Timebound (40 page)

I was rearranging my bonnet in the small dressing mirror above the sink when I felt a light tap at my elbow. It was Katherine. She grabbed my arm and yanked me around the corner.

“I thought that I saw you coming in here,” she said in a low whisper. “
Mrs. Salter
—or whoever she is—followed me. She’s in there.” She jerked her head toward one of the stalls. “If you want
to talk we need to leave now—we have only a few moments. I can’t seem to shake that woman.”

We dashed across the street toward the buildings that the various states had sponsored to parade their individual accomplishments, history, agriculture, and industry. The California Building was directly opposite the restrooms. I followed Katherine through the doorway and over to a gigantic tower made entirely of oranges, which I had to admit looked much more impressive in living color than it had in the black-and-white photos that I had seen. The display was apparently getting a bit overripe, however, as the unmistakable tang of molded citrus swirled in the air around us.

Once we were out of view of the entrance, Katherine held up my wrist to compare my bracelet to her own. The chains were different, but the charms were identical—a single jade and pearl hourglass, with a small chip in exactly the same place. “Tell me who you are, where you got this bracelet, and why you are here,” she said.

“I can’t answer the first question,” I told her. “But the answer to the second question is that you gave it to me. And I’m here to tell you that you need to return to CHRONOS headquarters immediately. Go straight to the stable point near the cabin. I’ll get a messenger to contact Saul—”

“But why? This isn’t standard protocol!” she said. “I’ll be back at the same time whether we finish our work here or not. CHRONOS doesn’t interrupt the jump even for a family emergency.”

“What is standard protocol if the historian is in danger?” I asked. “You
are
in danger, even if headquarters doesn’t know it.”

She didn’t answer, so I continued, looking her directly in the eyes. “Listen carefully. I’m going to tell you as much as I can. I can’t tell you everything without—well, you understand, right?”

“You don’t want to mess up the rest of the timeline if you can avoid it.”

“Right. Tell HQ that you’re sick and cancel your next jump.” She started to interrupt again, but I held up a hand. “You’re creative—you’ll think of something. A stomach bug might be convincing given recent events. Oh, and keep that appointment with your gynecologist, okay?”

Her eyes widened, and I continued. “Your suspicions about Saul are correct,” I said, and then paused, trying to decide how much I could tell without changing her actions. “He’s been bringing medicines from your era back to this one. But you
cannot
confront him about it until he returns from the next jump to Boston—the one you’ll be skipping.”

“Why do I need to skip that jump?” she asked.

“Because I don’t want to have to travel back, track you down, and extract you again at
that
location!” I said, a bit exasperated. “You need to stay put in your own time for the next few days.”

I made myself take a deep, calming breath and continued. “When Saul gets back, try to convince him to talk to Angelo—but wait to tell him about the baby, okay? You’ve got a solo trip planned next week, correct?”

She nodded. “To Boston, 1853.”

“You do need to make
that
trip. It’s…” I hesitated. “It’s safe.” I didn’t sound very convincing on that point, even to myself. The image of Katherine’s face after her fight with Saul floated before me, and I couldn’t help but remember her description of Angelo’s and Shaila’s deaths, but I pressed on. “And it’s
important.
”

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Try to avoid Mrs. Salter?”

“Who isn’t actually Mrs. Salter, according to you. A woman, I might add, who looks quite a bit
like
you, beneath the superficial differences in hair color and the glasses. Who is she? Is she the reason I’m in danger?”

I shook my head. “I’m going to have to follow the lead of my mentor here and tell you that’s strictly on a need-to-know basis, and—”

“And I don’t need to know. Funny. That’s the same line
my
mentor uses.”

“Well…” I shrugged. “It’s not exactly an original thought. Suffice it to say that if you can avoid her on the way back to the stable point, it would probably be for the best.”

“That may be easier said than done.” She narrowed her eyes slightly, and I could tell she was still trying to decide whether to trust me. “So tell me, how did that charm get chipped? The little hourglass?”

“An altercation between a carriage door and a starstruck young CHRONOS agent, as I understand it. Mr. Douglass is over at the Haiti exhibit, so you might want to avoid him as well—just in case he remembers the incident and asks you to return his handkerchief.”

Katherine gave me a cool, measured stare. “I’m the only one who knows that story, so you must have gotten it from me… but I have a very hard time believing that I would have directed you to interfere like this. It’s entirely against—”

“Yes,” I said with a tight smile. “I know. Against CHRONOS regulations.”

There was another long look and then she sighed deeply. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to tell Saul that I’m leaving. I’ll make some excuse. He may want to come back with me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t, given his recent behavior.”

“Just be sure that you don’t let him know the reason why…”

“I won’t,” Katherine said. “I’m going to follow your instructions to the letter. Skip the next jump, keep the gyno appointment, and avoid discussing my suspicions about Saul’s actions—and that’s all they are, I would remind you,
suspicions
—until the 26th.
I’ll make the jump on the 27th. I just hope you—or maybe I should say we—are doing the correct thing here.”

I thought back to Connor’s comments a few weeks earlier. “So do I. But as a good friend of mine—of ours, actually—recently told me, I’m pretty sure that what we’re doing is
right.
Sometimes, right and correct aren’t the same thing.”

She didn’t look entirely convinced, but she nodded and took a few steps toward the exit, before turning back. “Just in case we run into the ersatz Mrs. Salter, perhaps we should leave separately? She seems to have taken a rather intense dislike to you and your young friend.”

I agreed, and Katherine headed toward the door. I don’t know if it was a premonition or just that I was feeling nervous, but I only gave her about a twenty-second lead and then I headed toward the same exit that she had taken. As luck would have it, a large group burst through the door and I shoved my way against the tide of the crowd, which was almost entirely over the age of sixty. I muttered apologies and stood on tiptoe to look for Katherine over their shoulders as I pushed through the last few people and began to make my way down the steps in front of the building. One old woman rapped me on the leg with her walking cane. I really couldn’t blame her, since I’d nearly knocked her down.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t—” I began, and then stopped short as someone shoved the woman directly into me. I stumbled on the first step and just barely caught her before she fell. I was busy trying to set her back on her now very shaky feet when her assailant put his palm against my chest and pushed hard.

I fell down the last two steps and landed ungracefully on my backside. The man’s suit threw me off for a moment, since I’d previously seen him only in a ratty T-shirt and jeans. The jagged scar near his right temple was new, and it looked a bit like something that one might get if he were whacked very hard with a tire iron. He had added a truly pathetic little mustache, but there was no
mistaking the face. I’d seen it too recently and much too closely for my liking.

“Hi, Katie,” Simon said with a glint in his eye. “Imagine meeting you here. Catch you later, okay?”

And with that, he began walking at a rapid clip toward the Sixtieth Street station. Several members of the crowd I’d just pushed my way through came over to help me up, and one rather gallant gentleman, who was eighty if he was a day, tottered a few steps after Simon, shouting and shaking a fist in the air.

By the time I was on my feet, Simon was halfway to the station. A bit farther ahead I saw Katherine, who hadn’t managed to shake Prudence. The two of them were approaching the platform where the mayor’s group had assembled to await the train, which was chugging toward the stop. I raised my skirt and managed a weak imitation of a run, but it was clear that I wouldn’t reach them before Simon did.

The only thing I could hope was that my voice would travel better than I could. I pulled in a deep breath and shouted, pointing directly at Simon, “He’s got a gun! Stop him—he’s got a gun!”

I’m not sure if the group at the station heard
me,
or if they heard one of the many fairgoers who screamed and repeated “a gun” in the chaos of the next few seconds. But the mayor’s party all looked in our direction. Simon glanced over his shoulder once and then turned back toward the platform, his hand still in his pocket, as Prudence, with a maneuver worthy of a defensive lineman, tackled Katherine to the ground.

They both fell forward, Katherine’s sleeve snagging against the wooden railing, ripping the cloth from shoulder to elbow, just before her head smacked the edge of the platform. The screams of the crowd were now mingling with the roar of the train as it pulled to a stop. Saul knelt beside Katherine, and Prudence jumped to her feet, scanning the faces in the station.

I rammed my way through the mass of people, trying to get closer to Simon, but I couldn’t find him in the crowd. I didn’t think that he would have been brazen enough to make a temporal jump in broad daylight with hundreds of people nearby, but then he had been perfectly willing to make a jump in a crowded Metro station after snatching the diary, so who knew?

Two men in matching suits were walking purposefully toward the mayor. A Columbian Exposition security badge was visible on one of their shoulders. “False alarm, everyone. False alarm—the young lady was mistaken. We have everything in hand.”

Mayor Harrison walked over to talk to the men, shaking their hands and clapping them on the shoulders as he spoke. I couldn’t help but wonder how this incident would affect him, just hours away from the moment when an assassin would show up on his doorstep, requesting a word. Would he be less inclined to let a stranger into his house without having someone at least do a quick frisk for weapons? Or was this type of scare a pretty routine occurrence in a Chicago that was only slightly tamer than the Wild West?

I spun around again, still searching for Simon, but there was no sign of him. Saul was holding a handkerchief against the side of Katherine’s head. I could see a bit of blood on the white cloth, but it didn’t look as though she was badly hurt.

Kiernan had now spotted me and was running toward the platform. I held up one hand and motioned for him to wait on the bench—the last thing I wanted was for him to be in the middle of all this. He nodded but flicked his eyes behind me in a worried fashion.

As I turned back toward the platform, I came face-to-face with the reason Kiernan looked so concerned. Prudence was directly in front of me, her eyes intense enough to burn a hole through the lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses. “I had this
covered,
Kate,” she said in low whisper, grabbing my upper arm and squeezing hard. “Katherine would have been perfectly okay and
we would have avoided a spectacle. You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.”

I fought down the urge to laugh—she sounded like the villain in a
Scooby-Doo
episode. “What do you mean you had this covered?” I asked. “You’re the one I’m trying to protect her from—you and your Cyrist thug. I need to find him…”

“Don’t bother, you silly little cow,” she said. “Simon is gone.” She jerked her head toward the two large security guys who had spoken with the mayor. “I had men in place to grab the idiot. He would never have gotten near her. And if I had ever gotten two minutes alone with Katherine, she would have been back in her own time by now, with Saul none the wiser, and I might have actually had a chance to lure Simon over to my side.”

I was thoroughly confused. “You’re trying to
save
Katherine? But your group is the one—”

“You think this is for
her
sake?” Prudence asked with a harsh laugh. “Oh, no. This is personal. Did Saul really think I would give him that much power? Over
me
? All he has to do is yank hard on this damned medallion and I’d go out the same way she did.”

“So you’re going to help us fight them?” I asked. Having Prudence on our side would be an incredible advantage, and I could only imagine the joy on Katherine’s face and my mother’s if—

Her lip curled in a sneer, bringing my fantasy to an abrupt end. “I’m not
fighting
the Cyrists,” she said. “I
am
the Cyrists. There would be no Cyrist International without me. I was willing to share power with my father, but if he thinks he can push me aside without consequences, he is sadly mistaken. This ends here.

“And you need to listen well, my little niece,” she said, her eyes once more drilling into mine. “I’m letting you go for one reason only—your mother. Deborah had nothing to do with any of this, and it’s possible that she values your life more than my mother valued mine, so—”

“That’s not true, Prudence. Katherine tried to find you, but she can’t use the medallion any more than Saul can.”

Prudence’s expression made it clear that she wasn’t buying it even before she spoke. “You can drop the pretense, Kate. I know about the bargain she made with Saul. The funny thing is that I got the better end of the deal. Poor Deborah had to stay with
her.
”

Prudence shot a glance back over her shoulder. The train was pulling away from the platform and several of the passengers were craning their necks to look out the windows, just in case the excitement wasn’t really over. Katherine had gotten to her feet and Saul was leading her away from the platform, back toward the main fairground. We couldn’t have planned it better if we had tried, since the minor injury gave Katherine a plausible excuse to terminate the jump early.