by Walker, Rysa
That has me a bit worried until I spot Jack’s bag hanging from the coatrack.
“Jack? Kate? It’s Madi.”
No answer. I call out again as I glance into the kitchen. A single mug and cereal bowl are drying in the dish rack on the counter. They’re still damp. The appliances are a golden color that coordinates with the drapes and the telephone on the wall. I glance out the kitchen door, trying to keep my anxiety at bay, but I can feel the hair rising at the back of my neck. Opening the door, I step outside onto the porch, looking across the wide lawn toward the strip of trees and the lake beyond. There’s a dock that stretches out onto the lake, with a rowboat tied to the end. The setting is very peaceful, and that makes me even more nervous, probably because it’s in such total contrast to the way I’m feeling.
I cross over to the edge of the house. The lawn rises to a slight hill that overlooks the lake, where a low hedge of flowers encloses a small cemetery with three graves. Beyond that is a dirt road leading to two houses on the other side of the hill.
There’s no one out here, either, so I circle back to the porch and the still-open door to the kitchen. The pipes inside the house groan loudly, startling me so badly that I nearly stumble on the steps. I hadn’t even noticed there was water running. Closing the porch door, I hurry back to the front of the house. “Jack?”
A door opens on the floor above me, and then I recognize the pattern of Jack’s footsteps on the stairs. He’s in just his pajama pants, rubbing his hair with the ends of the towel draped around his neck. “Sorry. I didn’t hear you over the water.”
He loops the towel over my head and pulls me to his chest. His skin is still warm from the shower. The soap he used isn’t his usual brand, but beneath the surface smells of ginger and jasmine, it’s still Jack. I feel the tension leave my body piece by piece.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. “Just got a little freaked out when I couldn’t find you. Where are Kate and Kiernan?”
“Kate dropped me off here and rode home with one of her sons, so that I’d have a vehicle.”
“I thought this was home.”
Jack shakes his head. “Nope. Not for the past fifteen years or so. She lives across the border in the suburbs of Toronto. This was the first time she’d ventured into the US since the secession crisis.” He smiles grimly at my blank look. “I’d say you need a crash course in revisionist US history, but you’ve got enough on your plate right now trying to re-revise it. How long can you stay?”
“Not long.” I glance at the timer on my CHRONOS key and then begin selecting stable points to transfer as a batch, both the ones that I set and the ones that Tyson transferred to my key before I left the café. “We synced up our keys after the game officially started,” I tell him, “which was four hours and thirteen minutes ago. I have to make a quick stop in Bethesda and then back here again, because unfortunately, I have some work for you. We set about fifty stable points at Madison Square Garden that need to be scanned. And we’re supposed to have a team meeting back at the apartment in Manhattan at hour five.”
“You’ve been on the clock for just over four hours, and you already have an apartment in Manhattan? No wonder you look tired.”
I explain about Clio’s idea and the prep work that the Dunnes completed for us. “We’ve got detailed research packets for the various eras, identification for all of us, and a base of operations both in New York and Detroit, which is where Katherine and Richard are right now, investigating this Coughlin guy.”
“So . . . why have your rendezvous point be at the apartment in Manhattan? You’ve got computers in 2136. Jarvis. And Alex, Lorena, and RJ for that matter.”
“We don’t know how much we’re going to have to use the keys in the next two days. Tyson seems to think it’s a bad idea to overtax ourselves. We’re planning to take turns going forward to Bethesda. I’m going first, mostly because I need to talk to Thea.”
“You located her?”
I give him a quick rundown of the Temporal Dilemma tournament video and Thea’s inconvenient and typically dramatic appearance just as the game was beginning. “On the one hand, it’s really, really good that she got a heads-up from this Cyrist Book of Prophecy, because she was able to arrange for them to purchase the house so that we’d have a base of operations. But now she’s an observer, by which I’m pretty sure they mean pawn, so she needs to remain at the house. Knowing Thea, she’s probably driving Alex and the others crazy.”
“Speaking of Alex, how is he?”
“Barely eating, barely sleeping, and ingesting massive amounts of caffeine.”
“So, pretty much the same as any time he’s working on a project.”
“Maybe. But he seems to be having a tough time focusing, possibly because he’s worried about you. And I think it bothers him that there are so many different things going on. He keeps having to shift gears, trying to figure out exactly how the keys work and how the other side is managing to hitchhike on our signals and dealing with the Anomalies Machine, which is still spitting out changes. Plus, he had to sync our computers up to the game console, and he’s also trying to find a way to extend the CHRONOS field without using an actual key. It’s probably no surprise that he’s a bit more frazzled than usual. When he was sitting out at the picnic table today, I felt bad for him. I wanted to wrap him in a giant hug, but I wasn’t sure how he’d take that. He doesn’t seem to be the hugging type.”
Jack smiles. “Probably a good thing you resisted. You’d have scared the hell out of him. But yeah, this situation has to be extra stressful for him. Alex is used to being on a team where he can focus on one segment of a project. Multitasking isn’t really his strong suit. Maybe you can get RJ to help him with some of the research. I mean, not the physics stuff, but . . . is Lorena still working on the serum?”
“She’s doing the best she can, under the circumstances. The building she worked in doesn’t even exist anymore, so she turned the kitchen into a research lab. When I last spoke to her, she was trying to program the food replicator to spit out the components she needs for your stress-hormone cocktail.”
“You make it sound so appetizing.”
“Hopefully, it will be an injection instead of something you chug. Anyway, aside from the lack of lab equipment, I’m kind of glad they’re not venturing outside the house. Morgen explicitly said that his players wouldn’t be targeting their opponents, but observers are fair game. None of them are official observers, since they don’t have the CHRONOS gene, but I don’t think we can rule out Morgen’s team using them as leverage. Speaking of which, you need to be careful, too, okay? Stay here as much as you can. Of the three people who killed one of their observers, you’re the only one that isn’t a player, so even though you’re not officially part of the team, they clearly consider you a target.”
He pulls me close. “There’s enough food in the pantry and freezer to last through a nuclear holocaust, so I’ll be fine here. What exactly should I be looking for at these locations?” he asks as I hold the back of my key to his to transfer the observation points.
“Any sign of the players or observers, for one thing. I didn’t see any blips of light that looked like CHRONOS keys until we were outside the auditorium, but we have to assume they’ll be around later in the evening when the actual security breach occurs. We set a few outside the building, too, so maybe we can figure out how to keep the protestors from breaking through the line of police out front. Newspaper reports suggest that it happens around ten.”
I fill him in briefly on what we know about Lawrence Dennis and the recorded explosion. Then I go into the kitchen, find a piece of paper and pencil, and make a very rough sketch of the arena.
“What’s that thing?” Jack asks, pointing to a mark near the right margin.
“A stairwell. What does it look like?” I bump him with my elbow when he pulls a skeptical face. “I never claimed to be an artist. This is just to give you an idea of key locations.”
I mark two Xs in the appro
ximate spot where Tyson and I were sitting on the second level, and another X near the closet on the other side of the area where Tyson saw the phonograph. Finally, I draw a circle near the staircase—which, to be fair, really doesn’t look much like a staircase—where we assume Mrs. Slater and her daughters will be killed.
“Two of the stable points are just inside the doorway,” I say after labeling these spots. “I doubt they’ll give you much information, but between that and my very perfect map, you should be able to get a feel for the layout of the place.”
“So, do you think this Dennis guy coordinated with the people outside who let the protestors break through? Or did whoever told him to set the timer on the sound effects simply have it synced up to coincide with the breach?”
“No clue,” I say. “Hopefully you’ll find something to help us answer that. There are fifty-two stable points, so just skim through and see what you can find. Focus on the ones closest to the locations on the map, and right around ten fifteen, which is when they hear the explosion and the panic starts.”
“Will do. When will you have the rest of the stable points set?”
I’m confused for a moment, thinking he means additional points at the Garden, but then I realize he’s talking about the various other events and locations. “We should probably narrow it down before we bombard you with too much. Especially since it’s just you here. Even if you skim, fifty-two locations will take a while. I thought maybe Kate would be helping you with these—”
“Madi, I’m better off with her not here. She’s not exactly . . . happy with this entire enterprise. I could barely get her to speak to me. She waited outside until her son Harry showed up to drive her back to Canada about twenty minutes after we arrived. He was pretty closemouthed, too. Kind of looked like he wanted to punch me.”
“Did they say anything to give you a hint as to why they were so . . . antagonistic?” I ask, even though I know there are really only two things it could be. Either something happens to Clio, or something happens to Kiernan. Or both.
“All I know is he told me the same thing Kate told you at the bus station. Fix this. Anger aside, they’ve left me in good shape. A stocked pantry. Clothes. Money, although I have no clue why I’d need it. Just looking at it makes me feel weird, because it has the wrong pictures and it’s not even green anymore. There’s also a damned impressive library including a—actually, come upstairs and I’ll show you, because I’m not sure what it’s called. I’d never even seen one. It took me a bit to figure out what it was.”
I follow him upstairs to what must have once been a bedroom. Three walls are lined with books. There are framed sketches on the other wall, drawn by someone with far better skills than my own. Clio, maybe, since the curtains on the one window have pale purple flowers and look a bit like something you might hang in a young girl’s room. Two desks are on either side of that window, one stacked with papers and the other taken up almost entirely by an odd metal device that looks a bit like an old-style metal trash bin that someone tipped on its head. A stack of small cardboard boxes is next to the device, and even more of the boxes are on one of the nearby shelves.
“What exactly is it?”
“I thought the reels were movies at first. But they’re newspapers. Those little boxes by the machine contain the years 1936 to 1945. Several different newspapers. Each frame contains a picture of a page, and there’s an index. It’s really jumpy, though, and you have to zoom in to search the page. I tried it earlier this morning and nearly barfed up the cereal I’d just eaten. And I’m thinking maybe Kate felt the same way, because . . . hold on. Let me find it.”
Jack digs around and comes back with a tablet computer. It’s fairly clunky compared to the readers we have at the house, but it’s practically microscopic compared to the metal monster in Kate’s library. There are tiny amber dots attached to two corners. I run my finger over one.
“Yeah,” he says, “those seem to be CHRONOS-field extenders. They’re all over the house. You might want to take one back to Alex for comparison.”
“So . . . the house is under a CHRONOS field?”
“It could be. There’s a gadget in one of the bedrooms. If I put the key inside it, Kate says the field extenders will pick it up and create a protective barrier around the house. They set it up when Clio was small. But I feel safer wearing the key, and anyway, I don’t want these archives to be protected. We need whatever you change in 1939 or 1940 to be reflected on these microfilm copies the Dunnes bought in 1960 or whenever. That way I can tell if and when major events change.”
“How did they manage to rig all of this up? I mean, Clio was born in 1913, right?”
“Something like that, yeah. I’m guessing they raided the Cyrist Farm before they set the place up. There are several out-of-timeline gadgets, including a CHRONOS diary and that.” He nods toward the tablet.
“Maybe Kate got tired of doing research the old-fashioned way and had her daughter bring back an upgrade on one of her jumps?” I suggest. “You won’t need to bother with the background research, anyway. I can just get Jarvis to check things when I’m in 2136. It will be a lot quicker.”
“True,” he says. “Although your time is limited by that stupid countdown, and you can’t spend the entire game doing research. The tools at my disposal may be archaic, but I’m not on the clock. My time is pretty much limitless.”
He has a point, although I hate the idea of him here alone, staring at slightly different views of the same event for days on end.
“I just need to focus on the important stuff and avoid diving down rabbit holes,” he says. “Some of the stuff in those files ties in with my own military-history research, so it’s easy to get off on a tangent. She has a lot of articles comparing the deaths from dropping nuclear weapons on Japan to the deaths that would have occurred if the war had continued . . . which makes sense when you’re contemplating restoring a timeline where the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings occur. If it makes you feel better on that front, the US uses nuclear weapons first in this timeline, too.”
“Against . . . Japan?”
“No,” he says. “Against the western United States.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I wish I was. Small nukes, with three or four cities hit on each side of the Arizona-New Mexico border. About thirty-five thousand deaths total, so still less than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but when you add it to the million or so other deaths that could have followed if US forces hadn’t used it . . .”
I shudder and lean into him. The last thing I want is to have any part in life-and-death decisions of this magnitude, but yeah . . . repairing the timeline means repairing all of it. The good, the bad, and the unimaginably awful.
“So,” I say, after a deep breath, “how much time do you think you’ll need to scan three hours from fifty-two different angles?”
“Check back in a couple of days. If I’m not done, you can always just jump ahead to when I’m finished.”
“Okay. How about eleven p.m. on the 27th? That would give you about two and a half days.”
“Sure. Why so late, though?”
I put my arms around him and reach up for a kiss. “Because that’s about the time you usually get sleepy. I’ll have to sleep at some point, too. And I’m thinking I’ll sleep much better in 1966 with you than I will in 1939 without you.”
∞
BETHESDA, DC
NOVEMBER 18, 2136
My grandmother is on the couch when I blink in, scanning idly on a tablet and looking thoroughly bored. She doesn’t seem very happy that I dive straight into questions, and not particularly easy questions, as soon as I spot her.
“You would have existed anyway,” Thea says in response to my first question, “and you’d have a slight trace of the gene that is the core for the CHRONOS gene. Your friend in there who has been tinkering with the test tubes and the young man at the computers would have used that trace of the gene as the basis for their research, but it would have taken
several years longer. That is what The Book of Prophecy tells us, at any rate.”
Great. I’m featured in yet another book I’d never heard of until a few weeks ago. A Brief History of CHRONOS at least seemed to be dealing with a version of me that came into being without selective breeding. I have a sudden flash of sympathy for Kate Pierce-Keller, and fresh insight into why Prudence Rand may not have gotten along with her mother. Maybe they were just too much alike, since both Katherine and this cloned version of Pru were perfectly willing to play matchmaker in order to get a granddaughter who met their genetic specifications.
“Perhaps you could get me a copy of this Book of Prophecy,” I say, “since it apparently knows more about my origins than I do?”
She laughs. “Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, dear. Even I don’t have an entire copy. The Templars have given me information from the book from time to time, and we were given copies of one chapter—the “Chapter of Prudence”—as children, since we were required to commit it to memory. That’s the section that mentions the shrine.”
I’ve heard that word recently. It takes a moment, and then I remember that the church Charles Coughlin built, the one that Katherine and Rich are currently investigating, is called the Shrine of the Little Flower. “You mean the Catholic church in Detroit?”
Thea looks confused for a moment, and then she shakes her head. “No, dear. I mean this.” She waves her hand in an inclusive gesture that takes in the living room, foyer, and the two curving staircases that lead up to the second floor. “As it is foretold and decreed, the ancestral home of the Mother of Prudence shall be raised up as an eternal, unchanging shrine . . .”
There are several things in this that need to be unpacked, so I say, “Okay, let’s back up. Who did you mean when you said, ‘we’ were given a chapter?”
“The three in my birth group. I guess you’d call us sisters. Twins . . . or triplets, I guess. Clones, obviously, although we’re not really supposed to admit that. Anyway, they did this stupid thing of assigning us Greek letters as names. I hated Theta, so I dropped the middle t once my commitment was up. They’re all the way to Rho and Sigma now, and I guess there will be a new batch coming soon. I wonder what they’ll do when they run out of letters? Do you think maybe they’ll use a different alphabet?”
