Annum Guard: Blackout Part 23

The other man hands him several bills, which he shoves into his pocket. He stands and hightails it in the opposite direction, disappearing into another car. Then the man who's still seated turns to face me. And I realize he's not a man at all. He's only a couple of years older than I am.

It's Tyler Fertig.

And I know.

Old Blue is part of the blackout team.

And he's here for me.

CHAPTER 23.

"Tyler!" I gasp. I'm not sure what I'm hoping for. That the murderous look on his face will melt into a smile? That some resemblance to the guy I used to know at Peel will peek through?

But the Tyler I know is gone. He's been gone for a while. He pushes his chair back and stands, then lets his napkin drop casually to the table.

"I told you I could wait," Tyler says, "but now I don't have to anymore."

Fear p.r.i.c.ks the back of my neck. The Tyler I know is long gone. This Tyler is here to hurt me. Just like he hurt Orange and Indigo? Zeta?

I turn and run smack into Mrs. Withers, who's blocking the entire doorway. I look back. Tyler is taking his time. He knows I'm trapped.

"Move!" I bark. Mrs. Withers raises an eyebrow at me and I can see her anger rising higher, higher, higher. She opens her mouth to let it loose, but then she focuses on something-someone-behind me. On Tyler.

"Please move!" I hiss.

She does, and I push past her. I tear through one compartment, then another, and I hear laughter following me. He's laughing at me. Like this is some big joke.

He's close. I run into my compartment. It's empty. Everyone is in the dining car. Tyler slams the door shut behind him, and I shove my bag over my arm and keep running. I throw myself into the door at the other end and jiggle the handle. It won't turn. I flatten my back against the door.

"What do you want from me, Tyler?"

He smiles. "I think you already know the answer to that question."

He's not going to answer any of my questions, but I can't help but ask them. "Who sent you?"

He says calmly, "Oh, I think you already know the answer to that."

I do. XP.

"Where's the other man?"

He looks genuinely puzzled for a moment, but then he lets out a small laugh, like I just made a joke. "Oh, Iris, come on. You can't tell he's just someone I met on the platform and hired to watch out for a young woman with dark-brown hair, traveling alone? What were your grades like at Peel? Or are you letting your paranoia get the best of you?"

I don't want to fight Tyler, but I will. I bend my knees into a crouch. Tyler looks like he's packed on twenty pounds of muscle and grown several inches since I last saw him, but I know that's not possible. I just saw him.

The door on the other side of the car slides open. Mrs. Withers is standing there, hands on hips.

"What's this all about?" she asks.

"None of your business," Tyler says without turning. "Go back to the dining car."

Mrs. Withers looks at me, but I don't respond. No eye raise, no pleas for help. What can she possibly do besides make the situation worse?

"You leave that girl alone," she says. "She's on her way to a funeral."

Tyler snorts. "Yeah, her own."

And then terror seizes me. He wants to kill me. Are Orange and Indigo really dead? Zeta, too? I must be very close to the truth. I reach behind me and grab the handle again.

"I've already alerted the porter," Mrs. Withers says. "There will be twenty men in this car in less than a minute."

"Minute's too long. I won't need all that." Tyler reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a small cylinder, and then with one flick of the wrist, he shakes it, and it expands into a long pole. It looks like what Violet described, the same weapon they used to get Indigo.

"What is that?" I demand as Tyler twirls it around like a baton.

"Makes dual projection a snap." He snaps the fingers of his other hand for emphasis.

Dual projection. How two Guardians can travel together to the same point in time. This is how Tyler is able to take us.

"And it jams the signal in your tracker. It's a twofer."

I'm a piglet trapped in the back of the pen, staring down a farmer with a butcher knife. But Mrs. Withers doesn't seem to see the danger. Or she doesn't care. She barrels down the aisle and throws a shoulder into Tyler.

"I told you, you're going to leave her alone!"

He whips around, his elbow raised. It connects with the side of the old woman's skull, and she crumples to the floor.

He doesn't even flinch. He walks toward me. I scan the car, looking for anything I can use as a weapon.

I lunge forward and grab a man's walking stick, lying across one of the benches. I slam it against Tyler's ear as he reaches for me. He howls and stumbles back. But only for a moment. Then he lurches at me. I raise the stick, and he raises a hand in antic.i.p.ation, so at the last second I swing it low. It hits his leg with a crunch. He buckles in pain and lets out a scream, but I don't think I've broken his kneecap. I didn't use enough force. I've only bought myself a second or two.

That will have to do.

I leap onto the seat on my right and I pick up the edge of the dress and scramble over the back of the seat. Tyler tries to get to me, but I'm too fast. He grabs the sleeve of my dress, but I twist away and over the back of the next seat. Then I hop into the aisle and run.

I barrel over Mrs. Withers as she stirs on the floor and offer her a silent thank you for her momentary distraction.

Tyler shouts behind me. He's grunting. I push through the door, wedging my way between a group of men who've returned from the dining car.

I need to get off this train! I reach into my dress and pull my watch out. I can project and be safe in a second.

But I need to get to Was.h.i.+ngton, too. If I project now, my watch will never be able to come back to this date. It's a limit of our Annum watches-they can never return to the same date twice. Projecting would mean abandoning the Lincoln a.s.sa.s.sination, at least for now.

Dammit!

"There's nowhere to hide!" Tyler shouts behind me, and he's right. This train is a prison and a bull's-eye all at once. What am I going to do, keep running the aisles until we get to Baltimore?

No, I have only one option. I turn the k.n.o.bs on my watch and meet Tyler's gaze. "Until next time," I say with a smile that's more nervous than confident. I slam the face shut.

I'm shot up. The pressure builds in the back of my throat, like I swallowed a rock, as I fly though time. I'm ripping through time, stretching, straining. Projecting without the protection of the gravity chamber is h.e.l.l. I can't breathe. My bones are popping and cracking. I can't take this- I land in the exact same spot, sixty-three years and four days later. I land on my feet but stumble and immediately go down. My knees crash into the wooden railroad ties. I allow myself one yell, then I roll off the tracks and down a short embankment. I push off the ground and stand. My dress is torn, one huge gash right at my knees.

It's . . . I do the math . . . 1928. And I have no idea where I am. Somewhere in between Boston and Worcester. Railroad tracks are the only thing I see in either direction. No towns. No streets. No buildings. There's nothing. I've gone and stranded myself in the middle of nowhere.

I rifle through the duffel bag. I don't have any clothes for 1928, and it looks like I skipped that part of the money drawer, too. We'd traveled about forty-five minutes. I a.s.sume that means I'm close to Worcester? Maybe? I kick at the ground and send a dying clump of gra.s.s and dirt into the air. Then I heave a sigh, sling the bag over my arm, and start walking back toward Boston.

I don't know what to do. I could always project back to a few days before the a.s.sa.s.sination, hop another train, and just wait. But then I'd be giving up way more than thirty-five days of my life. And my teammates can't wait that long.

Or I could call it a loss and move on to the Boston Strangler. Goose b.u.mps dot my arms as I think of it. I really don't want to do the Strangler mission. Really really don't want to do it.

So I think about Tyler. XP got to Tyler. I shake my head. It's so obvious, I can't believe we didn't really consider it before. Each of our Annum watches costs something like twenty million dollars a pop. Tyler's watch only works with his DNA, so he's essentially free labor for XP. Plus, Tyler has a serious vendetta against our organization.

My mind races with questions. Violet said there were two people who s.n.a.t.c.hed Indigo, so there's at least one other member of the blackout team. Who? Another Guardian? Is Tyler's tracker still active? If it's not, how will we ever find him? And how did Tyler get his watch back in the first place?

I look up. In the distance, a building rises into the sky, and I take off at a trot, then break into a run. I forgot how good it feels to sprint, to forget about everything and just focus on how fast you can go.

I also forgot how much sprinting takes out of you, especially in a stiff dress and booties. I stop and bend over, gasping for breath, then decide on a brisk walk. I find the main road and stick to the shoulder. Cars zoom past me, and I don't want to get hit. Well, "zoom" is a bit of an overstatement. They're topping out at like twenty-five miles per hour.

I'm getting stares. Lots of them. Mostly from the women, looking my weird dress up and down. I keep my eyes on the cars as they pa.s.s.

One creeps by at about ten miles an hour. A Ford Model T. There's a girl in the pa.s.senger seat who is about my age. She's laughing and shrieking at something and brushes a strand of bobbed hair from her face. She has both legs propped up on the dash and a bottle of clear liquid raised to her lips. Moons.h.i.+ne, most likely. I'm pretty sure we're still in the middle of Prohibition.

Her dress is a sleeveless silk number with a short hemline. It's obviously expensive. She makes eye contact with me for a brief second and winks. Not a friendly wink. A wink of superiority. I narrow my eyes at her. Yeah, go ahead and wink. You won't be winking a year from now when the stock market crashes and that little silk dress goes the way of your savings account.

That was mean.

I wish Abe was here. He'd tell me that was mean, and then I would admit that it was mean, and then we'd laugh about how it would take a week to drive from Boston to New York in that car.

I wait until the car is completely out of view, then I turn to make sure another isn't coming. There's a horse-drawn carriage half a mile down the road, but they shouldn't be able to see me. I drop the duffel bag, take hold of my right sleeve, and yank against the shoulder seam. It takes several pulls, but eventually it rips. I tear off the sleeve, then start on the left. Then I bend down, grab a handful of fabric right below where it's already ripped, and pull with all my might, trying to rip it as evenly as possible.

I stand up. I should have left well enough alone. I don't look like I fit in to 1928, I look like I just lost a fight with some old, rusty playground equipment. Threads of various lengths dangle down my arms, and my skirt goes from long to short to long again as it travels around my knees.

I'm going to be run out of this town on a rail.

But what's done is done.

About twenty minutes later, a sign welcomes me to Framingham. Framingham is twenty miles from Boston. That's as far as we got? I head for the building I saw in the distance and discover it's the town hall. The large brick building is held up by eight Corinthian columns that are each two stories high. The words "Framingham Memorial" are etched above. The building looks brand new.

There's a restaurant across the street, so I duck inside. Every head turns to look at me, and I grimace.

"Good lord, child," says a man with a rag, wiping off a table. He stops and stares at me. "What happened to you?"

"I . . ." I look around. "It's a long story. I'm trying to get back to Boston. Can you point me toward the train station?"

"I can show you," a voice says from the back of the room.

My duffel falls to the floor. I know that voice. I lock eyes on a guy plunking a few coins on a table. He grins.

It's Abe.

CHAPTER 24.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been so thoroughly and completely shocked that I forget how to speak. The first was when I was seven and I found my mom pa.s.sed out cold on the bathroom floor. I stood there, staring, for what felt like hours, my little first-grade brain incapable of processing what was happening. The second was when the woman from Peel showed up unannounced on our doorstep the summer after eighth grade. She introduced herself and extended a hand, and all I did was look at it-this foreign hand offering me a way out. The third was just a few months ago, when I found out who my dad really was and how he died.

And now this is number four. My mouth drops open, and I gaze into eyes that are so familiar to me. Are they mad? Suspicious?

No. They're not. They're warm, hopeful.

I have to restrain myself from leaping at him. He walks up to me, and I stand there like a statue. He pulls a tweed cap out of his back pocket and plops it on his head.

He smiles at me and holds open the door. "Ma'am?"

I blink, then blink again, then walk out into the sunlight. And then I throw myself at him. I wrap my arms around his neck and inhale. The scent of adventure bodywash fills my nostrils and leads me back to Annum Hall, to Peel, to Ariel's house, to all of the places I've smelled it before. Everything is forgotten.

"What are you doing here?" I whisper into his neck. "Did everyone see my note?"

He reaches for my hand. "Everyone wants answers, but no one thinks you had anything to do with whatever happened to Bonner. Well, at least no one from Annum Guard."

"But that means . . . who?" A man loading chicken crates into a wooden-framed truck bed looks up at us, so I duck my head and pull Abe farther down the sidewalk.

"It's all being kept very hush-hush. No Boston PD, very limited number of feds. A special FBI task force made up of those with the highest clearance levels."

"And they think I had something to do with it?"

"They want to know where you are." He pauses. "Red has your back on this. He had me disable your tracker right after you projected here. He sent me to find you. I overrode my tracker, too."

Another Model T goes whizzing past at about ten miles an hour. I watch it for a few seconds, then turn back to Abe. "Does Red want me to come back?"

"The opposite. Red wants you-us-to keep digging. We're not going to get this opportunity again. With Bonner gone, Red has better access to old mission ledgers. He's got Yellow, Green, and Violet following up on a few more leads. And here"-he reaches into his back pocket again and pulls out two folded pieces of newspaper-"you have to see this."

I take the papers, then park myself on one of the steps leading up to Memorial Hall. There are all sorts of people around. Men wearing flat-brimmed straw hats rus.h.i.+ng up the stairs, women with bobbed hair wearing shapeless dresses walking down the sidewalk. A few of them eye my dress, but only for a moment.

I look down at what Abe's given me. The first clipping is from the society pages, dated about ten years ago. Well, ten years ago from the present. The half-page spread is devoted to pictures from a charity golf event. I wrinkle my nose. "What is this?" But then I spot a picture of Secretary Howe. He's standing next to a man I've never seen before. The man is probably in his late fifties. He's wearing a golf s.h.i.+rt and light pants. I look down at the caption: National Defense CEO Francis Howe and National Defense COO Alexander Quail Quail.

"Wait, is that . . . is that Bonner's dad?" I drop my voice lower as two older women on the sidewalk shoot disapproving glances in my direction. "Her dad was the chief operating officer of Howe's company?"

Abe nods, then juts his chin toward the picture. "And an old golf buddy."