Chapter 6

Any blind date that starts with?—

I'm so glad Jasper's the one who's always late to this thing. I am never late. I get sweaty if I'm not fifteen minutes early for important meetings and appointments. If I had to be late to the blind date from hell in perpetuity, I'd lose my mind.

Also, hi again, Mother. I glance up at the mural on the wall. Nice to see you. Did you know there's a drag queen on the south side of town who knows who we are? Who else does?

Yes, I know it's pretentious to always call my mother "Mother." It was her decision, not mine. She said moms were women who baked cookies and went to soccer games, and she did none of that. We can talk about what her insistent distinction between herself and "those other moms" meant for her own sense of femininity on a day when I don't die for the sixty-third time in a row.

"You sure you don't want something to eat? I could cook you up something." Vee comes up to the table.

"Who else knew about Mother?" I ask, not bothering with her question.

She blinks a few times, clearly not expecting me to go right for the heavy stuff.

"Who else . . ." She frowns.

"Who else knew the Legendary Flame was Farah Field?" I ask.

"Morgan!" she says, shushing me. We get a few curious looks from the other patrons in the diner. Vee turns her head like it's on a swivel, no doubt doing the same thing I did at Kicks when Max said she knew my mother. We don't talk about this. Ever. And considering Vee and I haven't talked since the night my mother died, she can't even begin to guess where I'm going with this.

If she only knew.

"It doesn't matter," I say, leaning back in my chair. "I'll be dead by the end of the night, anyway."

Also, holy shit, my back is killing me. I shift, and something like a scar tugs along the side of my spine. My hands are halfway to lifting my shirt to check if I can see anything before I remember I'm in a public place.

"What? Morgan, are you okay?" Vee's voice rises even louder than mine did a minute ago.

Jasper crashes through the door, rushing toward me.

"Oh, look," I say. "My date is here."

This time, instead of taking the seat across from me, he throws my laptop bag on the ground and sits next to me, eyes intent on mine.

"You're okay?" he says.

I tuck my shirt back into my pants. "I've been better."

"Can I get you anything to drink?" Vee's looking nervously between us, and I give her what I hope is an insouciant smile. Let her wonder if I really am dying. Or why I suddenly don't care about protecting my mother's secret identity. Not like I can give her a straight answer about either, anyway. I've died, but I'm not dead. I'll probably die again soon, but I can't say I'm actively dying now. Surely a massage is all I'd need to sort out this massive kink in my back. Wait until the masseuse hears how I got it.

"Just water," Jasper says distractedly.

"Two beers," I say. "And do you have any nachos?"

"Chips and salsa," she says with a soft smile as she writes the order down. "Though there's onion in the salsa. You don't want that."

I roll my eyes. "We'll have the chips. Put queso on the side too." I need Jasper well-fed while I yell at him for getting me killed in a villain dive bar brawl.

"Just the water," Jasper says. "We're not staying."

"We aren't?"

"Two waters it is." Vee stuffs her pad into the front of her apron and walks away.

When she's gone, we stare at each other for a long time before Jasper says, "So, how are you feeling?" The way he wrinkles his nose says even he knows it's an awkward question.

"Oh, you know. Just died again, then got sucked back in time. The usual." I wince as I lean in and the scar—or the memory of the stab wound, whatever the hell it is I'm feeling—pulls.

"You're okay, though?" He sounds so hopeful. His golden retriever vibe would be irresistible in so many other circumstances. If I'd met him in an undergraduate chemistry class, I'd have offered to be his study buddy for the semester while secretly hoping he might teach me to do way more than study.

"It's not something you bounce back from." I shift again, trying to relieve the ache in my back, but I can't quite find the right spot to sit. "But it hasn't killed me yet. Not permanently, anyway."

"Did you see who stabbed you?" Jasper reaches for my arm, like he might be trying to turn me to check for wounds. I pretend not to notice, even though some small part of me would really like him to touch me. Maybe pat my shoulder and tell me it's going to be okay. Maybe more. But the portrait of Mother on the ceiling is still watching, and I can practically hear her tell me now is not the time to be soft.

"No," I say, pulling clear of his grasp. "That's kind of the point of stabbing someone in the back. So you don't see them. Anyway, what does it matter who stabbed me?"

"It would be useful to know for when we go back to Kicks. We'd be able to keep an eye out for them and?—"

"Absolutely not." I bang on the table to punctuate the point and Vee, who is arriving with water glasses, jumps. "We're not going back there."

"I think we should at least?—"

My casual act is over. I don't need to repeat this experiment to know what the outcome would be. We walked into the lion's den and got eaten for dinner.

"Look, we tried it your way. You got thrown across a room, and I got stabbed. Why would we do that again?"

But Jasper's not listening. He's nodding like he agrees with me but then says, "We'll be better prepared. We can get some disguises."

"Disguises? People there knew who I was. Who my mother was. Do you think a funny hat and a pair of sunglasses is?—"

"Wait." Jasper holds up a hand. "Your mother? Who's your mother?"

Shit. I shouldn't have said that out loud. Dying so many times has scrambled my brain, and I'm letting secrets that I've been protecting my whole life slip. I don't care if the other people at Wench know who my mother was because they'll all forget with the next stabbing or bus accident. But Jasper won't forget, and he works for someone who would be very interested in this information.

"Nothing. Never mind." I grab my jacket and laptop bag. "We're not going back there."

Jasper follows after me as I head to the door. "Then where are we going?"

"We tried it your way, now we're going to try it mine." No more diving in headfirst. We're taking the careful approach. The scientific one. We are consulting experts instead of devising our own methodology when we clearly have no idea what's happening.

"Then what are we waiting for?" he asks, glancing around. We're standing on the street corner. I didn't even realize I had stopped.

"We're, uh . . . we're waiting for the bus."

"We're taking the bus?"

"No." My feet feel like they're glued to the concrete. "I'm just... waiting for it to pass so I know it's safe to cross."

Jasper checks his watch. It's an old one with a gold face and a worn brown leather strap. "The bus came three minutes ago."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah. I had lots of time to figure out the timing of things before you started remembering." He laughs softly and takes my hand. This time, I don't shake him off because I'm honestly not sure how I'll get my feet to move otherwise.

I try not to think about that too hard. It's like someone experiencing something while you were asleep. He could have done anything to me those first sixty times. Told me anything. He could have been all "come with me if you want to live," then pushed me off a cliff for shits and giggles, and I wouldn't know.

But true to his word, there's no sign of the bus. We cross the street and through the parking lot to my car and wow—this is a head spinner. We were here two hours ago, where I lectured Jasper and demanded answers, and now we're here again and I've died yet again and it's a different day, but the same day.

Jasper gives me a sympathetic smile. "Don't hurt yourself."

"Excuse me?"

His consideration is so at odds with the imaginary Jasper in my head who is still yeeting me off a cliff to pass the time. So much of him is at odds with what I know. He doesn't seem to have a mean bone in his body, yet somehow he works for Walter Wolfe.

"That's the face you make when you're trying to solve a tough problem, like how to tell me you've had a really nice time but you don't think this relationship has a future. I've seen it enough to know." He raises a finger to my forehead, and I jerk my head back. He doesn't look hurt by the action. "You're thinking about it. Time. Truth."

"Truth is relative," I say. "It's really not much more than consensus in the face of empirical evidence."

He laughs, even while I still feel way too vulnerable. "It's still better if you don't strain yourself trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense."

"This is a man-made phenomenon. Someone is doing this to us. We just have to figure out who it is, how they're doing it, and get them to stop." I unlock the car and motion for Jasper to get in before we have any more squishy feelings between us.

Jasper rolls his eyes as he slides into the front seat. "Oh, is that all? Why didn't I think of that before?"

I have to fight to keep from smiling. It's the first snarky thing Jasper's said, and the frustration in his tone makes me feel a little better. He's not operating with more information than I am. Despite his ambiguous views of good and evil, he needs me as much as I need him.

I say, "And if we can't figure it out on our own, we'll have to ask for help."

"Help?" Jasper asks as we pull out of the lot. "Who could possibly help us with this?"

"We're going to see the smartest person I know."

I only hope he's smart enough to know what to do.

I actually start driving us home before I remember Ezekiel has gone to the lab for the data breach. We do the same.

Ziro Labs is a white ultramodern complex built into the hillside at the edge of town. It's basically the complete opposite of Ziro Hall and its gothic architecture, but with the same imposing sense of scale. I skip my usual spot near the front of the cylindrical main building and go around to the back. With the story I'm about to tell Ezekiel, I want as few witnesses as possible. I have an image to maintain here. These people are my colleagues, and while their first impression when I started working here was some trust fund baby riding his stepfather's coat tails, I've worked hard to earn their respect. I can't show up now with a wild story about time travel and blind dates.

"Wow. Alyssa said this place was big, but it's big," Jasper says as I scan my thumb on the reader at the back door.

I frown at him. "When was Alyssa here?"

"She must have come with Clarissa. I didn't?—"

"Prestidigitator," I say when the screen prompts me for the password.

"Prestidigitator?" Jasper laughs. "What kind of place is this?"

"It's just a lab, but the password is set up to require a random word with five or more syllables." The lock clicks and I pull it open.

"Metamorphosis was already taken?" Jasper says as we head inside.

"I used that one last week." Honestly, as we've finalized our research, I lobbied hard to increase security. Changing passwords once a week isn't nearly enough, though the real security is inside, on our servers protecting the data and engineering models. "So, what did Alyssa say?" We typically don't have visitors in the building, not even spouses.

"What?" Jasper's walking around with his mouth open and his eyes wide, like he's never been anywhere like this before. It occurred to me on the way over that bringing someone who works for Walter Wolfe into Ziro Labs was probably a bad idea, but desperate timesand all that.

"Alyssa said this place was big and what else?"

"Oh. She said you were..." He glances around like he's trying to find an escape, but we're waiting for the private elevator that takes us up to the executive level, so there isn't anywhere to go.

"I was...?" I ask, mostly to watch him squirm. And maybe a little for my own ego, because I really need him to finish that sentence. Clarissa always framed my date with Jasper like she was doing me a huge favour. Like I couldn't be trusted to meet someone on my own. So what if I've been locked up in the lab the last few years? When I was ready, I would have found someone. Look how well her plan to set me up with Jasper has gone. But I'm curious to hear what Alyssa said that convinced him to go out with me. "Morgan's a nerdy shut-in with mommy issues and a boatload of emotional baggage" isn't exactly a great sales pitch.

But Jasper's still got his friendly, relaxed smile on as his gaze meets mine. Not a shred of pity. I'm already blushing before he says, "Alyssa also said you were funny and really good-looking, and well, I guess she was right."

Jesus, how pathetic can I be? A guy I don't know who works for a criminal organization called me pretty, and suddenly I'm out of words and my shoes have become very, very interesting.

"Sorry," he says. "That was weird, wasn't it?"

I should say yes. I should tell him this isn't really a date anymore. It's a survival mission. But my face is on fire, and what I actually want to do is tell him to keep talking. I might as well rub myself against his ankles like a cat.

Fortunately, before I have to confirm or deny, the elevator arrives. The distraction means the moment is gone by the time we start rising toward the top floor.

"What exactly do you do here?" Jasper asks.

"We're saving the world." My answer is immediate. A reflex. It's the same answer I give at press conferences and cocktail parties. Everyone loves a good sound bite. For the first while, I wasn't sure I believed it. The statement felt incomplete, knowing that we only had very human methods to accomplish the goals Ezekiel and I set out for ourselves. But over time, we made progress and came to understand how much we could do with the Ziro Machine. We're going save the world. No superpowers required.

"Save it in general or in a specific way?" Jasper asks with a laugh.

"Didn't we talk about this any of the first sixty times?"

He shrugs. "You said you had a presentation for work. Something about climate change. It feels more real, though, now that we're here."

I glance at him, but he doesn't appear to be laughing at me specifically, so I humour him. "It's basically impossible for industry and personal mitigation measures to achieve the carbon reduction targets world governments have set. We don't need a better light bulb, we need a complete technological shift on how we illuminate the planet."

"Sure." He stuffs his hands in his pockets, which says to me this isn't something he thinks about day and night the way I do.

"Ezekiel has designed a machine that captures excess energy from warming oceans."

"But then what?" Jasper asks. "He beams it back to space?" The way he asks, he's not being sarcastic. It's a genuine request for more information. And yet, the question surprises me. Hardly anyone wants this much detail. Most people don't ask anything at all. Despite decades of warnings, humanity continues to think of global warming as a future problem. They certainly don't ask what happens to the energy we remove, which has always been the issue. Storing that much energy is like building a giant bomb. A world killer. And we did consider the space launch option for about half a minute, but the risks were huge, and we ran into the continued issue of traversing the greenhouse gas layer.

"We repurpose it. The Ziro Machine essentially functions as a power conversion and transmission plant. Like a heat pump for your house but with additions and on a scale to power whole cities. Industries can access it the way they would power from a fossil fuel–fired system, but it basically becomes a closed loop. We're recycling power."

It's a work of art, honestly. It took forever to come up with something that would actually do what we needed it to. The technology to efficiently convert trapped heat in the seas into useable electricity doesn't exist. Or it didn't, until Ezekiel finally had his idea for the converter. I'd started to give up hope that our vision would only ever be theoretical. But one night, he burst into my office, face flushed and eyes bright with excitement. It was such a stark contrast after his daily persona of exhausted grief that I knew he'd finally broken through. He showed me a sketch of what would become the Ziro Machine, and the rest is history. One that will be responsible for shaping the future.

"But if you're cutting back on fossil fuel emissions, doesn't that mean eventually you won't need to be recycling the energy because it'll be escaping the way it's supposed to?"

My pulse is racing. Not in fear or annoyance like it has so many times since I met Jasper. More like excitement. I never get to have these conversations with people outside work. Never mind that we're in the lab. He's a henchman, but a pretty smart one. The concept turns me on more than it has any right to. I love a good argument with a well-matched opponent, but I love an intelligent conversation even more.

"Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels right now, it will take centuries for temperatures to go back to where they should be. It's only by collecting some of the excess heat that's already out there that we stop the temperature rises and changing weather patterns. So the system is sustainable and helps us stabilize and back us down faster from the tipping point than we would otherwise."

"You sound really proud of it," he says, and there I go, looking at my shoes again.

"It's going to be amazing," I say. It has to be. When my mother died, I swore I was done with superheroes. The last two years, I've given everything to the Ziro Machine. I was never going to save the world like my mother. This is the best way I know how.

The elevator slows and the doors slide open. We stand for a second, neither one of us moving. Finally, Jasper says, "I don't know where we're going, remember?"

His voice is soft and gently teasing, and he's standing so close to me his breath puffs over my neck, making the hairs at my nape stand on end. I flush. Right. Time to find a solution to this. The ice caps are melting, and so am I, apparently. The sooner we get out of this loop, the better.

"Let's go see Ezekiel."