The plane flew through the night, against the sun, across the Atlantic, bound for the heart of Reich Europa.
Nora couldn’t help but watch Ty. Since takeoff, he had been sitting in one of the plush chairs on the aircraft, staring down at the printed pages—the pages of the email messages from this world’s Helen Klein.
Nora knew he was nervous about seeing her. And what he might have to do.
She felt a connection with him, like an invisible cord that pulled tight whenever they drifted apart, a link that time hadn’t degraded, only buried. It had been resurrected by these circumstances, and she hoped it would never be buried again.
The bond between them wasn’t just the night they had spent on the airship. It was deeper than that. The connection between them had always been strong, ever since childhood. The strands of the tie that bound them were made of hardy fibers—the strength of which she hadn’t realized until now.
To Nora, she and Ty were like two bodies with one soul. She had never felt so safe or so comfortable with anyone in her entire life. Words couldn’t describe it.
Circumstances had torn them apart. Fate had brought them back together. Now she felt the urge to wrap him tight and never let him go again. Given the opportunity, she wouldn’t.
But what they were involved in was madness. And somehow, with him in her life, it hardly mattered. In him, she had found a piece of herself that had been missing—the last part of a puzzle that was her life.
When she wasn’t pondering the reentry of Tyson Klein into her life, Nora’s mind drifted to another person who loomed on the horizon: the other Nora. Was she still being held in Peenemünde? This world’s Nora was a
dark mirror of her, someone who had grown up in a world filled with war and hate. And it had shaped her thinking.
What would she be like? How would she react to Nora? Answers awaited in a few short hours.
Most of all, she felt a deep sense of responsibility to the other three individuals on the flight. They were in her care. They were her responsibility. That thought was like a vine of steel wrapping its way around her spine. It gave her strength. And purpose. There was a deep well of power in that, one she’d never known existed.
At the same time, her life and future were in their hands. In the power of Ty’s mind. In Kato’s instincts. In Maria’s voice.
Ty had been right: they were four corners of something. Of what, Nora didn’t know. But she knew it was something wondrous, something with the power to change this world.
