Abandoning Anarchy (The Lost in Time Duet #2)

by Kamery Solomon

  It was unclear how long I’d been sitting here. I wasn’t needed for anything else—I’d already identified the bodies and given my statement—but I couldn’t move.

  I couldn’t walk away from my family, and into the empty life I knew came after this day. I couldn’t do microwave dinners and lonely holidays, avoiding calls from my friends, living at work.

  Closing my eyes, I let the tears continue to fall, fingers folded in my lap, abandoned once more.

  Without introduction, hands were suddenly on my biceps, squeezing in a tight, comforting way. They were large and familiar, bringing a warmth I didn’t realize I’d lost.

  Opening my eyes, I stared into August’s face, his form kneeling on the floor in front of me, attention focused solely on me. He looked utterly worn out, maybe sick, his hair ruffled and dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. Still in the clothes he’d left in the night before, I wondered if he’d had any rest at all since our conversation. His expression was one of sorrow and compassion, his lips forming a small frown as he silently held me together.

  I stared at him, unable to find the words to say. Tears leaked down my face, my hair a tangled mess of ruined ponytail, and my shirt smelled like smoke from the accident.

  He said nothing, waiting for me to be ready to talk, patient as always. I didn’t know how he’d heard I was here, but it must have meant he knew what happened.

  “Mom and Dad,” I finally whispered. “They’re . . . Dead. In a car accident. Just like before.” My voice broke, tears rushing faster from my eyes, my shoulders beginning to shake as a great wave of grief overtook me.

  Nodding, he wrapped his arms around me in full, squeezing me comfortingly. Saying nothing, he only held me, letting me cry into his shirt, his touch firm and protective, the beat of his heart steady beneath my palm. There was no pulling back or rush to finish. He simply let me take what I needed, not holding anything against me and instead giving me all of himself at that moment.

  “You were right,” I finally blubbered. “Time knew. It took them from me, even though I did my best to not change anything. If I’d agreed to go back in time, they wouldn’t have had to suffer like that again.”

  “Hush,” he chided me, brushing his hand up and down my back. “None of it is your fault, love.”

  The statement only made me cry harder. It felt like it was all my fault. If I’d agreed to put things right, if I hadn’t fought with him, if I’d never traveled in the first place, I wouldn’t have ever had to feel this pain.

  I had wanted everything. Weren’t there at least a million stories that taught it always blew up in your face in the end?

  “I could have saved them,” I muttered, doing my best to keep from howling as my shattered soul so desperately wanted to do. “I feel like I should have been able to save them.”

  “You can’t stop what fate has decreed, Olivia.” Finally, he pulled away, retrieving a handkerchief from his pocket and using it to help wipe my face.

  “I can’t do it again,” I insisted, shaking my head furiously. “I can’t live life without them.”

  “I know,” he answered compassionately. “It won’t be easy. It never will be, I imagine. But I will do whatever I can to help lessen your load.”

  Blinking, I stared into his eyes, my heart clenching tightly. With a flash, I realized this time was not like the last.

  Because I had him.

  No matter what life threw at me from now on, August and I would be together. He wouldn’t let me push him out, or eat alone, or lose myself in work. He would be there, holding my hand and helping me along at every moment, in this time or any other.

  The loss of my parents stung like nothing else, but it helped to see I wouldn’t be completely abandoned or allowed to sink to the same level I’d been at. While the pain of their deaths would stay with me forever, as well as the knowledge that I was powerless to save them, I knew I would move on eventually, with August to help me each step of the way.

  “I’m sorry I fought with you,” I muttered, sniffing loudly and taking the wet cloth from him to finish wiping up.

  “Do not bother yourself with it,” he replied, brushing it off. “There are more important matters to be dealt with. What can I do to help you now?”

  The calm, soothing tone of his voice served to further soften my frazzled emotions. Somehow, he had a way of keeping his cool when I needed him the most. He’d been that way when we first met, myself almost frozen to death and his warmth wrapped around me.

  It felt that way again now. I’d been freezing to death in my impossible dreams of altered time, and my redcoat soldier had arrived once more, ready to carry me to safety.

  Sucking in a deep breath, I closed my eyes, finally accepting what I’d refused to consider from the moment I woke up here. This was not the home or life I’d known. I didn’t belong here in these circumstances.

  But I knew where I did belong, and where I always would.

  “Take me away from here,” I whispered. “Take me home.”

  He nodded. “Emilia is waiting out front with the car.”

  “No,” I corrected him. “I want to go home. Away from the mess of this timeline. To where we both belong. Take me to the seventeen hundreds.”

  Standing in front of the mirror, I stared at my old room, a bag packed by my feet and my coat already around my shoulders.

  “Are you sure you have to go now?” Emilia asked from the doorway.

  Turning, I looked as she leaned against the door jam, arms folded, her billowy yoga pants brushing the floor around her feet.

  “It’ll only be for a little while,” I muttered, glancing in the mirror as the lie passed my lips. “You won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  She snorted, her reflection rolling its eyes as she glanced down the hall, toward the stairs.

  Smiling, I faced her. “Besides, you have Dan. You don’t need me.”

  “Olive,” she chided. “How can you say that?” Striding into the room, she wrapped her arms around me, squeezing. “I will always need you.”

  Surprised at the tears gathering in my eyes, I hugged her, doing my best to remain strong. It was hard to leave her like this, with no real explanation of why or where I was going. I couldn’t tell her I was going to fix her life, that I intended to set the timeline right. She wouldn’t understand any of it, or worse, she would try and have me committed for a mental breakdown after the loss of my parents.

  “You are my sister,” I whispered to her. “Stay safe, okay? And be happy.”

  Laughing, her embrace tightened. “Of course. You’ll call? Email? Send me pictures?”

  “Absolutely,” I lied. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Biting my lip, I refused to acknowledge that this would be the last time I ever saw my best friend in this timeline, possibly at all. It helped, knowing she would have Dan and Jacob, that she would be happy and well taken care of.

  Emilia had been as much a help to me the past two weeks since the funeral as August. In the previous timeline, I’d lived with her my senior year of high school. We’d grown up together, living in the same apartment in college. I was the Maid of Honor at her wedding. Present for the birth of her son. We were more than sisters, even. If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t picture how I would spend the rest of my life without her.

  It was worth it to make sure she was happy with her family, though.

  Releasing her, I stepped away as a knock at the door downstairs sounded.

  “That will be August,” I stated, laughing some as I wiped away a stray tear.

  “Yeah.” Smiling through her tears, Em gave me one more quick hug and then grabbed my bag, carrying it downstairs for me. Before she opened the door, she set it down and took my hands.

  “I love you, Olive,” she said warmly.

  “And I love you, Em.”

  She hugged me once more, laughing, and then opened the door, passing my bag to August. As he carried it to the taxi, she grinned at me.
“Stay safe and have fun. I’m already excited to hear about your traveling adventures.”

  Grinning, I reached out and squeezed her hand, steeling my heart to walk away from her for the last time. “Love you,” I said.

  Stepping over the threshold, I breathed out, knowing I’d taken the first steps to setting life right once more.

  Sitting at one of the long tables in the Mercer library, I watched as Charlotte explained how time travel worked to Olivia. She seemed to be understanding it well, nodding and agreeing at intervals, as well as asking questions here and there to deepen her knowledge.

  Worry pricked at me as I studied her. She’d been morose the past couple weeks, justifiably, but her zeal for fixing the timeline had grown so suddenly, I couldn’t help but doubt her intentions. Part of me wondered if she was throwing herself at a task to avoid facing the pain she felt. She seemed to have realized it was Time’s intention for her to outlive her mother and father easily enough, but she asked a great many questions about Gabriel and his role in the changes.

  Swallowing thickly, I stared down at the table. Guilt and horror over my actions—my blatant attempt to murder Gabriel in cold blood—made my face flush.

  That was what it had been, after all. An attempt. Upon returning to my room at the Rittenhouse after Olivia and I had argued, I’d fumbled around the electronics given me and managed to search his name in the internet database as I’d watched Charlotte do before. Everything he’d changed, all of his war stories, each of his pictures was the same, save the addition of a neckcloth that covered the spot on his neck where I’d hung him.

  I’d left too soon. Gabriel Scott Mercer had not been dead as I believed, and he escaped to wreak havoc on my life in untold ways.

  It was clear to me now that this was why I had disappeared from all the records. I was purposefully erased, my enemy manipulating the past to ruin my future. The fact that my painting was now of someone else made my stomach twist.

  Charlotte and Olivia did not seem as concerned with the changes. While I’d not told either of them about my attempt to finish him before it all began, they asserted the changing of the portrait was a chance happening. They believed it must have been swapped at some point, the real portrait Olivia had gifted me hidden, lost in time, or destroyed by our common enemy.

  They hadn’t heard his promise to me, though.

  Every roadblock I can put in your path, I will.

  It felt like a miracle in and of itself that I was still here, working against him at all.

  “Our issue now is going to be stopping Gabriel in a way that will undo all of the wrongs he’d committed.”

  Charlotte’s voice flitted over to me, causing me to jerk my head up and stare at her intently.

  “What do you mean?” I pressed, interrupting their conversation without preamble. “You didn’t say anything about having a way to undo everything. I thought we were unable to travel to the same time more than once.”

  “That’s true,” she explained, hesitating some as she frowned. “The way I was thinking of taking care of him is, well . . . complicated.” Her brow furrowed and she shook her head. “I’m not even sure it will work. It’s more of a hunch than anything else.”

  Rising from my seat away from the two of them, I went to stand behind Olivia, placing my hands on her shoulders. “Go on.”

  “Right.” Turning to her board, Charlotte pointed out the loops once again. “A cosmic string gets shorter and shorter, until it fizzles out, right? I’m thinking if we have a string that is deteriorating, that links to a time Gabriel has already been, we can force him into it and let the string finish him off for us.”

  “And that will undo everything he’s done?” Olivia asked, her voice displaying her uncertainty.

  Charlotte frowned. “That’s the part I’m not sure of. We know he can’t travel to a time he already exists in. That alone should finish him. However, there was one case of someone getting stuck in a fizzled loop. So far as I can tell, other than my memory of them, there is no proof they existed at all. Anyone who wasn’t a traveler at that time has no idea who the person was.”

  “How many people have you put through these loops?” I asked, cutting her off as I grew somewhat impatient. “What knowledge do you have of the validity of your statements? You could be guessing, throwing us farther from the path we should be on.”

  Olivia’s hand gently laid over mine and she turned, looking up at me. Her expression was one of concern, as well as a plea to calm down.

  “What if he cannot be stopped?” I pressed. “If we are unable to fix what he has broken, there is a chance you and I will fade away from one another. I attempted to halt him once already, and it was futile—”

  “You did what?” Charlotte asked sharply, stepping forward as she folded her arms.

  Realizing I’d been caught, I shook my head. “What I did isn’t important. What matters is that it didn’t work. I believed I’d stopped him before he did anything other than keep General Mercer alive, but when I returned here, everything was the same.”

  Charlotte stared at me, studying my face until realization lit in her own. “You tried to kill him,” she muttered. “He was already traveling, and you met him along the way. That’s what happened, right?”

  “August?” Olivia regarded me carefully, as if she didn’t approve of such a thing.

  Sighing, I shrugged. “What else was I supposed to do? I knew we needed to fix the timeline. It was the only option I had at the time.”

  She stared at me with her sad eyes for another beat and then let out a long breath, facing Charlotte once more. “These fizzled loops,” she stated. “Do we know where one is?”

  “You are satisfied with attempting this method? Without knowing for sure what it will do?” Tightening my hold on her shoulder, I glared at Charlotte, feeling on edge around the both of them.

  It didn’t help that I hadn’t been sleeping well, either. The stress of my disappearance and considering all the different options we faced often kept me up at night, tossing and turning, unsure of what path to follow. Olivia had needed me to be strong for her during the aftermath of her parents passing, and Charlotte always had some sort of information she felt should be passed on right away. If I got through the rest of today without going unconscious, I would consider it another small victory.

  “I’m fine with letting Time sort him out,” Olivia replied coolly. “All we have to do is get him in the loop. Whatever happens to him after that will be out of our hands.”

  “Exactly.” Charlotte pointed at her and then moved to her pile of books on the table, flipping through various pages until she found what she was looking for. “We’ve had several people, in different times, marking down loops and the strength of their signals. After studying the new history Gabriel created for himself, I think I’ve found the one necessary to use against him.” Hedging, she glanced up at me. “However, it’s in a bit of a rough spot and time.”

  “Where?” I asked, a wave of tiredness washing over me as I listened. I wanted so much to curl up and sleep with Olivia cradled in my arms. Now that we were on the same side, I felt as if I’d won a major battle in this war. Surely rest was warranted after that?

  “Yorktown, seventeen eighty-one,” Charlotte answered, apology in the words.

  “Oh no,” Olivia responded before I could answer, remorse in her tone. “You can’t mean during all that?”

  “Unfortunately, I do.” Charlotte picked up the book she’d been looking in, holding it out to her. “The loop went out October fourteenth. It’s the only one I know Gabriel will certainly be near.”

  “What’s so important about the date and place?” I asked, confused as to why they both seemed so hesitant.

  “August,” Olivia started, frowning as she looked at me. “It’s the Battle of Yorktown. If we’re going to stop Gabriel with this loop, we’ll have to do it during the fight that ended the American Revolution.”

  “Well, not ended,” Charlotte corrected her. “
It was just the start of the end. With Cornwallis surrendering, the major fighting ceased, though.”

  “Surrender?” I asked in surprise. Not wanting to be rude, I kept any further comment to myself. It was hard to imagine the Colonials I’d faced in battle being so fierce that the British Army surrendered to them.

  “You have a lot to learn about what happened,” Olivia stated, smiling as she picked a book up from the table and offered it to me.

  “I agree.” Charlotte took one from her own stack, sliding it across the surface toward me. “If you’re going to be there, you might as well study all you can, so you can use it to your benefit. We all should.”

  “You’re coming with us?” Olivia asked, surprised.

  “Of course,” Charlotte replied promptly. “My brother deserves an ass whooping, and I intend to help give it to him.”

  Grinning, Olivia glanced at me, some of the old light of excitement returning to her eyes. “I guess we’d better get to reading then, right?”

  Sighing, my thoughts of getting to sleep early vanished, and I smiled. “I suppose you are right.”

  Laying in bed, the lamplight on the table emitting a soft glow by which I was able to read, I reveled in the feel of Olivia nestled in one arm while I held a book up with the other. Her fingers splayed across my bare chest, playing with the small amount of hair below the dip of my collarbone. I would never get tired of being near to her like this, even if she was distracting me from the history I was trying to study. With our planned trip to the past beginning in three days’ time, I really should have been paying closer attention to what I was reading, but her warm body next to mine was causing all sorts of sensations I wasn’t ready to put off yet.

  “August?” she asked tentatively, pausing in her exploration as she waited for me to answer.

  “Hmm?” Focused on the statistics of military generals, their plans for Yorktown, and the feel of her skin on mine, I wasn’t paying complete attention, caught off guard by her next question.

  “What will you do when we’re in your time?”