Lightning Rider (16 page)

On the other side of the open doorway, Papi hunches over the counter. Ilif peers over him, crowding his space, and looking almost . . . concerned.

“Papi, are you okay?”

He straightens. “I thought you were staying here.”

I shrug. “I never actually said that.”

He reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. “Glad you’re safe.”

I cock my head. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?”

“My first alteration seems to be very complicated,” he says with a sigh.

Tell me about it. “What’s going on? Did you get more mob money?” I ask, teasing.

His face falls. “No, this time I stole mob documents.”

“Wow. Ballsy.”

“Not exactly what I was going for.”

“What are you going to do? I mean, the mobsters you stole them from have been dead for a couple of decades now, right?”

“Ilif doesn’t think the alteration is finished yet. I’m stuck in an endless loop until it is.”

“You’re going back?”

“Not sure I have another choice.” He flexes his fingers. “What about you? Were you in danger?”

I shoot a sideways glance at Ilif. His manicured hands are folded in front of him, a smirk on his face.

Careful. Remember Penya’s request. Don’t antagonize.

Taking a deep breath, I choose my words carefully and dig for that first-time-customer voice I use in the shop every now and then. “I just did some sightseeing, but I do have a few questions for Ilif. I mean, when you guys are finished, and if he has any time.” I smile serenely.

Ilif quirks an eyebrow. “We’ve determined your father’s next course of action. What can I assist you with?”

“Wait. When did you guys get back?” I check the clock. It’s nearly three.

“Just a bit ago.”

“Were you in New York for six hours?” I ask.

Papi studies his watch and scowls. “No, about twenty minutes, not even long enough for Ilif to arrive.”

“Hmm. I was in Spain for a while, but not that long.”

“Remember,” Ilif says, “time is fluid. It does not pass the same here as it does in your alteration, and vice versa.”

That’s dumb.

“Why?” Papi asks.

Ilif straightens his tie. What is it with all the tidiness? I fight the urge to roll my eyes, and instead I twirl the end of my braid while I wait.

“The severity of the alteration affects the movement of time in your birth time. Sometimes backward, sometimes not.”

“So you don’t know,” I say.

“Did you have other questions?” he asks, evading my accusation.

I’m not sure why I bother, but I shove aside everything from the last hour and try to recall all my questions from this morning. “Is there ever someone local to help us?”

“Sometimes. The more difficult the alteration, the more resources the universe provides. In your father’s case, with the heightened danger, the places he accessed needed to be devoid of people, because they would have interfered with his alteration. But it is rare to have no one to assist with local elements. Occasionally there is even a safeguard, one bound to you, whose job it is to protect you from all danger.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Bound to us?”

“As best I can tell, it resembles love but without the messy irrational nature. Safeguards are willing to give their lives to save the riders’. While there have been only perhaps a dozen safeguards out of thousands of alterations, every time the safeguard and rider have united their lives at the end of the mission.”

“United their lives?”

“It would resemble marriage today.”

Everything in the room pitches and spins. I grab the counter.

“Evy, are you okay?” Papi puts his hand on my shoulder.

“I, um, yeah,” I say, close to hyperventilating. I force down a lungful of air and release my grip on the countertop.

Constantine can’t possibly be a safeguard. Not a chance. He’d sooner strangle me.

Papi asks Ilif, “If you’re not traveling with us, how do you know where we are or if we’re in danger—if the situation requires a safeguard?”

“If I am not present when an arc is initiated, I am alerted in my lab, and I go to meet the rider. If I am with the rider when he arcs, I follow the residue. Very clean. Very efficient.”

“Until now,” Papi says.

“Yes. There are certainly more complications.” He stares down his nose at me. 

I smile back, pretending to be oblivious to his displeasure, then scramble for a safe question. “What’s residue?”

“A portion of the energy stays behind, leaving a trace. Anyone who touches the residue before it dissipates will be yanked to the time occupied by the rider. ”

“Like a giant booby trap?”

“The residue dissipates in less than a minute. There’s never been an instance where a non-rider has been pulled through.”

“Seems like a pretty stupid glitch.”

“Fortunately it’s not one that concerns you. However, if the situation warrants, there are ways to erase residue in an instant.”

Papi clears his throat and angles his body between me and Ilif. “You said the alterations we make aren’t changes. How so?”

Ilif smiles condescendingly, as if pleased to impart his vast knowledge on our meager brains. “Let me explain. Alterations
are
changes, but minor ones—a tailor fixing a shirt that doesn’t fit. It’s still a shirt, but now it fits like an expensive, handcrafted piece. The alterations your family can make—diverting a train wreck, putting out a fire before it rages out of control—affect a moment in time. Sometimes the people you save play a small role in life, other times they conduct a symphony of impact. But your participation is only to see them on to tomorrow.”

Or take away all of their tomorrows.

“So our alterations are always about saving someone? Preventing their death?” 

His reaction is nearly imperceptible. A curl of his upper lip, the flex of his jaw. “Why do you ask?”

I shrug and try to keep it light. “Just wondered.”

He straightens and examines his nails. “There have been a handful of occasions where the success of an alteration required the cessation of life.”

A simple “no” would have been fine. I’m going to have to go back through that book with a magnifying glass and find what he’s hiding. For now, I need him to think his answer appeased me. “Oh.”

He studies me for a moment, then seems satisfied that I’m not asking about anything specific. Resituating himself, he sighs. “I believe one day a rider will alter a pivotal path, the path of someone who can connect all those independent bright spots of genius. A person with the capacity to bring the world together. A uniting force . . .” He looks as if he already has a particular someone in mind.

“You think we’re the uniting force?” Papi asks.

“No. God, no.”

Relief washes over me. I’m capped out on the responsibility front.

“You merely save them,” he says.

I catch enough of the news to know when bright lights get extinguished at the top of their game, when a senseless death could have been prevented . . . but I’m not sure I want to be responsible for saving—or killing—one of those.

“Does it really make a difference?” Papi asks as he sets a stool in front of me and reaches around the counter for the other two.

With a delicate precision that doesn’t wrinkle his suit, Ilif situates himself on the stool and starts again. “The power you have is vast. Every attempt I’ve made to recreate what you do has failed. You are guided by something far bigger than what science can explain or understand. Sometimes it takes me generations to realize the true impact of a single alteration.” He extends his hand. “In one instance, your great-great-grandfather emptied a stagnant pool of water and saved a family from malaria. Nelson Mandela was born to that family seven generations later.

“Time is fluid. Millions of choices happen every second. Affecting even one of them can impact the lives of billions for generations. I know this seems vague, and I can bring charts and graphs on my next trip, but for now, please believe this is not something to be taken lightly. I do not understand why your family alone possesses this skill or why it passes only to the men. I do not know if there’s an ultimate moment when everything is righted and your services are no longer needed. All I know is I’ve watched it for centuries, and there are a few alterations I . . . anticipate. Until then, we all have roles to play.”

“But it
doesn’t
only pass to the men,” I say.

“Yes. It does,” Ilif answers.

I’m on the verge of sinking to a “Yuh-huh”–“Nuh-uh” conversation, but I have a feeling Ilif could make me revert to a third grader and we’d end up wrestling on the ground.

Papi rubs my arm, making me bristle, but I hold my tongue. While I seethe, I concede that keeping Ilif in the dark about my own alteration might not be a bad thing.

“Throughout history, great men have been stifled by a single item.” Pausing for dramatic effect, Ilif rubs the outer corner of his left eye. 

I curl my hands into fists and suppress the urge to fling myself at him and pound the answers from his twisted little mouth.

“Money,” he says at last. “Revolutions have been thwarted, brilliant scientists have been denied funding, life-changing ideas have died on the vine due to lack of money. Rich, powerful men control everything.”

“Poor people can have global impact, too,” I say. Papi and I both built businesses from nothing . . . not exactly a global impact, but I’ll be damned if I let him get away with the “rich men” statement.

“Not without help along the way. A willing ear, a
pro bono
effort, a lucky strike.”

“Or a time traveler,” Papi interjects, snapping his fingers.

“No,” Ilif says. “A lightning rider.”

I think about Penya and Constantine. “So are we supposed to help people get rich or start wars? I don’t get it.”

He smiles, and it’s the most genuine I’ve ever seen him look. “You’re only seeing it from your very limited perspective of time.”

I raise an eyebrow. Well, duh. I bite my tongue and wave him to continue.

“The thirty-thousand foot view is remarkably different.”

Papi’s brow creases. “Well who gets
that
view?”

“It happens,” Ilif says, by way of nonexplanation. Sometimes asking him questions isn’t worth the wasted breath.

“Stay with me, as difficult as it may be. Assume there is a scientist who’s found the cure for cancer. Big Pharma will never allow him to receive the funding needed to complete trials and bring the cure to market, because they make more money treating cancer than they ever could curing it. What if a rider could create an alteration years earlier—limiting the power of pharmaceutical companies—one that could pave the way for the cancer cure to be realized?”

“Seems like riding just got more dangerous,” Papi says. “If we’re responsible for creating and destroying billions of dollars of revenue with a single alteration, wouldn’t people want to stop us?”

“Certainly. But you’re forgetting that if the event never happened, they didn’t have the billions to lose in the first place.”

I lift my hand to my temple. “This is making my head hurt.”

“All reasons why I’m necessary.”

“What’s in it for you?” I ask. “You’re just a do-gooder by nature?”

He crosses his legs and clasps his hands together over his knee. “I’m a scientist. History is ripe with the corpses of geniuses, men who lost their life’s work to an accountant’s or rich man’s whimsy. Every time an alteration affects a scientific endeavor, I feel we’re making contributions to mankind as a whole.”

“And when it affects a revolution?” I ask, watching his response closely.

For a flash, his face pinches like I just puked on his shoes, then his features dissolve into his normal, pasty-faced expression of disdain. “Both heroes and fortunes are made and lost in wars. Oppressed people are some of the world’s greatest innovators—they do not lack the need for change, only the funds to see their ideas through to fruition.”

I’m not sure if that means he’s for them or against them. His answer does, however, give me some insight into why Penya wants to keep him out of our alteration in Spain. If there’s a hero or fortune he wants to affect, war would be an easy catalyst. Not to mention a huge distraction. He could even entice someone to leave before the war gets bad.
Or—
my thoughts shift into third gear—if there’s a particular Spaniard scientist he wants to bankroll to stardom, a war would be a perfect reason for the guy to seek exile outside the country without much notice. Especially if it’s a scientist working on the fringe of “acceptable” practices. And I get the feeling Ilif’s studies are
far
outside the fringe. Once relocated to one of Ilif’s labs, the money behind Ilif could pave the way for whatever science he needed, essentially buying a specific future. I might be way off base, and starting a war seems like an excessive means to an ends, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Either way, his passion is curious, and I wonder how much of this is truth and how much is for our benefit.

“That doesn’t explain my alteration,” Papi says. “What do mobsters have to do with curing cancer?”

Ilif forces a laugh. “There are far more implications than science—those are just my personal favorites. As I said, I still don’t understand the origination or decision-making behind the alterations, but I do trust them.

“The possibilities are truly endless. Imagine what we could create in a world where the energy spent on competition and negativity is instead used for collaboration. Think of some of the top corporations right now. Ponder a future where they joined forces and funds. What if the person who is supposed to be initiating that new direction is already out there, but they’re boarding a flight that will crash and leave no survivors?

“Now do you understand the importance of this ability? Why I am unwilling to take it lightly?”

My chest constricts and my hands are clammy. I try to wrap my brain around it, but he’s not through.

“Those people.” He stands and takes a deep breath. Once he’s jammed his passion back inside and composed himself, he continues, his voice normal and robotic. “Those are the alterations that count. Which is why I believe lightning riders are drawn to certain individuals, not entire situations.”