Page 154 of The Scandal You Started
The mood grew sombre again.
“Well,” Declan said, stretching his spine. “A year after that, the Board decided to implement the rule you all now know. And a few years after that, Wilson was sadly diagnosed with cancer. By that point, your parents had already joined the project. They weren’t officially told about Studies being allowed to stay—that was stopped when the new rule was introduced. But because they were working under Wilson, they were told about it. And when he became too sick and eventually passed away, they were allowed to continue his work, but…” He drifted off as he turned to Victor.
“When Dr Wilson passed away,” Victor began, not moving from his slouched position, “rather than leaving his research with his assistant, Dr Jim Pine, he put Yasmin in charge of continuing it, even though she’d only been working with him for less than a year.”
Rayna stilled, George and Dominic twitched on either side of her, and River’s shoulders went rigid as comprehension zipped around the table.
“Pine didn’t like that,” said Victor. “He complained to the Board, but they refused to interfere. It made him angry. But he didn’t stop working on the team, he just made things difficult for them. When Samara was on maternity leave with you, George, he bugged your dad a lot. And a year later, when Yasmin had you, Rayna, she said he tried to take over the research and redo all the work they’d done so far.
“I saw it myself when I began helping the team a few months after I started at the lab. How Pine belittled your parents and Yasmin, especially when everyone found out we were dating.”
Victor rolled his jaw. “During my fourth year at the lab, a new position was introduced—a stepping stone to becoming a Board member. Jim wanted the role, but it was offered to Yasmin. She didn’t want to accept it at first, but we all encouraged her to take it. Especially me.” He dipped his chin as he swallowed. “I saw how hard she worked. She deserved the recognition, and she did accept it eventually on the stipulation that she could still work on the Rupture research.”
Rayna hadn’t ever really understood her mum’s work as a child, but she remembered that. Her mum’s promotion. One of the pictures in the photo frame that sat on her desk at the lab was from when they’d celebrated it. Her, Victor, and her mum. Next to the photo of when he’d proposed a few months earlier.
“It was some time after that, Alex, one of the newer historians, fell in love with a princess of Prio who’d been brought from three-two-eight PR,” Victor said. “Pine was in charge of her case, so when Alex went to him, saying they wanted to be together, Jim made a huge fuss.”
“When Yasmin found out, she persuaded your parents and me to try to help Alex and the princess.” A shadow cast over hisface as he let out a soundless sigh. “Thinking back, we should’ve realised how impossible it was, but she was willing to take the risk.”
“In the years they’d spent researching Ruptures, your parents theorised that the greater a person’s influence in history, the greater their Rupture would be. And the princess was someone who was entangled in more history than we could fully comprehend, so we didn’t even know where to begin with estimating it.”
Anger crashed down on his expression. “But Jim found out and singled Yasmin out. He threatened to get her kicked off the project and refused to give us enough time to create a proper plan, so she rushed into an experiment that shouldn’t have even been attempted.
“She wanted to use the second POTeM to try to travel into the Ruptured timeline and solve it from there.”
Rayna’s pulse pounded in fearful, knowing echoes as Victor’s brows drooped. “But the thing with a Rupture is that it’s not set in stone. There’s no guarantee where it starts or ends. We could guess, but pinpointing an exact moment or location was impossible. But she still wanted to try.”
“I should have been there,” he croaked, his eyes growing bloodshot. “I wasn’t. I was at the other end of the lab with the princess, working on our backup plan. But we heard it. The explosion.”
“It released ten times the safe amount of Type Two Z-energy. Alex, Samara, Frank, and Yasmin had all been in the room. Everyone else was evacuated from the lab. It took thirty minutes to get the sealed door open. They were moved to the infirmary first, and when it was realised how severe their condition was, they were taken to the hospital. The senior doctors there who knew about the project couldn’t figure out what to do.” His voicecracked. “But we knew…we knew there was nothing that could be done. We just didn’t know how long…”
“The princess was sent back immediately,” Victor added after a long pause. “The Board decided to destroy all the Rupture research and dismantled the second POTeM. They wanted to hide what had really happened and made the rest of us involved sign NDAs. Not just stopping us from talking about the accident, but about Ruptures too.
“While we were grieving, Pine twisted the story in his favour. And when I came back to the project, they’d already given Yasmin’s job to him.” Bitterness flamed behind his glasses. “Now he’s the CEO.”
Rayna’s muscles flinched when a hard clamp locked just above one knee. It was Dominic’s hand. She wasn’t sure when he’d put it there, but it grounded her. Stopped the spread of cold numbness as if her soul, all feeling and emotion, was withering away.
No one said anything for what felt like a small eternity. All the while, Rayna could feel Dominic imploring her to look at him, but she couldn’t. Winnie and Declan stayed huddled together as he caressed her hand. Victor’s glassy stare was focused on a spot past Rayna’s head. River kept his lashes lowered, and George swiped tears off his cheeks.
Rayna had completely forgotten her dad was still on the phone until his croaky voice broke the silence. “I can’t lose you, Rayna. You can’t do any experiments. Promise me you won’t. Swear to me you won’t, Rayna.”
“We won’t,” Dominic said sternly. “She won’t. I will not let her.”
She finally turned her attention to him, and the fear, the concern, the stubborn refusal to lose her was making his eyes quiver.
He was scared, and that fuelled her determination, anger, and own fear in equal measure. Taking a deep breath, she placed her hand over Dominic’s and faced the three older adults.
“So what do we do?” she said, her voice as tight as the pinch between her shoulders.
“Start by accessing museum records, databases, city hall records, whatever you can, to find out what happens in Dominic’s life,” Declan answered, rolling his hands around. “You’ll need to know to estimate how big his Rupture could be, and then you’ll have to reduce the Rupture by manipulating his history to roughly take the same path it was meant to, without him.”
“Will we be able to do that without all the research?” she asked.
“We’re not without it,” Victor mumbled.
She frowned. “But you said…”
Rather than answering her implied question, his gaze dropped to the phone. “Do you still have the key, Carlos?”
