Page 15 of The Book of Lost Hours

“Stop following me,” she shouted, darting around him to reach the book.

“Who says I’m following you? Maybe I’m just trying to do my job.”

“And what is your job exactly?”

“Lately? It’s to try and stop you from interfering.”

Lisavet laughed out loud. “Interfering? What about the people destroying memories?”

“It’s their job to decide what stays and what goes. That’s the whole point of timekeepers.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“And wrong. And chauvinistic. And imperialistically minded.”

“Whoa there, Merriam-Webster, calm down. English, please.”

Lisavet glared at him and repeated her words in German just to make a point.

Ernest gave her a sardonic look. “Cute.”

Keeping one eye on him to make sure he kept his distance, she took her book from her coat so she could file the pages away.

“So that’s where you keep all the memories you steal, huh?” he asked.

“No. It’s where I keep the ones I save from idiotic timekeepers like you.”

“Why?”

“Because I need a place to put them.”

“No, I mean, why bother saving them? Why do you care?”

Lisavet suddenly heard her father’s voice in her head. The whispers of the remaining memories she carried around with her. All she had left of him. She stashed the book in the folds of her coat and stood up.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Kind of. What if you’re saving something dangerous?”

“How could the memories of a dead person be dangerous?”

Ernest shrugged. That careless, infuriating jerk of the shoulders. “Same way the thoughts of a living person can be. They manifest. Take root. Become something bigger.”

Lisavet raised an eyebrow. “I save the memories because erasing them is wrong. Dangerous or not.”

She started to walk away. Ernest followed.

“Okay, well what about Hitler?”

“What about him?”

“Wouldn’t it have been great if someone had erased those thoughts before they spread? Before he used them to start a war and do all those horrific things?”

Lisavet stared at him blankly. When she had entered the time space nine years ago, Hitler and the Nazis had been little more than a political movement.

She knew there had been a war, but Azrael had intentionally kept her from learning too much about the outcome of it.

She thought about asking Ernest but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“So what, you think you can just erase all the bad parts of the world? Just like that?”

“Not all of them, no. Some things spread too quickly to be stopped. Some events have too great an impact to be altered. But other ideas, sure. Why not? Even if we can’t erase the event itself, we can change the way people remember it. So they remember the right version.”

Lisavet snorted at his insolence. “And who died and put you in charge of deciding what’s right?”

“My father,” he said without skipping a beat.

She started to scoff at him again, then stopped. “Wait… you’re serious?”

“As a heart attack. Which, coincidentally, is how he died.”

Lisavet’s lips parted in surprise. “I lost my father too,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. The part of her that still craved some sort of connection wouldn’t be silenced.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, taken aback. “When?”

“A long time ago. A timekeeper erased his memories so the world would forget about him. I watched it happen.”

It was Ernest’s turn to be surprised. Then the surprise morphed into concern. “Wait. How long have you been in here?”

“A while.”

“How long is a while?”

Lisavet took a step back. His tone had changed. Some of the edge had returned to it. An urgency that startled her. “Does it matter?”

He matched her step and followed it with another. “Well… yeah. This is the time space. A place where time is the only thing that exists. It can’t be safe to stay here that long.”

“For you maybe.”

“No, listen. I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I didn’t realize…” He came even closer, seeming intent on reaching her. “Maybe I can…”

“Stay back,” she said, voice tightening with panic.

“No. Hang on. I can help you.”

“I don’t need help,” Lisavet said, retreating farther and farther down the row.

“But you can’t stay here. I don’t think…”

Lisavet didn’t wait to hear what he did or did not think of her life. She turned on her heel and fled.

E RNEST HAD begun to question whether what he was doing was right.

It had been four months since he’d first told his boss about the German girl he’d met in the time space who was meddling in the affairs of other timekeepers.

Four months since he’d started tailing her at the department’s request. They wanted to know who she was, and more importantly, who she was working for.

But after their last encounter, Ernest was no longer certain if she was working for anyone at all.

How could she be when it sounded like she hadn’t left the time space in years?

When he’d mentioned that to Jack, he’d simply waved it off.

“Nonsense. She must be working for somebody. Why else would she be interfering?”

“I don’t know. She seems to be doing it on the basis of some moral high ground. She said she saw someone destroy the memories of her father. I think…” Ernest paused, furrowing his brow intently. “I think she’s been in there for a real long time.”

Jack made a disinterested humming noise.

He stood up and poked his head out the door to call for his secretary to order lunch.

The girl shouted back in acquiescence, her voice shrill and eager.

Jack was constantly cycling through new secretaries.

In his short tenure as director since the department was moved under the jurisdiction of the newly formed CIA earlier that year, he’d had at least three.

Theirs was a complicated relationship, Ernest and Jack’s.

As the director of the TRP, Jack was technically Ernest’s superior.

But Ernest, as the son of the program’s founder, was the undisputed successor to Jack’s job, favored by both Jack’s subordinates and those further up the ladder.

Ernest was smarter than Jack, more well liked than Jack, and, in his opinion, much better looking than Jack.

The only reason the job wasn’t his already was his age.

He had only been fourteen when the second war started in 1939.

Had forged his draft card in order to join the army two years later.

His mother had been furious with him. His father had only just died, leaving him the man of the house.

His mother wanted him to finish school, to get a good job, marry a nice girl.

Since returning from war he’d done all but one of those things.

He had finished school early, double majoring in history and physics, and had gotten a job in his father’s old department.

But he hadn’t gotten married and that, he found, was more distressing to his mother than any of the rest.

“A wife would do wonders for you, Ernie,” she scolded the last time he visited. “You’re too much in your own head. Always reading all that poetry, always working. A wife would help you with that.”

Ernest had brushed it off, as he always did. “If you’re telling me that a wife will interfere with my work, I’d best avoid getting one at all costs.”

“I just don’t want you to be like your father. He worked too much at that job.”

Ernest said nothing to this. If there was one person in the world he wanted most to be like, it was his father.

Gregory Duquesne had been a great man, everyone agreed.

Respected. Revered. Someone who always knew what to do and ran the TRP with unmatched steadiness.

Ernest wondered what his father would have done if it were him dealing with the issue of the German girl and not Jack.

“You should get yourself a secretary, Ernest,” Jack said, returning to his seat. “Free up some of that time you spend writing those reports.”

“No, I’m okay. I don’t mind the reports.”

“Right, I forgot,” Jack said with a sly grin. “You like writing those endless descriptions of the German girl. I’ll tell you, that last one practically had me in raptures. ‘Long golden hair. Big brown eyes. Legs from here to San Francisco.’ She sounds like quite a looker.”

“I never wrote that,” Ernest protested.

“Oh right, that was my imagination filling in the blanks.” He began throwing the rubber ball he kept in his desk up and down. “And you’ve never seen her leave the time space?”

“Not in the traditional sense. She disappears from time to time, but she doesn’t have a watch.”

“Maybe she’s meeting with someone. Handing over the memories.”

“That’s not it either. She keeps all the memories in this book she carries with her.”

Jack stopped throwing the ball and leaned forward. “A book? You mean she keeps it on her?”

“Yes. I’ve never seen her without it.”

“Well, there’s your solution then. Take it from her and let’s see what she’s been hiding all this time.”

Something about this idea made Ernest uncomfortable. “I don’t know…” he said.

“Well, why not? She could be working for God only knows who, compromising who knows what. Either you take that book from her and figure out what she’s up to or you drag her out of there kicking and screaming so I can question her in person. That’s always been my preference anyway.”

Ernest gave him a look. Whenever Jack was presented with two options, he nearly always opted for the more violent one.

“We’re not doing that,” he said firmly.

“Then we need the book.” Jack cocked an eyebrow. “Unless of course you’d rather I take you off the case? I’m more than happy to give it to someone else if you’re not willing.”

“No,” Ernest said at once. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Excellent. Now go get ’em, soldier.” Jack gave him a mock salute and sent him on his way.