Time's Edge

by Rysa Walker

  Jess’s face looks skeptical for a moment, and then he laughs. “More likely you’ve just been a greedy boy, keeping her all to yourself. Like I told you before, Kate, when you get tired of his shenanigans, you just let me know, and I’ll tell my Amelia to pack her bags.”

  “You will not, you horny old goat,” Kiernan says. “This store would close tomorrow if Amelia didn’t keep you in line, and you know it.”

  I raise an eyebrow at Kiernan’s language—so much for the idea that younger people respected their elders in the “good old days.” But Jess just cackles and tosses a small wooden box at Kiernan, who catches it easily with one hand.

  “Put that in the back room, boy. Be sure you get it on the right shelf, or these old eyes won’t find it. And I’ll fetch what Miss Kate is wanting from the icebox.”

  Jess shuffles off, and Kiernan leans in toward me. “It’s ginger ale,” he whispers before heading back to the storeroom.

  It is indeed ginger ale, pale brown in a tall, clear bottle, etched with the words “Clicquot Club.” Jess pries the top off with the bottle opener attached to the side of the counter, sticks in a paper straw, and hands it to me.

  “Thanks.”

  “No thanks necessary.”

  I take a long draw of the soda, and I’m instantly hit by a coughing attack. The effect is like snorting raw ginger, spicy-sweet and so potent that it takes my breath away.

  “You okay?” Jess laughs. “You should know better by now. You need to sip that stuff.”

  Kiernan is back by the time I catch my breath. He’s laughing, too.

  I shoot him an annoyed look and then smile at Jess. “Yes, I’m okay. Just went down the wrong way, I guess. How much do I owe you?”

  As the words leave my mouth, it occurs to me that what money I have is in the pocket of my sweater in the storeroom—and none of it has a date earlier than 1950. So I’m relieved when Jess says, “Not a penny and you know it, young lady. Just thank your uncle again for me.”

  Kiernan puts an arm around me and pulls me toward the door, grabbing two dark brown candy sticks from a little jar near the edge of the counter as we go. “You still have plenty of the pills, Jess?”

  The old man nods and smiles again. “Should last to the end of the year, unless it flares up.” He shifts his glance over to me. “If your uncle ever decides to sell those little beauties in Boston, you let me know. I’ll clear out a whole shelf.”

  I try to hide my confusion and give Jess a little wave as Kiernan steers me onto the sidewalk. “What was that about?” I ask as soon as we are out of earshot.

  Kiernan moves to the outer edge of the narrow sidewalk, which is raised slightly above the muddy roadway. He takes my arm, leading me toward an intersection with a larger, paved road a few storefronts ahead. A dozen or so horse-drawn carts, a few bicycles, and a lone car move cautiously along the brick road in front of us, going only slightly faster than we’re walking.

  “The story Jess has,” Kiernan replies, “is that your uncle is a druggist in New York with this proprietary blend for arthritis. You packed some generic Advil in an old tin box, and Jess has been feeling a lot better since then.”

  “Wow. Katherine would totally flip.”

  “Katherine doesn’t need to know. Or at least that’s what you said before . . .”

  Kiernan trails off, probably in response to my expression. I’m growing a little weary of being lumped with Other-Kate. I just met Jess, so I’ve clearly never said anything about any of this before. But I doubt it will do much good to remind Kiernan again that I’m not her, that she doesn’t even exist in this timeline. He knows that better than anyone.

  “Wait—” I pull him to a stop. “How does Jess remember the other . . . me? He doesn’t have a CHRONOS key.”

  “Uh, no. But I was at his place when the timeline changed. The one that . . . took you. The temporal shifts make me kind of dizzy, you know?”

  I nod. Even thinking about the three times I’ve felt those shifts is disorienting. When the last one hit, I collapsed to the floor as trig class morphed around me into a brand-new reality.

  “Well,” Kiernan continues, “Jess saw the look on my face and grabbed my shoulder when I stumbled. And the poor guy has been balancing two sets of memories ever since—one where there were few Cyrists and one where his middle daughter is a member. There’s a grandkid he remembers that no one else does. His family thinks he’s had a stroke or he’s going senile, even though in all other ways he’s sharp as a tack.”

  “That’s sad.” I take another tentative sip from the ginger ale and glance back over my shoulder at the storefront—John Jessup, Fine Tobaccos and Sundries—and wonder how many other people have accidentally come in contact with a medallion or someone wearing one. And how many of them are in mental institutions? “I hate that he was drawn into all of this. But he seems to be handling it pretty well, all things considered.”

  Kiernan flashes me a grin. “He’s convinced they’re the crazy ones.” He bites off a chunk of the candy stick, and a strange, sickly sweet smell fills the air.

  I wrinkle my nose. “What is that stuff?”

  “Hoarhound candy,” he says, crunching off another bite. “Want some?” He waves the other stick under my nose.

  “No.” I push it away. “It smells awful. I don’t like it.”

  A teasing smile, just this side of a smirk, crosses his face. “Of course not, love. You never have.”

  His place is actually a bit farther away than I’d imagined, although I guess the phrase “short walk” might have a different meaning in 1905. Kiernan deftly steers me away from the edges of the buildings, where puddles of waste decay in the summer sun. I know the tenants have little choice, given the general lack of plumbing, but it still makes for an unpleasant walk.

  When we reach his building, a group of thin, dirty children crouch in the entryway, playing jacks, and a few others sit in the stairwells as we climb to the fifth floor. Kiernan stops on the last landing to chat with a blond tyke who is maybe six. “Manners quiz, Gabe. I have an extra stick of candy. Would you like it, or should I offer it to the lady first?”

  “You should offer it to her,” the boy says, appraising me with big blue eyes. “But I’ll take it if she don’ want it.”

  I smile at the boy and give Kiernan’s shoulder a nudge. “Stop picking on him. You know I don’t want that nasty thing.”

  Kiernan grins and pulls the candy stick from his pocket. There’s a bit of lint stuck to it, but the kid doesn’t bother to inspect it.

  “And what do you say, Gabe?” Kiernan asks. The boy responds with something that could be thank you, but it’s impossible to tell with his mouth full of candy.

  We cross the hallway, and Kiernan unlocks a door with “#411” scrawled on the wall next to it. His room is neat, small, and hot. A white powder of some sort is on the floor in front of the door, which makes me suspect the ceiling is crumbling. A twin bed with a worn quilt is squeezed into the right rear corner, next to an old tobacco crate that serves as a nightstand, and a rope is tacked to the walls, with a piece of red fabric strung up to form a curtain blocking the opposite corner from view. Books are stacked everywhere.

  The ceiling slopes downward to the only window, which faces an alley. At first, I think that’s why the room reminds me of my own space at Mom’s townhouse. I’ve cracked my head more than once on my low ceiling, and I’m only a few inches above five feet, so this has to be a bit of a squeeze for someone as tall as Kiernan.

  Then I see the other reason it looks familiar. Kiernan’s ceiling is covered with glow-in-the-dark stars, just like the ones in my room.

  Kiernan closes the door behind us, tosses the bag with my shoes and sweater onto the bed, and opens the window. He sits cross-legged on the floor, moving a large book beneath the bed frame. “Have a seat. There’s no chair, so it’s the bed or the floor I’m afraid.” His expression is a bit strained, and he seems to be avoiding my eyes as he hunts for something.

 
; I sit down on the edge of the small bed and look around the room again. I don’t want to ask, but I blurt it out anyway.

  “Is this where you lived . . . before? I mean, when . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  I feel a blush creeping to my cheeks. From everything Kiernan has said, another version of my body—a few years older, but my body, nevertheless—spent many hours here with him. In this bed. I bite my lip and shift a bit closer to the footboard.

  “I thought about moving somewhere else, maybe closer to work, out near Newton,” he says, still not looking at me, “but I want to stay close to Jess for a bit longer. He needs to talk to someone who doesn’t think he’s lost his marbles. And this is close to the train, so . . .”

  “You aren’t still working for Jess?”

  He shakes his head. “I still help him out occasionally, but he can’t really afford to keep me on full-time. And I have something else going. Something we were . . . something I was working on, from before.” Kiernan takes a penknife from the nightstand, flips open the thin blade, and starts to pry at one of the floorboards. “This stupid board is stuck again,” he says. “The heat always makes the floorboards swell up.”

  “So . . . where do you work now?”

  “I guess you’d call it an amusement park.” He looks up for a moment and flashes me that grin. “Come back on Saturday, and you can watch me in action.”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer. He just yanks on the board, pulling it loose and also banging his knuckles on the underside of the bed. I expect him to hand me an actual list, written on paper, but it’s a CHRONOS diary.

  “Didn’t know you had one of these.”

  “I do,” he says, examining his skinned knuckle. “But this isn’t mine. This one is y—”

  He pauses and takes a deep breath before he continues. “Hers. It was Kate’s. You can take it. You’ll need it more than I will.”

  I open the slim book, which is probably best described as a twenty-fourth-century version of an iPad stuck inside an old book cover. It has pages, only they’re more like touch screens. Aside from the cover, I don’t think this device would have fooled anyone who inspected it carefully in the eighteenth century or whenever Other-Kate happened to be traveling, but it was probably a better option than flipping open a high-tech gadget right under their noses.

  My grandmother’s name is handwritten inside the cover, just as it was in the diary she gave me when she first broke the news that I’d inherited the ability to activate these devices. I drag my finger along the first page. The words, written in a flowery script that is clearly not my writing, begin to scroll upward.

  “Katherine’s research is stored in the first few pages,” Kiernan says, “but if you flip ahead, there are newer entries, with some pretty detailed background on the jumps you made—what went right, what went wrong, and so forth.”

  “Oh, wow. This could save us a lot of time. Katherine will—”

  “Umm . . . yeah. You might want to preview these before you show them to anyone else. Some are full-fledged rants, mostly about Katherine. You might want to pick and choose what you share. And you didn’t—” He shakes his head and then goes on. “Kate didn’t have much patience for writing things down. All of her notes are video, so you should probably wait until you get back home.”

  No question about that. I don’t even like watching myself on normal home movies, so it will be hard enough to view diary entries from this me-who-isn’t-me without doing it in front of Kiernan, who probably still finds it painful to hear her voice—which is, of course, the same as my voice, so I just sit there silently for a moment.

  I feel a soft touch on my ankle. “Something wrong, Kate?”

  I shake my head, and he just lifts his eyebrows. He knows I’m hiding something. But I’m not sure how to put any of the things I’m feeling into words.

  “Everything okay in the twenty-first century?”

  I nod. “Katherine and Connor are back from their trip. She’s gained a few pounds, so I think she’s doing a bit better. Dad and I have moved our stuff out of the cottage on campus, so I’m at Katherine’s half of the week and spend the other half with Mom. And I’m back in karate, more or less—I have private lessons with the improbably named Sensei Barbie twice a week.”

  He gives me an odd look, and I realize he doesn’t get the same visual image I did when I first heard the name—a tall, leggy blonde with a ponytail and disproportionate boobs. She’s actually only an inch or so over my five foot three, nearly double my weight, and runs my butt ragged for an hour each Monday and Wednesday without ever breaking a sweat herself. Kiernan probably doesn’t even know what a sensei is, for that matter, so I just continue.

  “I also celebrated my seventeenth birthday—again. So it’s the same old routine, pretty much. Aside from the occasional journey through space and time, that is.”

  And the dreams, but I don’t mention those or the fact that the past few months have been really strange. I tried to keep up with my classwork when I lived in the other timeline this past spring, even though I couldn’t attend school for the simple reason that there was no record of my existence. As a result, the schoolwork in the last few weeks of my junior year was relatively easy, except for the occasions where I stumbled across something different in this reality—a different president or some famous author, scientist, or inventor I’d never heard of.

  It was also odd experiencing events at Briar Hill that I’d only heard about secondhand from Trey in the previous timeline, especially since Trey won’t even be at Briar Hill until the fall in this reality. The sign for the prom that went up in May is a good example. Before, I’d have walked right past that sign and never have considered going. In the previous timeline, Trey said he’d never have gone without me—but we both would have been happy to go together. I guess I could have asked him to go this time, but we’re not really at the prom-date stage yet.

  So yeah, it’s been weird. And I can’t even gripe about all of this weirdness to my best friend, Charlayne, because she doesn’t know me. In this reality, she’s probably hanging out with her Cyrist pals, totally unaware that we were ever friends.

  Kiernan’s dark eyes are soft as he watches me. His arm is resting on the frame of the bed, and his hand cups my ankle, causing me to pull in a shaky breath.

  “And Trey? Are you seeing him much?”

  “Yes.”

  He raises his eyebrows like he doesn’t believe me.

  “Really, everything is great. He’s coming by this evening, in fact.”

  That last bit is the truth. But the part about seeing him much isn’t. Trey has barely been in DC since I gave him the DVD with video conversations between the two of us and a clip of himself, or I guess I should say his alternate self, attempting to explain our relationship. We went to the movies that first weekend after I gave him the DVD, and it was wonderful to see him, but it was awkward to say the least. I kept wanting to say (and do) things that I would normally never dream of on a first date, and I’d have to pull back and remind myself that he wasn’t really my Trey, at least not yet. I could tell he felt uncomfortable, too. He was going to come for dinner later that week, but then his dad surprised him with a three-week trip to Peru to visit friends he’d made when they lived in Lima. We texted a couple of times, and Trey posted a few scenic pictures on Facebook, but he spent most of his time at the beach.

  He’s back now, and the dinner is tonight. And while I’m really, really looking forward to seeing him, I’m simultaneously dreading it. Every time I’m with Trey and it’s not the same as before, a little piece of me withers.

  I have no idea why I didn’t just tell Kiernan the truth. That I’ve barely seen Trey. That everything is far from great. I opened my mouth, and the lie rushed out, and now I feel a little guilty.

  Apparently, it wasn’t even a convincing lie, because he’s giving me this sad, sympathetic smile. “But, it’s not the same as before. Is it?”

  It’s definitely not the same, no
t yet, but I’m nowhere near the point of giving up. And it seems cruel to give Kiernan false hope, so I just shrug and say, “Rome wasn’t rebuilt in a day, right?”

  “No. I don’t suppose it was.” He gives my ankle a quick squeeze and then lets go. I’m relieved but also a bit flustered to realize that I miss his touch.

  I flip to the back of the diary and see there’s a page of sequential numbers. They’re underlined, like the videos I’m accustomed to seeing in the diaries, but only a couple have dates or titles after the numbers. The link at the bottom of the page is 28, but when I tap the margin with my fingernail, the page starts to scroll upward. It scrolls for about thirty seconds, and the final link is 415. This is going to take forever.

  “There’s so much here. Do you think you could give me a CliffsNotes version?”

  Kiernan just looks puzzled.

  “That means the short version.” I laugh. “A cheat sheet?”

  He shakes his head. “I haven’t watched most of them,” he says. “I skimmed through the last twenty or thirty when I thought they might give me some clue as to where she’d gone, but then once I saw you on the Metro that day, I knew it was no use. If this version of you exists, then that one doesn’t. And later, when I was missing her, I watched a few entries I remembered her recording when she was here, but . . .” He shakes his head.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?”

  “It’s okay, Kate. Take it.”

  “Maybe I could make you a copy or something?”

  “No. Most of this was her private diary. I wouldn’t have watched them when she was . . . when she was here with me. I don’t feel right watching them now. And they don’t bring her back.”

  The hours I’ve spent watching the DVD of my conversations with Trey spring to mind as he says this. Watching them over the past few months has been somewhat bittersweet for me, and there’s still a chance that Trey and I will be together at some point. Would I keep those videos if I knew there was no hope? I’m not sure.