Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  He colors slightly. “In Madi’s bag. I sort of . . . um . . . borrowed it. But I put it back before either of you returned last night.”

  “You could be right,” I tell him. “Saul could be lying. But right now, it sort of feels like everyone is lying to me, so . . .”

  “I meant what I said, Katherine. I have never lied to you. There have been things that I held back, yes. Things that others told me in confidence that I couldn’t share. And sure, I didn’t tell you the full truth about . . . my feelings. But did you actually want me to be honest about that when you were with Saul?”

  I consider it for a moment, and then shake my head. I’m not even certain that I want him to be honest right now. But I can tell from his expression that shoving everything back inside isn’t going to be an option for Rich. I made the mistake of tugging a brick out of the wall, and everything is about to come crashing down.

  “Do you remember the first day of training? You came into class in this red sweater with black trim. About halfway through that first day, they told us we’d all be wearing CHRONOS scrubs from now on. You raised your hand and said, ‘Can we at least accessorize?’ Everyone in the class laughed.”

  “Including you,” I say, because yes, I remember that day very clearly. Those scrubs were ugly. They still are, but at least we get some options now.

  “Yes,” he admits. “Including me. But then you turned around with one eyebrow arched and asked if we all really wanted to be exactly like everyone else. I didn’t give a single fuck about having color options for scrubs—in fact, I kind of liked the idea of not having to make that decision. But you marched over that afternoon in the courtyard and told a group of us that you’d posted a petition requesting some, as you put it, ‘very reasonable choices in regard to our uniforms,’ and said you’d appreciate our feedback. You knew exactly who you were and what you wanted at age ten. And . . . that was it for me. I was gone.”

  I smile and shake my head. “You were also ten.”

  He takes a swig from his drink and continues holding it against his right palm, so the burn from the doorknob must still be bothering him. “Why is it everyone seems to think they know more about what I felt back then than I do?”

  “That’s not what I meant . . .”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what you meant. It doesn’t matter, though. I know what I felt. I know what I feel now. It has never changed. But . . . you did. After that first jump when they teamed you with Saul, you slowly morphed into someone else. You began to question yourself. At first, it was just when he was around, but then it started bleeding over into your entire life. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Adrienne said he was like some sort of confidence vampire. He just sucked it right out of you. And your mom—”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” I hold up one hand. “I’m not going to sit here while you lecture me about what my own mother thinks! Believe it or not, I know how she feels about Saul. She’s my mother, and she’s never going to think that anyone is good enough for her child, but she’s actually warmed to him in recent months. And as for Adrienne’s analysis . . .” I give a bitter chuckle. “Kind of ironic, don’t you think, when she flirts with Saul every chance she gets?”

  “You’re wrong,” Rich says. “It’s the other way around. Saul flirts with her. Probably because he likes a challenge. Adrienne saw straight through him from the beginning.”

  It’s not the first time someone has told me this. Not just about Adrienne, but about half a dozen other women that seem to cluster around Saul like flies. In the past, I’ve ignored them, and I can feel myself leaning in that direction even now, my mind starting to make excuses for him. But perhaps Adrienne and the others aren’t the ones buzzing around Saul. After last night, I at least need to consider the possibility that he’s the one buzzing around them.

  “So I’m just a shell now?” I say. “Saul-the-Confidence-Vampire sucked my personality away? Why the hell do you bother hanging around, since you believe I’m nothing but a doormat?”

  As soon as the words leave my mouth, I want to pull them back. I’m lashing out, and Rich just happens to be the person within my range. What I really want to do is tell him about last night. I’d even toyed with the possibility of doing that, but I want to scan the stable points I set first. I want to know exactly what Saul is up to before I pull in Richard and the others.

  “I’m not saying you’re a doormat.” Rich stares down at the table for a long moment, looking completely miserable, and my guilt ratchets up several notches. When he looks back up, however, his eyes are clear and determined. “I hang around because I love you. Because every day I see flashes of the person you are, the person you can be when you step out of Saul’s shadow. When you’re Katherine, not Kathy.”

  “Did you ever stop to think that the changes you think you see might be part of being in a relationship? Maybe it’s a matter of give-and-take.”

  “I know I’m looking at it from the outside,” he says. “And I’m absolutely one hundred percent biased against Saul. He’s an asshole and he doesn’t deserve you. But it seems like you give everything and get very little in return. So . . . yeah. If that’s normal give-and-take in a relationship, I’m better off on my own. Because I won’t let anyone do that to me. And I sure as hell would never do it to you.”

  There’s not much I can say, since I’m mostly in agreement with his points on Saul. My head agrees, but my heart is still fighting reality.

  “You need to go,” I tell Rich. “You’re going to be late meeting Tyson. We can talk more about all of this later, okay? I apologize for lashing out. I’m not feeling a hundred percent, to be honest.”

  It’s true. I’m tired and my head is pounding. But mostly, I want to get back to the apartment before everyone else so that I have time to scan through the stable points I set at Saul’s place in Miami.

  And I want to see this diary for myself. Madi can’t really object if I borrow it. After all, the damn thing is apparently mine.

  “You’re right,” he says, glancing at the time on his key. “And it’s okay. We’re all on edge. But Katherine . . . I’m not naive enough to think I can spill my guts like this and everything goes back to normal. I realize this is going to make things awkward. Just know that whatever else I may feel for you, I am still your friend. I don’t want to lose that.”

  ∞

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  FEBRUARY 21, 1939

  I jump straight to the bedroom and cross over to the small backpack on the floor next to the closet. Madi could pop in any minute, so I have to act quickly.

  As soon as the diary is in my hands, I know it’s mine. The name and address inside the cover are in my hand, and the diary contains personal entries I remember making, right up until about a week ago.

  And then the entries diverge. I scan through quickly, reading about things that haven’t happened yet. Things that quite possibly will never happen, and several things I hope to God never happen.

  When I reach the video entry Rich mentioned, I understand why he gripped the rail of the parachute basket so tightly. I’d have been furious at anyone who left those marks on someone I cared about, too. Even though Saul can be caustic at times, even though he has a temper, I would never have believed him capable of really hurting me.

  But it’s hard to argue against the evidence, particularly when it’s my own face staring back at me, telling me that Saul did this. That I’m terrified he’s going to come back, break down the door, and kill me.

  Our lamp, one of the first things we selected for our shared quarters, is shattered. The pearls from my necklace, which belonged to my grandmother, are everywhere—on the floor, the bed, the dresser. And the red line at the base of my neck doesn’t look like Saul simply grabbed the necklace and yanked. The line is too red, too swollen. No, it looks more like Saul grabbed the necklace and twisted. The fact that the string was old might have been the only thing that saved my life.

  I have to remind myself that this never happene
d. That it almost certainly won’t happen in this exact same way. But it could. This is proof positive that it absolutely could happen, and I think the odds are exceptionally good that something very similar will happen at some point if I stay with Saul Rand.

  There are voices in the living room, and I heave a sigh of relief that Madi decided to use that stable point rather than the local point she set here in the bedroom last night when she jumped forward to see Jack. I’m about to drop the diary back into her bag, but screw that. It’s my diary. I open it and set a password, then shove it under my pillow. Why the hell didn’t she tell me what was in it? She has to have known from the moment she met me. Before she met me, for that matter.

  And now I’m flashing back to how vulnerable I felt standing in front of the window in Miami last night. Saul could very easily have grabbed the chain of the CHRONOS key, exactly as he did my pearls, and twisted. The chain that holds my key is sturdy enough that I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have broken. And after I stopped breathing, all he’d have had to do was lift the key over my head, and there would have been no more body. No more me.

  There’s a tap on the door. Madi peeks in and says she needs to get the stable points from my key to deliver to Jack. I tell her I’ll be in the living room in a minute. She gives me a confused look and closes the door.

  Yes, I know why she didn’t tell me. I get it. But it still grates.

  I center the CHRONOS medallion in my palm and pull up the stable point at the office of the Shrine of the Lotus Flower, where Madi and I met Saul earlier. After making sure my tiny pen of death is in my pocket, I scroll forward to two a.m., blink in, and tuck my key back into the case. I push open the office door and set a stable point in the hallway. Then I continue to the massive main chapel, set a point at the main entrance and then hurry across the auditorium to set one on the other side.

  When I’m about halfway to my destination, a clanking noise comes from behind me. I startle, and whip out the laser pen, only to realize it was just the heat kicking on. Still, I need to hurry. I’m almost certain no one is here, but Coughlin does live on the premises, and there’s no guarantee that Saul isn’t here tonight staging one of his religious epiphanies to help keep his refrocked priest in the Cyrist fold. More importantly, though, the longer I spend here, the less time I’ll have to find out exactly what Saul Rand is up to.

  I probably have an hour at most before the others return, and I may need to make at least one jump to get information from Saul. The wisest course would probably be to go to the others and tell them everything. Madi could take these stable points to Jack, and he could examine them at leisure. It’s pretty clear, however, that they don’t trust me to be objective where Saul is concerned. They don’t trust that Saul is working with us, which is entirely fair. They don’t trust that he’ll keep anything I tell him from Team Viper, and again, that’s something I can’t guarantee, either. But the crux of the matter is that they don’t trust me to keep secrets from Saul. That’s the whole reason they set up this stupid buddy system.

  I need real information, though, not the claptrap Saul fed me when I had Madi in tow this morning. And contrary to what they may think, I’m perfectly capable of keeping secrets, even from Saul. Maybe even especially from Saul.

  As soon as I get the last point set, I bundle the new locations into the same folder where I stashed the ones I set at Saul’s house in Miami. That way I can keep them separate from the ones I set at the Fair that I’ll soon be handing over to Madi. Then I blink back to the bedroom, kick off my shoes, wrap the quilt around me, and get to work.

  Surveilling the locations at the house in Miami should be fairly simple. The house seems to be empty much of the time. But I can instantly see that this will not be true for the office where I met Saul this morning. A steady stream of people comes and goes, making it difficult to pinpoint anyone in particular. So I leave that for later and move on to the main temple. After the building opens in April 1939, the temple is occupied for two services a week, plus a choral practice and occasional meetings of middle-aged ladies with pink lotus flowers tattooed on their hands. It’s quickly apparent that all I have to do is focus on the person behind the lectern at the front of the temple and scan through quickly. Mostly, it’s Charles Coughlin, usually in his white clerical robes. Choir practice is easy to spot. A flash of pink turns out to be Elizabeth Dilling there on one occasion in mid-January 1940. I pause for this one and pan around the auditorium, spotting some of the same faces that were at the National Mothers’ Union meeting. The group is considerably larger, however, filling about a third of the auditorium.

  Several weeks later, Lindbergh is the speaker. It’s daytime, and an unusually sunny day because sunlight dapples the faces of the audience, which is evenly divided between men and women, with quite a few children in the pews as well. As I pan around, I see men in military uniforms lining the sides of the auditorium. Although . . . they’re not standard US military uniforms. More like something you’d see at a military academy, and there are three different varieties. One group is pretty easily identifiable as the Bund that Tyson and Madi mentioned last night. A few are wearing black shirts with a skull and crossbones above the breast pocket. The largest group is dressed a bit less formally, in pale, silvery-gray shirts. Most of them sport a large red L embossed on the left, but a few have the same shirt with a red U. It’s not a uniform I’m familiar with, and it’s making me crazy that I can’t simply ask my data system to pull up the information for me, or send a request for more data through one of my CHRONOS diaries.

  It’s possible, however, that Clio will know, given that the late 1930s are her home turf. I’d planned to hole up here in the bedroom and not let her know I’d returned. She’s bored, and I’m almost certain she’ll start a conversation that I don’t have time for. But maybe there’s another way.

  As I expected, Clio is draped over the chair next to the window, scanning through something on her key. She startles when I enter the room.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I jumped in straight to the bedroom because I’ve got a killer headache. You wouldn’t by any chance have aspirin?”

  “I do. A few out-of-timeline options, as well, if you’d prefer.” Clio unfolds herself from the chair and heads into the kitchen. “My parents have generally been sticklers about not bringing stuff back from the future, but they made exceptions for things like ibuprofen and immunizations. And I occasionally bring my dad a bag of these orange Doritos chips that he likes.”

  She hands me two tiny red pills. I wash them down with a glass of water and then ask, “Could you take a quick look at something for me? I’ve been scanning through one of the stable points, and there’s a uniform that I can’t place. The one with the letter over their chest.”

  I’m reluctant to transfer the point to her key, so I grab her hand and place the medallion in her palm. She gives me an odd look, but then glances down at the stable point I have open. After a moment, she laughs. “Wow. That’s quite an assortment. Not sure who the pirate-shirt boys are, but you’ve got the Bund, the Universal Front, and now the Silver Shirts. If you can find Klan regalia, I think that will count as a full house. The L is for Legion, as in the Silver Legion, but everyone just calls them Silver Shirts. Maybe the U is for Universal Front, and they’re consolidating their costumes? I am kind of surprised that an egomaniac like Pelley would share the stage with anyone else, though, especially with a bigger name like Lindbergh.”

  “Who is Pelley?”

  “William Dudley Pelley. He ran for president on a third-party ticket last time. Got maybe 1,500 votes. Coughlin didn’t support him, but ran his own third-party candidate, who fared better, but still got less than two percent of the vote. This Pelley guy is a mystic. Says some angels told him that all Jews are bad. My brother Connor secretly listens to Lindbergh’s speeches, and he has lousy taste in politics, but even Connor thinks Pelley is a complete loon. Is this the Madison Square Garden event? Looks a bit small.”

  “No,” I say.
“A different rally.”

  “Who are the folks wearing CHRONOS keys?”

  “What?” I say. “I didn’t see a key. Are you sure?”

  She shrugs. “Not certain. It’s on the far side of the hall in the upper level. A distinct blue-green glow, and it looks like more than one to me. Three. Maybe even four. Do you have any other stable points for this event?”

  “No,” I lie. “I’ll ask Madi to jump back with me and set a few more. I’m . . . I really need to stretch out for a bit and let this medicine work.”

  “Sure. You are looking a little shaky.”

  My hands are indeed shaking when I get back to the room, but I manage to pull up the second stable point that I set on the opposite side of the chapel, just before I blinked out. When I pan to the section of the auditorium that Clio noted, I can see that she’s right about the glow. I wouldn’t have spotted it immediately because the three people in the balcony are near a window, and while the glow is a bit more vivid than the sunlight streaming in, it’s not enough that I’d have instantly assumed someone was up there with a key.

  Three someones, as it turns out. One of them is Esther. The other two are Saul.

  The fact that my first reaction is jealousy makes me want to vomit. But my brain is hardwired for this response. It’s been my automatic reflex anytime I’ve seen Saul with Esther for the past few years. Thanks to his diaries, I’m well aware that they have a past.

  Then the rational side of my brain kicks in. Esther is welcome to him. In fact, she is more than welcome to play whatever games she likes with the doppelgänger twins. Although, in the interest of sisterhood, maybe I should send her a copy of that video. Maybe I should let her know exactly what she’s getting herself into.

  But this isn’t the Esther from CHRONOS, of course. It’s the one from Team Viper. I remember that at the same instant Saul’s twin turns his head slightly toward her and I see the scar and faint red twinkle of his bionic eye.