It doesn’t matter if the World War I change negates the financial collapse change. Once her World War I damage is reversed, then the Korean issue she created reappears. Remove C, and B comes back. Remove B, and A comes back. Only there are a lot more layers already than just three. The only way I’ll get things back to the way they should be is if I eliminate each change she’s made in the reverse order that they’ve been created.
It chills me how disturbingly well she’s thought things through. It’s an insane and admittedly brilliant plan. If I’m unable to figure out just one thing, there is the very real probability that I’ll never see Iffy or my sister again.
Each time we jump, I try to close the physical gap between us. Sometimes we stop only long enough for me to get a dozen feet. Sometimes I can go much farther. The problem is Lidia is also on the move, and every few jumps the distance grows larger instead of smaller. I’m gaining on her, though, and by the time I find myself in a wooded Kentucky wilderness in 1786, I am within a half mile of her position. We jump in this general location four separate times, my arrival spot moving up to fifty yards each trip, until finally Lidia seems to have found a place she’s happy with. If the overall pattern holds, we should be here for at least thirty minutes, and likely much more.
It’s time to eliminate the remaining distance between us.
The forest floor is covered in thick brush, and it takes longer than I like to find the path of least resistance that keeps me headed in the direction I want to go. Thankfully, I procured something to carry my chaser at one of the previous stops. It’s a burlaplike bag I found just inside the open back door of a general store. I dumped out the few bits of grain it still contained, and fashioned a strap out of the top portion. Some of its fibers are already wearing a little thin, so I keep an arm wrapped around it as much as possible in case it suddenly falls apart, but it’s better than carrying the box in the open.
I keep expecting the trees to thin and reveal a village where Lidia will be, but so far the vegetation has yet to back down. After ten minutes, I pause and check the map again. I’ve more than halved the distance between us, and know that if I were to yell out, she’d hear me. That, of course, is not something I want to do. I proceed with caution, carefully moving branches out of my way and then easing them back into position without a sound.
Three hundred yards. Two hundred. One hundred and fifty.
I stop when I hear a crunch ahead and to the left. I’m not sure if it was a footstep or something falling to the ground. What I do know is that it didn’t come from the direction of Lidia’s chaser. At least not according to my tracking map. Of course, it’s possible the map isn’t as accurate as it could be and the glowing dot is merely an approximation of her location, making me torn whether to keep moving forward or to alter my course toward the noise.
Best to stay on track, I decide after a few moments. If she’s not where the map says she is, then I’ll adjust.
I move forward in a crouch, rolling my feet from heel to toe on each step. As I do, I diligently scan the ground ahead for anything that might snap under my weight, and redirect myself around these traps.
Finally, when I’m within a hundred feet of her presumed position, I see an opening in the trees ahead. A meadow. It looks as if Lidia has stopped just short of it.
I continue creeping forward.
There are four people in the field. Two are kids, boys from their clothing, though I could be wrong. One is a man of perhaps forty. The last I think is a man, too, until he turns and I can see his face. While he has the height of an adult, he has the features of a young teenager. They appear to be clearing the area.
A father and his sons working the land together is my guess.
Lidia should be about forty feet away from me now, just a hair to the right of the direction I’ve been headed.
This is it, I think. I can put an end to her madness right now!
I adjust my path and take another slow step.
A scream, not of fear but of rage. It doesn’t come from Lidia nor those in the field, but from the same direction in which I earlier heard the crunch.
The man and his boys stop what they’re doing and look toward the noise just in time to see someone run out from the trees. A native, by the looks of his outfit and darker skin. Three others follow.
The man shouts out at his boys. The tall one grabs the arm of the brother that is closest to him in size and says something in the boy’s ear. The boy then takes off running in the opposite direction from where the natives are coming — to hide or get help, I have no idea which.
The tall one yells something to the littlest boy and then runs diagonally across the meadow to what looks like a small cabin.
The native reaches the older man, and with what looks like a single, bloody blow, drops the man to the ground. The native then turns toward the cabin, and he and his friends start after the older boy.
The small boy hasn’t moved since his brother ran away, but the attack breaks his paralysis and he races to his father, drops to the ground next to him, and shakes the man’s shoulder. There’s no response nor will there ever be again. There’s just too much blood.
One of the natives has noticed the boy and has turned toward him. I press my lips together to keep from shouting out a warning as I’m sure the boy is done for. But when the native is only a few feet away from him, the boom of rapid-fire gunshots cracks across the field.
I think at first that the tall brother has taken a shot at the native to keep him away from the smaller boy, but one of the bullets has slammed into the woodpile by the cabin that the older sibling is using for cover.
The result is the boy ducks down farther, and the natives running toward him break for the woods, scared off by the shots from an unknown assailant. Only the assailant isn’t unknown to me. The hail of bullets came from Lidia’s position. Somewhere on our journey she’s obtained an automatic rifle, a weapon over a century away from even being built. In Germany, probably.
One of the natives, though, has not fled for the trees — the one headed for the little boy.
He raises the same weapon he killed the father with over his head as he nears.
“Shoot him,” I whisper. I know that would be messing with the time line, but Lidia’s already pulled the trigger once, so who knows what’s right and wrong anymore?
But instead of shooting the native, she sends a single bullet toward the tall brother to keep him down as the native delivers to the small son the same sentence he gave the father.
I know that Lidia could have killed the boy and his father herself before the natives attacked. That would have been the efficient way, but I know none of this is about efficiency. It’s about manipulating history to do her dirty work.
I stare at the bloodied bodies, unable to move, unable to think, and barely able to breathe.
Jump.
I materialize at the edge of a group of buildings. Lidia should be in front of me somewhere, but there’s a structure between us, and I can’t see her.
All is quiet, though. It’s the dead of night. Which means we’re about to—
When the world reappears it’s daytime, though the sun is hidden behind a thick layer of clouds that foretell of rain soon to come. I’m next to a copse of trees just behind one of the buildings I had seen during the night moments earlier. I check the tracking map. Lidia is actually inside the structure.