Sunder (41 page)

“Please tell me you didn’t bring a photo back with you.” 

“Of course not, you silly girl,” he rolled his eyes at her as he dug into a concealed pocket in his cloak. He let out an
ah ha
and pulled his hand back, a chain dangling out of his closed fist. “Whenever you’re about in town, just keep your eyes peeled for a brunette with massive tits wearing one of these.” 

He opened his hand and pressed the medallion into Isabella’s palm. A pang hit her stomach as she opened her hand to look at it, her mouth gaping open, unable to even gasp for breath. 

“It’s what we used for our beacon. Shannan insisted I take one in case I changed my mind, but I took out all the internal mechanisms shortly after I arrived here. But on the outside, hers will look just like—” he broke off as he saw her face, the tears welling up in her eyes. “Are you all right?” 

“It looks like a hydrogen atom,” she gasped out hoarsely. 

“Yes,” he snorted a chuckle. “Originally they made it out of sterling silver with a garnet stone on the outer ring, but it just proved too tempting for thieves. Every single traveler got robbed of it; some even got their heads bashed in for the trouble. So now we use brushed nickel and the red spot on the ring is just an opaque plastic. It draws the eye, but in no way looks as valuable.” 

Isabella barely heard him as she stared at the silver-colored circle in her shaking hands. She could almost imagine it as a ring of white capped mushrooms sprouting from her palm, with the two red-scaled toadstools planted on the right side of the ring. 

“Isabella?” Selwyn shook her lightly. “What is it?” 

“Nothing,” she smiled as best as she could, looking into his eyes. “I’m looking forward to meeting Shannan.” 

His face darkened slightly. “Isabella, I hate to say this, but I can’t guarantee you’ll live to meet her either.” 

She grasped his hand, wrapping her fingers around his and pressing the medallion back into his palm. “I will meet her. I think she and I will have an awful lot to talk about.” She smiled contentedly and grasped Selwyn’s hand in her own. 

Together, they walked down the hill. From her vantage point, she could see the mass of humanity swarmed in the church yard, including the dark cluster of nuns, so rarely seen outside the cloister of the convent. The entire town gathered to bid farewell to the boy who should have been their next lord. She was still far enough away that she could not make out any faces, but close enough to be able to tell who was who by their location. Sigbert, the large figure in Sackcloth, standing with his face tilted up toward the heavens, Cædda, his unmistakable cloak and sword marking him even from this distance. Hilde stood behind him with the three remaining heirs—an infant in her arms and two little red heads bowed in sorrow. Behind Hilde were Redwald and Garrick—her family. Isabella had never seen them together as a family unit before. Were the three women behind Garrick his wife and daughters? She couldn’t see them; even if she could, she would have no way to recognize them. She had never really sought out this information—never cared, because they weren’t her people; this wasn’t her home. But now it was. More than that, those people standing down there were
her
family, that mass of humanity all standing still, probably silent, waiting for her to join them. And join them, she would. 

Releasing Selwyn’s hand, lest they be seen, Isabella drew in a breath and straightened her body, and walked down the hill toward the gathering, with Selwyn following behind. 

26

Shannan leaned back against the blank plaster wall, closing her eyes against the obscenely bright lights in the narrow hallway. Drawing in a deep breath, she focused her mind on her body’s myriad discomforts—the slats of the bench digging into her backside, her head pulsing with a persistent ache, and her mouth in such a dry state there was an audible click every time she swallowed. Though these ailments were not the primary sources of her pain and discomfort, Shannan chose to focus on them. If she gave much thought to the excruciating pain in her neck, she would begin to cry again.

She did not know how long it had been since Gabriel led her to this hallway, bade her to sit and wait, and then disappeared into the door in front of her, closing it behind him. It had been more than an hour, but perhaps not yet two, and every passing minute cleared her head of that truth serum. Without its pacifying succor, she had to fight off the image of Alfredo’s contorted face—the memory of him bending over, choking the life out of her, stabbing her in the neck with that needle. If left unchecked for even a moment, those images would flood her mind, overwhelming her senses; the tears she worked to hold back would erupt into a slobbering mess, thus destroying the façade of a believable, composed professional she planned to show the council.

They were a mystery to her, this council of men who would ultimately decide her fate. Even Gabriel, who had rushed in like the hero of the story to save her from Alfredo, was unfathomable to her. She had been secure in her expectation that, after she explained the situation to him, he would be full of righteous indignation.
This timeline is false? We’ve been taking orders from the man who changed it? Outrageous! We must set this right immediately
.

But of course, that had not been his reaction. He had looked… scared, sad. The way he had instinctively grabbed the picture of his wife on his desk and held onto it—Shannan could never have predicted he would react like that. She didn’t understand him, what he was thinking. She did not know if he was her ally or if he merely viewed her as a problem to be disposed of.

The click of the door latch echoed down the empty hall and her eyes flew open at the sound. Blinking against the bright lights, she squinted at the man who emerged from the room, expecting it to be Gabriel. It was not.

The man filling the doorway was likely in his forties, just like Gabriel; but there the similarities stopped. Unlike the debonair Gabriel or the well-dressed Carlo, this man had a hard look to him, one that indicated a possible past stint in prison. He had darker skin, with a thick moustache and a soul patch on his chin, his black hair slicked back in a fine sheen. Though concealed by his long-sleeved uniform, she strongly suspected his arms were covered in tattoos.

Her mouth fluttered into a nervous smile as she sat up straighter to give him a curt, salutary nod.

“They’re ready for you,” he said in clipped Mexican Spanish, more guttural than the Castilian Spanish Gabriel and Carlo used. “You’ll see a red box painted on the tiles. Come in, stand in the box, and don’t speak til you’re spoken to.” Stepping backward, he opened the door wider and jerked his head, beckoning her into the room.

“Thank you.” Shannan stood up and tried to alter her nervous tic of a smile into a friendlier expression. “My name is Shannan Fitzroy.”

“I know who you are,” he flicked his head towards the doorway once more, discouraging any further questions.

Shannan nodded and walked past him, his musky cologne swarming in her nose as the darkness of the room enveloped her. The man closed the door behind them, sealing off the last of the sunny hallway lighting and leaving her to squint as she approached the long table and the shadowy figures who sat behind it, waiting for her.

Alfredo was sitting at the table, front and center, glaring at her as she came to a halt in the red box.

What is he doing in here?

Her stomach spasmed as she forced herself to maintain eye contact and the pain in her neck seemed to rise up in rebellion at the sight of him. She had seen Alfredo being dragged forcibly into a cell by armed guards; so why was he sitting behind a plaque heralding his name and position as council president when he had supposedly been relieved of his duties?

Letting her eyes drift down the line of councilmen, she tried to discern the reason for Alfredo’s presence here from their faces, searching for any revealing flashes of emotion. But there were none. The other eight faces were studiously blank, and more than ever Shannan chafed under their stares.
I shouldn’t have come here
.

The oppressive, old-timey masculinity infused into the very walls of the council chamber admonished her presence in the room. It was such a contrast to the sleek, advanced-looking technology and decor of the rest of this place. The members of the council inhabited the dimly-lit room perfectly, as if the decorator had placed them at the table as accent pieces.

In front of each man was an antiquated wooden plaque engraved with a name and position title. To her far right, Shannan could barely make out the script on the plaque in front of Councilman Pierre Sagnier, Treasurer, literally the fairest of them all with papery white skin and silver hair that reflected even the scant light of the chamber. From right to left, the men got progressively browner, almost as if they had chosen their seating arrangements by color-coordinating their skin complexion.

After Sagnier sat Reynaldo Sauceda, Secretary, and Enrique Marcellus, Senate Representative, both varying degrees of lightly toasted Caucasian. Gabriel Ruiz, Vice President, Alfredo Jaramillo, President, and Manuel Lopez-Casteneda, Vatican Representative, sat in the middle of the group, each with their sandy Central American coloring. After them was the leathery Javier Sequeira, Public Affairs, and the decidedly Sicilian-looking Carlo DiMarco, Legal. The line of silent, disapproving councilmen ended with Paul Canaan, Logistics, with his deep mahogany South Asian skin, his purposefully bald head shining. Under normal circumstances, he may not have caught her attention at all. In the America she came from, Patel was tied with Martinez as the third most common last name. But standing in front of the council table, looking at the row of Spanish names and Mediterranean features, Shannan was struck by how... foreign he looked here. Almost as foreign as she felt.

Their eyes boring into her, Shannan felt a nervous giggle rise in her throat as the voice of Judy Garland echoed in her ear:
I don't think we're in Kansas anymore
. God, how she hated that line.

***

Gabriel felt his eyes droop with fatigue as he looked at Shannan’s unsuccessful attempts to keep the fear off her face. She was studying them, rotating her head to look at all the council members in an accusatory fashion, wincing every once in a while. She had pulled her hair over her shoulders, possibly in an effort to conceal the bruises on her neck, but it was obvious how uncomfortable she was. And why should she not be? Alfredo’s smugness permeated the entire room, and it was Gabriel’s own fault that hypocrite was allowed to inhabit his customary spot. In his haste to establish his own authority, he had made damning mistakes.
Sinful pride...

First, Gabriel had ordered the guards to bring Alfredo into the chamber in shackles, intending for the disgraced council president to stand in the red box on the floor and give a full accounting of everything he had done—to confess his hypocrisy and lies and abuse of power.

Though most of the council members had their own bone to pick with Alfredo, the sight of their leader being led into the council chamber in chains had unleashed a torrent of mouth-frothingly angry shouts. Even the notoriously even-tempered Paul Canaan had been offended at the disrespect. So Gabriel had no choice but to order the chains removed and to allow Alfredo to sit in his customary chair, which was a fair few centimeters higher off the ground than the rest of the chairs.

His second mistake had been to allow Alfredo to describe how he had changed the timeline and the lengths he had gone to in order to conceal it. Gabriel should have stood to address the council himself. He should have pointed accusingly at his former leader and told the council the horrors he had committed, how he had defied God’s laws as well as man’s. But Gabriel had stupidly sat back and allowed Alfredo to explain himself, to spin his own lengthy narrative filled with dramatic pauses and melodramatic hushed tones. By the time he was done, it all sounded so God-damned reasonable. 

All of the other councilmen had nodded in silent approval when Pierre Sagnier put forth the suggestion of turning Shannan over to Commandante Guerrero for imprisonment.
After all
, he had said passively,
she violated front-jumper protocols
. It was so much easier to throw away the young woman who had come to them with an unpleasant truth than to deal with the reality—the enormity—of what Alfredo had done.

With the room turning against him, Gabriel’s entire career may have been over if not for Paul Canaan. The Indian man had leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and looked directly at Alfredo.
So all of this, our entire history since 1688— all of that has been a lie?

His tone revealed a sense of betrayal, of abject hurt, and his quiet indictment reminded the rest of the council the gravity of their predicament. They had sentenced people to death to preserve this timeline, and it had never been worth protecting. It was all a fabrication—their whole world—a quilt spun together by murder and deceit. The tragic, destructive civil war in England, the resulting collapse of protestant European countries, the flourishing Spanish colonies in the New World… none of it should have ever happened.

A silent wave of relief had flooded Gabriel’s body, and he felt control of the room returning to him. There were no more suggestions to simply lock Shannan Fitzroy away as a violator of the Alpha 714 regulations. There were also no more motions to return Alfredo to his position as President.

Alfredo had no power in the council, not technically. But as Gabriel watched him glower at Shannan from his raised position, he knew the man still wielded influence here. In order for the council to restore the original timeline, there had to be seventy percent agreement. As Alfredo, Padre, and Sagnier were clearly on the side of preserving their existing timeline, Gabriel and the remaining five councilmen would all have to vote Aye in order for them to attempt the timeline correction. Though Gabriel knew it was the correct thing to do, he did not know if he would be able to cast his ballot for Aye. He just didn’t know if he had the strength, and it was for that reason he had been avoiding Shannan’s eyes.

Forcing himself to look up at her, Gabriel saw a determined look flash across Shannan’s face. Had she seen his wavering resolve? Without waiting for permission, she addressed the council in a loud, clear voice.

“I know you must be suspicious of me,” she said, her voice ringing across the chamber.  “After all, I am not technically supposed to exist. According to your records, I was never born.  But I am here nonetheless, so where does that leave us? I have information you want, and in return you will listen to what I have to say.  I know what happened to Isabella Jaramillo.”

The rest of the council leaned forward in their chairs. In all the discussion of Alfredo’s malfeasance, they had seemingly forgotten about Isabella. She was an honorary daughter to them all, and no matter how bad Shannan’s news may be, they all longed to hear what had happened to their sweet Isa. 

“I, like all of you, am a traveler,” Shannan continued. “And on my travels, I met a woman who, in my world, had never existed.  She did not belong in the twenty-first century of my birth. Nor did she belong in the century in which I met her.”

“So she is alive?” Padre interjected.

“Not anymore, Friend. Isabella breathed her last breath centuries ago. But I am not here to tell you about her – not really. I am here to tell you what she told me.”

The vision of Isabella living in the past produced a certain amount of dissonance in Gabriel’s mind. She had always been so polished and exacting. What had it been like for her to appear in that dirty, savage time? And what had happened to her to change her so? 

“I will admit I was confused by Isabella. She seemed to have a history completely foreign to my own. She was from 2114, a full forty-one years after my origination date.  That was an excellent reason for me not to know her.  But other things she said,” her voice dropped to a whisper, “troubled me.  So I asked her about her country, its history.  Her version of events could not have come from the correct timeline.  Hearing Adolf Hitler was a famous painter, and that there was no second Great War, was enough to convince me action must be taken. Nothing was as I knew it. Nothing was as it should be.”

That name had been foreign to Gabriel, and Shannan had not thoroughly explained what it was about this particular war criminal that invoked such hushed tones of revulsion whenever she mentioned it. Perhaps it was the invocation of that awful name that brought a pause into Shannan’s story. Whatever it was, Alfredo took the opportunity.

“Did Isabella tell you how she came to be Lost?” he asked her quietly. Gabriel could see him biting back his emotions. He had warned his former mentor he would be returned to his cell at the first sign of undignified behavior, and Alfredo seemed to heed the warning. But there was a vein protruding visibly from his forehead, pulsating feverishly. Alfredo kept his hands under the table, but if Gabriel had to guess, they were probably clenched into fists.