by Andy Gavin
“Tick-Tocks don’t have cooldowns?” I ask.
“Just those damn thirteen chimes and however long it takes them to dial in their destination.” She squeals like a schoolgirl. “Lock’s almost ready.”
“Why didn’t you tell me what I was?” I say.
She frowns. “Time got away from us? Let me make it up to you. Where’s this Yvaine of yours?”
Joe has finished gathering up his dynamite. “She’s probably in the women's maximum security wing.”
Sophie nods. “I know where that is.”
“You better get him there fast,” Joe says. “The boy’s so in love he might melt.”
My face sure feels hot.
Sophie positions herself carefully with one hand on the lock-pick.
“Joe, when I open the door, blow the ward and lose yourself in the chaos. Just don’t get shot by our side, the diversionary force is about thirty strong.”
“What about me?” I rattle the bars of my cage.
She keeps one hand on Joe’s door and reaches the other toward me.
“Grab my hand. After I open the door, I’ll hop us out of here — only about five minutes, but brace yourself for a rough ride.”
I reach through the bars to take her hand. She twists the lock one last time and kicks the door open. The building shakes.
Then we’re yanked uptime.
The in-between flashes like a strobe light and we’re somewhere else. My face hurtles at something white and I barely get my arms up in front of me before I hit.
Good thing. That something is a toilet somebody forgot to flush.
“Oh God,” Sophie says. “Why can’t I land on my feet like a normal person?”
She’s half under the stall partition of an industrial-looking restroom. Her torso is in with me, her legs clear through into the next stall.
“Charlie, be a dear and pull me out?”
Sophie clutches her remaining pistol, an old-style revolver Humphrey Bogart might’ve used. We slip out of the restroom and into what looks to be the prison guard equivalent of a teacher’s lounge. Big Bertha’s slightly thinner twin sits at a desk and talks into some kind of clockwork contraption with a mouthpiece shaped like a badminton birdie.
Sophie streaks over and puts her gun to the guard’s head.
“Don’t move.”
Bertha 2.0 looks sufficiently cowed.
“Charlie, get her weapons.”
I slide around and unbuckle the woman’s belt, claiming her billy club and a set of manacles.
“We’re looking for the girl named Jane Doe,” I say. “Tiny, pink hair, came in here three or four days ago for high treason.”
Bertha 2.0 talks very slowly. “That one was tried yesterday and sold at auction.”
Pent up frustration bursts in my brain and I swing the billy club at Bertha’s face, but the look of terror in her eyes stops me before I connect.
Sophie mashes the gun against her temple.
“Who bought the girl?”
“I have to look in the file.”
“Slowly, then,” Sophie says. “My nephew here’s got a short fuse.”
I’m starting to feel like a creep about that, but I glower at Bertha for effect. She rolls her chair over to a file cabinet and thumbs through a series of manila envelopes.
“Here,” she says after a minute. “The Lord Proprietor’s household.”
“Who is he?” I shiver inside. He’s the guy Mr. Fusée works for.
“William Penn IV,” Sophie says. “His family owns Pennsylvania.”
How do you own a state?
We leave Bertha handcuffed to her file cabinet.
“I thought we couldn’t shoot anyone,” I say.
Sophie grins. “They don’t know that.” I follow her down a corridor until we’re stopped by a sliding door made from steel bars.
“What now? How do we rescue Yvaine from this Lord Proprietor?”
“We find a way.” Sophie pulls out her picks and sets to work on the lock. “I might as well get this open, but if we can hold out another four or five minutes I can hop us out of the building entirely.”
“Into a latrine?”
“One time your dad and I popped up smack in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg.”
“Been there, done that. Different war,” I say.
“A rush, isn’t it?”
Not really.
“Actually, Yvaine’s pretty good at landing where she wants.” I try not to picture the Lord Proprietor taking inventory of his new slave girl. “She hopped us from London eighty years to her old house in France, right under the kitchen table.”
Sophie smiles. “Damned impressive. The further I go, the crazier the exit. It’s better with your father, but alone I don’t dare go more than a couple hundred yards.”
“Why’s that?”
“When you travel together, your skills blend. So with your dad I can go much further uptime without picking up so much angular velocity.”
“Yvaine didn’t know that.”
“Not surprising. There’s a lot we don’t know. Like why the Tocks are trying to make history into a hell-hole—”
CHIME! A Tick-Tock drops out of a hole in the ceiling behind us. He lands quiet as a cat and draws his sword.
“Use the gun!” Aunt Sophie yells while she fiddles with the lock.
I snatch the pistol from her belt, point it at the Tick-Tock, and squeeze.
The trigger won’t budge.
“The safety!” she yells.
I’ve never shot a gun, but the Tick-Tock is only about five feet away. I flick the switch on the side, aim, and squeeze again.
BAM! The unexpected kick knocks the weapon from my hands. But I must have hit him or at least grazed him — he stops, unbuttons his blue police coat, and examines the gauges and dials decorating his clockwork innards.
“Done!” With a rattling scrape Sophie slides the door open and drags me through.
The Tick-Tock lurches after us. My aunt pulls the door shut right in his face.
The bars bang against the jamb and rebound, sliding to a stop a couple inches ajar. We back away as the Tock thrusts his sword between the bars but makes no move to open the door.
“Hurry!” Sophie says, dragging me by my arm.
The Tick-Tock just stands there, watching us. He’s got the crack on his face, so this is Rapier, the same one that was after Ben Franklin. He glances around, then uses a single finger to spin one brass dial on his chest after another. The Roman numerals and double hands on one look exactly like a clock face.
“Why doesn’t he open the door?” I say as we turn the corner.
CHIME. Countdown to time travel.
“Tocks are way out of phase,” Sophie says. “More than us. They can’t move anything.”
CHIME.
“The hell they can’t! This one grabbed me in London, dragged me down the street.”
CHIME. The sound is fainter as we leave Rapier behind.
“You’re lucky to be alive, but that’s different. I said they can’t move anything. We’re out of phase too, just not as far. They can move time travelers — or kill them.”
CHIME.
I guess that explains why the Tick-Tock just stood there in Ben Franklin’s churchyard when I closed the gate in his face.
“So closing a door stops them?”
CHIME. I can barely hear it now.
“For the whole minute it takes them to wind themselves up and travel into our future. The only thing I know that holds them up for long is a really high-voltage shock.”
Sophie’s got all sorts of valuable info.
We plunge into a big open gallery filled with prisoners clustered at the bars of their cells. They cheer and bang against them and reach their hands out when they see us running but we veer away. I glance down to see row after row of cell blocks stacked beneath us. We’re on the top floor of what must be a ten or fifteen-story shaft. Jail all the way down!
We’re almost cut off by a
couple guards at a T-shaped junction but we put on the juice to get ahead of them. The officers swing into pursuit just ten feet behind us, legs pumping and clubs held high.
In front of us, a heavy ward door opens and a squad of rifle-armed guards hustles through.
With the Rapier Tick-Tock right on their heels.
“Hands above your heads!” shouts a guard with shiny things on his shoulders. “You’re trapped!”
Four gun barrels are leveled in our direction. Sophie doesn’t even pause, just hurtles right at them.
“Stay with me, Charlie!”
Holding my hand in hers, she hops up onto the rail of the balcony and gives me a tug.
She’s crazy for sure and I must be too, because I plant my free hand on the rail and plunge over the side with her.
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Plans
Philadelphia, March, 2011
MY STOMACH SOMERSAULTS as we tumble down the gallery shaft. The ground floor rises toward us just as fast.
“Uptime!” Sophie cries.
My neck jerks as our descent reverses and we pop up into the swirling whirling in-between—
Then slide out sideways onto a long table.
I lose my grip on Aunt Sophie as we spill across a sea of silverware. Plates, glasses, and food break, tip over, and splatter in our wake. By the time I roll to a stop, I have to extract a fork lightly embedded in the meat of my palm.
“Major,” a familiar voice says, “do you have something against shepherd’s pie?”
“How long since I left you in that cell?” Aunt Sophie asks Joe Fairfax once we’re off the table and I’ve pressed a napkin against the fork wound.
“Two days,” he says. “I thought you must be dead or captured.”
She runs her fingers through her hair, picking out bits of mashed potatoes and peas.
“You know me, always popping up unexpectedly.”
His smile is bright against his dark face. “I’m not going to complain. And we’ve made progress here.”
Sophie holds up ten fingers then points an extra one.
“You’d better have. The king gets here in eleven days.”
“Why’s he coming?” I say.
“2011 is King Charles’s Silver Jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his reign, so he’s touring the empire. And when he comes here, he’ll be celebrating up at the Lord Proprietor’s palace.”
I have to stop myself from running out into the street and hailing whatever passes for a cab.
“You’ve got it bad,” Aunt Sophie says when we we’re alone.
“I have to find her,” I say. “Back in France, time gave us the weirdest preview of Yvaine and me as a couple. Like seeing the future. We went downtime two weeks and kind of ran into ourselves.”
“Your residuals?” She grins.
“Yvaine called them time-ghosts.”
“Close enough.” Sophie leads me to the kitchen and pours a glass of water. “How’d you feel about yourselves?”
I help myself to a cold beer from the icebox. The taste makes me think of Yvaine.
“Confused,” I say.
“Residuals are just the universe’s way of putting a normal-person gloss on our abnormal existence. Your dad’s got a theory, says travelers have an extra dimension of motion, what he calls meta-time. Whatever the current history is, like this no-America Philadelphia, the entirety of it — past, present, and future — is our meta-present. The history you grew up with, that’s in our meta-past. It doesn’t exist for us anymore.”
Big bummer, since that’s where my mom is.
“We can’t travel there?”
“Sorry, Charlie. We’re stuck in our shared time traveler meta-present. You and I are standing here getting older. Eventually we’ll die and meta-time will go on the way regular time goes on for normals. If you double back on yourself you’ll just find time-ghosts.” She snickers. “Phantoms the universe creates to explain us away.”
“But if we change things back,” I say, “doesn’t the meta-past become the meta-present again?”
“Easier said than done.”
“Didn’t Dad have to change time to send his message?”
She nods. “Any forward communication does. But you have to be careful. Little alterations have a way of snowballing — and Tocks are good at spotting changes.”
Yeah, I’ve seen that in action.
“Anyway, your Yvaine’s in the present — this present — so first things first.”
Sophie takes me to what, judging by the guards at the door, is the rebels’ inner sanctum. When we find Joe I ask him why every inch of wall inside is plastered with photos.
“Since we plan on taking out the king at the Jubilee banquet,” he says, “we’ve been infiltrating and documenting every aspect of the preparations.”
“Can I look at them?” I explain the whole Yvaine-should-be-at-the-palace thing.
“Knock yourself out,” he says.
The black and white — well, brown and white — photos are sharp enough, but I have to climb on a chair to see the ones tacked up by the moldings. Looking at them, I get a sense of an enormous ballroom with big columns and tables for hundreds of guests. But other photos show preparations, decorations, and entertainment, including giant metal birdcage-things in different shapes and sizes.
“What are all these cages?” I ask.
“The party’s theme is the diversity of the commonwealth,” Joe says, “so they’ve hauled in captive animals from all over the empire. Tigers and snakes and the like. Of course, the real snake sits on the throne.”
There are a lot of photos. While I slog through them, Sophie goes to shower and Joe joins some of his cronies at a table across the room.
With my courthouse mugshot experience and Bréguet’s backward-facing son in mind, I’m betting we time travelers don’t photograph well. I study every picture, every person, and every part of every person until I’m exhausted — hey, I broke out of jail and fought a Tick-Tock today. Running for your life really takes it out of you.
One cluster of photos shows a bunch of girls posed on long tables. Their attire is, well, minimal, barely more than bikinis, and their limbs contort about each other like a giant game of tabletop twister. I’m not in the mood for soft porn right now, I just—
Spot something. Just the one shot. A single image of a leg, twisted up with a bunch of other girls’, but I’d know that little peanut-shaped birthmark anywhere. I call over to Joe.
“What’s the deal with these girls?”
He drifts over to look.
“Yours mixed in with them? Makes sense if she’s young and pretty. They’re buffet decorations.”
“I’m still confused,” I say.
“That’s because you’re a human being and not a Royalist,” he says. “Think of those slaves as human sculpture. Just a bunch of pretty flesh holding up platters of delicacies.”
“And your team is sneaking into this party?”
“We are, but if I’m catching your drift, you’d better know our tickets are entrance only. Even if we succeed, the security forces will make sure there’s no coming home.”
“I don’t care. I’m coming with.”
The rebel base was once someone’s house, but the windows are boarded over and the occupancy has at least octupled. It reminds me of our rank little cellar back in London, but with running water and toilets. Even if the toilets are powered by clockwork mechanisms, I’m still glad to have them.
After my first shower in a month, I find my aunt talking to a dark-skinned hard-muscled woman in bright-colored fatigues, with strong features and short black hair.
“I found Yvaine’s photo,” I say. “She’s going to be at the king’s party!”
“Do you two need privacy?” the dark woman asks. She has a lilting accent, maybe Indian.
“I’m sorry, Parvati,” Sophie says.
The woman smiles. “Just find me when you’re ready for bed.” And with that she gives my aunt a fu
ll-on kiss on the lips.
“How come you never told me?” I say as soon as Parvati leaves.
“You never asked.” Sophie smiles. “If you think it’s hard being a time traveler with Yvaine, imagine what a crimp the whole boy/girl pair thing makes in my sex life.”
Kinda sad. Me, I’m fine with the way the rules glue Yvaine and me together — more than fine. Now if I can just rescue her, get Sophie back to Dad, and fix the world, I’m eager to pick up where we left off on that whole pair thing.
“Where did you and Dad get your 411 on time travel?”
“Some from our parents,” she says, “but mostly Fink concocts his crazy theories from studying the Brief History.”
“Which is?”
“A Brief History of Meta-Time is our name for what old-school time travelers managed to write down. Way back in meta-time, before the war, somebody knew how to make metal sheets that are basically immune to time. But we’ve only collected a few, and the sheets are all scattered every which where and when.”
“We found one in France!” I pull it out. “Can you read it?”
Aunt Sophie sighs. “Ciphers give me migraines, but your dad has it mostly worked out.”
“This one has something to do with a clock inventor named Bréguet.” I tell her what happened in France.
“I was wondering where all this gearhead bullshit came from. Give the page to your dad if we find him. Fink deals with the Regulator mumbo-jumbo.” She pats one of the two pistols strapped to her hips. “I keep us alive.”
I remember Dad’s pile of pages. “That word, Regulator? I found it on this page, in Latin.”
“Not surprising,” Sophie says. “He wrote most of the pages we have. But he’s been dead for meta-forever, since the time-war. He was the first traveler — we’re all descended from him.”
“Shit! Then Yvaine and I are…” I’m too upset to finish the sentence. And my aunt looks amused.