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The alarm clock on the bedside table screamed at exactly 7:00 am.
Lucy awoke with a gasp, shooting up in bed, the same smell wafting in the air as the last, what, twenty times?
“Loop… I don’t even know,” she groaned, rubbing her temples, looking to the chair where she knew Flynn would be.
“I think I’ve lost count, too. At least neither of us died this time,” he quipped, cleaning his gun, exhaustion clearly defined on his countenance.
“Coffee… ah you know where it is. And you know to avoid it.”
Lucy swung her legs out of bed.
“Any new changes? Wyatt and Rufus still gone?”
“Nothing new that would help us. I mean, the receptionist is different this time, oh, and breakfast this time is different too, but no, nothing helpful. Wyatt and Rufus are still gone – the Mothership can still track the Lifeboat, and its still at our bunker in the present.”
“I’d appreciate if our Mothership could do nothing but take us home. How long were we here this time?”
“About 23 hours, by my count.”
“At least the window is stable, for now.”
“We can’t keep me doing this. We need to work out what’s wrong with our Mothership and, preferably, find a foolproof way to avoid those trying to kill us. Which reminds me, we should expect them soon, right?”
“Nope, I dealt with them this time, I think. A couple of loops ago, I realised they were staying not far from here. And yes, I let you sleep in, you're welcome.”
“You’re supposed to wake me, Flynn, so one of us can keep track of how many loops we’ve done. We could have been here for a year for all we know.”
“Surely, we’re not that bad of a team, Lucy, and fine, next time, I’ll wake you before we do a field trip. And as for what’s wrong with the Mothership, I’m no Rufus, but I think I know what the issue is.”
“You do?”
“Well, I’m no Rufus, so I can only guess, and there’s good and bad news relating to what’s broken.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Looks like it’s a small component of the quantum stabiliser. Bad news is, we don’t exactly invent them for another hundred or so years.”
“So, we’re stuck until Mason and Christopher work out what’s going on, or the Mothership stops being on the fritz, and we carry on as normal?”
“I don’t think we’re necessarily stuck,” Flynn said, walking to the window, staring out at the White City in the distance.
“When I went to our fellow gunmen’s hotel room, there were a lot of very interesting papers, and a name stuck out to me, a name that I heard Anthony mention once or twice – Archibald Thorne, and one of the names on my list.”
“Okay, and how is Mr Thorne going to help us get through and past this day?”
“Mr Thorne is a contemporary of Tesla, Edison, and Rittenhouse, who funded him heavily about a decade before now.”
Lucy frowned, her historian brain clicking into gear – she was used to not knowing the full picture when Rittenhouse was involved, but usually these famous figures were still in the history she knew.
She’d never heard of Archibald Thorne.
“I’ve never heard of him, and you’ve never mentioned him.”
“Well, Rittenhouse erased him,” Flynn said, finally done with cleaning his gun. “He was obsessed with temporal physics and mechanics, and the single journal that I could find suggests he built a prototype, a precursor to the Mothership. But when he tried it out, something went wrong. It drove Thorne mad, and he tried to destroy his own work. Rittenhouse kept it all, of course, hoping that with time, they’d be able to use his theories and hypotheses, but Thorne himself was a loose cannon. He isn’t mentioned after 1901.”
“Is he here, now?”
“The four wonderful gentlemen after us seem to have had a different target – Thorne. I guess he wanted to share what he found at the World Fair, and well, Rittenhouse couldn’t have that. The point is, it looks like he has a workshop in the meatpacking district. I’m thinking, if he’s here for the World Fair, he might have the components we need.”
“Well, this would have certainly been more beneficial to have known about seven loops ago, but I’ll take it.”
“And there’s more. The men had blueprints of what I assume is Thorne’s workshop. Looks like he’s rigged his workshop with traps to keep anyone but him out. We can’t exactly just go knocking on his door.”
“But do we have enough time to see him at the Fair?”
“We can try, but we can’t be certain where he’ll even be there, and we’ll lose another loop. Knowing this address gives us a chance. Look, you don’t have to come, Lucy. If we both die, we’ll forget this all. If it’s just…”
“Look, if he has what we need, we won’t waste time coming back here; we can go straight to the Mothership. And if we both die… I don’t know, but I don’t believe that’s going to happen.”
“It could have happened already.”
“It could have, yes.”
“How about this, as soon as one of us dies, we know the loop resets, no matter if it hits the end of the current loop, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, so the solution is simple – you just make sure to shoot me dead before you die and we’ll be fine.”
“Did you hear what you just said? Shoot you. Garcia, do you know how many times I’ve had to watch you die already? And that might not even be all of them, not if I’ve died too. The point is, I’d prefer we avoid your death, especially if I’m not the one pulling the trigger. You know how I am around guns.”
“I know you’re more proficient, you’re better. Who knows, you might end up outshooting Wyatt and me soon,” he said, and Lucy just stared at him, knowing that he was just trying to be nice.
Well, she did appreciate that about him for certain. That and his…
God, they were stuck in a loop. There was no time to be thinking about the things she would probably be doing if they were back safe in the present.
“No shooting if we can avoid it,” she acquiesced, “Let’s go see Mr Thorne, then.”
*
The workshop looked like any other from the outside, and for a second, Lucy wondered if Flynn had misread the address.
“Who trespasses?” a voice shrieked, and Lucy jumped back as a thin man emerged from the shadows.
“Archibald Thorne?” Lucy questioned, hands raised up, “We need your help.”
He looked at them, eyes wide, noticing how both Lucy's and Flynn’s eyes were fixated on what he held in his hands – it looked almost like the current component in the Mothership that was damaged.
He had made a quantum stabiliser.
There was one in the loop they were stuck in.
What luck was that? Lucy thought.
This coincidence is too perfect to be just a coincidence, the thought nagged at Flynn, but there wasn’t exactly much he could do now.
“You’re… you’re not them. Who are you?”
“Mr Thorne, we need your help. We’re travellers, and we need…”
“Travellers? No, no… The stream is closed… the circle…” he began to ramble on.
“Archibald, we need the stabiliser to fix our ship, so we can leave.”
“You can’t have it,” he shrieked, “YOU CAN’T HAVE IT. You’re with them… you are with them…”
He fled out of sight, the two following, noticing too late that Archibald was walking them into a trap.
A bolt of electricity arced across the room, and Flynn tackled Lucy, shielding her just as the bolt hit a stack of crates, some cylinders crashing to the ground, the shrapnel from the crates exploding, raining down on them.
“I’ll go after him; you stay here. Stay here,” he ordered, even though he knew full well nobody told Lucy Preston what to do.
He dashed away as Lucy picked herself up, fascination taking a hold of her as she thought she recognised some of the devices as those that history – the history she knew – assigned to others.
You’re not here to ogle Thorne’s creations.
She decided she’d follow Flynn when the sound of gunfire echoed, and she froze before calling out for him.
No answer.
“Flynn!” she ran towards where she’d heard the shot from, finding Thorne on the ground, either unconscious or dead, bullet wound in his shoulder.
So, Garcia was fine.
Except, she turned around and… Flynn was on the ground too.
He was sitting against a workbench, clutching at his abdomen, blood pouring through his fingers.
“Shit,” she got out, dropping to her knees.
“On the bright side, you didn’t have to be the one to shoot me,” he got out, and Lucy felt the urge to slap him silly. That’s the bright side here?
“That is not a bright side. But at least we know Thorne has what we need. Next loop, we’ll do better, and we’ll get out of here.”
“Tell me everything as soon as I wake up, okay.”
“I will,” he coughed out, and reached out with one of his hands towards Lucy, who stayed seated beside him, crying, even though she knew she’d see him in just a couple of minutes.
“I’ll see you in just a minute,” she told him, holding his ever-colder hand, until he stopped moving, and she knew he was gone.
She closed her eyes.
*
The alarm clock on the bedside table screamed at exactly 7:00 am, and this time, Lucy wasted no time lounging in bed.
“Get your gun, Flynn, and we’ve got to move. I know exactly where the stabiliser is, and I know where Archibald Thorne is.”
Flynn looked surprised but didn’t question it.
“I died the last loop, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, and that was the last time. We’re going home.”