Thomas felt dizzy. “Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“I just … haven’t flown in years. These cars crash too much.”
“You just flew from London on a plane.”
“Planes are different,” he said, looking out the window. “I can’t explain it.”
Flying cars were nearly unheard of in London: luxuries for the very rich, toys for the very daring. Tenokte had been designed to have roads in the sky, and the medium-sized city could handle the traffic. London, despite a bit of modernization, hadn’t changed that much over the years. Perhaps that’s why Thomas liked it so much.
The car soared through the cloudless blue sky, and it touched down on Thomas’s old street, Rosewater Drive, in a little over four minutes. The journalist was grateful to step onto solid ground, and smiled faintly when he saw the house he grew up in.
“I can’t wait to meet your parents,” said Zoë, closing her door. “So you’re father’s a police officer, and your mother is...”
“A pharmacist.”
“Brilliant. Why haven’t we visited them earlier?”
He didn’t answer.
They walked up the cobblestone pathway, and he rang the doorbell. In a few seconds a teenage girl opened the door. “Hey!” she said, hugging Thomas. She smiled. “You must be Zoë. It’s nice to meet you.”
Thomas glanced at his fiancée. “Zoë, this is my sister, Audrey.”
Zoë held out her hand, beaming. “It’s a pleasure.”
Audrey nodded and shook her hand. Her dark hair had been pulled back, and she wore jeans and a brown hoodie, which on her looked like they came off a fashion runway. “Come in,” she said.
They walked inside, and Thomas introduced her to his parents: his mother, Dr. (or Mrs.) Lily Huxley, pretty, light-skinned, with pale blond hair; and his father, Police Commissioner John Huxley, tall and handsome, with a dark complexion and steady gaze.
After a few minutes, Audrey pulled the dinner out of the oven and placed chicken, peas, mashed sweet potatoes, rice, and corn on the table. The family and the young couple sat down in the dining room to enjoy the meal.
“Have you lived in Tenokte your whole life?” Mrs. Huxley asked Zoë, passing a bowl of peas.
“No. I lived in Boston until I was thirteen, then I moved around a lot with my dad. I mostly lived here during high school.”
“That sounds really interesting,” said Mr. Huxley. “Where did you go to college?”
Zoë hesitated, and Thomas broke in: “Zoë went traveling with the band right after school.”
“But I want to go to Stanford,” she added.
That surprised Thomas. Zoë had only briefly mentioned a desire to continue her education, and not with a name in mind. She had dropped out of school at seventeen, when she would have been salutatorian of her class, and never looked back. Or so he thought.
“We chose a date for the wedding,” said Thomas. “July 30th.”
“Next month? Doesn’t that seem a bit soon?” his mother asked.
Audrey looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“You only met a year ago, didn’t you?”
Thomas glanced at Zoë. “We’re both very sure, Mom. We’re definitely ready.”
“I just thought a little more time would be better. Perhaps next May? We could have the reception here. The apple blossoms look lovely then.”
“My birthday’s in May, too,” said Zoë, “but we’ve already made plans ... it would be hard to change now.”
“Mom, let it go,” said Audrey. “They want to get married. Let them do the plans.”
“So, Thomas, who was with you at the hospital earlier today?” Mr. Huxley asked.
Zoë paused, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “You were at the hospital?” she asked her fiancé.
“Yes, well—I heard about the king, so I decided to stop in. Just to see what had happened.”
“You were talking to a girl there,” said Mr. Huxley. “Ariel, I think her name was.”
“Was it? I don’t even remember. She was some sort of investigator.”
“Oh. I thought you knew her. The way she spoke just made it seem like she was familiar with you.”
Zoë was looking at him.
“I only met her today. And I only wanted to know what had happened to the king.”
“Oh. So Zoë, isn’t it your brother who assassinated the king?” Mr. Huxley asked.
No one said a word.
Finally, Zoë said quietly, “He was accused, yes.”
“But he did confess, didn’t he?”
“Zoë didn’t even grow up with her brother,” said Thomas. “And like she said, he—”
“I just think that’s horrible. To kill a young man, in cold blood, and for what? For fame, probably. Aggression is a genetic tendency. It’s carried through families. So is insanity.”
Thomas stood up abruptly. “We’re not listening to this.”
“No,” said Zoë, looking away. “It’s fine.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Audrey. “Zoë is a completely different person from her brother. You can’t judge her based on what he’s accused of.”
“Thank you,” said Thomas. “But—”
“We’re just saying,” said his mother, “there’s a media uproar. Thomas, do you really want to marry someone who’s involved in that?”
Zoë stood up. “You know, Thomas is right. We really should get going.” She rushed out of the room, and Thomas started after her, calling her name.
Audrey was drumming her fingers on the table, not looking at her parents.
“Mom, Dad, if I get married, you’re going to find out by postcard a year later,” she said. “And I’ll be hiding somewhere in Mexico.”
4.
Zoë silently cried as they walked to the subway. The last of the light began to fade under the horizon, and stars appeared on the still-blue sky.
“I don’t talk to them very much,” Thomas explained. “I got out of the country as soon as I could.”
Zoë kicked at a piece of gravel. “My parents would have never spoken to you like that.”
“I know. Don’t listen to them; they really like you. When my mom heard about the engagement, she called and asked when she could meet you, and when she could expect grandkids.”
For a moment, Zoë didn’t reply. “They look young,” she said finally.
“They are. Married when they were eighteen; I was born a year later.” He looked up at the sky. “My mom and I used to study together when she was in college. I knew most of the periodic table before I could read. Can’t remember much of it now, though…”
Zoë wiped her eyes. “It’s because of the assassination, isn’t it? They hate me because of Damien.”
“No. It doesn’t even matter. By the Flyday, everyone will know he’s innocent.”
Zoë smiled, consoled, but Thomas himself wondered if it were true.
Chapter Six
Zoë Martínez’s parents never had the opportunity to do much more than daydream about their daughter’s marriage: they died six years apart, during two separate outbreaks of the falling-sickness, when Zoë was entering her teenage years and then leaving them.
Due to advanced medical technology and routine vaccinations, serious illnesses were rare in the twenty-sixth century. Diabetes and most cancers had long ago been wiped out, and no one in recent memory had even suffered from the common cold. But there were exceptions: a rare disease strikes, an injury weakens the body.
Zoë had been thirteen, living in Boston with her mother, when the first falling-sickness epidemic struck. The virus, a mutation from a rare influenza strain, came with no warning. It manifested at first as dizziness, confusion, and a high fever. But no one understood what was happening until people started to die.
Her memories of the incidents could easily be confused with dreams. One afternoon she walked through the house, an autumn sunset blazing in every window, and saw her mother working on a painting. Two days later, she attende
d her mother’s funeral.
The young teen packed a suitcase, leaving behind her school and all her friends, and boarded a plane to see the father and brother she barely knew. The disease burned out by the end of winter, taking only a few hundred victims: a scary news story that year, a footnote for the history books. But Zoë could never quite reconcile the loss of her mother and the sudden change in her life.
Then, at nineteen, she found herself sitting by a hospital bed. Her father lay dying of a rare disease whose name she never learned. His blood turned septic, poisoning him, and the infection wasn’t responding to medication. The doctors couldn’t do anything. Esteban Martínez, the famed diplomat who had once served as a fighter pilot, would die slowly in his sleep.
Zoë stayed in the hospital day and night. One afternoon she drifted asleep with her cell phone in her hand, waiting for a call from her brother, when the phone slipped from her grasp and hit the floor. The clatter made her sit upright, awake, and she went still. She could hear, in the distance, something like the flutter of wings.
When she pushed the door open, she saw doctors and nurses running through the hallway: their hurried footsteps had made the noise. Zoë stood there for a moment, confused, then grabbed someone’s sleeve and asked what had happened.
“It’s the falling-sickness,” said a wide-eyed intern. “The hospital’s under quarantine.”
By the time a crowd gathered, a hospital official came and asked that everyone on the floor stay put unless they absolutely needed assistance. No one was allowed to leave the hospital, under any circumstances. Zoë called her brother in Sydney for the second time that week, asking for his advice.
“Stay put,” he suggested.
So she sat in her father’s room, stunned, and watched the news as the disease spread.
Biochemical Pathways had been on tour in Australia during the outbreak, and continued their tour even as the world death count reached the hundreds. The fans who showed up were enraged at the band’s total disregard for the pandemic. One night, someone yelled out at Jamie, “You’re playing music at the end of the world?”
“Hey, hey,” said Jamie. “What did the band on the Titanic do as it sank?”
Fans started booing them. Kyle walked off the stage, and Damien shrugged and kept performing without the bass player for fifteen minutes. Eventually they were forced to stop the show. “This is how the world ends,” said Jamie, and he trudged out of sight.
They had to call off the tour, and Jamie called Zoë later that night. “How’s it looking in your lovely Massachusetts morning?” he asked.
“Oh, fantastic,” she replied, from the other end of the earth. “I’m just waiting for the four horsemen to come.”
The hospital’s quarantine was lifted a few days later, as nothing could stop the spread of the virus. That morning, Zoë walked into her father’s room and heard a strange buzzer go off.
It was an alarm signifying that the patient’s heart rate had stopped.
Doctors and nurses swarmed into the room, and one escorted the shocked young woman to the door. She was waiting outside, in one of the hospital gardens, when a doctor came to deliver the news.
Damien flew back that night to help prepare for the funeral, officially halting Pathways’ tour. On the morning of the burial, the two of them put daffodils on their father’s coffin, and a priest gave a reading at the cemetery. Numerous businessmen, politicians, and former soldiers filed past, giving the children their condolences.
But Zoë and Damien weren’t the only people who lost a loved one: the death toll from the falling-sickness was climbing, and people were panicking. King Richard II and the World Council met daily to work on a solution. They used military resources to distribute food and water to hard-hit areas, and sent police to quell rioting. Within a few weeks, the death toll fell sharply. The early quarantine efforts had made some impact after all.
Then scientists finished a vaccine for the virus, using research from the previous outbreak. Lines stretched for miles as people waited to get the injection.
“It was a futile, but polite, gesture,” historian Pelé Zapata would later note. “Anyone who could have died from it already had.”
But the king’s swift response restored the people’s confidence in their government. Early predictions of chaos and destruction would not be realized: the disease killed only a few thousand people across the world. Soon after the release of the vaccine, the king announced that the threat was over. But for people who had buried loved ones, the end hadn’t come soon enough.
For his part, Thomas Huxley had no memory of the pandemic. He had been shot on the day it was announced, and woke from a coma eight days after it ended.
On what should have been June 17, 2507, Thomas drowsily opened his eyes, and had the same feeling: the world had changed completely while he was asleep.
Instead of waking up in a tiny bedroom in Zoë’s ship, he found himself sitting inside an odd-shaped box with glass windows. The box moved over a flat gray ribbon that had white dashed lines painted on it. A strange roaring noise filled his ears, and he saw shining, colorful machines moving around him.
Was he still dreaming?
He looked to his left and saw Ariel holding a wheel. At least, he thought it was Ariel: he recognized her only by her dark red hair, since everything close to him was blurred.
“Hey,” she said, without looking away from the road. (Highway, his mind told him. In London he would say motorway.) He realized it was filled with old-fashioned cars, and looked down and saw a seat belt over him.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“We’re right by Tenokte. Except, it’s not Tenokte yet. Right now it’s autumn of 2007.”
“I was asleep—”
“I know. Dreaming about the falling-sickness.”
He paused. “Okay, I know you can travel in time, but how do you know what I was dreaming about?”
She turned and looked at him. “You talk in your sleep.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “So how did I get here?”
“You were asleep in Zoë’s ship. I thought it would be better that way: The brain doesn’t register time travel when it’s not fully conscious.”
Tell me about it, he thought.
So he’d traveled exactly five hundred years to ... well, where was here, exactly? Outside Tenokte? It looked like another planet.
He looked out onto the highway, which he could see clearly enough. It was a picture-perfect day, with a cloudless blue sky stretching over them. The road curved and slid under an overpass, and cars moved past them on an identical road to the left.
Tree-covered hills sat to his right and, further back, he glimpsed a scattered assortment of houses. A faint purple mountain ridge jutted up above the tree line. Green signs overhead showed—
“Maps!” he said, amused. Of course: computer navigation hadn’t been perfected yet, so people needed maps all over the roads to find their way.
“Sort of. They do give directions.”
Thomas sat back. “You got me out of Zoë’s ship, and into a car in your time?”
“Yep.”
“Did she see you?”
“No. And when I get you back, she won’t notice you were gone.”
He frowned. “I have to tell her about you.”
“So tell her.”
He turned away. “Except ... I can’t.”
“How to explain a time traveler,” said Ariel. “Maybe I can introduce myself. In any case, enjoy the 21st century sunshine. For your frame of reference, Dimitri Reynolds is twenty-three years old.”
He was astonished. “Can I meet him?”
“Well, not without attracting attention. He’s stationed in Iraq right now.”
“Oh. That’s right,” he said, still looking out the window. “Dimitri was a soldier when he was young.”
Ariel moved her hand and Thomas heard a distinct plunking sound, like a metronome. She turned her head, waited a moment, and then guided the car into the n
ext path between white dashed lines.
“Isn’t this dangerous?” he asked. “Car accidents are a huge cause of death in this century, aren’t they?”
“Not as much as in yours. Flying presents some … additional dangers. And don’t worry, I checked ahead. There aren’t any problems on this stretch of road today.”
“But can’t time change?”
She turned to him, her eyes hidden by a blur of green lenses. “I’m a careful driver.”
That didn’t do much to help his nerves. “Is this your car?”
“Sort of. I’m keeping it for someone.” She pressed a button on the center console, and music started playing softly: faint vocals, backed by a mandolin.
“This song all right?” she asked.
He listened for a minute. “Sure. I kinda like it.”
“Ha! I knew you’d be an R.E.M. fan.”
He didn’t recognize the name, beyond the fact that it had something to do with sleep. He really had no idea where she was from, beyond the turn of the 21st century. “Do you live here?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“When were you born?”
“December 31, 1989, right before midnight.”
Nineteen eighty-nine! He could hardly believe it. “So you’re … how old?”
“Eighteen, if you count the time I spent traveling.”
“Hm. That’s a good age, eighteen…” He felt a little better for knowing, as if it suddenly made her more human to have an age. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular. I just thought I’d take you for a drive.”
“Uh … Zoë’s brother is scheduled to be executed any day now, and you woke me up to ‘take me for a drive’ in an entirely different century?”
“Yep.”
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“What are you going to do, open the door and jump out into traffic?”
He sighed. “I thought you just needed the lieutenant’s name. Why are you still so attached to me?”
Ariel stared at the road ahead. “I need to know why they were tracking me, in case it starts again.”
“Then go ask Kira.”
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