Destroyer

CHAPTER TWELVE

If the entire universe disappeared earlier when I realized there were two chasers, then there are no words to describe how utterly stunned I feel now.

Sitting in the chair in the corner of the kitchen is my training mate.

My fellow rewinder.

My tormentor.

Lidia Brewer.

The condescending, upper-caste waste of a human being is the walking definition of why our old world needed to go away. She’d tried to force me to change everything back to our original time line by kidnapping Iffy. We had struggled, and when she was momentarily dazed, I had sent her far into the past with my own chaser, while keeping hers — the one I have been using ever since then.

She shouldn’t be here. I banished her to 1743. Even if her trainer had also taught her how to rekey a chaser, it shouldn’t have mattered. My device had been desperately low on power, and had barely enough left to activate for that final jump. She should have lived out her life in the eighteenth century and never bothered anyone again.

The giant takes my satchel from me and dumps it on the coffee table, then shoves me onto the couch next to where Kane has put Iffy.

We sit there in the darkness for several seconds before the overhead light clicks on and Lidia enters the room.

I feel Iffy stiffen beside me in surprise. I reach for her hand, but the giant slaps my wrist away.

At first glance, Lidia looks exactly as she did the last time I saw her, but as she nears, I detect a tension in her face that appears to have taken up permanent residence, and a disturbing glint in her eyes that makes me want to immediately look away.

“Didn’t think you’d see me again, did you?” she says as she takes the seat across from us. “Well, then, you should have sent me back farther than 1949.”

Nineteen forty-nine? I sent her to the eighteenth century, not the middle of the twentieth.

Unless…

During my training I was never told what would happen if a device quit mid jump, but my old chaser running out of power is the only explanation that makes sense. Instead of dropping her 272 years in the past, it obviously only took her sixty-six.

“I’ve always known you’d come,” she continues. “Even knew the date, too. That’s called planning.” She glances at Kane, then looks back at us. “You’ve met my grandson, Vincent.”

Grandson?

“He’s part of the plan, too,” she says. “And the fun part is I haven’t even had any kids yet.”

“One kid,” Kane says. “My mom.”

She gives the grandson, who must be a decade older than her, a halfhearted smile. “Of course, dear, but it doesn’t really matter. That time line is no longer relevant.”

There’s a flicker of confusion in Kane’s eyes, but unlike him, I understand immediately what she means. The version of her that will give birth to his mother did so purposely only to put one of her descendants — Kane — in the position to create this very moment. Now that it’s arrived, there’s no need for this Lidia to have that child. Kane has unintentionally been party to the erasure of his own mother.

“And this guy?” I ask, tilting my head toward the giant. “Another one of your descendants?”

“Leonard? No. I found him here. He’s been helping me get ready for your visit.” She looks around. “How do you like my house? Nice, huh?” When I don’t answer, she takes a puff of her cigarette. It’s a habit I don’t remember her having back at the institute. “Took me about six months after I arrived to figure out how to manipulate the system here. It’s amazing what selling a few simple product ideas can get you. Don’t worry, nothing too time line-destroying. After all, how would you ever know about it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She continues as if I haven’t spoken. “Maybe it should have taken less time, but as I’m sure you can imagine, I wasn’t in the best mental state when I arrived.”

If you ask me, she’s not in the best of mental states right now.

“I could be super rich if I wanted to be, and live in a mansion three times the size of my father’s,” she goes on. “But I knew doing that might make me lazy. And God forbid I started to like it here. Can’t have that.” She motions to the room around her. “This feels temporary to me. Just the way it should.”

There’s no mystery in where this is going. Bringing me here has been for one purpose only. She wants to finish what she was trying to accomplish before I exiled her. She wants to bring the empire back, and to do that she needs me. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m never going to tell you where the trigger is.”

“The trigger?” She laughs. “Seriously, Denny, do you think I haven’t already figured that out yet? I’ve been here three years. I’ve had plenty of time to find it. The hardest part was remembering the history from our time line since, obviously, those resources are no longer available to me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fair enough. I wouldn’t if I were you, either.” She pauses, then says, “Cahill. You told me and the others the name yourself. He’s important, but the rest of your story was a lie.”

I hold perfectly still, not letting the panic I feel inside show. She’s referring to the story I told when I tricked the few remaining rewinders into thinking I’d stumbled on the trigger that had erased our world, and I had then set things right. Cahill, indeed, was the catalyst.

“Robert or Preston or something like that,” she says. “His first name has eluded me, but it doesn’t matter. You know who I’m talking about. You kept him from turning George Washington in to the redcoats. So Washington lived, leaving us with this god-awful reality. Am I close?”

She’s not close. She’s dead-on.

I fight hard to keep my face neutral.

“All I would have to do is hunt around to find the exact moment.” After another puff, she taps the cigarette out in an ashtray. “I bet you’re wondering if I tried to make a jump the moment Vincent showed up with my chaser.”

“You couldn’t. It doesn’t work for you.” Her chaser isn’t her chaser anymore. It’s keyed to me.

She smiles. “Yes. That’s a bit distressing. But for argument’s sake, even if it did work, I wouldn’t have gone. Ask me why.”

I say nothing.

“Come on. Play along, Denny. Ask me why.” When I again don’t answer, she switches her gaze to Iffy. “You want to take a stab at it?”

“I don’t care,” Iffy replies.

“You should. But then again, soon enough it won’t matter to you.” Lidia looks over at Kane. “Vincent, why don’t you take… Ivy, is it? Please take Ivy up to the room we’ve prepared for her.”

“She stays with me!” I shout as I start to push myself off the couch. Before I gain my feet, however, Leonard shoves me back down.

I try again, getting all the way up before he pushes me again. This time, I stagger but don’t fall, and shove at his arms in an attempt to knock them away.

“Leonard,” Lidia says, “try his leg.”

I look down to see what she’s talking about and notice that blood has seeped into the denim above my wound. Before I can do anything else, Leonard whacks his knee into my thigh.

I fall back onto the sofa, my vision narrowing to a small circle surrounded by black. For several seconds that’s all I can see. When my sight finally returns, Kane is at the base of the stairs pushing Iffy up.

I try to rise for a third time, but Leonard grabs my leg and gives it a quick squeeze. The tortured yell that flies from my throat is quickly muffled by Leonard’s meaty palm slapping down across my mouth.

“Shut up and stay there.” These are the first words he’s said. His voice is gravely but more tenor than I would have expected.

When my rapid breaths finally start to slow, Lidia nods at Leonard, and he removes his hand from my face.

“I don’t know what happened to you,” she says, nodding at my leg, “but you might want to have a doctor take a look at it.”

The bloodstain has nearly doubled in size since Leonard hit me, and is damp enough to glisten in the light. Though I can’t see the wound, I’m sure several of my stitches have broken.

I level my gaze at Lidia. “If anything happens to Iffy, you will pay for it.”

“That’s her name,” she says, looking relieved. “Iffy. Should have remembered that.” She leans forward. “What happens to your girlfriend is up to you. Help me, and she’ll be fine. Don’t, and, well…” The mad glint returns to her eyes with a vengeance. “Here’s what’s going to happen. First, you’re going to fix my chaser so it works for me again.”

When she doesn’t immediately go on, I say, “And then what?”

“And then the fun begins.”

My chest tightens when Kane comes downstairs without Iffy. Following Lidia’s instructions, he retrieves the two chasers and sets them on the coffee table in front of her and then moves over next to Leonard.

Though he’s trying to look tough, I sense that he’s preoccupied. Leonard, on the other hand, is focused entirely on me. I doubt I could get an inch off the cushion before he batted me down again.

Lidia picks up one of the boxes. From the nick at the top, I know it’s the one that I’ve been using these past few months, the one that used to be hers. Which makes the other device my original chaser.

“How much power does it have left?” she asks.

I don’t respond.

She huffs out an annoyed breath. “The way this works is that if you answer my questions, I don’t send Leonard upstairs to hurt your girlfriend. Simple enough?”

I notice Kane glance at Leonard, troubled. Lidia’s blood may run through the accountant, but I’m starting to think he’s found himself in a situation he didn’t expect. Unfortunately, I have a feeling the same isn’t true about Leonard, so as much as I would like to, I know I can’t ignore her question. Before I say anything, though, I see the second chaser out of the corner of my eye, and an idea comes to me that that might at least give me a chance to get the upper hand again.

“It was around seventy-five percent last time I checked,” I say.

“You’re lying. It was well below that when you stole it from me.”

As I hoped, she’s taken the bait.

“You’re right. It was lower, but I charged it.”

Her eyes narrow angrily. “How could you do that? I didn’t have a charging kit, and I know you didn’t have one, either, or you would have never let your chaser get so low.”

“Which is why I had one made.”

She stares at me. “You had one made?” She snorts a derisive laugh. “Right. No more lies. How much power is left?”

“If you don’t believe me, the charger’s in my satchel.”

She glares at me, eyes narrowing, and then motions for Leonard to give her my bag. Once she has it, she dumps the contents onto the table. I’m relieved to see that the knife in the side pouch, though, has not fallen out.

Lidia is immediately drawn to the solar-powered battery and the tangle of wires that make up RJ’s charging unit.

“This?” she says, picking it all up.

“Be careful. It’s just a prototype, so you can damage it if you don’t watch what you’re doing.”

She twists the battery around, looking at both sides, and then follows the wires until she finds the not-quite-perfected connecter at the end. It’s close enough, though, that the shape of it surprises her.

She holds it out. “Show me.”

I scoot down to the end of the sofa, near her, and she slides my original chaser toward me.

“This one first.”

The lock that holds the top flap in place utilizes a different battery than the one that powers the device, a safety precaution for situations just like this, so when I touch my thumb against the small identification screen, the flap unlocks.

As I push the lid all the way open, Lidia grabs the sides of the device, ready to snatch it away if I try anything. I open the charging port and stick RJ’s connector in. Nothing happens.

“I knew you were lying,” Lidia states.

Ignoring her, I jiggle the connector. Just as Lidia is about to make another comment, a blinking dot appears on the main screen.

“Oh,” she whispers under her breath, stunned. She watches for several seconds until the battery meter appears and begins to tick upward ever so slowly. “How long does it take to charge?”

I explain in vague terms how the system works.

“Seems inefficient,” she says.

“I’ve only had a few months to get this developed since we last saw each other. You’ve been here three years and what do you have?”

She tenses. “Do you think I haven’t tried? They still use vacuum tubes in their electronics here, for God’s sake!” She grabs the other chaser. “Open mine.”

I so want to say, “Not yours anymore. Mine.” But I keep the thought from my lips, and take the box from her.

Once the flap is open, the screen comes to life.

She studies it for a second. “Seventy-two percent. So you weren’t lying.”

Her finger brushes across the surface as if she’s afraid it might disappear at her touch. It’s a moment I’m sure she’s been waiting for since she realized the other box no longer worked. Soon, though, the wonder in her eyes turns mischievous, and she begins rapidly inputting the coordinates for a jump.

She glances up at me and sneers, then touches the go button.

For a split second I fear that the machine might have some kind of residual memory allowing it to recall its former owner and take her away from here. But like what happened when Kane tried to do the same thing, the chaser doesn’t activate.

Instead of turning angry like I expect, she shrugs. “Worth a shot. Now, how do we make it work for me?”

“It needs a sample of your blood.”

“My blood?”

“For the genetic markers,” I say. In Iffy’s world it’s called DNA.

“That’s right,” Lidia replies as if I’ve only reminded her of something she already knows. But I can tell she has no idea how the process works. “Let’s do it right now.”

“It’s not that easy. We need to prep your blood first.”

A pause. “Remind me.”

“It needs to be dry.”

She raises a skeptical eyebrow, all pretense forgotten. “Dry?”

“A couple drops on a surface that it can be scraped off of later should do it. Metal or tile would work. Leave it overnight and it’ll be ready by morning.”

She studies me for several moments before saying, “And how does this dried blood get into the chaser?”

I touch the faint outline of a rectangular panel at the bottom corner of the control surface. “Under here.”

She pushes on the spot but nothing happens. “How does it open?”

“There’s no reason to do it until your blood’s—”

“I want to see.”

I say nothing for a moment. “Okay. I’ll need something thin, like a table knife. And a metal paper clip. They have those in this time, don’t they?”

Once more I’m subjected to her scrutiny. Finally, though her eyes never leave me, she turns her head to the side and says, “Vincent, you’ll find a knife in the kitchen. And there should be a paper clip in the drawer by the cutting board.”

Kane glances at Leonard as if the giant should be the one to run the errand.

“Vincent, now please.”

As Kane reluctantly heads into the back of the house, I notice a flicker of light near the bottom of my vision. I almost look at it, but I stop myself when I realize what it is. A full operating screen has replaced the meter on my original chaser. It means the battery has enough power now to make a jump. I doubt that it can go very far yet, but it is working again.

Lidia appears not to have seen it, and I’d like it to stay that way. My fear is that if she did, she’ll disconnect it from the charger. My chances of getting out of this are much better if there are two working devices.

“How did Vincent find you?” I ask, hoping to keep her distracted.

“It doesn’t matter how. What matters is he did.”

“It was the journal, wasn’t it?”

“Journal?” From her tone, she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“The locator he used to bring us here was in it. Your diary, I assume?”

“Well, the diary I specifically created for him to find.” She smiles coyly.

Though this admission is news to me, it’s not surprising. Of course, she created a journal that she intended to be read and used by one of her descendants. No doubt it’s packed full of lies and half truths meant to garner sympathy for a grandmother stranded in time.

In the kitchen, I can hear drawers opening and closing.

“Why 1952? Why not 1949, when you arrived here?”

She leans back and I think she’s not going to answer me, but then she says, “I’m sure you can imagine that I was in no condition to do anything when I first got here. If Vincent had come to me then, I doubt I would have even believed him. I needed time to work things out and get my head on straight. When I finally did, I picked a date.” She laughs to herself. “You’re going to love this part. I decided to do a little experiment. Six months ago I decided that today would be the day I wanted him to bring you to, but I didn’t write it down yet. No, I just kept it up here.” She taps her temple. “When Vincent used the information in the diary, the ink was already over sixty years old. The thing is, I didn’t actually write it in there until after he knocked on my door this afternoon. So in a way, you’re all here because I merely thought it. Blows your mind, doesn’t it?” She leans back. “What can I say? I’m a genius.”

“Why this year then? Why not 1953 or 1954?”

“My grandson tells me that I’ll be married and pregnant within a year. Better to have him come for me at a point where I can avoid all those unnecessary steps, but still have had plenty of time to prepare everything.”

“Those unnecessary steps were part of your plan, too, weren’t they?”

Her smug smile is all the answer I need.

The daughter she had (will have/will never have) was not conceived out of love or the natural desire to start a family. No, Lidia wanted to create a chain that would reach all the way to 2015, where she knew I would be. And now that chain is no longer necessary.

“Why didn’t you tell him to help you when you were in 2015 trying to stop me?” I ask.

Her smile slips a little. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

I suddenly recall the calendar in the future version of this very house, the date of April 4 circled. Kane had known. So why hadn’t he shown up then?

“Nineteen fifty-two is your backup plan.”

“You can never be too prepared.”

I shoot a quick look at Leonard. “And what about him?”

“Insurance,” she says, once more looking pleased with herself.

Of course. There was no way she could know the type of person who would be coming back to get her, but she would know they’d need my help. Leonard was to be the muscle in case her descendant turned out to be unable to handle the job. Which, I’m fairly certain, is the case.

A few moments later Kane reenters the room and hands Lidia a knife and a paper clip.

“Before I give these to you,” she says to me, “I want you to describe exactly what you’re going to do with them.”

She asks a few questions as I go over the procedure, and once she is satisfied, she hands the two items over.

I uncurl one end of the paper clip and then use the knife to bend the tip into a hook. Next, I turn the chaser so that the side the hinges are mounted to is facing me. There’s a small hole along the edge of one hinge. It looks like a gouge mark in the wood that might have been made when the box was created. It’s not. I slip the hooked end of the paper clip into the hole and then close my eyes. I have only done this once before, and that had taken me several tries. This time, though, it takes only a few seconds to find the notch and tilt the hook into it. Once I’m sure it’s correctly in place, I pull.

The rectangular cutout on the display panel rises a fraction of an inch. I slip the knife just under the raised piece and lift straight up.

At its height, it sits only an eighth of an inch above the control panel, like a raised terrace. On the long side that faces the display screen is a tiny tray. Using the hook, I pull it out.

“This is where the sample goes,” I say, tapping a shallow indentation in the tray with the clip. The blood I put there when I took control of this device is long gone, destroyed by the very process that mated me with the machine.

Lidia snatches the paper clip out of my hand. “Let’s see if it works.”

She punctures the tip of her finger with the unused end of the clip, causing a bubble of blood to appear.

As she moves her hand toward the chaser, I say, “Wait. I said dried blood.”

“And I don’t believe you.”

“Maybe you don’t, but if you’re wrong and I’m not lying, you’ll destroy the whole device.” While I have no idea if fresh blood will actually destroy a chaser, I’m telling the truth about its need for dried blood in the keying process.

She hesitates, her finger only a few inches from the tray.

“You’ve waited three years,” I say. “What’s another few hours?”

Though I’m pretty sure she still doesn’t believe me, she pulls her hand away.

“Watch him,” she says to Leonard and her grandson and then disappears into the kitchen.

They stare at me until Lidia returns carrying a saucer. She tilts it so I can see a spot of red where she’s dabbed her blood.

“Is this enough?”

“Should be.”

I reach over to the chaser and start to close the small panel.

“No,” she says. “Leave it open.”

“Unless you know how to fix these things if something goes wrong, I think it would be better to keep as much dust from getting inside as possible, don’t you?”

She considers the question for a moment before giving me a reluctant nod.

At Lidia’s orders Leonard takes me to the upstairs bathroom. I had hoped I would be reunited with Iffy, but she’s not there. My escort ties my hands behind my back and gestures for me to get into the tub. It’s too small for me to stretch out, and I need to fold my legs to fit, something my right thigh is not excited to do.

“You know she’s just using you, right?” I say as the giant secures my wrists to my ankles with another rope. He doesn’t even glance up. “Do you even understand what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

He yanks on the rope, pulling it tight.

“Please. At least put me with my friend.”

He checks the knots and stands. If it weren’t for the fact I know otherwise, I would start wondering if he was deaf.

As he walks to the door, I say, “Lidia is going to take everything from you. Everything.”

Looking back, he says, “Good,” then turns off the light and closes the door.

I test my bindings, but the giant has been thorough and has left no slack for me to work with. There’s no chance I’ll be able to slip them off. I could probably twist and wiggle my way out of the tub, but even if I manage it, I’d still be tied up. There’s not even a cabinet in the room that might contain something I could use to cut myself loose — just a pedestal sink, a toilet, and the tub.

For a while, I hear creaking in the hallway and the occasional muffled voice, but soon enough, silence descends. My mind spins as it throws out idea after idea on how I can turn things around. Each plan I come up with is more outlandish than the last, and even the tamest is not something I’ll likely be able to pull off.

I don’t mean to fall asleep, but other than the sporadic naps I had on the bus, I’ve been awake for going on twenty-four hours. I’m deep in a dark dreamless nowhere when someone shakes me. My eyes shoot open, and for a moment I think I’m in my bed in San Diego. But why can’t I move my hands?

Right.

Kane.

Nineteen fifty-two.

Echo Park.

The tub.

While the bathroom lights are still off, a glow of a twenty-first-century smartphone illuminates Kane sitting on the edge of the bath.

“Time to get up already?” I try to sound tough and disinterested, but doubt that I pull it off.

“Tell me about where you’re from,” he says.

Though my eyes might be open, my brain is still working at half speed. “From? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Where you and my grandmother grew up.”

I hesitate. “She didn’t tell you already?”

He nods with his chin toward somewhere else in the house. “She didn’t. My… other grandma — is that how you say it? — she told me. But I want to hear it from you.”

I should have made the connection before, but life has been running at light speed since Kane stole my chaser and lured us to Los Angeles. The few moments I’ve had to think, I’ve used to look ahead, not back, as I tried to figure out what to do.

The old woman who looked back at me from her chair in the front yard of this very house sixty-three years from now.

The one who wanted more sugar in her lemonade.

Lidia. Though the half dozen decades she lived through rendered her otherwise unrecognizable, that’s why I saw something familiar in her eyes.

From Kane’s tone it’s obvious that the Lidia here in 1952 is nothing like the grandmother he knows.

“All right,” I say. I take a few seconds to gather my thoughts, then as concisely as I can, I describe what life was like in Lidia’s and my original time line. I talk about the monarchy and about the institute and the caste system and the crumbling edges of our society.

He listens intently throughout, and says nothing until I’m done.

“I’ve been hearing the stories since I was a little boy, but the way you describe it doesn’t make it sound anywhere near as nice as the way Grandma did.”

“That’s because she’s from a privileged caste.”

“And you’re not?”

“Not even close.”

He’s silent for a moment, then asks, “Is that why you changed things?”

“Believe it or not, it was an accident.”

His brow creases. “She told me you did it on purpose.”

“The first time, no. The second time, yes.”

“Second time? I don’t understand.”

I tell him the story of the twelve seconds, and how I then used it to bring my dead sister back to life.

When I finish, he sits quietly for nearly a minute before saying, “I believed her stories when I was young, but as I grew up, I tried to convince myself it was all make-believe. But every once in a while, I’d start wondering again. What if the stories were real?” He pauses, seemingly lost in a memory, before going on. “Then I found her journal when I moved in to take care of her. I read her plan for her own rescue. I still didn’t want to believe that she’d been telling the truth all along, but it was hard not to. I thought, I’ll just go to where she wrote that you would be. I’ll see for myself that you didn’t really exist, then I could just move on.”

“April 4,” I say, thinking about the circled date on his calendar.

He nods.

“Where were you?”

He closes his eyes for a second as if he doesn’t want to remember, then lets out a quick, humorless laugh. “On the boardwalk near the pier. I saw you running, but I still didn’t believe it was you. Then suddenly she was there, rushing at you, and the moment she grabbed you, you both disappeared. I could hardly believe it. All her stories had been true.” Another pause. “When I went back to LA, I showed Grandma the journal, and told her what I’d seen. You know what she told me?”

“What?”

He stares at his hand, saying nothing for a moment, then, “She told me it was just stories. That I should forget it. That it wasn’t important.” He looks over at me. “She said that she loved me.”

It’s easy enough to connect the dots from there. For weeks, he did nothing, but then his own love for his grandmother and his desire to give her a second chance finally drove him to return to San Diego, to find me, and to initiate the plan a much younger and — though I don’t think he realized it until he got here — vengeful Lidia had thought up.

As he stands, I say, “She’s going to leave you here.”

He frowns and turns for the door.

“The moment she disappears and undoes what I’ve done, we’ll all be erased. This time line will have never been. Your mother will never have been. And unless she takes you with her, you will never have been.”

He opens the door and leaves.