Chapter Twenty-Seven

Shit, she’d almost revealed the end of the world. Okay, maybe not the total end but the annihilation of 95 percent of the Earth’s population. And she wasn’t ready to go there yet. Probably wouldn’t ever be, because she had an idea that Quinn would not take the news well and would not sit back and just let it happen.

And he couldn’t change it. That was the sort of thing that led to disasters of galactic proportions.

But she also knew from her history classes that it likely meant the death of Quinn and all his friends. She’d been searching for a way to prevent that. She was pretty certain Quinn wouldn’t save himself and leave his friends to die. Hell, she was half convinced he wouldn’t allow a whole bunch of strangers to die. He had a hero complex. He’d want to save the world. Only he couldn’t.

Primary protocol—do not change the past.

She took a sip of her drink. It was delicious and icy cold.

“Let me have a look,” he said.

For a minute, she had no clue what he was talking about, then realized he meant the bullet wound. But it was fine. “I’m all right. Really. It’s just a graze. It stings a little, that’s all.”

He studied her, a hint of frustration in his eyes. She was guessing he wished he could get in her head. And in a way, she wished it as well. Wouldn’t life be simpler if everyone could see everyone else’s secrets. He stretched out a hand and rested it on her calf, stroking her skin. She closed her eyes. She hadn’t realized how wonderful a simple touch could feel.

“That’s so good,” she murmured. “In the future, we don’t…touch so much.”

Shock flashed across his face. “No touching?”

“We touch. We have sex. Just not casually. Plus, my father’s people don’t even have sex anymore. They replaced it by an automated process hundreds of years ago. He says it’s less messy that way.”

“Your father?”

“He’s a Soprian.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s from a planet a few light-years away.”

“Your father’s not human.” He frowned. “You’re not human?”

“Of course, I’m human. I look human, don’t I? He’s actually my adoptive father. He was part of a peacekeeping mission to Earth. He found me after my parents were killed. He decided to keep me.” She smiled. “Says it’s the only impulsive thing he’s ever done in his life.”

“You told us your father was an agent with the Bureau.”

He sounded accusing. Quinn didn’t like lies. “He is. Just the Time Management Bureau, not the FBI. He’s actually my boss.”

“Fucking aliens,” he muttered, jamming a hand through his hair.

“You believe me?” she asked.

“Hell, yes. I sort of wish I didn’t, but actually, it makes a whole load of sense.” He blew out his breath. “Go on—so you volunteered to come back here.”

“I did. My father took some persuading, but I was qualified for the job. I’d done more jumps than any other agent. Well, living ones, anyway. So, I came.”

“You make it sound so easy. You just popped back two thousand years. How does it work? Do you have a time machine? Like Doctor Who?”

Doctor Who was one of her favorite TV series. “The first time machines were just that. A little like a space ship that traveled through time and space. They could carry people and things, and like a ship, they could be navigated, reprogrammed to go to other times and places. The later ones, like the Bureau now uses, are more like a chamber. You sit down, it’s all very comfortable, and you take whatever is touching your body. Clothes and so on. But all the programming is done back at the station. Once you’re sent out, you have no control—the Bureau thought there was less risk that way.”

“And how do you get back, if there’s no machine?”

“We carry a transponder device. Which remains linked to the time displacement unit. It’s normally preset to bring an agent back at a determined time, usually moved ahead the same amount of hours the agent has spent in the past. It seems to work best that way.”

“Shit,” he said. “That’s what happened that first night. When you vanished from the safe house.”

“Yes. My time was up. We can put it off, if disappearing at that point in time might cause problems. But we try to stick to it—it’s safer.”

“And that’s what happened to the guy who disappeared back at the ranch?”

“No, that was an emergency time displacement, only to be used in dire circumstances. I guess he thought you were going to shoot him.”

“These transponders? What do they look…? Shit.” He got up and went across to where his jacket was thrown over a chair. He delved into the pocket and pulled out the two transponder devices. “Your watch?”

“Yes. It’s also an alarm. It tells me whether there is some sort of time anomaly close by. It allows us to track down the source of the alerts.”

“It went off this morning?”

“When the other agents were getting close. And that first day in the van, when we were driving from the prison.”

“That’s how you knew people were following. Who?”

“I have no clue and that’s the truth.” She watched as Quinn sat down again and studied the transponders carefully, as though they might blow up or drag him to another time. Finally, he put them both down gently on the table beside her. “Maybe we should keep them where you can see them. In case any more of your friends decide to pay us a visit.”

She’d been trying to pretend to herself that she was telling Quinn this as part of her mission, because it would help her get to the truth. But she was breaking all the rules. Had the Bureau found out? Had she messed up and something had changed? She picked up the second transponder and swiped her finger over the controls, punched in a question. Brent’s friend had been dispatched the day after her. That didn’t tell her anything useful.

“We’re getting sidetracked,” Quinn said. “What happened when you came back? Did you find what caused your alert?”

“No. I had nothing but the time and we weren’t sure how accurate that was. There was no location, either. My first visit was a year ago. I started in Washington, set myself up a cover as an FBI agent and started going through reports, searching for anything that might help. I found references to an oversight committee looking into a group of telepaths. That seemed a probable link, since there shouldn’t have been telepaths in this time. I came back a year later to see what this oversight committee had discovered and found that it had been disbanded. Not only that, but the members were all dead. And I could find no reference to this group of telepaths. It was as though they had vanished completely. But I did find a reference to the man who had originally asked for the oversight committee review, about five years earlier.”

“Martin?”

“Yes. Then I found an article that told of a people discovered in Africa by a man named Malcolm Rayleigh in 1878, and I knew there was a connection. But guess what? Martin Rayleigh had vanished. Then I got lucky. As I was about to go rethink the whole thing, I picked up an alert that a Martin Rayleigh was being transferred between prisons. And so, I decided to go visit him.”

They were both silent for a few minutes while she let him process all she had told him. He rubbed a finger over the line between his brows. How much did he know? She suspected a lot. The more interesting question was, how much would he share with her?

“What happens if you find your anomaly?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Our goal is to remove the source, with as few ripples in time as possible.”

“Remove?”

She pursed her lips. She didn’t want to lie. “Usually it’s a matter of sending them back to where they belong. We prosecute them in their own time.”

“You don’t kill them?”

“Not usually, but sometimes they are…eliminated. There are not many crimes that result in the death penalty in my day, but violation of the time laws is one of them. The possibilities are vast, and so there has to be a strong deterrent. The consequences can be catastrophic.” She hated that part of the job but saw the sense in it. People knew the consequences if they still chose to break those laws…

He scratched his head. “What about us?” he asked. “My people. Do any of us make your little alarm go off?”

“Is there a reason why you would?” Silently she entreated him to tell her, to share, to trust her. “Tell me about your people. Where you came from.”

“You’ve heard most of it. None of us knew where we came from. We were part of a covert operations group, and we believed we worked for the government. We were all fostered as children and had no clue who our parents were. A few of our people died suspiciously, so we parted company with our government controllers and went searching for the truth. Anyway, to cut a very long story short, we discovered our connection to the original tribe. We were the product of genetic experiments mixing their DNA with ordinary DNA. But in the process of discovering this, something else turned up. It appears that our DNA contains markers which suggest we come from the future, not the past.” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe I’m saying that. I mean it’s crazy, and yet at the time, it’s just one more in a long list of crazy things.”

She’d suspected something similar, but hadn’t been able to see how.

“Tell me more about the original tribe.”

He shifted in his chair, clearly not comfortable with the question.

“I need to know, Quinn. I need to understand what happened. This won’t end with me. They’ll send someone else and someone else. We need to resolve it.”

“No fucking eliminating anyone.”

“No eliminating.”

“Christ, I wish I could see inside your head. I have no clue whether you’re lying to me.”

“I’m not lying. I promise that I will not willingly harm you or your friends.”

He took a deep breath. “I want to trust you. Hell. I’ve wanted to trust you from the moment I saw you. Well, maybe not quite then. If I remember correctly, you knocked me on my ass. But there’s not a lot I can tell you. You were at the meeting with them, you know just about as much as I do.”

Frustration clawed at her. There had to be more. She suspected she was so close to the truth, yet it still eluded her. “But they must know something. What about this secret they spoke of?”

She could almost see the mental fight he was having inside his head. To tell or not to tell. Finally, he gave a brief shrug. “When we first found out about the tribe, we believed they had all transferred to Scotland. But in fact, a small group was left behind. The guardians.”

“And what were they guarding? Do you know?”

“Something that’s lain hidden in those mountains for thousands of years.”

“And…?” She was going to punch him if he didn’t get on with it. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”

She gritted her teeth. “Tell me.”

“Kane believes it’s a time machine.”

And there was the answer. She heaved a huge sigh. A time machine that had been in place for thousands of years. It seemed unbelievable. She was guessing the tribe’s ancestors had been on that machine and had traveled from the future to some long ago past. But why? No matter how hard she searched her mind, she couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question.

But what could they do about it? None of the original people were still alive. Only their descendants. How long did someone have to be in place before they were a legitimate part of that time period? Quinn didn’t show up as an anomaly. This was his time, where he was meant to be. And the time machine had been hidden away, with only a few people knowing about it. Surely, they could destroy the machine. That would be the best course of action and would satisfy the Bureau. Quinn would be safe. At least, for now. Her mind shied away from that.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That if we destroy this time machine, the anomaly disappears, and there’s no reason for anything else to happen. You belong here.”

“There might be one slight problem with that,” Quinn said.

She didn’t want a problem. She wanted to go back with an answer, one that would make everyone happy. And she could find out what the hell was happening in her time. Why agents had been sent back to kill her.

“There’s no problem,” she said, hoping she was telling the truth. “It will be easy. All we’d have to do is turn a switch and it will self-implode.” He raised an eyebrow and she sighed. Why couldn’t time travel be more straight forward? Just this once. “Okay, tell me about this little problem.”

“The guardians. They won’t let you anywhere near that machine.”

“They’re not using it, are they?”

He snorted. “From what I can tell, they can’t even open the fucking thing.”

“So why will they complain? You can explain why it needs to be done.”

“Well, you see the time machine is part of something bigger. Kane and his people believe they were sent from God-knows-where, for some sort of sacred mission. They’ve managed to totally forget what that mission is, but apparently, all will be revealed through the machine when the time is right.”

“And do you know when the time will be right?”

“2020.”

Her mind went blank. “Holy shit, no.”