“What would you have us do with our time instead, Uncle?” Demetrius asked, rubbing the older man’s shoulder. Allaire marveled at how much easier Demetrius was with Yalé than with his own father, Rickard.
“I would suggest you go check on your wife,” Yalé said to Demetrius. “For all you know, she’s gone into labor.”
In dark moments, Allaire wondered whether she could ever really be a part of this family. Demetrius’s wife, Wanda, was about to bring the next Sere heir into the world, yet Allaire simply did chores around the factory to earn her keep. She wondered how many of her own actions were driven by the feeling of being an outsider.
“Yeah, I’m sure you’d be watching us train if you thought there was any chance of the baby coming right now,” Demetrius answered. “You brought me into this world, Uncle, and even if you’d never admit it, you’re excited to bring my son or daughter into it as well.”
Allaire gave Demetrius a playful shove. “Hey, Sappypants, go sit with your wife and pretend you enjoy bad talk shows. Think about how bored she must be.”
“It’s not my fault she can’t waddle around so easily these days,” he said with a wink.
“Well, it kinda is, D,” Allaire answered.
Demetrius turned toward the room he shared with Wanda. “I hate when you’re right.” In reality, there was no one in the world Allaire trusted more to live up to any responsibility than Demetrius.
Yalé followed the same way down the hall. Before she headed off the other way to shower, Allaire needed to speak her piece again. “Yalé?”
He turned, his contemplative eyes all hers.
“Demetrius was only about a year older than me when he first time weaved. And he wasn’t the fighter I am,” she said.
He walked closer to her and smiled warmly—politely, actually, since Allaire knew he was tired of this line of inquiry. “It’s too dangerous,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “You know the price we all paid when Demetrius came back sick with smallpox. And we lost his chaperone to the same disease . . . There’s thankfully no need to train you to go back. We live in a different era. To the best of our knowledge, all of the threads have been tidied. No randoms traversing through time causing problems in a long while. That’s a very good thing, Allaire. Something to celebrate. As guardians, we’ve done our job.”
“Right now,” she said. “Shouldn’t I be trained, though, in case all of that changes?”
“Hopefully, it won’t,” Yalé answered. “At this point, there’s more risk to sending you back, even on a training run.”
She felt frustrated the same way she always did by this conversation. “It’s not like there are so many of us,” she said. Immediately, she wanted the conversation to end. She couldn’t bear the look that was sure to come next from Yalé. He was usually direct with her, except during this conversation that had come up often lately. They had gotten into something of a rhythm; she’d tell him how she was ready to pitch in, and he would politely speak around the fact that she wasn’t really a member of the family.
“Forget it,” she said, turning away before turning back. “But what if something happens? What if something goes wrong with the timestream?”
Yalé still had that gentle look, searching for the right words to let her down easy. “Then, Rickard and Demetrius will deal with it.”
“But I can help,” she said. “And, I won’t get myself killed. Or sick. Why can’t you just trust me?”
“Like I said, there’s no need, my dear,” Yalé said, turning away. “Enjoy not having that kind of responsibility. Truly, it’s a luxury.” It was a strange thing, coming from Yalé, who did not have the genetic disposition himself for time weaving.
Allaire could never tell Yalé that there actually was a need, and that for her, it was very personal. She knew, of course, that her desire to go back to right a wrong went completely against everything she had been told about time weaving. And against everything she knew about the family that had taken her in.
She knew the story of her life as well as she knew anything. Dr. Peter Browning was Demetrius’s pediatrician. He had saved his life. Browning adopted Allaire after her mother left the two of them, and when Browning was tragically hit by a car, the three remaining members of the Seres bloodline took her in. Because she was never officially adopted by the Seres, Yalé or Rickard had to call themselves “Peter Browning” whenever serving in an official capacity as Allaire’s caretaker—essentially, whenever it was unavoidable that Allaire show up somewhere with a parent.
But the ruse of pretending to be Browning was a last resort. Allaire was never allowed to go to school, her education coming from the same old textbooks from which Demetrius, and Yalé, and Rickard before him, had been taught. Interactions with peers were nonexistent. It was Rickard’s strategy to protect their secret of time weaving by bringing as few individuals as possible into contact with the people living at the factory. Now that Demetrius had returned from his sojourn into the world to secure a wife, and she had proven willing to live under the same confines as the rest of them, the little leeway he had was pulled back as well.
Lonely as she felt at times, Allaire was thankful to the Seres for giving her this life. What she really wanted now was a chance to go back in time and prevent Dr. Browning’s death. Again and again, she had been told that was just not possible.
Allaire tried to focus instead on her excitement about the new baby who would be joining the household soon, as she headed to the bathroom closest to her room for a shower. Rickard was exiting as she approached the door. He nodded at her and began to walk by.
Before she could shut the door, she heard his voice.
“Before I forget,” he said. “I’m going to need you do something very important after the child is born.”
Allaire’s ears perked up. Yalé could deny her wish to go back as much as he wanted to, but one word from Rickard could change everything. If he needed her to time weave, that would be enough to make it happen.
“I need you to make yourself scarce around him for a while,” he said. “Wanda and the baby will need all of Demetrius’s attention. He won’t have time for a playmate right now. Your training will need to cease indefinitely.”
It wasn’t the first time Rickard had deflated Allaire with only a few words. She didn’t have a response for him.
“I know he must feel like a brother to you sometimes,” Rickard said. “But, he’s not. And he’s got something very important happening very shortly. He’s too kind to say it, but there really can’t be any distractions. It’s hard enough to raise a baby under the circumstances we have here at the factory. Much more so if your attention is divided.”
Demetrius always said that his father would’ve been better off leading an army rather than a family. Yalé, on the other hand, so marginalized by Rickard, and unable to father a family of his own, felt like their spiritual leader. Their heart, if not their voice of reason.
Rickard bore his eyes into her as if her defeated look was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever seen. Like he’d just asked her to dry the dishes, instead of telling her to stay away from her best friend just as he was about to become a father.
She nodded weakly and went into the bathroom, quickly closing the door behind her. She turned on the shower right away so no one could hear her crying.
CHAPTER 12
August 13, 1996
* * *
The next morning
When Allaire got out of bed to check on Wanda the next morning, she found everyone in the main room of the factory, even Wanda, who seldom got out of bed this far into her pregnancy.
At first, when she entered, Allaire feared that the lack of acknowledgment of her presence there was due to something she’d done. But then she realized they were all preoccupied with something else.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Wanda looked at her, holding her stomach in her hand. Allaire could see the tears rolling down her plump cheeks. She looked around, pani
cked. Allaire didn’t want to make her friend cry, especially now. “Please? What’s going on?”
Demetrius put his arm around Wanda, but she pushed it off of her. He stepped back for a second and then gestured with a flick of his head to Allaire to follow him to the other room.
“What the hell?” she asked him once they got into the small office next to the main factory room.
Demetrius shook his head, his eyes wide. Allaire could tell he was spooked. “This whole thing is a curse,” he said. “You think it’s not, I know. But believe me, Beachy, it is.” He called her “Beachy” because when she was younger, her head was very large in proportion to her body. He’d once told her she had a beach ball for a head and “Beachy” just stuck.
“What happened?” she asked.
He told her that thirty minutes earlier, a grotesque looking man had appeared on the fifth floor of their building. At first they didn’t recognize him, but after a while the man convinced them that he was, in fact, Frederick, Demetrius’s old chaperone. They’d all thought he died from smallpox back in 1863, never making it home through his silk blot. Rickard was in disbelief at first, and had actually pulled at the man’s face—scarred much worse than Demetrius’s—to make sure he wasn’t simply wearing makeup.
“So? Why is everyone so freaked out?” she asked. “Where did he go?”
Demetrius looked like he was holding back tears now.
Allaire put her hand on his shoulder. “D, I don’t understand.”
He stepped away, biting his lip. He frenetically tapped his foot against the ground like he did when he hurt himself training, so the repetitive motion could fill the time he would otherwise be focused on the pain.
Allaire’s heart raced. She’d joined this household when she was too young to think about what she was signing on for. Given that she was a ward of the family who controlled the secret of time travel, she felt like her life had been fairly normal. Allaire had a feeling that, somehow, Frederick showing up at the factory had just changed everything.
“He said my son was bad,” Demetrius said, choking back tears. “I haven’t even gotten to hold him yet, Beachy.”
“Wait, D . . . what? Bad?” she asked. “What does that even mean? Is he sick? Is he talking about now? Or in the future?”
Demetrius collapsed to the ground, kneeling prostrate like he was praying. Then, he pounded his open palms against the floor. “He told us to let him go.”
Watching this moose of a man crumble made Allaire terribly unsettled. He’d been her de facto big brother most of her life—certainly her closest friend. “‘Let him go,’ like . . . ?”
He nodded, and then kept nodding, still using repetitive movements to cope with what he was feeling.
“So wait,” she said. “This guy shows up after being MIA for, what, ten years—?”
“Nine years, in our timestream, but only a few weeks for him,” he said, standing up and wiping his face with his big scaly hands. “I haven’t seen him since I left him in 1863. I watched him die. At least I thought I did.”
Allaire shook her head. “So, he says your son’s ‘bad.’ That’s his opinion.”
“He knew things, Beachy. The kind of stuff we try not to learn,” Demetrius said.
There were rules and processes built into the entire fabric of the Seres’ culture. Knowing the future was taboo because once known, it became virtually impossible to live your life. They’d had ancestors go crazy. Others who tried to profit from the ability, which was still done from time to time to ensure the Seres had enough money to live.
For about fifty years during the first half of the 1900s, there were interlopers traveling through the time tunnel. They’d been let inside their great family secret by a Sere named Early, who had a charlatan’s soul. Rickard and several non-Sere cohorts had, to their knowledge, tied up every loose end in the timestream. This was no easy task.
Allaire knew what many people did not: that there were things in the world that had turned out differently the first time around. But the Seres taught her that, over time, as their rigid procedures for protecting the time tunnel developed, they’d learned that life couldn’t be “fixed,” and that time resisted change. So, their use of the time tunnel—other than for familiarizing family members who had the genetic disposition to handle time weaving, and teaching them how to do it—was essentially nonexistent. Demetrius, for instance, never planned to return to the time tunnel after his initial trip to the 1800s.
Demetrius pulled out a blade, and for a second Allaire thought it was one of their rubber trainers. He turned away from her and looked out one of the sooty windows. He held it to his wrist and then moved it up to his throat.
“What are you doing?” Allaire asked, walking fast toward him. She grabbed his hulking arm, unfazed by the ridges on his skin, and pulled his hand away from his throat.
“There can’t be another heir if I’m gone,” he said. “That baby’s safe if I’m gone.”
Allaire hugged him from behind, sliding her hand down his arm. She tried gently to disarm him. “You don’t know that he’s bad. Maybe Frederick’s wrong.”
“Come on,” Demetrius said. “You’re gonna have to do better than that.”
She took the Karambit from his hand, closed it, and put it into her back pocket. “You really think your father’s going to kill his grandson?”
“You know my father,” Demetrius said. “If he thought it was best for the bloodline, he wouldn’t hesitate . . . I pretty much know I’ve failed as a father before I even get a chance,” Demetrius said. “I swore to myself that I’d be better than Rickard.”
“You’re in control of this,” she said. “You have to believe that. This isn’t you traveling back in time to fix something. You don’t have to go back to fix this, just do it right from the start. You teach this child right from wrong. You give him the goodness in your heart, and he’ll be just fine. You practically raised me.”
“And what about Frederick? There’s always gonna be this threat out there now. At least until we know why,” Demetrius said. “Why he thinks that some really bad things happen because of my son. It felt like he was coming to us to say, ‘You deal with this, or I will.’”
Allaire put her hand up. “Wait . . . He didn’t tell you what exactly was going to happen?”
“He didn’t get to,” Demetrius said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Imagine someone came into your house and told you to kill your unborn baby,” Demetrius said. Kindhearted as he was, Demetrius had always been a bit of a hot-head.
“Did you run him off, D?” Allaire asked.
Demetrius nodded. “Right back into his blot . . . There’s something else he said too. When we told him he needed to stop weaving and give up his silk blot, he asked what gave us the right to keep time travel to ourselves. And then he asked what made us so sure that there weren’t other Seres out there.”
“Weird,” she said.
“Yeah, it makes no sense,” Demetrius said. “But it’s definitely not good that Frederick’s out there.”
A few minutes later, Allaire followed Demetrius, who was a little more composed now, back into the main factory room. Rickard was eyeing a silk blot laying on one of the machines, and talking quietly with Yalé.
Demetrius joined the two of them, while Allaire hung back a bit. “Father, I need to go find him. I need to ask him what he meant.”
“You made him run, Demetrius,” Rickard said. “And now you want—”
“I need to find him,” Demetrius said.
Rickard smiled coldly, putting his boot up on one of the tables and tightening the laces. “I think a more strategic approach is needed now.”
“Fine,” Demetrius said. “We’ll go together.”
Rickard smiled condescendingly at his son. “I won’t have both properly functioning male members of our family outside of their natural timestreams at once.”
Allaire looked at Yalé, who showed no hint of feeling the inferio
rity she imagined he must. Had it been his inadequacy—he couldn’t time weave, or ever have children—that led Yalé to develop into a Renaissance man with an unimpeachably logical mind? Was it his self-loathing that made him into a self-taught intellectual with knowledge that seemed to run as deep as anyone she’d ever known, including learning how to handle something like childbirth?
“This is my son we’re talking about, Father!” Demetrius said.
“And you need to be here when he’s born,” Rickard answered. “I’ll do what’s necessary. I spent a decade traversing that tunnel. This is no big deal.”
Allaire wished that Yalé would speak up on Demetrius’s behalf. Or, she wondered, was she the only one who saw how unfair it was to sideline him here?
“You shouldn’t go alone,” Demetrius said.
“You’re overstepping now, son. The reason you can spend your life doting on your pretty wife, and practicing karate with your . . . her,” he said, pointing at Allaire, “is that I eradicated the threats to our family—to our world—before you were even born. So, don’t tell me what I shouldn’t do.”
“What are you gonna do, Father?” Demetrius asked. “Can I at least know what you’ll do if you find Frederick? We need more details. I’m such an idiot for reacting the way I did.”
“You’re right,” Rickard said, lifting a silk blot from one of the machines in the room. Then he opened the ammunition locker, which Allaire had never seen inside of, and pulled out a few small guns and boxes of bullets, tossing them into a backpack. “And now, I will go back and clean up your mess.”
Demetrius looked panicked. Rickard’s tendency was to treat every problem like a nail to be hammered. He looked back at Allaire, but she knew there was nothing she could say to help in this situation. Rickard barely tolerated her as it was.
“You can’t kill him,” Demetrius said. “Please. He was trying to help us.”
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