She'd rushed into the blast, she remembered that. She thinks she meant to avert the disaster, stop them from bringing another building down. Her husband had been there in the gallery, attending his boss's whim despite Greg's disgust with the idea of execution. Sadler himself had been there, watching the end of the terrorists who had tried to kill him and all his colleagues in the Corporate Congress. She thinks they should have expected Liberate to want to add to death count at the very last moment.
She thinks she probably should be dead. It's something of a surprise that she isn't, but the surprise is crowded out by what feels like the aching aftermath of a dozen hits with the stunner and a hard fall. She lies on something cold, hard and damp and swims against the tide of confusion. There's an icy breeze blowing, and she finally realizes that the building is apparently gone.
She gets up. She stumbles around, trying to understand where she is, what's happened. A fine, damp snow is falling and her suit struggles to compensate for the temperature. There are streets and lights and buildings, everything run down and old-fashioned in a way she's never seen. Nothing is familiar. A transporter not a bomb, she can see that now. It had to have been. SadTech had been working on something like that, Greg had talked about it, like something out of the science fiction stories he'd liked when he was a kid.
He was probably worried. If she could figure out where she was she could contact him. There's a ringing in her head, it's hard to think, but there's something wrong with the people she passes by, the traffic on the streets.
Then she calls for backup, the only thing she can think to do even though there's a sinking sense inside her that tells her no one's there on the end of the line. She gets an answer.
The voice in her ear is male, young, and soft in timbre, alternately interrogating her with breathless curiosity and accusing her of being a hoax, and very definitely not central command. It distracts her from panic, it gets her mind ticking over again as she argues her way through to sense with the stranger. Then he tells her what year it is, and it's all she can do to keep standing, alone on an unknown street, listening to the worried voice in her ear.
Then he introduces himself, and suddenly their interaction is cast in an unsettling pall. Alec Sadler, the billionair, the congress member, the reserved and capricious boss about whom her husband had only select and cautious remarks. The old man in the expensive wool suit with the distant look in his face that gave nothing away. It didn't track with the sweet-voiced, eager young man who questioned and coaxed her through the hard landing on 2012, but then maybe that was a trick. Maybe his concern was only what he could gain from knowing a time traveller - that's what she is now even though she can't make it feel real.
He didn't stay quiet though, the stranger, the blithe fore-image of the great and terrifying mogul-philanthropist-legislator. He pushed. He questioned. He peered in behind her eyes. It was intrusive. He talked about theories of causality, raising bleak spectres before her, that the damage was already done or that it was all inevitable and all she could do was ride it out. She didn't want to think about those things.
Except that it doesn't feel like he's digging for information he can use. Except that this young, unknown Alec's voice is responsive and concerned. Except that he called her pretty and asked about her son, and it was too much, too close, but it isn't mean or cold, or even bad, exactly. Except that if she had been left, stuck, alone in that big, musty hotel room with the mute and implacable reality of her situation for company, she isn't sure what she would have done.
As she goes to sleep she, she wants to believe she'll wake from a dream or find herself in a medbay bed, Sam and Greg beside her. That she'll swim up from the murky depths of sedation and CMR induced healing stasis after the blast in the execution chamber. Kiera knows it's real, though, it's too new and too painful, and yet too ordinary to be otherwise.
She wonders what Sam thinks. She wonders if Greg has told him she was killed in the accident or the attack, whatever they decide to call it. She wonders if Greg knew about the time travel, the transporter, the real purpose of SadTech's execution device. She tries to tell herself that Sam and Greg haven't even begun yet, that she could spend days here and still get back before they ever know she'd been gone.
She wonders how old Alec Sadler is in 2012, where he is, if his rise to power is already begun. It could make all the difference in their success.
The first days pass, a marathon of chaos and accumulating lies and violence, with a steady drumbeat of terror in her chest.
She pretends she's Linda, the detective on the hunt, blandly competent and fresh from divorce - and she doesn't think about why she told Detective Fonnegra that and not something about a husband waiting for her back home. She pretends she's an agent, undercover with the gang, ready to lead Carlos and Dillon on a merry chase. She never knew she had such capacity for invention.
Carlos Fonnegra seems like a decent sort of man. He's a steady, persistent investigator and his interest in protecting the people is genuine. He's smart, too. He gives her the benefit of the doubt in order to get things done, but she sees the suspicion in his face when he watches her, and she's not always great on subtleties. He knows instinctively that there's something about her that doesn't quit fit, and even though he's polite, he's considerate, she knows he's watching her - and not in hopeful way that men sometimes do.
Kiera is sure that Carlos wouldn't take it well if she suddenly started talking about the future, about time travel, about devastating terror attacks where tens of thousands were killed only she doesn't have proof. She thinks she could convince him eventually, maybe, with the tech she brought with her, but it would take time. Liberate could get away. Ingram said they wanted to disappear into the era, and build their deadly offensive anew. If she loses police resources it will be hopeless.
And if she told, what would happen to her? Would she be taken captive? Would she be studied? Would she irrevocably destroy the timeline? She'd never had time for much in the way of theoretical physics or science fiction serials the way Greg had. She didn't have a frame of reference, but she did know she didn't want to end up in somebody's lab.
No matter how she feels about lying to Carlos and the Inspector, no matter how it wars with her training and her instinct to obey or meet disaster, she's going to keep her mouth shut. She's going to lie and lie and hope she can round up Liberate and get them all back home before the detectives here have time to figure her out.
Alec has flung himself into being her support system, and it's easy. It's so easy it's strange. Somehow the young man's voice has become disconnected in her mind from the formidable old man she saw on the new feeds back home. She doesn't understand how they can be the same person. This Alec is pushy but generous, clever but lighthearted. He jokes. He teases. He finds her the information she needs immediately, seemingly from thin air, keeping up a commentary through her CMR.
Kiera wishes that he would take her situation more seriously, the light tone of his makes her think this isn't as important to him as it is to her. Yet when he does talk seriously, when she hears his sympathy, his sense of her loss and confusion, it's worse. It makes her think about more than the immediate details, about the impossibility of time as a measure of distance, about how the universe is cold and violent and doesn't care that she misses her son. She wants to tell him to go back to making fun of her bad driving, only her throat is so full of tears she can hardly breath.
And then Alec tells her about a power source, a scientist, a machine that just maybe can punch a hole through reality. Kiera sees a door opening up before her, and she steels herself to run through it at full speed, damn the consequences. She doesn't tell Alec. She doesn't want him to tell her how it's a bad idea, how it could just as easily blow her up as send her back.
By the time she faces the crying wife of the kidnapped scientist, Kiera is numb. She fumbles for compassion, for reasonableness, but she's tired and she's desperate. She's already decided what her next move has to be. She's never faced so many angry, deadly people all on her own before, but even though it's a horrifying prospect, hitching a ride back with Liberate is the only path she can see that leads to Sam.
It doesn't really surprise her that her thoughts turn to Alec as she marches towards the big confrontation. She's hardly been there 50-something hours, and she's already used to the sound of his voice, used to having someone feed her information and asking her a barrage of questions about her time, asking her if she's okay. CPS would have disapproved, you weren't really supposed to use the comms for distracting non-mission chatter, but she's already gotten used to the company. She's going to miss that, him, when she goes back, as strange as it seems.
She wonders if Alec is going to try and talk her out of it when he realizes what she's up to. She wonders if SadTech CEO Sadler will remember her, if the young Alec she's leaving will remember her, or if this whole trip will have been some kind of glitch in time, that will heal itself over once it's done. She even wonders, abstractly, what he looks like - it strikes her as unfair that Alec saw her through the feeds but she never got to meet him face to face.
She doesn't wonder about what will happen if the machine doesn't send them back home, but also doesn't kill them. She can't think about it. Such a thing doesn't even seem possible anyway.
Carlos arrests her again, and she guesses that's fair after using her stunner on him. He's gentle about it at least, brusk and suspicious but not rough. The booking process is slow and primitive, but she's beyond anger or humiliation by this point, even beyond tiredness. In some ways it's a relief to be simply herded along.
Kiera thinks she should probably be worrying about another escape, making some room to regroup, but just for now it doesn't seem to make much difference. She's still in 2012 and the generator is destroyed, Liberate has the time travel device. This is her reality now, but she can't seem to absorb it. She's woken from her second explosion in less than three days and all she feels is scattered and distant.
She wonders why Alec is so quiet, why he isn't telling her it's going to be alright.
She'd dreamt of Sam while she'd been out, she remembers a disjointed jumble of love and familiarity, of relief that she was home. She remembers regret over promising her young, sensitive son that she would always come back. She remembers the cold, creeping sensation of realizing even as she grasped for these comforts around her, that she was dreaming and soon would wake, in danger and alone. Even though it hurt, she wanted to hold onto that dream for as long as the hazy recollection would last.
And then all at once she's free, Alec has worked some magic, and Dillon is telling her that he knows who she is now. That she could have saved a lot of trouble by briefing them up front. Alec has given her a highly classified agency, and Dillon is welcoming her aboard before she has a chance to form a response. Carlos is looking at her with grudging respect, is handling her a projectile weapon and a stapler with equal lack of hesitation or ceremony. Suddenly, she has been accepted into their team, one of the good guys, not one of the bad guys.
She thinks she is one of the good guys, after all, and it's a relief. It's a chance to survive, and maybe even to stop Liberate before they can restart their war. The thing is, she still knows she's lying, and that lie has saved her but now she's even more entrenched.
The thing is, she didn't prepare herself for the possibility that she might find herself alive, whole, and mostly sane, but not back home. She has to get out of the station, away from pretending she knows what she's doing for a while.
It's cold again outside, an icy mist hangs in the air, but she walks for a long time, a slow meander through a city whose bones she can now recognize, maybe, if she pretends. Alec's in her ear again, subdued and concerned. He can probably tell she's been crying on and off, but he spares her dignity by not calling attention to it, or trying to comfort her directly. He makes a few feeble attempts at banter and gives up. Instead, he asks her intermittent, quiet questions, how much the city has changed by her time, if the climate was really different. If they still had tv and radio and the internet, or if they'd invented something new and better. If they'd changed their minds again about which foods were bad for you. If time travel was a regular thing that people did where she came from.
She doesn't know what to tell him, how much information is too much. She doesn't really know if anything she answers even makes sense, she's tired and not paying her full attention. He isn't digging for more, though, no eager badgering her to clarify her answers. Alec is trying to keep her talking, she realizes, trying to keep the line open. Trying to take her mind off it.
"It's alright, Alec," she says at one point, "You don't have to stay up and entertain me. I'm not going to do anything stupid. I can cope with a lot when I need to."
"I know," he says gently, "I've had a pretty strange few days too, you know. Who could sleep after all that?"
"Nobody, I guess."
"Right."
Eventually it's cold and damp enough to drive her back to the warmth and safety of her hotel. Alec has been quiet for a while, and Kiera pauses after shutting and bolting the door, listening for the commline, and to the emptiness of the room.
"You still there?" she asks, barely above a whisper.
"I'm right here," he says, and for a moment he sounds older than she'd thought.
"I'm going to get some rest now, If you could…"
"The visuals are off, Kiera," he assures her, "Do you need anything else?"
"Not tonight," she says.
"Do you want me to say goodnight now?"
"Okay," she says, even more quietly, and then, "Wait, Alec? If it won't keep you up, could you leave the line open, just in case?"
Just in case of what isn't clear to her, but it seems important. A friendly voice to call on if she needs it. It's been a bad, long day.
"I can do that, Kiera," he says.
She sheds damp outer layers quickly, and leaves them over the desk chair before heading straight for the bed. It's kind of like being at the academy again, that same slippery homesick feeling, that same sense of sudden responsibility for herself. She coped then, and with the difficult posting on the Frontiers, and she even adjusted to coming back to the city, to being a wife and a mother in a clean appartment. Maybe this is just the next thing, the next daunting and foreign phase of her life.
"Alec?" she asks, staring at the ceiling.
"Yes, Kiera?"
"Just checking."
"Okay."