by Jana Oliver
OK, let’s try this again.
The overpowering smell of the river made Cynda’s stomach lurch. Why was she here at the edge of the Thames? She was supposed to be a short hike from the Charing Cross Hotel. She glanced down at the interface. The dial was blank. She gave the stem a twist. Still blank. A sharp shake did nothing to rectify the problem.
Her pulse began to race. What the hell is this?
Just then, she heard the creak of carriage wheels and the snort of a horse. Cautiously, she stepped back into the shadows.
The driver was heavily cloaked against the night air and kept looking around, uneasy. The carriage door swung open and a figure climbed out.
“This will do,” he said. “It’s a short haul to the river, and he doesn’t weigh much.”
He?
The voice registered. Dalton Mimes, the crazy author in the asylum, the man who’d killed Chris Stone. But what was he doing here? Cynda shrank farther back into a nook near a storage shed, worried he might spot her.
Meanwhile, another man exited the carriage. He was tall and wore a dark coat, his back to her.
Turn around.
With effort, Dalton Mimes and his companion pulled something out of the vehicle. It took her a moment to realize it was a body. As they adjusted the weight between them, she caught sight of the face. Bile rose, scorching her throat.
Chris. She was off-time again. This was the twenty-third of September, the night her lover had been murdered and his body thrown into the Thames. For some reason, she’d been brought here to witness this moment.
As they hefted his lifeless corpse, her eyes filmed with tears. She blinked to clear them.
“Let’s get it done,” the man ordered. He didn’t move like a Victorian. That puzzled her—if he were from ’058, her interface should be registering his ESR Chip. Unless he took it out. She didn’t have one, after all.
Mimes complied, and with much tugging and complaining, Chris’ body was carried to the pier and tossed into the Thames like a sack of unwanted puppies.
At the sound of the splash, Cynda’s hand dove into her pocket for the firearm, the ants inside her screaming for lethal revenge.
“It won’t bring him back,” she heard from her shoulder.
“I don’t care,” she hissed.
“It may make things worse,” Mr. Spider said.
“How could it be any worse?”
“Trust me, it can,” he nearly shouted.
The voice of her conscience had never steered her wrong. She took three deep breaths, trying to calm herself. There was no way to change the timeline now. Chris was gone. Forever.
He deserved so much better than this.
She forced herself to remove her hand from the pocket, clenching it into a quivering fist.
The cloaked man turned and she finally saw his face in the muted light. Cynda studied him intently, channeling her anger into action. He was tall, with a rigid stance. That seemed an important clue. Frantically, she rummaged in her mental filing cabinets for a name.
“That night in Wapping?” Mr. Spider suggested.
The memory surfaced. She heard the sound of a gunshot echoing off the brick warehouses and Harter Defoe collapsing, blood pouring from his chest.
Copeland. She’d called him Ramrod because of his stiff posture. He was one of the two TPB minions who’d come to collect her when she’d been hauled back to 2057 for trial. The man who’d threatened to shoot her and wounded Defoe instead. Somehow, this jerk was tied to Mimes. But why would TPB want Morrisey’s nephew dead?
“Taking the trash out,” Copeland joked, gesturing toward where Chris’ body had just splashed into the Thames. “Piece of cake.”
“You son-of-a-bitch,” she spat.
“Did you hear something?” Mimes asked, craning his head around.
Cynda froze. She didn’t sense the presence behind her until right before the hand covered her mouth, pulling her further back.
“Quiet. Don’t move.”
Fear coursed through her as her hand closed on the pistol again. She would have pulled it out if Mimes hadn’t moved closer, staring directly into her hiding place. He seemed to be looking right at her. She waited for the shout of discovery. Instead, he blinked a couple of times, then shook his head and backed off.
“Time to go,” Copeland called. The men loaded into the carriage and with a clatter of hooves the conveyance rolled away.
“They’re gone,” her companion said, releasing her. As she turned, a figure appeared out of the air. It was Defoe. Or at least someone who looked like him. With the shape-shifters, you never knew.
“How do I know you’re really you?” she asked, still edgy.
“Who else would it be? I’m the one who always saves your skin.”
Her eyes lit on the flower in his lapel. “Tell me about the rose.”
He smiled. “You said the one I was wearing didn’t have the right scent. That was when I knew you still had a working brain. Satisfied?”
She nodded. As she watched, he shifted into a distinguished gentleman, a lion’s head cane in hand. He had a white bloom around him, like he was edged in a silvery cloud. She’d seen that once before at the crazy place. The man who’d claimed to be her brother had one of those.
She decided to test a theory. “Change back to the real you.”
He looked confused. “What?”
“Just do it.”
After a quick look around, he shifted to the form she knew as Harter Defoe. The white outline vanished.
“Okay, now change back.”
He easily reverted to the Victorian gent again. As she’d expected, the white edging returned.
“I’ll be damned.”
“What are you going on about?” Defoe asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Why didn’t Mimes see me?”
“I went invisible and took you with me.”
“Neat trick.”
“It can be useful. So, what brings you here?”
“I didn’t intend to be here. Right now, my interface seems to have a mind of its own. I was supposed to go back to the night Keats was framed. I ended up on the fourth of November instead. When I tried it a second time, I was here, in September.”
“Playing their games again,” he muttered. “I landed in New York City. Couldn’t get to London no matter how I tried. Then some messenger boy handed me a ticket for a steamship, so I’ve spent the last week floating across the pond in First Class, regretting the wasted time.”
“So why are you here?” she quizzed.
“Testing a theory.” Defoe looked around again, suddenly uncomfortable. “We need to compare notes—something we were going to do the last time, but were interrupted.” He straightened his jacket. “Oh, and one other detail—if anyone asks, I’m Malachi Livingston.”
“Livingston,” she murmured. Why does that sound familiar?
“Dr. Montrose has probably mentioned me. I’m on The Conclave.”
“You’re one of them?”
He shrugged. “I got bored. Retirement is fine, but I have to keep my hand in. Let’s find a dining room with a quiet corner. I need to rest.”
Is this what she had to look forward to? Being bored to tears and having to content herself with meddling in the time stream?
“Pity they don’t have sushi here,” she lamented.
He shot her a look. “You actually like that stuff?”
“I do now. And Tai Chi. Chess, even. I’m getting pretty good at it.”
Defoe knit his brows. “I take it Theo oversaw your care?”
“Sure did. He helped me put my mind back together. It took a lot of effort to keep the shrinks out of the way.”
“Did he mention the Duckling Effect?”
“The what?”
“Oh, Theo,” he said, shaking his head.
“Look, I’m tired, so speak English.”
“You still have the attitude, I see.” He offered his arm and they strolled along the docks. “Just don’t
shoot the messenger, all right?” She nodded.
“Klein told me that after NMR treatment, the patient often adopts traits of the person most involved in their therapy. It’s sort of like a baby duck patterning after its mother. Your sudden love of sushi is a good example.”
Morrisey hadn’t told her any of that. Part of her was sincerely irritated. Then she shrugged it off. “Beats not knowing who the hell you are.”
A chuckle. “You have me there.”
“Anyway, there are worse people to pattern myself after.”
Defoe’s eyebrow quirked upward. “True, but I wonder if the world is ready for a Morrisey-Lassiter hybrid.”
“Then they shouldn’t have screwed with my brain in the first place.”
She paused and turned toward the water, thinking of Chris as he made his solitary journey downriver. She couldn’t remember their last time together. It was squirreled away in her memories, just out of reach.
“You’ll remember it eventually,” her delusion assured.
“He was a great kid,” Defoe said softly.
She could only nod, clenching her teeth to hold back a new round of tears.
At least now she knew the truth: Mimes had been involved in Chris’ death, but he’d had help from TPB’s minion.
Someone who isn’t crazy. Someone who could pay the price for murder.
Chapter 2
The dining room was busy, but with a generous gratuity they were shown into a private area. Cynda sat facing the door.
“Paranoid?” Defoe suggested.
“Hell, yes,” she declared, plopping her hat on the table. “Aren’t you?”
“Sometimes.” He ordered tea and cake, his words brusque. Meanwhile, her delusion shambled across the table and parked himself next to a sugar bowl. He had a fascination with those for some reason.
“So what’s going on here?” she asked once the server puttered off.
Defoe held up a hand for silence, then opened his interface and positioned it on the table. “It’s set to dampen our conversation. You’d have to be standing on top of us to overhear us.” It was a clever trick. To a Victorian, it would look like he was just overly concerned about the time.
“More of Morrisey’s fancy software?”
“Exactly.” Nevertheless, he lowered his voice. “We are experiencing a power struggle between our time and the future. Now is the battleground.”
“Morrissey said now was very unstable.”
“Extremely, or Sergeant Keats wouldn’t be facing the noose.”
“I thought it was because I sidetracked him a few weeks ago so he didn’t catch Flaherty when he was supposed to.”
“I doubt it was completely your fault, though you may have contributed to the time aberration,” Defoe explained. “I’ve inadvertently altered timelines before, but nothing came of it. It always went back on track.”
“Morrisey thinks someone else had already stirred things up, and I just gave it a bit more oomph.”
“Very likely. You play God, and things happen.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but bit her tongue as the server approached with a tray. Defoe clicked the interface shut and moved it out of the way.
“There ya are, sir. Nice and hot. The cakes are fresh. I bake them myself,” she said.
“Thank you, madam.”
Cynda performed the honors, doling out their refreshments as Defoe opened the interface and replaced it on the table.
“Morrisey said things go very badly for the shifters up the time stream,” she ventured.
Defoe’s smile dimmed. “I’m surprised he told you that. Theo’s usually more discreet.” He grew pensive. “If he trusts you that much...” He nodded to himself, a decision made.
“I met my first Future in 1979. I’d gone there to see one of the old moving pictures, Time After Time.”
“I know that one. H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco to retrieve his time machine. It’s one my favorites.”
“All utter nonsense, of course,” Defoe replied. “Still, it was great fun listening to the audience discuss the possibility of time travel, little knowing that someone from nearly eight decades into the future was sitting among them.”
“I wish I’d done that,” Cynda said wistfully.
“I didn’t pay much attention to the man sitting to my right until we’d left the theater. As we reached the street, he said, “Not quite accurate, is it, Mr. Defoe?”
“That had to spook you,” Cynda said, grinning.
“It did. He said his name was Robert Anderson, and the news he brought was anything but good. He told me what happens to the Transitives once their secret is made public knowledge.” Defoe took a long sip of tea. “Needs brandy,” he grumbled.
“What year was he from?”
“2075. Apparently he and some of the other Futures felt it was time we knew what was coming.”
“Does Guv know this?”
He shook his head. “Anderson said laws are enacted to prevent shifters from passing the ability when they die, keeping them out of sensitive Government jobs.” He frowned. “In the future, Rovers can’t be shifters.”
She dropped her spoon on the table. “Why not?”
“It’s a safety issue, they say. If you can look like anyone, you could mess with history and no one will know.”
“But you’re a shifter,” she said, trying to get a handle on this. “You and Morrisey. You guys invented this technology, and then you’re not safe enough to be part of it?”
He shook his head. “According to Anderson, the Transitives begin to fight back in 2065, going underground. By 2083, another group takes advantage of our distraction and it all goes to hell. Our petty war makes us lose the most important battle: our future.”
“What happens?” she asks.
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“But you said he was ’075. How would he know—”
“I think he got the word from a Future further up the time stream.”
Cynda huffed. “Great. Like a little bucket brigade of warnings trickling down to us.”
Defoe delivered a disgruntled look at her analogy. Fortunately, the server returned, checking on them. Once the woman was gone, beaming at another one of his compliments, Defoe opened his interface again.
Leaning back in the chair, he said, “Those ahead of us are becoming actively involved in whatever is going on here. I think this time period is critical for them in some way. We were both off-timed for a reason.”
“Why not just tell us Copeland was involved in Chris’ death?” she said, adding more sugar to her tea. “Why not just help us outright? It’s not like it’s going to get any more screwed up.”
Defoe arched an eyebrow as if she were being naïve. “There’s far more at stake than just Chris’ murder. Some of the Futures want the Transitives’ secret to be revealed much earlier. They feel that if the world knew of them in the late nineteenth century, then the sanctions wouldn’t be put in place, or if they were, they’d be removed by the twenty-first century.”
“That’s overly optimistic.”
He issued a weary sigh. “Well, that’s not our problem. We need to find out what’s happening here, and what it has to do with the explosives. Did Morrisey tell you how the Transitives are organized?”
“Yes,” she said, cutting a piece of cake.
“What do you know, so I don’t have to repeat myself?”
Cynda set the knife aside, sad the food had to wait. It looked yummy. She closed her eyes and visualized the shifters’ organizational tree. It seemed to help if she saw something in her mind before trying to verbalize it.
“The Ascendant is the top dog,” she began. “He has eight killers at his command: the Lead Assassin and the Seven, who follow the Lead’s orders. The Lead is always a Virtual. There are the Twenty who report to the head guy and determine when it is time to replace him. Then there’s The Conclave, which is more for show than anything.”
Only afte
r the fact did she realize why she’d earned herself a frown. His alter ego, Livingston, was a member of The Conclave.
“Did Theo discover who was the Ascendant at this point in history?” he inquired.
She shook her head. “He’s working on it. He said something about going to some special archive collection.”
“That sounds right. A lot of the Transitives’ history is not in electronic form. How about the membership of the Twenty?”
Cynda dug the pendant out from under her bodice, pulling it over her head. Clicking it open, she pressed her thumb against the picture of her parents. Nothing happened.
“Index finger on the back,” her delusion called out from near the cake. He was holding a small piece between two legs.
Thanks.
Once the device had acknowledged that she had legitimate access, the photo vanished and the dial lit up.
“Morrisey’s doing,” she explained in response to Defoe’s mystified expression. “He gave me a database of images so I can look through them every night and refresh my mind.”
“He’s known for those sorts of gadgets,” her companion observed with a smirk. “Sort of like Q in the old James Bond movies.”
“Who?”
He grimaced. “Never mind. It was before your time.”
She put the pendant near her mouth. “List Twenty,” she murmured.
Names began marching across the tiny screen. “Let’s see. We’ve got a Jackson, Marshall, Hyde-Smith, McClelland, Winston, Rivers, and Baron-Reid. That’s all he could—”
“Do you have a full name for Winston?” he asked, his voice suddenly brittle.
“Sure.” She addressed the device. “List particulars for Winston.” The screen lit up, filling with information. “Adelaide Winston, age twenty-eight. Born—”
Defoe’s cup slammed down onto the saucer, his eyes distant. He wiped his mouth with a napkin.
Whoa. I hit a nerve.
“You know something about her?” Cynda ventured.
“It appears she’s one of the Twenty,” he replied brusquely, as if that were the only answer. His eyes snapped back to hers. “What do you intend to do next?”
