by Rysa Walker
Dad raises an eyebrow. “Did you say trinium? Why does that ring a bell?”
Connor rolls his eyes. “Because it was a geek test. Trinium is a case where the sci-fi name became a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, right now, it’s sci-fi, but by Katherine’s time, some geeks gave the name to something they created that’s stronger than titanium.”
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s pretend that makes sense so that we can get back to Dad’s first two questions—do we know for certain this Marcus guy destroyed his key? And second, how do we destroy them?”
“I’ll add a third,” Kiernan says. “Shouldn’t you go ahead and destroy most of the ones you already have? Keeping them around seems like it’s asking for trouble.”
Connor nods. “All good points. I’ll take the second question. Short answer: you can’t physically destroy it. At least, you can’t destroy it with anything I’ve found. But you can turn it into a relatively worthless hunk of metal. The trinium casing is just the shell, inside which the time travel guts are housed.” He nods toward the medallion on Kiernan’s chest. “That thing is actually two pieces of trinium fused together. While I can’t create a high enough temperature to melt the metal, I can separate the two pieces just enough that the seam along the edge is permeable. Not easy, but it’s doable. And while the microscopic pieces inside the shell may be waterproof, they’re no match for sulfuric acid.”
“Waterproof?” Kiernan says to me out of the side of his mouth. “Knowing that would have made showering a lot easier.”
I smile, and then I feel a blush rising to my cheeks. Because now I’m visualizing Kiernan in the shower. And it’s clear from the smirk on his face that he’s guessed what I’m thinking, which, of course, makes me blush harder.
Katherine’s voice yanks me back to the here and now. “So it would actually be more correct to say that we have thirteen working keys and one useless trinket. And that is exactly what Marcus showed me when I caught up with him in Vienna a few years back. I couldn’t see the light at all, and the hourglass on the front was perfectly still. It was the only time I’d ever seen how the medallions appear to everyone else. Deborah has a point when she says it’s an eyesore.”
“But”—Connor looks around the table—“to answer Kiernan’s question, I’m not sure there’s any point in destroying them until we have them all. I know it seems like we’re tempting fate, keeping them here when Saul could probably arrange for the National Guard to take them if he really wanted to. But if someone shows up with a CHRONOS key, planning to steal our stash, and finds them deactivated, what’s he or she going to do next?”
There’s a moment of silence, and then Dad says, “Figure out when you deactivated them and storm the house just before.”
Kiernan shakes his head. “With all due respect, I disagree. Destroy them. Why make it easy? Yeah, they’ll backtrack if they don’t find them, but that may buy us a day or an hour. And we may need that day or hour. Maybe they’re waiting for us to collect them all, so they can come steal our stash.”
“Hmm . . . Grandpa has a point,” Connor admits, a bit reluctantly. “I’ll narrow it down to the minimum we need to keep the house and all of us safe, and maybe keep a spare, just in case. The rest get the acid bath.”
I grab a pen from the counter behind us. “So we mark the Nazi historian off the list, and we’re down to six. We have five that we can pin down with some degree of certainty—one in Russia in 1957, one in Port Darwin in 1942, and three in Athens, Georgia, in 1938. That leaves one.”
“Or maybe two. Saul might have traveled with two keys,” Katherine says. “I think Shaila’s was destroyed along with the others at CHRONOS headquarters, but I can’t be sure. Saul might have grabbed it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Leaving Shaila’s aside, you’re certain that other key is in the past and not ahead of our time?”
“Yes. The three cohorts were roughly divided by era, so that we had our research days to prepare for the various trips at the same time. That way, we could share expertise with others looking at the same general historical period. As I noted before, only two cohorts were in the field at a time, so that meant that the modern history group wasn’t on the jump schedule. Shaila’s was the most recent—sometime around 2020.”
“It was 2024,” Kiernan says. “That’s when Saul landed.”
“Nice to be able to pinpoint that after five decades of wondering,” Katherine says as she jots it down on the sheet in front of her. “As for that remaining key, I have nothing beyond what I put in the document I gave Kate. Esther was studying a matrilineal society in Africa sometime between 1100 and 1300. I’m pretty sure it was the Akan, which would put her location at the one and only jump site in Ghana at that time. But, that was seven hundred to nine hundred years ago. I suspect that one is buried somewhere, most likely with Esther, and will never be found. Think how long it took you to observe the various sites in Dallas, Kate. Can you imagine trying to do that over a two-hundred-year span?”
I shake my head. “I’ve had no luck with finding the guy in Moscow during a two-day window. Two centuries would be impossible. I guess we’ll simply have to assume that key can’t be found.”
“Well, maybe not,” Kiernan says. “I don’t know if Kate mentioned it in her diary, but I’m still working on something that we started together before she . . . before she disappeared. We’re pretty sure we’ve located a key in 1905.”
“Is that what she was talking about in London? She mentioned something about getting some flyers printed, which made zero sense to me, but there was nothing specific about a key. And it was all mixed up with the stuff about Georgia in 1938. She seemed kind of flustered those last few entries.” I glance at Katherine, but she’s looking down at her plate. She pushes her salad around with her fork until she finds an olive, which she spears and drops onto Connor’s plate.
“Yeah, well, 1938 wasn’t going so well,” Kiernan replies. “But to get back to 1905, I haven’t seen the evidence yet, but Kate was certain. She saw Houdini with it twice, once in London and once in New Y—”
“Houdini?” Connor’s eyes are wide. “You’re telling me Houdini had a CHRONOS key?”
Kiernan nods. “That’s what Kate, my Kate, told me. She was positive enough that she and Katherine—by which I mean the Katherine in the other timeline—put a good deal of effort into setting up . . . well, Kate called it a sting. And I now know exactly how much effort they put into it, because I’ve had to re-create all of their steps. I was back to square one after the timeline reset, but I think I have all of the puzzle pieces in place once again, and I’m back to working undercover.”
“Undercover as what?” I ask.
“Nice try,” he replies with a grin. “You’re still coming, right? Norumbega Park?”
“I promised, didn’t I?” I glance around the table. Dad and Connor are pointedly looking elsewhere, and Katherine still has her eyes on her plate, although they seem a bit unfocused. “Let’s go ahead and pencil that in for tomorrow morning. But maybe you could give us an overview now, for the sake of the others?”
“Nope,” he says, still grinning. “You can report back to them when you get home.”
I look over at Katherine, hoping she’ll chime in and say that she doesn’t want to wait, but she still doesn’t look up, so I’m on my own.
“I think we have a dress that will work for 1905, if we make a few alterations,” Connor says.
Kiernan shakes his head. “No need. There’s a dress at my place . . .”
At that point everyone, including Katherine, looks up at him, and even though there’s no reason for either one of us to blush, we both do.
“It’s sort of a hand-me-down,” Kiernan says. “From . . . before.”
I flip through the pages I’m holding to pull their attention back to the business at hand. “So, back to the list? The jump to 1938 makes me nervous.”
Truthfully, even mentioning the 1938 jump to Athens, Georgia, makes me nervous, because I’m certain
Katherine knows more than the smattering of information she included. There’s not a word about anyone dying in her overview. It’s bare bones, with just the names of the two historians she remembers—Abel Waters and Delia Morrell—the fact that they were married, and a note that they were trainers.
“Can you tell us anything more about that jump, Katherine?” I ask.
“I’d suggest that we focus on getting Adrienne’s key and Wallace Moehler’s key first. If we manage to do that without Saul’s people bashing in the door and ending this entire enterprise, then we can talk about 1938.”
I’m reluctant to let this go without more information, but perhaps this isn’t the time or place. “Fine, Katherine. Let’s move on to the Russia trip. They never got that key in the previous timeline.”
We debate the various possibilities for a few minutes, and Connor asks Katherine the same question that Other-Kate said he’d raised in the previous timeline—why would the Russians even have press conferences in a country with a state-controlled media?
He has to repeat the question, but Katherine finally says, “I don’t know. That’s a good point, Connor. But that’s definitely where Moehler said he was going.”
“Well, what if we look at this another way?” Dad asks. “Where else might they have held a press conference on this issue? Maybe the jump wasn’t to Russia after all.”
Katherine spins her head around and blasts Dad with a look that is pure venom. “I. Was. There!” she screams, leaning forward, her thin body rigid as both hands grip the edge of the table. “I know what I heard, Harry. I think the much more likely scenario is that your daughter did a half-assed job watching the stable points. She was probably online flirting with Trey or thinking about going to some damned park with this guy.”
Kiernan’s jaw clenches, but he doesn’t say anything. Dad looks kind of stunned, and I suspect my face wears the same expression. Katherine gets snippy; Katherine even gets a little bitchy, but I’ve only heard her raise her voice a few times. This is not Katherine.
She shifts her eyes over to me and then takes the handout and rips it in half, tossing the pieces on top of her plate. Her voice goes even higher than before. “If you took this at all seriously, Kate, we’d already be—”
“Katherine!” Connor says, his voice sharp as he grabs her hand. She yanks away from him and sits back, her face slowly draining of expression, her shoulders slumping downward. After a minute, Connor puts his arm around her, and she leans into him. “It’s okay,” he says, and his voice reminds me a bit of when I was comforting Daphne. “Just family here. Want me to walk you back to your room?”
“No,” she says in a small voice that worries me even more than the shrieking. “I need to stay.” She takes the torn pages and puts them under her plate and then says, almost in a whisper. “I’m sorry, Kate. And Harry.”
I give her a smile, which I doubt she sees, because her eyes are glued to the table. “It’s okay, Katherine.”
“Sure,” Dad says. “Not a problem.”
Connor looks around at the three of us and gives us a grateful nod. “Okay,” he says, his voice all back to business. “I don’t think it’s very likely that Kate missed Moehler. There were four new Diet Dr. Pepper cans in the library when I went in this morning, and nobody else here drinks that nasty stuff. I’m guessing she’s put a week’s worth of effort into this over the past four days, in between getting Deborah off for Italy. Am I in the ballpark, Kate?”
“Closer to two weeks’ work, if we’re sticking to the standard labor laws.”
“Then Harry’s right,” he says. “We need to look for alternatives to Moscow. Ideas?”
“Well,” Kiernan says, “if you can pinpoint his location at any point prior to his death, Kate or I could go ask him.”
Katherine’s head snaps up, and she gives Kiernan an odd look, a bit sad and a bit confused. “An excellent point, Kiernan. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”
She’s just echoed my own thoughts pretty much verbatim. The idea hadn’t even occurred to me until Kiernan said it. I guess I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around the concept of time as a two-way street. Kiernan has been dealing with this a lot longer than I have.
Not longer than Katherine has, however, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what’s running through her head right now. She looks over at Connor and says, “I think I will go back to my room—I’m tired. You can fill me in later.”
And as they leave the kitchen, Connor holding on to her arm, it suddenly hits me that they’re together. Like, together together—a couple. I don’t know if this is something new or if I’ve been incredibly naive or if they’ve just kept it well hidden. But if they have been hiding it, why? It’s not like I’m a little kid who would be shocked—although I have to admit I am a little shocked that I haven’t noticed it before.
After they’re out of the room, Dad slides over on the bench a bit so that he’s facing me and Kiernan. “I don’t know how well you knew the other Katherine,” he says to Kiernan, “but that’s really not her.” He looks at me. “Has Connor said anything more to you about her health?”
“Just that it’s not going to improve. He said he’s seen several of these outbursts, and he thinks it might be the steroids. Apparently they mess with your mood.”
“Katherine didn’t even have cancer in the other timeline,” Kiernan says. “Maybe we could go forward, get some better drugs.” His eyes shift down to my jawline for a split second, and I know he’s thinking about the hydrogel he used after I was splashed with the acid in Hotel Hell. I don’t even want to think about how badly I would be scarred if he hadn’t.
“Maybe,” I say. “Katherine and I talked about it before, but she said it was something they have to catch early. I don’t know if it would just be a matter of pills at this stage of the game, but they might have something that would buy her some time. I’m not sure how I’d convince some future doctor to help. How did you get the hydrogel?”
“Swiped it from the medical center at Nuevo Reino.”
“So . . . do you think you could get in there and snag an anti-cancer drug from . . .” I stop and think for a minute. “Katherine said around 2070, I think?”
“Nope.” Connor’s back in the kitchen. He walks over to the fridge and pulls out a beer. “Harry? Kiernan?” They both nod, and he brings the bottles to the table.
“What do you mean nope?” I ask after he sits down.
“It’s not going to happen, Kate. You cure her, and you risk screwing up any progress we’ve made thus far. Katherine and I have discussed this many times, and I can’t budge her on this one. It could change too many variables. So, nope.”
He reads my expression and says, “I don’t like it either, Kate. But we both know she’s right. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re skating on ether each time you grab a key. It’s like that Kerplunk game—eventually you’ll pull out a straw that brings all the marbles tumbling down.”
I doubt Kiernan even knows what Kerplunk is, but he nods and takes a sip of his beer. “Last time the final straw was 1938. I don’t know why. Maybe one or more of those keys ends up with people in the inner core—I’m not sure where Simon’s key or Patrick Conwell’s key comes from, or any of the other regional temple leaders.”
I turn toward Connor. “So how much do you know about the 1938 jump? I’ve got the information Katherine gave me and a little from Kiernan, but there’s not much in Other-Kate’s diary.”
“I know there were three historians stranded there, all embedded with the FWP—the Federal Writers’ Project. That location was used frequently by CHRONOS, because it was a sweet setup. The project hired thousands of unemployed people to record the life stories of average people. In places where jobs were scarce, if you could write a coherent sentence, they’d put you to work.”
Connor takes a swig of beer and then goes on. “Any place where the FWP was active was a great place for CHRONOS to hide, and it made an excellent training ground for new a
gents. Given all of the New Deal publicity about the FWP, people weren’t the least bit surprised if someone they didn’t know, maybe even from another town or up North, showed up on their doorstep, asking them to tell their experiences under slavery or whatever—”
“Slavery?” I ask. “It’s 1938.”
“So? Someone born in 1855 would be in his mideighties in ’38, likely to have some pretty solid childhood memories about living under slavery.”
“And,” Dad adds, “they’d have even better stories about the Reconstruction era. Your mom used FWP interviews in one of the classes she taught.”
“Yeah,” Connor says. “There are transcripts online, even a few audio recordings. But to get back to CHRONOS, the publicity around the program meant they could slip in and ask some questions of their own, especially in places like Athens, Georgia, where there was a lot of FWP activity. Anyone whose research dealt with the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century did an FWP jump at least once. Katherine was at the Athens site in February of ’38, trying to get information on popular arguments against allowing women on juries, something Georgia resisted until the early 1950s. She thinks Saul was there once in ’37, possibly a few other times. Abel Waters and Delia Morrell spent a lot of time at the two CHRONOS FWP sites in the South, so it’s not too surprising that’s where they got stranded. They were there with a trainee—Katherine can’t remember his name.”
“I think it was Grant,” Kiernan says. “Although I don’t know if that’s a first name or a last name.”
“Well, this jump worries me,” I say. “We save it for last. But I want to do at least one trip ahead of time to get my bearings. I can observe Delia’s crew from a distance, maybe, but mostly I just want to get a feel for the time and place.”
“Okay,” Connor says, penciling something onto the paper in front of him. “So, first Australia, then Russia, or wherever Moehler is—and we work on Georgia as we go along?”
“Yes.” There’s one last question on the list, so I turn to Kiernan. “Do you have any idea how many medallions the Cyrists have in total?”
