely. “If I never married you, then little Hope wouldn’t exist. And I wouldn’t trade her life for anything.”
An hour later, after Hope is tucked into her crib, which is just a hollow boulder lined with a piece of mattress and the softest blankets we could find, a knock sounds on our unit. Bandit opens the door, and a strikingly beautiful woman walks inside. Her dark eyes are as luminous as the stars that we no longer see.
“You may not remember me,” she says to me. “But ten years ago, we went to school together. We met briefly at the Newhouse awards banquet. Your brother was honored as one of the most brilliant young minds of our nation. So was your husband.” She winks at Bandit. “And so was I. My name is Cristela Ruiz, and I’m brilliant. So brilliant that we may be able to help each other. Together, we can change the fate of our world.”
She smiles, and for the first time since my brother closed his eyes on the dusty ground, an emotion rises in my heart. One tiny flutter, no stronger than a subtle stir. And yet it has the power to change lives. Futures. Worlds.
I know it’s changed mine.
Hope.
Chapter 48
I’m back in the void, floating in deep space. I must be getting better at existing in this realm, because there’s no disorientation. No flailing of limbs that don’t exist.
I have confirmation now. More explicit proof than I ever wanted that my brother is the Maker. As much as that pierces my incorporeal heart with an incessant onslaught of daggers, I need more.
How? How did we get from stopping Archie to killing Bandit? Why didn’t we dissuade him from going to Harvard? Why didn’t we prevent Mom from abandoning us?
Why didn’t we just…gulp…kill Archie himself?
I scan the images of my time stream as they slide by, faster and faster. I dip in and out of the river, and small pieces of the puzzle jump out at me.
Bandit and Cristela and I sabotaged his application to Harvard. We interrupted his mentorship with Charlie. We tried to convince Lalana to fall in love with my brother, and when that failed, we set him up with other women.
But my mom’s abandonment—we couldn’t touch. That event didn’t happen in the original time stream, Cristela explained. That branch was created by other forces, other actors from the future. For laws of science that I can’t understand, that incident is off-limits to us.
And then I see it. The scene that addresses our attempt to kill my brother. This moment, I want to understand deeply. This decision, I have to live fully.
Taking a figurative breath, I leap into the river with both metaphorical feet.
…
“I will throttle her.” I pace the tiny floor in our residential unit. My feet slap against the stone, threatening to wake Hope, whom I just got to sleep in her carved rock crib. But I can’t bring myself to care. “So help me, I will reach my hands through the black void, wrap them around my younger self’s neck, and choke her until there’s no breath left.”
“Now, now.” Bandit steps directly in my path. “That’s my wife you’re talking about. One whom I love very much. No matter how old she happens to be.”
I lower my forehead onto his chest, and for a moment, we just stand there, breathing.
“How was I ever that stubborn?” I mutter. “How did you put up with me all these years?”
“Believe me, it’s been a challenge,” he says, his lips twitching.
I smile—almost. Too much is unsettled. Too much is at stake.
“She just won’t kill Archie.” I pound my fists against his chest. “No matter how I explain to her. Not when we showed her the burn victims. Not when I told her that he was already dead, here in the future. Not even when I withheld the name of the target and let her reach her own conclusions.”
“So we keep trying.”
“We’ve been trying.” I take a deep breath and look into his face. Deep circles rim his eyes, and his always handsome face is too thin. As a doctor, he’s closer to the devastation. He visits the patients in the trauma bays every day, studying the disease in hopes of finding a cure. Witnessing that much pain, that much sorrow, day in and day out takes a toll.
My heart twinges. “I have three trips left. You and Cristela have both reached your limit, so this is it. Our last shot to save humanity.” My shoulders droop. “I hate to say it, but our chances don’t look good.”
Hope cries out, and Bandit scoops her out of the crib, cradling her as he sways back and forth, a tuneless hum on his lips. The burn that originated on her forehead has spread to her limbs and covers her entire torso.
By now, we’ve all been infected with the virus, and our only recourse is to stay underground. But the caves aren’t foolproof. Cracks form in the rock, and UV radiation seeps through. The walls of Hope’s day care were tragically compromised—and now we’re dealing with the consequences.
“She’s worse today,” I say. “She doesn’t gurgle anymore. Hasn’t smiled in a week.”
“We can’t lose faith.” He fixes his eyes on her tiny nose, her delicate but well-defined lips. “That’s all we have left.”
How can I not?
Every hour that I walk with my daughter in our cramped living quarters in an attempt to soothe the shivers that wrack her body, I die a little more. My heart gets a little harder. When the day comes that I lose her altogether, all that will be left is a blackened mass that disintegrates upon impact.
“I don’t know how I’ll keep on living when she’s gone,” I admit.
Bandit looks up sharply. “Don’t say that, Alice. You’ve lost her before, and you survived it. You can do it again.”
I frown. “What are you talking about? I’ve never lost her. She’s right here.”
He doesn’t speak. Hope has quieted, and he sets her in the crib, smoothing her sleep sack so that it lays unwrinkled beneath her. He then takes my hands solemnly, his callused palms scraping against my knuckles, and we sit cross-legged on the woven mat.
“When you travel through the black void, have you ever seen the twisted ropes of our time stream?” he asks, playing with my fingers.
“Yes, of course.” I clear my throat. “They kinda smack you in the non-face.”
“So you’ve noticed how the smaller threads break off from the central strand before weaving back in?”
I nod, in spite of my confusion. We’re not talking about time travel. We were discussing Hope. Where is he going with this?
His fingers stop moving. “Every time we travel to the past, a thread breaks off the original time stream. So far, the disruptions have been small, the ripples so minute, that the thread eventually rejoins the central rope. What this means is that although some details may change, our overall world looks the same.” He takes a breath. “What we want is for the threads to break off completely, to form an entirely new rope, because we need a world that is entirely different. A world where the Sun Virus doesn’t exist, where two-thirds of the population hasn’t perished.”
I’m still following, still waiting to see where this explanation leads. Hope shifts in her sleep, her breath coming out in a soft sigh, and my eyes flicker to our daughter.
“There are some events in our central thread that are unshakable. Take, for example, our love.” His thumb flicks over the back of my hand. “We’ve interfered with the past; we’ve tried to prevent ourselves from falling in love. But in every instance, we end up together. Even when we refused to officially marry, we become important to each other in a way that ultimately disappoints Archie. I believe, in every iteration of this timeline, that you and I will always find each other. We’ll always love each other.”
“That’s a nice thought,” I murmur.
Bandit drops his head. I want to hurry him along, to tell him to get to the point, but something stops me. A growing anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
“Other events are more fragile,” he says eventually. “Less…permanent, I guess you could say. Such as the exposure to the sun by a little girl.”
“What are you saying?” I ask faintly.
He looks at me, an unspeakable sorrow in his eyes. “Every time we travel to the past, we disrupt the universe enough that it changes the integrity of the cave walls. In a few lucky worlds, Hope manages to dodge the sun’s rays altogether. Other times, she succumbs to the burns later in life. But in approximately half the worlds…” He stops. Swallows hard. “She’s exposed earlier. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I yank away my hands, looking at the crib. A sliver of Hope’s ear peeks out from under her knit hat. The most perfect lobe in the history of time. “Are you saying in some of those worlds, Hope doesn’t survive?”
“Yes,” he says softly. “Between the two of us, we’ve traveled to the past thirty-seven times. Thirty-seven times, we’ve disrupted the universe. Five of those times, Hope lives a long—albeit limited—life underground. Twelve other times, she grows up to at least see adulthood. And the rest of the time, she…dies. As a child. Before she ever gets a chance to live.”
The truth crashes over me. I can’t breathe. I can’t claw my way to the top of this wave. Hope. My Hope. The candle of my heart. The breath and joy of my life. Gone. Extinguished.
I did this. By messing with the past, I destroyed the most important part of me. I did what I couldn’t get my younger self to do.
I. Killed.
Even worse, I killed my own baby. Over and over again. I lift my eyes to Bandit, to the only anchor I’ve ever had in this chaotic world. He’s crying. No, he’s sobbing, in a way I’ve never seen, tremors rattling his shoulders, silent tears streaking down his cheeks.
No similar moisture flows down my face. It’s like all my tears have been used up, erased out of existence with the deceased versions of my baby. “How do you know? How come…I don’t remember?”
Except I do remember. I know that now. In the last few months, there’s been a deep loss inside me, a void similar to that realm between times. I never understood it, but now, that hole has a shape. It has a name. It’s filled with moments and laughter and lives—even if I’ve never experienced them.
He gulps at the air for several seconds before he can compose himself. “From the beginning, I had my suspicions, a deep foreboding that what we were doing could mess up our lives. The people we care about. But my worries were swept away with the urgency of our mission. Before my last jump, I confronted Cristela. She admitted the truth. She’s known all along what could happen if we disrupted the past. She knew that our interference might save some lives and destroy others. But she thought it didn’t matter because we wouldn’t remember.”
“She’s wrong,” I whisper, my voice cracking along with my heart. “It matters. Hope matters, no matter which parallel world she’s in.”
“I agree.” He wipes away his tears with the back of one hand. “That’s why, during my last jump, I couldn’t resist. I dipped into some of the alternate threads. The ones that broke off from the main time stream after our earlier trips.”
I freeze. “You saw Hope?”
He nods once.
My world narrows down to a single point. “Tell me.”
“It won’t help. Seeing other versions of our baby doesn’t allow me to sleep through the night. If anything, knowing makes it worse, because now I can put images to the nightmares that haunt me.”
“I don’t care,” I say fiercely. Nothing will keep me away from my child. Not his flimsy need to protect me. Not even time itself. “She’s my baby, too. I deserve to know what happened to her. What I did to her.”
He nods again. He knows me so well. He always knew I would insist. “She was four years old in the first thread I visited. A beautiful little girl with a gap between her front teeth. We knew we would never be able to fix it, but we didn’t mind. We thought the gap only added to her perfection. She had a pair of striped pajamas, with a shark on the chest, that she wore every day. That is, until the burns spread across her body. The wounds were so raw, so gaping, that even the brush of that soft fabric was too painful. She cried when we took them away. She thought she was being punished, and she promised that she would be a good girl again, if only we would give back her pajamas.
“In another thread, Hope was just a newborn when she was exposed. So small that she still fit on my forearm. You put those little mittens on her so that she wouldn’t scratch herself, and you cried so much that your tears fell on her face like rain. She would never feel actual rain, you told me. On account of us living underground. On account of her life being so short. So you were giving her that experience, in the only way you could.
“And then, there was the time she was eight years old and understood exactly what was happening to her—”
“Stop,” I say hoarsely. One of these days, I’ll listen to all of Bandit’s stories. I’ll write down every detail. If some version of my baby had to suffer through those atrocities, then the least I can do is hear the specifics. Embrace them. Keep the stories in my soul where they belong. Where they live now.
But at this moment, guilt and sorrow lacerate my heart, and each word rips the gashes a little more. Each sentence sprinkles the salt a little more liberally.
“You’re not to blame,” Bandit says. “We did this together. We did what we thought was right.”
I almost laugh. What is right, and what is wrong? In this world, morality doesn’t exist. There is no good decision. There are only the choices that we made. The ones we decided were the less of two evils. The ones we’ll bear forever on our souls.
“Say something, Alice,” he begs, pain lancing his words. “I’m sorry. Sorrier than I can ever say. I need to know you’re going to be okay. Please, Alice.”
I snap up my head. “Stop calling me that. She doesn’t exist anymore. Not after what I’ve done. Not after I killed Hope, over and over and over.” My voice breaks and then shatters. “I don’t deserve that name. Not now. Never again.”
He takes a shuddering breath. “What should I call you, then?”
There’s only one answer. Only one name that fits. Only one word I merit.
“Malice,” I say. “You can call me Malice.”
Chapter 49
I open my eyes. The exposed beams of the soaring living room ceiling stare down at me, and the leather sofa cradles my spine. Sunlight dapples over the lower half of my body, and a lemony-citrus scent tingles my nose.
I’m back in my seventeen-year-old body. Back where I have complete control over my limbs, where I’m the actor, not the observer, in my life.
Testing, I wiggle my toes. Swallow. Flex my fingers. Just as my older self did ten years in the future.
In an instant, the next events of Malice’s life rush through my mind.
Panicking and desperate, Bandit hatches a plan so wild that it might actually work: kill his younger self so that he and Alice never fall in love. Never disappoint Archie. They’ll break the chain of abandonments that Archie suffers, take away that final hurt that sends him over the edge.
They may have failed in the previous attempts to separate the two. But they would succeed if one of them was dead.
With only three trips left, however, they have to be strategic. They have to return to a time where they’ve already laid the groundwork. They have to trick young Alice, so that it appears like Bandit was the target all along. And they have to accomplish all of the above without giving their younger selves a chance to fall in love.
Shouldn’t be a problem, Bandit said. In high school, he was arrogance personified. She was closed off to dating. And then he said something that Malice would never, ever forget: “Sometimes even soul mates won’t fit together if they meet at the wrong age.”
They proceeded to execute their plan.
