1564. This is all I did. What happens once I Send him is his responsibility.”
“Time travel,” I said hesitantly. “You can send people back in time.”
“People can be moved to other Strands,” she corrected me. “It is usually just a parlor trick, but sometimes it is useful to get somebody’s attention.”
“How much control do you have over it?” Tristan demanded, thinking fast. “Can you bring him back here before the crowd gets to him?”
She shook her head. “No, because I am not there with him. If he had asked a witch in Nagybörzsöny, politely, then she could have Sent him back here.”
“Why didn’t you mention you could do this?” I asked, trying pathetically to reap some useful research out of the situation. In truth, we should have known—it was in a couple of the translated documents, but always dismissed as being of minor significance.
She shrugged her dismissive shrug. “It is not a practical skill, there are so many . . . variables to contend with that it is of no practical use. It is seldom worth the bother.”
“You just murdered someone,” Tristan said.
“I just Sent him away,” she protested. “He was very rude to me.”
“That’s bullshit. You sent him there knowing he could die. You had control over a situation that resulted in a man’s death, how is that not murder?”
“There is never control when magic is involved,” she replied philosophically.
Tristan was nearly hyperventilating. “Moments ago he was in this room and now he’s dead. How is that not at least manslaughter?”
“He was going to shut the ODEC down,” she said. “I had to stop him.”
“You could have just turned him into a newt or something,” I said.
“You already know I can do that,” said Erszebet, preening again. “I wanted to show you something new.” To Tristan : “Isn’t that what you asked for? Something unexpected? To, what was your phrase? To ‘brand’ me?”
“This is a fucking catastrophe,” Tristan shouted, and kicked a chair. It tumbled across the room to the far wall, where the seat busted apart from the legs. “Fuck!”
“He was so disagreeable,” said Erszebet.
Tristan put his hands on his face and shuddered. “How the fuck am I ever going to explain this to . . . oh, Jesus Christ, you’ve ruined everything. Your own life. Do you understand that? That’s it, it’s over. You’re done. We’re done here.” He was pacing wildly and kept making the same anxious gesture of throwing his hands to either side as if he’d just walked into a spiderweb and were trying to free himself of the gossamer.
“I mean it,” he said, after a moment of silence. “Leave. Stokes, get out of here before you get embroiled in all of this. Leave her here.”
“I am no coward, I would not flee,” said Erszebet haughtily.
“That’s right. You’re going to prison,” he said flatly.
“That will be more interesting than the nursing home,” she replied, unfazed.
“Or I might just shoot you myself,” he said, suddenly weary. He uprighted the chair he’d destroyed, discovered it was broken, sat down on the floor.
Erszebet, perversely, looked delighted with this declaration. “Now you are speaking like a man of action. I have not seen such a side of you before. I approve of it.”
“I mean it, Stokes,” he said. His voice was husky. “Just get out of here. I’ve got to tell them what happened.” He put his hands over his face and began to mutter the phrases he would soon be typing into a report. “Diachronic effects confirmed . . . results unpredictable . . . Casualties . . . one KIA.”
Diachronic. Meaning “through time.”
Department of Diachronic . . . something?
“Go ahead and fetch his minion. I will Send him somewhere nicer,” Erszebet offered. “And then we can all pretend they never arrived and just go back to what we were doing. Only now we will do more interesting things, yes?”
Tristan pressed the heels of his hands hard against his closed eyes and groaned. “Shut up,” he said. “Stokes. Go. Really.”
“Go where?” I asked.
He moved his hands away from his eyes. “Just get out of town, let me deal with this. Somehow. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come home. Let Professor Oda know what happened so he doesn’t show up in the middle of a shitstorm offering to help with something.” He sighed heavily. “On your way out, tell Ramirez to come down here. I guess I start by breaking the news to him.”
I hesitated. I had an instinct to go to him, but as if he sensed this, he made a waving-away motion, like he was flicking something from his hand. “Go,” he repeated. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’ll be in touch when I can. Thanks for everything. Leave. Now.” He turned away from me.
Diachronicle
DAYS 305–309 (EARLY JUNE, YEAR 1)
In which not all is lost, although in retrospect perhaps it should have been
I SHALL SKIP OVER THE miserable, dreadful limbo of the next few days. Suffice it to say: after alerting the professor and his wife of the tragic developments, I retreated to my third-floor walk-up and never went out except to buy groceries.
I checked Facebook obsessively on the chance Erszebet would reach out to me that way. Nothing. I read the papers, actual and virtual; I ran Google searches (so what if they could trace me, they already knew who I was and where I lived). The dead taltos in Hungary remained an established historical fact. Erszebet Karpathy—the Asset, Schneider had called her—remained nonexistent.
I sniffed out possible job openings at universities so far below my pay grade that no prospective boss would bother contacting Blevins for a reference.
And—although this sounds dramatic—I suppose I grieved. I had thrown myself (uncharacteristically) with such abandon into the most remarkable adventure of my regimented little life, had reshaped myself as a trailblazer alongside a man I realized was the most vital human being I’d ever known . . . and now it was all gone. The life, the trail, the trailblazing, the man. I was an unemployed academic with a disastrous employment history and nothing to offer the world but an uncanny facility with (mostly dead and dying) languages. Nothing I might ever do would come close to seizing my attention the same way.
After what was easily the longest, most uncomfortable four or five days of my life, on an afternoon when I was so close to going mad that I began to re-alphabetize my vintage cookbook collection according to the Japanese syllabary, just to shut my brain up . . . the buzzer to my apartment blared. I almost jumped out of my skin.
I went to the door. “Who is it?” I shouted into the intercom.
“Stokes!” came a blessedly familiar voice through the crackle of crappy wiring.
I shouted with relief as I buzzed him in; he bounded up the stairs, and as he neared me, I can’t believe I did this, but I threw my arms around his neck and gave him an enormous hug. “Tristan!” I cried, and even planted a wet one on kissed his cheek. “You’re in one piece!”
Almost equally surprising, he was hugging me back, and he being so much taller than I, by the time he reached the landing, he had hoisted me off the ground. He squeezed me hard and then released me. “Better than one piece, even. Good to see you, Stokes.”
“Where’s Erszebet? What’s happened?”
“She’s fine, I’ll explain. What do you have for beer? Those pencil-pushers in DC all drink Bud