Rewinder

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

My plan is to catch a bus, but when I find one of the stops and ask a woman waiting there if I’m in the right place, she laughs.

“The only place this bus’ll take you is north,” she says. “You need to go west. To do that from here, you’ll have to go south first, then transfer to the one going to the beach. Not sure of the number.”

“How long do you think that will take?” I ask.

“Depends on how quickly the bus arrives. Maybe forty minutes. Could be an hour.”

An hour? I need to find a different way. “Thank you,” I say, and move off.

Half a block away, I see some people sitting in the patio area of a restaurant. I run up to the wooden railing that separates the patio from the parking area and yell, “I’m sorry to bother you, but can any of you give me a ride to the beach?”

Several people look over and then just as quickly return to their drinks.

“Please. It’s an emergency.”

A guy sitting at a table about ten feet away looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “The beach is an emergency?”

“I have to meet someone there at four. It’s…”

As the man laughs, I realize no one here is going to help me.

I run down the street and spot a large parking area in front of a big store with a sign reading HOME DEPOT. There’s a lot of traffic going in and out.

I concentrate on those walking back to their vehicles. The first person I ask looks at me as if I were crazy and hurries off before I can even offer what cash I have. Three more people react the same way.

Why won’t anyone help me?

I whirl around, looking for my next target.

“Please,” I say to a couple of guys who aren’t much older than I am. “Are you headed to the beach? I need a ride.”

“Get lost,” one of them says.

I’m about to turn away when the other guy says, “Which beach?”

“Straight west of here.” I don’t know what it’s called, but that’s where the point on the map was.

“PB?” he asks.

“Maybe. I’m not from here.”

“Come on, Jerry. Let’s get out of here,” the first one says.

The other one — Jerry — still looks at me. “We can get you most of the way there. You’ll have to ride in the back of the truck, though.”

“I’m fine with that. Thank you.”

His friend looks upset, and they fall into a whispered conversation as I follow them to their vehicle. Then Jerry nods at the open rear cargo area of a vehicle and says, “Get in.”

I pull my cash out of my pocket. “Here. It’s all I’ve got. Fifteen dollars. For your trouble.”

“Keep it,” Jerry says. “We’re going that way anyway.”

I sit with my back against the passenger cabin, sharing space with several boards, some round cans with thin metal handles, and a cloth tarp.

As the two guys deposit their bags next to the boards, Jerry says, “You’ll have to lie down. If the police catch you back there, we’re both going to be in trouble.”

“No problem,” I say.

I stretch out as best I can as they climb into the cab, and then we’re on our way.

The vehicle seems to be in a constant state of agitation, and I feel every bump. Turns are another problem. If I don’t brace my arm against the side, I’ll slide around, something I learned quickly when my shoulder smacks into one of the cans.

All I can see are the tops of buildings and blue sky, but nothing can keep away the feeling that I’ll be too late.

I don’t know how Lidia got her hands on Iffy, but there’s no question about why she took her.

To control me. And it’s working.

The truck has stopped so many times that I don’t even notice anymore, so I’m surprised when I hear one of the doors open.

Jerry peeks into the back. “This is as close as we can get you.” He points to the left. “That way three blocks and you’ll be there.”

I hop to my feet. “Thank you so much.”

My satchel bounces against my hip as I move to the edge. Before I climb out, I grab one of the coins I have inside and hand it to him. “Take this, at least. It’s not much, but—”

“What is this?” he asks, turning it around.

I jump onto the street. “Eighteenth-century Spanish dollar.”

“Are you serious?”

I nod. “Thank you again.”

Before he can say anything more, I run off in the direction he pointed.

I don’t stop until I reach the walkway at the landside edge of the beach. The location Lidia left for me can’t be far. I look around, hoping something will stand out, but to the south there is only sand and more sand.

The view north is not quite the same. A couple hundred yards away, a pier sticks out into the ocean. Could that be it?

“Excuse me,” I say to a man heading down the path. “Can you tell me the time?”

He pulls a phone out and looks at the screen. “A few minutes until four.”

As he starts to put it back, I say, “How many exactly?”

“Um, six.”

“Thank you.”

Six minutes. Whether it’s the pier or not, that’s the direction I run in.

As the path nears the pier, it jogs to the right and slopes upward between two buildings. But I’m not paying attention to either structure. My eyes are locked on the arched entrance to the pier ahead. That’s why I don’t notice Lidia race out from in front of the building on the left until she throws an arm around me and jerks me to a stop.

“Hello, Denny,” she says.

Before I can get a word out, the world disappears and we’re surrounded by the familiar gray mist. This lasts barely two seconds before we’re on firm ground again.

Wherever we are, it’s night, and given that nothing hurts, I know we haven’t gone far in time. Probably only a few hours back to the previous evening.

I widen my eyes to help them adjust, but with only stars and no other lights around, it’s taking some time for me to focus. The crashing waves tell me we’re still near the ocean but the ground is not sand, nor is it concrete like the path I was on. Grass, I think, or something similar.

Lidia removes her arm and yanks my satchel off me.

“Hey!” I say, twisting around and trying to grab it back. “That’s mine.”

“Shut up. You speak only if I ask you a question.”

“Where are we? Where’s Iffy?”

I see her hand a split second before it smacks into the side of my face.

“I told you to shut up!”

My cheek stings but I refrain from rubbing it. “And I asked you where Iffy is.”

I brace myself, ready to grab her arm if she tries to hit me again, but she doesn’t. Instead, I hear the flap of my satchel open, then Lidia saying, “Huh. Well, that explains it. I was wondering why you didn’t jump to where I was. You’re out of power. Which means you’ve been doing a lot of hopping around.”

I lunge at her, grabbing for the bag, but she whips it out of the way as she turns sideways. Unfortunately for her, this puts her rib cage in the direct path of my forearm. I ram it into her, and she stumbles backwards with a loud grunt.

I realize too late I should have kept going and completely subdued her, but thinking that way doesn’t come naturally to me.

Lidia, on the other hand, doesn’t have that problem. As soon as she steadies herself, she kicks me squarely in the stomach. Doubling over, I trip on something and land hard.

My hip aches, and I’m pretty sure I’ve scraped a chunk of skin off my arm, but I ignore the pain. I roll onto my side and tuck into a ball in case she lashes out again.

“Get up!” she orders.

I don’t move.

“I said, get up!”

Her foot slams into the small of my back, shooting a whole new blaze of pain through me.

“On your feet, dammit!”

I don’t want to feel her shoe a third time, so I gingerly move into a sitting position. As I put my hands down to push myself up, one of them hits the thing I tripped on. My Chaser. It must have dropped out of Lidia’s hand when I hit her.

“Hurry up,” she says.

I start to pick up the device as I stand, but she steps forward and knocks it away.

She then wraps a hand around my neck, and I feel a knife press against the skin just below my ear. “Where are the others?”

“The others?”

“Bernard and everyone who were with us. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

She tightens her grip and I start to choke. “Don’t lie to me! You said you knew when the break occurred and you fixed it. But you never fixed it, did you?”

“I…can’t…breathe.”

She stares at me, eyes bulging for another few seconds before easing her grip enough for me to suck in air again.

“Where are they?” she asks again.

“They went home.”

“You’re lying. You obviously never changed the world back. Where are they?”

I keep my mouth shut.

The metal tip pushes into my skin just enough to break the surface. “I know you know what’s going on. I could see you were lying when we all met. That’s why I only jumped into the woods. I wanted to see what you were going to do. When I saw that you waited to be last, I knew I was right. What happened to them?”

I counter with a raspy, “Where’s Iffy?”

“Answer my question!”

I shake my head, not an easy thing to do with her fingers pressed against the bottom of my jaw. “I don’t see her, you don’t learn anything.”

Neither of us moves. Finally, Lidia lets go of me and takes a step back. “All right. I’ll let you see her and then you tell me what happened. If you don’t, she’s dead. Do we understand each other?”

I nod.

“Say it,” she orders me.

“Yes.”

“Good. Now don’t move.”

She circles behind me and as she starts to put her arm around my waist, I realize we’re about to jump.

“Wait!” I yell. “My Chaser. We can’t just leave it here.”

Her arm hovers over my stomach for a second before she pulls it back. “Get it. But don’t try anything. If you do, I’ll leave you here and you’ll never see your little girlfriend again.”

Her warning is unnecessary. I’m not going to try anything, not yet, anyway. Seeing that Iffy’s all right is the only important thing right now.

I retrieve my Chaser and say, “I’m ready.”

It’s still night, and like before, I feel no pain.

My eyes, having already adjusted to the lower light, have no problem seeing my surroundings now. There is no ocean here, only a wide plain of dirt and brush with distant mountains on all sides.

The desert, I think, though I might be wrong. Though I lived close to it when I was in New Cardiff, I never visited it.

I listen for the sound of vehicles, but the only thing I hear is Lidia’s footsteps as she backs away from me.

Motioning with her knife, she says, “This way.”

I follow her across the dirt into a dry riverbed. Lying on the sand, pushed up against the bank, is Iffy, her hands and feet tied.

I sling off my satchel and set it and my Chaser on the ground as I drop beside her. “Are you all right?” I shake her shoulder. “Iffy?”

Her eyes remain closed, and for a moment I think Lidia might have already killed her. It’s only the rise and fall of her chest that eases my panic.

I twist around and glare at Lidia. “What did you do to her?”

Her lip arches in a sneer. “Just like I thought. You’ve lost yourself.” She grunts in revulsion.

“How did you find her?”

“I didn’t find her. She found me. Thought I would be you for some reason.”

Lidia’s Chaser, I realize. Somehow it connected to Iffy. Now I know why mine didn’t link with her when I came back.

Lidia raises her knife a few inches. “Where are the others, Denny?”

“They’re gone,” I say.

“Gone where?”

“I told you. They went home.”

It takes a moment before the reality of my words hit her. When they do, she rushes toward me like she’s going to grab my throat again, but I jump to my feet and shove her back.

“What did you do?” she asks, her teeth clenched.

“I didn’t lie when I told everyone I’d changed things back. What I left out was that I wasn’t done yet.”

Her expression darkens. “You bastard! You let them go back home, and then you, you changed it all to…” She looks around as if she’s never seen anything so disgusting in her life. “To this?” Her gaze shifts past me to Iffy. “All because of her?”

My guilt feels like a set of clothes two sizes too small. I sent the others to the equivalent of their deaths. But I would do it again. It was the only way I could ensure my sister’s and Iffy’s survival. “I did what I had to do.”

Those seven words push her over the edge. She leaps at me, knife flashing. Her anger has gotten the best of her so her attack is uncontrolled. I’m able to push her weapon to the side and wrap my arms around her. In a heap, we fall to the ground.

As soon as we hit, I roll to the side but she pins me down with her knees. The knife is gone, but that doesn’t stop her rage. Her hands seem to come at me from all directions — hitting, slapping, pulling.

“You’re going to change it back, dammit! You’re going to bring our world back!”

Her palm slaps against my ear and suddenly all I can hear is ringing.

This actually helps me focus. When one of her hands races toward me again, I knock it away and shove her with all my strength.

She flies off me and lands in a heap.

I hop to my feet and move back to Iffy, intending to pick her up, but my eyes are drawn to a light nearby. The screen on my Chaser is on. In the tumble, one of us must have hit the power button and it hasn’t shut down again. When I see the power level at.88 %, an idea comes to me.

Instead of grabbing Iffy, I grab the device and twist back around just as Lidia pulls herself to her feet. She twirls left and right, searching the ground before reaching down and snatching up the knife.

With a roar, she starts toward me.

I shove my Chaser out in front of me and yell, “Stop or I’ll smash it to pieces and we’ll never be able to change anything!”

Her steps falter, but she says, “Go ahead. I’ve still got mine.”

“Does yours have the exact coordinates of the change? It’s a very precise moment and location.”

“You know the date and time and basic area. We can figure it out from there.”

“And blunder around? Risking an even bigger error? Is that what you want to do?”

Getting the location from me is a possibility, but I could make it very difficult. It would be a hell of a lot easier to use the data stored in the Chaser, and I can see she realizes this.

“Have you really looked at this world?” I ask.

She snorts. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“What happens if you go back? You live the rest of your life inside the walls of the institute? That’s prison, Lidia. Do you really want that? Here you could live free, go where you want, be whoever you want to be.”

“You think I should just stay here?”

“It’s not a terrible idea. In fact, it’s a pretty damn good one. Drop your knife, give me your Chaser, and we’ll go our separate ways.”

“That easy, huh?”

“That easy.”

She looks like she’s actually considering the idea before she laughs loudly. “You really think I’d go for that? Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to give me your Chaser, Denny.”

I knew she wouldn’t take me up on my offer, but I had to give her a chance. Alternating my gaze between her and my Chaser, I start working the menu, praying it doesn’t shut down again.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

I don’t answer.

“Denny, what are you doing?”

She takes a step toward me so I raise the Chaser into the air like I’m going to throw it into the ground. When she stops, I pull it back down and pick up where I left off.

“What are you doing?” she asks again.

Again, I say nothing.

On the screen is a list of jumps stored in the device’s memory. I begin erasing them one at a time.

“Denny! Stop!”

When I get to the entry for the cemetery where my mother is buried, I pause. Though there is no cemetery at that location in this world, erasing it feels like forgetting. My finger hovers above DELETE for several seconds before it finally taps the button.

“Listen to me,” she says. “We’ll go back and fix things together, okay? When we get back to the institute, I won’t tell anyone it was you.”

She takes another step toward me.

“Back off!” I shout.

I’m almost there. There’s only one location left on my screen — the meadow where we gathered in 1702. I leave the location the same, but change the date to one in 1743, hoping that will be enough. I’m just finishing up when Lidia charges.

I twist sideways and hug the Chaser to my chest, expecting her to smash into me, but instead of heading in my direction, she goes left and kneels next to her bag, where she dropped it when we first arrived.

She pulls out her Chaser and smiles at me. As she moves her fingers over the control buttons, I hold out my device and say, “Here. You can have it!”

She pauses.

“The location’s there,” I say. “I was just getting rid of everything else.”

She eyes me suspiciously. “Why?”

“Because…because I’m not going with you.”

“Oh, no. You need to show me what needs to be done.”

“It’s easy. You’ll see me there. Just stop me from entering the building. That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

It takes a moment, but I can see she’s decided I’m not lying to her. And I’m not, at least not completely. “If you stay here…”

“I get erased,” I say. “What do you think my life’s going to be like when I go back? I’d rather it end here.”

She looks past me at Iffy. “You should’ve never left whatever slum it is you came from, Eight. You were always playing over your head with us.”

My jaw tenses. “Are you going to take this or not? Because my offer expires in ten seconds.”

She slips her own Chaser back in her bag and gets to her feet. Pulling the strap over her shoulder, she walks toward me. “All right. Let me see it.”

When she nears, I give it to her, but not the way she’s expecting. I whip it into the side of her head and she drops to the ground, blood oozing from her temple.

I check her pulse. It’s strong, so I probably have only a few seconds. I work her bag off her shoulders and confirm her Chaser is in there.

As I toss the bag to the side, she starts to moan. I scan the immediate area, looking for something long and sturdy. The best I can find is a withered branch about a foot and a half in length. I’m not sure it’s enough but it’ll have to do.

I pick up my Chaser and see the screen has gone blank again.

No, no, no! I tap the power button. When it comes back to life, I whisper, “Stay on, stay on, stay on,” and set the device on Lidia’s stomach.

Stick in hand, I stand.

“Hey, what the hell? What’s this…?” Lidia fumbles the Chaser as she tries to tilt her head up.

I jab the branch into the GO button.