Free Time's Mirror: A CHRONOS Files Novella (The CHRONOS Files) by Rysa Walker Page B

like I’m a Neanderthal or something? Granted, they probably won’t put me in a cage. They’ll just pop me on a vintage beanbag chair with my newly repaired Walkman. Maybe Tate asked his buddy to repair it just so I’d have a prop to hold.
    I don’t actually believe that. He seemed too happy about giving it to me for it to be work related. But it’s been much longer than the moment he promised. I scan the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of his head above the crowd.
    I can feel Campbell’s eyes scrutinizing me. “Can she still use it?” he asks when I finally glance over. He must see confusion in my eyes, because he clarifies, “The key. Can Kathy still operate it?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her with it.”
    “Does she know you can use it?”
    “No-o-o,” I say, although now that he has me thinking about it, I guess she might have suspected I’d be able to use it when I found the medallion in the jewelry box. “She took it away when I said I could see the color, but then I found another one.”
    He shrugs. “Not too surprising. She was probably worried you’d try to undo her damage.”
    I’ve definitely thought about this, but I haven’t had the nerve to discuss it with anyone.
    “Do you think I could?” I ask.  “I mean, could I go back to just before the explosion and warn someone?”
    As I say it, my mind is already spinning. It would save a lot of lives. But they’d arrest her, almost certainly. Deb and I would be born here, probably in prison. Dad…wouldn’t be my dad. It would be this Saul person I don’t even know. And would he even want us?
    Campbell doesn’t respond for a moment. He just watches me, and I get the strangest sense that he knows everything I’m thinking.
    “You certainly couldn’t do it without access to a key. And there are people here, in the government, who think it best that this disaster serve as a lesson about the so-called dangers of genetic enhancement in general and time travel in particular. I suspect you’d have a difficult time securing official permission to change anything .”
    “Even though hundreds of people died? And…didn’t it change things, having those people stranded in the past?”
    “Apparently not in any significant fashion. The official word is that it all averaged out over time, although I’m not sure I buy it.”
    Campbell folds his hands over his stomach and belches. One of the little bubble things floats down just above his head, sucking up the smoke or whatever else was in the air around him, then floats upward to a large vent in the “sky” above us, where it’s sucked away with a few others. It’s like the commercial with the cartoon scrubbing bubbles, only flipped upside down.
    “Of course,” Campbell continues, “they had the CHRONOS tech people who survived the attack scrambling to see if there were serious historical aberrations in the months after. If they found anything, it wasn’t reported to the rest of us. And truthfully, how would we know?” His eyes flit down to my wrist, where the bracelet Sutter gave me is concealed—barely—by the black lace of my glove. “The rest of us don’t have a device to shield us inside a CHRONOS field. The entire history of the world could change and we’d be none the wiser.”
    I feel a hand on my arm and Tate says, “Sorry about that.” Then he glares at Campbell. “What the hell were you thinking? Dana didn’t deserve that.”
    “Perhaps not.” Campbell picks something from between his front teeth, and stares at his finger for a moment before flicking the unseen speck onto the floor. “But you should consider your goals in life, Poulsen. Dana Erskine won’t help you achieve them. You’d be far better off focusing your attention elsewhere.”
    Campbell looks straight at me when he says the last word. I feel the blood rushing to my cheeks.  He might as well have just come out and told Tate I’m interested in him.
    But why is he championing my side?
    Tate