She doesn’t say anything. Because she has no response. Instead, she flees from my head, cutting short our conversation. Not because she’s in control. But because she’s panicked. Because she’s scared.

That’s when I know. I can taste the bitterness on my tongue. I can feel the aching in my heart. I understand the unshakable knowledge directly in my soul.

She’s telling the truth. She hasn’t lied to me about Bandit. She hasn’t tricked me with the cupcake. Because in her timeline, that lie and that trick haven’t happened yet.

All along, the Voice has been coming to me out of order.

The very first time she visited me…was actually one of her last.

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

The world tilts. The jellyfish lamp, my desk, even the mattress on which I’m sitting slant, and I have to dig my fingers into the bedspread to keep from sliding off.

This is huge. If the Voice has been visiting me out of order, everything changes.

I take a deep breath. And then another. Okay. I need to clear my head. I need to think this through.

Five minutes of deep breathing later, I’m steady enough to go to my desk. To pull out a piece of paper and start writing. Detailing each and every time the Voice visited me.

I list the visits in order—with one key exception. I pull out the three times she called me Malice and stick those at the end. And then, I examine the paper with fresh eyes.

Holy moly. It’s like those dot images where you step back and allow your eyes to un-focus, and presto, a completely different picture emerges.

Other than those three visits, when she targeted Bandit, she never mentioned the target’s name. She was steadfast in insisting that I reach my own conclusions.

Is it possible that in all those visits, she was sincere? That she truly wanted me to stop the Virus Maker, that she had no intention of tricking me? This conclusion would jibe with her calm and collected manner.

The other three visits, she was frantic. Panicked. She insulted me and zapped my brain to coerce me to obey. She even went so far as to take over my body, shooting out my arm to give the cupcake to Bandit.

I lean back in my chair, lifting it up onto its two back legs. Something must’ve happened in the future. Something that made older Alice change her strategy midstream. Something that convinced her to come to her teenage self out of order, to try and rewrite the story she was telling.

The legs tilt back an inch too far. For a moment, I’m suspended in the air, flailing, and then the chair—with me in it—crashes to the floor.