“Nico—” I say, but he cuts me off.
“You let her get to you. Goddamn it, Dodger, you let Trevor get in your head.”
“Two minutes,” comes the next countdown warning.
“Fuck off, Carter,” Nico bellows.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” Nico rakes his hands through his hair. “You changed a fixed point in time. Do you know the impact of stopping the birth of a someone who is supposed to live?”
“No.” I stop to consider the possibilities, and the first thought that comes to mind is—if I went looking for them—whether I could see my parents’ faces again. Merde. Are they still alive or did I fuck that up, too? “Do you?”
He blinks and, for a moment, I’m distracted by a flurry of dark eyelashes. He’s standing close enough for me to catch his scent: clean male with a hint of the wood smoke from the bonfire. It’s a heady fragrance, and I wish we could fast forward through this mess and be okay again.
“No,” he replies. “That’s the whole fucking point, Dodger. No one knows the impact of this level of meddling, because no one has ever done it before. Actually,” he lets out a snort, “What you’ve done can’t be labeled simple ’meddling.’ More like you’ve royally fucked the future. Who knows what we’ll find when we get home. If there’s a home to go back to at all.”
“What if the future’s not fucked up? What if things are better because of this?”
Hope is like a drug. It mollifies guilt and makes justifying insanity a tiny bit easier. I don’t know if I believe whether this surreal turn of events could possibly change history for the better, but one thing is sure: We’ll find out whether we like it or not.
“Time’s up,” Carter says. “Open the door so we can have a proper chat about the fine mess you’ve gotten us into, or I’ll let myself in.”
Nico pauses, a puzzled look flickers across his face. He moves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me and whispers: “Why doesn’t he barge in here and take us into custody like they did with Fagin? Why is he so interested in helping us look better to the Benefactors?”
“No clue,” I whisper back. “Maybe he doesn’t want to attract any attention from the locals?”
“Something doesn’t smell right. If Carter could get in the ship, he’d already be onboard. Keep him talking. I’m going to run a quick diagnostic to see if I can find which controls have been hacked. Could be they didn’t get any farther in than the CommLink frequencies.”
“I’m waiting,” Carter says in an irritating sing-song voice.
I swipe two fingers across the Comm Panel, and an exterior video feed hologram pops up on a nearby table. Somehow, reducing Jackson Carter to a six-inch tall action figure takes some of the bite out of his bark. Flicking a fingernail through his holo-head several times and watching as the light fragments scatter and reassemble themselves is childish, but satisfying.
“Last time we saw each other, you threatened to sic your highly-placed friends on me. I didn’t take you for a guy who does his own dirty work. Or are you still sore that I almost torpedoed your perfect mission history on the de Medici job?”
“Personal vendettas are a luxury I can’t afford right now. I have a job to do.”
“What, exactly, is your job?”
“You’re tap dancin’ on my last nerve, kid. Gotta hand it to you, though. When you fuck up, you do a whiz-bang job of it.” He sighs. “I’m here to fix what you’ve broken.”
“Fix it how?”
“Depends,” Carter replies. “We don’t know how much damage has been done. Our recovery team lost communication with the base back home the moment we arrived here. It’s possible the fabric of everything we knew began unraveling the minute you sent history to hell in a hand cart.” He pauses. “What we know for sure is that we can’t sit around and do nothing.”
“Okay,” Nico replies, “there could be a wound in the time continuum, as you say. Or the communication channels could be jammed by the government so we can’t talk to the Benefactors. It could be any number of things that screw with the frequencies, like solar flares.”
“Put two and two together, Garcia, and I’ll bet you still come up with four. What’s that old saying: The simplest answer is often the correct one?”
Nico turns back to the command console. After a few minutes, he looks back at me. “We can’t get through, either. No response from Command Ops back home.”
“Told you,” Carter’s voice brims with weary annoyance.
“You’re a manipulative son of a bitch,” I say. “You could’ve sabotaged the communication frequencies, yourself, to convince us to cooperate. I’d like to know how much the Benefactors are paying you. Whatever it is, it must be a handsome sum for you to take this job on.”
“Maybe I’m here just to watch you go down, Arseneau. That would be payment enough.”
“That answer doesn’t inspire confidence in your Kumbaya pretension.”
“You want inspiration to cooperate? Envision this as your last breath as a free woman. That oughta perk you right up.”
Nico, engrossed in running system diagnostics, holds one finger in the air. He needs a little more time.
“I need to talk to Fagin,” I say.
“After you open the door,” Carter snaps.
“Fuck off, Carter. Someone changed that letter to convince the king that Anne Boleyn got knocked up by another man. If anyone can help sort out this mess, it’s Fagin.”
There’s a soft, humorless chuckle from Carter. “She can’t help you. You have no leverage. If history has changed so much that time travel is never invented, we could all be stuck in this time. It’s in everyone’s best interest to get along and work together.”
Nico beckons me into the cockpit and points at the holographic display screen. “Only thing they hacked is the communication channels,” he says. “No other systems are compromised.”
“Yet, Commander Garcia,” Carter says. I glance back at the hologram image of him, still projecting in the middle of the tabletop behind
