Timebound

by Rysa Walker

  “Yes,” I said with a tight smile. “I know. Against CHRONOS regulations.”

  There was another long look and then she sighed deeply. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to tell Saul that I’m leaving. I’ll make some excuse. He may want to come back with me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t, given his recent behavior.”

  “Just be sure that you don’t let him know the reason why…”

  “I won’t,” Katherine said. “I’m going to follow your instructions to the letter. Skip the next jump, keep the gyno appointment, and avoid discussing my suspicions about Saul’s actions—and that’s all they are, I would remind you, suspicions—until the 26th. I’ll make the jump on the 27th. I just hope you—or maybe I should say we—are doing the correct thing here.”

  I thought back to Connor’s comments a few weeks earlier. “So do I. But as a good friend of mine—of ours, actually—recently told me, I’m pretty sure that what we’re doing is right. Sometimes, right and correct aren’t the same thing.”

  She didn’t look entirely convinced, but she nodded and took a few steps toward the exit, before turning back. “Just in case we run into the ersatz Mrs. Salter, perhaps we should leave separately? She seems to have taken a rather intense dislike to you and your young friend.”

  I agreed, and Katherine headed toward the door. I don’t know if it was a premonition or just that I was feeling nervous, but I only gave her about a twenty-second lead and then I headed toward the same exit that she had taken. As luck would have it, a large group burst through the door and I shoved my way against the tide of the crowd, which was almost entirely over the age of sixty. I muttered apologies and stood on tiptoe to look for Katherine over their shoulders as I pushed through the last few people and began to make my way down the steps in front of the building. One old woman rapped me on the leg with her walking cane. I really couldn’t blame her, since I’d nearly knocked her down.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t—” I began, and then stopped short as someone shoved the woman directly into me. I stumbled on the first step and just barely caught her before she fell. I was busy trying to set her back on her now very shaky feet when her assailant put his palm against my chest and pushed hard.

  I fell down the last two steps and landed ungracefully on my backside. The man’s suit threw me off for a moment, since I’d previously seen him only in a ratty T-shirt and jeans. The jagged scar near his right temple was new, and it looked a bit like something that one might get if he were whacked very hard with a tire iron. He had added a truly pathetic little mustache, but there was no mistaking the face. I’d seen it too recently and much too closely for my liking.

  “Hi, Katie,” Simon said with a glint in his eye. “Imagine meeting you here. Catch you later, okay?”

  And with that, he began walking at a rapid clip toward the Sixtieth Street station. Several members of the crowd I’d just pushed my way through came over to help me up, and one rather gallant gentleman, who was eighty if he was a day, tottered a few steps after Simon, shouting and shaking a fist in the air.

  By the time I was on my feet, Simon was halfway to the station. A bit farther ahead I saw Katherine, who hadn’t managed to shake Prudence. The two of them were approaching the platform where the mayor’s group had assembled to await the train, which was chugging toward the stop. I raised my skirt and managed a weak imitation of a run, but it was clear that I wouldn’t reach them before Simon did.

  The only thing I could hope was that my voice would travel better than I could. I pulled in a deep breath and shouted, pointing directly at Simon, “He’s got a gun! Stop him—he’s got a gun!”

  I’m not sure if the group at the station heard me, or if they heard one of the many fairgoers who screamed and repeated “a gun” in the chaos of the next few seconds. But the mayor’s party all looked in our direction. Simon glanced over his shoulder once and then turned back toward the platform, his hand still in his pocket, as Prudence, with a maneuver worthy of a defensive lineman, tackled Katherine to the ground.

  They both fell forward, Katherine’s sleeve snagging against the wooden railing, ripping the cloth from shoulder to elbow, just before her head smacked the edge of the platform. The screams of the crowd were now mingling with the roar of the train as it pulled to a stop. Saul knelt beside Katherine, and Prudence jumped to her feet, scanning the faces in the station.

  I rammed my way through the mass of people, trying to get closer to Simon, but I couldn’t find him in the crowd. I didn’t think that he would have been brazen enough to make a temporal jump in broad daylight with hundreds of people nearby, but then he had been perfectly willing to make a jump in a crowded Metro station after snatching the diary, so who knew?

  Two men in matching suits were walking purposefully toward the mayor. A Columbian Exposition security badge was visible on one of their shoulders. “False alarm, everyone. False alarm—the young lady was mistaken. We have everything in hand.”

  Mayor Harrison walked over to talk to the men, shaking their hands and clapping them on the shoulders as he spoke. I couldn’t help but wonder how this incident would affect him, just hours away from the moment when an assassin would show up on his doorstep, requesting a word. Would he be less inclined to let a stranger into his house without having someone at least do a quick frisk for weapons? Or was this type of scare a pretty routine occurrence in a Chicago that was only slightly tamer than the Wild West?

  I spun around again, still searching for Simon, but there was no sign of him. Saul was holding a handkerchief against the side of Katherine’s head. I could see a bit of blood on the white cloth, but it didn’t look as though she was badly hurt.

  Kiernan had now spotted me and was running toward the platform. I held up one hand and motioned for him to wait on the bench—the last thing I wanted was for him to be in the middle of all this. He nodded but flicked his eyes behind me in a worried fashion.

  As I turned back toward the platform, I came face-to-face with the reason Kiernan looked so concerned. Prudence was directly in front of me, her eyes intense enough to burn a hole through the lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses. “I had this covered, Kate,” she said in low whisper, grabbing my upper arm and squeezing hard. “Katherine would have been perfectly okay and we would have avoided a spectacle. You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.”

  I fought down the urge to laugh—she sounded like the villain in a Scooby-Doo episode. “What do you mean you had this covered?” I asked. “You’re the one I’m trying to protect her from—you and your Cyrist thug. I need to find him…”

  “Don’t bother, you silly little cow,” she said. “Simon is gone.” She jerked her head toward the two large security guys who had spoken with the mayor. “I had men in place to grab the idiot. He would never have gotten near her. And if I had ever gotten two minutes alone with Katherine, she would have been back in her own time by now, with Saul none the wiser, and I might have actually had a chance to lure Simon over to my side.”

  I was thoroughly confused. “You’re trying to save Katherine? But your group is the one—”

  “You think this is for her sake?” Prudence asked with a harsh laugh. “Oh, no. This is personal. Did Saul really think I would give him that much power? Over me? All he has to do is yank hard on this damned medallion and I’d go out the same way she did.”

  “So you’re going to help us fight them?” I asked. Having Prudence on our side would be an incredible advantage, and I could only imagine the joy on Katherine’s face and my mother’s if—

  Her lip curled in a sneer, bringing my fantasy to an abrupt end. “I’m not fighting the Cyrists,” she said. “I am the Cyrists. There would be no Cyrist International without me. I was willing to share power with my father, but if he thinks he can push me aside without consequences, he is sadly mistaken. This ends here.

  “And you need to listen well, my little niece,” she said, her eyes once more drilling into mine. “I’m letting you go for one re
ason only—your mother. Deborah had nothing to do with any of this, and it’s possible that she values your life more than my mother valued mine, so—”

  “That’s not true, Prudence. Katherine tried to find you, but she can’t use the medallion any more than Saul can.”

  Prudence’s expression made it clear that she wasn’t buying it even before she spoke. “You can drop the pretense, Kate. I know about the bargain she made with Saul. The funny thing is that I got the better end of the deal. Poor Deborah had to stay with her.”

  Prudence shot a glance back over her shoulder. The train was pulling away from the platform and several of the passengers were craning their necks to look out the windows, just in case the excitement wasn’t really over. Katherine had gotten to her feet and Saul was leading her away from the platform, back toward the main fairground. We couldn’t have planned it better if we had tried, since the minor injury gave Katherine a plausible excuse to terminate the jump early.

  Prudence let go of my arm. “Damn it,” she said. “I have to go. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her.”

  “Wait,” I called, running a few steps after her. “Don’t bother. She knows—she’s going back to HQ.”

  Prudence turned back toward me as I continued. “Katherine will skip the next jump,” I said. “She understands what she needs to do—and not do—over the next few weeks in order to keep the timeline intact.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Well, maybe you’re not entirely worthless,” she said. “I just hope you didn’t screw it up—otherwise it’s going to be very difficult to get back in here to fix things, due to the mess you’ve made. I was trying to do a surgical strike and then you come through like a tank… There’s no telling how many ripples this will create in the timeline.”

  It was beyond hypocritical for Prudence, who was working for a radical overhaul of history, to be lecturing me on the sanctity of the timeline, but I suspected that fine point would be lost on her. Rather than stick around and argue, I turned on my heel and headed toward Kiernan, who was still watching us from the sidelines.

  Prudence grabbed my arm again, yanking me back to face her. I had an intense desire to flip her over my shoulder and see how pushy she would be when she was flat on her back, but I gritted my teeth and returned her stare.

  “We’re not finished here,” she said. “I will keep Simon and anyone else from threatening Katherine on these jumps. Your existence and Deborah’s and mine will be protected. But. Don’t cross me again, Kate. You don’t want to end up on the wrong side of history. You could have a nice, comfy little life if you play things smart. The Cyrists are the future and, given your obvious gifts with the equipment—”

  “No.” I opened my mouth again to elaborate, but there was really nothing more to add. So I just repeated it, shaking my head. “No.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, shrugging one shoulder dismissively. “You can’t fight the Cyrists on your own, Kate. You can be one of the Chosen or you can line up with the other sheep to be fleeced and slaughtered.”

  I strongly suspected that she was right on the first point, but the casual way she referred to the destruction of those who were not “Chosen” turned my stomach. It also strengthened my resolve. No amount of power should be in the hands of a person who could say something like that with such conviction.

  There was, however, little gain to be had in arguing with her. “Are you done?” I asked, my jaw set.

  “Just one more little thing,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Stay away from Kiernan. He will be one of the Chosen—and he will be mine.”

  I glanced over at the boy who was watching us nervously from the bench. “He’s eight years old, for God’s sake!”

  “Now, yes. But he most definitely wasn’t eight when I knew him. And not when you knew him, either,” she added with a smug little smile. “But I guess you lost that bit of memory when the timeline shifted, didn’t you? You’re not the Kate he was in—infatuated with. And I intend to make certain that it stays that way.”

  The fact that Prudence could remember a version of me that I would never know bugged me much more than I was willing to let on. Katherine had said I wasn’t the same Kate she would have met if we’d been able to start my training six months earlier, and while I understood this on one level, it was an inconsistency that kept nibbling away at the back of my brain. If I understood Connor’s explanation of the changing timelines, that other Kate shouldn’t exist. Katherine’s cancer would have been a constant in all versions of the timeline. And if so, I would always have started the training when I did and I wouldn’t be listening to stories about this rogue Kate who was off somewhen having adventures I couldn’t recall.

  But I had glimpsed that other Kate’s life briefly in the medallion. And Kiernan—the very much grown-up version of Kiernan on the Metro—was clearly thinking of that other Kate when he pulled the band from my hair and slipped it onto his wrist.

  Remembering the expression on his face when he looked at me, I felt a sudden rush of empathy. How would it feel to stare into the eyes of someone you loved, someone who had loved you, and see no recognition, no love in return? I would soon know firsthand, assuming I made it back to my own time and found Trey.

  I glanced back over at Kiernan. The trains ran on the half hour, and the crowd around the platform had now cleared out entirely, except for an older black groundskeeper who was using a large push broom to sweep bits of debris into a pile behind the ticket booth. Kiernan was still waiting, his face tense and his hands clenching the wooden slats of the bench. He had already been through so much at such a young age.

  Despite my decision not to antagonize her, I couldn’t ignore that issue. “What about his dad?” I blurted. “Kiernan said that you were responsible—”

  “Kiernan is a little boy with a big imagination,” she snapped, cutting me off. “He doesn’t really believe I had a hand in his father’s death. His mother most certainly doesn’t believe it. And when Kiernan is all grown-up with”—she paused, giving me a suggestive little smile—“adult appetites, he’ll be quite eager to follow me back into the Cyrist fold. Or anywhere else I want him to go.”

  Prudence reached into the bodice of her dress and tugged out a thick gold chain with a CHRONOS key at the end. She quickly scanned the area around us and then activated it. “Stay away from Kiernan and stay out of my way. If you can remember those two little things, you should be okay.

  “Oh, and be nice to your mother,” she added. Her eyes twitched down to the CHRONOS key and then she was gone.

  20

  The wooden bench was empty. Kiernan had been watching us intently, and I turned around immediately to see how he would react to Prudence’s disappearing act. But he was no longer there. It seemed strange that he would have waited patiently for so long and then simply run off without saying anything.

  The only person who had been there the entire time was the groundskeeper, who was putting his push broom back into a tiny alcove on the outside of the booth.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “There was a boy, waiting for me on the bench here. Did you by any chance see where he went?”

  “Yes’m,” he said, glancing up briefly, and then back down at the ground. “You mean Li’l Mick, right?”

  I nodded, wondering exactly how many people at the Expo the kid knew.

  “He took off that way mebbe a minute ago, miss,” the old man said, tilting his head toward the Midway Plaisance. “He looked to be followin’ a gen’l’man who come runnin’ through from across the way—from over where the state buildins are.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Do you remember what the man looked like? It’s important.”

  “Well, I din look real close, miss—I was sweepin’,” he said, his forehead creasing as he tried to remember. “But he looked young t’me, ’bout your age mebbe. Di’n’ look like he worked outside much, kinda pasty-lookin’. And di’n’ look like he missed too many meals either, if y’know what I mean,” he added with a low ch
uckle. “Mick’ll be able to keep up with ’im, no doubt there. He’s a smart li’l cricket.”

  “Thank you,” I said, giving him a shaky smile over my shoulder as I ran toward the Midway entrance.

  The description was too much like Simon to be a coincidence. Was Kiernan working with him? His older self and Simon had been on the Metro together. And they’d apparently been friends or at least compatriots at some point, based on what Simon had said when he attacked me in Katherine’s front yard.

  I had a hard time believing Kiernan was in on this, however. It seemed more likely that the boy had realized Simon was the one I’d pointed toward when yelling, “He has a gun!” Maybe he was still acting as my assistant, and trying to keep tabs on Simon for me.

  Either way, his absence worried me. But what really baffled me was why Simon would be going to the Midway. If he’d come back to make a second attempt on Katherine’s life, which was the only reason I could think of that he’d be back at all, why was he going in the opposite direction from the stable point on the Wooded Island?

  And then I remembered—there were two Katherines wandering around the Expo today. That first trip was also in the diary that Simon grabbed when he took my backpack. Having been thwarted in his attempt to kill Katherine at the station, he had just moved on to the next logical target.

  Connor’s voice in my head was telling me to go back to the stable point, head home, and have another go at this after we’d had a bit of time to plan. But the idea of trying to tail Simon and, at the same time, avoid running into myself or anyone I’d seen that day, seemed fraught with even more problems than trying to find him here and now on the Midway. And he couldn’t be too far away—I was only a minute or so behind him.

  I just prayed that Kiernan wasn’t with him. I really didn’t think the boy would be helping Simon—it seemed too out of character—but I had to admit that I hadn’t known Kiernan long enough to be completely certain. And if he was simply following Simon, I just hoped he would be careful, because I was pretty sure that Simon wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him. Or use him as bait.