I crack a smile for the first time this evening.
“I get it now,” Inessa goes on. Then her face lights up. “Wait—does this mean you have no idea what a booty call is?”
“Oh no, Delaney taught me that one.” At this, Sumner raises his eyebrows, but William only continues. “Which is why I do not place my phone in my back pocket.”
Inessa falls to the ground cackling.
“All right, you lot have a laugh at my expense,” William says good-naturedly, “but you can’t blame me.”
Sabine’s eyes grow wide. “Now I understand why you were so excited to show me all those pre-programmed ringtones.”
“There was one time when he unplugged everything in our room,” Sumner offers. “For fun.”
Later, when I step into the hall to refill my water bottle, Sumner follows me. He waits for the door to shut before speaking.
“I didn’t tell them everything,” he says, voice low. I understand what he’s not saying. He omitted what could happen if we fail tomorrow. “Figured the truth about William was enough to process.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” I say. It feels unfair to unleash that panic on them right now. “Do you think we’re close?”
He nods. “We’re close.”
He wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. Even though this situation could not be further from normal, Sabine and Inessa’s additional support helps pull focus on this monumental task. We workthrough dinner. We solidify measurements and triple-check internal placements down to the millimeter. A hush falls over the room once everything is in place.
Inessa is the first to break the silence. “Can you run a test?”
“Only in the software,” Lionel says. “We don’t have the energy source to run a physical test. We’ll need a really powerful solar flare tomorrow in order to try.”
We decide to take it as a win. It’s all we can do.
38
Later that night I’m lyingin bed, watching the clock slowly lurch toward midnight, trying and failing to feel anything but slow boiling inner turmoil.
We’ve come this far, but there’s still so much out of our control. Lionel checked the Space Weather Prediction Center website before we parted ways, and even though the geomagnetic conditions are in our favor tomorrow, it’s still a prediction. There are possibilities where things go wrong. What if there’s not a large enough coronal mass ejection to create the geomagnetically induced current we need? That would mean there’s no strong current to fuel the isoborometer. And even if there is, what if the isoborometer doesn’t work? Where do we go from there? There’s no backup plan—not even an estimated future date where the forecast predicts another geomagnetic disturbance as intense as this one.
Dread winds around my lungs. The elimination of my existence in this time hangs in the balance of whatever happens tomorrow.
A gentle knock startles me from the depths of my thoughts. My pulse rockets. It must be Sabine or Inessa—I don’t know who else could need something from me at this hour—but when I open my door, it’s not them.
It’s Sumner.
The initial shock of seeing him steals my voice. His hair is windswept and disheveled, made messier as he runs a hand through it. What is he doing here? Every siren in my brain repeatsbad idea, bad idea. And instead of heeding those alarm bells, I wave him inside, a silent beckoning.
He steps around me, and I’m careful to noiselessly close the door behind him. My sun lamp casts the room in an orange glow, light bouncing off my disco ball to create tiny, fractured pieces of radiance that rotate across my walls. When I turn around, he’s reaching into his jacket pocket.
“From the library.” He hands me a paperback copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe Valley of Fear.“Since…”
I swallow a lump in my throat. He knows what these books mean to me. Like my dad’s ring and journal, they hadn’t been on my shelf when I returned earlier. The devastation hasn’t fully passed. I tried not to dwell on it.
I hold the book to my chest. “Thank you.”
His familiar maroon sweater is tugged over his shirt, signs of pilling on the collar, but it’s so uniquely him that a tender ache of longing grows inside me. Next to him, I’m underdressed in an oversized sweatshirt and sleep shorts.
“That’s not the only reason I came,” he says hastily. He’s pacing now. I don’t know if he realizes.
“Oh?” It comes out as more of a sound.
He powers on, as if he can’t keep it in any longer. “That nightin my room? Over Thanksgiving break? You were right. About all of it.”
