The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “This is quite a day for kissing,” I said. “Ask me why. Ask me who else got kissed today.”

  “Oh my God,” said Carter, eyes widening. “You kissed that cop?”

  “Gross,” I said. “No. Woodward. And he kissed me.”

  “You made out with a reporter?”

  “We didn’t make out. It was one kiss. In the elevator. On the cheek. When he was afraid he was sending me off to my death. It was very romantic.”

  “No journalistic integrity, that guy.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “I should call his boss. That’s so unprofessional.”

  “You will not call his boss.”

  “Plus, how will Carl feel? Poor Carl. You should go back and kiss him too. You don’t want to be the woman who comes between them.”

  “It was a kiss on the cheek, you’re making this way too big a deal.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up out of nowhere.”

  “I was just sharing,” I said. “It was just a coincidence, I thought it was interesting—”

  “You wanted to make sure everyone in this train car knew that you got kissed today? Fine, you win, congratulations, this is your big day, don’t let these two jerks ruin it for you.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Mazel tov to you and Mr. Woodward. I hope your first baby is a boy and you name him Carter. How do you feel about double weddings?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Both of you shut up,” snapped Calliope, pulling away from Leo and turning the full force of her irritated Calliope glare on Carter and me. A switch had flipped inside her, and she was back to herself. The sadness was still there in her eyes, but she was brisk and competent and focused once more, and a part of me wondered whether there was a chance that she and Leo were actually, against all probability, really good for each other. Maybe he would teach her what he had learned, as Leo Carstairs’ son, about how to live while carrying around a hole in your heart. Maybe over the past eighteen months, while they waited for me, she had been the one who made him braver. Maybe it made a weird kind of sense.

  “The fact is,” I said, “that regardless of what motivated Harold Grove, he’s not the one we have to worry about right now. We need to find Mars.”

  “And how do we do that?” said Leo. “We’re stuck in the 1970’s.”

  “No, we’re not,” I said. “Everybody, pick a uniform and put it on.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Leo. “What’s happening?”

  “There’s only one working transport lab left in the country that can take us home,” I said. “And these uniforms are going to get us there.”

  “Where?” said Leo suspiciously.

  “The belly of the beast,” I said, tossing him an armored vest. “We’re going inside United Enterprises.”

  Twenty-Two

  Mars

  “This is just the worst idea,” grumbled Leo as Carter strapped the laser rifle to his back for him and straightened his jacket.

  “What’s the plan once we’re inside?” said Carter. “Just Short-Hop out to the safe house?” Calliope shook her head.

  “It’s a secured building,” she said, “blocked for transport in or out except using their own equipment. The guards’ transport Comms are pre-set, we just need to push the button and the system will jump us back, but to get anywhere else we’d need to set coordinates from scratch from their main control room. Which they’ll hardly just let me waltz right into. No, it’s going to have to be old-school. Right out the front doors. We can Short-Hop once we’re two hundred and fifty feet away from the perimeter.”

  “Oh, if that’s all,” said my brother irritably.

  “If Calliope says that’s the only way out, Leo,” I said, “then that’s the only way out.”

  “It’s the only way out,” said Calliope.

  “We’ll be gone before you know it,” I said, trying to sound more reassuring than I felt. “We just need to look like guards for long enough to get ourselves to an open door. It’s a huge corporation. People come in and out all day long. We just need to find a door.”

  “Okay,” said Carter dubiously. “This better work.”

  “What’s your better idea?” I said.

  “Not marrying a reporter, for one thing. Writers keep crazy hours; the kids would never see their dad . . .”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Carter, I am not marrying Bob Woodward.”

  “Do not start this again,” Leo interjected before we could get going. “You can fight all you want once we’re back at the safe house.”

  “Everyone ready?” asked Calliope. We all nodded. She looked over at me. “You give the order, boss,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, raising my left wrist with my stolen U.E. guard Comm. “Go.” And I hit the transport button, and braced for disaster.

  * * *

  My first glimpse of the inner workings of United Enterprises was remarkably anticlimactic. I stepped through the Slipstream back to my own time and found myself in a tiny, blindingly white room, about the size of a broom closet.

  I blessed their trillion-dollar corporate budget that provided individual private transports for each on-duty agent (the U.S. government only had one in our whole building) because it meant that we had all landed with zero HIO interference. Nobody had seen us. It had worked. We were almost home.

  Now we just needed to get out of the building.

  I tentatively pushed open the door and peered out into the hallway. It was white out there too, pristine and immaculate. The guard’s helmet shielded my eyes as they adjusted to the bright light. I was in a long corridor full of white doors, all closed, with a massive metal double door at one end and a glass one into the control room at the other. I stepped outside.

  “Anybody else land inside a box?” I heard Leo say quietly, and realized the rooms must have been soundproofed; I could only hear him through the Comm.

  “Me,” said Carter.

  “And me,” said Calliope.

  “Come outside,” I said. “I’m in the hallway.”

  After a moment, I saw a door open, far away down at the other end, and a black-uniformed figure stepped out of it. Then another, right across from me, and another three doors down. We stood there tentatively for a moment, staring at each other, before one of them removed a helmet and revealed a head of springy golden curls. It was Calliope. Then we all took our helmets off.

  “I thought for a second you might be real guards,” said Carter in a very low voice as he and the others came towards me. “Damn helmets, you can’t see anyone’s face through them.”

  “Exactly,” I said, grinning.

  “I was expecting a crowded transport lab and guns drawn when we landed,” said Calliope. “This is much better.”

  “Let’s not stand out here,” I said, waving everyone back into the tiny white room I had come from, packing our four bodies in like sardines in a tin can. “Okay, Calliope,” I said, closing the door behind us. “Exits.”

  She pulled her handheld out of her pack and tapped on it a few times.

  “We’re on the twelfth floor,” she said, scanning the building to pull up a layout map, “and there are no interior stairwells. But . . .” She looked at me. I looked at her. We both said the same thing at the same time.

  “Sidewinders.”

  “Oh great,” I said. “That’s the last thing we need.”

  “What are you two on about?” asked Leo. “What’s a Sidewinder?”

  “It’s the world’s most sophisticated elevator,” said Calliope. “The whole building is constructed around it so it can move both horizontally and vertically. And it’s secured. You can’t just push a button. If it doesn’t recognize you, it won’t even open the door.”

  “And it’s the only way around the building,” said Carter. “And we’re on the twelfth floor. Hooray.”

  “So now what?” said Calliope, looking at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to figure somethin
g out on the fly. Helmets on, people, we’re going for a walk.”

  “We’re just going to go wandering through this building in our stolen uniforms and hope to God we don’t get caught?” said Leo. “That’s your plan?”

  “That’s all I’ve got so far,” I said. “If you have a better idea I’d love to hear it.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he put his helmet back on. I pushed open the door from the transporter and the others followed me outside.

  The metal door at the end of the transport corridor led to the master control room, which was bustling with activity. There was a grid onscreen that corresponded with the rows of transporters, lighting up red and green as agents came and went. Nobody appeared to notice us – the room was full of guards coming and going, and while not all of them wore helmets, enough of them did that we managed to sneak past unnoticed. The guards we passed gave us perfunctory head nods of greeting, a gesture we instinctively mimicked.

  Outside the transport lab, all was steel and glass and white. The building looked like a very expensive fish tank. As we stepped out of the lab into the heart of the building, we found ourselves in open space. There was a central atrium, as high as the top of the building itself (which was too many floors up to count), ringed with glassed-in offices and solid steel doors that led, presumably, to more hallways.

  “I wonder how big the paychecks are that come with these offices,” murmured Leo at my side, as we marched two-by-two down the hallway. “This is a lot nicer than your building.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “I don’t even have a window.”

  The mezzanine corridor felt a little too exposed, so we turned left and made our way slowly through the interior hallways. We wandered aimlessly for ten or fifteen minutes while I desperately looked around for anything that might help us get out of there. And then, rather abruptly, I got my first look at the Sidewinder as we found ourselves suddenly facing a chrome-and-white elevator bay, staring up at an imposing-looking metal door.

  A door with a small black panel on the wall next to it.

  I turned and stared at Calliope, feeling giddy.

  “Calliope,” I said. “The scanner. Look.”

  “What about it?” she said.

  “Waist level,” I said. “Not eye level.”

  “What are you—?”

  “The Sidewinder doesn’t do retinal scans,” I said, voice rising with excitement. “It scans security badges. It can’t tell the difference between us and our uniforms.” I pulled the badge from my stolen uniform and swiped it across the silver panel on the wall next to the door. A green light flashed twice, and the door whooshed noiselessly open.

  I was so relieved I almost laughed with delight.

  “Welcome,” said a soothing, computerized female voice as we stepped inside. “You have 1A elevator clearance. What is your purpose?”

  “There are no buttons,” said Carter, puzzled. “What the hell kind of elevator is this?”

  “How do you tell it where you’re going?” asked Leo.

  “You don’t,” I said. “It tells you.”

  “Welcome,” the voice said again. “You have 1A elevator clearance. What is your purpose?”

  “Leaving the building,” said Calliope. “Main exits.” The voice was silent for a moment, and we looked at each other nervously.

  “Scans indicate your shifts are not yet completed,” said the voice. “Permission to leave the building must be received from shift supervisor.”

  I felt all three of the others turn slightly accusatory eyes towards me. This was a scenario I had not, in fact, considered.

  “‘Steal a uniform and a transport,’ you said. ‘We’ll just walk out the front door,’ you said.” My brother’s voice was an exasperated sigh, and I glared at him.

  “Look,” I said, a little defensively. “First of all, watch your choice of words inside the sentient elevator. Second of all, I’m flying blind here.”

  “What is your purpose?” asked the elevator again, and I closed my eyes, frantically straining for a solution. Come on, I begged the universe, come on. Give me something. I heard Carter say something but I wasn’t listening. I scanned through everything I knew about this building, about its layout, about Sidewinders – which wasn’t much – trying to think of a way for us to get out of the building.

  We couldn’t leave without our uniforms, or we’d be recognized. We couldn’t leave with them, or we’d set off alarms for walking out the front door before our shifts ended. Either way, we’d never make it 250 feet from the perimeter without being caught.

  I was thinking so hard that it actually took me a second to realize the elevator was moving. I snapped out of my reverie and looked at the others. Calliope and Leo were smiling at Leo, who shrugged.

  “Welcome back,” said Calliope to me. “You missed it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I figured this elevator was too small – and too expensive – to be used for cargo,” said Carter. “But they got desks and conference tables in here somehow. So there must be a second – hopefully less opinionated – elevator somewhere in the building.”

  “Nice work,” I said approvingly, just as the Sidewinder came to a graceful halt and opened its doors. We stepped out and found ourselves in a less elegant, more utilitarian-looking hallway, facing a massive steel freight elevator door, with ordinary buttons outside it. Carter swiped his badge and pushed the “DOWN” button and we waited a minute, listening to the comfortingly old-fashioned sound of the heavy metal box rising up from the floor.

  The steel doors opened and we stepped inside, relieved to find it a perfectly ordinary elevator. I pushed the button marked “GROUND FLOOR” and we began to descend. After a few moments we found ourselves in a wide concrete hallway with a big set of rolling warehouse doors at the end, and an ordinary door marked “EXIT” beside it.

  I took a deep breath, walked over to it, and swiped my badge.

  The door opened.

  Air. Trees. Streets. Cars. Buildings.

  No guards.

  “Oh my God,” said Leo. “You did it. We’re free.”

  “Badges,” I said, holding out my hand, and everyone pulled theirs off and handed them to me. “I’ll leave these inside,” I said, “so we don’t trip the alarm.”

  “Good call,” said Calliope, and she stepped out the door.

  “Leo, you’re with Calliope,” I said. “You guys turn right and cross the street, then keep walking that way. Carter, go left. I’ll go straight. We’ll draw less attention if we split up. As soon as you hit 250 feet, jump back to the safe house. We’ll rendezvous there. Got it?” Calliope and Leo nodded. “Okay,” I said, double-checking that the coast was clear. “Go.”

  They assumed their best stern U.E. guard postures, put their helmets back on, and walked out the cargo door. I set their badges down on the floor, and stood up to see Carter looking at me with his arms folded across his chest and a stern look on his face.

  “You didn’t take off your own badge,” he said.

  “I will,” I said. “I’m going to. Go ahead; I’ll be right behind you.”

  “You think Mars is in the building,” he said. “Or at least a clue to who he is. And you want to roam around the halls in your stolen guard uniform and see what you can find.”

  “And you stayed behind to stop me.”

  “No,” he said, with a wry half-smile. “I stayed behind because U.E. security guards always work in pairs.”

  “Carter—”

  “I’m in this,” he said. “I’m your partner. That’s the deal. Where you go, I go. Where you lead, I follow. If you say we put our helmets and badges back on and take a stroll through the headquarters of United Enterprises, then I’m with you. Just . . . you know, try not to get us killed.”

  “I’m doing my best, I swear. I know it might not look like it.”

  He sighed and held out his hand. I gave him back his badge and he clipped it back on. “One condition,” he said. “The
second I see you do something reckless, and I mean the second, I will drag you back down here and shove you out that door if I have to carry you kicking and screaming. I am not letting you get yourself killed. Clear?”

  “Clear,” I said. “I’m not going to be stupid, I promise. I just want to look around.”

  “All right,” he said with a resigned sigh, pulling his helmet back on. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Back in the glassed-in atrium hallway, we strolled slowly around the perimeter to get the lay of the land a little better.

  “The other guards just look like they’re walking around,” I said. “I vote we just do a slow loop floor by floor and see if we see anything interesting.”

  “That sounds like a good place to start,” he said. “Left or right?”

  “Left,” I said.

  We turned left and walked slowly, purposefully, the way the other guards did, as though patrolling the hallways. My eyes darted left and right from behind the visor of my security helmet. There was nothing out of the ordinary on this floor, just people sitting at computers. We walked the whole circumference of the atrium. Then we went to the floor below and did it again. Nothing.

  We had no trouble getting from floor to floor in the elevator, which meant that so far nobody at United Enterprises had caught onto the fact that those four guards had not actually returned inside their own uniforms. I definitely didn’t want to be in the building when they figured it out, but I also knew that if I left now, I might never be this close to Mars again.

  I was going to have to be the one to go to Congressman Holmes. It was all up to me now – to clear my parents, to turn in Grove, to hand over the Watergate crime scene photos, to reveal the truth about the war.

  I thought back to that first meeting (which felt like a thousand years ago) where my mother and Director Gray and I sat in the Bureau Council Chambers across from the Congressional Time Travel Committee and I told them what the Timeline readings were showing us. Holmes liked me. He trusted me. And I think, deep down, he felt guilt about what happened to my father. I wanted to believe that he would listen, if I came to him with proof. But Grove alone wasn’t enough. I had to give him Mars too. I had to give him something about U.E. that he could use.