Time's Mirror: A CHRONOS Files Novella (The CHRONOS Files) (12 page)

“Set a local stable point. The system blocked historians from setting any local points after 2150. We could set new local points on jumps to years before 2150 to make it easier for upcoming research trips to that same location, but we couldn’t use those points without jumping back to HQ first. Point A to Point B, then back to Point A. No side trips. The key still reads my pattern as blocked. But your genetic pattern was never in the system, so…let me talk you through it.”

It takes nearly an hour, but I finally manage to create a local point for this room. I set the time for exactly one minute later. Morgen is still in the display at that later time, but he’s no longer snoring. He’s now at the other end of the couch, closer to Cyrus’s doggy bed, staring straight at me.

“Okay,” I say to Tate. “What next?”

“Focus and blink.”

I do, but nothing happens.

“You need to keep your hand steady,” Tate says.

“I’m trying!” And I am trying, but this suddenly feels very real. The last time I used one of these devices I shattered half my bones and spun off some strange alternate me.

Tate puts his hands on my shoulders and squeezes. “It’s okay, Pru. Just a local jump. I did this at age twelve. You’ll land right here, right next to me, at eleven twenty-eight. Both feet on the ground. You won’t feel a thing.”

I give him a shaky smile as he steps away, and try to focus. The fact that Morgen is staring straight at this spot gives me a bit of confidence…I mean, why would he be staring like that if I don’t make the jump?

This time, it works. I don’t feel any different, aside from the strange sensation of having the scene in front of me slightly altered when I open my eyes.

“I’ll be damned.” Campbell’s expression shifts from anticipation to something closer to amazement. When Tate laughs, he adds, a little defensively, “That may be nothing big to you, Poulsen, but those of us who weren’t gifted with the CHRONOS gene or assigned to one of the jump crews haven’t seen a time jump in person.”

Tate nods and takes the key from me. “Okay, now we know you can use it. I think it’s a safe assumption, then, that you can get back here if you land in trouble.”

“So what’s next?”

“Um…it’s nearly midnight. Campbell may be a gentleman of leisure, but we both work tomorrow. Maybe…”

“No!” I grin up at him. “Don’t tell me you’re tired. I’m way too wound up to sleep. At least find me a stable point in the past where I can actually see something, okay?”

“Fine.” Tate smiles, but it’s clear that he’s just humoring me.

Campbell seems wired, too. “We need to figure out some way to get a message to Saul. He might not even listen to her otherwise. Do you still have access to the diaries you used on missions?” he asks Tate.

“Sure,” Tate says absently, as he browses through the stable points. “The personal logs, at any rate.”

“Good. Record a message for him on one of those. I’d like to borrow it so I can record one as well. Privately.”

“Why privately?” Tate asks.

“I don’t plan to ask what you tell him. Why shouldn’t I have the same right?”

Tate looks up from the key. “Well, mostly because you don’t have the gene to operate it.” His eyes narrow slightly. “Unless you’re working with someone else at—”

Campbell snorts. “The arrogance of you CHRONOS people never fails to amaze me. Just because we lack the gene to travel with your keys, you assume no one can hack them. My tech crew worked with Sutter to help extend the field around the Club, and they even assisted on that bracelet he popped onto Pru’s wrist. Believe me. They’re more than capable of inserting a simple message into a diary.”

Tate doesn’t answer, but his frown deepens. At first, I think he’s just annoyed at Campbell, but he’s reacting to something on the key.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Those black squares aren’t night jumps, like I thought. I tried pulling up a few of them. They’re empty, like the stable points have been…scrubbed. Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you got this key, are you, Campbell?”

“I’d be delighted to, but I doubt it will help. It arrived in a box the morning of the bombing, with a machine-printed note that read:
So you’ll know
. No signature. My security sweep found no prints on the box or the key itself.”

“And you reported this?” Tate asks.

“I did
not
. No one ever asked me directly if I received a package containing a CHRONOS key, and I didn’t see the need to volunteer the information. Sutter would have liked nothing better than to pin me as part of some conspiracy.”

“You’re saying my mother sent it? Why would she send you a key?”

“I don’t think it was your mother, Pru. My best guess would be Saul. To be honest, I suspect he sent Poulsen the note that got him out of the building that day, as well.”

Tate shakes his head. “Doesn’t make sense. Saul wasn’t even scheduled to jump that day. He was just one of the people in the building whose—” Tate stops, glancing at me.

“Whose body was never found,” Campbell finishes for him. “And yes, I’ve told Pru there’s a good chance her father—apologies, dear, her
biological
father—didn’t survive the blast. So if you’re dancing around that bit of bad news, don’t bother.”

“You think Saul was working with Kathy, then? Before, you said absolutely not. And I know they asked you that question, because they asked
me
. Have your tech people found a way to slip a lie past Sutter, as well?”

“No, they have not.” Campbell’s face twitches slightly, and even without Sutter’s freaky eyes, I can tell he’s not being entirely honest. “I told Sutter what I told you. I do not believe for a moment that Saul Rand and Katherine Shaw planned the bombing together. I also told him, however, that I
do
think Saul may have had a clue that she was plotting something, probably with the historian whose key Prudence used, Richard Vier. There was a record of Kathy sending Vier a coded message the night before, and Saul was definitely agitated when he stopped by the OC later that evening. His jaw was swollen. Said he and Kathy had a fight.”

Tate looks like he wants to follow up on that point, but I interrupt him. I’m much more interested in the key he’s holding than the intricacies of who knew what and when.

“What about the
other
stable point, Tate? The green one at the top. Won’t that give us an idea who sent the key?”

“Maybe.” Tate does the eye navigation thing again and then pauses. “It’s in a garden of some sort. Or maybe a forest. The location isn’t labeled, but…I can look it up. Hold on.”

He taps the comm on his wrist and starts reading out a string of numbers.

“Don’t bother,” Campbell says. “My tech guy tells me the point is in south central Florida. Fort Myers. More precisely, it’s a banyan tree inside a garden on some inventor’s estate…Edison, I think. June 16, 2024 at six a.m.”

“Okay…anything special about that date?” Tate asks him.

“A Muslim holy day, one of the Eids…al-Adha, I think. Other than that, nothing significant.”

A pause, then Tate says, “Which means it’s Shaila’s jump, probably.”

“Who’s Shaila?” I ask.

“Our primary Islamic historian, but…I can’t imagine her working with Kathy on this. She was from an older cadre. Supposed to be retiring soon. Nice enough, but she kept to herself. And we know that she made it. She picked up an identity from the deposit box at a bank in Miami. There were records for a marriage. A death certificate too, some years later. It seems like she assimilated, settled down.”

Tate pulls up the stable point again and stares at it for about thirty seconds.

“There she is,” he says when he looks up from the key. “She’s wearing one of those burqas, where pretty much all you can see are her eyes. And I can’t even see those, because she walks away from the stable point after she jumps in. It’s just the black cloth.”

I take the key from him and carefully navigate away from the ruins of CHRONOS HQ and back to the view with the smaller squares. Then I focus on the green one and wait.

The scene is exactly as Tate described it. An overcast sky, or maybe it’s just dim because it’s early morning or because the stable point is in the shade. There’s an empty bench beyond the tree, with flower bushes behind it. Everything goes black for a moment, then the greenish-gray of the grass and trees reemerges as the figure in the black dress moves off to the left, away from the stable point. I follow her with my eyes automatically, and as I do the interface shifts slightly in that direction.

When I pan back to the right, a young guy suddenly appears on the bench. My age, maybe. A bit overweight. He’s reading something and he doesn’t pay any attention to the woman in the burqa.

Or that’s what it seems like to
half
of my brain. The other half is certain that the guy has been there all along, that the bench was never empty in the first place. Trying to reconcile those two images does weird things to my stomach.

“You okay?” Tate asks.

“Yeah. I saw her. Did you see the guy on the bench?”

He gives me a puzzled look and then takes back the key. After a moment, he says, “Hmph. I was so focused on Shaila I didn’t even notice him. It shouldn’t be a problem, though. The stable point is pretty well camouflaged.”

Campbell is leaning back on the sofa, drumming his fingers lightly on the cushion. “Speaking of camouflage…can we be sure that it’s even Shaila? A burqa makes a damn good disguise.”

I pull the stable point up again and watch until the figure moves away. “He could be right. You said they cover head to toe. And this is more head to mid-calf.”

Tate grabs the key back. After a moment, he lets out a sigh. “Yeah. Probably not Shaila. And those could definitely be Saul’s feet…I’ve seen them enough times propped up on the furniture.” He turns to me. “Then you can’t use this to contact him, Pru. He must have been working with Kathy.”

Campbell makes a noise like he’s disgusted, and pushes himself up from the sofa. “And why would you assume that, Poulsen?” he asks as he walks over to refill his drink. “Some friend you are. I don’t believe for a minute Saul was helping Kathy with anything. More likely, he took Shaila’s place trying to figure out what Kathy was doing. Trying to
stop
her. To keep her from making a mistake even greater than the one you made. The one he helped you cover up even though it could have wrecked both your careers.”

Tate’s face turns red and he jerks forward. For a moment, I think he’s going to slug Campbell, but he changes his mind, slumping back into the cushions. He just sits there silently for a minute, that little muscle in his jaw twitching like the tail of a pissed-off cat.

“Okay,” he says, finally. “Maybe you’re right. But it still seems dangerous to send Pru in there, not knowing.” He takes my hand and squeezes it gently, ignoring Campbell as he looks into my eyes. “We need to think about this. Mull it over for a few days, okay?”

I nod and return his smile. It’s nice knowing that he cares. That he’s worried about me. So, I’ll take a few days and let him think I’m debating, considering all the pros and cons.

Even though I already know what’s going to happen.

We have a key and I can use it. That means there’s at least a chance that I can
fix
this, all of this.

Maybe I can get back to Deb.

Maybe I can stop Dad from hitting that car.

Maybe I can stop my mother from destroying the one thing that made Tate happy. He could go off and do his Viking things, but he’d have to be back here sometimes. And he said he wasn’t trying to get back to this Maya girl. I could set a local point at his place. I could visit him when he’s not off chopping down forests and sailing over icy seas.

This little disc of lime-green light is chock-full of possibilities.

5

E
DISON AND
F
ORD
W
INTER
E
STATE

F
ORT
M
YERS,
F
LORIDA