Page 68 of The Book of Lost Hours

Lisavet caught her by the arm and held her back. The door slammed shut behind them, disappearing in an instant. Amelia wheeled around, jerking her arm free. She backed away, tears brimming in her eyes.

“Stay away from me!”

“Amelia, I’m sorry,” Lisavet said.

“You lied to me!” Amelia snapped as tears began falling for a second time. “This whole time, you lied to me!”

“I had to. I was trying to protect you.”

“Protect me?” Amelia let out a desperate laugh. “You weren’t protecting me. You shoved me out a window! You let Jack use me! You let them shoot James!”

“Amelia, I…”

“No!” Amelia stopped walking, aware of the chasm behind her.

“No. I don’t want to hear what you have to say.

How could you lie to me like that? How could you do all those awful, awful things to Anton’s father and all those other people?

How could you do that to Uncle Ernest? Don’t say it was for me.

Don’t you dare say that. I didn’t want… I wouldn’t have—” She stopped abruptly, gasping for air.

Lisavet gave her a sad look. Watching as Amelia wiped the tears from her eyes. “Finished?” she asked, some of her familiar self returning.

Amelia glared at her. “It was wrong. It was so, so wrong.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

“I know that too.” Lisavet took a step closer. “But I don’t regret it. I would do it all again if I thought it would keep you safe. I would rewrite all of history for you.”

Amelia scoffed at her, ignoring the other feelings that were trying to surface. “Why didn’t you tell me? All this time I thought you hated me. I didn’t know you were my… my…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Lisavet softened. She took another step forward. “How could I have possibly explained it?”

Amelia sniffled begrudgingly. “I guess you couldn’t have.” She looked down at the chasm behind her, folding her arms.

“Amelia. We don’t have much time. I don’t know how long Anton can keep your father out of here.”

Her father. Amelia felt her stomach twist again.

Lisavet came closer, nodding at Ernest’s watch in Amelia’s hand. “I need you to go out there with them, okay? Help Anton.”

Amelia looked up at her. “What about you?”

Lisavet shut her eyes for a brief moment. “I’m staying.”

“Staying?”

There was a long pause. Suddenly Amelia understood.

“No,” she said. “You can’t.”

“Ernest is right. It’s the only option. And the only way to keep him from doing it is if I do it first.”

Amelia’s lower lip trembled. “But… but you can’t go. I only just found out. I don’t want to lose you so soon.”

Lisavet blinked back tears of her own. “You won’t. You’ll still remember me. You’ll remember all of this. I promise.”

Amelia shook her head. “No. That’s not it. I didn’t even get a chance to know you. I didn’t get a chance not to be angry with you.”

Lisavet smiled at that. She took off her coat and slid it around Amelia’s shoulders, bending down so they were at eye level. “This is something I need to do,” she said softly. “This is my fault. And I need to be the one to fix it. Okay?”

“I’m not going,” Amelia said stubbornly. “I won’t let you do this.”

Lisavet shushed her, pulling her into an embrace. “I’m sorry, Amelia,” she said tearfully.

Amelia felt something drop into the pocket of the coat. She heard a ticking sound and pulled away. She reached into the pocket, her fingers barely closing around the brass pocket watch, before Lisavet spoke again.

“I’m so, so sorry.”

Amelia looked up. In the split second before she knew what was happening, Amelia felt her mother’s hand in the center of her chest. She felt herself slipping over the edge, falling into the darkness of the chasm below.

L ISAVET STOOD still for several moments after Amelia was gone, letting tears fall down her face.

A chasm was a passage, too, as Ernest had so diligently pointed out.

Which meant that, with the watch in her pocket, it would be a passage out, same as any door.

Amelia was safe. They were both safe. There was only one thing left to do now.

As if on cue, Azrael rematerialized beside her. “Do you know what to do?”

Lisavet nodded, wiping her eyes. “Yes. But that isn’t going to be any easier.”

To fix all this, she only needed to change one memory.

His. He had been the very first. The reason why the time space was discovered in the first place.

If she could alter that moment, removing the discovery completely…

that would be enough. She looked at Azrael.

He was content. His brow uncreased, unconcerned, even though he knew what was about to happen.

That saving the world meant erasing him from it.

“And you brought a book?” Azrael asked.

She nodded, withdrawing the little black book of forgotten names from her trouser pocket.

When she opened the book to the center, their eyes passed over the lines of names that the TRP had erased, that she had had a hand in erasing.

Like a father watching the repeated, youthful mistakes of a child yet never ceasing to love them, Azrael did not accuse her or express even an ounce of the disappointment she was certain he felt.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked. But he wasn’t trying to dissuade her.

“Many things might change,” Lisavet replied, her heart aching. “People who were erased will be remembered. Events that were tampered with will be altered. But if Ernest is right…” Her words trailed off.

He had to be right. They didn’t know for sure what would happen. How could they? Not knowing the outcome was one of the many dangers of living.

“You could be unraveling the entire course of history,” Azrael said.

“Then we’ll only be making it right,” she said. “As it should have been.”

“And what about you?”

Lisavet shut her eyes. The chasm would open, taking her and everything else in the time space along with it. She couldn’t know what that meant… if her mind would go on existing or not. The two of them stood still in the silence. She opened her eyes.

“Is it as empty as they all say it is? Death?”

Azrael smiled at her. “No, my child. There’s no emptiness in death. You simply move on. Your consciousness continues, creating and re-creating your happiest moments. And some new ones too.”

Lisavet gave him a weak smile in return. “Like time walking.”

“Yes. Like time walking. Shall we go on this one together?”

She heard the whispers of Time calling out to her as she reached for him, settling her hand along the side of his ghostly face.

His eyes locked onto hers, reassured in his demise, as if he had known it was coming from the moment he met her.

Perhaps he had known. Azrael had always been wiser than she was.

As Lisavet pulled at the delicate threads of what remained of Azrael’s memory and placed them in the book, she could already feel the time space beginning to shift around them.

That gentle whisper that had been her constant companion wrapped around and through them.

She tried to think about what Ernest had said.

That somewhere, sometime, in some version of history, there was the possibility of a life where she was happy.

Clinging to that promise, she stepped into the memories Azrael had left behind and parted the hands of Time, inserting herself into it.

Two thousand years in the past, Azrael stood on the precipice of a cliff, real, and solid, and alive, still dressed in the plain gray robes of either a monk or a pauper.

He was watching the approaching Roman ships draw nearer on the choppy sea below him, helpless to the coming invasion that would decimate his people.

Lisavet let out a shuddering breath, drawing his attention to her.

He turned his head, eyes widening, words she did not understand falling from lips that had not yet learned to speak any language but his own.

Lisavet almost expected to see a spark of recognition in his eyes, but there was only confusion. He did not know her and never would.

She stepped toward him, eyes shining with deadly intent.

But he didn’t run. Didn’t lift a finger to stop her as she drew nearer.

This man, a mortal being of forty years without the wisdom he’d accumulated in death, was so assured in his own existence, so certain that Time could not touch him, that he didn’t see what was there so plainly in her eyes.

He did not suppose that death was coming for him either way.

She knew the fate that awaited him, even if she did not choose this one.

When the Roman ships made landfall, he, along with his people, had but a handful of days remaining.

They would rip his secrets from him, force him to teach them the ways of the time space before killing him and erasing the rest of him from history.

How fragile Time is , she thought to herself as she approached the cliff where he stood. The entirety of history hanging on one moment. One man, standing on the edge of a precipice with a single idea in his head.

“Please forgive me,” she said in the language of her father and shoved him hard over the edge of the cliff and into the sea below. She watched with tear-stung eyes as he went under amid the crashing waves. Into the depths of the sea where the Romans would never find him, nor the secrets he kept.

Lisavet pulled herself from the memory and back into the time space just as Time began to splinter.

Already the shelves were falling, crashing into one another and turning to dust, which filled the air and became a new atmosphere.

She looked down as the book of lost names, which held the remnants of Azrael’s memories along with all her regrets, disintegrated in her palms.

As the widening chasm began to crack the ground beneath her feet, Lisavet Levy turned her eyes to the stars.