Return Once More

The Triangle Fire had been reflected to death—what it meant for women’s rights, workers’ rights, the development of unions, the reinforcement of greedy businessmen by the American court system, the horrible truth that people had to see injustice with their own eyes before it meant anything at all. Those truths had been established long ago and dissertated by Historians before me.

We were expected to bring new observations to the table during deep reflection, and after fifty years, that required focusing on smaller aspects. Which meant, in this instance, my distractions gave me an advantage. Deep reflection was one of the only times my tendency to obsess over the sidelines came into use. While in the past, we were supposed to record what they assigned, but in the Archives any focus was fair game.

The first original reflection I gathered was about the lives of the survivors—how humans had the capability to go on in the face of personal tragedy. There were diary entries in the system from later in Rosie’s second life, along with multiple interviews about the fire, and in every one, her guilt over leaving her friends and coworkers behind oozed from the words. She’d never forgiven herself for surviving, but she hadn’t disgraced her friends’ sacrifice by wasting the years she’d been gifted by my brother. She had fought for workers’ rights, and then women’s rights, and later, civil and gay rights. Rosie Shapiro had spent a lifetime making her good fortune count.

I thought briefly that my reflection might bring too much attention to Rosie, and therefore Jonah, but it seemed unlikely. For one, the only record that she had died was in the original manifest from Earth Before. Any Elder—if they even noticed—would assume the original records had been incorrect and corrected by one of our many trips.

The next two reflection topics were harder, but after three hours I managed to get the table comp to accept as unique contributions the devolving of humanity into a more animalistic state in the face of imminent death and the idea that the majority of the girls chose to have control over how they died.

Everyone else’s eyes were still trained on their comps, fingers nudging observations and typing reflections, with the exception of Oz, who had finished and left an hour ago. He’d probably been sitting alone in his room being boring and ruminating on these reflections since we’d gotten back from New York, wondering if one might be his ticket into the Hope Chest. Aside from his unauthorized trip to England, of course.

I got up and stretched, shaking out the kinks in my legs and neck as I paced the floor, searching for the single red dot roaming outside the Archives, which would have to be Oz’s. The more nonchalant I acted, the more Analeigh’s suspicious gaze burned between my shoulder blades.

When I finally found Oz, he wasn’t in the mess hall or the gardens or the dormitories. His dot disappeared from the travel chamber, then blinked a moment later in Canada, 1934 CE.

What in the System was that boy up to? Whatever it was, he could have used a handy dandy chip like the one Jonah handed me.

My Historian training, coded into my DNA as deeply as my attraction to Caesarion, demanded to know why he’d interfered in England. He changed something. I just didn’t know what. Or why.

If I cross-checked the places he’d gone, maybe a common thread would show up.

A quick press of his dot displayed bio data, and another punch pulled up a two-week history, which I transferred to my locked file before I slid back onto my stool across the table from Analeigh. I ignored her stare and after a moment, she heaved a sigh and returned to her reflection.

Two thousand years ago, someone would have had to flip through volumes upon dusty volumes of actual books to piece together a co

I knew he’d gone to see James Puckle, inventor of the Puckle gun, in 1714. That was a start.

I punched in the dates and asked the table comp to find any historical co

I frowned at my hands. Sometimes I wished they had done the nail polish.

The table comp beeped twice and then displayed a short list of possible co

The Chinese had invented gunpowder, and it had been introduced to the Western world during the Mongolian invasions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1934, John Garand of Canada had developed the first assault rifle. It said nothing about the Puckle gun being invented in 1717 even though it had been in the Archives the other day when I’d followed Oz—it had only displayed for me during the observation.

And now it was gone.

The memory of him shoving that woman right into James Puckle flashed through my mind. My fingers trembled as I pulled up the man’s biography with a few punches. Nothing about his inventing a gun. He’d married a woman named Mary and had children, which matched the information the glasses had given me the other day. Then he’d married again, only … I felt sure his second wife’s name hadn’t been Elira. It had been something English.

A click on the second wife’s name brought up nothing but their wedding photo. It was the woman from the street, the one Oz had shoved into Puckle’s path.

There was a paragraph on why their union had been recorded—she had been a Muslim from the region that would become Albania, and their union had changed Puckle’s rather rigid, vocal outlook on Muslims as mortal enemies of his own beloved Catholic Church.

There had to have been more about Puckle in the Archives previously, about why and how he’d invented that machine gun. Violence and weapons were one of the five major contributors to our evacuation from Earth Before, so anything related to firearm development would have been cataloged.

Oz’s actions had apparently wiped it from the record.

Because of his interference, Mr. Puckle had met Elira instead of Nice Catholic Girl, and it had erased the desire to create advanced weaponry from his mind.

Cold fingers made of fear gripped the back of my neck. How many other things had changed because that gun had never been invented? It seemed like it should be a good thing, slowing down the progress of weapons development, except it didn’t matter now. That wasn’t the reason Historians were allowed access to the past—not to change it or try to repair mistakes. We couldn’t fix history. All we could do was make sure fatal errors didn’t happen again here in Genesis.

Oz had heard the same lectures as the rest of us all of these years. His father was an Elder, for Pete’s sake. What did they know that the rest of us didn’t?

I swiped the search results away, pecking with my fingertips through files on the development of weapons, unsure what exactly I was looking for until I found an early reflection by Mi