“Hi, bro,” I said back, swallowing tears of my own.
“Oh, Lord,” said Calliope. “Emotions.”
“Calliope, let’s go hunt down some coffee for everybody,” said Carter, holding the door open and waving her out of it. “Let’s give them a minute.”
“Thank you, Carter,” said my mother. “Coffee would be wonderful.”
They left and closed the door behind them.
“Where’s Dad?” I said as soon as we were alone together, and my mom stroked my hair.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you did the right thing. You had to throw the rock. The Sharpeville Massacre restabilized the Timeline after the Incongruity hit.”
“He died,” I said, tears spilling out of my eyes. “He died again.”
“It was different this time,” she said. “There was no army of U.E. security forces storming the police station. There was no Beth Rutherford. There were only about five thousand civilians there instead of twenty thousand.”
“What happened?”
“Reggie—”
“Tell me what happened.”
She sighed.
“It was horrific,” she said. “The police saw a crowd of African citizens marching toward them and opened fire without even stopping to ask what they were doing there. They didn’t know or care that it was a peaceable protest. They were firing bullets into the back of a fleeing crowd. Carstairs saw a white police officer draw his rifle to take aim at an unarmed girl and he shot the man in the leg to stop him. That was when Jenkins jumped in and pulled him out. And the rest you know.”
I felt sick.
“I tried,” I said, tears streaming down my face, “I tried to fix it.”
“You couldn’t,” she said. “Reggie, there was nothing you could do. Carter was right when he told you to throw the rock. The Timeline corrected itself. This was what was supposed to happen. The Sharpeville Massacre was a watershed moment in the fight against apartheid. It woke people up – not just in South Africa but all over the world. It took an atrocity of that magnitude to get people to sit up and listen.”
“How many people died?” I asked.
“Sixty-nine,” she said.
“It was seventy before,” I said. She nodded.
“He couldn’t save everyone,” she said. “But he saved that girl.”
“And you,” said Leo, “saved fifty-six million people.”
I stared at him, then turned to my mom.
“It worked?” I said.
“It worked,” she said. “You were right. The Double Incongruity worked.”
“We did it,” I said softly, incredulous. “We did it. We stopped the war.”
“You did,” said my mother. “We’re in a whole new world now.”
And then I remembered what I had noticed before. I reached out a hand and touched the soft olive skin of my mother’s shoulder, where there were no marks at all, and I looked up at her.
“You don’t have a scar here,” I said.
“No.”
“You used to have a little scar from where they placed your subdermal tracker,” I said. “All my life you had it. And then the last time I saw you there was a big, ugly, messy scar in its place where you dug it out.”
She didn’t say anything, just looked at me and nodded.
It had worked. The Timeline had corrected itself. No scar. No subdermal tracker.
No United Enterprises.
Which meant only one thing.
“Mom,” I said, urgency creeping into my voice. “Mom. You didn’t come through the Slipstream.”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“The Timeline rewrote itself with you on this side of it,” I said. “Only the people who were stuck in the Incongruity remember what happened. Me, and Leo, and Calliope, and Carter. I’m right, aren’t I? We’re the only ones who actually remember.”
“That’s right.”
“So how do you know all this?”
She didn’t answer, but reached into her pocket and pulled out a thin filigree chain. My hand instinctively went to my neck and that was the first moment I realized my necklace was gone.
“The pendant from Carstairs is real,” she said. “I’ve had that for almost thirty years. The clock is something else entirely.”
“Ruth 3:11,” I said. “The hands of the clock. It meant something.”
She nodded.
“To remind you that I was still out there,” she said. “That we were still working together. Both literally and figuratively.”
She turned the silver hands from 3:11 to midnight and the clock face popped open. I peered inside.
“What the hell?” I said. “It’s not a pendant. It’s a data port.”
“I don’t remember any of what happened in your Timeline,” she said. “It’s all on this.”
“She was filing field reports the whole time she was gone,” said Leo, “and syncing them to that thing around your neck. She knew the only way to get the information back here to the other side was for it to travel through the Slipstream with you.”
“You sounded almost like a real agent when you said that,” my mom laughed, ruffling his hair. “You’re a natural.”
“He was amazing, Mom,” I said. Leo looked away, embarrassed, but I didn’t care. I had wasted twenty-five years of my life living half a world away from him and hardly being able to carry on a conversation for longer than five minutes, and I was suddenly full of things he wanted to say. “He was brave,” I said, and I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. “He saved my life. He was a hero. You would have been so proud of him.”
“I already am,” she said. “My kids saved the world.”
“Carter and Calliope did the hard stuff,” he said.
“You got me out of that building,” I said. “You’re the only one who could have done that. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
Carter and Calliope reentered with a tray of coffee cups and pulled up chairs next to us.
“Are you guys done having feelings at each other?” said Calliope. “Have you briefed Reggie yet?”
“The mushy part is over,” said Leo. “I know human emotions cause your cyborg processing chip to short-circuit—”
“Excuse me if I didn’t want to pull up a chair and make popcorn to watch you three have a private family conversation that didn’t involve me—”
“Since when do you stay out of—”
“That’s enough out of both of you,” said Carter. “Don’t make me send you to separate couches. Reggie has been conscious for like ten minutes and she probably has a million questions.”
“I do,” I said. “The field reports on the data drive – you’ve all seen them?”
“I have,” said my mother, “and Calliope has too. She built it for me.”
“You knew what it was?” I said to her. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“We couldn’t risk you drawing attention to it,” she said. “If you thought it was just a necklace, then everyone else around you would think it was just a necklace. If you started getting insane about it, Beth Rutherford would have seen right through you.”
“So you know all of it,” I said to my mother. “They’ve filled you in on what happened to us, but you also know all the things you - I mean the other you - didn’t tell me. The things we didn’t know.”
“I can tell you now,” she said. “You’ll want to know where I was after I left you in 1972. What I was doing.”
“What were you doing?”
“Hunting Harold Grove.”
“Did you know?” I asked. “Did you know he was Saturn?”
“I suspected,” she said. “There weren’t many agents who could have managed a patch that size on their own. But Grove was top of our class in Chrono-Engineering. And it was a puzzling coincidence that the day he went off active duty was the day the Chronomaly first revealed itself. So I followed him. Every mission he took in the 60’s and 7
0’s, I followed him and I watched. And then I began to realize that everywhere he went, the same woman appeared in the background.”
“Beth Rutherford,” I said softly. Mom nodded.
“She was there in Ohio,” she said. “At the library, when you pulled Grove out. Calliope synced your field reports to the necklace too. We watched the Microcam footage.”
“The woman he was talking to,” I said, realizing. “She walked away and then I pulled him out. That’s why he was so pissed at me. He was there for a meet with Beth and I got in the way.”
“That’s right.”
“I still don’t understand how he got mixed up in all this,” I said. “He still feels like the wrong fit. He’s not a power-hungry psycho like Beth was. Did he just get into it for the money? Auction off his integrity to the highest bidder?”
“Oh,” said my mother. “No, Reggie. That wasn’t what happened. No, I stumbled onto it almost by accident when I was following him. I overheard a conversation when he didn’t know I was there.”
“Beth Rutherford was his sister,” said Calliope.
“His sister?”
“It was her idea,” Mom said. “All of this. She concocted the entire thing. I suspect – and this is not in any way to defend his actions, obviously, but it does change things – that in the beginning, he only got into it to protect her. I think he found out what she was up to and he was afraid she’d be arrested for treason, so he tried to cover her tracks from inside the Bureau.”
“And then years went by, and things got more complicated, and before he knew it, he was an accessory-after-the-fact to Carstairs’ murder and then he was in too deep to get out. And it changed him. It became who he was.”
I looked at Calliope, who was stone-faced and dry-eyed.
“You wanted to believe in him,” I said. “You wanted it so badly. To believe he wasn’t a monster.”
“I don’t think he was a monster,” said my mother. “I think he was desperate, and it made him reckless. I think he was willing to cover up the deaths of fifty-six million people to keep someone he loved from being executed for war crimes. Beth wanted power. Grove just wanted to protect Beth. It isn’t defensible, but it’s human. He couldn’t see right and wrong anymore.”
“What happens to him now?” I said. “The Harold Grove on the other side of the Slipstream doesn’t exist anymore, since the Timeline is different, so the one on this side hasn’t actually done anything, but it still feels wrong for him not to pay for all those lives.”
My mother shook her head.
“There is no Harold Grove on this side of the Slipstream,” she said. “Their parents never had any children. That was the system self-correcting.”
“Oh,” I said.
Harold Grove didn’t exist. Beth Rutherford didn’t exist. They were not, never had been, real to anyone except the people right here in this room. I thought about that for a moment, trying to sift my complicated feelings about it.
“Wait a minute,” I said suddenly. “I still work for the Bureau, right? If there’s no Harold Grove, whose apprentice am I?”
“Oh man,” said Carter with a grin. “We have a lot to show you.”
* * *
After browbeating the medic on duty into letting me out of bed to walk around and stretch my legs, Mom took my arm and led me out of the room. Carter and Calliope followed, along with Leo, who had been granted a visitor’s pass. Apparently without United Enterprises guarding their proprietary technology with a borderline violent obsessiveness, the Bureau was like any other government building where properly scanned civilians could come visit their sisters at work.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” said a uniformed medical aide to my mother as we stepped out into the hallway. “Deputy Director Gray would like a word with you, if you’re feeling well enough. But he says if it needs to, it can wait.”
“No, I’m fine,” said my mother.
“Deputy Director Gray?” I whispered in her ear, and she grinned broadly and winked at me.
“Damn straight,” she said. The medical aide tapped on his wrist Comm.
“Sir,” he said, “Director Bellows is on her way.”
“Gray? As Director? Please!” my mother sniffed derisively under her breath. “Your old Timeline was a mess,” and we followed the aide down the hallway. I couldn’t help laughing as we stepped into the elevator.
“Try not to say too much,” said Calliope. “You’ve been out for three days and you’re a little fuzzy-headed, so use that as your excuse if you get lost.”
“What do you mean, if I get lost?”
“We’re through the looking-glass, Reggie,” said Carter. “Everything in this world is different. Your mom has briefed Gray and the Congressional Committee, so they’ve seen her field reports, but it’s all been classified. The four of us are the only ones who remember what really happened.”
“But we came through the Slipstream,” I said. “Where does everyone here think we were?”
“On a routine patch in the Gerald Ford administration, where we were hit with a Timequake,” he said. “We’ve all been laid up for about two days, although you were unconscious the longest. And Calliope made something up about your brother being an amateur historian.”
“Yeah, if anyone asks,” said Leo, “you called me with a question and the line was open when the Timequake hit so I got stuck with you. I can’t imagine how anyone bought it, but as soon as Mom was looped in, she smoothed it all over.”
“Who the hell is Gerald Ford?” I said.
“No idea,” he said. “Apparently a president.”
“Christ, I’ve got a lot of homework to do,” I sighed.
“Tell me about it,” said Carter.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Calliope. “I’ve got ten times more catching up to do than you two.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait and see,” said Carter with a grin. “It’s a surprise.”
We stepped out of the elevator and I found myself in a totally alien world. Gone were the vast, drafty, utilitarian hallways of our United Enterprise-built skyscraper. Gone were the dusty beiges and grays. There were marble floors beneath my feet, vaulted ceilings above my head, lush dark wood and brass fixtures all around me.
“What is this place?” I said. “This isn’t our building.”
“It is now,” said Carter.
“No World War III Chronomaly means a lot less patching,” said Calliope. “You’ll be astonished how much smaller the Bureau is. They don’t need hundreds of agents anymore.”
We followed her down a corridor lined with oil paintings.
“It looks weirdly familiar,” I said. “I have the strangest feeling I’ve seen it before.”
“You have,” said Carter. “You’ve been seeing pictures of it for years. This is the National Archives.”
I felt tears welling up in my eyes. Leo squeezed my hand.
“The city is still here,” I said. He nodded, eyes shining.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s all still here.”
We had stopped in front of a mahogany door with a brass plate labeled "20TH CENTURY."
“Now remember,” Calliope said, pushing it open, “Leo, you know nothing.”
“Got it.”
“Carter and Reggie, say as little as possible. We’re all three supposed to be on leave for the next two weeks. When in doubt, fake a headache. Don’t answer any questions until we’ve had a chance to get caught up on our homework.”
“We know,” said Carter.
I didn’t answer. I just stared.
It was a big, bright, open room, bursting with sunlight and bustling with activity. And there, to my left, I saw three doors in a row with brass nameplates.
AGENT REGINA BELLOWS.
AGENT CARTER HUGHES.
AGENT CALLIOPE BURNS.
“Surprise!” said Carter under his breath.
I looked at Calliope and felt the tears welling up again.
“Don’t
get sentimental on me,” she said. “This is gonna be no picnic. You have three weeks of medical leave to teach me everything these guys think I learned in five years at the Academy.”
“Calliope—” I started to say, but couldn’t find the words.
Calliope Burns had always been too smart for her job. She was brilliant and tough and irreplaceable as Grove’s assistant, and her loyalty kept her at his side, prepping missions and filing reports and making coffee, long after she had outgrown her position.
And more than anything else so far – more than my mother becoming Director, more than finding at least one of the ruined landmarks of D.C. still standing – this was the moment it finally sunk in, all the way down to my bones, that we had really, truly, rewritten time.
In a world with no Harold Grove, Calliope had gone up for Field Agent certification.
I said her name again, trying to think of a way to put my feelings into words, but couldn’t.
“Shut up,” she said. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
But she was smiling.
“Agent Bellows!” interrupted a perky voice I didn’t recognize, and I saw a dark head pop up from behind a cubicle wall in front of my office.
“That’s your tech,” murmured Carter. “I forgot her name.”
“Deborah,” murmured Leo helpfully into my ear. “I met her yesterday.”
“It’s so good to see you up and around again!” said the tech cheerfully.
“Thank you, Deborah,” I said, making a mental note to spend some quality time in the next week digging through the personnel database to learn everyone’s names.
“I did some hunting around while you were gone,” she said. “And I found that old book you were asking about. I already put the digital version on your handheld – I thought you’d like some new reading material while you’re on leave – but I found an original for you too. It’s on your desk.”
“Thanks,” I said, and turned the doorknob to enter my very own office.
I had an office.
The other three followed me inside.
“I’ve seen theirs,” said Leo. “But we didn’t go inside yours without you.”
“Doesn’t look like we missed out on much,” said Calliope with elegant distaste, looking around her. My office was a catastrophic mess, with papers and sweaters and tech equipment and coffee mugs everywhere. I loved it instantly.
The Rewind Files Page 42