A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII

by MaryJanice Davidson, Camille Anthony, Melissa Schroeder

  “—and you get mad when we think you won’t?” Insult to injury: she was playing with her phone while she said it.

  “Well, now you can think about what you’re going to tell the Lupez family. ‘Terribly sorry, but your loved one’s remains are in Cross Bones cemetery. If you have her exhumed, her skeleton will be about 500 years old. But at least she died in fear and terror, so it’s not all bad.’”

  The glum silence that followed actually had me feeling sorry for the merry band of morons. I sighed and rubbed my forehead and tried to think.

  “Okay, so—again, can’t believe the layman is suggesting this, but have you guys considered just shutting it all down? Not the half-assed ‘Joan’s probably dead so everybody take a half day’ shutdown you did before. I mean these things. This thing.” I gestured to the pad, the gate, the computer monitors, all of it. “Just cut power to everything. Go full dark. Like you were supposed to before you started frigging around with equipment you didn’t understand.”

  “Well. That might work.” Karen stopped talking (and texting) and looked at her colleagues for help, so I was suddenly terrified. What could be terrible enough to make her hesitate? Had they started a nuclear war while I was gone? Did they take a figurative dump on the space-time continuum?

  “That’s the problem with going dark,” Holt said bluntly, putting his pad aside. “It might work.”

  By now I had marched to the break room for terrible coffee, so I thought about what he’d just said. It might work, which meant no one would take a five hundred year fall. But it also meant …

  “Dammit, you guys!” I felt an urge to dramatically smack myself in the forehead, but didn’t want to spill the creamer. So I just waved it around irritably while Warren prepped my awful coffee. “Who’s the V.I.P. you need back? What did you selectively forget to mention this time?”

  “It’s just that if we do shut everything down, there’s no guarantee we could recreate the accident, or even get running at all,” Holt explained. “It’s like when your computer isn’t working but you don’t know what the trouble is. Sometimes a reboot works and the problem is solved. But sometimes the problem isn’t solved, or, worse, sometimes you can’t get the computer back up. And you still don’t know why, and you’ve made things worse.”

  This was rich from the poster child for Team Making Things Worse. “So you’re saying shutting it down might be permanent.” Nods all around. “Which, incomprehensibly, you think is a bad thing.” Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t feel right about stranding anyone in TudorTime. But the alternative was more victims. The alternative was another Teresa.

  So we drank coffee and yelled at each other, which was as productive as you might imagine, and I changed back into street clothes and came back and yelled more, and I had just made up my mind (as I had in truth before I came back) that I would go to the authorities (whoever they would prove to be) and make them believe me regardless of what I.T.C.H. did. I’d start with whomever was working Teresa’s case. The props I’d smuggled back would be helpful.

  But before I could make my getaway: “What in the fucking fuck is going on here?”

  I nearly dropped my awful coffee. “Lisa?”

  My thoroughly enraged roommate was standing in the doorway of the break room and behind her were two burly fellows in dark suits. Feds? Her car pool buddies? Two random guys in suits she’d met in the lobby? Future patients? Past patients? Pharmacy reps?

  And strangest of all: “Hey!” I pointed at her head. “You colored your hair!”

  In retrospect, I had probably focused on the wrong thing.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  “Don’t move.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean it, Joan. Don’t move one goddamn centimeter.”

  “I know.” And I wasn’t sulking from inside the magnetic resonance imaging scanner, if you were wondering. “Stop acting like this is my first MRI.”

  “Moving your lips is fucking moving, Joan!”

  I know you are, I thought. But what am I? Enh, not my best. At least this wouldn’t take as long as the CT scan.

  Things had been, um, tense since she and her chums from Bodyguards, Inc. yanked me (“Wait! My time-travel tote bag! And can we get a candy bar out of the vending machine before we go?”) from the bowels of I.T.C.H. to the bowels of Oxford University Hospital.

  Once I’d gotten over her radical hair color change—Easter Egg Pink to Jet Black—I asked the most pertinent question: “Do you not know what ‘keep clear’ means? Because this is the opposite. Literally the polar opposite. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I texted her.”

  I turned and stared at Karen. “How? Why? How do you even know her?”

  “I don’t.” Karen had set her phone aside to re-roll up her sleeves because the coat was too big because, again, it wasn’t her lab coat. “She and my brother work at the same clinic and they’ve been fucking each other.”

  I blinked. Had I really only been gone a day and a half? Maybe it had been a year and a half. “Lisa has a boyfriend?”

  “No. They’re fucking each other.”

  “Oh. Oh! That’s why you didn’t bet on me to die this time!” I said triumphantly. “You’re terrified of Lisa!” I lowered my voice. “Good call, by the way. And however scared you are? You’re not scared enough. Honest to God. And I wouldn’t recommend doing that thing where we talk about her like she isn’t here, either. She hates that.”

  “After I read your delusional note,” Lisa announced, “I reached out to your new bosses.”

  “They are not my bosses, just like I am not Henry VIII’s holy fool and I have told them both that exact thing!” Argh. I don’t think I could have yelled something that sounded crazier.

  “So I told this bitch …” Pointing to a cowed Karen. “… to text the moment you turned up, and explained how I’d express my displeasure if she didn’t comply. It would involve her ass, my fist, and quick-drying concrete.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Then I put these guys on retainer …” Jerking her thumb at the men.

  “Right, who are they again?”

  “… and here we are and you’re coming with me right fucking now and Jesus Christ, I don’t even know where to start with you.”

  I took a closer look at Lisa who, though normally very pretty, looked exhausted. The circles under her eyes looked like bruises; she’d bitten all her nails back—and this was a woman who breezed through med school on four hours of sleep a night. Although threats of death and mutilation (or death by mutilation) were her normal, she was so frazzled there was a chance she might carry them out.

  “Look, I’m fine. I’m sorry you were worried, thus the note.”

  “That fucking piece of paper did not set my mind at ease at all.”

  “Okay, I can see how that could be true. I’m not crazy. Back me up, I.T.C.H.” But even as I said it, I knew they were going to burn me. “Tell her about trying to invent teleportation but accidentally inventing time travel and then being too dumb to undo it and needing me to find the Losties while you worked on your cover story.” Yes: they were definitely going to burn me. I might have burned me.

  “Do you hear yourself?” I could count on one hand how often Lisa had looked so horrified. She whirled on the I.T.C.H. gang and hissed, “I swear. I swear to fucking Christ in his cradle, if you’ve exposed her to anything that made her sick, if you fuckfarts are screwing around with something toxic here—”

  “They are! Only it’s not a drug. And I’m not sick. I’m not sick!” (Not sure why I felt I needed to say it twice. Probably should squash that urge next time.)

  “—I will tie each of you up and run you through an automated carwash until the brushes scrub away your epidermis and/or you drown in soap and/or are dried to death.”

  (I’ve always loved Lisa’s weirdly specific and profane thr
eats. Also points to Warren, who was the only one who looked intrigued and not angry or terrified.)

  Dr. Holt cleared his throat. “Nothing like that. While it’s true we’ve managed to make progress with quantum teleportation, it’s also true that our funding has dried up and subsequent experimentation has been shelved. But Joan has been tremendously helpful in—”

  “Yeah, we’re going now.” Lisa made a curt motion and suddenly all four of us were on our way out.

  “Wait! He’s explaining, sort of! Okay, he’s leaving out critical information because that’s what he does but he’s backing most of my story and what is the rush?” Because we were practically jogging to the parking lot. “You’re not even gonna hear him out?”

  “Joan! Fuck’s sake! He is not gonna tell me you’re his time traveling errand girl!”

  “Well, that’s true, he won’t, but not for the reason you think.”

  “I need to run tests immediately. We need to find out what’s wrong right the fuck now. We’re already way behind; I should have done this weeks ago, we’re not waiting another minute.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me! Physiologically, I mean.” I looked up at one of her rent-a-guards, whose fingers were curled around my biceps as I was hustled to the waiting car. “You’re very good at this, by the way. Much better than Henry VIII’s guards.”

  Lisa groaned.

  “Maybe that’s what I’m meant to do: analyze and write about the dragging techniques of various guards through the ages.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  I could guess what she was worried about. She was a neuro-in-training; her first fear was going to be a tumor or something equally terrible lurking in my brain and driving me insane. And since I hadn’t been insane a month ago (as far as she knew), that meant she was worried it was something fast-acting. I was just a layman, but even I knew fast-acting brain tumors = get your affairs in order.

  And let’s not forget I was on experimental medication. She had to be worried about that, too.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her as we piled into the car, a sleek black sedan I’d never seen before. “I have proof I’m not clinically insane. Y’know, about this.”

  Except I didn’t. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Lisa is very good at her job.

  But even an efficient and ruthless genius can be thwarted by hospital bureaucracy.

  “A full day?” she snarled into her phone, then paused to listen. “But this is an emergency! What? Yeah, I’m looking at her confused-ass face right now. She’s staring at me like a big dummy.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said. “And I’m not staring. I’m glaring.”

  “Obviously she’s fine right now, but that doesn’t mean—no, wait, you can’t—hello?” She slammed the phone down. “That wiener-slurping jackoff!”

  “I’m not sure homophobia is the way to handle this.”

  “It’s literal! He’s straight! And he microwaves hot dogs and then licks them before eating them and he doesn’t use a bun!”

  “That’s a weird way to eat hot dogs,” I admitted.

  Have I mentioned Lisa used to get into fist fights with meth dealers? Until you’ve seen a bruised and bloody meth dealer running away from a 10th grade girl, you haven’t really lived.

  “Apparently since you aren’t bleeding out, unconscious, or otherwise fucked sideways, your scans are low-pri.” Lisa booted the stool so hard it shot across the lab and bounced off the far wall. “Fascist dingbats!”

  “As it should be,” I pointed out. “Come on, Lisa. Some poor kid knocked out in a car crash needs his results back a lot faster than I do.”

  “We have no way of knowing if that’s true. No fucking way. But do you know how we could definitively find out?”

  “Does it have something to do with prioritizing my tests?”

  “By prioritizing your tests!” She scrubbed her face with her palms, then glared at me with puffy eyes. “I should get you to an ER. I should put a Psych hold on you.”

  “The ER won’t do anything to me since I’m not a danger to myself or others, and you don’t have Psych privileges.” Right? That seemed like it would be correct. Could any random M.D. put any random person on a Psych hold? In truth, I had no idea, since I spent The After avoiding check-ups and health care of any kind.

  But I knew what would put Lisa’s big fat brain at ease. “Look, see?”

  “What am I looking at?”

  I’d brought my tote bag in with us and had upended it all over the table. Now I grabbed the bundle of blue and green fabric and held it up. “See this dress? It’s my special time-traveling dress. It’s rigged, it only looks like an impractical pile of clothing that would hinder and stifle anyone who put it on. See the zipper? And the Velcro? I started with something authentic and modified it.”

  She just looked at me.

  “And see these?” I showed her the gorgeous knife and spoon I’d kept after Anne’s Marquis banquet. “This is from Henry VIII’s court! Windsor, specifically. I picked it up in 1532.” I wasn’t bragging, just imparting information. Okay, I was bragging a little. At her prolonged stare (if she didn’t blink soon, her eyeballs were going to shrivel like raisins), I got defensive. “I had to steal it. Bringing your own spoon and knife is just basic good manners back there. It would have looked weird if I didn’t have those on me, and believe me, you do not want to stand out in Tudor England.”

  “No,” Lisa said quietly. “You don’t want to stand out. Anywhere.”

  “Not that again.”

  “Very fucking much that again.”

  I ignored her attempted foray into irrelevancy. “C’mon, look at it.” The knife was sharp and gleaming, with a scrolled silver blade and an even more scrolled gold handle topped with a tiny crown. It was solid from end to end, about seven inches long with a comfortable weight in the palm that was perfect for skewering meat off the group trencher. The spoon was from the same set, only heavier, with a nice deep bowl. “They don’t use forks yet,” I explained. “Or I would have grabbed one of those, too. And I’m sorry to say the spoons are shared around a little, but everyone catching the same cold is a small price to pay for the astonishing food. But look at this set … it’s five hundred years old and it looks brand new!”

  “Yeah. It looks brand new.”

  I sighed. “My point is, it shouldn’t, because I used it last week. In 1535.”

  Lisa took a breath before answering. If it had been anyone else, I would have assumed they were trying to figure out how to spare my feelings. “This is England, Joan. Everybody has a pile of ancient junk in their attic dating back to William the Conqueror.”

  “Yes, and it all looks old. This doesn’t! And where did I get it? I mean, you can tell it’s the real deal. So now I’m some kind of high end flatware thief? And look here! This is my pomander, which is like a portable Glade air freshener. But I’ve put other stuff in it—remember that talk we had about the book I lied about writing so you wouldn’t find out I was time traveling and think I was insane?”

  “Jesus Christ.” She’d twisted it open and was staring in disbelief. “You’ve stuffed it with Flintstones Chewables and Tootsie Rolls.”

  “I’m saving those for later!” I snatched both halves back and put them back together. “And hydrocodone. And anti-inflammatories. That was all I had time to pull from our medicine cabinet before I had to go rescue Teresa Lupez who’s been dead and buried in Crossed Bones for five centuries. Which reminds me.” I pulled out my phone and started to look up the cemetery.

  “Joan. Listen to yourself.”

  “Also I could really use your advice on how to break the news to the Lupez family. If I’m even the one to tell them—maybe the cops should do that? I don’t know the protocol. You’ve told people when a family member died—do you just say it right out
loud or do you lead up to it a little?”

  “Joan. Don’t you think if people were randomly being sucked into—into time portals or whatever—”

  “Gates.” I sniffed. “Nobody calls them portals, Lisa, learn the lingo.”

  “Whatever the goddamned things are,” she continued, exasperated, “don’t you think there’d be more of a ruckus?”

  “No, because less than a dozen people have disappeared in the last six weeks or so. Over a quarter of a million people disappear every year without time travel, and there are eight million people in London.” I glanced up from my phone. “Don’t look so surprised. I did some research. That’s why there hasn’t been a fuss. And I.T.C.H. doesn’t know why only a fraction of a fraction of the population falls through these gates. Which I could also use your help with—none of the Losties, including me, have anything in common. But you’re brilliant and terrible so I think you—oh, this is unacceptable bullshit!”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  I was clenching my phone so hard my fingers ached. “They dumped poor Teresa in a graveyard for prostitutes!”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Not cool, Cromwell!” I showed Lisa the entry for Cross Bones cemetery, which was so stuffed with dead sex workers they had to quit using it in 1853. Oh, that velvet-clad prick! “I can’t tell Teresa’s family to dig her out of a pile of prostitutes! No one should have to do that!”

  “Joan, will you stop it?”

  I set my phone down so I wouldn’t throw it. Possibly at Lisa. “I promised you I’d tell you everything if I got back. But I never promised you’d like what you heard. So stop pretending like you can’t handle it when we both know you’ve handled far worse.”

  “Christ, you don’t think much of me, do you? Or yourself. My best friend is either very sick or mentally unbalanced; ‘far worse’ pretty much covers it.” She rubbed her forehead and said, “All right. So you take these trips back to—”

  “TudorTime. I’m trademarking that, by the way. Don’t steal it.”