Page 136 of Incoronate
The image hit my chest hard, the impact spreading through me before I could stop it.
“You cannot deny that’s a very real possibility, angel,” said Dominic, his gaze moving over me carefully, reading every minute change. “Your Alt would have gone back the moment she understood what was coming for Trace and she wouldn’thave stopped to consider the cost. She would have taken the risk and dealt with the consequences later.” He paused, a barely-there smirk curving his lips. “After all, she is still you.”
I couldn’t argue that. I knew exactly how far she would go for the people she loved and exactly how little she would have thought about what it cost her. Because yeah, she was me.
“Then help me figure it out,” I pleaded, looking between the two. “Stop telling me every reason it can’t be done and help me find a way to do this!”
“How are we supposed to do that, Jemma? You’re asking me to help you do something that might erase you from my fucking life. Don’t you get it? I can’t do that.” He shook his head and turned away, taking three paces toward the window like the room had gotten too small for what he was feeling. “I won’t.”
The grief and the guilt hit at the same time, knotting together somewhere behind my ribs. I stared at his back for a few seconds longer than I should have and then made myself look away before it could change my mind.
Dominic’s eyes were still on me when I faced him again.
“Say we agree to do this, for the sake of argument,” he said, his voice measured and even, the tone of a man laying a trap gently enough that you didn’t hear the click until it had already closed. “You port back to the night before the Order came. Then what? You cannot simply warn your past self. The moment your Alt hears it and changes course, you’ll have created a divergence.”
“I’m not going back to warn myself,” I said, holding his gaze even though it felt like it was costing me everything to do it. “I’m going back to replace myself.”
Trace’s head whipped back around. “What? That’s not—” He stopped short as though he didn’t know how to finish his own sentence.
“I have to be the one to do it. I can’t rely on my past self to know what to do,” I explained, pushing the words out before the doubt could catch up to them. “She doesn’t know what I know. She hasn’t lived through any of this. It has to be me in that moment. With everything I have now.”
“Interesting,” mused Dominic as his eyes slid back to Trace. “Any thoughts?”
Trace’s brows creased as he met my eyes again. “It doesn’t solve everything, but it does change the equation a little,” he said, thinking now, not dismissing. “If you go back and take your Alt’s place, you still can’t have two of you in the same point in time. The Timeline would register the anomaly.”
“Right.” I nodded. I’d already hit that wall. “So past me can’t stay there.”
A shadow flickered through Trace’s eyes. “Then where does she go?”
I turned it over in my head, searching for the piece that made it fit. For this to work, I couldn’t have two versions of myself on the Timeline. One had to be displaced, and if she had to go somewhere, then the future was the only direction left that didn’t collapse the whole thing.
And then it was just there. The same way the answer always came when I stopped trying to force it, as though it had been sitting in the room with me the whole time just waiting for me to look up.
“Here,” I said, meeting his eyes again. “She takes my place on this Timeline, and I take hers.”
Trace dragged a hand over his jaw. He wasn’t pacing anymore. “A body swap.”
“Exactly,” I said, the word coming out with more confidence than I’d felt in hours. “That way nothing doubles. Nothing collapses. Past me steps into my place here, and I step into hers. Only this time, I’ll know exactly what’s coming.I’ll know every move they plan to make and I’ll know where to be and what to stop.”
Dominic’s smirk widened. “It’s not the worst plan you’ve ever had.”
“Thanks,” I said and rolled my eyes at him.
“Don’t celebrate just yet. It still has more gaps than answers. Porting alone isn’t going to cover all of it. We’d need something else,” he went on, his dark eyes narrowing as he turned inward, working through something the rest of us couldn’t see yet. “Something that doesn’t answer to the same rules and constraints that a Reaper does. Or rather, someone. Three of them.”
“The Roderick sisters.”
Trace made a sound at the back of his throat that was not enthusiasm. “Are we sure we want to bring them into this?” he asked, crossing his arms like he still didn’t trust them.
I didn’t fault him. I didn’t fully trust them either. But we weren’t shopping around for options anymore. We needed magic that lived outside every boundary the Order had ever drawn, and the Roderick sisters had spent their entire existence collecting exactly the kind of knowledge the Order had spent just as long trying to keep buried. If there was a spell or a working that covered what Reaper magic couldn’t reach, it was going to be with them.
“If anyone knows how to break the laws of time travel without getting erased in the process, it’s them.”
He looked at me for a long moment, the blue of his eyes dark and unreadable in the low light, something warring in there that he chose not to put into words. “And if they refuse?”
“They won’t,” I said confidently. “Not if it’s going to stop Ares from being killed. Not after everything they did to make sure he was born in the first place.”
All I had to do now was hope that the Roderick sisters actually had what we needed. Because if I’d just spent the last twenty minutes arguing myself hoarse about why this had to be possible, the least the universe could do was not make a liar out of me.
