I raise my eyebrows in silent question, and Evelyn nods. “Go ahead and start, Kate. I think we’ll be able to hear you over his chomping.”
“Actually, it might be easier to let Katherine tell you.” I navigate to the video that we made at Katherine’s house, turning the screen toward Timothy and Evelyn. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and I know it by heart. We spent a full week trying to figure out how much we could say without endangering the timeline.
“Evelyn, Timothy,” Katherine begins. “It’s been a long time.”
Evelyn draws in a sharp breath through her nose. When they saw her a few days ago, Katherine was around their age, midtwenties, with long blond hair. The woman on the screen is in her sixties, and her gray hair, although a bit longer than when I met her, is still very short due to last year’s chemo treatments. She’s sitting in the library, at a desk near the window.
“I don’t know if you’ve tried to pull up headquarters, but you won’t be able to reach anyone. It’s just a black void. My jump took me about six years ahead of you.
“I know you’ll want to try your keys, if you haven’t already, and I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t take this on faith, either. But they won’t get you back to HQ. It’s been more than forty years, and I still get nothing but black with a bit of static mixed in.
“So . . . the emergency protocol is in place. I’m sure you know better than I do where the closest CHRONOS safe-deposit box is. Once you get your new identities—”
Evelyn holds up one hand. “Switch that off. Now.”
I pause the video.
“She’s saying that we’re stuck here, Timo. Just like I was afraid of when my diary vanished. When I couldn’t pull up HQ.” Her face is pale. Timothy reaches for her hand.
“But if the keys don’t work, if CHRONOS is gone, how did you get here?” he asks me.
I glance down at the video. “Maybe we should let Katherine finish? She can tell this better than I can.”
I push “Play,” and Katherine’s voice continues. “—you’ll need to get on with your new lives. In case you’re wondering, it was Saul in the burqa with the knife to Shaila’s throat. He caused the explosion. And . . . a few hours before that, he killed Angelo.”
Tears well up in Evelyn’s eyes as Katherine continues. “Richard and I had just found Angelo’s body and asked the jump coordinator to call security when Saul burst in, dragging Shaila in front of him, and told them not to cancel the jump. He took Shaila’s spot—based on what we know now, I’m pretty sure he’s landed sometime after 2020.
“Saul’s hope was that destroying CHRONOS would allow him to jump from one point in time to the next, without being forced to return to HQ after each jump. But he miscalculated. He can’t use the CHRONOS keys any more than we can, but he’s learned the same thing I did. The CHRONOS gene passes on to our children and our grandchildren. I was pregnant with twins when I arrived in 1969. One of the girls, Prudence, had an accident with the key when she was fourteen. She’s been with Saul ever since. The other daughter, Deborah—well, I introduced her to this guy.”
Dad moves into the picture, with me at his side. Katherine and I argued for hours over whether this was a good idea. She said no, absolutely not, and initially Connor sided with her, but I won him over to my point of view. Timothy and Evelyn would probably believe me either way, but would they be willing to turn over their CHRONOS keys? I thought that plea would be much more effective coming from their son.
“Mom. Dad. If I could use the CHRONOS key, I’d have come myself.” Dad choked up a tiny bit when we recorded that part, and we had to restart the video a few minutes later. He barely remembers either of them, and he would love nothing more than to have taken my place. “It kind of glows when I touch it, but I can’t operate it.”
He puts his arm around me and gives my shoulders a squeeze. “So anyway, I’m sending Kate, in my—”
Evelyn reaches out for the phone and touches the screen to pause it, as she’d seen me do a moment ago. “Timo and I—we’re not around whenever this is, are we?”
“You know I can’t tell you that . . .”
“You don’t have to. It’s written all over his face.”
Damn it. Katherine was right. And as much as I love Katherine, I really don’t like it when she’s right.
“And,” she continues, “if we were around, you’d be showing a recording of the two of us explaining all of this, not Katherine.”
That’s true as well, and it makes me feel better about pulling Dad into the video. They would probably have figured it out either way. I push “Play” again, and Dad continues. “—place. Things are kind of crazy now. This Saul guy has set some things into motion that I don’t fully understand, but Kate says he’s planning to wipe out a good chunk of the population. So we’re trying to do an end run around his people and collect these keys before they can.”
Katherine leans back in. “I think Kate can answer any other questions you might have. The reality is simple—you can’t use the keys, and if you keep them, Saul’s people will try to take them. I’m really sorry—I wish I was able to give you better news, to tell you that this was just a temporary glitch and CHRONOS would have everything patched up shortly, but you’d find out soon enough anyway.
“You’re going to hear from a much younger version of me in a few years. It would be best if you don’t mention Kate’s visit to her . . . mention it to me, that is. It could . . . complicate things even more than they already are. Take care, okay?”
The video stops there. We had recorded a few minutes more, but Katherine thought that Dad saying goodbye might tip them off about future events, so she had Connor cut that section.
Evelyn grabs the phone from me and pokes the screen a few times, but nothing happens. “How do you reverse this stupid thing?”
“Should I go to the beginning?”
“No. Just back to—” Her look is raw and vulnerable. “What’s his name, Kate? What is my son’s name?”
“I can’t. You know I can’t tell you—”
“Oh come on, Ev. Give her a break. You know his name. He’s Alphonse, after your dad. We’ve discussed this half a dozen times. And if he’d been a girl—wait, he is named Alphonse, right, Kate?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.” I begin rewinding to where Dad starts talking, trying to keep my face neutral, so that nothing I do influences their decision. But it’s hard to keep from grinning at how close Harry Keller came to being named Alphonse.
I find the spot on the video and push “Play” again as I hand it to Evelyn. She pauses it before Dad can start talking. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at the screen.
After a moment, her expression shifts to a tight, almost angry look, and my heart sinks into my stomach. If this doesn’t go well, Katherine won’t exactly rub my face in it, but she will almost certainly find a subtle way to remind me that she was against Dad being in the video. This jump was supposed to be a sure thing. Before Saul, Prudence, and their Cyrist underlings managed to reset the timeline, these two keys were in our possession. Kiernan said they were relatively easy to get, but he doesn’t know the specifics because that other version of me, his Kate, Other-Kate, Kate-Past, whatever you want to call her, handled that jump before they met. And I have no clue what that Kate did, because in every sense that matters, she’s not me.
“I’m not sure if Katherine knows,” Timothy says, “but this was supposed to be a five-day trip. Everything around Dealey Plaza is going to be locked down and cordoned off, so we can’t get back to the stable point until around noon tomorrow at the very earliest. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. We’ve known something was wrong since Ev’s diary disappeared. She tried to send a question to HQ, and instead of getting an answer, it just . . . kind of . . . evaporated.”