Book Five, Chapter 126:: The Many Mothers of Gabriel Cano

🔴 REC    OCT 05, 2018 15:42:11    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

The hospital burned beside me. People cried for help.

Gabriel Cano stood before me, and at first, I didn’t know exactly why he was there—until he reached up and grabbed his right ear. At first, it looked like he was scratching it, but then he gave it a subtle tug.

That was the sign.

That was the signal we had planned for when our overall strategy was to go into effect.

It was supposed to be Lila who came to give me the news. Then I thought it might be Bobby because he got trapped on the other side of time. But it turned out to be Dina’s character’s son.

Whatever. I could be flexible.

I turned to Camden and said, “I have to go.”

“What? Why?” Camden asked.

“I can’t explain it,” I said. “I just have this feeling.”

Not my best work, but I was in a hurry.

I handed him my necklace with the meteorite jewel on it, as well as the book containing the various mass death events.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’ll see you soon,” I said.

Luckily, the meteorite had not gotten close enough to activating yet. Many people would lose their lives in the burning hospital, but they hadn’t died yet—or at least not most of them.

I still had time.

I ran away, following Gabriel Cano in my memories.

I knew where he was going before he led me there. With one last look over my shoulder at Camden, I put it into high gear and did my best to get around to the front of the hospital.

Everyone was panicking as the place was being evacuated. An ambulance, which had just delivered a new patient, had been sidelined, and the patient was rolled out into the parking lot instead of into the burning building.

It was a Generation Killer—the one we had seen with bullet holes in him.

He was talking to himself, delirious from blood loss.

“Not this one,” he said over and over again.

I didn’t spend any time talking to him. I grabbed his meteorite necklace from around his neck and reached into his overcoat to take his copy of the book of Carousel’s horrendous history.

“Hey, that’s mine,” he said with absolutely no force or effect. He was too drained.

I ran back, closer to the hospital, as the jewel from the Generation Killer’s necklace started to get brighter.

As it did, I set my mind on going to the moment in time we had all pre-planned to be the finale. After all, that was what we had all decided.

Bobby had found that there was a plane crash a week or two before we discovered the tapes inside the wall that Anna had hidden there.

We decided the finale would take place shortly after that plane crash.

After all, if you had time travel, you could choose when the end of the story was.

Of course, when we made those plans, we didn’t realize how much Carousel went out of its way not to use real-time travel, even creating multiple copies of Carousel proper on sound stages to represent different years.

But Kimberly had her Contract Negotiations trope, and we put all of our efforts into our plan.

At first, we thought Carousel might like it. We sure had to work for it, given how much we had to improvise around the various elements of the story that we hadn’t known about. It was looking like things were about to come together.

As the fire raged, I could hear screams from inside—demoralizing screams that I never wanted to hear again.

The jewel got bright and drained the saturation from all the color around me, turning everything a dull red.

As I opened the book to the right page, I could see Gabriel in my memory waving his hands, telling me that’s not where we’re going, basically.

But if I didn’t know where we were going, how could I take us there?

It turned out Gabriel had his own methods.

He came close to me, and while I couldn’t feel him, I could see him grabbing onto my arm.

As the ground felt like it was falling out from under me, suddenly his hand became more real, and I could feel the grip as his fingers tightened around my bicep. He was still illusory, but he seemed to control my direction.

As the world entered into the kaleidoscope and then into the impossible prism of rivers that I recognized as the shores of time, I noticed that we weren’t traveling the normal way anymore.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that I might be able to talk to Gabriel, as I wasn’t able to talk to Bobby.

But Gabriel talked to me.

“We need to go see my mother,” he said.

“Dina, right?” I asked, recovering from the shock of hearing his voice. “Dina Cano?”

He nodded.

“I read her letters,” I said. “They didn’t make a lot of sense. She says she wants to help us.”

“She does,” he said. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. “I told her what that man did to me, how he threw me to the other side of time so long ago.”

I stared at his face, making sure to capture it in frame as time passed by around us.

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He had a stern look. A tired look.

“Can we fix this?” I asked. “Is there a way out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think my mother can help.”

We stopped moving—but not in the way I was used to.

We hadn’t landed anywhere in time.

We weren’t at a mass-casualty event.

We were in a living room.

Dina’s living room.

She was sitting down with a tape recorder, saying words that I couldn’t hear well at first because of how much they echoed. But then I recognized them.

I had seen this before—or rather, I had heard it.

“Gabriel? Gabriel, can you hear me?” she asked through garbled sounds.

She then recorded the ambient sounds of the room as Gabriel spoke.

“Mom! I’m right here,” Gabriel screamed from beside me. “I think I can help fix this. I think I can fix everything!”

As she played the tape and listened to its hissing and clicking, she seemed to understand what it had recorded.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Dina said. “After last time, I thought something terrible had happened.”

“I’ve been gone, talking to the others,” Gabriel said. “I think I know what to do.”

The recording process repeated.

“I don’t know what to do to help you,” Dina said. “I sent letters to the museum like you asked, but nobody ever showed up. No one believes me.”

Gabriel, who was crying by this point, said, “They will receive them. Trust me.”

“I know. I believe you. I have always believed you. Can you tell me more about what you were saying before? Can you tell me about the shores of time?”

Gabriel looked at me and then said, “The shores of time are filled with broken things. Broken like me. But they can be fixed. I promise they can be fixed. You just have to be ready when I send for you. I have a man coming to you. A man who can take you to me. His name is Riley Lawrence, and he knows how you can help.”

Dina doubled over into her hands and cried. She couldn’t see us.

Carousel really did know how to mess with time—if you knew how to ask.

“Come on,” Gabriel said. “We have more stops to make.”

And so we did—seven, maybe eight more times.

We arrived at Dina’s house alone. She would get still, as if sensing our presence. Then, she would whip out her recorder and start a conversation, and with each conversation, Gabriel would tell her to wait for me to come get her.

But these weren’t the same Dina.

Some were old, others young. Some lived in trailers and others in mansions.

All of them had one thing in common.

They had lost their son during the collapse of a roller rink years earlier—some to death, one had lost her son to time itself.

We traveled from woman to woman until Carousel had gotten enough footage to set up our plan.

■ STOP

“There,” Gabriel said. “That should work. Your friend Bobby told me your plan. Hope it works out for you.”

We had a lot of plans. I had a hunch about which one Bobby had told him about.

I had stopped recording, but we didn’t stop moving through time.

We kept going until we found one more Dina.