“You okay?” Vic asks. I realize I’ve been holding my breath again. I nod at Vic and then close my eyes and exhale. We bump shoulders in the cramped car, but after the years we’ve worked together, after all we’ve been through, I hardly notice it.
Breathe.
Everything has gone off-kilter, like looking into a warped mirror.
“Do you think that was a normal fire?” Vic asks.
I slowly shake my head.
Ishimwe eyes us in the rearview mirror.
Vic sighs, running a hand through his short, dark hair. He keeps it in a military buzz cut. I keep my own mess of thick, brown curls cut just above my shoulders, long enough to pull back but not too long to have to worry about it much. Damn cultural conventions; I would kill for a shorter cut right now.
I get a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror and feel a sudden shock from the reflection. My normally tan skin is a sickly pale, contrasting the splash of dark freckles across my cheeks. With my wide cheek bones, narrow blue eyes and almond-colored skin, I have the kind of face that well-meaning friends of my adoptive parents would call ethnic, when they really meant mixed. It’s been a liability, but I’ve learned to simply take on the closest race to whatever area we’re traveling through, like putting on a jacket for a change in the weather. My parents couldn’t ever tell me anything about where I came from. They called me a miracle, since I was only an infant when I literally showed up on their doorstep. But having no past sure doesn’t feel miraculous, it feels like an emotional hole that can’t ever be filled.
“We’re here,” Ishimwe announces from the front seat.
We unfold out of the tiny Renault, lugging our packs from the small car. Genevieve’s apartment is inside a beautiful eighteenth-century brick building in Montparnasse. Her door is on the street-level. I knock softly. It only takes a moment before it’s opened.
Genevieve is tall and very thin. She has a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and is wearing baggy wool pants and a flowing cotton shirt. Ever under so many layers, she still seems to be made up of too many hard angles. We regard each other for a moment, and then she wraps me in a hug.
“Molly, tu y es arrivée, dieu merci!
My French is rusty, but I get the gist. She’s glad we made it.
“It’s wonderful to see you,” I respond.
Genevieve beckons us into her high-ceiling apartment. The sparsely furnished space looks as if it could have been an artist’s studio for the likes of Hemingway. An easel sits in the corner, holding a half-finished painting of a Parisian café. A chaise lounge and a low couch angle toward a small fireplace, logs blazing within. A single lamp in the corner is the only other light in the room, leaving much of the large space in flickering shadows. A hallway extends from the main living area, stretching into darkness.
Genevieve pulls the curtains shut tight. “Ishimwe, can you get towels?”
I realize that I am dripping on her floor.
She faces Leung. “This must be the new agent-in-training?”
I nod. “Agent Leung Mei, welcome to your home for the next six months.”
Leung brushes a strand of black hair from her eyes. “It’s very…” she pauses, searching for a word, “large.”
Leung had grown up on a farm. She had later been imprisoned for refusing to sleep with a soldier in the Emperor’s army. Leung spent one night in a cell before discovering that particular spot in the back corner contained a portal to another time. Despite her humble origins, she was proving to be one of my most adept students. She had learned English quickly and was having little trouble grasping the nature of our work.
Ishimwe returns with towels and we work on drying ourselves off.
Genevieve turns to me, her eyes darkening. The thought of Leung’s training seems already far from her mind. “The fire…”
I set the towel on the back of the couch. “How did it happen?”
Ishimwe leans against the mantel. “We were waiting for you. But the fire—it came out of nowhere. It spread quickly. We had to escape.”
Genevieve pulls her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “I left immediately to arrange things with my contact at the National French Police. He’ll make sure the gendarmes don’t look too closely at either the cellar or the sixth-floor additions.”
“And after the police are done?” I ask.
Genevieve is staring at the fireplace, her eyes distant. “We need to close it permanently.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “And why would we do that?”
Genevieve meets my gaze. “It was a Recursion Event.”
“How was this a Recursion Event?” Leung asks, saying the words carefully. Leung’s lessons have only briefly covered the phenomenon. “Aren’t they just,” she searches for a word. “Contra—”
“Contradictions?” I take in a breath. “They are more than that. Recursion Events are what happens when the Universe tries to make adjustments for anything that doesn’t fit. Sometimes it’s when an agent tries to change something. We’ve learned how to be careful, but if you try too hard, the Universe will fight back.”
“The other cause of a Recursion Event is an Interloper,” Vic says. “People who stumble into tunnels without realizing it. They can really screw things up.”
“An Interloper… like I was?” Leung asks.
“Like most of us were,” I say. “It’s how the ISD does the majority of their recruiting. I was an Interloper as well. The first time I traveled I spent weeks being followed around by all sorts of strange coincidences.”
Ishimwe gestures toward Leung. “How do we know it’s not her?”
Firelight flickers across Genevieve’s face. “The fire started before they arrived. This was planned. An Interloper was placed intentionally near our Station. Which means we can count on two things: this involves us, and it isn’t going to stop any time soon.”
I stare at Genevieve. “But close the Station? The tunnel could still be intact and closing the Station would collapse it for good. These tunnels are the world’s greatest resource—”
“I know,” Genevieve says.
“We will need authorization from Command.”
“Under extreme circumstances it can be done.”
“You will be adding months to this trip!”
Genevieve pulls her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Agent Gardner, that’s enough!” She softens. “It’s better if we talk about this alone. Come with me.”
Blood pounds in my ears as I follow. As a Station Agent, Genevieve is my superior officer. Though she doesn’t directly oversee my operations, the Station fire has changed that. “So you want us to close the Station just because there’s some Interloper wandering around nearby causing freak fires?”
Genevieve stops when we are near the end of the hallway. “It could be The Order.”
I regard Genevieve evenly. The Order is a rumored group that is believed to be from our future. But little is known about them. A primary part of my job is tracking Interlopers. Occasionally, this leads to the discovery of other groups controlling their own tunnels. Most of the groups we’ve learned about, so far, have been no surprise. China owns some tunnels, as well as Russia and, possibly, North Korea. The United States shares control of its tunnels with Britain and France; the ISD was formed in the early seventies and many of its allegiances follow Cold War sympathies. Of the other groups, there are the conspiracy theorists that have guessed a few things right, as well as a few Doomsday Cults. But when it comes to organizations claiming to be from our future, most of the time we disregard them as crackpots. Though, a few names have come up often enough to make it on our watch list. The Order of the Perpetual Dawn is one of those names. There was an Interloper who called himself Phaedrus—a name taken from Greek philosophy. He was captured by agents in 1974 and sent to our Los Angeles Station for interrogation. We would have dismissed him as another one of the crazies if it weren’t for the fact that he managed to walk right out of a secure underground cell and hasn’t
been seen since. A guard simply opened Phaedrus’s cell door and walked him right out of there. After forty years of ISD operations, no one has yet been able to determine how Phaedrus did it, or even if he is still alive.
I glance down the hallway. The others are finished drying off and have settled onto the couches. “Finding solid intel on The Order of the Perpetual Dawn could be a huge win for the organization.”
Genevieve nods. “Yes, but it’s dangerous. We know nothing about them. If they have future technology, as we suspect, then we may have no idea what we’re up against.”
“But closing the Station—that means Leung’s training is interrupted. It means we can’t get back the way we came. It means a new route home, which could add months to this trip.”
Genevieve holds me in her gaze. “And I am your superior, which means you do what I ask.”
I take in a breath, but Genevieve cuts me off.
“Find a new route home, Agent Gardner. The Station has never been so vulnerable. For the protection of the Agency and its secrets, we are closing it tomorrow. And Agent Gardner, about the other things we’ve talked about—” Genevieve glances back down the corridor where the others are visible in the firelight. “The others only need to know that we both believe the Station is too compromised for continued operations. There’s no need to mention anything else.”
* * *
I find my room and shut the door behind me. I throw my bag onto the bed and sink down onto it, letting out a long breath. Genevieve’s last words still itch at the back of my mind. I understand the need for secrecy, but these decisions affect all of us. And now Genevieve has tasked me with planning the route.
Like the rest of the apartment, the room is mostly bare: just a bed, a dresser, a wardrobe, and a small lamp. The plaster on the walls is cracking. Over the windows are flower-print floor-to-ceiling drapes. The decor could use an update, but that’s all relative. The ornate, hand-carved furniture all look like incredible antiques. Of course, they’re probably only a few years old.
I pull open my pack and stash my clothes into drawers. I also always travel with some basic survival gear, like a tarp, for sleeping in the elements, some twine, duct-tape, and a multi-tool. I take out my guns and ammo. For my mid-twentieth century missions, I like to carry a Beretta 418 and a Walther PPK-L. I pull out an ankle holster for the Beretta and a shoulder holster for the Walther and toss them onto the bed.
Finally, I take out some of the more sensitive pieces of ISD equipment. First, a handheld device shaped like a bar-code scanner. Next, an electronic tablet—though, without Wi-Fi, it will only do much good for me inside our Paris Station. Finally, I take out a long, cylindrical metal tube and twist off the cap. I tilt it, and a sheet of rolled paper slides out. I kneel down on the floor and unroll a world map covered in a complex, interlocking network of lines, each with an equation written underneath it. The map is on the tablet as well, but I prefer having the whole network of tunnels laid out in front of me. Overall, I prefer traveling low-tech. Tablets can fail or run out of batteries. A paper map never does any of those things.
Travel between the Paris Station and Central Command in Virginia is fairly standard. The Paris tunnel leads to a cave in eastern Kentucky in the 70s. From there, it’s only a seven hour drive to Chicago where a tunnel in the basement of a supposedly abandoned tenement building on the Southside will take us directly to the headquarters of the Isochronic Securities Department at Command Time (this makes the Chicago tunnel a major hub for travel). The whole route only takes a few days, but if we close the Paris Station, it will mean longer distances between tunnels and more “time zones” to cross.
I bend lower, studying the map, my eyes growing weary from the strain. My exhaustion threatens to take over. It’s been over twenty hours since I’ve last slept. But I want to get this done before the morning. Besides, when I sleep, I dream. And the dreams are rarely good.
I trace a line from Paris, across the Alps and into Austria. There’s a tunnel in Ostrava that will take us to the island of Cebu in 1920s Philippines. From there we could find a boat to Japan and travel through our Okinawa Station to 1998 Nairobi. The Nairobi Station Agent would have to secure the appropriate passports for us, but once that is arranged, it should only be a simple, twenty-hour flight to Chicago. The Chicago tunnel is about eighteen years behind Command Time. I’ll have to double-check the equations to account for each tunnel’s drift, but I do the math in my head and come up only ten months off. Only? This will add a year to a simple training mission.
I pause, staring at the map. Wasn’t there an embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998? Traveling is a delicate business. When we change things, history changes around us, but not instantaneously. We’ve created significant historic events before but it’s usually because we’re trying, with a lot of effort I might add, to change something else. The ISD isn’t some butterfly flapping its wings in Australia. We have to work for what we change, and so we rarely do it.
Still, significant historical events are, as a general rule, something we try to avoid. If I were at the ISD headquarters, I would have access to our historical databases with no lag and could plug in the dates down to the day and hour and fine instantaneous results, just to be sure. But I’m not at the ISD headquarters. I’m stuck in 1950s France and before the era of high-speed, secure Internet.
I repack my bag and then fall into bed. I clench my eyes shut, still overwhelmed. I need to relax even if that means dreaming tonight. That’s still better than the exhaustion that will follow if I spend the whole night planning. I feel sleep encroaching. If only I could clear my head and think about something else, anything else, then maybe…
* * *
The limo’s hood slams against the steel guardrail, metal screams against metal, and I am weightless. The vehicle slams against the water. My head strikes the side of the car and my vision telescopes inward.
A voice penetrates the darkness. “Molly?”
My vision returns.
A man is crouching over me. I stare at his stubbled jaw, dark hair, wavy and slightly balding, and his eyes—gray-green eyes that always seem to know when I’m angry, sometimes even before I know it. It’s my husband, James.
My mind scrambles to make sense of what is happening. I haven’t seen James in years. So how is he here? And then the answer comes. I’m dreaming. We’ve just left a campaign event at Gracie Mansion and were driving north on the FDR when we were hit by a truck and pushed into the East River. This is the car crash when I lost him. This is the first time I traveled.
“Molly, are you okay?” James says.
“My head hurts,” I say. But I only mumble the words. The pain in my head is all consuming.
The car tilts downward. Water must be filling the front of the limousine, dragging us down.
I feel James’s hands at the seatbelt, trying to unbuckle it, failing. Finally, there’s a click. It comes free and I drop down toward the divider, pulled by the shifting gravity. I put my hands up to stop my fall, but my head hits the roof. Darkness invades again.
I feel water on my arms and face. I open my eyes. The side of the car has been peeled off, probably from the guard rail, like the top of a tin can. Water rushes in over the jagged edges of metal and broken glass.
“Deep breath,” James says.
I gulp in air and then the water is over me and he is gone. I see nothing, only darkness, but then I feel his hand grasp mine, and he pulls me out of the car. There is no left or right or up or down, only James.
Something tugs at me. My hand slips from his grip. I crane my head around. There is something dark behind me. The limo? But there is no clear shape to this darkness.
I reach for his hand again and my fingers catch something small and solid. His ring.
I hold onto it as tight as I can with only my thumb and forefinger. But it slips off.
I grasp wildly until my hand closes around the ring.
James’s face, his eyes wide and staring, slips into darkness.<
br />
No, I am the one slipping into darkness.
Water and sensation disappear.
And I am floating in nothingness.
August 19
The ringing of a telephone shocks me awake. I open my eyes. It takes a moment to remember where I am. The cracked plaster walls. The ornate, hand-carved armoire. The flower-print floor-to-ceiling drapes. My fingers trace the small chain around my neck and the ring attached to it—the only tangible piece of James that I still have.
I slip out of bed, take a robe from the armoire, and steal quietly down the hallway. My heart is still pounding from the dream. I near the study—the source of the ringing telephone—and slow as I hear someone speaking softly in English.
“… Will be returning to the hotel soon…” There’s a pause and I step closer to the door, wanting to hear more. The low voice sounds like Genevieve but I can’t understand why she would be speaking English, particularly if she were speaking to her contact in the French National Police. “Yes, I understand.”
The phone jangles as it is returned to its cradle. I duck into the bathroom, closing the door just as I hear the one to the study opening. I don’t understand why I feel the sudden need for secrecy. Something about her odd use of English tells me it’s best not to be found right now.
I wait until I hear footsteps receding down the hallway, and then I slip out of the bathroom as quietly as I entered it.
I find everyone in the sitting room. Leung stares at her coffee. Vic stands by the window, scratching day old stubble and staring through a curtain at the streets. Genevieve paces the floor, her shawl billowing out behind her. Peter is there as well. He must have returned some time in the night. He’s the only one that seems relaxed, having sprawled out on the chaise lounge, a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Genevieve notices me enter.
“Where’s Ishimwe?” I ask.
“She went to the Station to relieve Peter and keep an eye on things,” Genevieve says.
I study Genevieve, wondering if she’s changed her mind and mentioned her suspicions to the rest of the team.
Recursion (Book One of the Recursion Event Saga) Page 2