I check the chaser’s map twice to make sure there hasn’t been a mistake. According to my device, I am just off the south coast of England on the Isle of Wight, between the towns of Newport and Cowes. More specifically, I’m in a field filled with rows of tall crops that I can’t identify that block my view. Rising on my toes, I can just get my eyes above the plants, but I barely start scanning around when Lidia yanks on my chain again.
The jump feels as if I’ve been standing in a dark room and someone has simply turned on the light. The sun beats down on rows of plants that look exactly those from the field where I’d just been. I stick my head up for a peek and am positive that I’m in the same field, though probably about ten yards south of my previous position.
I’m pretty sure we’ve just performed a textbook rewinder insert. Lidia brought us in under the cover of early morning, took a look around, and then jumped several hours forward to a position close to where she had been that would hide her when she arrived in the daytime.
Which probably means it will be some time before we travel again while she completes whatever evil task she has come here to do. I sit on the ground and finish my search through the menus, not allowing my mind to start down the worrisome road of trying to figure out why we’ve come to this place at this time.
Once I finish, there’s one thing I need to do before I can start testing combinations to get the tracker working. For any of the companion functions to work, I must reconnect the companion wires. Doing so makes me very nervous, however. While there are no trained and official companions in this time line, the box could connect to someone else, like mine did with Iffy back in late March. Also, I worry that opening the specialized area of the box might disconnect the slave mode.
I take a deep breath and then perform the task as quickly as I can. As soon as I close the panel again, I check the training functions to make sure the device is still enslaved to Lidia’s. Thankfully, it is. As for a companion, the status function under the companion menus reads UNCONNECTED.
I begin the testing phase. The initial attempts yield either error messages or nothing at all. I keep at it, though, positive that I’m on the right track.
I’ve been at it for nearly ten minutes when the screen suddenly goes dark. For a half second I fear that I’ve somehow disabled the device and I’ll be stuck here in the nineteenth century. But then it flicks back on, a map now displayed on the screen.
There are two glowing dots. One hovers over the spot where I am now. The other is in the town of Cowes.
It has to be Lidia’s chaser. What else could it be? I touch this other dot, and a callout appears beside it, containing a locator number.
If I wanted to, I could jump right to where she is, but that would mean deactivating the slave mode, a move that I’m pretty sure would alert her device that our machines were no longer tethered and allow her to make a jump I could not follow. What I can do, though, is shorten the distance between us the old-fashioned way.
Staying low, I move down the row to the end of the field, where I find a path. This leads to another and then a third, which eventually meets up with a narrow muddy road that, if my map is not misleading me, will take me to Cowes.
If we stay in this place and time for a couple hours, I should be able to reach her.
Take your time, Lidia, I think over and over as I limp down the road.
I’ve gone about a half mile when I hear the slow but steady clomp of hooves and the creak of wood behind me. Glancing back, I see a cart pulled by a pony heading my way. The driver is a middle-aged, balding man, with a gray-speckled brown beard. Stacked high in the cart’s cargo area are several canvas-covered bundles.
As he nears me, he slows his already moderate pace. “Are you lost?”
“I, um, I’m heading to Cowes.”
His eyes narrow suspiciously. “Don’t think we’ve met before.”
“No. I’m not from here.”
“Clearly. So where would you be from?”
His accent makes me think about the British Empire of my youth, and I stop myself at the last moment from saying New Cardiff. “America,” I tell him.
“You’re a long way from home.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Headed to Cowes, you say?”
“Yes.”
“That leg of yours isn’t doing you any favors.”
I glance down at my pants, thinking they’ve become bloody like my jeans, but while there are a couple dark spots, they’re small and not obvious. It’s my limp that’s drawn his attention. “No, sir. It’s not.”
He pulls on the reins, stopping the pony. “Well, hop on then. Unless you’d rather be on your own.”
I grab the side of the cart and start to swing into the back.
“No, no,” he says. “Up here. More room.”
I pull myself onto the bench seat next to him. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
He gives the reins a shake and calls out to the pony, and the cart starts moving again.
“Here for the boats, I assume,” he says.
“The boats?”
“The regatta. Cowes Week. Why else would you be here?”
“Right, yes. The regatta. I’m here for that.” Perhaps I’m not lying about that. Though I know nothing of this regatta, there’s a good chance something connected to it is what’s drawn Lidia here.
“So what were you doing way out here?”
“Friends.”
“Played a trick on you, did they? Got to drinking a little too much and they dumped you out here?”
I smile guiltily, but say nothing to confirm his guess one way or the other. His theory isn’t the story I was going for, but I like it better.
We ride on silently for a few minutes before he nods at my lap and says, “What’s in the box?”
Instinctively my grip tightens on my chaser. “Just… my things.” I pause, then add what I hope sounds appropriate. “Pens, paper. That kind of thing.”
“You’re a writer?”
“Only letters.”
“Got a girl back home, then.”
Iffy, I think, my heart tightening. “Yes.”
“Good for you. If you love her, hold on to her tight.”
“I’m trying.”
“Sure you don’t have any tobacco in there?”
“No, sir. Sorry.”
“Oh, well. Worth a shot.”
Several minutes later, I wonder if I should have just told him the box was a time travel device. That way he’d have had something to ease his shock when I suddenly disappeared.
The jumps start blending into one another — three minutes here, ten minutes there, a few times over an hour. Thankfully, the coordinates for each stop are automatically stored in a list on my chaser. I will need them later when I undo Lidia’s messes. What those messes could be and what possible atrocities they are causing press down on me like thick sheets of lead that I’m finding harder and harder to ignore.
I’ve noted that there’s a discernible pattern to the trips. We go back several decades, hop around a little bit there, then jump forward a few years before heading even farther back, like a weird game of checkers. My guess is that the initial backward trip is where she does whatever it is she has planned, after which we move forward so she can see the results. Then repeat and repeat and repeat.
And it all makes appalling sense.
Layers upon layers, starting at the most forward point in time that she wanted to affect — either the kidnapping in Santa Monica, or, most likely, the change she caused in prewar Berlin.
See, if she were to change the outcome of World War II and then go forward to the 1950s to do the same with the Korean War, she would likely find that ripples from the first break with the time line have altered the future so that perhaps there is no Korean War. What she’s doing instead is making each change farther back in time than the last. So she could remove a world leader from the 1950s, then alter the financial collapse of the 1920s, then throw a wrench into World War I, and so on.