I counter with a raspy, “Where’s Iffy?”
“Answer my question!”
I shake my head, not an easy thing to do with her fingers pressed against the bottom of my jaw. “I don’t see her, you don’t learn anything.”
Neither of us moves. Finally, Lidia lets go of me and takes a step back. “All right. I’ll let you see her and then you tell me what happened. If you don’t, she’s dead. Do we understand each other?”
I nod.
“Say it,” she orders me.
“Yes.”
“Good. Now don’t move.”
She circles behind me and as she starts to put her arm around my waist, I realize we’re about to jump.
“Wait!” I yell. “My Chaser. We can’t just leave it here.”
Her arm hovers over my stomach for a second before she pulls it back. “Get it. But don’t try anything. If you do, I’ll leave you here and you’ll never see your little girlfriend again.”
Her warning is unnecessary. I’m not going to try anything, not yet, anyway. Seeing that Iffy’s all right is the only important thing right now.
I retrieve my Chaser and say, “I’m ready.”
__________
IT’S STILL NIGHT, and like before, I feel no pain.
My eyes, having already adjusted to the lower light, have no problem seeing my surroundings now. There is no ocean here, only a wide plain of dirt and brush with distant mountains on all sides.
The desert, I think, though I might be wrong. Though I lived close to it when I was in New Cardiff, I never visited it.
I listen for the sound of vehicles, but the only thing I hear is Lidia’s footsteps as she backs away from me.
Motioning with her knife, she says, “This way.”
I follow her across the dirt into a dry riverbed. Lying on the sand, pushed up against the bank, is Iffy, her hands and feet tied.
I sling off my satchel and set it and my Chaser on the ground as I drop beside her. “Are you all right?” I shake her shoulder. “Iffy?”
Her eyes remain closed, and for a moment I think Lidia might have already killed her. It’s only the rise and fall of her chest that eases my panic.
I twist around and glare at Lidia. “What did you do to her?”
Her lip arches in a sneer. “Just like I thought. You’ve lost yourself.” She grunts in revulsion.
“How did you find her?”
“I didn’t find her. She found me. Thought I would be you for some reason.”
Lidia’s Chaser, I realize. Somehow it connected to Iffy. Now I know why mine didn’t link with her when I came back.
Lidia raises her knife a few inches. “Where are the others, Denny?”
“They’re gone,” I say.
“Gone where?”
“I told you. They went home.”
It takes a moment before the reality of my words hit her. When they do, she rushes toward me like she’s going to grab my throat again, but I jump to my feet and shove her back.
“What did you do?” she asks, her teeth clenched.
“I didn’t lie when I told everyone I’d changed things back. What I left out was that I wasn’t done yet.”
Her expression darkens. “You bastard! You let them go back home, and then you, you changed it all to…” She looks around as if she’s never seen anything so disgusting in her life. “To this?” Her gaze shifts past me to Iffy. “All because of her?”
My guilt feels like a set of clothes two sizes too small. I sent the others to the equivalent of their deaths. But I would do it again. It was the only way I could ensure my sister’s and Iffy’s survival. “I did what I had to do.”
Those seven words push her over the edge. She leaps at me, knife flashing. Her anger has gotten the best of her so her attack is uncontrolled. I’m able to push her weapon to the side and wrap my arms around her. In a heap, we fall to the ground.
As soon as we hit, I roll to the side but she pins me down with her knees. The knife is gone, but that doesn’t stop her rage. Her hands seem to come at me from all directions—hitting, slapping, pulling.
“You’re going to change it back, dammit! You’re going to bring our world back!”
Her palm slaps against my ear and suddenly all I can hear is ringing.
This actually helps me focus. When one of her hands races toward me again, I knock it away and shove her with all my strength.
She flies off me and lands in a heap.
I hop to my feet and move back to Iffy, intending to pick her up, but my eyes are drawn to a light nearby. The screen on my Chaser is on. In the tumble, one of us must have hit the power button and it hasn’t shut down again. When I see the power level at .88%, an idea comes to me.
Instead of grabbing Iffy, I grab the device and twist back around just as Lidia pulls herself to her feet. She twirls left and right, searching the ground before reaching down and snatching up the knife.
With a roar, she starts toward me.
I shove my Chaser out in front of me and yell, “Stop or I’ll smash it to pieces and we’ll never be able to change anything!”
Her steps falter, but she says, “Go ahead. I’ve still got mine.”
“Does yours have the exact coordinates of the change? It’s a very precise moment and location.”
“You know the date and time and basic area. We can figure it out from there.”
“And blunder around? Risking an even bigger error? Is that what you want to do?”
Getting the location from me is a possibility, but I could make it very difficult. It would be a hell of a lot easier to use the data stored in the Chaser, and I can see she realizes this.
“Have you really looked at this world?” I ask.
She snorts. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“What happens if you go back? You live the rest of your life inside the walls of the institute? That’s prison, Lidia. Do you really want that? Here you could live free, go where you want, be whoever you want to be.”
“You think I should just stay here?”
“It’s not a terrible idea. In fact, it’s a pretty damn good one. Drop your knife, give me your Chaser, and we’ll go our separate ways.”
“That easy, huh?”
“That easy.”
She looks like she’s actually considering the idea before she laughs loudly. “You really think I’d go for that? Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to give me your Chaser, Denny.”
I knew she wouldn’t take me up on my offer, but I had to give her a chance. Alternating my gaze between her and my Chaser, I start working the menu, praying it doesn’t shut down again.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“Denny, what are you doing?”
She takes a step toward me so I raise the Chaser into the air like I’m going to throw it into the ground. When she stops, I pull it back down and pick up where I left off.
“What are you doing?” she asks again.
Again, I say nothing.
On the screen is a list of jumps stored in the device’s memory. I begin erasing them one at a time.
“Denny! Stop!”
When I get to the entry for the cemetery where my mother is buried, I pause. Though there is no cemetery at that location in this world, erasing it feels like forgetting. My finger hovers above DELETE for several seconds before it finally taps the button.
“Listen to me,” she says. “We’ll go back and fix things together, okay? When we get back to the institute, I won’t tell anyone it was you.”
She takes another step toward me.
“Back off!” I shout.
I’m almost there. There’s only one location left on my screen—the meadow where we gathered in 1702. I leave the location the same, but change the date to one in 1743, hoping that will be enough. I’m just finishing up when Lidia charges.
I twist sideways and hug the Chaser to my chest, expecting her to smash into me, but inst
ead of heading in my direction, she goes left and kneels next to her bag, where she dropped it when we first arrived.
She pulls out her Chaser and smiles at me. As she moves her fingers over the control buttons, I hold out my device and say, “Here. You can have it!”
She pauses.
“The location’s there,” I say. “I was just getting rid of everything else.”
She eyes me suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because…because I’m not going with you.”
“Oh, no. You need to show me what needs to be done.”
“It’s easy. You’ll see me there. Just stop me from entering the building. That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
It takes a moment, but I can see she’s decided I’m not lying to her. And I’m not, at least not completely. “If you stay here…”
“I get erased,” I say. “What do you think my life’s going to be like when I go back? I’d rather it end here.”
She looks past me at Iffy. “You should’ve never left whatever slum it is you came from, Eight. You were always playing over your head with us.”
My jaw tenses. “Are you going to take this or not? Because my offer expires in ten seconds.”
She slips her own Chaser back in her bag and gets to her feet. Pulling the strap over her shoulder, she walks toward me. “All right. Let me see it.”
When she nears, I give it to her, but not the way she’s expecting. I whip it into the side of her head and she drops to the ground, blood oozing from her temple.
I check her pulse. It’s strong, so I probably have only a few seconds. I work her bag off her shoulders and confirm her Chaser is in there.
As I toss the bag to the side, she starts to moan. I scan the immediate area, looking for something long and sturdy. The best I can find is a withered branch about a foot and a half in length. I’m not sure it’s enough but it’ll have to do.
I pick up my Chaser and see the screen has gone blank again.
No, no, no! I tap the power button. When it comes back to life, I whisper, “Stay on, stay on, stay on,” and set the device on Lidia’s stomach.
Stick in hand, I stand.
“Hey, what the hell? What’s this…?” Lidia fumbles the Chaser as she tries to tilt her head up.
I jab the branch into the GO button.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I UNTIE IFFY and coax her back to consciousness.
“You came back,” she says.
“Of course I did. How do you feel?”
“Like someone tossed me off a building.” She looks around. “The girl.”
“Lidia,” I say.
She nods.
“She’s gone.”
Wincing, she pushes her torso off the ground. “Is she coming back?”
“No. She’s not.”
I don’t know if there was enough power in my Chaser to get Lidia all the way back to 1743, but I do know there won’t be enough left for her to leave once she gets there. And since both Iffy and I are still here, Lidia didn’t do anything that changed history back or in any obvious way.
“Not ever?” Iffy asks.
“Not ever. It’s over.”
She looks at me. “So you’ve decided to let my world hang around for a while?”
I smile. “Don’t you mean our world?”
__________
ELLIE STILL HASN’T completely accepted what’s going on. Who would in her position? Instead of being two years younger than she is, I’m now five years older, and the world she knows and understands is gone.
Iffy has helped me get an apartment in San Diego, where I live with my sister while she’s getting treatments. It is cancer, after all. But the doctors have caught it early and feel confident about a full recovery. It all costs money, of course. Let’s just say with Lidia’s Chaser (after I figured out how to link to it) and Iffy’s native knowledge, there are plenty of places to find cash. The illegal drug business is one of my favorites. It’s ugly yet lucrative, so I have no moral problem taking from drug merchants. My only criteria is that those I “visit” must be thousands of miles away from San Diego.
I’m thinking about using some of the cash to attend college soon. Not sure what I’ll study. History would be the natural subject, but, well, I should probably branch out a little. We’ll see.
The other thing I’ve used Lidia’s Chaser for is to create identities for Ellie and me. After a bit of research, I’ve even planted records in the court system, officially making myself my sister’s guardian.
Iffy is in San Diego, too, living again at her parents’. She and Ellie have become good friends, and sometimes when the three of us are together it almost feels like this world is the only one that’s ever been, and I can, for a little while, forget what I’ve done.
On June 20, Iffy and I drive back to Los Angeles. The traffic is horrible and I’m worried we’ll be late, but we reach Santa Monica Pier by a quarter to four.
“Do you want to do this alone, or…?” she asks after we get out of the car.
I take her hand. “I want you to come with me.”
We walk on the wooden boards high above the ocean. Unlike the last time we were here, the amusement park is open. Bells and music and laughter all but drown out the crashing waves below us. I scan those we pass, looking for faces I know, but see none.
We reach the end of the pier two minutes before four o’clock. I lean against the railing again, searching the crowd, certain that at any moment Marie will appear. But the top of the hour passes without her or Sir Gregory or Other Me showing up.
“Maybe she forgot,” Iffy says.
“Could be,” I say, but I know Marie would have never forgotten. My fear is they were unable to get away.
We wait another thirty minutes before we start walking back. Halfway down the pier, someone walking about fifty feet in front of us glances back in our direction. I slow in surprise, thinking it’s Marie. She’s walking with a man who, from the back, looks a lot like me.
Within moments, they disappear into the larger crowd in front of the amusement park.
I rush forward, pulling Iffy along behind me, but though we look everywhere, we don’t find them. I insist we wait until dark, but still the others don’t show up. With much reluctance, we head to the car.
As we climb in, Iffy says, “How about some dinner?”
“Why not?” I say, though I have no appetite.
“Peruvian?”
This brings a smile to my face, and a faint growl to my stomach. “That would be perfect.”
Slipping her arms around me, we kiss, and my disappointment begins to fade.
Maybe the people I saw were Marie and Other Me. Or maybe they’re out there somewhen else.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find them someday.
After all, there’s always time.
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to my editor, Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, for her tireless work; to my friends and two of my favorite authors, Tim Hallinan and Robert Gregory Browne, for their insight and encouragement; and to Dawn Rej, Jill Fulkerson Marnell, Corri Gutzman, Steve Manke, Paulette Feeney, and the “street team” for being early readers, and helping to make this novel even better.
I’m glad the story didn’t make any of your heads explode.
Table of Contents
Book Description
REWINDER Copyright © 2014 by Brett Battles
Both thanks and a dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Acknowledgments
Rewinder Page 23