Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II

by Padgett Lively

  “Miss Speex,” the oily voice of Knightly Davis insinuated itself into the darkness, “that’s private property you were about to destroy.”

  She spit her words out through gritted teeth, “It’s stolen, you bastard! That’s my brother’s technology, and you’ve no right to it!”

  The palmavox popped again, and Charlie’s voice crackled urgently over the airwaves, “Ettie? Ettie? What’s happening? They still can’t get in!”

  A smile touched the withered lips, and his flat eyes were like stagnant pools of blue. “I must admit, this caught me a bit off guard. I never thought anyone in this timeline would be so audacious. But then you’re not from here, are you?”

  Ettie could feel herself go lightheaded, and she blinked hard trying to keep from fainting. “You know I’m not. You and that crazy woman who killed my mother!” She felt fury reinvigorate her muscles and struggled to stand, Clem supporting her.

  She refocused her eyes on the man in front of her, but noticed something else moving behind him. Several small black-cloaked figures seemed to walk right through the wall and into the room.

  “How?” she silently mouthed the word.

  Clem’s voice was a bare whisper. “We must have cut off the machine’s energy supply when we disconnected the last Feralon.”

  Of course, Ettie thought, how could she be so stupid? It must have taken a couple of minutes for it to shut down once the Feralon were free. Her back to the machine, Ettie could see by his expression that Knightly Davis knew it too as the dials began to blink and fade.

  A malicious smile touched Ettie’s lips. “They’re going to get you,” she told him in the evil sing-song voice of horror movies.

  “Not before I kill you,” he said, raising the laser gun.

  In that instant, before he could fire, two things happened simultaneously. The door burst open as Charlie and Inspector Hamilton used their collective strength to crash through it, and a glittering void appeared through which a woman stepped.

  “My… my God!” Charlie stammered, struck motionless with disbelief, “Odette!”

  She spared him a bare glance and said off-handedly, “On the side of the angels this timeline, Drake?”

  No one could take their eyes off her. She seemed encased in starlight, her movements rustling with an internal breeze. A shot fired from Knightly Davis’s gun was deflected with the flick of her wrist, where it was absorbed into her hand and rendered harmless.

  “Mister Davis,” she said with false sweetness, “was that nice?” Her smile was both beautiful and terrifying. She walked toward him, and he dropped the gun to his side, backing away from her. “You’ve led us a merry dance, I must admit.”

  Us? Ettie looked around her to see the room surprisingly full of people, tall, stoic people who appeared both imposing and insubstantial. It was disorienting.

  “The frequency variations you used to entrap the little Liberi created the time shifts, effectively covering your tracks and hiding this timeline from us. We searched so many different alternative decisions that led nowhere.”

  His typically expressionless countenance reflected both terror and confusion.

  “From the look on your face, you appear to have been unaware of this particular consequence of your, um, ‘work.’

  “No matter, your intended crimes are sufficient.” She walked over to the Temporatus and circled it, looking it up and down. “That you were able to reengineer a technology that was meant for science and exploration into one of torture and enslavement is an accomplishment indeed.”

  Odette tried to hide it, but Ettie heard her words shake with fury. Finally, she stepped away from the machine. With a wave of her hand, it fell to dust.

  The Liberi, or Feralon as Ettie knew them, gathered around Odette. The rest of her people flanked out behind Knightly Davis.

  Odette stood tall before him, solemn as a high court judge. “You are a fool, meddling with power you know nothing about, motivated by greed and arrogance.” She shook her head. “Still, Mister Davis, your interference did have another consequence that, we hope, will prove positive.”

  He blinked, and his lifeless eyes reflected a spark of hope.

  “This timeline and your experiment have revealed to us a new generation of Liberi, or Time Traitors, as we are sometimes called.”

  Inspector Hamilton, who had been watching in awe next to Charlie, whispered, “Ungawen.”

  Odette cast him a quick glance and smiled. “Yes, and Ungawen, as well.”

  “What are you going to do with me?” Davis’s voice was steady, but tense.

  Odette walked up to stand only inches from him. “We are going to take you somewhere where you can no longer cause damage to any other living being until the day you die.”

  His face had molded into an impenetrable mask, yet his eyes flickered with malice.

  She saw it and said, “Don’t count on being rescued. We will find whatever accomplices you may have and stop them.”

  Two Time Traitors stepped up to grasp him by each arm. A smug smile spread across his face just before they disappeared, and Odette was left staring into thin air.

  She walked over to where Ettie and Clem stood.

  “You look like Odell,” she said simply.

  Ettie smiled and would have spoken, but her vision started to waver, the disorienting feeling of two overlapping timelines made her legs weak. Odette’s eyes went wide with panic, and a hoarse, terrified whisper broke from her, “No! Oh no!”

  In the instant between one blink of an eye and the next, she was gone, and Ettie with her.

  *

  Odell rolled on the ground and tried for a second time to get up. He opened his eyes and then shut them again quickly. Pulsing in his brain caused the room to roil with motion. The deafness in his ears came and went, punctuated by intervals of silence and roaring noise.

  Finally, he was able to get to his knees. His vision began to clear, and the scene that met him was one of chaos and terror. Several people lay prone and bleeding on the floor. The table was knocked over, and the candlesticks had rolled extinguishing their flames. The room was illuminated only by the fire in the hearth and the light from the open parlor door which backlit a hunching, howling figure.

  The figure was screaming, its voice pitched to the level of madness. It was her, Lillian Brandon, looking like an aged and insane Ettie. She couldn’t have been more than forty, but lines of fury and grief were etched deep in her fair complexion. She wore a workman’s rough-spun trousers and jacket, her blond hair escaping in wisps from a queue tied at her neck. In one hand, she limply held a semi-automatic handgun, and the other clutched her head where a bloody gash appeared.

  She was screaming at Ava, “Where’s my baby! What have you done with my baby?”

  Odell staggered to his feet and gasped at a searing pain along his ribs. He clutched at it and felt the unmistakable sticky sensation of blood. He surged forward as if finally released from the reverberations of the flash bomb.

  Ava looked up as he skidded to a stop beside her. Her expression reflected back at him his own shock and stupefaction. Yet she held in her hand one of the heavy silver candlesticks, with which it was clear she’d had the wherewithal to bash Lillian in the head.

  “Odell,” Ava said numbly, “Odell… I think the clip is spent.” She began to shake and tears spilled over onto her cheeks.

  Odell looked around the room. The walls were ragged with bullet holes. Washington and Adams were both superficially wounded and administering to the dying Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin was uninjured.

  Odell’s heart gave a jolt of fear when he realized that Franklin knelt beside the recumbent form of Gabriel Wright. A bullet hole in his chest, the mortally wounded man’s head rested on his daughter’s lap.

  Ava said shakily, “Gabe was her first victim, but only because he shielded Evelyn. You were next. She missed Franklin. He was too quick for her. The rest, I think, were just random acts of madness.”

  Odell nodded slow
ly as he walked toward the group, his muscles weighed down as if with lead. Of course, this had all been about revenge, an abused child’s payback. But then Odette, the one Lillian had meant to injure so grievously, to whom she wished to transfer her pain, wasn’t here to see it.

  And then she was. A glittering void opened with a vortex of wind blowing extraneous material around the room. The occupants were so traumatized they hardly blinked at the otherworldly woman who stepped from its center. She was followed by a bewildered Ettie, her bandaged arm hanging useless at her side.

  Evelyn stared dumbfounded at her mother, her eyes swollen with crying, bloodstained hands pressing hard on the gaping wound in her father’s chest. Odell watched as Odette checked her impulse to run to them, instead turning her steady gaze upon the wretched woman at the parlor door.

  She stood before Lillian, whose eyes now glittered with satisfaction.

  “You see now, don’t you?” she jeered. “You know how it feels!”

  Odette’s expression was unfocused and inhuman. She looked at the other woman with supreme disdain. She raised her hand in a gesture Ettie immediately recognized, one used to reduce the Temporatus to rubble. Ettie moved in protest, but Evelyn was before her.

  “Mother, don’t!” her voice was choked with tears. “Whatever you are going to do—don’t! You don’t… you can’t know what was done to her!”

  Odette stood still as stone, her raised arm hesitating.

  “It’s not an excuse, I know,” Evelyn implored through gritted teeth, her tears practically blinding her. “Can’t we stop it here, though? Please! Can’t it just stop?” She blinked and her vision cleared as tears cascaded down her face. “Papa needs you now… we need you now!”

  Those in the room watched frozen in place as Odette’s arm wavered and finally dropped to her side. She turned slowly and looked at her daughter with an anguished face. Released from her rage, she ran to them and knelt down beside Evelyn, asking gently, “May I?”

  Evelyn nodded and moved over so her father’s head now rested on Odette’s lap. His eyelids flickered and opened, and he looked up into his wife’s face.

  “I knew it must be you.” His voice was barely a whisper. “I’m feeling warmer.”

  Odette was crying silently, but was able to say, “I’ve been gone too long. Can you forgive me?”

  His laugh was a weak huff of air. “For saving the world yet again, my dear? I think I can find it in my heart…”

  “As always, Gabe, you overstate my accomplishments.” She smiled tenderly down at him and kissed his forehead, her tears wetting his hair. “I am but one of many, among whom you stand very, very tall, my love.”

  He reached his hand up to grasp one of hers with an air of desperation.

  “Have we really done it then? Have we really remade the world?”

  She nodded, almost unable to speak. “Yes,” she said simply.

  He sighed and closed his eyes. “Then it will be all right, my dear. Everything will be fine…” his voice trailed off.

  The space around Odette and Gabriel began to glow and waver. She looked at her daughter and said, “I will be back soon. I promise.”

  Evelyn nodded as she stood and stepped away from them.

  The shimmering grew brighter and more intense until no one in the room could look at them straight on. Gabriel opened his eyes again and gazed up at Odette in confusion.

  “What are you doing?”

  Odette pulled him more securely into her arms. “I’m taking you to see the world.”

  Thirty-Four

  HISTORY RECORDS AN infinitesimal fraction of human endeavor. Only the truly great or truly infamous remain with us over the centuries. Left behind are the every day and ordinary, those who strive for the little things, and even, sometime, those who accomplish the monumental.

  Such was the case with the founding of the Republic of America. Many of the names remained the same: Washington, Franklin, Adams, even Thomas Jefferson, who did not die on the Wright’s parlor floor that terrible night long ago. He survived what was declared a British assassination attempt, significantly diminished physically, but greatly enhanced in compassion for those deemed less worthy. His denunciation of slavery in the Declaration of Independence became the most quoted passage of that famous document, and his were the first slaves freed to take up arms against the British.

  While Virginia fought with the colonists, the Carolinas and Georgia remained loyal to the Crown. Benjamin Franklin was known to comment that they fought two wars in one: a war of independence, and a civil war for the very soul of their new nation.

  Six long, bitter years the war raged. Two years in, the economies of the southern colonies collapsed; their agrarian infrastructure was decimated by slave revolt and desertion. About that time, the French threw their money and military might behind the colonists. With the freedmen regiments fighting in the south and the native alliances holding strong in the north and east, it was a testament to the tenacity of the British that the war lasted another four years. Not surprising some would say, given the character of the people who now called themselves Americans.

  Other names emerged from the battlefield of revolution, less well-known perhaps than the Founding Fathers, but honored and famous nonetheless. Joseph Louis Cook, Hugh Harris, and Jonathon Sinclair were but a few to reflect the diversity and expansive vision of this new nation.

  No matter the good intentions of many toward the goal of inclusiveness, it seemed that the mantle of “other” must fall upon at least one group. Obscured by the biases of the time were the contributions of women. It would take several more decades of determined campaigning for their rights to be realized and enshrined in the Constitution. And yet more time would pass before scholars recognized the indispensible spy craft of Verity Turner and Cara Gordon, their courage, innovative techniques, and brilliant intelligence gathering hidden for years behind the codename of Three-Five-Five.

  One name that stood out, even among the greats, was that of Gabriel Wright. An Englishman coming late to the colonies, his writings were often considered the philosophical underpinnings of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. His eloquent plea for a nation of collective cultures, all equal and acting as a system of checks and balances against the worst excesses of the other, was a rough roadmap for the new nation. He had died suddenly before the official start of the war; the exact cause of his death was never recorded. His writings were compiled and published posthumously by his daughter, Evelyn Wright Reynolds. The book, titled, Pluribus et Concordis, was a staple in any good library.

  But not even the most diligent scholar would ever detect any significance in the presence of an obscure Wright relative and his Negro servant in those heady months before the Second Continental Congress would declare independence. The passionate words on slavery that influenced Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were attributed to an escaped slave by the name of Wendell Johnson. They were delivered in a meeting that was recorded by Benjamin Franklin to have taken place at his home in the sick room of the recovering Thomas Jefferson.

  Anonymous to history and her name erased from all places save one, a madwoman of no consequence was institutionalized at the Pennsylvania Hospital. The cost of her care was covered by the charity of one of the city’s most prominent citizens. Her suffering and heinous crimes unknown to the good doctors and nurses who cared for her, she was, in her old age, deemed quite harmless and allowed to help care for the sick and abandoned children in the pediatric wing.

  When she died at the age of eighty-two, she was interred in an all but forgotten grave in the churchyard of Saint Peter’s. Her name was etched on the tombstone with that of the grave’s other occupant: Here lie the mortal remains of Lillian and Sewal Brandon, mother and son.

  Epilogue

  IT WAS A clear autumn night and the city lights had been dimmed to allow its residents a view of the stars. Odell was but one of many who sat or stood out on balconies, stoops, and sidewalks to watch the const
ellations rise over the rooftops from the eastern horizon. Like the rest, he observed and honored this first day of the changing season. It was a ritual he had known all his life, adopted, he believed, from one of the many native cultures that infused his world.

  He stood on a balcony that projected out from one of the tallest buildings in the city. The beautiful room behind him, once used for evil, was his study and laboratory. It was Ettie who had found it as she had traipsed about the city years before, seeing what changes history had wrought.

  Unlike the last time he had traveled to a restored future, Odell retained conscious memory of his time travel and various alternate incarnations, as did Ettie. With Odette’s help, they were able to access the Liberi part of their brains to effectively mesh divergent timelines, at least in their own minds. This was not the case for Ava or Charlie. It was determined by the Liberi that they would retain no memory of their time travels.

  The hardest thing he’d ever done was set the Temporatus for the future, knowing that when they returned, Ava would remember nothing, or worse, not even exist in his time. She swung herself on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. Her wet cheek pressed against his neck, she had whispered, “Find me.”

  He shook his head in an effort to dislodge the memory and brought a pair of powerful binoculars up to his eyes. He aimed them for a spot just over Orion’s shoulder and found a faint and obscure cluster of stars.

  “Do you see them?” her voice came from just behind him, and he nodded his head without turning around.

  “Yes,” he answered and then slowly lowered the binoculars as she came up beside him.