“Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stay in there too long, and Bailey’s going to get you killed. How is that fearless leader, by the way? And Jude, is he still there?”
She turned away. “Fine. Anything else you want to warn me about? Watch out for falling meteors? Oh God, have sharks learned to live on land?!”
“Seriously, Airy. I worried about you. I thought you were dead.”
“Well, you wanted it that way. Told me not to contact you.”
“I nearly lost my mind thinking about you.”
The TV flickered on in the next room, announcing the seven o’clock news. The distant murmurs of newscasters’ voices wafted into the hall. Jamie stared at her.
“You lost your mind long before you met me,” said Ariel.
“And you haven’t changed a bit.” He shook his head. “Six years of my life, and for you it’s only been days? I can’t even wrap my mind around that.”
Ariel heard a familiar voice in the background, and she walked over to the living room. The flat TV screen showed a segment filmed the previous week. A familiar young reporter was speaking. He had dark hair, a standard British newscaster’s accent, and bored eyes.
Brown eyes flecked with green.
They only needed to track her once, because they knew exactly who she’d go to.
“So, Thomas Huxley,” Jamie remarked, strolling in. “Is he my replacement?”
“No. He’s—” She turned, then took a step back. Jamie had put on a pair of gray sunglasses.
“What’s wrong?”
She turned back to the screen. “Nothing. Thomas and I are going to leave before the Flyday’s over. I need you to look after Zoë.”
“You know I can’t,” he said, his jaw set.
Ariel glanced at him, tossing her red hair over her shoulder. “Then you’re right, Jamie. I haven’t changed at all. But neither have you.”
“You’re not going to try to stop me?”
“I tried a long time ago,” she said. “Whatever you do now, it’s up to you.”
She turned and walked out the door. Jamie’s eyes followed her as she went, but he made no move to make her stay.
3.
June 18, 2507
Thomas emptied out all of his suitcases, fearing he left the card back at his apartment in London. For years he had kept it under a false bottom of a drawer so any curious occasional visitors would not see it. Then he hid it in his bookshelf, until one day when it slipped out of sight.
Just when he nearly despaired of finding it, he opened up a wire-bound notebook and it slid out: A white card with the number 19 written in silver ink. (At a certain angle, the card looked blank.) He grabbed it and walked down the streets of Tenokte, then the side streets, until he found a small, dilapidated brick building on a deserted road. WHITTIER COMMUNICATIONS, INC., said the fading sign. He pushed open the creaky door and walked inside.
The next door was locked, but he spotted a staircase and, on a whim, went down it. When he pushed open the door, his surroundings looked vaguely familiar. The room seemed like a waiting area for a medical office. He walked up to the wood paneling on one wall, then put his ear to it. From the other side, he could hear a humming.
A computerized voice sounded: “Please show your identification.”
He noticed a card slot in the wall, thanks to a little green light blinking by it. On a whim, he slid his white ID through it. He heard a click as something scanned the card, and the panel shifted. A security camera appeared, and he jumped back. The robotic parts seemed unperturbed, and it stretched two feet out of the wall until it reached his eye, flashed a blue light, and, satisfied, retreated back into the wall. Retina scan. A doorway appeared as some of the paneling swung inside, revealing a passageway.
The tunnel was dim, and had the sound of humming, louder now, but with no visible machinery to make the noise. Then he stepped into a wide, bright room with hundreds of flat computer panels covering the walls: security footage for every inch of the city. He looked up at the flickering images, amazed.
The square room had tables attached to the walls, and thirty swivel chairs. One man with light hair sat looking at the screens, then swung around, bored, until he recognized the journalist standing by the door. He jumped to his feet.
“Huxley! What are you doing here?”
Thomas still had his messenger bag slung over a shoulder, and probably looked as lost as he felt. “Uh—”
“Nevermind. I’m Agent Five, John Caxton. Do you remember me?”
“No.”
“Ah, well, that’s probably a given. You’re in the headquarters of the Tenokte secret police squad.”
Thomas nodded. “Right. Uh-huh. What’s this for?” He held up the white card.
“That’s your ID.” Caxton returned to the computer screen, where he was inputting information.
“Right. But I’m not in the secret police.”
Caxton looked up. “You were.”
At Thomas’s puzzled expression, the agent smiled. “You were Agent Nineteen. They told me you didn’t remember anything. Bullet through the head ... partial amnesia ... old news. So, have you seen her?” Caxton asked eagerly. “The red-haired girl, I mean.”
The journalist looked at him for a moment. With the squad looking for Ariel, he wasn’t about to give her up. “Lt. Kira Watson asked me the same thing. Who is she?”
“Ah,” said Caxton. “She’s our anomaly. Jumps in and out of events. Usually shows up right before people die.”
“Why are you looking for her?”
“Curiosity. Border protection. If there are people with advanced technology out there, or just people slipping through our surveillance, we want to find them.”
Surveillance, indeed. They certainly had enough cameras. “What do you do here?”
“Everything and anything. The Celestial patrols do their own thing, but we run a lot of projects. Lately we’ve been trying to root out this rebel group called the Red Army. Ever hear of ’em?”
Thomas shook his head.
“Of course not. We killed most of them.” He sat back in the swivel chair. “But we do other things, too.”
“Uh-huh. So all the people who disappear ... this is where they go.” Thomas took a step, looking out at all the screens. They flickered to show different locations. Some were out, fuzzy with digital snow, but seconds later they blinked and the screens were replaced by sharp, clear video footage. He could see a park, the inside of restaurants, views of residential streets. And he realized that each screen had a microphone; the secret police could turn it on and listen to conversations. Spooky.
“Does any of this look familiar?” Caxton asked.
“No.” He looked up. “And I have to know. If I worked here, what did I do? I was a reporter. I had so many contacts ...”
“I don’t know. I think you were a detective. You just helped in any investigations your partner worked on.”
“My partner?”
“Yeah, Agent Six. He’s still around. Doesn’t want to see you, though. That’s why you got sent to Montréal for a few months, before your injury.”
He looked at all the screens. His life was starting to make a bit more sense. “How many people know about me?”
“Everyone who worked here at the time. We were torn up over what happened to you.”
“Would anyone be upset if I tried solving one more case?”
“Huxley? Last I saw, you’re still a full agent. Knock yourself out.”
4.
An hour later, Ariel saw Thomas walking down the street. Gray coat, upturned collar. Dark hair, messy but carefully casual. Messenger bag … could he get any geekier? Up above him were all silver skyscrapers and cars soaring through the slats of blue sky.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Better than that. Brilliant.”
Ariel looked at him critically.
“I got a break in Damien’s case, kiddo.
I had to flip through about a thousand files before I found it. More video footage of the assassination.”
“Better than the amateur one, I’m guessing?”
“Yes. You can see the shooter.” He held up the flash drive. “I didn’t tell them yet, because I want to make a copy of it. I have, in my hand, the proof of who shot the king. Do you really want to see it?”
“Of course! Why wouldn’t I?”
He stared at her. “You probably won’t believe it. And it doesn’t exactly make the case against Damien any easier.”
“Why not?”
He bit his lip.
Ariel considered, disheartened. “Is it Damien? If the secret police had proof of the real assassin, they wouldn’t execute the wrong guy.”
“Not quite. I’m guessing they just didn’t see this. So many cameras … one file could’ve slipped through the cracks.”
“Okay, fine, tell me.”
He told her, and she wished he hadn’t.
5.
October, 2007
On a day long before she met an inquisitive journalist, seventeen-year-old Ariel Reynolds couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned, listening to the rain fall gently on her window, and ended up leaving for school about half an hour earlier than usual. She drove through the sloshing roads and before long she found herself sitting in the drenched parking lot, leaving her car running for the heat, listening to the radio.
There was nobody else there, but after about ten minutes, more cars came, and soon a light flickered on in the school. Ariel turned off the ignition and opened her door.
She trekked with her head down toward the stone steps, her jacket pulled tight to keep out the drizzle of rain, which seemed more cold mist than water. Another car pulled up to the entrance just as she reached the steps, and when a door cracked open, Ariel heard the audio lingo of her favorite radio station, and then the opening notes to a song. Then the door was slammed shut, and the car drove away.
She hurried along due to the rain, but still got soaked. When she finally reached the door, a young man stood in front of it.
“Hi,” she said, and tried to walk past him, but he didn’t move.
“That was your favorite song,” he pointed out.
She stared at him, perplexed. He didn’t go to her school; in fact, his clothes were cut in such a strange way, he didn’t look like he was in the right country.
“ ‘Losing My Religion’ is really popular,” she said, trying to brush past him.
“If you had stayed in your car another minute, or left for school a minute later, you would have heard it. If you could go back in time, would you have changed what you did?”
“Maybe.”
“But everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it?”
She blinked, and realized that everything around her had frozen. No, not frozen; stopped. Rain droplets stood still in the air, defying gravity. Ariel reached out and touched one; it clung to her finger. She gasped and turned. A car that had pulled into the lot wasn’t moving; its occupants, too, seemed immobile. The wind that had been gusting not a moment before was nonexistent.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“You’re Ariel Reynolds, yes? I have something to ask you.”
She turned and ran to the school, but the door was still locked. She pounded on it.
“They can’t hear you,” said the man. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I’m a time traveler.”
“Sure,” said Ariel, and she pulled away from the door to face him. The droplets were just standing there, like a three-dimensional photo. “It’s a bit too early in the morning for me to be going insane.”
“You see things no one else does. Another person who missed her favorite song might think of it as an unfortunate coincidence. You see something deeper. But you also have other skills. You’ve studied history, languages.”
“So?”
“My name is Jude Fawkes. I want you to travel with me. Think about this for a few hours, and I’ll come back to you. And ... here’s a parting gift.” He handed her a rolled-up newspaper in an orange plastic bag.
“Uh ... thanks,” she said.
“Read it. I think you’ll find it fascinating.”
She blinked, and the rain pounded down again in a torrent, and the car zoomed away from the school, and the man was gone. Ariel stood there a moment, stunned. She pulled out the newspaper and skimmed the headlines. It was the paper her mother read every morning, she was sure of it, only it was dated for the next day.
Chapter Ten
June 18, 2507
Thomas, guided by a servant, walked into the enormous throne room of the palace. The roof was domed, the walls a creamy tan and ornately painted, the floors marble. This room served as a hall for entertaining guests, as well as a place for the monarch to call meetings or press conferences. At the end were two golden thrones, and beyond them were two wide staircases that curved inward and upward. Thomas moved up the left one, keeping one hand on the banister, and walked into a hallway.
“The princess will be here in a moment,” said the servant, a pretty young woman wearing a pink dress.
“Thank you,” he said, and the maid bowed and slipped away.
He would have to show the tape of the assassination to Kira. But how would he explain the identity of the shooter without giving Ariel away? At the moment, though, he had a different worry—his editor had asked him to interview the princess. And why not? Right now, everyone in the world wanted to know what was on her mind.
Thomas turned, then gazed at a long row of paintings on the wall: oils on canvas from the Renaissance. Some of them were astoundingly well-known and expensive: he saw the original of the Mona Lisa among them. Royalty, indeed. And in many of the pictures, he couldn’t help but notice, the subjects were nude. He stopped at one, of a young man reclining on a sofa, when a voice made him turn.
“Ah, the gallery,” said Princess Emily Montag, walking into the hallway. She wore a white gown with a saffron-red veil over her light hair. “They always make taking official photographs in this hallway difficult ... to say the least. My mom was always trying to sell them off, but my grandmother, more of a bohemian, always took a liking to them.”
“I was just looking at the frame,” Thomas said quickly. “It’s, uh, a nice frame.”
She smiled, charmed. “Who are you?”
“Thomas Huxley,” he said, sticking out his hand. Then, thinking better of it (especially when the princess blinked, perplexed), he pulled it back. “I’m a journalist. Lt. Watson said I could—”
“The lieutenant! Man, I could’ve guessed. You do look familiar. You’re on that news show, right? Your voice sounds different.”
“Yeah ... happens when I’m in back home, I guess.” He turned, looking at the paintings. “Your grandmother must have been something, your Highness.”
“Mm,” she said. “Reinette Deschaine, crowned queen at twenty-one. Her brother was Rémy, the great pianist ... and the musical talent has continued along in his family, I see.” (Thomas, understanding none of this, nodded.) She turned, walking away from the historic paintings, toward the family portraits. “My grandfather died when I was a baby, and after that, Grandmama didn’t have much drive to rule. She gave up the throne at sixty-five. My dad was forty-four; I was two. But she was always around, making sure we were presentable. And always at odds with my mother.”
“And then...”
“She got sick,” she said, her eyes misting up. “Wasn’t long after that when my parents and uncle died, too. Car crash—isn’t it always? Richard was nineteen, away at a university. I was at home, too young to be at royal balls. Only one to survive. Always the only one.” She shook her head, then turned to him. “Are you taking notes?”
He did, in fact, have a notebook in his messenger bag, the strap of which he clutched, uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to—”
“But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Capture the grief of the young princess. Historical record. Of c
ourse.” She blinked back tears.
Thomas took her hand, guiding her to two chairs. Fortunately, there was a box of tissues nearby.
“Why would someone want to kill him?” she said, crying. “He was all I had in the entire world.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve lost friends. It’s not easy, and I couldn’t imagine losing a sibling.”
She nodded, dabbing her eyes with the tissues, ands she didn’t even notice the notebook come out. She just kept talking, and Thomas, a faithful scribe, wrote.
Was there a reason why he always got the best interviews out of subjects no one else would touch? Why editors usually sent him to interview self-absorbed rock stars, until he was a guest host for a popular news show’s music segment? Maybe. He didn’t push questions. Didn’t ask for the spelling of a name and title. (He usually called later to confirm it, which was a good segue into follow-up questions.) He didn’t say, “Tell me more about that” or give a stiff “I see.” He just shut up, and by doing so let people know he genuinely wanted to know what they thought. People were either quotable or they weren’t.
And in the matter of being an accused assassin’s sister’s fiancé? It made no difference. The two were not subject and princess, but reporter and interviewee; except for the title “Her Royal Highness, Crown Princess” Thomas would stick in front of the girl’s name in the article, he had completely forgotten she was the only heir to a vitally important throne. For a few moments, she was just a victim of a tragedy.
He stayed longer than he thought he would. When he walked out, he hoped he was in the clear, but another woman wasn’t through with him. Lt. Kira Watson leaned against the glassy front doors of the palace.
“How’d it go?”
“Good.”
The lieutenant pointed to an earpiece, winking. “So I heard.”
Thomas shook his head. “Should’ve guessed.”
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