The Eighth Guardian (32 page)

Yellow bends over, loops her elbows under my armpits, and yanks me up. “You are going to look me in the eye right now and swear to me that you will never project without me again.”

What is she talking about? The scene replays in my mind. My father prevented that cop from stopping the assassination. That cop knew about the sniper, and my father deflected him and made sure Kennedy was shot.

“Iris!”

My father changed history so that Kennedy was assassinated? Kennedy made it through Dealey unscathed before my dad interfered?

“Iris!” Yellow grabs my shoulder and shakes me.

“What?” My voice is a whisper.

“Promise me you will not project without me.”

I push her away. “Are you kidding right now? What difference does it make? Nothing matters anymore.”

Yellow’s eyes bulge open. “Nothing matters? So your whole big plan about bringing down CE, who we now know is named Cresty Something-or-other, doesn’t matter?”

“What happened back there, Yellow? My dad is a—” I choke. I can’t finish it.

“An assassin.”

The words hang in the air and refuse to dissipate. He is. My father is a killer. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he might as well have. Before he interfered, that cop must have caught Oswald and stopped the assassination. My father changed all that.

I don’t want that to be the truth. This can’t be the truth. I need to know. I pull out my watch.

“We have to go back,” I tell Yellow.

“Go back where?”

“Go back to before this mission. Before my dad died. To read what the history books say. To figure out whether President Kennedy was assassinated before my dad interfered or not.”

“That’s not how it works,” Yellow says.

“When do you want to project to?” I turn the year dial forward.

“Iris,” Yellow hisses. “I said that’s not how it works. No one explained Chronometric Augmentation to you, did they? How it fundamentally works?”

That sounds ominous. “No.”

Yellow sighs. “We’re in a parallel future right now. A new future. That’s what happens when we change the past. We create a parallel universe that we all shift up to. You can’t go back to the old one to see what history books said before we changed the past, because those history books don’t exist anymore in our future. There are new books, and those books reflect the changes we made. Period.”

Her words bounce around in my head. My brain processes them, but my heart won’t believe it.

“Are you telling me I don’t get to know what happened here?”

Yellow takes a slow breath, as if she’s not sure what to say. “But you do know what happened here.”

I do.

I do.

I do.

I lean over and rest my forehead on the cool, metal railing. “He killed Kennedy. My father killed a president. This changes everything.”

“Yeah, he was in on it. But how does that change you wanting to bring down Alpha?”

I jump back. “My father was a bad person! I can’t just get over that!”

There’s shouting right below us, and footsteps pound up the stairs. Before I can even think, three men tear up the stairs to our landing. They’re all wearing suits with skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses and have FBI written all over them. Yellow and I exchange one panicked glance, and then we’re surrounded.

“Who are you?” one demands.

“How did you get in here?”

Shit.
When are we? When did I project to?

Yellow drops to her knees and holds up her hands. “I’m sorry, sirs,” she says with a convincing mock sob. “I just . . . I’m such a fan of the president’s . . . I had to see. I dragged my friend.”

“Get up!” the man in the middle says. “You both should be arrested. This is an active crime scene.”

“I’m sorry,” Yellow wails.

The man on the left grabs her and spins her against the wall, then pats her down. The man on the right comes over to me, and I hold up my hands in submission. He pats me down.

“Clear,” he says.

“I’ve got this,” the man holding Yellow says. He tosses Alpha’s notebook to the third man. Yellow looks at me with terrified eyes.

The man flips through it. “What’s this?”

“My notes from a home economics class at school,” Yellow says without missing a beat.

The man raises an eyebrow. “There’s an entry right here for June 17, 1998. HY. Eight point five. What’s that got to do with home economics, missy?”

Yellow clears her throat. “It’s an advanced sewing class. We’re trying to predict what fashion is going to look like in the future based on past trends. HY stands for Hiro Yu. He’s a Japanese fashion designer who’s currently creating some very avant garde pieces. I’m going to base my design on his. Eight point five is what I need to set the bobbin to. It’s just a note.”

I blink. I’m speechless. She just completely pulled that from her ass and passed it off like it makes all the sense in the world. Yellow is hands-down the best liar I’ve ever met.

“Sounds like a waste of class time to me,” the man says. “You girls need to be learning cooking and cleaning and maybe some typing.”

Yellow bows her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“What you girls did was very foolish.” He juts his chin toward the men holding Yellow and me. “Escort them out.” Then he looks right at Yellow and hands her back the notebook. “Don’t you ever enter this building again.”

It’s a long, tense walk down six flights of stairs. We’re given another warning to stay away from the building and pitched out onto the street. Piles of flowers, some long dead, some fresh, litter the front of the book depository. There are at least a dozen people out front, some crying, some praying, some standing and staring.

“Holy crap,” Yellow breathes after the door slams shut in our faces. “That was way too close.”

There is nothing like nearly getting arrested to snap you back to reality. Was it really only a few minutes ago I was curled up in a ball in the stairwell?

“Eight point five is what you set the bobbin to?” I ask. “What does that even mean?”

Yellow shrugs. “No clue.”

“When are we?”

She looks at the people in front of the building, then grabs my arm and marches me away. “December 23, 1963. You turned the month dial forward once. Thank God I saw you do it. Now promise me you will never project without me.”

“Yellow, I—”

“Promise me!”

“I won’t project without you,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Tell me how things have changed.”

“What?” I push off her.

“Murder, Iris. Assassination. This thing with Alpha is worse than we thought. And did you ever stop to think that maybe this means the entire organization is corrupt? Including my dad?”

I—no. I didn’t.

She huffs. “I’m sorry you had to find out about your dad that way. Really, I am. But that just means we have to work even harder to stop it. Do you get that? We
have
to stop it. And I have no idea where to go from here. None. It’s you and me, floundering around in 1963. We need help, and I don’t know how to get it.”

I close my eyes. I have to focus. I don’t want to focus. I’m sick of putting on a strong face. I’ve been doing it my entire life. For once it would be nice if I could just lie down, curl into a ball, and cry. But the only way I’m ever going to be able to do that is if I end this. If we end this.

“I do,” I whisper.

Yellow’s head whips around. “Huh?”

“I know where we can get help. We need to go back to Massachusetts. Cambridge. MIT.”

Neither Yellow nor I say much on the plane. I take the window seat and stare out of it the entire flight. I don’t want to think about my dad. It hurts too much. But my mind won’t stop replaying the moment when my dad mentioned the ten million dollars. When I discovered he orchestrated an assassination, only to be betrayed and murdered himself.

How many other kickbacks had he taken before that—gotten away with?

I know the truth, but I don’t want to believe it. It’s Alpha. It’s all Alpha. He corrupted my dad. Blackmailed him, maybe. My dad would not have done this on his own. Please let that be the truth.

I puke in a tiny, cramped airplane bathroom.

We’re climbing down the metal stairs onto the tarmac at Logan when I lean over to Yellow. “What happened to Beta?”

Yellow cranes her head around, and her face turns pained. “I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that, do you?”

“Tell me.”

Yellow sighs. “He committed suicide. Years ago. Probably not too long after . . . uh . . .”

“Committed suicide or got taken out just like my father did?”

Yellow presses her lips together.

“Whose father was Beta?”

She hesitates for a moment. “Green’s.”

I nod once. I never got a warm and fuzzy feeling from Green; but here we are, locked together in a mess of corruption and murder. He and I will be forever linked. And I’m kind of glad Beta got his due, all things told. He murdered my father.

Even if my father deserved it.

Maybe.

Probably.

I don’t know.

It’s a short cab ride from Logan to MIT, and I know exactly where I’m going now. Yellow pays the driver while I start walking, head down, toward the building in front of me. I hear Yellow take quick steps to catch up. We are the only two souls wandering the campus right now.

“Are you sure he’s going to be here?” Yellow looks down at her Annum watch. “It’s eight o’clock the day before Christmas Eve.”

“The man practically lives here,” I say. “Besides, Ariel’s Jewish, so it’s not like he’ll be rushing off to trim a tree or anything. He’ll be here.”

“But if he’s not?”

I sigh. “Then I know where he lives.” Although I’d like to avoid going to his house. I don’t know if I’d have the strength not to collapse into a puddle of tears and mourning in the living room.

We round the corner. The sky is dark, and a window on the fifth floor is illuminated. I point.

“Bet you anything that’s Ariel’s office.”

The front door is locked. I jiggle the handle a few times to make sure, but it doesn’t budge. Christmas holidays. Of course the door is locked. I don’t know what I was thinking. We’re going to have to break in.

I turn to tell Yellow, but she’s already standing in front of a first-floor window with a fallen tree branch. “Is there an alarm?”

I shrug. I have no idea. But I guess we’ll find out.

Yellow heaves the limb through the window, but apart from the sound of the glass shattering, it’s quiet. We clear out the glass, then I hoist Yellow up through the window. She scoots a chair over, and I jump to grab her hand.

We’re in.

The hallway on the fifth floor is dark, but light spills from Ariel’s open door.

“Told you,” I whisper to Yellow.

Ariel sits in the corner of his cluttered office with his back to the door. He’s hunched over a stool, tinkering with a small metal object. Papers are piled up and pushed to either side of the desk. I clear my throat, and Ariel turns at once. He somehow looks older than the last time I saw him, which seems weird. That was in 1962. Just over a year ago. Yet the Ariel who’s looking at me now has a harder face, more lines. There are bags under both of his eyes.

“Ah,” he says when he sees me, “Miss Hart, was it? I was wondering when I’d see you again.”

There’s a coyness in his voice. I look over to Yellow to see if she’s caught it, but Yellow’s just standing there staring at Ariel with her mouth open.

Chills dance up and down my arms. “My name isn’t Miss Hart.”

“I am very well aware of that,” Ariel says. “When are you from?”

“I—” Wait. Did he say
when
am I from?

“You—you know who I am?” My head snaps over to Yellow again. But she has the same shocked expression on her face.

“Not specifically, but when you showed up out of nowhere, begging me to change the design of my machine, I was willing to bet that you were, in fact, already using it at some point in the future. So now I’m asking you when you came from.”

Yellow’s fingers grab my bicep. “Don’t tell him,” she whispers.

I turn to face her. “What?”

Yellow starts backing out of the room, one foot at a time. “We need to go. Now.”

“Yellow, what are—”

“That’s Seven,” she whispers.

My mouth turns bone-dry as my mind races back to my Annum Guard orientation. The first generation Guardians were code named numbers. Only one of that generation is still alive.

Seven.

Ariel.

Which means . . .
Abe
.

I gasp. No. NO! Not Abe. Not Abe. NOT ABE! I whip my head back to Ariel in a flash. I’m not going anywhere.

“You’re a liar!” I say. “I know you. I’ve known you for years, which means you knew exactly who I was all those times. All those dinners. All those holiday celebrations. And you never said a goddamned word!”

Ariel holds up his hands and rises from his stool. “You need to stop talking right now.”

“Do you know what Annum Guard is?” I ask.

“Of course I do.” He waves his arm in the air. “It’s been in place for over a year. We’ve experimented, and we’re still at least another year away from consistently traveling, but we’re getting there. I’m Seven.” He looks right at Yellow. “I think you already know that, don’t you?”