Page 46 of The Book of Lost Hours

Moira pulled her arm away. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her all of a sudden. The dark, heavy expression that looked nothing like the way Ernest used to look at her but every bit the way Fred Vance did.

He stepped closer to her and tucked a hand under her chin. “You know, I heard they call you my girl.”

She stared him down. Unsure of where this was going, but very certain she didn’t like it.

Jack made a humming noise, moving his hand from her chin to the curve of her hip as if it had any business being there. “Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

Moira returned upstairs to her desk fifteen minutes later, her skin crawling.

He called on her to help him alter memories regularly in the months that followed, each set of living memories joining the first in the pages of the notebook.

This new book, like her old one, never left her side, and the sheer rate at which its pages filled left her with a gnawing sense of unease.

As the world around her was molded and remolded under the whims of the TRP, she alone knew that it was burning.

E RNEST HAD assumed that Moira Donnelly wouldn’t last. He had abstained from joining the betting pool the other timekeepers had going, but his money would have been on a particularly expedited departure.

After all, she was untrained, uneducated, and, given her proclivity for violence, entirely unfit for the role of secretary.

But somehow, she stayed the course. Not only that, but she was allowed in meetings that no other secretary had ever attended, privy to the inner workings of the CIA’s most clandestine department.

Furthermore, she had the protection of Jack, who swiftly told off any employee for questioning her presence, Ernest included.

No one had ever seen Jack go to bat for any employee, let alone a secretary.

It made Ernest wary of her, but also curious. Perhaps a little too curious.

He found himself staring at her from the open door of his office.

In meetings, too, eyes fixed to the spot where she sat at Jack’s shoulder, head lowered over her notes, her quick, steady hands transcribing every word that was said.

At least twice each meeting, she would look up and catch him in the act, a sharp zap traveling down his spine every time their eyes met.

It was the eyes that made him keep looking. A sense of knowing that unnerved him.

Unfortunately, his curiosity did not go unnoticed by his colleagues.

“Close your mouth, Duquesne,” Brady said to him as he shut the door to his office one afternoon. Blocking his line of sight to Moira’s desk. “You’re drooling.”

Ernest glared at him. Normally, he wouldn’t let another timekeeper get away with that, but Brady was one of Jack’s direct reports. He passed a hand over his face and leaned back in his chair.

“Sorry. Tired. Must have zoned out.”

Brady chuckled at him. “Hey, you don’t have to explain it to me. She’s a looker, that’s for sure.”

“With a wicked right hook,” Ernest added in a mumble. There was no point denying it to Brady. He had been in the FBI for five years before joining the TRP and so he knew how to read people.

Brady sat down in the chair across from him.

“True, true. Just… watch yourself with her, all right?”

“Why?” Ernest asked.

Brady gave him a stern look. “You heard what Jack said. She’s got clearance , Ernest. More than you or I have if I had to guess.

You know they don’t give that out to just anybody.

Odds are, she’s some kind of Soviet ex-spy or German turncoat the head office recruited.

Besides, she’s Jack’s girl. Even if you and him got along, stealing the boss’s girlfriend wouldn’t exactly be the fastest way to promotion. ”

Ernest frowned at that. “So it’s true then? She and Jack are…”

Brady shrugged. “Who knows? But she must be doing something right to make it this long, if you know what I mean.” He dropped a thick file onto the desk with a smack. “Enough about her. Temporal adjustments from Jack. Small stuff mostly. He wants you to give them out to your new guys as practice.”

Ernest’s heart sank. He lifted the file up and leafed through it. Names and histories, plucked from the past, waiting to be erased. “I’ll get on it,” he said, tossing the file to one side.

After Brady left, Ernest let out a long sigh, eyes straying habitually to Moira’s desk again.

This time, Jack was standing next to her, one arm propped against the desk, the two of them looking down at the page lodged in her typewriter.

She said something that made Jack smile, and then he looked up, locking eyes with Ernest through the doorway.

Ernest gave him a nod and looked away. Resolving not to look back at her until the day was over.

A few months ago, his attraction to Moira wouldn’t have been such an issue.

That’s not to say he would have pursued her as he might have when he was younger, but he might have at least been able to behave a bit more normally around her.

Might have even flirted with her. But lately, things had changed.

About two years ago, Ernest had stopped burning memories.

Not completely, of course. His position required him to continue in some capacity.

But less. Much less. He didn’t know exactly when it had started.

The hesitation. He supposed it began sometime around the time he’d figured out how to time walk.

A discovery he had more or less stumbled upon.

Something about being able to walk through memories made them feel all the more precious to him.

He felt so strong an attachment to those first memories that the idea of destroying them seemed unbearable.

Before he knew it, he had started stepping out of line. Disobeying Jack’s directives.

That night, Ernest took the file with him, rather than giving the contents to his direct reports.

He slipped into the cool quiet of the time space as the clock struck midnight and set off in search of the memories.

Each time he found one of the books he was looking for, he flipped through the pages with care to find the ones that Jack and those up on Capitol Hill had deemed worth destroying a person over.

Those specific memories he burned, knowing that if he didn’t, Jack would catch on.

The sound of each burned memory echoed in his ears like the dying breath of another human.

The rest of the book he would hide, burying it somewhere amid a more distant stack.

Leaving the remainder of the memories intact.

It was nearly morning before Ernest made it to the last one, a slim volume containing the memories of a boy barely twenty years old. This one he held with great care, noting what precious little there was. He had only just identified the part he was going to erase when a voice spoke behind him.

“I don’t mean to be a bother…”

Ernest nearly jumped out of his skin, dropping the book in surprise. He wheeled around, one hand reaching for his pistol, and found himself confronted by a specter. A man dressed like a monk, hovering a few feet behind him.

“God, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he said, bending down to pick up the book. “You should announce your presence or something.”

“I thought I was,” the memory said pointedly, eyeing him in amusement. “My apologies. I had a question for you.”

“Sorry. I’m not here to store memories today,” he said.

“That wasn’t my question.”

Ernest blinked. The specters did not normally talk to timekeepers unless they wanted their memories stored. “Oh. Okay. What is your question?”

“Why are you doing that?”

“Doing what?”

The monk gestured to the book. “Sparing the memories. Forgive me, it’s not like your kind to do that.”

Ernest didn’t answer right away, shifting the book from one hand to another. “It just… no longer feels right,” he said as forcefully as he could. “To burn them.”

There was a pause and for a moment Ernest thought the memory might simply accept his answer and leave. His ghostly eyes studied him closely.

“You should be careful,” he said at last. “I knew a girl who used to do that very same thing. It only brought her trouble in the end.”

“A girl?” Ernest asked, frowning. “What girl?”

The man gave him a vacant, searching look and then nodded at the book. “There are others, you know.”

“Others?”

“Others who hesitate to do what is asked of them. Others who no longer wish to burn…”

“There are?”

“Of course. There is no thought that has only been had by just one man. Some ideas are inevitable.” The man paused and smiled in a wry, ironic sort of way. “No matter how many men try to get rid of them.”

Ernest hesitated. He was curious. “Is it another American? Like me?”

“I’m afraid not.” There was another pause and then he said, “I could… introduce you, if you’d like. You’ll never meet him without help. Not unless you feel like getting shot at.”

Ernest eyed him with suspicion. “What do you mean?”

“His name is Vasily Stepanov.”

Ernest drew back on instinct. “A Russian?”

“See what I mean? Not exactly someone you can waltz up to without some kind of mediator. But if you’d like… I could facilitate something.”

Ernest’s frown deepened. “Why would you do that?”

“Same reason he stopped burning memories,” the man said, his expression deepening into a kind of mourning. “For her.”

Ernest considered the offer, wondering what could possibly come out of such a meeting between him and a Russian timekeeper. Surely nothing good. He wanted to say no to the monk, but the words slipped out before he could stop them.

“Next Friday,” he said. “Midnight. Tell him to come.”