A Thief in Time (Thief in Time Series Book 1)

by Cidney Swanson

  “Stop!” she cried, pulling against her bonds. “Where are you sending him?”

  She clung to the belief that Edmund would survive this. He had to. She’d seen it on his Wikipedia page.

  The machine began to whine.

  “Send me, too!” she screamed over the noise of the machine. Furiously, she began sawing at her PlastiCuffs again.

  Ignoring her, the professor tapped the podium screen once and then leaped backward, off the platform. Almost at once, the giant coils came to life as electricity snaked back and forth between them.

  “No!” screamed Halley. “Edmund—”

  But it was too late. The blue lights flashed and Edmund was gone.

  Gone—but where? Had the professor returned Edmund to his own time? Had he dropped him in the middle of some frozen ocean a thousand years ago? Her words catching in her throat, she choked out, “Please. Where is he?”

  Khan, recovering from Edmund’s attack, was still breathing heavily. He didn’t seem inclined to answer, and Halley had no way of forcing him to answer. No leverage. Nothing.

  She would never see Edmund again. There had been no last kiss. No words of love. Nothing. Just a fallen body, bleeding and shot through with fifty thousand volts, sent backward through time. She clutched at the bare facts from Wikipedia.

  Happily married to Maria of Lavenham.

  Ten children, six surviving.

  Debts paid off with his wife’s dowry.

  Halley told herself to breathe. Just breathe. This wasn’t the time to feel. She couldn’t look at her loss right now. Right now, she had to free herself. Taking a shallow breath, she started cutting her bonds again. The cuffs dug into her flesh each time she drew the knife against the plastic. She forced herself to focus on Edmund. She had to do everything in her power to make certain Edmund was okay. And if he wasn’t, she had to figure out how to undo whatever Khan had done.

  Think, she told herself. How can you get the information you need?

  She had to get Khan talking again. Start him talking, and he wouldn’t shut up about himself, his achievements, his time machine. She could trick him into revealing something.

  She swallowed. Cleared her throat. Took a slow, calming breath. And spoke.

  “You just told me Khan’s first law of temporal inertia states that permanent changes to past time lines are impossible. That means Edmund survives. It has to mean that. Right?” Her hand faltered as she cut. More softly, she pleaded, “Right?”

  Khan looked up.

  “Your imprecise use of language is truly appalling. To begin with, I said Khan’s Law may have proven changes to past time lines are impossible—”

  “So you admit you can’t kill Edmund. You admit he survives.”

  The professor frowned, his eyes now averted.

  “Are you this bad at paying attention in school?” he muttered.

  She sawed harder with the knife. Her wrist screamed, the skin torn and raw. “That’s not an answer—”

  “So figure it out yourself,” he shot back.

  Figure it out herself? Dread lodged in her belly, slowing her knife hand. What was she supposed to figure out? What had Khan said so far? She made a list.

  He might have proven he couldn’t change past time lines . . .

  Time was “self-healing,” which resulted in a photocopy effect . . .

  That was it. Just those two things. She couldn’t remember him making any other claims.

  And then her brain seemed to catch fire. The photocopy effect—it happened only once a return was made. Did it, then, extend to human beings? Did it extend to Edmund? Was that why Khan was so interested in Edmund’s state of health? Were there . . . two Edmunds? But if there were two of him, and if one had never left Elizabethan England, then the second Edmund—her Edmund—was in deadly peril. For him, there were no guarantees of a long and prosperous life, a wife, and six children.

  Halley felt her stomach heaving.

  “There are two of him,” she whispered, horrified. “The historical Edmund and the Edmund I know.”

  The Edmund she loved.

  The Edmund she had lost.

  She raised her eyes, brimming, pleading.

  “Yes,” said the professor.

  66

  • HALLEY •

  Halley’s heart stuttered. She sucked in a shallow breath. Exhaled. There were two Edmunds. There were two, but the one she loved had just been sent away.

  But where?

  And when?

  Professor Khan had stepped back onto the platform and was now tapping new orders into the time machine.

  Her head was spinning. Her heart was breaking. Breathe, she told herself. For him. Breathe. Think. Keep Khan talking. Fix this.

  “What are you doing?” she managed to whisper.

  “I’m disengaging the singularity device,” Khan replied. “Which will allow me the opportunity to test a hypothesis I’ve resisted testing to date, for obvious reasons.”

  She had to be strong. She had to stay alive. She had to finish cutting her bonds. And she had to get information from Khan.

  “Tell me . . . tell me about this hypothesis. About what you’ve done,” she said, her voice stronger this time.

  “I’m not sure you really want to know,” said the professor.

  “I do,” Halley said huskily.

  “Hmm.” Khan had fixed his gaze on a spot somewhere across the room, but Halley felt certain he wasn’t seeing whatever he was looking at. He was lost in his own thoughts.

  At last, Khan made a sort of harrumphing sound. And then, for the first time since he’d sent Edmund away, the professor met Halley’s gaze.

  “Very well. I owe you—that is, I believe that I’m indebted to you,” he said. “It seems likely you saved my life on Friday.”

  “I did?” Halley frowned.

  The professor nodded. “You reported that you rebooted the singularity device—that it awaited a yes or no response. This was new information to me.” He paused. “Until you explained your actions, I assumed the failsafe protocols had rebooted the system apart from . . . human intervention. I will need to make alterations so that they do in the future.

  “Unfortunately for you, when you tapped on ‘Y,’ you didn’t step off the platform. If the machine senses a body, it will engage transport. I must look into altering that protocol as well. But in any case, because you rebooted the program, I returned with the singularity device’s assistance. If my hypothesis—the one about which you inquired—holds water, I survived my return journey because of what you did. I like to repay my debts, so . . . I’ll answer your question about the nature of my hypothesis.” He took a deep breath, tapped the podium twice, and continued.

  “The singularity machine focuses the passage through ruptured space–time, rendering it possible to travel swiftly to a particular time and place in the historical past. However, as Khan’s first law of temporal inertia states, space–time abhors such a rupture and will not allow a person or an object sent back to remain in the historical past.

  “With or without the focus provided by the singularity device, the space–time continuum will, itself, expel what does not belong. So long as the machine provides a focus for this . . . expulsion, a traveler returns swiftly and without injury—”

  “But you just turned it off,” Halley blurted out. “What happens without the focus being . . . focused? What happens without the machine?”

  “We will know with certainty in”—Khan glanced at his watch—“less than six minutes.”

  “Why six minutes?” Halley’s pulse, already throbbing against the bite of her cuffs, began to race.

  “It’s another of the space–time continuum’s peculiarities. The pocket of time, once ruptured, will remain open for five hours divided by the square root of the number of years the traveler has traveled back. The return journey will be accomplished with or without the machine’s assistance. Space–time will repair itself. The machine simply focuses the journey, speeding it up f
rom the perspective of the traveler, as it were, and providing considerable safety.”

  Halley looked at him blankly.

  “Edmund—your Edmund—will begin his return journey in six, no—four and one-half minutes, from our perspective.” The professor grew quiet for a moment. “For us, his return will appear to be instantaneous, much the same as if he traveled with the machine’s aid. For him however, apart from the temporal focus the device provides, the journey forward will last over four hundred years.”

  Halley gasped in horror. “He’s going to be stuck time-traveling for four hundred years? Because you turned off the machine?” She shook her head. “How could you?”

  “It’s not as horrible as it sounds. In two minutes or so, he should expire from asphyxiation. I theorize the bacteria he carries with him will live for a significantly longer time. In short, I believe that when he returns, it will be in a state much like the human remains within my sarcophagi.” He gestured to two Egyptian mummy cases. “That is, in a very desiccated state.”

  Halley’s jaw dropped.

  “At least,” added Khan, “the orchid I sent recently returned thus.”

  “You’re despicable!” As soon as the words were out, Halley felt the cable tie she’d been cutting give way.

  “I have been as kind as was possible, given the circumstances,” said the professor. “I sent him, however briefly, back to his own time. Let us hope his relief at seeing London once more will calm him before his . . . final journey.”

  For a terrible handful of seconds, Halley’s hands seemed to remain stuck, and she thought she’d cut the wrong cable tie, but then her hands burst free, and knife in hand, she sprang toward Khan.

  67

  • HALLEY •

  Halley held Edmund’s knife extended in her left hand, leaving her right hand free to work the machine’s touch screen. As she’d hoped, Khan backed away long enough for her to tap “Resume” on the screen. She hoped that was the right decision.

  “Step away from there at once,” shouted Khan. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “I’m saving Edmund’s life,” she shouted back. “You’ll have to get past me if you want to do anything about it.”

  Khan rushed her, trying to reach the podium screen, but she thrust her knife at his upper arm. Crimson blossomed through his sleeve, and he emitted a sharp cry. Just as swiftly, he pinned her knife-hand with his good hand. Halley formed a fist and struck him, aiming Edmund’s golden ring on her third finger right at Khan’s nose. Unfortunately, just before the blow landed, Khan wrenched the knife from her grasp.

  Khan, cursing and blinking from the blow to his face, nonetheless managed to hold the knife steady, threatening.

  “Back away,” he grunted.

  “Make me.” Halley, now caught dangerously between the machine’s twin coils, heard two things in rapid succession. The first was a gentle sound—sand spilling onto the platform from where she’d pocketed it away a lifetime ago on the beach with Edmund. The second sound Halley registered was the thunderous groaning of the machine. Instinctively, she grabbed the sand from her pocket and threw it upward, right into the professor’s face.

  It struck him squarely in the eyes. Roaring with pain, Khan stumbled toward her, knife raised, half-blind, and then, just as he lurched onto the platform to reach her, she jumped off it. The Tesla coils fired to life and the professor, knife in hand, was frozen in their grasp. In less than three seconds, Khan disappeared, but as he vanished, a powerful arc of electricity discharged from the point of his upheld knife, blasting up and into the ceiling.

  And then Halley was alone, listening to the whine of the engines as blackened bits of ceiling rained down around her.

  68

  • KHAN •

  Jules Khan, veteran of dozens of journeys into the past, felt the familiar sensations of heat and noise and then the extended fall that meant arrival. He landed, bleeding from Halley’s knife wound, in the empty Curtain Theatre in the year 1598. It was twilight.

  Before he had the chance to do more than curse the girl, he realized he wasn’t alone. Edmund Aldwych stood on the opposite side of the stage, dressing his puncture wound with his shirt, now removed and torn.

  The two, seeing one another, froze momentarily. And then Edmund charged.

  The professor raised the small knife to defend himself, but Edmund was not caught off guard this time, and Khan was injured and without his Taser. Edmund disarmed Khan with a single swift kick to the elbow.

  Before Khan crumpled to the ground, he realized the snapping sound he heard was the breaking of his ulna.

  He shrieked in pain, clutching his arm to his chest, and then he screamed again, releasing his too-tight grip.

  Edmund shifted his focus to the dropped knife, spinning lopsidedly toward the edge of the stage. With a tremendous leap, Edmund managed to retrieve the knife just before it fell off the front of the stage. Then he turned to face the professor.

  “Where is Mistress Halley?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.

  And then the young man froze in place and vanished from the year 1598.

  69

  • HALLEY •

  Shaking, Halley approached the podium, keeping well away from the platform. On the screen, she saw a timer counting down.

  Fifty-four and eight-tenths of a second remained.

  Fifty-three seconds.

  Fifty. She looked up and saw tiny flames licking the charred edges of the hole Khan had blasted in the ceiling.

  Forty. She knew she should be concerned about the fire, but her heart clung to one thought alone: Edmund.

  Thirty. Burning debris fell from above. Halley stamped out the flames.

  Twenty. Edmund.

  Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

  Edmund.

  Halley backed away from the mighty Tesla coils as arcs of whitish-blue electricity shot between them, lighting the chamber like an exploding firework.

  A moment later, she saw him. He was bleeding. He was sinking to the ground. But he was also alive and reaching for Halley’s outstretched hand just as the ceiling overhead burst into brilliant orange flame.

  70

  • EDMUND •

  “Fire!” Edmund cried, rising. He held Halley to himself as though she were the boat mast in a tempest.

  “The stairs,” she said. “Now!”

  Together they crossed the room, Edmund feeling his strength returning moment by moment. He was alive. His lady was well. They were together, and Edmund vowed never again to part from her.

  They had not quite reached the stairs when a terrible wailing noise began.

  “That’s the fire alarm,” said Halley.

  “We must attempt to douse the conflagration.” Edmund looked about for buckets or basins.

  “No, we’ve got to get out of here,” said Halley. “The professor wants to kill us and he’ll be back any minute. Well, in ten minutes or so. Or maybe less—I’m not sure.”

  They had reached the top of the stairs. Alarms were sounding throughout the manor house.

  “Mistress, it is not right we should stand by idle whilst the building is encompassed in flame.”

  Halley swore. Edmund was right. They couldn’t just let Khan burn to death when he returned. She thought quickly, remembering things her mother had told her about the estate. “This building is hardwired so that the fire station gets a message as soon as alarms go off,” Halley said. “But we could get a garden hose or something . . .”

  “Let us hurry!” Edmund cried.

  “I should call 911, just in case,” she said. “Oh, no—my phone! It’s gone!”

  “The professor did remove it from you,” said Edmund, “after you were first fallen.”

  Edmund looked back at the stairs. A curl of dark smoke wisped its way up from the basement.

  “We’ve got to get that hose now,” said Halley.

  Edmund was on her heels, about to reply in the affirmative, when rain
began to fall upon them from the ceiling. He looked up, bewildered.

  “How is it that rain falleth through the ceiling?”

  “It’s sprinklers,” said Halley. “That will slow the fire down, at least.”

  They dashed for the entrance of the manor, slipping on the wet surface of the marble floor. Before they had reached the door, there was a loud noise as of a firearm discharging, and then the manor was plunged into darkness.

  71

  • HALLEY •

  As they ran out the front door, Halley saw sparks flying in the air. She looked up; a small box was exploding on top of a power pole.

  “I think that was the transformer for the estate,” she said to Edmund. “Oh, no . . .”

  “What is it, lady?”

  “The time machine,” she said. “It’s powered by electricity. Oh no . . .”

  “Mistress?”

  “It’s the professor. Without electricity, the machine will stop working. When the temporal rupture, or whatever the hell it’s called, tries to pull the professor back, it will take him four hundred years to get here without the machine’s help.”

  “Mean’st thou we are vouchsafed never to see him again?”

  Halley nodded in horror as fire truck sirens sounded, wailing in the night.

  72

  • HALLEY •

  The fire trucks rolled in. Forty-six minutes later, they had misidentified the professor as just one more mummy among the sarcophagi. Halley had promptly been sick when she heard about the misidentification. Edmund had discreetly loaned her his “handkercher” to mop her brow.

  After Halley had answered questions and filled out forms, after the fire trucks had rolled away, after the stars had melted from the graying sky, she told Edmund everything the professor had revealed. She told Edmund that his other self had made good on the debts of his family’s estate and passed the family name on to a new generation. And then, with a shaking voice, she explained to him that he could never go home again.