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  If he had a silk blot, he’d be able to search for her. But waiting for her to come to 2016 was his only option right now. In this reality, Myrna Rachnowitz knew nothing about time traveling, and there was no Allaire Thompson listed in any public record.

  He redeemed a couple of hours’ worth of tokens on SecuCam and opened up the camera feed from West 38th Street and 7th Avenue in New York.

  Keeping an eye on the feed, Kyle grabbed one of the binders from under his bed. After all of this time—after living through the bus crash twice—Kyle still couldn’t resist torturing himself. He was the only person in this world who knew he was responsible for the explosion at Silverman High School, but that didn’t affect Kyle’s dedication to flogging himself.

  He flipped through the names of the dead in binder number two—each printout inserted in plastic sleeves bought on discount at the Mega-Market—listed alphabetically. He had almost memorized them by now: Alyssa Nabarro, the wannabe gymnast. Pablo Narcisse, computer genius with crazy allergies. Brent Neville, Bryce Neville, twin lacrosse players . . .

  Three quarters of an hour after he started flipping through the binder, Kyle’s eyes finally got the sand-papery feeling of near sleepiness. It was nearly four in the morning—he could still salvage some sleep tonight if got into bed soon. He sat back down at his computer for a few more minutes of surveillance on the New York City building.

  He felt the knee-jerk, modest reaction to doubt himself when he saw the blond woman appear on the screen, looking over her shoulder and then hustling inside the front door of the building. Immediately, though, Kyle knew it was Allaire. After nine months obsessively searching, he’d hit pay dirt. He kept his eyes on the screen as he grabbed his sneakers and quickly tied them.

  He was glad to find Brady’s car keys on their small kitchen table. He’d hear it from Brady later for taking his car without asking, but Kyle had no time to wait for the first bus tomorrow morning.

  Unless she left the building within the next few hours, he would finally find Allaire again. Whether she wanted to be found was another story altogether.

  CHAPTER 3

  December 5, 2016

  * * *

  Four hours later

  The building looked old and worn on the outside, like all of its neighbors in the garment district. Many of the other structures nearby had their bottom floors occupied by dingy clothing showrooms, liquor stores, or restaurants, but this one just had a small lobby with a fire door and an elevator.

  He’d come here twice before, hoping to get answers, but the front entrance had been locked. This time, he didn’t bother trying to buzz up to the fifth floor. He pulled a crowbar from his backpack, looked around to make sure it was clear, and wrenched the metal door out of its locked position.

  Kyle let the door slam behind him and walked into a small, tiled lobby. He’d exited the building so quickly last time that he barely remembered being inside. Not that what Kyle remembered was anything he should rely on these days. His photographic memory had been severely compromised by all of the time traveling he’d done recently. He hit the call button and waited as the gears of the elevator roared into motion. A few seconds later, the metal door covering the elevator slid open and Kyle walked in. He hit “five” for the top floor, and waited, but the elevator was not taking his direction.

  He pressed the button over and over, then pressed “Door Close” to see if that might help. Nothing. Jabbing his finger into the “five” button again, he accidentally hit the button right underneath, labeled “three.” Immediately, the door closed and the elevator rose.

  Kyle stepped out on the third floor and found a huge, unfinished space. There was wood flooring with sawdust scattered—a coating that looked like it had been left a long time ago. In the corners of the space, he noticed some rats scuttling around. Built into the center of the area, extending from the floor to the ceiling, was a round structure. It looked to be eight or ten feet wide, and was placed as if someone had stuck a giant, concrete straw from the top of the building down to the bottom.

  The area didn’t look abandoned as much as never used. As if someone prepped the space for someone’s use when the building was completed long ago, but in all these years never bothered to find a tenant. In a city where every square foot was costly, it surprised Kyle to see this. He walked around the huge cylinder in the middle of the room and saw a small metal door on it—like the cover of a fuse box. When he pulled at the small ring jutting out from the door, he jumped back. The metal was hot enough to cook on. He put his hand up to the concrete wall of the cylinder and could even feel heat emanating from there. Kyle wondered whether this was the outside of the tunnel. It had to exist somewhere, he thought. Could this be the place?

  Next to the elevator bank was another metal door, and Kyle found a stairwell behind it. He headed up to the fifth floor, peeking into the fourth on his way up. More of the same. Ready for use—after a good dusting—but completely barren.

  After walking up two floors, Kyle found himself mostly in darkness on the fifth floor. There was enough light to make out the row of machines he’d seen last time he was here, and he carefully walked in that direction. Unlike the third and fourth floors, the fifth was broken up by walls creating a layout with several hallways and rooms. In the center, though, was the huge round structure that looked like a vertical tunnel. Kyle saw that one of the hallways to his right was lit as he approached the machines. A tiny bit of light seeped into the machine room and Kyle could see that one of the contraptions was hard at work, spinning white threads on eight wheels moving at once. It looked like a giant loom. Underneath the machine were huge tubs filled with boiling water and white pods which looked like little cocoons. Kyle could feel the heat on his legs from the lower part of the machine.

  In the middle of the machine, on a thick black slab, was something Kyle recognized instantly—a silk blot. The white silk from the wheels was feeding through the bottom of the black platform and the blot was forming before his eyes.

  Kyle reached his finger out to touch the silk blot. The instant he made contact, though, the machine ground to a halt. A hole the size of a quarter opened in the blot where his finger had touched. He’d never seen a hole in a silk blot before.

  He looked around him to see if anyone might’ve witnessed what he did, but didn’t see a soul. He walked over to the middle machine. There were two huge tubs laying on top of it, but unlike the ones underneath the first machine, these weren’t filled with water. And, instead of white pods, there were thousands of short gray worms inside, laying on a huge pile of leaves.

  He could see that the third machine in the room contained three boxes with mesh screens for walls. There were hundreds of butterflies, or moths, fluttering inside of them.

  As Kyle moved his face closer to check out the worms in the tubs, a light turned on in the room.

  Kyle jumped, and stood up straight. He turned back toward the first machine, where across from him, he saw a woman not much older than he was. She looked up at him, then down at her smartphone where she was typing furiously, then back at Kyle.

  “I’m . . . I . . . I’m looking for someone,” Kyle said.

  “Who?” she asked, before going back to fiddling with her phone. She had dark hair pulled into a ponytail, wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans. She didn’t look happy that Kyle was there, but also didn’t look quite as alarmed as she might have, given that Kyle was trespassing.

  Kyle moved his hands to the bottom of the machine. If he was going to be escorted out, he needed to leave with a silk blot. Otherwise, he might never find Allaire. “I’m looking for Allaire. Do you know her?”

  The girl bit on her bottom lip and gazed down at her phone again for a few seconds. What was so interesting on that phone? Kyle wondered to himself.

  Kyle decided not to wait for an answer. “Can you tell me if she’s here?”

  The girl still didn’t say anything, and just tapped on her phone. He thought he might be able to slide the sil
k blot right off the machine, and stuff it into his pocket without her noticing.

  “She’s not here,” the woman said, not looking up, as Kyle gently grabbed the silk blot with the hole using his thumb and forefinger.

  He was about to pull the blot toward himself, when he felt a hand clasp around his wrist. He tried pulling it away, only to feel his whole body being spun in the other direction. Kyle saw Yalé, the same old man he’d encountered the last time in this building. Yalé kept his grip on Kyle’s wrist and led him across the room. He pulled Kyle up against a wall, and swept his legs to get him into a sitting position on the floor. Everything was done gently enough for Kyle to know that Yalé wasn’t trying to hurt him. His every move carried enough force, though, that resistance would’ve been unsuccessful.

  The woman walked next to Yalé. “Did you get my text? I don’t think he’s been here long,” she said to him.

  “Welcome back, Kyle,” Yalé said.

  Kyle was more and more sure with every passing moment that he had some larger role to fulfill in all of this—whatever this was. “Where did Allaire go? I know she was here last night.”

  “You missed her,” Yalé said. “She was only here briefly.”

  “I need to find her,” Kyle answered.

  Yalé smiled. “Tell me why.”

  “I can’t,” Kyle said.

  “You can, and you should,” Yalé said. “That way, I might be able to help you.”

  “We didn’t part on good terms,” Kyle said. “I want to make things right.”

  “I would suggest taking more caution should you encounter Allaire again,” Yalé said. “You should go home. You were doing the right thing just living your life.”

  Kyle pointed at the silk blot, still laying on the machine. “My life was gone the first time I went into one of those things. I’m just trying to figure out how to make it mean something again.”

  “It’s not by coming in and stealing something that doesn’t belong to you,” the girl said to him.

  Yalé held his hand up to quiet the girl. “Samyra, please.”

  “What is this place?” Kyle asked. “I know one of those machines is making a silk blot, but what do the others do?”

  “You’ve got a lot of questions,” Samyra said.

  Again, Yalé looked displeased at her response. “I understand it would be impossible not to have questions, Kyle. But, none of what happens here is any of your concern.”

  “Who are you making them for?” Kyle asked.

  Yalé walked to the machine, grabbed the blot Kyle broke, and tossed it into a trash bin. “I’m afraid that nearly every answer I could give you would be less exciting than you might imagine. Mostly, we make the blots and dispose of them. This one you touched is broken, so it wouldn’t work for reaching the tunnel anyway.”

  “Why do you make them?” Kyle asked.

  “Because I’m a Sere, and it’s what I do,” he said. “My people have made and sold silk since ancient times. Along the way, we discovered that changing the process slightly resulted in a fabric with unusual properties. But in the generations since, we’ve learned something that I believe is now quite apparent to you as well—that little good comes from revisiting the past.”

  “I need to find her,” Kyle said.

  Yalé smiled warmly. “You have my word that Allaire is not troubling herself with whether you parted on good terms or bad. And you shouldn’t either.”

  “She sure isn’t,” Samyra added, almost like she was shooing away an animal. “Don’t come back here.”

  Yalé looked frustrated at her tone again. He reached his hand down to help Kyle up. “I’m sorry we can’t help you,” he said. “I’m sure it’s disappointing to come all this way—”

  “Is that the tunnel?” Kyle asked, pointing over to the floor-to-ceiling cylinder he’d burnt himself on, which he realized must intersect with each floor in the building.

  Yalé smiled, and shook his head. “No. The tunnel doesn’t exist in this world. That is my greenhouse. We grow mulberry leaves for the silk worms.”

  Kyle realized now what the little gray worms were. He remembered from science class that silk is spun from the cocoons created by silk worm as they move through the process of becoming moths.

  “Does Allaire work for you?” Kyle asked.

  Yalé smiled warmly again, but started to back away. “Samyra will see you out.” He turned and left them.

  At first, Samyra just stood there, watching Yalé go. She craned her neck, and Kyle looked too. When Yalé was out of their view, she bent into the trash bin and pulled out the ripped silk blot. She hid it under her jacket as they walked to the elevator and then handed it to Kyle. She pressed the call button. “I heard things work a little differently for you. This blot might be okay if you’re careful not to make the hole any bigger.”

  Kyle just looked at her, confused. She’d been dismissive and unfriendly to him only seconds earlier. “I don’t get it?”

  “If you can go through, maybe you’re supposed to,” she answered. “Yalé’s old-school. I had to say all that stuff in there, but I think you should go find her.”

  “Thank you,” he said, putting his hand over the elevator door to stop it from closing.

  “What’s the future like?” Samyra whispered.

  Kyle didn’t know how to answer. “You’ve never . . . ?”

  “Nah, feels like I’m burning alive the second I go in,” she said.

  “Well, you’re not missing much. The future’s not as good as it is here,” Kyle answered. “You were born at a pretty good time.”

  A sound coming from inside the factory made Samyra jump, and now she looked distracted. “Hurry and go. He’s coming. Oh hey, that blot was made to be thrown away, so even if it works, it’ll disintegrate in about forty-eight hours.”

  “Where’s Allaire?” he asked.

  Samyra shrugged and pressed the call button on the elevator. “Try 2060, if that tunnel hasn’t shrunk any more. If it has, try whatever year is at the end of the tunnel.”

  “The tunnel’s shrinking?” Kyle asked. “Why?”

  “You gotta go before Yalé realizes I gave you the blot,” she said as the elevator door opened. “When you get to the future, there’s this tall tower about a mile and a half from here. Just walk down 38th Street. They built it right where the Javits Convention Center is now . . . ”

  “Who is Ayers?” Kyle asked her.

  Samyra’s face tightened up. “What did Allaire tell you about him?”

  “Not enough,” Kyle said.

  She looked over her shoulder again. “He’s someone who might be able to help you. Now go.” Samyra pushed him lightly in the chest toward the elevator, and Kyle stepped inside. This was very different from what Allaire had told Kyle about him: that Ayers needed to be stopped.

  A minute later, he stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor. Kyle pulled out the torn silk blot and held it over his head. The hole was about the size of a baseball, and light from the fluorescent bulb above him shined through the otherwise opaque blot. As Kyle stood there examining the strange material, he noticed the hole starting to shrink. At first he thought his eyes might be playing a trick on him, but about three minutes later, the hole was down to the size of a dime and he could see that it was still shrinking. All Kyle had done was hold the silk blot. Yalé had thought it was worthless enough to throw out, but Kyle had mended it by simply touching it with his hands.

  Am I special? he wondered. Was there something drawing him toward time travel, or ‘time weaving’ as everyone seemed to call it? Or was Kyle just letting his strange experience cloud his thoughts, or perhaps letting his ego get in the way?

  Kyle pulled the silk blot over himself and, same as always, he found himself in the tunnel again. For the first time, Kyle began a journey through the tunnel without any hope of changing the past. What he sought now was to find out his place in the future.

  CHAPTER 4

  July 24, 2060

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sp; * * *

  Forty-four years later

  Kyle felt relief as he reached the rung labeled 2059 when he found that there was still more tunnel ahead of him. He wasn’t sure why, but the tunnel getting shorter and shorter sounded ominous to him.

  Approaching rung 2060 now, he knew that the tunnel would let him out in exactly the same geographical location where he entered the silk blot, but about forty-four years in the future. What he wasn’t sure of, though, was whether he could control what day in 2060 he exited into. So far, he’d just always wound up time weaving back to the date he needed to. In this case, he didn’t have a specific date in mind. He’d have to trust that whatever force always spit him out on the day of the bus crash in the past would let him exit the tunnel on a day Allaire was in the silo.

  Kyle pushed the silk blot into the slot labeled 2060 and slid through it. Then, he grabbed the blot from the slot as he climbed out into the lobby on the ground floor of the same building where he’d met Yalé forty-four years earlier, even though only about a half day had passed for Kyle. He was exhausted. While he’d gotten more used to climbing through the tunnel, it was still a physical test.

  It was nearly pitch black, except for the light of the moon shining into the small lobby. As his eyes adjusted, Kyle could see that the elevator was no longer there. In its place, an open shaft in the wall.

  He tried the knob on the fire door next to the elevator, but it didn’t budge. There was a thick metal plate drilled over the door jamb. No one was getting it open again without power tools. He’d hoped to go upstairs and see what had become of the machinery that was building silk blots in 2016, and to see if anyone was there. But the building felt strangely empty, like no one had been inside in quite some time. Even the air felt stale. The only remnant of activity was the clock hanging above the door. It still ticked on its way to 7:45 p.m.