Meredith McCardle - The Eighth Guardian

I don’t understand. My father is a cold-blooded killer, and I don’t understand anything anymore.

I inhale the pain and refuse to blow it out. I let it fill me, consume me, crush me. My hands find the floor, and I sink into it. It’s a lie. Everything I’ve ever known has been one massive lie.

“Get up,” Yellow says.

I ignore her.

“I said get up.”

“Go away, Yellow.”

“I’m only going to tell you to get up one more time before I bend down and pull you up myself.”

We studied the physical effects of trauma aftermath at Peel. Rationally, I know I’m in shock. I tell myself I am. But I can’t snap out of it. I’m classic: numb dizzy weak nauseated confused. I can’t process my thoughts. Too fast. They’re coming too fast.

Yellow bends over, loops her elbows under my armpits, and yanks me up. “You are going to look me in the eye right now and swear to me that you will never project without me again.”

What is she talking about? The scene replays in my mind. My father prevented that cop from stopping the assassination. That cop knew about the sniper, and my father deflected him and made sure Kennedy was shot.

“Iris!”

My father changed history so that Kennedy was assassinated? Kennedy made it through Dealey unscathed before my dad interfered?

“Iris!” Yellow grabs my shoulder and shakes me.

“What?” My voice is a whisper.

“Promise me you will not project without me.”

I push her away. “Are you kidding right now? What difference does it make? Nothing matters anymore.”

Yellow’s eyes bulge open. “Nothing matters? So your whole big plan about bringing down CE, who we now know is named Cresty Something-or-other, doesn’t matter?”

“What happened back there, Yellow? My dad is a—” I choke. I can’t finish it.

“An assassin.”

The words hang in the air and refuse to dissipate. He is. My father is a killer. He didn’t pull the trigger, but he might as well have. Before he interfered, that cop must have caught Oswald and stopped the assassination. My father changed all that.

I don’t want that to be the truth. This can’t be the truth. I need to know. I pull out my watch.

“We have to go back,” I tell Yellow.

“Go back where?”

“Go back to before this mission. Before my dad died. To read what the history books say. To figure out whether President Kennedy was assassinated before my dad interfered or not.”

“That’s not how it works,” Yellow says.

“When do you want to project to?” I turn the year dial forward.

“Iris,” Yellow hisses. “I said that’s not how it works. No one explained Chronometric Augmentation to you, did they? How it fundamentally works?”

That sounds ominous. “No.”

Yellow sighs. “We’re in a parallel future right now. A new future. That’s what happens when we change the past. We create a parallel universe that we all shift up to. You can’t go back to the old one to see what history books said before we changed the past, because those history books don’t exist anymore in our future. There are new books, and those books reflect the changes we made. Period.”

Her words bounce around in my head. My brain processes them, but my heart won’t believe it.

“Are you telling me I don’t get to know what happened here?”

Yellow takes a slow breath, as if she’s not sure what to say. “But you do know what happened here.”

I do.

I do.

I do.

I lean over and rest my forehead on the cool, metal railing. “He killed Kennedy. My father killed a president. This changes everything.”

“Yeah, he was in on it. But how does that change you wanting to bring down Alpha?”

I jump back. “My father was a bad person! I can’t just get over that!”

There’s shouting right below us, and footsteps pound up the stairs. Before I can even think, three men tear up the stairs to our landing. They’re all wearing suits with skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses and have FBI written all over them. Yellow and I exchange one panicked glance, and then we’re surrounded.

“Who are you?” one demands.

“How did you get in here?”

Shit. When are we? When did I project to?

Yellow drops to her knees and holds up her hands. “I’m sorry, sirs,” she says with a convincing mock sob. “I just . . . I’m such a fan of the president’s . . . I had to see. I dragged my friend.”

“Get up!” the man in the middle says. “You both should be arrested. This is an active crime scene.”

“I’m sorry,” Yellow wails.

The man on the left grabs her and spins her against the wall, then pats her down. The man on the right comes over to me, and I hold up my hands in submission. He pats me down.

“Clear,” he says.

“I’ve got this,” the man holding Yellow says. He tosses Alpha’s notebook to the third man. Yellow looks at me with terrified eyes.

The man flips through it. “What’s this?”

“My notes from a home economics class at school,” Yellow says without missing a beat.

The man raises an eyebrow. “There’s an entry right here for June 17, 1998. HY. Eight point five. What’s that got to do with home economics, missy?”

Yellow clears her throat. “It’s an advanced sewing class. We’re trying to predict what fashion is going to look like in the future based on past trends. HY stands for Hiro Yu. He’s a Japanese fashion designer who’s currently creating some very avant garde pieces. I’m going to base my design on his. Eight point five is what I need to set the bobbin to. It’s just a note.”

I blink. I’m speechless. She just completely pulled that from her ass and passed it off like it makes all the sense in the world. Yellow is hands-down the best liar I’ve ever met.

“Sounds like a waste of class time to me,” the man says. “You girls need to be learning cooking and cleaning and maybe some typing.”

Yellow bows her head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“What you girls did was very foolish.” He juts his chin toward the men holding Yellow and me. “Escort them out.” Then he looks right at Yellow and hands her back the notebook. “Don’t you ever enter this building again.”

It’s a long, tense walk down six flights of stairs. We’re given another warning to stay away from the building and pitched out onto the street. Piles of flowers, some long dead, some fresh, litter the front of the book depository. There are at least a dozen people out front, some crying, some praying, some standing and staring.

“Holy crap,” Yellow breathes after the door slams shut in our faces. “That was way too close.”

There is nothing like nearly getting arrested to snap you back to reality. Was it really only a few minutes ago I was curled up in a ball in the stairwell?

“Eight point five is what you set the bobbin to?” I ask. “What does that even mean?”

Yellow shrugs. “No clue.”

“When are we?”

She looks at the people in front of the building, then grabs my arm and marches me away. “December 23, 1963. You turned the month dial forward once. Thank God I saw you do it. Now promise me you will never project without me.”

“Yellow, I—”

“Promise me!”

“I won’t project without you,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Tell me how things have changed.”

“What?” I push off her.

“Murder, Iris. Assassination. This thing with Alpha is worse than we thought. And did you ever stop to think that maybe this means the entire organization is corrupt? Including my dad?”

I—no. I didn’t.

She huffs. “I’m sorry you had to find out about your dad that way. Really, I am. But that just means we have to work even harder to stop it. Do you get that? We have to stop it. And I have no idea where to go from here. None. It’s you and me, floundering around in 1963. We need help, and I don’t know how to get it.”