“Were the boxes open?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Could one be empty?”
“Why would there be an empty one?”
She shrugs. “A decoy? In case you show up and try to get yours back?”
“That’s impossible. Kane hasn’t had my chaser long enough to make a copy of the box.”
“Was he alone?”
“I don’t think so. He said something to someone.”
“Who?”
“I couldn’t see who it was.”
“Could he have been talking to himself?”
I think back to when I saw him standing in the family room, facing the hallway. “No. He was responding to someone.”
Several seconds of silence pass.
“So, what do we do now?” she asks.
I’ve been pondering that question myself for the last several minutes, but there’s really only one answer. “We get the chasers. Both of them.”
We find a spot next to several tall bushes from where we can see the house, but won’t be noticed by any neighbors.
It’s well after midnight when the lights in Kane’s house start going out one by one. The lamp in the master bedroom winks off last. We give it another forty minutes before we cross the road and head back up the steps to the front yard.
Though my instinct is to avoid the front of the house altogether, we can’t chance missing an opportunity to get inside. Very quietly, I approach the front door and try the knob. Locked.
I try the windows, but none moves more than a fraction of an inch, so we head around the same side of the house where Iffy found me, and try the ones there. While neither opens, I do see through the last one that the two chasers are still on the table.
We move around the corner and work our way slowly across the back of the house, checking more windows. As much as I’d rather do this quietly, if it comes down to it—and I’m starting to think it might—I can smash through a window, grab the chasers, and get out of there before anyone inside can react.
I almost feel foolish when I ease open the screen door covering the rear entrance, and reach for the knob. I’m under no illusion that it’ll be unlocked, but then the knob twists in my hand. When it stops moving, I give the door a gentle inward push, sure that there will be a bolt or a chain holding it in place, but it slips from the jamb and swings into the house.
I glance back at Iffy and see that she’s as surprised as I am. I then push the door until it’s wide enough for us to enter. After I step inside. I pause, listening for any noise that might indicate we’ve been detected, but there’s not even a creak.
I motion for Iffy to follow me. My plan now is that as soon as I get the devices, I’ll input new jump parameters into mine and we’ll leave from right there in the kitchen.
The screen door is on a spring so that it will automatically close. Iffy eases it back into place so that it doesn’t slam, and then we step over to the table. It’s too dark for me to see any of the wear and tear marks that would tell me which box is mine, so I reach down to pick them both up.
Before I can even touch them, though, a female voice from the corner of the room whispers, “I wouldn’t if I were you. You’ll never get it open in time.”
From the hallway steps a giant of a man. He’s at least another half foot taller than me, with the girth to match. Even in the dim light, I can see his face is hard and unsmiling.
I glance at the boxes again, quickly calculating whether I can grab them and escape out the back before the man can get to me.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” the woman says, her voice still soft, almost ethereal. “Vincent?”
Someone steps into the house behind me, and as I’m turning to see who it is, Iffy yells, “Let me go!”
Kane has come in from outside and now clutches Iffy against his chest.
The unlocked door was a trap that we walked right into.
“Sorry, Denny,” the woman says. “No way out this time.”
I twist to the left and spot her shadowy shape sitting on a chair. Whoever she is, Kane has clearly told her my name. But she’s wrong about one thing. There is still a way out.
I dive for the table and grab a box with each hand. Whichever is the fake should be the lighter one, but as I raise them up, they feel the same.
Just as I realize this, the big man reaches over the table and slaps a hand against my shoulders, slamming me down. My ribs collide against the table’s edge, knocking my breath from my lungs. I gasp for air as the two boxes I’m still somehow clinging to are taken from me.
“Denny!” Iffy cries.
“Quiet!” Kane tells her.
“He needs help!”
“He’ll be fine,” the woman says, still rooted to the same spot in the corner.
The silent giant comes around the table and flips me over so that I face him. He puts a surprisingly light hand on my chest, and after a moment I begin to relax. As I do, the pressure under my ribs eases and my breath returns.
“Gentlemen,” the woman says, “please take Denny and his pet into the living room, where we can chat.”
The giant yanks me to my feet and ushers me toward the hallway once Kane and Iffy have gone past. As he and I near the doorway, I hear the strike of a match, and look over to see the woman lifting a flame to a cigarette sticking out of her mouth. The light flickers over her face, revealing a slanted sneer and features that I know oh so well.
“Hello, Denny. Long time, no see.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
If the entire universe disappeared earlier when I realized there were two chasers, then there are no words to describe how utterly stunned I feel now.
Sitting in the chair in the corner of the kitchen is my training mate.
My fellow rewinder.
My tormentor.
Lidia Brewer.
The condescending, upper-caste waste of a human being is the walking definition of why our old world needed to go away. She’d tried to force me to change everything back to our original time line by kidnapping Iffy. We had struggled, and when she was momentarily dazed, I had sent her far into the past with my own chaser, while keeping hers—the one I have been using ever since then.
She shouldn’t be here. I banished her to 1743. Even if her trainer had also taught her how to rekey a chaser, it shouldn’t have mattered. My device had been desperately low on power, and had barely enough left to activate for that final jump. She should have lived out her life in the eighteenth century and never bothered anyone again.
The giant takes my satchel from me and dumps it on the coffee table, then shoves me onto the couch next to where Kane has put Iffy.
We sit there in the darkness for several seconds before the overhead light clicks on and Lidia enters the room.
I feel Iffy stiffen beside me in surprise. I reach for her hand, but the giant slaps my wrist away.
At first glance, Lidia looks exactly as she did the last time I saw her, but as she nears, I detect a tension in her face that appears to have taken up permanent residence, and a disturbing glint in her eyes that makes me want to immediately look away.
“Didn’t think you’d see me again, did you?” she says as she takes the seat across from us. “Well, then, you should have sent me back farther than 1949.”
Nineteen forty-nine? I sent her to the eighteenth century, not the middle of the twentieth.
Unless . . .
During my training I was never told what would happen if a device quit mid jump, but my old chaser running out of power is the only explanation that makes sense. Instead of dropping her 272 years in the past, it obviously only took her sixty-six.
“I’ve always known you’d come,” she continues. “Even knew the date, too. That’s called planning.” She glances at Kane, then looks back at us. “You’ve met my grandson, Vincent.”
Grandson?
“He’s part of the plan, too,” she says. “And the fun part is I haven’t even had any kids yet.”
“One
kid,” Kane says. “My mom.”
She gives the grandson, who must be a decade older than her, a halfhearted smile. “Of course, dear, but it doesn’t really matter. That time line is no longer relevant.”
There’s a flicker of confusion in Kane’s eyes, but unlike him, I understand immediately what she means. The version of her that will give birth to his mother did so purposely only to put one of her descendants—Kane—in the position to create this very moment. Now that it’s arrived, there’s no need for this Lidia to have that child. Kane has unintentionally been party to the erasure of his own mother.
“And this guy?” I ask, tilting my head toward the giant. “Another one of your descendants?”
“Leonard? No. I found him here. He’s been helping me get ready for your visit.” She looks around. “How do you like my house? Nice, huh?” When I don’t answer, she takes a puff of her cigarette. It’s a habit I don’t remember her having back at the institute. “Took me about six months after I arrived to figure out how to manipulate the system here. It’s amazing what selling a few simple product ideas can get you. Don’t worry, nothing too time line-destroying. After all, how would you ever know about it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She continues as if I haven’t spoken. “Maybe it should have taken less time, but as I’m sure you can imagine, I wasn’t in the best mental state when I arrived.”
If you ask me, she’s not in the best of mental states right now.
“I could be super rich if I wanted to be, and live in a mansion three times the size of my father’s,” she goes on. “But I knew doing that might make me lazy. And God forbid I started to like it here. Can’t have that.” She motions to the room around her. “This feels temporary to me. Just the way it should.”
There’s no mystery in where this is going. Bringing me here has been for one purpose only. She wants to finish what she was trying to accomplish before I exiled her. She wants to bring the empire back, and to do that she needs me. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m never going to tell you where the trigger is.”
“The trigger?” She laughs. “Seriously, Denny, do you think I haven’t already figured that out yet? I’ve been here three years. I’ve had plenty of time to find it. The hardest part was remembering the history from our time line since, obviously, those resources are no longer available to me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fair enough. I wouldn’t if I were you, either.” She pauses, then says, “Cahill. You told me and the others the name yourself. He’s important, but the rest of your story was a lie.”
I hold perfectly still, not letting the panic I feel inside show. She’s referring to the story I told when I tricked the few remaining rewinders into thinking I’d stumbled on the trigger that had erased our world, and I had then set things right. Cahill, indeed, was the catalyst.
“Robert or Preston or something like that,” she says. “His first name has eluded me, but it doesn’t matter. You know who I’m talking about. You kept him from turning George Washington in to the redcoats. So Washington lived, leaving us with this god-awful reality. Am I close?”
She’s not close. She’s dead-on.
I fight hard to keep my face neutral.
“All I would have to do is hunt around to find the exact moment.” After another puff, she taps the cigarette out in an ashtray. “I bet you’re wondering if I tried to make a jump the moment Vincent showed up with my chaser.”
“You couldn’t. It doesn’t work for you.” Her chaser isn’t her chaser anymore. It’s keyed to me.
She smiles. “Yes. That’s a bit distressing. But for argument’s sake, even if it did work, I wouldn’t have gone. Ask me why.”
I say nothing.
“Come on. Play along, Denny. Ask me why.” When I again don’t answer, she switches her gaze to Iffy. “You want to take a stab at it?”
“I don’t care,” Iffy replies.
“You should. But then again, soon enough it won’t matter to you.” Lidia looks over at Kane. “Vincent, why don’t you take . . . Ivy, is it? Please take Ivy up to the room we’ve prepared for her.”
“She stays with me!” I shout as I start to push myself off the couch. Before I gain my feet, however, Leonard shoves me back down.
I try again, getting all the way up before he pushes me again. This time, I stagger but don’t fall, and shove at his arms in an attempt to knock them away.
“Leonard,” Lidia says, “try his leg.”
I look down to see what she’s talking about and notice that blood has seeped into the denim above my wound. Before I can do anything else, Leonard whacks his knee into my thigh.
I fall back onto the sofa, my vision narrowing to a small circle surrounded by black. For several seconds that’s all I can see. When my sight finally returns, Kane is at the base of the stairs pushing Iffy up.
I try to rise for a third time, but Leonard grabs my leg and gives it a quick squeeze. The tortured yell that flies from my throat is quickly muffled by Leonard’s meaty palm slapping down across my mouth.
“Shut up and stay there.” These are the first words he’s said. His voice is gravely but more tenor than I would have expected.
When my rapid breaths finally start to slow, Lidia nods at Leonard, and he removes his hand from my face.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” she says, nodding at my leg, “but you might want to have a doctor take a look at it.”
The bloodstain has nearly doubled in size since Leonard hit me, and is damp enough to glisten in the light. Though I can’t see the wound, I’m sure several of my stitches have broken.
I level my gaze at Lidia. “If anything happens to Iffy, you will pay for it.”
“That’s her name,” she says, looking relieved. “Iffy. Should have remembered that.” She leans forward. “What happens to your girlfriend is up to you. Help me, and she’ll be fine. Don’t, and, well . . .” The mad glint returns to her eyes with a vengeance. “Here’s what’s going to happen. First, you’re going to fix my chaser so it works for me again.”
When she doesn’t immediately go on, I say, “And then what?”
“And then the fun begins.”
My chest tightens when Kane comes downstairs without Iffy. Following Lidia’s instructions, he retrieves the two chasers and sets them on the coffee table in front of her and then moves over next to Leonard.
Though he’s trying to look tough, I sense that he’s preoccupied. Leonard, on the other hand, is focused entirely on me. I doubt I could get an inch off the cushion before he batted me down again.
Lidia picks up one of the boxes. From the nick at the top, I know it’s the one that I’ve been using these past few months, the one that used to be hers. Which makes the other device my original chaser.
“How much power does it have left?” she asks.
I don’t respond.
She huffs out an annoyed breath. “The way this works is that if you answer my questions, I don’t send Leonard upstairs to hurt your girlfriend. Simple enough?”
I notice Kane glance at Leonard, troubled. Lidia’s blood may run through the accountant, but I’m starting to think he’s found himself in a situation he didn’t expect. Unfortunately, I have a feeling the same isn’t true about Leonard, so as much as I would like to, I know I can’t ignore her question. Before I say anything, though, I see the second chaser out of the corner of my eye, and an idea comes to me that that might at least give me a chance to get the upper hand again.
“It was around seventy-five percent last time I checked,” I say.
“You’re lying. It was well below that when you stole it from me.”
As I hoped, she’s taken the bait.
“You’re right. It was lower, but I charged it.”
Her eyes narrow angrily. “How could you do that? I didn’t have a charging kit, and I know you didn’t have one, either, or you would have never let your chaser get so low.”
“Which
is why I had one made.”
She stares at me. “You had one made?” She snorts a derisive laugh. “Right. No more lies. How much power is left?”
“If you don’t believe me, the charger’s in my satchel.”
She glares at me, eyes narrowing, and then motions for Leonard to give her my bag. Once she has it, she dumps the contents onto the table. I’m relieved to see that the knife in the side pouch, though, has not fallen out.
Lidia is immediately drawn to the solar-powered battery and the tangle of wires that make up RJ’s charging unit.
“This?” she says, picking it all up.
“Be careful. It’s just a prototype, so you can damage it if you don’t watch what you’re doing.”
She twists the battery around, looking at both sides, and then follows the wires until she finds the not-quite-perfected connecter at the end. It’s close enough, though, that the shape of it surprises her.
She holds it out. “Show me.”
I scoot down to the end of the sofa, near her, and she slides my original chaser toward me.
“This one first.”
The lock that holds the top flap in place utilizes a different battery than the one that powers the device, a safety precaution for situations just like this, so when I touch my thumb against the small identification screen, the flap unlocks.
As I push the lid all the way open, Lidia grabs the sides of the device, ready to snatch it away if I try anything. I open the charging port and stick RJ’s connector in. Nothing happens.
“I knew you were lying,” Lidia states.
Ignoring her, I jiggle the connector. Just as Lidia is about to make another comment, a blinking dot appears on the main screen.
“Oh,” she whispers under her breath, stunned. She watches for several seconds until the battery meter appears and begins to tick upward ever so slowly. “How long does it take to charge?”
I explain in vague terms how the system works.
“Seems inefficient,” she says.
“I’ve only had a few months to get this developed since we last saw each other. You’ve been here three years and what do you have?”
She tenses. “Do you think I haven’t tried? They still use vacuum tubes in their electronics here, for God’s sake!” She grabs the other chaser. “Open mine.”
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