3
I arrived at karate class a few minutes late and slid into my usual place beside Charlayne. For the next hour we practiced our routines, and the physical activity pushed the events of the past few days from my mind—almost. I was usually able to take Charlayne, probably because I’d had an additional year of classes, but I was flipped twice that afternoon and soon would have a nice, colorful bruise on my right thigh from a rather wicked clip by Charlayne’s foot.
We kept on task until class ended. As we headed out the door, Charlayne turned toward me. “So? What’s up? You haven’t answered any of my texts…”
I still wasn’t sure how much I really could explain without Charlayne thinking I had totally lost my mind. So I opted for a lame shared joke. “Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
Charlayne rolled her eyes. I could quote The Princess Bride pretty much start to finish. “Okay then, sum up, Inigo Montoya. What happened?”
I knew Charlayne well enough to be certain that she’d get the full story out of me eventually. If she thought I was keeping even a hint of a secret, she wouldn’t rest until she’d convinced me to cough up every juicy detail.
“Okay, here goes. My grandmother is dying, she’s leaving me a big house, a lot of money and my dad and I are going to move in with her for the year. I’ve inherited a special ability from her that she needs to teach me how to use in order to save the world as we know it. Or something like that. And I very nearly shared a kiss with what I think may be a ghost who disappeared into thin air on the Metro.”
“You nearly kissed someone on the subway? Was he cute?” Leave it to Charlayne to zero in on the kiss. Having three older brothers meant that there was a constant stream of guys at her house, and she kept several of them dangling on a string at all times. It was her goal in life to ensure that I lived up to my personal romantic potential, but so far her matchmaking efforts had been unmitigated disasters.
“Yes, he was cute,” I answered. “And I didn’t almost kiss him on the subway. It was in my grandmother’s kitchen—or in a wheat field somewhere. Both, I think.”
There was a long pause, while Charlayne just stared at me. “Okay. I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t lie to me, Kate. So that leaves insanity, heavy drugs…” She paused. “Or you’re telling the truth. I’m going to need more than the ‘let me sum up’ version to figure this one out.”
“We can figure it out together then, because I’m not entirely sure myself.” I pulled the diary out of my backpack. “I’m really hoping this will help.”
Mom wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that we wolfed down pizza, then grabbed sodas and headed back up to my room. That’s what we always do when Charlayne stays over. She also wouldn’t have been too surprised to see us hunched over books, since we often do homework together. She might, however, have been a bit confused if she had peeked in and seen us side by side, holding a lit match to a single page of what appeared to be a very old diary.
I blew out the match. “Okay. You can’t burn it either.”
“But the fire does make it smell kind of funny,” Charlayne noted. “And the cover—you can burn the cover, write on it, whatever. That’s weird. Why wouldn’t they make the cover at least as strong as the pages inside? The cover is supposed to protect the book.”
“True.” I thought for a moment. “But… have you ever slipped a different book jacket around something that you wanted to read in order to make your mom or your teacher think it was something you were supposed to be reading?”
“Well, yes. But…”
“Maybe the writer was trying to make other people believe this was just a plain diary. Look at the date inside the cover: 1890. This doesn’t look to me like something that should have been around in 1890.”
“Doesn’t look to me like something that should be around today,” Charlayne said. “Can’t you just call your grandmother and ask?”
“I could. But she did say that this would probably give me more questions than answers. I get the feeling she wants me to dig around a bit and see if I can figure it out on my own.”
Charlayne reached over and scratched at a small nub that was sticking out of the fabric on the spine. “What is this? There’s something stuck in the cover.” She had to tug a bit but eventually pulled out a small bright yellow stick, about twice the thickness of a toothpick, with a pointed black tip. “It’s a tiny pencil.”
I took the stick to look at it more closely. “It looks like a pencil, yeah, but—look, I can’t scratch anything off the pencil lead. I think it’s a stylus. Like the one on my mom’s old PDA. You’ve seen them. You just tap the screen, like this…”
I took the book and tapped the tip against the first page. The lines of handwritten text started scrolling slowly upward. “Aha. It’s not a book. It’s some sort of portable computer.”
Charlayne looked puzzled. “But why?” she asked. “Why not just carry a laptop, or iPad? This doesn’t make much sense.”
“Unless it’s 1890 and you don’t want to attract attention.” I closed the cover and it once again looked like an old diary. “Unless you don’t want people to know that you aren’t one of them.”
“Weird. I’ve never seen anything like this technology. How would your grandmother have something like this? You said she’s a historian—like your mom, right?”
I flipped open the diary again and ran my finger across the name printed on the inside of the cover:
Katherine Shaw
Chicago, 1890
“It could be a coincidence that my grandmother’s name is Katherine, but I don’t think so. And yes, she’s a historian, but I’m beginning to suspect that being a historian means something very different to her than it means to my mom.” I turned to a random page and tapped the top edge with the stylus thingy and watched as the text scrolled downward, stopping at the beginning of the entry.
May 15, 1893
Chicago, Illinois
We arrived around sunrise and merged with a crowd coming from the train station. The calculations were correct, although the area was not as isolated as we might have hoped. The city is packed and we landed near the entrance to the most popular attraction, so another entry point might be advised in the future.
People from all over the world have flocked to Chicago to see the new wonder—an enormous wheel surrounded by closed carriages that will carry passengers high into the sky as it spins. It will not open for another month, but a large crowd is always present to view the giant wheel, created by Mr. George Ferris. The hope is that it will be magnificent enough to outdo the marvel of the previous Exposition in Paris—the fabulous tower of Monsieur Eiffel.
I presented my letter of introduction to the Board of Lady Managers this morning and it was accepted without question. Background request on “the Infanta.” Several of the women were discussing her upcoming visit to the Expo.
“What’s that?” Charlayne pointed to a small star in the margin. I shrugged and tapped the symbol once with the stylus. Nothing. I tapped twice, and then a small information window opened on top of the handwritten page:
Infanta Eulalia (1864–1958): Daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain and Francis, Duke of Cadiz. Full name: Maria Eulalia Francisca de Asis Margarita Roberta Isabel Francisca de Paula Cristina Maria de la Piedad. Expressed progressive views on women’s rights in her later writings. Caution: Infanta’s visit will ruffle feathers of Chicago society. Was often found eating bratwurst or smoking a cigarette at German Pavilion when scheduled to attend official functions. Spouse found most evenings on the Midway Plaisance.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Charlayne said when we’d finished reading the entry. “If Katherine had the answer here, why did she make a background request?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she added it later?” I closed the pop-up window and we returned to reading the diary entry.
I am spending the afternoon at the Woman’s Pavilion where the World’s Congress of Representative Women is scheduled to begin its session. The Woman’s Pavilion is viewed as something of a wonder in itself—it was designed by a female architect, Sophia Hayden. Saul may attend later in the day, as there are scheduled speeches on the topic of women in the ministry, but he will spend most of his day at the other end of the fairgrounds, attending a planning meeting for September’s Parliament of the World’s Religions.
P.M.
Saw only a few activists; either have not arrived or (wisely) opted to skip this session. The welcome addresses were even longer in person than they seemed in print. I thought the introductions of the various foreign dignitaries would never end.
Submitting speeches and crowd view of Midway Plaisance.
CHRONOS File KS04012305_05151893_1 uploaded.
CHRONOS File KS04012305_05151893_2 uploaded.
Personal File KS04012305_1 saved.
I tried tapping each entry with the stylus, but there was no reaction and no little symbols appeared in the margins. “If the files are linked, I can’t figure out how to open them. I’ll have to ask Katherine later, I guess.”
“The second set of numbers…” Charlayne pointed at the file names. “Those are the date of the entry, right? May 15th, 1893.”
I turned a few pages and clicked the top, scanning quickly through the entries. Each of the pages that had been used contained the entries for an entire year. Most of the entries contained a CHRONOS file upload, and the last numbers always corresponded to the date. There were usually several sets of daily entries and then a gap of a month or so. Most were written in Chicago. The last two were from New York, on April 21st, 1899, and San Francisco, on April 24th, 1899.
“The KS must be her initials,” Charlayne said. “And… the first group of numbers also follows the format for dates, but…” She reached out for the diary and I gave it to her, along with the little stylus.
After a few seconds, a frown creased her forehead. “It’s not working.”
She pulled the stylus along the edge of a page, just as I had done, but the text didn’t move. It looked like a static page of handwritten text. “Maybe there’s a dead battery or something?” she asked.
I took the book from her and slid the stylus along the margin and, once again, the page shifted.
Charlayne looked a bit annoyed that she couldn’t make the diary work, but she shrugged. “Maybe it’s just sensitive—like the touch pad on my brother’s laptop. That never works for me, either.”
I scanned back through the entries, and Charlayne was right about the dates. The first two digits for each entry were always 01 through 12, and the second two digits were always between 01 and 31. “So we seem to have someone trying to blend in with the crowd in the 1890s by disguising a high-tech device as a handwritten diary. And we have two sets of dates, one from the past and one from the future. If we’re reading this correctly, and if this isn’t some elaborate forgery, this would suggest that these are entries about the 1890s recorded by someone in 2304 and 2305.”
Charlayne nodded. “If this isn’t some sort of elaborate forgery, then yes. I’m not ruling out elaborate forgery, however.”
I gave her a tight smile. “You weren’t on the train today. Those two guys just vanished.”
“Are you sure you didn’t just scare them off with the Ice Princess stare, like you did Nolan?”
I tossed a pillow at her head and she ducked, laughing. Nolan, a friend of Charlayne’s brother, was the victim in her most recent attempt to fix my love life. Nice guy, really cute, with nothing in his head other than soccer. I could have been friendlier, in retrospect, but I didn’t see the point in leading him on, especially when it was clear by the time we’d finished our pizza that Nolan and I were a total mismatch.
I put the diary back into the ziplock bag and tucked it into my backpack. “We need to sleep. I have at least a thousand questions to ask Katherine after school tomorrow anyway, and it will just add to the list if we keep looking through this diary. And if you show up with bags under your eyes tomorrow, your mom will never let you stay over on school nights.”
It was a long time before I fell asleep, however. Each time I tried, the vivid sensations from the medallion came flooding back to the forefront of my mind, and a pair of disturbingly passionate dark eyes followed me when I finally slipped into dreams.
Morning came much more quickly than either Charlayne or I wanted. I inhaled a breakfast bar as I ran to the Metro, which was so packed that I had to stand. The crowd thinned out as the train headed away from the city. I sank into the first open seat, plugging my iPod into my ears to muffle the subway chatter.
I didn’t see the pale, pudgy young man at first, probably because he was behind me. A few minutes after I sat down, however, I caught a glimpse of the left side of his face in the security mirror. I shifted slightly to get a better view. He was wearing the same shirt as the day before and didn’t seem aware of the mirror or of the fact that I had spotted him. I glanced around to see if the tall, dark guy was near, even pulling out my hand mirror on the pretext of fixing my hair, but I couldn’t locate him. Pudgy, however, was clearly watching me.
The next stop was not mine, but I stood just as the last of the passengers were leaving and headed for the closest door. Before I could reach the exit, Pudgy was right beside me. I felt an arm around my shoulder and something cold and hard digging painfully into my ribs as the last few passengers getting off at the stop pushed past me.
He spoke in a low whisper. “Give me the backpack and you can walk away. I don’t want trouble. Just pull it off your shoulders and give it to me.”
Normally I would have just given it over, no questions, no hesitation. Lesson one of self-defense is that you don’t argue with the man holding the gun. But the diary was in there.
Pudgy’s face was suddenly inches from mine and I felt a crushing pain in my toes as his heel ground into them. He whispered into my ear, “I can shoot you and be gone before anyone knows what happened.”
“Doors closing. Doors closing,” the automated voice chimed. The sound of my pulse echoed in my ears as Pudgy pulled me toward the door, slipping the foot that had just mangled my toes between the subway doors to keep them open. I glared at him, then slid the backpack from my shoulders and handed it over. He squeezed his chubby frame through the door, pushing me backward into the train, hard, and then disappeared in a flash of blue light.
I fell against two other passengers. One had on earphones and must have missed the entire exchange—he just looked annoyed at my clumsiness. But the woman had clearly been watching. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Should I call security?”
“Kate!” The voice from behind me was deep and the slight accent unfamiliar, but I knew who it was before I turned. My first instinct was to run—not that there was really anywhere to go in a closed subway car—but as he moved closer, I glimpsed a familiar blue light shining through the fabric of his shirt. He reached out to take my arm and pulled me toward a seat a few aisles away, out of earshot of the woman who had offered to help.
I sat, then whirled to face him. “Who the hell are you? Why are you following me and why did your friend take my pack? And how did you get that from my grandmother?” I poked the spot on his shirt where the light of the medallion showed through.
He paused for a second, processing the barrage of questions, and then gave me a small, slightly crooked smile. “Okay—I’ll answer them in order. I’m Kiernan Dunne,” he said. “I was not following you. I was following Simon. I’m not supposed to be here. Simon—the guy who took your bag—is not my friend, Kate. And this key,” he finished, pointing at the medallion on his chest, “is not from your grandmother’s collection. It was my father’s.”
He raised his hand and I flinched instinctively. His eyes grew sad and his smile faded as he moved his hand, more slowly now, to brush the right side of my face with his fingertips. “I’ve never seen you this young.” He reached around and pulled the band loose from my hair so that it fell to my shoulders. “Now you look more like my Kate.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up his hand and continued, speaking more quickly now. “We’re close to your exit. Go straight to your grandmother’s house and tell her what has happened. At least you still have this.” He touched the black cord around my neck. “Keep the CHRONOS key on you at all times.”
“CHRONOS key? I don’t have…”
“The medallion,” Kiernan said, again touching the cord.
“I don’t have a medallion.” I pulled the cord out of my blouse. At the end was the clear plastic holder that contained my school ID, a Metro pass, a few pictures, and two keys—one for Dad’s cottage and one for the townhouse. I flipped the holder around so that he could see the plain silver keys through the back. “And these are the only keys I have. Could you stop talking in riddles?”
The color drained from Kiernan’s face and panic filled his eyes. “Was it in the bag? You should keep it on you.”
“No,” I repeated. “I don’t have a medallion. Until now, I thought there was only one, and to the best of my knowledge it’s at my grandmother’s house.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why in bloody hell would she send you out with no protection?”
“I don’t know how to use it! Yesterday, I nearly…” I blushed, thinking back to the scene in the kitchen. “I saw you when I held it. Why? Who are you?”
The train began to slow. Kiernan closed his eyes and rubbed his first two fingers against his temples for a few seconds before looking up and shaking his head. “I didn’t plan for this, Kate. You’re going to have to run. Take a cab. Steal a car. Whatever you do, get to her house as quickly as you can and do not leave.”
He moved us both toward the doors and then turned, pulling me toward him. “I’ll try to stall them—but I don’t know exactly what they’re planning, so I have no idea how long you have.”
“How long before wha—” My question was silenced as his lips met mine, gentle, but urgent. My body was swept with the same sensations I had felt earlier when I held the medallion—heart pounding, unable to breathe, unable to move, unable to think.
After a moment he pulled away, a small smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “This wasn’t supposed to be our first kiss, Kate. But if you do not hurry, it will almost certainly be our last. Run. Run, now.” As the train decelerated, Kiernan reached into his shirt and closed his hand around the medallion. The dark green band that he had pulled from my hair was now on his wrist. And then he vanished.
The subway doors chimed open and I ran.
There was, of course, no cab outside the station. A glance at the schedule told me that a bus wouldn’t arrive for twenty minutes, and I wasn’t sure that I could run over three miles in my current state. On top of everything else, my toes hurt like hell from being stomped by Pudgy. I hobbled three blocks in the opposite direction to the Marriot and, after a panicked look at the empty cab stand, was relieved to see one just pulling up to the curb.
I slid into the back and gave him the address.
“You got money hidden somewhere, kid? ’Cause I don’t see no purse or no wallet and this is rush hour.”
“This is an emergency. It’s just off Old Georgetown in North Bethesda and I need to get there as quickly as possible. My grandmother will pay you.”
He looked as though he planned to protest further, but something in my expression must have convinced him to start the cab and pull back onto the main road. He drove as fast as traffic allowed, which was often only slightly faster than I could have run. I clenched my teeth in frustration.
“Sure you’re not runnin’ from the cops or something?” he asked, peering back at me through the rearview mirror. “You look like you’re runnin’ to me.”
“I was running to catch a cab to take me to my grandmother’s house. She’s… sick, okay?”
“Yeah, right.” He took a left at the next corner and then said, “Okay, Red Ridin’ Hood. I’ll get you to Grandma’s house ahead of the Big Bad Wolf. But she better have some money in her basket or I’ll be calling the cops myself.”
I rolled my eyes at that lame bit of witticism and settled back in the seat. I wasn’t sure why Kiernan thought I was in danger, but there was no mistaking the fear in his eyes. I touched my hand to my lips, remembering his kiss. It wasn’t just our first kiss, but my first kiss ever. Even with my total lack of experience, I could tell that there was strong emotion behind it. He knew me, somehow, from somewhere or some time, and he cared about me. As confusing as it was to think that I had a past (or was it a future?) that I didn’t remember, I couldn’t doubt that Kiernan was desperately afraid for me. I clutched the edge of my plaid skirt as the cab inched a bit closer to Katherine’s house and, hopefully, toward some answers.
I was out of the cab before it came to a full stop. I ran to the door and banged on it frantically. Connor’s face appeared moments later.
“Where is Katherine? Let me in.”
“Yes, of course!”
“Can you pay the cab? He stole my bag.”
Connor looked confused. “The driver?”
“No—a guy on the Metro.” Daphne was barking loudly, and Connor held her collar to keep her from dashing out the door.
“Yes, yes, I’ll pay him. Take Daphne.” He grabbed shoes from the hall closet. The driver began honking, inciting Daphne to ratchet up her noise level as well. “Katherine! Come down!” Connor called as he headed out the door. “Kate is here.”
Katherine appeared at the top of the stairs a few moments later, pulling a robe over her nightgown as she hurried down to greet me. “Kate! Why aren’t you at school, dear? You look frightened. What on earth? Sit down, please.” She motioned toward the sofa and slapped her hand against her thigh. “Daphne! Outside!”
She led Daphne to the kitchen door and I sat down, trying to catch my breath. I peeled off my shoe to inspect the toes that had been crushed by… Simon, Kiernan had called him, although I still thought of him as Pudgy. Two of the toes were a deep angry red, and one toenail had been squished so badly that it was ripped down to the quick. I gritted my teeth and pulled off the nail fragment to keep it from snagging on my sock.
Connor reentered the house just as Katherine came back in from the kitchen. I saw a soft blue glow through the threads of his jeans pocket and was relieved to know that he had a medallion. It hadn’t occurred to me that he, too, might be in danger.
He sat down in the armchair across from the sofa. “Did you find out who robbed her?”
“Robbed?” Katherine exclaimed. “Kate, what happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, pulling my sock back on carefully. I slipped off my other shoe and slid them both under the coffee table. “Some guy on the Metro now has your diary, however—and my iPod and textbooks. I’m sorry, Katherine. I would have tried to fight him off, but the Metro was crowded and… he had a gun. Or something that felt like a gun, poking into my side.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You did the right thing. I have several other diaries here and that volume is backed up in the computer system.”
Connor nodded. “We can track the original, too—so we may be able to get it back. I doubt a mugger will be too concerned with looking at an old diary, anyway. And he won’t be able to activate it.”
“Does this happen often on the Metro?” Katherine asked.
“What?” I shook my head. “No—I mean yes, people get mugged occasionally. I never have—the Metro’s safe, really. But this wasn’t just somebody grabbing a random backpack. He knew what he was doing. He wanted the diary. He saw me with it yesterday. And I think he had a medallion—like yours.”
Katherine looked at Connor skeptically, then back at me. “Are you sure? I don’t think—”
“No, I’m not sure about the mugger. But he did vanish into thin air—twice. And I saw a medallion under Kiernan’s shirt—” I stopped as Connor and Katherine simultaneously drew in sharp, startled breaths.
“His name was Kiernan?” asked Connor. “How do you know that?”
“Yes. Kiernan… Dunn or Duncan, I think. But he was not the mugger. He’s the one who told me to run. Dark eyes, dark hair, tall, and…” I trailed off, sure that I was blushing. “Why? Do you know him? He wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing a medallion. He told me to get here, to your house, as fast as I could, that something was about to happen, but he would stall them if he could, to give me time.”
Connor and Katherine exchanged another look. “Kiernan Dunne was my great-grandfather,” Connor said after a moment. “And I find it unlikely that he would be doing anything to help us.”
I had forgotten that Connor’s last name was Dunne, and I can’t say that there’s much resemblance between the two of them, except perhaps around the nose. And Connor was at least thirty years older than Kiernan—or, at any rate, at least thirty years older than the Kiernan who kissed me on the Metro. I sank farther into the couch.
“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Katherine suggested.
I recounted my steps from the time I left Katherine’s house on Monday morning until the cab brought me back to her doorstep. I glossed over a few bits—I wasn’t sure how she would feel about Charlayne reading the diary and our experimental efforts to determine its composition, and I most definitely was not ready to share the kiss. It wasn’t something I wanted to discuss in front of my grandmother, or for that matter, in front of someone who claimed to be the great-grandson of the guy who had kissed me. Things were weird enough without complicating matters further.
When I finished my summary, I turned to Katherine. “Whether you believe Kiernan’s information or not, there’s a lot going on that I need to know about. And I think perhaps my dad should be in on this. Or mom…”
I felt a bit like the accused claiming my right to an attorney, but maybe that wasn’t so far off. I didn’t know either Katherine or Connor well enough to feel that I could completely trust them, and Dad—well, he’s my dad, and I know whose interests he’d put first. And while my relationship with Mom is a little more complicated, she would do the same.
“Kate…” Katherine hesitated, apparently looking for the right words. “I admire you for wanting to keep your parents informed—and yes, Harry would be far more likely to understand than Deborah—but perhaps you should wait until you’ve heard my story. Then, if you want to talk to Harry… that’s fine.”
She reached up and pulled the chain around her neck, allowing her medallion to fall in front of her dark red bathrobe. The blue light altered the color of the robe near the medallion to a peculiar shade of purple. “But you must keep in mind, Kate, that your parents will never see this pendant as anything other than an odd piece of jewelry. If either of them held it for more than a few moments, they might feel a strange sensation—as Connor or anyone else with the recessive version of the gene does. They might notice a slight change in the color. But neither of them will ever see this as you or I do. And it would take time to convince them of what we can see and experience directly.”
Something about that statement nagged at me, but I focused on her key point that pulling Dad into the discussion would take time. I couldn’t shake the sense that time was short—the urgency in Kiernan’s voice had made that clear—and I wasn’t entirely sure that we could afford to wait until Dad was there and had been filled in on everything. And even though Katherine and Connor seemed to doubt the sincerity of Kiernan’s warning, I did not. It might have been my first kiss, but I trusted the instinct that told me Kiernan was on my side—whatever side that might be.