I smiled gently, thinking of the way he’d pulled the band from my hair in the Metro. “You always wish my hair was down, if I remember correctly.”
“Guilty as charged,” he said. “It reminds me of that time when we were at…”
Kiernan’s voice trailed off, and then he closed his eyes, shaking his head slowly. After a moment, he opened them again and gave me what he clearly hoped would be a cheery smile. “So who is this Trey person?”
“Trey?” I looked down, unable to meet his eyes. “He’s a friend—or he was a friend before…”
“Kate.” Kiernan’s voice was soft and so full of understanding that tears rushed to my eyes. “You called his name in your sleep, love. He’s more than just a friend, I think.”
It was so unfair for this to make me feel that I was betraying Kiernan. But it did.
He tilted my chin up ever so slightly and I looked into his eyes, as wet with tears as my own. “You cannot hide from your heart, Kate. It always finds you. And, sadly, I cannot hide from mine.”
He pulled me into his arms and kissed me—softly at first and then with a passion that shook me to my very foundation. I was carried back to the wheat field just as clearly as I had been when I first looked into the medallion. There were at least two blankets between us, not to mention clothes, but the memory of the earlier kiss was so strong that I could almost feel his bare skin against mine. A slow delicious burn rose from deep inside me as I kissed him back, wrapping my hands in his long black hair.
I’m not entirely sure who broke the kiss, but I don’t think it was me. I turned away and just sat there for several minutes, eyes closed, face flushed. I was stunned, confused, angry at myself, angry at Trey, angry at Kiernan, and all of that was competing with the very strong temptation to pull Kiernan’s mouth back over mine and forget everything else, if only for a little while.
I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn’t make myself look at him. Finally, he pressed his lips to the top of my head and held them there. “Ah, Katie,” he whispered, his breath warm against my skin in the cool morning air. “I’m being selfish. You have to go back—you need rest. I was so afraid you would go into shock last night. I kept the fire roaring so high it’s a miracle I didn’t torch the cabin. And I can’t stay here much longer either—I’ve pushed myself to the limit already. Even these short hops are a strain.”
I knew he was right. One half of my mind was screaming that I needed to get back, to see what had happened, to find out if Katherine was there, to find my parents, to find Trey. The other half was completely terrified of the prospect because there were so many ways that it could have gone wrong. Here and now was safe; the calm after the storm. There and then was simply unknown.
“Are you sure you can get back?” I asked. “You were worried about doing another jump…”
“I’ll be fine, love,” he answered. “If I can’t make it right away, I’ll rest up a bit. Going back home is never as hard as trying to leave. I feel like there’s a physical… anchor, I guess, dragging me back there.”
“Then I should go.” I met his eyes for the first time since we kissed and tried to muster up a smile. “But—you spoke about a resistance. Are you still in? I mean, even if Prudence gets Saul to back off and they don’t go after Katherine again, this isn’t over. I don’t know exactly what it is they’re planning…”
“I have a pretty good idea,” Kiernan said, leaning back to rest his shoulders against the bare wood of the cabin wall. “They refer to it as the Culling, necessary to save humanity and the planet. It will be pitched as an environmental accident of some sort. They’ve floated the idea of both airborne and waterborne, so I’m not sure.
“There’s no specific date, as far as I know—the general plan is to wait till they have about one-quarter of the population under their thumb and they’ll do whatever tweaking of the timeline they need to in order to make that happen. Cyrist members—or at least a good portion of them—will be given the antidote, along with a select few outsiders. People whose skills their experts have targeted as being vital for rebuilding.”
“So—it’s like the Creed they chanted at the temple,” I said. “‘As humans have failed to protect the Planet, the Planet shall protect itself.’ Except the Cyrists assume the role of ‘Planet’ and kill off those they consider unworthy?”
“Yes,” he said. “But don’t dismiss the appeal of their message so quickly. They make a compelling argument when you’re in the fold, y’know. There was a time when what Saul said made sense to me. You take someone from my time, a young kid who’s just learned to use the CHRONOS key and show him select scenes from say, the 2150s. Jump him around and give him a firsthand view of a nuclear disaster or two. Tell him about a society where your future is planned before you’re even born—written into your very DNA. Give him a few glimpses of modern war and the full extent of man’s inhumanity to man and the Cyrist solution doesn’t sound quite so evil.”
“So you think they have a point?” I asked.
“Don’t you?”
I didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes—okay,” I eventually admitted. “There’s a valid point somewhere beneath the layers of insanity. But most of the things you described are… incremental evils, if that makes sense. The mistakes of one generation build upon the mistakes of the next and you get a society that no one really wanted. Saul is talking about massive, planned evil, however, and assuming that you end up with a better society as a result. Morality aside, how is that logical? It seems to me that they’re gathering the greediest and most power-hungry of all, and I don’t think they’ll play nice together when the smoke clears. Prudence is one of those designing this brave new world and she actually told me I could either join them or line up with the other sheep to be fleeced and slaughtered.”
Kiernan snorted. “She could at least try for originality. That line is one she stole straight from her papa. But yes, it was precisely that kind of callous disregard for those who chose not to follow the Cyrist Way that caused my dad to leave.” For a moment he sounded like his eight-year-old self—my dad was almost me dad, and the same anger simmered beneath his voice.
“So you ask me if I’m in?” he said. “Of course I’m in. I’ll do anything I can to bring them down. But Kate, I was serious when I said that my abilities are limited now. They’re much weaker than they were just a few years ago, especially when I’ve been using the key so regularly. I doubt I’ll be able to do much more than a short hop out of my timeline for the next month. Maybe more.”
“But you have knowledge that we lack, Kiernan. You can give us the information we need to get started. Let me know how to get in touch with you,” I said, squeezing his hand. “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll come to you.”
I felt him stiffen slightly. I wasn’t sure what I’d said, but I would have given strong odds that I had stirred up the Ghost of Kate Past.
“I’m in,” he repeated after a long pause. “When you need to reach me, there’s a stable point in Boston. It’s a corner in the back of a tobacco shop near Faneuil Square. It’s stable from 1901 to 1910, but I’m going back to July 17th, 1905. Anytime after that, Jess will know where I am. He’s a friend. He’s the only one who’s ever behind the counter, and he won’t be surprised if you walk out of his storeroom—you’ve done it plenty of times in the past. You can leave a message with him and I’ll leave my location with him, too, once I’ve settled on a new place.”
“So—did we have a game plan? Before, I mean.”
“Yes,” he said. “And we’d actually made some progress before you… disappeared. It’s conceptually pretty simple. We just need to go back and convince the CHRONOS historians to steer clear of Saul and Prudence and give up their keys.”
“And if they won’t?”
“We take them anyway,” he said with a crooked smile. “So far, you’d persuaded twice and stolen twice.”
I gave him a weak chuckle. “So I get to play repo man? Great.”
“You onc
e said you were going to get a T-shirt printed with ‘CHRONOS Repo Agent’ on the front.”
“Poor Kiernan. Listening to me must be like being around my dad’s uncle—he never remembers he’s told you the same joke a dozen times.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s interesting to see you from a different… angle, I guess. And a lot of what we were doing was really more detective work than repossession work. The first few were easy—Katherine already knew exactly when and where those historians landed.”
“Why do you remember all of this, and Katherine doesn’t?” I asked.
“You’d have to ask her,” Kiernan said. “But I’d think the only logical answer is that something happened when she wasn’t under the protection of a medallion.”
“Was she still alive in my other timeline? When I was eighteen?”
“Yes,” he answered. “And aside from a touch of arthritis in the winter, she was quite healthy.”
“That’s…,” I began.
“Confusing,” Kiernan finished. “I know. Katherine’s cancer isn’t a given in the timeline, even though you’d think it should be. Another thing to puzzle out after we’ve both gotten some rest.”
I nodded and started to get to my feet, but Kiernan pulled me back down. “Probably not a good idea, love. I’ll get your things. That medicine I gave you is pretty strong stuff and I doubt you’ve had much to eat.”
He was right. Even the slight movement had left me a bit dizzy, so I leaned back against the cabin wall. Kiernan walked over to the pile of cloth that had been my dress and held it up for my inspection. I wrinkled my nose. It was clearly a lost cause. “I do need to get the little booster cells that Connor put in the pockets and hemline—he might be able to reuse them, I guess.” Kiernan removed several small silver rectangles and stuffed them into my bag.
“Anything else?” he asked.
I shook my head. “If the dress doesn’t disappear when I leave, toss it in the fireplace.”
The boots, unfortunately, seemed to have survived without a scratch. He placed them and the bag in my lap and then knelt down in front of me. “I’m sorry—I know you had a bonnet, but I couldn’t find it.”
“I’m not worried about a stupid hat,” I laughed. “You were trying to get me out of Hotel Hell in one piece. And I don’t think I ever really said thank you.”
He gave me a sideways grin and squeezed my hand. “Actually, love, I believe you thanked me very thoroughly just a few minutes ago. But I wouldn’t say no to a second round.”
A blush rose to my cheeks and I looked down into the bag in my lap, trying to avoid his eyes. I fished out the CHRONOS key and had just pulled up the interface when he touched my wrist, breaking my concentration.
“This Trey,” Kiernan said, his voice rough. “Does he treat you well? Does he love you?”
“He does… or at least he did,” I amended, my mouth twisting into a wry half smile. “He seems convinced that he will again. That all I have to do is smile at him or something and everything will be as it was.”
“But you’re not convinced?” he asked.
I shook my head, and looked up into his eyes. “Can you recreate the same magic the second time around? I don’t know.”
Kiernan stared at me for a long moment and then leaned over, kissing me gently on the corner of the mouth. “But you have to try, right? Slán go fóill, a stór mo chroí.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what the words meant, but it was clearly a farewell. He squeezed my hand one last time, and then I looked down at the key and closed my eyes.
24
I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a computer monitor a second before Connor even realized I’d arrived, so I fully understood his look of shock. The entire right side of my neck was bandaged. There were two red patches just above the hairline. Several other red marks dotted my shoulders and there were even a few holes in the petticoat.
Connor stared at me for a moment and then his lower lip began to quiver. I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or cry and I’m not sure that he could tell, either.
“We simply can’t send you out to play in nice clothes, can we, Kate?” he said finally. “What on earth happened to you? Are you—”
Whatever else he was going to say was drowned out by a crazed volley of barking from downstairs, followed by the sound of the doorbell.
“You,” he said, pointing. “Do not move.”
I knew it was Katherine before Connor reached the door. That wasn’t Daphne’s stranger bark. It was her welcome-home bark, the one with a little “I missed you” whimper in the middle.
Katherine’s voice drifted up the stairs. “How did I end up in the yard without a CHRONOS key, Connor? Or a house key, for that matter?”
I lay back on the floor and closed my eyes.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed. The floral arrangement Trey had sent to Katherine was on my dresser. It seemed an eternity ago, and yet the flowers looked as fresh as when they’d first arrived. Daphne was curled up on the rug next to my bed and Katherine was sitting on the sofa near the window, reading what appeared to be a historical romance—the sort my mom sometimes referred to as a bodice-ripper or lusty-busty. It was the first time I’d seen Katherine reading anything that wasn’t on a computer screen or inside a CHRONOS diary.
She glanced over after a few minutes. “Oh, Kate. I’m glad to see you’re awake, dear. I was beginning to worry.”
“The little blue pills,” I said, my head still quite fuzzy. “In my bag. They’re… nice.”
“I see,” Katherine replied, a hint of a smile touching the edges of her mouth as she sat on the side of my bed. “And where did you get the nice little blue pills? Connor filled me in on the day before you left. I’ve told him what I now remember from our adventure at the Expo. But neither of us know what happened to you after I climbed out that window.”
My lips were very dry and I asked for a glass of water first. After a few sips, I put the glass back on the nightstand. “Kiernan,” I said. “He gave me the medicine. He got me out of the hotel.”
“But how?” she said. “He was a very bright little boy, but I don’t see how that hotel could possibly have been standing when he got back. All of the historical accounts that I read—”
“He was a remarkable little boy,” I interrupted. “And he’s a remarkable young man.”
I gave her a brief synopsis to fill in the missing pieces, having to pause repeatedly to keep my brain on track. It felt like I was reaching through fog to find phrases to string together, and they never came out quite the way I’d planned. I must have dozed off for a few minutes at some point, because when I opened my eyes, Katherine had returned to the couch and was again reading her book.
“Where was I?” I asked.
“You were explaining Kiernan’s plan—or was it your plan?—for repossessing CHRONOS keys, when you drifted off between words,” she said, setting the book aside on the sofa. “After what you’ve been through the past few days, I was a bit afraid you might decide that you were done with us. You’ve got your life back for the most part and Prudence seems to have given you at least a limited degree of—immunity, I guess. You could walk away, you know.”
The thought hadn’t really occurred to me, but now that she’d spoken the words aloud, I was surprised that it hadn’t. I could return to my life before Katherine showed up with the medallion. Mom was back, Dad was Dad again—
“Charlayne?” I asked.
Katherine looked confused for a moment and then shook her head. “I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure nothing has changed for her.”
I asked her to bring me the computer, and after a brief search I pulled up the same wedding photo, the Cyrist emblem clear and distinct against Charlayne’s dark skin. Saving Katherine had fixed my life, but whatever happened with Charlayne’s family was entirely separate.
I pushed the computer to the side and looked back at Katherine. “Connor’s kids? The
y’re still gone, right?”
She nodded.
“Then you’re wrong—I really don’t have a choice.” The truth was, even if no one I cared about was personally affected in this timeline, I knew that I could never just sit by and watch as the Cyrists drew more converts and moved closer to some sort of mass genocide. Walking away wasn’t an option.
“So—what about you?” I asked, shifting slightly in the bed. The medicine was fading, which was both good and bad—words were less slippery, but the pain was also returning. “Do you remember anything from the day after the shift… after Simon?”
“I remember holding out the medallion to that foul cretin. And Trey…” She stopped, giving me a sad smile before continuing. “Trey’s car had just pulled up. I didn’t see any choice other than to have faith. Faith that Trey would move any mountain he had to in order to save you from Simon. Faith that Connor would work his magic with the boundary. Faith that you would be able to fix this timeline. I’ve never been good at that—at giving up control to others—but it seems to have worked this time.”
“But you remember being in the hotel and running from Holmes… and everything that happened that night. Isn’t that… disconcerting? I mean, you have two sets of memories.”
“It is a rather odd feeling,” she said. “But all of that happened so long ago. I do remember wondering whose daughter you would be—Deborah’s or Prudence’s—when the two of them were small. My bet was on Prudence, given the resemblance, until she disappeared.”
Katherine fell silent for a moment and then asked, “Prudence wasn’t in on it, then? She was trying to save me?”
I debated lying to protect her feelings, but I knew it wouldn’t serve much purpose. “She was saving you in order to protect herself, Katherine. And maybe to protect Mom. It definitely wasn’t out of any sentimental ties to you, or to me, for that matter. I got the feeling she thinks you traded her off in some sort of a custody battle. But I do think she’ll keep them from going after you again—at least until she finds out I’m still trying to stop the Cyrists.”