This is one of the gambits Ethan and I had thought of. On the one hand, it would be safer to get her to a public place and away from the scene of the murder altogether. On the other hand, the earlier and more radically we change the circumstances, the less advantage we have in knowing the future in the first place: What if by getting her out of that building, we only manage to change the venue and the timing of the murder, so we no longer know when and where it will happen?
How tenacious is the future? How tenacious is Andrew Baltos?
Mona rolls her eyes a little. “So Maya’s worried I’m going to spend my birthday alone, is she?”
“No, it’s not that. She didn’t say that.”
“Well, you can tell her that I’m supposed to be meeting up with someone later.”
Alarms are clanging in my head. That must be Baltos. So it’s not a surprise visit—that was one of the things we wondered about.
“Not somebody I’m so particularly eager to see, but contrary to what Maya may think, I’m not just withering alone in my office.”
What does that mean? What is her relationship with him? I look at Mona’s expectant face and I realize I need to stay where I am with her, not get ahead. “I don’t think …” I begin. My talents at sisterly diplomacy are completely insufficient. “I’m sure that’s not what she meant. I think she just wished she could be here to hang out with you, and so she asked me—”
Mona cuts me off with a gesture. “Thanks—is it Petra? I appreciate you trying. Maya has the most loyal friends a person could have, but I’ve actually got to stick around and upload a bunch of things to a new server. Some security breach in our company’s system. Like my work is so super secret and in demand.” The sardonic expression is back.
“Maybe it is,” I say earnestly. I probably shouldn’t have.
Her computer makes a dinging sound and she goes back to it. “One set of files done, four more to go.”
I am trying to figure out a way to stay with her that won’t sound socially ham-handed or weird. “Listen, I understand you not wanting to toast your birthday with a total stranger,” I begin.
“You know my sister Maya. You’re not a total stranger,” she says.
“Even so, I understand it’s kind of an odd offer, and you’ve got stuff to do. But do you mind if I hang out here for another twenty minutes or so? My friend is coming to pick me up, and he’s coming in from the city.”
“That’s fine,” she says quickly. “It’s the least I can do after you came all this way. Anyway, it’s boring waiting for this stuff to load. This whole lab usually clears out by seven, and it gets kind of creepy here, so I’m happy for the company. Here.” She draws a chair from the corner. “Sit.” She’s not unfriendly, but I don’t get the feeling she wants to talk. “I have another computer you can use if you need to.”
“That’s great. Thanks,” I say. I make no move to the computer, but I take a quick look at my phone. “But if you need to go—”
“This guy I’m meeting up with isn’t supposed to be getting here until seven-thirty.”
“Okay,” I say. My pulse is racing. This business is going to unfurl pretty quickly. Hard to imagine how one seemingly ordinary moment in life can stitch to a horrifying, life-ending kind of one.
“How do you like Boston?”
I’ve never been to Boston. “I like it a lot.”
“I did too. You’re on summer break now?”
“Exactly. Yeah.” My eyes are darting around, waiting for the next thing to happen. I cast an eye to her filing cabinet. It looks locked, I think. My nerves are coiling.
Part of me wants to keep talking to her, even though I am mostly lying, and part of me just wants us both to shut up and get on with it.
I poke around on my phone and watch her work, until a buzzer rings and I jump as though I never expected that in a million years.
Not so with Mona. She glances casually up from her computer screen. “That must be him.” She presses a button on her phone, connecting her to an intercom. “Andrew?”
Don’t let him in! Do you know what he’s going to do to you? I order my mind to shut up. We need to let this play out.
“Hey, it’s me,” I hear a man say.
My heart is pounding in my ears. I try to take normal breaths, to think calmly through the contingencies Ethan and I talked about. If this happens, then we do that. If this, then that.
She presses another button, I’m guessing to open the door to the reception area.
I fervently hope Ethan will find a way in through that door behind him. As Mona walks into the hall to meet him, I hang back for a second and push that same button again, just in case.
I can barely bring myself to look at Andrew Baltos walking down the hall. And when I do I am struck by something. He’s medium height, stocky, with hair not much longer than stubble on his head mostly covered by a baseball cap. My mind leaps around, trying to make sense of the connection. Lord knows what expressions are running amok on my face.
He looks past Mona to me, and I realize he’s studying me carefully too.
Discordantly, I watch Mona greet him with a cool embrace and step aside to make introductions. “Andrew, this is …”
I am fumbly and useless. “Petra,” I burst out. When assuming a fake name, it’s best not to forget it.
“My youngest sister Maya’s friend. Petra, this is Andrew.”
He doesn’t look so cold-blooded, or so collected himself. He sticks out his hand to shake mine.
Now what? I know what is going to happen, but I can’t imagine how it’s going to work.
There is something in his eyes. “Petra?” he repeats. He is trying to figure me out too.
And I realize what it is. His size and shape and the baseball cap on his head remind me in a visceral way of the dark shape I saw running away from my murdered father. Could it be? I couldn’t see him well enough to be at all sure, but what if he is?
And if he is, does he recognize me from that night? This isn’t what is supposed to be happening! If he does, is it going to blow everything? My thoughts are like marbles that fall out of my head and are clacking around on the floor. I wish I could gather them all back.
I picture my father curled like a mealworm on the ground. I try to picture the figure in the baseball cap running away.
I come completely unstuck from the moment. I float off to another place in time. By the time I come back, I’ve missed the juncture I was watching for. Whatever step I might have had, I lose.
It happens so quickly. They are walking back into her office, and Mona is saying something, possibly to me, that I don’t hear. She goes back to her computer to finish the last upload. I am trying to get my excellent eyes to stick on Andrew Baltos, but it’s all changing fast. Suddenly he’s shoving me toward Mona, and honestly it’s as though I never anticipated anything more dramatic than a pleasant conversation.
I fall into her, roughly, trying to regain my balance. He kicks the door shut behind him. Mona is looking up in astonishment, and I follow her eyes to the gun he is pointing at the two of us.
I can’t believe this is happening, in spite of everything I know. Why doesn’t he care that I am here witnessing his crime? I was supposed to be a deterrent if nothing else, cause some confusion and force him to rethink his plans. Is he going to murder the two of us just as easily as one? Weren’t we figuring on some amount of compunction?
Mona opens her mouth, lets out a noise. I put my hand on Mona’s arm. I don’t know why. I guess it is a gesture of comfort. I am welcoming her to her destiny.
And as I am trying to collect my marbles, I wonder, How am I going to stop this?
“Go over there,” Baltos says, gesturing with the gun. “Sit down against the wall.”
Mona looks at him in disbelief. Her eyes simply didn’t comprehend it enough to be afraid. “Are you serious? What is going on?”
“Go!”
I pull her by the arm to the wall. I sit her down. I comprehend it plenty w
ell to be afraid. A part of me just wants it to be over with. I don’t want Ethan to arrive at all.
Andrew Baltos keeps the gun pointed at us and steps over to her computer. I see the sweat soaking in big U shapes under his arms, patches down his back. With his other hand he navigates her screen. Within minutes of searching, his frustration quickly blooms. “What did you do?” he demands of Mona. He walks toward us. “Where are the EFP studies?”
I can see suspicion dawning on Mona’s face. “I moved them.”
“Where?”
“Someplace safe,” she says.
He goes to the other computer, a laptop, and searches its hard drive quickly, keeping the gun trained on us. He grows impatient with it and shoves it away.
He stands up and goes to the filing cabinet. I pray it is locked. He pulls at each of the drawers, cursing. With one arm he throws the heavy cabinet to the ground. It catches the side of the desk chair and flips the chair up on its side. Two of the file drawers pop open, and papers and folders spill out.
There is chaos of noise. Baltos has his back to the door and is leaning over to pick up files, and Ethan takes this moment to enter the office. I draw in a sharp breath as Ethan drives his shoulder into Baltos’s back.
Mona screams and I clutch her hand. Baltos smashes into the desk, and Ethan violently strips the hand holding the gun. The gun slides across the carpet toward Mona and me, and I reach for it. I think of what Ethan said about us and guns, but what am I going to do? I stand and point it shakily at Baltos. “Stand up,” I say. I can’t quite believe myself.
Baltos more or less complies, slowly getting up from where he’d collided with the desk. Ethan steps away from him.
Mona is staring, mystified, at Ethan. “What are you doing here?”
“Stand up,” I order Andrew Baltos again. “Put your hands out.” I use my second hand to steady my first on the gun. I glance at Ethan. I test the feel of the trigger against my index finger.
Ethan comes close to me. I can feel he wants to reach for me but doesn’t. He doesn’t risk interfering with my concentration. “Are you okay?” he asks under his breath.
“Yes,” I say. I want to look at him, for him to prop me up, and I also want to cry, but I don’t dare take my eyes off Baltos.
“Is Ethan the friend you were waiting for?” Mona asks.
I nod.
Ethan approaches Baltos again. “Keep your arms out in front of you,” he tells him. He takes the wallet from Baltos’s back pocket. “Now reach your arms up,” Ethan says. He reaches into Baltos’s shirt pocket and takes out his phone.
Ethan steps back and I can’t help but look at his face. There’s something in his expression that spooks me. “What is it?” I ask him.
He shakes his head.
“Ethan, tell me.”
“The gorilla.”
“What?”
“He’s a traveler,” Ethan says to me under his breath.
“Can’t be.”
“He is.”
“He can’t be.”
“I can see it very clearly.”
My hands are shaking horribly. “He’s in the newspaper.”
Mona and Baltos are staring at us. Nobody is moving.
“I think he’s your Moses,” Ethan says quietly.
TWENTY
Everything that happens after that is my fault. I am trying to make sense of what Ethan is saying and I lose my focus. I lose my nerve.
Where is he from? He didn’t come with us. What does it mean? The newspaper was written seventy years before we came.
When Baltos slams Ethan with his fist in the side of the head, I don’t shoot Baltos as I should. For that split second my eyes follow Ethan.
Baltos takes the moment to charge into me at full force. He throws me backward. My head hits the wall. I don’t even know what happens with the gun.
Mona cries out. I struggle to stay conscious and alert. I have to protect Ethan. I crawl across the floor to reach him, but Baltos is up on his feet, his gun back in his hand.
Baltos is rattled too. His hand is unsteady. “Why are you making this so difficult?” he demands. “All three of you. Put your backs against that wall.”
We do as he says. Ethan has his hands on me, checking to see that I’m all right. I hear Mona crying.
He gestures to me and Ethan. “I don’t want anything to do with you. Why are you here?” His voice nearly cracks with the strain of it.
“We’re not going to stand back and let you kill her,” Ethan says.
Baltos shakes his head. He looks like he’s going to be sick. “You don’t get to decide.”
Ethan is pushing himself up from sitting. Now it’s me clutching at him, trying to pull him down.
Baltos turns on him. “Just stay where you are, all right?” he explodes. “If you move, I’ll shoot you.” He is agitated. He looks crazy. He is Moses. He is Traveler One. But he doesn’t save us. He destroys us.
Ethan shakes free of my hand and gets up. “Ethan, stop!” I scream. I can hear myself sobbing. This is how it happens. I can’t let it happen.
Suddenly the gun is less than half a foot from Ethan’s head. I hear the barrel click. “Please, no,” I cry. I tackle Ethan to the floor and in that moment, Baltos turns and fires the gun directly into Mona Ghali’s chest.
In horror I watch as her chest seems to cave and then open.
I scream again.
Baltos’s body is shaking. He drops the gun on the ground. He looks almost as horrified as we do, like he wasn’t expecting this, this wet and warm and living horror to be the result of pulling a dry trigger on a gun. He throws the door open and disappears down the hall.
Gazing at Mona, angled wrong and open-eyed on the floor, I hear the heavy, rushed footsteps getting fainter.
“She’s dead,” Ethan says, and I know that’s true. He picks the gun up off the floor. Before I can do anything to stop him, he is gone.
I get up and go after him. I don’t know what else to do.
How long does thinking take? Does it fit into time? I think it is strange that the whole world can change in the time it takes to run across a dark parking lot.
At one end of the parking lot I am still fighting the natural order of time, still hoping to defy her. I am failing, but I am fighting. I lost Mona, but I am not letting her get Ethan.
At the other end of the parking lot, I know it is something else. I am not fighting time. She’s not really my enemy. I am fighting Andrew Baltos, Traveler One. He is the one who did this to her, to us. Mighty fate is injured and confused, like Babar’s mother after the hunters get her, and I am trying to help undo a terrible injustice. I am trying to give the poor soul a break.
I hear a gunshot.
My whole body turns icy. I am running on these terrible icy limbs of mine, though I can barely feel them. I am crying warmly, melting my own icy face.
You better not have, I say in my mind to Andrew Baltos. You just better not have.
I can’t see either of them anymore. The sound of the shot came from the wooded area beyond the parking lot. I run, icily, to where I heard the sound.
A few yards out I see two dark figures, one standing and the other on the ground. I sprint wildly toward the figure on the ground, ready to throw my arms around my beloved, but when I get there, I pull up short. It’s Andrew Baltos on the ground. Beloved son, brother, and friend is standing up and holding the gun, as alive as I am.
My whole body is flooding with warmth. “What happened? Is he dead?” I look down and I see he’s not. He’s writhing, though.
“I shot him in the leg,” Ethan says. His voice is flat. He hasn’t gotten around to feeling all this yet. Calmly, he takes a phone out of his pocket, the one he took from Baltos. I watch him, for the second time in four days, call 911. “My name is Andrew Baltos,” he says into the phone. “I’m at 7736 River Road, Teaneck. Sixth floor. I just shot someone. I believe she is dead.” He ends the call.
I can’t calm down, not any part of
myself. But my limbs are thawing in all this warm relief. “Is he okay? What are you going to do about him?” I say, looking down on him. He’s a poor specimen, our Moses.
“I’m going to call an ambulance and stay until it gets here. But before I do, we’re going to talk to him.”
Andrew Baltos is writhing, but I sense he is also listening.
“If he talks too slow, he might bleed to death, but otherwise he ought to be fine,” Ethan says, amply loud so he will hear.
I look at Ethan’s hands. In the darkness a phone is glinting in one fist and a gun in the other. I reach out and take the gun from him. I wind up and throw it. The three of us watch it spinning through the air. I’ve never thrown anything farther in my life. I hope the muddy ground is muddy enough to swallow it up forever.
“Why did you do that?” Ethan says. He’s more surprised than mad, I think.
“No more shooting today,” I say. For the first time, I let myself tug at the corner of the thought that Ethan will be okay.
“Who are you?”
At first Andrew Baltos is not in the mood to talk. But over a couple of minutes it seems to dawn on him that he’s not in the mood to bleed to death either.
“What do you mean, who am I?” he grunts. “I am the guy you just shot in the leg.”
Within a couple of minutes we are listening to the first siren. And then to a lot of sirens.
Ethan is all business. “I know you are a traveler.”
This stops the writhing.
“I want to know when you came from. Why you came.”
The man is in pain and he’s mad and he’s flabbergasted, and Ethan sure did get his attention. “How do you know this?”
“I can see it from looking at you. I’ve never seen a traveler who’s less assimilated.”
“And you’ve seen others?” Baltos sounds sarcastic.
“I have.” He points to me. “Her, for example.”
Andrew Baltos sits up and tucks his leg under him protectively. His face is pale, looking from one of us to the other. “Why should I believe this?”
“Up to you,” says Ethan. “It will save time if you do. I want to know why you came. Why you murdered Mona Ghali.”
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