If he pulled the length of floss until he felt the timer switch click over, he would have just sixty seconds until detonation. If he pulled the string hard enough to tear it loose of the switch, the explosion would be instantaneous.

The house lay silent but for the storm without.

What would you do for love? he’d once asked in a novel, written after the loss of Emily. Would you die? Would you kill? Yes and yes. The cause better be righteous, however, and in this case he knew it was right to kill these travelers out of time, who themselves had no respect for life. Even in his own time, evil players often did not recognize their own evil, thought themselves paragons of virtue, proclaimed themselves champions of justice to justify violence, with no understanding that justice is often subjective, that the pursuit of justice is not the same, not as worthy, as the pursuit of hard, objective truth; and judging by what he’d learned, it seemed the world a hundred years hence might be a place where most were evil, in a war of all against all, where every murderer thought himself a virtuous victim. David had no stake in such a future and no power to change it. He had only Emily, the hope of saving one life by facing the hard truth of his past betrayal.

He was physically exhausted, emotionally drained, mentally weary. By the grace of adrenaline, desperation, and raw hope, he remained on his feet and alert.

The period of what Corley had called “temporal dislocation” seemed to have passed. The lights maintained a steady glow, and the air remained warm. No hallway from another century folded into this one.

According to whoever operated the Nanette avatar, she required fifteen minutes to release Emily from the stasis chamber and bring her fully conscious.

David couldn’t imagine how Emily would cope with what had happened. She would remember Jessup’s assault, being stabbed, making her way to this house, collapsing in the front hall, but most likely nothing else. For her, all of that terror had occurred not ten years ago, but only minutes earlier—and yet she had no wounds.

Although she had supposedly remained unconscious in the stasis chamber, perhaps some subtle awareness of her status informed her dreams, if indeed she had dreams. Then she might awaken with a sense that something extraordinary happened. Maybe she even possessed a memory of being healed by miraculous technology before they had subjected her to suspended animation. In that case, upon being resurrected, she might suffer less from shock and fear than from perplexity or even just bewilderment. Whatever her condition, she would come to understand, to accept the ten-year hole in the middle of her life, because she would have him to help her. David would counsel her, guide her, gentle her into her life renewed; he would cherish her, live for her.