Timebound(48)

Katherine shrugged and then continued. “All of which matters not in the slightest in this timeline, since I’m dead already. The next morning, I visited CHRONOS Med and told them I fell down in the tub. I doubt they believed me. It was surely not the first time a woman had shown up with a similar story. But I didn’t want to do anything that might alert the rest of CHRONOS about Saul until I’d had a chance to discuss the situation with Angelo.”

“Who exactly was Angelo?” I’d given up trying to figure out the correct tense for these people. If he was in Katherine’s past, I was going to refer to him in the past tense, even though he wouldn’t be born for several centuries.

Katherine took another sip of her tea before she answered. “Angelo was our direct supervisor. He trained both me and Saul. He was a good man and I was, in many ways, closer to him than I was to my parents, because he… well, he had the CHRONOS gene, too. There were things I could ask him that would have been incomprehensible to my father or even to my mother. From the time I entered the program when I was ten years old, Angelo was the one who guided my studies. I understood the CHRONOS bureaucracy well enough to know that he would also be in very hot water over Saul’s actions. I wanted his advice, but I also wanted to warn him.

“After I finished at the med unit,” she said, “I went to costuming so that they could get me ready for the jump. It was around eight, and between wardrobe and hairstyling, they usually had me ready for a mid-1800s trip in about half an hour. But that day—I don’t think it had ever taken nearly that long. Several of the costuming staff had arrived late and they were backed up. I sat there in a chemise with my hair half up for nearly twenty minutes. The plan had been to give Angelo a few minutes to check his messages and then we could talk, but it was after nine forty-five when I finally got there. I was just going to stick my head in and say we’d talk after I returned.”

“You couldn’t have delayed the jump?” I asked. “It seems like a pretty important conversation to put off for several days.”

Katherine shook her head. “Not without a major upheaval. The jump schedule is set a year in advance. The crews put a lot of effort into getting things ready, and I’d already gone through costuming. And… you’re thinking linearly again, Kate.”

I was getting a bit tired of hearing that. “Sorry. Like most people, I’m used to moving through time in a single direction—forward.”

“My point is that the trip would, for me, seem to last the four days that it was scheduled,” she explained. “But I didn’t return four days later—that would have been a waste of time for the jump crew. We all left and returned from our jumps in batches. It was more expedient to set destinations for two dozen jumpers once or twice a week than to keep track of a bunch of individual travelers. When I got back to CHRONOS, only an hour would have passed for the crew, Angelo, and even Saul, since he was one of the dozen who wasn’t on the schedule. The first cohort—the day-trippers who didn’t need as much prep—had gone out at nine thirty and were scheduled to return at ten thirty. The twelve in my cohort would depart at ten with a set return for eleven o’clock.

“So it really wasn’t much of a delay for anyone at CHRONOS, and I kind of liked the idea of having a few days to myself, away from Saul, to think about exactly what I wanted to do. The idea of being a single mother and what it might mean for my career scared the hell out of me.”

Katherine shifted her gaze and stared out the window for a moment. “I don’t know what time Angelo got to the office,” she continued, “but when I got there, the door was open and one of his mugs was shattered on the floor. He always drank this really horrid herbal concoction in the mornings and the room smelled awful—there was a large puddle of the stuff on the carpet.

“I opened the closet to get a towel, and there was Angelo, shoved to the back, on the floor. There was a ring of adhesive wrapped around his mouth and his nose—the stuff is sort of like duct tape, but stronger. It’s been over forty years and I can still see his face sometimes—bluish purple and his eyes wide-open.”

“He was dead?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “It was long past the point where the med unit could have resuscitated him. I’ve always wondered, however, if it would have been different if I had gone to see him before I went to costuming.”

I gave her a sympathetic look and shook my head. “More likely, Saul would have killed you as well, right?”