Paradox Lost

by Libby Drew

  “You sure it’s not called a watch?”

  Reegan dismissed the cool tone. “It does a lot of things, actually. Keeping time is one of them. But its extra features include allowing me to control the time portal and keep track of the people I bring here.”

  “It doesn’t work so well, does it?”

  Scowling, Reegan dropped his hand. “She got hers off somehow.”

  Saul gave a dismissive snort.

  Reegan would have preferred to fight this battle clothed, but maybe this was better. Fewer barriers. Fewer places to hide. He edged around the bed, waiting for Saul to move away, retreat, but he held his ground. Brave to a fault. Brave and in so much pain. It bled from his expression, his rigid posture, and the hands clenched at his sides. They’d both invested too much in this connection. Too much, too quickly. They were sharing a temporary thing here. Saul couldn’t have known that, but Reegan had no excuse. Now it was too late. His heart wasn’t listening to reason.

  “Saul, I swear to God I’m telling the truth. And I wasn’t lying about the danger, either. There are—” How the hell could he explain this? “There are rules about time travel. Don’t ask me to get technical. I’m not a scientist. But we don’t belong here, Silvia and me. Temporary visits, those are okay. But staying permanently is impossible. Deadly, in fact.” He stepped around the desk into Saul’s personal space. “If I don’t find her and get the hell back to the future, we’re both dead.”

  Saul could have been a statue for all his chilly stillness.

  “Look at me,” Reegan demanded, softer this time. He risked a touch, a hand on Saul’s arm. “That’s the big secret. The thing I’ve been hiding from you. Do you understand why I did? But however unbelievable it sounds, I promise it’s the truth.”

  More explanations and apologies flew to his lips, but Reegan bit them back. He’d said his piece. He’d have to hope it was enough.

  He’d thought he’d lost when Saul sidestepped, and Reegan’s hand fell away. But all Saul did was move to the window and stare through a crack in the blinds. Arms crossed and back to Reegan, he shook his head. “I don’t know what to believe.”

  Not the worst thing to hear, by far. Weak-kneed, Reegan sank onto the mattress, then pulled the sheet over his lap. Thin protection, but comforting. “Then let me tell you more. Would you…would you please turn around?”

  A shudder racked Saul’s frame. “Why?”

  “Because I want to look you in the eye for this.” And because he’d be able to judge Saul’s reaction. After the past day, he’d learned that talent went two ways.

  Saul threw a glance over his shoulder, took in Reegan’s slumped figure, and sighed. “Fine.” He scooped his jeans from the floor and slid them on, but he didn’t join Reegan on the bed, choosing to perch on the edge of the desk instead. Distance Reegan couldn’t begrudge him, but the implied loss felt as though he’d swallowed a block of ice.

  Two fortifying breaths and Reegan began. “What do you know about time travel?”

  “Besides it’s impossible?”

  Reegan rubbed at the ache forming behind his temples. “Yes. Besides that.”

  “Nothing. Enlighten me.”

  He’d asked for it. Still, Reegan floundered at first. “The discovery is actually not that far down the road. Maybe twenty years. 2042, if I recall. But it took decades to make the process economically feasible, even longer to understand the dangers involved. But now, I mean, where I’m from, it’s commonplace.”

  “Let’s say I believe you.” Saul pursed his lips, focusing on a spot over Reegan’s shoulder. “Doesn’t all that bouncing around in time screw up history? I mean, aren’t there…contradictions?”

  “Paradoxes. We call them paradoxes. You’ve probably heard of the Grandfather Paradox. Where a man goes back in time and kills his own grandfather, thereby preventing his own birth.”

  “It rings a bell.”

  Reegan grabbed at the kernel of interest in Saul’s voice. “That’s faulty science. The result of years of supposition and what was considered common sense, at the time. Paradoxes don’t exist. Time exists in a loop, you see? Loops within loops, and because of that, events are far more stable than initially believed.”

  Saul bent over his knees. “You’re saying the future already happened.”

  “It’s happening now. Everything is happening now. And then. And before.” Reegan gave a shaky laugh. “I know. It can give you a headache. I never bothered much with trying to understand it beyond what was required to pass my physics tests.”

  “You’re telling me you have no idea how it works? And yet you travel back and forth through time as a—a what? A tour guide?”

  Breathing through the sting of the insult, Reegan nodded. “You drive a car every day, Saul. Do you understand the exact mechanics of the internal combustion engine? Do you know how a microprocessor works? I bet not. You just accept that they do. Why is it so difficult to understand I’m not well-versed in the mechanics of time travel?”

  “Because it makes you sound crazy.”

  Reegan conceded the point. “To you, probably. Okay, more than probably,” he amended when Saul shot him a dark look.

  They stared at each other for several seconds, neither willing to surrender. Finally, Saul blew out a breath and dropped his head, breaking eye contact. “Keep talking.”

  “We can travel to the past and move through it for limited periods of time. Research proves short jaunts are overwhelmingly safe. But the longer a traveler stays, the greater the danger their presence will cause a potential paradox. Their interference radiates and expands at an exponential level. When that happens, when the ripples get too big, the traveler is eliminated.”

  “Eliminated.” Saul looked to swallow a smile. “How?”

  Several examples came to mind. “Stray bullet?” Reegan touched his bandaged cheek. “Runaway truck?” A slip in the shower. As he’d said to D’arco, the possibilities were endless, the fight unwinnable. Reegan waited. With Saul’s keen intelligence, he’d make the connection soon enough.

  It took a mere two seconds. “And Silvia doesn’t know this, right? She thinks she’ll be safe here.”

  “She does.” That was Reegan’s theory.

  “If this time-travel stuff is so prevalent, why didn’t she know trying to escape into the past was impossible?”

  “Maybe she hacked her cyberschool account and cheated on her science tests. I don’t know. It’s the kind of stuff kids learn at a young age, but I suppose it’s one of those details that would be easy to forget if you’re not exposed to the subject every day.”

  Not that Reegan could ever forget. Every word of every warning he’d ever read had been circling through his brain since he stepped out of the portal the second time. He’d half expected to keel over from a heart attack the second he opened his mouth to confess the truth to Saul, but the office was still and silent. Safe, for now, despite how exposed he felt, sitting naked on Saul’s pullout bed. He eyed his crumpled pants, lying a few feet away on the floor.

  Saul’s voice broke through his thoughts. “Is that it?”

  The words had been little more than a growl, loosely enunciated. A warning that Reegan obeyed. He swung his gaze around. “Yes. Do you believe me?”

  Slowly, like a pendulum gaining momentum, Saul shook his head. “But I think you do. If I hadn’t actually seen your girl on the Mall that night? The one in your photograph?”

  Reegan gulped. “Yes?”

  “I’d toss you out right now. As it stands, I think she really exists. And I think she’s really in trouble.”

  He turned to a filing cabinet behind him and yanked a clean T-shirt free from the middle drawer. “Get some sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.”

  Clutching the sheet, Reegan rose to his feet. “You’re not staying?”

  Saul gave him a wide berth as he circled around the bed to the door. He paused with his hand on the knob, then jerked it open. “Get some sleep.”

  The quie
t click of the latch hurt Reegan’s ears more than a slamming door.

  *

  Neither of them slept. Reegan spent an hour listening to Saul move around the outer office, then remade the bed and got dressed. He eased the door open to find Saul at Cammie’s desk, bent over a stack of paper. Saul jerked his head up when Reegan appeared at his side. “You’re up.”

  “Never really slept.” He craned his neck as Saul gathered the papers into a messy pile. “Something related to a case?” Saul’s sad laugh made him wish he hadn’t asked.

  “No. Just bills.”

  The universal headache, in any time. Reegan hadn’t missed the way Saul’s gaze had fixed on the stack of cash the night before. “How’s business?”

  “Slow.”

  It went a long way toward explaining why Saul took his case, despite his misgivings. “You were a detective before this. And a soldier before that.”

  Bent over Cammie’s desk, hands fisted in his hair, Saul shook his head. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you know those things because you’re from the future.”

  Reegan bit his tongue on those exact words. “Why’d you leave the force?”

  The pile of bills found their way back into Cammie’s drawer. Saul closed it slowly, lips pursed.

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Reegan already regretted asking, but the question had been nagging him. Along with the mystery of what happened to Saul’s business after this year. “It’s none of my business.”

  “No, it’s not. I’ll tell you, though. It’s not exactly a secret.”

  Something public, maybe. Allegations of misconduct? Reegan couldn’t picture it. Then it clicked. “The drinking?”

  “Not in any way, shape or form. I always had a handle on the booze at work.”

  Reegan found his boots by the coat rack, stomped his feet into them, then brushed off his hat and put it on. “You didn’t drink on duty.”

  “I drank on duty all the time.” Saul sat to put on his sneakers. “I deserved to lose my job for that alone. But the vodka had nothing to do with it in the end. I had a falling out with my partner.”

  “You guys didn’t get along?”

  “We got along fine. Until he thought it would be cool to trade blowjobs.”

  Strangely, for the subject matter, Reegan detected little bitterness. He matched Saul’s nonchalant tone. “Was he any good?”

  “I’ll never know.” Methodically, Saul stood and loaded his pockets. Wallet. Cell phone. Keys. “He liked being on the receiving end well enough. But the rest was a bit too gay for him.”

  Tamping down his anger, keeping the conversation light when it was anything but, became a struggle. Reegan had studied the progression of societal acceptance of homosexual and polyamorous relationships, the subject being of personal interest to him. In Saul’s time, the old prejudices still had a foothold. “He outed you?”

  “Spectacularly and with much embellishment.”

  “The bastard.” A twitch in Saul’s shoulders stoked the fire. Reegan fumed. “What, you’re not angry?”

  Saul’s response held more uncertainty than Reegan had yet to hear from the other man. “He’s a good guy. He just didn’t know how to handle it. It was the end of our friendship. It was the end of lots of things.”

  The truth came into focus. A little too sharply for Reegan’s liking. “He’s not a good guy if he sacrificed a friend because he was afraid.”

  “What, being afraid is a crime?”

  “No, being afraid is human.” Reegan stalked to the door and threw it open. “But being a cowardly prick is a choice.”

  He breezed through the outer office, into the vestibule and out of the building. The city had come to life over the course of their sleepy afternoon. People rushed by on the sidewalk. The street teemed with cars, most moving slower than the pedestrians. Life went on, despite everyone’s personal crises. It would go on after Reegan and Silvia escaped or died. And it would go on for Saul despite the mistakes and betrayals in his past. But none of those facts tempered Reegan’s need to find Saul’s partner and punch him squarely in the face. More than once and with—what phrase had Saul used? Much embellishment.

  He didn’t fight the instinct, though the reason at its root was useless and unhealthy. He had to put the stops to whatever was building inside him, these feelings he was developing for Saul. Before he lost sight of the main goal—getting home alive.

  He made a surreptitious scan of the street, looking for any familiar faces. None that he could see. Maybe he’d been wrong about Pigtail, though that was an indulgent thought, most likely untrue. He could try to fool himself all day long, but it wouldn’t change the facts.

  Saul joined him on the sidewalk, hands slung into his pockets. They stood shoulder to shoulder watching the passersby until Saul spoke. “He is a cowardly prick. But what’s done is done. And if what you told me inside is true, about the timelines and stuff, then it wasn’t a test, or bad judgment, or even the moon in fucking Aquarius. It just happened, and now I’ve got to deal with it.”

  Sadly true. Yet Reegan got the impression that Saul hadn’t been dealing with it at all. “Does that make you feel better or worse?”

  Saul pried the keys from his pocket, jingling them absently. “Jury’s out on that. I’ll let you know.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Never seen her before.”

  Saul liked to believe he was the sort to disregard stereotypes. Still, when the bartender had given him Marty’s name that morning, Saul’s mind had formed a picture of a man who might have been a cross between Billy Joel and Fats Domino. The sort who’d strut the street, whistling, guitar swinging from one hand.

  Marty might’ve been thirty, as he claimed, but Saul pegged him closer to just-barely-legal. Big as a house, solid muscle with not an ounce of fat, and covered in tattoos that were visible through his white T-shirt, he waved off Silvia’s picture and sank onto the piano bench.

  It gave an ominous groan, sagged a couple of inches in the middle, but held.

  “Are you sure?” Saul kept the picture pointed at him. “The bartender said she might have been in here last night.”

  Marty shot a wicked glance toward the bar. “Maybe. I get lots of pretty ladies in here, though. Hard to keep track of them all.”

  Saul let his gaze drop to Marty’s left hand and the wedding ring gleaming there. Marty grinned.

  “Didn’t say I partook. No harm in looking, though.”

  Perhaps not, but the words sounded forced and he wouldn’t meet Saul’s eyes for more than a second. When he grabbed a towel off the top of the piano and swiped it over the crown of his shiny bald head, Saul knew he’d struck gold. Despite the slight chill in the air, Marty was sweating heavily.

  “Okay, Marty.” Saul put the picture away. It’d done its job. “Relax. I’m not a cop or anything.”

  “I couldn’t care less if you were,” Marty snapped. He turned to his piano and set his huge paws on the keys. “Now fuck off, or I’ll call the bouncer.”

  Reegan vibrated at his elbow, expression livid. He’d come to the same conclusion Saul had, and neither of them appreciated the misdirection. Quelling him with a sharp look, Saul moved around the piano, back into Marty’s line of sight, and leaned on the instrument. “We’re trying to help her.”

  “I just bet.” Marty swept his fingers across the keys, and despite himself Saul stopped to listen, preconceptions shot to hell once more. Marty played beautifully, large fingers finding purchase on the narrow keys without any apparent effort, and he seemed content to play forever, ignoring the two angry men who hovered at his front and back.

  Saul tried a different tactic. “We know her husband’s after her. We’d like to get to her before he does. We want to protect the lady. You hearing me?”

  Marty offered Saul another snarl as he took a break to slurp the rest of his drink, bourbon judging by the smell, jiggling the ice cubes to get the few final drops. A sharp cramp stuck Saul’s left side, but he rode out the p
ain without giving himself away. He’d never cared for bourbon, but that sound—the tinkle of ice in crystal—unearthed a longing. A desire as sharp as any he’d felt since his last tumble off the wagon. A clammy sweat broke out between his shoulder blades.

  “Marty, come on. Talk to us.”

  “I did.” The dark eyes turned dangerous. Tattoos rippled over bulky biceps. “Don’t know what you expect from me.”

  “Some help?” Saul ducked to catch his eye. “Can you tell me where she is?”

  “Nope.” Marty’s fingers tripped off the end of the keyboard. He shifted on the bench and began the number again, faster this time. Saul wrestled with a wave of frustration. Marty wasn’t bribe material. If they wanted the information, they’d need to do some quick convincing.

  “We want to take her someplace safe. She’s in danger.”

  “She’s already someplace safe.” A flutter of high notes punctuated Marty’s statement, then the song began once more from the beginning, flawless and haunting.

  Saul continued to dig. “Safe? Your place?”

  “Safer. Invisible.”

  Saul eased off to reassess. The terminology brought back memories, few of them pleasant. There was a chance, though the odds were slim, that he and Marty shared some of the same secrets. And if they did, Saul’s search just got a hell of a lot easier. He reached into his back pocket and retrieved his wallet.

  Fingers flying over the keyboard, Marty sneered. “Don’t bother, man. I ain’t for sale.”

  A fact Saul had already decided. Inside his bifold were several of Reegan’s crisp hundred dollar bills. He ignored them for the thick stack of business cards he kept jammed into the pocket next to the cash. He plucked the one he was looking for from the bottom of the pile and held it out to Marty.