The Bureau of Time (23 page)

The First laid the folder down, directly in front of the two young Timewalkers. He looked expectantly at them.

Of course,
Cassie thought,
he knows what we’ll do.

Shaun put his hand on top of hers, slate-gray eyes staring into electric-blue. She bit her lip, her heart fluttering with apprehension. She gave a single, almost imperceptible nod, and Shaun opened the folder.

*     *     *

“I don’t understand,” he said, his brow furrowing. He flicked through the pages, still white and almost perfectly preserved after years in a safety deposit box. Dozens of pages, each line redacted with a black highlighter – the only words that had survived the purge were fragmented and useless.

“This is the extent that White Tower went to, in order to hide their actions,” the First Timewalker said, tapping the folder. “They didn’t even trust their own people. This room,” he added, gesturing at all of the deposit boxes, “contains the last known intelligence stores of White Tower. Every Temporal Spike, debrief and research project for the past forty years is here. We call it the Archives. And I am the Warden of White Tower, tasked with monitoring their facilities across both universes.”

“What is the Timewalker Program?” Shaun growled, frustrated with the stranger’s riddles.

“It’s what made
us,
” the First Timewalker, Warden of White Tower, said. His body flickered – young, old, halfway in-between. “The Timewalker Program was a classified United States military program, run by an organization called White Tower. They were charged with creating the first generation of human weapons, genetically altered by a rare transuranium element called Cronium.”

In the silence that followed, Shaun heard loud voices and shouting – then gunfire.

His hand flew to his gun, and Cassie mirrored his actions. The Warden glanced toward the door, becoming young again, his jaw tight. He turned back to the teenagers and said quickly, “They’re coming.”

“Who’s coming?” Cassie asked, her question a mousey squeak.

“The Resistance,” the Warden answered, which of course was no answer at all, just another riddle. “Not enough time to explain. Listen to me, very carefully. This is the truth, whether you want to believe it or not.”

Loud bangs, muffled by the thick door, but definitely coming closer.

“You are not an accident, not some chance mutation caused by random evolution. The Bureau has always called you human weapons – that’s because they
made you
, they
created you
. In your world, White Tower was attacked in the late 1980s, crippled by the Adjusters in a comprehensive strike – you have seen the facilities, crumbling and forgotten.”

Cassie nodded frantically; Shaun gave only a grunt of acknowledgment. More gunfire, furious shouts, the last screams of dying men.

“In your world, the Bureau of Time continued their experiments on Timewalkers. They chose hospitals across the country, took infants and administered something they called Liquid Cronium Solution. They were making their own sleeper agents – they planned to recruit you into the reserves when you turned seventeen, and train you to become the most lethal weapons in all of human history.”

Shaun heard his own pulse raging in his ears, his indignation and fury growing. Voices shouted in his head, disillusioned, frightened, angry.
They lied to you. Said you were a freak of nature. They made you into a weapon. They made you. Lied to you. They knew what White Tower was. They lied to you. They knew they knew they knew THEY LIED THEY LIED!

“You said
planned,
” Cassie said, her voice coming from a great distance. “Something went wrong, didn’t it?”

The First Timewalker threw a glance to the door, older and hunched-over once more. He raised his voice to shout over the battle raging beyond the door.

“There was a disaster. The Bureau of Time had much of its intelligence and research stored in another facility, buried beneath the World Trade Center. When the towers fell, the Bureau lost decades’ worth of information on the Timewalker Program – and they lost the names of all the children who were unknowingly a part of their experiment.”

A dagger went through Shaun’s heart.

The day he had lost his parents, the day his life, and the lives of millions of Americans had been changed forever, was the same day that the Bureau had lost the Timewalkers.

That
was why there were so few Timewalkers. The Bureau had no way of finding them.
That’s why they monitor Temporal Spikes – hoping to find Timewalkers and get there before the Adjusters. Hope. Hope barely saved me; hope almost killed Cassie; hope wasn’t enough to protect Hayden Miller.

“I’m sorry,” the First Timewalker said, “I truly am. You didn’t deserve this. None of us did. In this world, White Tower remained undefeated. They would eventually use Timewalkers as instruments of destruction in what we called the Final War, the apocalypse that doomed us to a nuclear winter.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Shaun snarled, slamming his hand onto the bench. “We didn’t need to know! What are we supposed to do now?”

“I don’t know,” the Warden said. His words were drowned out by the sounds of heavy machinery – a blade cutting through the foot-thick reinforced door. Sparks flew into the room, followed by an acrid stench of burned metal. “You deserved to know the truth. Everybody deserves to know where they came from. To know
what
they really are.”

“That’s not an answer!” Shaun growled, advancing on the old man, his fists clenched. “How can we go back now, knowing this?”

“Shaun,” Cassie cried out, “Shaun, leave him alone!”

The saw pushed through the door, carving out a jagged hole large enough for a man to crawl through. The First Timewalker shifted again, becoming younger, his eyes blazing with furious intensity. He seemed to grow taller and broader, towering over Shaun.

“I gave you the truth,” he growled, “more than you deserve. Only you can decide what to do with it.”

A black-clad figure crawled through the opening, assault rifle raised and ready—

Cassie screamed, reaching across to grab Shaun—

Shaun brought his handgun to bear, but he was too slow—

“You have to go!” The First Timewalker, Warden of White Tower brought his hands together in a thunderous clap. Temporal Energy burst from his body, enveloping the room and hurling Shaun and Cassie into a dark void, where they were falling, down through the infinity of space and time, plummeting into sheer nothingness and the all-consuming void—

Shaun’s feet hit solid ground and his knees buckled.

The earth was warm and dry beneath him, the sun harsh, beating down on his back. He collapsed on all fours, a low roar escaping him. He beat the ground with clenched fists until his anger faded and shock took over.

It felt as though the world was crumbling down around him, every truth he had accepted now revealed to be a fabrication – even his place in the universe was being called into question.

He saw the cornfield around him, the green stalks swaying in the breeze, but he paid them no attention. He felt Cassie’s presence as she knelt beside him, her hand on his back. She pressed her head against his, a piece of her hair falling down over his face. He stared at the cracked ground, at a crevice between two clumps of dirt, and imagined crawling down into that crack, hiding away from the world.

“I’m not going back,” he whispered. “I can’t go back. Not now that I know.”

Cassie froze. For the longest moment, there was only the cawing of birds, the rustling of corn stalks, and her breath hot in his ear.

Then she asked, very carefully, “Why not?”

He twisted away from her, resting on his knees. He stared at her. “Why
not?
Because they lied to us, Cassie. They – they made us believe there was something
wrong
with us; they said they didn’t know where the other Timewalkers were, they said they didn’t know what White Tower was!”

She flinched, and he realized he was shouting, but he didn’t care. He was angry, and she should be too.
Why doesn’t she understand?

“So what?” she countered, her face flushed. “Shaun, we’re safe with the Bureau. They want to protect us. They can keep us safe from the Adjusters. We’re assets to them. They can’t afford to lose us.”

“
Assets?
” he exploded, getting to his feet. “I will not be treated like a tool for the Bureau to use! I don’t want to be protected because I’m
worth
something to them!”

“What choice do we have?” she cried, and he saw tears running down her cheeks.
She’s just as shocked as you, just as confused,
he tried to tell himself, but the rational part of his mind wasn’t working – it was being silenced by his anger.

“We can survive alone,” he said. “I’ve done it before, I lived rough on the streets, and I never needed the Bureau then. We’re better now, stronger. We can do it – together.”

He held his hand out to her. He silently pleaded that she would take his hand, that together they would abandon the Bureau.
Leave their lies behind, start fresh. Just the two of us.

Her shoulders twitched, her eyes puffy and red.

“Shaun,” she croaked, “don’t do this, don’t make me choose…”

“Please,” he begged, his hand trembling. “Come with me, please come with me.”

Then he heard Tallon’s voice booming over the field, calling their names. They were moments away from being found – he could hear Ryan crashing through the field like a mad bull.

“I can’t,” Cassie cried, shaking her head. “I’m sorry Shaun, I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

His hand fell down.

Tallon’s voice grew louder, and Ryan was almost upon them. Shaun felt something inside of him break, that small part of his heart he had opened up to her, the part that had been eaten away by his parents’ deaths, by his cruel grandparents, by the brutality of the foster care system, the alienation of the streets, and the military reprogramming of the Bureau.

He didn’t say anything.

He turned away, walking at first, then he broke into a jog and finally an all-out sprint. His roaring pulse drowned out Cassie screaming his name, silenced the cawing of the black crows as they circled overhead, and quieted his own doubts. The voices inside his mind were replaced with one, an old familiar voice, and as he stumbled out of the cornfield and onto a highway, the voice uttered three final truths:

I am a Timewalker. I can’t change that part of me.

But I am no longer an Operator for the Bureau of Time.

THE ENCHAINED

Cassie knelt in the dirt, staring down the long row between the cornfields, hoping that at any moment, Shaun would reappear. She imagined him coming back into view, his eyes downcast; she could almost see him as he apologized and embraced her, making everything all right in the world again.

He never returned.

Salty tears blurred her vision, spilling down her cheeks in fiery tracks. Ryan crashed through the field and onto the path, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear him – she withdrew from the world, everything becoming a distant blur of noise and color.

A helicopter wheeled overhead, the rotors buffeting the green stalks and almost knocking her over. Tallon was there, helping her to her feet, asking her questions that she didn’t have answers to.
Where did you go? Where’s Shaun? Were the Adjusters there? Where’s Shaun?

She mumbled her replies, too numb to form a coherent sentence.

Ryan helped her up into the helicopter, asking her a steady stream of questions; she blocked him out, staring at the cabin floor, fixated on something the others couldn’t see.

“He just left,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “How could he just…walk away?”

At that, Ryan fell silent.

Through the static buzzing in her mind, she heard Tallon contact Eaglepoint Station and request a satellite to track down Shaun. A tactical team would be deployed to find him, to bring him back to Brightwood Ranch.

It doesn’t matter,
she thought, a hollow pit opening in her stomach, threatening to swallow her whole.
He said we were in this together. Why would he leave?

So what if the Bureau had made the Timewalkers? What difference did it make, whether they were a genetic mutation or a science experiment? Either way, Cassie’s life had been torn apart by the Adjusters – she had lost contact with her family, lost her freedom, and been turned into a soldier, broken down and reshaped by the Bureau of Time. At least the agency could protect her from the Adjusters.

Those faceless monsters were the
true
enemy, not the Bureau.

“We’re out of fuel,” Tallon shouted over the roar of the engines. “We’re touching down a few miles outside Brightwood and driving the rest of the way. Vehicles are already there waiting.”

Cassie nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

The helicopter landed in a grassy field, and she was led at a half-crouch under the blades toward a black SUV on the road. The driver was in the front seat, and she climbed into the back beside Ryan. Tallon took the passenger seat and the car pulled away from the helicopter, destined for Brightwood Ranch.

“Listen,” Tallon said, turning around in the seat to look at her. He hesitated, his dark eyes darting all over her face, analyzing her in a way that made her skin crawl. “I don’t know what happened out there, but if you know something, you need to tell us. Shaun could be in danger.”

She sniffed, wiping her cheeks for the hundredth time, her hand still coming away wet.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said, her voice tiny.

“Cassie, what happened?” Tallon asked. There was a sharp edge to his question, interrogative. She shrank back in her seat – what could she say? Should she tell him the truth, about the Bureau, about Timewalkers, about
parallel universes?
It sounded too impossible to believe, not unless you had seen the
other world
in the flesh.

“She needs time,” Ryan said, coming to her rescue. “Anderson will debrief her anyway.”