“You always bring along a bunch of hired thugs for friendly get-togethers?” Riq asked, his heart rate ticking up. He was surprised that Tilda appeared to have a translation device as advanced as that of the Hystorians. The SQ probably stole that technology from them, too.
Tilda was shaking her head, taking looks back at the soldiers she’d brought with her. “I’m done taking chances, as you can see. This isn’t the first time I’ve come back in time to do the job that the SQ needs to be done.” She faltered a bit on the last couple of words — almost slurring them — and took a step to the left as if she’d suddenly lost her balance. “I hired every sword I could find in the city, and came to meet you here, exactly where I knew you would be.”
She pointed somewhere over Riq’s shoulder, and he turned to look. About fifty feet away, a woman was standing beside a tree, staring at them. Impossibly, it was Tilda — another version of Tilda, holding the Eternity Ring. A couple of seconds later, she activated the device and warped away in a blur of light and sound. Everyone gasped in surprise.
Riq spun around and shouted at the Tilda who was still there. “Are you crazy?”
“You can’t mess with time like that!” Sera added. “No wonder you can barely stand. Jumping around with the Ring like that is going to fry your brain — not to mention do who-knows-what to reality itself!”
Dak was still staring back at the spot where the other Tilda had disappeared. Aristotle, Olympias, Alexander — even Tilda’s own allies — just stood there, wondering what in the heck was going on.
Tilda stumbled again, but then moved a few steps forward as if she’d meant to do it. “Say what you want. Pretend to have all the high and mighty ideals you want. But I’m telling you, the Hystorians do not understand what’s at stake. We can all fight here, and lose a lot of lives in the process. But if you would just listen to me . . .” Her face scrunched up in genuine frustration, and Riq found a small part of himself wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt again.
“I don’t know you,” Aristotle said, his voice deeper and holding more resonance than Riq had heard in him yet. “And I don’t know the smallest part of what lies in the future or the extent of this battle between your . . . SQ and the Hystorians. But I do know that talking things through — trying to come to an understanding, might be our wisest course of action for right now.”
Maybe because we’re outnumbered three to one, Riq thought darkly.
Tilda took a few steps forward, and her focus was on Dak, Sera, and Riq, not the others in the group. “I know you think we’ve done bad things. Horrible things. But I’m telling you, we’re not idiots. We’re not evil. In fact, I know something that you don’t — that none of the Hystorians know.”
“And what’s that?” Riq asked.
Tilda answered quietly, her face a mask of stone. “How to stop the Cataclysm.”
SERA FELT a tingle in her temples, as if there were static electricity prickling her skin. She had encountered Tilda before, and it was never a pleasant experience. But this time felt different. Tilda herself seemed different. Desperate. Sera couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman was more dangerous than ever.
“You have no idea how to stop the Cataclysm,” Dak said. “The SQ boneheads are the ones who’ve been trying to make sure it happens!” The volume of his voice had risen with every word.
Tilda laughed as if she’d heard something horrible, not funny. When she did, she also winced like something hurt. Sera understood. Too much warping through time and your body started to feel like it had been stretched on a medieval torture device.
“Make sure it happens?” the woman said after she recovered. “You kids are supposed to be smart. You have to be, or the Hystorians would never have let you go back in time to fix their so-called Great Breaks.” She paused, taking a second to look all three of them in the eyes. Alexander and everyone else seemed content to observe for the moment. “You are intelligent, right? Or am I wrong?”
“Of course we’re smart,” Sera snapped. “What’s your point?”
Tilda held up a finger. “This. This is my point. Why on earth would we spend our entire effort — sacrificing lives and time and immense amounts of money — to run an organization that wants the world to end? What would be the point? If we want to rule humanity, don’t you think we’d want there to be a place for them to live? It’s insane to think we want the Cataclysm to happen. It’s outrageous and most definitely not intelligent.”
Sera wanted to say something, rebuke her somehow. But any potential words froze on her tongue. As much as she hated to admit it, the woman had made a good point.
Tilda seemed to sense a victory in their silence. “Our ways have been tough, I’ll be the first to admit it. We’ve been harsh because we have to be. Yes, we’ve ruled with an iron fist, and we’ve done everything in our power to make sure this man” — she tipped her head toward Aristotle — “didn’t fulfill his plan to mess up the world. To drive it toward the very Cataclysm that you think you’re preventing.”
She paused, and pinched the bridge of her nose as she took a deep breath. “Time and space are fine. The fabric of reality is fine. What you’re doing — messing with the past, trying to change major events — that’s the thing that will drive us to destruction. This young man . . .” Tilda paused and turned a sad gaze on Alexander. “He dies. He must die, for the good of the world. Whether by Pausanius’s hand or my own. I’m here to convince you to let that happen. With words, if possible. If not . . .”
She didn’t need to say the rest. Sera swallowed, feeling uncertain about their mission for the first time. Aristotle was the founder of the whole order of Hystorians — but was it possible that he’d created the organization for selfish reasons? That he simply couldn’t bear to see his favorite student killed? That it wasn’t about the fabric of time, but about a softhearted man who wanted to save a boy who could have been great? Sera hated it, hated this wave of doubt. “But why all the natural disasters?” she asked Tilda. “You’ve seen the state of the world. Plus, I went to the future and I saw the Cataclysm for myself. In a world that the SQ has been running, by the way.”