The apple slices were still untouched on Katherine’s plate and I realized that my own sandwich was barely half eaten. I took a few more bites and then asked, “Why did Saul think that destroying headquarters would make him able to jump from one time to the next, if he hadn’t done that before?”
“I wondered that myself,” Katherine said. “We all knew that we couldn’t jump between stable points, without a trip back to CHRONOS. In training, they said this was an institutional check—a way for CHRONOS to keep tabs on our temporal location. The medallion reads the genetic structure of the jumper as you depart and Saul must have believed, with headquarters out of the picture, that he’d be a free agent, so to speak. Without the anchor at headquarters pulling him back, he assumed that he would be able to travel between stable points whenever he wanted. But the medallions were locked to return to CHRONOS—the only thing he did was ensure that we couldn’t use them at all. I wasn’t pleased at being stranded in an earlier century, and I didn’t know when or where Saul landed, but it was at least nice to know that his plan hadn’t worked.”
“Kind of poetic justice,” I said.
“Right. All of that changed, however, when Prudence disappeared—or, I suspect, when Prudence found Saul, whenever or wherever he was. Once he realized that the CHRONOS gene could be inherited, then it was only a matter of time before he found a way to manipulate that knowledge to breed people who could go where he could not.”
“Just as you did…,” I reminded her in a soft voice.
“No, Kate,” said Katherine. She got up from her chair and walked over to the window, putting her empty cup and barely touched plate on the counter. “I introduced two lonely people who had something in common—sadly not enough to make their relationship last, but they were in love at one time. I think you know that, if you’re honest with yourself. I never forced anything, but just hoped for the best. And I got incredibly, unbelievably lucky.”
She paced back toward me, a touch of anger in her voice. “Saul, on the other hand, left nothing to chance. Did you know that Cyrist clergy are required to marry only people approved by the Temple hierarchy? That leadership of a temple is hereditary—and always subject to approval by the International Temple? Did you know that?”
Yes, I had known that—although the reasons hadn’t really clicked until Katherine spelled it out directly. “So all Cyrist Templars carry the CHRONOS gene?”
Connor, who had appeared at the doorway, answered my question. “We can only speculate at this point. But it seems likely. We’d know a lot more if we had a copy of their Book of Prophecy—assuming, of course, that the damned thing actually exists. The Cyrists use smoke and mirrors so often to fool their believers that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a lie.”
I gave him a long, hard look and then turned to Katherine. “And the two of you really think that I can change all of this? That I can what? Alter the timeline so that the Cyrists never emerge?”
Katherine shook her head, then stopped and threw her hands up in frustration. “To be honest, Kate, I don’t know. When you were a baby, I just hoped that someday you could help locate Prudence—if only to give her a message for me. To try and get her to come back to this time and let me explain. But then I began to see subtle changes in the timeline. And last May—everything became clear. Saul was putting his plans into action. I wanted to come back here, to see if you would help, to train you—but the cancer hit and I basically had the choice of fighting cancer or fighting Saul. I’m still not sure I made the right choice…”
“You did,” said Connor, who had appropriated Katherine’s apple slices and was munching as he spoke. “Your treatment bought us some time, and we have a much better chance of succeeding if Kate is trained by someone with actual experience.”
“It also cost us a considerable amount of time, and we have a more powerful enemy as a result,” Katherine countered with a sigh. “But either way, it’s done and we’ll have to play with the cards we’ve been dealt.”
I was still mulling over the point I’d made to Trey in the car. Would I be happy in a timeline where I was a museum piece who couldn’t leave the protection of a CHRONOS key without ceasing to exist? No, but…
“What makes you sure that the timeline you want me to help you ‘fix’ is the correct one?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with your training for me to go back and tell you what Saul is planning and have him arrested? After all, he kills at least two of your colleagues in the process. And how many changes happened because of his actions? Even if all of those historians stranded at various points in time did their best to avoid changing things, they must have made some alterations to the timeline. And like you said, if you hadn’t been stuck here, you wouldn’t be dealing with cancer right now.”