As I think this through, something tickles the back of my mind. A memory, I think, but before I can extract it, Lidia presses her go button again.
Yet another quick trip. This time, however, I don’t arrive on the side of the mountain but in someone’s backyard. Lucky for me, the occupants of the house haven’t noticed me, and to keep it that way, I duck down and hurry around the side, out of direct view.
I look at the chaser. It’s still 1952, just one day later, and late afternoon.
I look down the side yard toward the front of the house, and spot a nook between the chimney and the trash cans. The perfect place to hide if this ends up being another multi-hour stop.
Once I settle into my new position, I do my best to pretend the smell coming from the cans isn’t as bad as it really is. I’m there for just over forty-five minutes when—
“Hanging in there, Denny?” Lidia’s voice comes from the other side of the gate, just beyond the trash cans.
Before I have a chance to wonder how she found me, the house disappears, and in the blink of an eye, I’m standing between the wall of a concrete building and a field of drying brush. This lasts barely five seconds before we jump again, and I’m back inside the doorless cell.
“Did you have a good time?” Lidia asks from her side of the glass. “See anything interesting?”
“What was that all about?”
“See for yourself.”
She nods past me with her chin. Turning, I see two newspapers stacked on the floor behind me.
“The one on top’s the original,” she says.
The concrete wall I’d been standing near moments ago must be right outside this building. She used that short amount of time to deposit the papers in here. Then we had hopped again, like rabbits, she moving from this room to the one she’s now in, and me from outside to here.
I walk over and pick up the papers. They’re both copies of the Los Angeles Examiner, and, in fact, both are dated May 30, 1952. On the front pages are the exact same articles. “What am I looking for?”
“Page three, at the top.”
Since there are no tables in the room, I kneel down and open each paper on the floor. While everything on page two matches, the articles at the top of the page threes are different. In the one she called the original is a story about a robbery at a grocery store in downtown. In the other one, the headline reads:
WOMAN KIDNAPPED, FORCED TO DRIVE OUT OF TOWN
The story is about a woman named Felicia Andrews. On May 29, while I was getting sunburned on the mountainside, Miss Andrews had apparently been kidnapped in her own car and made to drive nearly thirty miles out of town. The story describes the kidnapper only as a “mystery woman.” Miss Andrews was then freed, and the kidnapper disappeared.
“You?” I ask.
“Guilty,” she says, holding up her hands.
What she’s done probably won’t make a large impact on the time line, but who knows? Perhaps this Andrews woman had originally been destined to do something important, but now will live the rest of her life in fear.
I walk over to the window. “Why?”
“Getting a little practice in first, having some fun.”
“You don’t need to do this,” I plead, trying to come up with something to stop her from doing anything else. “Just… just exile me somewhere like I did to you. That would be fair. You don’t need to destroy everyone’s lives. You just need to destroy mine.”
She responds with a scoff and then takes her rucksack off, puts the chaser inside, and pulls out a hardback book. She approaches the window again, and presses the book against the glass. Printed on the cover is:
WORLD WAR II: A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY
“What are you going to do? Change the war?”
She smiles but says nothing as she slips the book back in her bag. “Sit tight. You’ll be out of there soon.”
Like before, she leaves by the door, no doubt to put distance between us again. As soon as she’s gone, I turn to the question that’s been bothering me since she brought me back here. How did she find me in the side yard of the house? The question triggers a return of the thought poking at the back of my mind. Now, though, I am able to pull it into the light.
Back in my first week in Iffy’s time line, right after I had accidentally triggered the switch that kept Washington alive, Lidia had found me in downtown Los Angeles, outside the public library. She had found me.
She’d said Bernard, her supervisor, had showed her how to “tune” her chaser so she could locate other devices. Obviously she had used that method again just a little while ago to find me at the house.
I sit cross-legged with my chaser in my lap and scroll through the menus. I’m sure I’ve seen every function before, and don’t remember any that would activate this ability, but maybe I missed a special setting or something similar. I work my way screen after screen through all the menus, but nothing even hints at detection possibilities.
I must figure this out. I know in my heart there is truth to what Lidia said to me earlier. Perhaps what she’s planning on doing isn’t 100 percent my fault, but I can’t help feeling I share in the responsibility. I’m the one who caused her to step over the edge into insanity. I’m the one who took away everything she understood.
If it’s not a single function, then perhaps it’s a combination of different functions that by themselves can’t locate another machine, but working together might. Yes, of course. That’s got to be it, right? Because the last thing I want it to be is something physically I need to do to the device, like rearranging wire connections. First off, I’d have no clue what wires or components needed to be tampered with, and second, I’d have to assume that the moment I opened the machine, the slave mode would be deactivated. That’s something I can’t chance.
I start going through the screens again, slower this time and with an eye to what functions might be needed to create a makeshift chaser detector. The answer has to be here somewhere; it just has to—
Jump.
My arrival at our new destination isn’t greeted by the safety of night but by bright sunlight. Worse, there is noise everywhere. Engines and horns and voices.
As soon as I fully materialize, a shriek fills the air only a few feet away from me, and is quickly joined by several others. Without even thinking, I close the chaser’s lid as I look around. I’m in the middle of a busy sidewalk. The first scream came from a woman who had been about to walk through the space I now inhabit. She has witnessed my arrival, but she’s not the only one, and I’m quickly surrounded by a circle of fearful stares and shouts.
A man hollers a question at me. At least I think it’s a question. I don’t understand him. He’s not speaking English. It sounds like—
Another yell, this from someone outside the circle trying to push through.
— German, I realize.
The crowd parts for a man in a uniform. Around his arm is a red band with a white circle containing the black symbol I recognize from research I’ve done on Iffy’s world. In light of the book Lidia showed me, I guess it should be no surprise that we’re in Nazi Germany, either in the period known as World War II or the years just before it. A glance at my chaser would tell me for sure, but I can’t open the box and reveal what’s inside with all these people focused on me.
The uniformed man starts to ask me a question, but the woman who almost ran into me cuts him off and begins talking rapidly in what I’m sure is a detailed description of how I appeared out of nowhere.