by Rysa Walker
I feel like I’m reading lines in a play—a horribly lame, badly written play no one would ever want to see. Still, we have to say something, and I don’t want to venture near any topic that might give information to the Watchers.
“By the way,” Katherine says, “the scarf we talked about finally came in. You never can tell when you order online, but the fabric is just as beautiful as it was on the website. I left it on your bed.”
We’ve never looked at scarves online. Biohazard gear, yes. Scarves, not so much.
“Oh, good. Thanks.”
“You talked to Harry, right? How is your grandfather doing?”
“Better. Grandpa’s back home. Physical therapy starts tomorrow. Dad’s going to try to come back after that, at least briefly.”
Katherine talked to Dad yesterday, so she knows all of this. She’s just stuck in the same conversational dead zone that I am. I grab my coffee and hurry upstairs, sparing both of us the need to invent more inane chitchat.
When I open the door to my room, a shopping bag is on the bed, next to Julia’s tablet. Inside the bag is a long silk scarf in a pretty shade of burgundy. I pick it up, and a sheet of paper tumbles out of the folds of fabric.
It hits the floor a bit too hard to be just a sheet of paper. After unfolding it, I see four pins attached, roughly the same shade as the fabric. The paper itself is instructions on wrapping the scarf to form a hijab.
Good call, Katherine. I’ll have to change into clothes that are more modest than my current shorts and T-shirt to pull it off, but covering my hair will make it less likely that anyone Julia or the Cyrists have in London watching Mom will recognize me.
I pack a few things in my backpack and have now run out of excuses for avoiding Julia’s homework. So I pick up the tablet she gave me and type in the password she made me repeat five times before I left the office.
This time there’s no video, just a mostly blank screen with four documents, all labeled with a single digit. The document entitled 1 is a note instructing me to open the other files, verify the information, and add any other data I might have. The final sentence, in bold print, reads Do not disable track changes in any document! Someone clearly has control issues.
File 2 looks like an employment application. Everything has been filled in already, including private information like my social security number. There’s a small yellow flag at the bottom with a red X, pointing to a bit of legalese releasing Julia Morrell Waters, individually, and Cyrist International, collectively, from any liability if I am injured, “unless said injury occurs during an action specifically ordered by a superior.” There’s a line for my signature and one for “Parent or Guardian.”
Why would Julia be acting to protect Cyrist International? Last time I checked, that’s the group we’re trying to destroy.
File 3 is a graphic of a timeline, with colored boxes. The only key is a list of numbers assigned to the historians, so I can’t tell if the colors mean anything or if they’re just added for visual effect. Most boxes contain one or two numbers and a location, sometimes with a full or partial date. Maybe half of the boxes are crossed through. Some places and dates in the x’d-out boxes are familiar—the one labeled Dallas, TX 11201963, for example. It has two numbers inside, 15 and 16, assigned in their list to my dad’s biological parents, Timothy and Evelyn Winslow.
08091938 is assigned to 2, 3, 4—Abel, Delia, and Grant, the trainee who disappeared just before all hell broke loose at Martha’s farm. That box is shaded gray, with the 4 circled, which makes me wonder if they found out what happened to Grant. Katherine’s 1969 jump is there, but the trip she was supposed to make to 1853 is missing. Port Darwin 1942 is there, minus the date, and a quick glance at the section for the 1950s shows only a light blue box with the number 19, which they’ve assigned to Wallace Moehler. Thinking back, I’m pretty sure that I mentioned getting the Port Darwin key to Abel and Delia when we were at Martha’s last night . . . well, last night for me. I don’t think Kiernan or I said anything about getting Moehler’s key in Copenhagen, however.
They’re also missing all of the keys Katherine collected before she brought me into the picture, so updating this is going to take a bit of time. My first thought is ugh, homework. Then I remember this doesn’t have to be my homework. Filling in these blanks is one chore I can assign Katherine and Connor.
The boxes grow increasingly scarce toward the right end of the timeline. One reads ????2024, Cyrus, Miami, FL. Another box is even more cryptic—only the word Deadline with no specific year. The box just kind of floats below the 2030s.
Then there’s a long blank space before the final box, labeled 04272305, Washington DC, 25–48+. I’m not sure what the numbers at the end signify. The list below only goes through number 24, and there were only thirty-six historians counting the dozen who weren’t scheduled to jump that day. Why would it say 48+?
The date, however, is easy. April 27, 2305, is when Saul destroyed CHRONOS headquarters—or will destroy it, depending on your perspective. I’m guessing he took really detailed notes at team meetings those last few months and knew exactly where and when each of his colleagues would land. That way he could zip back and kill all twenty-three of them, making sure that none of them interfered with his plans for starting the Cyrists. Or maybe he only planned to kill some of them, if he had an ally or two among his colleagues. His one mistake was assuming that he’d be able to travel freely through time and space once HQ was gone and there was nothing to anchor him back to his point of origin. He was stranded, too, and powerless to change anything.
Until Prudence decided to play around with one of the keys, that is.
The logical thing would be for me to go back, slap that key out of Pru’s fourteen-year-old hands, and destroy it. Saul and the other twenty-three historians would be stuck wherever they landed. Mom would have her sister back. Prudence wouldn’t be a nutcase—well, probably wouldn’t be a nutcase. Kiernan’s family might never have left Ireland. Connor’s two children would still exist. Dad would probably have found the Emily woman from that alternate timeline, and they’d have two cute little curly-haired boys.
But that also means I’d never exist. While contemplating that doesn’t exactly make me happy, I’d make the sacrifice given that all of our evidence points to Saul taking out billions of people in a massive Culling if we don’t stop him. But Katherine’s convinced that plan is too risky. Saul might have had an accomplice. We might still end up with the same situation, and I wouldn’t be around to stop it. Everyone else—Trey, Dad, Kiernan, and Connor—agrees with Katherine on that point. I can’t help but wonder, however, whether some of them might be a bit biased toward finding a solution that includes me being alive at the end.
My eye strays back to the unattached Deadline box hanging out near the 2030s. There are four bullet points in the square:
04272024
12252025
04272034
????
The first entry is the day and month Saul sabotaged CHRONOS headquarters, combined with the year he landed. The next is Christmas of the year after he arrived, and the third would be the tenth anniversary of his arrival.
Whoever wrote this list of dates seems to be choosing events relevant to Saul—although I’m not sure why Christmas is in the mix—and the label Deadline suggests that these are the best guesses as to the date of the Culling. The 2024 date seems unlikely to me at first, given the time and effort they’ve put into setting up the Cyrist religion and establishing a power base, but I could easily imagine Saul deciding it was worth a few years of dueling memories to have himself hailed as a messiah the second he arrived in the past.
Even thinking about that starts my head throbbing. And the fact that all three actual dates are crossed out, leaving only question marks, sends a cold shiver up my spine.
I close the chart and move to the last file, by far the most detailed. It’s a collection of information about CHRONOS and the early twenty-fourth century, structured as a wi
ki, with hyperlinks to the various subsections. There’s enough to fill a book—and a fairly long book at that. Judging from the occasional note highlighting an unsupported or questionable assertion, it appears to have been written by several authors. In addition to lengthy sections on CHRONOS, there’s one labeled History, an odd word choice for a period nearly three hundred years in the future. It’s broken down into subsections: 2100–2199, 2200–2249, 2250–2299, and 2300–2305. After that, there are links to sections on Government, Economy, Demographics, Fashion, and Culture.
This file stirs up some very mixed emotions. Katherine maintains a strict “need-to-know” basis for any information about the future and has generally held that I don’t need to know much of anything. When it comes to the near future, events that I might actually live to see, I tend to agree with her. I steer clear of those locations in the Log of Stable Points, and I’m glad to see this file doesn’t go too far beyond what the people of the 2300s would have considered modern history.
But Katherine also tends to be cryptic on eras that couldn’t be considered spoilers for me, unless she’s worried I’m going to leave messages for my great-great-great-grandchildren. It’s nice that the Fifth Column is willing to give me a bit more latitude, and I’ll definitely be reading this file closely once Mom is back in DC and I can focus.
On the other hand, the very existence of this document suggests the Fifth Column believes Kiernan was right—the keys in the Cyrists’ possession were nabbed from CHRONOS headquarters.
That makes me very nervous. A black void, with short bursts of static, is all any of us sees when we pull up that stable point. It doesn’t look very inviting to me.
As I think more on that, this file, which seemed massive a moment ago, strikes me as rather paltry. Although I researched every jump, I also went into those trips with a pretty solid background about those eras from books, movies, and TV—historical tidbits I learned long before Katherine arrived with the medallion. My background knowledge may have been spotty and even completely wrong on occasion, but it gave me a bit of confidence going in. The past is, at least to some extent, a known quantity.
But everything I read or saw as a kid about the distant future is pure speculation. For a future jump, I’ll be going in with nothing except the information in this file and Katherine’s scattered recollections about the world she knew as a young woman.
That seems like a very thin cushion to land on if I have to jump into that black void.
∞3∞
COUNTY HALL, LONDON
September 10, 3:16 p.m.
Tourists swarm from the red double-decker bus onto the already crowded sidewalk. It’s a warm, sunny day, so I’m not surprised that the area is packed with sightseers. My original plan was to avoid the crowd by jumping in during the early morning when the streets were empty. I’ve never been to London, and even though I’m probably too nervous to thoroughly enjoy it, a few hours to walk along the Thames, see Big Ben, and collect my thoughts over tea and crumpets would be nice. While I’m not entirely sure what a crumpet is, the idea has a certain appeal.
But my plans for an early arrival were nixed. The stable point Katherine showed me last night, just before we were so rudely interrupted by Max, sits right inside the narrow stone entrance to the building. It’s fully cloaked by shadows. Katherine used this location to jump in for a Women’s Liberation Movement march in 1971, and unless someone is actually standing directly beside me in the tunnel, she swears I won’t be seen.
I adjust the pins holding the burgundy scarf in place and pull my backpack over one shoulder. It still feels weird to arrive in public, in broad daylight. It seems that Katherine was right, however. None of the people walking past spare me a second glance as I step out of the alcove. I wish I wasn’t surprised when Katherine actually gives me helpful information, but at this stage of her illness, the odds are against it.
Turning toward the river, I see the massive white lion that stands guard over the southern entrance to Westminster Bridge. I “walked” this street several times on Google Maps before I left Katherine’s, and even though some of the signs have changed since those images were captured, I still have the comfortable sense of having been here before.
Several of the tour bus passengers are now reading a directory near the lion, trying to get their bearings, while others head to the walkway along the Thames without pausing. I guess they’re familiar with the area, or maybe they caught a glimpse of their attraction-of-choice while riding across the bridge—the London Eye would be pretty hard to miss.
A young guy with dark-rimmed glasses leans against the base of the lion statue. I don’t even realize it’s Trey until he smiles. He hasn’t shaved, and he’s wearing a straw hat—not one of those boater things, but more like a fedora.
I stand there for a moment, stunned, and then run to greet him. Well, I try to run, but I have to dodge pedestrians every few steps. When I finally reach him, he scoops me into a hug, followed by a long kiss.
“How . . . and why . . . are you in London? And what’s with the hipster look?”
Trey grins. “Well, your way is obviously quicker, but planes do fly from DC to London, you know. Several times a day, in fact, and since you jumped forward a day, I had time to catch you. I took a red-eye flight and slept on the plane. As for the hat and glasses, consider them the male version of your scarf disguise. Katherine’s idea—she thinks we need to fly under the radar while here. But I kind of like it.”
“You look like your dad. Just younger and scruffier. And you didn’t answer the why question.”
“That should be obvious. I’m here because you’re here.”
“But . . . you shouldn’t be.” I step away, shaking my head slowly.
“You’re not happy to see me?” The question is entirely rhetorical. His eyes are smiling, and I’m sure the answer was written all over my face when I saw him.
But he must also know that his being here worries me, because he quickly adds, “Listen, I know everything you’re about to say. My parents know I’m here. They’re . . . well, I won’t say they were overjoyed, but they didn’t try to stop me.”
“Katherine—”
“Katherine paid for the ticket, Kate. Connor was planning to come instead, but he was glad I volunteered. He’d rather be with Katherine, in case . . . well, in case she needs him. Your dad’s busy in Delaware, and you need backup. Kiernan hasn’t contacted you, so you’ll have to settle for me.”
“Don’t. You’re never someone I settle for. You know that. I just . . . I don’t know what we may be walking into. Mom isn’t going to be happy to learn I’ve been hiding things from her.”
Even though I know I have to be the one to do it, telling Mom the secret I’ve been keeping for the past several months—the secret her own mother has been keeping for her entire life, the secret that has eaten away a good portion of her long-lost sister’s mind—isn’t something I’m really looking forward to. I still don’t know how I’m going to explain it, although I suspect it will involve a good bit of show-and-tell, just like when I told Dad.
“And even Mom can tell that Prudence isn’t stable. She just doesn’t know why yet.”
Trey turns up his palms in a so-what gesture. “Prudence’s instability is all the more reason someone should be with you.”
“I’m not going to be here for long, Trey. It’s not like we’ll have time for sightseeing or anything.”
“I’m not here for sightseeing. I did the tourist thing with Mom a few years ago. I’m here as backup. A second set of eyes. Moral support.”
I relent and give him a tentative smile. I won’t deny that I can use the moral support, and he’s just flown across the Atlantic to be with me. And he’s said more than once that he wishes he could do something to help me, that he feels useless. This is something he can do, so I’m not surprised he jumped at the chance.
But I’d be better off doing this alone. Katherine should have understood that. I think she would have understood
that if she was still thinking straight. While she may not know about the gun in my backpack, she does know about the CHRONOS key. If trouble arises, that medallion is my exit strategy, and it’s not a strategy that can include Trey. Or Mom. So even though I really am happy to see him, I’m also worried he could end up being one more weapon for Prudence to use against me.
Still, Trey is considerably bigger than I am. Bigger than Mom, too. That could come in handy if I need someone to help me drag her to Heathrow. I’m not sure how airport security would feel about him boarding with an unconscious woman, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
“They probably know you’re here,” I say. I’m not even sure who I mean by they. Saul’s people? Prudence’s? Julia’s?
“Maybe. Connor said he was careful when he ordered the ticket. And unlike you, I never promised anyone I wouldn’t go to London. So . . . what’s next? Do we give your mom a warning or just show up at her hotel door?”
“If I knew the room number, maybe. It seemed kind of an odd question to ask when she was in London and I was in Bethesda. I’ll call her again once we’re in the lobby. All I know now is that she’s in a balcony suite on the fourth floor. And it must be at the far end of the hotel—she said she can nearly reach out and touch the Eye.”
The Eye in question is the London Eye, also known as the Millennium Wheel. When Mom mentioned it, the image in my mind was of a tall tower with a needle’s eye window at the top, so I was picturing her on the eighty-seventh floor of some skyscraper hotel. Then I googled it and was hit with an eerie sense of déjà vu as the image of an enormous Ferris wheel, larger even than the one I rode at the 1893 World’s Fair, came onto the screen.
The size difference is even more apparent in person. This wheel sweeps high above County Hall, dipping down nearly to the river at its lowest point.
The early afternoon sky is mostly blue, although the clouds in the distance as we walk toward the Eye suggest rain could be coming. We stroll past a few storefronts, including a small café selling sweets and coffee. A banner outside the London Aquarium invites us to snorkel with sharks. That’s what I feel like I’ve been doing for the past few months anyway, so I’m happy to pass.