Splinter: A CHRONOS Files Story

by Rysa Walker

  He curses, and then abruptly shifts to a laugh. He’s just remembered the bottle of acid in his pocket.

  Across the room, Kate has the key in her hand and is working on locking in a stable point. I lunge forward to grab Holmes’s legs, hoping to trip him before he gets the stopper out of the bottle.

  I don’t remember crying out, but some noise must have escaped me because Kate looks away from the key toward me, losing her chance to blink out.

  She screams as the acid hits the side of her neck.

  I’ve heard that scream before, too. Five times now. But it pierces me, nonetheless. That sound could never become routine, even if I was locked in this cycle for eternity.

  Holmes takes a step back, maybe to avoid any splash-back from the liquid. As soon as he’s in range, I hook one arm around his legs and tug. The gun flies out of his hands, landing just a few inches behind Kate who is frantically crawling toward the door to the linen closet. His foot lashes out, connecting with my stomach. It’s not directly where the bullet entered, but close enough that hurts like hell. For a few seconds, I’m helpless, curled into an agonized ball.

  As Holmes hunts for the gun, I push myself back toward the cots. The bony arm is still there, inches from me as I tug my CHRONOS key out of the pouch, but it doesn’t bother me the same way now that I see Kate approaching the door.

  In my dreams, I think that hand has always been Kate’s hand, representing my fear that she had become just another anonymous corpse in this makeshift morgue.

  Holmes scrambles around on the floor and eventually locates the gun. He looks around for me, trying to determine why he tripped, but his attention is pulled back to Kate when she shoves aside the body that’s blocking the exit.

  For the first time since I began watching this horror show, Kate opens the door, and that jolts Holmes out of his momentary stupor. I need to stall him, keep him from following her.

  I toss one of the bottles toward him. “Come get me, you son of a bitch.”

  Holmes jumps and looks behind him, waving the gun in the direction of my voice.

  “What are you waiting for?” I speak louder this time, since Kate is out of the room.

  Does he think I’m a ghost? Most of the people he killed were women, but a few men lost their lives at his hand, too, including a few business partners. Maybe he’s expecting his own personal Jacob Marley to crawl from the shadows. He hesitates, but he only has the one bullet left and in the end, it’s Kate he decides to pursue.

  The CHRONOS key now reads 20:25:43. Nine seconds longer than Kate’s lived in any scenario. But she’s not out of harm’s way yet. I need to find my other self, my unwounded self, so that he can help her. I don’t know how badly injured she is from the acid or from the blow to her head when she fell. Is she even in a state where she can use the key?

  That thought is oddly prophetic, because it takes me two tries to pull up the stable point near the stairwell, where Kiernan Number Six is positioned.

  I roll the time back to 20:24:00 and blink in at the hallway location. At first, I don’t see Six. It takes me a few seconds to realize that this is before the time he was supposed to jump in. And I’m blocking the stable point he’ll be using.

  Idiot.

  Once I drag myself a few feet to the right, Six blinks in. When he sees me, color drains from his face, almost as if he’s the one who’s in danger of bleeding out.

  “What happened?”

  “I seem to have caught a bullet.”

  He glances down at the blood for a second, and then he pulls out his key. “I’ll go back and--”

  “No.” I stop to catch my breath. “Kate gets out. She’ll be coming this way in about forty seconds. She’s injured, but she’ll be okay unless Holmes catches up to her. He still has one bullet.”

  “Okay, then. Get back to the cabin. I’ll take it from here.”

  “I’m don’t think I can get back to the cabin. It took me two tries to blink back to this spot. Just leave me. Help Kate.”

  He gives me a doubtful look. And even though I wish he’d go and quit wasting time, I get it. I remember feeling the same way back in my room, and that version of me wasn’t in nearly as bad shape.

  “Damn it, just go. Get her to safety.”

  Six blinks away and returns a second later, holding a wet cloth that smells a bit like baking soda. Gauze pads and a roll of medical tape are tucked under his left arm. He hooks his right arm under my shoulders and pulls me to my feet.

  “I said, leave me.”

  “This isn’t about you, damn it.”

  Six half drags me to a door across the hall and after a brief struggle with the knob, he manages to open it. I lean against the wall, and he pulls the door closed behind us, then tosses me the wet cloth and other medical supplies.

  “I’ve set up points along the hallways and watched what’s happening. She’ll come this way. I’m going to distract Holmes and see if I can buy her a little more time, hopefully without getting myself killed. Kate will try this door, but it sticks, so she’ll think it’s locked. Open it, transfer the stable point to her key.”

  He doesn’t meet my eyes as he speaks. At first, I think he’s avoiding the whole hamster-on-a-wheel feeling, but there’s something else in his expression. Getting the medical supplies, setting all those stable points, watching them to see which way Kate would run...all of that took time. This hotel is a maze of hallways, and even if he was just watching the most likely routes, it took more than a couple of minutes.

  So I ask him outright, before he can blink away. “It’s been almost nine minutes for me. How long has it been for you? Since I caused the splinter?”

  “Not sure.”

  Yeah, right. The truth is written on his face--my face--and I’m not so far gone that I can’t read it. And even if there’s a touch of bitterness, and more than a touch of fear about what’s coming down the pike very, very soon, I know it’s better this way.

  “It’s okay. No point in lyin’ to yourself. I’ll get her to the cabin. You take it from there.”

  He does look at me then, and gives me quick nod.

  A split second after he leaves, the door handle rattles twice, followed by a frustrated curse. I’d recognize that voice anywhere, even strained as it is now from pain, from breathing smoke, and from running through these hallways seconds ahead of a madman.

  Crossing the short distance to the door is agony, but I make it. I twist the handle sharply to the right, and as Kate falls backward against me, I place one hand over her mouth to trap the scream that I know is coming. With the other hand, I press the wet cloth against the angry welts on the side of her face.

  My knees are shaking harder now that her weight is added to my own. I lean back against the wall, struggling to stay upright, as I close the door and push the bolt into place. That lock won’t hold Holmes for long--one good kick will probably do it. It’s flimsy and barely screwed into the wood, unlike the sturdy locks he’s placed on the outside of these doors. Holmes isn’t nearly as concerned with keeping people out of these guestrooms as he is with keeping his guests trapped inside.

  Kate struggles against me. I whisper her name softly, as I press my face against her hair, breathing her in. The stench of this place, full of smoke and death, clings to her, but her own scent is there, too, and it fills me with a sense of relief that I haven’t felt since I lost her.

  She looks up at me, and even though the light is dim, I can see that she’s barely holding it together. Her green eyes are unfocused, confused.

  “Kiernan? But how--”

  I hold my CHRONOS key against hers to transfer the stable point for the cabin, and then help her pull up the interface.

  “Kate, please. You have to focus. I’ve pulled up a stable point, love. Just slide your fingers over it and go. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”

  That promise is a lie in one sense, but hopefully, she’ll never know it. Six will be there.

  It takes a second longer than usual, but K
ate manages to lock in the location. And then she’s gone.

  I slide down to the floor. The gauze and medical tape are a few feet away, but I don’t have the energy. And it’s pointless. Holmes is already trying the door. Whether he shoots me, or I bleed out, or I simply vanish, the end result is the same. My time’s up.

  Still, I bring up the cabin on my key. Not to follow her. The fact that pulling up the stable point is a struggle tells me that’s not possible. I just need to see that Six made it back, that someone is there to help her. I’m not sure what I’ll do if he’s not, but I need to know.

  Holmes twists the handle again and then the door shakes. Once, twice and then it flies open.

  My eyes remain on the holographic display. Kate is in the cabin, crumpled on the floor. A moment later, I blink in--or rather, Six blinks in. He lifts Kate into his arms and I pan the view around to follow them.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Holmes. He scans the room for Kate, then raises the pistol in my direction.

  Closing my eyes, I hold fast to that final image of Kate, safe in the cabin, and wait for the end.

  Afterword

  This short story originally appeared in CLONES: The Anthology, a collection of stories about—you guessed it—clones, edited by Daniel Smith. Time travel isn’t the most common method of producing clones in science fiction, and it’s certainly not the most technologically feasible. But clones of this sort exist in my series, The CHRONOS Files, created when a time traveler doubles back on his or her timeline and changes something. That action results in a splinter--a temporary duplicate of the time traveler. One copy or the other vanishes in ten minutes or so, and the timeline continues on its slightly-altered way.

  But...which copy vanishes? You or the new you? Does it even matter if they’re both you? What sort of challenges would you face working with multiple yous toward a common goal? These existential questions are touched on briefly in Time’s Divide, the final book in my series, but I wanted to explore them in a bit more detail. The events that happen to Kiernan after the end of Time’s Echo, when he’s forced to create multiple splinters in order to save Kate, seemed like a perfect opportunity to dig a bit deeper, so I was delighted to have the chance to explore this somewhat unusual method of cloning for the Clones anthology.

  Thanks for reading “Splinter.” If you enjoyed this short story, you can find the entire CHRONOS series online at http://www.amazon.com/author/walker.

  About the Author

  RYSA WALKER is the author of the bestselling CHRONOS Files series. Timebound, the first book in the series, was the Young Adult and Grand Prize winner in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards.

  Rysa grew up on a cattle ranch in the South, where she read every chance she got. On the rare occasion that she gained control of the television, she watched Star Trek and imagined living in the future, on distant planets, or at least in a town big enough to have a stop light.

  She currently lives in North Carolina. The Delphi Effect, the first book in her new series, The Delphi Trilogy, debuted in October 2016.

  If you see Rysa on social media, please tell her to get back into the Writing Cave.

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