She turned back to face the hills and streets that rolled out below her, easing down into the bay. “I see…suffering. Pockets of homes. Twisted buildings.”
But on the whole, the damage—what her history texts had painted in broad, catastrophic strokes—was terrible, but not crushing. Frightening, but not terrifying.
“What you’re seeing is a city which has taken a severe knocking with the quake, but has been spared from fire damage, which is what ultimately caused the bulk of the damage and deaths in the timeline you know,” Henry explained, tucking his hands into his pockets. “But if you had come to this moment in Ironwood’s timeline, there would have been almost nothing to see. That was how devastated it was, by one small change that rippled out to a much larger one.”
This isn’t Ironwood’s timeline. Etta whirled back toward him. “What was it?”
“When Ironwood was pursuing his interests, or rather, the interests of his family’s ancestral territory in the Americas, he altered the outcome of a war. The Russo-Japanese War. Are you familiar with it?”
Etta shook her head. “No—wait, that was before World War One, wasn’t it? Over land disputes?”
“Over rival interests in Manchuria and Korea,” he said. “When it was clear the Russians were beaten and riots at home were breaking out, Ironwood convinced Theodore Roosevelt to mediate the peace talks, rather than let the war proceed a few more months as it had in the original timeline. It cost far more Russian and Japanese lives, but it resulted in sweeping reforms in the former, and spared the lives of millions of Russians in World War One.”
That was…impossible.
Like time travel, she thought grimly. And so was standing there, in an alternate version of the history she had grown up with. A passing breeze kicked a loose strand of Etta’s hair up, forcing her to smooth it back. Instead of smoke and ash, the breeze brought with it the briny scent of the sea, the metallic breath of exhaust, and the simple stenches of humanity.
“But what does that have to do with an earthquake in San Francisco?” she asked.
Henry turned to face her more fully. “This is what I want you to understand, Etta. I sympathize with you, knowing that your future is no longer what you remember. I know that pain, feeling your life and friends and dreams are gone. All of us have had to come to terms with the fact that our loyalty is to time itself. It’s our inheritance, our nation, our history. But the future you know is filled with strife and war; it is nothing like the world of peace that existed before Cyrus Ironwood decided to remake it.”
Etta recognized that she was as much in mourning over her dreams of being a concert violinist as she was for Alice. She had slowly come around to the idea that there was something more for her in life, and that she could still play without the validation of crowds and success. But the idea of an entirely unfamiliar future would always remain overwhelming.
“Each change we make, big or small, ripples out in ways we cannot always predict, that we can almost never control,” Henry continued. “A war in Russia spreads its vines throughout the years, touching individual lives, nudging them to different locations, shifting their choices, until one man, Dennis T. Sullivan, San Francisco’s fire chief, is in the wrong place when the earthquake strikes, and he dies of his injuries, leaving inexperienced firemen to wield dynamite to create firebreaks. A woman wakes up a few hours earlier than she would have and decides to make breakfast for her family, causing one of the most devastating fires of the entire century.”
“So…we’re in…” Etta began, trying to wrap her mind around the words. “We’re in the original timeline now? The men who took the astrolabe managed to change it back?”
Henry nodded, and, with that, changed her life as she had known it.
“We’ve been identifying potential linchpin moments in history for years—moments and people and decisions that have a huge impact when it comes to these ripples,” he explained. “They tested our theory that the Russo-Japanese War was one, and altered the future from 1905 onward. Ironwood’s focus was on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, thank God, most of his changes prior to then were minor. There wasn’t enough wealth at stake for him to care or make a major play before then.”
“But, unfortunately…?” Etta prompted, detecting the anxiety underscoring his words.
He gave a faint smile. “Unfortunately, we’ve heard reports that he’s already dispatched his men to see about altering events back. If we don’t move quickly, we’ll lose this advantage.”
“Move quickly to destroy the astrolabe, you mean,” Etta clarified.
“My men who took it from you were immediately followed by Ironwood’s men. One of them was, from the note we received, killed. The survivor is in hiding in Russia, still in possession of the astrolabe, waiting for us to rescue him,” he said. “Tonight, I need to inform the others that the only way forward is with its destruction. The complete reversion of the timeline to what was meant to be. We cannot leave the astrolabe in play; if Ironwood ever got his hands on it, he’d open up passages to new years, inflict more crippling changes on humanity. He does not care how many people die, or suffer, so long as he and his line survive. He wants more and more and more, and yet all of these years have proven nothing will ever be enough.”
Until he saved his beloved first wife from death. Until he had everything.
Etta drew his coat around her shoulders more tightly, trapping in the warmth.