Meredith McCardle - The Eighth Guardian

“Neither,” Yellow says.

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Look,” Yellow says with a huff in her voice. “What if . . .” She takes a breath. “What if the entire organization is corrupt? Every single member? What if my dad is working with Alpha? I don’t know if I can face the fact that my father might be a . . .” Her eyes get big as she realizes what she’s about to say.

“A traitor?” I finish. “Like my father was?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine,” I interrupt. It’s not fine. Nothing my dad did will ever be fine. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think your dad knows. I mean, Alpha had my dad and then Beta, and then when they were . . . taken out . . . he had to move on to someone else for these two.” I tap the last two locations on the list. “I don’t know what happened to that person, but now, all of a sudden, Alpha is trying to get the ability to project himself. That’s why he sent me back to get Ariel to change his design. The whole entire thing was one big setup to give Alpha the ability. If someone else was in on this CE thing, Alpha wouldn’t be so desperate.”

“That’s Eta or Gamma,” Yellow says.

“Huh?” I know she has to be talking about two members of Annum Guard Two, but I have no idea who they are.

“Eta and Gamma. They both died only a few years ago. Gamma’s—well, she was Blue’s mother. I’m going to doubt it’s her. She did a lot of the early lifting on missions, before the gravity chamber was invented. Lots of repeated projecting.”

“You mean like we’re doing?”

She ignores me. “Her body gave out on her. Just stopped. She lost the ability to walk, then even to stand. Her muscles atrophied. She—”

I hold up my hand to stop her. I don’t want to hear any more. I’m picturing Epsilon as she was in my orientation, her body twisted and broken by years of unprotected projections. How much damage am I doing to my own body trying to bring down Alpha? I’m young and healthy now, but how many years do I have left before I suffer the same fate? I don’t want to think about it.

“Eta?” I prod.

Yellow nods. “Eta seems most likely. I—I hate saying this because she is—was—Violet’s mom, and Violet’s been my friend like forever; but I can see Eta being swayed by the idea of money and power.”

“What happened to Eta?”

“She died,” Yellow says, looking down at the ground. “On a mission.”

“Or do you mean Alpha had her taken out during a mission because she knew too much?”

Yellow’s head snaps up, and her mouth falls open. “Do you think? I mean—oh my God—he really could have, couldn’t he?”

I shrug. Because now that the words have come out of my mouth, all I can think about is my dad. That maybe Alpha set it up so that Beta would kill my dad on the mission. So that he wouldn’t have to split the money with him. Maybe my dad was just a pawn. He got caught up in something he didn’t understand and got too far in. Or maybe he was just pretending on the Kennedy mission. It was a sting operation to bring down Alpha and Beta, and Beta got him first.

Or maybe that’s just the wishful thinking of a girl who doesn’t want to know the truth about the man who’d fathered her.

I look down at the piece of paper Ariel smuggled into my bracelet. “Okay, so we go back and look for Eta,” I mumble. “Lynn or Maryland?”

“I’ll take Maryland,” she says.

I nod. I’m relieved. Getting to Lynn is going to be so much easier. And faster.

We agree to meet up when we’re done, at the Christian Science reflecting pool in Boston on Christmas Day 1963. We already have the clothes, and it’s safer to stay away from the present, especially in Boston. Who knows what the manhunt looks like now.

Yellow and I walk to the bus station together. There’s a bus leaving for Lynn in twenty minutes and one leaving for the capital in three hours.

“Good luck,” I tell her as I climb the steps of a silver bus with a rounded top. She reaches out and squeezes my hand.

“You, too.”

The doors close behind me, and I take a seat. Here goes nothing.

I spend the entire bus ride with my head leaned against the window. When I get out of this— if I get out of this—I’m going to get my mom help. I won’t take no for an answer this time. I need her. I need normalcy. I’m going to haul her to the doctor, then the pharmacy; and I will shove those pills down her throat every damn day if I have to. I won’t let her stop taking them after two weeks—not this time.

I will be enough for her, goddammit. She will get better for me. I’m only a year away from eighteen. One year before I’m officially an adult. She owes me one last year of a normal childhood.

Normal.

I laugh. My father was a time-traveling assassin, and I’m a minor employed by a secret wing of the United States government. That’s as far from normal as you can get.

The bus drops me off at Market Square, which is somewhere in Lynn. I don’t know. I’ve passed the stops for Lynn on the highway before, but I’ve never been here. I find someone manning the ticket counter. He’s short and squat and wears a greasy blue shirt and an expression that shows he’s none too pleased about working on Christmas Eve.

“Pardon me,” I say. “I need to get to 1100 Western Avenue. Could you point me in the right direction?”

The man squints behind his glasses. “What did you say the address was?”

“1100 Western Avenue.”

The man’s brow furrows. “The GE plant?”

“The . . . the what?”

“GE,” the man says. “General Electric.”

I’m not sure why, but a funny feeling tickles the middle of my stomach. “Oh, right, yes.” I say it as if all along I was headed to a huge power plant.

The man points. “That crossroad there is Western. Hang a left and start walking. It’ll be on your left in a mile or so. Can’t miss it.”

I’m walking toward the water. An inlet of the bay. The wind is kicking up, and a light snow falls from the sky. I hunch my shoulders and keep walking. What I wouldn’t give for a coat right now. Or even a jacket. Anything to block out the cold that’s blowing right through the arms of my dress and piercing my skin. I can see my breath.

The streets are nearly empty as the sun sets on the horizon. Church bells ring in the distance, which reminds me that it’s Christmas Eve. I have no idea what day it is in the present. Definitely past Christmas, I would imagine.

There’s not a soul near the GE plant. I walk up to the front doors of the main building and peer inside the glass. It’s dark. Then I look up to the corner of the doorway. No camera. I have no idea when cameras became standard fare, but I was sort of expecting one here. You know, this being a power plant and all.

I unravel the black dress Yellow bought me in 1894. It’s so wrinkled that the few shakes in the air I give it do absolutely nothing. I glance down the street once more to make sure it’s safe. Deserted. I slip out of my 1963 dress and into my 1890s one, then stash the sixties dress behind a trash can. I’ll be back soon enough to pick it up.

I turn the dials on the Annum watch back to June 2, 1890. And then I laugh. I’m standing in front of a massively huge power plant, and I’m about to go back in time to try to track someone I don’t know and have never seen a picture of as she does something (I have no idea what) somewhere inside this building.

Easy.

I snap the lid of the watch face shut and am immediately ripped back through time. I land on the sidewalk in the early-morning light and gasp for breath. I close my eyes to block the vision of Epsilon’s broken body mangled before me during orientation, but it comes anyway.