The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (16 page)

"Think so."

He nodded back the way we'd come in. "Then how about I make sure none of Hockery's boys followed us up here. You catch up when you're through."

"Perfect," I said. He waved and turned his mule, rocks grinding under its hooves. Once he dropped from sight, I moved next to Vette and lowered my voice. "This is where the river begins."

She considered the basin. "I could see how that's valuable."

"But that's not all. Most of the land around the river is owned by hundreds of prospectors, speculators, and businessmen. Hockery could never get his hands on it all." I pointed across the basin. "You see that? That's Green Valley Ranch."

"So what? It's miles from the river."

"Today. But look. It's one of the lowest points in the basin. See how far it runs?"

Her mouth fell open. "If they divert it here at Ottoway, it'll re-stream through every piece of land they've picked up. They'll own the whole river. But why?"

"I don't know."

"So what's our next move? Break into Hockery's office? Track down the informant from San Claredo?"

"Ride off into the sunset," I said.

"You want to run away?" Vette cocked her head. "That doesn't sound like the Blake I know."

"It's too dangerous here. Too dirty and low-tech. We're outmanned and exposed. The easiest way to uncover what's happening is to go back to the future and see what they've changed."

"But it's days until the Pods take us back."

"My gut says Ottoway isn't an end in itself. It's a route to money. We can't follow that money any further until it exists."

"This sounds," Vette said, "like I'm about to go several days without bathing."

"Not in town, no," I said. "If you don't mind the cold, you can use the river."

"Like I said. Days without bathing."

We rejoined Mabry, then headed back through the foothills to the plains. I thanked him for all he'd done and tried to reward him with all the gold left in my purse. He refused. Vette hugged him, and while he awkwardly returned it, I slipped my coinage into his mule's saddlebag.

From there, it was just a matter of finding a quiet spot near the river, building a lean-to from the sap-sticky branches of pines, and foraging enough food to prevent ourselves from starving. I hadn't had to live off the fruit of the earth in a long time.

Little did I know how valuable those few days of practice were about to become.

The Pods whisked us back through the numb nothing between dimensions. Mara stood right outside, waiting for my emergence. I shielded my eyes against the hard white artificial light and followed her to be debriefed. It was as disorienting as always. Subjectively, I'd experienced two weeks, but in Primetime, mere minutes had passed.

Our trip had been incredibly messy and invasive—I was almost positive the hired goons we'd killed on the train were native to that timeline, for god's sake—but I told Mara everything. The implications were too vast. Anyway, Hockery had already hopelessly corrupted the continuity. Whatever changes we'd wrought were drops in a bucket.

"I want to go back," I said.

She frowned. "You said it had gotten too hot. That you were finished."

"In that specific time. I want to skip forward. To when Korry Haltur was killed. We were just there, any changes will be obvious."

"There are protocols. You need time to decompress."

"Haltur's death and the coverup were happening in real time. We're right behind them." I leaned forward. "And if some other world has time travel, Primetime itself could come under attack."

"God damn it." She rapped her knuckles on the plastic desk. "You'll need backup."

"I'm taking Vette. We talked it over while we were waiting for the Pod. It would take too long to get anyone else up to speed."

"She's brand new, Blake."

"And learning fast."

Mara breathed a long sigh through her nostrils. "Get what you need from the Pods. I'll set up the jump."

I smiled and headed off to requisition supplies. The Pods got to work, printing out weapons, surveillance gear, computer tablets, clothes. Vette joined me and I added her orders to the queue.

"You sure you're ready to go back?" I said. "Last trip was pretty rough."

She snorted. "You kidding? We spent the last four nights sleeping under the stars. I've never been more rested in my life."

"Good." The Pod spat out a jacket, time-appropriate shoes. Even the natural fibers (as much as you could call machine-printed leather "natural") had the smell of hot, crisp plastic. I stripped down and changed. "This should be a lot less hectic. All we have to do is sit back and watch."

"I'll believe that when I see it."

"Come on," I teased. "You're right out of the Academy. Give it at least a couple years before you get cynical."

She smiled. The Pods finished assembling our gear, but with the timeline in flux, they had no information to download to our tablets. We were going in blind. No matter. We already knew the world. And within minutes of plugging into the local networks, its data would overflow our tablets.

Mara punched up coordinates and came to watch us go in person. "Be careful. Be
very
careful. And if you get the chance, compile your report before you return. I want to take it to Central ASAP."

"Sure thing." I waved and climbed into the Pod. It closed, sealing me and Vette in its clean white security.

There was a moment of nothing, a fuzzy timelessness, and then we stood on a hill in a cold wind overlooking a city.

The skyline was dark. The towers were jagged, crooked, half-crumbled. There was no noise of cars or machines. Just the whistle of the wind through the bones of the city.

"What the hell?" Vette said. "Where did the Pod send us?"

"There's the mountains," I pointed. "There's the basin. The river's different, but we expected that. See the coastline? Exactly the same as we saw it from Ottoway. Or from the G&A tower."

She got quiet, the way people always do in graveyards. "Then what happened?"

"Exactly what it looks like." I zipped up my collar against the wind and got out my tablet to check for radiation. "Everyone died."

IV

Vette gawked at the gray ruins of Brownville. "What happened?"

"I'll give you two guesses. Last time we were in this when, it was a fully functional world."

"Why buy up all that land if you were just going to blow it up?"

I fiddled with my tablet. Radiation was more or less normal. I scanned for toxins. "Maybe they didn't mean to."

"Causality's a bitch." She got out a combined pen/camera/spyglass and peered at the silent city. "Maybe they're brand new to time travel. Didn't know how easy it is to screw it up."

"Could be," I said, distracted by my readings, which continued to come back within acceptable tolerances. "Environment looks safe. Let's head in."

"What's the point? This place is a wasteland now. Why don't we wait for the Pods, then try an earlier time?"

"Because the Pods will take a week. And we've only got food and water for two days."

"Oh right. Survival." She pocketed her spyglass and hoisted her pack. "Has this ever happened to you before?"

"Surprise apocalypse? No." I scanned the city, zooming in with my eyes. Crows and pigeons flapped between the dusty buildings, but I saw no people. "They used to run into this stuff in the early days of CR, but I haven't heard of such active changes to a timeline in decades."

"So what's protocol in these situations?"

I started down the hill. "Try not to die."

"Yeah, about that."

"Don't worry. It isn't usually permanent. They send back another agent to a point when we were still alive and extract us before the death occurs."

Vette frowned. "What about
un
usually?"

"Situation's deemed too dangerous to risk further agents. Or the timeline's deemed too tenuous too disturb any further."

"Why not go back to before we came here and warn us not to make the trip in the first place?"

I shook my head. "Because then you're undoing events in Primetime."

"And that's the one thing we can never do." She rubbed her arms. "So instead they let us die in the most foreign field we've ever known. Hell of a job."

I watched her, struck by her uncharacteristic ennui, then strode through the rustling grass, gun in hand. The Pod had dropped us in the mountains where any human presence would be unlikely and any settlements would be impossible. We had a long walk ahead of us. We were about to burn a lot of calories. Our enhanced metabolisms were sleek and efficient, but I was already on the lookout for food.

The wind chased the ghosts through the streets of the distant city. The river snaked down from the hills, as gray and dull as lead. But they'd shifted its course sometime over the three hundred years between Silas Hockery's Old West schemes and the future we were in now.

Just as we'd predicted, its new path flowed through what used to be Green Valley Ranch. The patchy green fields of the past had been plowed under by pavements and apartment blocks and waterfront diners, all of which had been leased out, no doubt, by Hockery's organization. The organization that had existed in a previous incarnation of this time and place as Greene & Associates, a wing of a daisu organized crime syndicate. Which was itself puppeteered by non-Primetime time travelers.

A snarled, far-reaching web. But with any luck, that would make it easier to trace, even in this silenced world.

We trekked over the ridges, the fields of green grass and black rocks. The air was a neutral non-temperature. Sunlight struggled to paw through layers of gray clouds. I angled toward the river. Not because I expected to find the answers in its new path. But because the city was a corpse. That meant the river might be our only source of food and water until the Pods zapped us home.

My expectations were quickly proven wrong.

A campus lay on the foothills, a couple miles of empty grass separating it from the city. From a distance, I'd thought it was a college, but occluded sunlight glinted from something metal around its perimeter. A wire fence. A solid barrier stood right behind the first fence, half covered in ivy, painted with a chameleonic substance that blended its surface to the surrounding ground, grass, and leaves. This substance had failed in parts, mangeing the ten-foot wall with cold gray blotches. Every couple hundred feet, a small round tower poked from the fence.

"Careful," I pointed. "The city's dead. But its defenses might still be breathing."

I angled away from the river, meaning to bypass the campus altogether, when I spotted a familiar logo on the bunker-like front gates. I stopped and zoomed in. It wasn't a perfect match to the one I'd seen in the previous version of this point in time, but it was nonetheless impossible to miss: the interlaced "G&A" of Greene & Associates.

I checked the site against the map I'd compiled from our last visit to this when, a thriving world where our largest concern was saving a programmer named Korry Haltur from a grisly death. "That's new."

"I smell a detour." Vette got out her pistol. Compared to the heavy, cannon-like revolvers we'd been carrying just a couple hours ago in the 19th century, the weapon looked like a toy. "Think it's haunted?"

I didn't know if she was speaking metaphorically, but I got out my tablet as we approached the closed gates. I didn't see any lights or hear the buzzing of electrified wires. The tablet confirmed there were no electromagnetic readings of any kind. Considering this facility looked quasi-military, and no doubt had its own internal backup power systems, I took that to mean this world had met its end years and years ago.

The gate's magnetic lock was useless, but it was still sealed by metal rods, portcullis-style. Like the outer electric fence, it was topped by razor wire. My synthleather jacket was knifeproof (against conventional blades, at least—I doubted it would help against this era's more exotic edged weapons), so I slung it over the wire and helped Vette climb up top. Straddling the jacket, she lent me a hand up.

Artificial grass paved the space between the outer electric fence and the chameleonic inner fence. I paused to get a read on one of the little towers, which I suspected contained automated guns of some sort, but they showed as unpowered too. As Vette and I helped each other up the ivied walls, the surface shifted color, attempting to blend itself with our dark clothes.

A host of buildings waited on the other side. Seal-sleek cars decayed in the lot. Several jammed the exit to the gate. One had a body inside. A skeleton rested on the asphalt, one bleached arm outstretched, the other missing completely.

"You ruled out nukes and poison," Vette said. "What about a virus?"

My skin tingled. Our immune systems were robust marvels, but they weren't impervious. Especially if a virus had been designed to cause doomsday.

"Whatever happened was years ago," I said. "Without hosts, most viruses die pretty fast."

"Really? What about the ones whipping around on airless, frozen asteroids?"

I approached the front door of a large and windowless white building. "Anyway, there are bodies here. People died fast. Too fast for a virus."

"Which raises another question—what are we hoping to find? If there were any survivors, I hope they would have taken care of their little skeleton problem."

"The dead might not be able to talk." I knelt beside the door and eyeballed its locks. "Their machines will."

I had to jury-rig my tools from my first aid and emergency kits, and after several fruitless minutes struggling with the locks, I was pretty sure we'd have to blast our way inside. As I poked and scraped, the wind moved through the old cars and silent lots, carrying plenty of dust but no sound besides its own moans. Then the first lock gave, and the second followed, and I knew I could take the rest, too.

The door opened smoothly. The entry was dark and smelled like dirt and ever so faintly of rot. I strapped my pad to my chest and switched it to flashlight mode. I wasn't worried about batteries. It was filled with tiny piezomotors that fed the batteries with every movement. Even with era-appropriate inefficient motors, if the light died, I could revive it by shaking the pad up and down.