Time's Divide (The Chronos Files Book 3) (34 page)

Tate kicks the leg of the coffee table. It splinters, and the glass crashes to the floor. I expect it to break. Instead, it bounces, then rolls a few inches until it bumps into the dog’s bed. Cyrus gives it one lazy lick and then ignores it.

The outburst surprises me. I’m not sure if I widen my eyes too much or blink too hard, but my left contact lens pops out. I glance around near me as best I can without drawing attention. I don’t see it.

Campbell just laughs at Tate. “Ooh, big bad Viking temper. Sit down and let me finish. I don’t know what they did with the key Saul gave me, but I
do
know Saul Rand. He’s twisted, perverse, and single-minded. He’s only loved one person, only trusted one person in his whole life, and that person is Saul Rand. Look at the effort he put into letting me know he won. The lives he was willing to expend to get that point across. If he set all of this up from his perch in the twenty-first century, then I can promise you he made sure one of his Cyrist lackeys found those keys.”

“Yeah,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm as I look about for my lens. “But which one?”

“Like I said. He trusts one person, and that’s Saul Rand. He couldn’t have the real deal in this timeline, so I think he’d settle for the pale imitation that lives here in the future. I’ve had two conversations with the man. He’s boring, insipid, and has been thoroughly pampered his entire life. Would you like me to arrange a meeting?”

Tate gives Campbell an odd look. “She needs to get the keys before September 20th . . . that’s in the past. What good would a meeting in the present do?”

Campbell sighs. “Don’t be dim, Poulsen. Meeting Pseudo-Saul in the here and now—a meeting that she’ll remember but he won’t—gives her an advantage.”

“Maybe. But the system has already tagged her as a Rand. It picked up on the DNA. And he’ll recognize her.”

“I would certainly hope so,” Campbell says. “That’s her biggest advantage if she plays it right. That outfit needs to go, however, if you want to play Cyrist Madonna. Use my printer to manufacture one of those white flowing monstrosities you wear in their propaganda.”

Campbell tilts his head to the right, and I see a glimmer of something I don’t like at all, something slightly malicious, in his eyes. “You remember how to use the printer, don’t you, Prudence?”

“It’s been . . . a while.” I push up from the sofa slowly, taking one last chance to scan the area around me for the contact lens. No luck. “I’m sure it will come back to me.”

“I’ll show you where it is, then.” He follows me to the door and says in a lower voice, “You might want to grab another lens before Poulsen there takes a closer look at you. And while you’re fabricating a new outfit, go ahead and fabricate a new story about who you are and why you’re here. Because you’re not Prudence Rand.”

R
ESIDENCE
I
NN

B
URTONSVILLE
, M
ARYLAND

September 12, 5:15 p.m.

Charlayne startles when I arrive back at the hotel room. And that causes
me
to startle because she whips up the rifle she’s cleaning and braces it against her shoulder. It looks a thousand times more dangerous than the pistol I’ve used, and it also looks emphatically wrong in her hands. It took me three weeks to convince Charlayne to take up karate back in my original timeline. She freaked when we were biking one day because she accidentally squished a lizard. And here she is acting like she’s fresh out of boot camp.

Maybe she is, sort of. She said they’d been preparing for this for a long time. I just didn’t know the preparations included advanced weapons training.

It’s not loaded if she’s cleaning it,
I remind myself, trying to force my heartbeat back into normal range.

She lowers the gun, letting out her breath in a big whoosh. “Could you give us a warning or something?”

“No early warning system on the keys. You’re going to have to get used to it.”

“Maybe you could settle on a specific time?” Trey suggests, looking up from his phone. “That way, we’d know when you’re coming in.”

Although, now that I look closer, it’s
my
phone he’s holding. That’s kind of odd.

“Okay,” I say to Charlayne. “Next arrival at exactly five thirty. Does that work?”

“Sure.” Charlayne gives me an apologetic smile. “And sorry about the gun. I’m just nervous. About all of this.”

She has every reason to be jumpy. I glance from Charlayne to Trey, and a wave of guilt hits me. Both of them are here because of me. Yes, they’d still be in danger from the Culling if I’d never met them, never crossed their paths in any timeline. But they wouldn’t be on the front lines. They’d be off living a normal life, blissfully ignorant of all this insanity. I can’t help but feel that would be better. Kinder.

“So, something went wrong?” Trey asks.

“Sort of. Charlayne, could you get Tilson and the others in here before I start?”

Charlayne gives me a quick nod and hops up to fetch them.

Trey eyes my costume, and an amused grin spreads across his face. “Is that what women wear in 2308? Not complaining, but . . .”

“Maybe it’s what they wore when Pru visited, but women’s fashion has taken a rather conservative turn.” I glance over at the guns on the bed. “What’s with Charlayne and the heavy artillery?”

“Ben says she’s actually a good shot, especially at long range. And even though I hate to say it, those guns could come in handy soon. We’ve . . . got a lead on your mom and Katherine.”

My eyes widen. “Oh my God. Where? How?”

“Well, it’s just your mom, really, but we’re hoping Simon has them in the same place. Remember when I set up that geo-location app for you and your mom when we were in London?”

“Now that you mention it. I’d kind of forgotten before that.”

“So had I. But then your phone buzzed—it was your dad. I answered. Hope that’s okay?” I nod, and he says, “I didn’t tell him where we were for . . . security reasons . . . but I told him you’re okay and you’d call him soon. He seemed really nervous. Anyway, your phone’s the same type as your mom’s, and holding it jogged my memory of setting the geo app. This blip on the map has been moving pretty fast since I first checked, and I lose the signal every now and then. I’m thinking she’s on a plane.”

Trey hands me the phone, and I see the blip he’s talking about, currently over the ocean, approaching DC.

“Maybe she had the phone in her pocket and they didn’t check,” he says. “We’re just waiting for them to stop moving.”

“And then?”

“Assuming you get the keys, then we take the fight to Simon. Did you know you lost a contact?”

The door opens and Charlayne and Ben enter. Tilson is behind them, followed by Max.

Attached to Max is Eve.

I stare at her, open-mouthed, unsure whether this is a trap or just stupidity on Max’s part.

He catches my expression and says, “What? I couldn’t leave her in the trunk indefinitely.”

Okay, not a trap. Just stupidity. Complete and total stupidity.

“And she has information. We’ve been having a productive little chat. Turns out her dad wasn’t always New Cyrist. In fact, he used to be—”

“Regional Templar? I already knew that. You may not remember the previous timeline, but I do. Eve here sicced the temple hounds on me, and I have the scars to prove it.”

I expect Eve to gloat, but she’s barely listening. She has Max’s arm in a death grip, and her self-assured smirk is gone. In fact, she looks nervous. Extremely nervous.

Tilson says, “I still think you should have taken her back to your place, Max. She could be wearing a tracker. And what if she manages to get away?”

“I checked thoroughly,” Max says defensively. “There’s nothing on her body that could lead anyone to us. And she won’t be running away. Will you, Evie?”

Eve doesn’t answer at first. Then Max starts prying her fingers away from his arm one by one until he’s holding her wrists in one hand, with the other pressed against her chest. He repeats, “
Will you
, Evie?”

“No! I won’t! Please.” She tries to move closer to him, her expression escalating from nervousness to sheer terror. “I won’t go anywhere! I promise, Max! Don’t let go . . .”

Her voice is almost a whimper at the end. This Eve is nothing like the one I knew. The Eve I met at the Cyrist temple, at her little barbecue, and even at Briar Hill, struck me as manipulative, bitchy, and quite possibly evil. But possessive and clingy? Definitely not.

And then I get it.

“You have her key, don’t you?”

“Actually, Tilson has it.”

“Does she exist without it?” Trey asks, glancing from Tilson to Max a little nervously.

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” The look Max gives Eve is angry and contemptuous, but there’s also a good deal of hurt in the mix. I think the bit about not caring is a bluff. To my surprise, Eve gives him an almost identical look, making me wonder whether the role she’s playing became a little too real at some point, at least where Max is concerned.

“Saul’s people like to alter several things at once,” Max says, “probably because these shifts hit them in the gut the same way they do us. I doubt they’d wipe out Evie on purpose, but there’s always a chance. Eve clearly thinks so, don’t you, sweetie? I’ve never had a very clear answer as to what happened to her mother.”

“Max, I’m not sure that any of us connected to CHRONOS exist outside a key right now, so you might . . .” I don’t finish the sentence. It’s hard to muster up anything close to a full serving of sympathy if Max did pull her key, when she evidently doesn’t care how many people die by Cyrist hands. Still, it feels a little
wrong
to root for her extinction. The Cyrists managed to convince Kiernan that their Way was the only Way for a while. And Kiernan had the benefit of knowing people outside the Cyrist circle, people who questioned those beliefs and made him question them.

Did Eve have anyone like that in her life? Or has it been lived entirely inside a Cyrist bubble?

I catch a glimpse of Charlayne’s face as I look away. She’s sitting on the bed, weapons on one side, Ben on the other. Her eyes seem troubled, and I suspect she’s thinking the same thing I am.

Max is asking me something, and I’ve missed the first part. “Sorry. Can you repeat that?”

“The keys? I take it you didn’t get them, since there are clearly no pockets on that thing you’re wearing.”

“No. I had a minor wardrobe malfunction.” I fork my fingers, pointing to my eyes. “Do we have a backup pair of lenses, Charlayne?”

She nods, and while she’s searching for her handbag, I bring my little corner of the Fifth Column up to speed on the changes I witnessed in the future and the fact that most of our research is essentially worthless.

“I know Julia . . . and I guess Delia and Abel, too . . . spent a lot of time on the file, but I don’t think it was even accurate before this last shift. Kiernan noted several changes that were in place as early as 2150, and—”

Max gives me a look that suggests he thinks I’m too dumb for words. “And how do you know he’s not bullshitting you, Kate?”

“Because I’ve just been there! What is it with you? The changes I saw go well beyond what Kiernan told me, and there are actually a few things that match up with his descriptions. The biggest problem now is—”

I stop in midsentence and look at Eve. “You know, I’m not saying anything more with her here. This is insane. What if she
does
happen to escape and she doesn’t vanish? It would be beyond stupid to just dish up everything I’ve learned on a platter. That never goes well when the villain does it in the movies, and even though we’re the good guys here, I can picture so many ways it could blow up in our faces.”

Max shrugs and then loops the arm that was resting on Eve’s shoulders around her neck, lifting her onto her tiptoes as he squeezes the pressure points.

I know this move. I used it—twice—on Detective Beebe back in Georgia. But it’s still disturbing to watch. Eve flails briefly, digging her nails into Max’s arm, and then goes limp.

Max holds her there about ten seconds and then slides her down to the floor. “Talk fast.”

“Fine. CHRONOS wasn’t just disbanded in this timeline. It never existed. But I think we can still get the keys if I go back to the date before Pru takes them. They should still be somewhere.”

I pull in a deep breath, preparing to launch into the reasons that Kiernan spelled out as to why the keys would still exist even if CHRONOS didn’t in this timeline. But Tilson is already nodding.

“That’s true. They should still exist.”

I could hug him, because I wasn’t looking forward to explaining that. Make it a group hug, because now Ben is nodding, too.

“Just a matter of figuring out where. They have their own CHRONOS field, so they should be . . . where they would have been . . . if there had been a CHRONOS in that timeline. Unless someone moved them.”

Max, Trey, and Charlayne all look a little confused, but Eve is stirring, so they’ll have to piece it together on their own.

Charlayne gives me the spare contacts, and I move over to the mirror inside the bathroom. Thankfully, the process of sticking these stupid things in my eyes gets a little easier each time.