The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  We walked for awhile longer before we circled back around to the elevator bay again. It was empty; Carter stopped walking and leaned against the wall.

  “Cover me for a second,” he said. “My head is itching like crazy.”

  I kept watch down the hallway while he quickly pulled off his helmet, sighed with relief, ran a hand through his short dark hair, and then – wrinkling up his nose and looking very much like a little boy asked to finish a much-hated chore – put his helmet back on.

  “It’s only been like half an hour and I already hate this thing,” he said. “How do these guys do it all day long?”

  “No idea,” I said, taking mine off and gathering up my hair for a moment to let the chill hallway air cool off my sweaty neck. I desperately did not want to put the helmet back on – it smelled like metal and perspiration and my coffee breath – but we had to keep going.

  “What’s next?” asked Carter, as if reading my mind. “We could do this for forty-something floors and not find anything.”

  “I know.”

  “We don’t even know what we’re looking for. We can’t just walk up to someone and ask where Mars is.”

  I stared at him.

  “What?” he said. “You’ve got your ‘Sudden Idea’ face on again. What did I say?”

  “We can,” I said. “We can.”

  “We can what?”

  We can ask where Mars is,” I said, grinning at him, and I swiped my security badge on the panel outside the Sidewinder. The robotic woman’s voice greeted us politely again and asked our purpose.

  “We’re looking for Mars,” I said. Instantly the wall behind us lit up, and we turned. It had become a floor-to-ceiling digital computer screen. It began to flash rapidly through a series of images.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Scanning all the security feeds,” I said. “It must be synced to everybody’s ID badges. So you can either tell it where you’re going, or you tell it who you’re looking for and it takes you directly to their current location.”

  “That’s . . . sinister,” he said.

  “But at the moment, convenient.”

  “Agent Mars is currently on floor Eighty-Seven,” said the soothing voice. “Please provide your Restricted Access Level security code in order to proceed.”

  “Goddammit,” I muttered under my breath. “I hate you, you stupid computerized elevator with your stupid questions and your stupid security codes.” The freight elevator wouldn’t help us this time – there was no way an unsecured cargo lift went up to the Restricted Access Levels if the Sidewinder required an additional password. And there were no stairwells.

  “Reggie,” Carter whispered in an urgent voice. I was only half-listening, trying to rack my brains for some way to access floor Eighty-Seven if neither the Sidewinder nor the freight elevator would take us there. “Reggie,” he said again, pulling at my sleeve.

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’m thinking.”

  “Reggie,” he said, his voice slow and soft. “Turn around.”

  I turned around.

  The video wall had located Agent Mars’ nearest security camera feed. It showed a gleaming, airy white hallway, skylights overhead – floor Eighty-Seven must be at the very top of the building. The digital projection was so detailed that I felt, uncomfortably, as though I were standing in that white hallway. I knew it was a one-way feed, but I felt naked and exposed, glaringly out of place in my black uniform.

  Directly in front of us was a pair of glass double doors. A very pretty young woman sat at a desk and behind her was a glass wall into the most grand and opulent office we had yet seen. Though everything was white, it was lush and ornate in a way the rest of the building was not. Where the hallways and even the atrium were chilly, this room was elegant and refined. A huge white desk, heavy and intricately carved, sat in the center, flanked by white leather chairs, with thick white carpet underneath.

  “Please provide your Restricted Access Level security code in order to proceed,” said the elevator voice again. We ignored her.

  Behind the desk was a high-backed white chair, facing away, with its back to us. A hand reached out for a white china teacup sitting on the top of the white desk, and Carter and I looked at each other.

  “That’s Mars,” I said, my heart in my throat. “Mars is right there.”

  “Please provide your Restricted Access Level security code in order to proceed.”

  Turn around, I begged the hand holding the teacup. Oh please, oh please. Turn around. Let me see your face.

  We watched, praying for something to happen. A Comm screen pinged on the pretty receptionist’s desk. We couldn’t see who she was talking to, but it was a brief conversation, and she rang off.

  And then the miracle happened. She turned around from her desk and tapped on the glass behind her. The hand set down the teacup and waved her in. My pulse was pounding. I clutched Carter’s arm. Oh please, oh please.

  We saw the chair slowly turn around.

  There, clad in a perfect white suit, legs crossed elegantly as she sipped her tea, sat Beth Rutherford.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. “Oh, holy shit.”

  “Oh, no,” said Carter.

  “Please provide your Restricted Access Level security code in order to proceed,” said the elevator.

  “Let us out,” said Carter, and the elevator door whooshed open. I couldn’t move. “Walk normal, Reggie,” he murmured under his breath, shoving me out of the elevator.

  “Carter—”

  “Transporter corridor,” he said. “It’s soundproof. Go. Walk. Now.”

  I held my head high, trying to walk steadily and purposefully like the U.E. guard whose uniform I was wearing, but I could hardly breathe inside my helmet.

  Mars was Beth Rutherford.

  She was Mars, god of war. She had planned this whole thing. All this time – while I was hunting through two different centuries for the mastermind behind the World War III Chronomaly – she had been sitting in the desk right across from me. For three months I had typed her memos and tolerated her snippy remarks about my punctuality. I had watched her endure a litany of endless indignities from people like Gordon Liddy and might even, if she had been a different sort of person, have pitied her for it.

  And all that time, she was pulling the strings behind everything.

  For three months, the enemy I was hunting had stared me in the face, and I didn’t even know it. She was ruthless and brilliant, and I was powerless against her. What chance did Carter and I and a handful of antiquated gadgets from Calliope have against this corporation, against a person like that?

  Mechanically, without even noticing where I was going, I followed Carter, retracing our steps back through the control room into the transport corridor, where he pulled me inside the first open door and shut it. We pulled off our helmets and stared at each other. Nobody said anything for a long time. Finally Carter broke the silence.

  “You have worse luck with bosses than anyone I’ve ever met,” he said, which struck me at that moment as so hysterically funny that I burst out laughing. I laughed and laughed and laughed, tears streaming down my face. I laughed until it crossed the line over into a kind of mania, as though all the tension and anxiety and panic of the past weeks and month had finally broken the dam.

  I’ve lost it, I thought to myself. I’ve officially lost it. Goodbye sanity.

  Carter watched me, an expression of growing concern on his face, until the laughter and the tears merged into some weird, gulping hybrid and I was laughing and crying and hyperventilating a little and beginning to feel like I might faint.

  “Come here,” he said, and he put his arms around me, and I laugh-cried into his shoulder until I felt my hysteria subside. “It makes a weird kind of sense,” he said thoughtfully, his sensible voice soothing. “We were close. We were on the right track the whole time. We had narrowed it down to the Counsel’s office. We just assumed we were dealing with Dean. But this explains everythin
g. The trace radiation, the U.E. wiretaps, the Gemstone link – all of it. It makes perfect sense.”

  “Beth Rutherford was the real brain in that office all along,” I said into his shoulder. “She ran that place. Dean could never have snuck a conspiracy this big past her without her knowing it.”

  “But she could certainly have snuck it past him.”

  “It makes sense,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it.”

  “Because she’s very, very good,” said Carter. “Come on. We’ve seen what we needed to see. Let’s head back to the safe house. Calliope and Leo will be wondering where we are. And we need to figure out a plan to get to Beth.”

  Something he said pinged the back of my brain.

  I pulled my hand away. Carter stared at me. “What?” he asked, concern in his voice.

  The safe house.

  I paged Calliope. No answer. Then Leo. Nothing. I tapped my Comm frantically, over and over, but neither of them picked up.

  “Reggie, what is it?” said Carter.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”

  “Reggie,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “We jumped from there,” I said. “Calliope wrote down the home coordinates and sent them to Sweethaven with Leo.” His eyes widened as he realized what I meant. “He jumped us from the safe house, Carter, Grove knows where the safe house is.”

  “Dammit,” he said fiercely. He pulled out his own Comm and tapped at it, but got nothing.

  “We have to go back,” he said.

  “No. We can’t. It’s a trap.”

  “Then we need to get out of the building,” he said. “We can take what we have to Congressman Holmes. The photos and your recording of Grove, and the Gemstone file. We’ll walk out of here and go straight to his office.”

  “Gemstone,” I whispered, feeling my chest contract. “Oh no.”

  “What about it?” he began to ask, but stopped short when he saw the look on my face. “Reggie,” he said slowly. “Where’s the Gemstone drive?”

  “Calliope had it in her bag when we left the safe house,” I said, “along with the evidence wall.”

  “Where is it now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember. But I think—” I stopped, going back over it in my mind. “I think she left it with Grove,” I said in a small voice.

  “Grove has your evidence wall, and Gemstone,” he said. “And presumably the first set of police photos. And the entire Bureau database.”

  “And the safe house coordinates,” I said, closing my eyes, swallowing my tears, and realizing for the first time just how badly I had screwed up.

  We had obliterated every trace of time travel agent involvement in the Watergate affair and in Gemstone. We had stolen police evidence, burned down Carter’s apartment, and destroyed everything that had come through the Slipstream that could possibly be traced back to the 22nd century. Harold Grove had set a trap and we had walked right into it. And then we had handed him every single piece of evidence he didn’t yet have.

  “So what do we tell Holmes?” said Carter.

  I shook my head, feeling the tears welling up, feeling the hysteria rising again.

  “We tell him nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do. I could go shoot Beth Rutherford in the head right now and it would stop nothing. There’s nothing we can do from here, Carter, don’t you get that? We can’t stop her. We can’t fight her. We can’t fight this company. Holmes isn’t going to help us. Telling the truth about U.E. isn’t going to help us. None of that means anything anymore. We went all the way back to get those photos for nothing.”

  “The photos,” he said, and he looked at me suddenly. “Reggie. Reggie. The photos.”

  “I told you,” I said wearily, without opening my eyes. “Holmes won’t do anything with the photos.”

  “Not those photos,” Carter said. “The other set.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said we walked into Grove’s trap,” said Carter. “That we followed his steps exactly. We did everything exactly like he asked.”

  “We did.”

  “No,” he said, voice rising with excitement. “You didn’t. You did one thing that wasn’t in Grove’s plan. And he doesn’t know.”

  I opened my eyes. I stared at him.

  “Woodward and Bernstein,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “We’re not sunk yet, Bellows,” he said. “That’s our ray of hope. You gave the photos to the reporters and it worked. Calliope said so. That means—”

  “That means we can still stop this thing,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken and the dull ache of sorrow in my chest slowly fade away. “But we can’t do it from here.”

  And suddenly I knew what I had to do . . . and where I had to go.

  “We have to go back,” I said. “Back to the beginning.”

  “Back to ’72?” he said. “To the Watergate?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “The real beginning. I have to get to another Timeline where I know Beth Rutherford will be. And then I have to get this Beth to follow me in, without knowing where she’s going.”

  “You can’t,” breathed Carter, eyes wide. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Carter—”

  “You’re going to create a Double Incongruity? On purpose?”

  “It’s the only way,” I said. “We have to erase Beth Rutherford from history so the Timeline can rewrite itself. It’s like a forced restart.”

  “We could get caught inside the Incongruity with her,” he said. “We could die there.”

  “There’s no ‘we,’” I said. “You’re staying here. We have no way of getting into the Bureau lab to do a Rewind if something goes wrong. I can’t risk both of us. I’m going in alone.”

  “Like hell you are,” he said, eyes flashing. “I’m your partner. I’m not letting you fight Beth Rutherford alone.”

  “You can’t come with me where I’m going,” I said. “It’s twenty times more dangerous for you.”

  “Why?” he said, suspicion dawning. “Where are you going?”

  “To the only other place in all of time where I know I’ll find Beth Rutherford,” I said. “I’m going to the Sharpeville Massacre.”

  Twenty-Three

  Three Minutes

  “This is a terrible plan,” said Carter’s voice from my Comm two hours later, as I found myself army-crawling through a dusty air vent.

  “Whatever,” I said. “You have the easy job.”

  “Bait is the worst job.”

  “You’re such a whiner.”

  “It’s not even a job. It’s something that gets eaten.”

  “Think of it this way,” I said. “Your reward is that as soon as you’re done being bait, you can leave. Plus, you got the fun part. You got to do the science experiment.”

  “That’s true,” he said, brightening considerably.

  We had made our way from the shiny white upper stories to the grimy and dim lower floors where the real work was done, to the lowest subbasement of the building our 1A elevator clearance would allow us to go. There, Carter raided a disused storage room and I formulated the plan that had since split us up and sent me into the air vents, gingerly carrying the unholy concoction he had cooked up with a handful of sugar packets from the mess hall pantry, an empty cardboard toilet paper roll, Carter’s stun pistol on its highest heat setting, and the gunpowder from the bullets in the guard’s sidearm that I had carefully pried apart with pliers.

  “I have the worse job,” said Carter. “I might get shot at.”

  “Might,” I said. “Whereas I definitely have climbed a tiny metal ladder through the building’s air filtration system up from Subbasement-D to the 14th floor, lugging the kindergarten craft project from hell, so your argument has no standing. Where are you?”

  “I’m almost there,” he said. “I’m just a few feet from the door.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Unless I made a wrong turn somewh
ere, I should be right above the transport lab in just a minute. Be noisy, okay? So I can find you.”

  “If this works, it will be plenty noisy,” he said, and as I crawled through the metal tubing – dusty and spidery from decades of disuse – I closed my eyes and prayed that this would not turn out to be a giant catastrophic disaster.

  “I’m outside the door,” Carter said. “Are you close?”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I think I see the vents.”

  Transport labs are aggressively climate-controlled – the equipment is highly sensitive to heat, and the rooms are generally on the chilly side, well-ventilated and dry. That meant if we could get into the vent system unnoticed, I should be able to find the right room by watching for the right kind of grates.

  “I see it!” I whispered. “Okay, I’ll be right above it in five seconds.”

  “Tell me when you’re in place,” he said, “and go fast. I don’t want to get caught lurking.”

  “I’m here,” I said, peering down through the grate at the room below. I was above the transport lab’s control room. Five white-coated techs were scattered around the room at the consoles. All was still and quiet. No one was looking up at the grates. Nobody had heard me.

  “Are you ready?” I asked Carter.

  “Ready,” he said. “Go.”

  I took a deep breath, used my stun pistol to light the fuse, and let Carter’s misshapen homemade smoke bomb – gunpowder and sugar heated together with a cardboard casing – drop to the floor, at the exact moment that Carter, clad in a head-to-toe biohazard suit over his guard uniform, charged through the door, discreetly elbowing the decontamination alarm on the wall to release a screeching klaxon wail, which reverberated hideously off every wall of the metal rectangle I was trapped in. Then, the final touch. Carter, who could not resist a dramatic flourish when it was presented, took a deep breath and shouted into the now-chaotic room.

  “Fire!”