“Of course. None of this would work if she didn’t. Everything proceeds from her death. Like a river from a wound in the earth.”
It sleeps.
It wakes.
They watched shapes and faces, time and space. They watched something that neither of them, not even Jack Allen, could quite comprehend.
Ethan finally found the shape of a possibility. “So if we keep Sarah from dying, we can stop it. Stop all of it.”
“You might want to be careful with that, son. You have no idea the powers at work here.” Jack Allen smiled: those teeth grinding together like stones. “Just like you don’t understand the rewards that can be won. I tell you, Mister Cross—I will be granted audience once more. I will ascend to a purer form. I will make a purer world.”
“You’re insane, aren’t you?”
“No. I am a totem of unbounded potential. I will drink of the source.”
Ethan swallowed. He had no idea what this could mean, but he doubted it was a good idea for a man this crazy to be granted anykind of power. “No. We’re going to stop you. We’re going to find a way.”
“You want to know the truth of it? When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t remember a thing.”
Jack Allen moved so fast, Ethan hardly felt the fingers in his hair, the knife move along his throat. Ethan felt a great warmth running down his chest.
“See you tomorrow, Mister Cross.”
PENELOPE
It was dark in Penelope’s hiding spot, dark and colder and smaller than you might think, but thanks to Adeline it was mostly dry, and Penelope had brought her sweaters, a cushion, snacks. “We won’t be down here for long,” Adeline had whispered, but that had been hours ago, back when Tabitha had started screaming at dinner and everyone had gone running and left Penelope alone in the motel’s cafe.
Except, she hadn’t been alone. Adeline had still been there with her in the cafe, practically perched on Penelope’s shoulder, whispering in Penelope’s ear like she’d been doing since the weird silver light had passed over the desert at four o’clock sharp.
Not that Penelope had a clue why any of this was happening. Or how any of it was possible.
“We’re trapped in a time loop,” Adeline had whispered, back in the van as Stanley’s Odyssey had barreled toward the motel.
Penelope had whispered all the usual things you would think—“This can’t be real, you’re dead, I’m hallucinating your voice, I have brain damage”—but after a while Stanley had called from the driver’s seat, “Why are you talking to yourself, Penelope?” and the weird Adeline presence nestled against Penelope’s back had said, “Hush, Polly, or he’ll make things more complicated than they need to be. Just listen.”
So Penelope had listened, even though she didn’t believe a word of what she heard. At least not at first. Adeline kept talking about “a time loop” and “we’ve been doing this over and over” and “if you want to survive you need to do exactly what I say.”
“Survive?” Penelope said. “If I’m just going to wake up again tomorrow, why should I worry about surviving?”
“Because you’re the most important part, dummy,” Adeline said. “Ifyoudie too soon—if wealldie—then it’s over. For good.”
“What’s over?”
“Everything. Literally everything.”
Obviously, Penelope had believed she was just going crazy in theback of Stanley’s minivan, that the weird silver light in the sky had done something to make her brain snap, but then things started happening exactly like this weird Adeline presence had said they would.
Adeline had said, “Stanley is only a couple hours’ away from home, but he’s going to stop at a little motel on this road. He says he’s going to need gas, but if you look at the meter, he doesn’t. He’s stopping here for some other reason. The place is called the Brake Inn Motel. Just watch.”
Adeline had said, “As Stanley pulls in, he’s going to see a car that belongs to a guy named Lance. He’s going to see two girls leaving the office and say out loud, ‘That looks like Fernanda and the waitress from the steakhouse.’?”
Adeline had said, “When Stanley parks, look to the right. There’s going to be a man watching you from the door of room nine. It’s the man from The Bad Night. Whatever you do, don’t try to talk to him.”
Talk to him? Adeline must have been the crazy one, because even though things proceeded exactly the way her sister had told her they would, nothing could have prepared Penelope for the face of the man watching her from room 9 of the Brake Inn Motel. He was a muscled man with hard hazel eyes, and at the sight of him Penelope’s whole body had squeezed up, from her toes to her eyes. Only her bladder seemed loose. For the first time since she was Adeline’s age, Penelope had thought she was going to wet her pants.
The last time Penelope had seen that man with the hard hazel eyes, he’d been standing beside her bed in her mom’s house with a gun pressed to Penelope’s forehead. They’d watched each other, Penelope and the man with the hazel eyes, and somehow, even before he pulled the trigger, she’d known that her mother and her sister were already dead.
Back then, on The Bad Night, the man hadn’t said a word. He’d pulled the trigger, and Penelope had seen bright silver.
