Time's Divide (The Chronos Files Book 3)

  Tate catches my expression and shakes his head firmly. “No. When you go back to your time, you’ll take my key along with this one.” His voice seems different, more solemn than before. “That’s how it must be. I’ve seen much, learned much, fought some good battles, and loved two women well—that’s more than many can say. You’ll either fix this and I’ll have a life worth living, or else you won’t and my life is done. I don’t agree with Campbell on much, but he’s right about not wanting to live as a ghost. And if the only tie holding me to this earth is that medallion, a ghost is all I’ll ever be.”

  OBJECTIVIST CLUB

  WASHINGTON, EC

  September 20, 9:40 a.m.

  A few people are lounging outside the pool or swimming laps when I blink in, but the area isn’t crowded yet. I stroll confidently past the desk and through the main lobby, trying to remember which turns I made earlier when I was walking with Tate. When I step inside the Transpod, I hold my hand against the spongy side wall.

  “Welcome, guest! I’m Alisa. Scanning DNA for family membership. Please wait.” After a moment, she continues, “Client DNA linked with a sixty-one percent probability to account Rand02. If this is correct, please state your name and destination.”

  “Prudence K. Rand. Please locate members of account Rand02.”

  “Saul Rand and Arturo Rand are in the Rand family quarters.”

  “Please take me there. Level ten.” I add the last bit just in case she has any questions as to whether I’m authorized, but the pod is already moving.

  “My pleasure.”

  I’d feel better if Kiernan was along for backup, but when we discussed this earlier, we couldn’t come up with any logical reason a day laborer would be in the living quarters without being logged into the system as a request.

  When the pod doors open, I turn left instead of right this time. The vertigo sensation from looking down at the levels below seems worse now, probably because I’m tired. Deep-down-to-the-very-bone tired. I keep my eyes trained on that center strip of carpet so I don’t feel as wobbly.

  Once I arrive at the end of the hallway, I press my hand against the wall as I saw Tate do earlier. There’s a faint chime, and I wait, tugging nervously at my toga.

  The door slides up, and an elderly man looks out. He seems confused and glances back at Pseudo-Saul, who’s a few steps behind. He also appears puzzled. I have to remind myself that even though I remember our meeting in Campbell’s apartment, it still hasn’t happened for him.

  I paste on a smile I hope is close to the beatific one Prudence wears in most of the Cyrist art. “Arturo Rand? Saul Rand?”

  “Yes! Yes, Sister Prudence.” The old man bows so low that I’m scared he’s going to tip over. After a moment, Pseudo-Saul bows, too.

  “I am here for the medallions you’ve been guarding.”

  Arturo gives me a confused look as he pulls himself back to standing. Then he waves his hand in a shooing motion at his grandson. “Go! Bring them to me.”

  Pseudo-Saul nods vigorously and disappears into one of the other rooms, leaving me with the old man. The silence is odd and heavy, but I’m not sure what to say.

  “You’ve . . . done well . . .” Sir? My son? How would Pru address him? “You’ve done well, Arturo Rand. Brother Cyrus thanks you for your service.”

  His smile is shaky and teary-eyed, and it suddenly occurs to me that this is my great-great-grandfather. Well, my sort-of great-great-grandfather, since there are now a few broken branches in the Rand family tree. Would that mean he’s my 61 percent great-great-grandfather?

  Pseudo-Saul is back now, holding a very plain white tub with a dark red top. It reminds me of this plastic cake holder Mom has, aside from the thin line of bright blue light leaking out of the seal. I take the canister and pry open the lid. The light is nearly blinding. Squinting, I tilt the container around to get a better view of the contents. There are a lot of keys in here. I almost feel like I should count them, but that would be pointless when we don’t know for certain how many there are supposed to be.

  Arturo seems to have picked up on my urge to count. “They’re all inside.” He gives his grandson a nervous look, and something in the exchange tells me they’re beginning to get suspicious.

  “We were told . . .” Arturo begins as I pull up the meeting place Kiernan and I established earlier—2:30 a.m. tonight, across the pool from the Juvapods.

  “In the letter,” Pseudo-Saul stresses the word. “The one from Brother Cyrus? We were told the keys would simply disappear at the appointed time.”

  “Brother Cyrus decided that would be unkind. You’ve given so much, the least I can do is come and give you my blessing.”

  I lock in the stable point and blink, expecting to see Kiernan’s face when I open my eyes, but it’s still the eerie, sculpted face of Pseudo-Saul.

  Okay, aside from ruining my dramatic exit, this is scary. Not just his weird face, but the fact that I’m still here. This is the first time a blink has failed, except for a few cases when I was rushing and didn’t fully lock in the stable point. I try to keep a neutral expression on my face, glad that they’re too far away to hear my heart pounding.

  Why now?

  Katherine’s comment about resting between jumps echoes in my mind. How many miles and years have I traveled in the past twenty-four hours? From the hotel to 1905 Georgia, here, back to Georgia, here, back to Georgia again for the stupid shoes, back here, back to the hotel, back here—and four or five local short hops in between. Over two thousand years . . . and at least that many miles. And that’s just today . . .

  I look up and add a hearty, “Brother Cyrus thanks you for your service,” hoping to make it look like the delay was intentional. My hands are shaking, which makes it hard to lock in the stable point, but I finally do. And even though it’s stupid and I know it has nothing to do with whether or not I get out of here, I blink extra hard.

  OBJECTIVIST CLUB

  WASHINGTON, EC

  September 20, 2308, 2:30 a.m.

  This time, it is Kiernan I see when I open my eyes. He’s a few feet away, still in his Boudini tux.

  My knees buckle almost instantly, and I collapse onto the squishy sand-stuff, glad for the soft landing it provides.

  “That’s it?” he asks as I push myself up to sitting.

  I lift up the edge of the lid so he can see the keys inside. “Kind of anticlimactic, huh? After all this, you’d think they’d be stored in the Ark of the Covenant or something more dramatic than twenty-fourth-century Tupperware.”

  His eyes narrow as he looks at my face. “Something happened. Did they resist? You look—”

  “No. Although they seemed a little suspicious since this wasn’t quite the magical disappearance outlined in the message handed down to them from Brother Cyrus.”

  He just stares, waiting for me to go on.

  I sigh. “You remember that standing rule I insisted upon, where you always jump first, just in case?”

  “Yes?”

  “We might need to revisit it. The first time I tried to blink out, nothing happened.”

  “You’re sure you had the stable point locked in?”

  “I’m certain. It worked the second time.”

  I don’t have to tell him why I’m worried. He battles this problem every time he jumps.

  “Bloody hell. If you had trouble on a local jump eight hours into the past . . .” Kiernan sinks down into the sand next to me. “But you’ve been hopping around like a grasshopper the past few days. Has this ever—”

  “No. Never. And I’m really hoping it was only a fluke. Give me your key.”

  He does. I transfer the stable point at the hotel that’s preset for my 5:30 p.m. return.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea for me to meet you there?” he asks after watching the stable point for a moment. “Given Max’s general lack of affection for me and the nasty-looking weapons on the bed next to your friend, I’m thinking—”

  “No.” I really don
’t want to get into a squabble with him right now, but I’m still worried about what he’s hiding. I also think it’s quite possible that the key will fail him, too, and I’m not about to leave him here the way Prudence did.

  “We need to go to the same place,” I say, “and your cabin is a longer jump, both chronologically and geographically. The hotel seems like our best bet, since Simon is watching Katherine’s house. I’ll jump in first, and I’ll tell them you’re coming before I step out of the stable point. If Max doesn’t like it, I’ll kick his surly ass.”

  “Under normal circumstances, that might happen, even though Max is twice your size. But you’re exhausted and dressed in a toga that isn’t exactly cut for kicking anything. Katherine’s place might be better, Simon or no.”

  I can’t decipher the look in his eyes—worry, definitely, but there’s a smidgen of guilt, too. That’s ridiculous. If the possibility I’d run out of jump juice didn’t occur to me, why should it have occurred to him?

  “I have backup. Trey’s there, too. And no one else in the room is very happy with Max right now.”

  “Why?”

  I look up from the stable point and fill him in on the whole Eve fiasco. “Did you know they’d planted Eve and Patrick as part of this Fifth Column?”

  “No.” Kiernan’s lip curls slightly. “But I’m not a bit surprised. Patrick is a good little Cyrist soldier. Does what he’s told, when he’s told. And Eve usually does what her daddy tells her, so . . .” He gives his head a shake and says, “Fine, since you have backup. Let’s jump to the hotel.”

  Except we don’t. I try three times before Kiernan closes his hand over my key.

  “If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s not going to, love. Voice of experience. It’s kind of like a car battery. You cranking the engine over and over won’t help.”

  I sink down onto the floor, resting my head on my bent knees as I try to steady my breathing. It doesn’t work, and I decide to just let it out.

  “How long?” I pound my fists into my thighs. “How long am I stuck here? I can’t be stuck here! There’s too much left to do!”

  He sits down next to me. “It’s not like the clock is running back home. You can jump in at the same time you planned all along. It’s just a temporary setback.”

  “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “I don’t know anything for certain. You and I could both explode in the next two seconds. Or the swimming pool over there could have a clone of the Loch Ness monster swimmin’ about on the bottom, ready to spring out and have us for a midnight snack.”

  He’s trying to make me laugh, but I’m tired enough and jumpy enough that I cast a wary glance at the pool before looking back at him.

  “But for right now, you make it back in. Keep watching past five thirty.”

  He’s right. A few seconds after five thirty, I see myself step away from the stable point, toward Trey. I’m holding the keys.

  “See? I have a lot of experience with that key failing. If it’s not permanent in my case, when I can barely use the bloody thing, it won’t be permanent in yours. You’ll get some rest, and later today . . .”

  “It could change, Kiernan. We still have several hours before I go to level ten and get these keys from Pseudo-Saul. He was looking a little suspicious by the time I blinked out. If we’re still here by the pool ‘later today,’ someone’s going to find the two of us with a bucketful of CHRONOS medallions. Then they find out I’m sixty-one percent from the family Rand, and Pseudo-Saul and my semigreat-great-granddad show up to take the keys back, and we’re at square one again.”

  I feel panic nibbling at the back of my brain, so I breathe deeply and close my eyes. Kiernan doesn’t speak, but I can feel him watching me.

  “I’ll rest here for the next few hours. If I can’t jump before the cleaning crew comes in, I’ll hide back in the damned Juvapod, and you take the keys. To the cabin, if you think it’s safest. Or take them to Katherine’s or the hotel. Anywhere is better than having them here. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”

  I shove the container of keys into Kiernan’s hands. “Hold on to them while I sleep.”

  He sucks in a breath, staring down at the container like it’s a bomb, gripping the edges so tightly that I can see every vein on top of his hands. His dark eyes are angry . . . furious. I pull away from him instinctively. After a moment, he shoves the container in my direction so hard that the sand-stuff piles up in a wedge behind it. Then he storms off into the dark, cursing.

  What in hell was that about?

  I fall back into the sand and look up at the blackness. I really want to follow him and ask what I did to precipitate such a drama fest, but I’m too tired. When he doesn’t come back after a few minutes, I roll onto my stomach, hook one arm protectively around the bucket of keys, and close my eyes.

  It’s still dark when I wake up. Kiernan’s sitting next to me, head resting on his bent knees. I prop myself up and check the time on my CHRONOS key. A little before five.

  Eventually Kiernan looks over at me. I can’t tell for certain in the dim light, but I think he’s been crying.

  “I can’t do it.” His voice is filled with self-loathing. “I swore I’d do anything, but . . . I can’t.”

  “You can’t what, Kiernan?”

  “I told Simon I’d make sure the keys end up with him. And you, too. He wants you as his backup—”

  “His backup Sister Prudence. Yes, Kiernan. I made the same promise. I should have told you, but . . . I thought . . .”

  I don’t finish the statement, since what I thought was that he’d object to me making that kind of sacrifice. But apparently not, so I shift tracks.

  “Simon said he’d be sure the people I care about are safe. If we can’t stop this, the chaos after the virus could be just as dangerous, and . . . Simon would target them. But it’s my fallback option, the very last resort, if we can’t stop him. You were thinking about giving him the keys now? Before we even—”

  “No! But I won’t lie. Part of me wants to.”

  “So is this how I end up in Rio? You hand me and the keys over to Simon?”

  His voice is barely above a whisper. “That wasn’t you in Rio.”

  “Yes. It’s me. Connor tried to argue that it could just as easily be Pru, but—”

  “Not Pru. But not you either. It’s my Kate.”

  I’m so stunned for a moment that I can’t speak.

  “But . . . that’s . . . not possible. Is it? You said it yourself—that when you saw me on the Metro that day, you knew if I existed, she couldn’t.”

  “You just saw this other Saul, the one you said looks like a statue or something. The other Saul Rand still exists in this timeline, too, back in 2035, right?”

  “But it’s not the same Saul! The Culling changed the timeline. A different ancestor here, a different one there, over several generations.”

  “And you aren’t exactly the same Kate. Damned close. Close enough to fool me, close enough that I can’t not love you, as much as I’ve tried. Genetically you’re probably indistinguishable. But a different experience here, a different one there, over several years . . .”

  “But . . . how? How could it happen?”

  Kiernan runs his hands through his hair and laces his fingers behind his neck. “Some of this is just my best guess, okay? Simon and Pru will both lie if the whim strikes them, whether they’ve got a reason to or not. The time shift, the one where my Kate disappeared? Simon was supposed to kill her.”

  He stops for a moment, like he needs to bolster his courage for the next part. “I think he did kill her. I’d almost swear to it, based on what I saw through the key that night, but I took an awful whack to the head earlier, so I’m not really sure of anything that happened. I think he killed her, and afterward, as he’s about to yank her key, he gets a better idea. He goes back and stops himself from killing her, ’cause he’s thinking she could take over for Pru running their Cyrist errands. I mean, they were pretty much o
ut of hours they could steal from her younger self. Simon said the plan all along was to tell me, to get Kate back to me eventually, but then . . . well, he started questioning my loyalty when he found out I was helping you.”

  “Okay, stop. I guess that explains how she’s around, but how did we get me? This me? Did Simon know that would happen?”

  “It actually wouldn’t have happened if Pru had done the job Saul assigned to her during that time shift. Simon says she was supposed to go back and kill Katherine when she landed in 1969. But . . . it’s like Pru said back at the Expo, remember? Doing that would have erased her own existence. And your mom’s.”

  Kiernan lies back in the sand and stares up into the darkness. It looks like he needs a moment, and I’m kind of okay with that, because my brain is already reeling.

  “This next part,” he says, “is what I’ve managed to piece together from being around Pru during some of her less . . . lucid . . . moments when she doesn’t realize she’s letting something slip. You’ve seen how she is now. It’s hard to tell how much is real and how much is fantasy. One night, Pru was going on and on about killing herself, and I’m saying no, you shouldn’t, but she’s saying she already has killed herself, back when she was fourteen, and she’s sad about it. Wishes she hadn’t. So my point is, a lot of what Pru says is just plain crazy. But . . . this is the only chain of events that makes sense.”

  Kiernan pauses, and I can see that he’s trying to decide how best to explain all of this. I feel a time travel headache coming on just watching him. As much as I want to understand, part of me wishes I could just tell him to skip the explanations.

  “Imagine for a minute,” he says, “the timeline before they started inserting any of their Cyrist nonsense. Katherine landed in 1969, had the twins, Pru disappears fourteen years later. And Katherine had cancer in that timeline, just like she does now. Except there’s no Connor with her because they never met, so Katherine’s all alone when she gets sick. Maybe your mum never married because Katherine had no reason to set her up with your da, so there’s no you, and despite their differences, your mum ends up taking Katherine in during those last few months.”