“But I haven’t . . . I didn’t even know there were—”
“Yeah, I know all that, and you know all that, but you’re missing the point. Me saying you were poking around in the future is what made Pru reconsider—she decided me keeping you busy wasn’t such a bad idea after all. And that’s why she’s left us alone.”
“Left us alone? She’s threatened me twice, Kiernan. She left the message with Eve and . . . she broke into Trey’s house.”
He looks a bit surprised at the last part but says, “Has she hurt anyone? Like I said before, Pru’s not playing with a full deck, and I expect she can’t resist getting in a few blows. But if things go as planned today, we’ll have all of the keys. Well, except for Houdini’s, but I’m still working on that.”
I’m starting to wonder whether Kiernan is the one not playing with a full deck.
“What difference does it make?” I scream. “You’ve already said Prudence isn’t interested in any of those keys! The question is why? Are they replicating CHRONOS keys somehow? You said they had at least six . . .”
“Yeah. But I’m thinking now that I was right the first time—it’s more like twelve, maybe thirteen.”
I stare at him, dumbfounded.
“Think it through, Kate—there’s only one possible answer. There were thirty-six historians, but only twenty-four in the field, including Saul. They’re not worried about the ones you’ve been looking for, because they have the other twelve.”
“But . . . how? The system doesn’t allow jumps past 2100 something—whenever it was that the equipment was invented. There aren’t any stable points after that.”
“I think maybe there’s one,” he says. “CHRONOS headquarters at the time the teams were supposed to return. It’s what all of us see at first, before we figure out how to use the keys. Do you remember? At the beginning, it’s all black, with bits of static. I think maybe that’s what’s left of CHRONOS. It may be a very unstable stable point, but I think it’s there, and I think it’s where Pru landed when she accidentally used the key.”
The black void Katherine talked about. I only saw it briefly that first time I held the key, but then Katherine was a little surprised at how quickly I was able to lock on to images. After only a second, I saw the wheat field and Kiernan, then white buildings near the water. After that, there was darkness. Someone crying. And then I was back in the wheat field again. But none of those were really like viewing a stable point for me. All of my other senses were active, too, which never happens when I pull up locations on the key now.
“Why go to the trouble of grabbing keys scattered about time and space when they had twelve all waiting in one spot?” he continues. “Prudence never came out and said directly that’s what happened, but she did say that neither she nor Saul is particularly worried that one little girl can use the equipment, especially when that girl is barking up the wrong tree.”
I clutch my head, which is pounding mercilessly, as I try to separate the threads of everything Kiernan has just said. It’s a tangled mess, but I find one semicoherent thought sticking out at the edge and follow it. “Okay, so why didn’t you go back and tell me I was barking up the wrong damn tree?”
“Two reasons—no, wait, three. First, that would have resulted in a lot of screwy memories for both of us. Second, this kept my cover, which could help us later on, because all of the times I was with you, in Boston, at Katherine’s house, in Georgia, were no longer a problem once Prudence said I should keep you busy.”
“But, Prudence just recently told you to do that, after you’d already . . .”
“But she didn’t know that, did she? You can’t think about this linear—”
“Yes, I know! I know. Just tell me the third reason. And find me some ibuprofen.”
“I can’t help you there, love. Gave the last I had to Jess. But the third reason is that the keys we’ve collected are only irrelevant if Prudence and Saul think we’re not going after the ones they stole from CHRONOS after the explosion. If we prevent them from getting those keys in 2305, which is precisely what I plan to do, then you’d better believe they’ll come looking for the ones we’ve been collecting.”
Kiernan executes an impressive multipoint turn on a narrow trail lined with densely packed pine trees, so that we’re now pointed out toward the road we were just driving on, in perfect position to pull out once we see their car pass by. I’ve been silent for the last few minutes, and he keeps shooting nervous glances my way. I can’t shake the feeling that he hasn’t told me everything, but it could be because my head is still throbbing from trying to sort out everything he has told me already.
“You’re certain Prudence trusts you?”
“Kate, I’m not kidding when I say she’s crazy. If she doubted me in the slightest, I would—at a bare minimum—have claw marks up and down my face. More likely, I’d be dead. You saw Philippa and Leo back at the cabin, right? They’re with her most of the time. Leo’s pretty good at talking her down. Not as good as Simon was and not nearly as good as I am, but he helps. And Philippa has a syringe ready if that doesn’t work.”
“And those people, Leo and Philippa, they trust you, too?”
“I doubt it,” he says. “But it’s more because they don’t like me hanging around Pru than that they’re worried about me going to the other side. I’m not even sure they know about me and . . . Kate.”
I grab at another thread from the tangle in my mind. “Why does Leo look like Simon?”
He shrugs. “Same mother. The gene pool is pretty shallow at Estero. If you ever want a family reunion, we can just stop by the Cyrist Farm after, say, 2030, and I’ll introduce you to the entire gang.”
“No thanks. By same mom, you mean Pru, right?”
He nods.
“So, Simon is my cousin?” I wouldn’t have thought that our encounter on the day Katherine disappeared could be any more repulsive, but this ratchets it up a level.
“Yeah. And so’s Leo and Philippa. Eve—I guess she’s sort of a half cousin. Of the ones who can use the key, there are only three I know who aren’t descended from Pru—me, Patrick Conwell, and one other woman named Edna. The Patterson woman, the one who’s president in your time, that’s Edna’s great-granddaughter.”
“Can Patterson use the key?”
“No. But she’s inner circle because of the family connections.”
I finish off the last of the coffee. “Okay. Let’s put aside family ties and personal relationships for the time being, although it might help if you draw me up a family tree when we get back. I need you to give me the bigger picture. You say Saul and Prudence are at odds. I get the sense that part of it is that he just doesn’t like the idea of her having a bigger following among the Cyrists than he does, right?”
“Yeah. That’s part of it.” He leans forward a bit as a car passes by on the road in front of us, then relaxes again.
“But not all of it, right?”
“No. It’s more of a . . . schism. Sort of a civil war. Saul’s trying to keep a lot of very different groups together, Kate. He pulled in smaller faiths and movements that already existed, the Koreshans and a bunch of others. Then you have those who are only around because the Book of Prophesy gives pretty solid stock tips to the faithful. Others came on board because the religion seemed woman friendly, though they tended to start questioning that when they saw Prudence treated more as Brother Cyrus’s assistant than as a prophet in her own right. And finally, you’ve got Cyrists who joined up because they’re worried about the damage being done to the earth by overpopulation, global warming, corporate farming, you name it. They find it a wee bit puzzling when church doctrine claims the End is coming to protect the earth but still encourages those who follow The Way to invest in the companies doing the damage.”