Page 103 of Only a Monster

‘We always knew that he was going to disappear,’ Tom said. ‘It was in the Liu records. But I promised him I’d protect him. I told him I’d keep him safe. I told him I’d change the timeline somehow.’

‘You’ve tried to rescue him before,’ Joan realised. ‘You became a guard to get into the Court.’

‘I never saw him in the Court,’ Tom said. ‘I tried, but I never got as close as I did tonight.’

Joan remembered what Aaron had told her once. Everyone goes up against the timeline. Everyone tries.

‘Jamie knows me,’ Tom said. ‘He knows I won’t stop until I get him back.’ His voice cracked. ‘That fucking mattress was still warm.’

As he spoke, the air in the sitting room seemed to shudder again suddenly.

Joan shuddered with it. ‘Tom,’ she said. She couldn’t stand to see any more from the device. Please, she thought. But when the image resolved, it wasn’t Nick.

Tom stumbled closer. A man in his twenties was standing in the middle of the room. He had Chinese features and a gentle quality. The kind of person who’d help an old lady cross the street, Joan thought. Her next thought was that he looked ill. His face was gaunt; the skin under his eyes looked bruised.

‘Jamie,’ Tom whispered. He lifted a hand to touch the man’s face. But there was nothing to touch. His fingers went right through.

‘Hello, Tom,’ Jamie said. He was in the prison cell. Joan could see the thin blanket. The cold stone floor. The sight of them gave her the swooping, sick feeling that she’d had when she’d been in there. The feeling from her old nightmares. She imagined she could smell the room again. Fear and sickness and death.

‘The guards told me that no one would ever get into this room,’ Jamie said. ‘But I knew you would.’ His eyes crinkled, fond. ‘I love you.’

I love you, Tom mouthed back, even though Jamie couldn’t see it. Tom’s expression was raw: an open wound. Joan felt like an intruder watching him.

‘Who’d have thought researching fairytales would be so hazardous?’ Jamie’s chuckle turned into a pained hitch. He rubbed his chest absently, as though his ribs hurt. The angle of his fingers looked wrong. They’d been broken and hadn’t been set properly, Joan thought. Tom’s own hands clenched into fists.

‘Tom,’ Jamie said seriously. ‘I found something I shouldn’t have. The hero is real. And he’s going to kill more people than you can imagine. He’ll commit dozens and dozens of massacres by the time he’s done. But what he doesn’t know is what you just saw. That he was made into the hero. He was made into this.’

There were echoing footsteps suddenly, real enough that Joan and Ruth both turned to the kitchen. But the sound was coming from inside the recording. From the muffled quality, someone was approaching Jamie’s room.

‘The woman who made him—who brought me here. She believes no one can stop her,’ Jamie said quickly. ‘But she’s wrong. She thinks she made the hero perfectly. She didn’t. She made a mistake with him. He can be stopped.’

‘On your feet,’ a voice called through the door. ‘She wants you in the chair again.’

Fear passed over Jamie’s face. He forced a smile over it when he looked back at the camera. ‘Tom, you need to stop looking for me,’ he said. ‘You need to turn your eyes to what’s really important. The hero must be stopped.’

Tom shook his head. ‘No,’ he whispered.

‘Yes,’ Jamie said, just as if he’d heard Tom’s voice. ‘You can . . . for me.’ His smile gentled into something real and soft. ‘You hate goodbyes, so I won’t give you one,’ he said. Tom was still shaking his head. Jamie kept speaking. ‘As for me . . . a Liu doesn’t need goodbyes. I can see you perfectly even now. I remember every moment that we were together. Every touch. Every conversation we ever had. For me, you’re always here.’

The recording ended.

They sat there for a long while in silence: Aaron and Tom on the sofa, Ruth slumped in a chair.

‘What are we going to do?’ Joan said finally.

‘What can we do?’ Aaron said. His voice sounded flat. ‘We should wait out the Patel hit and then just . . . disappear. Live quiet, unrecorded lives. Pretend we never saw what we just saw.’

‘You mean give up?’ Ruth said.

‘What choice do we have?’ Aaron said.

But it wasn’t just their own families. It was all those other people who were going to be killed—dozens and dozens of massacres, Jamie had said. It was the human time that Aaron and Joan had stolen to get here. It was Jamie Liu, being kept in that cell.

And it was Nick and his family.

‘In that message,’ Joan said, ‘Jamie said that Nick had been made wrong. That they’d made a mistake.’

‘If it was something that could have helped us, he should have just told us what it was,’ Aaron said.

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