# # #
Punch the Clock
At three a.m. on Monday morning, Felix placed a call to the director of the ALICE program in Geneva. I sat next to him on the couch in my living room while he did so. For whatever reason, he seemed to feel most comfortable with me, and I held his shaking hand as he waited to be connected to his cappo di tutti cappi.
"He doesn't even know who I am," Felix whispered during the pause. "We've never spoken."
"It's okay. You're covered, remember? We've got you covered. Let's just get this done. He can't touch you." I gave his hand a small squeeze and watched the dead-of-night shadows play across his nervous features. While I understood his unease, I couldn't imagine that anyone in charge of a project that was so visible and important would be willing to gamble on the chance of disaster.
The hand I held stiffened and gripped me tighter, and I knew that the director's secretary had switched the call over to her boss.
"Allo," a deep voice growled into the receiver, audible even from a distance of two feet.
Felix's voice was as shaky as the rest of him, but we'd prepared a script of sorts for him to read and he did his best to stick to it. Maybe it helped; after the first few words of greeting and questions, the voice on the other end of the receiver was dead silent while the man next to me spoke, so it was clear that Felix had the director's attention.
At the end of his schpiel Felix paused, clearly uncertain what to make of the complete silence in his ear. A small and painfully awkward silence followed, and then I heard an absolute torrent of garbled French spilling out of the handset.
" Mais ce n'est pas— Je comprends, mais— M'sieur, si vous me permettrait—" the man next to me spluttered, trying desperately to get a word in edgewise and growing ever more agitated in the attempt. I couldn't make out much of what the other man was saying, but it was pretty easy to guess that he was berating Felix and demanding some sort of proof for the suspicions he'd raised. Felix continued to offer disjointed attempts to clarify and assure, but he was getting nowhere.
I tugged his hand to distract him. "What's going on?"
He shook his head, defeat and abject horror camping out in his eyes. I had myself a quick little think, and saw no other options.
"Ask him for the chance to return and explain it all to him in person. Assure absolute discretion, and offer to tender your immediate resignation if what you have to say doesn't merit investigation." I tugged his hand again, this time far more firmly. "Do it. Talk over him. Do it."
Felix swallowed, but nodded and did as I asked, his voice rising both in volume and pitch until it was clear he'd finally managed to overpower the invective on the other end. Terse back and forth followed, ending with an abrupt 'click' and a dial tone. The director, it seemed, was done with the whole discussion.
Neither one of us said anything for a moment, and then I chucked him on the arm and tried to lighten the mood a bit. "So, he's clearly not one of those 'fun at parties' French guys."
"I can't do this. I can't."
My teeth ground against each other as I struggled to cultivate a little patience with the man. "You have no choice. Or, well, you have a choice, but only if you want to gamble with the lives of your colleagues and the future of the program. You're going back. You don't have to stay, but you have to go back and tell them what you know. You have to make them listen to you."
He doubled over and cradled his forehead in the palm of his hand, rocking back and forth like a child trying to comfort itself upon waking from a nightmare.
"Come on, Felix. I know it's not pleasant, but they can't do anything to you. I swear it. You tell them what you know, and then you can walk out of there and never look back. They'd never risk the scandal of saying anything about this. Anyone can see that you're sincere by just looking at your face, for crying out loud."
Felix tilted his face so that his eyes found mine. "Go with me. Please."
"What? Why? I'm not a scientist. I'm not even a hacker. I'd be useless."
"Not to me. Not to me, you wouldn't be." That murmur. It made me wonder whether anyone had ever stood up for this man in his entire life. Where would I have been if I hadn't had parents who supported me through school? If I hadn't had mentors like Andrew? If I hadn't had bosses like Peter, or coworkers like the guys, or friends like Alice, or happiness like Edward? I'd been born with courage, but that courage had also been fed and watered and cultivated by the people who surrounded me, who constantly challenged me to be the best version of myself.
I had no idea how I was going to make this work; taking a holiday weekend vacation was one thing, but abandoning the desk without a network-sanctioned reason was quite another. Peter was going to be pissed. The network was going to be really, really pissed. I absolutely couldn't leave, and I absolutely was going to leave.
"I'll go," I told him, and saw relief chase the anguish from his face while I elbowed the sane and sensible part of myself out of the picture.
"Seriously?"
"Sure. Why not? Should be fun." Without turning my head, I knew Edward had been lurking in the doorway the whole time to give Felix the illusion of privacy, and the amused snort that greeted my words was layered with about fifty different meanings.
"Crazy looks good on you, sweetheart. Now we really match." He strolled into the room, his bare feet slapping softly against the polished floors, and perched himself next to me on the rolled arm of the couch.
"Are you okay with this?"
"No. I hate it." A wry grin twisted his lips before they met the hairline at my forehead. "Doesn't mean I don't want you to do it, though. I don't, but I do, and you should go before I give in to the urge to chain you to the coffee table."
"But the show—and the network. God, Edward."
His warm hand found my shoulder, and he gave me a little squeeze. "We bring it to Peter. I'm pretty sure I can handle the show by myself for a night or two if it means saving the lives of innocent geeks." That wry grin shifted into something infinitely more mischievous as he spread his arms in ironic supplication. "Hey, how much trouble can I get into behind a desk?"
"I don't even want to think about it. Let's see what Peter says."
The two of us were lying in wait in front of Peter's office by the time he arrived that morning. He eyed us both with bleary but mounting suspicion, and we herded him into his office and closed the door.
"What? Oh, Jesus, what now. Come on, let a man have a second cup of coffee before you start tearing his world apart. And a muffin. I have a feeling I'm going to need a muffin for this."
He buzzed Heidi and barked his order at her, adding extra cups of coffee for each of us without even asking whether we needed them. Turning his attention away from his phone, he folded his hands on the desk in front of him. "Tell me I don't have to buzz her back and ask her to hunt down some nitroglycerin pills. Or some cyanide. Or anesthesia."
I took a deep breath. "I need to leave town for a day, maybe two."
Peter's eyes shifted between Edward and myself. "Is this a joke? You're here to ask me about your vacation? Just send a memo next time instead of scaring me to death."
"Yeah, see, the thing is, though, that I need to leave today."
He was still for a moment, his brow furrowed with concern. "Are you okay? Is this a family emergency?"
"No! Oh, no, they're all fine. I'm fine."
"Oh, well, that's good—"
"People could still die, though," Edward offered, interrupting Peter's short-lived relief. "Lots of people. Also, there might be a pretty big international scandal involved."
Our boss lifted a finger to silence Edward. "This is the part where we wait for the coffee, I think. Don't say another word."
Edward whistled while we stared at each other without saying anything for a full three minutes before Heidi tapped on the door and entered with a tray of coffee cups and pastries. Peter grasped his cup with the fervor of a man who'd spied an oasis in the driest desert, taking three huge pulls before setting down the cup and indicating that I should continue my explanation.
I laid the entire story out from start to finish, Edward helpfully supplying context and color commentary on what we were up against. Peter nodded, his face serious and his attention focused, and I thought again about the fact that I was insanely lucky to be working for someone who cared enough about me not to dismiss me out of hand even when I brought the craziest possible tale to the table.
When I was done, he tilted his head to one side and finished his coffee with a thoughtful expression before he spoke. "No chance of going on the record for this?"
"Absolutely none. I promised. Peter, please. This can't be about the news. It's about saving those lives and making sure the project isn't compromised. I don't know much about what they're doing over there, but I do know that embarrassing CERN isn't going to serve anyone's best interests."
"Hmmm." His fingers flexed on the surface of his desk while I waited for the verdict. Finally, he leaned over to punch the intercom on his phone once more. "Heidi? I need you to book a flight for this evening. Bella will give you the details in a minute." His left eyebrow lifted as he regarded me with a faint smile. "Make sure she uses her own credit card for this, too." He removed his finger from the intercom and rose to stand behind his desk. "For the record, this is horrible timing, but also for the record, anything important usually happens at the worst possible time. I'll figure things out here, but I need you to promise that you're not going to endanger yourself in any way. Offer this guy moral support or whatever, but keep your distance and run like hell at the first sign of trouble. This isn't your fight, and what you don't know about this stuff could hurt everyone there, including yourself. Keep your distance. The only reason I'm willing to let you go is because this Aro character isn't anywhere near the place."
"Thank you," Edward chuckled. "You know, that sounds far less condescending and controlling coming from you than it would from me. Could you add something about how you want her to take a few Marines along for the ride as bodyguards? Like, people who won't listen to her when she tries to shake them loose?"
Peter wagged his head in Edward's direction. "What the hell am I supposed to do with him while you're gone? I guess Richard'll have to pinch-hit for you."
"Ugh, no thanks. I'll fly solo."
"You'll sit next to Richard and stop whining about it, is what you'll do. The show's built for two. It's either Richard or Lauren."
"Why not Emmett? He knows the drill, and I actually like him, which I definitely can't say about Richard. Or Lauren."
"We'll discuss this later," Peter stated, his tone leaving no further room for argument. "Bella, you can catch the redeye after tonight's show. I want you back here in time for Wednesday's show, no matter what. Clear?"
"But that gives me no more than twenty-four hours to figure this out!" I still had no idea what we were looking for, and based on what Felix had told me, he didn't, either.
"Well then, I guess you'd better sleep on the flight over. You're going to need the rest."
Peter dismissed us, and I left his office to give an expectant Heidi the details on the flight arrangements for myself and Felix before Edward and I headed down to our own office.
The sudden prospect of leaving the office for two days, when combined with the reason for that departure, made me beyond frantic. I sliced through the every task in front of me like a buzzsaw, rushing home during my non-existent lunch hour to throw some random clothes in a bag with my passport. Felix had run up to his parents' house in Fairfield, but was due back at the studio with the town car by the time the show was finished, and we'd leave straight from the sign-off to take the same flight Edward and I had taken on our first trip over to Geneva.
And through it all, Edward kept his cool. For my sake, he refrained from telling me how little he wanted me to go over there without him. For my sake, he kept his mouth shut and didn't offer me any advice unless I asked for it first. For my sake, he showed me nothing but absolute confidence in my ability to handle the situation, do the job, and come home. Whatever I'd given him during his trip to Grozny, he gave me back in spades. It wasn't until the show had wrapped and I stood there with my bag in my hand, ready to walk down to the waiting car with Felix in it, that he let me see how difficult the whole thing was for him. I wanted to promise him that I'd be back, that I wasn't Oleg and that this wasn't the same thing at all, but if we were going to make this relationship work, he needed to trust me the way I trusted him.
"Listen to me," he said, his voice tense as he pulled me into a hug too firm for real comfort. "It might interest you to know that it costs $30,475 to have a private jet on standby to fly from JFK to Geneva at a moment's notice, not including airport fees and taxes, or tips for the cabin crew and a pilot who was part of the space program. Ask me how I know this." His arms tightened even further, and I felt his hands grip my jacket where it lay across my back before they came to rest on either side of my neck so that we were face to face. "Be brilliant, figure this out, and get back here. Definitely don't fall in love with any of those science guys. If you need me, call. Everything else can go right to hell, because you're the only thing that matters to me, you understand?"
"I'm a thing?" I teased him, because getting anything serious past the lump in my throat was impossible.
"You're my thing. You're my favorite thing. Now go ahead—scram." After one more squeeze and a kiss that left me legitimately breathless, his arms dropped to his sides and he stepped away from me. I felt something weighing against my hair, and turned my head to see he'd draped some fabric around me. When I yanked it away from my shoulders and saw that it was his lucky shirt, my heart absolutely doubled in size to accommodate the love I had for the man.
"Call it a loan," he grinned, though his eyes were serious and slightly wild with anxiety. "You'd better not need it, though." Then he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his suit pants and winked before turning to walk down the hall, clearly unwilling to watch me leave. "See you around, Mary," was his parting shot.
The trip was uneventful, although I realized that first class would always sort of be second-class without Edward across the partition from me. Unable to sleep, Felix fidgeted in the seat next to mine, dropping cutlery, switching his reading light on and off, and flicking aimlessly through the available television and movie offerings. I tried really hard not to be annoyed, and possibly succeeded as far as he could tell. Instead, I used the time to think about what we could do once we were cheek to jowl with whatever blinds Aro had built to conceal his actions. I didn't hold out much hope that we'd be able to either find what he'd done or figure out how to stop it, short of pulling the plug on the whole computer system and depriving it of a power source.
The net result of all that thinking was the depressing realization that the chances of us beating Aro in a programming contest were virtually nil. We'd be wasting our time in the attempt, and would just have to figure out another way.
I was no closer to a plan by the time we'd landed, the light drizzle and gloomy chill that greeted us doing nothing to brighten my outlook or fuel my non-existent optimism. I sent Edward a brief text to let him know we'd arrived, fighting the urge to call and possibly wake him up just so he could tell me again that I was more than capable of figuring this whole thing out.
Thirty seconds later, he texted back: Hurry up. What's taking you so long?, and that made the dreary flight and my overwhelming task momentarily vanish with a laugh.
We shuffled our way through the airport and found a taxi to take us straight to CERN. The institute's campus was practically deserted, with only a few early-bird employees making their ways toward their stations. Felix led the way through the security process, and in fairly short order we were standing before his boss.
Based on the phone conversation he'd had with Felix, I'd assumed that the man was French, but he was actually and fairly obviously German. His Teutonic beak and ice-blue eyes were all as sharp as knives, and he fired questions at both of us in clipped English as though he were shooting arrows from a bow. At turns skeptical and then concerned, to his credit, he heard us out while we put forth our suspicions. In the end, we managed to somehow convince him that neither one of us was out to ruin or embarrass the program, and that all we wished to do was to discover whether Castiglione had a different and far more sinister agenda.
"Very well," he relented. "You may examine the programming elements for the cryogenic system on the following conditions—I insist upon your absolute discretion, and you will each sign a confidentiality agreement to this effect. You will not discuss this matter with anyone else on the team. You will confine yourselves to the cubicle in the stack room for the duration of your examination, and should anyone ask you what you are doing there, you will only tell them that I have sent you there to review and inspect a protocol for me in advance of the soft test this Saturday. If you find any irregularities, you will bring the evidence straight to me, and to me alone. Do I make myself clear?"
We both nodded at him like children before a strict school teacher, and he asked his assistant to make sure that the cubicle he'd indicated was free for our use and to prepare agreements for us to sign. With that, we were effectively dismissed to the Siberia of the stack room, and the director went back to his directing.
I couldn't help but recall the tour I'd been on with Aro when we entered the stack room, and remembered with a shiver his comment about geography no longer being destiny when it came to relationships between men and women. If we were right about his plans, then geography was also no longer destiny when it came to committing what amounted to an act of scientific terrorism.
We dropped our things on the floor near the cubicle; Felix scratched the back of his neck, clearly unsure about where we should begin.
Sighing, I took advantage of a nearby office chair and kicked off my shoes. "Okay, so how do we access the cryogenic system from here? Any thoughts? I have no idea about computer forensics, but let's just start at the beginning and see if we can find anything that looks unusual."
For the next six hours, we combed through every inch of the command prompts for the cryogenic control program. It was mind-numbing work, and not at all unlike sifting through a mountain of rice kernels in the hope of finding one that was slightly misshapen. While we worked, Felix attempted to explain in hushed tones what was likely to happen if the cooling mechanism was disrupted. The enormous superconducting magnets that comprised the collider would enter a state called "magnetic quench", and in addition to releasing deadly amounts of helium into the tunnels, the disruption and subsequent overheating of the magnets would effectively destroy the functionality of the collider far into the future.
"It's a brilliant plan, actually," he mumbled, and the grudging respect in his voice would have shocked me if I had been dealing with anyone other than a scientist. "If you want to kill a collider, this is definitely the neatest way to do it."
"I'm glad you're enjoying the artistry," I snapped at him, and then immediately felt guilty about doing so because none of this was his fault. "Ugh, I'm sorry. I'm just really frustrated, and the jet lag isn't helping." I stood up and stretched my aching limbs, listening to the sound of the vertebrae in my back as they groaned from the effort of having held the same position for so long. Force of habit made me check the watch on my wrist, and I noticed that I hadn't even adjusted it to local time when we landed.
As my other hand moved to correct the oversight, every muscle in my body froze, and sudden, blinding realization coursed its way through me like a flash fire.
"Stop," I whispered. Felix, who was still typing away on his keyboard, looked up at the sound. "Stop."
"What? Are you okay? You look...strange."
So many things were suddenly flying around in my brain that it took me a moment or two to remember how to speak.
The date on the desk calendar. The date in Alice's dream. The date.
The computer lies to us. It tells us everything fine when it's not.
It's eleven o'clock in New York, but it's four o'clock in Geneva.
Edward wishing he could turn back time the day after the tornado.
We can lie to the computer. The computer lies to us, but we can lie to it, too.
"Oh my god." I was almost angry with myself, because the solution was so ridiculously simple that I should have seen it the moment we realized what Aro might be up to.
"What is it? What?" Felix's voice filtered back into my consciousness; he sounded more than a little freaked out, and I could only imagine what the expression on my face must have looked like to him. I probably resembled someone in the middle of a petit mal seizure. I sat back down again and scooted my chair so that it was right up against his.
"Tell me something. Are the pipes full of helium right now?"
He shook his head. "No, they probably won't start cooling the tunnel until Thursday, or maybe even Friday. No sense in wasting all of that energy if the magnets aren't active. Why?"
My right hand gripped his arm so hard that he actually winced. "Let's tell the computer it's Saturday. Let's just change the clock on the computer, and see what happens."
His eyes widened as he absorbed what I was saying. "That's just—holy cow."
"Right? Because if the computer thinks it's Saturday, then whatever Aro planned for the system should happen. And if it happens when there's no helium in the pipes, then nobody gets hurt and the collider is safe. All we have to do is lie to the computer and make it believe that it's Saturday."
I whipped my head around to see who was with us in the stack room, but it was totally empty. "When does this place close? Is the director still here? We should go back up and talk to him."
We weren't even pretending to be cool as we raced back to the director's office. His assistant took one look at us and got up to knock urgently on his closed door. She waited until we heard a muffled "Entrez" from the other side, and then twisted the doorknob to let us in.
Convincing him to let us rig the clock was, in the end, not the huge trial I feared it might be. For all his lack of warmth, the director was a clever man, and altering something so simple for the purposes of testing a theory was clearly a low-risk venture. This place was all about theories, after all. I was also pretty certain that we'd only get one shot at proving ourselves, and I prayed that the bullet in our gun was the right one. It seemed almost too simple, but maybe Aro's enormous ego made it likely he'd never stop to consider something as trivial as the clock on a computer.
The director himself agreed to go down into the tunnel to monitor what, if anything, happened when we rigged the computer clock. I couldn't tell whether he was rooting for us to succeed or fail, but it didn't really matter. I only cared that he was letting us try. Now that Felix had some direction and the hope of vindicating himself in the eyes of his boss, he seemed to latch onto that and let it invigorate him. We determined that the most likely window of activity would be within a half-hour of the start of the soft test, which meant that we'd set the clock to 9:30 a.m. on the nineteenth and just see what happened.
While the director made his way below with a walkie-talkie, we stationed ourselves in the cryogenic computer control center. The room was nondescript enough, and the setup was surprisingly uncomplicated. A simple computer terminal managed the entire thing, and while there were a series of blue-capped glass cylinders that fed a network of pipes which gradually increased in size, the control unit wouldn't have looked out of place in your average research carrel at a public library.
"Is this thing even running the latest operating software?"
Felix shook his head. "Around here, what the equipment looks like isn't the important thing. Watch this."
He tapped the space bar on the keyboard in front of the ancient monitor, and the screen burst into vibrant action, every subsequent keystroke he made almost instantly shifting what I saw on the screen.
"Whoa, that's a pretty speedy processor, whatever it is."
He zipped us into the computer settings, and before I could blink, we were looking at the date and time functions on the user panel. I rubbed my thumb against the "talk" button of the handheld radio, then pressed down.
"Yes?"
"We're changing the time now. Please stand by."
Several clicks later, it was suddenly the morning of the nineteenth as far as the computer knew.
"Cross your fingers," I commanded the man next to me, because god knew everything on my body was crossed. I'd even contemplated braiding my hair.
The minutes ticked by, and we watched the CGI second hand crawl around the face of the CGI clock.
The director's irritated voice crackled over the radio. "Have you changed the time yet? The system is perfectly intact down here. Precisely how long do you anticipate keeping me in this tunnel?"
I answered in the affirmative, and begged for his patience as politely and confidently as I could. In reality, I was shivering from nerves and the fear that we'd gotten it all wrong.
"Think, dammit," I urged both Felix and myself. "Is there a better time for him to strike than at the beginning of the test? Is there a time during the day that means more to him than—"
And then for the second time that day, I froze and burned in the same moment, because of course he wouldn't have made it that simple. Aro had only mentioned the importance of a clock to me once, and that was on the first occasion I ever spoke with him. It would absolutely be in keeping with his demented need for precision to do the same thing in this case.
"Felix, we need to reset the clock again." I smiled then, and could barely keep the giddy excitement from swallowing the words. From the moment the thought occurred to me, my instinct had turned over like the perfectly-tuned ignition of a combustion engine. "Check the USNO Master Clock website. Reset the computer clock to reflect whatever time it would be here when that clock reads 10:15 a.m. on the nineteenth."
"But that would be...five hours into the soft test."
"Do it. Trust me."
He looked at me as though I were insane, but did as I asked, and I held my breath as the computer reset to the new time.
Nothing happened for a full minute, and then the walkie-talkie next to me crackled back to life and vindicated every ounce of faith I'd ever had in my ability to get to the truth of things.
"Du Hurensohn! The valves are open. Engage the failsafe and terminate the trial immediately. Immediately."
"Gotcha," I whispered to Aro wherever he was, and punched a flabbergasted Felix on his arm to celebrate the victory. "Hah!"
"Ow."
Stifling the urge to call him a sissy and seriously wishing I had any one of my guys here instead of him, I radioed the director back and asked him to join us in the control room.
Despite the fact that it was so late in the day, it took surprisingly little time to notify the authorities that Castiglione was suspected of sabotage, although it took the better part of the night trapped in a room with those authorities to explain the whole thing and make a coherent case for them. By breakfast the next morning, we got word that Interpol had taken him into custody as he sat drinking a cappuccino on the terrace of his villa in the scenic Tuscan town of Volterra. He declaimed in the most profane manner possible, but they took him in all the same, and by the time I'd made it to the airport for the flight home plans were already in the works to extradite him back to Geneva to stand trial. Felix stayed behind at the request of the director, who wanted to debrief him with the computer forensics team they'd have to bring on to try to unearth the trail Aro had left behind.
Got him. On my way home, I texted Edward, and again received an almost immediate response even though it was still the middle of the night in New York.
About time, slowpoke. Stop goofing around and get back here. Bring cheese. And meatballs.
I was simultaneously as exhausted and as happy as I could ever remember being. No. Also, I might have lost your shirt.
I might overlook that if you show up here without any of yours, too.
Go back to sleep and keep dreaming. I'll see you tonight.
Thank god. So tired of fondling Emmett.
I put the phone on airplane mode and zoned out while the flight attendant went through the monotony of pre-takeoff floatation device instructions, barely making it to cruising altitude before reclining the seat and surrendering to the most delicious oblivion I'd ever experienced.
Sneaking up on Edward Cullen was no mean feat, but I was drunk on the victory of singlehandedly averting a major disaster for the world's most important scientific research facility, and I could hardly be blamed for pushing my luck a little as a result. Despite the fact that camping out in the computer stack room at CERN certainly hadn't resulted in the same body odor crisis that spending the better part of the week hiding among the poor in the ghettos of Grozny had, I still detoured to the shower in the employee's gym before heading over to the studio. Traffic from JFK had been horrific, but I had ten minutes to spare before we went to air.
Rose saw me first as I entered the room, and I held my forefinger against my lips to let her know I didn't want to draw attention to myself. She rolled her eyes at me, but somehow managed to communicate the information to the rest of the floor staff. And so it was that I managed to creep up behind my co-anchor, whose attention was distracted by Steve, busily hiding the coil of Edward's earpiece under the back collar of his suit jacket.
I slid undetected into my chair to his right and cocked my head to the side, waiting for him to notice me. I probably should have known better; the previous twenty-four hours had made me unrealistically optimistic.
Edward kept his back turned to me when Steve had finished with his mic. "Sweetheart, I'm pretty sure we've been through this already. If you want to sneak around, it helps to wear really quiet shoes." He heaved a dramatic sigh, but when he finally turned to look at me, everything in his eyes said love, and happiness, and relief, and home. "Hi there."
"Hi, yourself," I smiled back at him. "Kiss me before Charlotte does her thing with my face."
His hands came up to cup my cheeks. "She can do whatever she likes to it, but it'll always be my very favorite face." And the brief touch of his lips against mine was nowhere near enough for me, but the clock was ticking and Charlotte and Steve swarmed me like the most eager drones in the hive.
"Welcome back from wherever you wandered off to, Bella," Ben's voice grumbled in my ear. "Someone hand her the show run and get a level on her audio. Edward, you take the lead and give her time to catch up. We're on in two, people."
"Come on," Edward murmured, nudging his elbow against mine. "Let's make some news."
# # #
A/N - I'll just paraphrase Ben Franklin here, and say that she who is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. This is the final full chapter of "Breaking News"; an epilogue should post before New Year. Can you trust me? God, I hope so.
"Magnetic quench" actually occurred at CERN in 2008; it was an accident, which resulted in the release of six tons of helium and forced the institute to shut down the collider for months while they made the necessary repairs. To the best of my knowledge neither Italian megalomaniacs nor travelers from an apocalyptic future were involved in that event. I'm pretty sure the aliens were laughing their multiple heads off, though.
My deepest love and most sincere appreciation to Dina (denverpopcorn) for pre-reading much of this chapter to let me know if everything added up, and to Ser and Tracy for existing in the first place. And always, always to you people out there who read this and review it and tell other people about it. You're six hundred million proton collisions of beautiful. Have the most spectacular holiday ever.