A Girl in Time Page 5

  Cady flicked her thumb away from the mechanism as though burned. Smith held both hands up in a stopping gesture.

  “I would really appreciate it if'n you did not go fiddling with that thing, ma'am,” he said. “No good ever comes of that.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “So, how do you wind it up? Or change the time when it stops?”

  Smith shook his head.

  “It never stops. It never runs down. And as best I can tell, wherever you are, that's the time. If you are of a mind to change the time, though, and I mean that in the literal, you turn the crown. But please don't,” Smith hurried on to say.

  She frowned at him, but let the expression slide from her face when she remembered there was so much more to be skeptical of here than a watch which adapted to time zones and datelines.

  Smith took the watch back from her.

  “So, we have a piece of technology, an artifact of some sort, that you say is able to interface directly with the space-time continuum.”

  “That is what I would say, were I some pointy-headed professor given to such talk, Miss Cady, yes.”

  “Ms.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Cady tried reframing this insanity as a technical problem. It helped her deal with the feeling of vertigo that wanted to sweep over her again. She propped herself up a little straighter in bed. The iron bedhead wasn't especially comfortable to lean against, but she wanted to talk with Smith on equal terms, not as an invalid.

  “Okay, so talk me through the past four and a half weeks. That's how long you've been on the move with this thing?”

  “As best I figure it, yes, ma'am.”

  She wished she had a notepad and pencil, or a laptop, something to take notes with. The room was bare of any such conveniences, however, and Marshal Smith did not look the sort of man to bother himself with such things.

  “So, how did it happen?” she asked. “When did you go from looking after your mysterious Chinese friend to roaming up and down the timeline?”

  The Marshal made a show of folding his arms and letting his chin fall onto his chest, as if in deep thought.

  “I buried Wu late in the morning of my second day with him,” said Smith. “I put him under the earth near the tree where he had hidden his valuables. Carved his name into the trunk, for what it was worth. I cleaned up camp, saddled up, and rode out, heading deeper into the Indian territories. I still had those Buford boys to bring in. Judge Parker wanted them dancing from the noose a'fore I moved on t'other concerns.”

  “So you took his watch, his gold, anything else?”

  “He had some rice which was not too wormy. Otherwise I buried his things with him.”

  Smith seemed not at all embarrassed by having robbed a dead man.

  “And you had no idea there was anything special about the watch at this point?”

  “None at all,” he said. “I had played with it some, thinking that it might need winding. But otherwise, no. Chester and me, Chester being my horse …” It came out as “mah hoss.” “We were two days on the hunt for the Bufords when I had occasion to check the time, wondering whether I might lay up for the evening in a fair stretch of bottomlands where the grazing was good and the water sweet.”

  That haunted look stole over the cowboy's features again.

  “I do not know that I intended to trigger the infernal mechanism the way I did. But I did just that. One moment I am atop old Chester, on the banks of a wide but shallow river. It was late in the day, the sun was fixing to lay herself down for the night. Next thing, old Chester is bucking like an unbroken colt with a chili pepper jammed into its fundamental, if you will excuse the allusion. He nearly dusted me.”

  “I think I get the point,” she said. “So, what, you're no longer in Kansas? You're in downtown Seattle, or something?”

  “Weren't in Kansas, ma'am.”

  “Weren't my point, sheriff.”

  “Marshal, miss.”

  “Ms., Marshal.”

  “Done and done, then. Point was, we weren't where we was supposed to be. I would hazard a silver dollar that we weren't when we was supposed to be, either, if you get that point as well.”

  “I do. But you couldn't tell?”

  Smith shook his head, looking forlorn.

  “We had exchanged one wilderness for another. That was more than enough confusion for man and horse to be getting on with. Chester started bucking. I was a-hollerin' at him, and then just hollerin' because I could tell he had come apart for good reason. The sun, which had been setting, was rising, and that dawn was breaking over a field of dry tangle weed, not green pasture land. The river was gone. The hills had flattened themselves all out like a bedroll. Everything was catawampus.”

  “Cat-a-what now?”

  “All messed up, Ms. Cady,” he explained, getting her name right for once. “Took me some hairy minutes to get Chester calmed down, and when he was finally settled, I will confess to you that my own condition was catawamptiously chawed up.”

  Cady nodded. “I'm gonna go with the Google translation. You were messed up, right?”

  “Righteously so, ma'am. Now, a man in my line of work, on good open range, he might find himself taking a nap in the saddle, if'n he trusts his mount. And I did trust Chester. But that's not what happened here. I did not fall asleep and wake up a ways down the trail. That poor horse and me, we was snatched off'n one place and just dropped smack dab into another one.”

  “Any idea where?” Cady asked.

  “Not at all, not even to this day,” said Smith. “We were in the Badlands, I will credit that much. But none that I have endured. It was a flat landscape, bare but for one or two trees, and them of a type I had not seen before. We rode for a day, looking for some sign of where we had miraculously arrived without the intervening inconvenience of having traveled there. The whole time my mind was of a fever, and Chester, he weren't much better. Normally a placid beast, it was like he had the demons in him.”

  “Did you see any animals? Anything that might place you somewhere?”

  “Only at some distance, ma'am. Giant birds. As tall as a man, and ugly as original sin. They made a sort of gulping noise. I managed to shoot one, but it was poor eating.”

  “How long were you there?” Cady asked.

  “Day and a half,” said Smith, seeming more distressed as he got deeper into his story. I had food and some water, but there was no grazing for Chester, and not so much as a muddy puddle for him to drink from. This howling waste went on forever. I believe we would have died there,” said Smith. He sighed. “I do believe my poor friend did die there.”

  “Chester?” Cady asked.

  “Yup.”

  Marshal Smith gave the impression of preparing himself to do something difficult. Squaring his shoulders and taking a deep breath.

  “We were coming up on our second night there and I was getting close to having a conniption fit. I did not think myself in my right mind. We had made camp under a small tree, the only tree on a vast plain. I set to digging among the roots looking for what water I might squeeze from the damp soil. I kept at that fruitless task for some hours, until well after nightfall. There was a full moon out, bright enough to read by if you had your letters, and I checked the Chinaman’s watch, idle in my wondering at how long I had been digging. Well, my hands were shaking. I guess I triggered the mechanism again, which I now know to be a double press on the crown.”

  He had fallen to talking to his hands, but he looked up at Cady then.

  “Poor Chester,” he said, his voice twisted by grief. “I abandoned him in that howling waste.”

  “Oh, Marshal,” said Cady. “I'm sorry.” A silence fell between them. “But you didn't abandon him,” she said, softly, when the quiet became too uncomfortable to bear. “It was like you were, I don't know, like you were swept away in a flood or something.”

  The look he gave her spoke eloquently of just how little he thought of that excuse.

  “At least I do know wher
e I landed next,” Smith said. “Africa.”

  That surprised her.

  “Seriously? How? I mean how do you know it was Africa?”

  “Elephants,” he explained. “I could see elephants and I know they are in Africa.”

  Could have been India, Cady thought, but she did not want to interrupt him.

  “So, what happened then?”

  Smith put aside the loss of his horse and concentrated on the story.

  “I fetched up in grasslands. I guess there must be plenty to go around. Anyway, I knew I had done it again, because although it was dark, this place smelled very different, and there were a lot more trees. Not a forest, or a jungle, mind you. More like open rangeland with small clumps of trees here and there. Of course, I couldn't see that at first. I just knew it had happened again and I had lost Chester. I had also lost my possibles bag, my teepee, and all of my vittles.”

  “Your camping gear and your food?”

  “You would call it so. It was back with Chester, for what it was worth to him,” he said bitterly.

  “Please go on, Marshal. It's important.”

  She'd learned that the trigger mechanism for the device was a double push on the crown. He probably knew even more without knowing what he knew.

  “I did try to get back to him,” Smith said.

  “How?”

  “Just kept pushing that little doodad on the watch. But it made no difference. I know now that you only get one go every day.”

  Cady sat up in bed.

  “Every twenty-four hours? So it recharges once a day?”

  “Figure as much.”

  “And how long have we—”

  “We got here at two aught nine in the morning,” he said, anticipating her question. “You still have the better part of a day cached up here a’fore we can move on.”

  “Okay. That's useful data. Keep talking. Is there anything else you've been able to figure out?”

  “Nope,” he said, straight up. “Only that most places and times are skeersome bad and best avoided.”

  “Except your own time?” she asked. “Because we're almost there right now. Ten years out, but close enough.”

  Smith stared at her for a moment before speaking.

  “Not nearly close enough, Ms. Cady. I had me a little girl a-waiting on my return,” he said. “Still do, I would hope. I left her with the nuns as was my custom when I rode out. I have to get back to her. Her Ma died bringing her into the world. Elspeth is all I have, and I am her only kin. I could take sail for the United States. I still have enough of Wu's gold. But she would not remember me. Her father went missing in the territories twelve years ago, and she would be a woman of seventeen now. Old enough to have wed and delivered me of a grandchild, if'n the sisters did not take her into the nunnery of course. They do that.”

  He paused, and to her surprise and not a little embarrassment, Cady saw he was close to crying.

  “I fear, if I do not get back soon, that is exactly what will come of my absence. They will take her east and put her into cloisters as their own.”

  “And you've been …” Cady searched for words he might understand, “you've been jumping around history every day since? Hoping to somehow luck into the right time and place?”

  He shook his head, not in denial, but in shame and frustration.

  “Ms. Cady, I am a simple man. I have my letters and arithmetic from schooling, but not much more than that. I am not an academic. I do not understand the scientifical wonders of Mr. Morse's telegraph. And I most surely do not understand this infernal device.”

  He held up the watch.

  “I have been lost on an ocean of time for more than a month now and I do not mind telling you I am desperate for help. Any help.”

  “I'm sorry about your daughter,” said Cady. And she was. But she was mostly sorry for herself. If this guy couldn't get back to his own kid, how the hell was he going to get her home? She felt the first stirrings of anger as it dawned on her she might have been dragged into this on purpose, rather than by accident.

  “Is that why you brought me? To help you?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I would never presume upon your consideration. No, ma'am. I brought you here because of those scalawags that bushwhacked you.”

  She felt the heat banking up beneath the coals of her flickering resentment and anger.

  “Well, thanks for that but I'd just as soon have stayed. You looked like you had them handled. Why did I have to get caught up in this?”

  “I surely do apologize,” said Smith, “but them fellers you saw were not the only ones. There were more. There's always more.”

  “What do you mean always?”

  Smith chewed at his lip, sucking in the tips of his mustache.

  “Call themselves apprentices,” he said, “and they been chasing me since I got caught up in a willing frolic with some continentals.”

  “What does that even mean?” she asked, exasperated.

  “I'm afraid I got into a fight,” Smith explained, “and I had to kill a man. I guess they must be marshals, too, because they been chasing me ever since.”

  8

  “Oh man, time cops? Really?”

  “No,” said Smith, “or at least I don't reckon as much. They don't act like lawmen to my understanding. Never identified themselves. Never tried to talk to me. After the business in the marketplace, they just started turning up, looking to plug me.”

  Cady stood up from the bed. The walls felt very close. She walked to the window, careful not to catch her feet on any nails or splinters. The cracked and rotting floorboards offered an abundance of both.

  “And they call themselves what? Apprentices?” she said, twitching aside the burlap curtain and peeking back out through the window. It was caked so thickly with grime that it was like peering into a fog, but the scene was still recognizable.

  Totally not Seattle.

  Totally not her time or place.

  She saw details which had escaped her before. Strange red brick buildings, climbing three and four stories above the crush of tumbledown shanties and slums, giving the appearance of lighthouses in an endless leaden grey sea. Miles and miles of thick black telegraph wire strung from teeter-tottering wooden poles, like the web of a giant alien spider colony. And across the street below, impossibly dense with foot traffic, a shed of rusted iron and rotting wood with a flat roof on which dozens of children, all filthy and dressed in rags, huddled close together like a litter of abandoned puppies. They looked as though they might freeze out there, but none did anything to improve their position. They simply lay, as if drugged, occasionally moving against each other, perhaps burrowing into the mass of bodies for warmth.

  Cady grimaced and let the curtain fall back, striding over to where her boots stood by the door. She tried to forget the image of the freezing children.

  “Apprentices. Yeah, I heard them address each other by that title,” said Smith. “They ain't never identified themselves to me. They just come at me when our paths cross. Usually with blades and fists. Once or twice with guns.”

  She dressed while he rambled. It felt good, pulling on her boots. It felt normal. Next, her jacket and scarf. Smith's frown grew deeper as he watched her.

  “I hope you ain't fixin' to wander away from camp,” he said. “We get too far apart, and you could find yourself stuck here. Like Chester.”

  Cady walked determinedly back to the bed, picked up Smith's jacket, and tossed it to him.

  “Then you had better stick close, Marshal. You got me into this mess. You better not leave me here.”

  She stood in front of him, her boots planted shoulder-width apart, her hands jammed into the pockets of her leather jacket. She could feel the can of mace in there. It was reassuring, but not much. A tenuous link to another time, and a little equalizer she intended to keep to herself.

  “I will help you get back to your daughter,” she said, “because figuring out how to do that is the only way of figuring out how to
get me home as well. But understand this: you're not calling the shots. This is a partnership.” She waved a finger back and forth, metaphorically tying them together. “We work as a team and we might just get out of this. No, screw that. We will totally get out of this.”

  “I am mighty relieved to hear that, young lady,” said Smith in a voice that betrayed his absolute doubt in her promise, “but you really don't want to be walking out that door.”

  She fixed him with a defiant look, challenging Smith to contradict her.

  “That's exactly what I'm going to do, Marshal, and you're going to come with me. You're gonna stick close. You're gonna tell me everything about what has happened to you the last month. You're going to give me the data I need to analyze this problem. And while we're doing that, we're gonna pick up some supplies, because it’s obvious to me you have no idea what you're doing, and a little bit of preparation now could save us a hell of a lot of grief 500 years ago, or a thousand years from now, depending on where that crazy-ass timepiece of yours takes us next. So, let's roll.”

  Titanic Smith grumbled, but he did not put up much of a fight, not once Cady explained what she intended to do. He agreed it was a better plan than he had yet conceived. Pulling on his heavy suede jacket, Smith rolled his shoulders until it sat comfortably on his massive frame. The coat was long enough, she noted, to fall over his six-shooter and the giant knife strapped to his other hip. The cowboy hat went back onto his thick, unwashed hair completing the perfect picture of a frontier lawman. Which, she supposed, he was.

  “Ma'am, you will need to prepare yourself a'fore we head on down,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “The past is another country. I got it. I played a lot of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, you know. I probably know this city better than you do.”

  He favored her with the sort of disapproving look she hadn’t seen since the last time she’d tried to work in a team environment.

  “I meant your appearance, Miss Cady.”

  She rolled her eyes, but gave up on correcting him. He was only being polite, she supposed. A polite, sexist ass.

  “What? You think I'm gonna draw more attention than you, Buffalo Bill?”