Excerpt: ChronoNauts: A Time Watch of Chicago Novel

Cricket knew it was going to be a good day when she spotted a time-travelling assassin hiding in the hydrangeas.

It was a Monday, and Mondays were her day to guard the Montalban house from four in the morning until ten, when she would inconspicuously be replaced by a man named Yves. It was a quiet night up until six, which was when she spotted the assassin, creeping along on his stomach in the early morning dew. She assumed it was a man, anyway, she couldn't tell from his anonymous, dark clothing. He was sneaking along in a way that might not immediately suggest "assassin" to someone who was not Cricket, but it didn't matter, anyway. No one doing any good creeped around like that. He was either an assassin or a very unlucky thief.
She snuck around behind him, her heavy boots silenced by the soft grass of the Montalbans' front lawn.
When she was close enough behind him, she took a moment to evaluate his appearance. He was dressed entirely in black, with a ratty piece of fabric tied over his head and face and noise-cancelling pads stuck to his elbows and knees. Definitely a Traveler, though his weapon, a silenced pistol attached to his hip, was more certainly modern. He looked tensed to spring.
She moved to power on her own phaser, and in the second that it hummed to life he flipped onto his back. Before his leg swung around to knock her over, she realized he hadn't been tensed to spring forward, as she'd suspected, but back. Towards her. He wasn't the amateur zealot that she'd originally suspected. He'd seen her coming.
His leg swung up and she felt the wind forced out of her as it made contact with her gut and she was knocked backwards. The grass no longer seemed soft. It was cold and wet. She forced down the humiliation and in its place the adrenaline rush roared up. As he came down on top of her with his elbow out, presumably poised to press into her neck, she brought her knees up against the attack, caught him on her toes and pushed him on so that he was flipped straight over her and onto his back a few feet away, where she met him again, a second later, with her knee pressing into his chest. She unholstered his gun and tossed it away. It made a squelching sound in the hydrangeas.
"Good morning," she said.
"Where I come from, you're already dead," he said. His accent was vaguely southern in a way she couldn't place. It sounded garbled.
"Uh-huh," she said. "You're as good as, just now. How'd you like to die before you're even born?
"I will kill your grandmother in her childhood bed, you interfering shrew!" He spat the words like bullets, but she was used to it. She wasn't listening. She was already tallying up all the paperwork she'd have to fill out for this idiot, which is why he was able to surprised her.
With a sudden surge of strength, he pushed up and threw her away from him. She tried to grab him, but her hand caught in his facemask and tore it away. She could see his eyes, now, in the dark. They were angry and so bloodshot that they looked red. He'd taken something. She changed her mental filing of him again.
"Actually," he said. Streetlight glinted off of metal as knives dropped out of his sleeves. "I'd settle for finishing you now."
He lunged forward, slashing wildly. She dodged back, taking deep breaths even as he lunged again. His knives were jagged and cruel looking. Definitely dystopian. Good.
As he pulled back again, she unholstered her fully-powered phaser and took aim, her body squared and steady. Both eyes open. She exhaled and fired. The gun grew hot in her hands for a moment and then there was a short sound like "whump". Nothing seemed to have happened, but an instant later a third lunge turned into a controlled fall as the assassin toppled forward onto his face.
She rolled him over. "Don't let them suffocate in the dirt," they always said in training. Cricket pulled his mask back fully. His face was hard, covered in ugly bruises and scars like a map of past beatings. She noted that his jaw was uneven, like it had been broken in the past, and there was a fresh cut on his nose that was bleeding. She turned the phaser around to its opposite end and ran the hot handle over the cut, which closed, leaving a thin, white line where it had been.

She stood and made the call.

While she waited for back-up, she inspected his pockets, which held nothing but a Google map of the area with the Montalban house picked out in red marker and a wallet-sized photo of someone Cricket recognized very well, a fifteen-year-old boy with messy, brown hair and a perpetual look of incredulity.
Cricket felt eyes on her back and she whipped her head around to look up at the house. There was nothing but a curtain falling back into place on the second floor, but she knew whose window it was. She looked back down at the photo in her hand. "Shit," she said.

"Nice job," Yves said, when he arrived in a shuddering, old pick-up truck a few minutes later. He helped Cricket load the assassin into the back and then had her recount what had happened. While she was waiting, she'd gathered up his gun and his knives. They carefully bagged them, then Cricket showed him the map and the photo. Yves nodded. "We'll see what we get out of him, but it seems like we've got a clean-cut Zealot," he said.
"A DystopiNaut," Cricket added. "His eyes. He looked like he'd taken a pound of C."
Nod again. "So he's a Zealot and an idiot. Good."
For a moment Cricket considered telling him about the window, but she shrugged it off. It'd probably come to nothing. "See you at ten," she said. He drove off. Cricket looked back at the window, but, just as she'd suspected, everything was still.