by Rysa Walker
“No, those are not CHRONOS-issue.” I sighed. “I was in a hurry, Katherine.”
“Why? If you’re not from CHRONOS, how can you use that key? And why do you have two keys? No one gets two keys.”
“It’s kind of complicated,” I said.
That had been true from the beginning, but now it was even more difficult to know how much I should tell Katherine. I had no way of knowing whether Simon coming back to kill her meant that Prudence had failed in her promise to stop the attacks. He might simply have shown back up before she had time to force the issue. Things would have been so much simpler if I believed that Prudence would (or even could) keep her word, but I really didn’t—there were just too many variables.
Given that her jump had originated from CHRONOS headquarters, Katherine couldn’t leave from anywhere other than the stable point at which she’d arrived, and I couldn’t leave until I was certain she was on her way back to her own time. That meant my safe, quick, semidressed exit was out of the question. Resigned, I dropped the dress to the floor and stepped into the middle, pulling it up over my shoulders, and then turned my back toward Katherine. “Would you mind?” I asked, pointing to the laces.
She yanked the laces as I sucked in my breath. “We have to get you out of here,” I said. “Holmes isn’t after you, but someone else is—someone with a CHRONOS key. You need to go straight back to HQ. But—you can’t tell them about me, Katherine. Believe me. Nothing is more important than this. Don’t put this in your diary and don’t discuss it with anyone, not even Saul. Convince Angelo to cancel your jumps for a few months. Take a vacation, or a sabbatical—whatever you have to do.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Katherine said as she started buttoning up the dress. “I don’t run CHRONOS—Angelo doesn’t even run CHRONOS. And I can’t control other people’s actions, only my own. Believe me. I’ve tried a few times.”
She was clearly thinking of Saul. I rifled through my memory, trying to dredge up the dates. When had she become suspicious of Saul?
“I know that, Katherine, but I also know you’re a very resourceful lady. You’ll think of something.” She finished the last button and I turned to face her.
“And… the concerns that you’ve had? That maybe Saul is not sticking to protocol as closely as he should? About his friends at the Objectivist Club? Check his bag when he returns from Boston. But—you can’t confront him about any of this until April 26th. There will be an argument. You need to leave a message to let Angelo and Richard in on your concerns at that point. And you must be scheduled to take the jump the next day—on the 27th.”
Her expression grew increasingly skeptical as I added each new complication to the plan. Katherine was a skilled actor—she had to be in her line of work—but could she really pull all of this off? And if she didn’t, if she never made the jump to 1969? What would I find when I got back? Or would I even get back to my own time?
“Oh, and um… you’re pregnant,” I added with an apologetic smile as I sat on the bed and began to squeeze my feet into the boots. “You probably don’t know that yet, because it happened after the New Year’s Eve party.”
Katherine looked a bit uncomfortable at the mention of that night, and I focused on the shoes again as an excuse to look away.
“You can’t tell Saul about the pregnancy,” I said. “Not until you know how he reacts to you finding… what you find in his luggage.”
My fingers slipped on the buttons of the shoe and I cursed softly.
“But you already know how he reacts,” she said, reaching up to pull a pin from the back of her hair. She bent the hairpin in two places with a quick twist of the hand and gave me the result—a makeshift buttonhook. “I’m smart enough to connect the dots. He’s not going to respond in a reasonable way. But you expect me to go back, knowing all of this, and act like everything is fine for what, nearly two months? And to go through with an unplanned pregnancy that I could easily terminate at this stage?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, bending down to finish the shoes. “I know this is asking a lot. But if you can’t find a way to make this happen, exactly as I’ve said, I’m pretty sure that history is going to be rewritten on a grand scale. And, without giving too much away, you will not approve of the rewrite.”
“I don’t approve of any changes to the timeline,” she said, pressing her lips firmly together as she retrieved my bonnet from the cane-backed chair next to the fake window. “That’s what makes it difficult to believe what you’re saying.”
“Well, you’ve made an exception this time. At least, the Katherine that I know made an exception,” I said, holding her eyes with a steady gaze. “In fact, she’s spent most of the past twenty years trying to orchestrate this exception—even going so far as to arrange my parents’ meeting on the off chance they’d produce me. And unless you follow her lead, millions—no, let’s be honest, it’s probably billions—of people are going to die well before their appointed time.”
A long stare later, she let out a shaky breath. “Well, if that’s the case, granddaughter, I guess we’d better go.”
21
I really think we would have made it out of the hotel unnoticed if Kiernan had just stayed put on the sidewalk like Katherine had told him. Or if we hadn’t taken a wrong turn at the second corridor, which turned out to be one of the blind hallways Holmes had thrown into the floor plan just for grins and giggles. If either of those things hadn’t happened, Holmes would still have been in the office on the other side of the exit.
But both of those things did happen. The creditor Katherine had lured in to distract Holmes was downstairs, arguing loudly with Minnie, who was demanding that he wait for Holmes in the parlor. Holmes was on the landing between the first and second floors, holding a gun in one hand and the back of Kiernan’s shirt in the other.
“Good evening, ladies.” Judging from the pleasant smile on Holmes’s face and the humorous twinkle in his blue eyes, he might have been planning to engage us in a casual chat about the weather. “Does this young fellow belong to either of you?” he asked.
Katherine answered “No” at the exact moment that I answered “Yes.”
“He’s my assistant,” I said, giving Katherine an angry glance. “I’m a reporter covering the fair for the Rochester Worker’s Gazette. Your wife told me that you were kind enough to bring me back here when I fainted on the Midway. Thank you.”
“Good,” Holmes said. “That’s exactly what he told me.”
Even though I’m not a big fan of droopy mustaches, I could see why Holmes had found it easy to charm women. His eyes were almost hypnotic, and there were friendly crinkles—smile lines, my dad called them—around the edges.
I pulled my gaze away from Holmes to glance down at Kiernan. His face was pale and his dark eyes were wide and anxious. He mouthed the words “I’m sorry” silently, and I shook my head and gave him a look of sympathy. This wasn’t his fault.
Holmes was still smiling when I looked up. He nodded toward Katherine. “And who might this good lady be?”
“My mother,” I said. “She’s traveling with me.”
Katherine took her cue and stepped forward slightly, apparently deciding, as I had, that our best chance was to act as though the otherwise pleasant man on the landing wasn’t holding a pistol. “Yes, sir,” she said. “You have our deepest gratitude. I don’t know what might have happened to my daughter if you hadn’t…”
“No trouble at all, madam. In fact, it was my very real pleasure. Now if you and your ‘daughter’ wouldn’t mind taking a few steps back?” He gestured with the gun and we backed up silently. He then reached down and hefted Kiernan under his arm, carrying him up the stairs to the second floor where we stood.
“I’d be delighted to stand here and chat with you lovely ladies,” Holmes said as he reached the top step, “but I’ve had to leave my… wife to handle a rather distraught business associate and she’s really not very good at these types of situations. So I’m
going to ask you to return to your room, and we’ll continue this discussion at our leisure later this evening.”
He motioned again with the gun, and Katherine and I began to back toward the corridor.
“I think we’ll move much more quickly if you turn around,” he said.
We hesitated briefly, then reversed course, retracing our steps down the hallway. A few turns later, we were again in front of the door with the bolt on the outside.
Holmes tossed Kiernan at my feet as if he were a sack of potatoes and then held the door open as we filed inside.
“Please make yourselves comfortable. I promise I’ll return just as quickly as I can.”
Still smiling, he closed the door and slammed the bolt.
The tiny bit of daylight that had shown through the small window earlier was now gone. I could feel Kiernan’s small body shaking next to me, but I couldn’t tell in the dark whether he was crying. I knelt down on the floor and pulled him toward me, as much for my own comfort as his.
“I’m sorry, Miss Kate,” he said. “I shoulda stayed in the alley.”
Katherine gave a little huff as she sat on the bed, making it clear that he’d get no argument from her on that point.
“No, Kiernan,” I said firmly, giving Katherine a dirty look, even though I knew she couldn’t see it. “You were amazing—I can’t believe you managed to grab my things right under Holmes’s nose and bring help. But how did you find Katherine? I don’t even think I’d have recognized her.”
He shrugged. “It’s just disguises. You get used to ’em on the Midway. She walks the same an’ sounds the same. I seen her aroun’ lotsa times this year. An’ she always had on a bracelet like the one you’re wearin’. The one you said was your special sign.”
“You’re incredibly observant for an eight-year-old,” I said. “Are sure you aren’t a grown-up in disguise?”
It was a lame attempt at humor, but he obliged me with a little laugh. I gave him a big hug and kiss on the forehead. “You saved my life, you know.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to that conclusion,” Katherine said, “given our current predicament.”
She then removed something from the pocket of her skirt. The glowing interface of a CHRONOS diary popped up a few seconds after she opened it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m calling HQ for an emergency extraction. They can come in through the third-floor stable point and—”
“No,” I said, snatching the diary.
“Do you have any better ideas?” she countered, attempting to grab the diary back from me. “Holmes will return eventually and I don’t think he’s planning an ice-cream social for the evening’s entertainment.”
“I told you no one at CHRONOS can know about this, Katherine. Have you thought about what happens to me if you pull in HQ? Or to Kiernan? Do you think CHRONOS will be willing to let him go, no questions asked, given what he’s seen and heard?”
“He’s only seen me open a diary, Kate, and heard a conversation that he doesn’t understand in the slightest. And if you’d shut up and hand the book back to me, we can end that conversation so that he—”
“It’s not the firs’ time I seen one of those things, Miss Kate,” Kiernan interrupted. “It’s like the one of me dad’s, the thing I used to send a message to—”
I yanked his arm a bit and he took the hint, but it was too late. Katherine reached into the handbag and pulled out the CHRONOS key I’d been wearing earlier. The glow from the key lit the room with pale blue and I mentally kicked myself for not thinking of using it as a flashlight earlier.
“What color is this?” Katherine asked, holding the medallion close to Kiernan’s face.
“I canna really see it in the dark, ma’am,” he answered, glancing up nervously at me.
Katherine’s eyebrow shot up. “You’re a smooth little liar, kid, but you’re not fooling me.” She grabbed his free hand and pressed it against the center of the medallion. The display wasn’t clear—it was really little more than static, with the occasional visible word or button, but it provided her with the answer she needed.
“How?” she asked me. “How is he able to do that? They don’t even start training kids this young.”
“I can’t really tell you that,” I said. “It’s part of what we’re trying to correct.”
That was a blatant lie and I hoped that my poker face was better than Kiernan’s, at least in the dim light. A truthful response would have been that I was asking her to go back and start the very chain of events that would lead to Kiernan, myself, and who knew how many others being able to activate that equipment. But that chain of events was the one that I knew and the only one that seemed to promise any hope, however small, of stopping the Cyrists.
“So what do you suggest, Kate?” she asked, tucking the medallion back inside her dress. “I don’t think there’s any way out of this room, and our only other option is to sit here and wait for Holmes to return. It would be three against one, but one of us is pretty small, and I think the gun puts the odds slightly in his favor.”
“There is a way for one of us to get out of here,” I said. “And it only takes one person to open that bolt and get us all out. Your return trip may be restricted to the stable point on the Wooded Island, but mine isn’t. I can jump to any stable point from here. Didn’t you say there’s one on the third floor?”
“Yes, but how can you—”
“I can’t explain any further, Katherine.” It was, admittedly, a bit of a kick to be the one restricting her knowledge on a need-to-know basis, but we really didn’t have the time for a detailed discussion on the matter. And each bit of information I gave her was another string that she’d be tempted to pull, potentially unraveling the events that needed to transpire over the next few months.
“I only familiarized myself with the stable points inside the fair and near the entrances,” I said, removing my CHRONOS key from the inner pocket and handing it to her. “I knew there were others, but—well, I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. If you can pull the location up on the key so that I can see it and lock it in, I should be able to make the jump and get back here in a couple of minutes. I’m just not sure how we’re going to get out the front door with both Holmes and Minnie lurking at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Miss Kate?” Kiernan said, tugging my arm. “Maybe we don’ hafta take the stairs. Maybe we could take the ladder?”
“What ladder? There’s a fire escape?” I hadn’t even considered that possibility—I mean, really, what homicidal maniac would include fire escapes in the design plan for his torture castle?
“I don’ know if you’d call it a fire escape, but there’s a ladder from a window on the top floor, goin’ down to the roof of the buildin’ next door. I saw it when I was waitin’ all that time in the alley. Instead of goin’ home.”
I couldn’t help but grin at the note of sarcasm in his voice on the last sentence. If Katherine noticed, however, she didn’t let on. She just reached over and took my hand, placing the activated medallion in my palm.
“The kid and I will put our heads together while you’re gone,” she said, “and try to see if we can figure out which window is most likely to lead to the ladder.”
Positioning herself so that we could both see the interface clearly, she visually sorted through the various categories and then halted when a dark space came into view.
“Are you sure that’s it?” I asked. “It’s totally black.”
“Yes,” she answered a bit testily. “It’s a linen closet. And it is nighttime. What do you expect?”
“I’m just not sure how you can tell this closet from some of the other dark closets you zoomed past. I could end up in Des Moines.”
“I’ve never been to Des Moines. I’ve been here, however. Your first left and then your second left should get you from the closet to the staircase. And from there, you just need to retrace our steps back to this room.”
I nodded a
nd positioned my fingers over the controls, replacing hers. The display wavered for a moment and then sputtered out.
Katherine snorted in annoyance and pulled it up again. “Focus this time, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “I like you better as an old lady. You need time to mellow.” It was true, but I reminded myself that it had been a pretty stressful day for her as well. She’d just learned she was pregnant and that the father probably wasn’t what he was pretending to be, and she was smart enough to realize that her world was about to change in major ways. That was a lot to digest, even without threats from a serial killer.
The display flickered again briefly when Katherine moved her fingers to make way for mine, but I was able to pull the image back.
“Okay. I’ve got it. Thanks, Katherine.
“Kiernan,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on the display, “I’ll be right back. Only a couple of minutes. Katherine’s really not as nasty as she seems.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “Be careful, Miss Kate.”
“And Katherine?” I added in a lower voice. “If something happens, I’m trusting that you’ll get him out of here. I know for a fact that he is not meant to meet his end in this hotel. You’ll tell CHRONOS he saw nothing and he knows nothing.”
“My God, Kate. What do you think I am?” she hissed. “The kid has been a major pain in my backside today, but I wouldn’t leave him with that monster.”
“So I have your word on that? You’ll do everything you can to get him to safety if I don’t make it back?”
“You’d better make it back, since you seem so convinced that the fate of the world depends on it. But yes—you have my word. Would you just go?”
I focused on the very middle of the black rectangle that Katherine claimed was the third-floor linen closet and blinked.
I’m not a fan of small, dark spaces, so I was relieved that the arc of blue light from the medallion illuminated most of the closet. Apparently CHRONOS hired only very thin historians, however, because the stable point was a tight fit even for my slight frame. My shoulder collided with a shelf as I turned, tumbling a large stack of linens to the floor. The stench of chemicals and something more earthy and pungent underneath assaulted my nose.
