Maureen opened her eyes to familiar half-shadows. She rolled on her back and exhaled deeply. What a crazy dream tha thad been!

John had helped her grieve for Grant, and now her mind was bringing Grant back from the dead to help her mourn John, coming full circle in a tortured way. Although most of her dreams faded fast once she was awake, she feared this disturbingly vivid one would stay with her forever. She could still feel Grant's chest against her face and hear his heart beating under her ear, his arms closing around her body.

Shaking off a shiver, Maureen sat up on the edge of the mattress, glancing briefly outside the window. What? Her eyes opened wide out of confusion.

Under a gray sky stretched a long, barren island with tall dark rocks forming steep cliffs that fell in arches in the middle of a silver ocean.

That couldn't be.

She closed her eyes and opened them again. The beach was still there. What was wrong with her? Was she ill? She pressed a shaky hand to her forehead. No, no fever. Had she lost her mind then?

Slowly, she stood up, stepped to the window, and pressed her hand against the cold surface. Her breath fogged up the glass. If this wasn't a dream, what was it then?

Trust me, mom. Dad's not supposed to die. Something went wrong.

Remembering Will's words, Maureen recalled their ship plowing into a monolith as the lightning struck. Struck them. Then what? She woke up here? They had been transported back to this world. Why? And how? Had they opened one of those spatial rifts?

Maureen glanced back at the bed. She didn't even remember getting into it. She didn't remember anything after the shock of the collision. There was a big blank space in her mind. Was she still dreaming?

Standing still, Maureen stared at the wet, ruffled pillow next to hers and stopped breathing. John was always sweating at night, no matter the season. Had she cried during her dream?

Her heart pumping fast in her chest, she grabbed a sweater from her closet and stepped out of her bedroom. The corridor was chilly, dimly lit. She was conscious of the soft fabric against her goosebump covered arms. To her right, weak daylight filtered from the rooftop porthole into the hub. She paused in front of Will's bedroom. If it were a dream, or a nightmare, SAR would appear just now. Or she would open her son's door and find it at Will's bed, ready to kill her little boy, a sight certainly terrifying enough to wake her up, gasping.

Holding her breath, she opened the door and exhaled deeply. Will was curled in his bed, fast asleep. She moved to Penny's room, then to Judy's. All her children were huddled under their blankets. She heard a soft snore from down the corridor. Could it be Grant?

Maureen stopped in front of the open door and exhaled slowly. It was Don. The mechanic was there too, sleeping in the storage room, like he used to during the seven months they were stranded on this world. A shudder ran down her spine as she completed her tour around the hub. Next to the airlock, the EV suits were standing on their charging stations, save for John's.

Holding her breath, she shuffled toward the airtight door and peered through the small porthole. She gasped and her heart leapt in her chest. Harris was there too. Everything was as she remembered it that first morning, almost two years ago!

This was impossible. A spatial rift that made them cross hundreds of light years in a second was already an extraordinary discovery, but in time as well?

Not that time travel didn't exist. It did, although in a very specific way. They were doing it all the time, everybody, at the constant speed of one second per second into the future. Time was a one-way street. She had to be dreaming.

A reflection of something metallic drew her gaze to the ladder in the main shaft. Time stood still.

John.

Feeling strangely detached, she put on her EV suit, climbed up, and activated the decompression protocol. A minute later, the top hatch opened and a bright light flooded the small, confined space. Blinded, she clung to the ladder, barely able to breathe, and even less able to move. Her aching arms started to shake as a shadow darkened the sky.

"Need a hand?" John asked.

Maureen looked down, struggling for control. First Grant, now John.

"Hey, you okay?" He asked again. "Come on, give me your hand."

When she didn't react, John bent forward into the hatch, grabbed her arm, gently pulled her up, and helped her sit down on the hull. She looked above his shoulder. The binary suns were rising, reflecting on the ocean like on the surface of the ice. It had been a surreal landscape the first time she had laid eyes on it; today, it was – she didn't even know what it was – a miracle?

"You look like you're about to faint. Just breathe. Slow and deep. Did you have something to eat before climbing up here?"

Maureen shook her head as he massaged her shaking hands. Her dead husband was on his knees in front of her, telling her to breathe. John squeezed her arm.

"Let's get you back inside," he said, pulling her up but she yanked him back, wrapped her arm around his, and leaned her helmet against his shoulder.

"No. Just, just stay here with me. Please?" she whispered.

"You sure? You look very pale."

Like she'd seen a ghost? Maybe it was time to believe in the supernatural or in God, or just scrap the laws of physics and write some new ones because the past didn't exist. It was just a concept used to describe an ever changing present. And yet she was here, in the past, in her skin.

"Did Judy check you for concussion after Harris knocked you out? Do you feel any nausea?"

Maureen shook her head again, biting her lip to keep from laugning. Exotic particles existed and John was concerned she might have a concussion when he had one himself, plus a hairline fracture in his left arm, and had been running on painkillers since the day Will's robot had knocked him out.

"I've seen my share of storms over the oceans, but I've never seen lightning strike in a straight line like that," John said, falling back in line with her memory of their conversation. "Quite stunning, isn't it?"

"Yes, quite," she stammered once more, squeezing his hand tighter. She needed to make sure he was made of flesh and bones. Both John and Grant were alive. This was nothing short of a miracle, screw Einstein and Hawking. In this part of the galaxy, space ships not only traveled faster than light but through time as well.

Time travel! When she was a child, she wondered what she would do differently given the opportunity, but never had she thought to bring people back from the dead.

"Can we survive here? At least, until the Resolute picks us up?" John asked.

"Sure, we can. If we start the greenhouse, grow some crops, it will help scrub the CO2 from our air and produce the oxygen we need instead."

"What about water? Do you think we can drink this?" he said, pointing to the ocean.

"That's not water. The atmosphere is essentially nitrogen, and the clouds are a mix of methane and ethane. Which means this is a liquid methane ocean, like on Titan."

"Huh. Can we use it for fuel, then?"

"Our fuel is a more complex mixture."

"That's too bad. But at least you got the sensors running. What else do they say?"

Nothing. They were still down. Another minor fluctuation in their conversation.

Maureen gazed at the horizon, suddenly concerned about the butterfly effect. The first time around, survival had been top priority, along with finding a way to activate the alien power source in their garage. Now she was more worried about trying to make sense of time loops, paradoxes, and avoiding a temporal mess of galactic proportions.

Her eyes narrowed as a cold anger seized her. There was certainly one thing she'd do differently this time, no matter the risk. "What do you want to do with Harris?"

John grunted. "After what she's done to you and Will, she stays where she is until she dies of old age or we can deliver her to the authorities, whichever comes first."

"The airlock has never been designed to be a jail. She could get out. It's not that complicated to figure out how, really."

Unlike the previous time, John straightened and looked gravely for a few seconds. "Can you reprogram the lock mechanism? Add a security pass-code or something?"

"I don't have access to those safety protocols. I could try to hack them but it will take me more time than her to figure out how to break free."

"I'll install a safety shield just outside the airlock. She won't get out, I promise."

"Thanks," she replied, wondering why they hadn't thought about this the first time.

It was such a simple solution. On the other hand, would they have attempted to pursue her crazy idea to leave the planet if Harris hadn't sabotaged their greenhouse and reduced their chances of survival to nothing? Now shehe would have to find another way to convince her husband to go along with her plan. Later. Every problem has a solution, hadn't it?

Maureen tightened her grip on John's arm and pressed her helmet back against his shoulder. Right now, she needed to feel him against her, strong and invulnerable, even if he wasn't. Even if a part of him still eluded her.

"Hey," he whispered as scenarios on how to take down Hastings formed in her mind, "Why don't we go back inside and have breakfast with the kids. They must be up by now."

As they stood up, she saw him wince.

"You should ask Judy to check on your arm."

"It's just tendonitis," he said as he opened the hatch. "Had it on and off for a few years now. Come on, get in there first, I'll close it behind us."

She looked down at the ladder and sighed. Some things never changed, no matter the time line.

This thought returned a few minutes later. As Maureen sat on the bench at the bottom of the shaft to the main deck to remove her EV suit, she heard her daughters squabbling in the hub about the thermostat.

"Put a sweater on," Judy said as Don emerged from the storage room he used as personal quarters, carrying an agitated Debbie in his arms.

"Hey, good morning, Robinsons," the mechanic said as Penny raised her voice above the cackles.

"Are you blind? I'm already wearing one."

The chicken flew out of Don's hands and landed right in front of John's legs, causing him to trip and drop his helmet, which scared the bird and sent Don chasing after it down the corridor.

"Then put on a second one," Judy argued while John caught himself on the bulkhead with a grunt and nearly collapsed on the bench.

"This is a madhouse," he muttered. Maureen helped him to remove his compack, the heavy computer unit and oxygen tanks from his shoulders.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she asked with a smile. She had missed her children so much that their bickering was music to her ears.

"Mom, the thermostat won't work," Penny complained as she entered the hub. "Can you fix it?"

"We don't have enough power. Go put another layer," Maureen replied when she saw Judy's eyes widen with surprise.

"He's alive," Judy mouthed silently, tears in her eyes.

Maueen was about to go to her eldest when Will strode into the room, interrupting them.

"Guys, we need to talk. Everybody take a seat, please."

Surprised at his authoritative tone, Maureen settled at the table without a word, and like the others, listened to her son as he revealed everything without fear of wreaking havoc on the timeline. There was a long silence once Will stopped talking a few minutes later. Then Don pushed himself up.

"Good joke. You almost got me on this one."

Judy pressed her hand on his arm to keep him from leaving. "It's not a joke. I wish it was, but it's really not."

The mechanic frowned in confusion. Maureen glanced at John and saw he was similarly perplexed.

"It's real," she said. "Judy, Will, and I have lived through this already."

"Wait," Don interjected. "So we can go back in time, like in the movies? Wherever, whenever we want?"

"It doesn't work that way," Will said.

Maureen winced at the weariness in her son's voice. He sounded mature beyond his years. A thought suddenly struck her.

"How many times have you done this already?" she asked.

Will's expression turned somber. "This will be my fifth recursion."

Another silence fell as everybody tried to process the ins and outs of Will's answer. Between this moment and their reunion yesterday, thirteen months had passed, which meant Will had been doing this for at least four years, maybe longer, depending on how far in the future his starting point was. This led her to a mind-boggling question: how old exactly was her eleven-year-old son?

As John stood up and walked to the kitchen, Maureen's looked from Will to her husband. His eyes were on the floor and he seemed deep in thought as he leaned on the counter. It was like after he'd called his commanding officer when Scarecrow's ship had crashed in northern Canada. That one communication had changed their lives forever because he'd left an hour later, for three years. She'd always wanted to know what his CO had told him to make him feel like he had no choice but to go and lie about it.

"What's your plan?" John asked grimly.

"It's complicated," Will replied. "Until now, it was Robot and me alone trying to make things right but now–"

"By right, you mean what?" John cut in.

"Saving the Resolute from destruction, getting all of us safely to the colony, and making sure the robots won't follow us there this time."

They exchanged glances, worried, confused, speculative.

"But not all of us were killed, right? You survived," Maureen noted.

"Robot saved me."

"Wait. You survived alone?" Penny exclaimed.

Will's eyes shone with tears as he nodded gravely. Maureen silently cursed the day she had enrolled her children in the Alpha Centauri program to escape Earth.

"But we're all alive now," Penny said. "So I guess the good thing is that we're stuck in a Groundhog Day kind of time loop until we make this work, right?"

"Not exactly," Will replied. "To come back in time both requires and generates an insane amount of energy, and that has to go somewhere. Exotic particles create a kind of fracture in space-time that ripples through all dimensions and makes this solar system a little more unstable each time."

"Exotic particles?" said Maureen. "Where do they come from?"

Will shrugged. "I don't know. And I don't have the math to explain all this. Robot does all the calculations, but even it has limits and our communication goes only so far."

"So we need to rescue Grant first," Judy interrupted. "He's a math and physics genius. If anyone can figure out the equations, it's him."

"Grant who?" John asked.

"Before Grant, we need to retrieve Robot and Scarecrow. That means Ben Adler will probably join our group, which is fine because he's kind of caught in a time loop himself," Will said.

"Adler?" John repeated, looking more and more upset by the second.

"He's working with Scarecrow, sort of. We need them both on our team," Will explained.

"Who's Scarecrow?" Penny asked as John pinched the bridge of his nose. He resumed pacing back and forth in front of the lounge area while Will revealed that underneath the computer AI main frame was a slave, a tortured, sentient being, and that their colony was based on a crime against all the values they stood for.

The look on John's face as Will spoke scared the hell out of Maureen. The cold, hardened soldier he'd become in those last years had clearly resurfaced.

"So, first we get the team together. Then what?" he asked.

"No, first we'll have to get a power source that is powerful enough to get us to the colony in one shot and seal all the breaches in the timeline, then we'll assemble the team and find a way to cover our tracks," Will said.

"What about the alien reactor in our garage?" Maureen asked. "It's not dead. The lightning will boost it."

Will shook his head. "No, it's nowhere near powerful enough for what we want to do. We need the engine that powers the alien ring. There's only one on each planet."

Don piped up. "All this sounds fun and mysterious, like a quest, and I love quests as much as the next man, truly, since I was a child. You know, my first quest was to find food. Got pretty good at it because, well, I was hungry. But anyway, I digress, you all seem to forget one thing: how are we supposed to save all those people and machines and find this engine when we don't have fuel to make this baby fly?"

Maureen exchanged a knowing smile with Judy and Will.

"We don't need fuel."