The Eighth Guardian (Annum Guard)

by Meredith McCardle

  We started driving in the middle of the night, and I was so excited I barely slept. Before the trip, I could have cared less about all that Disney princess crap, but there was something about being inside the park. Seeing the characters right there. Getting my picture taken with Cinderella. I had to have the merchandise. Dress-up clothes and wands and dolls. Plates and cups and straws. My mom bought it all.

  I’m feeling the same urge today. I’m in Dallas. On the day of one of the biggest tragedies in American history. And I can stop it. Alpha will get a windfall, yes, but I could save my dad, too.

  Yellow looks at me. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  Am I being that obvious? I shake my head. “No,” I lie. “Of course not.”

  “Don’t get caught up in this.” Yellow gets right in my face and stares me down. “It’s so hard to do, but you have to distance yourself. You have to, Iris.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I brush past her and open the door to the depository and hold it for Yellow. I pass through and then Yellow’s in my face again.

  “Seriously,” she says. “Get yourself out of the moment. Think with your head, not with your heart. You’re a trained government operative.”

  Of all the things she could have said, this is the worst. Because she’s right. She’s so right. This excitement is a feeling—nothing more. It will wear off. Just like my mom’s high suddenly stopped in Virginia on the car ride back from Disney World. It was the first time she rapid cycled, so there was no normal phase. She sank straight to the bottom. We spent three awful nights in a motel that rented out rooms by the hour, as my mom cried and wailed and drank an entire bottle of Jack Daniels. I pitched all the princess crap into the parking lot Dumpster and never thought of it again.

  Think with your head, not your heart. That’s been the moral of my story since birth. I know better.

  I nod my head once to show Yellow I’m serious, and we start climbing the stairs. They’re located in the back left corner of the building, as far as you can get from the front right window where Oswald is going to start shooting in a few short hours.

  Yellow and I camp out on the landing between the sixth and seventh floors. If I peer over the railing, I can see two landings below me. The landing where my dad is going to die. I pull my head back.

  We pass the time by flipping through Alpha’s notebook and making notes of all the entries where CE appears. That sucker is everywhere. All over this notebook, going back more than twenty-five years. Most payouts are small, insignificant even. Other than the Kennedy assassination, there are four big ones.

  One commissioned before I was even born, before the Kennedy mission. That one earned Alpha $300,000. Another commissioned eight years ago for $250,000. Another one from four years ago, for a half million. And then one more, for an even million. The ink is barely dry on that one. I recognize the date. Yellow does, too.

  “The Gardner,” I say.

  Yellow nods. “The Gardner.”

  Just then there’s noise. Below us. A hammering of footsteps up the stairs. Yellow and I scramble up, and she tucks the notebook inside the belt of her dress. I look at my watch. It’s 12:20. That has to be my dad on the stairs.

  And then there’s a voice. A loud voice. It’s shouting things. I catch “sniper” and “gun,” and I have no idea what’s going on; but my heart starts thumping away in my chest with the realization that this isn’t right. It’s not right at all. I look at Yellow, and she has terror written all over her face.

  She leans over the railing for a half second before yanking her head away. Her eyes get wide as she mouths, A cop.

  My mouth drops open as the two of us plaster ourselves against the back wall. A cop. A cop who knows about the assassination attempt? None of this is in the history books. What the hell is going on?

  I guess we’re about to find out.

  The footsteps pound against the stairs, almost making a sort of rhythm. I close my eyes and try to make out individual patterns, to count how many men there are. It’s one. Only one.

  I open my eyes, and Yellow grabs my hand. She tilts her eyes up and mouths, The roof?

  I shake my head and wave her off. I’m not running away from this. I need to know what’s going to happen.

  The footsteps are louder. The man is on the landing right under us. But then a door opens with such a bang that I jump.

  “Back off!” a voice shouts. It’s a male voice, smooth and authoritative. “I have him.”

  There’s a scuffling and a grumbling.

  “I saw a man with a gun!” someone else shouts. The cop?

  “I said back off!” the first man shouts. “Dallas PD has no jurisdiction here anymore.” There’s another rustling. “FBI. We have the situation under control.”

  Yellow and I exchange a glance. Her eyes are wide, and I’m sure mine are wider. The FBI is here? They’ve captured Oswald before the shooting even begins?

  “You’re in Dallas!” the other shouts. “My jurisdiction.” The cop.

  “And you’re trampling all over my crime scene. The situation is under control. Go back down and don’t speak a word of this to anyone.” The first man’s voice is calm, collected.

  “But—”

  “Don’t give me a but. There’s a crowd down there, and the less they know, the better. You want mass pandemonium with the president’s motorcade in sight?”

  “No, but—”

  “The situation is under control.” There’s a shuffling of footsteps and a muttering of angry words, and I close my eyes but can’t tell what’s happening. “Don’t breathe a word of this. Not now. Not yet. Not until the parade is over. I have backup on the way, and then I’ll be down to your squad car to take your statement.”

  Then the voices speak over each other, and there’s more grumbling and scuffling, and I look at Yellow again. She shakes her head at me with uneasy eyes. She’s as clueless as I am.

  The footsteps on the stairs start again, but this time they get fainter and fainter as the Dallas cop races down them. I try not to breathe. The FBI is on the landing below me as we speak. They’ve already captured Oswald. I have no idea what the hell is going on and how we’re going to get out of here.

  But then. A whisper. Barely audible.

  “Delta, you’re cutting off the circulation in my arm.”

  Delta. My dad.

  A laugh. “Sorry.” It’s the first man. The first man is Delta. The first man is my dad. He’s not FBI. He’s . . . pretending to be FBI.

  “That was too close,” the other man says.

  I shake my head, over and over, as if I can shake out the truth and understand what’s going on. This is nothing like Alpha’s report. Nothing at all. I keep waiting. Waiting for some sign that my dad thinks this is an authorized mission. That President Clinton okayed it and that he’s there to stop the assassination. Any second now the truth will come out.

  It does.

  “You hear that?” my dad says. “The motorcade must be approaching Dealey.”

  A crowd cheers in the background.

  “Is Oswald in position?” the other man says.

  Wait. No. I—this isn’t right—

  “Should be,” my dad says.

  Next to me, Yellow grabs my hand and squeezes. I’m stunned into silence. I can’t move. My feet are granite slabs cemented to the floor.

  A shot rings out in the distance, and my neck snaps back. What is this? Why isn’t my dad trying to stop this?

  “Hear that?” my dad shouts. “That’s the sound of Old Cresty coughing up ten million dollars!”

  I can’t breathe. I bend over and wrap my arms around my body as I shake and convulse and—WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

  A second shot in the distance, out over Dealey Plaza. And then silence.

  “I ought to say that did it,” my dad says. “Dallas P
D will be swarming these steps again any second now. Time to go, Beta. We gotta take care of that real cop.”

  Beta. The other man is Beta. That doesn’t make any sense. Beta and my dad are in on it.

  “You’re right. Time to go,” Beta says. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about this, Mitch. I always liked you.”

  And then I bolt up. Because I know what’s about to happen. There’s a gasp on the floor below that echoes up to my stairwell. And then. A blast of gunfire. It pierces my eardrums as fireworks explode in my mind.

  I stumble to the wall. Yellow grabs my shoulder, but I shake her off. I fumble with my necklace, and my legs buckle and my knees slam to the ground. My hands are shaking. I need to get away away away. I turn a dial. I don’t know which one. And then I start to close the watch.

  “Iris!” Yellow hisses. She lunges at me, but I’ve already shut the watch.

  I’m yanked up for a quick few seconds, and I don’t feel the pain this time. Not the physical pain at least. I drop on to the landing, and Yellow pops next to me a few seconds later.

  “No!” Yellow screams. “No! You do not project without me, do you understand? You never, ever project without me. Thank God I saw your dial.”

  I drop to my knees and grab at my chest with my hands. I feel as if I’m having a heart attack. Deep, shooting pains throb inside my chest and fly down the left side of my body. But this has nothing to do with projecting. My heart has broken into a million pieces, and I’m going to die.

  My dad wasn’t a Navy SEAL. He wasn’t a war hero. He was a traitor. Alpha didn’t set him up.

  He assassinated a president.

  I don’t understand. My father is a cold-blooded killer, and I don’t understand anything anymore.

  I inhale the pain and refuse to blow it out. I let it fill me, consume me, crush me. My hands find the floor, and I sink into it. It’s a lie. Everything I’ve ever known has been one massive lie.

  “Get up,” Yellow says.

  I ignore her.

  “I said get up.”

  “Go away, Yellow.”

  “I’m only going to tell you to get up one more time before I bend down and pull you up myself.”

  We studied the physical effects of trauma aftermath at Peel. Rationally, I know I’m in shock. I tell myself I am. But I can’t snap out of it. I’m classic: numb dizzy weak nauseated confused. I can’t process my thoughts. Too fast. They’re coming too fast.

  Yellow bends over, loops her elbows under my armpits, and yanks me up. “You are going to look me in the eye right now and swear to me that you will never project without me again.”

  What is she talking about? The scene replays in my mind. My father prevented that cop from stopping the assassination. That cop knew about the sniper, and my father deflected him and made sure Kennedy was shot.

  “Iris!”

  My father changed history so that Kennedy was assassinated? Kennedy made it through Dealey unscathed before my dad interfered?

  “Iris!” Yellow grabs my shoulder and shakes me.

  “What?” My voice is a whisper.

  “Promise me you will not project without me.”

  I push her away. “Are you kidding right now? What difference does it make? Nothing matters anymore.”

  Yellow’s eyes bulge open. “Nothing matters? So your whole big plan about bringing down CE, who we now know is named Cresty Something-or-other, doesn’t matter?”

  “What happened back there, Yellow? My dad is a—” I choke. I can’t finish it.

  “An assassin.”

  The words hang in the air and refuse to dissipate. He is. My father is a killer. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he might as well have. Before he interfered, that cop must have caught Oswald and stopped the assassination. My father changed all that.

  I don’t want that to be the truth. This can’t be the truth. I need to know. I pull out my watch.

  “We have to go back,” I tell Yellow.

  “Go back where?”

  “Go back to before this mission. Before my dad died. To read what the history books say. To figure out whether President Kennedy was assassinated before my dad interfered or not.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Yellow says.

  “When do you want to project to?” I turn the year dial forward.

  “Iris,” Yellow hisses. “I said that’s not how it works. No one explained Chronometric Augmentation to you, did they? How it fundamentally works?”

  That sounds ominous. “No.”

  Yellow sighs. “We’re in a parallel future right now. A new future. That’s what happens when we change the past. We create a parallel universe that we all shift up to. You can’t go back to the old one to see what history books said before we changed the past, because those history books don’t exist anymore in our future. There are new books, and those books reflect the changes we made. Period.”

  Her words bounce around in my head. My brain processes them, but my heart won’t believe it.

  “Are you telling me I don’t get to know what happened here?”

  Yellow takes a slow breath, as if she’s not sure what to say. “But you do know what happened here.”

  I do.

  I do.

  I do.

  I lean over and rest my forehead on the cool, metal railing. “He killed Kennedy. My father killed a president. This changes everything.”

  “Yeah, he was in on it. But how does that change you wanting to bring down Alpha?”

  I jump back. “My father was a bad person! I can’t just get over that!”

  There’s shouting right below us, and footsteps pound up the stairs. Before I can even think, three men tear up the stairs to our landing. They’re all wearing suits with skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses and have FBI written all over them. Yellow and I exchange one panicked glance, and then we’re surrounded.

  “Who are you?” one demands.

  “How did you get in here?”

  Shit. When are we? When did I project to?

  Yellow drops to her knees and holds up her hands. “I’m sorry, sirs,” she says with a convincing mock sob. “I just . . . I’m such a fan of the president’s . . . I had to see. I dragged my friend.”

  “Get up!” the man in the middle says. “You both should be arrested. This is an active crime scene.”

  “I’m sorry,” Yellow wails.

  The man on the left grabs her and spins her against the wall, then pats her down. The man on the right comes over to me, and I hold up my hands in submission. He pats me down.

  “Clear,” he says.

  “I’ve got this,” the man holding Yellow says. He tosses Alpha’s notebook to the third man. Yellow looks at me with terrified eyes.

  The man flips through it. “What’s this?”

  “My notes from a home economics class at school,” Yellow says without missing a beat.

  The man raises an eyebrow. “There’s an entry right here for June 17, 1998. HY. Eight point five. What’s that got to do with home economics, missy?”

  Yellow clears her throat. “It’s an advanced sewing class. We’re trying to predict what fashion is going to look like in the future based on past trends. HY stands for Hiro Yu. He’s a Japanese fashion designer who’s currently creating some very avant garde pieces. I’m going to base my design on his. Eight point five is what I need to set the bobbin to. It’s just a note.”

  I blink. I’m speechless. She just completely pulled that from her ass and passed it off like it makes all the sense in the world. Yellow is hands-down the best liar I’ve ever met.

  “Sounds like a waste of class time to me,” the man says. “You girls need to be learning cooking and cleaning and maybe some typing.”

  Yellow bows her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “What you girls did was ve
ry foolish.” He juts his chin toward the men holding Yellow and me. “Escort them out.” Then he looks right at Yellow and hands her back the notebook. “Don’t you ever enter this building again.”

  It’s a long, tense walk down six flights of stairs. We’re given another warning to stay away from the building and pitched out onto the street. Piles of flowers, some long dead, some fresh, litter the front of the book depository. There are at least a dozen people out front, some crying, some praying, some standing and staring.

  “Holy crap,” Yellow breathes after the door slams shut in our faces. “That was way too close.”

  There is nothing like nearly getting arrested to snap you back to reality. Was it really only a few minutes ago I was curled up in a ball in the stairwell?

  “Eight point five is what you set the bobbin to?” I ask. “What does that even mean?”

  Yellow shrugs. “No clue.”

  “When are we?”

  She looks at the people in front of the building, then grabs my arm and marches me away. “December 23, 1963. You turned the month dial forward once. Thank God I saw you do it. Now promise me you will never project without me.”

  “Yellow, I—”

  “Promise me!”

  “I won’t project without you,” I say through gritted teeth.

  “Tell me how things have changed.”

  “What?” I push off her.

  “Murder, Iris. Assassination. This thing with Alpha is worse than we thought. And did you ever stop to think that maybe this means the entire organization is corrupt? Including my dad?”

  I—no. I didn’t.

  She huffs. “I’m sorry you had to find out about your dad that way. Really, I am. But that just means we have to work even harder to stop it. Do you get that? We have to stop it. And I have no idea where to go from here. None. It’s you and me, floundering around in 1963. We need help, and I don’t know how to get it.”