CHAPTER TWELVE

Back to the Lab

Dee Dee didn't know how long she'd been running. She only knew that evening had fallen, flooding the sky with shades of orange and red.

She couldn't feel the waves anymore. She couldn't hear the chaos. No one grabbed her arms or begged her to help. No one gazed at her with blank and empty eyes. The screaming and the sobbing that filled the air had faded away, replaced by an even more terrible silence.

She could still see the destruction spread out all around her, buildings broken and tumbled down as the energies of the core rolled across the earth with the intensity of the fiercest earthquake. She barely recognized the old neighborhood, would never have found the house, if not for a faint light glinting in the distance – a dying sunbeam on a bit of shining metal.

Dee Dee rushed to the light as though she were drawn by a magnet. The house itself had collapsed. The chimney was little more than a pile of rubble on the lawn, great holes gaping in the shingles of the roof, and the wooden frame leaned at such crazy angles Dee Dee had to throw all her weight against the front door just to push it open.

There was no one inside. No Mom or Dad, of course. No nice couple and their little boy. She didn't stop to wonder what had happened to them. The walls of the living room were cracked through, bits of wood and glass and plaster covering the carpet, but she saw that part of the staircase was still in tact, as well as some of the upper floor. She thought she knew why.

Sure enough, the elaborate steel reinforcements hidden behind Dexter's bedroom walls were still supporting the house's right side. Dee Dee found his bookcase shivered to fragments on the floor as it had fallen free of its bolts, leaving the laboratory doors fully revealed. The tremors had evidently triggered some kind of mechanism. They were open slightly, a small star-shaped hole formed in the intersection of the solid metal layers.

Dee Dee gripped the doors and pulled. There was a piercing shriek of grinding metal, but she managed to force the opening wide enough to allow her a path through. The fiery sunset shone through a gash in the ceiling where the roof had crumbled in, and she blinked against its reflection on the lab's gleaming surfaces. Only one thing mattered in all that vast space, and she kept running in its direction.

The time machine had fallen on its side in the commotion amidst a tangle of tubing and wires. She tried to drag it upright, and when it proved too heavy to move Dee Dee dropped to her knees by the clock's doorway instead.

"There's only one hope left," she whispered, flinging the wreckage of the lab away. Her voice was hoarse and panicked. It sounded like someone else. "I can go back to the past, back before any of this ever happened. I can stop it from ever happening if I can just…just…get back to the way things used to be!"

It was a mistake to start thinking. Dee Dee's chest tightened and tears welled in her eyes as she frantically searched the broken machine's control panel. "Oh god," she gasped into the silence. "Oh my god, I don't know how it works. How does it work?" The control panel was an external one, covered in dials and buttons. What did they do? She ran her hands over every switch, begging her brain to remember which one powered the machine. She'd only used it once or twice before, when Dexter had told her how.

The memory of it flashed like a shock through her mind. Her brother in danger, at the mercy of a terrible monster – screaming directions, looking to her, but no matter what he said she still didn't know what to do….

Then she'd clambered into the time machine, and the next second he was there at his desk, busy and safe, all their troubles disappeared.

The time machine would fix everything. She could warn him, stop him. All she had to do then, all she had to do now was just go back, give him a message and it would all bebetter, and he would look at her and say -

If there were a message so important that it would require time travel, I certainly would not entrust it to my idiot sister! I would send myself.

It hadn't stopped anything. He would never believe her.

"It won't work!" Dee Dee sobbed. "It won't work!"

She was choking on the air, face burning as salty tears surged through her scratches and wounds. She clung to the time machine, her last hope, but it wasn't really any hope at all. There was no going back, there was nothing she or anyone could do to protect the core, to stop everything from being ruined, to keep the world from being overcome with darkness. All she had left was the empty laboratory and its useless machines and its broken promises of a better future.

But at least she had a future.

The metal had grown warm from the touch of her skin. Dee Dee opened her eyes and lay against the clock for a moment longer, drained of all her tears and strength. Then, with one defiant burst of energy, she raised herself off the shell of the time machine.

She gulped, she sniffed, and she thought, Tears for the past are a waste of time.

She had a future. And as long as she had a future…she had a chance.

He really was a genius.

Dee Dee sat back on her heels and scrubbed at her cheeks, grit and grime smearing across her skin. She tried to push her hair away but the sweaty strands hung stubbornly in her face. She dug into her pocket. It was funny. She'd been slapped, and sliced, and nearly killed, but she still had a ponytail holder. Only one, though.

She tied her hair back, climbed to her feet, then staggered and twisted as a violent pain blasted through her knee. For the first time in hours she realized how badly injured she was, and the sight of the blood, dried black and brittle on her clothes, made her instantly faint.

Stumbling, panting, she carefully picked her way over to Dexter's primary workstation. He had stashed massive first-aid kits all over the lab, ready for use whenever she'd blown his latest experiment to smithereens. They'd often patched each other up in the angry silence that always followed.

"This isn't the right drawer, though." This one held old costume pieces for suiting up. There were boots, gloves, a few leotards, and resting on top Dee Dee found her favorite pink flight goggles. It was the pair she'd worn when her family had defeated the kaiju Badaxtra, against all odds. She was still the only one who remembered that.

Dee Dee held the goggles up to her eyes, and suddenly the world became soft and rosy and beautiful.

She thought, "It's gonna be okay."

She knew it didn't make any sense. She knew it was totally crazy. The waves of the Neurotomic Protocore had swept the earth; almost everything she loved was gone. But here, in Dexter's laboratory, she felt safer than she had in a very long time. She felt like she was home.

As long as she had a future…as long as she had a chance...there was still hope.

"It's gonna be okay."

Dee Dee shut up the drawers to Dexter's desk. She glanced over her shoulder at the time machine, resting on its side in the shadows. Then she took her old phone out of her pocket.

She had fallen on it during the fight, smashed it into splinters of plastic and wire. She brushed her fingertips over the smooth white surface, then she set it gently on the desk.

"You're right, Dexter. Some things can't be repaired. But a lot of things can. And someday, somehow, we're gonna make our future bright again." She smiled. "I swear it."

THE END