Twin Speex: Time Traitors Book II (31 page)

“Micro-what—”

“Micro-distortions,” an unfamiliar female voice interjected.

They turned as one to see a woman standing in the doorway. She was dressed entirely in black and white, the swirling houndstooth weave of her very tight trousers made Ettie a little cross-eyed. A form-fitting black silk jacket with a wide peplum covered a plain white shirt and accentuated her generous bosom, small waist, and shapely hips. Her feet were clad in heavy, black knee-high boots, and a jaunty little Robin Hood hat sat perched upon thick, black curls.

She carried a long ruler in one hand that she tapped along the side of her leg. Her full lips were parted in a slight smile and hooded eyes looked back at them with confident sensuality. Ettie felt rather than heard a collective intake of breath as if the male inhabitants of the room were taking a few heartbeats to adjust to her magnetism. Ettie resisted the urge to cut her eyes over to see Charlie’s reaction.

“Ah, Adelaide… Adelaide Farnsworth” Kevin announced, clearing his throat. “Odette Speex and—”

“Charles Drake, Earl of Westchester,” she purred. Her eyes held a spark of suspicion as she walked to the table and sat down. She crossed her legs and balanced the ruler on her knee. Looking directly at Kevin, she asked with thinly veiled hostility, “Do we trust him?”

“A question I’ve asked myself many times,” Ettie answered before Kevin could respond. She spoke in a clear, uncompromising tone determined to assert control over the conversation and their situation. “You don’t have to trust him, but I do. So if you want my help, you’ll just accept that and move on.”

Charlie’s lips twisted in a dry smile, but Adelaide turned to her with a hard look.

“What makes you think we need your help?”

Ettie’s gaze didn’t flinch. “Because we wouldn’t be here unless you did. My brother believed I could help, but you must also or why else expose your operation to outsiders? As a favor to your friend’s sister?” She looked a Kevin. “You could throw us off the roofs or leave us to the Feralon, but I don’t believe you are so depraved as to lure us up here just for that purpose.”

“No, depravity is the domain of the nobility,” Adelaide quipped, her hostility no longer veiled.

Dr. Smyth held up his hand for silence. “She’s right, Adelaide, we need her and likely Lord Westchester as well.”

“So why are we here?” Ettie asked, turning her full attention to Kevin in a determined effort to push past Adelaide’s interference. “I can only assume you and my brother hatched some sort of plan.”

“No, not a plan exactly,” he admitted, “but an idea.” He stood up. “Please, follow me.”

They followed him to the table where he had spread out various papers and maps. Kevin shifted the papers around looking for something and found it under a heavy parchment. From a thick glass box he pulled out a wristwatch-like instrument.

Charlie drew in a quick breath. “Where did you get that?”

Kevin held up the chromaticon to show the large digital face and array of tiny dotted lights. “You can’t imagine I’d tell you that.” He laughed. “She may trust you.” He indicated Ettie. “But I choose to be careful.”

Charlie merely shrugged his shoulders, but Ettie noted an extra level of tension from Adelaide as she threw Dr. Smyth a pleading look.

“Where we got it is really of no consequence,” Kevin continued. “It was discarded, because it no longer functions properly. Adelaide and I have been working for the past several years on the particle shifts and translations associated with
poste me
that I first noted at the Academy over twenty years ago. I built a more rudimentary model of the chromaticon. It was then that I recognized the
poste me
as a kind of time shift or miniature temporal distortion, MTD for short.” He nodded at Ettie. “Your brother was able to add much depth and nuance to the theory.” He laughed with self-deprecation. “Of course, he was able to add much more than that… proof that the timeline had been manipulated. It was a theory I was reluctant to truly consider until I’d met him.”

Adelaide sat down on the edge of the table, her resting leg swinging rhythmically. She reached out and took the chromaticon from his grasp. “What this device has done is alert us to a more sophisticated technology. The machine we built is much larger.” She turned the chromaticon over in her hands and ran shapely fingers along the smooth metal. “This little beauty can detect a much smaller signal or shift, and it’s a fraction of the size of our machine.”

“Your brother,” Kevin told them, “theorized that there must be a stabilizing element to the flux… perhaps an opening in the space-time continuum that allows them to tinker, so to speak, with the timeline—”

Ettie shook her head to stop him. “Listen, I appreciate you trying to explain all this to me. But honestly, it’s not going to make much sense to me either way.”

She walked back over to her chair where she had set a canvass bag on the floor. “So I’m guessing you need to find this stabilizing element, this opening, and close it,” she declared, grabbing the bag and walking back to the table. Kevin nodded. “Well, I came to give you these.” Setting the bag on the table, she pulled from its depths the phantasometer, spyglass, and cube paperweight. “Odell left them with me, along with a letter.”

Kevin and Adelaide bent over the objects, examining first the phantasometer and then the other two.

“Well, this…” Kevin indicated the phantasometer. “…looks something similar to the chromaticon.”

“It is,” Ettie agreed. “With one particular difference, it once functioned as a kind of transporter.”

“Once?” Adelaide asked.

“Odell used it to meet with a… a being of sorts. In his letter, he called him a trans-dimensional entity,
proditoris aevus
, or Time Traitor.” She shrugged her shoulders a little helplessly. “But apparently after my mother died, its ability to transport didn’t last long.”

Both Kevin and Adelaide looked at her inquiringly. So she related the story Odell had spelled out in his letter, his meeting with Ambrosius, the role of time and its minions, Odette, and his task to reconfigure a key event of the past.

After she had finished, they stood looking at her, speechless. For Charlie, this was the first time he had heard the entire story.

“Time? Adelaide muttered, her brow furrowed, “The enemy?”

Kevin began to pace agitatedly up and down the spacious room, his hands thrust deep into his pockets and looking down at his feet. Finally, he stopped and said, “Time and humans have never mixed well. Our lives are so short…” He shook his head and combed his fingers through his wild hair. “But that doesn’t explain why time would exploit our worst impulses. There is no evidence that its nature is more likely to constrict than dilate…”

“Why not seek out those expansive, connective actions, you mean?” Adelaide said, eagerly following up on his thought.

“Exactly,” he muttered half to himself. “Time isn’t the determining factor here, we are.” He turned to Ettie. “And Odell believes these… ah… Time Traitors are super-evolved humans?”

“That is what he was told, and, of course…” She cleared her throat to dislodge a little jagged piece of jealousy. “…his… our sister, Odette, is one.”

Kevin rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “I’m not convinced.”

“You don’t have to be convinced of the theory underlying this crisis… just that it
is
a crisis!” Charlie exclaimed, frustrated with what he felt to be needless debate. “Whether it is the result of time, or people, or some combination of both, this constriction is real, and the outcome will be the same.”

“He’s right,” Adelaide unexpectedly agreed with him, “the why sometimes doesn’t matter. This is bigger than just who has power and how it is used. If we as a species continue as we are, we will destroy ourselves. Maybe the Time Traitors were only meant to be
part
of the evolutionary process, the part that dealt with the nature of time. Perhaps they are only adept at one end of the equation.”

“And the human end of the equation…?” Kevin urged.

“We’ve failed,” she stated bluntly. “Even with the Time Traitors, with their way stations and TIFs, they can’t do it alone. They needed us to be better, and we’ve failed.”

They stood silently regarding each other until Kevin asked, “How is this different from the last time Odell told me about?” He looked at Ettie. “Why not just muck around in the timeline fixing things. What are we supposed to do? Find the source of the time shifts? Destroy it? Then what? Is it over? Or does it just take on another form? Go in another direction?”

“I’m not sure. I think Odette makes it different; she’s special. They’ve been waiting for her.” Ettie drew in a deep breath and picked up the spyglass, turning it absently over in her hands. “I know Odell is up to something, but we can’t just sit back and wait. He intended we should find the source of the rift in this timeline and put a stop to it.”

Ettie pulled the slender telescope to its full length and put it to her eye, absently surveying the room. She suddenly yelped and almost dropped it.

“It was right there—right there!” she cried out, pointing over Kevin Smyth’s shoulder and frantically looking around the room.

“What? What are you talking about?” Charlie asked. “What’s right there?”

Ettie’s hands were shaking, and she stood clutching the spyglass to her breast. “It was… it was… a person of sorts, hooded, in black. I couldn’t see a face.”

Kevin and Adelaide exchanged a puzzled look.

“You’re describing a Feralon,” Adelaide replied. “But while they are certainly good at hiding and very quick, I don’t believe they can hide in plain sight.”

“But I saw it through this,” Ettie insisted, thrusting the spyglass out in front of her. “I’ve looked through it before, but it only showed darkness and little floating points of light. I thought it was broken.”

Ettie swallowed hard and put it back up to her eye. She pointed it behind Kevin and gasped. Finally, she swallowed again and said tremulously, “I see you.”

Her three companions stood quietly observing her, while the hooded creature in the spyglass cocked its head to one side as if acknowledging her words. She watched as it reached its hands out in a gesture like parting a curtain. Ettie lowered the spyglass, and the little Feralon materialized out of thin air behind Kevin.

“Oh, my God!” Adelaide exclaimed, paranoia gripping her throat. “Have they been around us the whole time?”

Kevin turned slowly and looked down at the small creature, for it was no bigger than a ten-year-old child.

“What have we here?” he muttered.

Ettie couldn’t see its face, but she had the impression that it hadn’t taken its eyes off of her. It moved over to the table and picked up the cube paperweight. The creature walked to Ettie and handed her the object. She felt tingling in her fingers, and the object’s surface swirled with a murky glow, as if containing a cloud. Then two words appeared across one side.

“Help us.”

Twenty-Three

THE HOSPITAL ROOM was a dreary reflection of the overcast sky just outside its window. The light was low with the onset of dusk, and large raindrops plopped loudly against the glass pane. Clementine Lacy sat with her legs curled beneath her in an armchair typically reserved for family and visitors. A cup of hot tea warmed her hands as she watched the man sleeping peacefully in the hospital bed.

They had moved him only the day before to the recovery wing. The room was larger and better suited to accommodate family who wished to visit or stay overnight. There were some lovely prints decorating the walls, and the armchair and small sofa pulled out into perfectly acceptable beds. The recovery wing was designed to be peaceful, though Clem found it somewhat unnerving. It lacked the bustle and purpose of the medical wings and consisted of short, intersecting hallways that seemed entirely too quiet and isolated.

It was her break and, as was her custom of the last few days, Clem had come to share it with Arthur Bradley. So regular had become her visits and so happily anticipated by their patient, that the nursing staff adjusted his medication schedule so he was sure to be awake when she stopped in. Today, however, he had taken those first few steps on his own, and the pain was such that there could be no delay in medicinal relief.

Clem was disappointed. She liked the man. He was kind and interesting. Even before meeting Ettie, Clem had known of Professor Arthur Bradley from his opinion pieces in the Daily Mirror. The Mirror, as it was referred to locally, was the paper of record in New York City. Any important issue or debate was reported on and discussed within its pages.

Arthur Bradley was a noted professor of economics and an unlikely champion of educating women. Since Ettie did not assume his last name, the connection between the respected professor and famous ballerina was not generally known. Certainly, Clem had never known of it before. But she had silently cheered his editorials on allowing more than a very small quota of women into the universities.

Clem had an ulterior motive for her visits as well; she had hoped to coax from him the details of the night of his attempted murder, but so far his memory failed in recalling that traumatic event. She had even overheard Inspector Hamilton voice frustration at his enduring memory loss.

In the few visits Ettie managed to fit into her frantic schedule, Clem had discerned an attitude of wariness and even fear on the part of her patient. She had a theory why Arthur was reluctant to speak about that night, but it was such that she felt unable to share it with Ettie. So she had spoken instead to Aunt Abigail.

“I think he’s not entirely convinced that Ettie wasn’t his attacker,” she had confided in her aunt one evening in the blue sitting room. “I saw the painting; they look almost exactly alike.”

Aunt Abigail stirred the little silver sugar spoon around in her tea, contemplating the ripples. “Yes, but dear, didn’t you say that Inspector Hamilton had her under surveillance at the time of her father’s attack? And that the assailant was an older woman?”