“But the bigger issue is that it could… hurt you, Trey.” I stared down at his hand, fingers laced through my own. “You remember when you saw the pictures disappear, right? That was your brain trying to reconcile two very small conflicting versions of reality. Multiply that thousands of times over if you stayed here tomorrow. You’d have to leave the protective barrier at some point, and Katherine doesn’t know what it might do to you—mentally, emotionally.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Maybe not. But I do.”
We stared at each other for a while, seeing whose stubborn look would last the longest. Mine broke first, and I began crying. “I can’t focus on what I have to do, Trey, if I’m worried that you’re going to be hurt.”
“And now you know how I feel. Damn it, Kate…” Tears were in his eyes and he held me for a long moment before speaking again. “Will you answer one question for me?”
I nodded.
“Who is Kiernan?” My face flushed, and I didn’t respond. “I mean, I know he’s Connor’s great-granddad or whatever—the guy he showed me in the two photographs. But Simon was saying something to Katherine when I first pulled up—and then again when he was… on top of you. Exactly who is Kiernan to you, Kate?”
“He’s no one to me, Trey.” A small voice inside called me a liar, but I continued. I was determined to tell Trey as much of the truth as I could—as much as I understood, at any rate. “Kiernan told me to run that day on the Metro. He almost certainly saved my life when he did. And I’ve… seen his image in the medallion. He says we knew each other, in some other timeline.”
Oh, and he kissed me, I thought, but didn’t add, since that fact seemed likely to make Trey feel worse, rather than better. And I hadn’t asked Kiernan to kiss me. Enjoyed, yes. Requested, no.
“He knew you well enough to stake a claim, from the sound of it.” Trey’s voice was bitter and hurt. “Simon said Saul would never let Kiernan have you now…”
I pulled his face toward mine and stared hard into his eyes. “Whoever Kiernan knew in that version of the timeline, Trey, it wasn’t me. Neither Saul Rand nor Simon will be deciding who has me. I make that choice. I decide the person I love, the person I want. No one else.”
I pulled my body closer to his and slipped my fingers inside his shirt, running my hand against his chest. “And I love you, Trey. I want you.” I hesitated, looking for the right words. “I’ve never… with anyone… but I want you…”
Then his mouth was on mine, hard and hungry. His hands moved up the side of my body and I arched reflexively toward him. For several minutes, there was nothing else in the world, just the two of us, his body against mine—and then he broke away and sat up, staring down at the carpet.
“What’s wrong?” I tried to pull him back toward me, but he shook his head.
I gave him a weak little smile. “Daphne’s not here. No chaperone, see?”
He didn’t respond. I was now thoroughly embarrassed and kicking myself for not letting him make the all-important first move. Biting my lower lip to keep it from shaking, I pulled away to the far end of the sofa and hugged my knees, staring at a different spot on the carpet.
After a moment, I felt his hand running gently down the side of my leg. I didn’t look up.
“Kate. Kate? Look at me. Please.” A tear was making its way down my cheek, the cheek he couldn’t see. I closed my eyes tight, hoping my other eye wouldn’t turn traitor as well. He got off the couch and knelt on the floor in front of me, brushing the tear away with the pad of his thumb. “Would you just look at me, please?”
I glanced up and he continued. “You have to know beyond any doubt how badly I want you.” He chuckled softly. “I mean, really Kate, could it be any more obvious?”
I didn’t answer, even though I knew he was right.
“At this very minute,” he said, staring into my eyes, “there is nothing on this earth that I want more than you. But we both know that tomorrow or the next day, my memory of this night will be gone. You might remember, but I won’t. And when we make love for the first time, Kate, that’s a memory I want to keep.”
Trey didn’t leave until nearly midnight. I don’t know if he ever managed to write the Huxley essay. Probably not. He skipped most of his classes the next day, arriving on the doorstep just after noon with lunch from O’Malley’s—lots of onion rings and three obscenely large sandwiches. He hadn’t shaved and he didn’t look like he had slept any more than I had.
“Ditching school again, Mr. Coleman?” I asked with a soft smile.
“My girlfriend is about to change this entire timeline. I can’t imagine any scenario in which it actually matters that I left after my first class.”
He had a point.
“What about your parents? Estella?”
“I told them that your grandmother took a turn for the worse yesterday, and that I needed to be with you. Neither of which is a lie,” he added. “I expect the flowers my dad asked me to order will be here shortly.”
We sat down to eat with Connor, who, despite his great love for corned beef on rye, didn’t seem to have much appetite. The three of us reviewed the game plan as we finished lunch. “Try your best to follow her,” Connor said, “but you also need to keep plan B as an option, in case Katherine disappears into the crowd. Because she probably will.”
Connor was right. The fair attracted an average of 120,000 visitors per day between the time it opened in May and the time it closed at the end of October. That’s about three times as many people as Disney World handles each day, and the Exposition was held on a much smaller plot of land. The odds of me being able to keep her in sight were pretty slim.
“I’ll try to keep up with her,” I said. “If I can’t, she’ll be with the mayor’s group at the Ferris wheel at ten fifteen, and after lunch she’ll be downtown at the place where they held all the big meetings during the Expo—the one that’s the Art Institute now.”
“Right,” Connor said. “They called it the Auxiliary Building. But that’s going to mean navigating Chicago’s public transit. I know you’ve read CHRONOS notes on the era, but I’d feel a lot better if you stayed close to a stable point. If worse comes to worst, you can come back here and then take another stab at it.”
He was right—we could roll the dice more than once. If I lost sight of Katherine entirely and simply couldn’t find her, I could always return to the stable point and give it another try. A second jump would, however, mean multiple versions of myself walking around the fair, which would complicate things. I had a bad gut feeling about taking too long to accomplish this anyway, and both Connor and Trey felt the same. Katherine’s house was relatively well protected by an alarm service, but we were totally unarmed. As much as I hate guns, it wasn’t too comforting that Simon and whatever other minions of Saul’s had weapons and we didn’t. And, as Trey’s dad had noted, Cyrists now had friends in very high places.
Connor and I had spent the better part of the morning going over Katherine’s diary entries for the October 28th jump, gathering what details we could about her hotel and her itinerary on that trip. By the time Trey arrived, we’d had to admit defeat on one count—Katherine had failed to mention the hotel specifically, other than noting that it was near the fair. She had stayed at the Palmer House on the first jump for those dates, but that information wasn’t much help since it was the slightly later version of Katherine who was targeted. There were several other bits of info that would have been really nice to know, and I mentally kicked myself for not having asked these obvious questions when Katherine was around to answer.
As I picked at my pastrami, it occurred to me that I could just make a jump back to the previous day and ask Katherine, but Connor quickly nixed that plan. “Can you honestly tell me you won’t warn her?” he asked. “That you won’t do something to ensure she doesn’t walk out that door when Simon grabs you?”
I considered lying, but I finally went with the truth. “No, Connor—but so what? Why shouldn’t I warn her? Or warn myself not to go outside? It’s not like this is such a wonderful version of the timeline that it couldn’t do with a bit of alteration, and I’m willing to risk having some out-of-sync memories.”
Connor shook his head angrily. “Why in hell do you think she sent me upstairs, Kate? Our first priority has to be protecting you. No matter what. As much as it tore me apart to see Katherine vanish, at least I knew it was reversible—well, I knew it was reversible once you walked in the door, at any rate,” he continued, his voice softening. “That’s my point. Say we stop what happened yesterday—they’ll almost certainly just attack the house at that point. If we change something and Katherine survives, but you don’t—well, there are no mulligans without you, Kate. Then Katherine dies, Rand wins, and we just get to sit back and see what he does with the world.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what a mulligan was, but Trey was nodding. “Okay—that explains why she gave Simon the medallion even though she clearly saw me driving up. There was still a risk that he would pull your CHRONOS key before I could reach him. She was buying Connor some extra time to extend the barrier.”
“And buying you some extra time to grab a weapon, although I don’t know if she realized that,” Connor added. “I just hope that slimy bastard is in a world of pain today.”
The floral arrangement from Trey’s dad arrived later in the afternoon. It was beautiful—white lilies, lavender roses, and purple alstroemeria, with clusters of tiny white baby’s breath. I hoped Katherine would eventually see it, and I was glad that there would, at least within this house, be some reminders of my relationship with Trey. Even though every little memento would hurt like hell, that still seemed better than what he was facing—no memories at all.
The flowers were followed within minutes by the delivery of a large hatbox. It contained a rather elaborate green bonnet, which I’d quite liked the idea of traveling without. So with the last of my costume in hand, we set a firm departure time of 6 P.M. and the three of us began final preparations for my jump.
An emerald-green parasol lay on the bed, next to the black handbag that Katherine had carried on her last CHRONOS trip. The bag was about forty years out of fashion for a trip to 1893, but it would have to do, as it contained several hidden pockets that would come in handy. I couldn’t carry luggage, since I would emerge within the fairgrounds and there were no hotels on the premises. So the purse was stuffed with my spending money (all pre-1893, a coin collector’s dream), one of the diaries, a vintage map of the Exposition, a hairbrush, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a tiny first-aid kit, a flask of water, and four energy bars.
Connor’s inner Katherine had balked at several items in the bag, noting correctly that they were not historically appropriate, but this wasn’t a typical research mission and I might not be able to stand in line for hours to get food or drink. I cut several paper bags from Whole Foods into rectangles so that I could wrap the energy bars in plain brown paper—they’d probably get hard, but at least I wouldn’t starve. And I wasn’t traveling without a toothbrush if I might have to stay overnight, even if that toothbrush was made of sparkly pink plastic.