9/9/1999 – 7:25 AM

You were always so famous when we rode the subway.” Jockey’s words stop me from checking my multiverse watch. one. more. time.

“Well ... not you, but her, my mom. She is ... was an actress,” he adds, a moment later, like an afterthought. But I am no longer listening. I’ve already heard this—every day of the five years we’ve spent together. More than 1,800 days. He is not my kid here—never was—even if a parallel-universe version of me pushed him from my body in some other life eleven years ago.

I just can’t imagine.

And I don’t want to. I lift the leather-gold-and-glass watch to my eyes and shut the door to my imagination. But my heart’s not in it. My eyes don’t register where its arrow-shaped hands point. We have twenty-five minutes. Or twenty. Or thirty. It doesn’t matter because it’s different every time—in every different universe—some new version or shade of the last.

“Do you think this will be the time?” I ask—because I want escape from my head, haunted by the ghost of Jockey’s mom. Instead, instant regret washes over me. Jockey’s almost-teen mask recedes—just a little—and his sorrow comes out, like a child whose toy has been cast away. It’s a reminder that I’m a poor copy of his real mother, a woman I’ll never meet who made much better use of my genetics and opportunities than I ever will. She’s dead now and Jockey’s an orphan. He stays that way if I fail again.

I give in and force my eyes to focus on the watch and its tiny, useless arrows. I’ve kept the sleeve of my coat folded up over my wrist for so long that my skin has grown numb from the cold. 7:26 AM. I lower my arm to my side. What happened here that makes it so damned cold in early September? These multiverse watches, for all their twenty-first-century science under a granny-style mid-century face, can deliver the wonders of sending you to and from so many universes. What can they tell once you’re there? Nothing but the time.

Temporal community service never means time tourism, the probation service tells you on the day you receive your sentence. Break and enter and get caught ... then spend the rest of your life seeing all the universes where you made better choices. But you can never go back and change your own choices—someone has to want to do that for you.

“Why aren’t you more like her?” Jockey asks, to the sky, the crushed stone of the subway platform, the passersby whose English differs just enough from ours that they cast their eyes over us, trying to decipher where we’re from.

“Not now, Jockey,” I huff, cutting him off. I’ve got to focus on finding this ghost of lost chances, this version of me who’s worth this mission to save her life by risking my own. It’s a fair trade, they think, risking lost-cause Sarah to save all-the-right-choices, everyone-loves-her Sarah before the Attacks of September 9, 1999, can erase her from the timeline. The Sarah of this universe may be close enough to the woman who birthed Jockey. That’s what we’re here to figure out.

7:27 AM

My eyes follow Jockey’s extended finger. He’s pointing at a building across the platform. “That one looks familiar, Sarah,” he says, grasping for memories he doesn’t have.

At least he’s finally stopped calling me ‘mom.’ It’s my greatest parental achievement after four worlds of me telling him he’s not my son—four failed missions. In those worlds, I’ve found—we’ve found—drug-addict Sarah who died by suicide, sports-car Sarah who crashed a Datsun into two kids on bikes, worn-out mom Sarah who had her first kid at sixteen and then four more, and jilted-mom Sarah whose human-tissue breast implants kept her abusive boyfriend interested, but also got her terminal cancer. She had six months to live when we found her.

No matter the chances I get, I fail in spectacular ways, in so many ways. Except when I pretend to be someone else. People loved Crawford-House Sarah, Jockey’s mom. She acted out leading roles on its stage. But my Boston tore down the Crawford House before I was born. It’s a chance I was never given.

“Do you think this is my Boston?” Jockey asks, nudging me from my list of failures. I look across the platform again, but it’s just a brick building—like all the others that surround North Station in this Boston, and every Boston, where Boston and subways exist anyway.

We have twenty-eight minutes before this shit goes down. Jockey takes my cue to mind his watch as he follows my eyes to the dark mouth of the North Station subway tunnel. Every version of Boston means waiting for subway cars.

“Did they call it the T in your world?” I ask him, but he just shrugs. His shoulders sag at lost memories. He was just six then. Six-year-olds can’t form lasting memories around these things, not ones that survive five years later.

We keep watching the tunnel. A watched subway car never comes, I think, then scrap it because it doesn’t make any sense. I remember to smile at Jockey because that’s what his mother would have done.

7:29 AM

‘What happens if I die?’ I think. But I already know the answer. Jockey knows it too. They’d leave me dead. Another Failed Sarah. The Service wouldn’t send another version of me to save me, not this me.

I’m close enough to all-the-right-choices Sarah to keep Jockey’s little-kid memories of his mom alive, but not close enough to stop looking for someone better.

The yawning dark of the subway tunnel lightens to gray, but it’s a trick of my eyes. As the minutes tick down to twenty-five.

All I can do is watch the subway tunnel while the woman next to me sips at a hierba maté like she hasn’t just paid $20 for the infused juice of a weed that grows in whatever this place calls Bolivia. Fancy, hot drinks are big business in all my universes.

More moments tick by. Workers in suits, students in jeans, vagrants in something that looks like ripped sweatpants mill about the platform. An out-of-service train rolls away and I see a poster that urges us to experience the history of the Crawford House. Here, it still stands, even if a high-rise office building now sprouts from its roof and rises out of the picture like a beanstalk that promises golden eggs to naïve souls who don’t understand how corporate jobs work. It’s a sign we’re getting closer to the world of Jockey’s mom.

A smallish college girl carrying a huge backpack brushes my shoulder. She mutters an apology in an English that sounds like German.

It’s not Jockey’s English, not the English we found him speaking as a six-year-old orphan made motherless by his universe’s 9/9/99 attacks. He hasn’t noticed that yet. But maybe the English here is still close enough. Maybe this version of Sarah will be close enough so we can stop looking. Maybe I can leave behind this exercise of seeing all the ways my choices have led to failure.

No one else speaks on the subway platform. No one ever speaks. That’s the same in every world we go.

An electronic billboard across the tracks shows a boy who looks like Jockey with a milk mustache. DRINK MILCH, it says. I can’t remember how much German had leaked into toddler Jockey’s English. His Sarah would remember. Of course, she would.

I ground myself by listening to the small noises of the fifty people on the platform. Heels click. A gray-haired man coughs. A woman laughs. 7:31 AM. Two minutes have passed by like an eternity.

“Sarah?”

I almost don’t hear Jockey over the roar of the subway car, when its lights finally turn the bend.

“Yes?”

Squealing brakes bring the car into the station. We all squint like bats hit by a watchman’s flashlight. It’s a North Station car, but it’s called a wagen here, like the German word. 7:32 AM.

Seven minutes in this universe and we have as many as twenty-three left till the attacks come, or don’t, or come earlier or later. I drop my watch to my side and maneuver for a place at the front of the line of people, already herding like the recently departed, seeking Catholic-style salvation at the pearly gates of Heaven. No one recognizes me as a famous stage actress.

“Sarah?” Jockey beckons, from behind me. He’s my height now, a miniature man. The girl with the big backpack looks over. She’s going to ask which obscure European country we’re from.

“Where were you on 9/9/99?” Jockey asks, and the girl looks away.

I shift my eyes toward the car’s opening doors. A man beside me is staring me down. I’m blocking his ascent into the subway car. He hasn’t noticed that the car isn’t going anywhere.

7:32 AM

“LAST STOP, NORTH STATION. NORTH STATION, LAST STOP. PLEASE TAKE YOUR BELONGINGS AND EXIT THE WAGEN.” The conductor’s words blast from the train’s loudspeakers. We—the sea of humanity outside on the platform—stutter-step aside, clearing a path for the torrent of commuters exiting the train.

“LAST STOP, LAST STOP. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THIS WAGEN IS BEING TAKEN OUT OF SERVICE. PLEASE EXIT THE WAGEN.”

The commuters grumble and return to their newspapers. Their collective groans ring familiar in every universe, whether Boston has statues of victorious revolutionaries or loyalists, a view of New Berlin from a hill called the Trimount, or a Back Bay district filled in with its dirt.

“Sarah?” Jockey tugs at my sleeve as those-who-never-listen push toward the subway car’s still-open doors. A man bumps my shoulder as he pushes by. He looks back to utter an excuse-me in words that sound German.

“Yes, Jockey?” I look at him and try to channel a shred of the mother he needs, from somewhere deep within me.

“Where were you on 9/9/99?” he repeats his question.

This again. “That date doesn’t mean anything to me. Remember?”

The herd of commuters jostles and pushes us closer to the train.

“Last stop!” a man hollers from a few sets of shoulders away.

Jockey doesn’t respond, but behind his eyes, his brain processes how this central date of his life could mean absolutely nothing to another version of his mother. He clears his throat. A blonde woman in a blue skirt jams her hand between the closing doors and yanks them open again. More groans. More muttered expletives.

“Hallo!” the girl with the backpack calls in a high-pitched whine that would have been just as much at home in my Beacon Hill or Cambridge. “That wagen is coming out of service.” She then lifts her arm to point at the car and the sign that’s just now changing to confirm for those-who-don’t-listen. OUT-OF-SERVICE.

“But we have other dates that matter,” I tell Jockey like it’s a consolation, but I don’t tell him about 9/11 or why it matters to me. I turn back toward the car, with its doors finally closed. Its lights dim and it pulls away. The breeze catches a man’s newspaper, ripping it toward the ground. The sports section flutters open and I spy a photo of a smiling Pedro Martinez on the mound at Fenway. He looks the same as the Pedro Martinez from my world, from my 1990s.

“I guess,” Jockey relents, giving in like I’ve just told him that everyone’s mother dies.

“Hallo!” the girl with the backpack calls out again as another commuter jostles her forward. Her drink explodes on the ground, a mess of something purple with green dots. It’s like someone smashed up Barney the Dinosaur in a blender.

7:34 AM

“How much longer?” Jockey asks in the voice of the teenager-he’ll-become, like he’s stuck in Boston’s parking-lot-in-the-sky, its Central Artery, staring down into the cauldron of hell that is its Big Dig.

I’m about to tell him I don’t know, but the lights from the next subway car are ricocheting across the sheen of the godawful blouse I’ve worn to blend into the morning commute of this world.

“MUNICHDORF WAGEN,” the conductor shouts the subway car’s destination, barely over its screeching as it lurches to a stop. I tug Jockey up the stairs and into the car. We find a seat before the waves of people push in around us. I hope Munichdorf means Government Center like it did in the last world, or Scollay Square in the world before that. That’s where the Crawford House will be, and where we will find all-the-right-choices-Sarah.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” Jockey whispers as he slides into a hard plastic seat beside me. “I always forget ...”

“... that I’m not your Sarah. ...” I finish his sentence, too quickly, too brusquely. Regret wells up inside me.

My fingers sweep through empty air when I reach to touch his shoulder, or tussle his hair the way sitcom moms do when the camera rolls. But he’s moved two seats away. He is watching me with a still face.

It’s what his mother would have done, had she not died in the Attack on the Nines, on his world’s 9/9/99.

“Jockey?” This time, I don’t turn, or reach.

No response. I move my head so I won’t have to stare through my hair.

“Jockey?” He just stares at the floor.

He’s told me that in his world, I married his dad, Jack. Jack worked at the Crawford and got me into acting. I must have liked him. I named our son Jack too, but called him Jockey for the way he rode his red wooden rocking horse as a toddler. That version of me must have been a pretty good mom.

His version. Not me. It’s 7:37. The car roars to life and into a dark tunnel.

We glide toward Haymarket, or whatever they call that station here. I grasp the cold metal railing next to my seat.

Jockey is staring at our reflections in the dark window. Mirror images, mirror versions of us.

“You look just like her,” he says softly, and wipes at his eyes.

“Jockey?” I start, haltingly. “I’m sorry.” It’s not enough and it’s not real. Even after five years, I try to feel something for him, but it’s just resentment, like he embodies every wrong choice I’ve made in my life. Shitty Sarah, he’s just a boy—I say to myself—made from a copy of my genes.

Does that mean I should love him? There’s no answer for that.

The car jerks to a stop next to a red light in the tunnel. I move over a few seats and reach around him. Through his thick flannel shirt, I feel his bony shoulder. He’s almost taller than me. His voice is just starting to crack.

“It’s ok.” He struggles to regain control of his words. “I know you’re not my mother.”

We grow quiet amidst the crush of people. The small sounds of their movements and the mechanical squeals of the train wash over us. The engine roars back to movement.

“Sarah, do you think this is the right world, that she’s here and that she’s ...” he pauses, searching for his word.

“Not like me?” I ask. He’s wondering too if this Sarah will be close enough, a better copy than me, so we can stop looking. So we can both move on and stop resenting each other.

He just shrugs and heaves his shoulders, like I would have done as a kid—some remnant of me that exists across universes.

7:39 AM

“Does any of this feel familiar?” I ask him, even though he was just six when the attacks came, when we pulled him out just before his school was obliterated. We both exist out of time. I just had much more of it to fuck up before a plane barreled into the North Tower of the World Trade Center two years from now and two hundred miles away.

“Not really,” he admits. The attacks are fifteen minutes out and he suspects it too: The Sarah of this world won’t be close enough to his real mother—again.

The train moves faster this time. German engineering in Boston? I muse to myself, then wonder if that stereotype even exists here.

“The world doesn’t have to have come together in exactly the same way to create her,” I tell him. “Maybe she’ll be ... close enough?”

The colors worn by the people on the platform whirl by as we rocket through Haymarket station without even slowing.

“How will we know where to find her?” he asks when the window goes dark again in the tunnel.

“We just will,” I say. It’s true even if he hasn’t felt it yet—that sense you get when your soulmate is nearby, a memory of someone you haven’t met but some copy of you has. It’s like presque vu, as the French say: The memory flutters within your mind, dodging grasping fingers, like it’s your memory, but the universe says it’s not for you, not this version of you.

Presque vu is why this might work. Jockey will sense his almost-mom. She will sense her almost-son and I’ll lure her away. I’ll save Better Sarah from certain death. I’ll strap the third multiverse watch to her wrist and push her button. I’ll make sure Jockey pushes his next. Then I push my own. She escapes the Attacks. We escape the Attacks. I escape seeing my failures reflected in his eyes. Juste comme ça: Just like that, as the French say.

“You’ve done this before, right?” he asks, eyeing our watches and the pocket of my skirt where I carry the third one for his close-enough mom. He’s worried even if he won’t show it. He means, ‘Have you ever failed in a retrieval?’

I nod, “I rescued you five years ago. Even if you were too young to remember,” I tell him. I pull the sleeve on my coat back again and twist the face of the watch toward me. 7:40.

“Look, if she’s close enough to your mom and this is close enough to your world, she’ll be there,” I sigh. “It might not be the Crawford House High Rise, but we’ll find her ... if we’re in the right place.”

“Do we have enough time?” he asks as we speed back into the darkness toward the Munichdorf stop.

“Yeah – if it happens in the next fifteen minutes,” I remind him quietly. “And not five,” I think, but do not add.

7:42 AM

Jockey squints when the subway car glides back into the sunlight. I’m standing now and studying the map above the door, analyzing this world’s Munichdorf against the memory of my Government Center. Outside, two-story half-timber office buildings whiz by.

This isn’t my Boston. But, maybe it’s close enough to his.

The car stops on a platform overlooking a park that looks more like the Boston Common than the concrete wasteland of Government Center.

“MUNICHDORF STOP. CENTRAL PARK. PLEASE TAKE YOUR BELONGINGS AS YOU EXIT THE WAGEN,” the conductor instructs us.

We join the line of passengers standing and shuffling toward the door. We’ve got thirteen minutes. Or less. Probably not more.

“This doesn’t look like my Boston,” Jockey huffs softly into my ear.

I nod. This doesn’t look like any of my Bostons either. But it has a Crawford House.

My eyes tear up when I step down from the train into a bristling breeze. September 9th and it feels like November.

“Maybe she’s still here,” I offer, even if I can’t feel her. I see in his face that he can’t either. We press on anyway.

7:44 AM

Munichdorf has no trace of the frozen tan sea of my Government Center. No Boston City Hall. No City Hall Plaza. No sea of needless steps. A crisp, icy breeze sends thoughts of little ice ages through my scientist mind. I pull my watch up near my face, more to quiet myself than to check the time. When the Attacks on the Nines come, we push our buttons—whether we find her or not. I take in Jockey’s widening shoulders. I wonder if I’m still strong enough to grab his wrist and push his button.

“Do you feel her?” I ask Jockey, because I don’t. Presque vu rings stronger when you come out of someone than when you’re just a copy of her genes.

When Jockey doesn’t answer, I look over to see that he’s closed his eyes. He’s got his nose to the wind, like a hunting dog trying to prove its worth.

“I think I do,” he says, squinting with effort. “It’s like when someone’s watching you and your eyes find her, right?”

“You’ll know,” I tell him. And he will. But I won’t. 7:45 and it’s just minutes before I have to dash his hopes again. The button on his watch pokes out from beneath his sleeve. I can push it before I push mine. I have to.

“Shhh,” I put my finger to my lips even though he isn’t looking. His face is still pointed skyward, sniffing. “It’s starting ... back there.” I point at a large building behind us, five or six stories high with a name I can’t remember. It’s on the street opposite the park. I know my Boston demolished it when they poured in Government Center, but it still stands here. A rumble begins far away. “The attacks are early this time,” I say.

“This way,” he grabs my arm, with a strong hand that no longer belongs to the boy I rescued five years ago. My feet find balance as we fast-walk to the edge of the park. “I feel something,” he calls back.

Faces flicker in the dark fifth-story windows of the Crawford House High-Rise across the street, just above where the twentieth-century office building bursts from the original façade of the historic hotel and theatre. A plume of smoke rises from somewhere behind it, near where my State House would have been. My eyes linger on the red button of his watch as he pulls my arm forward.

He looks back when I don’t say anything. “Still nothing?” he asks. “You feel nothing?”

I shake my head and add to his list of my failures. I’m not close enough to his Sarah. Not at all.

I can’t wrench my arm free from his grip to check my watch. We might have ten minutes. He pulls me across the street without looking for traffic. The cars have stopped anyway. The ground shakes a little. The attacks are getting closer.

“That’s definitely a plume of smoke,” I point above the roofline of the buildings in front of us.

“I know,” he says softly without taking his eyes from the Crawford House building. “Give me more time,” he means.

7:46 AM

Roars fill our ears as vapor streams stretch across the sky. I hear the first screams.

“Jockey, it’s too late,” I say above the din.

He glances back, but keeps moving. “I feel her, Sarah. I feel my mother.”

A gust of warmth rushes over me as something big crashes behind us, out of view.

“Stop,” I say, but he keeps moving, pulling us forward. I lean back on my legs and try to stop, like I’m trying to win some tug-of-war match. But his weight pulls me forward. My knees pull and snap, and I fall to the ground, warm wetness soaking into my side and leg.

“Jockey, it’s too late,” I call, but he’s still moving. My wrist burns where he’s let go. 7:47 AM. I stare at the button on my watch. I will my finger not to reach over and push it. I can’t leave Better-Sarah’s son here to die.

I roll onto my butt and to my feet. I pull my skirt off my leg and see the blood. I look at the bulge in my pocket. I already know the third multiverse watch is broken before my hand finds its parts. It’s the way my life works. My fingertip finds the sharp line of the broken glass on its face. My eyes find its missing red button, a small dot nearly lost to the pavement of the road.

“Jockey!” I call to tell him, but he’s already gone. No one looks at a woman screaming names in the street like everyone else. Their faces have turned to watch the sky, pillars of smoke multiplying across the city. I move one leg in front of the other and walk, ignoring new and unfamiliar pain in my knee.

7:48 AM

I find Jockey with his head nearly resting on his back, looking up at the windows of the Crawford House building. I follow his gaze and find her. A different version of me. Three floors up. In blue. Businessy. Her eyes like saucers watching something above the trees I can’t see.

“She looks like an accountant. She’s got to be another failure,” the words escape my lips before I realize I gave them voice. Jockey doesn’t notice though. He’s hasn’t yet added the broken watch to my list of failures.

“It’s her,” he says as the ground lurches under our feet. Something large crashes into Brattle Street behind us, creating a new crater where a car had been. “I feel her,” he says.

I reach for his arm, for the watch, but he’s already gone, through the doors and into the lobby inside.

“Frig,” I cuss at failures and lost chances and push into the lobby. Everyone’s at the windows watching.

Fifteen paces in front of me, Jockey jumps the turn-style. The jets, if that’s what they’re called here, cut through the morning sky outside the windows, low and fast, faster than my eyes can track, between the buildings like no jet I’ve ever seen.

“Jockey, we can’t take the chance,” I call, knowing it’s too late. But he’s already invested and I can’t leave him here.

I jump the turn-style, still too many steps behind. My heels come down hard on polished tile. No one sees or cares. The floor shakes. Another explosion outside. I catch up to him.

“Watches,” I command, holding my calm, reaching for Jockey’s hand. “Watches, or there won’t be an us to find the right her.”

But he shakes me off, rips open a door, and starts up the stairs two at a time. “Fuck you,” he calls back, without looking. “I won’t leave her.”

I pull my finger from my watch and run after him. I reach the second floor when he flings open the door for the third.

7:53 AM

“7:53,” I say to the empty stairway, reaching the third-floor door. I pull it open with every ounce left of my strength.

Another jet, and then a second pass somewhere overhead. I hear the clicking noise of incoming plasma bombs, but the ceiling stays intact above me. A woman, then two more, scream outside the concrete wall to my left.

“7:54, Jockey!” I call out, louder, bursting into the light of the third floor. In the whir of jet engines, the screams of workers, and the whistle of descending missiles, the floor trembles. In the window across the cube farm, a dark hole opens up in the smooth blue glass of something that looks like the Hancock Tower. It’s Boston’s tallest building here too.

Shit. We’re going to fucking die for another loser Sarah, another Sarah of disappointments and lost chances. I risk a glance away from the smoldering Hancock and toward Jockey. He’s squinting at his watch, his finger not on the button.

“I can’t find her, Sarah,” he says. “... where is she?”

“Jockey, we have to fucking get out of here. It’s going up.” I point to the window. I count no less than six jet-things outside.

“This one’s not an actress,” I tell him. “She’s probably just another loser.”

But he just looks for her anyway, so I do too—for the blue of her suit, the back of my head wearing some other hairstyle.

Smoke fills the office. The people have sprung out of their shock. Like mice in rising water, they run for any way out. Jockey’s gone again in the crush of shoulders pushing me backward toward the exit stairs.

7:54 AM

“Jockey!” I call, but I can’t see him. I pull my fingers away from my watch again.

Above the sea of heads, the city dissolves into blasts and then balls of flame. Another skyscraper, the Pru, goes down. More jet-like things whiz by overhead.

Fuck it. Fuck it all.

I find Jockey at the window, watching.

“The Hancock ...” he sighs. With the wide eyes of Jockey-the-child, he melts what’s left of my resolve to leave. Behind him, the blue-glass skyscraper folds into the ground as dust and debris wash over Boston. The waves race toward the Crawford House building, swallowing people and cars and everything else.

“Jockey,” I yell over the white noise of destruction surrounding us. “Are you sure it was her?”

Blackness swallows us before my fingers can find our buttons, but I see the answer in his eyes.

7:55 AM

The ringing cuts out of my ears before my head stops spinning and I hear Jockey’s breathing beside me.

But it’s bright and there’s wind like we’re outside. There are screams too.

“I still feel her,” Jockey moans. There’s something wet under my head, thick and coppery like blood. The windows on this floor are gone. A piece of glass sticks out of my arm. A body of a man in a European-cut suit lies face-down a few feet away.

“Are you okay?” I ask Jockey, but he’s already up.

This time, he turns back and offers me a hand. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he says.

I stand and see the new huge, dark gash down my leg from the hem of my skirt to my ankle, but it doesn’t hurt yet.

I follow Jockey to the windows, stepping over bodies and desks and chairs. My heel catches in something squishy that feels like recent death.

I start to feel her, the faintest twinge in the back of my mind like she’s the furthest possible version of me who can still share my genes. I follow it and find Jockey standing over her. She’s on her back. Her eyes are closed, but they’re moving under her lids. Maybe she feels him too.

“How do we get her out?” He asks over the hum of jets flying low, nearby. I start to tell him about the broken watch, that we only have two, but I stop before the first word leaves my mouth. I see my button and I see his.

“How do we get her out, Sarah?” he asks again, shaking my arm. I wince.

“Are you sure she’s your Sarah? Does she feel close enough, Jockey?” I ask. “Closer than me?” I mean.

He looks down, tears starting to well in his eyes. I don’t need his answer. “Is she going to die?” he asks instead.

“I’ll check,” I say, bending over to check her pulse like actors on TV doctor shows do. She’s got a scar on her wrist that I don’t have—not the self-cutting kind. I run my finger over it for a moment, wondering what memory she has that’s hers and not mine. Her eyes keep twitching under her eyelids.

“Sarah?” he beckons me, “They’re coming back.”

I don’t look up. I can already hear the engines too. I feel the telltale static of incoming plasma bombs.

“Sarah!” he screeches, when the static grows so strong that our hair stands up straight. By then, though, I have my watch fastened to her wrist. By then, I press the button and she’s gone.

“Sarah?” Jockey looks at me, not comprehending. “What are you doing?” he asks, reaching for me.

“We only have two watches,” I tell him as I grab his wrist and push his button.

Then I’m alone, but only for a moment before the bombs hit.