Sunder (24 page)

The look on her face, so transparently like that of a toddler caught in the cookie jar, made him nod his head in affirmation.
Yes, you did think I was stupid. But you see now that you were wrong.

“No,” Her voice, slurred though it was, rose in pitch. “I came here to give you a message from Isabella.”

Liar.
Alfredo let out a disgusted snort. “What’s the message?”

For a moment, her face went blank—the horrified empty expression of a girl taking a test she had not studied for.

Alfredo took a step forward, certain now that she was going to cooperate. But as soon as he moved, Shannan reanimated, shaking her head vigorously, fixing him with an absolutely murderous glare.

“No, Alfredo. You don’t get to wrap your fingers around my throat and then act like you’re entitled to my obedience.” Her eyes narrowed, and she looked at him with abject revulsion. “You can do whatever you want to me, but it won’t make me tell you. This is not a power play or some game. You’ve proved you can’t be trusted with the timeline, so I’ll be damned if I tell you where she is. You should know me well enough to understand that.”

She set her face into an angry, intransigent frown, silently daring him to retort.  The bruises around her neck assured him she was very aware of the potential consequences of her refusal. Yet with seemingly little trepidation, she had drawn her line in the sand.

Alfredo smothered his urge to bash her head in by crossing his arms tightly over his chest. “You’ll tell me where she is, one way or another. In light of our past friendship, I’m willing to indulge you, but only to a point. State your terms.”

“I want you to tell me what you did in 1688 to destroy the timeline.” Her voice was clear, determined, indicating the last of the sedative had worn off. 

“You call it destruction, I call it creation,” he shrugged, unsure of why she cared. Even if she knew exactly what had happened, she could never hope to go back and fix it. She belonged to him now.

“I doubt your two dead travelling companions would see it that way,” she spoke through clenched teeth. “Maybe it’s been so long you’ve forgotten those two people you brought back with you, but I haven’t. You clearly didn’t give one flying shit about the rest of the world, but I would have expected you to at least care about them.” 

Shannan’s unexpected display of anger for the fate of his traveling companions jolted his memory loose, filling his mind with images of that nightmarish trip to the past he had long since banished to shadow.
There’s no harm in telling her, but how did she even know they were dead?

“Dr. Storm was killed shortly after we arrived, well before the… incident. It was a freak accident involving a runaway carriage. There was nothing we could do.” He closed his eyes, trying to clear the vision of his professor’s face.  Dr. Storm had been a solemn but kind man who loved history; the minute details that so many found boring were his treasures. He had been Alfredo’s advisor and protector in the past—until he was mowed down by a nobleman’s carriage, the coachman in too much of a hurry to stop for the man he had trampled to death. Dr. Storm was dressed as a peasant, after all.

“We had a full thirty hours before we could activate our emergency beacons; we were trapped in the past and alone. We didn’t know what to do,” he mumbled, guilt clutching at his throat.

“And Monica? Did you just leave her in the past or did you kill her to keep your secret?”

His neck snapped back and he stared at Shannan, wondering if she was playing some game with him. But her face revealed she was serious.
She doesn’t know
.

“Monica returned with me after…the incident. She is Isabella’s mother and we were married for twenty-one years.”

Shannan’s jaw clamped shut, then opened again, hanging in shock. “She—
Monica
is Isabella’s mother? The one who committed—”

“Yes.” His tone silenced the rest of her question.

“I’m… Alfredo, I’m so sorry.” Her eyes took on an unfocused glaze as she absorbed his words.

It was easy to forget that for Shannan almost no time had passed, a few days at most. Only a few days ago, she had been Monica’s roommate and best friend. Likely, the two of them had stayed up all night together, excited for their respective trips to the past. But now Shannan had to absorb that Monica had grown to middle age, was a wife and a mother, and had died as a result of a violent years-long depression.

The silence hung between them for a moment, and as he watched the tears trickle down Shannan’s cheeks, Alfredo tried to remember Monica as she had been when they were young—so full of life and ready with a smile.

“Why?” Shannan whispered. “Why did she do it? Did she leave a note?”

“No, she didn’t. She was unhappy for a very long time—with me, with the social demands placed on her—”

“With the lie you were both living?”

“There was no lie!” he jabbed a finger in her face as he hissed at her. “We were dropped into a world we didn’t recognize, one where we didn’t even exist! We had to literally start our lives from scratch and every single thing we had, we earned. Don’t you dare say it was a lie.”

“You chose not to tell anyone about what you had done in the past. You didn’t even try to correct it and somehow you convinced Monica that she shouldn’t either. That is a
lie
, and it was probably one of the things that poisoned your marriage.”

You’re always so sure of what’s right, aren’t you?

“We had no one to tell. In this timeline,” he held his hands out, “Time travel wasn’t functional in 2073. It had been discovered, but the public didn’t know. There was no Warner University, no GE-owned travel center. This, all of this,” he waved his hands around the brightly lit cell. “
I
built this, from the ground up.”

“Using the GE model and claiming those ideas as your own. Yes, they must have thought you were quite the innovator,” she said darkly.

Her apt summation of his rapid rise to prominence momentarily cowed him into silence. He had taken the ideas of hundreds of scientists—ideas that had taken decades to perfect—and passed them off as his own when he completed his honors thesis for his bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics. Within twenty-four hours of turning it in, there had come a knock on his thin apartment door and men in dark suits had “asked” him to please come with them. After Alfredo’s sincere assurances to the federal authorities that his thesis had only been a theoretical model of time travel for the masses (of course he didn’t
know
time travel had been discovered), he had been hailed as brilliant, as the next Michelangelo, and the doors of life had swung wide open.

He and Monica had discussed telling the truth. They contemplated setting it right. But one thing Shannan could never understand—she with her happy upper middle-class intact family—was that neither Alfredo nor Monica would have become rich, famous, and respected in their old world. The boy who was raised in foster homes and the girl who grew up eating rice and beans for every meal knew perfectly well what kind of pathetic existence waited for them if they ever “fixed” the timeline, and after a while, those conversations about setting it right stopped.

As if reading Alfredo’s mind, Shannan changed her tone. “Do you ever think about the life you two could have had if you hadn’t changed time? What if nothing had gone wrong in your trip to 1688? What if the two of you had come home, finished your degrees?” She looked around at the cell, perhaps trying to visualize what the rest of the Agency campus looked like.

“Maybe your life wouldn’t have been as grand as all this, but you would have graduated together, probably have gotten job offers with GE. You two could have had quite the life. Then had Isabella.” She paused, seeming to choose her words carefully. “In that life, there would have been no suicide. No scorned husband to take your daughter away from you. You probably wouldn’t be rich or famous, but you would still have your family.”

The green of her irises seemed to glow against their bloodshot background, but her tears had dried for the moment. “Why are you fighting to hold onto this world that has created nothing but misery for you?”

As he appraised her face, beset by sincerity, he felt a knot form in his throat. She didn’t understand. She
couldn’t
understand; she had not been there.

“Everything that happened was designed by God to bring about a righteous world. Who am I—who are you—to question God’s plan?”

“Alfredo,” she looked at him with incredulity. “You’re not God.”

“Don’t you patronize me. I did nothing wrong! From the moment we arrived in London, we were at the mercy of Providence. All of our best laid plans were for nothing. Dr. Storm died, then everything with Churchill… None of it was my doing! It was a nightmare. It was terrifying!” He took in a shaky breath, then bent at the waist so he could look directly into her face. “When we activated the emergency beacon… when we came back to 2073 and saw how the world had changed… I knew then God had planned it all. I was his instrument, and he rewarded me.”

“Churchill?” She had a strange light to her eyes as she repeated the name to him. “John Churchill?”

He ignored her question. “It was God’s will for the timeline to change, and now it is His will for me to get my child back.” He wrapped his hands around her confined arms, his fingers sinking hard into the flesh of her biceps. “Now tell me exactly where, when, and how you encountered her so I can bring her home.”

“It’s not that easy, Alfredo, I told—”

“It is that easy. It really is.” Alfredo shook his head, genuinely disappointed in her. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, Shannan.”

Timelines be damned, he thought she would have understood his love for his child. She, with her commitment to her family and love of children, should have understood. But she didn’t. His memory of her had been nothing more than a little boy’s smitten fantasy. What a shame.

He released her arms and straightened up, turning toward the steel sink bolted to the wall. Before the extraction team had left, Alfredo had requested they leave something for him in the sink, just in case he needed it.

“What are you doing?” Shannan whispered.

“What I have to.” Alfredo turned back around to face her, holding the syringe up so she could see it. “Like I said earlier, you’re going to tell me where she is one way or another.”

Even from across the room, Alfredo could see Shannan’s pupils constrict as her eyes widened in horror.

“Fredo… don’t do this.” Her voice rose hysterically as she focused on the long needle. “You’re not thinking this through. You know this is wrong!”

“No, this is right. You are the one who is wrong. I’m sorry, but I can’t trust you to tell the truth.” He advanced on her, coming to a halt as close as he could possibly get. “I always loved your morals, Shannan, but for now they make you my enemy.” Spreading his left palm on the side of her face, he pushed Shannan’s head to the side, exposing the veins in her neck and the thin trickle of sweat trailing down the slope of her shoulder. “Your loyalty is to the old timeline. I have every confidence you would consider that a moral reason to lie to me about Isabella’s whereabouts.”

He jammed the needle into her neck and pushed down on the plunger, ignoring her gasp of pain.

“I just can’t have that, Shannan.”

***

Gabriel’s teeth smarted as he ground them together, glowering at the door as if he could somehow intimidate it into opening for him. Lopez-Castaneda was correct, of course—the computer would certainly have him shot if he were to make any move now. Security had been alerted, but now that the Omega code was entered at the gate, only the combined authorization codes of five council members could open it. So no one would be coming to help Gabriel. Even if he called Sergeant Bullock and ordered him to unleash the extraction team on Lopez-Castaneda, none of them could restore his credentials. The computer would never let him in the building. Not alive anyway.

Damn that old fraud!

It probably irritated Alfredo that Gabriel steadfastly refused to address Manuel as Padre. But from the beginning of his tenure as a councilman, he watched that priest violate his vows over and over again. Every Sunday he watched him dole out the Eucharist to Alfredo, who was an adulterer, a liar, and—by proxy—a murderer. No other civilized nation on Earth had the death penalty, certainly not for time-travelling offences. Just last week, Alfredo had admitted to all of them he sent an Agent to purposefully cause an abortion through violence! A woman beaten, a child killed, and that priest gave Alfredo communion the very next day. No man who could do that should be able to call himself religious.

Religious…

If ever he was to stop Alfredo, if he was ever going to find out the truth of the front-jumper and how she was connected to Isabella and Alfredo, he had to get into the Depot now.  For that to happen, Lopez-Castaneda had to be the one to allow it.

Drawing in a deep breath, he dialed the priest’s number.

“Hello again, Gabriel. I’m sorry you have to stand out there, but it seems some damn fool sealed the depot—”

“Tell me, Manuel,” Gabriel cut into the gloating voice. “What would the Vatican do if they discovered you buried the body of a suicide in consecrated ground?”