“Hey,” she said as she stopped in front of him.
“Hey, yourself. I was just coming to find you.”
“To say goodbye?” He nodded. “It’s funny, isn’t it, but this might be the big one. The last goodbye. If everything goes to shit, then in days, or months, there’s a good chance we could all be dead.”
He studied her for a moment. “You’re in a cheerful mood.”
“I’m a little ray of sunshine.”
He grinned. “But seriously, once this thing in London is done, you should head over to Australia. There’s no reason to stay.”
“Maybe.” Actually, no way, but she didn’t want to get into that argument right now. “What about you and Christa?”
“She’s looking at shifting her lab over there. But there’s the time machine to consider.”
“Don’t you still feel like a complete dickhead talking about the time machine?”
“Total dickhead. But it’s real.”
“It’s also fucked and buggered.”
“There is that. Anyway, Christa still holds out hope that we can get it working, maybe even find out why it’s here.”
“My guess is a complete balls-up. It malfunctioned for some reason and landed way too early and in totally the wrong place.”
“That’s Christa’s view as well.”
“Great minds think alike.” She ran a hand through her hair then huddled into her coat. “Anyway, I just wanted to talk to you, before we leave.”
“About the files?”
She nodded. “Have you seen them?”
“Yes. And the files on the others who died or were experimented on. Including Josie.” For a moment, he was silent, pain reflected in his eyes. “I could kill the colonel myself.”
“Except he’s your father-in-law. You really should have thought about that, you know. Bad move.”
“Yeah. I’ll divorce Christa and we’ll kill him together.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She thought for a moment, trying to get her words right in her head. “I wanted to ask you—that night when we found Sam.” She blinked, then forced herself to go on. “Did I do the right thing? Could I have saved him? Should I have tried?”
He didn’t answer right away, and she liked that. He wasn’t going to just feed her platitudes. “Do you think I haven’t askedmyself that? So many times. But I always come up with the same answer. We couldn’t have saved him. It was irreversible, and he didn’t want to exist the way he was. You would have been going against his wishes. Doing it for the wrong reasons. Not to save Sam, but to keep him for yourself. You had to let him go.”
She’d known that herself, but it was so hard to accept.
“Sadie said she’s seen him. In a dream or a vision or whatever it is she has.”
“I know. She told me. But we don’t know how Sadie’s visions work.”
“At least she gets the visions. And she can talk to animals. So can Kane. Rose can do the psi-bolts. When am I going to get a new superpower?”
“God forbid. But that reminds me. My mother told me something after the meeting. About you.”
“Really?”
“Apparently, you do have a super-power. You’re something called a Foci.”
“A Foci? And that means?”
