“A library? The university?”
He sighed loudly. “Yes, yes. Not what you were expecting. I understand, but don’t go repeating everything I say.”
“Where exactly are we?” Charlie asked, having been completely turned around during their ascent.
“In the King’s Turret.”
Both Ettie and Charlie stopped in their tracks. The King’s Turret was a citywide landmark. It was called a turret, but it was really a scaled-down re-creation of the Keep at Winsor Castle. It was erected after a season of protests had been brutally repressed. The King was said to order its construction as a constant reminder of his presence even while far away in England. The turret had been built upon one of the tallest buildings in the city so that it could be seen from almost anywhere.
Hound Dog shooed them along. “Don’t dawdle.”
“But… but how?” Ettie asked amazed, as she followed him through the room.
“Oh, it weren’t much more than stagecraft. They built some stonework in the foundation, but much of it is backed by your standard masonry and even, in some places, plywood. We fortified it and laid in the heavy beams you see there and there.” He pointed out certain features of the ceiling. “It was meant to be symbolic of monarchal power. I mean, really, a keep on the top of a skyscraper ain’t much real use now, is it?” He waved his hand as if dismissing their unvoiced objections. “A real keep, maybe,” he admitted, “but this sham, no.”
After exiting the library they walked down a spiral ramp of sorts that stopped at the intersection of two hallways.
“Do they know you’re here?” Ettie asked as they turned down the rightmost corridor.
“They, being the nobles? Yes and no. They know someone’s here, but they don’t have much idea of the size of our operation. We’ve tapped into their grid, although the improvements Dr. Smyth has made far surpass what they have.” He laughed a little to himself. “Driving underground any scientist who doesn’t toe the line ain’t the smartest move. They’ve lost a lot of brainpower. Something we like to harness here at the university.”
While he spoke, they walked through a sky bridge connecting two buildings. On one side, large windows opened up to the view which was both spectacular and terrifying. Ettie and Charlie could see across the tops of skyscrapers. Ettie felt a tingle of panic shoot up through her feet at the void that stretched beneath the steel beams and reinforced concrete.
“How come I’ve never noticed this bridge,” Charlie asked.
“The bridge is built into the side of the building, and the brickwork is patterned so as to look two-dimensional. The windows are tinted and look like just any other part of the wall,” Hound Dog explained. “Also, the height is such that you would have to be almost eye level with the bridge to actually see it.”
“So you have persecuted architects and engineers here as well?” Ettie half-joked.
“That’s right,” he responded seriously and kept walking past two guards and into another winding hallway and finally up a short staircase. At the top was a thick wood-planked door that opened into a large room.
Walking into the room was like walking back into the sixteenth century. A very large fireplace was home to a roaring fire across which a few chickens roasted on a spit. The walls were covered in elaborately carved paneling, and a long oak table was spread with papers and books.
Leaning on that table, with both hands planted on its surface and looking intently at a map, was a slight man with wild gray hair. He straightened up and looked at Ettie.
“Miss Speex.” He had the clipped speech of an army drill sergeant, but the lopsided smile and messy hair belied any such discipline.
“Yes. You must be Dr. Kevin Smyth, a.k.a, the globular sea slug”
He laughed. “A nickname your brother gave me. The slugs, I believe, are a valuable commodity.” He shook his head. “I think he meant it as a compliment.” Changing the subject abruptly, he told her, “I saw you dance once.”
She wrinkled her brow.
He noticed her hesitation and was quick to discern the reason. “It must be confusing to switch dimensions, but rest assured that you and Lord Westchester, with his chromaticon, are unique in that ability. The rest of us are not cognizant of timeline phases.” He gestured them over to the fireplace where a smaller round table was set with fine china and a bounty of food. “Please sit down and help yourselves. You must be tired. I know the path can be harrowing.” He sat down with them and asked Hound Dog, “Please find Adelaide and ask her to join us.”
Charlie was looking at Kevin Smyth intently and said rather grimly, “Mine is not the only chromaticon.”
Dr. Smyth took note of his tense demeanor and poured him a glass of wine. “You are referring to the people for whom you work.”
Charlie nodded curtly and reached for the glass, sipping gratefully at the red liquid.
“Dr…”
“Please, call me Kevin.”
Ettie nodded. “Kevin, Odell sent me to help you. Do you know for what purpose?”
Kevin looked up from the plate on which he had served himself a helping of chicken and fried onions and chewed thoughtfully. Finally, he swallowed and said, “When I first met your brother he was in the company of a rather mysterious group we refer to as the Feralon.”
“The Feralon?” Charlie looked at him sharply. “Aren’t they just like the boogie man… a group of wild youth who creep into nursery windows… something made up to scare misbehaving children?”
“If only…” Kevin laughed, but then sobered. “I haven’t known them to steal babies, but they are secretive and agile; you will never see them coming. I have not seen one face-to-face. I don’t know anyone who has. Some here attribute the occasional murder from these rooftops to them. But, in truth, it could be any one of the criminal factions that reside here. The rooftops are the last refuge of many of the most notorious outlaws in the city.
“When I fled here over twenty years ago, it was a struggle to build something that was free of societal strictures, yet lacking in dishonest intent. We have tried to give refuge to those who seek intellectual and political liberty, to build a free community, but the criminal element is ever present.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There is something of a symbiotic relationship, certainly fear of their actions keep most of our enemies at bay. But it is definitely a double-edged sword.”
“Odell…” Ettie prompted.
“Um, yes, well, they had captured him… the Feralon. It was one of his first timeline shifts. He had been fleeing the police and made his escape over the rooftops.” Kevin shook his head in disbelief. “I do believe your brother can get out of almost anything. I don’t know how he accomplished it. The way he was dressed and his rather aristocratic bearing should have resulted in an ignominious death on the streets below. Instead, they brought him to me, or, rather, left him at my doorstep so to speak. I never saw them. I don’t think Odell really did either.”
He reached out and took a sip of wine before continuing, “His insistence that he knew me from another timeline was… um… hard to believe. We, at first, suspected him of being a spy.”
“His story would certainly have been unbelievable,” Charlie agreed.
“It would have been if I had not already been monitoring micro-distortions in the timeline for some months.”
“Micro-what—”
“Micro-distortions,” an unfamiliar female voice interjected.
They turned as one to see a woman standing in the doorway. She was dressed entirely in black and white, the swirling houndstooth weave of her very tight trousers made Ettie a little cross-eyed. A form-fitting black silk jacket with a wide peplum covered a plain white shirt and accentuated her generous bosom, small waist, and shapely hips. Her feet were clad in heavy, black knee-high boots, and a jaunty little Robin Hood hat sat perched upon thick, black curls.
She carried a long ruler in one hand that she tapped along the side of her leg. Her full lips were parted in a slight smile and hooded eyes
looked back at them with confident sensuality. Ettie felt rather than heard a collective intake of breath as if the male inhabitants of the room were taking a few heartbeats to adjust to her magnetism. Ettie resisted the urge to cut her eyes over to see Charlie’s reaction.
“Ah, Adelaide… Adelaide Farnsworth” Kevin announced, clearing his throat. “Odette Speex and—”
“Charles Drake, Earl of Westchester,” she purred. Her eyes held a spark of suspicion as she walked to the table and sat down. She crossed her legs and balanced the ruler on her knee. Looking directly at Kevin, she asked with thinly veiled hostility, “Do we trust him?”
“A question I’ve asked myself many times,” Ettie answered before Kevin could respond. She spoke in a clear, uncompromising tone determined to assert control over the conversation and their situation. “You don’t have to trust him, but I do. So if you want my help, you’ll just accept that and move on.”
Charlie’s lips twisted in a dry smile, but Adelaide turned to her with a hard look.
“What makes you think we need your help?”
Ettie’s gaze didn’t flinch. “Because we wouldn’t be here unless you did. My brother believed I could help, but you must also or why else expose your operation to outsiders? As a favor to your friend’s sister?” She looked a Kevin. “You could throw us off the roofs or leave us to the Feralon, but I don’t believe you are so depraved as to lure us up here just for that purpose.”
“No, depravity is the domain of the nobility,” Adelaide quipped, her hostility no longer veiled.
Dr. Smyth held up his hand for silence. “She’s right, Adelaide, we need her and likely Lord Westchester as well.”
“So why are we here?” Ettie asked, turning her full attention to Kevin in a determined effort to push past Adelaide’s interference. “I can only assume you and my brother hatched some sort of plan.”
“No, not a plan exactly,” he admitted, “but an idea.” He stood up. “Please, follow me.”
They followed him to the table where he had spread out various papers and maps. Kevin shifted the papers around looking for something and found it under a heavy parchment. From a thick glass box he pulled out a wristwatch-like instrument.
Charlie drew in a quick breath. “Where did you get that?”
Kevin held up the chromaticon to show the large digital face and array of tiny dotted lights. “You can’t imagine I’d tell you that.” He laughed. “She may trust you.” He indicated Ettie. “But I choose to be careful.”
Charlie merely shrugged his shoulders, but Ettie noted an extra level of tension from Adelaide as she threw Dr. Smyth a pleading look.
“Where we got it is really of no consequence,” Kevin continued. “It was discarded, because it no longer functions properly. Adelaide and I have been working for the past several years on the particle shifts and translations associated with poste me that I first noted at the Academy over twenty years ago. I built a more rudimentary model of the chromaticon. It was then that I recognized the poste me as a kind of time shift or miniature temporal distortion, MTD for short.” He nodded at Ettie. “Your brother was able to add much depth and nuance to the theory.” He laughed with self-deprecation. “Of course, he was able to add much more than that… proof that the timeline had been manipulated. It was a theory I was reluctant to truly consider until I’d met him.”
Adelaide sat down on the edge of the table, her resting leg swinging rhythmically. She reached out and took the chromaticon from his grasp. “What this device has done is alert us to a more sophisticated technology. The machine we built is much larger.” She turned the chromaticon over in her hands and ran shapely fingers along the smooth metal. “This little beauty can detect a much smaller signal or shift, and it’s a fraction of the size of our machine.”
“Your brother,” Kevin told them, “theorized that there must be a stabilizing element to the flux… perhaps an opening in the space-time continuum that allows them to tinker, so to speak, with the timeline—”
Ettie shook her head to stop him. “Listen, I appreciate you trying to explain all this to me. But honestly, it’s not going to make much sense to me either way.”
She walked back over to her chair where she had set a canvass bag on the floor. “So I’m guessing you need to find this stabilizing element, this opening, and close it,” she declared, grabbing the bag and walking back to the table. Kevin nodded. “Well, I came to give you these.” Setting the bag on the table, she pulled from its depths the phantasometer, spyglass, and cube paperweight. “Odell left them with me, along with a letter.”
Kevin and Adelaide bent over the objects, examining first the phantasometer and then the other two.
“Well, this…” Kevin indicated the phantasometer. “…looks something similar to the chromaticon.”
“It is,” Ettie agreed. “With one particular difference, it once functioned as a kind of transporter.”
“Once?” Adelaide asked.
“Odell used it to meet with a… a being of sorts. In his letter, he called him a trans-dimensional entity, proditoris aevus, or Time Traitor.” She shrugged her shoulders a little helplessly. “But apparently after my mother died, its ability to transport didn’t last long.”
Both Kevin and Adelaide looked at her inquiringly. So she related the story Odell had spelled out in his letter, his meeting with Ambrosius, the role of time and its minions, Odette, and his task to reconfigure a key event of the past.
After she had finished, they stood looking at her, speechless. For Charlie, this was the first time he had heard the entire story.
“Time? Adelaide muttered, her brow furrowed, “The enemy?”
Kevin began to pace agitatedly up and down the spacious room, his hands thrust deep into his pockets and looking down at his feet. Finally, he stopped and said, “Time and humans have never mixed well. Our lives are so short…” He shook his head and combed his fingers through his wild hair. “But that doesn’t explain why time would exploit our worst impulses. There is no evidence that its nature is more likely to constrict than dilate…”
“Why not seek out those expansive, connective actions, you mean?” Adelaide said, eagerly following up on his thought.
“Exactly,” he muttered half to himself. “Time isn’t the determining factor here, we are.” He turned to Ettie. “And Odell believes these… ah… Time Traitors are super-evolved humans?”
“That is what he was told, and, of course…” She cleared her throat to dislodge a little jagged piece of jealousy. “…his… our sister, Odette, is one.”
Kevin rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “I’m not convinced.”
“You don’t have to be convinced of the theory underlying this crisis… just that it is a crisis!” Charlie exclaimed, frustrated with what he felt to be needless debate. “Whether it is the result of time, or people, or some combination of both, this constriction is real, and the outcome will be the same.”
“He’s right,” Adelaide unexpectedly agreed with him, “the why sometimes doesn’t matter. This is bigger than just who has power and how it is used. If we as a species continue as we are, we will destroy ourselves. Maybe the Time Traitors were only meant to be part of the evolutionary process, the part that dealt with the nature of time. Perhaps they are only adept at one end of the equation.”
“And the human end of the equation…?” Kevin urged.
“We’ve failed,” she stated bluntly. “Even with the Time Traitors, with their way stations and TIFs, they can’t do it alone. They needed us to be better, and we’ve failed.”
They stood silently regarding each other until Kevin asked, “How is this different from the last time Odell told me about?” He looked at Ettie. “Why not just muck around in the timeline fixing things. What are we supposed to do? Find the source of the time shifts? Destroy it? Then what? Is it over? Or does it just take on another form? Go in another direction?”
“I’m not sure. I think Odette makes it different; she’s special. They’ve b
een waiting for her.” Ettie drew in a deep breath and picked up the spyglass, turning it absently over in her hands. “I know Odell is up to something, but we can’t just sit back and wait. He intended we should find the source of the rift in this timeline and put a stop to it.”
Ettie pulled the slender telescope to its full length and put it to her eye, absently surveying the room. She suddenly yelped and almost dropped it.
“It was right there—right there!” she cried out, pointing over Kevin Smyth’s shoulder and frantically looking around the room.
“What? What are you talking about?” Charlie asked. “What’s right there?”
Ettie’s hands were shaking, and she stood clutching the spyglass to her breast. “It was… it was… a person of sorts, hooded, in black. I couldn’t see a face.”
Kevin and Adelaide exchanged a puzzled look.
“You’re describing a Feralon,” Adelaide replied. “But while they are certainly good at hiding and very quick, I don’t believe they can hide in plain sight.”
“But I saw it through this,” Ettie insisted, thrusting the spyglass out in front of her. “I’ve looked through it before, but it only showed darkness and little floating points of light. I thought it was broken.”
Ettie swallowed hard and put it back up to her eye. She pointed it behind Kevin and gasped. Finally, she swallowed again and said tremulously, “I see you.”
Her three companions stood quietly observing her, while the hooded creature in the spyglass cocked its head to one side as if acknowledging her words. She watched as it reached its hands out in a gesture like parting a curtain. Ettie lowered the spyglass, and the little Feralon materialized out of thin air behind Kevin.
“Oh, my God!” Adelaide exclaimed, paranoia gripping her throat. “Have they been around us the whole time?”
Kevin turned slowly and looked down at the small creature, for it was no bigger than a ten-year-old child.
“What have we here?” he muttered.
Ettie couldn’t see its face, but she had the impression that it hadn’t taken its eyes off of her. It moved over to the table and picked up the cube paperweight. The creature walked to Ettie and handed her the object. She felt tingling in her fingers, and the object’s surface swirled with a murky glow, as if containing a cloud. Then two words appeared across one side.
Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II Page 24
