Timebound (47 page)

“But then… you stopped coming,” he said. “And I finally realized that wherever you were, you hadn’t been protected by a key. Something had changed. The entire resistance we were trying to put together had never been started. I just, well—sort of lay low, waiting. They teamed me up with Simon to watch you—it was Pru’s idea of a little joke, I guess, to put me so close since she thought I had no memory of you and you wouldn’t know me from Adam.”

I shivered, pulling the blanket tighter, and tried to sort out all that had happened. “I’m not so sure any of this was her idea, Kiernan. Or if she was in on it at the beginning, she changed her mind.” I gave him a brief rundown of my conversation with Prudence and her belief that killing Katherine was a power play designed to get her out of the way.

Kiernan chuckled. “She finally put two and two together, I guess. I don’t know that he was planning that specifically—but Saul doesn’t tend to think that the normal rules of morality should apply to him. And she’s been pushing to run things her way for
some time now. He may well have decided she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Oh, sure. Several times.” Kiernan helped me turn around to lean my back against the cabin wall and then poured a bit of water into a glass from a large jug. He shook two very modern-looking pills into his hand and gave them to me.

“Pru was always secretive about our destination—she’d lock in the coordinates on my key without giving me any idea of where or when—but Saul often summons the people he and Pru consider part of the ‘inner circle’ to meet with him. I doubt I’ll be invited again, however. He doesn’t know about this—that I helped you get away from Holmes—but he does know that I warned you that day on the subway.”

I remembered Simon’s comment about Kiernan’s interference. “They’re angry, aren’t they? They’ll be looking for you.”

He shrugged. “Probably. But I’m good at fading into the background. They’ll have some idea of
when
I am, but not where.”

“I’m sorry, Kiernan. You’re in all of this because you chose to help me.”

He didn’t speak for a moment and pulled in a deep breath before looking back at me. “It wasn’t a choice, Kate. There was never a choice. When I saw you on the train that first day, the day you were trying to destroy the diary?”

“I wasn’t trying to destroy it,” I said. “Just testing it to see what it was.”

He smiled, but his eyes were as sad as they’d been that day on the Metro. “I knew before we arrived on that train,” he said, a tiny break in his voice, “that you were different. I knew everything about my Kate. Hell, I knew her soul. She knew mine. No secrets. And when you looked at me and there was nothing in your eyes… you didn’t know me. That life had never happened and you weren’t
my
Kate—but you were still Kate. I still… loved you. I had to find a way to protect you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking again about Trey. The next time I saw him he would still be Trey, but he wouldn’t be
my
Trey. No matter what happened between us in the future, I would never see that Trey again. “I do understand. I’m so sorry, Kiernan.”

He sighed and shifted to sit beside me against the wall, putting his arm around me very carefully to avoid hurting me. “But here’s the real kicker,” he said. “I didn’t get the full irony until I learned about the plot against Katherine. You are
also
my Kate, my
first
Kate—the girl with the funny painted toes who gave me the medallion, who was willing to risk her life to be certain that an eight-year-old boy got out of that hotel. And I realized then that I really didn’t know what had happened that night—and that I had to find out.”

“So that’s why you were there tonight? Watching?”

Kiernan clenched his jaw. He looked exhausted—there were dark circles under his eyes and he’d clearly skipped the razor for at least a few days. Scruff looked unbelievably good on him, and I fought the urge to run my fingers along the side of his face.

“I’ve been to that hotel dozens of times, Kate. I’ve spent every possible minute in that hellhole for the past month. I’ve watched from every position, every angle, every vantage point.” His arm tightened around me. “I came so close to just killing Holmes, just strangling him there in the dark and tossing him down one of those chutes straight into the lime pit in the basement, just like he’d done with so many women. But you—my other you—were adamant that we could only change the bits of history that Saul and the Cyrists had disrupted. Holmes’s trial—that was worldwide. What kind of ripples would it cause if I killed him?

“And there were only a few seconds where I could act,” he continued. “If I made a wrong move, I couldn’t take it back—all I could do was add on. I mean, if I tripped him that first second
and the gun went off and shot you, I couldn’t undo that, aside from coming back earlier and stopping myself from tripping him. I also couldn’t risk interfering until Katherine was fully out of the window.”

He let out a long, slow breath and closed his eyes. “I watched you die over and over again, Kate. I watched him shoot you point blank fourteen times before I could see any way to change it.”

“The lights!” I said, sitting up fully. “Oh my God—that was you? I thought… my head—I hit it really hard when I fell. I thought that’s why I was seeing little blue flashes. But it was you!”

He nodded. “I finally did trip him, to slow him down, but he had the acid—I thought at first that he was getting it from the bottles near the cots against the wall. I was pretty close to one of those cots and I think he’d used acid on the woman who died there. But he had the bottle in his coat pocket. I thought it was the sound of his foot against the glass that reminded him he was carrying it—I even removed the bottles once, to see—but I guess it was just being there, where he’d used it once before that triggered the memory. I had to time it just right. The first four times I tripped him you were still facing forward. The acid caught you full in the face; two of the times your eyes were open.”

I flinched, remembering the scorching pain when the acid hit my neck and realized how very much worse it could have been.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Part of me said to keep trying until I got it entirely right and you left there without injury, but… I couldn’t keep going. I’m pretty sure you’ll have a scar on your neck, but I don’t think it will be very bad. I’ve put an advanced hydrogel on the burn. I put three more tubes in your bag.”

“My bag!” I said, looking around. “I didn’t…”

“No,” he said, reaching over to his right. “But I did. You dropped it when you fell. The hydrogel inside is from 2038, so you won’t get anything nearly as good in your time. I just wish your hair had been down—it would have shielded you a bit more.”

I smiled gently, thinking of the way he’d pulled the band from my hair in the Metro. “You always wish my hair was down, if I remember correctly.”

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “It reminds me of that time when we were at…”

Kiernan’s voice trailed off, and then he closed his eyes, shaking his head slowly. After a moment, he opened them again and gave me what he clearly hoped would be a cheery smile. “So who is this Trey person?”

“Trey?” I looked down, unable to meet his eyes. “He’s a friend—or he
was
a friend before…”

“Kate.” Kiernan’s voice was soft and so full of understanding that tears rushed to my eyes. “You called his name in your sleep, love. He’s more than just a friend, I think.”

It was
so
unfair for this to make me feel that I was betraying Kiernan. But it did.

He tilted my chin up ever so slightly and I looked into his eyes, as wet with tears as my own. “You cannot hide from your heart, Kate. It always finds you. And, sadly, I cannot hide from mine.”

He pulled me into his arms and kissed me—softly at first and then with a passion that shook me to my very foundation. I was carried back to the wheat field just as clearly as I had been when I first looked into the medallion. There were at least two blankets between us, not to mention clothes, but the memory of the earlier kiss was so strong that I could almost feel his bare skin against mine. A slow delicious burn rose from deep inside me as I kissed him back, wrapping my hands in his long black hair.

I’m not entirely sure who broke the kiss, but I don’t think it was me. I turned away and just sat there for several minutes, eyes closed, face flushed. I was stunned, confused, angry at myself, angry at Trey, angry at Kiernan, and all of that was competing with the very strong temptation to pull Kiernan’s mouth back over mine and forget everything else, if only for a little while.

I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn’t make myself look at him. Finally, he pressed his lips to the top of my head and held them there. “Ah, Katie,” he whispered, his breath warm against my skin in the cool morning air. “I’m being selfish. You have to go back—you need rest. I was so afraid you would go into shock last night. I kept the fire roaring so high it’s a miracle I didn’t torch the cabin. And I can’t stay here much longer either—I’ve pushed myself to the limit already. Even these short hops are a strain.”

I knew he was right. One half of my mind was screaming that I needed to get back, to see what had happened, to find out if Katherine was there, to find my parents, to find Trey. The other half was completely terrified of the prospect because there were so many ways that it could have gone wrong. Here and now was safe; the calm after the storm. There and then was simply unknown.

“Are you sure you can get back?” I asked. “You were worried about doing another jump…”

“I’ll be fine, love,” he answered. “If I can’t make it right away, I’ll rest up a bit. Going back home is never as hard as trying to leave. I feel like there’s a physical… anchor, I guess, dragging me back there.”

“Then I should go.” I met his eyes for the first time since we kissed and tried to muster up a smile. “But—you spoke about a resistance. Are you still in? I mean, even if Prudence gets Saul to back off and they don’t go after Katherine again, this isn’t over. I don’t know exactly what it is they’re planning…”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Kiernan said, leaning back to rest his shoulders against the bare wood of the cabin wall. “They refer to it as the Culling, necessary to save humanity and the planet. It will be pitched as an environmental accident of some sort. They’ve floated the idea of both airborne and waterborne, so I’m not sure.

“There’s no specific date, as far as I know—the general plan is to wait till they have about one-quarter of the population under their thumb and they’ll do whatever tweaking of the timeline they
need to in order to make that happen. Cyrist members—or at least a good portion of them—will be given the antidote, along with a select few outsiders. People whose skills their experts have targeted as being vital for rebuilding.”

“So—it’s like the Creed they chanted at the temple,” I said. “‘As humans have failed to protect the Planet, the Planet shall protect itself.’ Except the Cyrists assume the role of ‘Planet’ and kill off those they consider unworthy?”

“Yes,” he said. “But don’t dismiss the appeal of their message so quickly. They make a compelling argument when you’re in the fold, y’know. There was a time when what Saul said made sense to me. You take someone from my time, a young kid who’s just learned to use the CHRONOS key and show him select scenes from say, the 2150s. Jump him around and give him a firsthand view of a nuclear disaster or two. Tell him about a society where your future is planned before you’re even born—written into your very DNA. Give him a few glimpses of modern war and the full extent of man’s inhumanity to man and the Cyrist solution doesn’t sound quite so evil.”

“So you think they have a point?” I asked.

“Don’t you?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes—okay,” I eventually admitted. “There’s a valid point somewhere beneath the layers of insanity. But most of the things you described are… incremental evils, if that makes sense. The mistakes of one generation build upon the mistakes of the next and you get a society that no one really wanted. Saul is talking about massive,
planned
evil, however, and assuming that you end up with a better society as a result. Morality aside, how is that logical? It seems to me that they’re gathering the greediest and most power-hungry of all, and I don’t think they’ll play nice together when the smoke clears. Prudence is one of those designing this brave new world and she actually told me I could
either join them or line up with the other sheep to be fleeced and slaughtered.”

Kiernan snorted. “She could at least try for originality. That line is one she stole straight from her papa. But yes, it was precisely that kind of callous disregard for those who chose
not
to follow the Cyrist Way that caused my dad to leave.” For a moment he sounded like his eight-year-old self—
my dad
was almost
me dad,
and the same anger simmered beneath his voice.

“So you ask me if I’m in?” he said. “Of
course
I’m in. I’ll do anything I can to bring them down. But Kate, I was serious when I said that my abilities are limited now. They’re much weaker than they were just a few years ago, especially when I’ve been using the key so regularly. I doubt I’ll be able to do much more than a short hop out of my timeline for the next month. Maybe more.”

“But you have knowledge that we lack, Kiernan. You can give us the information we need to get started. Let me know how to get in touch with you,” I said, squeezing his hand. “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll come to you.”

I felt him stiffen slightly. I wasn’t sure what I’d said, but I would have given strong odds that I had stirred up the Ghost of Kate Past.

“I’m in,” he repeated after a long pause. “When you need to reach me, there’s a stable point in Boston. It’s a corner in the back of a tobacco shop near Faneuil Square. It’s stable from 1901 to 1910, but I’m going back to July 17th, 1905. Anytime after that, Jess will know where I am. He’s a friend. He’s the only one who’s ever behind the counter, and he won’t be surprised if you walk out of his storeroom—you’ve done it plenty of times in the past. You can leave a message with him and I’ll leave my location with him, too, once I’ve settled on a new place.”