Is this the sum-total of the GTC’s use for me? Carter could have one of his flunkies do this job. Yet, he insists my participation is crucial to mission success.
There’s a soft rap on my door. “Dodger, are you awake?” Fagin asks.
I swipe the lock on the remote control panel and the door to my quarters opens with a soft swoosh.
She enters, looks around my cramped, Spartan berth and shakes her head with a smile. “You’ve never been one for girly decorations. You were all business, even when you were small.” She settles on the edge of my bed and looks at me with that keen awareness I’ve been accustomed to since I met her. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you.”
“You’re on the GTC’s side,” I say. “Or the Benefactors’ side. Hard to tell which sometimes.”
“I’m on your side,” she whispers hoarsely. “Always have been.”
“They made you my keeper. I knew they had more on you—that you had more to lose— than you were saying. So, who’s withholding information now?”
She emits a tiny, laughing snort. “How much more is there to lose than your mind or your life? I’m not sure which I prefer: the blank nothingness of a memory wipe or to just blink out of existence altogether.” She snaps her fingers for emphasis. “Gone and forgotten.”
“I’m not talking about your life.” I pause, waiting to see how long it takes her to acknowledge the Benefactors’ leverage. She doesn’t take the bait, so I fix it on the hook a little more solidly. “Isabella.”
Fagin usually controls her body language, but I catch the small wince at the name. I’ve hit a nerve. “Who is she? Your kid? Your sister? She’s someone important to you or Trevor wouldn’t have mentioned her when I was trapped in King Henry’s toilet.”
Fagin stands, forces her posture into ramrod straightness from shoulders to feet; she looks more like a puppet with a stick up its ass than I’ve ever seen her. “She’s none of your business, that’s what she is.”
The lack of trust stings. “Who has her? Benefactors or the GTC?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Fagin says, angrily swiping the control panel to open the door.
I jump up, reach past her shoulder and close it again. “You’re not leaving until you tell me about Isabella.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“The more you know, the more danger you’re in.”
“I can handle my shit.”
“This time, you’re in over your head and the consequences will be deadly,” she says, trembling. Tears stream down her cheeks and the raw emotion shakes me to the core. “Isabella will die.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” I say, measuring my words into calm, steady beats, hoping to settle her frantic emotions. “Secrets are bad. Let’s have no more of them.”
We sit together, on the bed, holding hands tight, an attempt to keep our world from flying completely apart. She sniffles and I hand her a handkerchief from bedside table. She runs a thumb over the Vicomte’s embroidered initials and quirks an eyebrow at me.
“Old habits,” I say with a dismissive wave. I could be eighty years old and I’d still nick a gentleman’s handkerchief just to see if I could.
“Isabella?” I ask, again.
Fagin nods. “My god-daughter.”
“I didn’t know you believed in that sort of thing. Religion. Being a godparent. Raising a child in the way they should go and all of that.”
“When you owe a life for a life, you have little choice over how, and when, markers are called in. When I was an Observer, before crawling my way up the ladder to Thief Master, another a woman named Andreen—another Observer—saved my life. She said I owed her a blood debt and, one day, she may need my help. I figured it was a small price to pay: a future favor in return for my life.”
“Blood debts aren’t small,” I say, stroking her knuckles with my thumbs. “They’re huge, hairy, life-changing deals.”
“Isabella was certainly life-changing,” she says, nodding in agreement. “Social worker showed up at my door one day with the four-year-old girl in tow.”
“What happened to Andreen.”
She shrugs. “Disappeared. A neighbor found Isabella sitting on her doorstep with nothing but the clothes on her back and notarized documents naming me as her legal guardian.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Fagin blows out a huff of air. “And me, not the maternal sort.”
“That’s not true. You mothered every kid who passed through your doors.”
“Ah. That was good for business.” She smiles.
“You’re not as tough as you think you are, and whoever is using Isabella as leverage knows it,” I say.
Her smile fades as she presses her lips into a tight, thin line. She takes a breath and rises from the bed, extricating her hands from mine.
“That’s all you get,” she says. “You know who she is and why she’s important. I can’t risk telling you anymore.”
“Fagin, together, we can fix—”
“Enough,” she says. The set of her jawline confirms that I could take a sledgehammer to that infamous stubbornness and never do more than surface damage. “I can’t lose both of you, and that’s what will happen if I keep talking.” She glances around the room, once more. “You should at least change the wall color. Gray is so depressing.”
An hour later, with the temporal filters modified to mitigate the more serious time travel side-effects, Carter gathers everyone on the bridge and lays out the departure plan.
“We have the arrival set for the date, time, and geographic coordinates. Since Becca Trevor plants the bogus letter in King Henry’s chambers at eleven-thirty in the morning of December 23, 1532, we need to be in position by sunrise of that same day to intercept
