The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

in the big picture, it doesn’t matter; the river flows to the sea. Those who know the river, and who use it, know that it moves in complex ways, ways that we can use and even change. Our very bodies swimming in the river alter its flow. But we cannot change it for long, and we cannot change the ultimate truth: The river will run to the sea.”

“That is a pretty image, Alice,” Nick said. “But what are you trying to tell me?”

“And what about this hand holding, I want to know,” Arkady muttered.

Alice rolled her eyes at her husband, then shook her head at Nick. “I tell you,” she said, cocking her head in Arkady’s direction. “He is hardly worth it.”

Nick leaned back in his chair and twisted his ring on his finger. “Yes, your wife held my hand,” he said to Arkady. “What are you going to do about it?”

The Russian shrugged. “I kill you.”

Nick raised his glass in a salute, and Arkady raised his. They drank.

Alice, meanwhile, was chewing her lettuce with a bored look on her face. She swallowed, dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin, and propped her elbows on the table. “If you two gentlemen are finished with your little male-bonding ritual, I would like to continue my lecture about time and rivers.”

Arkady grunted and dug into his salad.

Nick spread his hands. “I’m all ears,” he said.

“Such handsome ears,” Alice said, cutting a look at her husband over the rim of her glass as she drank.

Arkady glanced up from his troughing. “Tonight, you pay for that.”

“Goody. Now be quiet.” Alice turned the full strength of her attention on Nick, her flirting clearly at an end. “Human history is like a river,” she said. “Billions of souls all living and loving and working and fighting and dying down through the ages, pushing history before them in a powerful flow made up of tiny particles. They make their choices, have their passions. Some are brilliant or powerful or rich or simply lucky enough to make a change for good, a little bend in the river, a slight deviation. Or for bad. Perhaps more often for bad. But ultimately, it is the vast power and flow of the river that carries them forward.”

“I’m following you,” Nick said.

“Then there is the strange, unexplained fact of us. The Guild. The people who can jump the river’s course. Move backward and forward along it, more like . . .” Alice paused, thinking. “More like a water bug, perhaps, than a drop of water.”

Arkady snorted. “I am not a bug.”

“No,” Alice said. “You would say that time is like a harem of beautiful women and you are like a thief who steals in by moonlight. But this is my account, and in my account we are like water bugs. We can skate here and there on the surface of the river, but nothing we do can really change its overall course, its powerful drive toward the sea.”

“But we all start with a jump,” Nick said. “Right?”

“Yes. Every single person who can manipulate time begins by first falling out of time. Jumping. We jump and emerge again somewhere further along. Usually it is something drastic that happens to cause the jump. Our lives are at stake. Mostly it’s war. We are fighting, like you were, or we are caught up in war somehow. Less often we are consumed by an unbearable grief or a drive toward suicide. We lift the knife. But instead of the great courage it takes to plunge the knife into our breast or face death, we tap into this ability, this talent. And we leap forward decades, centuries. Even sometimes a thousand years.”

“So it is a talent.”

“Yes.”

Nick thought about that for a moment. It was inside him, this thing. But he couldn’t find it. Arkady and Alice could use it, but he could not. He spoke again, watching Alice carefully. “Then that’s it for most of us. The Guild gives us a pile of money, life is cushy, and we can never manipulate time again.”

Alice pushed a toasted pecan across her plate. “Most of us don’t ever manipulate time again. We can. We just don’t know that we can.”

“Because the Guild makes sure we don’t know.” Nick remembered the Frankish butcher’s insistence that there was no way to go back. Nobody could. It was impossible, he had said. Nick remembered the old man’s sympathy for his first spasms of grief. “Does Ricchar Hartmut know that we can go back?”

“Ricchar Hartmut?” Alice put her head on one side, searching her memory. “The Frankish greeter. Was he the man who met you when you jumped?”

Nick nodded. “Does he know?”

“No.” Alice looked gravely at Nick. “He doesn’t have security clearance. And I know what you’re thinking.”

“That you have an honest, well-intentioned man telling your lies for you.”

“Ricchar is a good man. And yes, he is telling lies for us.”

“How do you live with that?”

“Easily. It’s about preserving the safety of our members, and the safety of history itself. It’s politics.”

“Politics.”

She nodded.

“Was it politics when you had Leo Quonquont and Meg O’Reilly killed?”

“Who?”

Nick narrowed his eyes. Was she lying? “Two people who were with me in Santiago. You met them. Remember when you saw me and Leo in that market? We were waiting for Meg to come out of the bathroom?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t remember that. My life is very full.”

“Right.” Nick glared at his untouched salad. It was drizzled with raspberry vinaigrette, a modern concoction that he’d found he simply couldn’t stomach. “Well, it doesn’t matter whether or not you remember. The point is that the next day they were gone.”

Alice exchanged a quick glance with Arkady. “Leo Quonquont and Meg O’Reilly. Was he the Native American who learned languages so quickly? And she was the hungry Irishwoman? Yes, I remember them now. I remember hearing that they’d left the compound. I’m sorry.”

“You heard that they’d left. And that was fine with you? You didn’t kill them?”

“Of course not.” Alice held