Timebound (20 page)

Katherine gave me a rueful smile. “And the burqa was a very smart choice on his part.”

“Because no one could see who he was?” I asked.

“Yes, it definitely kept him from being immediately identified, except for me and Richard, and we might not have recognized him if we weren’t already forewarned—just the eyes through that tiny space? But,” she said, “that’s not the only reason. With all of the rest of us, you could make an educated guess as to
when
we were headed. Maybe not where, at least not after the mid-1900s when fashions became more global, but you could generally tell the era within a few decades from the way we were dressed. The burqa, however—women have worn that in many countries for thousands of years. It was still worn in a few isolated communities in my era. Shaila studied changes in Islamic culture over time and I knew she’d made jumps that ranged from the mid-1800s to the
mid-2100s. So who knows when or where Saul landed? He could have been fully dressed for any era under that wrap.

“And it all happened so
fast,
” she added. “When Aaron pushed the button to launch the jump, Saul shoved Shaila face-first into the center of the circle. She hit the platform and the very last thing I saw was a flash of white light and a loud whooshing sound, before I landed, hard, in the cabin just north of the field where they were holding the Woodstock festival. A hard landing is not normal—usually you just appear in the new location in whatever position you started. If you were scratching your nose in 2305, you’d still be scratching when you landed in 1853. But I landed flat on my back on the dirt floor, with my hoopskirt quite nearly inside out. The thing Saul strapped to Shaila’s chest must have been an explosive—and I can only assume it was a powerful one since no one, to my knowledge, has been able to connect to CHRONOS since.”

The apple slices were still untouched on Katherine’s plate and I realized that my own sandwich was barely half eaten. I took a few more bites and then asked, “Why did Saul think that destroying headquarters would make him able to jump from one time to the next, if he hadn’t done that before?”

“I wondered that myself,” Katherine said. “We all knew that we couldn’t jump between stable points, without a trip back to CHRONOS. In training, they said this was an institutional check—a way for CHRONOS to keep tabs on our temporal location. The medallion reads the genetic structure of the jumper as you depart and Saul must have believed, with headquarters out of the picture, that he’d be a free agent, so to speak. Without the anchor at headquarters pulling him back, he assumed that he would be able to travel between stable points whenever he wanted. But the medallions
were locked to return to CHRONOS—the only thing he did was ensure that we couldn’t use them at all. I wasn’t pleased at being stranded in an earlier century, and I didn’t know when or where Saul landed, but it was at least nice to know that his plan hadn’t worked.”

“Kind of poetic justice,” I said.

“Right. All of that changed, however, when Prudence disappeared—or, I suspect, when Prudence found Saul, whenever or wherever he was. Once he realized that the CHRONOS gene could be inherited, then it was only a matter of time before he found a way to manipulate that knowledge to breed people who could go where he could not.”

“Just as you did…,” I reminded her in a soft voice.

“No, Kate,” said Katherine. She got up from her chair and walked over to the window, putting her empty cup and barely touched plate on the counter. “I introduced two lonely people who had something in common—sadly not enough to make their relationship last, but they
were
in love at one time. I think you know that, if you’re honest with yourself. I never forced anything, but just hoped for the best. And I got incredibly, unbelievably lucky.”

She paced back toward me, a touch of anger in her voice. “Saul, on the other hand, left nothing to chance. Did you know that Cyrist clergy are required to marry only people approved by the Temple hierarchy? That leadership of a temple is hereditary—and always subject to approval by the International Temple? Did you know that?”

Yes, I had known that—although the reasons hadn’t really clicked until Katherine spelled it out directly. “So all Cyrist Templars carry the CHRONOS gene?”

Connor, who had appeared at the doorway, answered my question. “We can only speculate at this point. But it seems likely. We’d know a lot more if we had a copy of their
Book of Prophecy
—assuming, of course, that the damned thing actually exists. The
Cyrists use smoke and mirrors so often to fool their believers that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a lie.”

I gave him a long, hard look and then turned to Katherine. “And the two of you really think that I can change all of this? That I can what? Alter the timeline so that the Cyrists never emerge?”

Katherine shook her head, then stopped and threw her hands up in frustration. “To be honest, Kate, I don’t
know.
When you were a baby, I just hoped that someday you could help locate Prudence—if only to give her a message for me. To try and get her to come back to this time and let me explain. But then I began to see subtle changes in the timeline. And last May—everything became clear. Saul was putting his plans into action. I wanted to come back here, to see if you would help, to train you—but the cancer hit and I basically had the choice of fighting cancer or fighting Saul. I’m still not sure I made the right choice…”

“You did,” said Connor, who had appropriated Katherine’s apple slices and was munching as he spoke. “Your treatment bought us some time, and we have a much better chance of succeeding if Kate is trained by someone with actual experience.”

“It also
cost
us a considerable amount of time, and we have a more powerful enemy as a result,” Katherine countered with a sigh. “But either way, it’s done and we’ll have to play with the cards we’ve been dealt.”

I was still mulling over the point I’d made to Trey in the car. Would I be happy in a timeline where I was a museum piece who couldn’t leave the protection of a CHRONOS key without ceasing to exist? No, but…

“What makes you sure that the timeline you want me to help you ‘fix’ is the correct one?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with your training for me to go back and tell you what Saul is planning and have him arrested? After all, he kills at least two of your colleagues in the process. And how many changes happened because of his actions? Even if all of those historians stranded at
various points in time did their best to avoid changing things, they must have made some alterations to the timeline. And like you said, if you hadn’t been stuck here, you wouldn’t be dealing with cancer right now.”

Katherine flushed and looked down at her plate, a bit of guilt in her eyes. “You’re right, Kate. That’s what I
should
have you do. There
were
some minor changes to history—I’ll admit that. A few instances where someone made a discovery that was a bit too advanced for their time, if you know what I mean.

“But,” she continued, “those changes were miniscule compared to what Saul is planning. And I haven’t been a CHRONOS historian for many years now. I’ve got a personal motive here. So do you. So does Connor. The timeline I knew for over forty years is the
correct
timeline for the three of us, as long as we can stop Saul. Being cured of the cancer would be nice, but I’ve lived a long time. I’m not willing to trade your life and the lives of my daughters, not to mention Connor and his kids, for an extra decade or so added on to my own life. Angelo and Shaila didn’t deserve to die that way, but from my perspective, they’ve been gone a very long time, and from your perspective, they never existed at all.”

Connor nodded. “Katherine and I have debated this over and over, Kate. I’m not sure there
is
a correct timeline here. I’m in this to get my kids back and hopefully to give them a nice, Cyrist-free future. I don’t know exactly what the Cyrists are planning, but based on what Katherine has told me, I don’t think a future with Saul in control is one that is good for anyone. It’s tougher for Katherine because she lost friends, but it’s pretty simple for me. I couldn’t care less which timeline is
correct,
because I know which one is
right.
”

11

I put the book down by the computer and rubbed my eyes. “This is the world’s most boring version of the Travel Channel. And the History Channel. Combined. And I don’t much care for either of those…”

Connor snorted. “You have real-time views of hundreds of spots in history, all around the world, and you’re bored?”

The Log of Stable Points was as deceptively thin as one of the diaries that I had been reading, but it contained even more information. It was similar to watching a small video, but these were live webcams, as best I could tell. I used the visual interface to choose a date and time and then blinked my eyes to select, at which point the translucent “screen” in front of me would display the geographical location at that specific date, in real time. It might sound cool in principle, but…

“Have you actually
watched
any of these?” I asked Connor.

“No,” he admitted, continuing to scan the document on his screen as he talked. “I can see text on the page, but the earpiece that you’re wearing is what triggers your ability to hear and see the video. I’ve tried it and I get occasional sound and images that break up every few seconds. It gives me a stomachache. Katherine can’t really pull them in clearly either—we think it’s because CHRONOS still had a lock on her signal when the explosion or
whatever it was happened. But she has described some of them to me…”

“Did she tell you that most of these videos are of a deserted alley? Or woods? Or a dark broom closet?”

“Would you rather appear suddenly in the middle of a crowd? On top of someone? In some of the eras you’re observing, that would be a quick ticket to burning at the stake, you know.”

“Yeah, well, I just spent five minutes watching a squirrel in a park in Boston. Supposedly on May 5th, 1869, but it could just as easily have been yesterday. He looked like a very modern squirrel to me.”

“Then you wasted five minutes.” Connor sighed. “Focus on the elements that are
constant,
Kate. The squirrel isn’t going to help you locate that stable point when you start doing test jumps, unless it happens to be a stuffed squirrel.”

I picked the book back up and was scrolling through to find something remotely interesting when Daphne began barking, followed by the doorbell. A few seconds later, I heard Katherine’s voice from below.

“Kate, you have a gentleman caller.”

I rolled my eyes. “How is it that a grandmother from the twenty-fourth century sounds like she’s from a Charles Dickens novel?”

Connor shrugged. “Maybe both eras seem like ancient history to her. Could you tell me the difference between what they called a boyfriend in 1620 and in 1820?”

This time I gave in to the temptation to stick out my tongue, and Connor surprised me by actually laughing.

I had purposely avoided thinking about whether Trey would come by like he said he would, mostly because I didn’t want to feel let down if it didn’t happen. The previous day had been too devastating for me to get my hopes up about anything. Still, I was ridiculously happy to know he’d kept his promise, and it took a conscious effort to keep from taking the stairs two at a time.