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They shared a look, but it was Carter who spoke. Maybe they thought I was crazy, and Good Cop Carter was better suited to handle the nutjob than Rip, Shit, and Bust Cop Dawson, who'd likely just pummel the crazy out of me if he got half the chance.
"Who's dead, Miss Wylde?"
"You don't know him," I told the agents. "He's not from around here. He did all this as he was passing through. I don't even think he intended to stop here. It was just a blip on the route of his journey that happened to make him skip tracks. I guess, in a way, it was an accident. A fortuitous one for him, as it turned out. A disastrous one for us."
"Us?"
"You, me, NASA. The people that died. Carrie."
"Your sister? We haven't met your sister yet. Just you. But neither of you are American, Miss Wylde. And this happened on American soil. The only anomaly we can find, however, is you. Not your sister. Just you."
I shrugged my good shoulder. It was going to be impossible to make them understand. I'd lived it and I barely understood it at all. Time was not linear as I'd been taught. Time had loops and curves and waves and switchbacks, and multiple tracks that crisscrossed for no apparent reason. If Time had a plan, it was a plan only it could understand. Not mere mortals like us. We pretended at RATS that we understood Time, but did we really? I was beginning to think Time was beyond us and we were just children playing with its castoffs.
Sometimes our games were deadly.
"Where did you go?" Carter asked.
"Hmmm?" I said, still thinking morbid thoughts of Time.
"The better question," Dawson said, "is how did you get out of the VAB without anyone seeing you leave it?"
That was interesting. Just how much time had passed for them? They clearly remembered taking me to the VAB. Showing me the sheet-covered bodies of the NASA techs who had died. Did they remember facing off against Jack and me back on Launch Pad 39A? Did they remember seeing the Orion where it shouldn't have been?
I hadn't paid much attention to the sun in the sky when Pratt threw me out of Orion 2b. I'd lost consciousness not long afterwards, and then when Agents Dawson and Carter appeared above me, I'd been too preoccupied with the guns they'd shoved in my face to work out what time of day it was.
We were clearly still back on Day One. Or as RATS would call it, OE: Alpha 1; Cape Canaveral. The point in time where it all started. That's what we assumed, and I was beginning to think it had been a good guess. Just because our parents had been dead for a year when Carrie and I met up with Sergei and RATS here, didn't mean the Russian had already picked the alternate Wyldes up in their St Petersburg, thereby killing my Wyldes in ours yet.
Bloody causal loops, or those temporal paradoxes that screw with your head and screw up Time. This Origin Event was more complicated than a hundred-year number theory math problem. I wasn't even sure if there was an answer, or if there was, whether we should try to decipher it.
This was allhisfault, I thought glumly. And then, with a jolt that actually had me jerking in my seat and disturbing my shoulder, I realised Sergei Ivanovwasthe Origin Event. Not here and now, buthim. One huge, long, never-ending OE. It started in his time when, as a Russian cosmonaut, he returned to Earth from the International Space Station in an Orion MPCV and continued on to RATS in the 23rd century, hitting the peak of Time's curves along the way. St Petersburg and Cape Canaveral in the 21st century just happened to be a couple of those peaks Sergei managed to hit along the way. Just because he came from a time further along the timeline than mine didn't mean he couldn't hit my time while on his way to our combined future.
"Causal loops," I whispered. Oh, how I hated them.
"What did you say?" Dawson demanded.
"You're still here?" I asked. "I thought you would have given up by now."
"You're not getting rid of us that easily, Miss Wylde. Nor are you escaping us for the third time today."
And that answered that. The poor bastardshadalready experienced the altercation with Jack and me on Launch Pad 39A. How the bloody hell were they staying sane?
I studied them, then, and noted a thing or two I'd missed earlier. Dawson's suit wasn't as pristine as it had been when we'd first met. His eyes looked bloodshot and red-rimmed, as if he'd been rubbing them in frustration. Carter looked even more rumpled than previously. I could see sweat stains on the armpits of his crinkled jacket. There was even a coffee stain on the collar of his shirt that I was sure hadn't been there before. Both had removed their ties at some stage.
These men had had their worldview challenged today, and the object of their altered state of being was sitting, cuffed to a table, right before them. I would be lucky to avoid the electric chair.
One of the first things they teach you at the Royal Academy of Time Surgeons is not to pollute contemporary time with out-of-time facts. But I was up against the wall here. I had no backup, no way of extricating myself from this mess, and despite having offed Sergei Bloody Ivanov, the cause of all this heartache and chaos, I was considered guilty by the contemporaries of my own time until proven innocent.
I had a choice to make. Follow the rules and sacrifice myself to Time. Or slap Time on the side of its head and make it pay attention to me.
I felt like I was drowning, but there was a rope tying me to the Royal Academy of Time Surgeons and it wouldn't let me float away. The deeper I went, the tighter the rope, and it might just save me.
I had to get back.
I'd killed Sergei, but some things were still out of time, weren't they? Carrie wasn't here, for one, even though I was. I'd been corrected, but she hadn't. And despite being an alternate universe Carrie, I justknewshe would stay in our universe no matter what. Don't ask me how I knew, I just did. Call my psychic. I just knew. So, her not being back in the 21st century, even though I was, had to mean something.
Yeah, nah. This wasn't over yet.
I made my choice, then. Hyde might have made a brief appearance, too. But whatever. I was done being Time's stooge. I was done taking crap from people who really didn't know me at all. I was just so bloody done with all of it.
