I knew he was right. One half of my mind was screaming that I needed to get back, to see what had happened, to find out if Katherine was there, to find my parents, to find Trey. The other half was completely terrified of the prospect because there were so many ways that it could have gone wrong. Here and now was safe; the calm after the storm. There and then was simply unknown.
“Are you sure you can get back?” I asked. “You were worried about doing another jump…”
“I’ll be fine, love,” he answered. “If I can’t make it right away, I’ll rest up a bit. Going back home is never as hard as trying to leave. I feel like there’s a physical… anchor, I guess, dragging me back there.”
“Then I should go.” I met his eyes for the first time since we kissed and tried to muster up a smile. “But—you spoke about a resistance. Are you still in? I mean, even if Prudence gets Saul to back off and they don’t go after Katherine again, this isn’t over. I don’t know exactly what it is they’re planning…”
“I have a pretty good idea,” Kiernan said, leaning back to rest his shoulders against the bare wood of the cabin wall. “They refer to it as the Culling, necessary to save humanity and the planet. It will be pitched as an environmental accident of some sort. They’ve floated the idea of both airborne and waterborne, so I’m not sure.
“There’s no specific date, as far as I know—the general plan is to wait till they have about one-quarter of the population under their thumb and they’ll do whatever tweaking of the timeline they need to in order to make that happen. Cyrist members—or at least a good portion of them—will be given the antidote, along with a select few outsiders. People whose skills their experts have targeted as being vital for rebuilding.”
“So—it’s like the Creed they chanted at the temple,” I said. “‘As humans have failed to protect the Planet, the Planet shall protect itself.’ Except the Cyrists assume the role of ‘Planet’ and kill off those they consider unworthy?”
“Yes,” he said. “But don’t dismiss the appeal of their message so quickly. They make a compelling argument when you’re in the fold, y’know. There was a time when what Saul said made sense to me. You take someone from my time, a young kid who’s just learned to use the CHRONOS key and show him select scenes from say, the 2150s. Jump him around and give him a firsthand view of a nuclear disaster or two. Tell him about a society where your future is planned before you’re even born—written into your very DNA. Give him a few glimpses of modern war and the full extent of man’s inhumanity to man and the Cyrist solution doesn’t sound quite so evil.”
“So you think they have a point?” I asked.
“Don’t you?”
I didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes—okay,” I eventually admitted. “There’s a valid point somewhere beneath the layers of insanity. But most of the things you described are… incremental evils, if that makes sense. The mistakes of one generation build upon the mistakes of the next and you get a society that no one really wanted. Saul is talking about massive, planned evil, however, and assuming that you end up with a better society as a result. Morality aside, how is that logical? It seems to me that they’re gathering the greediest and most power-hungry of all, and I don’t think they’ll play nice together when the smoke clears. Prudence is one of those designing this brave new world and she actually told me I could either join them or line up with the other sheep to be fleeced and slaughtered.”
Kiernan snorted. “She could at least try for originality. That line is one she stole straight from her papa. But yes, it was precisely that kind of callous disregard for those who chose not to follow the Cyrist Way that caused my dad to leave.” For a moment he sounded like his eight-year-old self—my dad was almost me dad, and the same anger simmered beneath his voice.
“So you ask me if I’m in?” he said. “Of course I’m in. I’ll do anything I can to bring them down. But Kate, I was serious when I said that my abilities are limited now. They’re much weaker than they were just a few years ago, especially when I’ve been using the key so regularly. I doubt I’ll be able to do much more than a short hop out of my timeline for the next month. Maybe more.”
“But you have knowledge that we lack, Kiernan. You can give us the information we need to get started. Let me know how to get in touch with you,” I said, squeezing his hand. “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll come to you.”
I felt him stiffen slightly. I wasn’t sure what I’d said, but I would have given strong odds that I had stirred up the Ghost of Kate Past.
“I’m in,” he repeated after a long pause. “When you need to reach me, there’s a stable point in Boston. It’s a corner in the back of a tobacco shop near Faneuil Square. It’s stable from 1901 to 1910, but I’m going back to July 17th, 1905. Anytime after that, Jess will know where I am. He’s a friend. He’s the only one who’s ever behind the counter, and he won’t be surprised if you walk out of his storeroom—you’ve done it plenty of times in the past. You can leave a message with him and I’ll leave my location with him, too, once I’ve settled on a new place.”
“So—did we have a game plan? Before, I mean.”
“Yes,” he said. “And we’d actually made some progress before you… disappeared. It’s conceptually pretty simple. We just need to go back and convince the CHRONOS historians to steer clear of Saul and Prudence and give up their keys.”
“And if they won’t?”
“We take them anyway,” he said with a crooked smile. “So far, you’d persuaded twice and stolen twice.”
I gave him a weak chuckle. “So I get to play repo man? Great.”
“You once said you were going to get a T-shirt printed with ‘CHRONOS Repo Agent’ on the front.”
“Poor Kiernan. Listening to me must be like being around my dad’s uncle—he never remembers he’s told you the same joke a dozen times.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s interesting to see you from a different… angle, I guess. And a lot of what we were doing was really more detective work than repossession work. The first few were easy—Katherine already knew exactly when and where those historians landed.”
“Why do you remember all of this, and Katherine doesn’t?” I asked.
“You’d have to ask her,” Kiernan said. “But I’d think the only logical answer is that something happened when she wasn’t under the protection of a medallion.”
“Was she still alive in my other timeline? When I was eighteen?”
“Yes,” he answered. “And aside from a touch of arthritis in the winter, she was quite healthy.”
“That’s…,” I began.
“Confusing,” Kiernan finished. “I know. Katherine’s cancer isn’t a given in the timeline, even though you’d think it should be. Another thing to puzzle out after we’ve both gotten some rest.”
I nodded and started to get to my feet, but Kiernan pulled me back down. “Probably not a good idea, love. I’ll get your things. That medicine I gave you is pretty strong stuff and I doubt you’ve had much to eat.”
He was right. Even the slight movement had left me a bit dizzy, so I leaned back against the cabin wall. Kiernan walked over to the pile of cloth that had been my dress and held it up for my inspection. I wrinkled my nose. It was clearly a lost cause. “I do need to get the little booster cells that Connor put in the pockets and hemline—he might be able to reuse them, I guess.” Kiernan removed several small silver rectangles and stuffed them into my bag.
“Anything else?” he asked.
I shook my head. “If the dress doesn’t disappear when I leave, toss it in the fireplace.”
The boots, unfortunately, seemed to have survived without a scratch. He placed them and the bag in my lap and then knelt down in front of me. “I’m sorry—I know you had a bonnet, but I couldn’t find it.”
“I’m not worried about a stupid hat,” I laughed. “You were trying to get me out of Hotel Hell in one piece. And I don’t think I ever really said thank you.”
He gave me a sideways grin and squeezed my hand. “Actually, love, I believe you thanked me very thoroughly just a few minutes ago. But I wouldn’t say no to a second round.”
A blush rose to my cheeks and I looked down into the bag in my lap, trying to avoid his eyes. I fished out the CHRONOS key and had just pulled up the interface when he touched my wrist, breaking my concentration.
“This Trey,” Kiernan said, his voice rough. “Does he treat you well? Does he love you?”
“He does… or at least he did,” I amended, my mouth twisting into a wry half smile. “He seems convinced that he will again. That all I have to do is smile at him or something and everything will be as it was.”
“But you’re not convinced?” he asked.
I shook my head, and looked up into his eyes. “Can you recreate the same magic the second time around? I don’t know.”
Kiernan stared at me for a long moment and then leaned over, kissing me gently on the corner of the mouth. “But you have to try, right? Slán go fóill, a stór mo chroí.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what the words meant, but it was clearly a farewell. He squeezed my hand one last time, and then I looked down at the key and closed my eyes.
24
I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a computer monitor a second before Connor even realized I’d arrived, so I fully understood his look of shock. The entire right side of my neck was bandaged. There were two red patches just above the hairline. Several other red marks dotted my shoulders and there were even a few holes in the petticoat.
Connor stared at me for a moment and then his lower lip began to quiver. I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or cry and I’m not sure that he could tell, either.
“We simply can’t send you out to play in nice clothes, can we, Kate?” he said finally. “What on earth happened to you? Are you—”
Whatever else he was going to say was drowned out by a crazed volley of barking from downstairs, followed by the sound of the doorbell.
“You,” he said, pointing. “Do not move.”
I knew it was Katherine before Connor reached the door. That wasn’t Daphne’s stranger bark. It was her welcome-home bark, the one with a little “I missed you” whimper in the middle.
Katherine’s voice drifted up the stairs. “How did I end up in the yard without a CHRONOS key, Connor? Or a house key, for that matter?”
I lay back on the floor and closed my eyes.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed. The floral arrangement Trey had sent to Katherine was on my dresser. It seemed an eternity ago, and yet the flowers looked as fresh as when they’d first arrived. Daphne was curled up on the rug next to my bed and Katherine was sitting on the sofa near the window, reading what appeared to be a historical romance—the sort my mom sometimes referred to as a bodice-ripper or lusty-busty. It was the first time I’d seen Katherine reading anything that wasn’t on a computer screen or inside a CHRONOS diary.