“But—”
“Don’t give me a but. There’s a crowd down there, and the less they know, the better. You want mass pandemonium with the president’s motorcade in sight?”
“No, but—”
“The situation is under control.” There’s a shuffling of footsteps and a muttering of angry words, and I close my eyes but can’t tell what’s happening. “Don’t breathe a word of this. Not now. Not yet. Not until the parade is over. I have backup on the way, and then I’ll be down to your squad car to take your statement.”
Then the voices speak over each other, and there’s more grumbling and scuffling, and I look at Yellow again. She shakes her head at me with uneasy eyes. She’s as clueless as I am.
The footsteps on the stairs start again, but this time they get fainter and fainter as the Dallas cop races down them. I try not to breathe. The FBI is on the landing below me as we speak. They’ve already captured Oswald. I have no idea what the hell is going on and how we’re going to get out of here.
But then. A whisper. Barely audible.
“Delta, you’re cutting off the circulation in my arm.”
Delta. My dad.
A laugh. “Sorry.” It’s the first man. The first man is Delta. The first man is my dad. He’s not FBI. He’s . . . pretending to be FBI.
“That was too close,” the other man says.
I shake my head, over and over, as if I can shake out the truth and understand what’s going on. This is nothing like Alpha’s report. Nothing at all. I keep waiting. Waiting for some sign that my dad thinks this is an authorized mission. That President Clinton okayed it and that he’s there to stop the assassination. Any second now the truth will come out.
It does.
“You hear that?” my dad says. “The motorcade must be approaching Dealey.”
A crowd cheers in the background.
“Is Oswald in position?” the other man says.
Wait. No. I—this isn’t right—
“Should be,” my dad says.
Next to me, Yellow grabs my hand and squeezes. I’m stunned into silence. I can’t move. My feet are granite slabs cemented to the floor.
A shot rings out in the distance, and my neck snaps back. What is this? Why isn’t my dad trying to stop this?
“Hear that?” my dad shouts. “That’s the sound of Old Cresty coughing up ten million dollars!”
I can’t breathe. I bend over and wrap my arms around my body as I shake and convulse and—WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
A second shot in the distance, out over Dealey Plaza. And then silence.
“I ought to say that did it,” my dad says. “Dallas PD will be swarming these steps again any second now. Time to go, Beta. We gotta take care of that real cop.”
Beta. The other man is Beta. That doesn’t make any sense. Beta and my dad are in on it.
“You’re right. Time to go,” Beta says. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about this, Mitch. I always liked you.”
And then I bolt up. Because I know what’s about to happen. There’s a gasp on the floor below that echoes up to my stairwell. And then. A blast of gunfire. It pierces my eardrums as fireworks explode in my mind.
I stumble to the wall. Yellow grabs my shoulder, but I shake her off. I fumble with my necklace, and my legs buckle and my knees slam to the ground. My hands are shaking. I need to get away away away. I turn a dial. I don’t know which one. And then I start to close the watch.
“Iris!” Yellow hisses. She lunges at me, but I’ve already shut the watch.
I’m yanked up for a quick few seconds, and I don’t feel the pain this time. Not the physical pain at least. I drop on to the landing, and Yellow pops next to me a few seconds later.
“No!” Yellow screams. “No! You do not project without me, do you understand? You never, ever project without me. Thank God I saw your dial.”
I drop to my knees and grab at my chest with my hands. I feel as if I’m having a heart attack. Deep, shooting pains throb inside my chest and fly down the left side of my body. But this has nothing to do with projecting. My heart has broken into a million pieces, and I’m going to die.
My dad wasn’t a Navy SEAL. He wasn’t a war hero. He was a traitor. Alpha didn’t set him up.
He assassinated a president.
I don’t understand. My father is a cold-blooded killer, and I don’t understand anything anymore.
I inhale the pain and refuse to blow it out. I let it fill me, consume me, crush me. My hands find the floor, and I sink into it. It’s a lie. Everything I’ve ever known has been one massive lie.
“Get up,” Yellow says.
I ignore her.
“I said get up.”
“Go away, Yellow.”
“I’m only going to tell you to get up one more time before I bend down and pull you up myself.”
We studied the physical effects of trauma aftermath at Peel. Rationally, I know I’m in shock. I tell myself I am. But I can’t snap out of it. I’m classic: numb dizzy weak nauseated confused. I can’t process my thoughts. Too fast. They’re coming too fast.
Yellow bends over, loops her elbows under my armpits, and yanks me up. “You are going to look me in the eye right now and swear to me that you will never project without me again.”
What is she talking about? The scene replays in my mind. My father prevented that cop from stopping the assassination. That cop knew about the sniper, and my father deflected him and made sure Kennedy was shot.
“Iris!”
My father changed history so that Kennedy was assassinated? Kennedy made it through Dealey unscathed before my dad interfered?
“Iris!” Yellow grabs my shoulder and shakes me.
“What?” My voice is a whisper.
“Promise me you will not project without me.”
I push her away. “Are you kidding right now? What difference does it make? Nothing matters anymore.”
Yellow’s eyes bulge open. “Nothing matters? So your whole big plan about bringing down CE, who we now know is named Cresty Something-or-other, doesn’t matter?”
“What happened back there, Yellow? My dad is a—” I choke. I can’t finish it.
“An assassin.”
The words hang in the air and refuse to dissipate. He is. My father is a killer. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he might as well have. Before he interfered, that cop must have caught Oswald and stopped the assassination. My father changed all that.
I don’t want that to be the truth. This can’t be the truth. I need to know. I pull out my watch.
“We have to go back,” I tell Yellow.
“Go back where?”
“Go back to before this mission. Before my dad died. To read what the history books say. To figure out whether President Kennedy was assassinated before my dad interfered or not.”
“That’s not how it works,” Yellow says.
“When do you want to project to?” I turn the year dial forward.
“Iris,” Yellow hisses. “I said that’s not how it works. No one explained Chronometric Augmentation to you, did they? How it fundamentally works?”
That sounds ominous. “No.”
Yellow sighs. “We’re in a parallel future right now. A new future. That’s what happens when we change the past. We create a parallel universe that we all shift up to. You can’t go back to the old one to see what history books said before we changed the past, because those history books don’t exist anymore in our future. There are new books, and those books reflect the changes we made. Period.”
Her words bounce around in my head. My brain processes them, but my heart won’t believe it.
“Are you telling me I don’t get to know what happened here?”
Yellow takes a slow breath, as if she’s not sure what to say. “But you do know what happened here.”
I do.
I do.
I do.
I lean over and rest my forehead on the cool, metal railing. “He killed Kennedy. My father killed a president. This changes everything.”