I start walking toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“To find a place to stay.”
“You can stay here. I’ll sleep downstairs on the couch. I’ve done it before.”
I shake my head. “I’m not kicking you out of your room.”
“Please don’t go. Not yet at least. Just…” She rubs a hand across her eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
I stop and turn to her. “I told you, you’re not crazy.”
“Then what’s going on?” she says, looking as if she’s on the verge of a breakdown. “Why do I know where you’re going to be? Why do I know you’re in trouble? Why do I feel you?”
My training demands that I say nothing, but in reality, what will it hurt? Once the twelve-second gap is eliminated and Richard Cahill is allowed to report Washington’s position, Iffy will either be entirely erased or live a life under empire rule in which she never meets me. As I think this, other thoughts begin stirring in my mind, the ones I was having at the library earlier today. I shove them away before I have time to acknowledge them.
I walk back to her. “I know why.”
“Tell me, then. Please!” Whatever she’s been using to hold herself together crumbles and she begins to cry. “I want to understand.”
I shouldn’t do it. I shouldn’t even be thinking about doing it. I should be turning around and walking out. I should already be on the stairs.
I pull her into my arms. I can’t think about what I should be doing, I can only think about what a bastard I’ve been. All this time I’ve been focused on how our connection affects me, not what it’s doing to her.
When her body begins to relax, I lower us to the mattress again. She sniffles a few times, and then looks at me through watery eyes, waiting.
“You’re not going to believe me,” I tell her.
“I will.”
“You won’t.”
“I’ll believe anything you say.”
She’s probably telling the truth but I need to ease her into it. I need to ease myself into talking about it. “Tell me about your name first.”
“My name?”
“Are there a lot of others named Iffy?”
That gets a laugh out of her. “I got it in high school, from someone who used to be a friend.”
“Not your parents?”
“My given name is Pamela.”
“That’s pretty.”
“For a soccer mom, maybe.”
I’m not sure what a soccer mom is but I get the larger point. “So, why Iffy?”
She thinks for a moment. “My friend and I had been in school together since third or fourth grade. One day she blew up at me, said she’d had enough of my waffling.”
“Waffling?”
“Yeah, said she was sick of me not being able to make a decision, that I was iffy on everything. She started calling me that, and it wasn’t long before others did the same. It used to make me so mad. I couldn’t wait to go to college where no one knew me and I could be Pamela or Pam or anything else.”
She pauses. “The thing is, the bitch was right. I was horrible at making decisions. By the time I left home after high school, I was so used to hearing the name that I kept it. Decided to use it to help me be better.”
“And has it?”
“Still a work in progress, but getting there.” She tilts her head and looks at me. “The old me would have never come looking for you. She would’ve hidden in her room, hoping the feeling would go away. Your turn. Why is this happening? Why you?”
How do you tell someone you’re a time traveler? Not from the future, but from the now? Only the now you’re from is real and the one the other person knows is an imposter.
I start at the beginning, with my selection to join the Upjohn Institute, and lay it all out from there.
Iffy is so quiet that I think, contrary to what she said earlier, she doesn’t believe a word. Why should she? If someone had come up to me before I joined the institute and said the same, I would’ve thought the person was insane.
After a while, she begins asking questions, having me fill in gaps in my story. When I come to my encounter with Cahill, I carefully explain what should have happened and then what did. She falls silent again, and I take this to mean she’s having a hard time following, so I start explaining it again.
“I got it,” she says, stopping me. “You created a delay that resulted in him being killed and Washington being allowed to live. That’s when everything changed.”
“Yes.”
I tell her of my mostly unconscious time in New York, and my escape to what I thought would be New Cardiff.
“I didn’t want to believe at first that I’d caused the change, so that’s why I went to the library, hoping to find it was something else.”
“You must have figured it out fairly quickly, though,” she says.
I nod.
“Then why didn’t you go back and fix it at that point? I mean, all you have to do is keep yourself from entering the tavern, right?”
I nod. She’s understood it all perfectly.
“Then why haven’t you gone yet?”
“I…I guess I want to know more about this world first. It’s so different than where I’m from. I want to know it better.” I take a moment, and then say, “Do you believe me?”
“You still haven’t told me why we’re connected,” she says.
I hesitate, then pull my satchel over. From inside, I remove my Chaser. “This is what you’re really connected to.”
“What is it?”
“A Chaser. It’s what allows us to travel through time.”
As if fearing it’d shock her, she carefully touches it before taking it from me. She turns it every which way until she’s inspected the whole thing. “Why would I be connected to this?”
I tell her about how the Chasers work, about companions, the sharing of the pain of travel, and the subtle mental connection between the machine and both of the users. “When my original companion disappeared, it chose you for some reason.”
“But why?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I’m not a scientist or an engineer, so I don’t really know the details on how all of this works, but I do know the link between machine and companion is made, from the human side, on a cellular level. You call it DNA here, I think. You know what that is?”
“Sure. Everyone does.”
“My theory is that you and Palmer Benson share, um, I guess common relatives.”
“You mean like we’re cousins?”
“In an odd way, I guess. If I’m right, then the device linked with you because you were the closest match to what it knew. How it figured it out…” I shrug. We’re already way beyond my areas of expertise and into pure speculation. I let her live with this for a minute before I say, “You haven’t answered my question.”
She looks at me, eyebrow raised.
“Do you believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter if I believe you. You can just prove it to me.” She hands me back the Chaser. “If I give you a date and time and place, you can go there?”
I smile at the thought of performing the same demonstration Marie used on me. “I can.”
“All right. February 13, 2012, 7:00 p.m.” She gives me an address in a city called San Diego. “That’s my mom’s house. I was still in high school. Oh, probably not a good idea to just appear in the living room.”
Despite the fact that the trip will use up precious power, I owe her this. “All right,” I tell her. “But you should know that as companion, even though the trip isn’t far, it’ll be painful for you.”
“Yeah, I’ve experienced a bit of that already.”
My short trips around the city. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right. Now get going.”