Timebound(53)

I pulled my hair back a bit and removed the small disk from behind my ear. “Want to try it?”

“Sure.”

My fingers brushed the side of his face as I reached up to tuck the little disk into the hollow between his ear and jaw. He pulled my hand toward him once the disk was in place, pressing the skin of my inner wrist against his lips. “You smell wonderful.”

I blushed, and tried to slow my pulse. “It’s probably the jasmine soap…”

He smiled, shaking his head. “The jasmine is nice, too—but it’s mostly you. And this is going to sound crazy, Kate, but I missed you from the moment I left.”

“I missed you, too.” I looked down, still a bit embarrassed. Trey tilted my chin up until our eyes met and then he kissed me, his lips soft against mine. I leaned into him slightly, thoroughly enjoying the tingle that pulsed through me at his touch.

It took several seconds for me to notice the gentle scratching at my knee. When I pulled away from Trey, Daphne took a step back from the two of us. Her head was tilted to one side, a quizzical look in her soft brown eyes.

Trey laughed and scratched her behind the ear. “I think we have a chaperone. Yes, Miss Daphne. I’ll behave.” He looked back at the diary. “So… what is this ear thingy supposed to do? I don’t see anything…”

I gave him a half smile. “And now we know for sure that you don’t have the CHRONOS gene. I was seeing a video of a much younger version of my grandmother, filmed in 2305, explaining in pretty graphic detail what she was going to do to a coworker who wouldn’t stop using her tea mug.”

“I just see a bit of writing and some squares, there… and there.” He removed the disk from behind his ear and faked a sad look. “Guess I can’t be part of the secret club then.”

“You say that as though it’s a bad thing.” I took the disk and pressed it back into place behind my own ear. “If you could operate this, they’d put you to work memorizing half a million jump locations—or stable points, as they’re called. I feel like I’ve spent the day in a rather odd history class. As I’m reading Katherine’s historical diaries, every now and then I’ll see a question that Katherine asked, like, ‘Who is the Infanta?’ or ‘What is a simoleon?’”

“In SimCity, a simoleon is money,” Trey interjected.

“Yes—it was slang for a dollar back in the late 1800s. Anyway, I couldn’t understand why she was writing the question when the answer was right there on the page.”

“Maybe they have like a 28G network in the future and they just texted her back?” he suggested. “Seems unlikely, but…”

“The answer is actually really simple, if you’re not thinking in a straight line. See this button—oh, no, I guess you can’t.”

He made a face at me.

“Sorry!” I gave him an apologetic smile. “At any rate”—I pointed to a section of the display that he couldn’t see—“when Katherine or the other historians pushed that button, the diary recorded the question. At the end of the trip, the historian returned at a set time, but the diary itself was set to return twenty-four hours prior to the time that the historian left on the trip. As long as Katherine made it back to CHRONOS as scheduled, each time she jotted down a question in the diary, a response would pop up because the question had already been answered by the researchers during that day before the trip began.”

“Okay—that kind of makes my head hurt.”

“Welcome to my world.” I grinned. “The bad news is that I can’t use that neat little trick. The date can be altered, but Katherine is pretty sure that the diaries are hardwired to return to the CHRONOS research department. She tried to send a message when she got stranded and the diary just disappeared. Poof. So when I go, I’ll have to rely on the information that’s already in the book or in my head.”

“So you’re really going to be… using that thing soon?” He gestured toward the medallion, with a note of concern in his voice.

“Yes, although Katherine says that it will be short local hops initially. There are a dozen or so stable points in the DC area and I’ll just do a quick shift there and back—a few hours or maybe a day ahead. That sort of thing.” I sounded more confident than I felt. “But even that’s a little while out.”

“And how exactly are you going to change things? How are you, all alone, supposed to be able to restore the timeline? I mean…” He shook his head slowly, a very skeptical look on his face.