“It was three minutes the last time,” said Leo Carstairs. “They’re getting longer.”
“What the—”
“The ripples from the Incongruity,” he said. “I saw you. I saw you all go down at the same time.”
“Reggie,” said Carter, who I realized had been the one to pull me up and was still holding onto me. “It didn’t affect him. When we all couldn’t breathe. Your dad, everyone else in the crowd, it didn’t affect them.”
“No one in the crowd would be able to feel it,” I said. “The effects of the Incongruity are only dangerous to people who are in Flexible Timelines. Everyone who’s where they’re supposed to be is fine.”
And then I froze, as I heard the words come out of my mouth. I stared at Carter. Carter stared back at me.
“No,” I said. “No. She didn’t throw the rock. It was all supposed to be okay. Beth didn’t throw the rock.”
“I’m sorry,” said my father. “But Carter is right. I’m in my Timeline. That’s what it means. Even without Beth Rutherford, I was always supposed to be here at this moment on this day. I’m in the right place.”
He looked around at the crowd of people. “The Sharpeville Massacre is real, Reggie,” he said. “That’s what it means. You have to let it happen.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t let innocent people die. I can’t let you die.”
“You have to,” he said. “You have to correct the Timeline. That’s our job, kiddo. That’s what we do. That’s who you are. You’re Agent Regina Bellows of the U.S. Time Travel Bureau and you have a war to stop.”
“Remember what you said to me at the Lincoln Memorial?” said Carter to me, taking my hand. “That sometimes part of this job is standing by and letting terrible things happen, to set the Timeline right? We’re here. We’ve arrived. It’s time. We have to get them home.”
My father nodded.
“You don’t know what happens after this,” he said. “None of us do. Maybe this is how it was always destined to be. Maybe the Sharpeville Massacre is such a horrific atrocity that the rest of the world finally sits up and begins paying attention to what’s happening in South Africa. Maybe seventy people die today to free a whole nation.”
“Seventy-one,” I said.
“We don’t know what happens next, Reggie,” he went on gently. “But if the Incongruity isn’t touching me, then I’m where I’m supposed to be. And you have to go.”
Then, suddenly, the Comm in my pocket – the one Calliope had given me from Dad’s safe house stash – crackled to life.
“Reggie,” said a voice I thought I’d never hear again. “Reggie, can you hear me?”
“Mom?” I exclaimed in shock.
“Reggie, the war is unraveling,” she said. “The whole Timeline is correcting itself. I don’t know where you are but you’re at a crisis point and you have to get out before you’re stuck.”
I looked at my father’s face. There were tears streaming down it.
“I’m in Sharpeville,” I said, voice choked with sobs.
There was a silence.
“Leo?” she said softly.
“I’m here, Katie,” he said. “I’m right here.”
“Reggie, you can’t pull him out,” she said wearily. “I’ve tried. I tried so many times. The Slipstream won’t open for him.”
“She knows,” said Carstairs. “I told her.”
“Get her out of there, Leo,” said my mother. “Get our daughter home.”
“I will,” he said. “I promise.”
He pulled me close one last time and kissed me on the forehead. “She’s something, isn’t she?” he said to my mother.
“She’s her father’s daughter,” she said, and her voice broke my heart. “Reggie, you have to jump, now. The Incongruity is almost on top of you. Where’s your necklace?”
“What?”
“The necklace I gave you,” she said impatiently. “Do you have it with you?” My hand moved instinctively to my throat. I had slipped it around my neck in 1972 and completely forgotten it ever since.
“I’m wearing it,” I said. “Why?”
“Don’t lose it,” she said.
“Mom, I’m coming home,” I said. “I’m going to see you again. I promise.”
“Go,” she said. “You have to get out. Jump now.
Then there was a silence. “Goodbye, Leo,” said my mother, and even though that was all they said, there was something in the air that was so intimate that I felt like I was intruding.
“Goodbye, Katie,” said my dad.
Then another blackout hit, worse than the last, and I lost my balance. My father caught me and stopped me from falling as I gasped for breath. When the world reemerged, I could see him looking at me, with infinite love and sadness and compassion in his eyes, and we both knew.
He was meant to die in South Africa. This was the end of the road.
My necklace had come untucked from the neckline of my shirt in the fall, and my father reached out and took the two pendants in his hand, and looked for a long moment at the one he had given my mother.
“’Time is a tree/This life one leaf,’” he said quietly, reading the words from the small silver disc. Then he knelt down, picked something up from the ground at his feet, kissed my cheek, and pressed it into my hand. I looked down at it.
A rock.
A craggy-edged, dirt-crusted, fist-sized rock.
I looked at my father.
“No,” I begged him, my eyes filling up with tears. My voice was choked with sobs, barely coherent, but he knew. I shook my head frantically – No, no, no – but he nodded at me firmly. Yes.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t. There’s no one to Rewind you. No one on the other side to pull us out, no lab to come back to.”
“I know.”
“That was the whole reason I came,” I said. “To stop this. I came here to stop Beth Rutherford from throwing that rock.”
“No, you came here to stop the war,” Carter said gently. “And you did. Or, you’re about to. The Double Incongruity will fix it. The Timeline is unraveling. It will erase Beth and set everything right. But you have to throw the rock, so your father will die, so everything he said to your mother will go into the Congressional records, so she’ll hide his Gemstone files, so that she and the Bureau will forget all about them until you tell her about Project Opal, and then give them all to you. It starts and ends with you, Reggie.”
Carter put his arms around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But he’s right. Your father’s right. You have to throw the rock.”
“But he’ll die,” I said.
“He knows that,” said Carter, and I could see there were tears in his eyes too. “He knows. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m ready,” said my father. “It’s okay.”
“They’ll all die,” I sobbed. “I was supposed to save them.”
“The Sharpeville Massacre is real, Reggie,” my father said gently. “You were never going to be able to stop it. You saved fifty-six million lives today. But you can’t save these people. You can’t save me. You have to let it happen. It’s time, Reggie.”
I looked at Agent Leo Carstairs, tall and blond and dashing, with his bright kind eyes, and I looked at the rock in my hand, and then I looked back at him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and he wrapped his arms around me in a crushing embrace.
“No,” he said. “No. You did everything right, sweetheart.”
He kissed the top of my head over and over and over. “You did everything right.”
Then he let go of me, tears in his eyes, and turned to Carter.
“It took me a little while,” he said, smiling. “But I finally figured out who you remind me of.” Then he hugged him tightly. “Thank you,” he said. “For everything. When you get home, tell your dad about this. Agent Hughes deserves to know that his son helped save the world.”
He turned to go.
“Wait,” I
said desperately. “Dad. Wait.”
I pointed to the two bodies on the ground at our feet. “It’s Leo,” I said. “Leo is here. Your son helped save the world too.”
“Leo?” said my father wonderingly, and he knelt down to where my brother lay on the ground. He stroked Leo’s cheek and kissed his forehead. I couldn’t watch, and turned away to bury my face in Carter’s chest. “I can see it,” he said in amazement. “He looks just your mother.”
“He looks like you,” I said.
“You two take care of each other,” said my father. “And tell Katie—” He stopped. I turned back to him. “She was the greatest adventure of my life,” he said softly. “Tell her that.”
“I will,” I said.
“Keep that necklace safe for me.”
“I will. I promise.”
Carter squeezed my hand.
“Reggie,” he said gently. “It’s time.”
I nodded, wiping the tears away from my eyes.
“Goodbye, Dad,” I said. “I’m really glad I met you.”
“Good hunting, Agent Bellows,” he said, and raised his hand to me in the old Bureau salute. Then he turned and walked away, back to the line of fire, back to the men with guns. He stood there, waiting. Like an actor in the wings, ready for his cue.
“Carter,” I said, voice choking on sobs.
“I’m here,” he said. “You’re not alone. I’m right here.”
The world blinked into darkness again, cold and grasping and hungry, and the void began draining the air from my lungs. I felt dizzy and weak, like I was drowning, flailing for breath. When I came back, I had lost so much oxygen that my knees gave out and I sank to the ground. Carter, who had fallen during the blackout, crawled over to me and put his arms around me.
“Reggie,” he said, “it’s time. The Incongruity is almost on top of us. We have to get out.”
He knelt beside two of the fallen U.E. guards and pulled off their wrist Comms, then grabbed their stun rifles and two helmets. He linked the still-unconscious Leo and Calliope’s hands together and clipped one of the stolen Comms onto Leo’s wrist, then the other onto his own.
“Helmet on,” he said, tossing it to me, “and have your rifle ready. I don’t know where we’re going to land. If anyone asks, we’re U.E. guards escorting these two prisoners. Got it?” I nodded. He knelt down and picked up the rock, which had fallen from my hand in the blackout.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “If you need me to. I can do it.”
“No,” I said in a numb voice. “It has to be me.” He nodded, compassion in his eyes.
“Okay,” he said, and squeezed my hand. “Let’s go home.”
I took a deep breath, then took the rock from Carter’s outstretched hand. I raised it, wound up my shoulder, prepared to throw. My father nodded at me, and I could see his mouth moving.
Three.
Two.
One.
Go.
I threw the rock. It crashed with a deafening clang against the metal roof of the police station, and I felt the world go crazy. As the next blackout hit, Carter threw his arms around me and pulled me down to the ground, pushing the buttons on his and Leo’s wrist Comms at the same time.
Then the darkness closed over me, and we were gone.
Twenty-Seven
That Ever I Was Born to Set It Right
Darkness.
For a long, long time, that was all there was. Darkness and cold. I felt the oxygen slowly leaving my lungs, and a heavy pressure beginning to coalesce inside my body.
This is dying, I thought. This is what dying feels like.
I am not brave, not really. I never have been. I think acts of desperation and adrenaline sometimes look like bravery, even when they aren’t. But the important thing to know about me is that I’m not a heroic person. I had told Beth Rutherford I was willing to die to stop her war, and I had meant it.
But alone, in the dark, feeling my heartbeat slow and my organs begin to compress and my breathing slow to a standstill, all I wanted was for it to be over quickly and painlessly, and to believe it hadn’t all been for nothing.
Please, I begged whoever might be listening in the cold darkness of the Slipstream as it closed in around me, fix it. Fix it so those fifty-six million people get to live. And if you can, please don’t let this hurt too much.
And then I closed my eyes, and I let the darkness close over my head, like I was peacefully drowning, and as I let go, I heard, far off in the distance – as though guiding me out of this life into the next – the sound of my mother calling my name.
* * *
“Regina.”
* * *
I floated through the darkness, not breathing, not moving. It was like a waterless drowning, this dark force that pulled me down into a deeper darkness. It was useless to resist. It was useless to kick and splash and struggle. All I had to do was let go.
* * *
“Regina, wake up.”
* * *
The second voice was somehow both closer and farther away – still muffled, as though coming from underwater or a very great distance, but louder than before.
I know that voice, I thought dimly, floating through the darkness, listening to my slowly fading heartbeat. Whose voice is that? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember anything. But the voice was pleasant, and I felt consoled by it. I was being welcomed into the afterlife very gently, by these loving voices calling my name.
* * *
“Can’t somebody wake her up?”
* * *
Something jarring, in the soft soothing darkness.
Go away, I thought sleepily to the harsh, sharp voice that pierced the womb-like peace of the Slipstream as it guided me away. Can’t you see I’m busy dying over here?
But it didn’t go away.
It kept talking.
It got louder.
I couldn’t pick out all the words, but I could feel them, hard and crystalline, slicing through the blackness and pulling me, against my will, in the other direction. I opened my eyes, and the world exploded into gold-and-white light. I squeezed them closed again, willing the darkness to swallow me up again, but it didn’t. I felt my heartbeat revive. I took a deep breath, and felt my lungs fill with air. I opened one eye again, just the tiniest bit.
The world was blindingly white and blurry, and I could see a glowing golden shape looming directly in front of my face.
I moved my lips and a cracked, hoarse whisper came out.
“Are you . . . an angel?” I whispered to the golden shape, as my eyes slowly came into focus.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Calliope. “How hard did you hit your head?”
“Calliope,” I said, the last shreds of darkness falling away as the world came back to me. I blinked and looked around. I was in a hospital bed, in a pristine white room. Across from me were two white couches with dark shapes curled up on them.
Carter and Leo.
Everyone was home.
“We’re okay,” I whispered. “We made it.”
Calliope grinned. “Bet your ass we did,” she said.
I shifted a little as I sat up and suddenly became aware of a heavy, warm weight beside me. There was somebody else curled up next to me in the bed. I rubbed my eyes, vision clearing, and turned to look.
It was my mother.
She was sound asleep, head pillowed on her arm. Her hair was disheveled, she had no makeup on, and she was wearing the cotton pants and sleeveless shirt she wore around the house and sometimes slept in. I wondered how long she had been there.
I watched her sleep for awhile before I reached over and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Mom,” I said softly. “Mom.”
Instantly, she awoke.
“Reggie,” she said, smiling, tears in her eyes, and she stroked my hair.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said back.
“Where am I?” I asked, struggling to sit up. “How long have I been out?
”
Calliope was at my side in an instant and gave me her arm, helping me to shift so I was sitting upright.
“You’re in sickbay,” she said, “and it’s been three days.”
“The others were up and around yesterday,” said my mother, sitting up and sliding out of the bed to stretch her back. “You were at the center of the Incongruity, so the Slipstream radiation hit you the hardest.”
I only half heard her. I was too busy looking at her shoulder, which was smooth and unmarked. Something about that felt wrong and strange to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something was missing. What was it?
“Mom,” I said softly.
She turned, mid-stretch, and looked at me, then saw what I was staring at.
“We have a lot to talk about,” she said with a smile. “Calliope, wake up the boys.”
Calliope leaned over to shake Carter gently.
“Carter,” she said. “Wake up.”
“I’m awake,” he said sleepily, without moving.
“Reggie is awake, Carter, we need to talk.”
“Reggie?” he said, bolting upright from the couch and flailing a little to sit up.
“I’m right here, Carter,” I said. He pulled a chair over next to the side of the bed and sat down in it, taking my hand in his.
“You scared the shit out of me, Bellows,” he said. “Don’t ever do that again.”
I started to say something but was distracted by a noise in the corner, where it appeared that Calliope had opted to wake my brother by smacking him on the head.
“Your sister’s awake, lazy ass,” she snapped. “Get over here.”
Leo bolted off the couch so fast he almost tripped, and ran to my side, half-climbing over our mother to get to me and wrap me in an enormous bear hug.
“Hi, sis,” he said, kissing the top of my head with tears in his eyes.
The Rewind Files Page 41