Rewinder

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Don’t sit down,” Marie tells me as I enter my study room.

We have just started the fifth week of my individual training, but this is the first time I’ve arrived to find no books on the table. Instead, there are two leather, over-the-shoulder satchels.

When I reach the table, Marie pulls one of the bags forward and says, “This is a standard mission kit.”

My skin tingles with excitement. We’ve discussed the kits before, but this is the first I’ve seen one in person.

“Open it,” she tells me.

Like a child on his birthday, I throw open the flap.

“Now carefully remove the contents and lay them on the table,” she instructs.

A sweater is on top, brown and nothing fancy. It’s designed, I know, to blend in with whatever time period this kit has been prepared to visit. There are other clothes, too — a shirt, a pair of pants, and one pair each of underwear and socks. Marie has told me that at most a kit will contain two sets of clothes. If in the very unlikely event a trip would last long enough to need more, items could be locally obtained. Next comes a plastic food box.

“What does that tell you?” she asks as I open the box.

Inside is enough room for several prepackaged meals, but it contains only one and a couple energy squares. “This isn’t for a long trip,” I say.

“And?”

Her question trips me up for a moment, until I realize the answer is the box itself. “And the trip can’t be going very far back, thirty years at most, I would think.” Any earlier and the box might draw unwanted attention.

She nods. “Keep going.”

I set the box down and pull out a notebook with attached pen, a cloth pouch that holds the medical kit, and a second pouch that contains several tools — knife, wrench, small screwdrivers, and a measuring tape.

The final item is inside a padded sleeve. I remove it from the box and pull off the sleeve.

A Chaser device.

When Marie showed me one at the beginning of training, I had no idea how to even turn it on. But in the weeks since, she’s taught me the meaning of every button and dial, gone over the steps for various operations, and tested me repeatedly until I knew it all by heart. I look at it now with educated eyes but it still holds so much wonder.

“This is yours,” she says.

“Mine?” I say, still looking at it.

“It’s the same one as before, but is keyed to you. Can you open it, please?”

After I unlock the latch, she takes it back and turns the power on. Once the screen comes to life, she navigates through several displays until she comes to one with the heading TRAINEE SETTINGS. There, she touches a button labeled SLAVE. Immediately a box pops up, with the word AUTHORIZATION at the top, an empty entry line in the middle, and a row of numbers, 0–9, at the bottom. She quickly taps in seven numbers, and as the last is entered, the authorization box is replaced by another with the word LINKING glowing in the middle.

“Right now it’s trying to link with my Chaser.”

She sets it on the table and removes her device from the other satchel. When she turns it on, the word LINKING on mine begins to pulse. After about five seconds, the word is replaced by READY.

“Repack the bag,” she tells me. “All but this.” She touches the Chaser.

I carefully put the items back inside.

When I’m done, she says, “Strap it on. You may need some of it on the trip.”

My hands begin to shake. Trip? Now?

She pulls the strap of her satchel over her shoulder, and after I did the same, she hands me my Chaser. “Technically, the two of us could jump with just mine if you held on to me tight, but you need to get used to what it feels like to be alone. After training is done, you’ll always leave from the departure hall. But we don’t have to worry about that at the moment. All set?”

I nod, though how can one ever be ready for this moment?

“We won’t be going far. Five years only. So the most you may feel is a mild headache, and likely not even that.” She pauses. “What is the mission?”

“To observe and record,” I say automatically. It’s a phrase that has been drilled into us during both mental and physical training. It’s also printed on a banner in the dining hall and a plaque above my bed. As Sir Gregory has stressed countless times, “It’s not just what we do. It’s all we do.”

“All right. Then I guess we should go.”

She pushes the GO button on her Chaser, and—

A dark gray mist surrounds me, but it’s there only long enough for me to register it before a different kind of darkness replaces it. A starry, moonless night.

I gasp. I don’t know if we’ve really gone back in time, but we have gone someplace other than my training room.

“Steady,” Marie says from beside me. “On first arrival, what do you do?”

On first what? My head aches with dull pain.

“Denny, take a breath and tell me what you’re supposed to do.”

I take three, not one, each slower and deeper than the last. Finally, the pain fades enough for me to answer. “Check your surroundings.”

“Then do it.”

I scan the area and see we’re in what appears to be a deserted alley.

Our location and time of day fits standard Rewinder procedures. First arrivals should occur at an out-of-the-way spot in the dead of night, suggested time between three and four a.m. This rule allows a Rewinder to get the lay of the land before daylight hours.

My Chaser displays a local time of 3:21 a.m. on May 16, 2009. The actual location is given as a string of numbers that can only be deciphered using the device’s calculator program, so I ask, “Where are we?”

“Chicago,” she says.

The Midlands, I think. Though I flew over this part of the continent on the way to New York, I have never set foot in it before. But the same could be said for anywhere that’s not New Cardiff.

“Come on,” she says, and then leads me to where the alley dumps onto a road lined with parked carriages.

I’m not an expert on vehicles, but none looks like any of the newer models I’ve seen advertisements for. The buildings on either side of the street are apartments, some with businesses on the ground floor. It could be 2009, and it could be 2014. Nothing stands out. There is one fact, though, I can’t ignore. When we left my training room it was morning, and here it’s middle of the night. Given that there’s only an hour’s time difference between New York and Chicago — if this is indeed Chicago — then I’ve either been unconscious for several hours or we’ve really traveled through time.

Marie turns down the sidewalk and I quickly step after her to catch up.

“I assume you saw the date?” she asks after a few minutes.

“Uh-huh.”

“And does it mean anything to you?”

The date? I look back at my Chaser to confirm. May 16, 2009.

May 16, 2—

I stop walking. Marie looks back at me.

“Oh, my God,” I say.

“Hold that thought.” She pushes the GO button again.

The change from darkness to a blink of the gray mist to sunlight is so abrupt that I have to slam my eyes shut.

“We don’t have much time,” Marie says. “Come on.”

She grabs my arm, pulls me to the left. Through narrowed eyelids, I see we’re in a field. Weeds and wild grass brush against my legs and I almost trip on what I at first think is a rock, but realize it’s the edge of the old foundation for a long destroyed building.

As my vision continues to adjust, I see we’re headed toward a group of brick buildings that look to me like old, abandoned warehouses.

“Still Chicago?” I ask.

Marie nods. “Southern industrial zone.”

When we reach the end of the field, she crosses the street and races over to one of the warehouses. As I follow, I once again have the feeling this is a place she knows. The feeling is reinforced when she jogs up to a set of metal doors and pulls them open like she already knew they’d be unlocked.

On the other side of the doorway is a staircase, but I don’t catch up to Marie until I reach the top landing, and this is only because she’s stopped to wait for me.

“We’re here for one purpose only,” she says. “This place gives us a good vantage point. Whatever else you see here is not important. Okay?”

“Sure,” I say. “Got it.”

She opens the door and we walk onto the sunlit roof of the warehouse. The weather-protection material that once covered the roof is torn in several places and missing altogether in others. There are at least half a dozen spots where the wood beneath has rotted away, leaving holes that offer a swift trip down to the concrete slab four floors below.

I’m so focused on avoiding these traps that I don’t realize we aren’t alone until we almost reach the raised lip at the edge. Looking around, I spot four other pairs of people scattered along the roof and immediately note a disturbing similarity. In each group, there is one person who looks to be around my age. That’s not the crazy part, though. The second one of each pair is Marie.

The same woman who brought me here.

Counting the one I’m with, there are five of her.

“Focus,” my Marie hisses at me.

I turn to her, and though I’m sure she can see the shock and confusion in my eyes, she ignores my unspoken questions and points toward the city.

“You see it? The tallest one?”

I have to force myself to look toward downtown.

“Yes,” I say, picking out the infamous Dawson Tower. From here it looks like a sparkling finger pointed at the sky.

“Just a few seconds now,” she says.

So much is running through my mind that I almost miss the very thing she’s brought me here to see. From this distance, we’re unable to see the exact moment the twenty-third floor begins its collapse, but we can’t miss the hundred-plus floors above it beginning to tilt. One of the others with us on the roof shouts in horror as the giant structure breaks into pieces, and a part of me is surprised I haven’t yelled, too.

It was supposed to be the tallest building in North America when it was finished, but on May 16, 2009, less than a month from completion, the tower collapsed onto the city, taking several other structures with it and killing thousands. That bit of history from five years ago is happening now right in front of my eyes.

“We could have saved some of them,” I say as a great cloud of dust rises. “We could have saved all of them if we wanted to.”

“And if we did?” Marie asks.

I know what answer she wants me to say but I find it impossible to voice. Who cares what happens after? Who cares what changes would occur to our present? We could have saved them!

“Suppose we did,” she says when I don’t answer. “Perhaps we convince a worker who would have been on the seventy-sixth floor to stay home. What if, in his relief for not having been in the accident, he gets drunk and causes the death of someone who wasn’t in the tower, someone who, in our home time, was still alive when we left? Now that person is not. Babies will be born who shouldn’t have been, and others who were born will cease to exist. Relationships with husbands and wives and lovers and friends and enemies and business partners will all play out differently. There’s no way to predict what will happen, except to say that our time will be forever altered. All this because we save the lives of those who were already dead. As much as we all wish it were different, a Rewinder is not a god. A Rewinder is an observer, who keeps his contact with those in the time he’s visiting to a bare minimum.”

“I get it,” I say. “I just…”

“It’s human nature to want to help,” she says.

I nod. That’s it exactly.

“I feel the same way every time I watch this happen,” she says.

“How do you keep from acting?”

She’s silent for several seconds, then says something that sounds more like she’s reading it from one of the institute’s manuals than feeling it in her heart. “By doing nothing you are serving the greater good of humanity.”

I have a hard time believing that but don’t know how to respond, so I quietly watch the dust cloud grow. When I can take the tragedy no longer, I look over at the others along the lip.

“More of your students?” I ask.

“Three of them are. One is someone I haven’t met yet, but I see him here every time.”

I look at her. “You’ve seen me here, too?”

“I have.”

My brain is starting to hurt. “Everyone’s in the same position?”

She nods.

“Doing the same things?”

Another nod.

“Did you notice us having this conversation before?”

“I’m watching us right now.”

She nods past me, and I look back to see the second Marie over looking in our direction.

“What if you do something you haven’t seen before?”

She looks uncomfortable. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. What if you wave? Have you waved at the others before?”

“No, but I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“You mean it’s kind of like if we tried to save those people?”

After a silent moment, she suddenly raises her hand above her head and waves at the other groups. A few respond in kind.

“Whoa,” I say, surprised. “Do you now remember seeing you do that?”

“It doesn’t work like that. My memory doesn’t change.”

“So what does that mean?”

She looks back toward the city. “What’s your understanding of what caused the Dawson Tower disaster?”

I’m actually glad she’s changing the subject, because any answer she might give would undoubtedly lead to more questions and my head is already overfilled. “Disgruntled workers sabotaged the project,” I say, following her gaze. “They were led by a guy named, uh, Wendell something, I think.”

“Wendell Barber,” she says.

“Right.”

“They were scapegoats,” she says. “He and the people who were executed with him knew nothing about what caused the disaster.”

I get the sense this conversation is turning political, and as an Eight who was taught long ago what should and shouldn’t be discussed, it’s not a comfortable direction for me.

“There was sabotage, all right, but not by disgruntled workers,” she goes on. “The building was brought down by budget skimming through the use of inferior materials and bribed inspectors. The true causes are the same ones that invade most aspects of our society — greed and corruption.”

It’s impossible to keep the discomfort from my face.

She says, “I’m telling you this because you need to know. When you go on a mission, you will come face to face with this same greed and corruption time and again.”

I say nothing.

“I know you were taught to ignore it and pretend it’s not there. But this is reality, Denny, and you’re going to be waist deep in it. It’s a part of the empire, and has been since…” She pauses. “Well, you tell me.”

For a moment, I’m at a loss, but then it comes to me. I have to fight through my fear to give her the answer. “The Home Party.”

“I knew you’d get it. After they took power, everything changed. There’ll be a lot of times you’ll need to navigate through layers of corruption to find the truths you’re assigned to uncover.” She’s quiet for a moment before adding, “One other thing. It’s something the other trainees probably won’t be told, but everyone figures it out eventually. The true histories you uncover may not be the ones we initially present to the clients.”

“Wait. Are you saying our job isn’t to report the truth?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. The institute expects you to always report the facts exactly as you’ve observed them. Records of those truths will be kept in the archives, but there will be times when the directors decide it’s better to tell a sanitized version to the family who engaged us.”

“But why?” I ask.

A flash of disapproval appears in her eyes but quickly vanishes. At first I think it’s meant for me, but when she speaks, I’m not so sure. “The truth isn’t necessarily good for all to have.” Like earlier when she spoke about the “greater good of humanity,” the words come out as if she’s said them a million times before and they’ve lost all meaning to her.

I look back along the edge of the roof and see that two of the other Maries and their students are gone.

“Time we go home,” my Marie says.

A second later, 2009 is history again.