The River of No Return

cannot force us to . . .” He paused, clearly searching his prodigious memory for a phrase. “You cannot make us drink the Kool-Aid. The evidence is incontrovertible. Someone has disappeared, and someone else—this Ignatz person—is in hiding. Gacoki said ‘the Brazilian resistance.’ Meg heard her say it.”
    “No,” Nick said. He heard the way his voice was shifting registers, moving to the front of his mouth, taking on the clipped precision of an affronted aristocrat—but he was too frustrated to temper his condescension. “This is paranoia—a delusion of Meg’s.”
    “Are you calling me a liar?” Meg was technically sitting in the back, but she was so angry that she had thrust her skinny shoulders up between the front seats.
    Nick turned his head and looked her in the eye. “I’m not calling you a liar, Meg. I’m calling you a drunken left-footer.”
    After that there was complete silence between them.
    * * *
    The next day, Meg and Leo were gone. Disappeared from the compound.
    For a couple of days everyone gossiped about it. The general consensus was that they’d been cherry-picked for jobs in the Guild, airlifted out of the compound to glorious new lives in London, at the Guild headquarters.
    Nick knew better.
    Either his friends were on their way to Brazil, seeking their fantasy of a resistance movement, or they were dead. In Wellington’s army the smallest infraction had been a capital crime. Theft. Insubordination. What Meg and Leo had voiced last night was bigger than that: tantamount to treason. They had broken the fourth rule: Uphold the rules. No questions. No unhappiness. No disloyalty. Perhaps the car had been bugged. Maybe the cost of dissent was death. Maybe the Guild had taken them away and killed them.
    Nick stopped going to classes, stopped socializing. He was thrown into grief—for Meg and Leo, and back into all his original grief for what he had lost when he jumped. For everyone he had ever known. His entire world.
    He would have been completely alone if not for the girl with the dark eyes. At least she hadn’t deserted him. Her eyes, her smile—they absolved him. As they had that first time, and every single time afterward. He floated around his pool in Leo’s panda and dreamed of that warm, comforting gaze.
    * * *
    Exactly a year after his arrival, Nick had left the compound outside Santiago and begun his life in the United States. Nine years later he was still here. He told people he was thirty-three years old. But when he counted to himself, he counted in centuries.
    He divided his time between a loft in SoHo and his house in Vermont. He managed, for the most part, to forget about the Guild. He followed the four rules, and he attended the Guild convention, held biannually in either Santiago or Mumbai. It was basically a mandatory weeklong cocktail party, and Nick hated it. Every kind of human from down the timeline, and all they could think to do was stand around and brag about how they spent their money. Most were collectors. Antique dowry chests. Antique guns. Antique musical instruments. Always it was antiques—or if it wasn’t antiques it was BMWs and Apple gadgets. The Guild patronized both brands with equal fervor.
    Nick didn’t collect antiques and he drove an old Chevy LUV pickup. It pretty much expressed the state of his emotions: misspelled, and a little cramped for space. But he knew that in spite of his small resistances, he was like any other Guild member, skimming the fat off the top. It was a good enough life, tinged at the edges with loneliness, but padded, too, with luxury. Of course he might have had another story, if he’d survived the war and not jumped. He might have gone home and settled down. Fallen in love. Found the girl with the dark eyes grown up and waiting for him. Married her. Set up his nursery. Lived out his life surrounded by the hustle and bustle of servants and children and a wife, dogs and horses and tenants and seasons. Never leaving Devonshire. Eating beef and drinking claret and dandling fat babies on his knee.
    But that other life existed only in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He was here in Vermont in 2013 and that was all there was to it.
    Nick stretched his feet out to the fire and put his hands behind his head. He stared at the letter on the mantel. Instead of the girl with the dark eyes he had the Guild. The generous foster mother of time’s little orphans. Generous and controlling. He thought of Meg and Leo. Controlling and