Tito obviously mistakes my expression for embarrassment, because he pats my hand and says, “No, no, don’ worry. The magician boy likes you. I can tell these things. And he seems a lot nicer than your other namorado. That one, he no make you smile, so is good you get rid of him.”
“Thank you, Tito,” I say and give him the biggest smile I can muster, hoping that he’ll leave if he thinks I’m happy. It works—he pats my hand again for good measure and then heads down the aisle to the orchestra pit.
I wait until his attention is elsewhere and then move toward the exit, keeping my head down. From the corner of my eye, I’m almost certain I see the blue flash of a medallion off to my left, at the very back. I tell myself not to look in that direction, but when I reach the rear of the theater, I do. Everyone is moving forward, folding umbrellas, shaking water from their hair and clothes, and craning their necks to find a cluster of seats where they can sit together.
All but two of them, that is.
The couple near the back isn’t wet at all. Their backs are pressed against the rear wall of the theater. The guy is a little above average height, kind of chunky, and I recognize Simon’s pale, pudgy profile scowling out at the people pushing in front of him. He has a tight grip on the upper arm of the girl standing next to him, who wears a high-waisted dress. Prudence is about my age, my height, pretty much my everything, but it’s her face that draws my attention. It’s slack, almost vacant. She’s staring at the door that Kiernan entered a few minutes ago, her mouth slightly open, her eyes empty.
Whirling around, I shove my way through the stragglers still filing into the theater and run out into the rain. I tug the medallion out of my blouse as I look for a place with a bit of cover. The rain is coming down so hard that I decide it’s probably a lost cause, and I just press myself against the side of the building, pull up Kiernan’s room at 10:15 a.m., and blink.
I take a deep breath and then slide away from the stable point, leaving a trail of water behind me on the wooden floor. A few seconds later, Kiernan appears, dripping wet, with three sets of cuffs on his arms and two on his ankles, the CHRONOS key clutched in his hands.
The black one-piece suit does in fact look good on him.
It takes a second for him to register that I’m as soaked as he is. “What happened?”
“You’re being watched, Kiernan. Every day. Every show.”
∞9∞
I open my eyes in the library. Rain drips down the windows, and I can’t help but feel that dreary weather is chasing me through space and time—first in Boston with Kiernan, then in Port Darwin, Australia, and now here.
Katherine and Connor are right where they were when I jumped to Port Darwin. All things considered, Adrienne took the news that she’s stranded in 1942 fairly well. She was nice. I hope she makes it out before the bombs hit.
I toss the key in Connor’s lap. “One more for the trash heap.”
He smiles. “No problems, then? No crocodile?”
“I think someone may have killed him, actually. Either that or he found something rather large to eat, because there was a big pool of blood on the beach.”
“I still don’t understand why you were determined to go alone,” Katherine says.
“Like I said before, Kiernan’s being watched. Prudence knows he’s up to something, and it’s not going to help either of us if she connects the dots. And this was a snap once Adrienne realized she was stranded. The only shaky point was when she asked whether she survives the bombing, but she didn’t push when I told her I couldn’t say. I do want to see what happened to her, though—”
“Why?” Katherine interjects. “What’s the point, Kate? You’ll just feel bad if you discover she was caught in the attack.”
Katherine’s right, at least on the surface. There’s no concrete purpose served in tracking Adrienne down, other than satisfying my curiosity and the fact that she asked me to. I liked her, and I’ll be tempted to go back and warn her if I find out that there’s a nurse’s assistant on the casualty list now who wasn’t there before. I don’t know if I’d actually do it, but I’d be tempted.
I consider dropping the point, because I’ll run that search later on, whether I admit it to Katherine or not. Either way, I want to know. But this is as good a time as any to raise the issue of the death in 1938. If Other-Katherine knew someone was going to die, I’m pretty sure this Katherine does too. And we might as well thrash it out now.
“So is it Delia, Abel, or this Grant guy who gets killed in 1938?”
She arches an eyebrow at me and looks back at her computer screen. “It’s irrelevant. He died before Saul started changing the timeline.”
He died. Okay, she didn’t answer the question, but at least she narrowed it down to Abel or Grant.
“No, Katherine, he didn’t. Saul started changing the timeline when he stranded the three of them in 1938. If not for that, the man would have made it back to his own time, right?”
Katherine shrugs, still looking at the screen. “Probably. But as I noted earlier, we can’t worry about that timeline. Our priority is to restore this reality, the one in which you exist to stop Saul. Anything else is a luxury, and we cannot afford to experiment.”
We’ve gone over this before, and yes, I know she’s partially right. We have no way of telling how many people are dead in this timeline who weren’t in some other reality or who don’t exist here but did exist there. My mind strays back to Dad’s two kids in the other timeline, and while it’s not exactly the same, never-existed and dead are functional equivalents.
But once again, Katherine’s made herself the sole arbiter of right and wrong and the one who defines what I need to know. I’m not down with that. Based on what Kiernan told me, neither was Other-Kate, and she had the advantage of a Katherine whose brain was fully operational and not hampered by steroids and who knows what else. Even though Katherine thinks the issue should be closed, I know it can’t be.
“For argument’s sake,” I say, “let’s pretend I agree on that point, even though we both know I don’t. I still need to know every single thing you can tell me about those three historians, what they were doing in Georgia and why you think they wouldn’t give up their keys. This is almost certainly the jump that brought everything down around our ears in the last timeline. That Kate no longer exists. And before she disappeared, that Kate was so angry at you that Kiernan thought she needed a chaperone before confronting you. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that if I repeat what she did last time, I won’t exist either, and there’s an excellent chance I’ll discover the same thing that made her want to punch you. So, maybe we should try something different this time?”
That seems to get her attention. Connor’s, too, although he shifts his eyes back down to the book he’s pretending to read.
At first, it seems Katherine’s going to argue the point, but then she says, “I don’t really remember Grant. He was a trainee. This would have been his first or second jump. It’s Abel who dies. I found out when I tracked Delia down, after Prudence began changing things. Delia was alive until about six years ago—taught for most of her life at a women’s college up in Maine. She remarried, and judging from the number of offspring, I’d say she intentionally flaunted CHRONOS protocol about minimizing changes to the timeline.”
“Well, that was before birth control, wasn’t it? It was probably hard to—”
Katherine sniffs. “Before the pill, yes. But there were reasonably effective methods available long before 1938, if you knew where to look. Delia would have known. Seven children, twenty-five grandchildren—that’s bound to ripple the timeline a bit. But, to get back to my point, she told me Abel was killed right after that last jump.”
“Killed how?”