23
The man yanked me to the right of the doorway. The white cloth was sopping wet and he pressed it against the side of my face, his arms holding me close against his body.
“Kate!” It took a moment for the familiar voice, soft but urgent in my ear, to cut through my panic. I looked up into the man’s face. It appeared strange in the blue light from our medallions, but the dark, worried eyes were the same ones that I’d stared down into only a few minutes earlier.
“Kiernan? But how—”
“Kate, please. You have to focus. I’ve pulled up a stable point, love.” The display showed a small, dimly lit room with blankets in the corner. “Just slide your fingers over it and go. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”
I don’t know if it was his voice or just the knowledge that I wasn’t alone, but amazingly, my hands steadied as I reached for the CHRONOS key. It flickered only the tiniest bit and then it was clear. I blinked and pulled in a huge lungful of fresh, smoke-free air, before I collapsed onto the dirt floor.
I faded in and out of consciousness for a while. Kiernan’s voice would pull me to the surface for a few moments before I slipped back under. The clearest memory I have was the sensation of water being poured in a steady stream on my neck. It hurt, but the pain was far worse when the water stopped. He forced me to sit up at one point, his hands gentle, and made me swallow a few capsules. My eyes closed again and I slipped back into the fog.
It was daylight when I fully woke. Kiernan’s sleeping face was the first thing that I saw, his long dark hair damp against his skin. He was sitting with his back against the corner of the cabin. I was wrapped in blankets, my head resting on his thigh, his fingers laced through my own. The smell of smoke was strong and pungent in his clothing. I pulled my free hand up to the right side of my neck and felt a large swath of gauze, held in place by medical tape. Several bottles and containers of ointment were scattered around us and the remnants of a fire were smoldering in the fireplace. My green dress lay in a crumpled heap, with the damp dirt floor showing through the numerous spots the acid had dissolved.
My body was stiff and I needed to readjust my position. I moved slowly, reluctant to wake Kiernan, but his eyes flashed open at once. “Kate? Are you all right?”
I tried to nod, but that wasn’t a pain-free option, so I stopped and gave him a weak smile. “Yes. It hurts, but I’m okay. This is the cabin—on the Wooded Island, right? But when are we?”
“Around 5 A.M., I think—it’s just the next day,” he answered. “There’s no one here—there won’t be many people here at all today. The closing ceremonies were canceled because of the mayor’s assassination. And it was easier for me to set everything up here. I’m—it takes a lot out of me to jump long distances. Little jumps are easier, but I’ve been making a lot of them lately—I didn’t want you to be too far away, just in case I had to walk here to reach you.”
“Holmes? And Katherine, did she…?”
“Holmes escaped, just as he was supposed to. He’s probably on the train to Colorado today. The fire wasn’t supposed to happen for a few more weeks, but I don’t think it will change anything with his eventual capture and trial. And yes, Katherine and I made it to the stable point. I took her by a back route and we didn’t run into any problems.”
I sighed, relieved to know that at least that much of the plan had succeeded. “Tell me how you knew, Kiernan. Why did you come back? How did you know to be in that room?”
He stared into my eyes for several moments before he spoke. “It took me a long time to put the pieces together, Kate. You were always there, at the back of my mind year after year, but I never knew for certain whether you made it out of the hotel. I went back that night, after taking Katherine to the Wooded Island, and the place was in full blaze—the firefighters said there couldn’t be anyone alive inside. There wasn’t anything I could do but go home.
“I did as you told me. I never removed the medallion. I even kept my hand on it when I bathed. We moved back to the Cyrist farm—there really weren’t many options once my mother took ill. I let them teach me to use to the CHRONOS key. I’m not as good with it as many of the others, but that never mattered much to Prudence,” he added with a bitter laugh, “and she generally determined who would be given privileges.”
“She didn’t—” I broke off, hesitant to say what I was thinking. “You were so young.”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. She wasn’t that much older than me most of the times she came to the farm. About your age, maybe, the first time I saw her as a young woman. I was only sixteen—it’s very hard to say no to a willing girl at sixteen, Kate.”
“Didn’t you know that she was—well, that you knew her when she was older? And when you were younger…” I shook my head and then winced as the bandages shifted against the burn. “I mean, you seemed convinced that she had something to do with your dad.”
“Yeah… but that was Pru when she was older, y’know? I don’t know what she did later—I still don’t have any proof one way or the other—but none of that had happened for her when she was eighteen.”
“Christ, that makes my head hurt,” I said. “It doesn’t make you crazy? Thinking of an older Prudence knowing you when you were younger and then the two of you, together as teenagers?”
“I keep forgetting that you’re—how do you say it—a ‘newbie’?” Kiernan said with a teasing grin. “You’ll get used to the twists and turns soon enough. At eighteen, Pru was just a confused kid, not entirely sure of what Saul wanted her to do or of her place in all of this. She wasn’t a bad person, then, from what I could tell. After a while, I decided it wasn’t fair to judge her on the basis of something she wasn’t—or at least wasn’t yet. Does that make sense?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I understand, but I can’t say it makes any sense at all. None of this does.”
“I’m not proud of that relationship,” he said. “I’m not sure I would say that I used Pru—at least not any more than she used me—but my feelings were complicated by my past. I mean, if I never looked at her eyes when we… well, she reminded me of you. I was just a kid when we were here together, but I never forgot you, Kate.” He paused for a moment, tracing my lower lip ever so softly with his finger, and a shiver ran all the way through my body. No, Kate, I thought, no, no, no. You’re exhausted and grateful and… yes, damn it, incredibly attracted to him. But no.
“Then, a year later when I was seventeen, you were there, Kate—not you, not this you, but a different Kate. My Kate. A little older than you are now—so beautiful, so intent on convincing me to fight the Cyrists. We were so much in love, Kate, but you had no memory of an eight-year-old boy, no memory of the Expo. I could never understand that.
“And now, even though I understand why, it’s hard to imagine a Kate who doesn’t remember that year we spent together. I think you were in Boston 1905 more than you were in your own time and place. It’s a miracle you didn’t collapse from exhaustion—you’d tell Katherine you were going downstairs for coffee and then jump back to spend all day with me, popping back in ten seconds after you left. They were always so much easier on you, the jumps. They… drain me, and we had to be careful to hide things from Prudence.”
“You were still… with Prudence?” I asked, wincing a bit as I pushed myself up to sitting. I tried to keep the totally irrational note of jealousy out of my voice, but the pleased little smile on Kiernan’s face told me that I had failed.
“No, Katie. Never again, not that way. Not after I found you.” He sat in front of me and took my hands in his.
“Pru was madder’n hell when she found out, and that’s when she swiped Dad’s key. Well, not her directly, it took three of her Cyrist goons to get it off me, but they had no idea about the spare you gave me. Pru gave the key back a few months later after they’d made the changes, and I played along—she’s never realized that I know the whole truth.
“But then… you stopped coming,” he said. “And I finally realized that wherever you were, you hadn’t been protected by a key. Something had changed. The entire resistance we were trying to put together had never been started. I just, well—sort of lay low, waiting. They teamed me up with Simon to watch you—it was Pru’s idea of a little joke, I guess, to put me so close since she thought I had no memory of you and you wouldn’t know me from Adam.”
I shivered, pulling the blanket tighter, and tried to sort out all that had happened. “I’m not so sure any of this was her idea, Kiernan. Or if she was in on it at the beginning, she changed her mind.” I gave him a brief rundown of my conversation with Prudence and her belief that killing Katherine was a power play designed to get her out of the way.
Kiernan chuckled. “She finally put two and two together, I guess. I don’t know that he was planning that specifically—but Saul doesn’t tend to think that the normal rules of morality should apply to him. And she’s been pushing to run things her way for some time now. He may well have decided she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Oh, sure. Several times.” Kiernan helped me turn around to lean my back against the cabin wall and then poured a bit of water into a glass from a large jug. He shook two very modern-looking pills into his hand and gave them to me.
“Pru was always secretive about our destination—she’d lock in the coordinates on my key without giving me any idea of where or when—but Saul often summons the people he and Pru consider part of the ‘inner circle’ to meet with him. I doubt I’ll be invited again, however. He doesn’t know about this—that I helped you get away from Holmes—but he does know that I warned you that day on the subway.”
I remembered Simon’s comment about Kiernan’s interference. “They’re angry, aren’t they? They’ll be looking for you.”
He shrugged. “Probably. But I’m good at fading into the background. They’ll have some idea of when I am, but not where.”
“I’m sorry, Kiernan. You’re in all of this because you chose to help me.”
He didn’t speak for a moment and pulled in a deep breath before looking back at me. “It wasn’t a choice, Kate. There was never a choice. When I saw you on the train that first day, the day you were trying to destroy the diary?”
“I wasn’t trying to destroy it,” I said. “Just testing it to see what it was.”
He smiled, but his eyes were as sad as they’d been that day on the Metro. “I knew before we arrived on that train,” he said, a tiny break in his voice, “that you were different. I knew everything about my Kate. Hell, I knew her soul. She knew mine. No secrets. And when you looked at me and there was nothing in your eyes… you didn’t know me. That life had never happened and you weren’t my Kate—but you were still Kate. I still… loved you. I had to find a way to protect you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking again about Trey. The next time I saw him he would still be Trey, but he wouldn’t be my Trey. No matter what happened between us in the future, I would never see that Trey again. “I do understand. I’m so sorry, Kiernan.”
He sighed and shifted to sit beside me against the wall, putting his arm around me very carefully to avoid hurting me. “But here’s the real kicker,” he said. “I didn’t get the full irony until I learned about the plot against Katherine. You are also my Kate, my first Kate—the girl with the funny painted toes who gave me the medallion, who was willing to risk her life to be certain that an eight-year-old boy got out of that hotel. And I realized then that I really didn’t know what had happened that night—and that I had to find out.”
“So that’s why you were there tonight? Watching?”
Kiernan clenched his jaw. He looked exhausted—there were dark circles under his eyes and he’d clearly skipped the razor for at least a few days. Scruff looked unbelievably good on him, and I fought the urge to run my fingers along the side of his face.
“I’ve been to that hotel dozens of times, Kate. I’ve spent every possible minute in that hellhole for the past month. I’ve watched from every position, every angle, every vantage point.” His arm tightened around me. “I came so close to just killing Holmes, just strangling him there in the dark and tossing him down one of those chutes straight into the lime pit in the basement, just like he’d done with so many women. But you—my other you—were adamant that we could only change the bits of history that Saul and the Cyrists had disrupted. Holmes’s trial—that was worldwide. What kind of ripples would it cause if I killed him?
“And there were only a few seconds where I could act,” he continued. “If I made a wrong move, I couldn’t take it back—all I could do was add on. I mean, if I tripped him that first second and the gun went off and shot you, I couldn’t undo that, aside from coming back earlier and stopping myself from tripping him. I also couldn’t risk interfering until Katherine was fully out of the window.”
He let out a long, slow breath and closed his eyes. “I watched you die over and over again, Kate. I watched him shoot you point blank fourteen times before I could see any way to change it.”
“The lights!” I said, sitting up fully. “Oh my God—that was you? I thought… my head—I hit it really hard when I fell. I thought that’s why I was seeing little blue flashes. But it was you!”
He nodded. “I finally did trip him, to slow him down, but he had the acid—I thought at first that he was getting it from the bottles near the cots against the wall. I was pretty close to one of those cots and I think he’d used acid on the woman who died there. But he had the bottle in his coat pocket. I thought it was the sound of his foot against the glass that reminded him he was carrying it—I even removed the bottles once, to see—but I guess it was just being there, where he’d used it once before that triggered the memory. I had to time it just right. The first four times I tripped him you were still facing forward. The acid caught you full in the face; two of the times your eyes were open.”
I flinched, remembering the scorching pain when the acid hit my neck and realized how very much worse it could have been.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Part of me said to keep trying until I got it entirely right and you left there without injury, but… I couldn’t keep going. I’m pretty sure you’ll have a scar on your neck, but I don’t think it will be very bad. I’ve put an advanced hydrogel on the burn. I put three more tubes in your bag.”
“My bag!” I said, looking around. “I didn’t…”
“No,” he said, reaching over to his right. “But I did. You dropped it when you fell. The hydrogel inside is from 2038, so you won’t get anything nearly as good in your time. I just wish your hair had been down—it would have shielded you a bit more.”
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 once 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.