Shattered snow, p.22
Shattered Snow, page 22
“I expected more than this. A trap maybe?”
Charul held up the letter Keltson had just sent with Gunther. The edges were brittle and torn and the wax seal was smeared and faded. Keltson couldn't believe it worked.
“I'm confused. Are you actually turning yourself in?” the boy asked.
Keltson stood straighter and threw his melted vest to Charul, who caught it and glanced down at the device, his eyebrows raised in surprise.
“You have no idea what it's like to be stuck here.”
“So, you called me to take you back to jail?” Charul asked, skeptically.
Keltson took a step backwards, motioning to the casket behind him. Charul crept forward with cautious interest. Peering over the edge of the glass case, he caught his breath. “Bianka? What happened to her?”
“One of my clients, Lilia, split and gained an unsavory hatred for the girl. Bianka hid here for a few years, but Lilia found her and did this.”
“What is this contraption?” Charul ran his fingers along the melted metal seams.
Keltson swallowed the knot in his throat. Exposing Lilia’s invention felt like the worst possible thing he could do. After this, ITTA would know about the Pause. But he had to do it, for Bianka.
“It's a time capsule. She's frozen in a separate dimension where time doesn't exist.”
Charul looked up in amazement. “Is that possible?”
“Lilia repurposed some of my equipment.”
“But we have Lilia in custody, how could she…”
Keltson interrupted, holding his hand out in front of him. “Like I said, she split and duplicated. As soon as you arrested one version of her, the second one took over here.”
Charul's eyes widened. “You made quite a mess, didn’t you?”
Keltson set his jaw. He was fully aware of the jumbled timeline he had created. It hurt knowing he needed to rely on this teenager and ITTA to set things straight.
Charul turned his attention back to Bianka. “She's even more beautiful now. She’s much older.”
Keltson's gut tightened as he saw the admiration in Charul's eyes. He had never considered that Charul and Bianka developed some kind of relationship during the weeks they knew each other. Keltson pushed back the wave of anxiety. He needed Charul. There was nothing he could do for Bianka without him.
“Why is it frozen inside and burnt on the outside?” Charul asked, fingering the blackened trails climbing up the sides of the capsule.
“We had trouble saving her from a Roman temple,” Keltson admitted.
“Is that how…” Charul trailed off as he eyed Keltson’s burnt calves.
Keltson pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “I just want to do what’s right.”
Charul pushed himself up from the casket. “I thought you were all about screwing things up?”
“I don't have to justify myself to you,” Keltson said, trying to hide the venom in his voice.
“That's true. It's the judge you'll have to answer to.” Charul pulled out a pair of handcuffs.
“I'm willing to accept responsibility on one condition,” Keltson said. “That you do everything in your power to remove Bianka from this time capsule and return her home. But not the life she knew before. Her original future was not a good one. If you care for her at all, you won’t let her be poisoned. I've worked too hard to save her from being murdered at twenty-one to have her put directly back into that timeline.”
“So, you're asking for me to arrest you, but not to revert all the damage you've done to the timeline?” Charul asked incredulously.
Keltson nodded.
Charul sighed. “You're being arrested for tampering with the integrity of the Standard Timeline as recorded by the International Summit of 2042. Under this violation, I am responsible for taking you in without further notice, where your case will be investigated and a fair trial will be held.”
Keltson clenched his teeth. These were the words he had dreaded for years. His own personal game-over. He sighed and held out his right hand. Charul looked surprised at his willingness to submit but took his wrist anyway. As he fastened the cuff, Keltson pulled his left hand forward for Charul, but at the last second, twisted Charul’s arm and covered his emergency escape button exactly where Ammond said it would be.
“Now!” Keltson yelled. Ammond jumped from his hiding place beneath a leather oilskin and ran at Charul with a pair of wire cutters. Meanwhile, Baigh ran from the front door and helped Keltson hold Charul down, keeping his hand away from the ignition. Luckily, a spindly teenager was no match for three men. Ammond knew exactly where the wire was in Charul’s sleeve and snipped it, disabling the vest.
“No!” Charul yelled just as the vest short-circuited. A wave of electricity rippled down Charul’s body.
“It feels good to take down prince charming,” Keltson said, breathing heavily.
Charul regained his composure quickly and grabbed Ammond by the shirt collar. “You traitor!” he shouted. He raised his hand as if to strike Ammond, but without a word, Rusha appeared behind him and smacked Charul on the top of the head with a cast-iron frying pan, knocking him out cold. Ammond and Keltson looked at her in shock.
She straightened up and smoothed down the front of her skirt. “I didn't like the way he looked at Bianka.”
Keltson smirked at Charul's once perfectly smooth hair now smudged with dirt. He bent down and pulled the severed device off the boy, then took a box from his shirt pocket and opened it to reveal the motherboard from his own vest. He opened a slot in Charul’s vest, detached the ITTA board, and inserted his specialized programming.
“It fits?” Ammond asked,
“Yeah, but I won't know if it really works unless I try it,” Keltson said.
“What do we do with this guy?” Baigh asked, nudging the unconscious Charul with his foot.
“Well, we can't keep him here, can we?” Urig nudged the boy with his foot.
“I don't want him,” Rusha said flatly.
Keltson rubbed his forehead with his hand. A few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have felt any remorse for what he planned to do with the boy. But after the split, morality had become starkly black and white again. Growing up, Baigh had always given him a hard time for his moral compass. Over the last five years, he learned to see the grey between the lines for the greater good. But now, he felt a knot in his stomach.
“We can’t afford to have him going back to ITTA now. He knows too much and would put Bianka at risk,” Ammond said.
Do the right thing.
“I visited France once and hated it. Why not drop him there?” Urig said. Mathilda let out a stream of French expletives at him.
“You hate everything, Urig,” Cenric said.
“Perhaps he would hate it more,” Urig said, prodding Charul with his toe.
“France in the twelfth-century doesn't have any ITTA ports for him to get back through,” Ammond agreed.
“What's an ITTA port?” Keltson asked.
“They're secure bases for stranded agents. Kind of like your stationary mirrors. Only they lead to ITTA headquarters. It'd be a good thing to abandon him somewhere that would be too difficult to get back to the future and rat us out.”
Do the right thing.
Was abandoning a teenager in the past the right thing to do?
“Perhaps you should go after Bianka first. Then we can take care of this guy,” Ammond suggested.
“Ammond,” Keltson said, “I, of all people, understand the overwhelming urge to follow the instinct of our split, but my voice constantly pushes me to do the right thing. And right now, it’s definitely telling me to get him out of here.”
Ammond sent him a short nod, then stepped back, opening the way to Charul. “We should at least make the man a survival pack.”
That felt like a good idea.
“I’ll drop him, then head immediately for Bianka.” As Ammond stepped forward and set the dials of his new vest to twelfth-century France, Baigh brought Keltson a pack from Rusha and gave him a reassuring pat on the back.
“Be careful, Kelts. And good luck.”
Keltson felt a tinge of jealousy. If he successfully saved Bianka, Baigh and the others would get their happy ending in a matter of seconds. But he still had a long, treacherous road ahead of him. One that was likely filled with plenty of trials and errors before reaching a resolution.
He waved goodbye, wrapped Charul in the tarp, then pressed the ignition and transported them both into a beautiful forest.
“Welcome to your new home,” Keltson said, grabbing the still unconscious Charul under the arms and dragging him toward a tree. “This isn't so bad. I don't know what Urig was so fired up about. There shouldn’t be anything remotely close to you here, so I prepared you a survival pack. It's mainly boy scout equipment from the 1500's, but hopefully, you know how to find food on your own. If I remember right, you didn’t mind bragging about your hunting skills.”
Charul’s eyes fluttered.
Keltson patted his head, purposefully mussing his hair out of its perfect wave. “Now remember, it would be REALLY nice if you could just hang out here forever instead of going back to the agency and bringing all of Hades down on us. We already had a run in with Poseidon and that was a terrible experience.”
Keltson straightened and looked down at the awakening Charul. “Seriously though, dude, don't come back,” he said. He gave him a casual salute then jumped into the Pause near Ammond’s cottage to look for a way to free Bianka.
The space felt smoky and the trees were so dense that when they shattered, there was hardly room for them. Ammond gazed at the spot where Keltson disappeared. Keltson searched around the coffin, hoping to find the best way to open the device. But as he looked at it, he realized the top was completely dark.
His heart clenched in his chest. He moved forward to inspect the casket and as soon as he touched it, his surroundings melted into the floor. An immense stone ballroom rose around him. Cracked mirrors lined the walls. He startled and jumped back as they each cast beams of light onto the floor across the room. The light grew into shadowy silhouettes of Bianka. The faded woman filled the room on every side of him. Some were young, merely children. Others had grown gracefully old. All of them dressed like the countess she should have been.
Some danced, others spoke to invisible companions. It was as if he saw a hundred different moments in the lives Bianka might have lived. Had he really tampered with her life this much?
“Are you lost?” a young voice asked from his side. Keltson startled and looked down at the girl. She seemed about eight years old. She blinked up at him sweetly.
Before he could respond to the child, a teenage version of Bianka whirled by, spinning with an invisible partner. She bumped into him and apologized with a giggle as she was whisked away in a silent waltz.
Keltson stood on the edge of the immense crowd of variances, his head whirling at all the changes he had made.
The young girl spoke again. “Are you lost?” she asked.
He looked into her deep brown eyes. “Um, yes. I am,” he said.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
“You, actually,” he said.
“No one has ever come to see me here before.” Her eyelashes fluttered as she spun gently from side to side. “But at home, Father is called on quite often.”
“I believe that,” Keltson said.
“I love having guests. Are you a guest?” she asked.
“Actually, I'm here looking for someone like you, but, older.”
The young Bianka's smile faded. “One of them? Not me?” she asked, motioning to the crowd of Bianka's standing in the center of the room.
“Yes, could you help me?” he asked.
“I wish you well. But I should see my other guests. There are so many who wish to call on me,” she said, whirling back with a swish of skirts.
Keltson watched her curls bounce behind her as she walked into the never-ending crowd. Everyone around him was dressed in finery. His Bianka would be dressed in simple linen. At least, that's what she wore in the casket. Keltson stood a perhaps ten centimeters taller than Bianka so he could see over the heads of the entire crowd. But everyone looked identical, making it impossible to pick her out.
“Excuse me!” Keltson shouted, hoping to gain their attention. No one responded. His shoulders slumped. He was about to set out around the perimeter of the large room when someone else spoke.
“They don’t listen very well,” another young voice said behind him.
He turned, surprised, and found a very young Bianka, sitting on the side of the room behind him, eating an apple. She couldn’t have been more than four years old. Behind her stood a frosted mirror laid into the wall. As he stepped closer, he could barely make out a hazy shape in the center. He peered through the glass and gasped when he saw that Bianka lay inside, frozen and white as a ghost.
The little girl recognized his gaze and looked behind her.
“The pretty lady wanted a bite of my apple,” the young girl said.
“She did?” he asked, taking a step forward.
“Yes, her face appeared in the glass, watching Father and me. He got me this apple, you see. They're my favorite. She wanted it, but when she tried to reach for it, she froze. Now I wish I could give her some, but she might choke.”
Behind Keltson, the dancing Bianka whirled by again, her skirts brushing his boots.
“You are a very smart little girl,” Keltson said, examining the frame around the mirror. She smiled, then hesitated.
“Father says others must call me ‘milady’, or just ‘lady’. But, you may choose.”
“My apologies, your majesty.” Keltson gave her a dramatic bow. The girl giggled.
“Why do you think she wanted your apple?” Keltson asked.
She ignored him and turned back to admiring her apple. “Father must have sent the servants to search the deepest parts of the cellar for it. They must be very brave to go down there in the dark. He knows that I love apples.” She smiled, her dimples carved into her round cheeks.
Do the right thing.
This girl was so young, younger than he had ever seen her before. Was this Bianka’s original life? He turned and looked at the girl frozen behind glass and began to doubt. Which life would she have chosen for herself?
“The pretty lady wanted a bite of my apple,” the young girl said, holding up the apple again. He looked down at her, confused.
“Yes, her face appeared in the glass, watching Father and me…” He listened as she repeated every word, exactly as before, as if stuck in a loop.
A skirt brushed against his boot as the dancing Bianka whirled past him. Again. Keltson looked through the mirror at the sleeping countess. Her hair curled over her cheek as she slept and her body was slightly twisted as if she looked back through the mirror as she passed through. Had Bianka regretted the decision she made?
Of course she had regrets. She must have just realized it was a trap.
Do the right thing.
Why had Bianka wanted to step into this time capsule in the first place? Was she attempting to leave the life she knew? Was she that unhappy? He looked at her, looking back, now frozen in time, in a place where she didn’t exist at all.
Around him danced all the tragic lives that Keltson wanted to change. The women who flitted around the room might seem contented, but…
He turned back around to look at the face in the glass. This most recent Bianka was different.
Through every timeline, Bianka remained kind, but often kind to all the wrong people. She was quiet and non-confrontational, but at the most crucial times when speaking up was necessary, she maintained her silence. She was confident, but only in her beauty.
This girl in the casket was different.
Bianka was happy despite all the horrible things that happened to her. She was kind, yet stood up for herself. She was quiet when others needed her to listen. She was confident in her compassion toward others.
Dressed in simple linen with frost forming in her tangled hair... This Bianka was the most beautiful in the room. She looked back longingly at a life of hardship, near death, and betrayal. But also of friendship, bravery, and honor. In this room, where he could choose from a multitude of women to take back with him, Keltson wondered which life would Bianka have chosen?
The right choice.
He looked back down at the young girl, who continued to loop through her story about her father. “Enjoy your apple, your majesty. Make sure you thank your father for it,” Keltson said to the young girl.
She smiled brightly and Keltson leaned over, touched the frosted glass of the mirror, and felt the room melt around him.
-Sketchbook of Dorothea Wild
Lilia’s Time Capsule
Pause
Bianka's eyes flew open and she let out a startled gasp. The man knelt over her, his eyes wide in surprise. Everything was icy, dark and frigid. Crystals covered the walls and glittered on the floor. The ice underneath him crackled as he shifted his weight.
“Mirror?” she asked. Her lips barely formed the words. The sound came out as a breathless whisper, no more than a puff of moisture that drifted up into the air. The man immediately stooped to pull her from the floor. As he moved her, her thin linen dress crackled. He wrapped a long, stiff blanket around her and pulled her onto his lap. She shivered into his chest, her breath creating a thin cloud around his face.
He rubbed her arms. “I'm here. I'm so sorry. I'm here.”
Bianka couldn't speak. She only shook violently.
“Ammond and the others want you home. I came to find you,” he said.
Bianka blinked, but no tears came. It was too cold for tears. She recognized the hints of a beard she had seen in all her visions of him. In the back of her mind, Bianka knew it was improper to study him so closely, but she also deserved to inspect the corners of his jaw, the shape of his brow.
You have seen my face a hundred times, she thought. But this is the first moment we are no longer strangers.
