UNQUILL HAD BEEN the last to wake up the next morning. He left Kaloa lying in the park, alone as she had always been. He entertained the idea of letting the virus consume his body as well. He wanted to hold her as they die together. If not for Kenneth and Savannah, he would have done so.
If he died, who would take them back to their own time? Who would be there to interact with the constabulary on their behalf? They had no one else.
Unquill decided to live for them both.
Before he opened his eyes, he knew that Kaloa had died in the night. She had never lied to him, not about anything. He wondered what her death had been like. Had she died in agony?
He did not know for sure. He didn't want to go back looking for her, even assuming the virus had left enough of her body to be recognizable. He wanted to lie in bed and let all the misery he'd carried with him on the way back to the hotel eat away at his insides. He wanted to let the world take care of itself, just for once.
A cold finger pressing into the flesh of his foot made him open his eyes. He saw Savannah, her uncombed hair gathered around her head like an exploded cotton ball. Unquill looked past her to the television. A nature feed displayed on the screen.
"It worked! Kenneth, wake up! It worked! The computer is working again!"
Kenneth, who had put his shirt on inside out, asked, "Okay, it's working. What do we do next? Do we get to go home now?"
Unquill pushed the blanket off his body. He slept in the same clothes he'd worn since the previous day. An oily, dirty feeling pervaded his body. He wanted to take a shower. But he wanted, more than anything, to have Kaloa back beside him once more. He hadn't known how much he missed her. But he knew how much he was missing her now.
He sighed. There was no going back. There was only forward-and the reason why he chose to live.
He would have to settle for a change of clothes and a spell underneath a torrent of hot water first. But, after he talked with the children.
He glanced outside. The lights of the city came back on in waves. He heard shouts of celebration from the room below, made faint by the ceiling and floor between. Though Unquill had lived his whole life by the central computer in Jakarta, looking at the image before him made doubts surface in his mind.
He wondered if, contrary to all his previous understanding, it might be better if the computer had stayed inoperative. His image displayed around the world as Hinjo Junta might be a fair trade for averting the catastrophe Kaloa and others had set in motion.
Unquill said, "We can't leave yet. At least, there's still seven days before I have to take you back no matter what. Before that happens, I think I should be honest with you both."
He looked from Savannah, sitting at the foot of the bed, to Kenneth, sitting next to him. He sat up, resting his back against the bed's wooden backboard.
Then, he told them everything he knew from what Kaloa had told him.
He left nothing out, not even his own feelings.
WINNOW HAD FINISHED his seventh conversation with a police officer working the night shift when all the computer screens in the office turned on as one, all displaying the same blue and white pop-up with a single phrase entered above a gray OK button: "Press enter to continue."
Winnow had found nothing substantial regarding the identity of Olon Daniel. In fact, the more he spoke to the police officers in the station, the more he felt himself circling around the main issue.
People wanted to talk about their own cases, in which Winnow offered his advice on the premise that they would, in turn, help him with his own problem. He found this not to be the case.
However, the computer screens turning back on caused such an uproar in the office that, for a moment, Winnow forgot whom he wanted to speak with about the case of the corpse in the airport. The lights blinked on overhead. People blew out candles. Winnow felt himself suddenly adrift on an island in which people felt free to ignore him, even though he had taken the trouble to wear his Black Brigade uniform.
Instead of seeking out Jonnan to see if he encountered better luck than himself, Winnow obtained permission to use a free work station. He sat down in front of the computer. He turned the black keyboard in front of him upside, shaking it. Dust and debris drifted out from between the keys. Only when the small particles stopped falling did Winnow pull out a small white trashcan from beneath the desk. He brushed all the dirt into it, and then laid the keyboard down before him.
He pressed the enter key.
Several windows opened at once. Winnow took his time looking at each one before he found the one he wanted: the search field.
He typed, "Olon Daniel" into the query field, then hit enter once again.
The computer, which contained all the results of every fact every future historian had recorded, retrieved what it knew about the man who had died in Jakarta International Airport. The report took Winnow a long time to read. He lost himself in the task, emptying a cup of coffee that someone placed before him. He sipped at the cup even when there was nothing left in it. He crumpled up the white cup, and then flung it into the trashcan.
After reading through the minutiae of the man's life, Winnow came to a section that he would not have believed existed had he not seen it with his own eyes.
Everything up until September 7245 had been recorded. After that, nothing existed. Winnow refreshed the page to make sure everything loaded correctly.
The same blank spot appeared where Olon Daniel's record of death might have been. That blank space meant, so far as Winnow knew, that no one from the past or future had investigated the manner of Olon Daniel's death.
It also meant, if Winnow understood the principles of causality, that whatever report he might make would not find its way into the hands of anyone who could record anything into the central computer.
He scratched his hand. He had never understood temporal theory. He decided to leave that aspect of the investigation for someone more knowledgeable than himself.
He focused instead on Olon Daniel's associations over the past week. He saw the man meeting with a rich European heiress by the name of Kaloa Syncrate. Together, they had lunch with another man of some power in the Middle East region.
The record listed his name as Walid Felor.
Winnow reclined in his chair, thinking about that meeting and what it might mean. It had taken place a week ago exactly in the middle of the day. Olon Daniel, born in North America yet a registered citizen of Jakarta, sat around a table with a European woman and a Middle Eastern man.
When Winnow tried to think of the things they might have talked about, he drew a blank. None of them had anything in common, save their membership to an unnamed organization.
"An organization without a name?" Winnow asked of the computer screen.
Of course, the screen did not answer him.
More surprisingly, when he looked into the lives of Walid Felor and Kaloa Syncrate, he discovered both of them deceased as well-Felor two days ago and, if Winnow read the future history records correctly, Kaloa would be found dead later in the day.
Three people sharing lunch, all of them from different regions, all of them dead.
Winnow decided that their organization bore investigation.
Before that, though, he used the workstation to open up a line of communication to the Unbroken Tower.