“Did he say where Abel was?”
“No. He was kind of cryptic.”
He opens his mouth to say something else, but I interrupt him. “You trained with Saul, right?”
“Yeah,” he says, his hazel eyes growing wary. “Only once, two jumps before this one. No offense, since he’s your grandfather and all, but he’s a total ass.”
“No offense taken. Did you come to that conclusion before or after hearing my grandmother in the video?”
“Before.” He gives me a worried look. “You swear you’re not with CHRONOS?”
Something in his tone of voice makes me smile. I was predisposed to dislike him, but he seems like a decent guy. “Cross my heart, hope to die. Pinky-swear, if you’d like.”
“I’m not familiar with that last one, but I’ll take your word. Let’s just say Saul screwed me over on the training jump.”
“What did he do?”
He gives me a long look again, like he’s trying to decide whether to trust me, and then sighs. “Our jump was to Atlanta—September 1911. Some religious conference. I’m not a religious historian. I do nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal history. There was this string of murders in Atlanta—some two dozen black women were murdered in the last half of 1911. The papers dubbed the killer the Atlanta Ripper, and the cases were never solved. I wondered if they tried very hard, given the state of race relations at the time, so Angelo decides I should tag along with Saul and see if I could get an answer to that research question.”
Grant drinks the last bit from the cup and then crushes it. “Apparently, he didn’t ask Saul’s opinion on the matter, because Saul was completely whizzed off to be stuck with a trainee. We get there, and Saul attends maybe one session at the conference, then says he’s got a side trip planned. Claims a lot of the historians do it and tells me to hang out in Atlanta until he gets back. But I said no way. It was only my second jump, and I wasn’t supposed to be left on my own for more than an hour, tops. So he says fine, I can come with—he’s studying some small cult about two hours from Atlanta. It may even have been in this direction. I’m thinking a few counties over?”
“So . . . what happened?”
“We get there, and it’s not much at all. An old lady runs the place, sort of like a collective farm. She was super friendly, offered to let us stay overnight, since it was late when we arrived.” He shakes his head. “You ask me, it was all about some girl. She was half his age, too. Pretty enough, but . . . I’d even have considered her too young. Maybe Saul just gets off on breaking rules.”
“That’s a pretty safe bet.”
“Anyway,” Grant continues, “I got horribly sick that night. Saul says I was drunk, but I only had one glass of this homemade wine the old guy we were staying with gave us. He gave some to the girl, too, so I don’t think it was very strong. Hell, I didn’t even finish the glass—it was too sweet for me. Next thing I remember, it’s the next day, and we’re in the truck, halfway back to Atlanta. Saul tells me if I breathe a word to Angelo about the side trip, he’ll say I took off and he found me trashed in a bar. But if I play along, he’ll tell them I got food poisoning and that’s why I came back with almost nothing for my research.”
He tosses the cup into a wicker basket next to the bench. “CHRONOS Med checked me out pretty thoroughly when we got back, however, since Saul said I’d been sick. They never actually questioned the food-poisoning story, but I don’t think they bought it. Or maybe I’m just a crappy liar. Anyway, the next jump, I’m scheduled with Delia, the most by-the-book trainer of the bunch. They must have told her something about the Atlanta jump, because she lectured me for a good hour before we left—said I was to watch and observe, and limit my interactions as much as possible without looking out of place. And what happens? Just by standing there, I manage to whizz off the biggest jerk in the crowd and get Abel arrested.”
“Well, you can hardly be blamed for that.”
“I should have punched the idiot myself. I really, really wanted to. But I held back, because I kept hearing Delia harping on about staying in the background. I already had one black mark on my record from the jump with Saul. I didn’t want to add another.”
A woman walks in, one child in front of her and two others trailing behind. The child in front is cradling her arm and looks a bit woozy. The woman leads her over to the reception desk and shoos the other kids to the waiting area, where they take the bench opposite us.
I slide over a little closer to Grant so that there’s less likelihood of anyone overhearing us. “If you’d hit Willis, you’d be the one in jail.”
“Yes, and that would be a billion times better. Like I said, I study legal systems. White man hits white man in 1938 Georgia, and even if he’s a stranger, there’s a decent chance that they’ll listen to the outsider, especially if there are witnesses who back him. So I think your friend will be okay. Black man hits a white man, however—hits three, maybe four of them in this case—and reason flies out the window. And that Willis guy was getting his ass kicked before the others jumped in, so he’s going to be in a vindictive mood.”
One of the two kids, a girl of about nine, is watching us, possibly because we’re spattered with blood. I tug at Grant’s sleeve, nodding toward the door. The heat isn’t much worse outside, and there’s less chance of being overheard.
I tell the receptionist we’ll be outside, and we walk out onto the porch of the hospital. The place looks more like someone’s house than a medical center. There’s a large shade tree on the lawn, and we sit down beneath it.
“We’ll get Abel out,” I say.
“I hope you’re right. But even if we do, being stuck in 1938 isn’t exactly good news for an interracial couple. And here’s the irony—Abel’s five or six shades darker than his parents. Delia’s several shades lighter than hers. Why? CHRONOS doesn’t need multiracial historians—they’d have a tough time blending in any time before the twenty-first century. So they tweak appearance as well when your parents sign you up. I don’t look much like my family, either.”
“So—they do that to all the historians?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Hair color, eye color, skin tone—mostly stuff like that.”
I’m silent for a moment, preoccupied with wondering what I’d look like if all four of my grandparents hadn’t been genetically altered.
“Not that being stranded here is good news for me, either,” Grant says. “On top of everything else, there’s a draft coming up in a few years. I can’t believe I could end up as a soldier, for God’s sake. In an actual war—how ironic is that? This is just wrong on so many levels.”
“I’m not sure my era is a lot safer right now—it’s just that no one realizes they’re in danger.”
“And this danger in your time is from Saul?” Grant asks, with an incredulous look. “From these Cyrists he’s created? I know he’s a jerk, but . . .”
He’s not convinced, and I don’t blame him. And just as he did a few minutes ago with me, I stare into his eyes, trying to determine whether I can trust him. It’s probably not a great method even when both eyes are readable, and one of his is now swollen almost completely shut.
He could be lying. He could be in on it with Saul.
I don’t get that sense, however. I’ve seen a homicidal maniac quite recently—two, if you count Holmes along with Saul. Three, if you count Prudence, although Kiernan seems convinced that she views the Culling more as collateral damage. Grant could be that type, I guess—a true believer so intent on some cause that he sees human casualties as a necessary evil—but that seems hard to believe. He looks like an average guy who just got some really bad news—and who got the crap beaten out of him as well.
“What can you tell me about your time, Grant?” I can see that he’s taken aback by what seems like an abrupt change of topic, so I add, “I’m not asking for spoilers, although I’m not sure they can really be considered spoilers when I’ll be dead long before then. I’m just trying to get a sense of what Saul’s people want to change. Are there trees in your time? Animals? Do you have to live under a bubble in order to breathe?”