The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  * * *

  It took another four full minutes for the first pair of guards to make it to our end of the train. Crouched underneath the seats, curled up into a tiny little ball, I watched with my heart pounding as four black-booted feet walked slowly down the aisle, then stopped.

  They took the bait, I thought to myself triumphantly. We had left our packs, Bureau tech scattered around in plain sight, on the seats two rows away from the floor space where we were hiding – Carter on one side of the center aisle, me on the other. The guards had stopped exactly where I wanted them to and were bent over, their backs to us, looking down at the pile of gadgets on the seat.

  I nodded at Carter. He nodded back.

  We drew our stun pistols, crawled out into the aisle, and before the two guards even had a moment to register our presence, shot them both in the leg. They dropped to the ground immediately, immobilized but conscious. One reached for his Comm, but I was faster; I stunned them both in the chest, knocking them out before they could make a sound.

  “Nice work,” said Carter approvingly.

  “Can you do that again?” I said. “Without me? When the second two come looking, can you get both of them on your own?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Two unconscious coworkers is way better bait than a bag of Bureau Comms. Why, where are you going?”

  “Into the warehouse,” I said, and he stared at me.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said incredulously.

  “They weren’t sure about the train,” I said. “I mean they can’t have been completely sure we’d be on it. But they did know about the rendezvous point. They knew we had to come back to the warehouse.”

  “So?”

  “So if it was you,” I said, “doing a sweep of a pitch-black warehouse in the middle of the night, and you couldn’t find any signs of the people who were supposed to be there, what would you do?”

  “Call for help,” he said, eyes widening. “Report in, confirm the drop coordinates, narrow the search.”

  I nodded.

  “They’re going to search this warehouse top to bottom and they’re not going to find us,” I said. “And then they’re going to call Grove.”

  “And?”

  “And I have to be there when they do. I need proof that he’s Saturn.”

  “That’s suicide.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Reggie—”

  “Grove has been friends with Congressman Holmes for thirty-five years,” I said. “How the hell am I supposed to get him, or anyone else, to believe me without proof? Even Calliope doesn’t believe me.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

  I pulled his Short-Hop, loaded and ready with five jumps, from the seat where we had left it as bait and handed it to him.

  “Knock out the two guards when they come,” I said, “then Short-Hop them to the train with Calliope and Leo. Keep them there and wait for me. Zap them again if they start to wake up.”

  “You weren’t kidding,” he said. “This really is a bad idea.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he warned me, as he crawled back under the seat again. “Just get what you need, fast, and get out.”

  “I know,” I said. “I promise.”

  I put on my knapsack, set my Comm to stealth mode – the others would be able to hear everything I heard, and the device would record everything, but the incoming channel was turned off, leaving the device silent – then set my own coordinates. I took a deep breath, said a silent prayer, and tapped the Short-Hop’s screen.

  Instantly I was engulfed in blackness. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I found myself exactly where I had hoped I’d be – standing just inside the warehouse doors, concealed in a dark corner away from the guards. They had swept the front of the room first, and I could see their flashlights moving around in the dark away from me. I had to get close enough to hear – and record – without being spotted.

  I waited in silence for a few minutes, watching the flashlights sweep the far corners of the warehouse. They were finishing up. They hadn’t found us. They were annoyed. Oh please, I begged silently. Please, be annoyed. Call your boss and tell him. Please, please, give me something.

  A flashlight beam glided over the wall above my head and I ducked down, huddled in a corner between two overturned train cars. It moved from floor to wall to floor and I realized that one of the guards was walking towards me.

  “Bravo Team to Saturn,” said the guard.

  “Report,” said a voice that was so unmistakably Harold Grove’s that I didn’t realize until that moment how desperately I had wanted to be wrong.

  Dammit, I thought. Damn everything.

  I sent a silent apology to Calliope, who I knew could hear it through my silent Comm, and closed my eyes to blink back tears.

  “We’ve swept the whole warehouse,” he said. “There’s no sign of them.”

  “What time is it there?”

  “Quarter past eleven, sir.”

  “And the train?”

  “Alpha Team is sweeping it now, sir, but they haven’t reported anything.”

  “Run a scan,” said Grove. “One of them never left the building. She’s still there. Did you look inside the train cars?”

  “Yes, sir. And we’ve run scans. There’s no trace of agent activity; no radiation and no trackers. Like they were never here.”

  “Damn her,” said Grove, his voice an unsettling mix of anger and something that might have been affection. “She’s covered their tracks somehow. You’re just going to have to start kicking open doors, then. They’re inside that building, or they will be soon.”

  “What do we do we don’t find all of them?” said the guard. “If they’re not together.”

  “Shoot the boys,” said Grove. “They don’t matter. But Mars wants Regina Bellows alive.”

  “And the other girl, sir?”

  There was a silence.

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said finally. “You can stun them both, but I don’t want the girls harmed. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Report back again in fifteen minutes.”

  “Will do, sir.

  And the Comm clicked off.

  I pulled out my Short-Hop and jumped, landing in a dingy freight car on a moving train. Leo and Carter were huddled together next to the pile of black-uniformed bodies, talking quietly, while Calliope sat alone in a corner, staring at the wall. All three were startled by my arrival.

  “Strip them,” I said. “Keep everything. Uniforms, weapons, scanners, all of it. Where are we headed?”

  “Calliope said this train is on its way to Baltimore,” Leo said. “We have about two hours.”

  “Good,” I said. “That gives us plenty of time. We have about half an hour before these four start to wake up.”

  We worked in silence for a few minutes, stripping each guard down to their underwear and frisking them carefully. Carter and Leo and I worked on uniforms and set all their tech aside for Calliope. They all wore earbuds and Microcams, had stun pistols in their holsters and wicked-looking laser rifles strapped to their backs, and – most importantly – transport Comms.

  All of this went into Calliope’s pile. She watched us in silence for a moment from her corner before her curiosity got the better of her, and she rose to walk over to our side of the train car and see what we had collected.

  Once the four guards were entirely stripped down, Carter helped me lay them out on the floor, in pairs, limbs entangled with each other in a grotesque dance.

  “Calliope, I need two Short-Hops,” I said. “Programmed for the coordinates Carter and I just left. We need Bravo Team to think Alpha Team is still sweeping the train to buy ourselves a little head start.”

  She didn’t acknowledge that she had heard, but wordlessly pulled the devices out of her pack, tapped on the screens a few t
imes, then tossed them to me without even looking in my direction. I set one on top of each pair of guards, then stared at them.

  “How do you turn them on without touching the thing and getting yanked back with them?” asked Leo.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “I didn’t think that through.”

  “You could grab the guy’s hand and use his fingers to push the button. Then you’re not touching the Short-Hop,” suggested Carter.

  “But I’d be touching him,” I pointed out. “I’d still get yanked.”

  “What if you lifted up his foot,” said Leo, “and put the thing under his heel, and then dropped his foot, so then when it pushed the button you wouldn’t be touching it?”

  “Or you could put it next to them,” said Carter, “and roll them over.”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” snapped Calliope, pulling out her handheld. “They have a remote setting,” and with three clicks all the guards were gone.

  “Thank you,” I said, but she had already gone back to scanning one of the U.E. transport Comms and pointedly ignoring me.

  We watched her work in silence for awhile as the train slowly chugged along towards Baltimore.

  “I’ve tried,” Carter said to me very quietly, “and Leo’s tried, but . . .”

  And he gestured in Calliope’s direction helplessly.

  “Really?” I said incredulously. “Me? Calliope’s having emotions and you think I’m the one to go talk to her?”

  “Not under regular circumstances, no,” he admitted, “but Leo and I couldn’t even get her to look at us.”

  “Good Lord,” I said.

  “Why do you look more uncomfortable about this than about charging into the warehouse to spy on armed guards?”

  “Reggie Bellows,” I said. “Pleased to meet you,” and against his will he let out a tiny snort of laughter. I sighed and looked over at Calliope, still tinkering with the wrist Comm. “Here goes nothing,” I said to Carter, and walked over to sit down next to her.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Can I help?”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “No.”

  “Then no,” she replied coldly, without looking at me. I gestured helplessly at Carter and Leo and started to get up and leave, but they both waved me back down. I watched Calliope work in silence for a little while, her irritation at my continued presence almost palpable. A few minutes went by before I spoke again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I’m sorry you had to hear him say those things.”

  “Stop talking right now,” she said in a cold, dangerous voice. “Stop.”

  “It wasn’t an I-told-you-so,” I said. “It was to get evidence for Holmes.”

  “I’m not doing this with you right now.”

  “Calliope, I had to. You know I had to. I needed proof.”

  And then Calliope snapped.

  “I swear to God, Regina Bellows,” she said, flinging the wrist Comm in her hand onto the floor of the train car with a loud clang. “If you say one more word after I’ve asked you twice to stop talking, I’m going to throw you out of this train.”

  “All right,” I said, finally losing my patience. “That’s it. I am done having this fight with you. I’m over it. You can stomp and shout at me all you want to, but you know what? He was my boss too. He was my mentor too. He went to school with my parents. You don’t have a monopoly on being devastated here.”

  “You do not get to act like I did this to you, like you’re the only one this is happening to,” I went on. “Leo and I grew up in that office, Calliope. We’ve known Harold Grove since we were born, and now we’ve just found out that he might have killed our dad. So don’t lose your shit in my face like I’m the one that did this to you. You want to be mad? Be mad at him.”

  “It’s not you,” she said after a long moment, and I could see her unbending slightly. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at me.”

  I looked at her curiously, and she looked back at me for the first time. There was weary resignation in her eyes. She looked ten years older than she had that morning.

  “The Chronomaly was concealed for years by someone at the Bureau who was logging in every single day to reconfigure the Timeline manually,” she said. “And then the very day Harold Grove is taken off active duty is the day the mask starts to slip, and suddenly the Chronomaly is visible. You want to know why I’m angry? I’m angry because I missed that.”

  I didn’t say anything, but put my arm around her.

  “It should have been so obvious,” she said. “Right from the beginning. He must have panicked when he woke up in sickbay and realized he had no Timeline access and no security clearance. He would have known that the Chronomaly was becoming visible. He would have guessed that you and your mother had found it, and that was why you were sent to 1972.”

  A pause. Then she continued, “So he did the only thing he could do. He started the rumor that Carstairs and Bellows had planted the Chronomaly themselves. He couldn’t cover it up anymore, so the next best thing was to let it get out in the open and blame it on somebody else.”

  “And shut the whole Bureau down while he was at it,” I agreed, “so nobody could go back and undo all his work.”

  “He’s always been good at thinking on the fly,” said Calliope. “It’s a very Harold Grove plan.”

  “I know.”

  “I wish it wasn’t.”

  “I know.”

  “We played golf together,” she said. “Did you know that? He taught me how to play golf.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He spent Christmas with my family twice,” she said. “He sent flowers when my grandmother died.”

  “Calliope—”

  “I was nineteen when I started working for him. He was like a dad to me. He taught me everything I know.”

  She turned to me, eyes shining, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never seen Calliope cry. “He’s a good person, Reggie,” she said. “This can’t be who he really was. He can’t have been this person all along. I would have seen it.”

  “Calliope, we don’t know who he really was,” I said gently. “We only know what he showed us. We only know the face he put on at work.”

  “And now you’re telling me he was a traitor. And that fifty-six million innocent American and Chinese citizens died so he could help some company get rich. This man I’ve worked for my entire adult life. He’s a monster.”

  “Find me a better answer then,” I begged her, tears suddenly heavy my eyes too. “Seriously. Anything. The craziest idea you have, I’ll take it. I don’t want it to be true either, Calliope. Because if it is? If Saturn was Grove all along? Then that means all these years he’s been committing treason right under our noses. He was doing all of this from ten feet away. Logged into the same computer system. You were right there. He was hiding from everyone, Calliope, but he was hiding most of all from you.”

  “He’s not Mars, at least,” said Leo, who I noticed had suddenly drifted over towards us. “That’s something.”

  Calliope turned and looked at him sharply.

  “What do you mean?” she said. Leo looked down, suddenly shy.

  “Well,” he said uncomfortably. “I mean, I might be wrong. It might mean nothing. But I just thought – well, Mars is really the one who started the war, right? So we don’t actually know if Harold Grove had anything to do with what happened to Dad, or to all those other people. Maybe he was just the cover-up.”

  “The cover-up for a war that killed fifty-six million people,” said Carter. “He was complicit in genocide. I know he meant a lot to all of you, but we can’t forget that.”

  “We’re not,” said Leo. “She’s not. I didn’t mean that. All I meant was . . . Calliope, maybe it wasn’t all a lie. Maybe he wanted you to think he was a good person because he wanted to believe he was a good person.”

  Leo’s voice was reasonable, patient. “Maybe once, long
ago, he did a terrible thing, and found himself under the thumb of this company, and he’s been stuck there for years. Maybe he’s desperate, and he’s afraid, and he’s trapped – but maybe he’s not a monster.”

  “You heard him on the Comm. We all heard him. He told the guards not to touch you. He didn’t want anyone to hurt you. He’s still Saturn, he still has all that blood on his hands and he still needs to be stopped, but maybe, also, there’s a tiny part of him that’s still the man you wanted him to be. Would that help? A little?”

  “I never thought of it like that,” I began to say, before I realized that neither of them were listening to me. They were looking at each other. And then Calliope did the least Calliope thing I had ever seen her do. She stood up, dusted herself off, wiped the tears from her eyes, and walked over to Leo. Then she placed her hand on the back of his neck, pulled his face down toward hers, and kissed him.

  Watching someone kiss your brother is uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons, and I wanted to look away, but Carter and I were both so totally astonished – in fairness, I think, so was Leo – that we just stood there, staring, jaws on the floor, as Calliope kissed my brother and my brother kissed her back.

  “You’ve been with them a lot longer than I have,” I whispered to Carter. “How long has this been going on?”

  “As far as I was aware, for the past fifteen seconds,” he said. “I had no idea.”

  “That can’t possibly be true.”

  “Well, all right, I admit I did harbor some idle wonderings—”

  “I knew it. You were holding out on me.”

  “I assumed you paid attention to the behavior of other human beings and that eventually you’d pick up on the context clues yourself. The more fool I.”

  “I had three days, you had eighteen months.”

  “I’m thinking an April wedding, tulips and hyacinth, bride and groom in white linen, wine and seafood reception to follow at Leo’s restaurant.”

  “Are you hiring yourself as wedding planner?”

  “I’d be an amazing wedding planner and you know it. I’d be so much better at it than you. If you were in charge the wedding reception would be just everyone sitting around on couches eating protein supplements with no pants on.”