“As for Jean,” Mongoose smiled, “I was almost sorry that he had to undergo conditioning. I really developed quite a liking for that kid.”
“How extensive was the conditioning?” said Forrester.
“In Jean’s case, fairly minor. He would remember Monsieur l’Avenir and his peripheral involvement with the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but he would forget all about the… untimely things that he had seen. After that, well, it seems he had always hated Paris. He and his brother used to dream of going to sea and becoming sailors. After their uncle died, they signed onto a merchant ship as cabin boys. They had a fascinating future ahead of them.”
“What actually happened to create the split?” said Andre.
Mongoose shook his head. “I can only guess. Perhaps Blakeney, our Blakeney, was killed by Chauvelin in the Chat Gris and the fact that it was a substitute Blakeney, which already worked against temporal inertia, was enough to cause the split. But then, Armand St. Just and the Comte de Tournay were due to arrive shortly. They would have been arrested, in spite of Chauvelin’s promise to Marguerite, no doubt. Possibly Ffoulkes and several other members of the league would have been caught as well. Whatever it was, that one moment in the inn was obviously the catalyst, because when it occurred or rather, when it did not occur, the alternate timeline ceased to exist.”
“Having never existed in the first place,” Forrester said.
“But of course it existed,” Andre said, frowning. “Why else was all this-”
“It never existed in the first place,” Forrester said, emphatically. “It was a shadow, a dream. What happened to the bodies of those agents from the alternate timeline? They disappeared, because they were never really there.”
Andre stared at him, perplexed.
“What he means,” said Mongoose, gently, “is that we changed reality. For a time, our reality was that which we knew, prior to the split. Then, we were dealing with another reality altogether. We changed that. We restored reality to the way it should have been, the way it was, the way it is. At this moment, as we sit here now, the incident that created the alternate timeline never occurred. That timeline, along with everyone in it, never existed. It was like a dream.”
“A nightmare,” said Forrester, drinking deeply.
Andre shook her head. “No, you can’t play tricks with logic to change what was. For a time, however brief a time from where we sit now, that timeline existed. Those people were real. There was another world, another universe!”
“If we accept that,” Forrester said, “then we must also accept that you helped kill them all.” He held her gaze. “You understand?”
She remained silent. She glanced at Finn and Lucas, but they wouldn’t meet her gaze. Both men stared down at the floor.
“I need another drink,” said Finn.
“So do I,” said Lucas.
Forrester refilled their glasses.
