“It cannot be done,” Blain says as she shuts the top hatch of Adam 1.0 over the two of us.

I fasten my seat belts beside her. “Why not?”

She doesn't answer. “I'll take you back to that night on the bridge. You walk back home as if you climbed out of the portal. Simple as that. Try to meddle with anything else and there'll be consequences.”

She reaches out and tugs at a lever. With creaks and hisses, the wall before us opens into the bleak expanse of ashen earth. Blain manoeuvres us outside under the overcast sky.

“Take me to the night of the incident--before I tried to jump off,” I insist. “If I just stop myself from going to that damned bridge at all, none of this takes place and everything goes back to normal.”

She fumbles with the buttons before her, and with a sudden jolt, we rush forward. The scene of the plains fades around us, and there is darkness, only the fairy lights blinking in the back as Adam speeds through a vast emptiness.

“Blain, I--” She interrupts me before I can repeat my argument.

When she speaks, it is like a warning. “You cannot alter what has already happened. Go home, and sleep it off. Don't try to change anything else. It doesn't work that way.”

“How do you know?” I retort. “You don't know everything!”

She laughs, a dry and bitter sound. “I know just enough to tell you that this plan of yours will never work. Learned that lesson with my own damn life.”

I stare at her. The tunnel of emptiness changes form. Stars speed past us, beads of light lengthening into bright lines. They cast shadows across her face.

“You know how I came to be this way? Why do I do this?”

I don't. I await her answer in silence.

“It's my little brother. Died in a car crash. He was five. My parents--they have never been the same since that day. For years, I watched them wither away, a husk of themselves. And I wanted them back, you know? I wanted my brother back. I wanted everything to go back to the way it was.”

She pats the dashboard before her. “And so I stole this. Traverser 003. Makes the impossible come true, they said in the advertisement. And so I went back to the day of the accident and tried to stop it from ever happening.”

A heavy pause.

“But no matter what I did,” she says, “the reality would not change.”

She looks down at her own hands. “Each time, he would die a more gruesome death than the last. The more I tried to stop it from happening, the worse it would become. So in the end, I was just a thief and my brother was still dead. It wasn't until years after I shook the cops off my trail.”

She reaches into the back and retrieves a ball. It glows as she picks it up, and hovers weightlessly above her palm as she lets go. It looks like a child's toy, fading doodles made upon its surface by an unsteady hand.

I don't have it in me to ask who it belonged to. Saying I'm sorry seems too cheap a response. I lay my hand on her shoulder and say nothing. I was never good at comforting people.

Blain flinches. I wonder how long she has been on the run, how many years have passed since she felt the warmth of another human being. She pats my hand awkwardly.

“Just…go home and sleep it off if you can. Don't be stupid like me,” she says.

Our moment is ruined as something collides into Adam, shaking us to the core. A guttural roar erupts behind us, something like a bloody tentacle flitting past our line of sight for a moment.

We go pitching sideways, and the top hatch snaps open. Blain hits her side on the wall. As the whole thing turns upside down, I slip out of the seatbelts, and there is nothing beneath me to hold onto.

“Reagan!”

A hand closes firmly around my arm, and with a jerk that nearly pops it out of its socket, I am pulled up. Blain shoves at a button with her boot, and Adam turns upright again, the top closing with a skull-rattling slam.

Blain utters a stream of curses as she fumbles with the controls, one hand clutching her side.

“What the hell was that?” I scream as Blain blasts off with full speed.

“They call her Medusa,” she says, and glances back. “Fuck, I didn't think she was still around.”

“That still doesn't answer my question!”

“She's a living war machine from the 30th century,” says Blain. “Only, they never got to put her to use. She escaped from the lab where she was made. Apparently, the bastard can travel through time. A fine specimen, eh?”

I look back. The misshapen mass of flesh and wriggling, worm-like tentacles is bounding towards us with tremendous speed.

“Oh, she's breathtaking,” I say, wondering how long it'd take the creature to catch up to us and crush us with a single blow.

Adam glides through the air, turns sideways and out of reach of one of the encroaching limbs of the monster. Blain fumbles with the buttons, setting a new destination for us.

“Where are we headed now?” I ask.

“A place where Medusa can't reach us,” she says. “The safest place in the land of time.”