All Our Yesterdays

by Cristin Terrill

I was in my father’s office once when the fire alarm went off. Someone silenced it almost immediately, and everyone around us continued working without even looking up. Dad explained that they always sent security guards to check out the area where the fire was supposed to be, because there were so many false alarms. Something as little as a bit of dust getting into one of the detectors could set it off. Only if the guards found a fire would they turn the alarm back on and evacuate everyone.

  So, for this to work, there has to be a real fire.

  I find a supply closet across from the ladies’ room. It’s stocked with toilet paper, hand towels, and reams of copy paper. I rip into the plastic packaging over a dozen rolls of toilet paper without even bothering to check if anyone’s coming. There’s no time for that now.

  The toilet roll catches instantly when I hold the lighter to it. I light a few more and place them on top of the copy paper. I leave the door to the closet ajar to give the fire oxygen and ensure that the smoke will find its way to a detector soon. I run back to the stairwell and climb up to the roof landing, pulling the gun from my belt and checking that the safety is off.

  Then I wait, the sick pounding in my head like my pulse counting down the moments until the end. Hopefully mine and not Marina’s.

  The first wails of the fire alarm last less than twenty seconds before they go quiet. Just like my father’s office. I count the seconds. For almost a minute there’s silence, and then the alarm comes back on, louder and more piercing than before. I immediately hear the effect it has. There are footsteps all around me, and the doors to the stairwells open on all the levels below, voices spilling out, hundreds of pairs of shoes against the concrete echoing and magnifying. I peer over the edge of the handrail onto the twenty-fourth floor landing. A man in a black suit, like the one I saw at the entrance to the parking garage, is holding the door open and ushering people out.

  “Take your time,” he says as workers pass him. “Probably nothing. Our meeting spot is in front of the bank on the corner.”

  I watch every face that passes beneath me. No doubt there are multiple exit stairways, but if Richter and James happen to come through this one, I can end this right now.

  After a minute or two, the steady flow of men and women slows to a trickle. They must have gone through another exit. I’ll have to go to the bank on the corner. It will be harder to shoot James in a large group of people, intelligence officers no less, but I can do it.

  Then a man steps into the stairwell, and even before seeing his face, I recognize Chris Richter.

  “Did you see a kid come through here?” he asks the guard. “Seventeen, tall, dark hair?”

  I grip the handle of the gun, which is suddenly slick in my grasp. They aren’t together?

  The guard shakes his head. “Must have gone down one of the other staircases.”

  “I need to go check—” Richter turns back toward his office, but the guard’s hand on his shoulder stops him.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you need to evacuate now. It’s procedure.”

  “But there may be a kid alone in there,” Richter says, as if he gives a damn for James.

  “Hoskins and Grant are sweeping the floor. If anyone’s in there, they’ll get them out.”

  Richter swears, and I see the battle in his face. If James is still in the building, he needs to find him. But if he exited via another stairwell, he needs to get to him quickly.

  “You notify me the second you lay eyes on him, understand me?” he barks.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Richter goes barreling down the stairs, while the guard lifts a sleeve to his mouth, talking into his radio. “We clear, Hoskins? . . . Roger that. I’m closing the southeast door. Mancini, you’re cleared to close the northwest. See you at the bank, fellas.”

  The guard drops his sleeve and starts the descent down the twenty-four flights of stairs, letting the door to his floor start to swing shut behind him. I act on instinct, ripping off my hoodie, leaning over the railing, and tossing it. My good luck holds. The hoodie lands on the threshold of the door and stops its progress, leaving a two-inch gap. If James got separated from Richter, it must be because he wanted to be. Something tells me he’s still inside the Associated Institutes of Research.

  As soon as the guard’s footsteps have faded in my ears, I scramble down from the roof landing and slip onto the twenty-fourth floor, closing the door softly behind me. Everything but the red emergency lights are off, which makes the office look hostile and eerie. I walk through the metal detector inside the door, setting off another alarm that joins the cacophony, and I have a moment of doubt as I creep deeper into the office. Am I letting James slip away again? Maybe I should be rushing down the stairs to the office rendezvous point to find him. But I have a tugging intuition that he’s still here. For Richter to have lost him in the first place and to be so frantic to find him makes me think something must have happened between them. Did they fight? Did Richter tell James something he wasn’t ready to hear?

  I may be grasping at straws, but I don’t think so. If James is upset, I know better than anyone how he likes to hide.

  I race through the office, gun held low in front of me. I peer into cubicles and locked conference rooms with glass paneling, but I don’t have time to make a thorough search. There are a hundred places he could be hidden, but the anxiety inside of me has been building with each second that Finn hasn’t called to say Marina’s safe. I have to find James now, and luckily I think I know where he’d go. The same place he used to hide at Sidwell when things got too intense for him.

  The alarm goes silent as I make my way toward the men’s room, which probably means the fire department is somewhere below me. I open the door to the restroom with my foot, keeping my hands tight around the gun. It looks empty. I duck down to look under the stalls, which also look empty. I kick the first open. The metal door hits the dividing wall of the stalls with a crash; there’s no one inside. I move on to the next one, but before I can kick it in—

  “Over here,” James says.

  The door to the last stall opens, revealing James sitting cross-legged on top of the toilet.

  “I knew you’d find me,” he says. “I need to talk to you.”

  Thirty-Three

  Marina

  “Please don’t shoot me,” he says, looking small and young. “I’ve got a lot of questions, and I need answers.”

  Just do it, I think, but instead I lower the gun an inch. “You’ve been waiting for me? Even though you know I mean to kill you?”

  He nods. “I know it’s crazy, but . . . Richter brought me here to show me a photograph of Nate’s killer leaving the Mandarin. Marina and Finn don’t trust him, so they left me, but he did show me the picture.”

  “Yeah? Who was it?” I don’t know how Richter could have had the time to start his frame-up of Mischler, but it can’t have been Nate’s real killer either

  Distantly, though, I know I’m just stalling.

  James frowns at me. “Don’t you know? A Secret Service agent named George Mischler.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Something about his face . . . maybe it’s just because he’s the man who killed my brother, but something about him seemed wrong.” I’m guessing it was the rushed Photoshop job. In my memory, Mischler isn’t arrested for several more months; something must have happened to push Richter’s schedule forward. “I started to feel like the walls were closing in on me. I asked if I could see the CCTV footage of the people who shot at me at the hospital, and Richter said no. Came up with some excuse about it being out of his jurisdiction now, and it was like this alarm went off in my head. Why wouldn’t he let me see it? He must have seen it himself and knows that it shows you and Finn, not a couple of gang members like he said. He knows you’re my friends, so why wouldn’t he have had Marina and Finn arrested or at least told me about it by now?”

  I don’t say anything. There’s only one explanation for it.

  “Unless,” James says, “he
knows it was really you and not her. And if he knows that, what else does he know?”

  James stands, and I raise my gun again, but he doesn’t come any closer.

  “I got so upset I ran in here, thinking I was going to throw up, and then I couldn’t make myself go back,” he says. “All I could think about was you and the things you’d told me. I’ve got to know everything, Marina.”

  I wince. “Don’t call me that. It’s just Em now.”

  Realization creeps into his face. “Like what Finn calls you?”

  I pause. “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you go by Marina anymore? I’ve always loved your name.”

  “It’s a silly name. It’s the name of a fairy-tale princess who gets back everything she ever lost.”

  “God.” James tilts his head at me. “Who are you?”

  I clench my hand around the hilt of the gun. I should do it now. Put us both out of our misery and spare Marina from the monster who’s coming for her. But he looks so sad and broken. Maybe it’s stupid, but I think Finn was right before. He deserves an explanation for why I’m going to put a bullet in his brain. Maybe then I’ll actually be able to pull the trigger.

  “I will still kill you, you know,” I say.

  “I know. And I’ll still fight.”

  I sit down on the cold tile floor, the gun aimed at him, and James sits opposite me.

  “What do you want to know?” I say. “Make it quick.”

  “How does this work? If you kill me, you’ll create a paradox.”

  “Time is sentient,” I say, “like you always suspected. Actions like this become fixed in time. A shadow of me will always be here to kill you, even after I’m gone.”

  “And you know,” he says, “that if you kill me, you’ll die, too?”

  I nod. “This version of me will blink right out of existence.”

  “So you’re on a suicide mission.”

  “I guess, but I don’t think of it that way. If I can give Marina a chance for an escape from what I’ve been through, what you’ve put me through”—he flinches at my words—“I don’t mind giving up this second-rate existence of mine.” What will she become if not me? Will she go to college, have children? Will she spend a year living in Europe and go skydiving on a dare and all the other things I used to dream about in my cold concrete cell?

  He takes a deep breath as he absorbs my answer. “But why . . .”

  The words fall off, and he pauses before trying again, his voice softer this time.

  “If I really invented a time machine,” he says, “then where are my parents? Why didn’t I save them?”

  It’s a good question, one I’ve always wondered about myself. James never would have become obsessed with the idea of time travel in the first place if his parents hadn’t died when he was a kid.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Knowing the version of you from my time as well as I do, I suspect you were afraid that if you saved them and grew up with a whole, happy family, you would never care enough about time to discover how to control it. And you’re so in love with the power it gives you that you couldn’t risk that. Maybe a time line exists somewhere where you made a different decision, but it isn’t this one, so I still have to stop you.”

  James buries his fingers into his hair and looks down at the floor. “Why do you want to kill me?”

  “I don’t.” The words come out harsher than I intend. “God, James, I never wanted this. But . . . things are so bad. . . .”

  “How?” he says. “I need to know what that means.”

  I sigh and lower the gun to my lap, though I can still raise and fire it before he could move six inches from where he sits. “It starts about a year from now. You’re working with Richter and the SIA. This place isn’t the Associated Institutes of Research; it’s the Security and Intelligence Administration, a covert subset of the CIA that works in conjunction with the Pentagon. In my memory, things happen mostly like they have so far. You meet Richter because he’s in charge of Nate’s case. He’s interested in your work with the fourth dimension, and he has resources you can’t get anywhere else. Our relationship grows strained. I don’t like Richter, and I’m scared of the changes I see in you.”

  “What changes?”

  “You become even more obsessed with your work.” I imagine James at eighteen, explaining his theories to me, the passion in his voice so bright, it’s almost mania. “Your idealism is one of the things I always loved most about you, but faced with the prospect of actually being able to change the world, you become rigid. You’re so convinced you’re right that you won’t entertain any doubts. It’s started happening already—do you see that?”

  His eyes see past me. “The way I left with Richter even when they said I was vulnerable and he couldn’t be trusted.”

  “It’s going to get worse,” I say. “A lot worse. Sometime—I’m not sure when—you’ll develop the machine at a classified government lab in rural Pennsylvania. You’ll call it Cassandra. That’s when things will start to change.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “All kinds. For instance, before Cassandra, all the countries of Europe formed a single large nation called the European Union,” I say. “They had one government, one currency, everything. It would exist right now, except you and Richter used Cassandra to go back in time and stop it ever happening.”

  “Why?” James asks, bewildered.

  I shrug. “Richter convinced you it would be a threat to the United States.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “You told me about it,” I say, “during one of our midnight chats. You used to come into my cell at night and talk to me for hours sometimes. Mostly you’d want to talk about when we were kids, but sometimes you’d tell me what you and Richter were up to. Government leaders you had assassinated, terrorist attacks you either staged or stopped, natural disasters you were able to warn people about. Remember when the levees broke in New Orleans and flooded the whole place?”

  “Sure,” he says. “The city was evacuated ahead of time, though.”

  “Not originally. You made sure everyone was out of New Orleans before the hurricane hit, because you remembered the tragedy it had been the first time around.”

  “See?” he says, eyes widening like a child. “I do good things. That’s all I want, to make things better.”

  “I know.” For a moment, I’m tempted to reach out to him, but I wait out the urge. “I think that’s why part of me has such a hard time pulling this trigger, because I know that even the future version of you, who has done so many terrible things, honestly believes he’s acting for the greater good. Three years from now, a dirty bomb will go off in Manhattan, killing thousands and contaminating the Northeast.”

  James’s voice is barely a whisper. “And I stop it?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “You, and more likely Richter, think that stopping that one bomb isn’t enough, because there will just be others. Instead of stopping the bombs, you need to stop the country’s vulnerability to them. So you’ll send people back in time—to one year from now, two years, six months—and have them set off a series of smaller bombs in half a dozen cities. Hundreds die instead of thousands, and the government pushes through dozens of new security measures that make what we have now look like mall security. A national biometric ID, no travel without authorization, electronic surveillance, body scanners in every building, CCTV on every street. It becomes impossible to do or say or buy anything without the government knowing about it. The dirty bomb never goes off, and in some ways we’re safer than ever, but—”

  “I’ve created a police state,” James says, the horror palpable in his voice. “A totalitarian government.”

  “Richter is worse,” I say. “He sees time as a weapon, something even more powerful than bombs to use against the Chinese or North Koreans or whoever he sees as a threat. I’m sure he pushed you into many of the worst things you used Cassandra for, but you were so blinded by then that you couldn’t s
ee it.”

  “Then why not kill him instead of me?” James demands.

  “We tried that.” It was number four on the list. That version of me must have been tough as nails. “It didn’t work. I suspect there are plenty of equally ambitious, ruthless people who were able to take his place in your life. You believe, James, and no one can take that away from you. In the end, it always comes down to numbers with you. You’re willing to hurt a few people to save many more.”

  “Are you one of the people I hurt?” he asks.

  I nod. “Two years from now, Marina and Finn leave D.C. It’s right after the first bomb, in San Francisco, and they’re scared Richter will want to get rid of them because of what they know. Marina has documentation of some of your calculations for Cassandra—”

  James frowns. “No, she doesn’t. There are only my originals and the copies that Nate made, which I destroyed.”

  “Well, I won’t tell you where she gets them,” I say. “I’ve been guarding that secret for years, and I won’t stop now. By the time Richter comes for her and Finn, they’re gone, and they’ve taken the documents with them.”

  Suddenly, the room tilts. Time grabs me around my middle. No, not now! But it’s already dragging me away, sucking me into darkness.

  My vision clears. I’m in my bedroom, pacing the length of the room. Finn is cross-legged on my bed.

  “You’re making me queasy,” he says.

  “So sorry my terror is upsetting your stomach,” I snap. “Close your eyes.”

  He catches my wrist as I pass for another lap. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just what you have to say.”

  I laugh, and the brittle sound hurts the back of my throat. At least I can count on Finn to be honest.

  “Sit down,” he says. “Please.”

  I reluctantly sink onto the bed and begin to pick at a loose thread on the bedspread. When I pull it, the fabric around the string ripples through the whole length of the bedspread, highlighting the weakness in the otherwise uniform surface of the fabric. It makes me think of cosmic trampolines and tiny portals through space-time. I shudder and smooth away the wrinkles.