A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) by Kim K. O'Hara

quickly realized that it was actually easier when he put the settings on “all three,” and harder when they had four game boards going at a time, one for each type of sensory input and one mixed. Pretty soon they were sitting around the coffee table, turning over pairs, then passing the board to the next person. By the time the “sight” board got back to any of them, they had forgotten what was on it. They exulted over small victories and pretended someone had reset the squares when they couldn’t remember. The game cards kept them happily occupied until the meal was ready.
    “Hot off the grill,” said Marak in his best waiter voice, and soon they were enjoying the results of their kitchen teamwork.
    “Best barbecue ever!” said Jored, rubbing his tummy. “Now can you tell me what those four things are for?”
    Dani brought the plastic, leather, stone, and metal objects over where he could touch them. “Do you want to guess?”
    “Are they samples of stuff that can have chronographic recordings in them?” he asked, with that cute little look that his face took on when he was thinking. Was this boy smart or what?
    “You’re exactly right. Except three of these objects are made of materials that can retain a chronographic recording, and one can’t. Can you guess which one can’t?”
    “Um…the plastic one? Because it’s synthetic? Or the leather one, because it’s from an animal?”
    “The plastic one is right, and you guessed the right reason. You can think of all the rest of these objects as little miniature recorders. They aren’t actually doing the recording, of course. They have to be placed in my chamber at work, and the chamber uses their chronetic energies to focus a recording device on some specific time in history. That’s how we see things.”
    Jored touched each sample, except the plastic one, with a look of awe on his face. Dani laughed. “They’re not anything special. They’re a rock, and a metal disk, and a piece of leather.”
    “But that’s what makes them special,” he said, earnestly. “Stuff we see every day can do all that.”
    Dani told herself again how lucky she was to know this kid, with his untainted sense of wonder. She mussed his hair and gave him a hug. “Hey, how about a game of chess before bed?”
    She had barely mentioned the idea and he was already pulling her down the hall to his room to get the chess set. She guessed that was a yes.
    It was a cute room, decorated with scruffy-looking dog images hovering in a slightly raised 3D effect on several of the bright yellow walls. When he turned on the light, they chased each other and fought over a couple of tennis balls. She’d been in his room many times, and each time the pups did something different. If she ever had kids of her own, she thought, she’d have Kat come help her decorate.
    “Do you want to play here?” Jored asked.
    “Let’s take it back out to the living room, okay?”
     
    WALLACE HOME, Lower Queen Anne, Seattle. 2030, Tuesday, June 6, 2215.
    Kat came back from tuckin g Jored into bed. She shook her head. “I still have to remind him to brush his teeth. He never remembers.”
    “Probably has a lot of other things on his mind,” said Marak. “He’s always thinking about something.”
    Kat glanced over at Dani. “Speaking of having other things on your mind, what happened yesterday afternoon? Do you want to talk about it?”
    Dani sighed. She almost wanted to say, “No, we can do that another time.” It had been so nice to just behave normally for a few hours, but now all her doubts came rushing back and she knew she needed to talk. Now. Tonight.
    She started slowly, watching their reactions. “I saw something yesterday that shook me up. A lot. I don’t know who else to talk to about it.”
    “What happened?” asked Kat.
    “I was doing an investigation—that’s usually a second, more specific look at something we did a sample scan of earlier—of an object. The date specified was