“Gentlemen,” the woman says, “please take Denny and his pet into the living room, where we can chat.”
The giant yanks me to my feet and ushers me toward the hallway once Kane and Iffy have gone past. As he and I near the doorway, I hear the strike of a match, and look over to see the woman lifting a flame to a cigarette sticking out of her mouth. The light flickers over her face, revealing a slanted sneer and features that I know oh so well.
“Hello, Denny. Long time, no see.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
If the entire universe disappeared earlier when I realized there were two chasers, then there are no words to describe how utterly stunned I feel now.
Sitting in the chair in the corner of the kitchen is my training mate.
My fellow rewinder.
My tormentor.
Lidia Brewer.
The condescending, upper-caste waste of a human being is the walking definition of why our old world needed to go away. She’d tried to force me to change everything back to our original time line by kidnapping Iffy. We had struggled, and when she was momentarily dazed, I had sent her far into the past with my own chaser, while keeping hers — the one I have been using ever since then.
She shouldn’t be here. I banished her to 1743. Even if her trainer had also taught her how to rekey a chaser, it shouldn’t have mattered. My device had been desperately low on power, and had barely enough left to activate for that final jump. She should have lived out her life in the eighteenth century and never bothered anyone again.
The giant takes my satchel from me and dumps it on the coffee table, then shoves me onto the couch next to where Kane has put Iffy.
We sit there in the darkness for several seconds before the overhead light clicks on and Lidia enters the room.
I feel Iffy stiffen beside me in surprise. I reach for her hand, but the giant slaps my wrist away.
At first glance, Lidia looks exactly as she did the last time I saw her, but as she nears, I detect a tension in her face that appears to have taken up permanent residence, and a disturbing glint in her eyes that makes me want to immediately look away.
“Didn’t think you’d see me again, did you?” she says as she takes the seat across from us. “Well, then, you should have sent me back farther than 1949.”
Nineteen forty-nine? I sent her to the eighteenth century, not the middle of the twentieth.
Unless…
During my training I was never told what would happen if a device quit mid jump, but my old chaser running out of power is the only explanation that makes sense. Instead of dropping her 272 years in the past, it obviously only took her sixty-six.
“I’ve always known you’d come,” she continues. “Even knew the date, too. That’s called planning.” She glances at Kane, then looks back at us. “You’ve met my grandson, Vincent.”
Grandson?
“He’s part of the plan, too,” she says. “And the fun part is I haven’t even had any kids yet.”
“One kid,” Kane says. “My mom.”
She gives the grandson, who must be a decade older than her, a halfhearted smile. “Of course, dear, but it doesn’t really matter. That time line is no longer relevant.”
There’s a flicker of confusion in Kane’s eyes, but unlike him, I understand immediately what she means. The version of her that will give birth to his mother did so purposely only to put one of her descendants — Kane — in the position to create this very moment. Now that it’s arrived, there’s no need for this Lidia to have that child. Kane has unintentionally been party to the erasure of his own mother.
“And this guy?” I ask, tilting my head toward the giant. “Another one of your descendants?”
“Leonard? No. I found him here. He’s been helping me get ready for your visit.” She looks around. “How do you like my house? Nice, huh?” When I don’t answer, she takes a puff of her cigarette. It’s a habit I don’t remember her having back at the institute. “Took me about six months after I arrived to figure out how to manipulate the system here. It’s amazing what selling a few simple product ideas can get you. Don’t worry, nothing too time line-destroying. After all, how would you ever know about it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She continues as if I haven’t spoken. “Maybe it should have taken less time, but as I’m sure you can imagine, I wasn’t in the best mental state when I arrived.”
If you ask me, she’s not in the best of mental states right now.
“I could be super rich if I wanted to be, and live in a mansion three times the size of my father’s,” she goes on. “But I knew doing that might make me lazy. And God forbid I started to like it here. Can’t have that.” She motions to the room around her. “This feels temporary to me. Just the way it should.”
There’s no mystery in where this is going. Bringing me here has been for one purpose only. She wants to finish what she was trying to accomplish before I exiled her. She wants to bring the empire back, and to do that she needs me. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m never going to tell you where the trigger is.”
“The trigger?” She laughs. “Seriously, Denny, do you think I haven’t already figured that out yet? I’ve been here three years. I’ve had plenty of time to find it. The hardest part was remembering the history from our time line since, obviously, those resources are no longer available to me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fair enough. I wouldn’t if I were you, either.” She pauses, then says, “Cahill. You told me and the others the name yourself. He’s important, but the rest of your story was a lie.”
I hold perfectly still, not letting the panic I feel inside show. She’s referring to the story I told when I tricked the few remaining rewinders into thinking I’d stumbled on the trigger that had erased our world, and I had then set things right. Cahill, indeed, was the catalyst.
“Robert or Preston or something like that,” she says. “His first name has eluded me, but it doesn’t matter. You know who I’m talking about. You kept him from turning George Washington in to the redcoats. So Washington lived, leaving us with this god-awful reality. Am I close?”
She’s not close. She’s dead-on.
I fight hard to keep my face neutral.
“All I would have to do is hunt around to find the exact moment.” After another puff, she taps the cigarette out in an ashtray. “I bet you’re wondering if I tried to make a jump the moment Vincent showed up with my chaser.”
“You couldn’t. It doesn’t work for you.” Her chaser isn’t her chaser anymore. It’s keyed to me.
She smiles. “Yes. That’s a bit distressing. But for argument’s sake, even if it did work, I wouldn’t have gone. Ask me why.”
I say nothing.
“Come on. Play along, Denny. Ask me why.” When I again don’t answer, she switches her gaze to Iffy. “You want to take a stab at it?”
“I don’t care,” Iffy replies.
“You should. But then again, soon enough it won’t matter to you.” Lidia looks over at Kane. “Vincent, why don’t you take… Ivy, is it? Please take Ivy up to the room we’ve prepared for her.”
“She stays with me!” I shout as I start to push myself off the couch. Before I gain my feet, however, Leonard shoves me back down.
I try again, getting all the way up before he pushes me again. This time, I stagger but don’t fall, and shove at his arms in an attempt to knock them away.
“Leonard,” Lidia says, “try his leg.”
I look down to see what she’s talking about and notice that blood has seeped into the denim above my wound. Before I can do anything else, Leonard whacks his knee into my thigh.