The elevator doors closed on him looking after me with worry in his eyes, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was thinking.
We were both wondering if we would ever see each other again.
The trip back to the train station was mercifully uneventful. A passenger train from Union Station was scheduled for maintenance and departing in ten minutes – the last of the trains on Calliope’s list. I had cut it uncomfortably close
I bought a ticket for the train adjacent to it, using my 1972 cash per Calliope’s instructions, then waited until the conductor’s back was turned and darted across the rails, slipping into the empty train through an unlocked door. I sat down on the floor of the nearest compartment, so I couldn’t be seen through the windows, and tapped my Comm to page Calliope.
“It’s done,” I said. “They’ve got the photos. I told them everything.”
“Reggie!” she said, nearly shouting. “You’re the last to call in. I’ve got Carter here too.”
“I’m on my way back now,” I said.
“Me too,” said Carter in my ear. “Are you on the train?”
“Yes. Car 12.”
“I’m in Car 8. Stay where you are, I’ll come to you.”
“Any word from Leo?”
“I’m here,” said Leo’s voice. “I got back about eight. I’m with Calliope.”
“How did it go at Dean’s apartment?”
“Not quite like we expected,” said Calliope. “I don’t think he’s the one we’re looking for.”
“Are you sure?”
“There were definite traces of Slipstream radiation attached to objects all around his apartment,” said Calliope. “But only certain things. If he had come through the Slipstream himself, the scanner would have lit up every single thing he’d ever touched or breathed on. But the levels were way too low. Just traces, really. And only attached to certain things. This pair of shoes but not that pair of shoes. The desk in his office but not the bookshelf next to it.”
“So he’s definitely been in contact with either Mars or Saturn,” said Carter’s voice over the Comm, just as the door opened and he entered, sitting down beside me and dropping his pack on the floor next to mine. “That’s helpful.”
“Hi,” I said, smiling.
“Hi,” he said. “Good to see you.”
“Let’s look at the scans when we get back to the safe house,” Calliope said, “and see if we can figure out anything helpful from looking at which objects have trace radiation. Reggie worked for him, so maybe something will jump out at her that the rest of us missed. Carter, how did it go with you?”
“Well, I can now cross ‘fire-bomb own apartment’ off the list of things I need to do before I die,” he said dryly, pulling his water bottle out of his pack and taking a drink. “I went over the place with a fine-toothed comb and the good news is I don’t think anyone’s been in it since I left. All my tech was still there. I snagged everything I could, pulled the fire alarm to get everyone else out of the building, then set the explosives and ran out with the rest of the crowd.”
“And I don’t have to ask how Reggie’s day went,” said Calliope. “Because I can see it myself.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled.
“I don’t want to toot my own horn,” she said, “but sending you to the reporters was the first thing we’ve done that’s actually created measurable results. I logged into the General Timeline through your dad’s old handheld and it’s going crazy. This whole Timestream is in flux. The system is beginning to self-correct. I can’t tell if it was the photos specifically, or something you said, but there was a huge spike.”
“So it’s working,” said Carter. “That’s good.”
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Calliope. “But we haven’t reached the tipping point yet. The system still isn’t sure what it wants to do. Events on the Timeline are blinking in and out.”
“We need to throw another rock in the pond, that’s what Mom said,” I told her. “The ripples aren’t big enough yet.”
“Yes,” said Calliope. “We still haven’t stopped the war. The war is still stable. We’re getting closer and closer – whatever the reporters are doing is clearly nibbling away at it – but it’s going to need another push from our end as well.”
“Still,” I said, “we did it. Good work, everyone.”
“Back to the safe house after this?” said Leo.
“I think so,” I said. “U.E. is going to be pissed as hell, and we should lay low for awhile until we know which way things are going. But once Congress reopens the Bureau, and Mom can come back, we’ll have better resources to track Mars and Saturn and figure out exactly how to stop them.”
“This is real progress,” said Calliope. “I’m kind of amazed this went so smoothly.”
“Christ,” said Leo. “Don’t jinx it,” and they laughed like it was some kind of private joke.
I felt the train slow down, and I realized we were already back at Ivy City Yard.
“We’re pulling in right now,” said Carter. “Be there in five.”
He stood up and walked towards the door, looking out the window. Then his expression changed, and a look of puzzled concern came over it.
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s someone there,” he said. “Blocking our entrance.”
“What?” I said, jumping up to go look out the window next to him.
“It’s okay,” said Leo. “He works here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Tall white guy, wearing jeans and a bright orange plastic vest thing?”
“Yeah,” said Carter. “Has he been here since you got back?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay,” said Leo. “He’s not a security guard or anything. He was working on one of the train cars in the yard when I got in, and there was no way for me to get across the street to the warehouse without him noticing.”
“So I got off the train on the other side, snuck around some of the other engines until it looked like I was coming towards him from the street instead of the train, and then I pretended like I was lost and asking for directions. He snapped at me to go away and then as soon as his back was turned I ducked into the warehouse.”
“What’s he doing now?” asked Calliope.
“Just standing,” said Carter. “Looking at his watch.”
“Does he see you?”
“He sees the train,” I said. “He doesn’t appear to be looking at us.”
I looked at the man in the orange vest for a moment, trying to figure out a way to navigate around him, when the last thing Carter had said clicked into my brain and my heart stopped beating. I reached out a hand without thinking and latched onto Carter’s forearm. He yelped in pain as my fingers clamped onto him.
“Jesus, Reggie, what?”
“It’s not a watch,” I said hoarsely, pointing with a shaking finger. “Carter. Look. It’s not a watch.”
And we watched as the man in the orange vest lifted his hand, spoke into the black band around his wrist and tapped it three times. Then he disappeared.
“Son of a bitch. It’s a wrist Comm,” I hissed furiously. “U.E. found us. Calliope, we’re blown.”
“What?”
“He transported out,” I said. “I just saw it.”
“Shit,” said Calliope fiercely. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Did you recognize him?” said Leo. “Was that our guy?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think that’s Mars. I think that guy was just here to give the signal.”
“Signal for what?”
“That we’re all here,” said Carter softly, as an ominous-looking dark van pulled up directly between us and the warehouse doors.
“We’re screwed,” I said to Calliope. “Carter and I can’t get to you. And you can’t get out.”
“What do you mean, we can’t get out?” said Leo in a voice laced with panic. “Why can’t we get out?”
“Because,” I said, watching out the window with my heart in my throat, “Eight U.E. guards just showed up between you and your exit.”
They got out of the van, and as it drove away, I saw them split up into two teams of four. Guns at the ready, one team crept very slowly and quietly inside the vast train car warehouse where Calliope and Leo were hiding, while the other turned and began to move towards the train which had just pulled in. The train with me and Carter on it.
I pulled Carter down to the floor of the train car and we ducked beneath the seats.
“Damn,” I said under my breath. “Calliope, where are you?”
“Same place where you left me,” she said.
“Is the door to your train car closed?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can you lock it? Quietly?”
“I can try,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Turn your lights off. There are four armed guards inside the warehouse right now.”
“What?” she exclaimed in a whisper.
“And four more headed towards us,” Carter said. “In case you guys were worried that we felt left out.”
“They know we’re here?” said Leo in horror.
“No,” I said slowly, thinking it out as I spoke, retracing the guards’ movements in my mind. “No. I think they think we’re here.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Calliope. “Carter, what is she talking about?”
Carter looked at me.
“The guards in the warehouse were stealthy,” I said. “Hand signals. Moving slowly. If they had us on trackers they’d have charged in, guns blazing, and shot out the walls of Calliope’s train car. But they didn’t.”
I risked a swift look out the window, lifting my head up just enough to see out of the corner of my eye. There were four guards down at the far end of the train, closest to the warehouse, guns drawn, slowly entering the first car. “It’s the same on our end,” I said. “They started down at Car * * *1, closest to the warehouse entrance, and they’re going through one at a time. They’re hunting. They don’t know which car we’re in.”
“They can’t be tracking our Comm frequency,” said Carter, “because these things are a thousand years old. And we’re all carrying around a scan blocker to mask our radiation trails. So either they have some way to hack into decades-old tech that Calliope didn’t know about, or they didn’t use tech to find us.”
“The scan blockers work,” said Calliope. “I’m watching the readouts right now. No trace radiation has escaped the filter. There’s no chance of anyone finding us that way.”
“I don’t get it,” said Leo. “Then how did they find us? No one knows we were here.”
And then my blood went cold and I felt a pain clench my heart.
“That’s not true,” I said quietly. “There is someone. Someone who knows exactly where we are.”
The silence that followed was awful. I couldn’t look at Carter, but I could feel him looking at me. Through the Comm channel, I heard someone – I didn’t know if it was Calliope or Leo – inhale sharply. Everything was very still.
Nobody said the thing we were all thinking. We all let it hang there. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I slid down the wall and sat back down on the floor of the train car.
Harold Grove.
“No,” said Calliope finally. “No. There’s another explanation. We just have to figure it out. We have to find a way out of this warehouse and—”
“There’s no other way out of the warehouse, Calliope,” I said dully, “and you know that. He dropped us inside a building with one exit. And now it’s blocked.”
“Stop saying ‘he,’” she snapped.
“We’re not doing this right now,” said Carter. “Reggie, we need exit options.”
“He sent us all over Washington D.C. to collect every last piece of evidence that might tie U.E. to Gemstone,” I said to Calliope, ignoring Carter. “The original photos. That was his idea. Sweeping the apartments. And insisting that we all four go together, even at the risk of sending a civilian with no radiation immunity on a 140-year jump.”
“We were idiots, we didn’t even think. Of course this was what they wanted. There’s no evidence that any agents were ever in this Timeline now. The Bureau’s shut down, they control our whole building, and Carter just burned down his whole damn apartment to destroy the cargo drop that was the last working link to the Slipstream. We just did all of U.E.’s dirty work for them. And now we’re trapped.”
“He would never do this,” she said. “He would never. He would never.”
“Then how did they find us, Calliope?” I snapped. “You were on tech. You set the scan blockers. You covered our tracks. Did you screw up? Did you miss something?” The anger in her silence came in waves over the Comm.
“No,” I answered for her, “you didn’t. Which means the only person who could possibly have known exactly when and where to find us is the person who sent us there.”
“Go to hell,” said Calliope coldly, and was silent.
“What do we do?” Carter mouthed silently to me, huddled underneath the seat across from mine, and the petty annoyance at Calliope I was using to press my emotions down into the pit of my stomach evaporated, leaving a dark empty numbness in its wake. I felt hollow. Off in the distance, there were voices and clanging metal. The guards were moving closer. They had guns. We might die here. I should care, but I didn’t. I felt nothing at all.
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice sounding dull and flat, even to me. I couldn’t think about making a plan. I couldn’t think about anything except Harold Grove’s voice saying, “Midnight, don’t forget.”
Carter pushed the mute button on his wrist Comm, then knelt in front of me and muted mine as well.
“He’s Saturn,” I said, my voice expressionless. “Grove is Saturn.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I quit. I’m out. I can’t do this. I’m going to stay on this train until either a guard comes in and shoots me or they send it back to Union Station, and then I’m going to just ride along, wherever it’s going.”
“Reggie—”
“Chicago, maybe. I’ve never been to Chicago. I think I’d like it. I like people with really strong opinions about pizza. I feel like I could be happy in Chicago.”
“Reggie,” said Carter, “I need you to stay with me here, okay? There are armed guards closing in and we need to get out of here. You’re the leader. We need you to lead.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “We need you to tell us what we’re going to do.”
“How the hell should I know?” I exclaimed. “What are my qualifications? Harold Grove was running a decades-long con to hide a massive Chronomaly from everyone in the Bureau and he was doing it ten feet from my desk. Right under my nose, and I never saw it. And I’m supposed to outsmart him how, exactly?”
“Reggie—”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “Everyone thinks that just because I’m Carstairs’ and Bellows’ kid that I’m some super genius, but I’m not. I’m just a smart girl who’s good at computers. We had one way back to our own time, and it was a trap. How the hell am I supposed to fix that? I’m not magic, Carter.”
He sat down next to me and took my hand. We sat in silence for a few moments.
“I worked for him for five years,” I said finally.
“I know.”
“Calliope is never going to speak to me again.”
“We can’t worry about that right now.”
I leaned my head back against the train car wall, sighed, then turned my Comm back on. So did Carter.
“Where the hell did you two go?” said Leo as the Comms clicked back to life.
“Sorry,” said Carter. “That was an accident. But we’re back now.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We have two problems in front of us, so let’s start with the biggest.”
“The men with guns?” said Leo.
> “Unfortunately, no,” I said. “That’s the small problem. The big problem right now is that we have no way to get out of 1972.”
“Wait a minute,” said Leo. “You’re telling me there was no backup plan?”
“I would have told you if there was a backup plan,” I said. “If I don’t say ‘Here’s the backup plan,’ assume there’s no backup plan.”
“So in that whole bag of tricks Calliope has been hauling around, there’s nothing we can use to get home with?”
“No,” said Calliope. “I have a dozen Short-Hops – you can go about six months at a time with those – but not nearly enough to get us from 1972 to 2112. No, for a big jump like that you need a device synced up to a real transport lab.”
Something clicked inside my head. A device synced up to a real transport lab.
Those guards had black uniforms, not white, so they hadn’t come from Sweethaven. They must have transported here directly from United Enterprises.
Which made them our ticket home.
“Wait a minute,” I said to Calliope, the beginnings of a plan slowly beginning to coalesce in my head. “You have Short-Hops? You have them with you, right now?”
“Yes,” she said. “The ones I swiped from the safe house. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
“You all have one,” she said. “Didn’t you go through your bag on the train like I asked you to?”
“Just to look for snacks,” I said.
“Christ, you’re predictable.”
“Calliope, please tell me there’s another train leaving Ivy City Yard tonight.”
“The train three tracks over from you – the passenger train – is being prepped for departure now. Scheduled to leave in twenty-eight minutes.”
“Are you packed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “You and Leo, use a Short-Hop and get on that train. Set it for just before departure. Carter and I will meet you. Leo, pick a number between one and five.”
“Two.”
“Great. Set coordinates for Car 2. Now go.”
“Wait a minute,” said Carter, looking at me. “Where are you going?”
I pulled the stun pistol out of the pack Calliope had sent with me.
“I have a really, really bad idea,” I said.
The Rewind Files Page 34
