Isle of Man - By Ryan Winfield

CHAPTER 1

Picking up the Pieces

I never meant to kill Hannah’s family.

Or Jimmy’s either. And although I didn’t kill them myself, at least not directly, I can’t help but think that if I’d never left Holocene II, they’d still be alive.

I’m standing on the bluff looking down on Hannah as she picks through what’s left of her childhood home. It isn’t much. I watch her run a hand along the jagged stones that outline the remains of the foundation. She turns toward the water, pressing her palms against the air, as if miming where the living room window had been, the window where her mother would sit and watch the lake from the family rocking chair.

Farther out, along the debris-littered shore, I can just make out Jimmy walking the beach in front of Gloria’s bungalow. Or what was Gloria’s bungalow before the wave came and dragged it out into the lake. Jimmy’s head is bent in mourning. Junior, his fox pup, trails at his heels.

I have no idea where any of us go from here.

By the time I climb down off the bluff, Hannah is standing in the exposed, flooded basement, looking like some exotic red-topped flower with her green dress floating around her waist. She’s lost in her thoughts and doesn’t even notice me wading toward her until I wrap my arms around her from behind.

“I’m sorry, Hannah.”

She leans into me and sighs.

“You did the right thing.”

I’m tempted to tell her that it wasn’t me. That I couldn’t do it. That her mother had been awake, and that she came down and triggered the wave herself, then saved me by locking me away in the safe room. But if I tell her, she’ll know that her mother let the wave take her—that she committed suicide. I won’t risk spoiling Hannah’s memory of her mother.

Hannah moves through the water toward the open door of the safe room. I slosh after her and watch as she peers inside, searching the shadows of the room. Her eyes land on the open safe where her father kept the vials of longevity serum, the genetic elixir that would grant us each a thousand years of life. She sees that it’s empty and frowns. I reach in my pocket and pull out the case of loaded syringes, and Hannah smiles for the first time since seeing that I was alive yesterday. She grabs the clear-plastic case of syringes and holds it up to the light.

“Oh, Aubrey!” she exclaims. “You’ve saved us!” Her voice sounds like an angelic harmony, echoing off the water.

“You sure you wanna do it?”

“Of course,” she says, as if there should be no doubt about it at all. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“I don’t know. Your mom seemed to have some regrets.”

“She was sick.”

“What happens when we get sick?”

“I would have fixed it for her if I’d had more time.”

“But she had lots of time, Hannah, and she couldn’t fix it. And you’re just sixteen.”

Hannah waves the syringes at me.

“Yes, but my mother taught me well,” she says. “Plus, I only have to pick up where she left off. Science is a relay race, Aubrey, not a marathon.”

“Even so. What will we do with a thousand years?”

“Everything,” she says, leaning in to brush her lips against mine. “And why settle for a thousand? That’s just the start.”

“Just the start?”

“Sure,” she says. “There are three doses here. One for you, one for me, and one left over to study. We can recover the lab at the Foundation and with as much time as we’ll have, I’ll find a way to extend our lives longer. Let’s live forever, Aubrey.”

“But that third dose has to be for Jimmy.”

“Jimmy?” she asks, sounding disappointed.

“Yeah, Jimmy.”

“Of course, you’re right,” she says, frowning and handing me back the syringes. “I’m sorry.”

“Did someone say my name?”

I look back and see Jimmy standing on the steps, holding a stick strung with fish. Junior is crouched at his feet, lapping water from the flooded basement.

We gather wood to the edge of the lake. and Jimmy strikes a fire lit. He wraps the gutted trout in strips of green bark and buries them in a shallow trench beside the fire. Then we wait, sitting in a semi-circle looking at the lake, and listening to the popping wood as Jimmy uses a stick to push coals over the fish. It’s only late morning, but clouds have descended like theatre props in windless skies, bringing an evening gray and the bite of winter’s cold with them.

“I figured the lake