Xela

He was safe in the meantime, in the safety of his jet in the Deepspace, but who knew for how long. Where was her phone? Fell out of her grasp somewhere. She had to warn him as soon as she could.

Sharp pain lanced through her shoulder, breaking through her racing thoughts. Liu Ying’s shoe was digging into her socket. He was everywhere she went. His black hair was longer, tied into a low ponytail. He didn’t do that in her original timeline. Stubble around his jaw. Didn’t have that either.

But the disdain in his face was the same.

“You were supposed to be in prison,” she blurted.

“You and your brother would love that, wouldn’t you?” A derisive laugh slipped past him. “But it’s good to see that you remember me.”

Even in this timeline he couldn’t speak of his intentions clearly. She shoved at his leg with an irritated grunt, though he didn’t budge. “You murdered infants. You were on national news.”

“Forgiveness is a virtue. I served my sentence. I’m as innocent and free as you.”

Eight years of imprisonment was too short for his crime. “You should’ve been locked up for more.”

“Some things are above the law.”

So blackmail or bribery. “And you? How do you know my brother and me?”

“Get up.” Liu Ying dragged her up and hauled her towards a building surrounded by crooked fences, her bare foot chilled across the wet grass. She’d replace the slippers before Caleb noticed she lost one half of them.

“I have a place to be.” She tried to twist herself out of his grasp.

“Your nainai can wait.”

Another bolt of fear shot through her. He knew about her grandma too. He couldn’t possibly—

“Would you drop your dramatics? You were shouting like hell to find her. Everyone in this town knows you’ve lost her.”

It did not do a thing to soothe her.

This seemed to be an abandoned laboratory. They walked past the lone guard standing by the main doors, who nodded at Liu Ying and was ignored. When it became apparent that he was also ignoring her, she tried to bite his arm, which earned her an irritated glare.

“You have the choice to be easy. Choose that.” The air thickened around her, a tell-tale sign that his Evol was activated.

“You assaulted me in broad daylight. I deserve an explanation before I report you to the police.”

He sneered at her. “When has law enforcement been on our side?”

“Don’t liken me to you. We’re not even acquainted.”

He stopped and pushed up her sleeves, his hand gliding across her skin. Her goosebumps had nothing to do with the cold. “This is my handiwork. The bones have grown well. Beautiful.”

“You remember all your patients?”

“Only the special ones.”

She couldn’t shake off the suspicion that he was aware of her importance to EVER. “Millions of people break their arms. I’m not special.”

“Caleb Xia seems to think you are.”

She yanked herself away. “Did he tell you that himself?” Liu Ying had been talking about Caleb as though he knew him personally. He’d done this in her first timeline. He knew more than he was letting on.

The question was, how much?

Liu Ying took one look at her before pulling her to the stairs. Without a working lift, they climbed up without a word—the dust was too thick to be comfortable speaking in. The building might be smaller than Toring Cybernetics Institute, but she still lost her navigation after duplicates of dark corridors and staircases.

They came to a stop in front of a white door with light escaping beneath it. A low buzzing sound too, if she endeavoured to listen. Liu Ying scanned his palm on the rectangle beside it, and the lock gave a rusty whir before sliding open.

She heard the pained grunts first.

Then she saw the tall polygonal chamber in the middle of this room, all sides made of metal except for the glass front.

She thought she knew what nightmares were. She thought the worst had happened and there couldn’t be anything to rival it. But Liu Ying possessed more creativity than her.

The upper half of the glass was open. That was where the noises came from. That was where Caleb’s thrashing and groaning escaped from.

He couldn’t thrash much. Strung up there without his shirt, the robotic arms and needles at the container’s sides made sure of it, drilling into him.

She broke into a sprint and smacked right into the glass case. The tubes that circulated his blood shook. “Caleb?” She whirled at Liu Ying, but he simply watched with a tilted head from afar. “What are you doing to him? Get him down.” She rattled at the glass door that wouldn’t give. “Get him down!”

It took Caleb a monumental effort to open his eyelids. The eyes that met hers, she’d never seen them hold this much terror.

Caleb had always masked his suffering. The fact that he currently wasn’t meant that this had gone over his pain threshold.

“Why are you here?” he heaved out. “You’re not supposed to be here.” His head snapped up at Liu Ying, agony morphing into rage. “She’s not supposed to be here.”

Her heart plummeted to the ground, a dead weight that gravity actively worked to push down.

“What do you mean?” she whispered. “Why can’t I be here?”

Caleb’s gaze on her didn’t soften as she’d expected. He seemed angrier by the second before glancing away. “You know why.”

This Caleb was more bitter than she was used to. She’d missed out on the time to get to know him. A fortunate event for him, she supposed, as he’d used that time effectively to work against her.

What had he done?

“Then why are you in there?” she snapped. “You said things were good. You said EVER wouldn’t touch us anymore. Were those all lies?”

“They weren’t supposed to touch you,” Caleb growled out, but he was looking at the person behind her.

Lies, then. Everything was.

Caleb did the one thing they agreed not to do. It was their whole reason for moving away. Finding a hiding spot was useless if he’d lure the enemy in anyway.

He’d betrayed her after she left. Or was it before? Before. Liu Ying was imprisoned before. All the information she’d shared with him, had he been collecting it to conduct a separate mission?

They were supposed to be a team. They were supposed to be safe and happy and not experimented on.

Caleb knew she’d be hurt by this, but he didn’t care. Safety over feelings. Safety over trusting his own meimei. To think he was mad at her for leaving him behind when he’d done the same. Her breathing got shallow as the flames of her fury crackled higher and higher.

Liu Ying’s hand landed on her shoulder like a vulture’s claw. “Captain Xia, your sister would like to know how dear she is to him.”

“Don’t touch me.” She rammed her elbow against Liu Ying’s ribs.

With his Evol, Liu Ying pinched the nerve above her elbow. It sent a horrible twinge up her arm that caused her to yelp and lean into the chamber. She could smell Caleb’s sweat mixing with the metals restraining him and digging into him.

“Liu Ying!” he shouted.

Oh, now he cared about how she felt.

Surprisingly, Liu Ying listened and held up his hands in acquiescence.

She steadied herself against the circular door. “Why is he in there?”

“It’s my hypothesis that an Evol, when extracted correctly, could exist in a vacuum. So long we have believed that Evol is a gene dependent on its host, but what if it could stand on its own? What if we could duplicate it and recreate it ourselves? No one would have to feel inferior for not being an Evolver.”

Liu Ying was talking, she could hear that, but his words were not coming to her with their meaning intact. He was offering her new information about the damned Evol extraction project. It’d do well for her to remember it.

But all she could think of was how she had dodged the future. She’d succeeded. Now, instead of Caleb’s corpse being experimented on, his living body had taken his place.

Liu Ying couldn’t expect her to care about constructing Evolvers when he was using Caleb to meet his goal. She wouldn’t want to see these newly enhanced humans. Caleb was Caleb. He was hers. He couldn’t be rent apart and injected into other people’s bodies.

Every part of him belonged to this body, and this body belonged to her.

She glowered at Liu Ying with her teeth clenched, trying to rein in her anger. “It’s not very altruistic of you to torture a person to prove your altruistic cause.”

“Certain sacrifices have to be made. Caleb here is a willing participant.”

She swivelled to Caleb. “Willing?”

“Would you do the honour of telling your beloved sister?” Liu Ying thrust her against the glass.

Caleb strained against his handcuffs. “Get your hands off her.”

“Not everyone is as vile as you.” Liu Ying scoffed. “Don’t blame me too much. You’re the one who led me to her.”

She closed her eyes for a long moment. How far back had his betrayal gone?

“Caleb Xia. Explain yourself.”

She had to hear it from him. There must be something logical behind this.

Caleb’s jaw was set, however.

“Too afraid to own up to what he did. A pity.” The way Liu Ying’s thumb brushed her neck made her hackles stand. She needed to peel her skin and scrub it until it was raw and new and unaffected by Liu Ying. “Many years ago, someone tipped off the police about my experiment and called it infanticide. I’ve lost everything because of him.”

“Caleb?”

Her gege, who loved to run his mouth a million words per minute to scold her, had turned mute.

So he hadn’t been anxious when he showed her the news. He was parading his victory. His cruelty knew no bounds.

She doubted there was anyone who hated him as much as she currently did.

“How dare you?” she demanded. “You know I would’ve agreed to your plan. Was I not capable enough for you?” Perhaps all those times he prodded her to be more open, to rely on him more, were also ploys to double-cross her.

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know. It’s yours. You don’t care about what I want. You don’t care about me.”

Caleb shook his head fervently. “I was trying to protect you.”

“By bringing us back to Liu Ying. Congratulations. You’ve done a great job being my gege. I am so thankful to have you here with me.”

She thought she’d feel satisfied to see the hurt and guilt slashing across his expression, but they multiplied in her instead. Unlike him, she couldn’t revel in the win. If he hurt, she hurt.

Why wasn’t this the case for him? Why was it so easy for him to trample on her to achieve his selfish needs? All her effort had been for nought.

But some of this was on her. Her mistake was assuming that the younger him would be more cooperative. After the Colonel version of him sabotaged her mission and sacrificed a child to protect her, she should’ve known. She kept learning her lessons too late.

And Caleb always paid the price for it.

“I didn’t know you were this pitiful.” She spat at Liu Ying. “All of this, just for revenge? You killed infants for your own gain. No one is on your side.”

He turned her head around and gave a thin smile. “EVER will.”

Hadn’t he been with EVER the whole time? “Why would they?”

“Once I give you over to them, they’ll invest in me again. Who knew Caleb had been hiding two of EVER’s most wanted?”

“Liu Ying, we had a deal,” Caleb seethed. “I take her place, you leave her alone.”

“You may have been a spy and a lab rat for EVER, but do you think they’ll still need you when I bring them their treasured lost subject?”

She thought Caleb would be shocked or frightened on her behalf. Not this. Not studying her through his haze, worrying about her reaction more than his.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“You knew?” he asked finally.

“You knew?”

Caleb averted his gaze.

Of course he did. Was that the reason for his resentment that spilled onto Grandma when he thought she didn’t notice? Her memories kept being safeguarded from herself. Her family conducted themselves as though they had the right to call the shots for her.

She was left out everywhere, including in her own family. Nobody thought she was worth trusting.

When Liu Ying dragged her by the back of her collar to the control panel, she let him. “What’s the progress?” he asked the computer.

A glitching mechanical voice said, “Attempt number thirty. Evol has not been successfully extracted. Subject is fighting against the procedure.”

Liu Ying pushed up his glasses and sighed, agitated. “All subjects do. Switch to the invasive method.”

One of the robotic arms transformed its end into a scalpel and drew a long slice down Caleb’s right bicep. The smaller ones pried out the strands of his nerves.

The temperature dropped. Then she screamed and punched and kicked until her privilege of having working limbs was taken away.

Caleb bit down on his lips so hard he started to bleed. He was clearly muffling his groans for her sake.

It seemed to work at first. There were flickers of the familiar dark violet Evol, traversing into the cylinder beside the chamber. But a few seconds later, they slammed back into his nerves. His blood was pooling on the chamber’s floor.

Her fingertips tingled. Without knowing how she knew, she was certain the Gravity Evol had reached out for her resonance.

Caleb was fighting against the procedure now that she was present, but there were clamps around his wrists and ankles and buckles across his torso. There was no space to move.

He didn’t take his clothes off yesterday. It wasn’t for a sexual reason. He’d been hiding the scars criss-crossing over his upper body. White and brown and red.

Today wasn’t the first time he was cut open.

She would’ve noticed something was off if she’d been here. He’d taken advantage of her past self’s memory loss.

Caleb truly was the worst gege anyone could have.

But, no. This wasn’t the time to let her emotions go haywire. Mental cremation jars. It was imperative to keep her wits about her. Challenging, since Liu Ying was deliberately keeping her weak. There was fog in her brain that wouldn’t go away despite her rapid blinking.

She was from the future. She had hindsight knowledge. Remember that. Liu Ying didn’t know Evol extraction was possible on corpses. He would’ve killed Caleb long before if he did.

What was the point of having the most treasured subject right here if not to be utilised?

“Stop!” she called out. “I’ll take his place. I’ll be your extraction subject. I have an Anhaunsen Class Evol. It’s rarer than his. Gravity can only do so much. My resonance can amplify other Evols. Use me instead.”

Caleb groaned. “Don’t try to get involved.”

To have a Caleb to be angry at, there had to be a living Caleb in the first place. She had to get him out of there.

He might be open to being a repeated test subject, but she was done watching him being sliced open to spare her life. She was not worth that much.

In the end, what Liu Ying wanted was still the same. Caleb was the stepping stone. She’d step on him to get herself to Liu Ying.

Liu Ying straightened her legs and gave the control back to her. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“No!”

She’d never heard Caleb sound that furious.

“I wasn’t done speaking. Are you sure he’s your final choice?” He strode to a dark corner in the room. “Because you can only save one.”

While her mind was still reeling, Liu Ying had wheeled out a box draped with cloth and slid it off.

Air escaped her lungs.

This must be the punishment the universe had doled out on her for messing with time, correcting itself in the form of haunting parallels.

It was a cage.

It was a cage too small for humans, but Grandma was cramped into it, her knobby shoulders and knees slumped against the metal bars. Her head lolled. She couldn’t tell if she was conscious.

“Nainai?” She crept forward. In her stress about Caleb, she’d forgotten who she’d come here for.

Grandma raised her head, her thinned hair matted to her face, then it drooped again.

“Why are you doing this?” Her voice was a mere breath.

“If you want Caleb to be alive, you’ll have to kill Josephine.”

“Why?”

“EVER wants her dead.”

“You can kill babies but not one elderly?”

Liu Ying wasn’t phased. “I’ve found that the easiest way to torture Caleb is through torturing his sister.”

Her mental jars were rattling so badly that she couldn’t focus. This was just a game to him. But pain was a weapon in the wrong hands. She wouldn’t give Liu Ying that win.

She’d faced him before. Deep breaths. Adopt a detached demeanour. Detach herself from everything going on here. This was only as real as she let it be.

“Your calculation was off. I couldn’t care less about what happens to her as long as Caleb is safe.” She poked Grandma’s hand. It was so cold. He hadn’t bothered giving her a blanket.

Liu Ying crouched beside her, held out her palm, and folded her fingers over a knife. “Kill her then.”

A rush of energy flowed back into her arms. She was herself again.

Before he could so much as blink, she flung the knife at him. It had to be a throw, or he’d freeze her mid-air.

The knife lodged itself between his shoulder and neck. She swore. Her aim had been off. It was so close to the carotid artery. Damn this body.

She was about to drag it across his throat when a turn of his fist crumpled her to the ground.

Liu Ying propped himself up against the cage while stanching the blood with the discarded cloth. She hoped it’d be infected. This room was coated in dust and black mould. No wonder he was going the extra mile to secure EVER’s funding.

One of Grandma’s nail beds was exposed, sunken and bloodied. She must have fought against whoever handled her.

Liu Ying didn’t have any visible scar, and there was a guard outside. She had to assume there were more.

He didn’t alert the security though. Instead, a robotic arm slashed across Caleb’s other arm, and the chamber rattled as a dark flare of Evol burst around him.

His head banged against the sheet of metal he was strapped to.

“Hurt me more. You’re allowed to. I’ll pass it on to him.” Liu Ying handed the knife back to her. “In every thirty seconds you don’t eliminate Josephine, the machine will make a new incision on him.”

A timer appeared on the control panel’s transparent screen. True to his word, every half minute pried out a fresh stifled shout from Caleb.

She’d do anything to make it stop.

She’d do anything.

Grandma wasn’t stirring again. For everyone’s sake, she wasn’t. She could open the door and do a quick slash through the neck. The knife was long enough for that.

She held Grandma’s chin up and gripped the knife so firmly that Liu Ying’s blood was seeping between her fingers.

She’d vowed to save her, and now she was going to kill her. This was what Grandma’s protection over her had been for.

She could do this. This was a trap, but there was no other way. She could smell the metallic twang of Caleb’s blood from here.

Her hand wouldn’t stop trembling. She could do the hard part to spare him. She had to.

She’d poised the knife at her face when a wave of Evol eddied around her and shot into Grandma.

Her eyelids flew open.

Grandma slapped it away on instinct and toppled backwards. It produced the loudest clatter she’d ever heard. There was a long cut across the back of Grandma’s hand.

Liu Ying retrieved the knife for her. “Why the hesitation? Childhood is a crucial period for development. If you truly wanted to free your Caleb from the shackles of his past, killing her should be an easy decision.”

She frowned. What nonsense was he spewing now?

Liu Ying’s surprise seemed genuine. “You don’t know?” He chuckled at Caleb. “She doesn’t know. How are you in love with each other when you have so many secrets between you?”

“What don’t I know?”

Caleb shook his head at her. She couldn’t decipher his code. Perhaps she never had the ability to. Everything she understood about him was because he’d allowed her to.

She grabbed Liu Ying’s shirt. “What is it?”

He kicked her down before clamping down on his wounded shoulder. The throbbing when her back hit the cage barely registered. “You didn’t grow up in EVER’s facility alone. Josephine headed your program alongside Caleb’s.” He gestured dismissively between them. “I heard you two were the best subjects EVER had.”

She turned to Caleb up there in disbelief. “The shelter wasn’t the first time we met?”

His expression became unbearably sad. “For you, it was.”

She scoffed out a mocking laugh. A short burst at first, then it grew uncontrollable.

One thing after another. This family and their secrets were carrying them right into their graves.

She jolted the cage bars. “Nainai, is that true?”

Grandma, with her head resting against the metal, clasped her stiff hands around hers. “We wanted you to have a normal childhood.”

She could tolerate not having a normal childhood due to the mysterious nature of her Aether Core. She could not accept that Caleb had to pretend he was never experimented on for her sake.

How could Grandma do this to him? He was a child like her. How could she make him complicit in an act he didn’t have the wisdom to decide on?

What a respectable guardian. Grandma shouldn’t have taken them in if she’d only put Caleb through more suffering.

Liu Ying floated Grandma out of the cage and dropped her upper body on it.

She knew what his intention was. But she couldn’t stop herself from playing into his hands.

Scrambling on her knees, she brushed the hair off Grandma’s cheek, still manic and grinning, her eyes blown wide. “You shouldn’t have hurt him. He didn’t do anything wrong. You hated him when he hadn’t done anything wrong. Hasn’t his life been hard enough?” Her head was shaking on its own accord. The warning signs of crying were contorting her facial muscles. It felt like tears might fall, but she was too overwhelmed to dispense anything.

“I’m sorry.”

Her smile dropped. Bullshit. Apologies were useless when no adequate explanation was provided. “Don’t tell me that. Have you ever apologised to him?”

Grandma stared at Caleb, then back at her.

She graced her five seconds.

“I saved him for you,” Grandma said instead. Behind her words, she heard her stubborn resolution. Everything for her. The world rearranged for her. She didn’t even want to inhabit it in the first place.

She made the mistake of glancing back at Caleb, still needing his encouragement despite everything. How could a meimei stop needing her gege?

The childish self in her that Caleb had nursed back to life was begging for his help. That girl wanted to hand over this decision to him and bury her head beneath his shirt. If she couldn’t see it, it wouldn’t be real.

But her gege’s help had brought them here. It was irresponsible of her to indulge in lost time when she’d known a lot more could be lost. Her incompetence was humiliating. She just brought death back to their doorstep.

Caleb couldn’t choose for her. This disaster was enough. It had to be her.

His eyes were on her. Those pained violet eyes had never left her.

Liu Ying crossed his arms. “Do you have so much time to waste? How long do you think his body can hold up?” He waved his hand at Caleb, and the open wounds stitched themselves up. The groans subsided, but after a few seconds, the metal blades glided through his arms again.

Caleb thrashed with renewed fervour.

She had never hated anyone this much.

But fine. Fine. If that was how this had to be.

Grandma was, what? Seventy? Eighty? She’d lived long enough. She’d atone for her sin of being a perfidious grandchild later.

With a suppressed scream, she plunged the dagger into Grandma’s heart.

Grandma’s body jerked. There was a horrible gurgling sound from her mouth. Red bloomed over her favourite teal cardigan and dripped down the cage.

She bit the inside of her cheeks until it bled. Let all her family bleed today. Now they could say they were related by blood.

Grandma hacked one last cough, and her body stopped convulsing, her eyes dull and jaw hanging wide.

It was done. She’d killed Grandma.

There was no escaping from the slick crimson in her hands. This was on her. Liu Ying hadn’t forced her hands to enact it.

She took in every detail. Her fault. This remembrance was the start of her punishment.

What were Grandma’s last words? It was already hard to recall.

She saved Caleb for her. Right. Caleb was just a pawn to keep her happy. It made sense now, how Grandma always warned her against him. She never cared about him. He was brought in to be abandoned and used.

Except she still showed her concern for him. Provided for him when he couldn’t work yet. Didn’t she worry about him being caught in the rain and feel guilty that he had to do her job when she fell sick?

She probably cared about Caleb in her own way. Nothing was absolute in this world. People could hate and love in equal amounts. Look at herself.

She released the murder weapon she was impossibly still clutching. This clatter was louder. Then she fell next, slumping to the ground and grabbing Grandma’s dangling hand.

She’d murdered someone who felt sorry for her and tried to give her a peaceful life.

How could she ever pay for this?

“Well done.” Liu Ying patted her shoulder. She stared up, not really seeing him. “Don’t worry. I’m a man of my word. You’ve done what I asked for. I’ll let Caleb go.” He hoisted her to the control panel.

“Meimei.” Caleb’s panting was short and heavy. He didn’t have to shout from here. He shouldn’t strain himself any more for her.

But she couldn’t bring herself to look at his face. The bloody puddle on his feet had grown manifold. He needed a transfusion, or he’d die at this rate. No amount of tissue regeneration could save him if his body didn’t have enough fuel to fix itself, and Liu Ying wasn’t replenishing his blood.

This wasn’t over. She had to get a hold of herself. Caleb was still in that chamber. She had no faith that Liu Ying would follow through with his promise.

But at a series of key inputs, the needles retracted one by one. At least the torture was over.

They were almost out when Liu Ying looked back and forth from the screen to Caleb. “Wait.” The needles paused as he walked up to the chamber. “Are you seeing this?”

Her heart sank. The gashes on Caleb’s waist and arms were blackening and exuding a familiar awful stench. It wasn’t natural for necrosis to take place this fast.

A scant amount of Evol energy was passing through the dead tissues. The tube beside the container shimmered with restless blue shards. They weren’t stable, flickering in and out.

The percentage on the screen above the container had jumped from zero to three.

The Liu Ying from her timeline had performed the extraction procedure exclusively on corpses. This Liu Ying would reach that conclusion soon.

She tested her arms and legs. They were free to move. He’d forgotten to keep her down.

She lunged onto his back and strangled him. He tried to get her off while swinging the knife blindly, but she added more force while twisting his wrist. The dagger clanged to the floor as he tripped over the chair, bringing them down.

Liu Ying’s hand fumbled for the emergency button on the control panel, and the alarm blared.

That fucking hand.

In a clean arc, she stabbed the knife into it. It was a nice slide through the meat before she pinned it to the table. Liu Ying howled and dropped to his knees, trying to pull it out. She wrenched away his free hand and cracked the fingers until they were bruised and mangled.

Then she wrenched the hand off the wrist joint.

This body might not be trained for basic combat, but her mind remembered. Technique was more important than size or brute strength.

She waited for Liu Ying’s Evol to reach her, but nothing happened.

As she had guessed. His control over his Evol was dependent on his hands. He was not stronger than Caleb.

She stomped down on it once more with a satisfying crunch. It tore out a guttural cry from Liu Ying. Without wasting her time, she dashed up to the chamber’s jutting platform and clung to the lower glass. “I’m getting you out of here.”

“No. You. They’re after you,” Caleb said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Blood spluttered out of his mouth. “Language.”

“No, shut up. Fuck you for ruining our lives. I tried so hard to get it right, to keep everyone alive, and now I’ve killed Nainai, and you’re being dissected because of me, and you don’t even know how badly I want to die.” She felt around the container’s sides for the latches. “Your sacrifices mean nothing to me. They can’t keep me alive. They only make me want to kill myself more.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You can’t kill yourself. Listen to your gege.” His voice came out in a ragged rasp. “This is for you. Your life.”

“Did you honestly think I want to stick around after everything that’s happened? And now you’ve made it worse.” The latches were easy to undo except for the last one. It was rusty, and her fingers were stiff and slippery from the blood. “I’m so sick of you.”

“Meimei,” Caleb pleaded.

“Gege,” she said in a mocking tone.

“You should’ve told me.”

With a furious kick, the latch came off and the glass clicked open. “I have a dishonest gege who gave me bad examples. He made me like this. It’s his fault I have to hide things from him.” She pulled at the buckles around his limbs that wouldn’t give.

Caleb’s head hung low. She thought he’d fainted, but then he said in a small voice, “The computer.”

The computer was shielded by Liu Ying’s heap of body.

The door banged open, and the previous security guard sprinted in.

“Get the girl,” Liu Ying growled.

Caleb honed in on the guard. There was a mad possessiveness on his face that used to be on her first Caleb’s. She knew how badly he wanted to cover her with his battered body. His Evol blazed around him as he put up a shield to drive the guard back.

Its reach was wider now that the chamber glass was open, but Caleb was too weak to cripple him. His Evol kept zooming back to him as though he were a magnet. The AI assistant announced a warning about the contradictory usage of Evol and extraction, but he pushed through, forming a barrier against the flying bullets.

The barrier was flimsy though. One of the bullets passed through and grazed her calf.

Her legs buckled, but she bit her lip and grabbed Caleb’s strapped hand.

This would hurt. At the very least, she had the decency to feel apologetic.

She channelled her resonance into him with her whole might, and his exposed nerves lit up with a golden hue. Caleb let out a wrecked shudder, a black portal emerging in front of the guard.

Air was sucked from the room. One second he was there, and the next second he was not.

Caleb had mastered this skill in this timeline. Good. He’d equipped himself with the means for self-defence.

She jumped down and rushed to the control panel. Liu Ying tried to shove her aside, so she rotated the blade until she heard a squelch. “Stay still if you don’t want me to chop it off.”

She tapped away at the screen and panel before finding the right button. The buckles that held Caleb’s body retracted, and he toppled forward from a considerable height.

But she’d forgotten one thing. The needles might have been taken out, but the other appendages of the machines were still prodding his body.

They ripped through his tendons and veins.

Blood spurted across the floor and her face. Seconds went by in stunned silence, then Liu Ying’s laugh echoed across the room.

“Xia Yizhou!” She slid to her knees, her hands frantically hovering over his body. “Gege. Please, I don’t— I’m sorry. Please don’t die. Don’t do this again.”

Too many open wounds, too much blood. She couldn’t put him back together. He’d always been the one to do that to her, not the other way around.

“Locker room.” Caleb coughed and sprayed blood over her shirt. He lifted his arm to touch her dog tag necklace, and she could see the red muscles quivering from the effort. “The second fourth. Go.”

She didn’t have a Biological Manipulation Evol. She couldn’t heal him or borrow the Evol from Liu Ying. Her Evol was so rare that it was rendering her useless at a critical moment.

For a moment she regretted damaging Liu Ying’s hands, but he wouldn’t lend his power for this. He wanted Caleb dead, and she was helping him make it come true.

“This floor. I’ll hold the others back. Leave.” He sent her skidding a short distance away before his Evol sputtered off.

She clambered back to him, blood soaking through her trousers. “What are you talking about? I can’t leave you here. You can’t even get rid of me.”

“Vial in my locker. It’ll help. Don’t waste my effort,” he said between breaths.

“In betraying me?”

Caleb’s attempt to smile was worse than if he hadn’t tried at all. She had to keep witnessing him losing himself for her. His thumb brushed her cheek. “Please, go. I’ll be here when you come back.”

Her lips trembled, but she heard a horde of footsteps running down the corridor. If there was any hope in saving him, it wasn’t by sitting around and doing nothing. She’d done that, and this was the result.

She ducked when another guard shot at them. Caleb halted the incoming bullets and emptied his gun magazine. With an impenetrable shield, he herded him to the side, clearing her path out.

Caleb’s lips were turning blue by the minute. He couldn’t create any more black holes.

She threw one last glance at him and Grandma and flew down the dark hallway. The red lights overhead were blinking wildly, and she had to squint to read the direction. Her calf burned from the bullet graze, but she pushed on. This was nothing. She’d been through worse.

The main lift was her best bet in finding the lockers. Past visitors would need easy access to it. She tossed aside her remaining slipper that constantly tripped her and picked up the pace.

Sure enough, she passed by a door labelled “Changing Room” when the defunct lift was within reach. After making sure that no one was inside, she slinked in and sagged against the wall.

It was a small room with grey lockers lining up two sides of the wall. Rusty interactive mirrors hung opposite her. The lamps here worked as normal, somewhat abating her headache from the red light.

Caleb had said something about the second fourth. Second and fourth lockers? Starting on the left side, she counted from outside in and inside out, checking each keypad. Individual batteries powered them, but none turned on.

Fourth locker on the second side? More likely.

She stopped before a keypad with faded numbers. Caleb always used her birthday as his password.

She tapped it in. It didn’t work.

She fiddled with her ring. The loud alarm wasn’t helping. What other date was important to him?

It occurred to her as soon as she asked. She quickly input it, and the door clicked open.

July seventh. The day they got together. Caleb remembered. He must have celebrated the anniversary himself even though they weren’t officially a couple.

She shook her head, warding herself from the guilt, and rummaged through his satchel until her hand hit something odd.

It was a glass vial filled with sparkling blue and gold particles. If she looked close enough, small electric currents ran through them. It reminded her of when she had to deal with the static from an electric storm caused by the Deepspace fluctuation. The label itself was classic Caleb, a drawing of a clock inside an apple.

A clock could only mean one thing.

Had he figured out how to trigger the temporal anomaly? What should she do with this? Snort it up her nose or swab it on her tongue? She flipped the label but couldn’t find any written instructions.

The sudden banging from the door startled her. More than one person was out there. She had to figure this out fast. Her pinky burned when she dipped it into the powder, but the vial cooled the moment she ceased contact.

Not safe to consume.

Caleb was touching her necklace. It was scorched after she travelled to this time, and he was the one who directed her attention to it. They couldn’t all be coincidences.

Bracing herself for another burn, she lathered the particles on the necklace—and the fluttering of her Aether Core ramped up.

She almost dropped the vial. Caleb had found a way to activate one half of the time travel.

The mirror. She should smear it on the mirror too.

There was a problem of not being able to set the destination, but she had a working theory.

The door creaked open, and the dull ping of bullets got louder. She sprinkled the electric dust onto the smooth glass. When nothing happened, she poured more, spreading it with her hand.

It was like dipping her hand in corrosive chemicals. Her skin started to sizzle, steam coming out of it. She pinched her thigh and continued. A constructed pain to distract from unwanted pain. She’d learned this from Caleb when he thought she was sleeping. His back to the door, his thighs lined with red.

There was a reason Caleb never took off his trousers when the lights were on. She’d never brought it up in fear that he’d push her away and hide further into himself. She couldn’t lose the parts he’d offered her.

A heavy force launched the bench back and ripped the door off its hinges. She immediately crouched behind the closest bench.

“Don’t shoot,” Liu Ying commanded, and the shooting stopped. His stabbed hand had healed while the other’s bones were still cracking to knit into one another.

He could fix himself without the aid of his hands. Unfortunate.

He staggered in with two guards training their guns on her. She slowly moved back. If the powder worked, she needed to be in proximity to the mirror. The nearer she was, the faster she’d leave.

Liu Ying slumped on the bench, sweat lining down his temples. “You’re not the easiest subject to handle, but I have you to thank for advancing my research.” He grimaced when his finger snapped into place. “My files said you were more docile than this,” he mumbled.

She could imagine what this timeline self had been doing. Gallivanting with her friends, working a fulfilling job, living happily with her family, not a worry in her mind because she didn’t know how it felt to lose everything and be the one responsible for it.

Liu Ying gave a signal, and a burly guard entered with a pale body slung over his shoulder.

Every muscle in her body seized up. She didn’t have to see to know who it was.

But they made her witness it. The guard dumped Caleb’s body before her like he was disposable trash. Blood wasn’t flowing from the open gashes anymore; they were black and smelled of rot.

Liu Ying nudged Caleb’s head with his foot. Eyes still open too. Eyes still purple and orange but had lost their lustre.

Bile crawled up her throat. Caleb was dead.

Caleb was dead again.

She just remembered she hadn’t closed Grandma’s. She hurried to shut Caleb’s. His skin was stiff and cold like he’d been dead for more than mere minutes.

“Gege,” she choked out.

He said he would be there when she came back. Caleb was always waiting for her to come home into his arms. He was waiting for her. He died while thinking she’d come back for him. She didn’t. She didn’t. She didn’t.

She tried to put his head in her lap, but he’d always helped her in lessening his weight. He was too heavy. She couldn’t carry him alone. She needed him here to help her.

His hair was so soft. It had the same fragrance as the shampoo she once told him smelled good on him. Had he been sticking to it in case she returned? Was there ever a moment where he wanted to give up on her?

She would. So many people were fighting to get their hands on her when she just wanted to slip away.

They’d only been reunited for a day. It wasn’t enough time to catch up. How many more questions did she have to bear on her own because the person she wanted to ask wasn’t here anymore?

Caleb was never where she needed him to be. Never quite by her side. His love was so cruel.

But the things she said to him—no. No. She wasn’t sick of him. That was an impulsive, meaningless sentence. Did he believe her? Her words had been sharpened to cut. He was already cut open. There was no reason for her to add more.

Did he die thinking she hated him? He must have. He must.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” said Liu Ying.

Her hold around Caleb’s head tightened. How was she supposed to touch him when his body was slashed open? He wouldn’t want her to touch him like this. Or he would, because he’d want to suffuse her into his marrow.

But not this way. It had to be voluntary. He had to wait for her with his lively, expectant face. What if she forgot how that looked again? She’d just learned to remember. She’d just learned to put down her anxiety over forgetting him because she thought he’d be there to remind her.

Her tears weren’t falling, and rightly so. They were not for display. Their love would not be degraded into entertainment for the person who’d wanted him dead.

“I mean, look at his Evol.” From his pocket, Liu Ying retrieved a small tube of dark shards bobbing up and down, a shrunken version of the cylinder at Toring Cybernetics Institute.

So they were back at the start.

Four times. This was Caleb’s fourth death. She couldn’t take more of this.

Caleb must have known he’d die when she left him there. She had left him to die alone. This wasn’t even the first time.

He deserved a better meimei. Her existence spelt out doom for everyone she loved. She didn’t want to live to kill her loved ones. They needed to stop loving her so much.

Caleb had done all this because he loved her, she knew.

Her hands were shaking so violently that the blue-gold powder sprinkled down the floor. The cap. She needed to screw it back on. This couldn’t have been easy to retrieve. It was the last thing Caleb had left for her. She wanted to keep it whole and not use it and stop fighting.

She’d backtracked through time to ensure his and Grandma’s lives were safe, yet here she was, surviving both of them as their executioner.

But Caleb wanted her to help herself. He was well-acquainted with her need to escape and thought this would give her an out.

It was true. She did want to leave again. Her original timeline had been better. At the very least, she hadn’t had a hand in their deaths.

No—that wasn’t her intended destination. She wasn’t sure if mental projection was how it worked, but it was better to err on the safe side. She had to stop thinking about it before she got carried off there.

The time when she was happily dating Caleb. That one. The laughter they shared inside crumbling walls. Grandma might not have wanted them in her life, but at least there was still a life to exist in. Hold that image in her mind.

The anomaly always carried her to the point in time she longed to go to. The first was the past she thought she couldn’t return to, the second was the future where everything was solved for her.

This had to work. She had no other plan.

Run, you coward, said the voice inside her head. That’s what you always do.

Was it even worth going back to the second timeline?

Yes, yes, it was. Until she’d tried every alternative to save Caleb, she would not stop. Besides, this wasn’t a good place to die. Liu Ying and EVER wouldn’t let her.

“You killed him.” Her voice sounded too reedy in her ears.

“No, you did. I simply connected him to the machine and manipulated his corpse with my Evol,” Liu Ying said with barely contained excitement. “The nasty business was all you.”

His left ankle was bent at an awkward angle. Caleb hadn’t died without inflicting some damage. She tried to smile for his service. It was for her. She wished she could hate him, but not him. Not him.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I won’t devolve into some self-flagellation breakdown in front of you.” Her necklace was growing warmer. It was working.

“A disappointment? You? Not a chance. Look what you’ve done for me. And now I have you. EVER will be so pleased.”

“Do you think I’d still keep my promise? You didn’t hold up your end of the bargain. You’ve killed my Caleb.”

“Your dedication to each other is disgusting. No siblings should act like that.” Liu Ying’s mouth curled. “Take her away.”

At the end of his sentence, yellow light beamed from the mirror. It was so bright that Liu Ying disappeared from her view. She ducked below the guards’ reach and grabbed the coat hanger under the bench. It was heavy, but she managed to swing it across their legs.

They tumbled down, and she slammed it against the mirror.

The mirror was old, like her grief, like what Caleb would never get to be. The shattered pieces hailed down on her, cutting her cheek and embedding themselves in her head and arms.

One guard slammed her to the floor headfirst and bared her neck. Her vision spun. At the same time, her necklace was yanking itself towards the broken mirror with a garroting pull. The guard examined it before casting it aside.

She wriggled her arm free. So close. She fully intended to listen to Caleb’s last order.

Right when she managed to press her blistering hand against the mirror, a thick needle jabbed into her neck. Numbness crept up her limbs, and the room blurred.

She had to go back. She hadn’t tried hard enough. Once more. Just once.

Please.

There was a sharp blow to the back of her head, then her body went limp.

Footnotes:

When I was a kid, I accidentally banged the door on my thumb and lost my whole nail. That was the first time I knew how squishy a nail bed is. A lot of blood and tears were involved (and then I was sad when my nail grew back because I couldn’t squish it anymore). In my teenage years, my brother accidentally rode a bicycle over my toe, and I lost another nail. That one never recovered its original shape. Gore was me before I ever wrote gore.

Honorary thank you to Spiderman Brand New Day and Pursuit of Jade for helping me during the last-minute revision. Peter Parker’s depressed mood got me into MC’s headspace, and Changyu’s and Xie Zheng’s expressions in THAT post-battle scene rearranged my brain neurons.