March 9
“Okay,” he says. “Look, it’s gonna take me a little bit of time to get the sample invalidated. I think I can go back and still get everything taken care of before I lose it completely. You have something else you need to do in the meantime, though.”
“What?” I ask. I’m through doing your dirty work.
“I…” he pauses. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I could get in so much trouble for this. But you have to know. Okay, look. Until I get the line restored, you’re still going to be crossing over between the fragline and the real history. To mitigate the damage, you need to go to the Beanery and keep an eye on things.”
“I thought…”
“I know what I said,” he says. “We don’t have time for this. Once I get this sorted out, I’ll meet you at the Beanery. Just go there and… just go there.”
It doesn’t take me long to get back to the Beanery. Mostly because I’m running, but also because there’s not nearly as much traffic on the sidewalks now for some reason. The sense of wrongness about the world has started to fade, but I can still feel it on the edge of my thoughts, pressing me forward.
March 8
It fits. It fits perfectly, except… “Reynolds. This is important. Katie’s your great-grandmother on what side?”
“My mom’s mom’s side,” he says. “What are you getting at?”
“And Katie, did she ever tell you about Ray?” I ask. “In the future. When she was your great-grandma, that is.”
“She died when I was two,” he says. “I never got… Oh my God. I get it now.”
“I think I get it too,” I say. “Look, can you go back and stop yourself from giving blood?”
“Contact with a past self is illegal,” Reynolds says. “But I can go back and cause some trouble with the sample so that it’s not used. Why?”
“Ray was Katie’s first husband, but it was a short engagement,” I say, remembering both pasts. “A few months after the ceremony, he was hit by a bus and died because there was a shortage of his type of blood. Your grandmother is Katie’s daughter from her second husband, who she apparently hasn’t met yet.”
“Oh my God,” he says. “It makes sense. That explains Gramma Raye’s name, too…”
How could you be so freaking dense? “By saving Ray, even inadvertently, you caused your Gramma Raye to never be born. It was probably just a freak stroke of luck that you wound up with Ray’s exact blood type.”
March 7
“The red center, for lack of any better phrasing, is a wound in time,” Reynolds says. “If anything, that’s about the best gauge of how much time I have left. Care to throw out a guess?”
I do a little bit of math in my head. It’s been about sixteen hours since we last spoke, and in that time, the red center has gotten about twice as big. So, sixteen hours to double in size, when you start from a third, and are now at two-thirds, you need to expand by half in order to be totally full. “Eight hours,” I say. “Give or take. If that thing gets bigger faster, you might have less.”
“Damn,” he says. “All right. I thought I had longer. Okay. So, let me ask you this. What do you think caused this?”
“How the hell should I know?” I say. “You’re the one farting around in time. What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing important. Well…”
“Well what?” I ask. “You did something. Fess up.”
“I, uh,” he says, nervously. “There was a blood drive. I needed some cash…”
You didn’t. You could not have. It’s freaking impossible! “You gave blood?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It was just a couple pints. I couldn’t just let it go, you know? I mean, I have a rare type, and…”
March 6
The Steamer is bigger now, as if it weren’t big enough before; it flows out from the part in his coat, spilling out into the world. If I didn’t know it was invisible to everyone else, I’d expect it to cause some panic. Even knowing this, I lean back in my chair. The thing is about the size of Reynolds’ head now, with the rage-red center about two-thirds of the size. It seems to be boiling away faster, and more vapor is coming off of it, wafting in front of his face. It smells now, too. I think by now you can guess how bad it is. I swallow the bit of puke that built up in my throat and blink away the tears.
“It’s bad, huh?” he asks. I nod silently, and he closes his coat. Instantly I feel better. “It’s not anything, well, physical,” he says, as I stare at where it had been. As big as the Steamer is now, it’s completely invisible under his coat. “This coat is… well, think of it like a bullet-proof vest for time. As long as I’m wearing it, I get a little more time. But it can only do so much.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It looked… well, the red part is definitely bigger now. It’s bad. Really bad.”
March 5
“Fine,” I say. “What do you want me to do? I’ve never even seen a Steamer before you came along.”
“You…” Reynold’s eyes widen, almost to the point that they’re about to jump out of his skull. “I’m… what year is this?”
“Two thousand,” I say. “Turn of the millennium. Why? What year do you think it is?”
“This is the right year,” he grumbles. “This is the right year! What the hell? I’m not early!”
“Calm down,” I say. “You’re attracting attention. I don’t think that’s good for the Steamer.” It’s another lie, of course; for all I know it could be the right thing to do.
“You’re right,” he says, taking a long pull from the coffee. It’s my turn to gawk now. “Oh, right, I probably just burned myself,” he says. “Side-effect of being attached to a Steamer too long. You lose yourself. I need to get this fixed before I start to forget who I am entirely.”
“Heavy.”
“I know,” he says. “Okay. First, what I need from you is just a guess. An estimate. You… well, you don’t know this yet, but your guess is going to be pretty damn close to accurate. It’s going to be better than my guess.”
“Okay,” I say. “Give me another look at it.” He opens his coat, just enough to let some light onto his chest.
March 4
“I was only back a few months, relative to this point,” he says. “I was just going to have a look at how my great grandparents got together, and see if I could use that as a little bit of inspiration. See, I’m a writer, and in my time dramatic genealogy is a big seller, especially with the whole ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ thing.”
“Let me get this straight,” I say, frowning. “You were in the past to watch your ancestors hook up? For a book?”
“It sounds lame now,” he says, “but the story about my great-great grandfolks went to number seventeen on the New York Times bestseller list.”
Unbefreakinleivable. “You’re a perv.”
“Blame society,” he shrugs. “Anyway, I don’t know how long this thing has been on me, but since I can see it now, I don’t have long. You gotta tell me what I screwed up, and how long I have to fix it.”
“Hold it,” I say. “I don’t ‘gotta’ tell you jack. This is your problem, not mine.”
“I know,” he says, “but you’re the only one who can.” I look at his eyes again… and I know he’s telling the truth. I can’t tell how I know, but I do… and it pisses me off.
March 3
Anomaly. “You mean the Steamer?”
He pauses. “Still not the safe word,” he says, frowning. “But yeah, you call them Steamers. They’re… timers. Indicators that the person they’re attached to is in danger of being erased from time.”
Holy crap. That’s why I thought that thing was evil. It’s something that should not be… because it eliminates things which should not be. Figures. You’d have to send a monster to destroy a monster, right? I can’t fathom why I can see these things, but that doesn’t seem to be important right now.
“Anyway, the big problem with the An– I mean, Steamers,” he continues, “is that only an Interloper can tell how much time the bearer has before the fragline becomes irrevocable. Time, as you know, is funny about paradoxes and stuff like that.”
“All right,” I say. “Assuming I believe all this bullshit about time and paradoxes and the Steamer, what do you expect me to do about it? I didn’t change the past. You had to have.”
“I know,” he says, “but I don’t get how I managed to create the paradox. I wasn’t doing anything that didn’t happen in my past.”
I start to speak, but then catch myself. Of course. He had to have changed his own past somehow. That’d be how he managed to create the Steamer. “What exactly were you doing in the past?”