Timebound

by Rysa Walker

  Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.

  She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”

  She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…

  “Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it, “I sent a letter to the granddaughter who was Richard’s caregiver before he died. I told her I was writing a history on nineteenth-century journalists and her grandfather was one of the people I was researching, and I was surprised when she asked me to visit in person. When I arrived, she went straight to her china cabinet and pulled out a CHRONOS key.

  “She said that her grandfather had always been a bit psychic and he told her that one day when she was in her seventies, a woman named Katherine might come asking questions. If that happened, Richard said that she should give me that old medallion and his diary, because I’d know what to do with them.

  “I packed Richard’s key away with my other belongings when I married Jimmy, a few months later. He was a young history professor, and I was a newly widowed research assistant, six months pregnant with your mother and Prudence.”

  She smiled softly. “Jim should have been born in an era where knights-errant rescued damsels in distress—when he met me, he became a man with a mission. I was reluctant to marry so quickly. CHRONOS members were told to wait at least a year before making the decision on how to best assimilate. But I knew better than the others that this was, in all likelihood, something worse than a mere technical glitch. Jim and I were married before the girls were born and they were, in every sense other than biological, truly his girls. I could not have asked for a more devoted husband and father.”

  “So Mom doesn’t know?” I asked. “I mean, even after the accident, you didn’t tell her that Jim wasn’t her father?”

  Katherine looked a bit surprised at the suggestion. “Do you really think that I should have told her? She was angry enough at me as it was—telling her a different lie about a father killed in Vietnam was pointless. And telling the truth would just have convinced her that I was insane. I did the only thing I could do after Jim died—I tried to get her sister back from Saul. And I failed.”

  Her comment explained so many other things that I found myself unsurprised that Prudence was alive—or at least, that Katherine believed Prudence had survived the crash.

  “It never occurred to me that either of the girls might be able to activate the key,” Katherine continued. “There had only been a few generations of CHRONOS historians and… well, it’s not as though we carried CHRONOS equipment around in public. If the children of historians had ever shown an ability to activate the equipment, it wasn’t something I’d been told.

  “I kept my key in my jewelry box. I’m not sure why. I wouldn’t have left my family if it had suddenly become active, but I guess it was just a memento—a reminder of a world that seemed almost unreal to me by that time.” She paused for a moment. “And I knew that Saul had made a jump. He was stranded, too. He thought that destroying the stable point on the CHRONOS end would mean that he had free rein—that it would allow him to go from one stable point to the next, from one time to the next, without limits. And it might have worked, but… I still don’t know what happened that day. Wherever, whenever Saul landed, however, I’m quite sure he blames me for wrecking his plans.”

  Katherine toyed with the chain around her neck. “I never imagined that the key would be dangerous to the girls. Prudence found it a few months before she disappeared. She and Deborah were looking for old items to use as costumes for a school play. I don’t know how long Prudence held it or what she saw. I do know that she and your mother got into a rather nasty fight because Prudence insisted the medallion was glowing green and your mother couldn’t see it—she was convinced it was another of her sister’s little jokes.”

  She was quiet for several seconds. “So what did you do?” I prodded.

  “I did what most mothers would have done—I took it away, yelled at both of them, and said I was tired of their silly arguments. I refused to take either side or to discuss the issue when Prudence raised it later.” Katherine’s blue eyes dimmed a bit and she looked down at her hands. “That was a mistake. I know that now. I think she saw something that… troubled her. Maybe it was the same black void that I still see when I try to activate it—but I don’t think so. She started having nightmares and was moody. Well, she was always a bit moody, but… more so… after.”

  A tear slid down Katherine’s face, dropping onto her sleeve. “I thought she was getting past it. Then, a few weeks later, I was going to walk into Georgetown with Deborah to buy her some new shoes. It was a Saturday and Jim was taking Prudence to her violin lesson, which was on campus. Prudence had this sneaky look on her face as she got into the car, but I assumed that was because she was wearing a lot more makeup than I usually allowed—Deborah said she had a crush on her violin instructor. As they pulled out of the drive, Prudence gave me a sassy grin and held up something that looked like my CHRONOS key, glowing a soft orange…

  “We only had the one car—so following them was out of the question. If it had been a decade later, we would have had cell phones. I could have called and told him to come right back so that I could take the damned thing away from her.

  “Instead, I ran to my bedroom and dug through the dresser drawer where I’d hidden the key, and to my surprise, the key was right where I’d left it. I decided that Prudence must have found a similar piece of costume jewelry, and Deborah and I headed downtown as planned. But something kept nagging at me—hadn’t Prudence said the medallion glowed green for her? So why would she have bought costume jewelry that was orange? Still, I couldn’t think of any other explanation.

  “And then I remembered the box in the attic,” she said. “We ran back to the house—Deborah was furious, of course, that I had changed my mind after a half-mile walk. Anyway, I found the old trunk with my items from before Jim and I were married—and sure enough, it was open and Richard’s key, the one his granddaughter had given me, was gone.”

  Katherine heaved a sigh, then stood and walked into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I heard her let Daphne in. The dog was apparently sensitive to her owner’s mood, because she was far more subdued than I had ever seen her. She padded softly over to the couch and sniffed around in Connor’s lap, looking for gingersnap crumbs, apparently. He fished a cookie from the bottom of the box and tossed it into the air. Daphne caught it with a snap of her jaws and stretched out at my feet, anchoring the prize between her paws and nibbling at the edges.

  I was about to follow Katherine into the kitchen, but Connor shook his head. “She’ll be back soon,” he said. “It’s difficult for her to talk about this.”

  I nodded. “My mom, too. But I think I know the rest, anyway. Mom said Prudence was never found, and her dad died that evening at the hospital. They don’t know why he lost control of the car. I do
n’t think Mom even got to talk to him, so I guess he never woke up?”

  “He spoke to Katherine. He was in and out of consciousness, and—”

  He cut off the sentence as Katherine appeared in the doorway, looking frail and tired. “Jim only spoke for a few seconds. He said, ‘She was there and then she was just gone. The car… I lost control.’ And then he grabbed my hand so tightly and said, ‘Where did she go, Katherine?’ And then Jimmy was gone, too. Not literally, like Prudence, but…”

  She ran one hand across her short gray hair and leaned against the wall. “The nurse and Deborah were both in the room. I’m sure they assumed he meant that the river had pulled Prudence away—that he was confused about the order of events. But I saw the look of disbelief in his eyes, Kate. I knew what he meant. She disappeared—and seeing someone vanish from the seat next to you when you’ve never seen anything of the sort… well, I’m not too surprised that Jim forgot about the road.”

  Katherine fell silent after that. I didn’t know what to say, and I was relieved when Connor shifted the conversation. “Maybe we should focus on what happened to Kate this morning. Can you tell us any more about the guy who took your bag?”

  “My age, maybe a bit older? Kiernan said his name was Simon. He had a black shirt, with something like a band logo on the front, but I didn’t recognize the band. A bit on the chubby side… looked like a hard-core gamer.”

  “A gamer?” Katherine asked.

  “Out of shape, pale, rarely sees sunlight,” Connor said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He was writing something—kept looking down at his notes. I got a better look at the other guy, actually. Kiernan. Tall…”

  “Wait…,” Connor said. He held up his hand and headed for the stairs. “I may be able to save you some effort there.” When he returned a minute later, he was carrying two very old photographs, in identical black frames. He handed one of them to me. “This was taken in 1921.”

  It was a formal photo of a family with four children, the youngest boy seated on his mother’s lap. The man was middle-aged, tall and dark with a well-groomed beard. He was looking directly at the camera and I recognized his eyes instantly. I glanced at the woman sitting in front of him and felt a sudden, irrational twinge of jealousy that his hand was on her shoulder. In his other hand he clutched a large, ornate book, perhaps a family Bible, with a ribbon that hung from between the pages.

  I handed the photo back to Connor. “It’s him. I’m sure.”

  “The second boy from the right,” he said, “the one standing next to the mother? That’s supposedly my grandfather, Anson. I think he was eleven, maybe twelve. The man, as I noted earlier, is Kiernan Dunne, my great-grandfather. Based on the genealogical research that I’ve done recently, Kiernan was a prominent Cyrist Templar in Chicago until his death in the late 1940s. He came over as a child with his parents to work on one of the Cyrist collective farms that sprang up in the Midwest during the mid-1800s.”

  I looked again at the picture that Connor held, unsure which bothered me more—that I had been kissed by a married preacher or that he had died more than half a century before I was born. I could still feel the sensation of his lips on mine and his hand on my face, and I could see his smile as he loosened my hair.

  I shook my head to clear it, and Connor thrust the other picture into my hand. “I have always believed, however, that this young man is my grandfather Anson.” He pointed to a boy, a bit younger, in another family photo. In this picture, there were three children and a different mother. They were dressed less formally, seated outside in front of a large farmhouse. The man was tall and dark, with a slightly longer beard, and he looked less serious, with just a hint of a smile. The eyes were identical.

  “Kiernan had a twin?” I asked.

  “No,” said Katherine. “At one point, these were two copies of the same photograph. The second one has been in my possession and under the protection of a CHRONOS field continuously since 1995, when Connor’s mother allowed me to make a copy of the original for my research on the descendants of the various CHRONOS historians. The first one—the more formal portrait—is actually the original photograph that I made this copy from in 1995. Connor obtained it from his sister by mail last May. Except I don’t guess you can really call her his sister, since—”

  “Wait, you’re losing me here.” I had no idea what a CHRONOS field was, but there was no way that these photographs were from the same original. “They’re not the same photograph at all. Different people and different locations… how could the second one be a copy of the first?”

  “In the stories I remember,” Connor said, “my great-grandfather was a farmer—not a minister, and certainly not a Templar.” I noted the disdain in his voice and was about to inquire further, but he went on, pointing out the differences in the images. “The mother is not the same in this photo. There are slight differences in the children.” Connor nodded toward the staircase. “I can trace the male line in my family on current genealogy sites, but the names are different. My mother never married my father. I was only able to attain that photograph by pretending to be my—what would you call him? He seems to be the version of me in this timeline. My half brother? Half self?” He looked at Katherine, his eyebrows raised in a question.

  Katherine just shrugged. “We’re beyond my level of understanding now. I’m just a historian. I used the equipment, but I didn’t invent it. We were told that the system was safeguarded against this type of—aberration—but Saul…”

  “Saul,” Connor said with a sneer. “I spend my time now trying to figure out exactly what that bastard has changed and how we might change it back.” He crushed the cookie box, with a bit more force than seemed necessary. “And every day, I see a few more of his bloody temples dotting the landscape.”

  5

  Dad had been telling the truth when he said that Katherine had a lot of books. They lined three walls of the very large library that took up most of the left wing of the house. It looked like a normal library in most respects, at least normal for the type of library that I had seen only in movies, with a rolling ladder connected to each wall and books stacked from floor to ceiling.

  There were, however, some distinct differences. Along the vertical edge of each block of shelves, a bright blue tube—the exact shade of the CHRONOS key—ran from bottom to top and then extended across the ceiling to meet in the middle, where they formed a large blue X.

  My gaze drifted toward the computers. Dozens of hard drives were stacked on metal shelves. There were three workstations, each with large dual monitors. To their right was an odd apparatus that I couldn’t identify—except for the objects in the very center. Two CHRONOS medallions were seated in some sort of casing, from which they seemed to be connected to a series of cables. The top of the case was tinted glass, which partially dimmed the blue light. A thick rope of twisted cables attached to the casing ran four or five feet from the computer station to bookshelves and connected to one of the bright blue tubes.

  “What… is all of this?”

  “This, Kate, is what makes the house a safe house,” my grandmother said. “You have no idea how difficult it was to move all of this to a new location, especially given the need to keep everything protected during the voyage. It would have been much easier to bring you to Italy, but I suspected that would be impossible to arrange with your mother.

  “Connor has devised a rather ingenious system here. The signal from the CHRONOS keys is amplified and the protection extends, more or less, to around twenty feet outside the house.”

  Connor added, “For now, we just keep one of the other keys on us if we need to go outside that perimeter. I’d like to add the entire yard to the safe zone, but that will require using a third key—and I’m worried that extending the protection that far could overload the system.”

  “What do you mean—protection?” I suddenly flashed back to Kiernan’s question on the Metro. Why would she send you out with no protection?

  “From t
he temporal distortions,” Connor answered. “Any thing and any person within these walls—or anyone wearing one of the keys—is not affected by a temporal shift. Katherine and I, for example, clearly remember that the second picture you saw is the correct one. It has been shielded along with most everything else in this house. But the first picture that you saw and… the people and things outside the protective area… have all been changed.”

  “So why didn’t the first picture change back when you brought it here?” I challenged. “If this is, like, a safe zone, shouldn’t it show the reality you know?”

  Katherine shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, Kate. It wasn’t protected when the temporal shift occurred. Think of this as… a lead apron, like you’ve worn at the dentist. You’re shielded when the apron is on, but it isn’t going to undo any damage that might have been caused if you were exposed earlier. The documents we have here, that we’ve always been protecting—including the ones that are digitized on these servers—all of those are preserved. Anything that we bring in from the outside, however, might have been changed. Actually, it will have been changed, unless it was in constant physical contact with someone wearing a medallion. But it won’t be altered further once we have it here.”

  “That… makes sense, I guess. Okay, I’ve seen…” I paused to count. “Five medallions, including the one Kiernan had. I’m assuming Simon… the guy who mugged me… must have one as well. Where are they coming from? Have you learned to replicate them?”

  “No, the additional keys and diaries that we have here are ones that I’ve collected,” Katherine said, sitting down at one of the computer stations. “Before Prudence disappeared, I hadn’t expended much effort trying to track down what had happened to my former future colleagues—other than keeping an eye out for Saul, because he could have landed anywhere, anytime.