11
“Smooth,” Zoey said, when she reviewed the recording. “Real sophisticate there.”
Ephrem, who was sitting with us in her office, suppressed a smile.
“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”
“No, look,” my sister said, “we didn’t cover Shakespeare in your training.”
“Zoey,” I said, “Ephrem, what would happen, just theoretically, if I messed up?”
“Don’t mess up.” Ephrem glanced at his device. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I have a meeting with my boss, but I’ll see you in my office in an hour.” He left us then, and I was alone with my sister.
“What were your impressions of the violinist?” Zoey asked.
“He was in his eighties,” I said, “maybe even nineties. He had a slow way of talking, like his accent kind of dragged everything out. He’d done that thing to his eyes, that color-change thing? His eyes were this strange shade of purple. Violet, I guess.”
“Probably all the rage in his youth.”
She looked back at the transcript, rereading something. I rose and went to the window. It was night, and the dome had gone clear. Earth was rising on the horizon, a vision in green and blue.
“Zoey,” I said, “can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
I turned back to her, and she looked up from the transcript.
“Do you remember Talia Anderson from the Night City?” I asked.
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“She was in my grade for a while in elementary school. Her family lived in the Olive Llewellyn house, and then I ran into her again when she hired me for that hotel security job.”
“Wait,” Zoey said, “are we talking about Natalia Anderson at the Grand Luna Hotel?”
“Yes.”
Zoey nodded. “She was on the list of people we interviewed when you were being cleared for this position.”
“How do you remember a name on a list from five years ago?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just do.”
“I wish I had your brain. Anyway. She kind of warned me off coming here, to be honest.”
“So did I,” Zoey said.
“I guess her parents worked here,” I said, ignoring this. “A long time ago. She said her dad was indiscreet.”
Zoey was watching me closely. “What did she say?”
“She said, The traveler’s presence itself is a disruption—”
“Those exact words?”
“I think so. Why?”
“That’s from a classified training manual that went out of circulation ten years ago. I wonder if she’s telling anyone else about it. What else did she say?”
“She said that when the Institute was done with me, it would throw me away.”
Zoey looked away. “It’s not always the easiest place to work,” she said. “Staff turnover is high. You’ll remember that I tried to dissuade you.”
“You were afraid I’d get thrown away?”
She was quiet for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. When she spoke again, she wouldn’t look at me, and her voice was strained. “I was close with someone, a long time ago, another traveler who was investigating something else. She messed up.”
“What happened to her?”
Her hand drifted to the necklace she always wore. It was a simple gold chain, and I’d never really noticed it before, but from the way she touched it, I understood that the lost traveler had given it to her.
“Here’s what you have to understand,” she said. “You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity.”
“And if you intentionally change the time line…”
“It’s not difficult to deliberately lose someone in time. Frame them for a crime they didn’t commit, for example, or, in less serious cases, they can just be placed somewhere with no way home.”
“Wouldn’t framing a traveler for a crime have, well, some repercussions for the time line?”
“The Research department maintains a list of crimes,” Zoey said. “Carefully selected, carefully vetted to avoid any major repercussions.”
(“Bureaucracy exists to protect itself,” Talia said, gazing out over the river.)
Zoey cleared her throat. “Big day tomorrow,” she said. “Remind me where you’re going first?”
“1912,” I said, “to talk to Edwin St. Andrew. I’m going to pretend to be a priest and see if he’ll talk to me in the church.”
“Right. And then?”
“Then I’m going to January 2020,” I said, “to talk to the video artist, Paul James Smith, see what we can learn about that weird footage.”
She nodded. “And you talk to Olive Llewellyn the next day?”
“Yeah.” By now I’d read all of her books. I hadn’t especially liked any of them, but it was hard to parse whether this was the fault of the books or the fault of the dread I felt when I thought of her, given the timing of the scheduled interview.
“You know you’re meeting her in the last week of her life,” Zoey said. “You’ll interview her in Philadelphia, and she’ll die three days later in a hotel room in New York.”
“I know.” I felt a little sick about it.
Zoey’s face softened. “Remember how Mom used to quote Marienbad at us when we were kids?”
I nodded, and for a moment I was transported back to the hospital, the last days of our mother, the week outside of time and space when we never left her side.
“But you’ll keep it together, right?” In the way my sister looked at me, I knew she saw a previous Gaspery, a shiftless version of myself who was prone to error, who lived aimlessly and hadn’t spent the past five years in training and study and research.
“Of course. I’m a professional.”
I knew the facts of the life, and of the death: Olive Llewellyn died in a pandemic that began during a book tour. She died in an Atlantic Republic hotel room. But of course the thought of breaking the protocol occurred to me, then and in the morning two days later when I reported to the travel chamber, when the coordinates were entered into my device, when I stepped into the machine to meet her.
