No Time Like the Present

by Ellison Blackburn

  “But as soon as you registered that I was there, I could make out a mix of emotions the mere sight of Henry Ennis provoked. And he was someone who only reminded you of me. I saw anger, despair, hatred, betrayal, frustration, pain—so much pain—and I came to realize that I was only adding to your grief. That’s why I kept my distance.”

  His explanation is not good enough, and yet, I find myself nodding. He pauses to consider his words. “River, I was prepared for you to despise me. We’d never see one another afterward. We’d let go, eventually. That’s how it had to be.”

  “Why? Because I wasn’t enough?” I long to ask, but I can’t let the pathetic words out of my mouth.

  “Only, no one could have ever predicted this would happen. But it did, and my presence here would have to be dealt with at some point. So, your brother and I chose Marlowe’s birthday as a final deadline. Now, will you please look at me?”

  “Why is that so important to you?” I ask quietly.

  “Because Archer said you’ve grown into your abilities. If you just look at me, you’ll know positively that I’m telling the truth. And hopefully, it will hurt a little less when you’re not wondering any more what really happened with me and to us.”

  Finally, I look at him. And for the next solid minute or two, he lets me search the depths of his intelligent, kind, boundless sea-green orbs. I can feel my heartbeat quicken and will it to ease up.

  I see him, the man from my memories, except he is more handsome than ever. The same faint lines span his forehead and crinkle around his eyes. I want to recount the two dozen freckles across the bridge of his nose and the few scattered across the top of his cheeks. I have to fight back the urge not to graze a touch over every contour of his face or to press my finger into his lush watermelon tinged lower lip, watch the color fade from it and rush back.

  After my study, I feel almost spent. I was afraid of this. It had taken everything I had to accept what he did, to reconcile the man I knew with the other man he was too. This truth keeps me grounded to the present, and I turn the conversation back to his explanation.

  “Birthdays tend to fall on the same day every year, including my dad’s,” I say without looking away. “Marlowe had one last April, a good six months after we arrived. Are you saying you’re that slow that you failed to notice the trend?” I cannot keep my tone from turning churlish. It has been over two years since he left, a year and a half since we arrived in this backward world. It annoys me that he didn’t need my forgiveness, really.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “IT WAS IDIOTIC of me to think there could be such a thing as a better time. I felt it was bad timing for all of us, but especially for you. Like I said, I didn’t want to compound things. You’d lost Reid.”

  Mesmerized, I watch his lips move and for signs of his candid expression wavering. “Fine. Enough with the small talk. How is it you’re here? Let’s start with that.”

  He scratches the side of his beard and starts speaking slowly. “Hm. The rain was coming down in sheets.” His voice immediately takes on a distant quality. “All the lights flickered and went out for good, and then there was the strangest, loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard in my life. It made my teeth rattle. I’ll never forget it. You could have told me I’d been struck by lightning, and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Only I was still standing.”

  Although I remember that odd feeling as well—as though the spirit of something passed through me—I didn’t recall the storm. “So, you were in the house. This house.”

  Vale then leans back and draws an ankle atop the opposite knee. “Yes, or I think I was still. After that jolt, which I think is when the actual time warp took place, I remember leaving through the side door. Then something really did conk me on the head, and when I woke up … I don’t know how it started or how long it went on, but half the house was already engulfed in an inferno. It was dark and bright all at once, a glowing, burnt-orange blaze.” A frantic, haunted look skitters across his eyes, as if he’s reliving the moment. I’m not far behind his thoughts and bite down on my lip.

  “For some reason, the door I’d originally exited out of was locked. I made my way around the house trying to get back inside. I caught a glimpse of a man I didn’t recognize—a man I haven’t seen again since—leading Selene with Allen’s help into the back yard.”

  “Elliot Masterson,” I supply. “That was his name. He died that night trying to save us. A complete stranger.”

  “Thank whoever or whatever for him.”

  I nod, and we’re both silent for a minute.

  “Uh, finally I managed to climb in through a broken window in the library and saw Masterson and Allen carrying Archer toward the back. He’d been knocked out too. From a backdraft, he told me later—”

  “You saw Allen and Selene; did they see you?” I interrupt. The warmth in my chest is steadily growing hotter at the idea of my supposed friends keeping Vale’s new identity from me for so long.

  “No. Selene was settled behind the shrubs over there, and from that moment her head was between her knees the whole time as far as I saw. As for Allen, I would think he was too preoccupied. The back gate was open, and I saw him running back and forth through there, yelling for help. Still, he might have seen me at some point. I couldn’t say for sure. He seemed to recognize me the other day, but Archer said Allen’s confusion stemmed from my disguise’s failure to wholly do its job.”

  I allow a small sigh to escape my lips. Archer was right there. “Then what?”

  “I was trapped in the library for a while—more like I couldn’t get from that room into the hall or the study. All the doorknobs were practically on fire themselves, and I couldn’t kick the doors open as they open inward. I went back out of the window and found my way in from the other side of the house.

  “But by this time, the stairs were completely impassable, and I’d lost Masterson. It didn’t matter, he was obviously capable of choosing his own priorities.”

  He inhales and exhales audibly before saying, “I’d left Marlowe in his study and assumed he’d gotten out fine. I assumed wrong.”

  “Wait. You left him in his study? That’s why you were at the house, to begin with?”

  “Yes,” he says, drawing out the single word. “I’ll come back to that. So … just then, after having wasted so much time, I was desperate to find you.”

  I shoot him a skeptical look, hoping—I don’t know—perhaps to hear more of how crazy with worry he was thinking I was in harm’s way, devastated at the idea of losing me. Perhaps I wanted to hear those lost redeeming words from his lips: That despite everything he’d done, he still loved me.

  But the vibrancy in his eyes seems to dim. Of course, he cared. He wasn’t unfeeling. But I apparently shouldn’t make more of his ‘desperation to find me’ than the frenzy of the moment. I glance down, feigning interest in my fingernails, so he doesn’t see the way my throat tightens, doesn’t see the crushing disappointment on my face.

  He raises his hand, but an inch from my chin, he drops it to rest on his thigh. “River. I need to get what happened out. I—”

  I croak, “I’m not stopping you. By all means, go ahead.”

  In my peripheral vision, I see his knee is twitching again. He forcibly pushes down on the ankle with both hands for fifteen seconds and then lets go. After his brain was hijacked, and he’d been extracted, Vale’s recovery had been slow. And this was a technique Dr. Mayhew had advised him to practice until his mind relearned how to respond without the guidance. Cerebral disruptors were not an option for Vale.

  “I hoped against hope that if Allen, Selene, and Archer had made it out, so had you, Quinn, Reid, Kinnari, Everly, and Marlowe. I went room by room, kicking in all the doors downstairs first, looking through all the windows as I passed. Finally, I caught a glimpse of you through the front window,” he says with immense relief.

  His voice is alert and present as if recalling something that happened just yesterday. “You were sitting on the lawn
with Willow’s blanket wrapped around your shoulders. Your body racking violently with coughs. But you were safe. And crouching by your side was a man—”

  “Martin.” To whom I owe my life.

  “To say I was relieved is putting it mildly. The fog around my brain seemed to evaporate at that moment, and I remembered these stairs. I could use them to get upstairs, to find the others. I turned away for an instant, and when I turned back, you were gone. Martin must have led you somewhere safer, I thought. I made my way to the back of the house and saw several other strangers helping Allen and Selene into a wagon and loading Archer onto it too.”

  He looks sadly out at the hummingbird feeder hanging from a tree branch at the edge of the coy pond. “I’m sorry, River. I never made it upstairs. There was a sudden ruckus of popping and booming like someone had set off a truckload of fireworks inside. I was sure the house was going to blow up. The flames and smoke overwhelmed everything, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stay. So, I left.”

  “To go where?”

  “I followed the chaos and found my way to the hospital, hoping you’d be there. You weren’t, and neither were any of the others. I remained to help out, thinking our paths would cross, eventually. You know I don’t pray, but I prayed then that you were all together. It gave me a little peace to think that.

  “I almost came to believe in miracles when four days later, you were sleeping soundly on the third level of the infirmary. Apparently, you’d been brought in the day before. Your chart said you were in a coma. But how, River? You were fine … well, as fine as one can be.”

  “It might have gone differently for me if …” I say, absently tracing a finger over my scar, the result of a shooting that had damaged my frontal lobe. “I went back into the house.” My voice is low and raspier than usual, my throat sore from holding back tears.

  “No.”

  I nod an unnecessary affirmation. “I saw Marlowe and Royce. Then I went up these stairs. I could barely make out what I was seeing, but I knew. It was R-Reid and Kinn and Everly.” I pause and clear my throat. “Um, after almost falling through the floor, somehow, I made it to the backyard, which is where whoever found me found me.”

  “River, you could have died,” Vale says softly.

  “There were countless chances of that, and many of us did.” And after a brief silence, I ask, “Did you ever find Archer, Allen, and Selene? And what happened to Quinn—do you know?”

  “Archer told me he, Allen, and Selene were taken to St. Andrew’s across the river. They went back a couple of days later and found Quinn in his rooms. Apparently, he’d been in the house the entire time.”

  “Ah.”

  “And you? I’d seen you for all of fifteen minutes. I went in search of a doctor to tell me what was going on, but when I came back, you were gone again. Where did you go?”

  “They moved me.”

  “Archer said you had amnesia?”

  “For three weeks, yes. For another three, I thought my brain had been hijacked.”

  He winced. “I didn’t know that,” he says through clenched teeth.

  “It took a long time for it to register that we’d been deposited nearly three centuries into the past. I went back to the house when I could manage it, and there was no one there.”

  “It was uninhabitable for two months. Your brothers and Allen and Selene took rooms next door to the Wells Street Police Station in the interim, which is how he discovered it was missing a chief.”

  I feel braver asking Vale the one question I’ve been avoiding asking my brothers. He has that power still. My two eldest brothers were little more than family to me before. My relationship with Archer had been one of mutual tolerance and respect for the roles we played at the Division. And Quinn had always been aloof. I hadn’t been close to either of them. So, I hadn’t asked them myself because I was afraid of the answer. Part of you still is.

  In spite of the distinct quaver in my voice, I ask, “Did Archer never mention to you what they thought happened to me?” What I really want to know is why my brothers hadn’t moved heaven and earth to find me since mine would have been the only body not uncovered in the aftermath.

  “You didn’t ask them?”

  “I couldn’t,” I admit.

  The soft skin under his right eye twitches, and he smiles sympathetically. “I’m so sorry, River,” he says, exhaling my name in a sigh. Then he takes a risk, holding out his hand for mine. I know even this small gesture is dangerous, so I don’t accept his offering, reminding myself that I don’t need his comforting. I just need answers.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Okay, I think but can’t seem to utter. It is so not okay. Instead, I nod and extract my watch from my waistcoat pocket, staring down at it blindly.

  Vale drops his foot to the floor and leans forward, his forearms on his thighs and his hands still outstretched in case I change my mind. “Like I said, I had no sooner discovered you at the hospital than you disappeared again. I kept asking for information about the woman who’d been in that bed. But by the time you left, that particular bed had been given to someone else and then to another person and another person. It was an impossible scene. So many people, so many of them seriously injured.”

  “You would have gotten more intel if you’d asked after the boy in that bed,” I say casually, but I can feel a blush coloring my cheeks.

  “Ah. That’s what gave you the idea, then.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I murmur, knitting my brows together for good measure. That sure was easy for him to accept.

  “And Selene, is she—” His tone and expression possess more than a twinge of doubt.

  “Come on, Vale. There’s no way.” On the day of our impromptu arrival, Selene was wearing would-be men’s clothes too. But with an ample bosom, her long, lithe, curvaceous figure, her luxurious gold tresses, and her feminine features and complexion, she is irrefutably a woman. “Go on, you were saying?”

  “So … when I couldn’t track you down, it occurred to me to ask after Archer. Even finding him took longer than I would have expected, but there was so much to sort out back then. For an instant, I too, thought the malware in my brain had been triggered. But I also felt freer than I’d had in a long time.” He grimaces. “And I was completely cognizant of the fact that we were not in our time anymore. But I had to think about where I was going to live, what I was going to do with myself.”

  I can hear the defensiveness in his voice and raise my brows critically as if to say, “We all had to make our way. Now, where are you going with this, exactly?”

  His voice deepens an octave. “A few days after you vanished, Dr. Henry Flynn Ennis, an alienist from Boston was brought into the infirmary. At the time, I still had nowhere to go, so I stayed at the hospital, sleeping in whatever bed or chair was vacant at the end of the night or when I could catch a nap. Every single level of the hospital was overrun with casualties, and they needed all willing and able to help to lend a hand.

  “Henry had suffered through a fairly constant bout of smoke inhalation since the fire started on the eighth, but he thought he was fine and that whatever his issue was, it would pass when the smoke cleared. But he’d waited too long, and his chest irritation turned into a full-on bronchial infection and then pneumonia. We became close over the several months, and he told me what brought him to Chicago. He followed on the heels of a man who he suspected of playing a hand in his wife’s death and possibly his child’s, a physician named—”

  “You don’t have to repeat yourself there. I was listening when you told Archer the day before yesterday.”

  “I figured. I have no doubt Dr. Ennis was a wonderful person. He was particularly kind and generous to me, a much-needed friend at the time. And although I didn’t tell him my story, he knew I was destitute and let me stay in his house even though he wasn’t there for the first week entirely. He was also well aware that he wouldn’t make it through the remainder of the year. So, he offered me his life—his identity, his l
ivelihood, and all his worldly possessions—in exchange for my willingness to see a dying wish through to whatever end.”

  Vale hesitates and then says, “It was his idea, not mine.” He stills, willing me to dive into the pool of his gaze and believe in him again.

  While I’d loosened the grip on my anger, I make no attempt to hide what I’m thinking. Remember, I’ve seen your true colors, Vale Hennessy. We had my dad’s direct account; there could be no denying Vale had said what he’d said. Not only had he volunteered to negotiate a deal with criminals but had somehow forgotten one crucial quality about Marlowe St. Clair. Dad was an extremely principled man.

  Vale had said: “Had you thought of selling the tech in the first place …” Of course, Marlowe would have thought of selling Clarion’s tech, but only to ensure everyone knew it was absolutely out of the question if they wanted any part in the Division. The slightest breach of confidentiality or hint of disloyalty was and would always be met with swift action.

  And still, I couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe in Vale’s cunning for a good long time. So, I waited with Reid by my side for all to be set right. But when the stolen technology was traced back to Vale after all, his guilt was proven. Archer had nailed that nail.

  Vale Hennessy, who had everything, had betrayed Clarion and the St. Clairs for greed. Since the day Marlowe broke the news to me, Thursday, August 2, I have racked my brain to understand how big of a piece of everything one person could need. A fairly sizable chunk had apparently not been enough. Thus, little by little, I forced myself to believe that the malware in his brain had actually turned him. Because whoever that stranger was, he was not my Vale, no way.

  But it still hurt like hell.

  He glances away, biting the inside of his cheek, thoughtfully. “We didn’t look too dissimilar that it couldn’t work. Lose a little weight, grow a beard, glasses … And he had no remaining family, so it was easy to recast him as Harold, my supposed brother, and myself as the renowned Boston alienist.