NICK
"Come on," Stephen said from where he stood by the door.

"Just a second." Cutter pulled his keys from his pocket and opened the locked drawer in his desk. It didn't contain much – Evelyn's ARC file, a few sentimental photos he kept hidden away from everyone, a letter from the university that he should have replied to ages ago, and four small samples of the material that made up the anchor around his wrist. They were all roughly spherical, smooth on the surface and cool to the touch; the biggest was the size of a fat marble, the smallest no larger than a pea. Cutter's gaze moved slowly over the antimetal, his fingers unconsciously brushing the bracelet on his wrist. It was beautiful in a very dark, strange kind of way. Cutter remembered what Connor had said: that the antimetal was like no element on Earth.

Remembering Connor's words jolted Cutter from his reverie. He picked up the smallest sample of antimetal and shoved it into his pocket to pass onto the lab team, then grabbed the papers they'd prepared and nodded at Stephen. "Let's go."

They walked in silence to where Stephen had parked; Cutter was still without a car. He'd been offered one on loan from the ARC, but he only ever used it for travelling to anomaly sites. "Can I ask you something?" Cutter said as they swung into Stephen's car. They'd already devised the unspoken rule that Connor was always to sit in the back seat.

"Of course," Stephen replied.

Cutter leaned against the windowsill as he tried to figure out a way to phrase it. "Claudia asked me it first, today," he began.

"Okay."

"She wanted to know if I thought Helen would be back."

There was a very long pause during which Stephen glanced over at Cutter, then stared out his own window the moment Cutter moved to return his gaze. "What did you tell her?" he asked eventually.

Cutter shrugged. "I told her it depends on what Helen wants."

Stephen nodded. "Which is?"

"I don't know." Cutter looked at the anchor around his wrist. "It's anyone's guess. I gave up trying to figure out what Helen wanted a long time ago; she changes her mind every day. She's fickle." He sighed. "Look, we know she wanted the company of someone with the aura so that she could travel to different universes through the anomalies. I don't know how many people with the aura there are on Earth, but if there are others and Helen wants one badly enough, she'll find them. But if she decides she wants the anchor, she'll come back. If she wants the ARC's research, she'll come back. If she just wants to make our lives hell a little bit more, she'll come back." He shrugged his shoulders. "I really don't know, Stephen."

"Then what makes you think I do?"

Cutter looked at him. "You know what."

Stephen grimaced. "Cutter, look, I..." He swallowed and turned away. "I know nothing more than what you do, all right? Helen and I... Well, I haven't seen her any more than you have over the past twelve years. I didn't know her any better than you did."

"That's evidently not true," Cutter said pointedly.

Stephen's face took on a pained expression, but he still didn't return Cutter's gaze. "Nick..."

"Forget it." As abruptly as he'd brought it up, Cutter dismissed the issue. He went through phases, on and off, of wanting to know exactly what had happened between Helen and Stephen and wanting to sweep it all under the carpet and never talk about it again. "Let's just hope she's done with us and decides to stay away."

Stephen nodded, and they remained silent until Connor joined them.

"About time," Cutter said, turning around in his seat to lecture Connor. He changed his mind when he saw Connor's expression, though; he looked as if he'd seen a ghost. "You all right?"

"What?" Connor stared at him, his eyes wide. "Oh. Oh, right. Yeah. Fine." He settled into his seat, hugging his laptop to his chest. Cutter frowned a bit, but didn't press him on it, and all three of them were quiet on the way home.

"I'm gonna read through this," Cutter said, waving the lab report as they got out of the car. "Connor, I'll talk it over with you when I'm done."

By the time Stephen had readied dinner, Cutter still hadn't managed to read all the way through the report. His head was buzzing with numbers and statistics and strange facts about antimetal all through their meal, so it was a quiet one. Connor was heavily distracted by something – Cutter assumed it was the lab report – and Stephen was tired out after the raptor chase the previous night. Though he'd had his prosthetic for several months now, he still didn't participate in many field missions. The only reason he'd helped with the raptors was because they'd been relatively closely contained in the football stadium.

"Connor," Cutter said when they were finished, "come to my room and talk through the report with me."

Stephen's spare room had been well and truly taken over by Cutter's presence. It was dominated by an enormous wooden desk piled high with papers. Butcher paper was tacked over all over the walls and covered in scribbles, calculations, and diagrams. He'd unpacked a few of the boxes Stephen had kept from his house; almost every flat surface that was not taken up by paper had a model or a fossil sitting on top of it. "Whoa," Connor said, looking around in awe. "Do you ever sleep?"

"More than some people," Nick muttered. He picked up the lab report from his desk and held it out to Connor. "How much of this is actually useful to us? Realistically?"

"Um..." Connor took the papers and shuffled them nervously. Cutter took a seat at the foot of his bed; Connor went to claim the desk chair, but it was covered with still more paper. Perching nervously against the desk, Connor said, "It depends on what you mean by 'useful'. I mean, a lot of it's really interesting stuff –"

"You know what I mean," Cutter said. "How much of it is going to help us with the anomalies?"

Connor grimaced. "Well, that's the thing. We really don't know. Stuff like specific heat capacity and molar mass could end up being useful once we figure out what the anomalies actually are, but..."

"But until we know more about the anomalies themselves, none of this means anything." Cutter let out a frustrated sigh. "We're getting nowhere with this. I thought the antimetal research would actually help us learn something, but it feels like we know just as little as ever. If only Evelyn..." He trailed off and gave another sigh, but this one was not born of frustration. "No point wishing, I guess," he said.

Connor tentatively held out the report, and Cutter accepted it with a smile. "Thanks, Connor. I'll finish up reading this and talk to you more about it tomorrow. Oh – before i forget." He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the pieces of antimetal. "Give this to the lab team. Tell them that it's the last piece they're going to get, so for God's sake, don't blow it up this time."

Connor nodded, closing his fist around the strange material. "Will do." He walked to the door before hesitating and turning again. "Um... Professor? Can I ask you something?"

"Mhm," Cutter murmured, not looking up from the report.

"It's, um..." Connor cleared his throat. "It's about girls."

Cutter was properly shocked at that. He looked up at Connor with a bemused expression on his face. "Connor," he began, "you're asking me for advice about girls? I don't exactly have the best track record, you know. My wife left me eight years into our marriage to go day-tripping through every era of the world's past."

"Oh. Right." Connor winced. "Um... Should I try Stephen, then?"

Cutter tilted his head. "You could try, I suppose. I don't know if I would personally trust his judgement."

Connor opened his mouth to ask, remembered, and closed it again quickly with a blush. "Right," he said again. "Sorry. I'll, um... I'll just ask someone else. Later, I mean. Don't worry about it."

Cutter nodded slowly, and watched him go with a small smirk.

He lay awake at night, as had become his habit. Also by habit, he was thinking of Claudia. This time, he was wondering what she was doing right at that moment: whether she had managed to fall asleep by now, only to wake from another nightmare about Helen. His wife. The guilt threatened to overwhelm him. He was used to blaming himself for things he could never have prevented... and he was used to having Claudia tell him it wasn't his fault, just as Stephen had done when Helen had disappeared. Now, she could only tell him not to worry about her – which he did, of course, incessantly.

He stared up at the ceiling, the only surface in his room that wasn't covered with scribbled notes and diagrams. The plain, white plaster was blank and quiet, a stark contrast to his racing thoughts. He was angry at Helen, worried that she'd make another appearance. He'd promised Claudia once that she would never reappear to cause them trouble. He'd been proven wrong, so he wasn't going to promise that again.

What Cutter wondered now was what he would do if Helen did return. The frightening thing about the anomalies and Helen's superior knowledge of them was that there was no way of keeping her away forever. They could arrest her and send her to prison, but it would be difficult to explain the imprisonment of a woman who had been legally dead for several years, and Cutter had a feeling that a jail cell wouldn't hold her for long. There was really only one long-term way to keep Helen from interfering, and Cutter knew that he would never be able to go through with it. Helen herself had said as much when he'd held a gun to her in the yard months ago: You wouldn't have the guts.

It was true. He could never kill anyone, including – perhaps especially – his wife. He knew nobody would ever ask him to; Claudia would probably have been shocked if he'd told her he'd even been thinking about it. That meant, though, that they would have to constantly be looking out for her. She's got all of time and an infinite number of parallel universes to explore, he thought. Maybe, just this once, she'll leave us alone.

He hoped it was true. He doubted it was.