LIDIA’S ISLAND, AND the rain hammers the land.
I pre-entered the jump so this is where I end up, but I don’t need to come here this time. I don’t have anyone to drop off. And I certainly don’t want to destroy the extra chaser here, in case the other Lidias can figure out a way to put it back together.
But I stand there, letting the rain soak me to my bones.
It has always been a possibility that I’d have to kill one or more of the Lidias, but things had been going so well, I was starting to think I’d get away without splashing more of her blood on my hands.
Technically, I suppose, I still haven’t. It was the other Denny who shot her, not me.
But that’s semantics. I pulled the trigger as much as he did.
And no matter how long I stay in this downpour, I can never wash that away.
Jump.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I CAN’T HELP but feel anxious now that I’ve finally crossed into the twentieth century. It’s where I last saw Iffy, at Lidia’s Echo Park house in 1952. That’s only thirteen years from the 1939 I’m standing in. So close, but unless I stop Lidia here, Iffy will have never traveled with me to the past, and likely will never be born at all.
Though it’s been well over a year since Lidia first dragged me to prewar Berlin, the memory of nearly getting caught by Nazi soldiers is as fresh as the day it happened.
Unlike on that first trip, when we jumped straight into daylight and I was immediately seen, I arrive now in the safety of night.
I’m aware in broad strokes of what Lidia did here, and know I need to take more than her chaser with me when I leave. She showed me the textbook before we jumped here—World War II: A Comprehensive History. Whoever she gave the book to put it to good use, because when Lidia jumped us several years into the future to see what happened, Germany had won the war.
The spot where she will arrive is at the edge of a small park near some very governmental-looking buildings. My guess is, her target is inside one of them.
The trouble I had on the Isle of Wight still fresh in my mind, I take extra precaution when I search for the perfect place to watch her show up. I choose a bench deep in the park that’s sheltered by a leafy hedge. There are enough gaps in the branches to allow me to observe unseen.
She shows up right on time. I note the direction she is facing, and watch her look around before casually walking out of the park. I could follow and see where she goes, but that would be academic. I walk to a quiet street, make sure I’m unobserved, and jump backward ten minutes.
Back in the park again, I position myself and ready my chaser. The moment Lidia materializes, I grab her arm and press go.
The instant we appear on Lidia Island, I knock the chaser out of her hand and shove her away. She stumbles over the wet, uneven terrain and falls to the ground.
“Denny? How?”
I’m tempted to say, “By being smarter than you,” but my mission isn’t done and I can’t afford to get cocky yet.
As she starts to get back on her feet, I leave.
__________
INSTEAD OF ARBITRARILY choosing a date on which I can find some new clothes, I purposely jump to August 25, 1945.
While I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of my original timeline, I haven’t fully memorized Iffy’s. What I do know is that the Second World War ends somewhere around mid-August of this year. If I’m not mistaken, Germany surrendered months earlier, but I want to make sure the war is truly over.
After wrecking the latest excess chaser and scattering the bits and pieces far apart, I hop in and out of several closed stores until I find one that sells newspapers. When I read that the Japanese surrendered ten days earlier, I break down and cry.
That’s it.
I’ve corrected all the historical events Lidia altered. Iffy and Ellie are alive again, and the trajectory of mankind is back on course.
Not the original trajectory, of course, but the one I’ve selfishly chosen humanity to have.
I still can’t fully rejoice, though. History may have been repaired, but I still need to deal with the matter of Lidia’s grandson, Vincent Kane, forcing Iffy and me to take him to 1952 to reunite with his grandmother. It’s the event that allows Lidia to start her backward rampage through time.
As much as I’d like to simply travel to 2015 and stop Kane there from ever taking us back, it’s not that simple. Just like I’ve been doing since stopping Lidia from interfering with the Mongols, I must unwrap everything in layers. Which means I need to intervene in 1952 before I continue to 2015 and complete my mission. Plus, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to grab the energy-depleted chaser from the Echo Park house.
Lidia’s chaser log ends, or, I guess, begins with the moment she leaves 1952, with me being dragged along via the slaved chaser. There are several jumps after she departs her home, but these are merely the quick trips she used to put some physical distance between the two of us.
I input a jump that will take me to a quiet spot I’ve used before in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles, and set the time for two nights before Kane is to arrive at his (much younger) grandmother’s house. But I pause before hitting go.
Not all those quick jumps Lidia took were to build up the space between us. Lidia did change something. I almost forgot about it. The woman she kidnapped. They drove up the coast for a while before Lidia let her go.
I try to remember the woman’s name, but so much has happened since then that it’s buried under a ton of other memories. The kidnapping may very well have no repercussions on the grand timeline, but it will affect the woman’s own path.
I can’t just let it go.
I study the log until I find the entry that I’m pretty sure represents when Lidia kidnaps the woman. I jump there in the middle of the night. The location is a stretch of sidewalk on a residential street in Santa Monica. To my left, maybe a hundred yards away, is what looks like a main boulevard. I note everything of interest, then jump to a hidden spot a few minutes before Lidia arrives.
After she appears, she spends several minutes looking around before she jumps again. From the log I know she’s gone only up the block, toward the main street, and will materialize at about 8:45 a.m.
I walk down to the spot, find another hiding place, and hop to a minute before she shows up.
I witness her approach a woman who is getting into a car. She joins the woman inside, as if she asked for a ride. The driver clearly has no idea what’s about to happen.
Or what would happen if I let it play out.
I jump back a few minutes to the appropriate spot along the side street. The moment Lidia materializes before me, I grab her arm and poof, we’re gone.
__________
AFTER ADDING YET another person to the growing population of Lidia Island and procuring a dry set of clothes, I’m back in 1952. My location is Echo Park, near the corner of Echo Park Avenue and Baxter Street.
I haven’t come to this moment to negate the 1952 problem. That, I’ll take care of soon enough, a hundred and fifty miles northeast of here. My purpose for this stop is purely selfish.
From an unlit spot along the sidewalk, I watch the road. It’s only a minute or two before I see headlights coming my way. Through the halo I make out the shape of the taxicab I was in before. That I’m in now.
It pulls to the curb, the door opens, and two shadowy forms climb out.
As the cab pulls a U-turn, its headlights swing over them, catching Iffy and an earlier me for the briefest of moments in their glare.
I stop breathing.
For what seems like a lifetime, I’ve had only the memory of Iffy to sustain me, but now, here she is. Not a picture in my head but in real life, breathing the same air I’m breathing.
I want to run to her.
I want to wrap my arms around her.
I want to swing her in a circle and kiss her and tell her everything is going to be okay.
But to do so would be an even more selfish act
than coming here has been.
This Iffy will soon never be. Once I stop Kane, first here in 1952 and then from ever coming here from the future, the events I’m now looking at will have only happened in my memory. And the Iffy I will eventually reunite with will have never experienced any of this.
I know I must wait until we both can share in the joy, but standing here without moving is perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life.
I watch them walk across the street and disappear up Baxter on their way to Lidia’s house. I almost follow them, just to see her for a little longer, but with a sigh, I take my next trip.
__________
I HOP BACK a week, but physically I don’t move an inch. I make my way to Lidia’s house.
Using a series of covert jumps, I’m able to find a window of time when she and her goon Leonard are gone.
My next trip puts me in her living room, two full hours before she will return. In a hatbox in the attic, I find the non-working chaser I used to exile her back in time. I replace it with a few paperback books from downstairs that together weigh about the same as the device, and then I make sure the hatbox looks exactly as it had when I found it.
I confirm I’ve left no signs of my visit and take my leave.
__________
AFTER A STOP to pick up a winter coat, I arrive on the dry lake bed in Owens Valley, in the dead of night six days later.
I’ve thought through how to deal with Kane. I have examined everything I know about the few days he spent here in 1952, considered every possible moment I could make my move. And I always came back to the same one. The one that makes the most sense. The one that has the best chance to succeed. What I force myself to ignore is the downside of the choice. I’ll figure something out. I’ll find some way around it. Neutralizing Kane is the only important thing.
That’s why I’m here on the lake, a few minutes before Kane, Iffy, and the earlier me arrive from 2015.
A struggle will ensue soon after they arrive, Earlier Me’s leg will get cut, and Kane will get away with the chaser.
I could try to intervene here at the arrival point, but there are too many variables—Kane’s gun, the knife, Iffy, Earlier Me. Better if I stack the odds in my favor.
I reposition to the edge of the lake, along the path Kane will take to the highway. Several minutes later, I hear a gunshot and know Earlier Me is about to get cut. No more than another minute goes by before I hear Kane’s running steps and ragged breaths heading my way.
When he’s within a few feet of me, I pop up and shove him as hard as I can to the side. He tumbles to the dirt, the chaser falling to the sand near his head. While it’s tempting to just grab the device and get out of there, I can’t afford to let even a chaser-less Kane get to Lidia. He could tell her how things went down in 2015, and she could use that information to adjust her plan for getting the working chaser brought back to her and start the whole mess all over again.
No. Kane needs to come with me.
I grab the chaser he’s stolen, place my hand on his back, and hit go on my device.
__________
DUMPING KANE ON Lidia Island would be unnecessarily cruel. Kane is not a bad guy. He’s just someone trying to help his grandmother have the life he thinks was taken from her. He has no idea the loving old woman he grew up with had once been angry and bitter and insane. So I can’t subject him to a lifetime surrounded by multiple Lidias, punishing him for betraying them.
When the gray mist clears, we are outside London, March 1, 1850. Young Lidia is still 99 years away from showing up in Los Angeles. If Kane lives long enough to meet her and warn her, he’d be the oldest human who ever lived.
I pick up a stone and use it to smash the chaser I took from Kane.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
I bring the stone down on the device again and again without answering.
He tries to grab my arm but I shake him off.
“Stop it! You can’t! We’ll never get out of here!”
“Sit,” I say, and make like the next swing will be at him.
He stumbles back, raising his hands to cover his face.
“I said sit.”
He lowers himself to the ground.
When I smash the box again, the cover breaks away and the display screen cracks.
“No,” he moans, but makes no further attempt to stop me.
Two more hits and I’m sure the box will never work again, but I keep pounding it until it’s a pile of unidentifiable scrap.
Kane is on the edge of tears. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I don’t need it.” I open the bag on my hip and show him the chaser inside.
As confused as this makes him, it only gets worse when he takes his first good look at me. To this point, he’s probably been thinking I’m the Denny he just traveled to 1952 with, but I’ve aged considerably since then.
“Who are you?”
I pull a bottle of water from my satchel and toss it to him. “Get comfortable. I have a story you need to hear.”
I hold absolutely nothing back. I tell him about how I first realized he might be following me that day at the library, about figuring out who the old woman living in his house was, about him taking Iffy and me back to 1952. While he’s surprised by what I know, it’s all stuff that has occurred already. What I say next really blows his mind.
I tell him about the version of him who wasn’t stopped on the dry lake, who made it to his grandmother’s house. I tell him about Lidia, about who she was at that point in time, and what she did with the chaser he brought her. And finally I tell him about what I had to go through to fix everything again.
Does he believe my story? I don’t know. But he hasn’t dismissed it out of hand, so I’m content to let the ensuing silence go on for as long as he needs. Which, it turns out, is about a quarter of an hour.
“You’re saying she was using me all along?”
If he asked me this question a year ago, I would have said yes without hesitation, but after I’ve had time to put all I’ve seen and heard together, the picture it paints is not black and white. “You told me once how the 1950s Lidia is not the same as the one you grew up with.”
His eyes narrow. “When? I never talked to you about that.”
“You didn’t, but another version of you did.”
He looks uncomfortable, but says nothing.
“You also said your grandmother when she was older told you to forget about the journal of hers you found, the one she wrote when she was young. That they were just stories.”
His lips part in shock. “How did you know that?”
“Like I said, the other you told me.”
“Other me. You-you’re crazy.”
“Am I? Me and the version of me you were with a little while ago are different, aren’t we? And yet we were both there in the desert with you.”
A mental struggle plays out on his face as he tries to fight my logic. “You want me to believe my grandmother doesn’t care about me when she’s young, but when she’s old she does?” He’s not challenging me by asking this. He clearly wants to know.
I look past him toward the city. It’s a dark silhouette on the horizon, dotted here and there by gas street lamps that are still on at this hour of night.
I planned on leaving him here after a few jumps to collect enough money to give him a chance at a decent life, but I now have another idea, one that will help me finish all of this and ensure the problem never happens again.
“You know what? It doesn’t matter what I say.” I stand up and open the chaser. “Grab on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE SOFT THUMP of someone coming up the concrete steps to the front yard drifts in through the open windows.
The wooden chair I’m on creaks as I adjust. The wait is finally over.
The footsteps move along the pathway and up onto the narrow stoop. A jangle of keys before one slips in the lock and the door opens.
K
ane enters, looking anxious and distracted. He doesn’t even glance into the living room of his grandmother’s house as he starts up the stairs to the second floor.
“Vincent,” Lidia calls.
He jumps, and then sees her sitting in the recliner. “Grandma. What are you doing up? You should be in bed.” He leans over the railing and looks down the hallway to the back of the house. “Lorna! Come out here, please.”
“Lorna’s not here,” Lidia tells him.
“She’s not here?” He backs off the steps and approaches her. “Did she go to the store?”
“I sent her home.”
“You sent her—” His cheeks grow red with anger. “She’s not supposed to leave you alone. She knows that!”
He pulls a cell phone out of his pocket, but before he can activate it, Lidia says, “Who said she left me alone?”
He looks at her, confused.
I move just enough so that my chair creaks again.
Kane whips around and sees me sitting in the front corner, but the lights in the living room aren’t bright so he doesn’t recognize me.
He takes a step toward me. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“He’s an old acquaintance. Actually, he tells me you know him.”
“I what?” He looks at her and then at me again.
I rise and walk toward him, holding my hand out. “We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Denny Younger.”
In a rush, he backpedals all the way to the staircase. “What are you doing here?”
“Your grandmother and I have been catching up.”
“No.” He swallows nervously. “No! You get out. You’re not wanted here!”
“Vincent, please. He’s my guest.”
“How can he—” He tries to regain control of his temper. “How can he be your guest? He ruined your life!”
“Once, maybe. But he also gave it back to me.”
Kane opens his mouth several times, but he can’t seem to find the words for what he wants to say.
“Sweetheart, please. Sit down.” Lidia gestures toward the sofa.
He shakes his head. “No, no, no. I’m calling the police.”
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