“Well, that didn’t exactly go as planned,” Ty said when the door had closed between them and the women.
“No,” Con agreed, but he was glad it was out and he wasn’t the one who’d done it.
“Let’s go to the silo…” Ty began.
“I need to stay here, close to Rita,” Con interrupted.“You said we are safe, but that’s not strictly true, is it?”
“Well, yes and no,” Ty said.“No one can approach here without us knowing and we have few protections we’ve added since the last time we had a problem.”
He didn’t go on and Con didn’t ask.He knew that in a way he was compromised.He’d gone into the past and brought Rita back here with him.He hadn’t done it on purpose.But he had planned to not come back, not if it meant leaving Rita to the wolves.
“How did we get here?”he asked out loud.That was the question that kept circling in his brain.He’d seen it with his eyes, but he didn’t know how or why it had happened.
“Alice has a theory,” Ty admitted.He came away from the door and settled behind the desk.“She suspects that Rita is a time sensitive like she is.And your Faraday cage wasn’t quite perfect.She doesn’t think it gave off enough signal to really track you, but it may have interacted with the instability that probably formed when Rita went off script.”
“Oh.”Since he hadn’t understood much of it, he couldn’t think of anything else to say.Then he looked up.“Can we use it?”Use it against the opposition is what he meant.
“We’re looking into that,” Ty said, a slight smile tugging the edges of his mouth.
Con didn’t blame him.He wasn’t just the new guy, he was the clueless and non-science guy.
“She could still be a trap, you know,” Ty said.
Con nodded.“But if she is, it was without her knowledge, Ty.I’m sure of it.”
Ty gave a shrug that could have meant anything.Suddenly his gaze stabbed into Con’s.
“We might not be able to help her, to save her.”His face was grim.“It’s hard enough to hide in time when the opposition aren’t sure who you are, but they know her.They know her name and when she was born.”
“They could…” Con couldn’t say it.
Ty nodded grimly.“Why do you think we keep our names so far under wraps?”
Con stared at the floor between his feet, his mind twisting and turning, trying to solve a problem he didn’t even understand.Then he looked up.
“Why haven’t they done it already?”
“We can think of two reasons,” Ty said.
“She’s a trap.”
Ty nodded.
“And the other?”
Ty sighed.“It is possible that she is important to their timeline in some way that they either need to change or fix before…”
“Or they hope they can kill her out of time, so it wouldn’t impact them.”
“Yeah,” Ty said.“If I were an evil time overlord that’s how I’d do it,” he added thoughtfully.
“And how do the good guys handle it?”Con asked, with a hint of belligerence.Rita, well, she mattered.She didn’t deserve any of this.
“Well, we could try setting our own trap,” Ty said mildly.
“With Rita as bait.”Con didn’t like that even more.
“It might be the only way to save her life, Con,” Ty said.“All our lives, now that she knows we exist.”
