Madman's Dance (Time Rovers) Page 25

  “You sure I like tuna?” she asked.

  “You used to. You eat raw fish now; you should be able to eat the cooked stuff, for heaven’s sake.”

  To make him happy, Cynda took a bite. The taste was unbelievable. She moaned. “This…is good,” she said through a mouthful of food. “Better than chocolate, even.”

  “That’s more like the old you.” He smiled. “Oh, Eli and his wife send their regards.”

  She raised an eyebrow. He took the cue. “Eli Greenwald the Third. You call him E3. We used to eat there all the time, or go up to the park and have a picnic. You used to smuggle tomato seeds through him to your parents Off-Grid.”

  E3? She shuffled through the files and then came up with a matching memory. She’d hand him her sandwich tote, the seeds hidden in the bottom, and he’d swap the contraband out for a sandwich and pickles. To the casual observer it didn’t appear they’d broken any laws.

  Once she finished swallowing, she set the sandwich down reluctantly. “Thanks, Ralph.”

  “No problem.” She noticed his own meal sat still wrapped in front of him.

  “Wait a minute, let me work on it…” She screwed up her face in thought, hovering her hand over the wrapper like she could divine what was inside. “Roast beef and…something, right?”

  “Roast beef, mayo, and American cheese,” he confirmed with an approving nod.

  “We’ll go to this place together someday.”

  Ralph’s smile faded. “We won’t get that chance if you go back to ’88, Cyn. They’ll kill you this time.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “It’s not just about you. Rumors are floating around that TPB has threatened to jail Morrisey if there are any further unauthorized transfers. They’ll close the company for good, sell it off to the highest bidder.”

  “I doubt they’ll be able to pull it off,” she said, hoping that was the case.

  “Is one Victorian’s life worth all that?” he argued.

  Though the question annoyed her, it was a valid one. “I believe it is, Ralph,” she told him. “Keats cannot die that way.”

  “Was there something going on between you two?”

  Cynda looked up, startled. “There might have been, before this.” She tapped her temple where the mark still darkened her skin. “I don’t know now. I think we took a left turn along the way.” She took another bite of her sandwich.

  “What about Dr. Montrose?”

  “Same story, I think.” Is he jealous, or just curious? Another thought surfaced. “Were you and I ever...you know?”

  Her friend shook his head. “We would just drive each other crazy.”

  That made sense. She set the sandwich down again. “You’re not eating, so what’s really going on here, guy?”

  Ralph’s oval glasses were off in a heartbeat, being polished with the bottom of his shirt. She’d learned that was his way of dealing with stress. “You’re my best friend, Cyn. Hell, almost my only friend. We’ve been like twins since we first met. If you go to ’88 and don’t come back…”

  “We’ve always been there for each other, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, we have.”

  “Then we will in the future. I’ll know you have my back, Ralph. That’s why I’ll be the one kicking butt this time, not the other way around.”

  “You’re too damned stubborn,” he grumbled. “Morrisey said you’d get better, that you wouldn’t give in. I wasn’t so sure.”

  “So the Genius wins this round,” she joked.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  Ralph’s brows furrowed. “Sometimes I do. Mostly I’m not sure. It’s funny. I used to think he was a god. Now I can’t figure him out.”

  “Makes two of us.” She pointed at his sandwich. “Eat, will you?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Mom.”

  She rolled her eyes back at him and returned to her own meal, savoring both the sandwich and the unshakeable love of her best friend.

  ~••~••~••~

  The moment Cynda heard the door to the botanical garden whoosh open, she sighed. So much for her quiet meditation. Morrisey stopped a short distance away, not joining her on the bench as was customary.

  “I’m sorry for interrupting,” he announced. “I’ve run some computer models. The alternate thread is gaining ground.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “This is something different than a Time Incursion. Usually an alternate thread dies out rather quickly. It’s my guess that the instability in 1888 is contributing to the problem.”

  “Defoe’s there. Why hasn’t he fixed it? He’s Rover One, after all.”

  Morrisey sat next to her. “I don’t think he can. I think it has something to do with you.”

  Me? “You mean if I do go back, it will resolve?”

  “Perhaps, but not necessarily the way we would like.”

  Which meant Keats might die no matter what. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she murmured. “How ugly can it get?”

  Morrisey went quiet. He doesn’t know for sure.

  “No clue?”

  “If this disconnect becomes firmly embedded in the timeline, it will methodically rumble forward. What sort of changes would occur?” He shrugged at his own question. “Time travel may not exist as we know it. You…me…we may never have been born.”

  Then I have no choice.

  “Jacynda…”

  Their eyes met. She saw the desperate plea in them. “I would argue that you’re not entirely whole yet.”

  Cynda agreed. Someone had dropped her box of puzzle pieces and there were a number of them that had vanished under the furniture for eternity. In all likelihood, this was as good as it was going to get.

  “The clock is running,” she told him. “TPB will eventually realize I’m a lot more with it than they think. I can’t go on fooling the shrinks forever.”

  “I have connections. There are places you can hide where they won’t find you.”

  And have them throw you in jail?

  “I’ve been thinking about this: I’ll go back to the night Nicci was killed and intercept Keats before he gets to my hotel room. I will insist we go somewhere public, where he’s known, so he’s seen by a number of people during the time Nicci dies. He won’t meet with Flaherty, go on trial, or be up for the noose.”

  “Sounds too simple.” Morrisey rubbed his forehead in thought. “You might meet yourself. That can be very disconcerting.”

  “You’ve done it?” Cynda asked. To her knowledge, he’d only made a couple of time trips to deliver information to her in ’88.

  Morrisey shook his head. “Harter has. Said it was very…” He struggled for a word.

  “Creepy?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Does it cause any harm to the timeline?”

  “Not that we can tell,” Morrisey replied. “You should still avoid it.”

  Fulham appeared in the doorway to the solarium. “The post has arrived—from Victorian London.” He held out a letter. And something else. “Apparently you left this behind, and the doctor felt you would want it.”

  She’d know that furry face anywhere. “Fred!” She leapt to her feet and snatched him out of Fulham’s hands. “Fred,” she repeated, squishing the stuffed animal in an enthusiastic embrace.

  The assistant bent over and whispered something in Morrisey’s ear. He gave a curt nod. “Tell Klein we’ll be ready very soon.”

  Impatiently, Cynda tore open the letter and immersed herself in Alastair’s flowing penmanship, Fred in her lap. The first couple of paragraphs were full of the doctor’s supreme delight at hearing of her improvement. Then his tone turned dark when he wrote about Keats.

  She heard Morrisey’s throat clearing, and knew what he wanted.

  “He writes, ‘All seem to be against him, except for a loyal few. Lord Wescomb’s second, Mr. Kingsbury, performed a masterful job of defending Keats, but the
end result is that he has been found guilty of Nicola Hallcox’s murder. Wescomb is profoundly upset, dismayed at being unable to navigate the vicious politics that swirl around our friend like a maelstrom. You may well wonder why Kingsbury was in charge of the case: his lordship, Keats’ staunchest defender, was nearly assassinated the other night in what can only have been a bid to ensure conviction.’ ”

  Cynda looked up at Morrisey and saw a troubled expression.

  “That’s not in Wescomb’s timeline,” he said. “Things are starting to unravel faster than even I had anticipated.”

  She returned to the letter. “‘I truly fear the worst. I beg of you, if there is anything you can do to save him please do so, history be damned.’ ”

  “History be damned?” she repeated. “Sounds like it already is.”

  Cynda handed over the letter, knowing Morrisey would want to study it further. One of the butterflies swirled around her. She set Fred aside and followed it a few feet until it landed on a nearby flower. It fanned its purple iridescent wings as it drank deeply of the nectar.

  You don’t care about the future, do you? You just live in the now. Wish we could.

  There was a rustle of paper being folded. She found Morrisey studying her intently.

  “Klein says if you’re going, you need to leave within the next twenty-four hours. TPB is getting edgy. He thinks they know you’re better off than we’ve been letting on.”

  “You kept them off my tail longer than I expected.”

  A weary shrug. “He wants you to depart from their facility, not ours.”

  “Why?”

  “Harder to track, for one.”

  “Where else would I go but ’88? Why cloak ’n dagger it?”

  “Klein has his reasons. So far, he’s played straight with us. I would suggest we do as he asked.”

  He’s hiding the real reason. “Klein’s trying to keep TPB from shutting down the company, putting you in jail.”

  Morrisey looked dismayed. “Yes, that would be one reason.”

  For a daring moment, she imagined smuggling him to 1888 with her. Just as quickly, she dismissed the idea. Even though Morrisey understood the inner workings of time travel better than any Rover, he was a neophyte when it came to the actual realities of life in another era. He was safer here, no matter what TPB did to him.

  “You realize how dangerous this trip will be,” he warned. “It is more like a war than anything and we still don’t know all the combatants. You may have to kill to stay alive.”

  “I know.” In the past that would have bothered her, but not now. “Have you ever…done that?”

  “No,” her companion replied.

  “Ever wanted to?”

  At long last, Morrisey nodded.

  “Who?”

  “Myself,” he replied. “After Mei’s death, life no longer seemed important.”

  “Mei?” Then she remembered the photograph on his credenza of the exotically beautiful Asian woman. She’d seen it every day as she’d headed to the practice room, but never had the nerve to ask who it was.

  Morrisey’s voice grew distant. “She was my lover. She was pregnant when she went Off-Grid. Mei died in childbirth. So did the baby.”

  Cynda felt his guilt enveloping her like a brittle Highland mist. To say she was sorry would be meaningless in the face of such a loss. “What kept you from killing yourself?”

  “Harter. He made sure I had something to keep me occupied.”

  “Breaking the fourth dimension?”

  “It seemed an impossible task, and it kept me from brooding.”

  “Not so impossible, apparently.” She had to ask. “Did you ever wonder if you could go back and change things?”

  “That’s why I started working on the project in the first place. It wasn’t until after Harter made the first few trips that we began to realize that there might be limitations. Then we lost a Rover…” his voice trailed off.

  She’d probably learned all this in the Time Immersion Academy, but right now she couldn’t remember the details.

  “Harter was devastated. He tried over and over to prevent the death, but nothing worked. Once there’s been a mortality within the time stream, something precludes correcting that loss. I have never been able to determine what that is.”

  Mei and Chris are gone forever.

  He looked up at her. “When I finally realized that, it was like losing Mei all over again.”

  Cynda turned back toward the butterfly where it rested on a leaf. Now she understood his passion for all things Asian—the artwork, the tatami mats, the sushi and Tai Chi. Theo Morrisey was honoring his dead lover every second of his life.

  He rose from the bench in a fluid motion. “If you must leave, all I ask is that you make sure you’re doing so for the right reasons.” His footsteps retreated.

  What did that mean? She had no clue. Of all the mysteries she’d worked through, T.E. Morrisey was the most difficult to untangle.

  “I’ve been here too long,” she muttered.

  “I second that.”

  The voice was familiar. She glanced around the solarium, trying to find the source.

  “Up here,” it called. A ball of blue wandered out on a branch, many legs moving in concert. She edged to within a foot of the creature. It was about the size of a shrew, and had eight distinctive appendages.

  “Nice color,” she observed, thinking hard. “You’re not real, are you?”

  “I’m real to you,” it answered.

  She’d seen this thing before. Memories bubbled up unbidden—a monstrous version taunting her and then a smaller one issuing a warning not to go down an alley.

  “A warning you ignored,” the arachnid observed coolly. “Bought you a knife in the chest.”

  That memory surfaced as well, evoking a deep shiver. “If my brain’s been rebooted, how can you be here?”

  “You didn’t think that would fix everything, did you?”

  “Apparently not.” Then she smiled. “It’s really you.” He was smaller, but just as sarcastic. “You’ve been gone for a long time.”

  “So have you,” he replied wistfully. “How soon are we leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning should be just about right.”

  “Good. These hummingbirds are driving me mad.”

  Chapter 27

  Just last night, she’d finished her drawing, adding the colored grains of sand that brought the dragon to life. In the sunlight, it almost seemed alive.

  Cynda heard the door to Morrisey’s private suite open and close, then his tatami sandals on the walkway. How she had grown to love that sound. This hour had become their time to meditate together, or just speak quietly about whatever was on their minds. Some mornings they did not speak at all, the conversation unfolding on a different level.

  In deference to the warmer weather, Morrisey was in his green silk robe, the one with the embroidered phoenix on the back. Lithe, he covered the distance with smooth motions and joined her under the pagoda.

  She awaited his reaction, anticipation making her fidget with the chopstick in her hands.

  Morrisey looked out at the sand and then shot to his feet. “My God, it’s magnificent!” He cautiously made his way down the steps to examine her sand sculpture. He paused near a wing. “I have never seen a T’ien Lung like this, Jacynda.” He beamed at her with a mixture of pride and something indefinable. “It’s,” he gestured in unusual agitation, “incredible.”

  Cynda nodded, her heart light. It was incredible. And she’d created it.

  Morrisey returned to the pagoda, still beaming. “Is it you in dragon form?”

  “Yes. The ones on top of the pagoda would never come down to talk to me, so I decided I’d send them a message of my own.”

  “And so you have. Do you know the significance of the color yellow?” he asked, pointing to the sand dragon.

  She shook her head. “I thought it was pretty.”

  “It is, but it comes with its own lore. Yellow
signifies a celestial dragon that cannot be captured, tamed, or killed. It is said it will only appear when perfection is found.”

  Cynda looked back at the dragon and cracked a smile. “Perfection?” Then she laughed, shaking her head. “Hardly. I’m still missing so much.”

  “Still, you’re remembering names more readily now. New memories are being retained.” He smiled. “You’ve moved past building sand castles and throwing tantrums.”

  “I liked my sand castles,” Cynda laughed.

  “I knew you could do it,” he said, that look of pride returning.

  “I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t run interference for me.”

  “Then we both deserve the applause.”

  You more than me.

  “There is one more thing before I leave,” she said. “It has nothing to do with the Victorians or any of the other stuff. I’d like to see you do Tai Chi with a sword.”

  His eyes flashed in surprise. “I would be honored,” he told her. “You realize I will damage the sand dragon.”

  “It has served its purpose.”

  He nodded and then vanished into his rooms. She closed her eyes and waited. Above her, the peg clock marked off the time. It whirled away, seemingly oblivious to the fact that everything was in flux. To it, time was just a certain number of seconds per day.

  A few minutes later, Theo Morrisey took his place in the center of the dragon, his dark hair contrasting with the pure white silk of his loose tunic and pants. In his right hand he held a long sword, a red sash tied to the hilt.

  He began with a deep bow of respect. As he raised the sword, the morning sun spun a line of gold down the edge. Like a king who has claimed a legendary blade, he flowed across the sand, moving with controlled grace. He was a tiger in the reeds, a heron upon the water, an eagle soaring in the clouds. Human poetry.

  Incredible.

  When he had finished, he turned and bowed to her again, beads of sweat on his brow. She rose and returned the gesture.

  “Thank you, sensei,” she said. She had never called him teacher before.