Panic had hovered at the edge of Laila's mind from the outset. Like an obsessed fan that had found their way backstage and was waiting for the right moment to rush out and ruin the performance for everybody. She had ignored it. Held it at bay with her incredulous conceit, her sheer personality. And then, after finding Maria, the stoic, uncompromising pilot had held everything together as panic began to grow, trying to break out and make Laila lose her mind.
Her personality had taken some hits since then, revealing she wasn't quite as conceited, not quite as confidant as she thought herself, and now Maria lay crumpled on the floor, bleeding, hardly breathing, and Laila could hold back the panic no longer. She thrashed against whatever held her, kicking and screaming, throwing her booted feet behind her and hitting something solid and unforgiving. The gun dropped to the floor, clattering away and she couldn't stop herself from crying once again. Until she realised that nothing else was happening. No-one attacked her. She was just held by something.
Still ready to scratch the eyes out of anyone who might try anything, she whipped her head around, ruined hair flicking at her cheeks until she saw that only a door, that thick, heavy door that had listed at the side, now sat closed in the frame. Somehow, that door held her and she began to scramble at the belt at her waist, unfastening it before slipping her arms out from the straps and spinning around, hand falling to rest on Maria's sweat-soaked head, soothing her hair.
The backpack. It now sat within the body of the door, as though the door had flowed around it, or through it. Trembling, she reached out and tugged at the straps, but the door held the pack fast, unrelenting in its hold and, when she tried to peek inside, through the edge of the flap, she could see parts of the door and parts of the explosives all melded into one. Except, that couldn't be possible. Not at all, because she had seen that door, in the derelict, rusted future, and it didn't have the backpack embedded in it. They had changed history again.
A groan brought Laila out of that particular thought and she dropped to her knees, lifting Maria into a better position and laying the short-haired head upon her lap. The pilot moaned, head moving, eyelids flickering as though she fought to open them. Her skin felt cold and clammy, the patch of blood now covered almost the entire side of the shirt and Laila didn't dare look underneath.
"No, no, no. Maria! You can't do this!" She rocked back and forth, looking around and hoping to find a first aid kit attached to a wall, or someone, anyone, that could help. "We made it. I can see the controls, but I need you to work it out. I don't know this sort of thing. Oh, god, please! Wake up, dammit!"
Miraculously, a bottle of water remained intact in a side-wall pocket of the backpack and Laila reached up, stretching to tease it out, catching it before it fell away, and cracked the cap from it, dribbling water against Maria's lips. The water trickled along the lips and dropped away, down the sides of Maria's cheeks, not a drop entering the pilot's mouth. Frustrated, Laila poured some into her mouth, pressed her lips against Maria's and squirted the water into Maria's mouth. She wasn't certain if the water would help, but she had to try something. And she had to try, somehow, to stop the machine.
She could hear it, thrumming and buzzing. The control panels sat not ten feet away, lights flashing, dials flickering, but it might as well be a mile away, because Laila wasn't leaving Maria. She couldn't, even though she had the impression that Maria would leave her to stop the machine. Not because she didn't care about Laila, but because she would see it as her duty. Laila realised that about Maria now, that was who she was. Dutiful. Determined. Indomitable. Or she would be if those assholes hadn't shot her.
"Stop ... machine ... stop it ..." Maria talked fretfully in her broken state, proving Laila's assessment. "Have to ..."
They had to. Maybe it wouldn't save them, but, then again, maybe it would in some twisted way. They were in the past. Turn off the machine now, break it here, in this time, and it wouldn't still be working in the future to bring down their plane. She had worried about the consequences before, about how it would affect the future, about how it could mean she would never meet Maria, but she'd rather that than watch Maria die, here and now.
Shifting her weight, she rose up, hands under Maria's arms and started to drag her away from the door and closer to the controls, pausing only to pick up the gun she had dropped and place it on Maria's chest with the other. She struggled, unused to pushing herself like this, but she managed to drag Maria up to the console and rested the pilot against it while she looked at the controls.
They told her nothing. Not a damned thing. There were so many switches and buttons and dials and gauges and displays with strange symbols on them as watch-like hands fluttered along arcs of black lines with numbers on that were probably important, but told her absolutely nothing. She started to grow frantic, fingers playing over the switches, unable to work out even the most simple things, frustrated and now furious. With a shout, she began to hammer her hands against the console, as though that would suddenly work, only, by pure coincidence, to hit a switch that did do something.
A rumbling, rattling sound came from the wall above the panel and it began to roll away to the side, revealing something strangely beautiful beyond. She didn't know what it was, but it looked incredibly complicated, like white-hot flames caught in an invisible ball. It rolled in the air between four pylons, lightning arcing along their surfaces as the ball of fire, of energy pulsed and throbbed. That was the machine itself, it had to be.
"Okay. Okay. So, this is the thing that's doing it all? It doesn't look all that. Alright, it does, but I'm not giving the damned thing the satisfaction, okay? Don't argue with me." She talked to Maria, but the pilot couldn't hear her. "So, it's probably not going to be a big red button that says 'off', right? Right. Of course not. So, we have 'giga' something or other. I think that's 'output'? It says output. And ... uh ... 'magnetic containment'. That sounds important."
"That ..." A hand touched Laila's leg. A feather touch that fell away. "Try ... try that."
"Maria!" The console forgotten, Laila dropped to Maria's side, kissing her forehead, collecting her hand and kissing that. "Don't you worry me like that again!"
"You care, princesita." Eyes rolling, face covered in sweat, Maria tried to smile. "Got you."
"Yes, you do. Now get up and stop being silly." She pushed the hair slicked against Maria's forehead away, trying to mirror a smile Maria couldn't make.
"I don't think I can." She managed to open her eyes, looking up but unable to see the console. "Magnetic containment. Try it. If it's not con .... Contained, it can't ... can't power ..."
She faded again, trying desperately to keep her eyes open, unable to talk and breathe at the same time. She pushed at Laila's hand, urging her to try that switch and Laila had to. If it did nothing else but save Maria's life, it was worth it. It wasn't as though she would know the difference if she changed the future. Standing, she found the switch again, reaching out, touching it, getting ready to throw it ...
The siren! That damned siren again and Laila tried to throw the switch, but everything had started to fade in and out already and she threw herself down to Maria, holding her tight and close, protecting her as Maria would protect her. Eyes clenched tight, she could already tell that resonant, piercing noise had started to fade. It all happened so much faster here, so close to the machine. She wondered if she should wait for it to happen again. To change the past to change the future.
Eyes open once more, she could see what the years had done to the machine and it's console. The wall remained open, the machine beyond still pulsing with that restrained fire, but even more brightly, if at all possible, the pulses and throbs happening far faster than in the past. Ensuring Maria remained as comfortable as possible, Laila returned to studying the console, only to find eighty years of neglect had not been kind to it. All the glass on the gauges had broken, the words on the dials faded or browned and aged. Those words stencilled in metal had become indistinct from rust and tarnished. She couldn't remember which switch was for the magnet thing.
"Oh, no, no, no. We'll ... we'll just have to wait. Just have to suffer it again to go back in time and turn it off then. That's it. That's ..." She looked down at Maria to see long strands of blood emerging from her ears and nose, her head flopped against her shoulder. "Maria?"
She dropped, staring at her companion, but she couldn't see her chest moving. A light touch to Maria's wrist and Laila couldn't feel a pulse. She tried shaking Maria's shoulders, but she only made the pilot flop around like a rag doll until, eventually, she pulled Maria into an embrace, sobbing into the pilot's hair. She was too late. Too stupid to have stopped this back in time, when it could have saved Maria. This was her fault. All of it. From the moment she had demanded they ignore the FAA warning. All her fault.
In a daze, she returned Maria to lean against the console and took the gun from where it had fallen in her lap, turning it over. She only needed to switch off the safety. Pointing the barrel away from the body of Maria, Laila flicked off that switch, lifted the gun, pointed it at the window behind which the machine sat, and began to fire. She fired until she had used every bullet, slapping and trying to make it work more before returning to Maria and taking her gun from around her neck and she fired all of those until the window finally shattered, the bullets ripping into the pylons and sending sparks and lightning sparking outward.
The pulsing of the ball of flames faltered, flexed and then burst outward in a massive outpouring of plasma, but Laila had already dropped back below the console, holding Maria close. And, this time, she would never let her go. Not now. Not ever.
-+-
"Government and Navy officials are refusing to comment on the purpose of the facility on the island, where a massive explosion occurred early yesterday morning. In a coincidence some people are calling 'miraculous' the explosion revealed the whereabouts of the international singing superstar, Laila, whose plane had crashed there over three days ago during a freak storm. Otherwise unhurt, Laila has refused to talk about her experiences and has, surprisingly for her, cancelled the remainder of her world tour ..."
"Miss Laila?" The flight attendant almost tiptoed toward her, afraid to even stand near her. "We'll be landing in LAX within half-an-hour. A limousine is waiting but they'd like to know where you'll be going. There are a lot of people waiting for you and if ..."
"Thank you. I'll let them know in a moment." She tried smiling, but it was difficult. Everything was difficult.
She looked at the paused newscast on the big screen in front of her and then peered out of the window. She could see the coast. At least, she thought she could. She had learned not to trust her eyes so much. After the explosion, she had lost consciousness for some time, only coming around when the crew of that ship, that had seen the tower going up and had come to investigate, had found her and taken her aboard. She had said nothing for hours. She didn't need to. She survived, that was all that mattered.
With a click of the remote, she set the newscast going again.
"... lost in the plane crash were Toby Ryerson, Laila's manager, Genna Thomas, Laila's personal assistant and a number of flight attendants whose names are withheld by their families. Also found was the pilot, Maria Carballo, who remains in stable, but critical condition. And in other news ..."
They had both survived.
"Miss? Tell the limo driver we'll be going to Cedars-Sinai. I have to meet a friend when they fly her in." She looked out of the window again. Yeah. She could see the coast. She was certain of it.