Time's Divide (The Chronos Files Book 3) (31 page)

“And it’s been two years? That’s just wrong, Pru . . . a babe should have his mother. Maybe when you find him, you can go back, make up the time.”

I’m really glad it’s dark, because I’m pretty sure my cover would be totally blown if Tate could see my face right now.

“You’ll find him, Pru. You will. Is there any news of Patrek?” He says it oddly, almost like
pot-wreck
, with a slight accent on the second syllable.

“Patrick?” I ask.

“Is he part of this . . . Culling?”

I can tell he’s hoping I’ll tell him no, although I’ve no idea why. But I tell him the truth. “Yes. He’s helping Saul.”

“Then that’s my fault, too.” He looks like he’s going to cry again, but he just presses his lips to my palm, then turns my hand over to trace his finger over the tattoo. “You let them tat you. I liked the other one better.”

No clue what other one he’s talking about, so I just give him a tiny smile and change the subject. “Only you and Campbell remember the other timeline?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “There could be others, but I don’t think so. There were rumors before—when I was CHRONOS—that someone in the administration was under a key. Some people said the president, others said the vice president. But I think they’d have started up the program again if someone in power remembered about CHRONOS, if they knew some historians were behind a plague that wiped out nearly a billion people. I think they’d try and stop it. Don’t you?”

Nearly a billion people.

My first emotion is relief—not even a billion! The models Tilson and Ben mentioned predicted at least triple that number.

That’s followed by the realization that it’s still
nearly a billion people
. And whatever the number, the changes were radical enough to create this reality, which is a far cry from the future Katherine, Delia, and Abel knew. Grant, too. Would he have wanted to return to this version of his future?

“But maybe . . .” I’m about to say that maybe someone in power is in the process of doing exactly that, at this moment, but I catch myself. It’s one of those odd conundrums that twists my brain into a pretzel. The fact that this plague
did
happen would seem to suggest that he’s right. No one in a position to reinstate a time travel program knows about Saul’s role in this “Great Plague,” because if they did, they’d have found a way to be sure Saul’s Culling never happened. The newspaper headlines Tilson showed me would never have been written.

But. Here comes the bendy-twisty part. That same logic could be applied to me, since I’m also currently trying to prevent that catastrophe. Does the fact that I’m here in the future, seeing evidence that it happened in the past, mean that I fail?

No, no, no, no. Stop it, Kate.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go on the assumption that it’s just you and Campbell. Do you think he can help us?
Will
help us?”

“I don’t know. All of the changes sort of . . . undid him. He’s drinking a lot. Last time I was there he went on and on about CHRONOS history and other things . . . other people . . . that used to exist. I think he’s taking some strong mood drugs. Or it might just be how much he’s drinking. Anyway, I had an hour with him that first day, and he was coherent maybe fifteen minutes, total. It wasn’t much better last time. All I managed to find out is that he was inside the club when everything shifted. The next thing he remembers, someone hands him a sealed box, saying it’s from Brother Cyrus, and shows him to his quarters.”

“What was in the box?”

“A blank CHRONOS diary, which I’m guessing was included only for the CHRONOS field. Copies of Saul’s two little books. And a note, which Campbell says was in Saul’s handwriting, on some really old paper. Two words:
I win
.”

Tate sucks in a breath and then slams his fist into the side of the building. The punch meets only slight resistance before the wall swallows his hand, kind of like the sand-stuff did earlier.

“The books were a
joke!
We were both nuked half the time when we were writing them. Saul was going to give them to Campbell at the holiday party. Then he moved in with Katherine. I guess she convinced him they were a work of genius.”

I’d love to know what evidence Saul left behind that convinced everyone Katherine was the mastermind who destroyed CHRONOS. I mean, it’s a moot point in this timeline, since CHRONOS never existed, but I’d bet it was at the heart of Prudence’s decision to stay with Saul. Mom said Pru was always the more rebellious twin, always eager to butt heads with Katherine. But even though Mom herself would never have nominated Katherine for Mother of the Year, would she have believed Katherine was evil enough to commit an act of terrorism that killed God knows how many people? I think the evidence would have had to be very, very convincing for her to accept that.

But whatever the evidence was, Pru did believe it. And asking questions at this point seems ill-advised, especially when Tate is already wound up.

“If I could use this damned key, I’d track both of them down and separate their heads from their necks.”

I watch as the dent Tate punched in the wall finishes filling back in. When everything is going to hell around you, it’s kind of comforting to see something repairing itself. To see something humans invented that’s useful rather than destructive.

“I’ll take care of Saul and Katherine, Tate. But first, we have to come up with a plan for getting the CHRONOS keys.”

Tate stares at me blankly. “But . . . we did that. You have the keys. Getting the keys made things worse.”

“Saul has the keys . . . or at least most of them.”

“Then why are you here? Go back to . . . whenever . . . and get them from Saul.”

I was really, really hoping Tate would already understand what Kiernan told me earlier about the keys existing even if the rest of the timeline didn’t. That maybe this type of discussion was part of CHRONOS Agent Training 101. But Katherine’s knowledge on these issues seems pretty sketchy, so there’s no reason to assume the other historians are any more inclined toward perverse temporal logistics. CHRONOS never planned for historians to change timelines, and they even took precautions, faulty though they may have been, to make sure that they couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t want them even thinking about how it might be done and the possible ramifications.

“Saul would kill me before giving them over, Tate.” That’s true, as far as it goes. I’m just leaving out the bit about not knowing when and where the transfer happened. “I need to stop . . . myself from giving the keys to Saul in the first place. As you keep saying, everything changed. CHRONOS never existed. But despite that, you’re still wearing a key, right? So am I. The keys are a permanent fixture. They have their own CHRONOS field, so alterations to the timeline don’t affect them. The existence of the keys is the only constant. Somewhere and when there’s a whole box of unassigned CHRONOS keys—the only link between this reality and the others.
When
is easy—before Prudence got them.” My mouth goes suddenly dry as I realize what I’ve just said. “That is, before the younger me got them.
Where
might be tougher. I’m guessing someone—”

I stop in midsentence and resist the urge to thwack myself in the forehead. “They took Campbell’s key, but he’s okay if he stays inside the OC. Do you mean the entire building?”

“Yeah . . .”

Connor’s rig in the library takes three keys, and the range extends the CHRONOS field to the rest of the house and most of the yard. That club building takes up a full city block, and it’s at least ten stories high. While it’s entirely possible they’ve found a way to amplify the field far beyond Connor’s twenty-first-century limitations, we do know they have at least one key—the one they took from Campbell.

It’s a start.

“Tate, tell me again how you got into the Objectivist Club. And this time, I need specifics.”

O
BJECTIVIST
C
LUB

W
ASHINGTON
, EC

October 15, 2308, 4:45 a.m.

Kiernan jumps into the stable point as soon as I step aside. He looks annoyed and tired.

“How did you get away from Thor?”

Sure. Last night he calls the nickname stupid, but now that he’s seen the guy in person, he steals it.

“He’s joining me later. Since he can’t use the key, he’ll have to take another route.”

We sit down in the sand-stuff, and I bring him up to speed about Campbell and the fact that this entire building is, based on what Tate told me, under a CHRONOS field. Then I pull up the observation point I set outside the building around daybreak and scan ahead a few hours to show Kiernan the line that stretches around the building. It isn’t moving yet, so apparently the screeners got a late start.

“They’re all day laborers. Tate said there are rarely fewer than two hundred candidates waiting, even though the screeners never choose more than fifty on a weekday, evenly split between servers and companions.”

“Companions?”

“Yeah. Paid escorts. Or—”

His nose wrinkles slightly. “I get the point.”

“Tate’s near the front of the line because he has a blue chip they scan as he comes in the door. The chip means you’re a regular or a special request. Or both.”

“Which is he?”

“Special request, I think?”

“No. Server or companion?”

“He’s listed as companion, although he seems embarrassed about that. Campbell requests him, just to have someone to talk to, and Campbell has special status with the group running the place. Tate says they treat him and the dog kind of like mascots. Check out the girl just behind him. Does she look familiar?”

“Um . . . no. Should she?”

“I think she’s the one with the wings. That we saw watching the stable point set at that party. See the way her cloak sticks up in the back?”

“What’s with all the cloaks anyway? It’s kind of hot.”

“You joked about the propriety police back in 1905? Apparently that’s a
thing
in this reality. Red cloaks for the women applying for escort positions. The female server candidates—there aren’t many of those, because they usually hire men—are in the black cloaks.”

I don’t point out that there’s a double standard—no cloaks for the men. Most are in tuxedos, applying for server positions, but some near the middle of the line are shirtless and oiled like bodybuilders, probably hoping to catch the eye of a screener and steal an escort spot from someone like Tate near the front. Tate is still in jeans—which look identical to men’s jeans in my time—but he traded his T-shirt for a gold mesh tank top clearly designed to draw attention to his chest and abs, so I don’t think he’s as confident about getting back into the building as he pretended. He said the shirt—what little there was—would give him an edge, but it’s clearly not his preferred attire, judging from the Simonesque sneer when he pulled it out of his pack.

“Tate’s part of the Cyrist gene pool, isn’t he? He looks like . . . what Simon could have looked like, if things went right. Except his nose, but that’s familiar, too, for some reason.”

“June’s the only one who knows for sure,” Kiernan says, “except maybe Saul. The nose looks like Conwell to me, except it doesn’t look quite as oversized on Thor’s face.”

“Yeah. He mentioned Patrick, but I didn’t understand it. And he asked Pru if she’d found some baby. I got the sense from what you said before that she didn’t want anything to do with motherhood.”

“With the surrogate babies, I know that was the case. But . . . maybe she felt differently about that first one. And I’d say it’s a safe bet that Tate was directly involved in that pregnancy from the way his hands were traveling all over you last night.”

The last words are clipped, his mouth firm and judgmental.

“Hey! I’m walking a very thin line here. Do you think—”

“No. I’m sorry.” He actually does sound a little apologetic. “If anything, you probably need to be a little more enthusiastic. Because Pru would be.”

“I thought
you
were the one Pru was interested in?”

“Convenience,” he says, with a little shake of his head. “I was there, easy access. But I wasn’t her first. Never asked who was because I was worried the answer might be Saul, and if so, that’s a scar I didn’t want to disturb, you know? But sometimes, during . . . well, I got the feeling she was imagining I was someone else. Fair enough, since I was doing the same.”

I don’t really want to meet his eyes after that, so I pull up the local point outside the club. Tate’s still in line.

“You think you can trust Tate?”

“To help us fix this? Oh, yes,” I say. “Absolutely. He doesn’t want to stay in this reality. Do you still have the tux you wore as Boudini?”

“It’s in the loft at the cabin. Why?”

“You’ll need it in order to pose as a server. Unless you’d rather be a male companion?”

“No thanks.”

An evil little part of me is dying to say he has more experience as a companion, given his time with Prudence, but I bat it down.

Five minutes later, he’s dressed in the tux. That involved me jumping back to the cabin twice because I couldn’t find his stupid shoes. The cut isn’t identical to the tuxedos I saw on the prospective workers outside, and I’m certain it’s not the same fabric, but unless someone decides to give it a thorough inspection, it’s close enough.