As soon as reality had coalesced into its normal solid presence around him, Alec realized that he'd been shot. It really hurt, but he couldn't just stay and wait for Escher's people to capture him. He pressed one hand against his bleeding forehead, grabbed the time travel device in his other hand, and rushed out of the antimatter lab.
He was starting to feel more than a little woozy, and some of the blood was getting into his eye. Head wounds tended to bleed a lot, right? That didn't necessarily mean it was serious.
Somehow, he managed to get out into the street without anyone stopping him. He wasn't entirely sure where he was going. The headache was growing worse, and by now there was blood dripping down his neck.
Just a little further, so they wouldn't find him, he really didn't want the device to end up in Escher's hands… Was his vision starting to fade or was that just the gore obscuring his sight?
A few passers-by had stopped to stare at him.
Next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees, throwing up. This wasn't right, he had to save Emily! He tried to pull himself together and stand up again, but just thinking was getting more and more difficult, let alone coordinating his movements.
Someone was calling for an ambulance. That probably wasn't a bad idea right now.
It had been a very long day, but finally, Lucas was in custody, and Kiera had the rest of the pieces of the time travel device. She almost didn't dare to think about what it meant - she was holding the keys to going back home! She was on her way to hand them to Alec when her phone rang.
"Agent Cameron? It's Ann Sadler. I'm sorry if this is a bad time, but I just got the news and I thought that since you're his friend and you're with the police, maybe you could tell me more about what happened -"
"Slow down, Mrs. Sadler. What're you talking about?"
"Alec, of course! I though you knew. They just contacted me from the hospital."
"What? I'm sure there's been some kind of a misunderstanding. Please hold for two seconds."
Kiera took the cell phone from her ear, covered the microphone, and contacted him with her CMR. "Alec? Alec, are you there? Alec, is everything all right?"
She had to wait all of five seconds before he answered, "Yeah, yeah, of course I'm here, what's up?"
"You might want to listen in on this," she told him, and picked up her phone again. "Mrs. Sadler? He's all right, he's in his lab. What exactly did they tell you?"
"I don't understand," Alec's mother said, sounding confused. "They called me and said that he's in the hospital, that he's been shot. They had his wallet and his phone, that was how they knew to contact me in the first place. They described what he looks like and it sounded just like him. How's that possible if he's not actually there?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, but I'll go there and sort this out. Don't worry, he's fine, he really is. You can call him to check for yourself."
"All right, thank you. I'll do that."
"Okay, that was weird," Alec said as soon as Kiera had disconnected the call. "What do you think is going on?"
"I have no idea, but I'm going to find out."
Kiera's first guess was time travel, and when the doctor took her to see him, she knew she'd been right. If the unconscious young man in the hospital bed wasn't Alec, then he was using some camouflaging technique that was way beyond anything invented in this day and age. The latter explanation felt unlikely, though, especially since his belongings also matched Alec's. She scanned him, and saw nothing to suggest that it wasn't actually him.
"He was quite agitated and confused when they brought him in. The bullet only grazed his skull, but the impact was forceful enough to cause a cerebral contusion, which could lead to further complications," the doctor explained. "He wouldn't be unconscious otherwise, but we're going to keep him sedated until the morning, just to be safe. He was extremely lucky. An inch or two to the right and he'd be in the morgue instead of here."
"All right. Let me know when he wakes up, I want to ask him a few questions as soon as possible. Where, exactly, did they find him?"
"Kiera?" Alec said through the CMR link, sounding annoyed. "Kiera, the connection's glitching, the visual feed is a complete mess."
Alec had just been able to catch a glimpse of someone who looked exactly like him in the hospital when the connection started acting up. He'd never seen anything quite like it. It was as if another signal was coming through on the same frequency, but that shouldn't have been possible.
He heard someone enter the lab, looked up, and the explanation was instantly evident.
"Hello, Alec", Kiera said. Another Kiera. Two of him, two of her. Two signals from the exact same CMR messing up the system.
"What the hell is going on?" he asked her.
"I was going to ask you the same thing. You're the original Alec from this timeline, right?"
"As far as I know, yeah. And who does that make you?"
"The one that was sent to fix the mess your counterpart made."
"I don't think he's doing much of anything right now, he's in the hospital."
"Is he okay?"
"He probably wouldn't be there if he was, would he? Why is he even in this timeline? How did you do it? You used the device, didn't you? What was the power source?"
"Alec…" Kiera began hesitantly. "I guess there's no point in keeping the truth from you. In our timeline, Emily died. You traveled back to save her, and the entire timeline collapsed. The Freelancers sent me after you, to make sure that this timeline will stay on the right track."
"I - what? How does a timeline collapse, what does that even mean?"
Her answer didn't make much more sense than her initial explanation, but the details didn't really seem all that important to him, either. One sentence was stuck in his head as if it had been branded there in fiery letters.
Emily had died.
He couldn't let that happen in this timeline.
Emily had had an absolutely rotten day so far. She had to do something, get away from it all, from both Escher and Kellog - she couldn't care less about their power struggle, she just wanted to be free and to be sure that Alec was safe.
When she saw him in the lab, the haunted expression and the dark circles under his eyes, even more pronounced than after his usual long night spent working on one project or the other, she figured his day hadn't been any better than hers.
"What's going on? Has something happened?" she asked him.
He walked to her and grabbed her in a hug. "I'm so glad you're here. It's a long story, and you wouldn't believe half of it."
"Are you going to tell it to me?"
"Maybe later," he said, looking more troubled and desperate than she'd ever seen him. "Emily, let's go on a road trip. I'm fed up with everything here."
"What? Right now?" She was taken aback, not least because that was pretty much what she had been planning on suggesting.
"Well, after I've finished this and we've picked up our stuff. We could just hop on a bus and go wherever it takes us?"
"Yes! I think that's the best idea I've heard in days, I'd love to go! But Alec, this really isn't like you. Is everything all right?"
"No, not really. I'd be better off if we were somewhere else."
Did it really matter why he wanted to go? She'd probably learn the truth about it later. He had his secrets, but so did she, and hers were pretty major. Maybe somewhere else, somewhere away from all this, they could both be completely honest with each other.
She would've been ready to leave that second, but he still had some work to do - something about separating two overlapping signals, if she understood it correctly.
"They want to keep me here for at least another full day," Alec groaned to the second Kiera to visit him today - the one from his original timeline, the one who'd gone through all the same things that he had, and then some. Her description of the Freelancer prison and her dealings with them had been really impressive.
"I'd listen to them if I were you. Don't even think about running away," Kiera said, sounding quite serious. "You look like death warmed over, you know, and you do actually have a brain injury, even if it's a minor one."
"Funny, the other Kiera just told me the same thing in almost the same words."
They both did have a point, too. He didn't exactly feel healthy - even with all the pain medication, he still had a vague headache, and he felt way more tired than he would have expected after the longest night's sleep he'd had in ages. Still, even if he knew she was right, he didn't like it one bit.
"I didn't come here to just lie in bed and watch things unfold exactly like they did in our timeline."
"You won't have to, I think we've already caused some major changes just by being here."
"How can you be sure? Today is…" he paused to sort his thoughts. What would happen today? He knew the date for yesterday, so - oh no! "Kiera, it's today, she dies today! And before that, Travis attacks the lab and takes the suit. We have to do something!"
"Alec, you don't have do anything, okay? Just stay here, and get better. I'll handle this."
"Hurry, then! Go on!"
As soon as she was gone, he followed suit. Standing up made him feel horribly dizzy, but it settled after a while.
This very day was why he'd traveled back in time in the first place. No way he was going to just wait it out and see what would happen.
Kiera was torn between what the Freelancers expected of her, that she should keep things the way they were supposed to be, and helping Alec, but in the end, the feeling that she had to do something won. Both she and the Freelancers had played their parts in Emily's death in the other timeline, after all.
She drove as fast as she could, rushed into the lab, and - she was too late.
Travis was already there, holding Emily by the neck. When Kiera ran in, he looked up, his eyes flashing.
"I told you not to call for help!" Travis yelled at Alec. "I told you what would happen if you did."
"No, no, no, no, I'll do it, I'll do everything you ask for, just don't -"
With a horrific, sickening crack, Travis snapped Emily's neck, and dropped her to the floor without even looking at her. "I keep my promises. You're next, Sadler."
Alec fell on his knees to grab hold of Emily's lifeless hand. "Go on and kill me, then, I don't care. Good luck finding someone else to reactivate your CMR."
The whole thing had happened too fast for Kiera to act, but now she had her gun trained on Travis. "Don't even think about it," she said, and fired.
Travis leaped aside, and ran towards her, firing back. When he got close enough, up the stairs, they went hand to hand. Even without a suit, his strength matched hers.
He managed to knock her down, and that brief pause in their struggle was enough for him to turn and point his gun at the lab below. He fired three shots in quick succession.
When she got up, he fled towards the door. He didn't have what he had come for anyway, so it didn't really matter. She was too shocked by what she saw to go after him.
She walked slowly down the stairs, tears in her eyes.
Alec and Emily were lying in a heap on the floor. He was facing down, her lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling, his blood staining her face. Travis had fired three times: once in the head, twice in the back. Kiera didn't need a scan to verify that he was just as dead as she was.
A clatter and a muffled sob from above made Kiera look up. Alec, the one from her timeline, still wearing hospital clothes, blood seeping through the bandage around his head, was sitting on top of the stairs, crying.
In the year 2056, Alec gazed out of the observation room, at the gleaming space ship filling the massive hangar. Building it had been an incredible feat with raw materials running so low, not to mention the constant sabotage attempts by competitors and the latest incarnation of Liber8, but they had pulled it off. Out of all the things he had helped create during his life, this was without doubt the most amazing, and the most beautiful. The first building blocks had been laid down long ago by his father – the antimatter technology had been originally developed by Piron, and although they had had their grudges, Alec had eventually inherited the company from him and merged it with SadTech.
Deep down, he felt disheartened that he couldn't join the mission himself, but he had to face the facts: he wasn't a young man anymore. Space travel was better left to those who had more years ahead of them, such as Jason, who had just turned thirty. It hadn't been an easy choice allowing his only son to participate, but Jason had been adamant about it, he was the most trustworthy person Alec could think of, and by any measure, he had been one of the best candidates.
They had put everything they had into this project. If it failed, SadTech would be done for, as would everyone else. The continuously escalating competition between the corporations, with the powerless governments failing to control it, had lead to a situation where they were so low on resources that the planet simply could not sustain them anymore. They had to solve this somehow, or the human race would not last another generation.
He had considered time travel, of course, but he did not find it an appealing option. He knew firsthand how uncontrollable it was. He had talked it through with both Kieras, and they had felt the same way.
It was better to look to the future than to the past.
