“I think you’re crazy,” I said. “I think this whole place is crazy.”
“Look,” said Elegy. “It’s not difficult to understand. You’ve seen Back to the Future, right?”
“That Michael J. Fox movie?”
“I love that movie,” Kellen spoke up, sipping at his screwdriver. “I just can’t get enough of Christopher Lloyd.”
“Right,” said Elegy. “Well, in the movie, you remember how he’s got that photo, and he and his siblings are disappearing out of it because he’s messed with the past?”
I squinted. “Sort of. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that movie.”
“Well, that’s what I do. I fix things that people mess with in the past so that the future isn’t screwed up.”
I took another drink of my rum runner. I was remembering more and more about those movies. “But when you change something in the past, doesn’t it create like a parallel world or something? Like in the second movie, when Biff takes that score book back to the past?”
“There are no such things as parallel worlds,” said Elegy. “That’s just completely made up.”
I had to laugh. “Right. But bars that move position and the Fates are real. I get it.”
“When you mess up something in the past, you mess up everything,” said Kellen. “See, if I decide that I’m going to go back in time to fix something, and I fix it, then when I get to the future, I don’t need to fix it anymore, so I won’t go back in time, therefore I can’t have fixed it. It’s a paradox. Paradoxes make the fabric of time completely unravel. Everything gets screwy.”
I blinked, trying to follow what he’d said. “Paradox.”
“Yeah.” Kellen lit a cigarette. “So what I do is I go back and stop people from changing things, so there aren’t any paradoxes.”
I looked at Elegy. “I thought that was what you did.”
“Sort of,” said Elegy. “I can’t actually leave the bar. It’s a praxidikai. It imposes justice. It’s kind of like my prison.”
I made a face. I was really, seriously confused.
“It’s a long story,” said Elegy. “At any rate, I pick up the volurs, like Kellen here, and then I take them back in time, and they fix paradoxes. The minute one happens, I feel it, and I know where we need to go to correct things.”
Kellen took a drag from his cigarette. “Which reminds me, what are we doing today?”
“Someone killed Hitler again,” said Elegy.
Kellen groaned. “Seriously?”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” I asked.
“Weren’t you listening about the paradoxes?” Kellen asked. “It’s not a good thing.”
Right. Paradoxes. I tried to remember what Kellen had said about paradoxes. I squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t believe any of this.” I looked at the door. “What was out there, anyway?”
“The Middle Ages,” said Kellen.
No. That couldn’t be true. I couldn’t be in a completely different time. I shook my head. “I want to go home.”
“You can’t,” said Elegy. “I feel like we’re going over the same stuff over and over again.” She picked up my glass, which was mostly empty. “Want me to top off your drink?”
“No,” I said. “I want everything to stop being absolutely insane right now. I want everything to go back to normal.”
“But that’s what we do,” Elegy said. “We make everything go back to normal.”
Kellen puffed on his cigarette. “So what part of Hitler’s life am I going back to this time? Is it World War I? Is he a struggling artist?”
“Nope,” said Elegy. “He’s a kid.”
“A kid?” said Kellen. “That’s kind of sick.”
Elegy shrugged. “Eight years old.”
“Who would do something like that?” Kellen put his cigarette out, looking disgusted.
I chewed on my lip. “Well, it is Hitler.”
They both glared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that it’s the ultimate question, isn’t it? Everyone’s wondered what they’d do if they got the chance to kill Hitler. Most people would do it.”
Kellen shook his head. “Don’t I know it? How many times have we been back here to save Hitler? Eleven? Twelve?”
“Our timelines are different,” said Elegy, smiling.
I finished the last of my rum runner. “You said that before. How does that make Kellen know who I am, anyway?”
“Well,” said Elegy. “Think of it like this. We drop Kellen off in 1965 today. When we pick him up again, he’s in 1130, where I dropped him off last week. For us, a week has passed, for him, only a few hours. So, timelines are different. In our future, we’ll pick up Kellen again. It just so happens that our future is Kellen’s past. Make sense?”
Sort of. Not really. “Maybe I do want another drink.”
“Coming right up,” said Elegy.
* * *
The door opened and Kellen walked back into the bar. I was on my fourth rum runner, and I was feeling a little woozy. Near as I could tell, the only way to deal with this craziness was to be drunk. I didn’t want to believe that I was stuck in a time-traveling bar, but when we’d stopped to let Kellen out, I’d looked out the door. Another completely different place. Either I’d lost my mind, or it was true.
“That was quick,” Elegy said cheerily.
“I was too late,” said Kellen. He walked over to the bar and threw himself onto a stool. “It was awful, really. They pushed him off a high wall, and he fell down. His skull was cracked open. He looked so small. He’s only a kid. I yelled at the guys who did it. They seemed upset about it, actually, but fat lot of good that did them.”
“Guys?” said Elegy.
“Teenagers,” said Kellen. “Probably from the twenty-third century by the looks of their clothes.”
Elegy raised her eyebrows. “Must have been kids who snuck into a portal to mess around, then. They weren’t thinking their actions through. Killing someone, even if it’s Hitler, is a pretty big deal.”
I leaned forward on the bar. “Well, isn’t this bad, then? Isn’t there going to be a paradox, if Kellen didn’t stop it?”
“There’s a paradox, all right,” said Elegy. “Open the door a crack and look outside.”
“Why?” I said.
“Just look.”
I went to the door and opened it a few inches. Outside, the sky had turned a strange red color and all of the houses were floating in the air. I slammed the door shut. “Why is that happening?”
“Everything gets really weird when the fabric of time starts unraveling,” said Kellen.
I was having a hard time catching my breath. “And this isn’t a parallel world? Because the sky did not turn blood red in the 1890s. I would have heard about that.”
“We’ll fix it,” said Elegy.
“And all the people who are witnessing this right now?”
“Won’t remember it,” said Elegy. “Once we go back and stop these kids, their memories will change and the paradox won’t have happened.”
“Unless you’re like me,” said Kellen. “That’s why I’m a volur. I remember a paradox happening. It completely freaked me out. One minute everything was all floating and falling apart and the next minute it was normal again. I tried to talk to people about it, and they just locked me up in a mental facility.”
“That’s when I got the message to go pick him up,” said Elegy. “The Fates can’t have people wandering around remembering the paradoxes, so we put them to work fixing stuff. There aren’t very many humans who would remember, anyway. Those who can are like seers. We call them volurs.”
“So you can’t go back to your life anymore?” I asked. “You have to wander around in time fixing stuff?”
“Pretty much,” said Kellen.
“Does that piss you off? Do you want your life back?”
Kellen shrugged. “Well, there’s Elegy now, isn’t there? She’s kind of a nice compensation.” He waggled his ey
ebrows at her.
Elegy laughed suggestively. “Later, you.” She set a shot glass on the bar and poured some whiskey into it.
I looked from Elegy to Kellen. Were they like... a couple? They did both dress equally badly.
“So how are we going to fix this?” asked Kellen. “I can’t cross my own timeline.”
Elegy drained the glass of whiskey and shivered. “I need liquor if I’m going to deal with teenagers,” she told me. She turned back to Kellen. “I’ll go back to the point in time where they got out of the time portal, and I’ll open the door of the bar, and you can yell for them to come in here.”
Kellen looked around. “In here? It’s a bar, and they’re teenagers.”
Elegy filled her glass again. “Oh, yes, well, I’m sure you never drank alcohol when you were a teenager either.”
Kellen shrugged. “Good point.”
Elegy looked up as if something had changed, even though nothing has as far as I could tell. “We’re here.”
Kellen started for the door.
“Hold on,” I said.
They both turned to me.
“If they see dressed like that, doesn’t it, you know, confuse people? I mean, wouldn’t your clothes mess with the fabric of time?” I asked.
“Fate fabric,” said Kellen. “These clothes will look like they belong to whatever time period I end up in. They’re made especially by the Fates for volurs.”
“He’s not leaving the bar, anyway,” said Elegy. “The bar can make things look however they need to look.”
I nodded. “But your clothes really look like that?”
He must have noticed something in my tone. He lifted his jacket and surveyed himself. “What’s wrong with the way they look?”
“You just both like of look like rejects from videos on MTV in the 1980s,” I said.
“I like the 80s,” said Elegy.
“I’m from the 80s,” said Kellen.
Okay, then. I went back to my drink.
“Be back in a sec,” said Kellen. He went over to the door of the bar and began yelling.
“He’s definitely got a cute ass,” said Elegy.
“Are you guys like dating or something?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” said Elegy. “Volurs are only good for occasional rolls in the sack. You can’t get serious about them. Besides, he’s human. I’m a goddess. Explain to me how a relationship like that could ever work.”
“So you’re like fuck buddies.”
Elegy made a face. “That’s so coarse. Really.”
I toyed with the straw in my rum runner. “So if I met a nice volur, could I date him? I’m not a goddess, after all.”
Kellen was still yelling. He was apparently having a long, involved, shouted conversation with the time travelers.
She pursed her lips. “I thought you’d be all sworn off men after that jerk beat you black and blue.”
What was I thinking? I had a boyfriend. Maybe he was right that I wanted to run around on him. Maybe I did deserve what he’d been about to do to me. I was going to find some way back to Richard, eventually. Of course I couldn’t date guys like Kellen, even though he did have a cute ass. “It was just a hypothetical question. I won’t be here long enough to form any kind of attachments. You’re taking me home after we save Hitler.”
“Sweetie, really,” said Elegy. “I’m beginning to think you might be deaf. You can’t leave this bar. Ever. What part of that isn’t making sense?”
That made me angry. “You can’t keep me prisoner here.”
Elegy poured more whiskey into her shot glass. “Here, you might need this.”
The smell of whiskey made me think of Richard. I shook my head. “No. And I’m not staying here.”
“You have to,” said Elegy. “You see, if you leave the bar, then you’ll be back in the regular time stream of the world. And you won’t belong in the time stream. If the Fates see you out there, then it’ll be curtains.”
Kellen’s voice had become more cajoling. He was saying something about beer.
“I’ll belong in my own time stream. If you take me back right to the point where I ran away from Richard, then it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Well,” said Elegy, “you see, you weren’t supposed to run away from Richard. I sort of interfered.”
“Why does that make a difference?”
“Because, if I hadn’t interfered, Richard would have—”
Kellen came back over, dragging along two kids by their collars. One of the kids was wearing a large puffy metallic jacket with fringes at the elbows. The other had on tight purple bib overalls. I guessed fashion took a turn for the worse in the future.
“This place doesn’t look like it belongs in 1898,” said one of the kids.
“Twentieth century all the way,” said the other one. “What the hell is going on?”
“It’s like I’ve been trying to tell you,” said Kellen. “You can’t kill Hitler.”
* * *
The two boys couldn’t have been older than sixteen. They swiveled back and forth on the stools at the bar while Elegy made them drinks. Their names were Derek Yost and Henry Underwood.
“I can’t believe you’re serving us,” said Derek. “What kind of bar is this anyway?”
Elegy set a drink down in front of him. “I can’t believe you’re traveling in time. What kind of society lets underage people through a portal without supervision?”
Derek and Henry exchanged a guilty glance.
“We kind of snuck through,” said Henry.
Elegy set a drink in front of him too. “That’s what I thought.” She rested her elbows on the bar. “Teenagers. All set out to rebel against everything and don’t even take the time to realize they might be ripping apart the fabric of time and space.”
Derek and Henry looked at each other again.
“Uh,” said Derek. “What are you talking about? We’re just trying to save people’s lives.”
“There’s a thing called a time paradox,” said Kellen.
Elegy waved a hand at him to stop him. “Let’s not even get into that for a second, Kellen. There are all kinds of reasons why killing Hitler is a bad idea, even if it doesn’t cause a paradox.”
Henry held out a hand to Derek. “I told you it would cause a paradox, buddy. Pay up.”
“No way,” said Derek. “I’m not paying until we try it and see what happens.”
“You did try it,” I said. “And it did cause a paradox. I saw it.”
“We did not,” said Henry. “We just freaking got here, when he—” he jerked a thumb at Kellen— “showed up and dragged us here.”
“Right,” I said, “but we came directly from the future, where Kellen saw you do it, and then everything completely got messed up.”
Derek eyed me suspiciously. “Who the hell are you guys anyway?”
“We’re the time police,” said Kellen. “Elegy, can I have another screwdriver? Dealing with these guys is making me crazy.”
“I’ve never heard of the time police,” said Henry, crossing his arms.
“Who we are is not important,” said Elegy, getting the vodka to make Kellen another drink. “But Catherine’s just brought up a good point. The first reason why you shouldn’t kill Hitler.”
“Oh yeah?” said Derek. “What’s that?”
“Taking a human life would take a psychological toll on both of you.” Elegy scooped some ice into a glass and began to pour vodka in it. “If you kill someone, it eats you up inside. You’re too young to set off down a path like that.”
“Killing Hitler wouldn’t do that,” said Henry.
“When he’s eight years old?” said Kellen. “You probably can’t even imagine what it would be like to see his little body lying on the ground, his skull cracked open, blood everywhere. The knowledge that he was a living, breathing person one minute and that you stole it from him.”
Elegy poured orange juice into Kellen’s drink. “It would either make you
wracked with guilt or drunk on power. You’d either become frightened headcases or little mini-Hitlers yourself. Human life is sacred.”
“If you really thought human life was sacred,” said Derek, “you’d let us kill Hitler. He commits genocide, or did you forget that?”
Elegy stirred the drink and gave it to Kellen. “Oh, Hitler’s a bad man, all right. But you shouldn’t have any control over what he does. You should only have control over what you do.”
“If you’re stopping us from killing Hitler, then how do we have control over what we do?” said Henry.
Elegy got out a shot glass and filled it with whiskey. “Teenagers,” she muttered. She slammed the shot back.
“Wait,” I said. “He has a good point. I mean, if you’re fixing time so it runs properly, then that means that things are already decided, right? So, if there’s fate, and you’re enforcing fate, then people don’t really have free will, do they?”
Elegy glowered at me. “Sure there’s free will. As long as you’re moving forward in time, there’s free will. But once events happen, they’re woven into the fabric of time. You can’t change them just because you want to.”
“But you can move all around in time,” I said. “So that must mean that the fabric of all time is already woven, isn’t it? From your perspective?”
Elegy shrugged. “I guess so.”
“So, then everything’s set. It’s fated. There’s no actual choice.”
“Catherine, we’re getting off topic here,” said Elegy. She turned back to the boys. “Let me make this simple. You can’t kill Hitler, because even if you could be successful, you’d completely destroy the timeline of humanity. Nazi Germany is responsible for rocketry and highway systems and medical advances in cancer and Volkswagens.”
“Volkswagens?” said Derek.
“I forgot there are no cars in the twenty-third century,” Elegy muttered. “But do you see my point?”
“Yeah,” Henry said. He looked down at the bar.
Interestingly, neither of the boys had touched their drinks. I wasn’t sure why that was. Maybe they didn’t feel comfortable drinking in front of Elegy. She was kind of letting them have it.
Adventures of Elegy Flynn Page 2