by Rysa Walker
“Can we talk?” he asks.
“I just came down to get dinner.”
“Yes,” he says. “I know. It’s the only time you come down. This is your house, Madi. You don’t have to hide in your room to avoid me. I’ll stay out of your way.”
“I’m not hiding.”
We both know it’s a lie. I’m not sure why I bother denying it. Pride, I guess. If there was a food-processing unit in my bedroom, I wouldn’t be here right now.
“I’ve just been busy,” I say. “And I have been outside my room. I went for a swim. I even watched Yun Hee for Lorena so she could shower in peace.”
Both of those things are true, but they don’t disprove Jack’s claim about me hiding. The swim was when I knew he was asleep. And Lorena actually brought Yun Hee to my room. The baby was in a much better mood—apparently her tooth finally pushed through—and we watched some animated videos on the wall screen and played peekaboo games until Lorena came back to get her.
Although I don’t mention it to Jack, I think Lorena had a secondary motive for leaving the baby with me. Yes, she probably did want a few moments alone, but what she really wanted was for me to bond with Yun Hee. To feel personally connected, so that I’d be willing to go the extra mile to fix this catastrophe. I’m a little insulted that she would think she needed to do that. Every time I look at either one of them, my stomach clenches and my resolve to undo this time shift kicks into turbo. But hey, if Yun Hee were my kid, if my existence and hers hinged on the goodwill of some person I barely knew, I’d probably do the same thing.
To Jack’s credit, he doesn’t press me. He stands in the doorway, watching silently as I place a stopper in the wine bottle and turn toward the food unit. There’s a book in his hands. It’s one he was looking at earlier in the library, which I know because there’s a stable point in the library that I’ve been able to view from my room. That’s how I know that everything seems fairly normal between Jack and Alex. This fact kind of has me wanting to smack Alex, since his willingness to forgive and forget makes it look like I’m being unreasonable. I don’t see how he can be so blasé about the whole thing. True, he wasn’t one step away from tumbling into bed with Jack, but the man was his roommate. Jack faked a friendship with him, at least at the beginning. He used all of us to get information, and no matter how sound his reasons may have been, it makes it hard to trust him.
“Did you ever manage to get up with your mom?” Jack asks.
Yesterday, when we spoke briefly in the hallway, I told him I’d managed to locate Nora, but not my mom. Finding Nora was actually easy. Her comm-band account is still the same, which is probably a good thing, since I am on her account and would be screwed otherwise. It was an odd conversation, with me saying only vague things, waiting for Nora to fill in the blanks and confirm what I already strongly suspected. Our conversation at the cottage never happened in this reality, even though I have a blood sample from her downstairs that begs to differ. The cottage was sold last spring, and Nora is living in a rented flat in Bray with a woman who is—or perhaps I should say was—a friend of hers. The arrangement isn’t working out at all.
Finding Mom wasn’t all that difficult, either, once I thought things through. If Nora’s finances are worse, maybe Mom’s are a bit better.
In this reality, she got the slightly better end of the financial negotiations after we lost almost everything, because she’s in our old house and Nora is in a shared flat. I didn’t find out exactly how or why that happened. I think maybe Thea is involved, because when I asked if Mom had heard from her, she said Thea was expected back in a week or two.
“She’s still at the address we lived at in London before my father died,” I tell Jack. I don’t add that the first few minutes of my conversation with her were among the hardest of my life, partly because she was sitting in Dad’s old study. But more to the point, I realized that Nora hadn’t mentioned Dad when we spoke. Neither of us had. For a full five minutes, as Mom chattered on, I held my breath, wondering if it was possible that he was still alive. But then she said something about the memorial service, and I knew.
“Did you ask her about the genetic enhancement?”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t see the point, since we intend for this timeline to be temporary.”
A long silence follows, in which he just looks miserable. I can tell he’s trying to think of something else to ask, so I decide to save him the trouble.
“I’m just not ready to talk yet, okay, Jack? And I’m definitely not ready to talk about anything that doesn’t pertain directly to the problems at hand. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have plenty to keep me occupied right now.”
That came out a little more accusatory than intended, but it’s true. I’m the only one who can use the stable points, so I had to scan through to find a good time to go back and discuss this current situation with Kate. Alex says it needs to be very close to the time she dies. I’ve been hunting for a good opportunity in her last few weeks of life, even though that isn’t the Kate I want to visit. I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice old lady, and she’ll probably have some sage advice to offer. But what I want is to go back to when she was younger, when she could actually use the key. If she fixed the time shift last time, maybe she could help me now. But Alex says that’s too risky, and I suspect he’s right. I can’t afford to do anything that makes things worse, or that causes my name to appear along with Lorena’s on the Erasures list.
I’ve also been going through Kate’s and Katherine’s diary entries. The goal is to understand as much as I can about what happened in her time before I jump back to talk to her. We won’t have much time, so I need a way to quickly let Kate know that I’ve read—and hopefully, understood—the information she left behind for me. Unfortunately, two days in, I feel more confused than when I started.
“I know you’re busy,” Jack says. “That’s what I want to talk about. You can give one of the diaries to me.”
I’m about to protest that it would be pointless, but something about his expression stops me. He looks like he’s bracing for a blow, and I get the sense he’s just confessed to another lie. But if he can’t use the key, how can . . .
That’s when I remember that first night when we found the diaries. The interface didn’t seem to respond nearly as well for Jack, but it did respond. And when he realized that it was something that worked better for me—when he realized that it was reacting to the CHRONOS enhancements—he couldn’t get it out of his hands fast enough.
“Yes,” he says, before I can get the question out. “I can’t jump, but I can see the interface.”
“How do you know you can’t jump?”
“Because I spent several weeks trying. Not with your key. With one that’s been in a LORTA vault for the past four decades. I should have told you everything at once, but . . . my father and the colleague who helped him could easily end up in prison if anyone finds out they let me handle it. My sister could be at risk, too, if they find out about me, since she’s also enhanced, although I don’t have the slightest idea whether the gene is expressed in her case.”
This isn’t making any sense to me. “So your parents had both of you enhanced?”
“No. Like I told you, I’m from a military family, going back generations.”
“Yeah. I remember that part. You’re the black sheep because you decided to study history. But what does that have to do with being enhanced?”
“My granddad was one of several dozen military test subjects back in the 2070s. He was in the first round of time-travel guinea pigs, before they figured out that the genetic tweaking had to be in vitro.”
“How did they even know what to tweak?”
“They had blood samples from some guy who was imprisoned after the first time shifts happened. I think there was some blood at a crime scene at the Cyrist Temple, too. They developed a serum from those samples. All my grandfather or any of that first group could do was see the light from the key, and he told my dad
that he thinks some of the participants may have been lying about that, because having any sort of ability kept them off active duty while the researchers continued trying different formulas. After that, they shifted over to in vitro test subjects. Most of the volunteers were low-income pregnant women whose babies had some sort of problem. Something that could be fixed if they had the money for prenatal gene therapy. The government coerced them into signing their kids up to be test subjects, although they had no clue for what, in order to make sure their babies were born healthy.”
“That’s . . . awful,” I say. “Not the parents. I mean, you’d probably do whatever you had to do in that situation. But it’s pretty damn reprehensible on the part of the government to put that kind of condition on the deal.”
“Exactly. Anyway, they had to wait for these kids to reach an age where they were responsible enough that they felt comfortable testing them. Or, more to the point, old enough that they understood that there could be repercussions for their families if they misused the device. Only one of the first group seemed to have any real ability, and then 2092 comes along, and he’s wiped out, along with the lead researcher.”
“That’s the researcher Alex mentioned. So, were you part of a second batch of subjects, or . . . ?”
“No. I got the genetic boost the same way you did—inheritance. Only it’s coming from just the one side for me, and two generations back. My parents have known that I inherited some enhancements since my birth, but one perk of being a military test subject is that the government doesn’t tend to hold things you volunteered for against your offspring, and the program was discontinued long ago. I didn’t find out until eight months ago, when my father dropped all of this on me . . . and dropped that damn CHRONOS key into my hand. The hope was that I’d be able to use it. When that failed, he convinced me to pursue Plan B. A few years ago, one of their researchers started picking up the signals that Alex mentioned from the chronotron particles. They were probably here all along, but the research wasn’t far along enough to detect it.”
“So why didn’t they just come get the damn thing?”
“They . . . uh . . . tried,” he says, hesitantly. “About six months before you moved in. But they couldn’t find it. The signal was dispersed through the house. They thought it might be in the basement, because it seemed a bit stronger down there. But the scientists finally decided that there wasn’t actually a key here. That someone had just figured out a way to put the house under a chronotron field without one.”
“Is that possible?”
Jack shrugs. “Alex thinks so. He says that these diaries emit the chronotron particles, too, so he’s examining one to see how that works. He can’t risk opening up one of the medallions to examine it. I mean, you obviously need yours in order to travel back to fix this, and we can’t leave the place unprotected now, because of Lorena and the baby. That’s what he’s been working on the past few days—trying to extend the field from one of the diaries without diluting it too much. Well, that’s one of the things he’s working on. He’s also discovered what he says are weird surges in the field at the times when you jumped to Liverpool and to Montgomery.”
I start to ask for more information, but he cuts me off. “That’s the only thing I understood from what Alex told me, and he talked for a good five minutes. He didn’t seem to think the field around the house was in any danger of collapsing, though. He was pretty excited about the possibility of stabilizing that surge.”
“If the diaries have a CHRONOS field, maybe we should have Lorena carry one. And Yun Hee, too.”
We had talked about pulling the key out of the device in the basement and having Lorena wear it, but that’s risky, since the house would no longer be shielded. If there’s another shift, Alex or Jack might be affected, and we kind of need everyone to keep their memories intact.
Plus, after this latest time shift, some of the books in the library would also pop out of existence if they’re not under the CHRONOS field. That’s a minor consideration compared to protecting Lorena and the baby, but I suspect James Coleman would have an entirely new crop of orphaned works to adopt as his own if he were still alive. I’ll admit that I feel a slight twinge thinking about this. What if it is Flowers for Algernon that is unwritten? Or the Harry Potter books I loved as a child? Suddenly I’m a lot more sympathetic to Kate and James’s plan to ensure that certain works weren’t erased along with their authors. If what I assume is correct, Flowers for Algernon and the other books James published were erased in an earlier time shift. Faced with the choice of those books never being written, never being read, I’d probably have done the exact same thing my great-grandfather did. And it wasn’t just the fiction. Those odd alternative histories are probably from other timelines. They are dry, almost unreadable—but the same can be said of most actual history textbooks.
“I still don’t think we could chance them going outside of the house,” he says. “Even if that field around the diaries is stable, it would be too big of a risk.”
“True. Since Alex needs an extra key to experiment on, maybe you could go grab the one from your dad?”
Jack rolls his eyes at the hint of sarcasm in my voice. “It’s back in the vault at DARPA. His successor risked a lot letting him borrow it the first time around. And anyway . . . I haven’t actually told my dad that you can use it.”
The food unit finally beeps, and I’m glad to have something else to focus on while I think that last comment through. Jack’s purpose was to get this research fast-tracked. Why wouldn’t he tell his father that I can use the key?
My plan had been to take the pasta and my glass of wine back up to my room, but I carry them over to the octagonal table that is recessed into the kitchen wall. The table and benches are made of dark, heavy wood. I’ve sat here often while eating breakfast, but now, for the first time, I wonder if the table was here when Kate or Katherine owned this house. Did they sit here around this table, trying to sort out how to undo the last temporal catastrophe? Did Kate and her husband take their meals here with their children and grandchildren?
Jack is still standing in the doorway. “Grab a glass and the rest of the bottle,” I say, nodding toward the bench across from me.
I’m still angry with him. In fact, there’s a part of me that’s even more angry now, because when he was supposedly coming clean with me, he was still holding this back. On the other hand, I’m apparently not the only one who has recently discovered they’re genetically altered. That was a tough pill for me to swallow. I’m sure it was the same for Jack.
He pours himself some wine and then hovers the bottle over my glass. When I nod, he tops it off.
Once he’s seated, I pull the CHRONOS key out and hand it to him. “What really happens when you hold it?”
He colors slightly. “I’m sorry I lied to you—”
“Not now. Just tell me what you can see.”
He centers the key in his palm. “I see the light, but not like you do. It’s sort of a turquoise color. And I can keep the interface steady, even scroll through the stable points and set the time. If I watch the stable points long enough, things change—people walking past, and so forth. But I can’t blink into the location. Not even really short jumps—in terms of time or distance. Absolutely no luck.”
“Can you set a new stable point?”
“I haven’t tried. Didn’t even know you could do that until you mentioned it.”
My stomach responds with a very audible growl.
“You should eat,” he says. “It’s going to get cold.”
“What have you found out from the diary you’re holding?” I dig into the pasta as he talks.
“Actually, I don’t think it’s a diary. I’ve spent the past two days going through the stacks in the library. There were two more of these books tucked away inside the shelves, but they don’t appear to have belonged to anyone in particular, since there’s no name written inside the cover. One says Book of Prophecy on the front. That’s one of the Cyr
ist religious texts. Not the Book of Cyrus—they distributed that one far and wide—but the other one that the clerics kept mostly secret.”
“Yeah. I spotted that one on the shelves the other day. I think it’s a joke of some sort, though. It’s blank.”
He nods, placing the diary he’s holding on the table. “This one is blank, too, but you may find the title interesting.”
He slides it over to me. There’s barely enough light in here to read, but I make out the words Log of Stable Points.
“I think we owe RJ credit for that title,” he says.
It takes a moment, but I remember. “That’s right. That first day that I demonstrated the key to him and Lorena, he said we’d need to put together a log of stable points, to present to buyers along with the device.”
“Do you think maybe the book is blank because RJ is no longer part of the team?” Jack asks.
I consider it, and then shake my head. “Doesn’t make sense. The book has been under the CHRONOS field the entire time. His name is still in that Brief History of CHRONOS book, isn’t it? Also, Kate mentioned this in her . . .” I stop, remembering that I couldn’t view the videos or other linked files in the diary until I started using the eardisk. “Hold on. Maybe it’s not blank.”
Pushing my half-eaten pasta aside, I hurry upstairs to grab the disk and diaries from my nightstand. Then I dig through my bag and find the vial with the rest of the disks. If Jack can use the equipment even a little bit, maybe it will be enough for him to see the videos and scan through events occurring at stable points.
When I get back downstairs, I toss Jack the vial. He gives me a questioning look.
“I figured out what these were for while I was gone, but with everything else going on, I forgot to mention it. Also, I didn’t have any idea you could use it. Just peel one off and press it into the little hollow behind your ear. It’s . . . kind of a speaker, but it must be sending a signal to the optic nerves, too, because that’s how I can see the videos.”
