When I peeked again after counting to thirty, Oz had continued down the street.
The cobblestones made my steps unsteady, tripped me more than once before he turned down a less crowded alley, then onto a different street. A man stood on the stoop of a legal office, and Oz headed toward him. When my eyes focused, the glasses followed my gaze, analyzing the time, date, and place, and running facial recognition on the man before displaying details in my peripheral vision.
James Puckle. Lawyer. Three years hence, inventor of the world’s first machine gun technology. Married twice. Children with the first wife, Mary (decd), none with the second, Elizabeth, wed two months hence.
None of it meant anything to me. The glasses and my bio-tat gave no indication that today would be special, not in Norwich, not for James Puckle. He had impacted the world with his technology, but not yet.
Not yet.
My mouth went dry at the thought, recalling the sonic waver nestled against Oz’s hip. At the memory of Booth’s random comment about changing the past, at the realization that I now knew that it had been done before—by my brother. The chance that he was the only one seemed remote now, watching Oz move with such purpose.
Before my imagination ran wild, my classmate swerved into a young woman who had bent to retrieve a bundle of rosemary she’d dropped into the street.
Her coloring didn’t match the rest of the commoners in town; her skin was shaded an olive color similar to my own, and her long, silky black hair was pinned into a knot at the back of her neck. When Oz banged into her she toppled sideways and right into James Puckle, who caught her in his arms and righted her, concern softening his rigid features. His concern shifted to irritation as his gaze swept the street, probably looking for Oz, before he asked her something in a voice too soft to be overheard. She nodded.
The wisp of Oz’s coattails turned at the end of the street and I hurried after him, turning right to discover an empty, smelly alleyway. He had returned to Sanchi.
The scene I’d witnessed left no doubt in my mind that Oz was up to no good. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an observation. He’d interfered. Pushed that woman so that she and Puckle interacted. Touched the past, as I had done the other day. I knew why I had broken the rules—to meet my True Companion. But Caesarion was personal; I wanted to save him because of my feelings, but it didn’t mean the rules that governed the Historians weren’t smart or in the best interest of humanity as a whole. I would never jeopardize our lives on Genesis or our future.
Nothing I had done so far would change anything significant. What I’d witnessed a moment ago, though … I had a feeling it could. Would.
It left me with the lingering question of whether Oz felt the same way about what we’d been taught at the Academy, or if he had different plans altogether for those of us living in Genesis.
Chapter Fifteen
Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)
This morning we were working on private reflections, entering our individual conclusions on the Triangle trip, and this afternoon we’d have our last supervised reflection on the event.
Our footsteps and hushed conversations banged off the walls of the empty hallway as my class made our way to private reflection. I’d read old mystery novels where characters overheard conversations through heating ducts or in sewers—the entire Academy felt that way. At least our dormitories, with our blankets and furniture, soaked up some of the noise.
The seven of us found the main Archive room empty, with the exception of a third-year boy whose name escaped me. He scooted past us and out the door without a word. Oz escaped to the private carrel he had on permanent reserve before the rest of us dropped our things. We spread out, two or three to a table, all subdued in the early morning.
It was my first chance to get back to the Archives since following Oz to Norwich, and I wanted to jump right into figuring out what in the System had happened there, but the Triangle reflection came first. There was no way I was ever going back into that memory if it could be helped, and if our deep reflections weren’t approved at our end-of-month review, we had to redo the observation.
The Triangle Fire had been reflected to death—what it meant for women’s rights, workers’ rights, the development of unions, the reinforcement of greedy businessmen by the American court system, the horrible truth that people had to see injustice with their own eyes before it meant anything at all. Those truths had been established long ago and dissertated by Historians before me.
We were expected to bring new observations to the table during deep reflection, and after fifty years, that required focusing on smaller aspects. Which meant, in this instance, my distractions gave me an advantage. Deep reflection was one of the only times my tendency to obsess over the sidelines came into use. While in the past, we were supposed to record what they assigned, but in the Archives any focus was fair game.
The first original reflection I gathered was about the lives of the survivors—how humans had the capability to go on in the face of personal tragedy. There were diary entries in the system from later in Rosie’s second life, along with multiple interviews about the fire, and in every one, her guilt over leaving her friends and coworkers behind oozed from the words. She’d never forgiven herself for surviving, but she hadn’t disgraced her friends’ sacrifice by wasting the years she’d been gifted by my brother. She had fought for workers’ rights, and then women’s rights, and later, civil and gay rights. Rosie Shapiro had spent a lifetime making her good fortune count.