Kiernan sleeps with his head on one arm, his body curled around a pillow. I watch him for a moment, and then a shiver runs through me as I imagine how I’d feel if I discovered someone was, without my knowledge, watching me while I slept. But why is he still asleep at ten in the morning? I thought people were all early to bed, early to rise in 1905. Apparently not Kiernan.
It also occurs to me that I have no clue what he sleeps in. Or doesn’t sleep in. And he could throw those covers off at any second. So I jump ahead to noon, only to discover an empty room. I work my way backward in five-minute increments and finally hit the jackpot at 11:35. He’s awake and sitting on the bed, in black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt, buttoned up to the neck. A thin black strip of cloth—a tie of some sort, maybe?—hangs down around his collar on both sides.
He got a haircut, and it really looks better long. Not that it’s any of my business, of course. I take a deep breath and then blink to lock in the destination.
As always, his face lights up when he sees me. “Kate! It’s Thursday. I thought you were coming on Saturday?”
“Oh. No. I mean, yes, I am.” I’d actually kind of forgotten about Saturday, which I suspect would hurt his feelings. Hopefully, if I just barrel ahead, I’ll outrun his uncanny knack for reading every expression that crosses my face. “This is something else. I was going to ask for your advice about a couple of jumps, but I can see you have plans. I’ll just come back later.”
“I’m heading out to work, yes. But I can just as easily go tomorrow. What’s up?”
“No, that’s okay. I’d hate to make you miss a day of work.”
He laughs. “I don’t plan to miss a day of work. I’ll go to today’s work tomorrow. Or the day after.”
I glare at him, because he’s clearly enjoying messing with my head. I really should be getting a handle on this whole temporal-relativity thing, however, after the past few days. The cancer may limit the time Katherine has left, but as long as I don’t screw with my memories by having two versions of myself in the same place at the same time, there’s nothing to stop me from doubling and tripling up if needed. All told, I’ve put in about a hundred hours of research and an additional thirty hours spending time with Mom, running errands for her and so forth in preparation for her trip to Italy.
“Okay,” I say, sitting on the side of his bed. “I’ve spent the last . . . I don’t know, but it feels like a century . . . watching the diary entries and going through Katherine’s notes. We’re going to have a meeting about it tomorrow, and I think it would help if you were there.”
“So, it’s been what . . . a week since you were here?”
“The calendar says six days, but I did most of those hours two or three times.”
“What happened to your decision to take things slow? To wait until you—as you put it—know the hell what you’re doing?”
“Partly Katherine. But mostly me realizing I’ll probably never know the hell what I’m doing.” It was intended as a joke. A lame one, admittedly, but Kiernan either doesn’t get it or doesn’t think it’s funny, because his eyes are somber, still locked on my face.
“Can you tell me what you remember about two trips discussed in the diary?” I ask. “The first is to 1902. You’ve talked about the Cyrist Farm on a number of occasions, but where was it?”
“There’s more than one. I was at a farm in Illinois just before you and I met at the Expo, back when that place was the headquarters. That farm still exists, but most of us had moved down to Estero by 1902—”
“That’s in Florida, right? And that’s where you met Other-Kate?”
“Yeah. She was nosing around Nuevo Reino—well, that’s not what it was called back then, but it’s what they call it later. Cyrist International is still officially headquartered in DC, but Saul has been in the Miami area since shortly after he landed in 2024. Only a few people know exactly where, because he moves around, but he has a house there.”
I make a mental note to let Katherine and Connor know the actual year Saul landed and then get to the main point. “So, here’s the thing. Katherine says the Koreshans aren’t the same as the Cyrists. That they were around before Saul. But everything I’m seeing—”
“Katherine’s sort of right and sort of wrong. The Koreshans definitely existed. They were an odd little group that thought the universe was a hollow sphere, with Earth in the center, based on some visions that Cyrus Teed had after getting the bloody hell shocked out of him during a scientific experiment in his basement. He said this beautiful woman came to him and told him he would lead his followers to salvation and eternal life by building this new community. He renamed himself Koresh and developed plans for a place he called New Jerusalem that would one day hold ten million people, or so he claimed. He was pretty forward thinking on some things—believed women should have the vote, for example, and that God was both male and female. That’s probably one reason that he attracted a lot of followers, especially women, and they were happy to turn over their money to help him build this new paradise.
“When Teed died in 1908, he said he’d be reincarnated or resurrected. It was all built up around this idea of communal purity. If men and women lived together in pure—that is, sex-free—harmony, they’d become immortal. Cyrus died three days before Christmas, so they all thought he’d rise up on Christmas Day. His followers just put him in a bathtub and waited. In the pre-Saul timeline, I think the county eventually came in and made them bury him.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I read about that in an old religious history text in Katherine’s library. The group gradually died out after realizing Koresh wasn’t coming back.”
He nods. “Which is how most of these groups end. In this case, they decided if God didn’t resurrect Koresh himself, the very foundation of their faith, what hope did his lowly followers have?”
“But the records show Cyrist International was founded back in the 1400s, right? So . . . why take over this group in the early 1900s?”
“Sometimes it’s easier to just change the historical record, rather than changing history itself. The date you’ll usually see for Cyrist International—I should know this—1470 something . . .”
“It’s 1478.”
“Yeah, well the only thing that happened in 1478 is that Prudence, or maybe it was Simon, went back and paid this guy William Caxton, who was the first person in England with a printing press, to print up some copies of the Book of Cyrus. A few years later, they do the same for the Book of Prophecy. Then, they make sure those books end up in a few archives. The B of P included accounts of so-called miracles Cyrus would perform later—in a couple of cases, it even gives a rough idea of the dates. And there’s lots of predictions in there too, things that shouldn’t’ve been known when the book was printed. As those dates roll past and predictions come true, folks start thinking maybe this Cyrus guy was the real deal.”
“So the miracles—are those the cures that Katherine mentioned? Things Saul did before he blew up CHRONOS headquarters?”
“Yeah. And the prophecies start attracting believers kind of like that Nostradamus guy, except the B of P doesn’t leave as much room for interpretation. So, with the Koreshans and a handful of other groups, all Saul did is cash in on an opportunity. He invested enough money in Cyrus Teed’s little commune to push the plans for the move to Estero forward by about six years. And he had Prudence orchestrate several so-called visions, convincing Teed to give up this silly Hollow Earth idea and some other views Saul thought were bunk. And in these visions, Prudence tells Teed that she’s his future female incarnation, which he probably thought was a pretty sweet upgrade. She even shows up as a vision to a few of the other Koreshan leaders. Then, Teed dies.”
“Only it’s now in 1901 instead of 1908, right?”
“Yeah. I suspect his death wasn’t entirely accidental in either timeline, but Saul pushed it forward seven years. Then, the true believers pile him into the tub, and—”