The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  And then it came to me.

  “This was one of the turning-point states,” I said to Calliope. “The ’68 election came down to California, Illinois and Ohio. Nixon only won Ohio by about 2% of the vote and that’s what put him over the Electoral College majority he needed to win. Pull county-by-county polling data for me.”

  “I’m looking at it now. Belmont County went like 2-to-1 for Nixon.”

  “He’s checking to see if the votes have changed,” I realized suddenly. “He’s using St. Clairsville as a bellwether, trying to test the waters. If Belmont County is sliding left, it might be a sign that the rest of the country is too.”

  I had circled the block by this time and returned to the front steps of the courthouse. Across the street, outside a brick building labeled “ST. CLAIRSVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY,” festooned with red, white and blue bunting, a long line of people snaked down the block and around the corner.

  The library must be the town’s polling place, I realized. The line filed into the building through the left of two double glass doors, and out on the right.

  That’s when I spotted Grove.

  “I’ve got him on visual,” I whispered. “I’m looking at him right now.”

  “Where is he? Oh! I see him! Over by the door to that building. He looks okay, don’t you think he looks okay?”

  “He looks fine, quit worrying. Time check?”

  “Eleven minutes. What’s he doing? Why is he talking to those people?”

  “God, he’s good,” I murmured approvingly. “He’s posing as a reporter doing an exit poll. He’s asking everyone coming out of the booths how they voted.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Oh, yeah. Happens all the time.”

  “How reliable is it?”

  “Hard to say,” I said. “But he doesn’t look happy.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  Grove had positioned himself just outside the right-hand exit door so everyone leaving the building had to walk right past him. I saw him asking questions and making notes as they passed.

  As I crossed the street, my heart sank. A stream of voters exited the building, and one of them held the right-hand exit door open, beckoning Grove in. No doubt on account of the chill in the air, Grove smiled and obliged. Now he was inside, which meant I somehow had to get inside to get to him.

  “Well, that’s inconvenient,” said Calliope, annoyed.

  “I’ll say. Can you do a building scan? Give me some options.”

  Technically all I had to do was grab him and then jump out; my Comm would latch onto him the moment I made physical contact.

  But there was no way to vanish into thin air, in such a crowded place, without screamingly high HIO levels, and anything above a twenty would send a red alert to the absolute last person I wanted notified of my screw-ups. She would find out eventually, but you can’t blame me for wanting to stall the inevitable shitshow as long as possible.

  “Pickin’s are slim,” said the voice in my ear. “The library used to be a bank, so it’s not exactly an embarrassment of riches in terms of unsecured entrances. You’re going to have to go in the front door. That’s the downside. But the interior is pretty crowded, and the shelves are high. If you can get him away from the polling booths and into the stacks, you should be able to get a little cover.”

  “Thanks, Calliope.”

  “Nine minutes, by the way.”

  With only one entrance to the building, and with the queue passing through it nearly two blocks long, I decided my only option here was to play to my strengths — namely, being a gigantic pain in the ass.

  So I cut to the front of the line.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said the gray-haired man about five spots from the entrance who I had just stepped in front of. “I was next.”

  “I’m not really in line,” I said. “You’re fine.”

  “The line ends over there,” said the woman next to him, pointing back to the corner of the block.

  “I’m not really in line,” I said. “I’m not here to vote.”

  “The library is closed. You can’t go in unless you’re voting.”

  “I’m not going in, I just need to talk to that guy over there,” I said, pointing to Grove, who was now about twenty feet away with his back to me.

  “We’ve all been waiting patiently,” said the gray-haired man. “You can’t just cut in front. That’s rude.”

  “Yes. I’m a very rude person. It’s terrible. But look, seriously, I just need to go talk to that guy. I’m not going to slow down your voting.”

  “You need to get out of this line,” said a woman behind me. “This isn’t fair to everyone else who’s been waiting.”

  “Holy shit, can you calm down!?” I snapped. “I’ll be out of your hair in like two minutes.”

  I don’t know whether it was the soft tick of the HIO meter on my Comm, notching up a dangerous few levels, the exasperated sigh from Calliope, or the horrorstruck faces of the people standing next to me that penetrated first, but I knew I’d gone too far.

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. Do women not say ‘shit’ here?”

  “Ladies don’t,” said the woman behind me frostily.

  “Well, sorry,” I said. “I’m new.”

  “To civilization?”

  “Listen, lady —”

  “Oh my God Reggie — stop talking — stop talking — stop talking!” Calliope screeched in my ear, so loudly that I winced. Hard. Like in a full-body flail kind of way. The HIO meter ticked up again as everyone stared at me.

  “This is going well.”

  “Shut up, Calliope.”

  “Who is Calliope?” asked the woman. Tick. “Who are you talking to? Why are you dressed like that?” Tick, tick.

  “Oh, look, the line’s moving!” I exclaimed, faint with relief, and shoved the people in front of me through the doorway.

  “Four minutes,” said Calliope. “By the way, if I get fired I’m taking you down with me.”

  “Oh, I think I’ll be able to get myself fired with no help from you,” I murmured, shoving into the front door behind the annoying Ohioans.

  “See the tall shelves to your right? About five feet behind Grove? Don’t say anything, just nod if you see them.”

  I nodded.

  She continued, “No human activity, blocked sightlines to the rest of the room. If you can get him behind the stacks, you’re clear to transport. Just stay out of the line to the actual polling booths, they’re asking everyone to show their voter registration and they’ll throw you out the door if you don’t have it.”

  I nodded again, and as the line of voters inside the library moved closer to the check-in table I spotted a woman wearing a badge that said VOLUNTEER.

  “Excuse me, where’s the ladies’ room?” I said politely, and thanked God for my first stroke of good luck all day when she pointed in the direction that Calliope had indicated to me.

  “You’ll lose your place in line,” she cautioned.

  “It’s okay, I didn’t feel like voting anyway,” I said. “One old white guy or another old white guy, what’s the difference really?”

  And I stepped out of the line to make a break for Grove, leaving her shocked face behind me.

  Once in the stacks, hidden from view, I relaxed a little bit. All I had to do now was creep up behind Grove, pull him behind the shelves and jump.

  I checked my Comm. Three minutes. I was so close.

  That was when it suddenly occurred to me what I had missed. Somewhere, in this quaint small-town library full of ordinary men and women, something was not right. I was three minutes from the crisis point, which meant that whoever or whatever was about to cause the Chronomaly was right here. Something in this room was causing interference so intense that Grove couldn’t transport. But I had no idea what it was.

  I hung back slightly, out of Grove’s line of vision. There was a break coming up in the line of exiting voters; there was a woman talking to him now, but nobody in line aft
er her had emerged from the voting booths yet.

  “Two minutes.”

  “I’m going in as soon as that woman leaves,” I murmured, heart beginning to accelerate. We were so close. Whatever was going to happen was about to happen.

  Grove, deep in conversation with the woman wrote something on his notepad and nodded as she moved away. Still, no one coming out of the booths. Nobody on Grove’s side of the door. It was now or never.

  I pounced.

  Grove was a big guy, and in a fight he would have overpowered me in a heartbeat. Very few people, however, are at their best when taken by surprise, so when I stepped up behind him, grabbed his arm and yanked him back into the stacks — rather neatly, I thought, and almost entirely unnoticed — he was too startled to resist.

  “Incoming,” said Calliope. “Turn left and then right and you’re clear.” I followed her instructions, dragging Grove with me.

  “Bellows, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Saving your ass, sir,” I said. “We’re one minute out from a massive Incongruity. We have to jump before it hits.”

  “Let go of me right this minute, Bellows, you are jeopardizing the completion of this mission.”

  “Due respect, sir, right now Calliope is staring at a giant TRANSPORT SHUTDOWN error message flashing on her screen. You could have been stuck here permanently, or ripped in half if you tried to jump back with busted equipment. Calliope?”

  “Clear.”

  “Signal locked,” I said to her, grabbing tightly to Grove’s hand. He was furious.

  “Goddammit, Bellows, you have no idea what you’ve done!”

  “Yell at me later,” I said. “Let’s go.” And the library shimmered into nothingness and was gone.

  We hit the Slipstream, and I felt the familiar tingling sensation. I counted to five and waited to land. Suddenly I felt a jolt to the stomach and a drop in pressure. This was taking too long. We should have landed by now. Something was wrong.

  I opened my eyes but saw only darkness. We were falling. I clutched tight to Grove. He was heavier, dragging me down, but I held on. I felt the air around me expand, become dense and heavy, as though it were pressing on me with a physical weight, and I realized we were trapped inside the Incongruity. If Calliope didn’t have a lock on our signals, we were dead.

  Grove’s eyes were wide with panic and I opened my mouth to yell at him to hold on, but nothing came out. Cold fear shivered down the back of my neck. Breathe, Reggie, breathe, I told myself sternly. Come on, Calliope!

  I began to feel shaky all over. Lack of oxygen was a common side effect of getting trapped inside a Slipstream for too long, much like when divers who spend too much time in the deeps of the ocean get “the bends.” It could be lethal, and Grove’s system was already weakened by coming out of a mission with so many interior drops. If we didn’t get out soon, it could cause us both permanent brain damage.

  The blackness softened slightly around the edges and a small, telescoping point of light slowly opened up in the center of my vision. My eyes were fuzzy and my brain was beginning to swim. It was either the lab, or I was about to die. At that point I felt so faint that I didn’t really care.

  “Oh, thank God!” Calliope’s shrill voice pierced through the fog in my brain as I felt the comfortingly solid floor beneath my feet. My legs buckled beneath me and I began to sway, pulled down to the ground by some unseen force.

  Dimly, I could see three green-uniformed medics standing at the ready (Calliope, ever prepared). One of them caught me as I started to collapse. That was when I noticed the thing that had been pulling me downward.

  I had not let go of Grove’s hand.

  Grove was not moving.

  “I’ve got you, ma’am,” said the medic comfortingly as he scooped me up in his arms. “You’re gonna be fine.”

  “He isn’t moving,” I said haltingly, remembering as I spoke them how words were formed in my mouth. My entire face felt like it had been shoved full of cotton balls and sand.

  “His vitals are stable, he’s just unconscious. He’s gonna be fine too. We need to get you up to Medical. I need you to let go of his hand.”

  “But he’ll fall,” I said sleepily, my head lolling back into the medic’s arms. “I came back to save him. I can’t let go of his hand.”

  “You saved him,” said Calliope’s voice, from inside Calliope’s now upside-down head. “You did it, Reggie. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  I let go of his hand.

  Five

  Called To the Principal’s Office

  I came to in one of the hospital beds in the thirty-sixth-floor Medical bay, feeling like I had been run over by a marauding Viking horde. Everything hurt.

  A blazing golden shadow shimmered into view, which turned out to be Calliope’s blonde hair caught in the bright sickbay lights.

  “How do you feel?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, I think,” I said, sitting up and stretching myself. “How long was I out? What day is it?”

  She gave me a curious look. “What?” I asked, beginning to panic.

  “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you,” she began. My heart turned over in my chest at the sad, serious look in her eyes.

  “Tell me what? Tell me what?”

  “Reggie. You’ve been unconscious for ten years,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Ha! I’m totally kidding. It’s been like an hour.”

  “I hate you so much right now.”

  She laughed, sitting down on the bed next to me and handing me a glass of water.

  “Drink this. Thanks to you, Grove made it,” she said, answering before I could ask. “He’s in a coma. But he’s alive. The doctors said to congratulate you on your quick thinking. I don’t know what kind of malfunction kept him from being able to spot that Chronomaly, but every short-hop he took just made the Incongruity worse. If he’d tried to jump out using his own equipment, he’d have ended up with massive organ failure the second he entered the Slipstream.”

  “What about the election?”

  “Johnson lost the Electoral College. Landslide. Wasn’t even close. The Chronomaly repaired itself and 1968 is back to normal. We still don’t know why it took so long, but the patch eventually worked.”

  “Thank God,” I sighed, lying back against the hospital pillow before sitting bolt upright again. Calliope laughed, seeing it on my face before I even asked.

  “Your report has been waived,” she said. “The data’s not relevant anyway, since the mission was terminated and Grove is back. And he can give a full report when he’s awake again. Right now you need rest. You just combined thirty-three hours of no sleep and very little food with a massive Slipstream malfunction.”

  “Calliope Burns, that is the greatest of all your great ideas,” I said agreeably, and allowed her to settle me back into bed.

  “Sleep until I come get you,” she said. “Do not, under any circumstances, get out of this bed until I or a medical professional say you can. Deal?”

  I was already asleep.

  * * *

  It felt like only half a second later when I felt someone gently shaking me awake, but in actuality it had been almost nine hours. The longest I’d slept in a month, at least. I still felt groggy and bleary-eyed, but much more sane.

  “Agent Bellows?” said a warm male voice. I opened my eyes and saw the medic from the transport bay.

  “Mmmmmmmghhhhhhh,” I replied.

  “And good morning to you,” he grinned. “You’re cleared to go, and you’re needed back on your floor in an hour. Wardrobe cleaned your clothes, and there’s a shower just down the hall.”

  The shower was a brilliant idea, and I told him so — profusely — on my return. I stayed there for ages, hot water pounding my knotted shoulders and neck into submission. I stood in there until my skin was flushed and pink, then dried my hair and got dressed, thinking idly that it felt like another lifetime ago when I
took off that sweater and traded it for Calliope’s lab coat. The medic smiled when he saw me.

  “You look much more human,” he said.

  “I feel more human.”

  “Good luck down there,” he said as I headed for the elevator.

  “Thanks,” I tossed over my shoulder, then stopped and turned back around. “Wait. Good luck with what? What did you mean?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Sorry, I didn’t — I know she’s — I just meant, I would be intimidated if it was me. That’s all.”

  “Intimidated by what?”

  “I thought Calliope told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “They just rang me before I woke you up,” he said, an apology in his tone. “You’ve been called in to meet with the Deputy Director.”

  “The Deputy Director,” I repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Tall, brown hair, ice-cold eyes of judgment? Passed on only the shittiest half of her genetic material to the daughter she’s probably about to fire? That Deputy Director?”

  “Good luck,” he said again, more weakly this time. I sighed.

  Well, it’s not like I didn’t anticipate this, I thought to myself as the elevator plunged downward. I knew it was unauthorized. I knew I could get in trouble.

  I had known that before I brought Grove back. I had been willing to take my lumps with him, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to me to remember that this was Katie Bellows’ turf, and shame-inducing lectures on breaches of government ethics were her favorite way to unwind at the end of a long day.

  * * *

  I don’t know whether or not you’ve been raised by a celebrity parent. If you have, I’m so sorry. Come to D.C. and I’ll buy you a drink. If you haven’t, you should know that it’s the kind of thing that sounds like a whole lot more fun than it is.

  For one thing, most of my professors at the Academy were colleagues of my mother’s, greatly reducing my opportunities for slacking off, tardiness, or fun. Everywhere you go, people are watching you, eager to report back and score some points with the boss. To her credit, she was a perfectly reasonable amount of strict — a little firmer with Leo, the renegade, and a little looser with me, the placid bookworm — but reasonable either way.