The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series)

by Heather Blackwood

  She also explained about the bubble world he had slipped into when the Seelie had drugged him, so long ago at Luna Park, and how Felicia’s home world was similar, a bubble world off of one of the seven main worlds. That was why Seamus could never find a way to get her home. The point was moot now, but he would tell Seamus and Felicia when he saw them again.

  “We got final confirmation from Huginn and Pangur Ban,” said Neil from the doorway. “We have an exact date and coordinates.”

  Elliot’s stomach jumped. “Are they sure?”

  “The chieftain died young and the widow disappeared a week later. We have a clear window for travel.”

  Bennu was waiting, the woman from the Library. She had been promised as a wife to a Northern chieftain and forced to move far from her African desert home. Unable to leave the Library or take her with him, they had been separated. He had never ceased to think of her. She was clever and fierce, protective of her people and willing to sacrifice herself for them. She had married the chieftain, he knew that much. But if the chieftain was dead now, then her duty to her people was complete.

  “Are you ready?” Neil asked.

  “Let me shave and change my shirt.”

  Neil gave him a knowing look, almost a smile, and left him. When Elliot was finished, he went up on deck, and Hazel set coordinates for a time in the past where a warm-skinned desert woman waited in the cold and snowy North.

  Chapter 51

  History was strange, Seamus thought, as was the future. Some of the Time Corps’ past mapping of time still held, but with the new merged world, much of it did not.

  The president during the American Civil War had been one Abraham Lincoln, not Breckinridge, as in his world. The first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong and in this world, the atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the widespread use of steam engines in the nineteenth century had never taken hold. Some famous people he remembered had risen to historical significance while others ended up leading unremarkable lives.

  His feet, or remaining foot, rather, was just as it always had been, more apelike than those of the others. Hazel’s feet were the same, as were Luke’s. But they were the exception to the rule. No one else had feet like them. And few people had the lighter-colored eyes that people in Felicia’s world had. The physical differences between people in the different worlds had been averaged out, and in some cases, erased entirely.

  His parents and siblings still lived, though they were still in their proper time in the 1800s. His parents had been shocked to meet Luke and Felicia, but had embraced them as their own, naturally. Though skeptical at his tales of traveling in time, they had been convinced by the technology involved in his prosthetic leg and his digital watch.

  With a few months of work and some input from Janeiro, Seamus had modified his time machines so they were less damaging to the world. He managed to automate the machines to close their own rips. It was imperfect, but workable.

  There were only a few trips through time left to make before he could rest. First he went to 1961 to deliver his favorite time machine, the one to which he added brass embellishments and decorative touches, to an older Hazel in New Orleans. Inside a little door in the body of the machine waited a book of coordinates in his own handwriting. That machine and that book would be the start of so many things.

  The book and the machine had been part of a time loop. He had received the two from an older version of himself, and thus neither had been properly created. He copied his own device, then gave it back to a younger version of himself. It had no stable origin. Many of their friendships were the same, people meeting each other because one of them knew the other from previously meeting them. But Astrid had fixed things when she healed the rips. The world was more stable than it had ever been, according to Janeiro.

  In New Orleans, Seamus gave an older Hazel the time machine, which she took to the attic. They had lunch together, and then it was time for him to go.

  He traveled to the hospital where, after research on 1960s’ medical practices, a much older Luke spent months working, waiting for the day when his young mother, nearly drowned, would be brought in.

  But there was another person Seamus was keen to see.

  “Is Oren here?” he asked Luke. Oren had also been nearly drowned in the Mississippi.

  “He is.”

  Luke took him to Oren’s room where his old friend lay unconscious. Seamus knew he would wake before Felicia. Some of their personal time threads remained unchanged. But the man lying there was not the same one who had given his life to save Seamus’s. This was the man who wanted to destroy parts of New Orleans, who had stolen Seamus’s engine designs, who wanted to jump start the Civil War. The man who was his friend was truly gone, for he had never existed.

  “Now take me to your mother.”

  Luke led him down the hall. Felicia was as still as death, her lips white. She would wake, and she would come to him using the very machine he had delivered to Hazel’s house. Even now, Hazel was visiting the hospital, claiming to be Felicia’s aunt. And when Felicia woke, Hazel would be there.

  “She looks so young,” said Seamus.

  “So do you.”

  Seamus rested his hand on his son’s shoulder. “And you and Hazel are older now. And when I get home, you’ll be young again.”

  That was how it always was, with lives lived asynchronously. Even now, an older Felicia was in the future, working in an advanced medical laboratory with a younger Luke.

  “It was good seeing you, but I think it’s time for me to head home,” said Seamus.

  Chapter 52

  “When we get there, I want you to tell me what you see when you look at them,” Santiago said to Yukiko.

  “Who, the prostitutes?”

  “All the people. But them too.”

  It was a winter night in Las Vegas, too cold for comfort. Santiago had spent part of the evening gambling and had won a fair sum.

  “Give me the money,” said Yukiko.

  “I already gave you some.”

  “The deal was all of it except living expenses.”

  “I can spend quite a bit on living expenses.”

  She put out her hand, and he pulled sixteen one-hundred-dollar bills from his billfold, a ten and some ones. The faces on the bills were different from the ones in her old world, but many things looked a little strange to her now. Like all of the Time Corps, she retained her original memories. She would adapt. She always had. It was how she had survived so long.

  “Now,” Yukiko said, folding the bills in half and handing them back to him. “You’re going to give it away.”

  “To the hookers?”

  “Them or the homeless. Take your pick. But I have a soft spot for the prostitutes.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” he said.

  “You’ve done worse things, I’m sure.”

  He gave a little shrug and after walking down the street a bit, Yukiko saw a pair of women. She knew what they were immediately. Sure, their clothing gave them away, but more than that she knew the way they held themselves.

  “C’mon. It’s more than sixteen hundred bucks,” said Santiago. “We could get one of the fancy hotel rooms and drink champagne all night together.”

  “I’m not interested in you or the champagne. Now give it to them.”

  She stood back while he approached them, and they smiled and turned to him. His back was to her, but she watched him give them the money and walk back to her.

  “What a waste of money,” he said. “Both of them could have come with us. They’d have a good time. I have centuries of experience.”

  “They’re not for sale.”

  “Sure they are. Everyone is if you name the right price.”

  “You really can’t see them, can you?” she asked.


  He put his hands in his coat pockets and shrugged. “I told you I wanted to know what you saw.”

  “People. They’re just people. That’s what I hoped you’d see. Doesn’t helping them do anything to you?”

  They walked in silence for a long while.

  “I can barely see them,” he said. “When I’m with them, with a woman I mean, I can see her. I can feel her then. But she’s like sand through my fingers. A tide rolling out. A clock ticking down to the grave. The older I get, the less real they are to me.”

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be a problem if you stopped being a womanizing son of a bitch.”

  “You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But actually my mother was—”

  “That’s not my point.”

  It was long past midnight and they walked back to the parking structure where Santiago’s sports car waited.

  “It’ll be sunrise in a few hours,” he said. “We could drive out into the desert and have a nice nighttime run. Maybe see if we can catch a few jackrabbits.”

  She was tired, but the idea did have its appeal. It had been ages since she had gone hunting.

  “Come on,” he said. “An old guy like me needs the young.”

  Few other beings would have called her young, but she understood what he meant without him saying more.

  “All right,” she said. “I think we have enough time.”

  Chapter 53

  Felicia glanced up at Luke. He was in his early thirties, but she found that no matter how old he was, she always felt he was much younger than she was.

  “We’re done, right?” he asked.

  “That’s it. Now we just bring it to your father.”

  Together, they packed up twelve vials of synthetic drake blood. It had taken them months to get it right, but now that they could make it, they could run the time machines indefinitely.

  “I’ve been studying limb grafts in my spare time,” said Luke. “The technology will be viable in a few years, and in sixty more, we can grow Dad a new leg and Sister a new tongue.”

  “No clones,” said Felicia. “I’m not harvesting things from clones.”

  “No, I know you wouldn’t go for that. I mean single limb generation, grown over a synthetic bone. The skin color might be a little off from the natural leg, and it won’t have birthmarks or scars. It will look like baby skin until it’s attached and the hormones make it grow hair, but it’ll function.”

  “We’ll talk to Seamus when we get home.”

  “And Sister?”

  “Her too. Though she seems pretty content as she is.”

  Seamus was too, if she thought about it. He was always reengineering his leg, working on perfecting the joints and foot shape. The man wasn’t happy unless he was tinkering, and his leg provided a never-ending focus for that energy.

  Felicia set up the time machine, and the two of them returned to the early twenty-first century. They found the car they had left parked the day before according to the car’s time line, but months before according to theirs, and Luke drove them home.

  On the way, her phone rang.

  “I’ve found a number of clear paths to some times we haven’t explored yet,” said Seamus. “Some really promising ones. How did your trip go?”

  “I have enough blue fluid for you to make many machines. And we can synthesize more.”

  “How is our boy?

  “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

  “Tell him I miss him.”

  “You can tell him yourself. We’re on our way home.”

  Author’s Note

  I love hearing from my readers. To drop me a note or to learn about my other books, please visit

  www.heatherblackwood.com.

  If you enjoyed this book, please post a review on the retail site where you purchased it.