Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read online

  “Geez! There’s our pictures again,” Julie exclaimed moments after starting to mess with the pile of paper.

  “I feel like this is as famous as I’m ever going to be and I can’t enjoy it because I’ll be shot on sight if anyone sees me,” Billy complained, as he looked at the front page article where mugshots of the four of them were lined up one after the other.

  “The paper’s from Tuesday,” observed Rose, as she abandoned her search through the bookshelf for a moment to peer at the newspaper as well.

  “And it says that we escaped from our cell on Monday evening, around 8 o’ clock,” said Billy, who had begun to read the article.

  “So, the same time that we did our jump back to 1916, from our own timeline,” Tim said. He didn’t look too closely at the newspaper. He didn’t like how he looked in pictures under the best of circumstances. He would have to remember to never get in trouble with the law again, because he felt that mugshots were especially unflattering.

  “Right,” Julie said slowly. “That makes sense. We couldn’t have been both in 1916 and here at the same time. So we must have vanished from here at the same moment we vanished in our original timeline.”

  There was silence for a moment as the others tried to let this sink in.

  “I mean… I’ll buy it, but I’m not going to think too hard about it or I’m going to get a headache,” BIlly said.

  “We can ask Hopkins when we see him,” Julie said. “It’s not a bad working hypothesis for now, though.”

  “All right,” BIlly said. “But why aren’t we just going to talk to Hopkins now? I mean, I get that we can’t just call him on the telephone, and he can’t even travel to this year again because the time travel device won’t let him go to the same year twice, but why don’t we get the ball rolling awhile? We could go to the oak tree and check if he’s left a letter there for us, or leave one for him, right? And he could answer our questions.”

  “I don’t want to go back to him empty handed. We can find out what the differences in the timeline are, then we’ll have something to contribute to the conversation when we see him,” Tim said.

  “Empty handed?” Billy asked, in a slightly high-pitched voice. “We just stopped the Emperors of Time from changing the 1916 election. Whatever’s going on in this timeline is happening because the Emperors are scrambling to get things back on track after what we did.”

  “And hopefully that means that Hopkins will have been able to capture one or two more of the Domini while the Emperors were vulnerable,” added Rose.

  “Right, but…” Julie said. “We could have gone there in the first place, right? To my house and the oak tree? Except that probably the Emperors have my house staked out now that we’re missing. So the best thing to do will probably be to go back in time to before we were missing to dig. And if we’re going to time travel to get there, we might as well take a couple minutes to get our bearings first. I don’t feel like we’re done with that yet, do you?”

  “Besides, I’m curious,” Rose opined. “Before we go jumping through time to dig holes next to an oak tree, let’s take a minute to figure out what’s going on here.”

  “Whatever, I’m outvoted, anyway,” Billy said with an eye-roll and a shrug.

  Tim had never stopped his search through the bookshelves during this conversation. He was now sitting on the floor, thumbing through the table of contents of a big high-school textbook with worn binding and an American flag on the cover, called The American Journey.

  He narrated what he saw on the page. “Well, of course, there is the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson… Wait. Where’s the Civil War?”

  “No Civil War?” Rose asked, eyes wide. She plunked herself down next to Tim as he opened the book about a third of the way through, trying to find where the timelines might have diverged to prevent the deadliest war on American soil. Rose had a more beat up volume called American History in Brief that she also began flipping through.

  “Germany just launched a manned shuttle to Mars,” announced Julie, who had continued to read the newspaper that had their own mugshots on the front.

  “So, Germany isn’t ruled by France in this timeline?” asked Billy, who sounded not so much curious as annoyed by the change in geopolitics.

  “I can’t even process that right now,” said Rose. “But here’s something: The fact that there was no Civil War seems to have meant slavery didn’t end until 1898, when President… Oh man! William Jennings Bryan becomes president in this timeline?”

  Julie and Billy looked puzzled, so Tim explained, “He ran for president three times around 1900. I guess it makes sense that if he was able to run three different times in our timeline, he would find a way to run in this one, too. He always was one of my favorite failed presidential candidates.”

  Rose laughed. “Mine, too, I guess. So maybe that’s one good thing about this timeline. But that’s crazy that slavery lasted an extra three decades.”

  “Right,” Tim agreed. “Well, in this timeline, Lincoln was never president. In fact, I’m seeing Democrats as presidents from Pierce until… in 1880 James G. Blaine served as a New Federalist?”

  “Was that a question or a statement?” Julie asked..

  “A statement,” Tim shrugged. “The question was, ‘what on earth is a new-federalist?’”

  “Like the regular Federalists, but newer?” suggested Julie, whose smirk suggested that she knew she wasn’t being helpful.

  Rose flipped through her book with great concentration. “Let’s think about this logically for a minute. What could have stopped the Civil War from happening?”

  “Or maybe we should be asking what caused the Civil War. Not the big things, like slavery or economic factionalism, because those must have still existed, but even things like that don’t trigger wars without a spark,” Tim reasoned.

  “That makes sense,” said Rose excitedly. Tim noticed that Billy and Julie shared an eye roll. Tim wasn’t surprised they weren’t quite tracking the conversation. But then, he and Rose were the ones who had a shot of figuring it out anyway. Tim had sat through enough math lessons that were over his head that he had limited sympathy for Billy or Julie.

  “Right, so what would it have been, I wonder?” Tim asked, looking directly at Rose now and ignoring Billy and Julie, since he knew they weren’t really interested in the conversation.

  “Maybe the Missouri Compromise. Its failure led to the war,” Rose said.

  Tim flipped through his book to a promising chapter, scanned some of the pages and announced, “No, can’t be the Missouri Compromise, that’s in here.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s worth asking what the Missouri Compromise was?” Julie asked.

  “It was a law passed in 1820, and it was the foundation for determining which states could enter into the Union as free states and which ones would be slave states. It helped preserve peace for the four decades between 1820 and 1861. Still, it clearly wasn’t a good enough compromise to keep the nation together any longer. But it happened in this timeline, too, and apparently it stuck,” Tim said.

  Billy looked at Julie with a single eyebrow raised. Julie shrugged.

  Rose thought for a moment. “Wasn’t there one after the Mexican-American War? It admitted California as a free state, established Texas’s boundaries, but kind of pushed off the problem as far as New Mexico and Utah were concerned?”

  Billy shook his head again. “It’s like a freaking PBS history special.”

  Julie laughed, but also looked vaguely interested in finding out the answer. Tim ignored Billy and started scanning further in the chapter.

  “That’s the Compromise of 1850,” Tim said, “And… It’s in here.”

  “Oh,” Rose said disappointedly.

  “But hey, what about the Kansas-Nebraska Act?” Tim asked.

  “Could be,” Rose said.

  Tim went a little further in the book and said, “Well, I’m not seeing it…”

  “Really?” Rose as
ked, excited again.

  “Yeah, I mean, here’s Pierce. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was supposed to take place during the Pierce administration in 1854, and here’s… whoa, Stephen Douglas? In 1860. He’s the next president.”

  “Stephen Douglas?” Julie asked. “I thought he was the one who debated Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat? Don’t we get the name of the Lincoln-Douglas debates from him and Lincoln? I thought the highest office he ever got was Senator?”

  “Yeah, that’s true in our timeline. And yours too, I guess, which makes sense because yours didn’t diverge from ours until the end of the Civil War. But something must have changed in this one,” Tim said. “How do you know that by the way?”

  “Oh… you’re big into debate in my timeline--” said Julie.

  “In mine, too,” registered Tim.

  “--and you told me about it, that’s all,” said Julie with a shrug and a hint of a blush in her cheeks.

  Tim decided to ignore this as he plowed forward. “So that’s it then,” he said. “No Kansas-Nebraska Act. That’s big.”

  “Why?” Billy asked.

  “The Kansas-Nebraska Act,” Rose said, stepping in, “determined that popular sovereignty on the state level, and not national agreements made in Congress like the Missouri Compromise, was what should determine whether a state was admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state. The ironic thing is that this debate centered around Kansas, which should have, according to the Missouri Compromise, been admitted as a free state. After all the debate, and after the Senators fought and yelled and formed new alliances over this piece of legislation allowing the Kansans to enter the Union on their own terms, the vote in Kansas to decide whether they should have slavery in the state came back with a ‘No’ decision.”

  “Right,” Tim said. “But not before there were a crazy amount of acts of violence in Kansas. Both sides tried to intimidate people into voting one way or the other. The debate leading up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the violence that followed it were a big part of what tore the nation apart and lit the fuse for the Civil War. The vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act divided both parties, and the Whig Party basically fell with that vote. Soon, it was replaced by the Republican Party and the nation headed toward Civil War.”

  “And it never happened in this timeline?” Julie asked.

  “I’m not seeing it in here,” Tim said with a frown, as he continued to thumb through the book to see if maybe he had just missed it.

  Meanwhile, Rose was at the bookshelf. Tim figured she must have been looking for a book with more specifics on the time period around the Civil War, because she came back with a book called, Nineteenth Century America. The volume was thick and looked to Tim like it would have made for some pretty dry reading, even for someone who loved history as much as he did. But it would surely mention the Kansas-Nebraska Act if it went through.

  Rose spent a minute going through the book as Tim looked at the bookshelf, trying to find another book that might be helpful. Julie and Billy, meanwhile, talked about how lucky it was that they were with people who actually understood these history books so that they didn’t have to.

  Finally, Rose spoke up. “All right, here it is. There was debate in the Senate about a bill that would have allowed self-determination in Kansas. I’m pretty sure that this is the bill that would have been the Kansas-Nebraska Act if it passed. But it didn’t.”

  “Does it say why?” Tim asked, giving up his search for another useful book and sitting back down on the floor next to the others.

  “Yeah, so get this,” said Rose, as Tim leaned forward and Billy yawned. “There was a new compromise instead, called the Kansas Compromise.”

  “Okay,” said Tim, filing this new bit of historical information. “Tell me more.”

  “All right, here’s the rundown: Kansas enters as a free state, like it was supposed to, but any future state added to the Union would have a choice of whether to enter as a slave or free-state.”

  “So they gave the North what it wanted in this single instance on the assumption that they could get other states in the future. But weren’t most places that would later become states further north than Kansas anyway?” Tim asked.

  “In our timeline, yes,” Rose said. “This book points out that this compromise was the foundation for adding Cuba and the four states south of Texas as slave states over the next decades.”

  “Four states south of Texas? Wow. So maybe it was implicit in the negotiations that there would be a more hawkish foreign policy?” Tim asked.

  “Could be. It might not even have been implicit. I mean, it makes sense that less than a decade after the Mexican-American War, the party of Pierce, the War’s hero, would do something to get another swing at Mexico.”

  “And all this made the Civil War not happen?” asked Julie, who seemed to be trying both to redirect the conversation to get it back on track and to actually understand what Rose was talking about.

  “It made it so it didn’t happen in 1861, anyway,” Rose said, as she paged through the book a bit more. Soon, she found a heading that caught her attention, and summarized what was underneath it. “In 1890, the country was extra-unified after a second Mexican-American War. This one was caused by Mexico’s president declaring war on the United States. That doesn’t sound like something that would have happened in our timeline, even without the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But it could’ve been something else that the Emperors caused in this timeline.”

  “All right,” Billy said, impatiently. “So we’re pretty confident that this Kansas Compromise happening instead of the Kansas-Nebraska Act is what made it so the Civil War didn’t happen?”

  “Yeah, has to be,” Tim said. “The bill was debated in the Senate, under the same president who presided over the Kansas-Nebraska act in our timeline, Pierce.”

  Rose brought the conversation back to the second Mexican War. “It makes sense that the Emperors would want a second Mexican-American War. It seems like their overall goal is to make the United States strong as early as possible. Taking another swing at Mexico would have been a relatively easy way to do that in the mid-nineteenth century.”

  Tim returned to his textbook. “Right. It looks like by 1890, the United States had acquired all of Mexico as territories.” At this point, he flipped through a few more chapters. This textbook gave a new map every time the United States gained foreign territory. He found the next map and announced, “Get this: In 1914, instead of the Great War, there was a war with Great Britain against Germany, but in this one the United States allied with Germany. When the war ended, Germany took over Britain and her overseas colonies except for Canada, which the United States received.”

  “All right, look,” said Billy, a bit irritably. “It seems to me that we know now where history changed, even if I’m not quite clear how avoiding the Civil War leads to war with Britain-”

  “That wouldn’t have been the only change there was. Hopkins told us that there would have been several other changes, too, along the timeline. But we only need to change the first one back, because the first change made it so that the right conditions existed for the rest of the changes,” Rose said.

  “Yeah, fine, whatever,” Billy said, with a shrug. “My point is, we’re done now. We don’t need to debate about the ins and outs of the new world history because we’re about to change it back anyway. We just need to--”

  “Hey guys,” Julie said from over by the window. “We’ve got a problem.” She reached into her pocket to find her Dominus Temporis.

  “What’s wrong?” Tim asked.

  “We’ve got three police cars coming at us from a block away,” Julie said.

  “Seriously? Are you sure?” Billy asked.

  “Assuming that cars with flashers on top and the word ‘Police’ written in big letters on the side are still police cars in this timeline, then yes, I’m sure.”

  Chapter 3

  Digging

  “They’re definitely onto us,” said Rose, he
r voice wavering.

  “That or the antique store is being robbed,” registered Tim, as the cars pulled closer.

  “We’ve got to time-jump, right?” Billy asked. “Can we go back to, say, one year ago? We probably wouldn’t have been wanted for treason yet.”

  “I think most of what’s in here would have been here then,” said Rose. The teens jumped back from the window and drew the blinds as the cars stopped across the street.

  “You should be the one to picture this place last week… You’d know a good time when they wouldn’t be in the room, and we’d have been in school, so we don’t run into ourselves in town” said Julie. There was a harsh knock at the front door of the shop. They heard a muffled response from Uncle Patrick, but didn’t want to stick around to hear the rest of the confrontation.

  “Sure,” said Rose as Julie handed her one of the two Domini Temporis that they had. Rose cringed. She had never been the one who had controlled the Dominus before. She replaced the nerves apparent on her face with a steely frown of concentration as she received the round metallic microchip. The Dominus would allow Rose and anyone she was touching to travel back in time to any place and time where a chosen object had been.

  As they linked hands, Rose closed one hand around the Dominus, touched a nearby bookshelf, and squinted in concentration.

  “Did it work?” Rose asked. Most of the times that Tim had time-travelled, he had also changed location, but now, they were still in the same library-like room in the upstairs of the antique shop.

  Tim took a look around the room. “It must have,” he noticed. “Those books we got down aren’t sitting on the floor anymore, they’re on the bookshelf. And look, there’s no newspapers over there, and…”

  “And my cell phone says it’s 8 o’clock in the morning,” Billy said, with an air of finality. “I guess they do change automatically when we travel through time. It makes sense, though, ‘cause I have mine set to automatically sync the date and time over the internet.”