Time's Echo: A CHRONOS Files Novella by Rysa Walker

the one that held
the CHRONOS key. I could tell she was spooked and I was pretty sure she was
just waiting until we reached Estero to duck out of sight and jump back to her
own time.
    There was no way
I could let that happen .
    We docked at Bamboo Landing and
began walking toward the settlement. Just as I suspected, Kate veered off the
path almost instantly. I usually led the visitors to the Arts Hall, but I
turned those duties over to Driggers , and took off
after her.
    I grabbed her hand just as she was
pulling up her location on the key. A second later and she'd have been gone.
The only way to keep her from jumping away was to answer her questions. So
that's what I did. I spent the next three hours spilling my guts, telling Kate
everything I knew about the Farm, about the Cyrists, about Prudence, trying to
persuade her to trust me.
    It didn't help that she had no
memory of the 1893 Fair, no memory of running through a burning hotel with a
killer on our heels. We eventually decided it must be something in her future,
even though I'd have sworn on everything holy that the Kate who stood in front
of me on the banks of the Estero that day was older than the girl from the
Expo.
    Before Kate stepped into the boat
that day, I'd nearly convinced myself that my mum was right about the Cyrists.
That Da had been wrong. That the Cyrists were just
trying to avoid the greater evils coming down the pike if someone didn't take
action. That the eight-year old kid inside me who'd believed they were evil was
naïve, too young and innocent to realize that social change is rarely bloodless
and never without sacrifice. That the end justified the
means.
    Talking to Kate about the Cyrists
violated the trust of everyone I knew. It also made me a traitor to the religion
my mother embraced.
    None of that mattered now.
    I don’t know if I loved her then,
but I do know that seeing her gave me hope. The little piece of my soul that
died when my mum dragged me back to the Cyrist Farm came roaring back to life,
and I didn't want to snuff it out again. From the moment I saw Kate on the
landing at Ft. Myers, I knew I'd do whatever it took to keep her from pulling
out that CHRONOS key and vanishing out of my life.
    Now here I am nearly eighteen
months later and she's done just that—vanished. But it was through no choice of her own . And what was true back then is doubly true
today. I'll do whatever it takes to get her back.
     
    ∞
    Franklin and Edna, two of the regional
Cyrist leaders, are waiting in the conference room when I enter. Pru is between
them, her back toward me. I can tell from the way she's standing that she's
furious, and the other two look uncomfortable.
    They transfer the coordinates to
Prudence's key and she vanishes.
    This is standard protocol for any
meeting with Saul. I've only seen him face to face twice, and both times,
someone entered the coordinates into my key. The first was when I was about
ten. I traveled with three other likely prospects about my age, so that we
could demonstrate our skills with the CHRONOS key before the Great Leader. The
other three kids were, like Simon, children of Prudence, probably carried to
term by a surrogate. I'm two generations removed from CHRONOS and only on one
side, so it's probably no surprise that my abilities were the weakest of the
lot. Saul barely looked at me before moving on to the next kid in line.
    I'm more than happy to be ignored.
Saul's favorites have a way of becoming dead when they cease to amuse him. One
of those kids who lined up with me at ten years of age isn't around anymore.
Rumor has it Saul or maybe one of his bodyguards, snapped the guy's neck during
an argument, once he was old enough to have opinions of his own. Simon seems to
think the rewards for sucking up to Saul are worth the risk, but then he's
always had more ambition than sense.
    The second meeting was just me and
Pru, supposedly a family dinner with Saul. Pru was nineteen and coming out of
her rebellious phase.