Timebound

by Rysa Walker

  The acid was pure flame, scorching my neck and scalp. I screamed—there was no way to avoid it even though it gave away my location. I held my breath, waiting for the shot, but I heard a different loud noise instead. It sounded like he had tripped over the cot, but he was soon on his feet again, moving toward me.

  He was just playing it conservatively, I thought—with only one bullet he wanted to be certain of his target. I crawled along the floor as quickly as I could, away from him, back toward the linen closet, trying to keep from whimpering as each tiny movement worsened the blazing pain on the side of my head.

  The smell of smoke was growing stronger, battling with the stench from the decomposed body just ahead. Holmes had only one escape route from the fire—the window. With any luck, he would think that was my only way out as well and maybe, just maybe, leave me to my presumed fate in a burning building. If I could keep moving and avoid slipping into shock, however, all I had to do was get out of this room and find a spot where I could concentrate and use the CHRONOS key.

  The doorway had to be close. I struggled to my feet so that I could move faster. I was still seeing the little blue stars, so I leaned against the wall to steady myself before taking a step. I couldn’t see Holmes, but I heard movement from behind me.

  My hand finally found the opening in the wall and I lowered my head to step through and enter the tiny linen closet. I shoved open the door to the hallway and sucked in a mouthful of air—smoky, but at least without the underlying stench of decaying flesh. Running as fast as I could in the general direction of the stairwell, I whipped around one corner a bit too fast and caught the heel of my stupid boot in the hem of my skirt. The rip echoed through the hallway—the auditory equivalent of a big red arrow pointing Holmes in my direction.

  I ducked into the third corridor on the right and then darted across the hallway, taking a left at the next intersection. Hopefully, the doctor would assume that I’d taken the quicker, easier turn to the right. He had stopped to light a lantern—I could see it casting shadows against the walls as he ran.

  At the third room down, I jiggled the knob on the off chance that it had been left unlocked. No luck. The footsteps grew louder and I pulled myself as close to the door as possible. Taking a deep breath, I pressed my fingers to the center of the medallion.

  I didn’t think there was time to pull up a location and lock in the date—I was just going to pick a spot and blink. I remembered Connor’s caution about landing in the middle of a highway, but if the other choice was a mass murderer armed with acid and a gun, a possible collision with a semitruck sounded like a bargain. I tried to steady my hands so that I could focus and pull up the display, but it was hard to concentrate. The display wavered and then disappeared.

  As I prepared to try again, I saw a faint light from the corner of my eye. The doctor turned briefly into the right corridor—then the lantern swung around and he headed straight toward me.

  And then the door behind me opened and I fell backward into the room. A large hand covered my mouth, trapping the scream before it could escape my lips. Another hand, holding a white folded cloth, moved toward me.

  23

  The man yanked me to the right of the doorway. The white cloth was sopping wet and he pressed it against the side of my face, his arms holding me close against his body.

  “Kate!” It took a moment for the familiar voice, soft but urgent in my ear, to cut through my panic. I looked up into the man’s face. It appeared strange in the blue light from our medallions, but the dark, worried eyes were the same ones that I’d stared down into only a few minutes earlier.

  “Kiernan? But how—”

  “Kate, please. You have to focus. I’ve pulled up a stable point, love.” The display showed a small, dimly lit room with blankets in the corner. “Just slide your fingers over it and go. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”

  I don’t know if it was his voice or just the knowledge that I wasn’t alone, but amazingly, my hands steadied as I reached for the CHRONOS key. It flickered only the tiniest bit and then it was clear. I blinked and pulled in a huge lungful of fresh, smoke-free air, before I collapsed onto the dirt floor.

  I faded in and out of consciousness for a while. Kiernan’s voice would pull me to the surface for a few moments before I slipped back under. The clearest memory I have was the sensation of water being poured in a steady stream on my neck. It hurt, but the pain was far worse when the water stopped. He forced me to sit up at one point, his hands gentle, and made me swallow a few capsules. My eyes closed again and I slipped back into the fog.

  It was daylight when I fully woke. Kiernan’s sleeping face was the first thing that I saw, his long dark hair damp against his skin. He was sitting with his back against the corner of the cabin. I was wrapped in blankets, my head resting on his thigh, his fingers laced through my own. The smell of smoke was strong and pungent in his clothing. I pulled my free hand up to the right side of my neck and felt a large swath of gauze, held in place by medical tape. Several bottles and containers of ointment were scattered around us and the remnants of a fire were smoldering in the fireplace. My green dress lay in a crumpled heap, with the damp dirt floor showing through the numerous spots the acid had dissolved.

  My body was stiff and I needed to readjust my position. I moved slowly, reluctant to wake Kiernan, but his eyes flashed open at once. “Kate? Are you all right?”

  I tried to nod, but that wasn’t a pain-free option, so I stopped and gave him a weak smile. “Yes. It hurts, but I’m okay. This is the cabin—on the Wooded Island, right? But when are we?”

  “Around 5 A.M., I think—it’s just the next day,” he answered. “There’s no one here—there won’t be many people here at all today. The closing ceremonies were canceled because of the mayor’s assassination. And it was easier for me to set everything up here. I’m—it takes a lot out of me to jump long distances. Little jumps are easier, but I’ve been making a lot of them lately—I didn’t want you to be too far away, just in case I had to walk here to reach you.”

  “Holmes? And Katherine, did she…?”

  “Holmes escaped, just as he was supposed to. He’s probably on the train to Colorado today. The fire wasn’t supposed to happen for a few more weeks, but I don’t think it will change anything with his eventual capture and trial. And yes, Katherine and I made it to the stable point. I took her by a back route and we didn’t run into any problems.”

  I sighed, relieved to know that at least that much of the plan had succeeded. “Tell me how you knew, Kiernan. Why did you come back? How did you know to be in that room?”

  He stared into my eyes for several moments before he spoke. “It took me a long time to put the pieces together, Kate. You were always there, at the back of my mind year after year, but I never knew for certain whether you made it out of the hotel. I went back that night, after taking Katherine to the Wooded Island, and the place was in full blaze—the firefighters said there couldn’t be anyone alive inside. There wasn’t anything I could do but go home.

  “I did as you told me. I never removed the medallion. I even kept my hand on it when I bathed. We moved back to the Cyrist farm—there really weren’t many options once my mother took ill. I let them teach me to use to the CHRONOS key. I’m not as good with it as many of the others, but that never mattered much to Prudence,” he added with a bitter laugh, “and she generally determined who would be given privileges.”

  “She didn’t—” I broke off, hesitant to say what I was thinking. “You were so young.”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. She wasn’t that much older than me most of the times she came to the farm. About your age, maybe, the first time I saw her as a young woman. I was only sixteen—it’s very hard to say no to a willing girl at sixteen, Kate.”

  “Didn’t you know that she was—well, that you knew her when she was older? And when you were younger…” I shook my head and then winced as the bandages shifted against the burn. “I mean, you seemed convinced tha
t she had something to do with your dad.”

  “Yeah… but that was Pru when she was older, y’know? I don’t know what she did later—I still don’t have any proof one way or the other—but none of that had happened for her when she was eighteen.”

  “Christ, that makes my head hurt,” I said. “It doesn’t make you crazy? Thinking of an older Prudence knowing you when you were younger and then the two of you, together as teenagers?”

  “I keep forgetting that you’re—how do you say it—a ‘newbie’?” Kiernan said with a teasing grin. “You’ll get used to the twists and turns soon enough. At eighteen, Pru was just a confused kid, not entirely sure of what Saul wanted her to do or of her place in all of this. She wasn’t a bad person, then, from what I could tell. After a while, I decided it wasn’t fair to judge her on the basis of something she wasn’t—or at least wasn’t yet. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I understand, but I can’t say it makes any sense at all. None of this does.”

  “I’m not proud of that relationship,” he said. “I’m not sure I would say that I used Pru—at least not any more than she used me—but my feelings were complicated by my past. I mean, if I never looked at her eyes when we… well, she reminded me of you. I was just a kid when we were here together, but I never forgot you, Kate.” He paused for a moment, tracing my lower lip ever so softly with his finger, and a shiver ran all the way through my body. No, Kate, I thought, no, no, no. You’re exhausted and grateful and… yes, damn it, incredibly attracted to him. But no.

  “Then, a year later when I was seventeen, you were there, Kate—not you, not this you, but a different Kate. My Kate. A little older than you are now—so beautiful, so intent on convincing me to fight the Cyrists. We were so much in love, Kate, but you had no memory of an eight-year-old boy, no memory of the Expo. I could never understand that.

  “And now, even though I understand why, it’s hard to imagine a Kate who doesn’t remember that year we spent together. I think you were in Boston 1905 more than you were in your own time and place. It’s a miracle you didn’t collapse from exhaustion—you’d tell Katherine you were going downstairs for coffee and then jump back to spend all day with me, popping back in ten seconds after you left. They were always so much easier on you, the jumps. They… drain me, and we had to be careful to hide things from Prudence.”

  “You were still… with Prudence?” I asked, wincing a bit as I pushed myself up to sitting. I tried to keep the totally irrational note of jealousy out of my voice, but the pleased little smile on Kiernan’s face told me that I had failed.

  “No, Katie. Never again, not that way. Not after I found you.” He sat in front of me and took my hands in his.

  “Pru was madder’n hell when she found out, and that’s when she swiped Dad’s key. Well, not her directly, it took three of her Cyrist goons to get it off me, but they had no idea about the spare you gave me. Pru gave the key back a few months later after they’d made the changes, and I played along—she’s never realized that I know the whole truth.

  “But then… you stopped coming,” he said. “And I finally realized that wherever you were, you hadn’t been protected by a key. Something had changed. The entire resistance we were trying to put together had never been started. I just, well—sort of lay low, waiting. They teamed me up with Simon to watch you—it was Pru’s idea of a little joke, I guess, to put me so close since she thought I had no memory of you and you wouldn’t know me from Adam.”

  I shivered, pulling the blanket tighter, and tried to sort out all that had happened. “I’m not so sure any of this was her idea, Kiernan. Or if she was in on it at the beginning, she changed her mind.” I gave him a brief rundown of my conversation with Prudence and her belief that killing Katherine was a power play designed to get her out of the way.

  Kiernan chuckled. “She finally put two and two together, I guess. I don’t know that he was planning that specifically—but Saul doesn’t tend to think that the normal rules of morality should apply to him. And she’s been pushing to run things her way for some time now. He may well have decided she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Oh, sure. Several times.” Kiernan helped me turn around to lean my back against the cabin wall and then poured a bit of water into a glass from a large jug. He shook two very modern-looking pills into his hand and gave them to me.

  “Pru was always secretive about our destination—she’d lock in the coordinates on my key without giving me any idea of where or when—but Saul often summons the people he and Pru consider part of the ‘inner circle’ to meet with him. I doubt I’ll be invited again, however. He doesn’t know about this—that I helped you get away from Holmes—but he does know that I warned you that day on the subway.”

  I remembered Simon’s comment about Kiernan’s interference. “They’re angry, aren’t they? They’ll be looking for you.”

  He shrugged. “Probably. But I’m good at fading into the background. They’ll have some idea of when I am, but not where.”

  “I’m sorry, Kiernan. You’re in all of this because you chose to help me.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment and pulled in a deep breath before looking back at me. “It wasn’t a choice, Kate. There was never a choice. When I saw you on the train that first day, the day you were trying to destroy the diary?”

  “I wasn’t trying to destroy it,” I said. “Just testing it to see what it was.”

  He smiled, but his eyes were as sad as they’d been that day on the Metro. “I knew before we arrived on that train,” he said, a tiny break in his voice, “that you were different. I knew everything about my Kate. Hell, I knew her soul. She knew mine. No secrets. And when you looked at me and there was nothing in your eyes… you didn’t know me. That life had never happened and you weren’t my Kate—but you were still Kate. I still… loved you. I had to find a way to protect you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking again about Trey. The next time I saw him he would still be Trey, but he wouldn’t be my Trey. No matter what happened between us in the future, I would never see that Trey again. “I do understand. I’m so sorry, Kiernan.”

  He sighed and shifted to sit beside me against the wall, putting his arm around me very carefully to avoid hurting me. “But here’s the real kicker,” he said. “I didn’t get the full irony until I learned about the plot against Katherine. You are also my Kate, my first Kate—the girl with the funny painted toes who gave me the medallion, who was willing to risk her life to be certain that an eight-year-old boy got out of that hotel. And I realized then that I really didn’t know what had happened that night—and that I had to find out.”

  “So that’s why you were there tonight? Watching?”

  Kiernan clenched his jaw. He looked exhausted—there were dark circles under his eyes and he’d clearly skipped the razor for at least a few days. Scruff looked unbelievably good on him, and I fought the urge to run my fingers along the side of his face.

  “I’ve been to that hotel dozens of times, Kate. I’ve spent every possible minute in that hellhole for the past month. I’ve watched from every position, every angle, every vantage point.” His arm tightened around me. “I came so close to just killing Holmes, just strangling him there in the dark and tossing him down one of those chutes straight into the lime pit in the basement, just like he’d done with so many women. But you—my other you—were adamant that we could only change the bits of history that Saul and the Cyrists had disrupted. Holmes’s trial—that was worldwide. What kind of ripples would it cause if I killed him?

  “And there were only a few seconds where I could act,” he continued. “If I made a wrong move, I couldn’t take it back—all I could do was add on. I mean, if I tripped him that first second and the gun went off and shot you, I couldn’t undo that, aside from coming back earlier and stopping myself from tripping him. I also couldn’t risk interfering until Katherine was fully out of the wi
ndow.”

  He let out a long, slow breath and closed his eyes. “I watched you die over and over again, Kate. I watched him shoot you point blank fourteen times before I could see any way to change it.”

  “The lights!” I said, sitting up fully. “Oh my God—that was you? I thought… my head—I hit it really hard when I fell. I thought that’s why I was seeing little blue flashes. But it was you!”

  He nodded. “I finally did trip him, to slow him down, but he had the acid—I thought at first that he was getting it from the bottles near the cots against the wall. I was pretty close to one of those cots and I think he’d used acid on the woman who died there. But he had the bottle in his coat pocket. I thought it was the sound of his foot against the glass that reminded him he was carrying it—I even removed the bottles once, to see—but I guess it was just being there, where he’d used it once before that triggered the memory. I had to time it just right. The first four times I tripped him you were still facing forward. The acid caught you full in the face; two of the times your eyes were open.”

  I flinched, remembering the scorching pain when the acid hit my neck and realized how very much worse it could have been.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Part of me said to keep trying until I got it entirely right and you left there without injury, but… I couldn’t keep going. I’m pretty sure you’ll have a scar on your neck, but I don’t think it will be very bad. I’ve put an advanced hydrogel on the burn. I put three more tubes in your bag.”

  “My bag!” I said, looking around. “I didn’t…”

  “No,” he said, reaching over to his right. “But I did. You dropped it when you fell. The hydrogel inside is from 2038, so you won’t get anything nearly as good in your time. I just wish your hair had been down—it would have shielded you a bit more.”