Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  And then I see him at 11:47. He enters the room from the staircase that leads up to the bedrooms and goes into the kitchen. A few seconds later, he comes back into the living room and places the note on the coffee table. Just as I’m about to blink in, I spot Lorena’s hypospray in his hand. I don’t know whether he’s used it yet, but if he has, I’m fairly certain he’s going to hit me with a bunch of reasons why he should handle this emergency with Clio, whatever it is, even though we have no idea whether that injection will allow him to make multiple jumps or even how long it’s likely to last. I’ll feel much better about that conversation if the hypospray is in my hand, rather than his. So I scroll back two minutes and jump in.

  The time shift hits me hard before I can brace for it. I stumble backward onto the couch, pulling in deep breaths to calm the tempest raging in my stomach. As I look around the room, I’m torn between relief that we managed to flip the timeline and the realization that some things are still very broken. This is not the living room I saw in Kate and Kiernan Dunne’s family photos. It remains barren, aside from a coffee mug on the end table next to a notebook flipped open to a page filled with Jack’s handwriting. No family pictures on the walls. No artwork, no knickknacks, none of the many little things that make a house a home.

  Despite the nausea and dizziness, I force myself up and stumble into the kitchen. The hypospray is next to the toaster, exactly as before. I slip it into my pocket and then head back into the living room to collapse on the couch. I hear Jack’s footsteps on the stairs a few moments later.

  “Madi?” he says. “Oh, thank God. Clio said you jumped straight home.”

  “Guess I did, in a sense. I wanted to be with you when I found out whether it worked.”

  He wraps me in a tight hug and then quickly steps away. “Clio showed up here about twenty minutes ago to tell me we should not jump to the library, because there was something off about the stable point. She thought you were already there, because she scanned through this location and never saw you jump in.”

  I shake my head. “That doesn’t make sense . . . oh. Maybe it does. I was planning to jump to Bethesda. Told her that was the plan. Even opened the stable point, fully intending to jump in. But at the last second, I changed my mind. What’s wrong with the stable point?”

  “She said it’s a trap. The note about the bombing being averted is highly misleading, for one thing. While the bomb didn’t go off in the Court of Peace, it exploded in the location where it was originally placed—inside the closet at the British Pavilion. Killed nearly twice as many people, because the top floor collapsed. She jumped back and called in a bomb threat, but the police made it clear that they’d had quite enough bogus bomb threats for one day.”

  “They ignored it?”

  “Yeah. To be fair, they’d already checked that utility closet after the first call. The one that the bomber or whoever placed before any of the time-travel insanity began. And then they get a second call to find the suitcase with a damn balloon, and apparently there was someone else who claimed there was a bomb in a trash can at the Court of Peace. So it’s not too surprising that they were skeptical.”

  “Please tell me Clio isn’t planning to try and remove it herself.”

  “She is. Or she did. I checked the July 5th paper on the microfilm. Seven people injured, but no mention of any deaths. They do mention the possibility that a woman was the bomber, but she got away.”

  I center the key in my palm, but he shakes his head. “You need to wait, though. There’s more. Pull up the stable point in the library.”

  “Which one?” He gives me a confused look, and I say, “There’s one next to Grandpa James’s desk and—”

  “The one you transferred to everyone else. Over near the wall screen.”

  I open the location and see the display from earlier, with a new addition at the top.

  Three Bund deaths & Lindbergh attempt prevented

  “The timeline-restored part seems true,” I say. “I felt the shift as soon as I arrived. I’m still feeling it, to be honest.”

  “Yes. Just . . . pan around to Alex’s cave.”

  The first thing I notice is that Alex isn’t there, which is a rare sight. His displays aren’t even on, and he never turns those off. No one is in the library at all. The only display is the one for the SimMaster, off to the left, which is currently counting down from one hour, twelve minutes, and six seconds. That seems a bit off to me. According to the timer on my key, it’s just over one hour and five minutes.

  And then it says one hour, thirteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds.

  “It’s a loop,” Jack says. “Clio noticed it. Someone appears to have hacked the stable point. And if you simply looked at the wall screen, or even if you’d only been in the library a few times . . . you might not realize anything had changed. And speaking of . . .” His brow creases and he looks vaguely ill. “Something changed here. Because I have a memory of going straight to the kitchen. I wrote you a note . . .”

  “Yes. I saw it. You were planning to try Lorena’s serum, even though you swore you wouldn’t do it when you were alone.”

  As I speak, I pull up the second location at the library. Unlike the room depicted in the stable point next to the wall screen, the room I’m seeing now isn’t empty at all. Alex’s display cave is still missing, and he’s not at his desk. He’s in one of five office chairs lined up by the sofa, along with Tyson, Katherine, and Rich. Thea, RJ, Lorena, and Yun Hee are on the couch.

  When I pan to the right, I see why. The three surviving Vipers are also in the room, along with their lone remaining observer. Esther and Other-Saul are armed. The observer seems to be monitoring stable points on a CHRONOS key. And the SimMaster countdown is no longer working. There’s something on the display, but I can’t see it from this angle.

  I hold out my key to transfer the location to Jack. “Clio’s not the only one in trouble.”

  He takes a look and curses softly. “How the hell did—”

  The telephone rings, startling both of us. We follow the sound into the kitchen.

  “Have you been answering it?” I ask, staring at the phone as it rings again.

  “This is the first time it’s rung.”

  I pause with one hand above the receiver, and then pick it up. “Dunne residence,” I say.

  “Like hell it is.” The elderly voice on the other end has a faint Irish lilt, and a pronounced slur. It’s Kiernan, but either he’s been drinking, or he’s had a stroke. “No one named Dunne has lived in that house since July 1940. We’d have sold the cursed place if not for the fact that putting your friend up for the past few weeks might be our only shot at getting Clio back.”

  “What happened to Clio? I’m going back to fix it, and we’ll scroll through the stable points to fill in the blanks if we need to, but any details you can give me will save time.”

  I hold the phone between us so that Jack and I both can hear. Kiernan’s voice is a bit less harsh when he continues. “Cliona was watching through the key like she told you she would. Watching the list on your wall screen. She sees all those check marks, and she’s pretty excited, thinking it worked. Then she sees Katherine jump in and realizes there’s something odd going on with the stable point. That it seemed to sort of ripple, and then Katherine vanished. She thought maybe Katherine just jumped back out for some reason, but then she scrolls forward, and the same thing happens with Tyson. And something is off with the countdown. So she starts to get a little panicked, and I’ll admit I was feeling the same. Anyway, she jumps forward to the next day to grab the newspaper, and we learn the bomb didn’t go off in the Court of Peace. It went off inside the British Pavilion, from that very same closet where Saul left the bodies for Team Viper to find. Clio and I both try calling it into the police, but that’s like the third, or maybe fourth time someone has dialed in to say there’s a bomb at the Fair, and the police are to the point of thinking it’s all a big series of hoaxes. And they know for a fact there’s no b
omb in there, because they checked the damn room, you know? The bomb squad had already checked it, and they didn’t find a bloody thing, and there were police crawlin’ all over the place, so they can’t imagine how someone could have sneaked anything in without them seeing. They’d even closed off that part of the building.”

  He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and when he continues, his voice is faint and tired, and I realize with a jolt that he would be over eighty now. “Anyway, she could see the damn thing in the closet through the stable point. It’s dark in there, but some guy with a key, quite possibly Saul, drops it off maybe four minutes before it explodes. So there’s not a very big window between the time it’s dropped off and the blast. And she knows . . . we both know . . . from the paper and from what she can see through the stable point outside that half the top floor collapses about ten seconds after five o’clock. They don’t make World’s Fair buildings to withstand an explosion, or much of anything, really, because they know they’ll be torn down when the Fair closes. She told me she was going to Skaneateles. Hoping that she’d find you there, because she knew the other three were in the library. Said she’d come back to the apartment if she didn’t find you, but I knew. I knew from the way she hugged me goodbye. And then I get the phone call from Connor maybe twenty minutes later. Said Clio showed up in the living room, bleeding badly.”

  He’s rambling, not really making much sense to me. Jack seems confused, too.

  “So, you think she carried the bomb to the same location as before?” Jack asks. “I just read the article from the next day’s paper on the bombing. It said that the explosion happened near the fence around the fairgrounds, same as in the original timeline. A few bystanders did say they saw a woman running out of the building carrying something. That she might be the bomber. But they claimed she got away.”

  “Most of them probably thought she did,” Kiernan says. “And if anyone saw her, do you really think they’d mention a girl torn to bits who vanished right in front of their eyes? Or that the papers would report that? Not exactly the sort of thing you write up in your article if you want to keep your job, now, is it? Connor and Harry both said they didn’t know how in hell Clio managed to even use the key in that condition. She died in Kate’s arms there in the living room. So, yeah. That grave up on the hill, that’s hers. We buried her with the key, though. So she’s dead but not erased. And I’ve been waiting twenty-six years to tell you that you could still fix this.”

  There’s more than a bit of judgment in his tone, and I want to object that there was never a time when we didn’t fix it. But there must have been, because here we are in 1966 with Clio dead for the past twenty-six years. The one thing I do know is that whatever happened, it wasn’t by choice. I made a promise. And if something happened so that I couldn’t keep my promise, I sure as hell wouldn’t have vanished without trying to change it or even explaining it to her family. I don’t think Tyson would. Even though I don’t know Katherine and Richard as well, I don’t believe they would, either. And Jack was about to inject himself with this serum without anyone here to oversee the possible complications to try and save her, so I know damn well that he wouldn’t have.

  “If Clio doesn’t make it in this timeline, Kiernan, it’s because we didn’t make it, either. Clio was right about the situation at the library in 2136. Team Viper set a trap, and they have the others hostage. Not just the three you met, but five more, including a ten-month-old baby and my grandmother Thea. They’re alive, but I don’t know for how long. We already know that Esther and their version of Saul are a bit trigger happy. And yes, Clio did come here looking for me. I guess she assumed I went straight to the library, as well. I told her I’d meet her there, but I decided to stop here first and let Jack know. Now that I know when she was here, however, I’ll go back and intercept her. And we’ll fix this.”

  There’s a pause, and then Kiernan says, “There are hunting rifles in the garage if you need them. Ammo, too.”

  “Can you tell me why she physically carried the bomb out?” I ask. “Is there a limit on how much weight you can carry with you? I don’t even know how much a bomb like that weighs.”

  “I don’t know,” Kiernan says. “I never jumped with anything heavier than a large suitcase. I’m pretty sure Simon or Prudence brought back some computer equipment for Saul at one point, but they likely did it piecemeal. It’s possible she didn’t think about blinking out with the thing, but . . . I don’t think so. She’d used the key a lot. Too damn much. Kate might know. Connor said she went to the fairground. Set stable points, nearly drove herself crazy watching them. Tried her best to use the key so she could save her.”

  The fact that he’s reporting this as something his son told him rather than as something he observed or something Kate said is telling.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll see what I can figure out from watching the stable point.”

  “This is gonna sound harsh,” Kiernan says, “but I have to say it anyway. It’s not enough to just save her. If Clio thinks she was saved at the expense of a bunch of other people, whether it’s the people in the British Pavilion or all of you, she won’t be able to live with herself. That’s not who she was. So you have to fix it all. Or as much as you can. And I’m not saying this just for her sake, but for you and your friends as well, since you didn’t strike me as callous people. I’ve spent most of my life haunted by nightmares about those folks at God’s Hollow, the kids I couldn’t manage to save. If you can avoid that sort of regret, you’ll be better for it in the long run.”

  “That’s the plan, sir,” Jack says. “I’ve got close friends at Madi’s place. And we both made a promise to your wife.”

  Jack and I go back into the living room and spend the next few minutes scanning through the stable points around the British Pavilion and the back fence. We get three glimpses of Clio. One is in the utility closet, and it answers the question of why she didn’t use the key. The bomb is in a large, circular box. If it ever had a handle, it doesn’t anymore. She spends nearly a minute trying to work out a way to hold the box and still have two hands free to pull up the stable point and blink out. Finally, she grabs the box, shoves the door open, and runs.

  “She panicked,” Jack says. “She should have jumped back. Gotten some rope, or . . . something.”

  He’s right, but when you’re faced with a ticking bomb, only a few minutes on the clock, and dozens of lives on the line, panicking is a pretty natural response.

  Our second glimpse is outside the British Pavilion. I spot her white dress with the tiny red flowers that look like polka dots from a distance. There are tourists everywhere. She turns back for a split second, and I can tell she realizes she’s made a mistake, and she’s probably thinking the very things that Jack just said. Then a group of people walks between her and the stable point, and she’s gone by the time they pass.

  The final image is at the clearing near the fence, and it’s more of a blur than anything else. She’s walking rapidly, very nearly running, toward a clear patch of land off to the left of the gate, where the bomb-disposal unit took the device in the previous timeline. Then she stops, places the bomb on the grass, and runs. The device goes off almost instantly, but we can’t see her clearly with the debris in the air. Shrapnel, I guess, and padding of some sort. By the time it clears, we can’t see her at all.

  “Look at the time,” Jack says.

  I do. It’s 4:59:20. “Do you think Clio had the time of the explosion wrong?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it exploded early because she was running with it. Either way,” Jack says, “you’ll have less than four minutes.”

  We could pull up one additional location. The one here in the living room, the one that I first thought of as clearly a daughter’s stable point. If we scrolled back to July 4, 1940, at 5:01 p.m., we could see the aftermath. But there’s no point. Because I’m going to fix this.

  “Let’s find some rope,” I say. “Maybe in the garage, with the guns that Kiernan mentioned.”


  The garage is detached from the main house. We go out through the back door. I take a deep breath of pine-scented air as we cross the lawn. The guns are mounted on the back wall. Jack cleans and loads two rifles, and searches for rope to make a handle. While he’s busy with that, I scan through the various stable points in Bethesda, and we try to formulate a plan. The observer they have posted at the library door is clearly doing the exact same thing I’m doing with his key. I’m guessing they’ve assigned him to monitor observation points set around the house, so we’re going to need to be stealthy. I have a stable point in the kitchen, one in the backyard, one in my bedroom, and three or four in the living room and library. I also have one in the basement, which I set just after the others moved in, during a brief period when I was doing my best to avoid bumping into Jack and spending quite a bit of time in the pool doing stress-relief laps.

  “Of all the locations in the house,” I say, “the basement seems the most likely spot they might have missed. From the upstairs landing, it just looks like a basement, especially if the sliding stone cover is in place.”

  “Which it may not be,” Jack says, “given that Thea is inviting everyone down for communal nude bathing. But yeah, I’d say it’s our best bet.”

  We head back across the yard, with both guns and a length of rope. I keep my eyes on the ground, determined not to look at the graves on the hill, and this time, I succeed. Once we’re in the kitchen, Jack holds out his hand. I’m not sure why, but then he glances over at the toaster, and I remember the hypospray in my pocket. I pull it out and he rolls up his sleeve.

  “Did you read the info Lorena sent with this?”

  He nods. “I’m fully aware of all the possible side effects. I may lose my lunch, or breakfast in this case. Might also be a bit punchy from the adrenaline.”