The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  And not just to prevent him from tracing Gemstone back to United Enterprises.

  It was to prevent the future that would come about if he had lived.

  Because if he had lived, I realized, my father would have become head of the department, over Harold Grove, when Mom was promoted to Deputy Director. Grove could never have pulled off the cover-up with Leo Carstairs looking over his shoulder.

  If he had lived, it would have been my father, not me, sent to rescue Grove from the spike in Ohio that almost killed both of us. It would have been him in front of the Congressional Time Travel Committee, revealing that the Third World War was a Chronomaly. It would have been him, with two decades of field experience, sent back to 1972 to fix everything. He would have tracked down Beth Rutherford, spotted the Chronomaly, unraveled the entire conspiracy and prevented the war.

  But he didn’t. Because he died here instead.

  Beth Rutherford’s entire empire – the future she had killed tens of millions of innocent people to obtain – was built on top of my father’s dead body.

  “None of it was a coincidence,” I whispered. “The Mandela crisis pulling all the black agents into the same Timestream; Mom getting benched; Daisey ignoring everyone’s warnings; your transport not working. All of this was planned, Dad. This is an assassination.”

  “How many people are going to die unless we stop it?” he asked. “I don’t mean me, I mean everyone else. How many?”

  “Seventy-one today,” I said. “And fifty-six million more in twenty-two years.”

  “All right,” he said, nodding. “What do we do?”

  “We have to find the first Beth Rutherford before she picks up a rock and starts a war,” I said. “And then we have to go back to the spot where I dropped in and catch the second one.”

  “And create a Double Incongruity.”

  “Yes.”

  “Force-restart the Timeline, basically, without her in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s insane,” he said. “Insane.”

  “Dad, there’s no other—”

  “No, I love it. You really are my kid.”

  I felt tears welling up in my eyes, and instantly he was on his feet and his arms were wrapped around me.

  “If I died here,” he said. “then I died before you were born. I never got to do this. I never got to be your dad.”

  “I’m only twenty-five,” I said into the shoulder of his jacket, voice muffled. “We still have time.”

  “Katie did a good job,” he said, and I could tell he was crying a little too.

  I heard the soft buzz of the alarm on my Comm.

  “Ten minutes,” I said.

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

  * * *

  We decided to split up, with my father pulling a few of the Sharpeville police officers he had befriended to fan out with him and discreetly begin searching through the crowd for young Beth Rutherford. We had the element of surprise on our side with at least one of the Beths; this one, the one here to throw the rock, had no idea we were coming for her.

  I watched him slip out of sight, then hoisted my U.E. guard rifle and walked back to the spot where I had come through the Slipstream to wait for the other Beth – the pissed-off one who was out for my blood. I had seven minutes left, by my calculations, until the drop coordinates. It was the longest seven minutes of my life. The heat, the wind, the rising tension. I watched the endless procession of Sharpeville citizens walking up to the police station steps and handing over their passbooks to submit themselves for arrest.

  Please, I thought to myself, please let me be able to save these people.

  All seventy-one of them.

  There was a soft ping! on my Comm, signaling an incoming transport, and my heart pounded like a bass drum in my chest. I pressed my back against the army jeep behind me, took the safety off my rifle, and pointed it at the spot where I could still see my own footprints in the dust. Come on, Beth, you crazy sociopath, I thought, don’t fail me now.

  Then the Slipstream shimmered into view before me. I took aim. I slipped my finger onto the trigger.

  Then the Slipstream opened, and out stepped Beth Rutherford.

  Holding a knife to Carter’s throat.

  Twenty-Five

  Double Incongruity

  I froze.

  “Hello, Regina,” said Beth pleasantly. One arm was wrapped around Carter’s waist, from behind, almost intimately. The other held a wicked-looking serrated blade at his jugular vein, pressed against his skin just hard enough that I could see the slightest pressure would draw blood.

  “Let him go, Beth,” I said. “I’m the one you want.”

  “Here’s the problem with that,” she said. “You managed to cause quite a bit of property damage in my building, which was deeply vexing, and I’m not at all in the mood to grant you favors. If your little plan was to lure me through the Slipstream to some undisclosed location, well, fine, I’m here, congratulations. But if you thought I wasn’t going to arrive without some kind of insurance policy, that was very stupid.”

  “Please,” I said desperately. “Let him go. You don’t need to hurt him.”

  “Lower your weapon,” she said. “You have no idea how to use that thing. Someone might get hurt. Why don’t you put it down?”

  “Don’t do it, Reggie,” said Carter sharply. “Do not listen to her.”

  “Carter—”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said.

  “Yes, Regina,” said Beth. “Please, do try not to be an idiot.”

  “If I put down the gun,” I said, “will you put your knife away? So we can talk?”

  “Set it on the ground,” she said, “and put your hands up.”

  “Reggie, no!” Carter snapped at me and then winced. I had hardly seen Beth move her wrist but suddenly I could see the faintest trickle of blood snake down the blade of the knife.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’m putting it down.”

  I set the rifle down in the dust and put my hands up.

  “Kick it over to me,” she said, and I did. In one graceful motion, she knelt to the ground, Carter still wrapped in her arms, then switched the knife for the gun so quickly that we had no time to react. She pushed Carter over towards me, the rifle trained on both of us.

  “Kneel,” she said, pulling a wooden crate out of the back of the jeep and dusting it off, “and put your hands behind your back.”

  We did.

  “All right, Regina,” she said, setting the crate in the sand facing us, and sinking gracefully onto it, crossing her legs and leaning back against the door of the jeep in a posture of supreme relaxation, for all the world as if she were holding court in that posh U.E. penthouse office. The rifle lay in her lap, casually pointed at our heads. “You wanted to talk. Let’s talk.”

  I looked at her, sitting there on that crate, her white suit still impeccable as if somehow resistant to dust, not a hair out of place, and I told her the truth.

  “When I first met you,” I said, “I thought how depressing it was that someone so brilliant was stuck filing paperwork all day for a man whose job you could do with one hand tied behind your back. I thought, ‘I wish Beth Rutherford had been born in another time so she could really be who she was meant to be.’”

  “And then, when I saw you behind that desk, when I realized that you were Mars, that you were the one we were chasing, you know what? There was some sick part of me that felt relieved. That felt some weird sense of satisfaction that there was more to your life than the White House Counsel’s Office. If ever anyone was born to be a super villain, it was you.”

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  “It was.”

  I felt her relaxing slightly, and took the risk of shifting my position, sinking down onto the dirt to sit cross-legged in front of her. If you ignored the gun, we were just two people having a conversation.

  “And now,” I went on, “I find out you did all of this to get rich.
What a letdown. You’re not even interestingly evil. You’re just like everybody else.”

  She looked at me appraisingly, her dark eyes thoughtful and with a flicker of unexpected amusement.

  “You’re disappointed in me,” she said. “I’ll admit that’s not the reaction I was expecting.”

  “I expected more from you,” I said. “Money. So pedestrian.”

  “I hope you realize we don’t need to be enemies, Regina,” she said. “You’re an extraordinary agent. We could use someone like you.”

  “I’m nothing like you,” I said. “I would never do the things you did.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” she said softly. “There’s nowhere in all of history that you wouldn’t go rewrite time, if you could? To get back what was taken from you? Are you quite sure?”

  Carter and I looked at each other. I swallowed hard. There was nothing visible behind and around us but dust and metal shacks. The jeep shielded the crowds from view. And we knew we had destroyed the Comm system that sent her through, blocking her from seeing her own coordinates when she jumped. But there was something in her voice that unsettled me.

  Did Beth Rutherford know where we were?

  “I dedicated my life to building United Enterprises,” she went on. “Thousands of hours of field work over decades went into crafting this company.” She leaned forward, as if imparting a great secret to me. Against my will, I found myself drawn in.

  “Time is delicate,” she said. “It’s fragile. It needs to be handled carefully, like precision clockwork. We tried nearly a hundred different methods of manipulating the Timeline until we found one that managed to remain stable. If you don’t think I found it distasteful, being forced to make use of incompetent children like John Dean and Gordon Liddy, maneuvering them with the utmost care while keeping my eyes demurely cast down towards the floor and calling them ‘sir,’ well, then you have no imagination. But still, despite all my best efforts, the only tactic that worked – that stabilized the future the way I wanted it – forced me to cover up their clunky, half-witted espionage attempts so it wouldn’t discredit President Nixon. So I swallowed my pride and I let Gordon Liddy win. Because in the end, I got what I wanted.”

  “He died in the first D.C. bombing,” I said. “That must have been satisfying.”

  She dismissed that idea with an impatient wave of her hand.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Regina, I’m not a monster. The war was a side effect. A terrible one, I’ll grant you. I didn’t set out to kill fifty-six million civilians. Genocide is so . . . inelegant. No, what I needed was a President in my pocket, and the Third World War was how I got him. It was simple. I didn’t foresee that Reagan would suspend the 23rd Amendment and serve four terms, but it worked magnificently in my favor. United Enterprises had the ability to predict, and provide him with, everything he wanted.”

  “In exchange for him giving you everything you wanted.”

  “Naturally.”

  “All that time,” I said, “going back and forth, living two different lives – running a massive corporation from the top floor and then stepping back in time a century and a half to be hit on by old men and treated like half a person. Aren’t you tired yet?”

  She laughed.

  “I wasn’t forced to take that job for John Dean,” she said. “I fought for it. I moved all the chess pieces around the board to clear that space. I sat across from him and offered soothing advice when he was at his wit’s end. I made gentle suggestions that he later remembered as if they were his own. I ran him, Reggie. That wasn’t a punishment. That was the point. He was completely under my control. All those men were. But because I was a woman – and not even a particularly pretty one – they couldn’t see it.”

  She looked me up and down. “You,” she said thoughtfully, “interest me enormously. You see, the Gemstone Chronomaly was very nearly stable. It required a high level of patching in a few key places – that kept Grove fairly busy – but more and more it appeared to be a promising long-term solution. The war put United Enterprises right where I wanted it – it made us a world power. Our technology, our security guards, our private transport access . . . I didn’t create the best products because I wanted to be rich, Regina, I became rich because what I built was the best.”

  “And then you came along – with your clumsy, dogged persistence and your need to prove yourself. Always interfering, always in the way, but so deftly that it took me a little while to be sure of you.”

  “When did you figure out I was from the Bureau?” I said.

  “Oh, that?” She dismissed the question. “I knew the first moment I met you. You were visible from a mile away. No, what I didn’t know was why you were there. Whether you could be safely ignored until your mission was completed and you went away again – as other agents have – or whether I needed to dispose of you before you became a nuisance.”

  “I know there’s not a lot we agree on,” I said, “but I think we can get together on the fact that you did not stop me from becoming a nuisance.”

  Beth burst out laughing. Not a diabolical villain chuckle, but a real laugh, hearty and unforced. She likes you, I thought, you didn’t think she liked you but she does, and a treasonous corner of my brain was irrationally flattered and pleased by it. I remembered our brief moment of kinship when Liddy was drunk and hitting on us, and I wondered what she had been like before she became the wall of iron she was now. I felt myself grow dangerously close to not hating her.

  “You and me,” she said. “Think what a team we could have been. Think what we could do together.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, a sane and logical voice was screaming and pounding on the wall and yelling, Stop! Stop! But I was like a bird hypnotized by a cobra. She looked at me, I looked at her, and I forgot about Carter, about my father, about Sharpeville, about everything in the world that wasn’t Beth Rutherford.

  “Look at me,” she said softly, as though I was capable of doing anything else, and she rose from her seat to come over to me. She was very close. She knelt down right in front of me and touched my cheek with her hand. She had the greenest eyes I had ever seen. I had forgotten that anyone else in the world existed. I had forgotten who and what and where I was.

  You don’t have to kill her, I thought.. You don’t need to erase her from the Timeline. Maybe there’s still good in her. What if she turned herself in? What if it ended here, peacefully, and we all went home, and nobody had to die?

  “Put the knife down, Beth,” said the voice of Leo Carstairs, and the spell was broken. I snapped back to reality with a jolt to see my father standing behind Beth with the barrel of his gun pressed to her temple. It took me a second to realize what he had said, and then I looked down.

  She must have picked the knife back up when she came over to me, because now it was pressed against my left breast, had already sliced through the fabric of my shirt and was about to pierce the skin. She had slipped it there so gently that I had not even noticed it. I recoiled, violently, looking up at my father, and remembered with piercing clarity all the things that Beth Rutherford had done, all the lives she had destroyed, and why the thing we were about to do was necessary.

  “Murderers tend to be very charismatic,” he said in a nonchalant voice, picking up the knife and holding it out to Carter, who threw it as far away from us as he could. “They often have extremely attractive, compelling personalities. But whatever she might say to you, it’s important that you remember this woman is not your friend. This woman is here to kill all of us.”

  “Your hired muscle is very opinionated,” she said. “If he were one of mine, I would dock his pay for insubordination, but I suppose to each her own.”

  I looked from her to him and back again, and felt a surge of wild delight take over my body. It had worked.

  “You have no idea where we are,” I said exultantly. “You don’t recognize him.”

  She dismissed it with a hand wave.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she
said. “My tracking coordinates have been sent to the U.E. cargo transport and there’s an entire army of security forces on their way. So unless you’ve got an army of your own, besides the President’s butler” – with a dismissive gesture towards Carter – “and your blond arm candy over here, you’ve got about three minutes before all three of you get a bullet through the forehead.”

  “The blond arm candy,” I said, “is my father.”

  She froze.

  “Agent Leo Carstairs, United States Time Travel Bureau,” he said, pressing the gun closer to her temple. “Welcome to Sharpeville, Ms. Rutherford. And Ms. Rutherford.” And that was the first time any of us noticed the body lying in a heap at his feet.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “she’s still alive. Just unconscious.”

  It was unquestionably the most deliciously satisfying moment of my entire life. Beth’s entire face went pale and contorted in horror.

  “Oh, you stupid, stupid girl,” she breathed. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  “I know exactly what I’ve done,” I said, and stood to go look at the second Beth Rutherford, unconscious on the dusty ground. She was younger than me, and she hadn’t grown into her imperiousness yet.

  She looked ordinary. She looked like someone I would like. She was wearing khaki pants, a loose white shirt and a headscarf which had come loose in her fall. I knew she was dangerous, and that stunning her was the only safe thing to do. Still, there was a part of me that wished I had met her.

  “You’ve trapped us in a Double Incongruity,” she said. “We could all die.”

  “You know what?” I said, walking right up to her and staring her down. “I don’t care if I die. I don’t. Seriously. I only care if you do. Because without you, there’s no Gemstone. No United Enterprises. No World War Three. All of it goes away. You’re the brains behind this whole thing and I want you erased from Time like you never existed. If I can have that, I don’t care what happens to me.”