Rewinder (6 page)

“Eighteen thirty-seven,” she says.

“She was queen for three years until her assassination by Edward Oxford.”

“The date?”

Every student knows this one. “June 4
^th
, 1840.”

Oxford lay in wait for the queen and her husband, Prince Albert, to ride by in their open carriage. The first bullet took her life, while the second ripped through the prince’s shoulder, puncturing his lung. He lived, but only for a few more months. Officially his death was caused by infection from the wound, but the popular story was that he died from a broken heart.

“And the succession?” she asks.

“James the Third took the throne.”

She cocks her head. “Surely you were taught more than that.”

From a young age we’re expected to memorize the order of royalty. Any kid older than eight can recite it, up to at least the early eighteenth century: The four Georges (I, II, III, IV), William IV, Victoria, James III, James IV, John II, Catherine, James V, and, the current king, Phillip II. But she’s right. I do know more.

“There was something about one of her uncles,” I say as I dig into my memory. “The king of…Hanover. Right?”

“Correct. Ernest Augustus. The queen had produced an heir the year before she died, a daughter. But since she was still a baby, he claimed the throne should be his.”

“But that didn’t happen,” I say. “He died before he could be crowned. So did the child.”

“Correct, again. And how did they die?”

“Some kind of disease.”

“Pneumonia? Is that what you’re looking for?”

“Yes. Right. Pneumonia.”

“Then you’ll be surprised to learn the king of Hanover was poisoned.”

“Is that true?”

“It is.”

“What about the girl?” I ask.

“Suffocated.”

Though the revelations are unexpected, they occurred nearly a hundred and seventy-five years ago, so I don’t feel the need to get too worked up over them. Still, I’m curious enough to ask, “Why?”

“Why would you think?”

I shrug. “I guess someone didn’t want either to take the throne. Would it have been that bad if one of them had?”

“It wasn’t a matter of good or bad,” she says. “Let’s say you’re member of a group that’s not happy with the direction the empire is heading in, and you want to do something about it. Say, in the wake of the queen’s death, confidence in Parliament plummets and a special election is quickly held.”

I know this isn’t conjecture. It’s what happened in the aftermath of Queen Victoria’s assassination.

“Now,” she continues, “say that your group is able to secure a majority of seats in the lower house, and at the same time gain influence over a large number of those in the House of Lords.”

She looks at me, waiting.

“You would control the government,” I reply.

“Completely?”

“Not completely.” By that point in history, much of the power of the British Empire was held by Parliament, but it didn’t control everything.

“If you wanted it all, what would you need?” she asks

“You’d need to control both Parliament
and
the Crown.”

“Exactly.”

It takes me a second, but then I get it. “The Home Party,” I say.

The Home Party has controlled the empire without a break since right after Queen Victoria’s death. While other political parties do exist, none ever gain enough seats to make a dent in the Home Party’s rule.

Marie smiles again. “Then you have your answer.”

CHAPTER
SEVEN

“D
ON’T SIT DOWN,”
Marie tells me as I enter my study room.

We have just started the fifth week of my individual training, but this is the first time I’ve arrived to find no books on the table. Instead, there are two leather, over-the-shoulder satchels.

When I reach the table, Marie pulls one of the bags forward and says, “This is a standard mission kit.”

My skin tingles with excitement. We’ve discussed the kits before, but this is the first I’ve seen one in person.

“Open it,” she tells me.

Like a child on his birthday, I throw open the flap.

“Now carefully remove the contents and lay them on the table,” she instructs.

A sweater is on top, brown and nothing fancy. It’s designed, I know, to blend in with whatever time period this kit has been prepared to visit. There are other clothes, too—a shirt, a pair of pants, and one pair each of underwear and socks. Marie has told me that at most a kit will contain two sets of clothes. If in the very unlikely event a trip would last long enough to need more, items could be locally obtained. Next comes a plastic food box.

“What does that tell you?” she asks as I open the box.

Inside is enough room for several prepackaged meals, but it contains only one and a couple energy squares. “This isn’t for a long trip,” I say.

“And?”

Her question trips me up for a moment, until I realize the answer is the box itself. “And the trip can’t be going very far back, thirty years at most, I would think.” Any earlier and the box might draw unwanted attention.

She nods. “Keep going.”

I set the box down and pull out a notebook with attached pen, a cloth pouch that holds the medical kit, and a second pouch that contains several tools—knife, wrench, small screwdrivers, and a measuring tape.

The final item is inside a padded sleeve. I remove it from the box and pull off the sleeve.

A Chaser device.

When Marie showed me one at the beginning of training, I had no idea how to even turn it on. But in the weeks since, she’s taught me the meaning of every button and dial, gone over the steps for various operations, and tested me repeatedly until I knew it all by heart. I look at it now with educated eyes but it still holds so much wonder.

“This is yours,” she says.

“Mine?” I say, still looking at it.

“It’s the same one as before, but is keyed to you. Can you open it, please?”

After I unlock the latch, she takes it back and turns the power on. Once the screen comes to life, she navigates through several displays until she comes to one with the heading
TRAINEE SETTINGS
. There, she touches a button labeled
SLAVE
. Immediately a box pops up, with the word
AUTHORIZATION
at the top, an empty entry line in the middle, and a row of numbers, 0-9, at the bottom. She quickly taps in seven numbers, and as the last is entered, the authorization box is replaced by another with the word
LINKING
glowing in the middle.

“Right now it’s trying to link with my Chaser.”

She sets it on the table and removes her device from the other satchel. When she turns it on, the word
LINKING
on mine begins to pulse. After about five seconds, the word is replaced by
READY
.

“Repack the bag,” she tells me. “All but this.” She touches the Chaser.

I carefully put the items back inside.

When I’m done, she says, “Strap it on. You may need some of it on the trip.”

My hands begin to shake.
Trip? Now?

She pulls the strap of her satchel over her shoulder, and after I did the same, she hands me my Chaser. “Technically, the two of us could jump with just mine if you held on to me tight, but you need to get used to what it feels like to be alone. After training is done, you’ll always leave from the departure hall. But we don’t have to worry about that at the moment. All set?”

I nod, though how can one ever be ready for this moment?

“We won’t be going far. Five years only. So the most you may feel is a mild headache, and likely not even that.” She pauses. “What is the mission?”

“To observe and record,” I say automatically. It’s a phrase that has been drilled into us during both mental and physical training. It’s also printed on a banner in the dining hall and a plaque above my bed. As Sir Gregory has stressed countless times, “It’s not just what we do. It’s
all
we do.”

“All right. Then I guess we should go.”

She pushes the
GO
button on her Chaser, and—

__________

A
DARK GRAY
mist surrounds me, but it’s there only long enough for me to register it before a different kind of darkness replaces it. A starry, moonless night.

I gasp. I don’t know if we’ve really gone back in time, but we have gone someplace other than my training room.

“Steady,” Marie says from beside me. “On first arrival, what do you do?”

On first what?
My head aches with dull pain.

“Denny, take a breath and tell me what you’re supposed to do.”

I take three, not one, each slower and deeper than the last. Finally, the pain fades enough for me to answer. “Check your surroundings.”

“Then do it.”

I scan the area and see we’re in what appears to be a deserted alley.

Our location and time of day fits standard Rewinder procedures.
First arrivals should occur at an out-of-the-way spot in the dead of night, suggested time between three and four a.m.
This rule allows a Rewinder to get the lay of the land before daylight hours.

My Chaser displays a local time of 3:21 a.m. on May 16, 2009. The actual location is given as a string of numbers that can only be deciphered using the device’s calculator program, so I ask, “Where are we?”

“Chicago,” she says.

The Midlands,
I think. Though I flew over this part of the continent on the way to New York, I have never set foot in it before. But the same could be said for anywhere that’s not New Cardiff.

“Come on,” she says, and then leads me to where the alley dumps onto a road lined with parked carriages.

I’m not an expert on vehicles, but none looks like any of the newer models I’ve seen advertisements for. The buildings on either side of the street are apartments, some with businesses on the ground floor. It could be 2009, and it could be 2014. Nothing stands out. There is one fact, though, I can’t ignore. When we left my training room it was morning, and here it’s middle of the night. Given that there’s only an hour’s time difference between New York and Chicago—if this is indeed Chicago—then I’ve either been unconscious for several hours or we’ve really traveled through time.

Marie turns down the sidewalk and I quickly step after her to catch up.

“I assume you saw the date?” she asks after a few minutes.

“Uh-huh.”

“And does it mean anything to you?”

The date?
I look back at my Chaser to confirm. May 16, 2009.

May 16, 2—

I stop walking. Marie looks back at me.

“Oh, my God,” I say.

“Hold that thought.” She pushes the
GO
button again.

__________

T
HE CHANGE FROM
darkness to a blink of the gray mist to sunlight is so abrupt that I have to slam my eyes shut.

“We don’t have much time,” Marie says. “Come on.”

She grabs my arm, pulls me to the left. Through narrowed eyelids, I see we’re in a field. Weeds and wild grass brush against my legs and I almost trip on what I at first think is a rock, but realize it’s the edge of the old foundation for a long destroyed building.

As my vision continues to adjust, I see we’re headed toward a group of brick buildings that look to me like old, abandoned warehouses.

“Still Chicago?” I ask.

Marie nods. “Southern industrial zone.”

When we reach the end of the field, she crosses the street and races over to one of the warehouses. As I follow, I once again have the feeling this is a place she knows. The feeling is reinforced when she jogs up to a set of metal doors and pulls them open like she already knew they’d be unlocked.

On the other side of the doorway is a staircase, but I don’t catch up to Marie until I reach the top landing, and this is only because she’s stopped to wait for me.

“We’re here for one purpose only,” she says. “This place gives us a good vantage point. Whatever else you see here is not important. Okay?”

“Sure,” I say. “Got it.”

She opens the door and we walk onto the sunlit roof of the warehouse. The weather-protection material that once covered the roof is torn in several places and missing altogether in others. There are at least half a dozen spots where the wood beneath has rotted away, leaving holes that offer a swift trip down to the concrete slab four floors below.

I’m so focused on avoiding these traps that I don’t realize we aren’t alone until we almost reach the raised lip at the edge. Looking around, I spot four other pairs of people scattered along the roof and immediately note a disturbing similarity. In each group, there is one person who looks to be around my age. That’s not the crazy part, though. The second one of each pair is Marie.

The same woman who brought me here.

Counting the one I’m with, there are five of her.

“Focus,” my Marie hisses at me.

I turn to her, and though I’m sure she can see the shock and confusion in my eyes, she ignores my unspoken questions and points toward the city.

“You see it? The tallest one?”

I have to force myself to look toward downtown.

“Yes,” I say, picking out the infamous Dawson Tower. From here it looks like a sparkling finger pointed at the sky.

“Just a few seconds now,” she says.

So much is running through my mind that I almost miss the very thing she’s brought me here to see. From this distance, we’re unable to see the exact moment the twenty-third floor begins its collapse, but we can’t miss the hundred-plus floors above it beginning to tilt. One of the others with us on the roof shouts in horror as the giant structure breaks into pieces, and a part of me is surprised I haven’t yelled, too.

It was supposed to be the tallest building in North America when it was finished, but on May 16, 2009, less than a month from completion, the tower collapsed onto the city, taking several other structures with it and killing thousands. That bit of history from five years ago is happening now right in front of my eyes.