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

  But Tate? Seeing him each day at work is like watching a balloon slowly deflate. He clearly hoped talking about his research would be a good thing. That he’d be happier. But it seems to have only reminded him of what he’s lost.

  Campbell’s right. Working inside, working here in this time, is sucking the life out of Tate. He isn’t cut out to answer questions on the comm from school kids. He needs to be out there hacking something down. Trees, other Vikings, whatever.

  “No, Anya. I didn’t know Mother sent him a note.”

  Although, now that she has me thinking about it, this would explain one of Campbell’s comments at his New Year’s Eve party, something about a warning. I need to ask Tate about that.

  But Anya is glaring at me now, angry tears in her eyes. “Your mother didn’t send him the bloody note. She didn’t send the one I got either! Haven’t you been paying attention to anything I’ve said the past few weeks?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Anya. I’m sorry. It’s just…”

  I spend the next few minutes trying to calm her down. Telling her I’ll keep an open mind until I finish watching the stupid diaries.

  Even though she still seems a little hurt, she gives me a hug when she leaves (at exactly three o’clock), saying she’ll call to schedule a visit in July. I hug her back, a little harder than usual, partly because she’s the only member of my future family who bothered to visit.

  But mostly because—if things go the way I’m hoping—I won’t be here for anyone to visit in July.

  REDWING DINING HALL

  OBJECTIVIST CLUB

  WASHINGTON, EC

  June 30, 2306, 8:32 p.m.

  It’s the first time I’ve invited Tate to one of these little dinners with Campbell. I’m glad to have him along. While I’ve gotten used to Morgen, he’s still…slimy. I don’t like dealing with him. But since he’s the only person I know with a CHRONOS key, the squeamish feeling lost out to curiosity when he asked me to dinner back in February. And it’s lost out again and again every few weeks since then.

  Not that Campbell has ever made any actual advances. His eyes cover plenty of territory, but he’s always a perfect gentleman, aside from the occasional innuendo. Of course, it’s occurred to me that the man owns the equipment that scans me to create the clothes I wear. He owns the Juvapods and the rooms where I sleep and where I shower. For all I know he’s got an anatomically correct Pru-Bot back in his room.

  Blech.

  Morgen carves another chunk from a barely cooked steak that I’m pretty sure came from a real cow, and shoves it, still dripping, into his mouth. I stare down at my own half-eaten salad and try to think of an indirect way to work our conversation around to the topic I need to discuss.

  But then, Campbell already knows why I brought Tate. Screw it. I’ll just dive in.

  I lower my voice just above a whisper and lean toward Tate, hoping to keep the conversation at our table only. “Campbell has a CHRONOS key.”

  “What?” Tate looks back and forth from me to Campbell. “That’s not possible.”

  Campbell looks up from his cow carcass, eyebrows arched. “Lower your voice, Poulsen.” His eyes slide around to the other tables. “And Pru, have a bit of discretion. Can’t this wait until after-dinner drinks?”

  Which means we have to wait over half an hour, since no dinner is complete for Campbell without at least one dessert. Tate and I mostly sit there in silence after a few lame attempts at chitchat. He keeps giving me looks that practically scream why the hell didn’t you tell me?

  I’m not sure why I didn’t tell him. I’ve nearly told him a dozen times in the past few months. I think the real issue is that I’m not entirely sure Tate won’t run off and tattle to CHRONOS, and Tate knowing that Campbell knows he knows about the key seems to make that less likely.

  Once we’re in Campbell’s apartment, Cyrus, his fat Dobie, greets us with a mixture of snarls aimed at me and Tate, and whimpers aimed at Campbell.

  “Okay, okay, boy. I know. Yes, I brought you something.” Campbell reaches into his pocket and flings a chunk of meat across the room. Cyrus runs off—okay, waddles off just a tiny bit faster than usual—with his long nails clacking against the floor as he chases down his prey.

  Campbell’s living room is a weird mix of old and new. The inner wall is wood paneled—dark, with ornate carving around the top—and his taste in art is boring. Fruit in bowls and fat naked cherubs. The outside wall is more interesting, since it’s nothing but a floor-to-ceiling curved window. He has a fabulous view of the city, with the Washington Monument and Reflecting Pool off in the distance. They still call it a pool, even though it’s larger than some lakes now. The monument sticks up straight out of the water like a big white toothpick.

  Tate refuses the offer of a drink, but I need a little courage-booster.

  “Took her long enough to figure it out,” Campbell says, as he hands me a ruby-red concoction that looks and tastes a bit like cherry cough syrup. “I was beginning to think she couldn’t see the light at all.”

  “Not true. I saw the key at the New Year’s Eve party. I just didn’t know you well enough to…trust you.”

  Okay, that last bit is bullshit. I still don’t trust him. But I do think I can manipulate him enough to get my hands on that key.

  “So what about me?” Tate says. “You didn’t trust me either?”

  I start to respond, but he’s moved on to Campbell. “How did you get it, Morgen? I work at CHRONOS. Hell, Pru, you work there, too. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t report this.”

  “See? That’s exactly why I didn’t say anything before, Tate! And you want a reason? I could give you a dozen, including all of the people who died, but let’s just pick the one closest to home. You’re miserable at CHRONOS, and maybe I can fix all of this. Maybe if you show me how to use the key, I can figure out how to send a message forward so we can stop my mother.”

  “Which means she never goes back in time, which effectively erases you, or at least this you, and then you’re not around to send the message,” Tate says. “At least, that’s the most obvious of the possible conundrums it could create. We don’t know. Right now, the situation seems to be stable, Pru. Maybe the critics are right. Maybe we should never have screwed around with time travel in the first place—”

  “Oh, boo hoo,” Campbell says. “Maybe Eve should never have plucked the damn apple from the tree…or maybe Adam should have had the balls to pluck it first. Maybe we should never have split the atom…or maybe we should have wiped out all our enemies when we were the only ones who had the bomb. You can go round and round, but none of this matters once the genie is out of the bottle. Someone will use that technology again. Only question is whether you and I will still be alive to benefit from it. And it’s hardly Pru’s fault that she’s stuck here. Would you rob the child of the chance to meet her father?”

  I narrow my eyes and give Campbell a warning glance. He was doing fine until he shifted over to the poor child crap. Let me handle Tate, old man.

  “I should have mentioned this to you before, when I first suspected he had the key. But I wasn’t sure how you’d react…and I need your help, Tate. Campbell has the key, but he doesn’t know how to use it. You do. You can help me go back. Maybe I can figure out a way to fix things so that you still have a CHRONOS. So you can get back to…there. To her.”

  I have to look away at the last part, because I don’t like thinking about this woman, this girl, the one I’m pretty sure Tate thinks about when he’s kissing me. I have my pride. I don’t want to be his Plan B, the girl he settled for, but not the one he really wanted.

  “God, Pru! Is that what this is about?” Tate says. “No, okay? I don’t have a future with Maya. She married someone else.”

  “But you could change that, right? Fix it?”

  “Absolutely not. I’m done with tweaking history, okay? I just want to do what I’m good at. What the scientists at CHRONOS designed me to do. Would I go back to that time p
eriod? Yes. In a heartbeat. If I could, I’d stay there. But not back to that village. Too many memories. Some good, but far too many of them bad.”

  Campbell is watching us over the rim of his glass of green stuff. “Are you done with the little lovers’ spat? All patched up now?”

  Tate tosses a few choice words at him and then turns back to me. “Pru, if you want to try this, if you want to go back, it has to be for you. And it’s most likely a moot point. I doubt you can even use the key.”

  “But I did use it once. The way you’ve described using the key is exactly what I did. I pulled up that black square. It looked all fuzzy, white specks everywhere, but that was the debris in the air as more of the building caved in. I saw it floating around me when I blinked in, as I was falling. I don’t think it was a fluke, like the historians you mentioned. I felt my eyes locking on the point and then I blinked. I blinked hard, because the car…” I shake my head. I still can’t talk about that. “There are other stable points, right? Other points on the key that I could travel to? Maybe those historians who got stranded would help me. I mean, they can’t be too happy about it.”

  Tate gives Campbell a look I can’t quite decipher, but he seems less resolute about reporting all of this than he was before. “This key could be a replica, Pru. It wouldn’t be the first time Campbell has pulled a prank that no one else would ever imagine was funny.”

  I shake my head. “No. I don’t think so. I’ve touched it. It’s…” I can’t really explain it, so I just shrug. “It feels the same.”

  He turns to Campbell. “Let me see it.”

  Campbell weighs the situation for a moment, and then pulls the key out of his inner coat pocket. The lime-green light fills his palm, but he pulls his hand back when Tate reaches out to take it. “Now you’ve seen it. I’m not fool enough to hand it to you.”

  Tate rolls his eyes. “Morgen, if I want to take that from you, I’ll take it. Your guard dog over there is way past his prime, and even if Pru decided to help you, the two of you combined couldn’t stop me.”

  It’s a valid point, and Campbell knows it. “And now you see why I was hesitant to bring him in, Pru. Big Viking bully.”

  Tate takes the key and runs his finger across the surface. I can’t see the interface when he holds it, but he’s navigating with his eyes, like I did with the reading device.

  After a couple of minutes, he slides it into my hand. “It’s real, as best I can tell. What do you see?”

  I focus on the display and my mouth goes dry when it pulls up that same black static-filled square. “It’s still bringing up the CHRONOS building…after—”

  Tate puts his hand between my eyes and the interface.

  “Relax, okay? You’re all tense. It’s defaulting back to that stable point, so you’re going to have to navigate away from it yourself. I’m not sure you’d make it through that fall a second time though, so don’t blink.”

  “Thanks. Now I really, really feel like I need to blink, even though I didn’t before.”

  “Then look away. Look down at the floor. And don’t worry too much. A short blink won’t do it. Never did for me, anyway. Okay, now just let your eyes lose focus a bit…pull out. Do you see the little red dot at the top?”

  I don’t see it at first, but then I relax my eyes a bit more. “Yeah. It’s there.”

  “Okay, shift focus to that. What do you see now?”

  “Squares. A bunch of them. Mostly black, but there’s a green one at the top.”

  “Yeah, the black ones are stable points for night jumps. Hand it back and let me find one for you.”

  “You’re not going to let her jump now, are you?” Campbell asks. “Without any sort of a plan?”

  “Of course not,” Tate says, as his eyes scroll across the interface. “First, I’m going to see if she actually can use it. I need to test two things.” He stands up and takes a few steps away from the couch, then tries to enter something on the display a few times. “Nope. I can’t do it,” he says, handing the key back to me. “Let’s see if you can.”

  “If I can what?”

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

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

  “Okay,” I say to Tate. “What next?”

  “Focus and blink.”

  I do, but nothing happens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So what’s next?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why privately?” Tate asks.

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

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

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

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

  “What’s wrong???
? I ask.

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

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

  “And you reported this?” Tate asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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