Recursion (Book One of the Recursion Event Saga) Read online

  Recursion

  Book One of the Recursion Event Saga

  Brian J. Walton

  Camton House Publishing

  August 18

  I float. All around me is darkness. It’s almost pleasant, like drifting underwater in a darkened pool. But I’m not in a pool. I try to look down, just to see my body, but I can’t move. My head won’t even turn. Something is holding me in place. So I stretch my consciousness, searching the limits of my body. My leg tingles, like when it goes dead from sitting in the wrong position for too long. The tingling erupts across my body and a deep cold overwhelms me.

  I want to scream.

  But screaming requires oxygen. Here, there is no oxygen. No light. No gravity. Not even a vacuum or I’d be dead.

  Am I dead?

  No. I can’t be. I’ve done this before. If only I could remember...

  And then the memories come, unbidden and fractured like half-forgotten dreams. Ice skating on a frozen lake. My father, slamming a door shut on me. A college boyfriend, smiling doe-eyed behind a tangle of red hair. And then I am seven and falling down a flight of stairs. I land with a sickening crack and look down to see my radial bone poking, red and ugly, through the skin.

  I’m so cold.

  More memories stream through my consciousness. A man with thinning brown hair smiles crookedly at me. James. My husband. But he’s gone now.

  My mantra comes back to me.

  Your name is Molly Gardner. You are an agent for the ISD. You are traveling through time.

  Something tugs at the center of my navel.

  Reality floods in like a tsunami. Stimuli overwhelm my senses and I come crashing back.

  * * *

  Smoke fills my lungs as I fall out of the blackness and onto a hard-packed dirt floor. Coughing, I roll onto my side, blinking away burning tears. A staircase on the far side of the room stretches up to a shut door. Shelves filled with jars and canned food line one wall. Racks of guns line the other. Have I been here before?

  I remember my mantra.

  Your name is Molly Gardner. You are an agent for the ISD. You have just traveled through time.

  But when? And where?

  I roll onto my side, waving away the smoke. The straps on my pack dig into my shoulders. Flames lick at the ceiling. The shelves to my left erupt into flames, almost spontaneously. This is no normal fire.

  The staircase is still untouched, but I need to hurry. I move slowly, staying low, across the dirt floor, my pack heavy on my back. I am wearing a knee-length skirt, long by modern standards, but not long enough to offer much protection. At least my wool coat and pack are keeping the sparks off of my skin.

  I reach the foot of the stairs and climb, coughing in the smoke. At the top is a wooden door. I pause, remembering more. This is the Paris Station. It is 1955. I’ve come with…

  My partner, Vic, and our new agent-in-training, Leung. They must still be traveling behind me through the tunnel. The fire has spread down the shelves. It could soon reach the stairs. I can’t leave.

  I descend back down the stairs, waving smoke from my face. In the back of the cellar, a shelf has been pulled out a few feet from the walls. Dancing light hits the shelf but doesn’t touch the shadows behind it. It is dark, there. A dark beyond dark.

  The tunnel.

  On the shelf next to me are folded blankets, canteens, and canned foods. I grab a blanket and a canteen, wrapping the blanket around my shoulders and draining the canteen in a few gulps. Sparks rain down from the ceiling. It could give way any minute. Come on, come on.

  I sense it happening before I see it.

  The atmosphere in the room takes on a sharp, electric taste. The darkness at the back of the cellar intensifies. My vision warps as if the wood itself bends and stretches. My ears pop as the air pressure in the room shifts, and my partner, Vic, is suddenly there, falling in a heap.

  He groans, rolling over. I rush to his side and grab his shoulder, shaking him.

  “Come on Vic, get up.”

  There’s a creak as the weight of the house settles against the changing structural support.

  Vic coughs. “What’s happening?”

  “The Station is on fire.”

  “We gotta get out of here,” Vic struggles to his feet. He stumbles for a moment under the weight of his own pack. He stands, and then drops back toward the ground, coughing from the smoke.

  I grab him by the arm. “We have to wait for Leung.”

  “Who—” He shakes his head as if to clear it. “How long since you came through?”

  I check my watch. Maybe four minutes had passed between when I came through the tunnel and when Vic arrived. It’s now already been almost a full minute since Vic’s arrival. How far behind me was Vic when we went through on the other side? Our protocol is to wait five seconds. I estimate the differential at a factor of twenty. It should be three minutes, but was Leung delayed before entering? Did the Director say something to her? At such a high differential, a delay of seconds turns into minutes. I can’t worry about that right now.

  “Vic, there are hotel guests. And the other agents.”

  He nods. “I’ll find them.”

  Vic shoulders his pack and runs through the smoke and up the stairs, his boots pounding on the wooden planks. He stops at the door, testing the surface for heat, then pulls the door open. For a moment, Vic is surrounded by an orange corona of light. Then the door closes and he is gone.

  I stare at the darkness in the back of the cellar. Leung is the third member of our team, and this is her first mission. I remember seeing her eyes locked with my own moments before I stepped into the tunnel. I imagine her stepping into this hellish inferno alone.

  Above me, Vic’s boots pound from one side of the building to another. We’re in the Paris Station, in the cellar of an old, six-story hotel that had once been a brothel. It is a Way Station for the most secretive government organization the world has ever known. The brothels were shut down after the war in 1947 and, while investigating the disappearance of American soldiers after the city had been retaken, ISD agents discovered the unique properties in the building’s cellar. Now the ISD owns the building and uses the hotel as a front.

  But this fire means people, reporters, and police will dig and file and categorize everything they find. We’re going to have to make sure no one discovers the additions in the sixth-floor apartments, or the failsafe buried behind the stairs in the cellar.

  Oh yeah, the failsafe. We have explosives buried in the foundation of the building designed to implode the building and collapse the tunnel if its secrecy is ever threatened. I’m standing on top of a bomb and the room is on fire. Great.

  Still no Leung.

  My watch reads five minutes since Vic came through. Something’s wrong. Tunnels are unstable by nature. The fire could have collapsed it. But if it hasn’t collapsed and I leave, then I am abandoning Leung to this inferno.

  A whole piece of the ceiling gives way, crashing to the ground in front of me and erupting in a shower of sparks. I hold my hand up against the light. As the smoke clears, I see Leung’s small figure, dwarfed by her pack, lying prone on the ground.

  She made it.

  I run in a low crouch across the floor, throw the blanket over Leung, and wrap my hand around hers. She moans, her eyes flickering open.

  “You have to get up.”

  The glow of the fire against the shelves increases. The flames have spread down the shelves on both sides of the room and creeping along the ceiling toward the stairs. The smoke is so thick that I can barely see the top of the stairs. If Leung doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll both be dead.<
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  * * *

  I grasp blindly for the nearest shelf and my hand finds a second canteen. I unscrew the lid and dump its contents onto Leung’s face. Her sputtering gasps give me hope.

  “Get up or we both die.”

  Agent Leung Mei of the eighteenth century gets up. Leung is our most recent recruit. She had stumbled from China’s Qing dynasty to Manila in the midst of the Philippine-American War, traveling over a hundred and fifty years. American troops captured Leung, and their reports led the ISD to her. I’ve been training Leung at Command for five months now, and this was supposed to be her first trip out with the ISD. 1950s Paris. An easy trip. Tourism, really. The Station Agent here had trained me, and she is set to take over Leung’s training. But this fire may change everything.

  I take Leung by the arm and help her up the stairs. We emerge into the building’s main corridor. Oil paintings line the walls and a crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling. The smoke is thicker here. Flames lick at peeling wallpaper and dance across the ceiling. The paintings drip colors, bucolic scenes of country life transforming into a Daliesque nightmare. One of them erupts into flames, the fire spreading from nowhere.

  I’ve seen this before.

  I continue down the hallway. Part of the ceiling gives way. I jump back, pulling Leung with me, as a chandelier crashes to the floor in front of us. We step around it, walking faster.

  “Where is Agent Rom?” Leung asks through coughs.

  “Checking the building.”

  Vic appears at the end of the hall, descending a circular staircase. He runs toward us through the smoke.

  “Find anyone?” I ask.

  “They’re gone,” he says. “And they didn’t get the Station cleared. We’ll have to come back.”

  I hear a distant siren. There could be a whole crowd out there by now. “Should we go out the back?”

  Vic shakes his head. “No, it’s worse. I can’t even figure out where the fire started. The front door is the best option.”

  I nod and help Leung up the length of the hallway. Her coughing lessens and she is walking more on her own. Vic goes to a window by the door and peers through.

  “People?” I ask.

  Vic nods. “No chance of avoiding them.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” I say.

  Vic throws open the door, and we stumble out onto cobblestone streets. It is early evening. Just past sunset. A crowd has gathered around the burning building.

  A woman in evening wear gapes at us, holding a gloved hand up to her mouth. She steps behind a tuxedoed man as we stumble by, coughing from the inhaled smoke.

  “Vous allez bien, mademoiselle?” the well-dressed man asks.

  “What year is it?” I ask through hacking coughs.

  He tilts his head in confusion.

  Leung straightens, taking most of her weight off my shoulder. “En quelle année sommes-nous?” I ask again, this time in French. I shouldn’t be drawing attention to us like this, but desperate times, as they say. The fire could have caused the tunnel to shift before any of us came through, which means that we could be in any decade—any century, really.

  “Nineteen fifty-five,” he responds in English.

  We’ve arrived in the right year. That’s one piece of good news.

  The well-dressed man takes a step toward me and opens his mouth.

  “Merci beaucoup,” I say before he can ask anything else.

  We push through the crowd. Behind us, an emergency vehicle wails. A convertible-style fire truck, shaped like a torpedo, screams up to the building. Firefighters, looking more like military officers than the American firefighters I am used to, climb out and get to work.

  More people are pouring from the surrounding apartments and climbing out of their cars. A young American man with a Parisian girl draped across his arm watches with wide eyes. A group of pre-adolescent children in dirty clothes, street kids by their appearance, elbow each other in excitement. We push our way past them. The children run to keep up with us, shouting questions in French too quickly for me to understand.

  I try to walk faster, but they surround us again. One girl catches my attention. She’s older than the others with wavy brown hair, dark skin, and wide-set eyes. She’s dressed differently as well. The word “upscale” comes to mind. And she’s with a man. He is a gaunt, slightly hunched, middle-aged man, his hand tightly clasping the girl’s wrist as if she were a pet. It could be the smoke, the circling children, or the strange man, but the combined effect is making me nauseated.

  There’s a crack of thunder and a curtain of rain sweeps past us. The crowd begins to scatter.

  “Do you see Genevieve?” I ask Vic.

  Vic shakes his head. “No, but we can’t keep looking for her. We need to get outta here before those firefighters start asking questions.”

  Genevieve is the Senior Station Agent of the Paris Station. She trained me, and not knowing where she is sends a rush of anxiety through me. But Vic is right.

  Glancing around, I spot a dark alleyway alongside the hotel. I angle toward it with Vic and Leung. The fire escape provides some shelter from the rain. There aren’’t any street lamps back here, and the light from the street recedes behind us. I slow, not knowing where we’re going. Our Station is compromised. Maybe sabotaged. Our Station Agent is missing. We’re in a strange place and time with no support and few supplies.

  “Agent Gardner!” I stop at the sound of a deep voice with a British accent, almost melodic sounding.

  A man steps into the orange glow of the streetlights. He wears a pinstripe suit complete with a vest and pocket watch. He has a lean face, lined with blonde hair, close-cropped and well combed. A thin mustache outlines pale lips, making him look like a blonde Douglas Fairbanks. The rain drips down his hair and his suit.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  “Who are you?” Vic demands.

  “I was sent by the Station Agent—by Genevieve.”

  Vic takes a step closer. “Your name.”

  The man smiles an apology. “Of course.” He takes in a breath as if he’s getting ready to deliver a prepared speech. “I am Lord Peter Windsor, fourth Earl of Yarborough and thirty-second in line to the throne—that was in eighteen ninety-seven, of course.” He says it calmly. “But now I suppose I am nothing but a lowly agent of your Isochronic Securities Department.”

  Then I remember Peter. He was just a trainee under Genevieve the last time I was at her Station. Vic hadn’t been with me on that assignment.

  “It’s okay. He’s one of Genevieve’s recruits.” I gesture at Vic. “This is Agent Rom.”

  “Do I have to call you ‘Lord’?” Vic asks.

  Peter ignores him, turning to me. “We’ve met?”

  “Only briefly,” I say.

  Above us, a window explodes outward in a shower of glass and sparks.

  Peter studies the building. “I have a car that will take you to Genevieve’s.”

  “What is happening?” Leung asks. Her black hair is plastered across her face in dark lines.

  Staring at the building, an answer begins to take shape. I’ve seen events without causes before. I saw them the first time I traveled. But I should talk to Genevieve about this first. “I’m working on that,” I say.

  Lights blind us as a car pulls into the alleyway.

  “That’s your car,” Peter says.

  The car stops near us. The driver’s window rolls down, and a young woman stares out. She is slender with charcoal black skin, a narrow face, and piercing black eyes. Her curly hair is pulled back in a tight bun.

  “Agent Kantengwa will take you to Genevieve’s apartment. I assume you’ve met her as well, then?”

  “Hello Ishimwe,” I say. Ishimwe has been stationed under Genevieve for as long as I’ve been an agent. I remember hearing her story when Genevieve was training me. She’s Rwandan and had been fleeing the genocide when she stumbled into a tunnel that led to New York in the late nineties. She started blogging about her sto
ry. We shut down the blog and hired her in return.

  Ishimwe grins. “Agent Gardner, good to see you.”

  “You should go,” Peter says. “The police will be here soon.”

  “Not you?” I ask.

  “I front as the hotel manager,” he says with a wry smile. “And I’m afraid I have guests to deal with. Six of them. Not to mention the police.”

  The car is a Renault, a tiny round thing with suicide doors and a rear engine. Ishimwe hops out, pulling open the front trunk. We load our packs in and then climb into the car. Vic and I slide into the back seat while Leung gets up front. I look for a seatbelt before remembering that there are none.

  “Hold on,” Ishimwe says. She puts the car in gear. The engine rattles and thrums and we surge forward. We whip around the corner and onto the street. The scene recedes behind us. The crowd of rubberneckers is scattering, looking small in the distance. The Paris Station smolders in the falling rain. This was my home for six months. But when a tunnel is lost, it’s lost forever. Like Leung, my first time traveling was accidental. It was a car crash, and the tunnel was underwater. I could have died. Instead, I traveled fifteen years into the future and spent the next few weeks slowly losing my sanity as I became a lightning rod for bizarre, unexplainable events. But I never caused anything like this. This is different. We’re stepping into the unknown.

  * * *

  We drive down cobblestone streets. Ishimwe is sucking on unfiltered Gauloises, and the car quickly fills with hazy smoke. I crank down my window and breathe in the fresh air. The rain has stopped. The lamps, not as ubiquitous as I am used to, cast golden pools of light, illuminating people as we pass them: locals stumbling home from work, a prostitute trying to catch her next John, a pair of lovers wrapped in an embrace. I hear a brief refrain of a busker singing Autumn Leaves. The words are in French but the tune is unmistakable. We lock eyes as I pass, and for a moment the singer, a cherubic woman accompanied by a husky young man strumming an autoharp, is singing it only for me, her voice soaring and tremulous in the night air.