All Our Yesterdays (33 page)

“You notify me the second you lay eyes on him, understand me?” he barks.

“Yes, sir.”

Richter goes barreling down the stairs, while the guard lifts a sleeve to his mouth, talking into his radio. “We clear, Hoskins? . . . Roger that. I’m closing the southeast door. Mancini, you’re cleared to close the northwest. See you at the bank, fellas.”

The guard drops his sleeve and starts the descent down the twenty-four flights of stairs, letting the door to his floor start to swing shut behind him. I act on instinct, ripping off my hoodie, leaning over the railing, and tossing it. My good luck holds. The hoodie lands on the threshold of the door and stops its progress, leaving a two-inch gap. If James got separated from Richter, it must be because he
wanted
to be. Something tells me he’s still inside the Associated Institutes of Research.

As soon as the guard’s footsteps have faded in my ears, I scramble down from the roof landing and slip onto the twenty-fourth floor, closing the door softly behind me. Everything but the red emergency lights are off, which makes the office look hostile and eerie. I walk through the metal detector inside the door, setting off another alarm that joins the cacophony, and I have a moment of doubt as I creep deeper into the office. Am I letting James slip away again? Maybe I should be rushing down the stairs to the office rendezvous point to find him. But I have a tugging intuition that he’s still here. For Richter to have lost him in the first place and to be so frantic to find him makes me think something must have happened between them. Did they fight? Did Richter tell James something he wasn’t ready to hear?

I may be grasping at straws, but I don’t think so. If James is upset, I know better than anyone how he likes to hide.

I race through the office, gun held low in front of me. I peer into cubicles and locked conference rooms with glass paneling, but I don’t have time to make a thorough search. There are a hundred places he could be hidden, but the anxiety inside of me has been building with each second that Finn hasn’t called to say Marina’s safe. I have to find James
now
, and luckily I think I know where he’d go. The same place he used to hide at Sidwell when things got too intense for him.

The alarm goes silent as I make my way toward the men’s room, which probably means the fire department is somewhere below me. I open the door to the restroom with my foot, keeping my hands tight around the gun. It looks empty. I duck down to look under the stalls, which also look empty. I kick the first open. The metal door hits the dividing wall of the stalls with a crash; there’s no one inside. I move on to the next one, but before I can kick it in—

“Over here,” James says.

The door to the last stall opens, revealing James sitting cross-legged on top of the toilet.

“I knew you’d find me,” he says. “I need to talk to you.”

Thirty-Three

Marina

“Please don’t shoot me,” he says, looking small and young. “I’ve got a lot of questions, and I need answers.”

Just do it,
I think, but instead I lower the gun an inch. “You’ve been waiting for me? Even though you know I mean to kill you?”

He nods. “I know it’s crazy, but . . . Richter brought me here to show me a photograph of Nate’s killer leaving the Mandarin. Marina and Finn don’t trust him, so they left me, but he
did
show me the picture.”

“Yeah? Who was it?” I don’t know how Richter could have had the time to start his frame-up of Mischler, but it can’t have been Nate’s real killer either

Distantly, though, I know I’m just stalling.

James frowns at me. “Don’t you know? A Secret Service agent named George Mischler.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Something about his face . . . maybe it’s just because he’s the man who killed my brother, but something about him seemed wrong.” I’m guessing it was the rushed Photoshop job. In my memory, Mischler isn’t arrested for several more months; something must have happened to push Richter’s schedule forward. “I started to feel like the walls were closing in on me. I asked if I could see the CCTV footage of the people who shot at me at the hospital, and Richter said no. Came up with some excuse about it being out of his jurisdiction now, and it was like this alarm went off in my head. Why wouldn’t he let me see it? He must have seen it himself and knows that it shows you and Finn, not a couple of gang members like he said. He knows you’re my friends, so why wouldn’t he have had Marina and Finn arrested or at least told me about it by now?”

I don’t say anything. There’s only one explanation for it.

“Unless,” James says, “he knows it was really
you
and not her. And if he knows that, what else does he know?”

James stands, and I raise my gun again, but he doesn’t come any closer.

“I got so upset I ran in here, thinking I was going to throw up, and then I couldn’t make myself go back,” he says. “All I could think about was you and the things you’d told me. I’ve got to know
everything
, Marina.”

I wince. “Don’t call me that. It’s just Em now.”

Realization creeps into his face. “Like what Finn calls you?”

I pause. “Yeah.”

“Why don’t you go by Marina anymore? I’ve always loved your name.”

“It’s a silly name. It’s the name of a fairy-tale princess who gets back everything she ever lost.”

“God.” James tilts his head at me. “Who
are
you?”

I clench my hand around the hilt of the gun. I should do it now. Put us both out of our misery and spare Marina from the monster who’s coming for her. But he looks so sad and broken. Maybe it’s stupid, but I think Finn was right before. He deserves an explanation for why I’m going to put a bullet in his brain. Maybe then I’ll actually be able to pull the trigger.

“I will still kill you, you know,” I say.

“I know. And I’ll still fight.”

I sit down on the cold tile floor, the gun aimed at him, and James sits opposite me.

“What do you want to know?” I say. “Make it quick.”

“How does this work? If you kill me, you’ll create a paradox.”

“Time is sentient,” I say, “like you always suspected. Actions like this become fixed in time. A shadow of me will always be here to kill you, even after I’m gone.”

“And you know,” he says, “that if you kill me, you’ll die, too?”

I nod. “This version of me will blink right out of existence.”

“So you’re on a suicide mission.”

“I guess, but I don’t think of it that way. If I can give Marina a chance for an escape from what I’ve been through, what you’ve put me through”—he flinches at my words—“I don’t mind giving up this second-rate existence of mine.” What will she become if not me? Will she go to college, have children? Will she spend a year living in Europe and go skydiving on a dare and all the other things I used to dream about in my cold concrete cell?

He takes a deep breath as he absorbs my answer. “But why . . .”

The words fall off, and he pauses before trying again, his voice softer this time.

“If I really invented a time machine,” he says, “then where are my parents? Why didn’t I save them?”

It’s a good question, one I’ve always wondered about myself. James never would have become obsessed with the idea of time travel in the first place if his parents hadn’t died when he was a kid.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Knowing the version of you from my time as well as I do, I suspect you were afraid that if you saved them and grew up with a whole, happy family, you would never care enough about time to discover how to control it. And you’re so in love with the power it gives you that you couldn’t risk that. Maybe a time line exists somewhere where you made a different decision, but it isn’t this one, so I still have to stop you.”

James buries his fingers into his hair and looks down at the floor. “Why do you want to kill me?”

“I don’t.” The words come out harsher than I intend. “God, James, I never
wanted
this. But . . . things are so bad. . . .”

“How?” he says. “I need to know what that means.”

I sigh and lower the gun to my lap, though I can still raise and fire it before he could move six inches from where he sits. “It starts about a year from now. You’re working with Richter and the SIA. This place isn’t the Associated Institutes of Research; it’s the Security and Intelligence Administration, a covert subset of the CIA that works in conjunction with the Pentagon. In my memory, things happen mostly like they have so far. You meet Richter because he’s in charge of Nate’s case. He’s interested in your work with the fourth dimension, and he has resources you can’t get anywhere else. Our relationship grows strained. I don’t like Richter, and I’m scared of the changes I see in you.”

“What changes?”

“You become even more obsessed with your work.” I imagine James at eighteen, explaining his theories to me, the passion in his voice so bright, it’s almost mania. “Your idealism is one of the things I always loved most about you, but faced with the prospect of actually being able to change the world, you become rigid. You’re so convinced you’re right that you won’t entertain any doubts. It’s started happening already—do you see that?”

His eyes see past me. “The way I left with Richter even when they said I was vulnerable and he couldn’t be trusted.”

“It’s going to get worse,” I say. “A lot worse. Sometime—I’m not sure when—you’ll develop the machine at a classified government lab in rural Pennsylvania. You’ll call it Cassandra. That’s when things will start to change.”

“What kinds of things?”

“All kinds. For instance, before Cassandra, all the countries of Europe formed a single large nation called the European Union,” I say. “They had one government, one currency, everything. It would exist right now, except you and Richter used Cassandra to go back in time and stop it ever happening.”

“Why?” James asks, bewildered.

I shrug. “Richter convinced you it would be a threat to the United States.”

“How do you know this?”

“You told me about it,” I say, “during one of our midnight chats. You used to come into my cell at night and talk to me for hours sometimes. Mostly you’d want to talk about when we were kids, but sometimes you’d tell me what you and Richter were up to. Government leaders you had assassinated, terrorist attacks you either staged or stopped, natural disasters you were able to warn people about. Remember when the levees broke in New Orleans and flooded the whole place?”

“Sure,” he says. “The city was evacuated ahead of time, though.”

“Not originally. You made sure everyone was out of New Orleans before the hurricane hit, because you remembered the tragedy it had been the first time around.”

“See?” he says, eyes widening like a child. “I do good things. That’s all I want, to make things better.”

“I know.” For a moment, I’m tempted to reach out to him, but I wait out the urge. “I think that’s why part of me has such a hard time pulling this trigger, because I know that even the future version of you, who has done so many terrible things, honestly believes he’s acting for the greater good. Three years from now, a dirty bomb will go off in Manhattan, killing thousands and contaminating the Northeast.”

James’s voice is barely a whisper. “And I stop it?”

“Not exactly,” I say. “You, and more likely Richter, think that stopping that one bomb isn’t enough, because there will just be others. Instead of stopping the bombs, you need to stop the country’s vulnerability to them. So you’ll send people back in time—to one year from now, two years, six months—and have them set off a series of smaller bombs in half a dozen cities. Hundreds die instead of thousands, and the government pushes through dozens of new security measures that make what we have now look like mall security. A national biometric ID, no travel without authorization, electronic surveillance, body scanners in every building, CCTV on every street. It becomes impossible to do or say or buy anything without the government knowing about it. The dirty bomb never goes off, and in some ways we’re safer than ever, but—”

“I’ve created a police state,” James says, the horror palpable in his voice. “A totalitarian government.”

“Richter is worse,” I say. “He sees time as a weapon, something even more powerful than bombs to use against the Chinese or North Koreans or whoever he sees as a threat. I’m sure he pushed you into many of the worst things you used Cassandra for, but you were so blinded by then that you couldn’t see it.”

“Then why not kill him instead of me?” James demands.

“We tried that.” It was number four on the list. That version of me must have been tough as nails. “It didn’t work. I suspect there are plenty of equally ambitious, ruthless people who were able to take his place in your life. You
believe
, James, and no one can take that away from you. In the end, it always comes down to numbers with you. You’re willing to hurt a few people to save many more.”

“Are you one of the people I hurt?” he asks.

I nod. “Two years from now, Marina and Finn leave D.C. It’s right after the first bomb, in San Francisco, and they’re scared Richter will want to get rid of them because of what they know. Marina has documentation of some of your calculations for Cassandra—”