The 48 Read online

  The brass plaque next to the painting stated that it was a replica, as the original had been destroyed in a fire in 1698.

  False. Unlike the Mona Lisa, this was, in fact, the original. The 48 were very good at going back in time, swapping original artwork for fakes. If for any reason the fake was destroyed, the art world, then and now, would mourn the loss of the original, not realizing that the original was safe and sound—and hidden in plain sight. This subterfuge meant that precious artwork wasn’t targeted by thieves, because no one went after something they thought was a copy.

  Next to the painting of Henry VIII was another face I recognized: Thomas Cromwell. This was another original, yet again swapped and carried off as a copy to deter thieves. Grinch herself had gone back to the Tudor court after Cromwell’s arrest and taken it. It was much smaller than Holbein’s painting of Henry.

  But there was something about it…something unnatural. It was pulling me toward it.

  “Charlie,” prompted Alex. “It’s time.”

  “Blue pill,” I said to Alex, snapping myself away from Cromwell’s small portrait. My brother held up his left hand. The oval tablet was already in his pincerlike grip.

  My senses were in overdrive. The bitterness of adrenaline was coating my tongue. I could feel the grains of the pill beneath my fingertips. The red cloak in the painting of Henry was starting to bleed outward…

  I placed the pill on my tongue.

  I could smell blood.

  I could hear screaming.

  “What the hell is that?” yelled Alex, turning as the screams echoed like a bell through the deserted gallery. “Is that Grinch?”

  “If it is, we can’t help her!” I cried. “We only have seconds, Alex. Concentrate on the vanishing point!”

  “Charlie, if that’s Grinch we can’t just leave her!”

  “We have no choice!” I yelled. “Alex—for God’s sake, the painting. Look at the vanishing point in the painting!”

  I could hear the second hand on my watch vibrating on the hard floor.

  10

  9

  8

  My head started spinning. I reached out for my brother. He reached out for me.

  7

  6

  5

  In my peripheral vision I saw a figure appear in the entrance to the gallery. Was it Grinch? I tried to open my mouth to speak, but my tongue was swollen. I couldn’t breathe. The air around me was distorting. Stretching and pulling my body through the ages.

  4

  3

  2

  I could smell burning wood and the stench of open sewers. I could hear bells tolling…

  1

  We had forty-eight days left.

  There were four stages to time travel. The first was a heightened awareness of the five senses—not just in the time you were departing from, but also in the new time you were invading. It was disconcerting to the extreme—almost like a sixth sense. For time travelers, atoms in the air had a corporeal mass that could be felt.

  The second stage of time travel was the sensation of one’s body stretching through space. It hurt. A lot. Like someone tying your four limbs and your head to separate pieces of rope and then pulling you through fire.

  The third stage was the worst. It was also the one that lasted the longest. The firelike heat dissipated and was replaced by biting cold that felt like it was snapping at your skin. Some Assets with real-life experience said the sensation was like being flayed.

  The first three stages only lasted for as long as you fought them. It was perverse, but if you accepted the pain—totally gave yourself to it—then you recovered to a new normal a lot faster than if you tried to fight it off.

  * * *

  —

  The new normal for Charlie and me was the year 1536.

  Our time destination was Hampton Court Palace in England. I could hear my brother groaning. I hated to hear him in pain, but the guttural noises he was making reassured me that we had come through together. That had been my biggest fear: being separated by time, especially after what had happened in the Louvre before we left. Distractions during the time travel process could be deadly; I had read about that in the archives.

  I couldn’t help Charlie until I helped myself. I needed to fully come to. I could tell that my left cheek was lying against stone. Everything was dark and freezing cold. Open your eyes, I thought. Just open your eyes. It isn’t as bad as it feels. It really isn’t as bad as it feels.

  But aside from feeling like I was encased in ice, my head was pounding. I recognized the metallic taste of blood right away. I had bitten the inside of my cheek. My throat was constricting.

  Don’t fight the third stage. Don’t fight the third stage.

  My old senses of the Louvre and the modern world were fading, although those screams were still echoing in my ears.

  “Alex,” groaned my brother. “Don’t fight it. The pins and needles don’t last for long.”

  I found my voice. “Pins and needles? I’m being stabbed by steak knives here.”

  I took a deep breath. With my eyes still closed, I pulled myself up onto all fours like a dog. My balance was okay. I felt around with numb fingers. I still had all my limbs. A head. Hair. The relief I felt over that was ridiculous, but I was kind of attached to my hair. It wasn’t vain to not want to be bald at the age of seventeen.

  My eyes were swollen. I leaned back on my calves and pried open my eyelids with a thumb and forefinger. I had to blink several times before they stopped watering. Eventually they started to focus.

  Get a grip, Alex, I thought. This is the third time you’ve done this time distance. You should be used to it by now.

  * * *

  —

  We were in a small, circular room constructed of neatly stacked pale gray stone flecked with dark flint. Directly above us was a large, copper-colored bell, which was rusting around the rim. It was attached to a sturdy-looking wooden pulley. A long piece of frayed rope dropped from the mechanism through a large hole in the center of the stone floor. The area around the hole was fenced off by a rotting wooden railing. I peered over the edge. We appeared to be about eight stories high.

  Our surroundings were all too familiar. “Not again,” I said, groaning. “We’ve arrived in the same place as last time. Grinch is going to kill us.”

  “Only if you insist on ringing the bell again like an idiot.”

  He had a point. The last time, I hadn’t been able to restrain myself. But I wasn’t expecting to come face-to-face with temptation again. We were supposed to arrive in Thomas Wolsey’s rooms, which had been left empty after his death.

  I shook my head and crawled gingerly to a window five feet to my left. The landscape before me took my breath away. “We’re really back, Charlie,” I whispered. “Wrong arrival point, but we’re back.”

  The enormous brick palace of Hampton Court was straight ahead. To my right was the river Thames, pea-green and foamy. Small wooden sailboats jostled for position near the embankment walls. Beyond the palace were the gardens, beautifully manicured and connected like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Black smoke rose in thin tendrils from various chimneys around the palace. The smell of burning wood rent the air.

  “We need to change,” said Charlie. He hadn’t joined me at the window, but he was finally compos mentis.

  Our backpacks were lying on the ground next to us. Charlie had been obsessive about checking their contents earlier, but it wasn’t as if I wasn’t aware of the inventory. Together they contained a change of clothes, a small explosive charge—one that our scientists had configured to ensure that it didn’t set off sensitive alarms at the Louvre—for burning our twenty-first-century clothes, and a pocket-sized dossier on the assignment itself.

  “Can you hear anyone?” I asked, crawling to another gap in the floor. It led down to a set of na
rrow wooden stairs.

  “No,” replied my brother. He propelled himself forward and sat for a moment with his head between his knees.

  I had to say something about our departure. “Charlie, that screaming back in the Louvre. What if it was Grinch?”

  “Alex, just—just don’t. Please don’t. That stuff with Katie and Willem, and now the Louvre, it’s all distraction. We can’t make it our problem because we can’t do anything about it right now. The mission is all that matters for the next forty-eight days, and we have to focus.”

  We remained silent for a few seconds, staring at each other. Finally, I nodded. My brother nodded too. Then we started to get dressed. Quickly. We had to hurry because the fourth and final stage would soon be upon us.

  The fourth stage was the reason Assets continued to time travel without complaint, even as their assignments became more dangerous and their bodies started to experience the painful side effects of radiation. Older, seasoned Assets called it the Quickening. Younger recruits like us called it the best high you would ever have. It made you fearless. It made you feel stronger. Everything around you was more pronounced, from the color of the sky to the intonation of your vowels. You didn’t fear death. You felt like you could rip its mangy head off.

  It was amazing. But it was a dangerous state to be in, because it could make you lose control. And Assets were always supposed to be in control. Assets had gotten themselves killed during the Quickening before acclimatizing to their new surroundings. So the sooner we were dressed in proper clothing and away from heights, the better.

  White shirts with pearl buttons, long black pants, and knee-high leather boots were the outfits we had been given to change into. We even had to wear sixteenth-century underwear, which essentially meant boxers the size of board shorts. The pants were made of thick cotton and were high-waisted, with lots of buttons. The sleeves on our shirts were fashioned from enough fabric to make bedsheets—a fact I’d found most convenient when packing. The boots were comfortable, but we could only pull them on while we were lying down because they were so long.

  I had missed several things about the Tudor court, but the clothes weren’t one of them.

  “Do you have the dossier?” I asked Charlie. He was having a fight with his right boot. The boot was winning. Charlie’s face was getting redder and redder, and his eyes were growing wide.

  Damn. The Quickening had already started for him. Which meant I wouldn’t be far behind.

  “Yes,” he replied, panting. “I have it. Alex, it’s starting.”

  “I know.”

  I did know. My lungs were filling with glorious oxygen. My skin was tingling, but it wasn’t unpleasant; it was as if all the hairs on my body were rising like feathers. I could swoop out of here if I wanted to and fly across London.

  “Great!” I shouted. “If you’ve got the dossier, then I’m detonating the charge.” I jumped up. My whole body was shaking like a dog drying itself after a bath.

  “I think we should get downstairs before we do anything else.”

  I grinned. An evil, I can do anything grin. All teeth and no lips.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Alex,” warned Charlie.

  “Define stupid.”

  “Alex…”

  “It’s coming, Charlie-boy!” I cried. “Race you to the bottom!”

  I flicked a round charge, the size of a dollar coin, onto our discarded pile of twenty-first-century clothes. Without waiting to see if it combusted, I straddled the wooden railing and grabbed the rope.

  This was déjà vu, medieval style. We had done this the first time we arrived, and I had been feeling reckless. This time, caught up as I was in the fourth stage, reckless didn’t even begin to cover it. I laughed maniacally as I slid down. Charlie followed me and the bell pealed our arrival to every living soul in the surrounding countryside. Who cared about arriving quietly? We were otherworldly. Ecstatic. Invincible. Omnipotent. Gods. I was fire and wind and the sky and the earth and everyone would see me and love me, and—

  * * *

  —

  —And suddenly, the godlike feeling started to fade. Five feet from the ground, Charlie let go of the rope and dropped. I didn’t drop so much as fall.

  By the time I picked myself up, the fourth stage was over and my hands were killing me. I looked them over and saw that my palms had thick red welts from rope burns.

  “You freaking moron,” groaned Charlie, kneeling on the dusty, straw-strewn ground. “What made you jump down the rope—again?”

  “What the hell made you follow me—again?” I groaned back, shaking out my stinging hands.

  Charlie snorted. I started laughing. I knew damn well he found it almost impossible to stay mad at me most of the time. Though it was a fact I often took for granted.

  “I suppose I should be thankful you didn’t try to fly out of the window,” said Charlie.

  “An Asset did that once! I read about it in the archives.”

  “What is wrong with you, sicko? Is that all you do, read the archives for death stats? Why can’t you stick to Tenets and Imperatives like the rest of us?”

  “I read the archives for lots of things. Not just Asset deaths. Tenets and Imperatives only teach you so much. The archives are where you get the real information—which is why I’ve brought several of them with me.” I patted my sleeve.

  “What? When did you sneak archives in there? I’ve been watching you. I checked our inventory before we left!”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t check my Tudor shirtsleeves, obviously. They’re big enough to hide a whale.” My brother looked royally pissed, so I smiled and said, “Come on, Charlie. It’s not illegal to copy archives, and I’ve had them on me the whole time. You just weren’t watching me hard enough. I didn’t sneak anything—except this knife.”

  “What the…how did you get that through the Louvre security?” exclaimed Charlie.

  “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” I replied, winking.

  “I’m going to watch you like a hawk from now on.” My brother sighed and took a good look around. “We should probably start up with Charles and Alexander again. Right now.”

  “Copy that. And don’t forget the German accent, Charles Douglas of Cleves.” At that, I had to laugh. “Our names just roll off the tongue around here, don’t they? We owe our parents one for that.”

  “I’m pretty sure they had zero choice in the matter.”

  I bowed my head and flushed. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

  When it came down to it, there was no reason to believe our parents had had much say in anything that concerned us, including our names. Like every other couple at The 48, they’d been matched and approved by the TOD board. Charlie and I, like all children, were raised more or less communally, along with extra Asset trainees who’d been brought into the organization as infants from foster homes all around the world. They helped diversify the bloodlines when they came of age. If and when blood parents died or were terminated—like ours had been—other Assets would step into the role of guardians.

  You learned early on never to get too attached, because inevitably, the guardians wouldn’t be there one day either. You learned to avoid feeling too much affection for anyone, period.

  Not that lust wasn’t accepted within The 48. It was actually encouraged, for letting off steam. And no one cared about sexual orientation or gender identity. I never came out as gay because I never had to. But falling in love was seen as a weakness: a loss of control. And The 48 didn’t like to have its Assets lose control.

  * * *

  —

  A solitary beep echoed around the ground floor of the bell tower. We knew what it signaled. I pulled up the sleeve of my shirt. Inserted into the underside of my wrist was a tiny rectangular display. It was the same pale color as my skin, and you had to know it was there to really make it o
ut. To anyone looking, especially in daylight, it appeared as if the eight numbers displayed on the minuscule panel were just smudges of dirt.

  I thought back to Lady Margaret. I was sure she had spotted the countdown panel on my wrist, but I took comfort in knowing there was no way in a million years she would recognize it for what it was. As far as she was concerned, we were the sons of Cleves.

  47 23:59:55

  In forty-seven days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty-five seconds, Charlie and I would be somewhere in the palace, standing in front of some artifact that still existed in the twenty-first century, ready and waiting to be drawn back through the cosmic string that had brought us here.

  And with a little luck, we’d be leaving secure in the knowledge that Jane Seymour was no longer of any interest to King Henry VIII. I took a deep breath.

  This was real. Charlie and I were on our first full assignment.

  And our forty-eight days were already grains of sand running through the hourglass.

  For obvious reasons, history was an important academic Imperative at The 48. Assets never stopped studying it—from ancient times to modern—and that suited me just fine. I loved history. Reading The 48’s archives didn’t interest me as much, because they were all about acts of historical manipulation, rather than the real history itself. But studying history as it actually unfolded? It was fascinating. My dream assignment would be to go back to the time of the Trojan War and somehow have a hand in shaping what happened. Or just bear witness to it—to fill the archives with notes that would intrigue the likes of my brother.

  I knew it was a futile dream. Given the order from TOD to eradicate religion from the ages, I knew that my short life would now be dedicated to that goal. Even so, knowing that The 48 could shape—and had shaped—the course of history was empowering. I might not have been drawn to the archives of our exploits, but I loved being a part of that excitement. Not a single historical figure knew when fate was about to knock on their gilded door, but we did. History was littered with events whose outcomes resulted from our involvement. Not all were assassinations. Sometimes we actually delayed death. Sometimes we helped people to fall in or out of love. Sometimes we gave science a little nudge forward—or backward. Whatever the rich and powerful men and women of TOD demanded.