The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “A Chrono-Spliced Comm link,” she said. “Undetectable from within the system, on both sides.”

  I kissed the top of her head.

  “You’re a miracle worker,” I said. “I adore you.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Leo from the kitchen, still sautéing away.

  “It means we can make a 20th-century telephone call through Calliope’s computer,” said Carter. “An untraceable one. It means we can set up a meet with Barlow and make sure he still has the photos. Nice work, Calliope.”

  “Oh, this is gonna be fun,” I said, climbing up next to Calliope on the couch.

  “I’ve set it for two hours after you left the meet with him,” she said. “You’re going to tell him you’re coming in tomorrow for the photos.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I’m ready when you are.”

  “You’re live in ten,” she said. “The rest of you shut up. Reggie has to do her Katie Bellows impression and she can’t screw this up.”

  I heard a click and the voice of a switchboard operator.

  “Detective Barlow, please,” I said sweetly.

  “Detective Barlow is unavailable at the moment, may I ask who’s calling?”

  “It’s Calliope Burns,” I said. “And believe me, he’s going to want to take this call.”

  “Will he know what this is in reference to?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “He most emphatically will. Go get him, please.”

  “But he asked us not to—”

  “Now,” I said, as sternly as I could muster, averting my eyes from the sight of Carter and Leo in the kitchen, collapsed in helpless, silent giggles. I heard her set down the receiver and walk away.

  “Shut it,” Calliope hissed at the boys. “No cackling in the background.”

  “Sorry!” whispered Leo. I waved him into silence as I heard footsteps in the background. I took a deep breath and thought about my mother. What would Katie Bellows do?

  “Agent Burns,” said Detective Barlow’s voice, polite but annoyed. “So sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Then next time, don’t,” I said frostily, and Carter nodded approvingly.

  “I wanted to apologize again for—”

  “Save it,” I said. “I’m not interested in your excuses. What I need to know is, when I come back tomorrow to pick up another set of those photos, will they actually be there waiting for me, or will yet another enemy agent be strolling around town with classified information that the Bureau somehow can’t manage to get its hands on?”

  “Tomorrow?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m assuming you have the ability to reproduce a set of photos given an entire twenty-four hours to do so. Or should I just take the originals down to the Fotomat and hand over confidential evidence to the teenager in a polo shirt behind the counter and see if he can do your job better than you can?”

  “I . . . there’s no need for . . . Agent Burns, I assure you, I . . . there’s—”

  “Yes, that’s very well put,” I said in a lofty voice, turning my back away from the kitchen, where Carter and Leo were doubled over in soundless laughter. “But be that as it may, what I need from you is your assurance that you will have a set of photos ready to place in my hand – mine only, Detective Barlow, absolutely no one else’s – and that you will tell no one else about this conversation. Can I trust you with those two extremely simple tasks?”

  There was a sullen, grumbly silence before he finally muttered, “Of course, ma’am.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “What time should I expect you?” he said.

  I looked at Calliope. Calliope looked at me. We hadn’t figured that part of it out yet. What should I tell him? I mouthed to her. She shrugged, I don’t know, make something up.

  “I don’t know,” I said, then caught myself. “I mean . . . my schedule is exceptionally crowded and I can’t possibly make any guarantees. It could be any time.”

  “You’re asking me to sit around the police station with an envelope all day long and you can’t even tell me when you might possibly be coming by to get it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That is what I’m telling you. And unless you want me to tell . . .” (I paused, thinking; Hanson, Calliope mouthed at me, and I nodded gratefully) “. . . Hanson about your little scam with falsely arresting my friend Kitty to pocket an extra fine in cash, you’ll do it.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” he said irritably.

  “Tomorrow. Don’t screw this up, Barlow.”

  And then I nodded at Calliope, who clicked twice and the line disconnected.

  Free of the encumbering restraints of silence, Carter and Leo burst into hysterical peals of laughter.

  “Oh man,” said Leo. “Oh man. That was a badass Mom impression.”

  “I could have listened to him fumble around for like nine more hours,” said Carter. “I really could. It was glorious.”

  “Nice work,” said Calliope. “You’re really getting into character. A masterful performance.”

  “So we did it,” said Leo. “The photos will be there.”

  “Yeah,” said Carter, “now we just need a way into Sweethaven so we can actually send Reggie back to get them. Any brilliant ideas yet?” he said, turning to me.

  “Well,” I began slowly, looking at the boys as the traces of a plan clicked together in my head.

  “It’s not as easy as all that,” Calliope jumped in. “Unless you’ve forgotten about the part where she’s a fugitive on the run from a global corporation with eyes on the ground in two different centuries looking for her. And me. And you. She can’t just waltz in there and say, ‘Hello boys, I’m here for your transporter.’ We need to assume that U.E. has access to the Bureau’s entire personnel database. Any one of us could be spotted.”

  “So how do we get in unrecognized?” asked Leo, sliding a spatula under the flawless bacon-and-leek omelette in his pan and gently setting it on a plate before looking up to realize I was staring at him.

  “I do have a way in,” I said, and suddenly I had Carter and Calliope’s attention too, “but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like it.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Send in the only person in this room who isn’t in the Bureau’s personnel database,” I said, and the spatula clattered out of Leo’s hand and onto the counter.

  “Why don’t I finish this one,” said Carter, gently shoving Leo out of the way and into the living room towards me and picking up the omelette pan. Leo’s face was still expressionless.

  “You can’t be serious, Reggie,” he said finally. “I mean you can’t actually be serious.”

  “Give me another option, then,” I said, and he was silent. “Leo, this is the only way.”

  “I’m not you, Reggie, I can’t do this.”

  “You’ve done it already,” I said. “You did it for a year and a half. You got me out of that building. I’d still be trapped there if it weren’t for you. You’re on the team. You’re in this.”

  “That was different,” he said. “I wasn’t actually lying. I mean I wasn’t hiding anything. I told them I didn’t know where you were because I didn’t know where you were. I would park outside the Bureau and they’d search me and I’d tell them there was nothing in the car because there was nothing in the car. I told the truth for so long that they just stopped asking, so by the time I had to actually smuggle you out of that building underneath my coat, they didn’t even look in the back seat.”

  “That was different.” He paused, then went on. “That, I could do. This is, what, marching up to an armed guard in front of a medical facility and lying to his face to get let in? And then somehow convincing Grove to trust me? Who, by the way, I don’t think I’ve seen since we were like ten years old and used to come to the office with Mom after school, so how the hell does Grove know I’m one of the good guys?”

  “You’ll have a Comm with you,” I said, “and as soon as you’re inside, you’ll turn it on and
Calliope and I will explain everything. All we need you to do, Leo, is get the Comm to Grove.”

  “Oh, that’s it?” he snapped. “That’s all?”

  “Leo—”

  “God, you say that like it’s so easy,” he said, frustrated. “It’s not easy for the rest of us. Our mom went missing and left me some cryptic instructions I could barely understand, and then these two show up and say, ‘Oh, by the way, your sister is stuck in a time warp, you need to figure out a way to get inside the building, but not until next Christmas, and by the way we don’t know if Reggie is alive or dead but we’re in charge of erasing an entire war from history to save fifty-six million people,’ and there are spies chasing you in two different centuries, and to top it all off, apparently they murdered our dad.”

  Carter, behind him, picked up the two plated omelettes, gave Calliope a look, and left the room. She followed him wordlessly upstairs. I held out my hand to Leo, and he came over to sit down on the couch next to me. I pulled my feet up underneath me and curled into the side of his body. He put his arm around me and I rested my head on his shoulder. We sat like that for a few minutes in silence.

  “Our mom is missing,” he said. “Our dad is dead. Me and you, we’re all we have.”

  “I know.”

  “No part of this is normal. You can’t be pissed at me for not being ready to turn into a government super-spy at a moment’s notice. I didn’t go to school for this, like you did. I went to public school, with the regular kids. I learned everything that regular kids learn about the 20th century – about Nixon, about Reagan, about World War III.”

  “You’re all experts. I’m not. Calliope, she just has to look at a piece of computer equipment and it does her bidding. Carter is an encyclopedia of knowledge about the presidency. You and Mom, you spent years of your lives becoming experts on Richard Nixon.”

  He sighed. “I didn’t do any of that. I wait tables and clean fish and sign purchase orders and manage bar staff. Do you need me to do that? Do you need me to make goulash? Do you need me to hire and fire employees? If you need an informational lecture on Old Town Dubrovnik, I can do that; the historical society guided tour stops right underneath my living room window on Mondays, so that one I can do. But this world is yours. Yours and Mom’s. It isn’t mine. I don’t belong here.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You’re from the outside. So you see things from a different point of view. You keep catching things the rest of us miss.”

  I added, “Me and Carter and Calliope, sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees. You’re the only person in this house who figured out what Mars and Saturn meant. You’re the only one who ever thought to ask why World War III wasn’t fought with nuclear weapons. And you’re the only one who could have gotten me out of that building yesterday. It’s because you’re not inside the Bureau. It’s because you’ve lived this whole other life. You see things the rest of us can’t. We need you, Leo. I need you.”

  We sat in silence for awhile, lost in thought, before the rumbling of my stomach alerted me to the fact that Carter and Calliope were the only ones who had gotten lunch.

  “Oh,” he said. “Crap. You didn’t get an omelette. No, don’t get up, I’ll make one.”

  “I want to watch you do it,” I said. “Show me.”

  He went back over to the kitchen and I followed, hopping up to sit on the kitchen counter and look down at him while he worked.

  “Talk me through it,” I said.

  “Step one is to have the filling ready,” he said, and I watched the tension leave his face as he began pulling the ingredients back together. We were back in the world that he knew. “An omelette only takes about thirty seconds to cook all the way through, so whatever is going inside of it has to be prepared beforehand and waiting for you.”

  “Step two is prepping the eggs.” He pulled over a glass bowl full of golden liquid, wonderfully flecked with visible chunks of black pepper, and scooped out a small amount. “An omelette for one person only takes about two or three eggs. Any more and it takes too long to cook and turns leathery. This is as much as you want.”

  “And then you add a little milk, and some salt and pepper. Not too much salt, since there’s bacon in the filling. And Carter added some thyme and chives.” He sliced a generous pat of butter and let it sizzle and hum in the pan for a few seconds, holding the pan by the handle and turning it so the melted butter coated the whole surface, then poured in the eggs.

  “This is the tricky part,” he said. “Because it looks like you’re scrambling them, but you’re not. You have to let it form that browned skin so it all stays in one piece.” And I watched as he deftly swirled the pan while smoothing and spreading the egg mixture out with the spatula as the wet golden egg mixture softened and lightened into opacity. It was all over very quickly. Then he scooped the leeks and bacon into the center of the egg mixture and slid it onto the plate, folding it over as he went, and handed it to me. “That’s how you make an omelette.”

  “You eat that one,” I said. “Let me try.”

  He started to object, then saw the stubborn look on my face and yielded without a fight. I mimicked his movements exactly, swirling the butter until it sizzled but hadn’t yet browned, pouring in just the right amount of egg mixture, and gently moving it around the pan with the spatula until it formed a perfect yellow circle, then carefully adding the filling, folding it over and scooping it onto the plate.

  “I know how to make an omelette now,” I said.

  “Only because I showed you what to do,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I told him. “That’s exactly my point.” I took a bite of the omelette I had made myself. “This is amazing,” I said. “I’m sorry I gave you shit about the leeks.”

  “Reggie—”

  “I wasn’t born knowing everything about Richard Nixon, Leo. You weren’t born knowing how to make an omelette. We had to learn. But we’re smart people who learn fast. And you’ll have Carter, Calliope and me on Comm with you the whole time. If I can make a totally delicious omelette without screwing it up, you can do this. I know you can.”

  “You know what the difference is?” he said. “The omelette wasn’t shooting at you.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “The omelette didn’t murder our dad.”

  “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “The omelette didn’t manipulate the Timeline to cause fifty-six million innocent people—”

  “I get it, Leo, we’re on the same page, you can stop now.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m scared, Reggie,” he said. “This is terrifying.”

  “I’m scared too,” I said. “We all are.”

  “And you don’t really have any idea if this is going to work.”

  “No.”

  “I’m Katharine Bellows’ son; it’s possible they might have me in their database even though I’m a civilian.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And even if you bring home these photos, there’s no guarantee that they’ll find anything in them that helps us.”

  “I realize that.”

  “And going back to 1972 could be incredibly dangerous.”

  “I know,” I said. “But we can figure all of that out together. The only thing you need to do is walk into the lobby of that building, give them your real name and tell the truth. You can do that.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “You can do this, Leo. I know you can.”

  “Can we come down now?” I heard Carter shout down the stairs. “Are you done fighting?”

  “We’re done, come back,” said Leo.

  “Oh thank God,” said Calliope as the two of them clattered down the stairs. “Are you in?”

  I looked at Leo. Leo looked at me.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “I’m in.”

  Twenty

  Last of the Time Agents

  Two and a half hours later, with no wo
rd from Leo, I began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake.

  “How much longer do we wait before we just find an empty broom closet, Short-Hop inside and hope for the best?” asked Carter, only half-joking. He was sprawled out on the couch while Calliope packed up supplies from Carstairs’ cabinet and I paced anxiously.

  “We can’t,” said Calliope. “It’s a secure facility. Short-Hops don’t work. You can only get there through their own private transport lab or by walking in through the front door. Visitors have to go through a background and security check with a full-body scan and then a resident or staff member has to vouch for you. Grove’s going to have to agree to see Leo and sign an authorization form just to get him into the building.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “He will,” said Calliope firmly. “Reggie, where’s the Gemstone drive?”

  “Upstairs, in my room,” I said. “It’s plugged into my handheld.”

  “I’ll go get it,” she said. “We’ll want to send it to Congressman Holmes along with the photos.”

  “Grab the file on my bed, too,” I called to her as she went upstairs. “I took down the evidence wall in case they want it.”

  Carter turned to me as soon as she was gone.

  “Truth, now,” he said. “Is there really anything Grove can do?”

  “Truth? I don’t know,” I said. “He’s been friends with Holmes for decades and he’s technically the only licensed Bureau agent left in the United States, so he’s our best hope by a mile. A lot depends on how convincing he thinks this evidence is. And a lot depends on figuring out the identities of Saturn and Mars. But if there’s anything he can do, he’ll do it. For Calliope if nothing else. He owes her.”

  “They seem remarkably close,” he said, looking upstairs after her.

  “Calliope got placed with Grove right out of the Academy and never left,” I said. “She could have gone up for agent certification any time in the past decade and aced it, if she wanted to. Mom used to push her about it all the time, said she’s a hundred times too smart for her job – which is true – and that she was wasting her potential staying a tech forever. All the other techs on our floor are like twenty years old. It’s a job you grow out of fast. And Calliope’s the smartest person I know.”