Timebound(22)

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.”