by Walker, Rysa
“Well . . . not here,” Clio says. “We could do it at Madi’s place in 2136. Or at my parents’ house.”
“We’re not taking Katherine’s key,” Rich says.
“Richard is right,” I tell them. “Looking at this from a strictly practical point of view, that would cost us a player, something we can’t afford. Plus, we lose our advantage. Right now, Saul doesn’t know we’re aware that he created the Cyrists. Katherine is our only hope for keeping an eye on him and figuring out whether he’s on our side or theirs.”
“Again, though . . . are you seriously suggesting that we don’t tell Katherine?” Rich says. “You claim to have evidence that Saul is abusive, and you’re actually planning to keep that from her?”
“No,” Madi says. “We will tell her. Just not yet. She’s been with him for years, Rich. When this is over, win or lose, I’ll give her the diary and let her make her own decision. The main reason I suggested the whole buddy-system idea was concern for her safety. Our priority right now has to be finding out what the hell Saul is up to, and where his loyalties lie. Katherine is far more likely than anyone else to figure that out and, for that matter, to help us find him. Alex can narrow the time and place down a bit, but his system is reactive, not predictive. It only picks up the chronotron surge when Saul jumps from a location, not where or when he’s jumping to. Plus, there’s the original reason I told Tyson what I know. The Cyrists are wrapped into this somehow. I think Katherine knows more about Saul’s connection to the Cyrists than she’s told us.”
“Waiting has another benefit,” I say. “If we win this thing and CHRONOS is restored, the goal has to be to get Saul back to HQ. That way, security can deal with whatever he’s done and prevent him from any future crimes.”
“Alternatively, you could just shoot the rat bastard and yank his key,” Clio says. “That’s the option my parents would suggest. And this time, if you future folk can resist digging up medallions or inventing more of the damn things, maybe he’ll stay erased.”
Madi gives Clio a look that I don’t fully understand. Sympathy, but I think there’s also a bit of wariness in the mix. I debate asking but decide it might be better to just talk to Madi later.
“I’m generally not a fan of violence,” Rich says, “or I’d probably side with your parents on this one. I’ll definitely get a great deal of satisfaction, however, from siccing Sutter on his ass.”
“On whose ass?” Katherine says from the kitchen doorway. Her eyes seem a bit red, as if she’s been crying, but she’s smiling ear to ear.
The four of us exchange a look. “Um . . . Morgen,” Richard says. “We were just wondering if they had a Sutter in their reality.”
Katherine gives him a confused look, but it disappears quickly. “I’m really sorry that I’m late, but I have good news. Saul was under a key when the shift happened, so Team Hyena now has an extra set of hands. Unofficially, of course, but still . . . He’s been trying to find us for months, and he finally tracked me down at the church where I was speaking with Elizabeth Dilling. Which means we don’t need to worry about anything on that front. Saul has the whole situation with Coughlin covered.” She tilts her head slightly to the right and frowns. “None of you seem particularly surprised.”
“I just finished telling them that Alex thinks the red bubble you saw on the display was Saul,” Madi says. “He dug a bit deeper and realized that a red dot jumped out from the same location as you and Richard. At almost the same time, too. So . . . we sort of put two and two together and assumed Saul survived.”
“How, though?” Rich asks. “How did Saul just happen to be under a key?” There’s a faint undertone of damn it all to hell in the question, but Katherine seems to be too excited to notice.
“I know! I’m not normally the type to believe in miracles, but this experience has me wondering if we don’t have a guardian angel. Maybe we can win this thing after all.” She spends the next few minutes explaining how Saul swiped the key from Morgen Campbell, who had apparently decided a while back that his quarters were going to be under a CHRONOS field and had enough cash to make it happen. Saul had also seen the note from Team Viper that supposed hackers placed on all the TD systems. He and Morgen had both dismissed it as a joke, but they’d been curious enough to run a quick basic scenario on what it might take to keep the US out of the war, and that meant Saul had at least some idea what had happened when the time shift hit.
There are only two pieces of new information in what Katherine tells us. The first is that when Saul was on his jump to Georgia last week, the Saul from Team Viper tried to recruit him. That explains a lot about the way he stormed out of the jump room and Katherine’s emergency exit in the middle of our meeting with Angelo. The second bit of news is the fact that the key Saul swiped from Morgen has the hyphenated version of the word CHRO-NOS engraved on the back, which has me wondering whether this is their first incursion into our universe. Or maybe it’s a relic from some other group that was over here playing time tourist.
One thing that’s conspicuously missing from Katherine’s recitation of Saul’s narrow escape from oblivion, however, is any reference to the Cyrists—specifically why, when faced with a reality where the US doesn’t enter World War II, his mind had gone so quickly to converting Coughlin. Apparently, it’s going to be on me to ask her that question, because Madi and Clio give me expectant looks when Katherine wraps up. Rich glances my way, too, although his expression is more one of resignation than expectation.
“So,” I begin. “Saul has been looking for you for over a month. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, given that he found you at Coughlin’s church, that he’s behind the priest’s sudden change of faith?”
“Yes. Which is why it didn’t score when we listed it as one of our initial predictions. Team Viper never entered it into the system. Saul figured out that they were planning to use Coughlin to fan the isolationist flames. And he preempted them, so that saves us a move.”
“But . . . Tyson and I heard Coughlin speak at the rally tonight,” Madi says. “Aside from name-dropping the Cyrists on a few occasions, he’s still beating the same drum.”
“Well, yes,” Katherine says. “But Saul has only just started working with him. And Coughlin can’t switch gears all at once, or he’ll lose his listeners. If nothing else, this will isolate him. Saul has already gotten him off Hitler’s payroll.”
“But that means he was on Hitler’s payroll in our timeline,” Clio says. “That’s not something we needed to change. So at best, what Saul is doing is unnecessary, and at worst, it could make actually fixing the timeline a lot harder.”
Katherine opens her mouth as if to speak, and then closes it again. When she finally does respond, it’s simply to say, “I don’t think so.”
“But why this particular move?” I ask. “If Saul ran game scenarios, like you said, he’d have been running them on a system fairly similar to the one we used. We compiled the top options for Angelo’s meeting, and I’m certain that converting Charles Coughlin to Cyrisism wasn’t on the list.”
“Because it’s what he knows,” Katherine says. “My first inclination when looking at this problem, or any problem for that matter, is to figure out what social movements are active and how they might have been motivated. It’s what I study. It’s what I know. You probably look to see which group of racist jerks have their fingers in the pie, although in this case, the giant swastikas at that rally made your job fairly easy. As a religious historian, Saul played to his strengths and looked for a way that religion might be used to change the situation. Keep in mind, he didn’t know we made it out. He was half convinced that the person he saw in Georgia was just some later version of himself, screwing around with his head.”
“Why the Cyrists, though? Why not leave the guy as a Catholic? What connection does Saul have to the Cyrists?”
It’s an obvious question, one that I was about to ask, in fact. While I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it come from either Madi
or Clio, I am a bit surprised to hear the words coming from Richard. He’s seated directly across the table from Katherine, looking straight at her as he asks the question. She doesn’t meet his eyes at first, and when she finally does look up, her composure seems to falter a bit.
“Katherine,” Richard says, and his voice is gentler as he repeats the question, “what connection does Saul have to the Cyrists?”
Clio expels a huff of breath and gets up from the table, snatching a few dishes away to put in the sink. I get her frustration. We would have learned a lot more about Katherine’s loyalties and motivations if Richard hadn’t essentially tipped our hand. There’s no way she could be looking at his face right now and not realize that we know, or at least suspect, something. The only real questions at this point are how much she’ll tell us and how much Rich will end up telling her.
“The Cyrists were part of a couple of scenarios he ran with Morgen,” Katherine says. “Saul had this running joke, where he added verses to The Book of Cyrus. Changed them up. Added bits from other religions. Tate Poulsen sometimes joined in. I think it was something they started doing when they were roommates. And apparently the fascination with the Cyrists is something he and his twin over on the Viper side have in common, although some of the details seem . . . different. The symbol, for example. When Team Viper was setting things up to use the Cyrists, it looked more like a standard cross. I think Saul switched it . . . back. Back to the original.” Katherine rubs her forehead. “I could be wrong, though. It’s been a long day.”
“You’re definitely right on that account,” Madi says a bit too cheerfully to be convincing. “I’m exhausted. I think we all are. Which is probably why we all started dissecting the one bit of good news we’ve gotten since this nightmare started. From what all of you have said, there’s no one better at The Game than Saul, right? So having him on our side—officially or not—is a coup. And it has to be such a relief to you to find out he’s okay.” Katherine nods, her eyes going teary, as Madi continues. “Anyway, why don’t we go around and give a basic report of anything else we learned during our respective jumps? That way, we can let everything gel overnight and start fresh in the morning.”
Katherine smiles. “Good idea. I’ve told you most of what I found, so mine will be quick. Elizabeth Dilling confirmed that Coughlin had been planning the move to the Cyrists for some time now. She converted, too, and now has a lotus-flower tattoo on her hand. And then Saul found me, and well . . . I’ve told you the rest.”
Richard then summarizes his jump, which is a repeat of what he’d told us before Katherine arrived.
When he finishes, Madi says, “Tyson is a better person to tell you about the rally, since he understood more of it than I did. After that, I jumped to 1966 to hand the stable points off to Jack.”
“Is my mom being nice to him?” Clio asks.
“Yes,” Madi says with a slightly shaky smile. “Jack told me he has absolutely everything he needs, which isn’t much, since he’ll mostly be staring at the key, trying to find something that can help us avert the killings at the rally.”
“That event isn’t one of their moves, though,” Katherine says. “According to Saul, the fact that they were awarded a double geographic bonus means we should focus on events within five kilometers of the one initial prediction we got right . . . so, basically, we should assume everything they did was at the World’s Fair.”
“That tracks with Alex’s theory,” Madi says, “which I was about to get to, but this does raise an important question. There were three deaths at the rally that didn’t happen in our timeline. If that wasn’t one of their moves, but was rather an unintended consequence, can we still act to prevent it? I mean, even if you take the view that the woman was in league with the Nazis, two kids were killed. They weren’t old enough to know better.”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “If that wasn’t one of their official moves, reversing it might be seen as a violation of the rules. I know they have cameras, or at least stable points, at two different locations in Manhattan, which is well outside the five-kilometer range. Maybe changing the timeline will reverse it, and we won’t have to do anything specific. Or maybe we’ll have to come up with some off-the-books way to deal with it. Maybe there won’t be any cameras there and it won’t matter. Because you’re right. Those are deaths that weren’t supposed to happen.”
“Saul says the extra moves he’s made won’t count,” Katherine says. “Unless the other team launches a challenge. In which case, recordings might be entered into evidence, but . . . the SimMaster is just going to measure the moves we enter and whether or not the goal—that is, the US entering the war on schedule—is accomplished. Anything else is peripheral. So . . . reversing those moves should be peripheral, too.”
I shrug. “I’m more worried about Saul’s convincing people like Coughlin and Dennis to back the Cyrists than I am about the rally, to be honest. I mean, there’s a quick and easy way to stop those three deaths. I’ll just jump in and rip the timing device off the phonograph. Figuring out how to undo what led Lawrence Dennis to set the damn thing in the first place is going to be a lot harder.”
“Saul has promised me that he will go back and remove his version of The Book of Cyrus and anything else he planted,” Katherine says. “He can also go back and tell himself not to contact Coughlin and the rest of them after we flip the timeline. Saul handles double memories a lot better than most of us do.”
I’m very skeptical on Saul following through with these promises. Judging from the expressions of Rich, Madi, and Clio, I’m not alone in my skepticism. But there’s little point going into this now, so I move on to the next person at the table. “Your turn,” I say to Clio.
“Oh, lots of excitement for me, since you told me to stay inside the apartment. I made grilled cheese sandwiches and soup—although I can’t really claim credit for the latter, since you opened the cans and added water. All I did was stir. Oh, and I cleaned a large bloodstain out of your jacket, something I actually had a bit of prior experience with, sadly.”
“Blood?” Madi asks.
“Yes. Not mine.” I deliver a brief summary of my evening, and as I expected, Rich gives me an annoyed look when I mention the location of my meeting with Lawrence Dennis. It quickly fades, however, when the story moves from Café Society itself to the alley behind the building.
“And so,” I tell them, “despite Clio’s diligent efforts, I’m pretty sure that the jacket over there still carries traces of the blood of a doorman that the Viper version of Esther murdered tonight. It would probably be stained with Marcy Bateman’s blood, too, if that hadn’t disappeared when Alisa snatched her key. And while I get the sense that the communist who runs the place might generally steer clear of involving the police, he probably made an exception when they found his doorman dead next to the dumpster. Given that Lawrence Dennis and I had been arguing back there just a few minutes earlier and both Tallulah Bankhead and Billie Holiday saw me waving my pistol around, they’re probably already working with some police sketch artist to make sure they get as much info as possible into the all-points bulletin.”
I try to keep my tone matter-of-fact. But as Clio had predicted, talking about it stirs the same low-level panic I was feeling earlier.
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” Madi says. Everyone is silent for a moment, and then she adds, “This is exactly what I was talking about earlier, though. We’re going to be in dangerous circumstances. I think we need a buddy system. If something happens to one of us, the other person can jump back to get help. Near the end, we may have to split up to do everything in the order and at the speed it needs to be accomplished. But for tomorrow at least . . .”
Katherine frowns. “But we’ll cover more ground if we separate. You might want to stick with Tyson, since you’re new to this, but Richard and I are both experienced agents. There’s no reason to treat us like first-years.”
Madi doesn’t argue, but she gives me a very pointed
glance. Apparently, that’s my cue to step in as team leader.
“We need to make it a blanket rule given what very nearly happened to me in the alley. Safety in numbers. Not just at the Fair, but across the board.”
“That’s silly,” Katherine says. “All four of us are armed. Richard has the watch gadget. I have Sutter’s nasty little laser pointer or whatever it’s called. Madi still has the tiny gun she used at the Beatles concert. So . . .”
“Katherine, I was carrying a pistol at the time. I still could have been killed.”
She glances around at the others, and when it’s clear that they’re taking my side on this, she gives me a little nod and says, “Fine, then.”
“Okay. If that’s settled, maybe we should get some rest. It’s nearly one a.m., so let’s be back here and ready to start the day at nine. We can decide then who will go where and with whom.” I can tell from their faces that the thought of waking up with eight hours less on the clock terrifies them exactly as much as it does me, but we can’t function without sleep.
“I’m tired, too,” Rich says. “But maybe we should briefly discuss plans for tomorrow first? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll sleep better knowing we at least have a tentative game plan.”
“Maybe you and Katherine can set observation points at the World’s Fair,” I suggest. “We’ll put together a list of all the spots we’re going to need to watch.”
“Alex gave me a map of the Fair marked with some of them,” Madi says.
“Good. We can just add to it as needed. As for me, I’m going to try to talk to some people within the Universal Front, since they held a protest outside the gates on the day the Japanese ambassador was attacked. One of the newspaper accounts seemed to think they could have been responsible.”
