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“They’re shutting the line down for maintenance at the end of the summer,” Myla reads.
“Shutting it down?” The dates indicate September 1 through October 31. “Two months? I won’t be able to see her for two months?”
Myla turns to her, eyes wide. “Didn’t you say—if she doesn’t see you—?”
“Yeah,” August says. “When I stopped riding the Q, everything got blurry again for her. Do you… do you think she would…?”
August pictures Jane trapped for months, alone and confused and staticky and forgetting, or worse—tripping back out of this precise moment in time just like she tripped into it, lost again, gone further than August’s research could ever uncover. They have no idea how firmly she’s planted here and now.
August just found her. It’s too soon to lose her.
At Billy’s, Lucie does not look happy to see August, considering she’s been faking mono for weeks. But she shoves two menus and two rolls of silverware at her and wordlessly seats them at the bar.
Winfield drops off a plate of fries, and once he’s gone, August leans over and asks, “What the hell do we do?”
“Okay,” Myla says. “I have a theory.”
August opens her mouth before snapping it shut when Winfield drops off the ketchup. As soon as he’s gone, she asks, “What?”
Myla leans in. “Do you know anything about time slips?”
August blinks. “No.”
“Okay,” Myla says. She seizes the ketchup, dumping it over the fries. August pulls a face, and Myla waves it off. “It’s this sci-fi trope where somebody gets lost in time. So, like, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mark Twain book. Guy gets hit in the head and wakes up in Camelot. Maybe something happened to her on the train that threw her out of time.”
August frowns. “Like, she time traveled?”
“Sort of,” Myla says thoughtfully. “But you found proof she was around in the ’80s and ’90s, right?” August nods. “So it’s not only then to now. Maybe she’s been, like… flickering through time. Maybe she’s stuck on the subway because some big event, some big anomaly, tethered her there. She’s, like, trapped in the in-between.”
“In between what?”
“Dead and alive, maybe,” she says. “Real and not real.”
“So the train is like… purgatory?” How very Catholic.
“Yeah, but… not. Like, okay. You and me, we’re real. We’re stuck to reality, in this timeline. Linear. We started at point A, and we move forward through points B, C, D, et cetera. This is because nothing has ever interfered with our reality. There’s never been an event that could have disrupted our timeline. So our points A, B, C, D, correspond to the same order of points in linear time. But say there was an event like—like on Lost, when they detonate the H bomb and get thrown forward in time. Something just big enough to make a crack that one person could slip through, and it knocked her loose from the timeline of reality. Her point B could be our point D, her point E could be our point C. It’s not linear for her. She can be in 1980 one moment and 2005 the next and 1996 after that, because she came unstuck.”
August scrunches her hands up in her hair, trying to wrap her brain around it.
“Okay, so like… like music on the radio,” she attempts. “Like, the radio waves start in one place and they’re picked up by whatever receiver catches them. She’s the transmission, and her receivers are—”
“All at different moments in time, right,” Myla says. “So, if we look at it that way, she’s the music, and we’re the receiver picking her up.”
“And the other people that have seen her and interacted with her on the train over the years, those were—”
“Like antennas on cars catching a radio station as they pass through town. She’s—she’s always broadcasting out of the same tower.”
August feels like her brain is going to melt out of her nose. “The Q. She’s broadcasting out of the line.”
“Right. So… whatever it was must have happened while she was on the train,” Myla says slowly. The fries are going soggy. “We just need to figure what.”
“How do we do that?”
“No idea.”
August straightens, shoving her glasses up her nose. She can do this. Her brain is wired to solve things. “I mean, a big enough event to throw a person out of time—there would be a record of that, right?”
Myla looks at her. “Girl, I don’t know. This is all hypothetical.” She must see the frustration flash across August’s face, because she picks up a fry and points it at her. It flops over pathetically, dripping ketchup onto the table. “Look, you might be right. But it could have been totally localized. People could have missed it completely.”
