by Rysa Walker
Colfax takes the chair next to the couch and pulls a cigar out of his coat pocket.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks Colonel Blood.
“Not at all.”
He’s reaching back into his pocket, probably for a match, when Comstock chimes in. “Put that nasty thing away. You’re on duty as an officer of the federal government. Tobacco in all its forms is a vile, ungodly habit.”
Colfax tucks the cigar back into his jacket with a resigned expression.
Pleased that he’s struck another blow against the forces of immorality, Comstock turns his gaze to Prudence and me. “Along those same lines, I must ask you two . . . ladies . . . to wait in the inner office. And close the door. Your clothing and demeanor are indecent and unfit for mixed company.”
I want to knock that pompous expression right off his face. This dress is tacky and even a bit revealing for the era, but it’s hardly indecent. And the only flesh exposed on Prudence is above the collarbone and below the elbow. While her dress doesn’t sweep the ground and her ankles peek out a little beneath the hem, calling it indecent defies reason. Then again, I doubt Comstock and reason have more than a passing acquaintance.
Prudence is clearly fighting the same impulse. She’s already taken one menacing step in his direction when I reach out and grab her arm.
“Come on. We didn’t want to stay in here anyway.”
Pru yanks her arm away, glaring first at me and then back at Comstock. But she starts walking toward the inner office, and I follow.
“What I want to know,” Pru mutters, “is why federal marshals take orders from a dinky little barf bag from the YMCA.”
Adams holds open the door for us. I doubt he knows what a barf bag is, but his expression suggests that he’s wondering the exact same thing.
∞12∞
48 BROAD STREET, NEW YORK CITY
November 2, 1872, 12:15 p.m.
Pru sits on top of a large desk facing the door. The wooden desktop shows through in rectangular patches, interspersed with triangles of dust, suggesting someone just cleared the office of its contents. There’s not a single scrap of paper or book in sight. Someone must have tipped them off about the pending arrest.
“Saul wants to keep you from getting the keys at CHRONOS headquarters.” Talking to Pru feels like walking on ice. I need to move carefully, measuring each step. “From what you’ve told me, he’s planning to send someone to prevent you or anyone allied with you from accessing them without his permission.”
“Who’s he sending? Simon?” The sneer in her voice makes it clear that, at least on the issue of Simon, my aunt and I are simpatico.
I want to say yes, Saul is sending Simon, because he probably is. But when Katherine and I went over this earlier, we decided to keep things vague. The less I say, the less likely I’ll slip.
So I opt for good old need-to-know. “You said not to tell you that.”
Pru rolls her eyes and huffs. “Major surprise.”
“I need to know what happened on that jump—when and where you grabbed the keys, if anyone helped you, and so forth. And we need to hurry. Woodhull will be back soon, and we have to get out of here or the marshals—”
“In case Future-Me failed to mention it, that last part is going to be a problem. I can’t get out of here until Woodhull gets back. She’s got my damn key!”
Oh.
“How did she get it?”
Pru’s face flushes, and she says, “I woke one morning and it was gone.”
“You don’t have a spare?”
“If I had a spare, would I have been stuck in this place for the past six months? I didn’t suspect it was Vicky until last week—I mean, why would she want it? But then the Beecher story hit, and Teddy began ranting about how Vicky was making him look like a fool in public. Right in the middle, he starts laughing about how she’s the foolish one if she believes my ugly old pendant is a conduit to the next world.”
The name Teddy pulls up an immediate visual for me. I’m pretty sure it’s wrong, but I have to ask. “Not Teddy . . . Roosevelt?”
“No, you idiot. Theodore Tilton.”
I decide I don’t want to know why she’s on familiar enough terms to call him Teddy. For one thing, he’s still married. More importantly, my mind is trying to make a connection to her comment about the key being a conduit to the next world. I can feel it just out of reach, but then Pru starts talking again and it slips away.
“Vicky must’ve seen me use it once, even though I was really careful.” She shakes her head. “It was a release, you know? Coming here and helping with the campaign was something I could do when I needed to get away from Saul and from her to clear my head for a while.”
I’m about to ask who she means by her when I realize she’s talking about her older self.
“They were on my case constantly—jump here, do this, do that. I could never get a minute’s peace. Back here, with the campaign, I thought I might actually make a difference. Woodhull’s ideas—have you read her speeches? What if they’d actually paid attention to her in 1872? If her views on birth control, poverty, the abolition of war . . . well, almost everything, were taken seriously?”
Her eyes are more animated now than I’ve ever seen them, and I get the feeling she’s not simply talking fast because she knows we could be interrupted. She reminds me a bit of Woodhull herself when she was on stage at the Apollo, but also of this kid from my second-grade class who was really, really into dinosaurs. He could name every species, and he’d keep going forever once he got wound up. I want to steer her back to when and where she got the keys, but she doesn’t pause long enough for me to get a word in.
“I mean, do you remember hearing about her in school?” I start to respond, but she barrels on. “Sorry. I forgot. Cyrist tutors for you, right? Anyway, they never mentioned her in my school. Or if they did, they did a piss-poor job, because I don’t remember it. I wanted to see if I could make them pay attention. I tweaked a few things, gave her a few stock tips to help juice up the campaign. Not for her to win. Just to be remembered, you know? To show that these ideas weren’t new. That people have been talking about ending war and controlling the population for a very long time. So they’d see we can’t just keep spinning our wheels if we want to avoid catastrophe. And then I could do the same with the environmental movement, and . . .” She trails off and shrugs. “Then maybe people would wake up? Maybe we could avoid Saul’s way. It was worth a try, you know?”
A door closes and we hear footsteps, but then everything is silent.
“If Older-Me is telling you to go up against Saul, you aren’t safe, either. He doesn’t just kill puppies, you know.”
I’m positive there’s a truly awful story behind that comment and equally positive I don’t want to hear it. “And if I don’t go up against him,” I say, “neither of us is safe. No one is.”
“But you saw them, too. All the bodies, little kids even. Stacked up in piles to be torched.”
It’s the same thing Kiernan talked about. An all-time-greatest-hits mash-up of man’s inhumanity to man. Glimpses of war and famine and genocide. But all I see in my mind is Saul’s own contribution, a chapel full of bodies and one little arm hanging over the edge of the pew.
“Yes. But I don’t believe Saul is trying to stop those atrocities. Later on, you won’t believe that, either.”
What I’ve said must ring true, because Pru starts talking again, this time finally on the topic of the keys that were at CHRONOS—or at least in the general ballpark.
“The bombing reopens the entire debate about CHRONOS. Not just the time travel, but the laws on genetic alteration. Because CHRONOS agents didn’t just get a single tweak like others did. They altered appearance, intelligence, memory, almost everything, in addition to the bits that let them use the key. Tate said that revived the debate about cloning, lifespan exten—”
“Wait, wait. You’re going too fast for me to remember any of this.”
I have only a
vague memory of Katherine talking about the laws on genetic alteration—“chosen gifts,” as she called them. CHRONOS may have enhanced the memory of all four of my grandparents, but only a smidgen of that trickled down to me. I’d rather place my faith in a recording. I open my bag, slide my thumb across my phone to Utilities, then click the Voice Memo app. “Okay, go ahead. First, who is Tate?”
Pru starts again, with a slightly annoyed edge to her voice. “Tate was Saul’s roommate, back before Saul and Mother moved in together. Saul sent him a message that got him out of the building the day of the attack. I guess even the devil himself has one good deed in him. Anyway, the government closed CHRONOS for good and reopened the building as an archive and museum. There’s this huge educational exhibit about how it was a mistake for humans to time travel, but on the bright side, there’s all this info about the past we gained—oh, this is in 2306 that they open the museum. April 27th. One year after the explosion. They’ve got this exhibit showing how terrorists from the past destroyed CHRONOS. I guess they decided not to reveal my dear mother’s role in the whole mess.”
I fight to keep my expression neutral. She thinks Katherine bombed CHRONOS?
“How long were you there after you accidentally used the key? Or rather, how long were you then?” I shake my head to clear it. “In 2305?”
“A little over a year, then maybe another year on and off after I found Saul. The first four months I could barely move. Medical technology is pretty sweet in the future, but one thing hasn’t changed. Physical therapy still hurts like hell. They had this one machine that—”
Interrupting seems risky, but it sounds like she’s headed off on a tangent. “Yeah, you mentioned before that it really hurt. What happened after?”
“Well, once they decided I was telling the truth that my arrival was an accident and not some plan Mother cooked up, they put me to work at the new museum, talking about what it was like to be a kid in the olden days.” She grins. “Those visitors got some interesting quote-unquote history. They were okay people, though, at CHRONOS. They wouldn’t let me keep my key because they were worried I might actually figure out how to use it again, but they kept me under a CHRONOS field just in case not being under it would make me . . . you know.” She snaps her fingers. “Pop into the reality next door or whatever. Even after what my mother did, most of them just acted like I was one of the historians who survived the attack, like Tate. But it was much worse on him than it was on me. They stuck him at one of the exhibits, just talking about the Vikings. Tate is a doer, not a talker.”
There’s a new gleam in her eyes as she says that, and I’m pretty sure she’s imagining this Tate guy doing, not talking.
I cast a nervous glance at the door, and she shifts back on topic.
“Anyway, Tate and I both realized the keys in the exhibit weren’t real. They were glowing, but all the same color, and everyone could see the light. Tate found out the actual keys were in the archives. There was one guard—one old guard—on that floor. The fake medallions in the exhibit were better guarded. I guess they assumed no one could use them without the equipment, and they didn’t rebuild that. So when Saul decided we needed those keys for all of the little Cyrist babies he was planning, I convinced Tate to help me. We’d change things, get his job back so he could go do Viking stuff again. So he’d be happy. Tate took care of the guard, I returned Campbell’s key, and then I was out of there. Piece of cake.”
“Campbell’s key?”
“Yeah. A friend of Saul’s. No clue why he had a key, since he doesn’t have the CHRONOS gene. Simon says Saul told him it was all about a bet, but Saul never mentioned that to me. I guess you have to be his drinking buddy to get that info. Anyway, Campbell’s the one who loaned me the key in the first place. So that I could find Saul. Tate showed me how to use it.”
She’s hopping from one subject to the next so much that I’m having trouble keeping everything straight. I can’t help but wonder if her brain isn’t already too jumbled to trust, but what alternative do I have at this point? “Okay,” I say, “so you find Saul, and he eventually decides he wants those keys. When you jumped back again to get them did you go to the same stable point as the first time?”
Pru gives me a look like I’m too dumb to live. “No. Shattering my back and legs a second time seemed like a bad idea. I set a stable point in the museum before I left.”
From what Katherine told me, historians didn’t have the ability to set local stable points after 2150. It was a purposeful safety built into the system because CHRONOS didn’t want them changing things in their own lives or the lives of others. They could set local stable points in historical locations to make things easier on future jumps to that same place and time, but the system blocked anything after the period when time travel technology was created.
This must be another second-generation glitch. The original historians’ genetic code was locked in when the system was destroyed, rendering the equipment useless for them, but that data wasn’t in the system for those of us who inherited the gene. There was a similar safeguard preventing historians from jumping from one location to the next without going back to HQ—the limitation Saul assumed would be lifted if he destroyed their home base. But the only thing blocking me from jumping from Point A to Point B to Point C, ad infinitum, is the fact that it wears me out and confuses the hell out of me.
“Of course,” I say, pasting on a silly-me expression. “Don’t know what I was thinking. It’s been a long day. I don’t suppose you remember those coordinates at the museum?”
Prudence snorts, as I expected she would. The geographic coordinates alone are more than twenty digits, so the best I can hope for is a date and approximate time.
“Not likely. But I’ll transfer them straight to your key if we ever get mine back from that thieving bitch.”
Well, that’s a game changer.
If I have that medallion—the one with the exact coordinates that Pru used on the jump when she retrieved the other CHRONOS keys from the future—everything becomes much, much simpler. No jet pack jumps into crumbling buildings required. No wandering around trying to figure out when and where they grab the keys. Just pop in and grab them. Like she said before, piece of cake.
Maybe it’s the accumulated weight of all my dumb questions or maybe something in my expression shifted while I was thinking all of that through. Either way, when I glance back at Pru, her eyes have narrowed into little slivers of suspicion. I can almost hear the gates clanging down around me.
“So, riddle me this, Batgirl. How do I know you’re not the person Saul’s sending to stop me from getting the keys? Hmm?”
“I’m not—” I begin, but apparently the question was rhetorical, because Pru keeps talking.
“It would make perfect sense from Saul’s perspective. You look like me. Saul might even think Tate won’t know the difference. But he most definitely will. Saul doesn’t know half as much as he thinks he does about me or about Tate.”
“Prudence, I’m not—”
“Lips zipped. Not telling you anything else.”
Pru pushes off the desk and crosses to the window. She lifts back the curtain, looks outside, then curses and kicks the baseboard. I walk over and see it’s a straight drop of about thirty feet to a brick courtyard. If she was thinking of the window as a possible escape route, it’s not going to happen.
“I’m not with Saul.”
“Yeah, well, prove it.” When I don’t respond instantly, mostly because I’m trying to think of how I might prove it, she takes it as confirmation. “I have no reason to trust you and no time to waste. Vicky could be back any minute, and as soon as she walks in that door, that d-bag out there is going to cart all of us off to the Tombs.”
“It’s not the Tombs until later in the month. Ludlow Street Jail today.”
“Who cares? Jail is jail.”
From what I read, that’s not true. The Tombs was hell on earth, with few accommodations for celebrity guests. Ludlow Str
eet is more like house arrest. Zulu will visit Victoria and Tennie there tomorrow, along with half a dozen journalists, friends, and associates.
“Either way,” I say, “Comstock won’t be taking you. From what you told me—”
“Yeah, well, whatever I told you was what happened before you showed up. Are you basing your jail-or-no-jail predictions on that?” Pru arches an eyebrow. “Thought so. I’d have been out the door before the cops arrived if Zulu hadn’t kept bopping up and down the stairs to ask questions.”
I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s partly because she could very easily be right, partly because she could also be completely wrong, but mostly because I have no way of telling the difference.
Is my being here the reason she escapes or the reason she doesn’t?
Ack!
I rub my eyes and look at Pru, who is again staring out at the bricks below the window. Time travel conundrums aside, my best chance for getting Prudence’s key is to get her out of here and handle Woodhull myself. Pru won’t be worried about the key Victoria has if she has my spare—at least she won’t be worried about it immediately—and I won’t need extensive information on who helped her, when, where, and how. I can just jump in, use a bit of brute force if necessary on this Tate guy, and take what I need. I generally prefer finesse to brute force, but I make exceptions when the clock is quite literally ticking.
I unfasten the back of my dress. “Let me put this another way. Comstock won’t be taking you to jail. Hopefully he won’t be taking me either. I’ll stay here and get the other medallion from Vicky. You . . . you’ve done enough. If I give you my spare key, you can get back to the Farm, right?”
Pru stands there gaping for a moment, then kicks off her shoes. “You have a frickin’ spare? Why didn’t you say so earlier?” She starts stripping out of the grungy stockings. “But you should leave, too. I mean, we look alike, but not that much alike. Comstock—”
