Page 8 of Hallow

  *

  When he came to his senses, the world still refused to stop moving. The difference was that it had stopped moving in circles.

  "Where am I?" he asked Walt, who was sitting next to him, with his tie undone and shirt collar unbuttoned.

  "On our way to a celebration," he replied.

  Zachary looked around. They were sharing the back seat of a taxi. The street they were travelling through looked familiar. His house was not far.

  "What celebration?" he asked, with his mouth tasting like dirty socks. His head hurt. He touched the side of it with his fingers and found what could be the beginning of a bump. He remembered too well what had happened in the church. "Did they cancel the deal? Will they sue us?"

  "Relax," Walt said. "I don't know where you get those crazy ideas from. They offered to take you to the nearest hospital, but I said this happens all the time and you only needed to rest for a bit."

  "Never happened to me before," Zachary said.

  The taxi went around a corner and they entered his street. After a while, he saw his building pass by. "It was back there," he said, raising his voice so he could be heard by the driver. "You missed it."

  He got a look through the rear-view mirror, but Walt waved a hand at him, signaling that Zachary was not to be taken seriously.

  "He doesn't understand you," he said. "I don't know what language he was speaking when we got in, but he seemed pretty concerned that you'd barf all over his shiny plastic upholstery.

  Whatever language he did speak, he seemed to understand what Walt said and muttered some apparently concerned words while looking briefly over his shoulder.

  "Don't worry," replied Walt, like he was fluent. "We've arrived, see? It's right there." And he pointed.

  The taxi stopped, the driver got his money and they both got out. Zachary still felt his legs a bit shaky, but the fresh air did wonders. It was getting dark and, looking up, he was greeted by an orange and purple streaked sky.

  "How can he drive people around without understanding what his clients say?" asked Walt, genuinely curious, while crossing the street, followed by Zachary.

  "No idea," said Zachary, trying to make his head stop spinning. Walt went on.

  "He was a nice guy. Helpful. He'd go far if he bothered to learn language." Walt Jenkins in his career orienting persona. "Didn't even kidnap you during the stop I had to make."

  "You thought he'd kidnap me?" asked Zachary, alarmed.

  "No," Walt said. "Not really, at least. Not with the possible barfing situation."

  "Where did you go?"

  "To see my accountant and leave our check with him."

  "You have an accountant?" Zachary felt perplexed.

  "Of course," said Walt. "I take my financial affairs very seriously."

  "You said: our check," Zachary remarked.

  "True. I did."

  "But he's not my accountant. I don't even know him," said Zachary.

  "Don't worry," said Walt. "I'm an excellent judge of character. If I trust him, you should too. You'll be very happy with his services."

  "I'd be very happy if I never had to wear one of your suits again," said Zachary. "What fabric is this? Why does it itch so much?"

  "I'm not sure," he said, walking towards a set of downward stairs under a neon sign, while Zachary tried to keep up. "It was the cheapest they had in the store. I'd let you borrow my good suit, but I'm inside it."

  "Where are we going?" Zachary asked.

  "You'll see," said Walt. "I thought a small celebration was in order."

  Those words sounded like a declaration of impending doom to Zachary. He couldn't really explain why. It was a feeling that originated in his guts and spread to the rest of his body.

  The neon sign said 'Harry's' and included an arrow pointing to the bottom of the stairs and the logo of a well-known beer brand. They went down and Walt pushed the door. What awaited on the other side didn't look as menacing as Zachary expected. In fact, it didn't look menacing at all. It was just a bar. A couple of tables and chairs, some high stools near the counter. Glasses hanging upside down on top, assorted bottles lining the wall behind, a jukebox in one corner, a TV screen mounted near the ceiling, showing some racing car event. It was also entirely empty, apart from the two of them and the bald old man with his arms crossed behind the counter, looking up at the TV and not even looking their way as they approached. Surprisingly, it was almost... cozy. For lack of a better word.

  Then Walt opened his mouth and said something Zachary could never have expected him to say. There or in any other place.

  "Carrot juice, please. With a yellow straw.

  The man didn't take his eyes from the TV when he replied.

  "We're out of carrot juice." He uncrossed his arms, moved one hand under the counter and pointed at a corner door with the other. A significant buzz was heard. He crossed his arms once again.

  Walt and Zachary approached the door, with Zachary's confusion growing as fast as his apprehension. The door was marked 'EMPLOYEES ONLY'. Walt turned the knob and opened it. There was a dim corridor on the other side, with walls painted red and a dark-curtained doorway on the opposing end. Light came from a flickering lamp hanging from the ceiling. Voices reached their ears, over a slow musical background.

  "Was that Harry?" Zachary asked.

  Walt shook his head.

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  "I told you," said Walt. "We're going to celebrate a successful deal.

  "Will we also meet Harry?" asked Zachary, feeling his nerves taking over his mouth and controlling what came out of it.

  "No. There's no Harry. I'm not sure if there ever was."

  Walt reached for the curtain, pulled it aside and they passed.

  It was like a perfect replica of the bar on the other side of the corridor. There was a closed door instead of the jukebox and there was no TV screen to be seen. Other major differences were that that side of the magic mirror had customers and the person behind the bar was a young woman who appeared to be dressed in her underwear.

  "Fun, isn't it?" asked Walt.

  "Yes," said Zachary, noting with a brief glimpse that the three men whispering around one table seemed more than slightly threatening. "Fun."

  They approached the bar and the disrobed bartender looked at them like they were too puddles of piss that had, somehow, become sentient and decided to spill into a bar and start history's most bizarre joke.

  "Hello, Dawn," said Walt.

  She looked at him with even higher contempt.

  "I'm not Dawn," she said.

  "Oh..." said Walt, clearly not feeling as embarrassed as he pretended to be. "What happened to Dawn?"

  She shrugged.

  "Married. Pregnant. In a nunnery. Dead. Who cares?"

  "I see," said Walt. After several seconds of trying desperately not to stare, Zachary was almost entirely sure that the girl wasn't dressed in her underwear, after all. It only looked that way. But her outfit was surely skimpy enough to forgive those who, like himself, were fooled by the first impression. "Can we have two beers?"

  She reached under the counter and placed two cans over the polished wood with perfectly synchronous motions. No glasses. No complimentary bowl of peanuts. They didn't even look cold. While looking at the closest can, Zachary noticed the girl had a tattoo on her side. Something in cursive lettering. It said...

  "What is your friend looking at?" she asked Walt. Zachary looked away immediately, but his gaze fell on the suspicious-looking men around the table, who, for some reason, were looking back at him. He decided to examine the countertop with great interest, following it with his eyes until the end, where a redheaded woman in a black dress was also looking in his direction.

  "Sorry," Walt said. "He's from out of town. Is Ron here?"

  While Zachary was doing his best to keep his eyes on a bottle of gin behind her, she moved through a pair of swinging doors behind the bar and came back almost immediately. A tall, skinny, middle
-aged man with crooked teeth and his hair dyed black came out, saw Walt, seemed surprised by his presence and immediately buried his surprise under a layer of convincing indifference. He walked around the bar and moved to one of the tables, motioning them to follow. They didn't bother to take their warm beers with them. When they were all sitting around the table, the man looked Zachary in the eyes, forcing him to look away once again. It was becoming a habit. The redhead sitting at the bar didn't bother to pretend she had no interest in what was going on.

  "Who is this?" the man asked.

  "A friend," explained Walt. "He's okay."

  "He's with you, Walt," said the man. "That alone makes me suspect he can't be okay."

  Zachary swallowed audibly.

  "Listen, Ron, I came to settle things straight," said Walt.

  The noise coming from Ron's mouth sounded very much like laughter, but not quite.

  "Really?" he said. "You've come to pay what you owe me? With interest?"

  "Sure," said Walt. Zachary wished his friend Walt would had a healthier notion of what could be considered a celebration. "And I also want to apologize."

  "For what?" Ron placed both his hands flat on the table. Almost like he was trying to prevent them from closing around Walt's neck.

  "For not coming sooner," Walt said.

  "That's very thoughtful of you," said Ron. "Of course I meant to have someone break your legs as soon as I found out where you live, but... let bygones be bygones, right? All is forgiven. Because you were nice enough to drop by and say you're sorry."

  Zachary turned his face and saw the men at the other table. They had gone back to their whispered conversation. There was certainly one among them, or all three, who were versed in the art of breaking people's legs. Maybe they would have a special 'two-for-the-price-of-one' deal. He also noticed the woman at the end of the bar was gone. He didn't see her leave.

  "Where is it, then?" asked Ron.

  "Not yet, but soon. I need a couple of days," Walt said. Judging by the look on Ron's face, that was very far from being the right answer. He raised an eyebrow. Walt explained. "I don't like owing people," he lied. "I especially don't like owing you." That part was probably true. "I didn't come by before because I didn't have enough to pay even half of what I owed."

  "But?" said Ron.

  "But I've made a good deal and that changed," he said. "Coming here was the first thing I did. You can ask my friend. I wanted to get rid of this weight on my conscience."

  "I worry more about the lack of weight in my wallet," Ron said. He looked at Zachary, who was feeling his legs twitch, almost like they were trying to drag him away from there. "Is this true?"

  "Yes," he squeaked.

  "You finished this deal and came right over?"

  "Yes," Zachary managed.

  "Because Walt thought he'd keep his legs intact if he pretended to care?"

  Zachary didn't reply. He recognized a trick question when he heard one.

  "It's not like that, Ron," Walt protested.

  "It isn't? Do you take me for a fool?" asked Ron.

  Walt didn't say anything. Apparently, he was also capable of spotting trick questions. Especially trick questions that could result in bones being broken. His bones, to be more precise.

  "Tomorrow," Ron said, after a tense pause. "You know what happens if I don't see my money by noon tomorrow."

  "I do," said Walt. There was an almost imperceptible gulp. "We'll get going, then."

  "Not so fast," said Ron. Walt and Zachary waited to hear what was coming after that. "It would be very stupid to let you leave again without knowing where I can find you, wouldn't it? Just like last time. I was very stupid then. Only stupid people trust someone who doesn't deserve to be trusted."

  Walt stuck one hand in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out one of the business cards he had made for something called 'The Atkinson Knowledge Foundation', after he checked that the original Atkinson Foundation had shut down a few years following the death of its founder.

  "Here you go," he said, sliding the card over the table, towards Ron. "My address."

  Zachary felt something crush his stomach, climb up to his chest and demand access to his vocal chords.

  Ron picked the card up and read, straightening his arm and raising his head slightly, compensating for his poor eyesight.

  "What the hell is this shit?" he asked, sounding more intrigued than angry. But there was some anger there as well. It seemed to be present in all his words.

  "It's our new business. Mine and Zachary's," Walt said. "The reason why I can pay you back."

  Ron pocketed the card.

  "Hence the stupid suits. I don't care. Just make sure I get my money by noon of tomorrow." He waved them way and they got up. "Back door." He pointed at the door near the end of the counter. "I don't want my regulars getting the wrong idea if they see you leaving with full use of your legs."

  They moved towards the door.

  "Bye, Ron," said Walt. "Thanks for everything."

  "Tomorrow," said Ron.

  The door opened into a storage room full of empty crates and a metal door allowed them passage into the back alley. The door could only be opened from inside.

  As soon as they were out, Zachary felt he couldn't keep it to himself any longer.

  "What's wrong with you?!" he asked, doing his best to keep his voice controlled. "You just gave my address to a mobster as collateral for your debt!"

  "You're overreacting," he said, while they walked away from the door. "Ron is not a mobster."

  "He does a very convincing impersonation of one."

  Walt meant to say something in defense of his dear friend Ron, who had just made repeated offers to have his legs broken, but something prevented him. From the shadows of the dark alley, a darkened human form approached. The light from the nearest lamp illuminated his grizzled and wrinkled head. The apparition startled Walt, who, after a second of fright, decided to take action, jumping at him and pushing him hard against the wall while holding him by the collar of a dirty sweater.

  "Leave me alone!" he screamed at the old man, who was even more startled by this sudden outburst. "I don't know what you want from me, but I don't have what you're looking for. Just leave me alone and tell your friends to do the same." He lowered his voice just a fraction. "Did I make myself clear?"

  The old man kept his stupefied eyes fixed upon Walt's face.

  "I only wanted some change, mister," he managed.

  That seemed to surprise Walt.

  "What?" he asked, releasing him. The old man took one step backward.

  "Some change..." he said. "But it's okay if you don't have something to spare. No need to get upset over it."

  "But..." Walt started. "You weren't about to grab me and start yelling that I was found and that you must register I don't know what?"

  The old man looked confused. He also looked drunk and filthy, but the other aspect took precedence over these two.

  "No," he said.

  "So you're just a regular hobo?" Walt asked, tactlessly.

  "I guess so," said the old man.

  "Ah."

  "Can I go?" the old man asked, afraid to continue his journey away from the crazed man who had come out of the bar's back door.

  "Sure you can," said Walt, trying to sound normal and harmless. It wasn't easy after that. He stuck a hand in his pocket. "Wait, I'll give you something for your trouble." Finding all his pockets empty, he turned to Zachary. "Do we have something we can spare?" he asked.

  "Do we?" repeated Zachary. "Let me check our pockets." He found a couple of coins and placed them on the old man's outstretched hand. He thanked them and hurried out of the alley, looking back once to make sure they weren't following him.

  "What the hell was that?" asked Walt.

  "I think it was you going insane and attacking a harmless old beggar," said Zachary, managing what, to him, sounded like a very accurate description of the events.

  "N
ot that," said Walt. "Where did he come from? And why wasn't he one of the old men who've been following me around?"

  "Maybe they're gone," said Zachary. "Do you miss them?"

  "No. But I'd like to know what has been going on. This is very strange. Any theories?"

  "None," replied Zachary. "Can't explain it also."

  "I can," said a voice, startling them again.

  4.1

  The dot on the screen started blinking faster as she crossed the street and approached the luminous sign. 'Harry's' written with letters formed by a single tube filled with some sort of luminescent material. And stairs going down. According to her marker, the target was somewhere down there.

  The data she had downloaded from the old-timer's marker made the tracking easier, but it was still hard to get an exact and instant location with information gathered by an obsolete model. It was lucky the two markers still allowed for a direct connection to be established. There was no signal of the target at the address the woman had given her, the house belonging to the man named Zachary, but the marker caught traces of his presence and, following those traces, she had ended up there.

  She put the marker inside her pouch and took out her stylus, twisting a small dial on the grip and hiding it in a jacket pocket. Then, she went down.

  The place looked exactly like the old images she had seen of public establishments of the kind, but without any customers. It didn't impress her at all. Even nostalgia bars from her own time that tried to duplicate that vintage look managed to be slightly more appealing in their blatant fakeness. Not that Margrit preferred them. She had never enjoyed spending time in places crowded with complete strangers or with strangers pretending to be her friends and she started enjoying it even less since the beginning of the heretic attacks. It was like people stopped being able to talk about anything else, and she heard enough about the subject at work.

  She approached the man behind the bar, sticking one hand in her pocket. The man didn't look at her, keeping his eyes on the screen showing land vehicles chasing each other at high speed.

  "Hello," she said.

  The man didn't reply. He still didn't look at her.

  One thing hadn't changed with time and frequenting public places still worked more or less the same way in her time.

  "I'd like a drink," she said.

  The man gave her a brief look. He was old, but not too old. In her time, she would have said he was somewhere between 75 and 85 years old, but she couldn't tell with local-timers. Their lives were much shorter and they died of old age when they should be in their most valuable years as experienced workers and leaders.

  "What kind of drink?" he asked, looking back at the screen. The vehicle chase was probably very stimulating.

  What drink could she ask for that already existed in that time? Not a malt-powermix, for sure. Or a single-lime booster.

  "Beer, please," she said.

  "We're all out," the man said.

  Should she find that strange? Wasn't beer a very common beverage in the early 21st century?

  "Ok," she said. "What do you have?"

  "Nothing, we were about to close for the night." He grabbed the screen controller on the counter, pointed it, pressed a button and the screen went black. "Good night." He was looking straight at her, this time, with both hands firmly planted over the polished wood.

  There was definitely something there that wasn't as it should be. Margrit looked around.

  "What's behind that door?" she asked, pointing at the door at the end of the counter.

  "That's where we keep the none-of-your-damn-businesses," the man replied. He was starting to feel aggravated. Margrit understood that insisting could have unpleasant consequences. The look on the man's face told her so. She tried to remain calm and as friendly as she was able to appear.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude," she said.

  "Just go," said the man, pointing at the exit.

  Margrit got closer to the bar and took the stylus out of her pocket.

  "Look at this," she said.

  The man looked and wasn't impressed.

  "Nice. Get out."

  "You'll need to watch closely."

  "What do I care about your stupid pen?"

  "Funny that you ask."

  "Why?"

  "Well, because..."

  There was a brief 'woosh' sound and the man fell on the floor behind the counter. Margrit went to the door and tried it. Locked. She went around the counter and crouched near the unconscious man, placing two fingers on his neck. There was a pulse. The offensive capabilities of the stylus were nowhere as advanced as the technology powering the marker and, sometimes, a stunning setting could be fatal. It was also true that a lethal setting could simply stun a target or not do anything at all, but agents were forced to deal with the flaws until a more effective model was developed, approved by Church authorities and distributed first to selected timenauts for testing purposes and later to everyone else. Killing the man wouldn't have disturbed her too much. It wouldn't be her first accidental casualty. Still, it was preferable to keep a clean record. After all, her performance in the mission would be evaluated upon her return and getting a bonus was something that interested her very much.

  While she was crouching, she saw a very conspicuous button under the counter. She decided to press it and heard a promising buzz. She walked around the counter again, opened the unlocked door and walked along the corridor until the curtained doorway, entering an almost exact replica of the room she had been in before. Looking around, she saw a man sitting by himself at one table, three others sitting around another and a half-naked woman standing behind the bar. They were all looking at her, expecting her to do something. Suddenly, she understood.

  "I see," she said. "You're doing something illegal, aren't you?"

  The three men around the table looked alarmed for a second, before becoming angry and getting up. But it was the man sitting by himself who spoke.

  "Do you have a badge to flash?" he asked.

  Church agents did have badges. A silver shield attached to a piece of black leather, containing inside her number and the eight-pointed star of the Divine Mentor. And she'd have to admit it was pleasant being able to pull it out and flashing it at criminals on routine busts. But time-jump operations were not routine and had different procedures. One of those procedures demanded that timenauts left their badges behind. It was highly unlikely that the time continuum would collapse if a local-timer would see one of these badges, but it was better not to argue with the bureaucrats that came up with the rules. Margrit had learned early to obey and keep her objections to herself, no matter how preposterous the rules might be.

  "No," she replied. "Not right now."

  "That's good to know," the man said. The other three were approaching, doing an excellent job of looking menacing, but he raised a hand and made them stop. "Who are you and what do you want?"

  "I don't want any trouble," she said. That was always a good way to start. "And I have no interest in whichever criminal activities you're engaged in back here." That left the three men even more agitated. Their eagerness to reach her was almost palpable. The half-naked woman behind the bar disappeared through a back door, expecting the worst. Margrit could sympathize. "There's a man called Walter Jenkins," she said.

  "I know there is," said the man with shiny black hair, not moving from his seat. "What about him?"

  "He was here recently. A man named Zachary could be with him," she said.

  "Hmm-hmm," said the man. "Go on."

  "I'm looking for them," she concluded.

  "Walt gets that a lot," said the man. "What do you want from them?"

  "That probably doesn't concern you, does it?" asked Margrit.

  The man thought about it.

  "It's like this," he started. "Normally, I wouldn't care. Even if you told me you were out to kill Walt, I'd wish you luck and perhaps even offer you some sort of bonus. But not right now. I need him to stay aliv
e for now. Would you wait a couple of days?"

  Margrit didn't understand the reason why she was being asked to wait. Nor did she care much. Besides, even if she did consider attending the man's request, she couldn't wait. The event was probably getting very close and she'd have only one opportunity to document it. One opportunity, as far as she was concerned, of course. Other timenauts would be sent back and get a chance to do the same, but, if she failed, there was nothing awaiting her back in her time besides utter rejection from her peers and, basically, everyone else. One chance to settle the religious schism that was threatening to tear the world apart. She had sworn to give everything she could to the cause and she wouldn't go back on her word simply because an unknown man in a den of iniquity asked her to wait a couple of days.

  "No," she said.

  "I see," said the man. "Can you think of a reason that would prevent my men from killing you?"

  Margrit looked back and saw the three men pulling out handguns. She was almost amused to see people using those preposterous museum pieces until she recalled they intended to use them on her. Museum pieces or not, they were more than capable of bringing about her death. Her stylus couldn't help her. They were too far and it would take too long to get nearer and target one of them. Even if it the stylus did work as it should, the other two would be left with enough time to finish her. She regretted that Command didn't allow timenauts to take back proper weapons. Another random rule.

  "I can't think of anything, to be honest," she said. "Unless it would help if I assured you I don't mean to kill this Walt."

  "You'll understand your assurance won't do any good, right?" the man asked. He was waiting for the right moment to give the order. When he did, it would be the end of that mission completion bonus she was expecting. And of her life as well. "We've just met. What's your name?"

  Another chance to be entirely honest.

  "Margrit," she replied.

  "Nice to meet you, Margrit," the man said. "I'm Ron." He looked at her jacket. "Velvet. I used to have a jacket just like that. You have good taste."

  "Thanks, but I didn't choose it," Margrit said.

  "Then the guy who gave it to you had excellent taste," Ron said. "I'd ask you to give him my regards, but I'm not sure that would make sense in our current situation." A pause. Margrit expected the worse, but Ron continued. "My doorman. Is he dead?"

  "No. He'll wake up soon enough. With a headache, but otherwise fine."

  "Merciful," Ron said. "If you're speaking the truth."

  "Why don't you go check for yourself?" she dared. "All of you. I promise I won't budge."

  Ron's lips curled into a chilling smile.

  "And a sense of humor. What a catch," he said.

  Margrit wondered if that counted as a compliment, coming as it was from a man who intended having her killed and, for a brief moment, thought if she should thank him for it.

  "I think I'll take your word for it and stay right here," he said.

  Margrit said nothing.

  "What do you want with Walt?" he asked.

  "Not kill him," she said.

  "You've already said that."

  "Let's say I've come a long way to see him do something," she explained, thinking that was as far as she could go without actually disclosing the real nature of her mission. What would Command say about sharing mission details with local-timers? Almost immediately, she realized they did say something about it. They forbade it completely, under penalty of expulsion of the offending agent and a possible jail sentence of the extended variety.

  Ron looked intrigued.

  "To see him do what?" he asked. "I know Walt is a resourceful guy, too resourceful for his own good, even. But I wasn't aware of any performing talents that would motivate someone to travel a long way to see him."

  The half-naked woman came back and stood nervously behind the counter, looking at both of them.

  "I would prefer not saying more than I already said," said Margrit. "Really."

  "And I would prefer not to kill you," Ron said. "Really. But you're not making my life any easier."

  "Boss," said the woman. Ron ignored her.

  "You could let me go," Margrit said, without much hope. "I did already give you my word I don't intend to kill your friend. Or to hurt him, even."

  "He's far from being my friend," said Ron. The notion amused him.

  "Boss," the woman said again. Ron looked at her for a second, but looked back at Margrit immediately after.

  "Your time is up," he said. Margrit thought about her bonus again. She never bothered to prepare herself for the post-mortem loss of money she had already seen as assured. A big mistake.

  The men behind her would point their obsolete exploding powder weapons at her, pull the primitive triggers and then... Apparently, that type of gun used to be very noisy. Should she cover her ears?

  "Boss!" said the woman, once more.

  "Damn it!" yelled Ron. "What is it? Can't you see we're busy here?"

  "It's Tanya," the woman said, pointing at the door she had come from.

  "What about her?" asked Ron.

  "She's dead."

  "What? She was here a moment ago. How can she be dead?"

  "I don't know," said the woman. "But that's not the strangest part."

  Ron's annoyance for being interrupted faded.

  "Someone stuck her in the freezer," said the woman, her pale complexion turning even paler. "She's naked. And frozen solid."

  For what seemed like an eternity, everyone was silent. Finally, Ron said:

  "What?"

  The woman opened her mouth, ready to repeat what she had just said, but Ron was faster.

  "Are you high?" he asked.

  "No," said the woman, almost offended by the question, but not quite.

  "She was right there," Ron said, pointing towards the end of the counter. "Minutes ago. When I looked again, while talking to Walt, she was gone. I thought she would be back there doing something."

  "Does being frozen solid count as 'doing something'"? asked the woman.

  A new pause.

  "That's impossible," said Ron.

  "Go check if you don't believe me."

  He looked at the men with the guns and nodded once towards Margrit. They grunted their agreement before he disappeared through the door behind the counter, emerging moments later, looking dumbstruck.

  "Shit," was his only comment.

  "So Walter Jenkins was here," said Margrit. It occurred to her that the moment was far from being appropriate for that remark, but it was too late. The words were already out. Ron looked at her, confused. She thought her situation wouldn't become much more hazardous if she explained. "You said you talked to him."

  Ron kept looking at her without speaking.

  Margrit thought about the bonus once more. Possibly for the last time. She had planned to buy the forest cabin her father had dreamed about. Would her mother miss her? She had never been her favorite daughter, despite having no siblings.

  Ron finally broke the silence, after what seemed like an eternity.

  "Tell me again you won't kill him. Say it with heart. Your life may depend on it. Wait... It does depend on it."

  Margrit did her best.

  "I won't kill him." Ron kept his eyes intensely fixed on hers. "I mean it."

  They all waited for Ron's retort, quite possibly expecting him to say very different things.

  "Go," he said.

  At first, no one got what he meant. Understanding came with an enormous burst of relief. For Margrit, at least. The three men pointing ancient weapons at her looked disappointed. The half-naked woman behind the bar still seemed too dumbfounded by the discovery of a dead acquaintance to care too much about Margrit's fate. Her indifference was mirrored by Margrit's in what concerned the matter of the frozen Tanya. For what she could infer from the words she heard, someone had been stuck into some sort of cold preservation locker and, for some reason, that was perplexing. They had been about to ki
ll her where she stood an instant before. It should be expected that they were more accustomed to dealing with death with a lot more casualness. Was the intention of putting a sudden end to her yet to be glorious career as a timenaut entirely put aside? The gun barrels were still pointed at several points of her body, although they had lowered slightly while the men holding them followed the conversation taking place in front of them. But not enough to keep the shots from being fatal.

  One of them decided to say something.

  "You're letting her go?" he asked.

  "Yeah," replied Ron. "I am."

  "But she's right here," he stated. "We could just..." He raised his gun a couple of inches and Margrit started having doubts about her longevity again. "She saw things," he added, looking convinced that he had found the argument to convince his boss beyond any doubt.

  "What did she see, you idiot?" asked Ron. Judging by the look on the gunman's face, that wasn't the reaction he was waiting for. "She didn't even know there were things to see until you said so."

  The man finally lowered his gun.

  "She knows about Tanya," said the woman behind the counter.

  Ron thought about it for a second.

  "True," he said. "But she also knows we were too busy preparing her death to kill someone else. Don't you?" Margrit nodded. "Now go, before I change my mind. And remember: no killing Walt for the next two days. After that, I don't care."

  She looked at the three gunmen. Two of them were returning the weapons to their hiding places inside their jackets. The third, the one who had spoken, kept holding his at the end of his lowered arm.

  "You sure you thought this through, boss?" he asked, keeping a suspicious eye on Margrit while she walked slowly towards the door.

  Ron did a surprisingly good job of restraining his exasperation.

  "Do you want to spend the rest of the night hiding two bodies instead of one?" he asked.

  The gunman holstered his pistol grudgingly and Ron looked at Margrit and nodded towards the door.

  When she let the door close behind her, Ron was saying something with a raised voice. She didn't feel curious enough to go back and listen, focusing instead on her task.

  The dark alley was empty and she took the marker out of her pouch, flipped it open and looked at the screen. A persistent blip was still signaling the target's presence, but he was nowhere to be seen. She keyed in the command to refresh tracking and, after triangulating the area with the tracking data compiled by the old-timer, the blip returned to the marker's screen, this time hovering over the map of a different area, with coordinates in a corner and a digital compass needle pointing the direction she should follow to get there.

  She looked up and saw few stars on a sky tainted by the city's many lights. Funny how the sky didn't appear to change, no matter what time she was in.

  She shook her head, dismissing the absurd thought, put her marker back in the pouch and moved towards the alley's exit.

  5

  The woman was clearly insane. Walt had seen her before, during one of his previous visits to Harry's, before he decided to accept Ron's generosity and take the very beneficial loan he was willing to give him to start a science fiction-themed restaurant that would be a guaranteed hit. Before he used up all the money over the space of five months, not even bothering to learn what was the first step he should take in order to become a restaurant manager. Before his failure to repay made him start looking behind more frequently when he walked around, particularly in that part of the city.

  She was some sort of 'professional'. She would sit at the bar, start conversations with the patrons and, occasionally, leave with them. Walt was also approached, but he didn't need long to understand what was behind her eagerness to please. He didn't like paying for it. He also didn't like redheads too much, so she gave up and kept looking.

  That night, she was different. After approaching them in the alley, where she was unexplainably hiding in the shadows and watching his bizarre altercation with the hobo, she suggested they went to a place where they could talk, suggesting a nearby square in front of a large department store, already closed at that hour. For some reason, she seemed eager to leave the alley. The square was deserted, with only occasional passersby, and it did, in fact, make for an excellent place to discuss matters that should be kept secret from everyone else. The only problem was that Walt didn't know what they could talk about that was so secretive and, also, he didn't understand how the square, with its lights and convenient location for both drivers and walkers, was more secretive than the dark alley they had come from.

  "Much better," the woman had said. If he remembered right, her name was Tanya. She didn't introduce herself again and didn't ask who Zachary was. "We won't be interrupted here."

  But what qualified her most as a crazy person were the things coming out of her mouth, after she'd taken them to a darker corner, behind a large tree and some bushes. There just wasn't any way to see it other than as the result of a case of severe and possibly incurable insanity. On several occasions while she was speaking, Walt thought if she could get dangerous and if he could use Zachary as a decoy while he ran away. Zachary wouldn't mind. He'd probably see it as a way of examining her boobs from a closer distance, something which he had been doing almost continuously for the last moments. If Walt noticed, so did Tanya, but she didn't say or do anything about it. Maybe she was enjoying the attention. Or perhaps she was too concentrated in expelling a long string of absurd sentences from her mouth and thought it took precedence over telling Zachary, the randy little geek, to focus on her eyes.

  "Why?" asked Walt, when she stopped speaking and it seemed like a good opportunity to finally say something.

  "Why what?" Tanya asked, looking intently at a woman with shopping bags passing some feet from them.

  "Why are they looking for me?"

  "Well," she started, surprising another hungry look from Zachary and, again, not seeming to mind, "they are trying to prevent you from doing something you will do soon."

  "What is that?" asked Walt. There was only one thing in his agenda. "Paying my debt to Ron?"

  "No," Tanya said. "Something else."

  "Then they got the wrong guy," said Walt. "Because I'm not planning to do something else." Zachary stopped his mammalian contemplation and looked at him, arching one eyebrow. Walt looked at him and glared.

  An old couple passed between them and the nearest department store wall before Tanya spoke.

  "Believe me," she said. "You will do something else. "

  "What?" asked Walt.

  "I can't say," she replied. "I don't know what." He was almost sure she was lying.

  "How can you be so sure of that? How can they?"

  A group of young girls passed by them, giggling. For a brief instant, Tanya seemed angry.

  "What I'm about to tell you next may perturb you," she said.

  Perturb. Walt didn't remember such a fancy vocabulary from their previous conversations. Perhaps she had started to read the dictionary when she wasn't... well... being a professional.

  "Go right ahead," he said. Even Zachary started paying attention.

  "They are time travelers. From the future."

  And there it was. Irrefutable proof of insanity.

  "Okay," said Walt, wanting to take several steps backward, but not daring.

  "Time travelers?" repeated Zachary. Tanya nodded. "Backwards time travel is a theoretical impossibility. I read it online."

  Tanya was pondering a reply, but Walt beat her to it.

  "Don't believe everything you read online," he said, giving him a discreet wink, that Zachary didn't understand. "It's perfectly possible for an army of smelly, old hobos from the future to be after me to... what was it?" He looked at Tanya. "Prevent me from doing something by..."

  "Killing you," she said.

  "Ah. Of course." He looked at his watch. "I'd love to stay and chat, but we have to..."

  "I can prove it to you," Tanya said.


  "How?" asked Zachary. Walt didn't care and hated him for saying that.

  "Not here," she said. "There's an underground automobile storage unit nearby. Follow me there and I'll show you."

  Underground automobile storage unit. There it was again.

  "We'd love to do that, but we really can't," Walt said. "But I'll give you a call and we can go explore underground automobile storage units together next week. How about that?"

  Tanya sighed, looking resigned. She looked one way and the other. Nobody was approaching from either side and, apparently, that made her feel at ease to reach inside her purse and...

  Woosh.

  She collapsed on the floor. Where her head used to be, Walt saw a hand holding a pen with a glowing tip. He needed time to understand what had happened.

  "What just happened?" he asked, deciding it was best if someone explained it to him, saving him the effort to figure it all out by himself.

  Attached to the hand, there was an arm with a complete woman attached to it, coming out of the bushes. Short brown hair, big round eyes, the kind of face that looked permanently bothered by something. The tip of the pen was no longer glowing. She lowered it. Zachary crouched near Tanya, trying to think of something to do. He tried holding her wrist up with two fingers.

  "I can't find a pulse", he said.

  "You're doing it wrong," said the newcomer, putting the pen inside a black pouch attached to her belt. "But she should be stunned."

  Zachary got up, holding something that had fallen from Tanya's purse. It was a piece of black material shaped like the letter L. He was turning it in his fingers, looking puzzled. The woman was startled, reached out one hand and took it from him, examining it closely.

  Walt was expecting sirens, but he heard nothing. It made no sense to hear sirens so soon, he realized. Immediately after, he started worrying that someone would come and see them with an unconscious woman at their feet behind some bushes. It could hardly look more suspicious than that.

  "Oh," said the woman. She was still looking at the thing in her hands. So was Zachary. Walt did the same and saw that it was starting to smoke. He thought about suggesting her to drop it, since it was about to burst into flames, whatever it may be, but something very odd happened next. The L-shaped object vanished.

  Smoke started to rise also from the unconscious Tanya. In two blinks of an eye, she was also gone, leaving behind her purse, with the lipstick and can of mace that had rolled from inside, her black dress and her red shoes.

  "This!" squealed Zachary. "What was this?"

  The woman seemed vaguely surprised.

  "I don't know," she said. "Never saw anything like this before. But I was wrong. She is dead."

  "Who the hell are you?" Walt asked her, with a slight panic making him raise his voice and realizing immediately after that he shouldn't, because the last thing he wanted was to attract attention to that dark corner of the plaza. Even if three people standing around discarded women's garments didn't seem as incriminating as three people surrounding a corpse.

  The woman was raising her hands to the light, as if trying to see if the vanished thing had left any sort of residue on her skin. Judging from her expression, it hadn't.

  "Doesn't matter," she replied.

  "That's very convenient!" said Walt, raising his voice again. "Are you also here to warn me about old men from the future coming to kill me?"

  "What?" That got her attention.

  "Take it easy, Walt", said Zachary, trying to calm him down.

  "Take it easy? Didn't you see what just happened?" said Walt. "You're not the one who started magically attracting crazy people all of a sudden."

  "What did you say?" asked the woman.

  "Yes, I'm including you when I say crazy people," said Walt.

  "That thing about old men coming to kill you..." she said.

  "Yes. What about it?"

  "Where did you say they came from?"

  "What?" Walt wasn't getting it. Luckily, Zachary was there to lend a hand.

  "He said they came from the future," he said.

  "Ah," said the mysterious pen stabber. "Who told you that?"

  "What's it to you?" asked Walt.

  "Just tell me," the woman said. "Please."

  "Well..." He looked down. "She did. Tanya."

  "I see," she said. "That is... I don't know what to make of it."

  "Do you know what to make of the woman you just killed and whose corpse turned to smoke?" asked Zachary.

  "No. To be honest, I don't know what to make of her either."

  Walt felt dizzy.

  "I think I'm having a mental breakdown," he said, considering sitting on the floor, but giving up on the idea, since he didn't want to be closer to what was left of the dead woman.

  "Why did you kill her?" asked Zachary.

  "Equipment malfunction. I only wanted to stun her," said the woman. "But she was about to kill him." She pointed at Walt. "And you too, probably."

  "What?" asked Walt, sounding exasperated.

  "That thing she was reaching for was probably a gun," she said.

  "Probably?" said Zachary.

  "Most likely," she emended.

  "What reason could she have to kill us?" asked Zachary.

  "I'm not sure, but it's probably related to things I can't talk to you about," she said.

  "That's not very helpful," said Zachary.

  Walt was still looking down.

  "Tanya wouldn't want to kill me," he said. "That is... unless Ron told her to... but I..."

  "She wasn't Tanya," the woman said.

  Walt looked up at her.

  "Sure she was. She used to work at Harry's as a..." There was no need to mention the moral faults of the recently deceased and evaporated. "She used to work there."

  "No," the woman insisted. "Did she look like this Tanya you're speaking of?"

  "Of course she did," said Walt, not understanding where the conversation was going to, but not wanting to follow that road, anyway. "It was her."

  "No. It was someone pretending to be her, using means I didn't know were possible," she said. "The real Tanya is back at the bar."

  "She's alive?" asked Walt, opening his eyes wide.

  "I wouldn't say that."

  "Oh God..." He felt sick. "I don't understand anything anymore."

  The woman turned to Zachary.

  "You should take him home," she said.

  After staring at her for a moment, Zachary put one arm around Walt's shoulders and started to pull him away.

  "Come on."

  Walt didn't resist. He'd be glad to be far from there. He was used to things making a lot more sense.

  "Wait," said the woman. The word threatened to turn Walt's stomach upside down. "Is your name Walter Jenkins?" she asked him.

  "Leave me alone!" he blurted.

  She nodded.

  "I needed confirmation," she said. "See you around."

  Not if I can help it, thought Walt while Zachary lead him away.

  5.1

  Margrit Lorne still wasn't impressed. Even if her marker had finished the scan started an hour earlier, when she was hiding in the bushes next to the target, producing a positive identification with 99.9% certainty. Not even the remaining 0.01% would manage to impress her and turn her back into a believer. But she had a job to do and she meant to do it.

  She lifted her slate, erased the previous drop and wrote:

  99.9% pos ID. Contact unavoidable. Failed target elimination by unknown agent. Awaiting instruc. Drop 4.

  She buried it again in the rubble and went back to the corner where she had pitched her thermal tent, sitting down on a brick she had been using to sit down on, disregarding painful protests from her behind.

  It was completely dark outside, and the only light in the abandoned warehouse came from her lantern. She'd sleep an hour or two before sunrise, much less than the five hours recommended by Command physicians, but she was never much of a sleeper, anyway. Even whe
n she wasn't on a mission. The combination of tension, anxiety and alertness prevented her from relaxing long enough to fall asleep and the sleeping pad also contributed a great deal. It wasn't much better than sleeping on the rubble. In fact, it was almost like sleeping on the rubble, only with a thin layer of polymer over it. She wondered if the geniuses in Command's Standard Equipment Development Division had ever slept in one of those to know how it felt. It seemed unlikely. Or perhaps they did and couldn't care less.

  Two or three hours left before she passed out of exhaustion, the only assured way of getting some sleep while on a mission.

  She looked at the marker screen again. The '99.9%' was still flashing. She pressed a button and replaced it with a map of the area. Another button click and the screen filled with a list of data blocks, including the ones she had downloaded from the old-timer's marker, some of which were corrupted and were completely useless. Luckily, the ones that were intact were more than enough to allow a positive tracking. Another button press brought up strings of numbers and letters arranged in columns. Lists of coordinates. The place where she was, the places where she had been recently, the places she could go to from there. The places that didn't exist yet, but would become real in several consecutive futures. Yet another button press and the '99.9%' was back on the screen.

  Shit, she thought.

  Such an advanced piece of technology and they couldn't fit some form of passing the time in it. How hard could it be? There was that old visual game of arranging falling blocks into rows, making them disappear and preventing them from reaching the top of the screen. The marker had more than enough memory and processing capacity to support that with ease, but did someone think of it? No. Of course not. Because the people developing equipment had never been on a mission and had no practical idea of what was needed. Their knowledge was entirely theoretical.

  When she returned, Margrit thought, she would write a letter to the head of the Church's Department of Personnel to suggest it. Other timenauts would certainly support her.

  Or maybe she would do nothing of the kind. Because what mattered while on a mission became unimportant when she was out of duty. That was how things were. Nothing to do about it. It would never change.

  She closed the marker and stuck it in her pouch.

  There was also the matter of the woman to keep her awake. The weapon she almost used to kill the target was similar to the ones available back in her time, with an important difference. Weapons she was familiar with didn't evaporate once their owner was eliminated. But this wasn't as disturbing as seeing the body also turn to smoke. All that and her unexplained intention to eliminate the target suggested she came from the future, but it didn't make sense. Why wasn't she following procedure? How did Command allow her to time-jump while armed? And, most importantly, what interest could she possibly have in getting rid of Walter Jenkins? Unless she wasn't an agent of the Church, but of the heretics. If so, how had they gained access to time travel technology? Should she expect other armed agents to be sent? Should she start following the target around as a bodyguard, to assure he would stay alive until the event?

  And when would the event take place, after all? Both her marker and the old-timer's agreed that it would be soon, but when? Saying something would happen soon and not pointing out exactly when was completely useless. Another thing to mention in the letter she would never write to the Department of Personnel.

  Feeling drowsy, she decided to take the chance and hope sleep would come earlier that night, getting up from the brick and unrolling the pad inside the tent before laying herself on it and closing the tent flaps.

  Or maybe she shouldn't worry too much about the target's death. If that man was really who they had been looking for since the first time-jumps, the purpose of the mission and the belief system that had shaped her world started to look very dubious. A womanizer, lying, dishonest and possibly criminal individual. There was nothing pious about Walter Jenkins. If the people back in her time, the people who believed, who took part in regular cults, who paid the Church's due taxes, met Walter Jenkins, they would feel seriously disappointed and the strength of their beliefs would be severely undermined. She almost felt glad for thinking it was all just superstition before the mission started. There was no way disappointment would get at her also.

  But, if someone asked, she was the most diligent believer of them all. Whatever was necessary to keep her job. If she was required to fall on her knees in front of Walter Jenkins and praise his divine graces, she would. Almost without hesitating. Margrit did have pride, but she never let it get in the way of the comfortable life she thought she deserved.

  She felt her eyebrows heavy and was almost about to close them when...

  A sudden popping sound and an inexplicable wind, blowing against the camouflaged tent cloth. A quick hand took her stylus out of the pouch, while the other reached for the clasp keeping the tent flaps closed, pressing it and opening them.

  There was a man outside, short and chubby, trembling and breathing hard. There was a circle of exposed skin shaved on top of his skull and he was wearing pants made from a coarse blue material that were far too large for him. The red shirt was so big that it made him look like he was wearing a dress. A large blue number '26' decorated his back. About the high leather boots, the only thing that could be said was that they weren't more ridiculous than the rest of the ensemble. He was twisting something in his hands. A tan bucket hat, she saw, when she went around him, unnoticed. Sometimes, it was very hard to escape thinking that Command's idea of what would constitute acceptable local-time wear was seriously flawed.

  The man saw her and jumped. He then saw the stylus she was pointing at him and, probably because he couldn't think of a more extreme reaction than the previous jump, decided to stand very still.

  "Oh," he said.

  "Oh what?" asked Margrit.

  He cleared his throat, trying to make it lower and more manlike. Without success.

  "Agent Margrit Lorne?" he squealed.

  "That would depend."

  "Hmm?" He looked even more panicky, if that was possible.

  "Who are you?" she asked.

  "Ah, yes. Of course." He cleared his throat again. It wasn't helping. "I'm Brother Maxwell. Chaplain of the Church. Command sent me to establish contact with the target."

  "Did they?"

  "They... well... yes, they did, actually," he stuttered, most unconvincingly.

  "Is there any way you can prove it?" Margrit asked.

  The pale little man looked around. It was doubtful that he would find anything in the abandoned warehouse to help him, but he tried anyway.

  "I don't... know?" he said, turning it into a bizarre question to which there was no possible answer.

  "You'll have to do better than that, Brother..." said Margrit. "Or should I say alleged Brother?"

  He was making a real effort to come up with something to answer her request, but, judging by the way his pale complexion started to look green in the points reached by the light of the lantern, his efforts were getting nowhere.

  "I know what you can do," said Margrit, deciding to help him out. She liked to think fairness was one of her qualities. "Pray."

  "What?" he asked, with his eyes wide open following the tip of the stylus. "Pray?"

  "Yes. A chaplain should know how to pray, don't you think? It's not a complicated request."

  "What should I—"

  "The Lord's Prayer will do fine," she said.

  The man swallowed hard, trying to calm down enough to be able to speak without stuttering. Then, he joined his hands, bowed his head with eyes closed and started.

  "Our Lord, thou hast given us our Divine Mentor to guide our steps out of misery and unto eternal bounty. Bless our words and deeds, bless your children and unworthy servants, so that we can thrive and bring the light of thine star to the world. Amen."

  He looked up, hopefully, while keeping his hands together, waiting for Margrit's judgment. It was
convincing enough. Didn't prove a thing, of course. Most heretics had started as children of the Church and would also know the words, but the man had said them with genuine fervor and, although it could also have been out of fear for his life, she decided to follow her intuition. It didn't fail her too often.

  "That will do," she said, lowering her stylus.

  The man breathed with relief.

  "Praise Creation," he said.

  "Brother Maxwell, was it?" Margrit asked.

  "That's right," said the man.

  "So Command is certain?"

  "Well, your last drop mentioned a 99.9% certainty," he said. "A 95% certainty calls for personal verification by a member of the clergy. And here I am." He pointed at his ridiculous wardrobe.

  "Yes," said Margrit, looking him up and down and wondering if he had any idea of how ridiculous he looked. She hoped she didn't look that bad. "Here you are."

  "I also bring information concerning that unknown agent you mentioned," he said.

  "Any idea who it could be?" she asked. "Was it someone sent by Command?"

  "No," Brother Maxwell replied with a grave expression. "The situation is quite serious."

  Margrit thought that, if the situation was that serious, he should get on with the explanation instead of trying to keep it suspenseful.

  "Well?" she said, on the verge of losing her patience.

  "There has been a disruption in the continuum," explained Brother Maxwell. Margrit understood enough about time travel to know that 'a disruption in the continuum' could mean anything. At the same time, she didn't understand enough about time travel to even dare guess what it could be. "We are still trying to explain it."

  "And what did this disruption in the continuum do, exactly?" asked Margrit.

  He lifted his hat slightly to scratch his forehead.

  "We're assuming it created a parallel reality in which the heretics are dominant and have access to time-jump technology. Also, they seem to have developed it to a point which we haven't reached yet."

  "That's a very big assumption," said Margrit.

  "It was an unfortunate choice of words," said the chaplain. "Forgive me. Command is almost certain that this is what happened."

  "Almost." Margrit repeated the crucial word.

  "Yes," said Brother Maxwell. "Until the theory is confirmed, it will remain just that. A theory. You know how the Church is obsessed with proving things."

  Margrit knew nothing of the sort. In her opinion, the problem was precisely that they didn't interest themselves enough in proving claims, expecting the faithful to be just that and accept everything they said as undeniable truths.

  "This woman who tried to kill the target," said Margrit. "She told him the old-timers had been sent from the future to kill him. Could that be the cause of the disruption?"

  "Not likely," said Brother Maxwell, without hesitation. "The Narrative clearly states an annunciation by travellers from the future. That would already be encompassed in the continuum."

  "Then I've run out of ideas," Margrit admitted.

  "It could be something that hasn't yet happened in this time," said Brother Maxwell.

  "It could," said Margrit. She thought of something more disturbing than disruptions in complex temporal perceptions. "So Command already knew about these parallel reality agents? The woman I saw wasn't the first?"

  The chaplain looked adequately concerned.

  "No, she wasn't," he said. "They have been sent to our native time as well. With dramatic consequences."

  That didn't sound comforting at all.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "There have been three of them," he explained. "Two exploded themselves in temples during cult. Hundred of casualties and irreparable damage to the buildings."

  "And the third?"

  "The third..." It looked like an unpleasant matter to remember. "He was sent to the Archbishop's official residence. To murder His Eminence."

  Dramatic was, indeed, the right qualifier. Margrit understood the chaplain's concern.

  "The Archbishop is...?" Even if she was far from being the most devout believer, the Archbishop was still the highest authority figure of the world she knew and, apart from that, he was her boss.

  "No, thank Creation," said Brother Maxwell, looking appalled by the thought. "He was absent at the time. But both the Secretary of State and the Bishop-Regent perished. With several non-lethal casualties in his staff."

  "What happened to the killers?" Margrit asked.

  "Well... the first two..." The chaplain looked queasy. "There couldn't have been much left of them after the explosions. As for the third, he was shot by Security Staff members and... Something unusual happened. We're still trying to understand it.

  "Let me guess," Margrit said. "His body turned to smoke."

  The chaplain looked surprised.

  "Yes! And not only him—"

  "His gun also."

  "That's right. Was it the same with the agent you eliminated?"

  "It was. How can they do this?"

  "Well, like I said, their technology seems to be more advanced than ours. And, apparently, they can also locate targets without need of previous acquisition of tracking data."

  There was a large elephant in the room. Margrit decided to point directly at it.

  "Isn't it disturbing that a parallel reality where the heresy is dominant has managed greater advancements than our own?" she asked.

  Brother Maxwell looked very much like someone who preferred not having heard that.

  "We cannot discuss such matters," he said. "That would be heresy in itself."

  Margrit rolled her eyes.

  "Spare me," she said. "Did you bring a weapon with you?"

  "A weapon? I thought the rules­—"

  "I know about the rules. But the woman I killed had a weapon. And my stylus can hardly be considered a reliable piece of equipment for something other than writing on slates."

  "I didn't bring a weapon," he said, uselessly.

  Typical, Margrit thought. That was so typical of Command. They were incapable of thinking ahead.

  "Do you, at least, have martial training?" she asked, without any real hope.

  The chaplain's expression mixed equal amounts of embarrassment and disbelief with a slight hint of something that could be classified as vague amusement.

  "Religious seminars aren't the best places to find trained fighters," he said.

  Of course he wasn't trained. Margrit should have learned by now that wishful thinking didn't lead her anywhere.

  "Well," she said, "I'm sure they sent you for a reason. You must be the man for the job in these difficult circumstances."

  "Ah," he said. A sudden sinking of his expression did not hint at something positive.

  "Ah what?"

  "I'm not... well... I wasn't... so to speak..." he stuttered.

  "What?" she repeated.

  "The top graduates of my Chapter were taking part in the cult where one of the bombs went off," he said.

  "What does that mean? That you're the best of the surviving chaplains?"

  "Not entirely," Brother Maxwell admitted, with some dismay. "When I said the top graduates of my Chapter were there, I should have mentioned that the others were all present as well. I had been dispensed because I was at home with a serious flu and..."

  "And you're the only chaplain left," Margrit concluded.

  "Yes. That's right."

  "Perfect."

  "But I assure you my determination is unwavering."

  "I'm sure it is."

  There was a pause during which Margrit cursed her luck internally and tried to come to terms with the fact that the mission was starting to look very much like it couldn't end well.

  "Shouldn't we get going? Time is of the essence," said Brother Maxwell.

  "Going where?" asked Margrit.

  "To find the target so I can perform the identification ritual and make it official. So we can return back home and put
an end to the heresy."

  "Now?"

  "The sooner, the better. Don't you think?"

  "It's the middle of the night," she said. The chaplain didn't seem to grasp the concept. She explained. "We're several decades away from alpha wave maximization tablets. He wasn't too happy when I left him earlier, to say the least. He wouldn't enjoy it very much if we dragged him out of bed. We should wait for the morning."

  She went back to her camp and sat on her brick, lifting another for the chaplain and dusting it with her hand. To no avail. It was still dirty, but nobody could blame her for not trying.

  The chaplain thought for a while and ended up following her and sitting down.

  "I suppose you're right," he said. "He should be safe inside his home."

  "Not his home," Margrit said. Brother Maxwell didn't look like the most interesting conversationalist in the whole temporal continuum, but he was still preferable to staring at her marker's screen over and over and trying to identify amusing shapes in the strings of numbers. "He is staying with a friend."

  "Is he? How curious. The Narrative gives no details about the Divine Mentor's years before the Revelation. I suppose it will be a usual arrangement for this time era."

  "Well..." Margrit recalled her visit to the betrayed woman's house, the one where Walter Jenkins no longer lived. "About this guy..."

  For a moment, the chaplain didn't seem to understand who she meant. He eventually got there, but not without a certain concern.

  "You mean the target?" he asked.

  "Yes, the target. He may not be exactly what you're expecting him to be."

  "How so?"

  Margrit thought of a way of saying it that wouldn't shock him too much.

  "I just think that the Narrative describes him in a certain way and that may not have much in common with what he really is. If his identity is confirmed, that is."

  "Of course." Brother Maxwell thought about it for a while, in silence. "I'm sorry, but I don't think I grasp what you mean," he admitted.

  Margrit was out of euphemisms.

  "There is a high probability that we're dealing with a bastard of unfathomable proportions."

  The chaplain couldn't have looked more alarmed if she had insulted God Himself. And, in a way, it was possible that she had done just that. It all depended on the point of view.

  "Agent Lo-Lorne..." he stuttered. "I understand you are an experienced timenaut and are tired after your effort on this mission, but it is my duty as a clergyman to remind you that you could be talking about the Divine Mentor. Until I perform the confirmation ritual, we can't know." Suddenly, he looked so authoritative and sure of himself that it was impossible not to take him seriously. "Keeping that in mind, I have to ask you to make an effort not to mention the target in such a disrespectful manner."

  Margrit thought about her bonus again and wondered if the chaplain was in a position to stop her from getting it.

  "Okay," she said, deciding not to risk it.

  They didn't speak for a long moment. Eventually, Margrit decided to break the silence with a less sensitive subject.

  "Why does it always have to be so complicated?" she asked.

  "Hmm?" said the chaplain, awoken from reverie. "What was that?"

  "I was wondering why time travelling matters can't be simpler. It's always about disruptions in the temporal continuum, things that happen in the past and alter the future, things that happen in the future and change the past. Not to mention the theoretical possibility of people becoming involved in conceiving their own grandparents."

  "That's the way things have to be, I suppose," said Brother Maxwell. "Time is a complex thing."

  "I guess it is," said Margrit. "I read somewhere that time travel used to be a common theme for fiction long before it was close to becoming an existing technology."

  "I've heard the same," said Brother Maxwell.

  "Do you think their vision of time travel was as complicated as the real thing?" she asked.

  "I don't know," replied the chaplain. "Not really my area of expertise. But I guess it will be hard to tell even for people who study such things. So little from their cultural output has survived the Calamity."

  "That's another thing," Margrit said. "Do you think they ever foresaw the possibility of a Calamity destroying the world as they knew it? Could they have foreseen that civilization would have to be remade almost from scratch?"

  "I can't say," said the chaplain. "But, to be honest, I doubt their imagination could reach such a tremendous extent.

  Margrit placed her elbows on her knees and propped her head on her hands, looking at the dark world visible through the large gaping hole on the walls of the abandoned warehouse.

  "And we can't even try to find out if that's right because it could change the future. We'd go back to our own time and discover that mankind had been replaced by large hyperintelligent snails as the planet's dominant species." Brother Maxwell's shocked gasp made her smile. She probably shouldn't smile, but there was no helping it. Time was, in fact, an overly complex thing.

  6

  Walt Jenkins felt seriously hungover although he didn't remember drinking a thing in the previous night. The symptoms were all there. His head ached like it was about to burst, the light coming through the windows hurt his eyes, making him nag Zachary more than once about the absolute need to close the shutters, to which Zachary responded by saying he couldn't work in the dark. That was nonsense. What could he be working on? And why? He had given up on reviewing that stupid curling iron and the encyclopedia deal would get them enough money to last years. Zachary would then add something telling him off for deciding to sleep on the couch in his living-room/office, after ridding it of the boxes containing refrigerated wine carafes that previously covered it. It was not his fault that the trauma sustained on the previous night had prevented him from having enough strength to reach his spare bedroom.

  He was completing a mental list of all the hangover symptoms he felt when the phone rang. Acute hearing sensitivity was another one. Luckily, Zachary got up to answer and it didn't last long.

  "It's your accountant," he said.

  "Tell him to call later," Walt said.

  Zachary carried his message through and waited.

  "He says it's important."

  "Tell him I'm sick."

  "You're not sick."

  "Tell him I'll call him back later."

  He did and hung up. Walt turned around and tried to sleep some more. He thought it was still too early to ask Zachary how he planned to feed his guest, best friend and fellow entrepreneur.

  "What did he want?" he asked, when Zachary sat in front of his computer.

  "No idea," he said, without turning around.

  "Didn't he say something?"

  "He did. He said he'd call back later. Wasn't that what you wanted him to do?"

  "Didn't he at least hint at what he wanted?"

  "Other than hinting that he wanted to talk to you, no."

  "I see," said Walt. He didn't like that one bit. Sure, he didn't feel like talking about money with his accountant (he was an accountant, after all; what else could he want to talk about?), but, now that he had gotten rid of that obligation, he regretted not knowing what could be that important. It was that old impossibility of keeping a cake and eating it at the same time. He never liked that saying. What prevented someone from eating half the cake and keeping the other half? The world needed to be a bit more flexible, he thought. Things would go along much smoother.

  Tired of looking at mold patches on the ceiling, he closed his eyes and wondered if he should try to go back to sleep.

  But the world, that inflexible and even cruel world, would not have it.

  Someone was ringing Zachary's bell. Walt covered his head with a pillow, but it was useless. A perfectly decent morning's sleep ruined beyond all hopes of repair. Zachary got up, mumbling something vaguely obscene and went to the door. Immediately after, Walt heard him say:

  "It
's your ex-wife.

  That sounded so definite. He understood his marriage was over, couldn't say he would miss it that much, but, still, calling Sarah his 'ex-something' didn't sound right, for some reason. He decided her visit was reason enough to make him get up from the sofa. Even if it was entirely unexpected. He wished she would call first. Her last unexpected arrival had unpleasant consequences, still too fresh in his memory. Rosie refused to take his calls. It was likely that she had finally managed to get the entirety of the situation through her tiny brain.

  He was buttoning his shirt and slipping his feet into his shoes at the same time, in a remarkable display of coordination, when Sarah walked towards him, picking her way among the boxes and piles of things that cluttered Zachary's apartment.

  "Hello, Sarah," he said, doing his best to appear pleasant and show her that he wasn't such a bad guy after all. But, judging from the look on her face, she wasn't in the right mood to exchange pleasantries. "What is it?" he asked, frowning. "Are you absolutely sure it was my fault?"

  She moved in a blur, something dark appeared in her hand, coming from somewhere inside a pocket, and there was a sound like a loud buzzing insect suddenly being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Walt felt something brush the side of his head and he heard something else hit the wall behind him.

  Pain. Sarah had just fired at him. And that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that she was raising the gun to do it again, this time taking her time to improve her aim. What could he possibly have done to upset her that much? While he dove to the floor, something occurred to him. The black thing she was holding didn't look like a gun at all. It looked like the object Tanya had pulled from her purse the previous night. Before that other woman in the bushes pointed a pen at her and she fell to the ground, dead. Before she turned to smoke.

  She fired again and he heard the same sound, while rolling behind the sofa. There was no new pain added to the palpitating burn he felt on the side of his head. But she quickly went around the sofa and found him with nothing to hide behind. That was it. He stared at the barrel of the strange gun and didn't see his whole life flash before his eyes. It was better that way. There were some things he wouldn't like to see again.

  Sarah pulled the trigger, or whatever device served the same function, and Walt closed his eyes. This time, he only heard a gasp. He opened one eye, then the other and took a second to understand what he was seeing. Zachary was behind her, holding the curling iron in one hand and pulling the tip of its power cable with the other. Somewhere in the middle, there was his ex-wife's neck, with the cable firmly wrapped around it, getting tighter as Zachary pulled with all his strength. Her face was starting to turn red.

  But the arm holding the gun was still free and she raised it, trying to guess where Zachary's head was, which was no easy task because he kept moving it from side to side.

  "Do something!" he said.

  Without thinking, Walt jumped forward, and grabbed the hand holding the gun, trying to pull it away and keep it still. His wife's face stared at him with a kind of desperate fury, turning from red into purple while Zachary pulled the cable even tighter. Her tongue was out and the gasping sounds coming out of her mouth were dreadful. Her skin acquired a darker tone of purple and Walt managed to tear the gun from her fingers as they were growing limp. With a final loud gasp, she dropped to the floor. Zachary followed the body's drop, still holding the curling iron and the power cable and pulling them in opposite directions until he understood it had become useless. He dropped the thing and got up, staring in horror and probably wondering if he could add 'very convenient as an improvised murder weapon' when he finally got around to reviewing it.

  They didn't say a thing, looking at the fallen body of someone who looked exactly like Sarah. Maybe it wasn't really her. Just like the Tanya that had tried to kill Walt wasn't the real Tanya. Wasn't that what the strange woman in the bushes had said? It didn't make sense, but neither did bodies turning to smoke without leaving a trace behind. And it was happening again, right in front of them, with the scene looking even more gruesome in broad daylight. The dead woman was lying on her stomach and, thankfully, they couldn't see her face, but, even so, they saw more than enough flesh liquefying at first and turning to smoke immediately after, until there was nothing left but clothes. The whole thing took around three or four seconds to be over and, at the same time the body evaporated, so did the gun, on the floor, where Walt had dropped it as soon as Sarah's possible double had fallen.

  Her clothes and shoes were now the only sign of her presence, placed in the exact same position as her body, but empty. The smoke dissipated in an instant, without a smell. There were also two holes, one on the wall and the other on the carpet, next to the sofa, as if to prove them that it really had happened.

  Finally, still staring at the clothes on the floor, Zachary spoke.

  "Did I just..." He couldn't finish. But there was no need.

  "Yes," Walt answered, also unable to look away.

  "Oh God..." said Zachary.

  Another long moment went on before they managed to look at each other. Walt identified that vague gnawing sensation on the side of his head as pain and lifted his hand to it. He felt a bump starting to form, but, when he looked at his fingers, there was no blood.

  "What do we do now?" Zachary asked.

  That was a very pertinent question. But what could be the answer?

  "I..." Walt realized he didn't know what to say. "I don't know."

  "Should we..."

  Another unfinished sentence. It was becoming recurrent.

  "What?" asked Walt, also wondering what he should do next and feeling open to all suggestions.

  "Well... call the police," Zachary finished.

  "Are you mad?" asked Walt.

  "Huh?"

  "You just killed Sarah and you want to call the police?"

  "That couldn't be Sarah!" argued Zachary, pointing at the clothes on the floor and stopping when he realized what he was doing. "You heard what the woman said last night..." He waved a hand vaguely towards the empty garments. "The redhead from the bar... She also... The same thing happened to her after she..."

  "Died," Walt said, feeling a strange urge to state the obvious, even if it bothered him to great extent.

  "Yes," said Zachary. "What matters here is that it wasn't her. I didn't kill Sarah, all right?"

  "You killed someone," stated Walt, finally managing to look away and taking a few steps towards the window. He felt the need to open it and breathe some fresh air.

  "There is no body left," said Zachary, raising his voice and catching himself halfway. "That is not normal. People don't just turn to smoke when they die. Something about this makes no sense. And that talk about time travellers from the future last night. Has the whole world gone insane?" He looked at Walt and saw him looking out the window, not saying anything. "What?" he asked.

  He kept looking outside, silent.

  Zachary thought he should be getting some attention from him. The matter was certainly serious enough.

  "What is it?" he asked, approaching and looking out the window as well. There was an old man wearing a dirty old suit standing down there, looking up at them.

  "I think calling the police might be a good idea," said Walt, without taking his eyes from the hobo. "It's the hobo from the police station."

  "He's not moving, though."

  "For now," Walt said.

  "And he's alone."

  Walt turned his head to look at him.

  "Are you suggesting we kill him also?"

  Zachary was horrified.

  "No! I'll go call the police."

  He took one step towards the phone when he heard Walt say:

  "Shit."

  Returning to the window at once, he saw people approaching the old man. There were two of them. One was the woman from the previous night and the other was a fat guy with a ridiculous outfit, including baggy jeans and a sports jersey at least three sizes too long fo
r him. He looked like he was wearing a dress with the number 26 printed on it.

  Walt thought of something relevant.

  "Is the door closed?" he asked.

  Zachary ran back to the door and locked it. He had left it open after letting Sarah in. After letting in someone he thought was Walt's soon-to-be ex-wife, having no reason to doubt her identity, since, for starters, she looked exactly like her.

  "Are they doing something?" he asked, running back to the window and hitting his leg on a cardboard box on the way.

  "I'm not sure," said Walt. The woman was talking to the old man, who seemed to be refusing something. He removed a box from his jacket pocket and kept pointing at it repeatedly.

  "What's happening?" asked Zachary. Walt remained silent.

  He was still silent when the woman looked up, seeing them. The hobo and the strange-looking man with her also looked and the five of them stared at each other.

  Walt thought if they should move away from the window. They knew for sure he was there, so it would be pointless trying to hide it, but still...

  He was still trying to decide when the old man started to wave.

  He didn't wave back and went back to Zachary's sofa, sitting down. He really wasn't in a waving mood. And he thought he had good reason.

  6.1

  The old-timer was being stubborn.

  "I already told you, Albert," Margrit was saying, trying to reason with him. "This doesn't concern you anymore. Please leave."

  He wouldn't have it.

  "I'm not sitting quietly while other people steal the credit for all these years I dedicated to the mission," he said.

  "It's not about you, agent Ford," said Brother Maxwell. "The purpose was always making sure the true faith crushed the onslaught of the heretics once and for all."

  Albert Ford gave him a thorough look. He was not impressed. And this was coming from someone who had been wearing the same replica of local-timer clothes for decades. The reinforced fabric resisted the passing of time, but there was no mistaking the smell of ancient filth.

  "Why did they dress you like a clown?" he asked.

  Brother Maxwell turned to Margrit.

  "What is a clown?"

  Margrit shrugged.

  "No idea."

  "A performer who dresses and acts foolishly for entertainment purposes," explained Albert. "They still exist in this time, but will be outlawed in a few years. More and more people started to be afraid of them."

  "Ah," said Brother Maxwell. "And I suppose you didn't mean it as a compliment."

  "I didn't," replied Albert.

  "Watch it, Albert," Margit warned. "You're speaking with a chaplain." Who could have guessed that Margrit Lorne would be lecturing people about the proper way of dealing with authority figures from the Church's hierarchy?

  "So you said." Albert looked unimpressed. "He certainly doesn't look like one." Something occurred to him. "Does this mean the target's identity is confirmed?"

  "I still haven't confirmed it," said the chaplain. "If you'd let us get on with our job, I'll be glad to give you an answer. As long as you wait here."

  The old-timer started to smile, showing two rows of rotten teeth.

  "I knew it!" he said. "I got a 97% reading when I got here." He pointed to the obsolete marker he took out of his pocket.

  "That doesn't really mean much, agent Ford," said Brother Maxwell.

  "What? Don't even joke about that! I was right. It's him. It was because of me that he was found. Because of my hard work and because of everything I sacrificed!"

  "Not exactly," said the chaplain. The old-timer looked at him, outraged, waiting for an explanation. It came soon enough. "Over the years, the Church sent a great number of agents, as you know. Many came before your time-jump." The old man nodded, willing to wait and see where he was going with that. "Many of the surviving pioneers... in fact, most of them, started reporting readings with high percentages of certainty over the last months. Your drops were just as relevant as hundreds of others. Or as irrelevant, if you prefer."

  For a moment, Albert couldn't say a thing. Finally, he managed to open his mouth and all that came out was:

  "Oh."

  Margrit felt sorry for him. He had been a brave timenaut one day, an agent devoted to the cause, before turning into that pathetic wretch. And he showed signs of being more devoted than she had ever been. Not that it was a hard feat to accomplish.

  "Besides," the chaplain went on, "you know very well that establishing contact with the target is the job of chaplains and not of field agents."

  "I just..." he looked up at the window and saw the two men behind it. "I just wanted to speak with Him and hear some words of comfort." He raised his hand and waved.

  Walt Jenkins and his friend looked frightened by the old-timer's gesture.

  "Don't expect too much," murmured Margrit.