Time's Mirror: A CHRONOS Files Novella (The CHRONOS Files) (18 page)

She runs her forefinger around the edge as she gives me a long, calculating look. “You needn’t worry. I’m not the girl you sent hurtling to her death in the ruins of CHRONOS. You were right to get rid of that one. I don’t know if she was a mistake, but she was most definitely an
extra
. She wasn’t supposed to exist. But I’m just you. Later-You.”

I’m pretty sure she’s telling the truth. I’m still pissed, however, both because she snagged my weapon and because she scared me. So I say, “Yeah? Prove it.”

“Hmmm. Shall I tell you all about Tate’s birthmark? Or maybe that little scar just behind his knee and the way he shivers when—”

“Stop.” Her words stir up an immense feeling of homesickness, not for my own time and place, but for Tate.

Saul kept his promise. He allowed me a one-week trip back to 2306, about a month after we relocated here to the Farm. He said he trusted me to return.

Simon apparently did not share that sentiment. He handed me another picture of Deborah right before I left. It was taken in 1999. She’s walking along a sidewalk with some guy, and she’s pregnant. The city doesn’t look like DC, but I don’t ask Simon for details anymore. He gives me a new photo every few weeks. He always gives one to Saul, too. Saul smiles and thanks him, then attaches it to the board in the kitchen with all of the others.

I see that board every day. It looks very out of place in the ultramodern kitchen. It’s just a plain corkboard, exactly like the one in our kitchen back in 1984. For all I know, Simon could have broken in and swiped it.

At first, I thought Saul was too naive to understand that Simon intends these pictures as a threat. But then I realized they really
aren’t
a threat to Saul. Only to me. For me, they are a concrete reminder of why I’d better behave. Of why I’d better come back.

I’m sure Simon has the coordinates from Campbell’s key. He could follow me if he wanted to. I know he’s been to 2306, because he tacked a souvenir from the 2306 World Series to that same kitchen bulletin board. Maybe he was there keeping an eye on me, but if so, I wasn’t able to spot him.

And they have another method of keeping tabs on me. June took a blood sample before I left, and one when I returned. She ran those samples through a filter hooked up to one of the computers in the clinic. It spat out a whole list of results, including the fact that I overstayed by four days. It’s not precise—I’m pretty sure I was more like seven days late—but the Rat Bastard latched on to my failure to color between the lines, and Saul freakin’ grounded me. Again.

I’m under a key this time, but they’ve stripped every single stable point. I can set a local point here at the Farm and change the date, but there are always people around here to tattle if I try to leave the premises, no matter when I jump to.

I was late coming back mostly because Tate got cold feet after we snagged the spare medallions from a back room in the CHRONOS archives. We could still put them back, Tate said. I could stay there with him, and we’d work at the museum. He couldn’t shake the feeling that handing the keys over to Saul before we knew more might only make things worse.

Everything Tate said was tempting. He was
so
convincing. He was convincing several times for the last five nights I was there. Convincing a few afternoons and early mornings, too. All of his qualms about me being too young and not ready vanished.

But as I lay there in his arms, I knew deep down that Tate wouldn’t be the same person after a few years of answering stupid questions, like whether the Vikings were the ones who wore kilts. And I kept thinking of the picture of Deborah that Saul tacked to the bulletin board. How long before they figured out I wasn’t coming back? How long before Simon came hunting me? Maybe he was already watching us?

My dad paid a high price for my mistakes. I won’t let Deb pay, too.

In the end, I managed to convince Tate that Cyrist International is a good thing. That Saul really is trying to fix the problems my mom created. That maybe we can get everything back to how it was without triggering some stupid conundrum along the way.

And then we spent that last night convincing each other that we weren’t making a huge mistake.

Those days and nights with Tate were private. I don’t like the fact that the woman sitting in my chair knows anything about them. They’re
my
memories. And the fact that she’s an older version of me doesn’t make me feel any better about having to share those memories with her.

“Why are you here?” I ask. “What do you want?”

“Ooh, no chitchat for you. Straight to business. Okay, then.”

Older-Me comes over to sit on the edge of the bed and tosses me the mortar. I catch it, but one of the cigarette butts bounces out onto the quilt. Gizmo sniffs at it, and then ducks back behind me. The woman’s eyes follow him. They seem sad. Confused.

She shakes her head briskly and looks back up at me. “You shouldn't smoke in bed. In fact, you shouldn't smoke at all.”

Her voice is a lot like mine, although I hope to God I don’t sound that preachy. That part is more like Mother.

“You’re not addicted yet,” she continues, in that same prim tone, “and you’ll need to quit about six months before you hit item twenty-nine on Saul’s to-do list, anyway."

“There are only twenty-six items.”

“And there were twenty-two commandments when our own personal Moses jotted them down initially, right? I’ve
seen
the list. I know what’s missing. I know he’ll add more.” She stops, looking perturbed. “Come to think of it, I can’t guarantee that it will even
be
number twenty-nine. He and Simon have been juggling things around pretty much at will lately. But that task will most definitely have a star beside it, and a specific day you need to do it.”

“They all have specific dates. That’s part of the travel coordinates on the key.”

“No, dummy. I mean a specific day for you.” She grabs the diary on the nightstand with her left hand, and I get a closer look at her medallion. It’s not strapped to her arm, as I first assumed. It’s
inside
her arm—an implant. The skin around it is raised and slightly puckered.

It’s horrible. I start to ask her about it, but then I catch a glimpse of my own unmarked arm. If that thing is in my future, do I want the details?

No. I do not.

She taps the calendar app on the diary. “You’ll take care of task twenty-nine when you are seventeen years, ninety-two days old. Day 811. Around nine p.m.” A sly grin sneaks across her face. “And it’s a task you’ll enjoy quite a bit, as long as you
don’t
follow Saul’s exact orders.”

“It’s Tate, isn’t it? I go to him to get pregnant, instead of this guy Saul wants. Moehler. The historian in Copenhagen.”

Older-Me smiles. “Yes. That was a little twist I added. Saul might consider it a mistake, but it definitely wasn’t. And it served him right, after—” She stops abruptly, and her eyes drift over to the pillow next to me, where Giz is chewing on the edge of the quilt. “No, I can’t tell you about that. You’ll find out on your own.”

She reaches down to pick up a stuffed bear that’s partly under the bed. Saul gave it to me, so it’s not something I’m exactly attached to. But it’s still a little disconcerting to see her rip at the seam in its leg and start pulling out bits of the stuffing.

I decide not to mention the systematic destruction of the bear, mostly because I think it would be a bad idea to get her off topic. “This whole secrets thing is infuriating, you know. Surely you can tell me something.”

She thinks about that for a moment. Then she gives me a tiny smile as she shakes her head and pulls her fingers across her lips with a zipping motion. “No spoilers.”

I’m really tempted to whack her with the mortar. Why wake me up if all she has to offer are cryptic bullshit warnings?

Gizmo is getting braver now. He inches forward and sniffs her hand, patting at the diary in her lap with one oversized paw. He’s a German shepherd and Chow mix, and June says he’s going to be huge if he keeps growing at this rate. He may have looked like a
Gizmo
as a Christmas gift, but he’s starting to resemble a lion now. I grab his brown-and-gold ruff and tug him back, shaking him a little the way he likes when we play-fight. As I expected, he forgets all about Other-Me and rolls over on his back, with my wrist in his mouth, gnawing and growling.

Older-Me watches us play for a moment, frowning. Then she does that weird head-shake again, as she keeps right on pulling the fluff out of the bear. I wait to see if she’s going to say something else, but she seems to be on another planet.

“So…?” I prompt. “Did you just stop by to scare the hell out of me and remind me to use sunscreen and conditioner?”

That pulls her out of the little trance, although her hands keep right on going with the bear. “No, smart ass. I came to give you some advice. You’re making yourself—no, you’re making
us
—much too dispensable. Enough of this Brother Cyrus is the font of all miracles crap. Veer off his damned script when you’re at these temple events. Take some credit for yourself. And listen to June, for God’s sake! What she said about all the things you’re changing, the so-called
mistakes
they have you correcting? June is right. You’re producing double memories. It may not seem like a huge deal right now, but the closer you get to me…to this age? The impact of all those changes will mushroom. June isn’t just predicting. She’s
seen
it. Those things Simon and Saul call mistakes? They make you who you are. You can’t keep tugging at those threads.”

I glance down at the bear, whose threads and innards she’s been tugging. One leg is now a hollow sleeve and he’s lost a bit of weight around the middle, too.  The parallel between what her hands are doing and what she’s saying seems to be lost on her, however.

Everything she’s just said is an echo of what June tells me each chance she gets. I don’t entirely trust June, but I trust her far more than the others around here. I think June might actually have my best interests at heart…well, except for her concern that I make sure she continues to exist. But hey, I kind of get that.

“And keep in mind,” Older-Me continues, “that Saul and Simon don’t know everything about what I did. They don’t know all of my…mistakes. There are already a few that you’ve missed, and neither of us are going to like the end result if this keeps up.”

She pulls a sheet of paper out of her pocket and unfolds it.

“I think this is all of them. Well, all of the major ones. It’s always kind of hard to tell when something small becomes important.”

There are maybe twenty items on the list she hands me, several of them starred. Some have
Day 1763
or
Day 2102
or whatever beside them. Some of them include names. And quite a few of them include details that I really don’t want to see.

One in particular catches my eye, because I’ve met him, and also his father. “You’re kidding me? The little guy who came over on the boat last week? He's a baby!”

Okay, not a baby
exactly,
and I guess it was only last week from my perspective. Simon finally convinced the elder Kiernan Dunne to bring his family over from Ireland. I helped, mostly by spending a few minutes talking to the woman, Cliona. She seemed a little in awe of me, probably because Simon was laying on the Sister Prudence stuff really thick. I told Cliona about the Farm up near Chicago—one of the five we have in the US now—and how there was plenty of work for them, and plenty of food. The kid clutching her skirts couldn’t have been much more than four, a dark-eyed little guy who didn’t say much. He didn’t look like he’d been eating much lately either.

“A baby?” Older-Me rolls her eyes. “Do you know how stupid that sounds? By all means, jump forward to when he's eighty if that's what turns you on. You saw him back at the Cyrus Teed resurrection, didn’t you? He’s growing up nicely.”

Her words send a cold chill through me—a chill that has nothing to do with the Dunne family and everything to do with Cyrus Teed’s so-called resurrection. That jump was the fifth task on my List, one of the starred items that Saul said I had to do exactly the way I did before, or we’d mess everything up. So I followed the script to the letter. I let Saul paint me with the stupid glow paint, I even smiled up at the rafters like I was happy to be standing behind the tub where that old coot was slowly rotting.

The Kiernan kid was there when it happened, near the back of the barn. He’d been hanging out earlier with a younger version of Simon and this electrical engineer we recruited. Kiernan helped them set up the lighting so that I’d look all ethereal and otherworldly.

I saw Kiernan’s face after those people slit their throats to show their devotion to Cyrus. The boy’s mouth hung open and he just stared at the bodies, as huge tears rolled down his cheeks. Seeing him there, seeing someone else looking the way I felt—I think that’s the only reason I was able to hold it together until I got out of there.

Saul tells me that fewer people died this time, but I’m pretty sure he’s lying. I get these flashes of double memory every now and then. I think it happened almost the exact same way last time around.

And the flashes I get?  They’re only
double
memories. I’m now convinced that Saul lied about me doing things over and over, spinning off multiple timelines trying to get things right. That has me wondering what else he might be lying about.

“I’m not interested in Kiernan Dunne,” I tell her. “He’s got bad taste in friends.”

I can tell from her expression that she agrees with me on that point, but she taps one of the starred dates on her little addendum anyway. “All I’m saying is this thing with Tate doesn’t last forever. I probably shouldn’t even tell you that. Kiernan and I spent a lot of time together, if you get my drift. He’s not a bad guy…and unlike Tate, he’ll be around when you’re lonely. If you don’t add Kiernan to your little to-do list, there are going to be more double memories than our head can handle. And I think you’ll regret it.”