“Mom had a thing for Paul McCartney.”
She put the picture back where she found it. “Will went through a real Manchester phase, huh?”
“He was different back then. Before our parents died. More connected. Funny, even.”
“Their deaths hit him hard?”
“I don’t think it was the loss that snapped him. I think it was knowing that he was going to take everything they had built and spend it on his bullshit experiments. Like some sad addict who couldn’t help himself.”
“And then you found out.”
“A couple years later.”
“And you left Riverport.” She looked at him, choosing her words. “But the experiments, they weren’t bullshit, were they?”
This was difficult. He hated how well he thought he knew her, while accepting that he knew her not at all. “Why are you here?”
“The end of time is coming, Jack. The training, the travel, the people in Arizona… meeting you… it was all so that I could be here and do some good. I’ve said and done all the right things. I’m inside Monarch. I’m in place. I’m ready.”
The answer seemed foregone. “So, you’re from the future?”
Again that tight Bruce Willis smile. “Not yet.”
12
A few years back Will had claimed the attic as an office, the place he went to compose his articles and correspondence. Now it was mainly cardboard boxes full of nostalgic miscellanea that neither brother was able to discard.
Jack flipped one loose lid, peered inside: more papers. “There’s more stuff here than I remember.”
“Interesting.” Beth forged a path farther into the confusion of plastic crates, garbage bags, and removal-company boxes.
“How long have you been with Monarch?”
“Four years. I’m a little below mid-level. Tried out for their chronon operative program. You met a few of them at the university. I got through all of the training then tanked at the end.”
Jack frowned at this. “You…?”
“On purpose. I wanted the training, but not to be locked down to a specialist unit. Better to be underestimated and filed as generic. More room to move without being noticed.”
There was a single cot and a small writing desk with a cheap twelve-inch flat-screen bolted to the wall above it. An old-style Bakelite phone with a coiled cord hung on the wall. Maybe Will had started spending nights here.
“Ever done anything you… regret?”
“No. I’m very good at not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Jack thought of Aberfoyle’s last moments. I believe in cause and effect.
“Which is why I’m not sweating Monarch’s interest in you yet.” Beth stepped around the rotting carcass of a recliner stacked with bundled printouts. “Does anything look out of place to you?”
Jack ran his eyes over ordered stacks of boxes, sloughing heaps of clothes-filled garbage bags. “Mr. Squishy.”
“Pardon?”
Jack waded sideways past knee-high stacks of Scientific American to fetch a fading toy elephant from the top of a corner stack of boxes. “Dad won him at a county fair when I was, like, six? I carried him around the house for years. Will used to say, ‘Squish knows all Jack’s secrets.’”
Beth blinked, made her way back, and started rapping the boxes top to bottom. Tap tap. Tap tap. Tap tap. Nothing special. She booted the bottom one with her foot. It had all the give of a concrete block. “That one.”
Together they tossed the top three boxes aside and tore open the lid of the fourth. Slotted neatly inside was what could only be the flat, hard, gunmetal-gray top of a…
“Safe.” Beth tore the box away. Short, even-sided, manual combination lock. “B-rated. Less than three hundred bucks from Home Depot. Get me a drill and I think I can crack this.”
“Seriously?”
“YouTube.”
“We kept a lot of that stuff in the barn. Sit tight, I’ll grab it.”
Beth waved him off. She removed a bulky, palm-sized device from her pocket, checked the power on it. “I got it. Look around, see what else you can find.”
Jack gestured to the hunk of black technology in her hand. “What’s that?”
“Business. Be right back.”
And, just like that, Jack found himself alone and outflanked by battalions of forgotten details in allegiance to a history he had tried to forget.
The muscles in Martin Hatch’s jaw were flexing. “I must insist,” he said once more. “Let me give the order. It can be done quickly and quietly.”
Paul extended a leather-gloved hand. A waiting operative handed him his handgun and rig. “I saw many futures for William Joyce, most of them featured him doing harm to our cause. He had to die. The path we are on now does not feature Jack being an immediate concern. There is time.”
Martin wasn’t having it. “We both know that a motivated individual conditionally exempt from the laws of causality possesses enormous potential for harm to this company-on a timeline of any length. One word from you and that variable is forever removed.”
Paul pulled on the remaining glove, concealing the light of his flesh and flexed his strange, aching hand.
Martin pressed his point. “Eliminating Joyce is an act of conscientious diligence, not only to our shareholders, but to our species. We are ten minutes from midnight, Paul Serene.”
Paul slung the shoulder rig, zipped his light woolen sweater, and shrugged into a calfskin driving coat. “No. We have attempted time and again to replicate my condition. Time and again: failure. Dr. Kim-that poor howling bastard-represents what we have condemned each one of our test subjects to becoming. Yet here is Jack, intact, sound of mind and body, manipulating time as freely as I do. We cannot simply have him killed, Martin.”
An operative pulled the van’s door aside, letting in brisk morning air.
“Not before better options have been expended.”
Inside the front door of the house Beth took a breath, focused, and moved briskly out and down the steps at a tripping gait, eyes scanning the tree line. The barn was unlocked. Once inside she double-checked the device in her hand. It was a two-inch-diameter polyurethane ball attached to a cell-phone-sized brick of tech with a one-inch monochrome display. She powered it up, cycled down the five-option menu to DISPLAY, and the screen flicked over to a white-on-black central dot. A single white-light clock-hand swung 360 degrees around the dot and vanished: the unit seemed calibrated.
She checked her watch, then scooted up the ladder to the hayloft. The hayloft doors that faced the house and the tree line beyond were closed. Sure enough the wall on either side of the hayloft doors held a few shelves, the shelves containing tools.
Beth ignored all of them and went for the hunting rifle.
Cross-legged in the dust, Jack stared at the safe. Then he looked at the towering stacks of his past. Then he looked at the stuffed elephant in his hand.
“You wanted me to find this,” he said. “What combination would you have used? What combination would you have thought I’d know you’d use?” The elephant had no answers. Jack checked his watch. He had been here for two hours. He had to go. Then, halfway to rising, he chose to sit back down. Maybe the past had something to say. “If you want to show me, show me.”
Nothing. Just dusty light and the smell of rat bait and mothballs.
Then, just as he was about to leave, the light changed. The sun through the window sank below the eastern horizon, the attic interior cycling light-to-dark over and over, faster and faster, and then…
A man came into the attic, closing the hatch behind him. Jack heard something being placed on the writing desk, the sound of two latches popping. Papers. Two latches clicking shut.