Time's Divide (The Chronos Files Book 3) (42 page)

Prudence just stares at me. It feels like we’re teetering on the edge of a cliff. I’m scared to speak again, and Kiernan looks like he’s holding his breath.

Then her chin comes up defiantly. “It will be better . . . after. You’ll see. And it won’t kill everyone.”

“No. Not everyone,” Kiernan says, “But close enough. Pru, you can’t really . . .”

Even though he’s still talking, I’m too intent on her eyes to follow what he’s saying. Maybe there’s a moral compass in there somewhere, but we don’t have time to search. And maybe that’s not the safest route to take.

“Simon is going to kill your sister, Pru. And CHRONOS will never exist.
Tate
will never exist if we don’t stop the Culling.”

I’m about to add that none of us will exist, at least outside of a key, but Prudence is twisting the shell of the ruined sofa cushion so tightly that it looks like her knuckles will slice through her skin.

“Give me the key.
My
key. The one you took from Woodhull. So I can see him.”

I untie the cord from the belt loop of my jeans and hand the key to her. “You can see the coordinates. But you won’t see Tate. He’s not there anymore, Pru. Whatever Saul told you, the Culling won’t fix anything. The keys still exist, but CHRONOS is never created in this timeline. So Tate is never born . . . at least, not the Tate you knew.”

Prudence slides her fingers over the key, and for several minutes she browses through the local points, her expression growing more desperate with each one she tries. Finally she flings the key onto the carpet at her feet and grinds the heel of her boot into it. Pointless, and she probably knows that, but maybe it makes her feel better. There’ve certainly been times I wanted to do the same thing.

Kiernan waits a moment and then asks, “Will you help us fix this, Pru?”

She doesn’t respond, just stares down at the still-intact medallion on the carpet. There’s a stubborn set to her jaw as she flips her arm over to activate her embedded medallion.

Kiernan grabs her hand. I’m trying to think of something else to say, something to convince her, when I remember the promise I made Tate.

“Tate told me to give you a message when I saw you.” She’s still staring at the CHRONOS key on the inside of her arm, but her eyebrow flicks upward in a silent question, so I continue. “He said he’s sorry. He doesn’t blame you . . . for this mess with CHRONOS or for the baby. And he wishes he could make you another mix tape.”

She’s completely still, staring down at her medallion for so long that I start to worry she’s gone catatonic. Then her eyes close, and I expect her to vanish, but she must have broken contact with the location at the last second. A solitary tear leaks from the corner of her eye and down her cheek. Otherwise her face stays blank.

“I don’t know where they’re keeping the virus,” she says in a small voice. “And I don’t know where to find Simon. But Saul can’t jump. I can
find
him.”

M
IAMI
, F
LORIDA

July 13, 2030, 9:50 a.m.

“I’ve been here before,” Kiernan whispers. “The last meeting . . . they wiped the location from my key.”

“Not mine,” Pru says. “I left early. Shh. This is the door.”

We listen, but I don’t hear anything. Apparently neither does Prudence, because she inches the door open, looking around, and then shoves it inward.

It’s a conference room, with a shiny black table at the far end. The wall to our left is glass, overlooking the ocean. It’s stunning. And it’s also empty.

“He was here!” she fumes. “I peeked through the door. I saw them in the mirror. Saul and two guards.”

Kiernan spins around nervously, eyes flicking between the door we just entered and one at the other end of the room. “You forgot to mention the guards.
Kind of important
, Pru!”

“Why? You’ve got a gun. And Evie says your friend there is a baby ninja.” She kicks one of the chairs aside. “Simon must have changed something. Damn . . . him . . . to—”

Prudence stops abruptly, bending down to pluck something from the carpet. She holds it up to the light streaming in through the window and grins.

Kiernan nods and pulls out his key.

I’ve no clue why. She’s holding up a clump of straw.

E
STERO
, F
LORIDA

July 13, 2030, 9:53 a.m.

I open my eyes to a larger, more modern version of the barn where Kiernan and I watched three people slit their own throats. We’re on the ground floor this time. There are dozens of stalls, but I only see one horse, a palomino, housed a few doors down. There’s a faint, oddly familiar smell—sweet, but not in a good way. Horse manure, maybe?

Pru walks over and holds out her hand for the animal to sniff. It immediately nuzzles her arm. She’s cooing something when we catch up to her, rubbing the horse’s neck as she reaches for the latch to open the stall.

Kiernan clears his throat, and Prudence looks at him, puzzled.

“You can ride later, Pru. We’re here to locate Saul, remember?”

She shoots him a petulant look. “I haven’t ridden Wildfire in ages—”

“But Simon has Deborah. Remember?”

“Deborah’s right behind you,” she says with a little smirk. “That’s what she called herself in New York. Funny how you keep calling her Kate.”

He’s about to argue with her, but I just say, “Your
sister
. Simon has your sister.” She still doesn’t move, so I add, “Are you really going to let him erase Tate? He’s counting on you to fix this. So . . . do you want to fix it or do you want to ride a horse?”

“Fix it,” she huffs in a singsong voice. And yes, I feel a little guilty for manipulating a mentally ill woman, but I don’t have much choice.

“Then come on.” I relatch the gate and look behind me for Kiernan. There’s a door a few feet to the right, but he’s hurrying off in the opposite direction.

Something is wrong.

“Kiernan?” I run after him. The odor is stronger in this direction. It’s not manure. It smells a little like the linen closet at H. H. Holmes’s hotel.

When Kiernan rounds the corner at the end of the stalls, he steps back sharply, almost like someone has shoved him. One hand is over his mouth. He holds the other toward us, cautioning us to stop. I do, but Prudence pushes forward, so I follow.

An old-fashioned tub, exactly like the one I remember from the other barn, is shoved into the corner. It might even be the
same
tub. This time, however, there’s no sheet of glass on top, and the glow of the CHRONOS key isn’t coming from above the tub. It’s coming from within it.

Saul’s knees are bent and tilted toward the back of the tub, but his hands are folded serenely across his shirt. A CHRONOS key hangs from his neck on a leather cord, resting on top of his hands. He’s older than I remember, and although his face is nearly as pale as the tub, the collar and upper half of his white shirt are now the dark, reddish brown of drying blood, like the jagged slit across his neck. A large fly crawls up the side of his face, while several more circle around the tub.

I gasp and cover my nose and mouth, but Prudence shoves Kiernan aside so that she can get a better look. Her eyes are open wide as she stares into the tub. She lowers her head, hair falling forward over her face, and her shoulders begin to shake. Kiernan reaches out for her, but she shrugs him away.

She’s not crying. The laughter bursts out of her in waves as she braces herself on the edge of the tub.

“Oh my God,” she gasps. “It’s perfect! No matter how much I hate the Rat Bastard, this is so,
so
perfect.”

“What? You think it was
Simon
?” Kiernan says.

Pru wipes a tear from her eyes, still fighting back the laughter. A speck of Saul’s blood must have been on her hand, because there’s now a faint pink trail running across her cheek.

“Who else?” she says. “Wasn’t me. Wish it had been, but—”

She looks up as the door behind us creaks open. Kiernan pushes me behind him, whipping the rifle up to his shoulder.

The woman jumps back when she sees the gun. Then her eyes shift to his face and she relaxes. “Kiernan. Put that thing away.”

“June.” He lowers the gun slightly, still looking past her.

She’s somewhere between Mom’s age and Katherine’s. Her hair was probably a lot like mine when she was younger, but it’s mostly gray now, and her nose is slightly hooked, like Eve’s. And . . . the name is familiar. Kiernan’s mentioned her. I glance down at her hands. She’s wearing clear gloves like doctors wear.

Right. She’s the doctor at the Farm, Nuevo Reino, or whatever they’re calling this place in 2030.

June follows Kiernan’s gaze, looking back into the garden behind her. “Unless someone else showed up in the past minute, I’m the only one around. Except for my patient. Almost every soul at Estero is gone . . . everyone who wasn’t under a key, at any rate. And I’m thinking Simon made sure most of them weren’t under a key.”

Prudence laughs again, a single snort.

The look June gives her is sad and maybe a little protective—but there’s a healthy dose of fear in that expression, too. Kind of how you might look at a pet rattlesnake that’s escaped its terrarium.

“I was coming out to deal with the body,” June says. “Or to jump back a few days and stop Simon from killing him. I hadn’t quite decided which.”

Pru reaches down into the tub and yanks her arm back, hard. The bit of Saul’s knee that was visible above the rim vanishes and specks of blood fly into the air before evaporating.

“There. All taken care of.” She shoves Saul’s medallion into her back pocket and starts to wipe her hands on her pants, then apparently thinks better of it when she sees the blood spatter on her arms. “Yuck. I’m going to take a shower and change. Don’t leave without me, okay, Kier?”

I step toward the tub, half expecting to see that Saul’s knees simply slipped down and the body’s still there. The surface is now white, with a few splotches of black where the enamel has chipped away. Not a single trace of Saul. All that remains of my grandfather is the blood on Pru’s arms and clothes as she saunters out of the barn. And I’m guessing she’ll have no trouble removing the bloodstains from her clothes—just toss them into a corner outside of a CHRONOS field and they’ll be squeaky clean.

The three of us just stand there silently for a moment, staring as Pru walks away.

I have a hard time believing that Saul is dead.
And
gone. I’m relieved beyond measure that I won’t be the one to kill him. I’m sure that I could do it, given the circumstances, but I’m not especially wild about the idea of killing anyone, even the monster that is—
was
—my grandfather. I don’t feel a single shred of regret that he’s gone.

What worries me most is the
why
question. What would push Simon to slit the throat of the man who more or less raised him—and to toss his body in a bathtub?

And then I remember that the same man is holding my mom and Katherine, and I have to push down my panic. I don’t have time to think about that now, and I refuse to even imagine a scenario where we don’t get them back.

Kiernan finds his voice first. “Any idea where Simon might be?”

“No,” June says. She keeps looking at me, like I’m a puzzle she’s trying to solve. “But he’ll be coming back this afternoon. I told him to give it a full twenty-four hours, which would be around dark, but . . . you know Simon. He never listens. I’m guessing he’ll be back by three or four at the latest. He’ll probably have Patrick with him. And I doubt he’s going to be happy to find you working with Pru, since he seems to think you’re on his side in this whole schism mess. In fact . . .”

She glances over at the tub as her voice trails off. Whatever she’s thinking, she decides not to say it.

“I’m not on anyone’s side.” Kiernan must notice that June’s eyes keep drifting toward me, because he takes my arm and pulls me a step forward. “June, this is Kate.”

“I already know her name, kiddo. I’m just trying to figure out why she’s here . . . and how she’s connected to the near carbon copy Simon has handcuffed to the bed in my clinic.”