29. The Songbird.

Abe was grateful for the crisp winter air. He sat wearily on the stoop outside and let the chill wash over him in deep, frosty breaths. 

They had done it. 

Ava had fixed the Unchangeable, and Abe had fixed Ava. The Coulise timepiece should work as it had before. She could take it. She would probably go home.

But Abe couldn't shake the feeling that his father hadn't been totally honest with them. This all seemed too easy after years with that old man's obsession.

A slew of bright, musical chirps interrupted Abe's thoughts. Two lemon-yellow songbirds crooned playfully from the branches of a nearly-dead pear tree, and Abe dropped his worries to smile at them. He always loved the songbirds here.

But a ferocious shout from inside the house startled them into flight, and Abe was shaken from his reverie. He rushed inside--Ava must have finally woken up. And the furious argument she seemed to be having with Charlie did nothing to assuage the doctor's suspicions.

28. The Wolf.

Ava awoke to a musty smell and a dim light overhead. She was lying on a small bed, with a hard mattress, propped up with several thin pillows. Across from her, Charlie sat in an armchair watching her, a permanent scowl set on his brow.

She tried to sit up, but the room swung wildly around her the moment she exerted herself. "I did it," she said weakly as she settled back against the pillows. "I fixed the Unchangeable." 

Charlie chuckled to himself--a brash, unpleasant cough of a laugh. "I know you did," he said. "Would you be here right now if you hadn't?" 

Ava tried to stifle the fury rising in her throat. "You knew I could have been trapped?" She tried not to picture where the plane would be now if she hadn't been on it. She reminded herself it was supposed to happen. It had always happened. It had to happen -- for Allie.

He grinned. "Technically, you had an eternity to figure it out," he said. He leaned forward with a wolffish look in his eye. "Tell me," he said hungrily, "what did you see?"

27. The Surgeon.

"That's what you're here for!" Charlie yelled. "Make it happen! Or did you not notice that this is an actual Coulise?!" Abe was feverishly working on a pale and unconscious Ava who, if she hadn't been a Coulise, would certainly have been dead by now. 

Abe colored at his father's jab. The man was intolerable. "Will you shut it?" he snapped back. "This is a surgery that should be performed at a hospital, not in the back room of some crazy old man's lair!" 

Charlie looked surprised--and perhaps proud--to hear his son speak to him that way for once. He'd never seen Abe at work. 

But his stunned silence didn't last long. "What did I send you to medical school for, anyhow," he said, returning to his characteristic growl, "if you can't save the last damned Coulise?!"

Photo by KadriPhoto. 

26. Make It Happen.

Ava dreamt of the sea. She was trapped in another time piece, one that opened underwater. When she swam for the surface, the rippled underside of the waves was utterly impassable, like some kind of thick, shifting glass. She slammed her fists against it from below, desperate for air, but she may as well have been pounding on solid stone. 

Her lungs screamed. In the distance she could hear Charlie's gruff voice insist that she figure this out. "That's what you're here for," he snapped. "Make it happen!"

25. The Cleared Skies.

He sprinted through the trees and back towards the field. She was probably fine, he told himself. She would probably laugh at him for worrying at all. She was probably already on her way. Right?

He burst out of the trees and down the slope towards the wreckage of the old plane. A slumped figure lay in the grass ahead, easily visible in what was now a clear and starlit night. "Ava!" he cried.

She was unconscious, and so pale as to look gray in the silver light. He knelt down in the mud next to her and tried to shake her awake, but her side and stomach were covered in blood.