Nomad (28 page)

"Hit the brakes, what's he saying?" the sales clerk asked, finally paying attention. The other shoppers and store employees ignored the live C-SPAN footage, accustomed to tuning out bombastic politicians making exaggerated claims.

"--collaborators in Congress would give me a new position, Secretary-General of the United States, with full and unchecked control of the executive branch--I met with them several times, collecting evidence I am now prepared to upload into the Congressional record." Logan held up a small blue data cube.

A mob of senators rushed him, swarming over the rostrum. The presiding officer banged his gavel once, called a recess, and ran for his life. The entire scene shuddered and wobbled, and then the C-SPAN projection vanished, replaced by a blank blue sphere.

"Did everybody see that?" Kevin the clerk looked around the store, but nobody had been paying attention. Only a couple of people glanced his way when he asked the question, and they seemed annoyed. He looked back at Raven. "You saw that, right?"

"I saw it. Thanks. You can go back to your cartoon dog show now." Raven walked toward the door.

"Hit the brakes, chick!" He chased after her. "Don't you want one of these sweet new holo-def systems? I'll give you my employee discount. One percent." He winked.

"No, thank you."

"We've got financing, chick!" he yelled as she left the store.

Raven crossed the central plaza of the shopping mall and pushed through a maintenance door, stepping into a dim, dusty back corridor. An alarm whooped above her--it wasn't exactly the discreet exit she'd intended. She activated her timepiece and disappeared in a flash of light before the mall security guards could find her.

* * *

In the year 2064, Raven approached a sand-colored two-story villa surrounded by lush, dense trees heavy with tropical flowers. She was on the island of Saint Martin, and it was nearly sunset.

Nobody stopped her from walking through the unlocked front door. Inside, she passed through one large, empty, sandstone-tiled room after another. There was no furniture, the bare walls held no pictures or paintings, and the high windows had no curtains. Golden island sunshine flooded the house, and nothing remained to cast a shadow.

The rear doors stood all the way open. Twelve feet high, five feet wide, and made of beveled glass, the two rolling doors were like sliding walls that opened up to bring the beach and sky inside the house.

Beyond them, Logan occupied one of a row of deck chairs on the white granite patio, his back to her, watching the crystal blue waves shatter against the hard-packed ivory sand. The tide was moving out, away from him. On the little table beside him, he poured himself a drink from a dark bottle.

"What are we drinking?" Raven asked. He froze in his chair, a seventy-year-old man in a straw hat hearing an intruder in his home. He settled, though, and managed to keep his cool. He didn't look back at her.

"It took you long enough to visit me," Logan said. "I'm nearly dead. Is that it? Did you come to see me just before I died?"

"You're not quite dead yet." She stood beside him. He was wrinkled now, his hair gray and turning white. He had grown a long, unkempt beard that ruffled in the salty wind.

"Have a drink," he suggested.

"I'm fine. I have to go soon."

"When you make me wait fifty years to see you again, you can't refuse to drink with me. That's just bad manners. It's Cruzan rum, personal favorite." He poured the rum into a second glass.

"Who's the second glass for?" she asked.

"You," he said. "I set one out for you sometimes, when I'm drinking alone and I convince myself you might show up. This was the first time my hunch was right. Will it be the last?"

"Maybe." Raven drank. The rum was strong and sweet.

"You can sit." He gestured to an empty chair. In the version of 2064 she remembered, he was always seen in a severe black suit, leading to one of his many derisive nicknames, "the undertaker." Now he wore a Hawaiian shirt polka-dotted with pineapples, frayed khaki shorts, and flip-flops.

"I'll stay for a minute." She took the deck chair beside him. "I just watched the day you revealed the plot. Very impressive. I'm proud of you."

He laughed a little. "The day that wrecked my life? When those senators grabbed me and pulled me from the microphone, I thought of how you once compared me to Julius Caesar. I believe you said, if I were in his position, I would certainly have crossed the Rubicon. Something like that."

"You certainly would have."

"What else was Caesar going to do at that point, though? Stop? Sit with a huge army and go nowhere?"

"You stopped," Raven said. "It was the greatest thing you've ever done. Believe me."

"My testimony was mysteriously deleted from the record. The mass media didn't report on what I said, but they did start calling me crazy every chance they got. Why wouldn't they? I'd just accused their corporate parents of high treason. Everybody came after me, hammer and tongs, as Uncle Henry would have said. Lawsuits, hostile takeover bids, IRS audits, SEC investigations. Providence Security lost its public contracts and went into Chapter 11. It's been gone for more than a decade now."

"In my world, Providence agents were the blackshirts of your regime," Raven said. "I can't say I'm sad to hear the company's been destroyed."

"Why would you ever be sad for me? You know what I am and who I was fated to be. You're the one who really knows me. Everyone else buys my act. I've felt like a fraud my entire life." He took a long drink and smiled. "For years, I was just following a script you gave me. I saw it all unfold as you said. On that day, the day I changed history...that was the first day I didn't know what happened next. Since then, I've felt free, even after I lost everything."

"I think your life turned out better this way."

"I married Macey. I suppose you know that."

"I do."

"Three kids, grown and gone now. Four grandchildren. Macey and I had forty-five years together. She went two years ago. Bone cancer."

"I'm sorry."

"Can't wait to see her again." He poured more rum for both of them. "I told her everything. Not the time-travel crap--even I think I'm crazy when I think about that. I told her about the attempted coup. She wanted me to expose it. She didn't care what happened to us. Never lost that idealism, Macey."

"I thought she'd be good for you."

"I miss her." His dim green eyes looked out to the gathering darkness on the horizon. "It was a good life. Good enough. I kept the kids away from the family business, politics and Providence. I knew I'd have to crash that ship one day."

"The first time around, you never had any children," she told him.

"Then you're right, my life turned out better this way. I'm afraid I won't have much inheritance to leave them. The vultures are picking my bones. I have to sell this place." He looked back at the cheerful villa. "We all used to vacation here, every August, the whole family back together. This is my last trip, closing the sale of the house. I won't be returning to this island."

"It's nice here."

"Too many memories."

They sat quietly, watching the water retreat from the sand.

"I brought you something." Raven handed him the two data cubes from her backpack. "These are the only records of that other world, the one where you were the monster. If you ever doubt you made the wrong decision, just have a look at these."

"Thanks. I'll try to avoid doing that." He had a thin smile as he dropped them onto the table. "I remember the first time you showed me one of these. I was shocked by the technology.
Holograms!
" He chuckled.

"And you screamed when the hologram soldiers attacked you."

"That wasn't fair. You were sneaky."

"I thought it was funny." Raven drank down her rum.

"Why did you wait so long to visit me?" he asked. His smile faded to a sad, wistful look.

"I had to see how your life turned out. You did the right thing, so I didn't want to interfere with history again."

"So why come see me now?"

"This was the day I left," Raven said. "Today, I broke into a secret research facility with a team of revolutionaries, and I traveled back through time. Now I've returned home."

"You told me you were just a history student from the future."

"I lied."

"I figured that out long ago, thank you," Logan said. "So you've won the revolution, all by yourself. I am your defeated dictator."

"Yes," Raven said. "I completed the mission."

"Then where do you go next? There is no revolution, so nobody remembers you went back." Logan rubbed his temples. "But if there is no revolution, you won't be traveling back in time to stop me...but if you don't travel back and change history, then everything will go back the way it was..."

"The universe has a way of handling it," Raven said. "Don't give yourself a headache."

"Thinking was never my strongest point," Logan said. "There are those who like to think and those who like to talk. They're not often the same people."

Thousands of stars emerged in the newly fallen darkness over the water.

"Congress never launched an investigation," Logan said. "Too many of them were in the pockets of the megacorps. The Vasquez administration never moved on it publicly, either, but I've heard she used it as a cudgel behind the scenes. She forced them to accept her reforms."

"Your efforts weren't wasted, then," Raven said.

"I gave her the sword she needed to go to war against the powerful interests. She cut back their special privileges and monopolies. I have to admit, the economy did recover slightly during her eight years, though not as much as she promised during her campaign."

"Under your administration, American cities were reduced to war-torn slums."

"It's a good thing my administration never happened, then."

"It is." Raven looked out at the ocean with him. "What about the Vendée Globe? Did you ever compete?"

"Ha. I'm afraid my life didn't leave much time for sailing."

"That's too bad."

When a few minutes had passed, Raven stood.

"I always imagined we'd have more to say to each other," he said.

"I suppose it's for the best we didn't end up married," she said, and he laughed, but it sounded forced.

She stepped off the patio onto the beach. The warm wind blew the hair back from her face.

When she looked back, the old man's head was nodding onto his chest as he drifted off into a boozy sleep.

Chapter Thirty

Raven returned to New Haven on a warm spring day in 2064, tracking a new target.

Kari had grown up in Tacoma, Washington. In the old version of history, her father had been a police officer who'd vanished after helping the resistance with intelligence and weapons. In the new version, Kari's family was still alive, her father was a police chief, and Kari herself was a sophomore at Yale.

The Gothic buildings were the same as they'd been in 2013--only the altered landscaping hinted that decades had passed. Raven stalked Kari from a distance as she cut across the lawn of Old Campus, absorbed in a fast-paced conversation with two girlfriends.

Kari wore her Yale shirt with pride. This version of Kari was pudgy, bubbly, even giggly as she chatted with her friends--nothing like the girl Raven remembered. She was, however, alive and at peace.

Kari paused and looked back directly at Raven, as though she had felt the other girl watching her. Her friends slowed and turned to see why she'd stopped. Kari stared at Raven as if struggling to remember something.

Raven slipped on her sunglasses and walked away, leaving Kari to her new and improved life. It warmed her heart to see her friend happy and healthy. Raven didn't want to spoil that by interfering.

Her next stop was her parents' house in Bellevue, Washington, early in the evening as the sun was setting. Three electric cars sat in the driveway, and she could identify their owners by security stickers on the windshields. One sticker was for the parking deck at the news studio downtown--her father. Another granted parking at the hospital--her mother. The third car had a University of Washington sticker.

In the early darkness, she crept around the outside of the house, keeping to the shadows in the woods alongside the property.

She tiptoed into the back yard, a grassy lawn with a crushed-pebble path down to the water, lined with green shrubs clipped into spheres.

Through one of the big picture windows, she saw her mother and father at the dinner table, and she nearly collapsed at the sight of them. They were fifteen years older than she'd ever seen them, going gray, but incredibly, wonderfully alive. She wanted to run inside and hug them, and she felt herself starting to cry.

Raven took a step toward the back door, but then
she
arrived.

She looked just like Raven, except her black hair was dyed with red stripes. She dressed in a manner completely unfamiliar to Raven--her shirt looked like handkerchiefs of different colors and materials, loosely held together with large wooden buttons. Her jeans were canary yellow and embellished with swirls of glittering costume jewelry, held up by bright blue suspenders. Raven couldn't imagine ever picking out such clothes for herself. This version of 2064 had developed some bizarre fashions.

The other version of her sat down at the table, half-listening to her mother as she served herself salmon and grilled vegetables from the platters on the table. Raven watched them eat, finally understanding what Eliad had said to her.

"It's beyond strange, is it not?" a voice whispered in her ear. "The first time you see yourself this way?"

Raven jumped and drew the plasma pistol from beneath her jacket. Eliad smirked as she jabbed the barrel against his chest.

"I was just putting forth an observation." His dark gray eyes had a mischievous glint, and she recalled that she owed this boy a slapping. Now she owed him two.

"Where did you come from?" Raven lowered her weapon but didn't put it away.