Skyline by Zach Milan

bomb?”
    “Clearly
Paris should’ve trained you better.” Ana lit up her mesh astrolabe, the lights
springing onto their surroundings, burning an impression of where she was
headed. Then she was gone.
    Her
bomb kept ticking.
    •
• • • • • • • • • • •
    “ We have to go after her,” Monroe said.
“There’s no time to—”
    “No,
Monroe,” Charlotte said. “This isn’t the Ana you met.” Didn’t he see how
different she was? What mattered now was the bomb. “This isn’t just a normal
bomb, with eight hundred million seconds ticking away slowly. She placed an orb
in here. A little time device nestled amid all these wires. Sometime soon, the
orb will be activated; the bomb will be taken through time.”
    “You
mean all those seconds …”
    “Are
probably more like thirty or sixty,” Charlotte said.
    Bill
exhaled, hands still clinging to the corners of the box.
    “Then
we have to go!” Monroe shouted. “We have to get out of here; there’s no way we
can defuse it in time. Bill, c’mon.” Monroe tugged at his thick shoulder. “You
don’t know the first thing about defusing bombs.”
    Bill
wouldn’t move. Just like in the subway, he was being an idiot. “I can’t.”
    Charlotte
shoved him to the side, getting her hands on the bomb. “Then let me.” Within
seconds she had a grip on the lid, and she pulled it as hard as she could. The
thin metal bent, creaking with Charlotte’s strength, tugging the few screws Ana
had used. With Bill’s help, the lid sprang off, revealing the mass of wires
within.
    Nestled
inside the wires was the orb that Ana had placed. Not wire mesh like her
astrolabe, not a glassy orb like Charlotte’s, but there was no doubt the dull
metal sphere contained a time device.
    If
Charlotte could get it free, the bomb would never relocate to the future. Would
never cause the Blast. The problem was: she didn’t have the time to investigate
each wire connecting to the orb. She couldn’t see what risks there were. The
orb could activate at any second, and those eight hundred million seconds would
count down all at once as it launched forward in time.
    Without
any other options, Charlotte yanked out the wires connecting the orb and tossed
it to Bill. He snatched it from the air, closing one eye in a flinch. But
nothing happened. Bill wasn’t transported away. The rest of the bomb didn’t
trigger.
    “Okay,”
she said, leaning back to the box. “Now we should have a little time.”
    “Almost
a billion seconds,” Monroe said with a smile. But as he flipped over the lid
that Charlotte had wrenched off, his smile fell. The nine digits were no longer
counting down second by second, but by a thousand, ten thousand, one hundred
thousand. She hardly had any time at all.
    Charlotte’s
hands trembled as she plunged them into the wires of the bomb, trying to
understand how it was constructed, what all the wires did, whether there was
any fast way of defusing it. But there wasn’t any easy-to-see switch. The wires
all tangled into a computer board below. As she ran her fingers through, she
felt another round object. She shifted the wires around, twisting her head
closer to see it.
    Another
time orb.
    “Um.”
Why would that be there? What could this bomb be for ? The first orb
would likely get it to the Blast day. But why would there be a second?
    Could
it be that this wasn’t an explosive at all?
    “Another
one?” Bill asked.
    Charlotte
didn’t reply; there wasn’t time. The red digits ticked past ten hundred
thousand.  She pulled out small wires to disconnect the larger cables,
slowly freeing the orb. As the timer ticked past two hundred thousand, there
were only three cables left. Two. She yanked out the remaining cables, right as
the timer hit zero. She could breathe again, and found herself chuckling.
“We’re fine,” she said. “See?” She held up the small sphere for Bill and
Monroe. Without the box’s power, the orb remained in her