I continue creeping forward.
There are four people in the field. Two are kids, boys from their clothing, though I could be wrong. One is a man of perhaps forty. The last I think is a man, too, until he turns and I can see his face. While he has the height of an adult, he has the features of a young teenager. They appear to be clearing the area.
A father and his sons working the land together is my guess.
Lidia should be about forty feet away from me now, just a hair to the right of the direction I’ve been headed.
This is it, I think. I can put an end to her madness right now!
I adjust my path and take another slow step.
A scream, not of fear but of rage. It doesn’t come from Lidia nor those in the field, but from the same direction in which I earlier heard the crunch.
The man and his boys stop what they’re doing and look toward the noise just in time to see someone run out from the trees. A native, by the looks of his outfit and darker skin. Three others follow.
The man shouts out at his boys. The tall one grabs the arm of the brother that is closest to him in size and says something in the boy’s ear. The boy then takes off running in the opposite direction from where the natives are coming—to hide or get help, I have no idea which.
The tall one yells something to the littlest boy and then runs diagonally across the meadow to what looks like a small cabin.
The native reaches the older man, and with what looks like a single, bloody blow, drops the man to the ground. The native then turns toward the cabin, and he and his friends start after the older boy.
The small boy hasn’t moved since his brother ran away, but the attack breaks his paralysis and he races to his father, drops to the ground next to him, and shakes the man’s shoulder. There’s no response nor will there ever be again. There’s just too much blood.
One of the natives has noticed the boy and has turned toward him. I press my lips together to keep from shouting out a warning as I’m sure the boy is done for. But when the native is only a few feet away from him, the boom of rapid-fire gunshots cracks across the field.
I think at first that the tall brother has taken a shot at the native to keep him away from the smaller boy, but one of the bullets has slammed into the woodpile by the cabin that the older sibling is using for cover.
The result is the boy ducks down farther, and the natives running toward him break for the woods, scared off by the shots from an unknown assailant. Only the assailant isn’t unknown to me. The hail of bullets came from Lidia’s position. Somewhere on our journey she’s obtained an automatic rifle, a weapon over a century away from even being built. In Germany, probably.
One of the natives, though, has not fled for the trees—the one headed for the little boy.
He raises the same weapon he killed the father with over his head as he nears.
“Shoot him,” I whisper. I know that would be messing with the time line, but Lidia’s already pulled the trigger once, so who knows what’s right and wrong anymore?
But instead of shooting the native, she sends a single bullet toward the tall brother to keep him down as the native delivers to the small son the same sentence he gave the father.
I know that Lidia could have killed the boy and his father herself before the natives attacked. That would have been the efficient way, but I know none of this is about efficiency. It’s about manipulating history to do her dirty work.
I stare at the bloodied bodies, unable to move, unable to think, and barely able to breathe.
Jump.
I materialize at the edge of a group of buildings. Lidia should be in front of me somewhere, but there’s a structure between us, and I can’t see her.
All is quiet, though. It’s the dead of night. Which means we’re about to—
When the world reappears it’s daytime, though the sun is hidden behind a thick layer of clouds that foretell of rain soon to come. I’m next to a copse of trees just behind one of the buildings I had seen during the night moments earlier. I check the tracking map. Lidia is actually inside the structure.
Hearing voices coming from around the front of the building, I slip into the trees and move through the cover until I have a better view. There are maybe a dozen buildings strung along a wide central road. I’m not sure I’d call it a town. A village perhaps, if even that.
Several people are about, and others are coming into the settlement on horseback via a trail that leads from the woods. The few women I see are all wearing black dresses, while the men tend to be dressed more in work clothes, though some have covered these with black jackets. They all seem to be heading into the building where Lidia is.
I cross a short, open expanse to a group of bushes that will give me a view of the front of the structure. A man standing outside the main entrance and greeting everyone as they go in tells me all I need to know. A church, but one that’s still under construction.
Why would Lidia be in a church? I doubt she’s sitting with everyone else. A stranger would stick out in a small place like this. Besides, I’d be willing to bet some people were inside already when we arrived, and if Lidia had appeared in front of them, people would be running out of the building screaming instead of calmly waiting as others walk in.
When the preacher follows the last of the arrivals inside, I decide to move closer. After crossing to the front of the building, I peek around the edge of the door, look around, and then quickly pull back when the preacher begins turning in my direction. There are at least thirty people seated inside. As far as I could tell, though, Lidia was not among them. What dominates the room—and is obviously responsible for the mood of the crowd—are two wooden coffins sitting up front, one considerably smaller than the other.
The father and son from the meadow—why else would we be here? The town is so small I wonder how the events that took the two lives can possibly be important enough to be of interest to Lidia. And yet they had. Obviously she knew the attack was coming and that the father would die. It’s the son who is really the key here, I realize. I’m pretty sure he was supposed to live. Lidia’s meddlesome hand has kept that from happening.
The preacher begins talking. There are prayers and quotes from the scriptures and then, “. . . we pray for Bathsheba Lincoln and her children Mordecai, Josiah, Mary, and Nancy to find peace in knowing that their husband and father Abraham and their son and brother Thomas are now in the arms of the Lord . . .”
Whatever else he says becomes background noise to my thoughts.
Bathsheba Lincoln . . . husband Abraham.
Could it be?
Abraham Lincoln is a giant in the history of Iffy’s time line. But something’s not right. That Abraham Lincoln rises to fame in the second half of the nineteenth century. This Abraham Lincoln, if he’d been allowed to live, would still be long dead by 1850.
And it’s Thomas Lincoln whom Lidia has murdered, not Abraham.
My breath catches in my throat as a possibility strikes me. A child sees his father killed but survives the attack himself. Would it not make sense for this child to grow up and name his own son after his dead parent?
Have I just witnessed the erasing of the man who is supposed to end slavery long before he would take his first breath?
When I hear someone moving around inside, I quickly retreat back to the brush in case they come out for some air, and it’s from this hidden place, a half hour later, that I’m whisked even farther back in time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I look at my chaser twice to make sure I haven’t misread the date. I haven’t.
I’m at the edge of a dark, treelined road. A look at the map confirms what I already know. Though I’ve never been at this exact spot before, I have been in this area on this very day in 1775 several times.
Has it all been a ruse? Have the seeds of destruction Lidia has been sowing simply been a game? Has she just been teasing me? Playing a little joke before doing what she really wanted to do all along?
We are near Cambridge, Massachusetts, no more than a ten-minute walk from the infamous Three Swans Tavern. This is the night and the tavern is the place where I made the twelve-second mistake that wiped away the world I was born in.
Clearly Lidia lied to me when she said she was no longer interested in bringing the empire back. The only reason we are here must be to stop the earlier version of me from changing things. Why else?
I check the tracker and see that Lidia is in the woods off to my right and already moving toward the tavern. There’s no way I can sneak up on her without making a lot of noise, but the road provides a clearer path than the forest she is working her way through, and even with my limp, I should be able to reach the tavern before she does.
I set as brisk a pace as possible. Though I can feel a dull throb in my thigh, for the most part it’s numb. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it is allowing me to move faster than I had thought I could.
It’s my fault Lidia has found this place. When I was executing my plan to bring my sister to Iffy’s world, I tricked the other rewinders who had survived the initial time line change into thinking I wasn’t the one who caused the break but that I had discovered where the deviation had occurred.
Mixing a bit of truth with a larger lie, I told them that Richard Cahill—the man who should have turned George Washington over to the British—had disappeared from history, his mother killed before he was born.
Oh, God, I realize as I nearly stumble on the path. The death of the two Lincolns and the likely erasure of the man who should one day be president.
She’s taunting me with my own story. A story that was all made up because Cahill’s death had nothing to do with his mother and everything to do with the twelve-second delay I created. That tiny change to the time line caused Cahill to be killed by a pair of British soldiers before he could report on Washington, an event that will be happening in just about ninety minutes unless Lidia interferes.
She’s had three years to check my story. There would be records showing that, unlike what I told her and the others, Cahill had indeed been born, and there would be more documenting the night he died. She could put the pieces together, and while she might not know the exact details of the evening, she had clearly figured out enough to get us here on this night.
It’s those details that I hope will be my savior. I know them intimately. All the events of this night, the multiple trips I made here, are all only a few months in my own past, and still vivid in my mind.
I push my pace even more, and tell myself she’s finally made a mistake. I just hope to God I’m right. I’m about halfway to the tavern when I hear horses on the road behind me. Two, coming fast.
I step into the trees, more to keep from being hit than to hide. Though the riders don’t even glance in my direction as they race by, I’m able to get a good look at their faces. I’ve seen them both before, inside the tavern. These are the two British agents who will instruct Cahill to report on Washington’s whereabouts.
As I watch them disappear into the darkness, I realize that I just discovered a second place where the time line could be altered. All I would need to do is keep them from reaching the tavern, say, flag them down and warn them of a waiting ambush at the Three Swans. Simple and more than enough, I would think, to get them to flee back the way they’d come. It’s not perfect. Cahill would still be alive, so who knows what he might do in his altered future, but I file it away, just in case I need to call on it later.
It’s the strong smell of cooking meat from the tavern’s chimney that lets me know I’m getting close. After making sure there’s no one on the road either behind or in front of me, I check at the tracking app. Lidia’s still heading straight for the tavern, but as I’d anticipated, her progress has been slower than mine.
I’m just about to turn the screen back off when a new dot appears, indicating the presence of a third chaser, this one maybe fifteen yards in front of the tavern. I check the time. It’s 8:00 p.m. exactly, which means the new arrival is me. Specifically, it’s the one I think of as Scout Me, a naïve junior rewinder at the beginning of the mission to observe Cahill. Scout Me’s job is/was to record all the comings and goings at the tavern.
I take a moment to plot a course that will keep me well away from him, but then I pause.
Scout Me’s chaser.
It’s not slaved to Lidia’s.
I could hide my slaved chaser in some bushes, and use Scout Me’s device to hop back a few minutes and be in the woods waiting for her to arrive at the tavern. Since I wouldn’t need to turn off the slave mode, she would think I’m still here and would be unaware as I sneak up on her.
I enter the woods about fifty feet shy of the clearing where the tavern is, and carefully circle through the trees toward Scout Me. As soon as I get a glimpse of him, I pause and check to see where Lidia is.
She, too, has neared the clearing, but has stopped about half a dozen feet within the trees on the side where the wagons are parked. The position gives her a front-row seat for the little shell game the other versions of me are about to play to save my sister and Iffy’s world. In just over a minute, there will be three Dennys near the wagons—Original Me, who is destined to go inside the tavern and cause Cahill to delay his departure; Off Switch Me, whose job it is to stop Original Me and leave the empire’s time line intact so that I could return there to kidnap my sister; and finally, On Switch Me, who’s tasked with stopping Off Switch Me after Ellie is safe. It’s all very complicated and confusing, I know, and I’m sure it’s about to get even more so now that Lidia’s set to join the party.
My plan, what little there is of it, is to wait until Lidia makes her move. I’m sure she will engage the other versions of me, which means Scout Me will see this, taking his attention away from his satchel, which I know is lying at his feet. I’ll grab it, hop back, and stop Lidia before she even gets to this point, ending her march of terror.
I creep through the brush, moving in as close to Scout Me as I can without giving myself away, and then huddle down. All his attention is on the arrival of a new customer, and he is completely unaware of my presence. I want to check on Lidia again, but I don’t dare open the chaser for fear that the light will be noticed. Instead, I look past the wagons, toward the woods where she should be hiding.
On Switch Me is the first to appear. If I didn’t know he was coming, I wouldn’t have picked up on the slight change of shadows at the back of the wagons. Scout Me hasn’t noticed him at all, just as planned. I’m sure Lidia, on the other hand, can’t help but see him.
I tense, my gaze on the clearing, ready to make my move the moment Scout Me sees her break from the forest. But all remains still.
I can’t help but glance over my shoulder to see if she’s decided to sneak up on me. At some point, I know she’s going to want to separate me from my chaser and break our connection so she can roam free through time. It would be poetic to her, no doubt, if this were that moment. But the woods behind me are quiet, nothing moving.
Looking back at the field, I know that by now Off Switch Me should be at the wagons. On Switch is probably moving in behind him to tell him Ellie is safe so there’s no need for him to do anything; as soon as this conversation is over, Off Switch will leave the area. Still no sign of Lidia, though.
What’s she doing? Has the fact that there are two of me caused her to sit tight? If so, she’s about to get another jolt.
In the field beside the wagons, directly in my and Scout Me’s view, appears yet another version of me—Original Me. If Lidia really wants to bring back the empire, now is the time she needs to act. In less than a minute, it will be too late.
No movement. No Lidia running from the woods to throw a wrench into things. No yells to draw everyone’s attention. No nothing. Just the night playing out the way I had designed it.
I have no choice. I need to know where she is, so I crack open my chaser’s lid just far enough for the screen to come on. There are now six dots on the tra
cking screen. Lidia’s hasn’t moved from the spot I last saw it. Did she only come here to witness what I’d done before? Or did she leave her chaser and is right now moving toward my—
The screen changes to the main jump screen without me doing anything. I’ve never seen this before, but it can mean only one thing. My device is receiving information for a new jump.
My plan to use Scout Me’s chaser is shot, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it at some future point. There is no time for me to finesse it from him, though. I launch myself forward, wrapping one arm around him to move him out of the way as I reach for his satchel with my free hand. My fingertip is a fraction of an inch away when 1775 disappears.
The jump is longer than any Lidia has taken me on yet. When the mist finally falls away, I tumble forward, my head pounding with the effect of the lengthy trip. My fall, however, is cushioned by a body below me.
Though it wasn’t my intention, Scout Me has come along for the ride. Unfortunately, his satchel has not come with us.
He rolls out from under me and scrambles to his feet, ready to either fight or flee. But as he takes a couple backward steps, he looks at me and freezes.
“What . . . wha . . . what are . . . what?”
“Grab on to me,” I whisper as I push myself up and stumble toward him. It’s pitch-black out, and given recent patterns, I know it’s extremely likely Lidia is following protocol again, and at any moment, we’ll be jumping to daytime.
But Scout Me shirks back. While the person I’ve become has had plenty of experience talking with other versions of me, this is Scout Me’s first time, so he’s understandably freaked out. “Where’s my chaser?” He desperately looks around. “Where’s my chaser?”
“Don’t worry about it right now,” I tell him. “Just—”
“Don’t worry about it? How can you say that?” He pauses. “What are you doing here? Which . . . where . . .”
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