by Henry Clark
“There!” he said triumphantly, waving the case around. “Totally misfiled! Heads will roll in clerical, unless they’ve also misplaced the portable guillotine, in which case I’ll have to content myself with a strongly worded memo. Now—”
He flipped open the case and displayed its contents to us. It was full of brightly shining surgical tools. I particularly didn’t like the one that looked resembled a can opener.
“—whom shall I interrogate first? Or would you prefer to reconsider and simply tell me everything?”
“Hey, boss?” said the guard who wasn’t Millard.
“Not now, Alphonse; I’m busy.”
“Why is there a trombone case on the desk?”
Garlock turned and regarded the case. I decided we had reached the point where one of us had to speak.
“You should open it,” I said, because opening it was the last thing I wanted him to do.
“Oh, I should, should I?” Garlock stepped over to the desk and put his hand lightly on the Shagbolt’s case. “Nobody breaks into a prison and brings a trombone with them. A harmonica, possibly. In an extreme case, an ocarina. But nothing this size. What is it, really?”
“It’s a trombone,” I answered honestly.
“It is the symbol of our cause,” said Frankie. “You’ve heard the expression ‘bold as brass’? We are BRASS. The trombone is our symbol. And we are your worst nightmare!”
“BRASS? Never heard of it!” Garlock drummed his fingers on the trombone case. I made a great show of ducking my head and wincing, like I expected something horrible to happen, and he stopped, yanking his hand back like he’d been stung. “What does it stand for?”
“What does what stand for?” asked Frankie.
“BRASS!”
“Boys—” I said the first word beginning with B that popped into my head.
“Brotherhood—” Frankie overrode me.
“Right!” I agreed. “The Brotherhood of—”
“Brotherhood Rebuilding—” Tom corrected me.
“A Saner Society!” Frankie finished. “Brotherhood Rebuilding a Saner Society! BRASS! Hear it and tremble!”
“You’re one of those sick little protest groups that will stop at nothing to make some wrongheaded, meaningless point?” Garlock goggled in horror at the trombone case. “IS THIS… A BOMB?”
“Why don’t you open it and find out?” I asked.
“Want I should call the bomb squad?” asked Alphonse, reaching for the nearest phone.
“NO!” Garlock caught Alphonse’s hand before it could get to the receiver. “We’ll handle this ourselves. If this is some trick of Gnuteson’s, I will not be made a laughingstock!”
“But, boss, what if it really is a bomb?”
“Then one of these clever children will disarm it.” Garlock took a scalpel from his collection of razor-sharp flatware. “It’s time we stopped fooling around!”
Two strides brought him over to us. He gathered Frankie’s hair in one hand and tilted her head back. “Stay perfectly still,” he advised her. “If you so much as raise your hand, or try to kick me, I can guarantee things will go very badly for you and your friends. Now, which one of you offensively dressed young men cares enough about this young lady to save her from getting a very nasty scar across her neck?”
He raised the scalpel to Frankie’s throat and pressed the tip against her skin.
CHAPTER 16
Erase Trouble
What do you want to know?” I asked, prepared to tell Garlock everything, even though I knew he wouldn’t believe it. I tried desperately to imagine a lie that he would.
“For starters, and most importantly,” he said, repositioning the scalpel below Frankie’s left ear, so I could have a clear view of what he might do if he didn’t like my answer, “the question is, who are you working for? That is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room!”
“No,” rumbled a voice behind Garlock. “I am the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Let go of the child!”
Garlock and the two guards spun around and were slapped across their collective faces by a hand the size of Michigan. Guns got yanked from grips and thrown across the room, a scalpel got tossed aside, and within moments, Alphonse, Millard, and Garlock had been neatly stacked on the floor and Mr. Ganto was sitting on them. They struggled to free themselves, but Mr. Ganto bounced once, and they stopped.
“What took you so long?” asked Frankie.
“Someone played the Shagbolt while I was still quite distant from it,” said Mr. Ganto, sounding hurt. “Almost as if they did not wish to travel with me.”
“We would never leave you behind; you know that,” cooed Frankie, patting one of his hairy wrists.
We had seen Mr. Ganto materialize silently behind Garlock and the others a few seconds before he made his presence known. If anyone had been paying attention to our faces, no doubt our expressions would have betrayed him. Several recent swims by the Gigantopithecus across the Gustimuck River had washed away any lingering trace of skunk.
“Am I sitting on Nazis?” asked Mr. Ganto. “They feel as though they might be Nazis. There is a bumpy sort of arrogance to them.”
“Mr. Ganto has a very sensitive tush,” Frankie explained.
“Sensitive enough to feel arrogance?” I was surprised. Mine was only sensitive enough to feel awful, usually after I had eaten too much peanut brittle.
“They might as well be Nazis,” replied Frankie, ignoring me. “Something we did in the past has changed the present so much that there’s virtually no personal freedom. You can’t even wear a kilt without going to jail.”
“We have to go back to the past and straighten things out!” Tom chirped happily, and the Gigantopithecus scowled.
“He’s right!” agreed Frankie. “And the longer we stay here, the more danger we’re in!” She began an end run around Ganto to get to the Shagbolt. Ganto reached casually behind himself and pressed a hefty index finger down on the case’s lid.
“Your father does not want you using this,” he said, in a voice like sorrowful gravel.
“What’s wrong with Nazis?” demanded Garlock from somewhere in the middle of the pile. “They were our allies—mmpht!” Ganto bounced twice and Garlock shut up.
“My father doesn’t want me using it, but my mother thinks I’m destined to become the Shagbolt’s Keeper! And she’s the one with the crystal ball! If I’m ever going to be the Keeper, I need more practice with it!”
“Your mother and father do not talk,” said Ganto.
“Well, duh!” snapped Frankie, and I thought it was a weird response.
“It is childish to play one against the other.”
“Gantsy, we don’t have a home here to return to,” Frankie explained. “The Romani are gone; anybody who was even the least little bit different is gone; we have to go back to 1852, figure out what we did wrong the first time, and undo it! We have to use the Shagbolt!”
“Undoing mistakes so rarely goes well for you,” replied Ganto, shaking his enormous head sadly from side to side.
“This sort of thing has happened before?” I asked, feeling a flash of anger. “What is wrong with you, Frankie? It’s like your father locked a gun in a safe and you don’t understand why he doesn’t want you to have the combination. The Time Trombone is dangerous! It just wiped out hundreds of thousands of people!”
“The trombone didn’t wipe out those people; other people wiped out those people! Trombones don’t kill people; people kill people. And we can bring them back!” Frankie tugged on the case and Ganto lifted his finger, releasing it. She staggered backward with her prize. “If you had your own time machine, you would use it, too. Believe me!”
“I don’t think I would, if I knew how dangerous it was.”
Frankie handed the case to Tom, opened it, and withdrew the Shagbolt. She looked at Ganto, who shrugged and stood, his head almost grazing the ceiling. He opened a supply closet and shoved his prisoners into it, jamming Alphonse and Millard i
n first and then, when it became obvious there would be absolutely no room for Garlock, stuffing him in, too. Then he upended a desk and stuck it under the closet’s doorknob.
“It’ll help if we’re all thinking about August 12, 1852,” said Frankie. “And the place should be here, rather than San Francisco, no matter how badly one of us wants to see the American premiere of chopsticks.”
Tom nodded to show he understood.
Frankie raised the mouthpiece to her lips and played the same flatulent notes that she had the very first time we had time-traveled. Again, I felt myself disintegrate and turn into tiny particles, and I realized it must be the way sand feels when it’s passing through the narrowest part of an hourglass. The office in the prison that had once been my school vanished, and I was never happier to leave a room in my life.
We were instantly surrounded by hay, and at first I thought we were back in the runaway wagon before the horses bolted, but then I saw the roof, and I realized we were in the hayloft of a barn.
“This is the place where they held us prisoners!” declared Tom, peering over the loft’s edge at the barn’s floor. “I recognize the corn shucker!”
“You would,” I said, a little tired of his knowledge of strange antiques. I looked where he was looking. Eyes gazed up at me from the top of a rusty contraption.
“And I recognize the cat,” said Frankie. “So we’re in the right place. But what time is it? Is it after we escaped, or before they brought us here?”
Bright daylight flooded the loft as Mr. Ganto swung wide a door in the back that opened into thin air.
“Midday,” he rumbled.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Frankie muttered.
I whipped the tablet out of my apron pocket, thinking all I had to do to find the time was turn it on, but then I realized I was being foolish. A tablet had to be connected to a network to know what the local time was, and there was no way an 1852 barn was going to be a hot spot.
The black surface of the tablet glinted.
The noises around me faded to a distant buzz.
The glint on the glass expanded and became a blurry picture, then sharpened in the center where human figures moved. Oh, I thought. Somebody downloaded a movie. It looks like a Western.
I watched, mesmerized, as people walked up a gangplank and boarded an old-time paddle wheel steamboat. The name Buckeye Beauty was painted on the boat’s side. I recognized two of the passengers. The boat was chugging up a river, and arm in arm, looking eagerly toward their destination, were Dwina and Seth. I broke into a big smile, seeing Dwina again.
Then the boat exploded.
I shouted, threw the tablet into the air, and staggered backward. Sound came flooding back, and the first thing I heard was Tom saying, “Bro! What? Are you okay?”
Frankie retrieved the tablet from the hay and glanced at it. I could see the screen was blank. “What?” she demanded.
“Dwina!” I gasped. “And Seth! They were on a steamboat called the Buckeye Beauty—and it blew up!”
“You saw that on the tablet?”
“Yes!”
“What app were you using?” Tom asked. “It wasn’t SimCentury Nineteen, was it? That’s only in beta; it’s full of bugs!”
“The tablet wasn’t turned on!” I explained. Behind me, Ganto snorted.
“He was scrying,” said Frankie. “That’s what Rose’s kind of precognition is called. He can glimpse the future in shiny objects.”
“So you think I saw the future? You think Dwina and Seth are going to be on an exploding steamboat? I didn’t save her life just so she could die trying to get across the river! She’s supposed to live and have kids!”
“I don’t know what it means, or why it’s the first thing that’s happened now that we’re back!” Frankie ran both hands through her hair as though things were getting to be a bit too much for her. It was the first time, in all we had been through, that she showed signs of losing her cool. It made me like her a little more.
“First things first!” she decided, regaining control. “We figure out what we did to ruin the future, and we fix it! Then we decide what to do about this new thing.”
“We find Dwina and Seth,” I said, “and we keep them from getting on any steamboats!”
“Possibly. But not before we work out what we did to cause the future to change so radically!”
“We should consult the I-Ching,” said Tom, digging the quarter out of his apron pocket.
“The last time we did that, we got dead as a Morse code message,” I said. “But nobody died.”
“I’m pretty sure dead was a description of the society we found ourselves in. It looked pretty dead-end to me.” Tom balanced the coin on his thumb. “Everybody think about our current problem and the best way to solve it.” The coin flew in the air and Tom caught it.
“Tails!”
He slid the pencil he had gotten from the prison out from behind his ear and looked around for something to write on.
“Here,” I said, taking the pencil from him and drawing a broken yin line on the post I was standing next to. Tom tossed the coin five more times, until I had drawn this:
“It’s the forty-sixth hexagram,” he said, and showed us the page.
HEXAGRAM 46
RISING. ASCENDING.
LIFE HAS ITS UPS AND DOWNS. BUOYANCY IS A VIRTUE. ONLY AFTER YOU’VE HIT BOTTOM CAN YOU TRULY GO OVER THE TOP. WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND. THE DUTY ROSTER FOR TORNADO WATCH IS, APPROPRIATELY, ROTATIONAL.
“More gobbledygook,” I decided. “Is there a message in Morse?”
“Do you have to ask?”
“I wish I didn’t. Just once, it would be nice if the word in Morse turned out to be stupid, or inane, something that proved whoever is sending these messages knows how idiotic this all is.”
“Inane?”
“Vocabulary word in Richardson’s class last week. You were out sick. Means ‘silly.’”
“The Morse here,” explained Tom, poking at the hexagram with his finger, “is four dots followed by one dot, followed by a dot and a dash, followed by a dash and two dots. Morse code for head.”
His decoding was even quicker than usual.
“Meaning what?” I wondered. “That we’re supposed to use our heads to solve our problem? Isn’t that obvious? How is that a help?”
“Phone,” said Tom.
“What?”
“Foe-un,” Tom repeated, turning it into a two-syllable word.
My phone rang.
It was the ringtone I used for my wake-up alarm. My phone thought it was six o’clock on Thursday morning—I had been up for twenty-four hours. It was a good thing I had dozed off during social studies. I slapped the places where my pockets usually were, remembered I was still wearing a dress, and scooped the phone out of my apron. I shut off the alarm, glanced at the phone—and froze.
“It says I’ve got perfect reception! That shouldn’t be possible, should it? In 1852?”
“Cell phones only work if there are cell towers,” said Tom. “You should have zilch.”
“Unless…” I tried puzzling it out. “This phone is here right now in two places. I’ve got one, and my past self has one, but it’s the same phone. Maybe it’s in touch with itself. Maybe… holy cow!” I finally recognized the voice that had called me just before Killbreath had captured us. “Nobody recognizes their own voice when they hear it over a speaker! That was me! I have to warn him!”
I punched my number into the phone. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and on the fourth ring a voice said, “Hello?”
I knew I had very little time, but at least I knew what I was supposed to say.
“Listen to me,” I said, as rapidly as I could. “Whatever you do, don’t let Dwina drown! You got that?”
“What?”
“Don’t let Dwina drown! Repeat it!”
“Who is this?”
“Repeat what I just said!”
“Uh, don’t…”
&
nbsp; “Let Dwina drown!”
“Let Dwina dwown. I mean, drown.”
“Good. Now duck!”
“What?
“DUCK!”
The phone went dead.
“All right,” I said. “About how long did it take, after Killbreath captured us, before we all arrived here at the barn?”
Frankie thought for a moment. “About forty-five minutes, tops.”
“Then we have forty-five minutes to figure out what we have to undo.”
“Assuming we didn’t do it between getting captured and arriving here,” said Tom.
“Let’s hope we didn’t. I don’t remember us talking much. Not with burlap bags over our heads.”
Frankie thumbed the tablet to life.
“If we’re lucky, this thing’s got an encyclopedia, or something similar, stored in its memory,” she said, searching through the apps.
I pointed at the tablet’s upper right corner with Tom’s pencil.
“Watch out for that,” I said, tapping the spot. It showed the battery life was down to 2 percent. “What the—?” I looked closely at the pencil for the first time. “This pencil has KILLBREATH printed on it!”
“Yeah,” agreed Tom. “I noticed that. It’s probably a campaign pencil, the sort of thing they give away before an election. Puma Ma’s got a sponge with our congressman’s name on it. She says it’s ironic.”
“No,” I said. “Then it would say something like VOTE FOR KILLBREATH. This just says KILLBREATH No. 2.”
“Maybe the opposing candidate paid for it,” suggested Tom. “Maybe they were comparing Killbreath to a big load of the old number two.” Tom held up two fingers and grinned.
“No,” I disagreed. “It’s more like it was made by the Killbreath Pencil Company!”
“‘Killbreath Graphite Novelties,’” Frankie read from the tablet. “‘Founded 1853. The most successful pencil-making company in the history of the world. It made its founder, former slave catcher Archibald “Kill” Killbreath, a millionaire by the time he was thirty, and enabled the start of the Killbreath political dynasty.’” Frankie looked up at us. “Ask me what made Killbreath Graphite Novelties so successful.”