Blade Phenomenon

by Josh Anderson

  Rickard walked into the room ahead of Yalé and Demetrius. He held a notebook in front of him. “What did the boy know about time weaving?” he asked. “That’s a good place to start.”

  “You know, I don’t want to sit here and just listen to what I did wrong,” she said.

  Rickard looked at Yalé and Demetrius, then frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  Allaire looked at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “You did a good job,” Rickard said. “Unless there’s something I don’t know about?”

  Allaire looked at Demetrius. She hadn’t spoken to him since turning away from him in Flemming. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might keep any of that from his father and uncle.

  She was suddenly scrambling. Instead of defending herself, Allaire just sat back, unsure of what to say.

  “Now, getting back to my question . . . ” Rickard continued.

  Allaire was stunned. Even faint praise from Rickard was so rare, she never knew how to process it. “He didn’t know anything,” she said. “The woman who sent him back—”

  “Myrna,” Rickard said.

  “Right,” Allaire continued. “She must not have known much. Or else she didn’t share much with him.”

  Rickard looked at Yalé, and both looked satisfied. “That’s good.”

  “Did it work?” she asked, looking at Yalé, then Demetrius. “Did he get his father to stop the bus crash?”

  Yalé smiled nervously and looked at Rickard.

  “Of course not,” Rickard said. “You know how—”

  “I don’t believe you,” Allaire said.

  “Beachy, it didn’t,” Demetrius jumped in. He’d never made it a habit of lying to her. There was plenty he kept from her over the years, but he’d always decline to answer if he couldn’t give her the truth.

  “But it could’ve worked?” she said. “It’s not really impossible to change life and death?”

  Rickard rarely struggled with his words. “There’s not a simple answer to that, Allaire. You just have to take—”

  “Dr. Browning—” she said.

  “No,” Rickard said.

  “No,” Yalé said.

  “Please,” she said. “You have to let me try.”

  She could see Rickard’s face getting red. “We don’t do that,” he said. “You’ve grown up here. You know this.”

  “Come on, Beachy,” Demetrius said.

  “He saved me,” she said. “And if there’s really no way to stop him from dying, then what’s the harm in letting me go and try?”

  Rickard stood up and glared at her. “We saved you.”

  “Saved me?” she asked. “You know what? I’m done. This whole thing, it’s really a fucking one-way street.”

  Yalé started to speak. “Maybe that’s—”

  “Done?” Rickard asked, spittle flying from his mouth. “Were you under the impression that you could just—?”

  Yalé stood up and put both hands on his brother’s shoulders. “Maybe we need to go cool off. All of us. Consider whether there are some terms we could propose for a severance.”

  “I know how the blots are made,” she said.

  Rickard stood up and pushed Yalé aside. Demetrius got up as well.

  Rickard walked around the table to Allaire. “That sounded like a threat.”

  She glared up at him. “You heard me.”

  Rickard grabbed the back of Allaire’s head by her hair and pushed it toward the table. Allaire knew he was reeling. His cold precision wasn’t there. He was lashing out at the idea that he might not be able to control her anymore. She suddenly had the thought that someone in the room might not make it out alive. He pushed her face harder against the table and made a grunting sound. She wasn’t sure what he was trying to do, and wasn’t sure he knew either.

  For a moment, she thought it would be best for her if she just let him win. He could rough her up a little bit and feel like she’d backed off. But she’d backed off for too long.

  She pulled her Karambit from the holster on her side and flicked the switch to open it. With her left hand, she grabbed his hand and squeezed until he pulled it back from her head. Like the spring inside the knife, she popped up from her chair and pulled Rickard close, the curve of her blade lined right up against the curve of his neck.

  “Hey!” Demetrius yelled out. “Come on, let’s all take a breath.”

  Allaire looked at him. “You think he’s gonna let me walk out of here?”

  “There’s got to be a solution,” Demetrius said. “Just calm down. Everyone’s always treated you fairly, Allaire.”

  “I don’t know what fair is anymore, D,” she answered, still clutching Rickard.

  “You don’t have the guts to live in a world without me in it,” Rickard said to her through gritted teeth. There was nothing further from the truth. Her main hesitation about killing him was the idea of destroying her relationship with Demetrius and Yalé.

  She’d thought about doing just this ever since killing the police officer. Even though it may have saved her life, she hated herself for how satisfying it felt to slice through the cop’s neck. But with Rickard, she had no such complex emotions. Dragging the blade across Rickard’s neck. Watching him bleed out. The idea excited her. Would she ever have him right here again, ripe for the slicing? She looked at her blade, harmlessly prodding his skin and licked her lips.

  Over and over, she pictured his skin opening and blood pouring over her knife. Over her hand. She could feel the stickiness already. She was lost in the image. Over and over.

  The next thing she knew, Yalé and Demetrius were gently pulling her away from Rickard. Once they pulled her off of him, they all safely kept their distance. She still clung to the Karambit in her hand.

  “We will find a way out of this,” Yalé whispered to her. “Just don’t do anything rash. Let’s talk about everything.”

  But hadn’t she done something rash already? How could she be safe here again?

  “We can talk when I’m back,” she said. There was likely a silk blot, ready to be used, on the spinning machine right now.

  “You can’t,” Yalé said to her.

  “Then tell me why,” Allaire shouted. “You want me to follow your rules, you need to make me understand them.”

  Yalé looked at Rickard. Allaire knew by now that anything they shared with her was with Rickard’s permission.

  Rickard smiled and gestured a reluctant nod. “Put down the blade,” he said.

  Allaire looked at Yalé and Demetrius. Demetrius looked at Rickard, and then nodded at her. She laid her blade on the table.

  “Slide it here,” Rickard said.

  She did as she was asked and watched Rickard pick it up. “No more weapons?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Tell me everything,” she said. “I deserve to understand.”

  Rickard walked closer to her. “You’re right,” he said. “Although I’m beginning to think you haven’t understood a single thing we’ve taught you.”

  “I’ve given my life to you.”

  Rickard lifted her knife above his left ear with his right hand and brought it down toward her heart. “Not yet.”

  Allaire realized what was happening quickly enough to turn her shoulder toward him. She felt her own blade rip into her upper arm. It wasn’t a deep cut, but as she jumped away from him she could feel it begin to throb. Stepping backwards quickly, she tripped and fell.

  “Father, no,” Demetrius yelled, jumping up onto the long table and sliding across. He caught Rickard as he came at Allaire again.

  Allaire stumbled trying to get to her feet.

  Rickard pushed Demetrius aside and lifted the knife again, moving toward Allaire. She backed away like a crab, putting her arms up to protect herself in this vulnerable position.

  Rickard stood over her now, ready to strike at her defenseless hands. Demetrius moved toward them. As he brought his arm down with the blade, Rickard suddenly s
topped. Allaire saw that Demetrius had plunged his blade into Rickard’s side. For a second, Rickard’s eyes rolled back in his head, as if the blow had instantly killed him. But then the laser focus came back. The anger.

  Rickard turned and made a huge sweep with the knife through the air toward Demetrius’s throat. “You are a failure.”

  Allaire managed to use the walls in the corner of the room to pull herself to her feet. It looked like Rickard had missed Demetrius with the knife. But then, Allaire stood in horror as she saw blood pool, and begin to pour down the front of Demetrius’s shirt. He looked at her. She could see the fear in his eyes for a couple of seconds before he fell.

  “No!” she screamed. She couldn’t imagine the world without Demetrius in it. He was the lens through which she viewed everything. Really, her only friend. She ran at Rickard’s back and leapt on him like a monkey. She knocked him onto his stomach and dug her heel into the wound on his side. She tried to pin him with one arm while she grabbed Demetrius’s blade from the ground. His Karambit was slightly larger than hers.

  She looked at Yalé for a brief second. He looked on blankly from the same position he’d been in when it started. She wondered if he’d also figured out, like she had, that there was no way both she and Rickard were ever going to walk out of that room.

  Allaire took her weight off Rickard enough to roll him over. She leaned close to him and thought about delivering parting words, but instead, she just moved the blade, slow and deep, across his soft neck. Watching him bleed out was as satisfying as she’d imagined. She kept both hands there and let his blood wash over them.

  Yalé was still frozen in place when Allaire closed up her knife, and stepped around Rickard’s body, making sure not to trail blood into the hallway as she left the room.

  CHAPTER 17

  February 8, 1998

  * * *

  Three days later

  For the next few days, Allaire and Yalé moved through the factory in a delicate dance, avoiding each other expertly. She had broken down several times each day thinking about Demetrius. But, the strange circumstances of her life gave her a glimmer of hope that she could possibly, one day, see him again.

  They’d worked together—silently—to dispose of the two bodies the same evening as the bloodbath, incinerating them as if they were undertakers and it was their job. Since then, though, they hadn’t interacted at all.

  Several hours of conversation with Yalé—which Allaire saw from afar but was not privy to—led to Wanda leaving the night Demetrius was killed. Although Allaire couldn’t imagine her taking the Seres’ only heir to live elsewhere, she was also shocked to see her go without taking Ayers.

  Allaire couldn’t handle being around for Wanda’s tearful goodbye to her two-year-old, knowing too well the toll abandonment took on a kid’s psyche. Allaire wondered what Yalé must’ve said to convince a mother to walk out on her child. Did he threaten her? she wondered. Ayers was the lone Sere heir now, and if anything happened to him, it would mean the death of their entire bloodline. Without a Sere able to procreate, Yalé would have no one to whom he could pass the secret of time travel, nor the burden of protecting the world from its consequences.

  Allaire had also been told many times by each of the Seres she’d known that, according to the family’s ancient history, if there were ever no remaining living Sere, the entire clock of the universe would reset, obliterating the current timestream and everything in it. Whether she believed it or not, Allaire had seen enough extraordinary things in her time with the family that she didn’t want to risk finding out.

  To help distract from her grief over Demetrius, Allaire threw herself into her new role as Ayers’s primary caretaker with gusto once Wanda left. She was cutting a banana in the factory’s kitchen for Ayers when Yalé walked in and sat down at the small card table they sometimes used for eating. He looked lost in thought.

  She felt like she was going to burst. She couldn’t act like there was nothing to say any more.

  “Did you make her leave?” Allaire asked, eyes on Ayers.

  “Of course not,” Yalé answered. “She still has a place here anytime she wants to live by our rules.”

  Allaire tossed the banana peel in the garbage. “But you let her leave.”

  “I’ve never agreed with keeping anyone here any longer than they wish to be with us,” Yalé answered.

  Allaire felt a pang of sadness when she realized that there wasn’t really an “us” anymore. The Seres, the great keepers of time travel, were down to an old castrated man and a toddler.

  “I’ll leave as soon as I can figure out somewhere to go,” she said.

  “Allaire,” Yalé said. “There’s been so much loss already. If you can live by the same rules you always have—”

  “I can stay until you hire a nanny . . . If you want me to,” she said as she scraped some banana pieces onto the tray attached to Ayers’s booster seat.

  Yalé looked at her. “Where would you go?”

  “Military, maybe,” she answered.

  Yalé shifted in his seat. “I can’t bring someone into this from the outside. Not at such a precarious point.”

  Allaire looked at him and shrugged. She still couldn’t believe Demetrius was gone.

  “He’s going to need someone to take him through the tunnel when he’s older,” Yalé said. “I’m not going to be around forever. If something should happen to me, he’s going to need someone to explain this world to him. The importance of our bloodline.”

  “How can someone explain something they don’t know anything about?” she asked, punctuating her question with a shrug.

  “You know more than you think you do, Allaire,” Yalé answered.

  “All right, why were Demetrius and Rickard weaving so much lately? For as long as I knew them, they mostly stayed out of the tunnel. Why now?”

  Yalé looked down at the table, then back at Allaire. He took a long, deep breath.

  Allaire smiled and stood up. She took the milk carton from the refrigerator and started to fill a sippy cup. “See? You think only someone from your precious bloodline can be trusted. Even when there’s none of you left.”

  “There are problems ahead,” Yalé said. “They were intervening. Creating contingencies . . . Sending you to meet Kyle Cash was one of them.”

  “What kind of problems?” she asked.

  Allaire could see that Yalé was struggling with the idea of being completely candid. “With Ayers. He grows up to be . . . unpredictable.”

  “Just like Frederick said when he came back,” Allaire answered.

  “We’re concerned that he may have some traits that make it difficult for him to find a suitable mate in the traditional way,” Yalé said. “It’s always been very important that a Sere choose a partner very carefully. As you know, we are loathe for our secret to be in the hands of anyone but a select few.”

  Before Allaire could say anything, she felt a blow to the side of her head.

  She jumped back, and then saw Ayers’s sippy cup rolling across the ground. He laughed as Allaire handed it back to him. “No throwing!” she said, her voice jumping up a few octaves.

  “There’s a very suitable woman who Ayers will fall in love with in 2016,” Yalé said. “She had a brother who died in the bus crash that Kyle caused. We felt that Ayers making an effort to stop the crash, by sending Kyle back, might make her more inclined to overlook some of his difficult traits and choose to love him back.”

  Allaire sat down again. She realized that this was what she’d been asking for, but having the information didn’t mean she understood it. “So, it is possible to change the past? To change life and death?”

  Yalé slowly nodded. “That wasn’t the purpose. It was simply a matter of her seeing that he tried. Based on our calculations, that would be enough.”

  “You haven’t given me a straight answer,” she said. “Is it possible to save someone’s life by going back?”

  Yalé shrugged. “Perhaps.”<
br />
  “Perhaps?” she asked, giving him a skeptical look.

  “I’ve never seen it achieved, but . . . ” Yalé’s voice trailed off. “It’s certainly not easy, or reliable, and there’s a steep cost . . . Time, it . . . it resists change. And when something big changes, it creates a new timestream—”

  “Timestream—what does that mean?” Allaire asked.

  “Another thread. Another version of time,” he answered. “When small things change as a result of someone time weaving, the universe can adapt. It can make adjustments. It can heal. The future may change, but not so much as to throw off any of the delicate balances by which the universe operates. But with matters of life and death, when something changes, it layers an entirely different version of the whole universe on top of itself. Time doesn’t want to be rewritten, and the universe strongly resists these additional timestreams.”

  “Did it work?” Allaire asked. “Stopping the bus crash? Did this woman marry Ayers?”

  “I don’t know,” Yalé said. “As you know, I wasn’t born with the genetic ability to time weave—yet another failure of my birth. I’m hoping we can intervene so that the version of the future where Ayers becomes a prob—” Yalé paused. “ . . . Where Ayers has some difficulties, never comes to pass.”

  Demetrius had tried explaining the idea of multiple timestreams to her once, but only in the context of small changes that were almost unavoidable when time weaving. The idea of these vastly different versions of the world, all existing at once, but invisible to each other, was enough to drive a person’s brain crazy. Her head spun with different thoughts.

  “You belong here, with us,” Yalé said. “Follow Ayers. Teach him. Make him into the man Demetrius would’ve wanted him to be. Someone worthy of carrying on our ancient bloodline. The tunnel has never been in anyone else’s hands. Imagine the scenario if someone with bad intentions, or even just someone careless, got inside. Or the government . . . They wouldn’t be as careful as we are.”

  Allaire stared at Yalé. Then at Ayers.

  “I can’t give you the thing you want most,” Yalé said. “The good doctor needs to be left in the past, I’m afraid . . . But, I can give you a purpose like no other. The military needs soldiers, but I need you.”