A moment later the door was thrown open to an empty room. Just a small red book on a chair, and an empty bedroll.

The Citadel of Chronos, Anchorage, Alaska district, Midtime.

Jared stood on the balcony of his apartment in the citadel, watching the ocean wash against the balmy subtropical shores of Alaska. A smooth breeze blew his hair as he leaned against the rail and sipped his juice. He had two days off, psychological recovery time. Jared always equated psych time with a long vacation in some slow-time or reverse time universe. Midtime was his favorite, although he rarely came. The hours were twice as long, because time moved half as fast. Also, by the particular twist of being a foreigner to Midtime reality, he grew about five years younger with each day he spent there.

The psych board always gave time off, after jumps into certain zones of history. Many of them were not necessary, but he could remember plenty that had been. Jared knew lots of agents had been ruined or had quit the service after jumps into the Covert Zone and beyond, that funny period of history from industrialization to the invention of time travel, when history began to pick up momentum. The things a tuner saw in the Covert zone were sometimes not something that could be fixed with a few days off. Jared had been lucky this time. His mission had been pretty simple. All the time off did was put him alone with his thoughts.

Not everything in a time stream could be changed. His last jump before he had picked up Anne, he had failed for an eighth time at Rouen. He had brought over the inquisition with his archangel con, convinced them to free her. But Cauchon had gone berserk, and in a fury of superstitious dread, had killed Joan himself that night, six hours before her universal death.

There was no point in avenging her, the stream had rebounded, and Jared’s intervention had never happened. His meddling was erased, and existed only in his memory, and Prometheus Council records. The good news was he could try again, if the Council ever gave him clearance again. But the bad news, he had started to notice surreptitious looks cast his way from the council, and he sensed he had probably taken things too far with his crusade to save her.

He took another sip, savoring the rich flavor. He had to try again, though. It was intolerable to let such a noble young woman stand alone. He sensed a huge temporal loggerhead behind her death. He just hadn’t found enough leverage to break it loose yet. And no one else seemed to see what Jared sensed. He could not explain it; it was just a powerful instinctual sensation.

Sometimes the stream did that to an agent. It was like a premonition of something that could happen, but wouldn’t unless helped. He sensed the huge potential in that moment. Everything else told him her death was a universal historical milestone, however.

Some events occur in every single universe, on every single time stream. But he felt vaguely that the Death of Joan of Arc was not one of those moments…it felt connected to something else…he couldn’t quite bring it to the surface and examine it. The moment was gone again. Jared sighed.

Anne had been saved, and was happily ensconced at the Academy in Downtime. She would be trained for service to the Temporal Continuum, probably as an Observer, perhaps even a Sempai agent if she qualified. He thought she, indeed, had it in her.

The Prometheus council had the length and breadth of time in hundreds of universes to call upon for recruits, so they could afford to be picky. Anne had been recruited in several other universes, and the committee recommended her to Jared, so he had altered the stream he was responsible for, stream number 700, just enough to extract her.