by Walker, Rysa
She turns toward me and realizes there’s no need to finish the question. My grandmother is still alive, but it’s clear that she won’t be for long.
“I’m sorry,” Katherine tells her. “I tried to warn you. Why did you—”
“It’s okay.” Thea reaches out with her free hand and gives Katherine’s arm a feeble squeeze. “It’s in the diary I sent to Madi. Help her find your daughters. Let them know that he’s . . . gone. And if there’s no CHRONOS,” she adds, looking up at me, “maybe he’ll be gone for good this time.”
I exchange a look with Katherine. Thea must have missed the fact that the Saul she shot was a splinter. And even though I have every intention of fixing this, I don’t have the heart to tell her in her current condition.
“You’re going to be okay,” I say. “I’m going to go back and fix this.”
“I knew you’d say that,” Thea says, smiling. “But no, sweetie. This was my path. All . . . part of . . . the plan.”
It’s the same maddeningly calm tone she was using earlier, even though her breath is ragged. Even though her blood is pooling on the wood beneath my knees.
“No,” I tell her. “This isn’t your decision.”
Katherine gets to her feet. “I’m going to grab some cushions from the couch. If we prop her up, maybe it will be easier for her to breathe.”
Jack helps me lift Thea, and we wedge the pillows beneath her. Her eyes are closed, but she’s still breathing.
“Set a stable point from where you were standing,” I tell the others. “And at various locations around the room. Find a vantage point where we can stop Saul from firing. Or a moment when we can shoot him before Thea gets the chance. We’ll have double memories, but . . .”
They all nod and spread out around the room. I take a few steps toward the couch to set a stable point at the spot where I was crouched just before Thea took the shot, and I set another from a few feet away.
When I look back at Thea, she’s still breathing. Her eyes are half-open, watching me, and her hand is clutched tightly around the brass cuff. I wonder again if she dropped the weapon she used or if the thing is more lethal than it looks. She gives me a sad smile as she uncurls the fingers holding the bracelet. It rolls out of her hand and onto the floor. By the time it comes to a stop about six inches away, all that remains of Thea Randall is a slight indentation in the cushion.
∞EPILOGUE∞
TYSON
BETHESDA, MARYLAND
NOVEMBER 22, 2136
Katherine and Rich slide over to make room for me at the octagonal kitchen nook, but it’s crowded already, with Lorena, RJ, and the baby’s chair taking up about half the space. I smile and shake my head, carrying my plate of turkey and stuffing out to the patio, where Madi, Jack, Alex, and Clio are sitting. I take the spot across from Clio, and for a few minutes, we eat our simple Thanksgiving meal in silence, looking out at the backyard and enjoying a warm autumn afternoon.
Alex finishes the last of his food and starts to get up. Madi tugs on his arm. “Stay,” she says, and when he reluctantly sits back down, she tops off his barely touched glass of wine. “All the wormholes and twisty, tangled timelines will still be waiting for you. You need to relax. It’s a beautiful Thanksgiving Day, and we have a lot to be thankful for.”
She’s right on both counts.
Our losses could have been so much worse. This timeline could be far worse as well. The air is clear. The grass is green. There are several large trees, and Madi says the place looks exactly as it did in our timeline, as best she can tell. This house once again belongs to Madi, willed to her by her grandmother. The only difference is that the title was in Thea’s name, not Nora’s, and cosigned by a group called Sisters, Inc.
All told, the Anomalies Machine only registered a few thousand differences between this timeline and our original version, and most are minor. The western states are no longer a separate entity, there was no nuclear exchange on this continent, and the government is currently engaged in only a few middling international crises. Jack’s family is alive and well, and he seems relieved to learn that some leader in Akana is no longer threatening to annihilate her neighbors, at least for the time being. She’s apparently found religion, and reporters noted the presence of a lotus-flower tattoo on her hand when she was last sighted.
There is one rather massive change, however, at least from our perspective, and it’s the reason Katherine, Rich, and I are still here. We’ve tried to blink home on several occasions. The local points we set while working on the report for Angelo and the point Richard says he set in Sutter’s office at the Objectivist Club are all inactive. A location that I set—the one outside the library that stands where CHRONOS HQ is in our time—is still active, but only until 2160. In fact, none of our stable points work after that year. This is the one thing that suggests to us that there is a CHRONOS, or some variant thereof, in the future. In our timeline, 2160 was the cutoff date beyond which no time travel was allowed.
But Rich, Katherine, and I have all made jumps to times and places where we traveled for training or with other historians, hunting for a familiar face. I looked for Glen, the mentor with whom I studied the Klan, at the trailer we shared in Polk County, North Carolina, on and off between 1964 and 1966. The trailer is there, but a family is renting it. At first, I thought maybe it was because Glen wasn’t training me, and therefore he picked some other place to live. But he’s not studying the Klan in that area at all. I set local points inside the community center where most Klan gatherings are held. Glen never shows up.
Rich and Katherine report the same thing. No CHRONOS historians. No CHRONOS keys.
Madi is also right that Alex needs to relax, but I get why he can’t. He’s fairly confident that he’s blocked the signal for any hitchhikers from 27V. But there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to keep them out. Even more troubling, however, are the red dots that keep popping up on his displays. The first was in 1780, which didn’t seem to surprise Katherine at all. She said the last words Saul’s splinter uttered were from a poem about an event predicted by Jemima Wilkinson, a quirky minister in 1780. Only now, instead of fading into obscurity, Jemima was burned at the stake, along with quite a few of her followers. A hundred years after the witch frenzy ended in the United States, a second wave started.
Earlier this morning, Alex told us a second cluster of red dots had begun popping up, this time in Salzburg, Austria, during the panic over the Zauberjackl in the late 1600s. I’d never even heard the name, but Katherine went pale and left the library.
Saul is taunting us. Taunting Katherine, mostly. And I suspect that soon these changes will flip the timeline again. He didn’t like Campbell screwing with our history, but he seems more than willing to mess it up himself.
Madi lifts her glass. “To Thea. She would have preferred that we toast her with champagne, which she always called bubbles, but this pinot blanc is the closest thing I had.”
We join the toast, and I can tell Madi is fighting back tears.
“I should have told her. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so keen to make some grand gesture if . . .” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “Nope. Not going to go there. We’ve hashed through all of this over and over.”
We have indeed hashed through all of it. Madi blamed herself. Then Alex blamed himself for simply telling Jarvis to turn on the simulation, rather than restoring all power to the room. That led to Jack and Madi telling Alex that he really couldn’t have known the specific command that Jarvis was given. Jarvis chimed in at that point to apologize for taking the command too literally. I wouldn’t have thought it was even possible to guilt a virtual assistant from this era.
“I’m not going to spoil the day,” Madi says. “We will simply honor her memory and give thanks for her sacrifice. Even if . . .” She cuts herself off again, blinking back tears. “I’ll go get dessert.”
The pumpkin pie she brings out clearly pushed the limits of Madi’s food unit, but the whipped
cream is good. We talk a bit as we eat, but mostly we sit in companionable silence as the sun sets behind the willow tree.
When Alex, Jack, and Madi head inside, I’m about to follow, but Clio asks me to wait. “I have a stable point to share with you.” She holds up her key and taps the back against mine. “I wasn’t sure of the exact time. Or even if that was the right drugstore. But then I saw the dress you mentioned, and . . .”
Antoinette Robinson is leaning against the wall, her orange dress vivid against the dusty bricks. Laughing with the other girls as they look at something in the magazine with the Ronettes on the cover. Passing a smoke back and forth. Waiting for the friend to pick them up and take them to the Beatles concert where John Lennon will not be murdered prematurely. We checked.
I stare at the stable point for a long time, and then look up at Clio. “Thank you. I was going to go back and check the phone book like I did last time. But this is so much better.”
She shrugs, looking a bit uncomfortable. “I was just doing a little stalking of this house near Chicago, with a white picket fence and a happily married ex-boyfriend with too many kids and . . .”
I pour the last bit of wine into our two glasses. “Any reason why you’re torturing yourself like that?”
“The same reason that you do. Because while I can’t have, and might not even want that life, I still want to know that he has it. We need some sort of objective test, right? Something other than wars, and systems of government, and all of the big-picture things the Anomalies Machine measures. Because the small, fragile things matter, too. Otherwise, how will we know whether any given frog-tongue universe is worth keeping?”
It’s a conversation that very few people would understand. I like that.
I tap the edge of my glass against hers. “To frog-tongue universes.”
“Well, maybe not all of them,” she says.
“Fine. To our frog-tongue universe.”
She smiles. “Yes. I can definitely drink to that.”
∞Acknowledgments∞
I began writing this book in 2019, having no idea how strange the next year would be. As I finish the last stage of edits, it feels as if our time train has veered seriously off course. I’ve gotten many emails and messages on social media pointing out parallels to my books and asking if I could send someone back to fix 2020. If any of you happen to have the CHRONOS gene, please let me know. The keys I have are 3-D printed replicas, but after the year we’ve had we’re due at least one miracle, right?
In this era of alternative facts, it’s more important than ever to take a few minutes to sort out fact from fiction, especially in a book where some of the characters are historical figures. I’ve retained as much as possible of their actual words and opinions suggested in interviews and biographies. While I’ve taken a few liberties in furtherance of the plot, this is generally in sections after the timeline was altered.
Excerpts from the New York Daily Intrepid, a fictional newspaper, appear between chapters. These are all based to varying degrees on articles from the time period, although they diverge a bit from actual history once alterations to the timeline begin.
Verses from The Book of Cyrus are sprinkled throughout the manuscript. This is obviously a work of fiction, but Saul Rand stole liberally from the Bible and other religious texts, so if you had flashbacks to your religious-education classes while reading, that’s why.
For those who have not read the first CHRONOS books, some background on the Cyrists may be helpful. The Koreshan Unity, a group that Saul co-opted to form his religion, was an actual religious community founded in Chicago in the early 1890s by Cyrus Reed Teed. They relocated to Estero, Florida, a few years later and were active into the 1960s. The group believed that Earth is a hollow sphere, that God was both male and female, and that celibacy would result in eternal life. When Cyrus Teed died, his followers placed him in a bathtub and waited for him to awaken, agreeing to bury him only when the county health inspector insisted. Cyrus was his given first name, but he believed that he was the reincarnation of the biblical King Cyrus, who was hailed as a messiah. (Any of you interested in an eerie modern parallel should google “King Cyrus coin.”)
Laura Houghtaling Ingalls was an acclaimed pilot and Nazi informant. She dropped antiwar leaflets over the White House in 1938, in addition to numerous other activities with isolationist women’s organizations. Five years earlier, she went missing for a day, prompting some concern for her safety. Her quote about landing so that she could practice using her six-shooter is from her comments to journalists upon landing a day late in Miami. Elizabeth Dilling was also active in the isolationist movement and a vocal supporter of Father Coughlin, although she did not work directly with him.
Most information about Father Charles Coughlin, one of the most famous radio evangelists of all time, is historical. He was indeed on Hitler’s payroll, and his weekly sermons were aimed at Americans who were generally willing to embrace fascism and anti-Semitism if there was a chance it would help to ward off communism. In his publications, Coughlin, who often lifted lines verbatim from published speeches by German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, remained a Catholic priest in Detroit for several decades after his radio empire crumbled. His organization, the Christian Front, did not become an official ally of the German-American Bund, but they shared goals and members with the Bund and other American Nazi groups.
Both Dorothy Thompson articles are paraphrased from her weekly columns, as are her comments about other figures such as Lawrence Dennis, Charles Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh. While hers is far from a household name today, she was widely considered to be one of the two most powerful women in prewar America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt. Thompson was married to author Sinclair Lewis who wrote the book It Can’t Happen Here, a fictional depiction of a United States in the grasp of a uniquely American variant of fascism. She was the first American journalist Hitler evicted from Germany, and she did attend the 1939 Bund Pro-America Rally at Madison Square Garden, where she was ejected for laughing at the Nazis.
No one was killed at the 1939 Bund Pro-America Rally, but several bomb threats were noted in newspaper accounts. Aside from Saul’s additions to the speaking roster, the descriptions of the event closely track the historical record and were based in part on an excellent Oscar-nominated short documentary, A Night at the Garden.
Charles Lindbergh was not shot at a Bund event and, like Coughlin, never officially joined forces with the organization. Lindbergh and some other members of America First did, however, express sympathy for the Nazi cause prior to Pearl Harbor.
While Lawrence Dennis’s story may seem a bit implausible, it is historically accurate. As a child evangelist, he toured churches in the US and Europe, billed as Lonnie Dennis, the “Inspired Child.” He cut ties with his African American family as a teen, attended Exeter and Harvard as Lawrence Dennis, and would eventually become a leading writer in fascist circles. The only references to his career that are fictional are those specifically noted in the story as being changes to the timeline.
Events at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair adhere closely to the historical record, aside from those noted explicitly as alterations to the timeline. Descriptions of the exhibits are taken from articles and films about the Fair. Albert Einstein and Franklin Roosevelt both spoke on opening day. Einstein was active in promoting the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. A terrorist bombing did occur on July 4, 1940, at the British Pavilion. Two police officers were killed, and while the case was never solved, there is some suspicion that it was the work of British intelligence agents, hoping to stir up sympathy and tip the needle of public opinion toward the US joining the war.
The super-many-time theory is based on a real theory by Japanese physicist Shin’ichirō Tomonaga. He was studying with Werner Heisenberg and had to leave Germany abruptly when World War II began. On his way back to Japan, he took a day to visit the World’s Fair . . . and I think it would have been hard for him to resist stopping by an exhibit c
alled the Theater of Time and Space.
The sections about Café Society are mostly historical, although I have no indication that Lawrence Dennis ever visited. Barney Josephson may or may not have known, but it’s fairly certain that his brother tapped friends in the Communist Party for the loan to start the business. Leon Josephson was arrested in Europe as part of a plot to kill Hitler. Billie Holiday was the first vocalist at the club and gained considerable recognition after performing the anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit.” Tallulah Bankhead was performing The Little Foxes in New York during the time that Tyson visited the club. She was every bit as over-the-top as I’ve portrayed her here, despite the fact that her father was a member of Congress. Bankhead was fairly open about her sexuality, especially her numerous affairs with both men and women, including a brief fling with Billie Holiday.
This is just an overview, and I’m probably forgetting something. If you have a question about some aspect of the history, feel free to give me a shout on social media.
And now, on to the acknowledgments. First, a huge tip of the hat to my publishing team at 47North, including Adrienne Procaccini who helped get the series off to a fabulous start. Mike Corley’s covers are always eye-catching, and I’m grateful to Kate Rudd and Eric G. Dove for bringing my characters to life in the audio version. Thanks to Tegan Tegani for helping me unravel time threads in the developmental edit, and to the dedicated group of copyeditors and proofreaders (especially Katherine and Patty Ann) who patched up my assorted gaffes.
My friends on Facebook and Twitter helped keep me relatively sane during the truly crazy period in which this book was written. Special thanks to my CHRONOS Repo Agents and beta readers for their feedback and support: Cale Madewell, Chris Fried, Karen Stansbury, Ian Walniuk, Mary Freeman, Meg A. Watt, Alexa Huggins, Alexis Young, Allie B. Holycross, Amelia Elisa Diaz, Angela Careful, Angela Fossett, Ann Davis, Antigone Trowbridge, Becca Levite, Billy Thomas, Brandi Faith, Chantelle Michelle Kieser, Chaz Martin, Chelsea Hawk, Cheyenne Chambers, Chris Fried, Chris Schraff Morton, Christina Kmetz, Claudia Gonzaga-Jauregui, Cody Jones, Dan Wilson, Dawn Lovelly, Devi Reynolds, Donna Harrison Green, Dori Gray, Emiliy Marino, Erin Flynn, Fred Douglis, Hailey Mulconrey Theile, Heather Jones, Hope Bates, Jen Gonzales, Jen Wesner, Jennifer Kile, Jenny Griffin, Jenny Lawrence, Jenny MacRunnel, Jessica Wolfsohn, John Scafidi, Karen Benson, Katie Lynn Stripling, Kristin Ashenfelter, Kristin Rydstedt, Kyla Michelle Lacey Waits, Laura-Dawn Francesca MacGregor-Portlock, Lindsay Nichole Leckner, Margarida Azevedo Veloz, Mark Chappell, Meg Griffin, Mikka McClain, Nguyen Quynh Trang, Nooce Miller, Pham Hai Yen, Roseann Calabritto, Sarada Spivey, Sarah Ann Diaz, Sarah Kate Fisher, Shari Hearn, Shell Bryce, Sigrun Murr, Stefanie Diegel, Stephanie Kmetz, Stephanie Johns-Bragg, Summer Nettleman, Susan Helliesen, Tina Kennedy, Tracy Denison Johnson, Trisha Davis Perry, Valerie Arlene Alcaraz, and the person—or more likely, persons—I’ve forgotten.