11
I put the book down by the computer and rubbed my eyes. “This is the world’s most boring version of the Travel Channel. And the History Channel. Combined. And I don’t much care for either of those…”
Connor snorted. “You have real-time views of hundreds of spots in history, all around the world, and you’re bored?”
The Log of Stable Points was as deceptively thin as one of the diaries that I had been reading, but it contained even more information. It was similar to watching a small video, but these were live webcams, as best I could tell. I used the visual interface to choose a date and time and then blinked my eyes to select, at which point the translucent “screen” in front of me would display the geographical location at that specific date, in real time. It might sound cool in principle, but…
“Have you actually watched any of these?” I asked Connor.
“No,” he admitted, continuing to scan the document on his screen as he talked. “I can see text on the page, but the earpiece that you’re wearing is what triggers your ability to hear and see the video. I’ve tried it and I get occasional sound and images that break up every few seconds. It gives me a stomachache. Katherine can’t really pull them in clearly either—we think it’s because CHRONOS still had a lock on her signal when the explosion or whatever it was happened. But she has described some of them to me…”
“Did she tell you that most of these videos are of a deserted alley? Or woods? Or a dark broom closet?”
“Would you rather appear suddenly in the middle of a crowd? On top of someone? In some of the eras you’re observing, that would be a quick ticket to burning at the stake, you know.”
“Yeah, well, I just spent five minutes watching a squirrel in a park in Boston. Supposedly on May 5th, 1869, but it could just as easily have been yesterday. He looked like a very modern squirrel to me.”
“Then you wasted five minutes.” Connor sighed. “Focus on the elements that are constant, Kate. The squirrel isn’t going to help you locate that stable point when you start doing test jumps, unless it happens to be a stuffed squirrel.”
I picked the book back up and was scrolling through to find something remotely interesting when Daphne began barking, followed by the doorbell. A few seconds later, I heard Katherine’s voice from below.
“Kate, you have a gentleman caller.”
I rolled my eyes. “How is it that a grandmother from the twenty-fourth century sounds like she’s from a Charles Dickens novel?”
Connor shrugged. “Maybe both eras seem like ancient history to her. Could you tell me the difference between what they called a boyfriend in 1620 and in 1820?”
This time I gave in to the temptation to stick out my tongue, and Connor surprised me by actually laughing.
I had purposely avoided thinking about whether Trey would come by like he said he would, mostly because I didn’t want to feel let down if it didn’t happen. The previous day had been too devastating for me to get my hopes up about anything. Still, I was ridiculously happy to know he’d kept his promise, and it took a conscious effort to keep from taking the stairs two at a time.
I could hear Katherine’s voice in the kitchen. “So kind of you, Trey. Connor will certainly be pleased—he has an insatiable sweet tooth.” She turned as I walked into the kitchen, two iced coffee drinks in her hands. “I’ll just take these upstairs and leave you two young people to talk.”
“Hi, Kate.” Trey was crouched down, petting Daphne, whose tail was wagging happily. “I see they found you something to wear besides your school uniform.”
I nodded, hit by an inexplicable wave of shyness. Despite everything that had happened the day before, we were still only a few hours removed from being strangers. “Connor is a surprisingly good shopper, as it turns out.” I took one of the two remaining drinks, both of which were topped with whipped cream and a drizzle of caramel, and settled down on the window seat. “Thanks. How did you know that caramel and coffee is my favorite flavor combination?”
“Well—the coffee part I knew from yesterday. Caramel was just a lucky guess.” He sat down next to me and his smile faded a bit. “So… are you okay? I mean, that was some hellacious day you had. I was thinking about it on the drive home and, well, I was worried about you. Kind of wished I could call or text you or something, but…”
“Hold on.” I walked over to the counter near the telephone and found a notepad. I jotted down the screen name and free email account I had set up that morning while I was ordering some additional clothes and other necessities.
“These are both active now,” I told him. “No phone yet—we’re going to get one of those pay-as-you-go things next time Connor goes out. Katherine and Connor had to do some creative banking yesterday once they realized what happened. She kept a lot of cash on hand and his accounts are still active—I mean, he still exists, it’s just that some things are different. I’m beginning to wonder how long we have before someone out there figures out that we are, technically, squatters. The house is shielded from the time shift, but… if Katherine doesn’t own it now, someone must.”
“Yeah, you’d think,” he said. “So did you get all of your answers? It looked like the conversation was headed toward choppy waters when I left.”
I shrugged. “I actually decided I wasn’t up to that conversation last night. But we’ve made up for lost time since I woke up this morning.” I began filling him in on the day’s events and revelations, then hesitated a bit when I reached the part about the Cyrists.
“What religion are you, Trey?”
“Uh—Presbyterian, I guess? We don’t really go regularly—at all, to be honest. Actually, I’ve probably been to more Catholic services. Estella likes to have company at holiday mass. Why?”
“Just making sure I wasn’t about to step on any toes. This is going to sound kind of crazy, anyway.” I took a deep breath and then continued. “How much do you know about the Cyrists?”
“About as much as anyone who isn’t a Cyrist, I guess. They’re pretty secretive—but I’ve known a lot of members, both here and abroad. They’re everywhere in Peru. Not quite as numerous as Roman Catholics, but it’s a close call. I don’t like it when they try to lecture me on ‘The Way,’ especially when they seem so genuinely worried that ‘The End’ is near. But otherwise they seem harmless enough. And they do a lot of educational work with the poor and other charities, so…”
I explained about Saul’s creation of Brother Cyrus and the Cyrist International, and as I expected, Trey’s reaction was pretty much the same as mine had been. It was hard to fathom how an organization that had, in our view, existed long before we were born could have possibly been formed in just the past year.
“But you know,” he said, considering the possibility, “if you wanted to build a power base that was outside the scrutiny of the government, a religious organization gives you a lot of room to maneuver. And the Cyrists have an odd mix of liberal and conservative views—the purity pledge, and then women can be ordained, but they have to marry another ordained minister. Most of the temples are led by a family, with control passed down from one generation to the next.”
He paused, pointing at the CHRONOS medallion on my chest. “So if you took that thing to a Cyrist temple, you’re saying that they would see it the way you do? And that they could use it?”
I nodded. “The leaders of the temple, yeah. Or at least that’s the theory we’re going on. They’d be able to power the diaries, too.” I walked over to the table, then picked up Katherine’s personal diary that I been listening to earlier and opened it. As with Charlayne, Trey could see the scrolling text, but he couldn’t make it scroll.
I pulled my hair back a bit and removed the small disk from behind my ear. “Want to try it?”
“Sure.”
My fingers brushed the side of his face as I reached up to tuck the little disk into the hollow between his ear and jaw. He pulled my hand toward him once the disk was in place, pressing the skin of my inner wrist against his lips. “You smell wonderful.”
I blushed, and tried to slow my pulse. “It’s probably the jasmine soap…”
He smiled, shaking his head. “The jasmine is nice, too—but it’s mostly you. And this is going to sound crazy, Kate, but I missed you from the moment I left.”
“I missed you, too.” I looked down, still a bit embarrassed. Trey tilted my chin up until our eyes met and then he kissed me, his lips soft against mine. I leaned into him slightly, thoroughly enjoying the tingle that pulsed through me at his touch.
It took several seconds for me to notice the gentle scratching at my knee. When I pulled away from Trey, Daphne took a step back from the two of us. Her head was tilted to one side, a quizzical look in her soft brown eyes.
Trey laughed and scratched her behind the ear. “I think we have a chaperone. Yes, Miss Daphne. I’ll behave.” He looked back at the diary. “So… what is this ear thingy supposed to do? I don’t see anything…”
I gave him a half smile. “And now we know for sure that you don’t have the CHRONOS gene. I was seeing a video of a much younger version of my grandmother, filmed in 2305, explaining in pretty graphic detail what she was going to do to a coworker who wouldn’t stop using her tea mug.”
“I just see a bit of writing and some squares, there… and there.” He removed the disk from behind his ear and faked a sad look. “Guess I can’t be part of the secret club then.”
“You say that as though it’s a bad thing.” I took the disk and pressed it back into place behind my own ear. “If you could operate this, they’d put you to work memorizing half a million jump locations—or stable points, as they’re called. I feel like I’ve spent the day in a rather odd history class. As I’m reading Katherine’s historical diaries, every now and then I’ll see a question that Katherine asked, like, ‘Who is the Infanta?’ or ‘What is a simoleon?’”
“In SimCity, a simoleon is money,” Trey interjected.
“Yes—it was slang for a dollar back in the late 1800s. Anyway, I couldn’t understand why she was writing the question when the answer was right there on the page.”
“Maybe they have like a 28G network in the future and they just texted her back?” he suggested. “Seems unlikely, but…”
“The answer is actually really simple, if you’re not thinking in a straight line. See this button—oh, no, I guess you can’t.”
He made a face at me.
“Sorry!” I gave him an apologetic smile. “At any rate”—I pointed to a section of the display that he couldn’t see—“when Katherine or the other historians pushed that button, the diary recorded the question. At the end of the trip, the historian returned at a set time, but the diary itself was set to return twenty-four hours prior to the time that the historian left on the trip. As long as Katherine made it back to CHRONOS as scheduled, each time she jotted down a question in the diary, a response would pop up because the question had already been answered by the researchers during that day before the trip began.”
“Okay—that kind of makes my head hurt.”
“Welcome to my world.” I grinned. “The bad news is that I can’t use that neat little trick. The date can be altered, but Katherine is pretty sure that the diaries are hardwired to return to the CHRONOS research department. She tried to send a message when she got stranded and the diary just disappeared. Poof. So when I go, I’ll have to rely on the information that’s already in the book or in my head.”
“So you’re really going to be… using that thing soon?” He gestured toward the medallion, with a note of concern in his voice.
“Yes, although Katherine says that it will be short local hops initially. There are a dozen or so stable points in the DC area and I’ll just do a quick shift there and back—a few hours or maybe a day ahead. That sort of thing.” I sounded more confident than I felt. “But even that’s a little while out.”
“And how exactly are you going to change things? How are you, all alone, supposed to be able to restore the timeline? I mean…” He shook his head slowly, a very skeptical look on his face.
I shrugged. “We’ll figure out when they killed Katherine—and then I’ll warn her and try to get her to return to CHRONOS headquarters before it happens. I’m sure they had—will have?—some sort of emergency return-to-base protocol. We haven’t really gotten that far.”
“You said the guy on the Metro—the one that mugged you—was armed.”
“Yeah, I think so. At the very least, he wanted me to believe he was armed.” I paused. I was torn between kind of liking the fact that Trey sounded protective and not wanting him to think I was totally helpless.
“But if the Metro hadn’t been crowded,” I continued, “and if I hadn’t suspected he had a gun, I would have tried to flip him. I’ve been taking karate since I was five. I have a brown belt. Or at least I had one… I guess that disappeared, too.”
“Really?” His voice was serious, but his eyes were clearly laughing. “Think you can flip me?”
“I could,” I teased. “But on a marble floor? You’d crack your skull when you hit. And we would scare poor Daphne. She’s still looking a bit concerned from… earlier.”
“I want a rain check, then. You don’t look like you could flip anything much heavier than Daphne. No offense.” He grinned at me. “Prudence Katherine Pierce-Keller, time-traveling ninja.”
“Oh, ho… funny.” I laughed and then faked an angry look. “Lawrence Alma Coleman the Third clearly likes to live dangerously.”
Trey’s smile lingered for a moment and then his eyes grew serious. “No, Kate, not really,” he said. “And I think I’d be happier if you didn’t have to, either.”
The next few weeks fell into a pattern. I spent my mornings reading the mission diaries that seemed the most likely targets for Katherine’s murder. In the afternoons, I would focus on memorizing the stable points, and by the end of the second day, I had begun trying to pull up visuals of local stable points while holding the CHRONOS key. On the occasions I managed to hold the focus steady, I could see a holographic display. If I moved my eyes carefully, the medallion picked up those movements and I could adjust the digital display to set a date and time.
Within a week, I’d become pretty good at locating the specific stable points and even setting the time display. I had also learned how to set a new location—in this case, two points within the house—although this was, Connor said, not something you wanted to do unless you knew for certain that those points would remain stable. Otherwise, you might materialize over an empty elevator shaft or in the middle of a busy freeway.
Katherine said I was making incredible progress, but I found it frustratingly difficult to maintain focus with the medallion. At first, while holding it, I found myself repeating what had happened in the kitchen, when Dad was there—I would zip through a series of scenes, overwhelmed by sensory input and the absolute clarity of what I seemed to be seeing and hearing. On several occasions, I was again in the field with Kiernan. Watching him, feeling his warm skin beneath my fingers, was downright unnerving and I immediately put the CHRONOS key down and moved on to a different task when this happened.
And even though it was probably irrational, as the days went by, I found myself feeling disloyal and a bit angry at myself when Kiernan’s face appeared. Trey’s visits were the only thing I had to look forward to, especially since Katherine and Connor were adamant that I wouldn’t be leaving the house at all for the time being. Trey came by most evenings and on weekends as well, and we would work on his homework or he’d bring DVDs. There was no TV in the house, so we ordered pizza and watched the movies in my room on the computer—at least Katherine wasn’t a prude and allowed us some privacy. Even Daphne had begun to relax a bit in that regard.
Trey was funny, smart, and handsome—everything I would have looked for in a boyfriend. (Although, as a little voice in my head that sounded a lot like Charlayne pointed out, I had rarely given guys with hair as short as Trey’s a second glance.) It was wonderful to curl up next to him, watching the Man in Black and Inigo Montoya battle left-handed atop the Cliffs of Insanity, or laughing at Shrek and Donkey or some silly comedy Trey had rented. He was clearly picking movies that he thought would make me smile and, at least for a short time, help me escape my present reality. I eventually satisfied his curiosity about my karate skills by flipping him—after setting out a pile of cushions and making sure Daphne wasn’t around to object. Trey then pulled me down beside him when I tried to help him up and discovered my own personal kryptonite—terribly ticklish feet.
If it hadn’t been for anxiety about the rapidly approaching trial jumps and a hollow ache whenever I thought about my parents, I would have been happy. And there was also the gnawing fear each time I watched Trey drive away—the fear that he wouldn’t be back, that another time shift would occur and he wouldn’t even remember my name.
All of this—the happiness, the fear, everything—made me miss Charlayne. In my previous life, she would have been texting me five times a day to find out how things were going with Trey and filling me in on which guy she was dating, considering dating, and/or planning to dump. I had gotten very used to using her as a sounding board for my ideas. Talking to her always made me feel stronger and more capable, and with so much on the line, I really needed that kind of support.
One night after Trey left, I brought the laptop over to the bed and stretched out, pulling up Facebook so that I could look at Charlayne’s page. I knew that only “friends” could view some sections but some of her photos were public. I thought it might make me feel better just to see her smile.
Charlayne’s page wasn’t there, however, and that had me puzzled. She’d joined Facebook about a year before I transferred to Roosevelt, and had been the one who’d convinced me to start posting. If this latest time shift was fairly localized, as Connor had said, then the only thing that should have changed in Charlayne’s life was that she and I never met—meaning her page should still be active.
I Googled Charlayne Singleton and her address. Nothing. I removed the address and typed in Roosevelt High School. Still nothing, so I decided to try her brother, Joseph. He had played three sports last year, when he was a senior, and his parents had a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings on a table all by itself in the living room. Charlayne referred to it scathingly as the Joseph Shrine, but her dad said that she’d been the loudest voice cheering him on from the stands.
Several hits popped up for Joseph Singleton in the DC area—mostly sports-related, but not at Roosevelt. It was the second link from the bottom, however, that caught my eye—a wedding announcement in the Washington Post “Style” section. “Joseph Singleton, Felicia Castor.” The wedding had been held in February at the Cyrist temple on Sixteenth Street, the same church I’d attended with Charlayne a few months before. I scanned the article and read that Felicia’s parents had been members of the Temple since they were children—not a big surprise—but the next sentence was a shocker. “Parents of the groom, Mary and Bernard Singleton, have been members of the Temple since 1981.”
A picture of the bridal party appeared below the text. Joseph, tall and handsome in a resplendent white tux, beamed happily at the camera, his arm around his new bride. There were three bridesmaids, each clutching a small bouquet of flowers against her chest. The face at the end caught my eye and I clicked to enlarge the photo. Her smile was more subdued than the wild, exuberant grin I’d hoped to see on her website, but it was definitely Charlayne—with the pink petals of the lotus flower clear and distinct on her left hand.