“Wait…,” Connor said. He held up his hand and headed for the stairs. “I may be able to save you some effort there.” When he returned a minute later, he was carrying two very old photographs, in identical black frames. He handed one of them to me. “This was taken in 1921.”
It was a formal photo of a family with four children, the youngest boy seated on his mother’s lap. The man was middle-aged, tall and dark with a well-groomed beard. He was looking directly at the camera and I recognized his eyes instantly. I glanced at the woman sitting in front of him and felt a sudden, irrational twinge of jealousy that his hand was on her shoulder. In his other hand he clutched a large, ornate book, perhaps a family Bible, with a ribbon that hung from between the pages.
I handed the photo back to Connor. “It’s him. I’m sure.”
“The second boy from the right,” he said, “the one standing next to the mother? That’s supposedly my grandfather, Anson. I think he was eleven, maybe twelve. The man, as I noted earlier, is Kiernan Dunne, my great-grandfather. Based on the genealogical research that I’ve done recently, Kiernan was a prominent Cyrist Templar in Chicago until his death in the late 1940s. He came over as a child with his parents to work on one of the Cyrist collective farms that sprang up in the Midwest during the mid-1800s.”
I looked again at the picture that Connor held, unsure which bothered me more—that I had been kissed by a married preacher or that he had died more than half a century before I was born. I could still feel the sensation of his lips on mine and his hand on my face, and I could see his smile as he loosened my hair.
I shook my head to clear it, and Connor thrust the other picture into my hand. “I have always believed, however, that this young man is my grandfather Anson.” He pointed to a boy, a bit younger, in another family photo. In this picture, there were three children and a different mother. They were dressed less formally, seated outside in front of a large farmhouse. The man was tall and dark, with a slightly longer beard, and he looked less serious, with just a hint of a smile. The eyes were identical.
“Kiernan had a twin?” I asked.
“No,” said Katherine. “At one point, these were two copies of the same photograph. The second one has been in my possession and under the protection of a CHRONOS field continuously since 1995, when Connor’s mother allowed me to make a copy of the original for my research on the descendants of the various CHRONOS historians. The first one—the more formal portrait—is actually the original photograph that I made this copy from in 1995. Connor obtained it from his sister by mail last May. Except I don’t guess you can really call her his sister, since—”
“Wait, you’re losing me here.” I had no idea what a CHRONOS field was, but there was no way that these photographs were from the same original. “They’re not the same photograph at all. Different people and different locations… how could the second one be a copy of the first?”
“In the stories I remember,” Connor said, “my great-grandfather was a farmer—not a minister, and certainly not a Templar.” I noted the disdain in his voice and was about to inquire further, but he went on, pointing out the differences in the images. “The mother is not the same in this photo. There are slight differences in the children.” Connor nodded toward the staircase. “I can trace the male line in my family on current genealogy sites, but the names are different. My mother never married my father. I was only able to attain that photograph by pretending to be my—what would you call him? He seems to be the version of me in this timeline. My half brother? Half self?” He looked at Katherine, his eyebrows raised in a question.
Katherine just shrugged. “We’re beyond my level of understanding now. I’m just a historian. I used the equipment, but I didn’t invent it. We were told that the system was safeguarded against this type of—aberration—but Saul…”
“Saul,” Connor said with a sneer. “I spend my time now trying to figure out exactly what that bastard has changed and how we might change it back.” He crushed the cookie box, with a bit more force than seemed necessary. “And every day, I see a few more of his bloody temples dotting the landscape.”
5
Dad had been telling the truth when he said that Katherine had a lot of books. They lined three walls of the very large library that took up most of the left wing of the house. It looked like a normal library in most respects, at least normal for the type of library that I had seen only in movies, with a rolling ladder connected to each wall and books stacked from floor to ceiling.
There were, however, some distinct differences. Along the vertical edge of each block of shelves, a bright blue tube—the exact shade of the CHRONOS key—ran from bottom to top and then extended across the ceiling to meet in the middle, where they formed a large blue X.
My gaze drifted toward the computers. Dozens of hard drives were stacked on metal shelves. There were three workstations, each with large dual monitors. To their right was an odd apparatus that I couldn’t identify—except for the objects in the very center. Two CHRONOS medallions were seated in some sort of casing, from which they seemed to be connected to a series of cables. The top of the case was tinted glass, which partially dimmed the blue light. A thick rope of twisted cables attached to the casing ran four or five feet from the computer station to bookshelves and connected to one of the bright blue tubes.
“What… is all of this?”
“This, Kate, is what makes the house a safe house,” my grandmother said. “You have no idea how difficult it was to move all of this to a new location, especially given the need to keep everything protected during the voyage. It would have been much easier to bring you to Italy, but I suspected that would be impossible to arrange with your mother.
“Connor has devised a rather ingenious system here. The signal from the CHRONOS keys is amplified and the protection extends, more or less, to around twenty feet outside the house.”
Connor added, “For now, we just keep one of the other keys on us if we need to go outside that perimeter. I’d like to add the entire yard to the safe zone, but that will require using a third key—and I’m worried that extending the protection that far could overload the system.”
“What do you mean—protection?” I suddenly flashed back to Kiernan’s question on the Metro. Why would she send you out with no protection?
“From the temporal distortions,” Connor answered. “Any thing and any person within these walls—or anyone wearing one of the keys—is not affected by a temporal shift. Katherine and I, for example, clearly remember that the second picture you saw is the correct one. It has been shielded along with most everything else in this house. But the first picture that you saw and… the people and things outside the protective area… have all been changed.”
“So why didn’t the first picture change back when you brought it here?” I challenged. “If this is, like, a safe zone, shouldn’t it show the reality you know?”
Katherine shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, Kate. It wasn’t protected when the temporal shift occurred. Think of this as… a lead apron, like you’ve worn at the dentist. You’re shielded when the apron is on, but it isn’t going to undo any damage that might have been caused if you were exposed earlier. The documents we have here, that we’ve always been protecting—including the ones that are digitized on these servers—all of those are preserved. Anything that we bring in from the outside, however, might have been changed. Actually, it will have been changed, unless it was in constant physical contact with someone wearing a medallion. But it won’t be altered further once we have it here.”
“That… makes sense, I guess. Okay, I’ve seen…” I paused to count. “Five medallions, including the one Kiernan had. I’m assuming Simon… the guy who mugged me… must have one as well. Where are they coming from? Have you learned to replicate them?”
“No, the additional keys and diaries that we have here are ones that I’ve collected,” Katherine said, sitting down at one of the computer stations. “Before Prudence disappeared, I hadn’t expended much effort trying to track down what had happened to my former future colleagues—other than keeping an eye out for Saul, because he could have landed anywhere, anytime.
“After Prudence was gone, I locked myself in a room and spent the next several weeks trying desperately to get some sort of signal from the CHRONOS key. I think I came very close to disappearing into that void—that black hole is still the only thing I can see in the medallion.”
I hesitated. “Do you think that’s where Prudence went? Into that… black hole?”
“I thought it was likely, at first, although I didn’t want to admit it to myself. The other possibility was that Saul had found us and that he had taken Prudence. Either way, I was determined after that point to collect every single one of the remaining keys, because I didn’t want to think of anyone else disappearing in that fashion. Twenty-three CHRONOS historians were stranded and each had a key. Most, fortunately, were headed for relatively modern eras—only four were before the fifteenth century. Several were traveling as a team, as Saul and I had done often. Twelve were handling North American history—since CHRONOS is located in North America, there is a bit of a local bias. Six were in Europe and the rest were scattered around the globe.
“To date, I have located ten keys and a few diaries, in addition to the diaries that I had packed for my last jump. Many of the keys were passed along by family members as an odd heirloom, a strange piece of jewelry. Most people were eager to get rid of the things, which they believed to be haunted—either they or someone else said it glowed or moved, or it just gave them a bad feeling. One of the researchers who was investigating Nazi Germany—he actually destroyed his CHRONOS key and the diaries he had with him. I spoke with him briefly, just before he died, and he said he had not wanted to take any chances that they might be reverse-engineered by the Nazis, as highly unlikely as that might have been.
“In retrospect, he made a wise choice. Had I not known that Saul, wherever and whenever he was, would have no scruples about misusing the technology, I would have destroyed every single one I found. I’m glad I didn’t destroy them, however, because about three years after the accident, I noticed the first change.”
Katherine turned toward the computer and clicked a folder, and a file, and then an image opened. It was a scanned replica of a yellowed document with a list of names, separated into columns labeled Ladies and Gentlemen. Printed at the top were the words Woman’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, 1848.
“A framed copy of this document was on the wall of my office at the university from the time Prudence and Deborah were two or three years old, so they had both seen it many times. One hundred people—sixty-eight women and thirty-two men—signed the Declaration of Sentiments from that convention. But if you look carefully, you’ll see there are now one hundred and one names. There’s another name here, near the bottom of the middle column—Prudence K. Rand. And that name began to show up in other documents as well.”