by Jen Greyson
I jerk upright.
“Did you know?” I rub my forehead and stand, pacing the room. “Holy shit, Nikola. Did you know that she’d gone missing?” Back and forth I cross the room, my boots rubbing against the carpet. I yank open the closet to change while I’m here and I still.
My duffle’s in the bottom. I squeeze my eyes shut, too keyed to remember when I could have brought it, but I must have dragged it with me before Tiana and I went to the warehouse. The days are a blur.
Did I remember it right? I yank the zipper and pull out my jeans. The paper’s still there. Hurrying, I slip into new clothes and flatten the paper. Nikola’s writing pierces my heart and I trace each letter. “What does it mean?”
I screwed up the name of the diner but got the rest right. January 6, 2:00 p.m., Misters Gehlen and Skorzeni, Secret Service, Patrina Diner.
I walk into Tiana’s room and sit down at her desk. Her perfume and spearmint bubble gum hang in the air.
“Help me.” I take one of her pens from the Transformers plastic cup on the corner, doodle the names, the dates, the abbreviations. After a few minutes, my page is a mess. Nothing jumps out.
I rewrite the dates and add dashes, turning them into a line of numbers that resembles a combination.
I underline Tesla’s use of Misters instead of the abbreviation. That seems like an oddity, even for him. He doesn’t do things on accident. Ever.
I abbreviate the name of the meeting place. Now I’m left with a short list:
01-06-19-43-14-00
MGS, SS
PD
A list of nothing.
My elbow bumps Tiana’s computer and it flashes to life, so I type in the details and pause straining to listen for the phone. I should have grabbed the cordless out of Papi’s office so I can answer Brandt’s call.
First, I want to play out this hunch. A quick internet search yields nothing for the sequence of numbers. A few places outside Paris, but nothing that jumps out. I move onto the next one. Again, it’s a fail. The SS bothers me. Isn’t that how they name ships? My thoughts flutter to that big door in his underwater warehouse, the watertight seal, the spinning wheel locking it closed, just like a submarine ship. S. S. Could it be backward? Would he deliberately have mixed it up hoping I’d figure it out? That’s one hell of a gamble. And what if it sends me in the wrong direction?
I type in SS MGS and hit enter.
CHAPTER 24
PENYA.
DNA SEQUENCING.
The details in the folder.
She’s got it.
Now she just needs Tiana to catch up to where Evy was.
Waiting is impossible.
CHAPTER 25
“YOU’VE GOT TO be kidding me.” I trace my finger down the monitor, skimming the information. SS, MGS is an abbreviation for sire-maternal grandsire. I have no idea what that means. Equations and explanations—variances and selections—fill the page. This has to be a miss. It’s all about DNA and genetics and how traits get passed—
“Oh shit.” I squeeze my eyes shut.
I could be onto something, but this isn’t what he wrote down. He didn’t write down SS MGS. He wrote it the other way around. He chose to write it in a way that would yield nothing.
I lean back in the chair and link my hands on top of my head. The page of gibberish mocks me.
This means nothing. Except to someone like me who’s the product of a long line of genetics.
Only one person would know if I’m on the right track.
I have to find my way back to Nikola.
CHAPTER 26
EVERY TIME PEÑA was in his lab and came to see Evie she left a secret. The secrets that Constantine is talking about. She talked about papers that she found. Have her remember all of that. She and Iliff have to work through that. Evie has to ask him questions. What would this have been for question mark what were you guys working on? What was sheet after? That’s the only way were going to find Tiana. Is if we can think about if we can reconstruct what she wanted and whether or not she got it.
Far more likely that she did not accomplish what she wanted,” Constantine says. “It is the enemy who has failed who is stronger than any who have succeeded. She will be hungry from the defeat.” He drags his fingers down the back of my arm curling them around my elbow. “Your return to your house that night prevented her from accomplishing something. What was she after? What did you have in your house that night that she wanted?”
I picture the trunks, the massive piles of hastily gathered papers that were in those trunks, teslas own handwriting. She was headed for them when I stopped her. But was that what she was after? Did she know Tiana had been there with me? When we all left Tesla’s warehouse was Peña going after the papers or my sister? And which answer terrified me more? If Evie knows it disappoints that Peña and Iliff worked for Tesla they can talk that through. “What were you guys working on? Were there things he wouldn’t let her be a part of?” I know how selective he was about allowing people into his space. Especially at the ends. I rub my four head and try to erase the pounding starting behind my right I. “Tesla came to see you, didn’t he? Not the other way around.” I look up at Ellis, finally sorting through the puzzle. “I always thought it was the other way around. I always thought you came back to see him. They you guys worked with him in his lab. But that wasn’t it, was it?” My voice is rising. Rising high. The panic is setting in.
The men are still. Deathly still. “Tesla wanted our portion of his research to remain separate from the other. He knew, even then that his work had come to early for the people of his time. It’s why he wanted you to get those people papers to Camarillo.”
“In your time.” The realization falls out of me and my knees buckle. I handed Peña everything she needed. I let her play me. “She knew.” I shake my head at my own foolishness. “She knew that if she told me to take the papers to camera area I wouldn’t do it. But by forbidding me. By telling me that I couldn’t. That no one had ever traveled to the future, she guaranteed that I would test it. That I would push the limits, unsatisfied with anything being impossible.” I M such a fool.
“Peña never told me house she solved the glitch in the system. The one that had eluded me. The one I was so close to solving for so long. I came in one day in she and Renée had it. They’d worked all night they said.” I shake my head in disbelief. We’ve all played right into her hands. Camarillo probably wasn’t even a really is daughter. Maybe. Maybe she was. Maybe we do all fit together for a reason. Maybe I did have to save Constantine’s daughter. I look at him and I see the question on his face as well. I rest my palm against his cheek. “For that I’m glad. I am so glad to have spared you a really is death. He turns his lips into my palm and kisses it there are still no words for that moment in time. One decision that will stand for always. Whatever else Peña has given me, both the heart ache and the stress and the near death experiences, she has given me the gift of this man’s daughter. His grandchildren, the missing lines that used to be there. The journal pages filled with grief. For that, I will kill her swiftly instead of making it drag out.
CHAPTER 27
FLIP TO PENYA.
She wants to teach Tiana.
Take Ada Lovelace out of it. Why london? (Doesn’t have to be london. That could easily have been Paris, right?) Do you need to keep any of those scenes???
Penya has all the time in the world to teach Tiana.
Tiana trusts her 100% doesn’t think she’s in any danger. Does she ask about Evy and her dad?
Penya lies to her.
CHAPTER 28
CREATE A DIFFERENT way to find Penya.
Could still be in London.
“To Penya, science stood as the ultimate pillar.
CHAPTER 29
ILIF LEAVES.
HE’S going to find Tiana
With papi’s help.
I hate waiting.
Let’s go train.
While they walk, they talk. (7900 words in here —
ZERO action.)
“I don’t know who to trust. So much has happened.”
“What do you know to be truth?” Constantine asks. “Start there.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Nothing.”
“That is not truth. Strip away the emotion. Tell me the facts as if I were a runner reporting on engagements of war. What would you relay to your commander?”
Simple. Always simple with him. “Okay.” I absently pick up a drumstick sized branch and tap it against my thigh while I let the thoughts and memories flow freely. “About this time?”
“Start at the beginning.”
“…Rider.” Penya’s very first command to me what seems like a lifetime ago. Memories of a death camp and bodies swarm into my mind’s eye. “I met Penya the first time in a place filled with horror. Bodies everywhere. Death, everywhere. Destruction as far as I could see. I know neither the time or place. She told me it was Spain.” My boot kicks another the same shape and length. I pick it up and get lost in the motion of the sticks, letting them twirl between my fingers. It feels like forever since I’ve touched either sticks or my drums. Such an out of place thought for the moment, but I let it come and go without judgement letting it crisscross the other thoughts.
What would I report about my time as a lightning rider?
“Papi and I found the Lightning Rider stuff, accidentally landing me in 1927’s Spain. I met Penya again.”
Constantine doesn’t comment.
“I met Penya.”
“Critical details,” he says. “Runners are not know for their ability to carry long lists. What is most important?”
None of them has been accidental.
Penya told her to kill Viriato (to keep Ilif from destroying Spain)
Penya told her to save Aurelia.
Ilif told her to get Tesla’s patents.
But Ilif told her that SHE determines who to save, not the lightning.
But once she’s IN an alteration, she must see it through.
Jesus, they’ve manipulated me from the very beginning.
What of your father’s alterations?
“I don’t know. He went to New York City, um, that’s not close to our house. It’s in the Americas, uh, across the ocean.” I wave my hand, trying to explain things we don’t have time for. “It’s on the other side of the world.”
“Truth?” Constantine asks, shocked.
“You’ve been there. I mean, to Papi’s, not New York. Did you think it was closer?”
“It had not occurred to me that an ocean stood between here and there.”
“We’ll get to that later. You’d love planes.” I have so much to show him. One day. First we have to sort all this out.
CHAPTER 30
WE’RE FUCKED.
THERE has to be a better way to do this. I don’t want to spend months figuring this out. There’s too much danger.
What of your scientist?
“Ilif?”
He shakes his head. “You told me of another.”
“Tesla?” My voice catches. “He isn’t born yet.”
Constantine doesn’t bother to say anything, but he cuts me that exasperated look that begs me to look beyond what’s in front of me. I don’t have time for that look. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Why not go see him?”
“I can’t.”
“Why? You came to see me while you were in his alteration? Why not go see him while you’re in this one?”
I blink and take a step back. Holy shit. “I—do you… Wow.” What if that were possible? I didn’t know about Tesla during my first one. I mean, Ilif had mentioned him, but only peripherally and I wouldn’t have thought to go. But now… I pace.
Constantine waits, contented that he, like always, has given me a different lens to look through.
“Think. Think of comments Penya made that you dismissed. What lies and half-truths did she commit while she was “locked up” in Ilif’s lab? Were there things Ilif told you that you overlooked because you were in a rush?”
I look away.
He steps closer and lowers his voice. His fingers curl around my elbows. “You think I know nothing of your magic, but I know you. I know what it is to have a warriors’ heart. I know of wanting so badly to charge into the fight that I overlook the obvious, toss out clues presented to me well in advance of their connection. I may know of war, of bloodshed, of a time far different than yours, but I do know of men, of secrets, of strategy. People will always tell you what you need to know.”
I lift my gaze and let the intensity of him seep into me.
“If you’ll quiet long enough to listen.”
What are the clues:
Penya’s
Try to go see Tesla.
Doesn’t work. (Becasue she’s trying to arc to him)
I press my fingers into my temples. “They’ve both told me so much, but what of the lies? How will I figure out what I can trust?”
Has to try again.
They’re in Egypt. There’s danger. C fights them off.
“Get us out of here!”
Arc to his place. Crash to the dirt. He rolls her on top of him, takes an elbow to the gut. Grunts. Sorry.
“How did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
He’s her bookmark in time.
My brain is swimming with threads of conversations, lies and truths mingling together with no way to tell them apart.
I look around, at this place that is my second home, this man who is my bookmark in time, and I wonder how that changes now that we’re together. If I’m taking my bookmark with me, can I break the rules and manipulate when I can arc?
First, I need to clear my head so I can figure out where.
“Training field?” I ask, standing and dusting off my pants.
He grins. “That’s my girl.”
Weave this in while they fight.
He is developing new methods of travel. Aurelia’s sudden death wiped out an entire line of scientists. Ones he needed.”
So much information… I squeeze my eyes shut. Think, Evy. Ask the right questions.
“What is Ilif working on?”
Her image leans closer. “I do not know. I promise I do not. But you are strong enough to handle the answers this time. I promise you will know everything as I do.”
My lightning flickers at her praise.
“I will learn more. He leaves me for days at a time—but there may be stretches when I cannot get to you. I must go.”
“Wait!” I press forward, grinding my knees into the bamboo floorboards. “What time are you in right now—when are you?”
“I have not pinpointed an exact date. Same with our location. To say Ilif put a good deal of thought into this lab is an understatement. When I do get to wander, it is fully contained and he does not permit me beyond the building.”
“Then how are you traveling?”
“I used the tracking software to locate you and project this image, but otherwise, my physical form is captive. I also think he found a way to block certain places from arcs, starting with this one.”
I go back farther, to Ilif’s first explanations. I struggle to find the ends of threads I’ve cast aside without care or worry. He talked of machines and
We need Ilif.
“It is worth trying, no?”
I snort. “That’s your new motto on the front end of battle?”
“Avoiding battle is always the best way to win.”
Ask Ilif for answers.
She has to figure this out. (This was originally the ending.)
Tesla:
“Nikola is the only one who can fix it.”
“What?” I frown, caught off-guard. “Tesla? Why?”
Ilif shrugs. “Don’t you remember? It was his machine allowed me to travel.”
I do remember that, but so much has happened since those first declarations of how this all worked—lies, truths cloaked as lies
, testing my limits, more lies, time with Nikola—so many things impacted our lives far more than a single machine. “So?”
“Nikola was an incredibly smart man, but time travel was not his passion. He turned over several ideas he’d never patented, ones I used to tailor every bit of the program. In the beginning, your family was unique in your responsiveness, but I may have fibbed on a few details about how I stumbled across the first rider.”
“You said it was a genetic enhancement only our family had,” I scowl, trying to piece together all the other lies and facts he's given us.
“After Penya destroyed my first lab and the work on so many of my projects, Nikola’s time travel was so far removed from my own work I could immerse myself in it without the pain of memories. I worked tirelessly on it and tested hundreds of participants. Only your ancestor held the perfect DNA to work with what he’d devised—almost as if Nikola had designed it specifically for you.” (SS MGS!!) He picks up my hand and turns it over, tracing the lines of my palm. His voice is quiet. “There is much science behind how you travel. The more we learned, the more I discovered we could manipulate any event in time and force it to stand… But there is no more magic in riding than there is in the continual sunrise. Only math and science keeps them both working as we predicted—As Nikola predicted.”
