Destroyer (Rewinder #2)

by Brett Battles

  I so want to say, “Not yours anymore. Mine.” But I keep the thought from my lips, and take the box from her.

  Once the flap is open, the screen comes to life.

  She studies it for a second. “Seventy-two percent. So you weren’t lying.”

  Her finger brushes across the surface as if she’s afraid it might disappear at her touch. It’s a moment I’m sure she’s been waiting for since she realized the other box no longer worked. Soon, though, the wonder in her eyes turns mischievous, and she begins rapidly inputting the coordinates for a jump.

  She glances up at me and sneers, then touches the go button.

  For a split second I fear that the machine might have some kind of residual memory allowing it to recall its former owner and take her away from here. But like what happened when Kane tried to do the same thing, the chaser doesn’t activate.

  Instead of turning angry like I expect, she shrugs. “Worth a shot. Now, how do we make it work for me?”

  “It needs a sample of your blood.”

  “My blood?”

  “For the genetic markers,” I say. In Iffy’s world it’s called DNA.

  “That’s right,” Lidia replies as if I’ve only reminded her of something she already knows. But I can tell she has no idea how the process works. “Let’s do it right now.”

  “It’s not that easy. We need to prep your blood first.”

  A pause. “Remind me.”

  “It needs to be dry.”

  She raises a skeptical eyebrow, all pretense forgotten. “Dry?”

  “A couple drops on a surface that it can be scraped off of later should do it. Metal or tile would work. Leave it overnight and it’ll be ready by morning.”

  She studies me for several moments before saying, “And how does this dried blood get into the chaser?”

  I touch the faint outline of a rectangular panel at the bottom corner of the control surface. “Under here.”

  She pushes on the spot but nothing happens. “How does it open?”

  “There’s no reason to do it until your blood’s—”

  “I want to see.”

  I say nothing for a moment. “Okay. I’ll need something thin, like a table knife. And a metal paper clip. They have those in this time, don’t they?”

  Once more I’m subjected to her scrutiny. Finally, though her eyes never leave me, she turns her head to the side and says, “Vincent, you’ll find a knife in the kitchen. And there should be a paper clip in the drawer by the cutting board.”

  Kane glances at Leonard as if the giant should be the one to run the errand.

  “Vincent, now please.”

  As Kane reluctantly heads into the back of the house, I notice a flicker of light near the bottom of my vision. I almost look at it, but I stop myself when I realize what it is. A full operating screen has replaced the meter on my original chaser. It means the battery has enough power now to make a jump. I doubt that it can go very far yet, but it is working again.

  Lidia appears not to have seen it, and I’d like it to stay that way. My fear is that if she did, she’ll disconnect it from the charger. My chances of getting out of this are much better if there are two working devices.

  “How did Vincent find you?” I ask, hoping to keep her distracted.

  “It doesn’t matter how. What matters is he did.”

  “It was the journal, wasn’t it?”

  “Journal?” From her tone, she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

  “The locator he used to bring us here was in it. Your diary, I assume?”

  “Well, the diary I specifically created for him to find.” She smiles coyly.

  Though this admission is news to me, it’s not surprising. Of course, she created a journal that she intended to be read and used by one of her descendants. No doubt it’s packed full of lies and half truths meant to garner sympathy for a grandmother stranded in time.

  In the kitchen, I can hear drawers opening and closing.

  “Why 1952? Why not 1949, when you arrived here?”

  She leans back and I think she’s not going to answer me, but then she says, “I’m sure you can imagine that I was in no condition to do anything when I first got here. If Vincent had come to me then, I doubt I would have even believed him. I needed time to work things out and get my head on straight. When I finally did, I picked a date.” She laughs to herself. “You’re going to love this part. I decided to do a little experiment. Six months ago I decided that today would be the day I wanted him to bring you to, but I didn’t write it down yet. No, I just kept it up here.” She taps her temple. “When Vincent used the information in the diary, the ink was already over sixty years old. The thing is, I didn’t actually write it in there until after he knocked on my door this afternoon. So in a way, you’re all here because I merely thought it. Blows your mind, doesn’t it?” She leans back. “What can I say? I’m a genius.”

  “Why this year then? Why not 1953 or 1954?”

  “My grandson tells me that I’ll be married and pregnant within a year. Better to have him come for me at a point where I can avoid all those unnecessary steps, but still have had plenty of time to prepare everything.”

  “Those unnecessary steps were part of your plan, too, weren’t they?”

  Her smug smile is all the answer I need.

  The daughter she had (will have/will never have) was not conceived out of love or the natural desire to start a family. No, Lidia wanted to create a chain that would reach all the way to 2015, where she knew I would be. And now that chain is no longer necessary.

  “Why didn’t you tell him to help you when you were in 2015 trying to stop me?” I ask.

  Her smile slips a little. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

  I suddenly recall the calendar in the future version of this very house, the date of April 4 circled. Kane had known. So why hadn’t he shown up then?

  “Nineteen fifty-two is your backup plan.”

  “You can never be too prepared.”

  I shoot a quick look at Leonard. “And what about him?”

  “Insurance,” she says, once more looking pleased with herself.

  Of course. There was no way she could know the type of person who would be coming back to get her, but she would know they’d need my help. Leonard was to be the muscle in case her descendant turned out to be unable to handle the job. Which, I’m fairly certain, is the case.

  A few moments later Kane reenters the room and hands Lidia a knife and a paper clip.

  “Before I give these to you,” she says to me, “I want you to describe exactly what you’re going to do with them.”

  She asks a few questions as I go over the procedure, and once she is satisfied, she hands the two items over.

  I uncurl one end of the paper clip and then use the knife to bend the tip into a hook. Next, I turn the chaser so that the side the hinges are mounted to is facing me. There’s a small hole along the edge of one hinge. It looks like a gouge mark in the wood that might have been made when the box was created. It’s not. I slip the hooked end of the paper clip into the hole and then close my eyes. I have only done this once before, and that had taken me several tries. This time, though, it takes only a few seconds to find the notch and tilt the hook into it. Once I’m sure it’s correctly in place, I pull.

  The rectangular cutout on the display panel rises a fraction of an inch. I slip the knife just under the raised piece and lift straight up.

  At its height, it sits only an eighth of an inch above the control panel, like a raised terrace. On the long side that faces the display screen is a tiny tray. Using the hook, I pull it out.

  “This is where the sample goes,” I say, tapping a shallow indentation in the tray with the clip. The blood I put there when I took control of this device is long gone, destroyed by the very process that mated me with the machine.

  Lidia snatches the paper clip out of my hand. “Let’s see if it works.”

  She punctures the tip of her finger
with the unused end of the clip, causing a bubble of blood to appear.

  As she moves her hand toward the chaser, I say, “Wait. I said dried blood.”

  “And I don’t believe you.”

  “Maybe you don’t, but if you’re wrong and I’m not lying, you’ll destroy the whole device.” While I have no idea if fresh blood will actually destroy a chaser, I’m telling the truth about its need for dried blood in the keying process.

  She hesitates, her finger only a few inches from the tray.

  “You’ve waited three years,” I say. “What’s another few hours?”

  Though I’m pretty sure she still doesn’t believe me, she pulls her hand away.

  “Watch him,” she says to Leonard and her grandson and then disappears into the kitchen.

  They stare at me until Lidia returns carrying a saucer. She tilts it so I can see a spot of red where she’s dabbed her blood.

  “Is this enough?”

  “Should be.”

  I reach over to the chaser and start to close the small panel.

  “No,” she says. “Leave it open.”

  “Unless you know how to fix these things if something goes wrong, I think it would be better to keep as much dust from getting inside as possible, don’t you?”

  She considers the question for a moment before giving me a reluctant nod.

  At Lidia’s orders Leonard takes me to the upstairs bathroom. I had hoped I would be reunited with Iffy, but she’s not there. My escort ties my hands behind my back and gestures for me to get into the tub. It’s too small for me to stretch out, and I need to fold my legs to fit, something my right thigh is not excited to do.

  “You know she’s just using you, right?” I say as the giant secures my wrists to my ankles with another rope. He doesn’t even glance up. “Do you even understand what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

  He yanks on the rope, pulling it tight.

  “Please. At least put me with my friend.”

  He checks the knots and stands. If it weren’t for the fact I know otherwise, I would start wondering if he was deaf.

  As he walks to the door, I say, “Lidia is going to take everything from you. Everything.”

  Looking back, he says, “Good,” then turns off the light and closes the door.

  I test my bindings, but the giant has been thorough and has left no slack for me to work with. There’s no chance I’ll be able to slip them off. I could probably twist and wiggle my way out of the tub, but even if I manage it, I’d still be tied up. There’s not even a cabinet in the room that might contain something I could use to cut myself loose—just a pedestal sink, a toilet, and the tub.

  For a while, I hear creaking in the hallway and the occasional muffled voice, but soon enough, silence descends. My mind spins as it throws out idea after idea on how I can turn things around. Each plan I come up with is more outlandish than the last, and even the tamest is not something I’ll likely be able to pull off.

  I don’t mean to fall asleep, but other than the sporadic naps I had on the bus, I’ve been awake for going on twenty-four hours. I’m deep in a dark dreamless nowhere when someone shakes me. My eyes shoot open, and for a moment I think I’m in my bed in San Diego. But why can’t I move my hands?

  Right.

  Kane.

  Nineteen fifty-two.

  Echo Park.

  The tub.

  While the bathroom lights are still off, a glow of a twenty-first-century smartphone illuminates Kane sitting on the edge of the bath.

  “Time to get up already?” I try to sound tough and disinterested, but doubt that I pull it off.

  “Tell me about where you’re from,” he says.

  Though my eyes might be open, my brain is still working at half speed. “From? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Where you and my grandmother grew up.”

  I hesitate. “She didn’t tell you already?”

  He nods with his chin toward somewhere else in the house. “She didn’t. My . . . other grandma—is that how you say it?—she told me. But I want to hear it from you.”

  I should have made the connection before, but life has been running at light speed since Kane stole my chaser and lured us to Los Angeles. The few moments I’ve had to think, I’ve used to look ahead, not back, as I tried to figure out what to do.

  The old woman who looked back at me from her chair in the front yard of this very house sixty-three years from now.

  The one who wanted more sugar in her lemonade.

  Lidia. Though the half dozen decades she lived through rendered her otherwise unrecognizable, that’s why I saw something familiar in her eyes.

  From Kane’s tone it’s obvious that the Lidia here in 1952 is nothing like the grandmother he knows.

  “All right,” I say. I take a few seconds to gather my thoughts, then as concisely as I can, I describe what life was like in Lidia’s and my original time line. I talk about the monarchy and about the institute and the caste system and the crumbling edges of our society.

  He listens intently throughout, and says nothing until I’m done.

  “I’ve been hearing the stories since I was a little boy, but the way you describe it doesn’t make it sound anywhere near as nice as the way Grandma did.”

  “That’s because she’s from a privileged caste.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Not even close.”

  He’s silent for a moment, then asks, “Is that why you changed things?”

  “Believe it or not, it was an accident.”

  His brow creases. “She told me you did it on purpose.”

  “The first time, no. The second time, yes.”

  “Second time? I don’t understand.”

  I tell him the story of the twelve seconds, and how I then used it to bring my dead sister back to life.

  When I finish, he sits quietly for nearly a minute before saying, “I believed her stories when I was young, but as I grew up, I tried to convince myself it was all make-believe. But every once in a while, I’d start wondering again. What if the stories were real?” He pauses, seemingly lost in a memory, before going on. “Then I found her journal when I moved in to take care of her. I read her plan for her own rescue. I still didn’t want to believe that she’d been telling the truth all along, but it was hard not to. I thought, I’ll just go to where she wrote that you would be. I’ll see for myself that you didn’t really exist, then I could just move on.”

  “April 4,” I say, thinking about the circled date on his calendar.

  He nods.

  “Where were you?”

  He closes his eyes for a second as if he doesn’t want to remember, then lets out a quick, humorless laugh. “On the boardwalk near the pier. I saw you running, but I still didn’t believe it was you. Then suddenly she was there, rushing at you, and the moment she grabbed you, you both disappeared. I could hardly believe it. All her stories had been true.” Another pause. “When I went back to LA, I showed Grandma the journal, and told her what I’d seen. You know what she told me?”

  “What?”

  He stares at his hand, saying nothing for a moment, then, “She told me it was just stories. That I should forget it. That it wasn’t important.” He looks over at me. “She said that she loved me.”

  It’s easy enough to connect the dots from there. For weeks, he did nothing, but then his own love for his grandmother and his desire to give her a second chance finally drove him to return to San Diego, to find me, and to initiate the plan a much younger and—though I don’t think he realized it until he got here—vengeful Lidia had thought up.

  As he stands, I say, “She’s going to leave you here.”

  He frowns and turns for the door.

  “The moment she disappears and undoes what I’ve done, we’ll all be erased. This time line will have never been. Your mother will never have been. And unless she takes you with her, you will never have been.”

  He opens the door and leaves.

&n
bsp; CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pale sunlight streams through the bathroom window when I open my eyes again, but it’s the sound of raised voices that wakens me.

  The confines of the tub make it hard to tell exactly where the noise is coming from. One of the voices is Lidia’s so I assume the other is Kane’s, though I guess it could be the near-silent giant.

  The distance makes it almost impossible to tell what’s being said. Words here and there are all I get at first, but then Lidia moves closer to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Which one of us knows how this works?” she says, annoyed. “I do. So you need to trust I know what I’m doing.”

  “But—” Kane begins.

  “But nothing! It’ll all be fine. You’ll see for yourself. I’m hurt that you even doubt me.”

  Whatever Kane says next is too low for me to hear.

  “Good,” Lidia says. “Now help Leonard bring them down.”

  Seconds later, two sets of steps pound up the stairs.

  They come for me first. Leonard removes the rope from my ankles, but leaves my wrists tied. As I’m jerked up, I’m able to get my good leg under me, but my injured one takes considerable effort to extend.

  After I awkwardly climb out of the tub, Leonard manhandles me out of the bathroom and shoves me against the wall, then glances at Kane. “Get the girl.”

  Kane enters the room across the hall and returns several moments later with Iffy. She looks scared but otherwise unharmed.

  Still, I ask, “Are you okay?”

  As she nods, Leonard yanks me off the wall and pushes me toward the stairs.

  “Wait!” Iffy says. “His leg. We need to take a look at it!”

  “Later,” Leonard says, and gives me another push to keep me moving.

  I stumble forward, nearly tripping, but save myself from tumbling down the stairs by quickly leaning into the wall.

  Leonard taps my back again. “Keep moving.”

  When we reach the living room, I notice that my original chaser is still sitting on the coffee table with the charger connected. While I had wanted them to remain joined last night, I can’t help but feel a sense of dread this morning. Lidia would have never left the machine hooked up that long unless she had something in mind.