Timebound (19 page)

She massaged her temples briefly and closed her eyes.

He’ll be home soon. He’s been with Campbell and his other idiot friends all day. I’m scheduled for a solo jump tomorrow morning at nine. I’m going to try to talk to Saul tonight, and then with him or without him, I’m going to talk to Angelo tomorrow.

If it wasn’t for the baby, I’d say to hell with him. But if Saul ends up on a labor farm, this kid isn’t going to see much of his—or her—daddy. And maybe things will go okay… there’s so much good in Saul. I just can’t believe that he’d…

A deep sigh and then Katherine leaned forward to stop the recording.

A gentle rain had begun outside while I watched the April 26th entry, and I heard a light pawing at the screen door. The earpiece brought in the sound from the journal so clearly that almost all background noise was canceled out. Judging from the reproachful look that Daphne gave me, she had been scratching at the door for a while. I was repaid for my negligence with a secondhand shower
as Daphne shook vigorously to rid herself of the rain that had collected on her auburn coat.

Connor had come in around twelve thirty, while I was watching the journal entries. He hadn’t said anything—just grabbed a fork and a plastic container of some sort from the fridge—so I assumed that lunch, like breakfast, would be just me and Daphne.

There were several other plastic containers in the fridge, but I had no idea what they were or how long they’d been there. I poured a glass of milk and began to forage through the pantry, eventually coming up with bread and peanut butter. The peanut butter was smooth, rather than the extra chunky I prefer, and there was no jelly other than mint (yuck), so I sliced a banana on top of the peanut butter and switched the journal back on, watching while I ate.

The last entry in the diary was dated April 27th at 0217 hours. When Katherine reappeared on the screen, I drew in a sharp breath, nearly choking on a bit of sandwich.

She had taken off the jacket and was wearing only the blue sleeveless shell. Her hair, which had been pinned up neatly before, was in disarray. The necklace was gone, and the angry red line around her throat made me suspect that it had been ripped from her neck. Her lower lip was split, and she held a small white pad against her right cheek, which was swollen. When she spoke, her voice was small and flat.

Saul knows—I mean, he knows that I know. I didn’t even get to the part about the baby—I didn’t dare, not when he was screaming at me that way. Maybe I should have started with that part… maybe he wouldn’t have—but, no. I don’t want him to know about the baby. Not now.

I think… I think he’s gone crazy. I’ve never seen him like this… so angry.

Tears were pouring down her face and she stopped to collect herself before continuing. The traveling bag I had seen on the bed in
an earlier video was neatly packed, but the rest of the room had been trashed. A large tube-shaped object that might have been some sort of lamp was shattered and the painting that had hung above the bed was now on the floor, with a huge rip in the center of the canvas.

When I told him that we needed to just go to Angelo and tell him before someone else discovered the same violations that I had, he began raving that I didn’t understand the good that CHRONOS could accomplish if we harnessed the tools that we had at our disposal to change history, instead of just studying what century after century of idiots had created through their mistakes and blundering. About how this was his destiny and that Campbell had shown him that people just needed a strong leader to help them create the world that could be and should be. He had a plan, he said—and he wasn’t going to let a bunch of academic fools at CHRONOS determine the fate of humanity.

And all the while, he kept hitting me. Saul never hit me before. Even when he was really angry, he would hit the wall or break something, but never…

I finally lied—I told him that he’d convinced me. That I loved him and we wouldn’t go to Angelo and maybe I could help him change things. Just to make him stop. But he got this cold look in his eyes. He didn’t believe me. And then he left.

I don’t know where he’s gone, but I’ve bolted the door. If he comes back, I’ll call building security. I’m going to try and get a few hours of sleep and then I’m going to CHRONOS Med so that they can… repair this.

She pulled the pad away from her swollen cheek and gently touched the area, wincing at the pressure. There was a small abrasion near the cheekbone.

I’ll tell them… something. I don’t know. Then I’m going to talk to Angelo. He usually gets there by eight when we have jumps scheduled.

But… I’m going to message him first. Tonight. And I’m going to copy Richard on the note. I’m scared of what Saul might do—and if something happens to me, somebody at CHRONOS needs to know why.

I had been so immersed in the journal that I didn’t realize Katherine was sitting across the table from me, a cup of tea and some apple slices in front of her. It was an odd sensation to look up from the younger, battered face in the video and see the older version, calmly sipping her tea.

“I just reached the part where Saul left,” I said. “What happened the next day? Could they really repair your face?”

Katherine laughed softly. “Yes. There were quite a few improvements in medical care, and a minor dermal injury like that was a pretty easy fix. If we were still in that era, I wouldn’t have these wrinkles at such a young age, either. That’s one—of several—medical advances that I’d love to have access to now.”

“Could they cure your cancer?” I asked.

Katherine nodded. “There has been a lot of progress in cancer research in the past few decades, but there will be much more about fifty years from now—assuming we can repair the timeline. If I was a patient in 2070, or even a bit earlier, my treatment would have been a fairly simple course of medication—they’d have caught it much earlier and it would be a bit like curing a difficult bacterial infection today. Instead, my body gets pumped full of much more dangerous chemicals and radiation. And they
still
miss the target.”

Katherine shrugged and then continued. “All of which matters not in the slightest in this timeline, since I’m dead already. The next morning, I visited CHRONOS Med and told them I fell down in the tub. I doubt they believed me. It was surely not the first time a woman had shown up with a similar story. But I didn’t want to do anything that might alert the rest of CHRONOS about Saul until I’d had a chance to discuss the situation with Angelo.”

“Who exactly was Angelo?” I’d given up trying to figure out the correct tense for these people. If he was in Katherine’s past, I was going to refer to him in the past tense, even though he wouldn’t be born for several centuries.

Katherine took another sip of her tea before she answered. “Angelo was our direct supervisor. He trained both me and Saul. He was a good man and I was, in many ways, closer to him than I was to my parents, because he… well, he had the CHRONOS gene, too. There were things I could ask him that would have been incomprehensible to my father or even to my mother. From the time I entered the program when I was ten years old, Angelo was the one who guided my studies. I understood the CHRONOS bureaucracy well enough to know that he would also be in very hot water over Saul’s actions. I wanted his advice, but I also wanted to warn him.

“After I finished at the med unit,” she said, “I went to costuming so that they could get me ready for the jump. It was around eight, and between wardrobe and hairstyling, they usually had me ready for a mid-1800s trip in about half an hour. But that day—I don’t think it had ever taken nearly that long. Several of the costuming staff had arrived late and they were backed up. I sat there in a chemise with my hair half up for nearly twenty minutes. The plan had been to give Angelo a few minutes to check his messages and then we could talk, but it was after nine forty-five when I finally got there. I was just going to stick my head in and say we’d talk after I returned.”

“You couldn’t have delayed the jump?” I asked. “It seems like a pretty important conversation to put off for several days.”

Katherine shook her head. “Not without a major upheaval. The jump schedule is set a year in advance. The crews put a lot of effort into getting things ready, and I’d already gone through costuming. And… you’re thinking linearly again, Kate.”

I was getting a bit tired of hearing that. “Sorry. Like most people, I’m used to moving through time in a single direction—forward.”

“My point is that the trip would, for me, seem to last the four days that it was scheduled,” she explained. “But I didn’t return four days later—that would have been a waste of time for the jump crew. We all left and returned from our jumps in batches. It was more expedient to set destinations for two dozen jumpers once or twice a week than to keep track of a bunch of individual travelers. When I got back to CHRONOS, only an hour would have passed for the crew, Angelo, and even Saul, since he was one of the dozen who wasn’t on the schedule. The first cohort—the day-trippers who didn’t need as much prep—had gone out at nine thirty and were scheduled to return at ten thirty. The twelve in my cohort would depart at ten with a set return for eleven o’clock.

“So it really wasn’t much of a delay for anyone at CHRONOS, and I kind of liked the idea of having a few days to myself, away from Saul, to think about exactly what I wanted to do. The idea of being a single mother and what it might mean for my career scared the hell out of me.”

Katherine shifted her gaze and stared out the window for a moment. “I don’t know what time Angelo got to the office,” she continued, “but when I got there, the door was open and one of his mugs was shattered on the floor. He always drank this really horrid herbal concoction in the mornings and the room smelled awful—there was a large puddle of the stuff on the carpet.

“I opened the closet to get a towel, and there was Angelo, shoved to the back, on the floor. There was a ring of adhesive wrapped around his mouth and his nose—the stuff is sort of like duct tape, but stronger. It’s been over forty years and I can still see his face sometimes—bluish purple and his eyes wide-open.”

“He was dead?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “It was long past the point where the med unit could have resuscitated him. I’ve always wondered, however, if it would have been different if I had gone to see him before I went to costuming.”

I gave her a sympathetic look and shook my head. “More likely, Saul would have killed you as well, right?”

She shrugged and pulled her sweater closer around her shoulders. “Either way, I felt responsible. I knew I needed to call security, but I was fully dressed for 1853, with just my bag packed for travel, and I didn’t have a communicator on me—I couldn’t exactly take it on a jump to the 1850s, so I’d left it back in the locker with my other belongings. I walked down the hall to find another supervisor, but they had either stepped out or weren’t in the office yet. And then I saw Richard, coming out of wardrobe. He had on the most outrageous tie-dyed shirt and bell-bottoms that were nearly as wide as my skirt—and it was clear from his expression that he’d gotten my email. He was as devastated as I was when he saw Angelo.

“Richard said everyone was probably already in the jump room, which made sense. We usually gathered around the platform—a large circular area—for ten minutes or so before getting into place, chugging a last cup of decent coffee or whatever. Richard and I were actually late—we only had three or four minutes before the jump.”

“But the crew would cancel a jump in case of a murder, right?” I asked.

“Yes. But they never got the chance to cancel it. Richard and I told the jump coordinator—his name was Aaron—about Angelo. Richard also mentioned that he had seen Saul a little after eight, outside the building with a few of his friends from the Objectivist Club. Two of them were part of CHRONOS—a middle-aged historian who was scheduled to retire in a couple of years and one of the guys in the research section.”

She gave me a little smile. “But I’m getting sidetracked. At any rate, Aaron was calling in this information to security headquarters, which was two buildings over, and we were just about to tell the others, when Saul came into the room—although I don’t
think anyone realized it was Saul at first. I know I didn’t. He was dressed in a burqa—you know, the Middle Eastern head-to-toe covering?”

I nodded.

Her face was pale as she continued. “He was holding our colleague, Shaila, right in front of him, with a knife to her neck. And there was something odd strapped to her chest—a small square box.

“Saul ordered Aaron to cut off the call to security and told everyone to get into their places for the jump. And, of course, we all did what he said—I mean, the others didn’t know about Angelo yet, but some crazy person in a burqa was holding a knife to Shaila.” She shuddered. “He was staring straight at me the entire time, Kate, with the same expression I’d seen in his eyes the night before, like he was wishing the knife was at
my
throat. Richard saw it, too, and I think that’s why he moved into my spot on the platform. I don’t know if Saul noticed we switched or not—he was in Shaila’s space, still keeping the knife to her neck.”