Page 15

Auclair finds her just past lunch, hungry and irritable and holed up on the third floor of the campus library. He doesn’t greet her when he arrives. He only drops a stack of books atop the table and sinks into a vacant seat. He looks as terrible as she feels.

She flips through a dated textbook on theoretical physics, striving for nonchalance. “How’d you know where to find me?”

“I know all your hiding places, Wells.” He tugs a book toward him and flips it open. She catches a glimpse of the spine: The Problem with Causality , by M.K. Alastair. “Not very clever of you to hang around your usual haunts, given the circumstances.”

“I have a lecture with Donovan,” she assures him. “I won’t come this way for hours.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.” He thumbs to the back of the book and falls to reading. Georgina watches him scan the index out of the corner of her eye. He is alien to her like this. Quiet. Courteous. Cooperative .

“Are you helping me?”

“I’m helping me,” he corrects, without looking up. “I’d prefer not to die.”

“You should be more careful. To your point, I might have been November Georgina.”

His mouth twitches in a near smile. “Is that what you’re calling yourself?” He lets the book fall shut. “I saw November Georgina rushing off to class on the way in. You’re wearing a ridiculous parka today, by the way.”

“You told me I looked like a picnic blanket,” she says, remembering the encounter. “You said if I sat too still, I might attract ants.”

“That was mean,” he admits, grinning. “The truth is, I think you look pretty in everything. Even a picnic blanket.”

All the air gutters out of her. “Why would you say that?”

“Here’s a thought,” he continues, as though he hasn’t heard her. “What would happen if you ran into yourself?”

“I don’t really know.” She shuffles through her assortment of books, desperate for something to do with her hands. “I’ve been researching all morning, but I can’t find anything on time travel.”

“I’m not so sure it is time travel,” Auclair contests.

“What? What do you mean? I started in December, and now I’m in November. I went backward. That’s the literal definition.”

“It’s the definition of drifting,” corrects Auclair. “Only, you swam downriver. Not across.” He punctuates this with a stare that feels like a kick in the gut. She wonders if he’s thinking of the peculiar carousel of memories between them. Of the seamless way they’d fit together.

It’s all she’s been able to think about.

“Tell me about the first time you drifted,” he says, as though he doesn’t already know. As though it wasn’t all anyone could talk about, when she first transferred to Tempus. Georgina Wells, freak of nature.

“My mom was deployed,” she says. “I’m sure you’ve heard.

She’d been stationed in the Baltic Sea during the sanctions immediately following World War Three.

We had minimal contact. We exchanged letters whenever we could, but hers usually came back with entire sentences blacked out.

It used to really upset me – more than it should have.

It just felt like they were keeping her from me.

I’d cried myself to sleep the night it happened.

I remember wanting her so badly. I needed my mom, and then there she was. ”

She lifts her eyes from where she’s fallen to fiddling with her sleeve. Across the table, Auclair is giving her his undivided attention. Elbows braced on his knees, fingers steepled, a stray lock of hair falling into his eyes. Georgina wishes he would look anywhere else.

“Do you know how hard it is,” he finally says, “to drift overseas?”

“I’m aware, yes.”

“I mean it, Wells. They talked our ears off about it back in high school, but in practice it’s an entirely different beast. My dad used to be flown as close as possible to his drift location.

He’d spend days beforehand studying photos of the location.

Blueprints. Maps. Satellite images. All of it.

He’d memorize every angle, and even then, he sometimes ended up in the wrong place. ”

“I know,” says Georgina, growing impatient.

She doesn’t need him to explain. She’d taken all the same classes.

Read all the same books. She knew how it worked.

She knew, too, that what she’d done – exploding out of her cluttered little bedroom in Rhode Island and reappearing below decks on an aircraft carrier four thousand miles away – was an anomaly.

A hiccup.

It was an uncontrolled spasm of power, and it couldn’t be replicated on command. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. Over and over again.

“Your trigger is emotional,” says Auclair. “It makes perfect sense. There are few bonds stronger than that of a mother and daughter. You were upset that day. You wanted your mom, so you went to where she was. When I died—”

“Don’t say it, Auclair.”

“Why not? We’ve both seen it. What’s the point in pretending otherwise?”

“It’s a false memory. A–A distortion. We saw something that never actually happened.”

“Yet,” says Auclair.

She launches to her feet. He trails her.

“You followed a bond,” he presses on, undeterred. “ Our bond. Like it or not, Wells, that’s the reality. There was no bank to cross to reach me. You can’t follow the dead. So, for the second time in your life, you did what no drifter has done before—”

“Shut up.”

“Get over your pious fucking hang-ups, Georgina, this is important. It’s—”

“I’m serious,” she snaps. “Someone’s coming.”

He falls silent, listening. The sound of laughter trickles in from the hall. Her laughter. November Georgina. His eyes jolt to hers.

“You need better hiding places.”

“Shoot. I forgot Donovan finished early today.” She’s gathering up her things. Shoving books into her bag. “Move. Quickly.”

To her immense relief, he follows her lead.

They clear out just in time, sliding through the nearest door and pulling it closed just as she catches sight of her parka, oversized and flannel, and very much like a picnic blanket, rounding the corner.

The door snicks shut. They’re left shrouded in the dark, hemmed in by industrial shelves piled high with toilet paper and cleaning products.

“A closet,” intones Auclair. “Nicely done, Wells. You really thought this through.”

“I panicked,” she snaps, wary of his elbow poking into her stomach. Able to think of almost nothing else. “What if I see myself and my brain breaks?”

“Like you broke mine?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Nothing you do is ever on purpose.” There’s a grunt, and she feels him turn, fitting himself into the narrow space as best he can. “Maybe that’s your problem. You need to start assuming some responsibility.”

“I’m not going to fight with you inside a broom closet.”

“Why not?” His breath gusts across her face. He is dangerously close. “It seems as good a place as any. Out of curiosity, how long do you think you’ll stay out there?”

“Until Theosophy, at least.”

“Ah, so we’re trapped. Excellent. Fucking Wells and her books.”

“I can hear you.”

“You were meant to.” The industrial shelf rattles beneath his lean. She can picture his slouch. The seamless slide of his hands into his pockets. After a brief but loaded silence, he falls to humming. It’s a dangerous sound. A provocative sound. He knows she hates it when he hums.

“Do you think,” he finally says, “the first time I kiss you, it’ll be because I saw it in a memory or because I want to do it?”

Georgina’s pulse skips several beats. “What?”

“It really brings all thoughts of predetermination screaming to the forefront, doesn’t it?”

But she’s still stuck on what he said. “Who says you’re the one who kisses me?”

His surprise is palpable. Or maybe it’s only that she’s so attuned to him, after so many years of furious scrutiny, that she knows him blind.

“Well, it certainly wouldn’t be you,” he says, after a moment’s consideration. “Everything you do, it’s because you stumble into it. When I kiss you, it’ll be on purpose.”

Heat gathers in her cheeks. Simmers just beneath her skin.

“Come to think of it,” he muses, before she can chastise him, “if everything is predetermined, one could argue that we don’t possess free will at all.”

“Auclair.”

“Yes?”

“Can you stop waxing philosophical for a second and—”

“Kiss you?”

The world, and everything in it, comes screeching to a halt.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Wasn’t it?” He’s moved without her noticing. The thin strip of light from the door illuminates the bridge of his nose, the devastating curve of his mouth. And then, suddenly, he’s touching her. Barely. Just. His hand skims the curve of her hip.

“Look around, Wells,” he murmurs. “Look at where we are.”

His directive brings the shadowed opacity of the closet careening into focus.

Bronze winks down at her from a box of brass fixtures on a topmost shelf.

Directly over her head sits a series of dated encyclopedias, haphazardly stacked.

And beside her is a broom, its wooden handle splintered.

She is, all at once, both within a memory and outside it, Orson Auclair’s touch skating up, up, up – over her ribs, along her clavicle, up the soft underside of her throat – until finally, finally, he reaches her mouth.

His thumb presses a shallow indentation into her lower lip. A single, cut breath escapes her.

“It’s fascinating, isn’t it,” he notes. “What came first, do you think? Our awareness of this moment, or the moment itself? Here’s a thought experiment: if I lean in and kiss you now, is it because I’ve been led to do it, or because I want it all on my own?”

Sense eludes her. Her entire world has winnowed down to this: the pad of his thumb scraping along the edge of her teeth. She tilts back. Just a little. Just enough to get her bearings.

Her voice comes out tattered. “ Do you want it?”

“Hell yes,” he breathes, and kisses her.