Survivor (Rewinder Series Book 3)

by Brett Battles

  I shake my head.

  “The main facility’s in Rome, and of course there’s one in Karakorum.”

  Karakorum. That’s a city from Mongol history that’s only ruins in my and Iffy’s futures.

  “Are there any others close to Saint Jakup?”

  She thinks for a moment. “The closest is in Kyoto, I think. But that’s across the ocean.” Another pause. “Our outpost does have a few research stations. Maybe she went to one of those. I believe the nearest one’s on Shandong peninsula, along the inner gulf.”

  I don’t know where the Shandong peninsula or inner gulf is, but the look on Jovan’s face tells me he does so I don’t press anymore.

  Later, after Clora goes inside to lie down, I ask him about it. Shandong turns out to be the Baja peninsula of Iffy’s world, which means the inner gulf is the Gulf of California.

  Even if it’s not where Dumont went, the research station—if it hasn’t been destroyed—is our best bet at finding out where she did go.

  The only problem is, there’s a lot of land between here and there.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I SCAN THE area between the hill I sit atop and the fence demarcating where civilization begins again.

  Jovan promised he’d be back an hour ago, but I haven’t seen any sign of him.

  The old binoculars I’m using aren’t helping matters. They aren’t night vision, so all I can do is memorize the shadows and look for movement, but there’s been next to none.

  I shouldn’t have let him leave but he insisted. “We’re almost out of water and we can’t just live on crackers. I’ll be in and out without anyone ever knowing I was there. Don’t worry. I used to do this all the time.”

  “The last time you did it, you got caught.”

  “I won’t this time.”

  I’m beginning to wonder if that was wishful thinking on his part. If he has been captured, the authorities will eventually turn him over to Shim, and she’ll get him to tell her where I am.

  “Anything?”

  I look back.

  Clora, who was napping on the ground behind me, is sitting up now.

  I shake my head.

  She crawls over, sits on the rock next to me, and holds out her hand. “May I?” Without Jovan to translate, our conversations are succinct.

  I give her the binoculars.

  After only a few seconds of looking through them, she says, “Something happen.”

  “Where?” I reach for the glasses, but she keeps them pressed to her eyes.

  “Over Tolovic.” She gives the binoculars to me. As I look through them, she says, “East side. See?”

  I do. The lights of at least a dozen aircraft are circling an area about two miles south of the fence, several shining as spotlights on the ground. A manhunt.

  Jovan.

  It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be something else.

  I check the dark nearby land again but there’s still nothing, so I return my attention to the aircraft. If I can take anything positive from the sight, it’s that the searchers don’t seem to have found their prey.

  I spend the better part of an hour alternating between looking for my friend and watching the aircraft. But when the first rays of light grace the eastern horizon, Clora and I reluctantly return to our basement hideaway.

  We try to sleep, but it’s no use. What I want to do is ignore the daylight and go back outside for another look around. I’m a hair’s width from doing just that when the door is yanked open and sunlight streams inside.

  A dark shape descends the stairs and pulls the door shut again.

  “For God’s sake, how about lighting a candle?” Jovan bellows.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I yell back as I get one going.

  Jovan navigates his way to our sleeping area and plops onto the ground. “Had to take the long way home.”

  “We saw the…rotors and the searchlights. We thought you were caught.”

  “So did I there for a moment.

  “What happened?”

  “Someone must have seen me and called it in. I was coming out of the back of a bakery, and I suddenly heard all these patrol rotors heading my way. If I had left a half minute later, they would have spotted me for sure. As it was, I barely had time to slip into a garage and climb into the town’s drainage system.” He smiles. “Not the first time I’ve used it.”

  He and I share a look, both knowing we are no longer safe here. If someone even half suspects the thief in Tolovic was either Jovan or me, it won’t be long before the searchers turn their attention north of the fence.

  Jovan pulls a newly acquired backpack onto his lap. Opening it, he says, “Anyone thirsty?” He tosses us each a bottle of water before we can respond. “I have food, too. Real food.” He digs around inside. “Oh, and this.”

  He removes a package containing a ribbed cylinder about three inches long. When he opens it, several pieces fall out, and I realize it’s not a cylinder but a stack of power discs.

  I grab the radio off the shelf. Jovan shoves a couple of discs into the appropriate slots and flips a switch. The screen lights up and an electronic buzz pulses from the speaker. Jovan turns the volume down several notches and fine-tunes the device, but picks up nothing but static.

  “Too buried here.”

  We relocate as far up the stairs as possible without opening the door, and Jovan tries again. This time we hear snippets of music and voices as he adjusts the tuning button. Finally he stops on a male voice that’s going at too fast a pace for me to understand. But whatever he’s saying causes Jovan’s brow to crease. Clora backs down the stairs to the basement floor as if something’s about to jump out of the device.

  “What’s he saying?” I ask.

  Jovan lowers the volume some more. “It’s official. They’re definitely looking for us.”

  Clora speaks almost as quickly as the announcer did.

  Jovan says, “She wants to know who we are.”

  “Who we are? What exactly did that guy say?”

  “That we’re dangerous, escaped prisoners.”

  As he tells me this, Clora takes another step away.

  “Don’t you think if we were going to hurt you, we would have done it a long time ago?” I ask.

  She hesitates before saying, “You forced me here. You…you”—something I don’t understand—“me.”

  It takes Jovan a few tries to describe what she means.

  Kidnapped, or something close to that.

  “You want to leave? Then go. If you can’t see it’s smarter to stay with us right now then we won’t stop you.”

  “She can’t,” Jovan says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were caught on one of Trinity’s cameras when we climbed onto the catwalk. They know she came with us willingly. She’s wanted, too, now. For helping us.”

  I cannot care about people here.

  I cannot worry about someone who will disappear as soon as I have the chaser again.

  I cannot.

  And yet, I do.

  I care about Jovan and would not have made it this far without his help and kindness. And I care about Clora and feel responsible for, unintentionally or not, turning her into a fugitive.

  “I’m sorry.” My words are so woefully inadequate that I regret saying them the moment they leave my mouth.

  They certainly do nothing to calm Clora down. With a grunt of anger, she pushes past us, shoves the door open, and races outside.

  “If she really wants to save herself, she’ll turn herself in and tell them exactly where we are,” Jovan says.

  I want to believe she wouldn’t do that, but Jovan and I are not her friends. We are, at best, acquaintances who’ve been thrown together by circumstances. Turning us in would be the smart move for her.

  We need to leave. Now.

  We stuff the remaining crackers and a few other potentially useful items into Jovan’s backpack, on top of the supplies he obtained, and use some
old wire to secure the radio to the bag’s flap. I wish we had another backpack so we could share the load, but we’ll just have to take turns.

  When we’re done, I say, “Give me five minutes to try to find her.”

  The look Jovan gives me says he doesn’t think it’s worth the effort, but he doesn’t stop me.

  __________

  CLORA SITS ATOP the hill where we waited for Jovan’s return. Not wanting to scare her off, I approach with care and sit on a rock about ten feet behind her.

  With the morning sun, a haze has risen that all but obscures the land beyond the fence. It gives me a—perhaps false—sense we are hidden from searching eyes.

  Without looking back at me, Clora says, “Why were you in prison?”

  What do I tell her? That I’m a time traveler who murdered a woman for turning history into chaos? Should I say I did nothing? After all, there were no charges against me and no trial, at least as far as I know. If I want to be totally truthful, I could say I specialize in wiping out entire societies with the push of a single button, and that I’m planning on doing the same to hers.

  I settle for, “You won’t believe me.”

  That gets her to twist around.

  “Tell me. Tell me or I leave!”

  “They jailed me because I’m not from around here.” Without Jovan, I phrase my answer a few different ways until she gets the gist of what I’m saying.

  “But what is your crime?”

  “That is my crime.”

  “Why do you lie?”

  “I speak truth.”

  Though there is still anger in her eyes, some doubt is creeping in. In a less accusatory tone, she asks, “Where are you from?”

  “You’ve never heard of it.”

  “Where?”

  Like I did with Dumont, I answer in English, “The British Empire via the United States.”

  “Where is that?”

  Far away and yet right where we’re standing. “North America.”

  “More lies,” she says.

  “No. The truth again.”

  Her next question is much longer. I understand a good portion of it, but I’m still missing some key words so I stand up and say, “Wait here. I bring Jovan. He can help.”

  After a pause, she nods, and I fetch my friend.

  The first thing she does is ask him about his crimes. Though he doesn’t translate all of this for me, my understanding of Gaulish has improved enough that I’m pretty sure he’s telling her about his family and his life of stealing to survive.

  When she asks me again what I have done, I tell her the same as before, though this time I add I had a companion who died when I was captured.

  “Did you kill her?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “You did kill her. That’s why you were in prison, isn’t it? You’re a murderer.”

  “No. I was in prison because I’m not from here. And…and because of what’s in my head.”

  “Your head?”

  Jovan says to me, “Do you want me to tell her about the box and the book?”

  Those old taboos of discussing the chaser and anything associated with time travel clamp down on my chest again, but I’ve crossed the line so many times that the sensation isn’t as strong as it once was. I nod, and Jovan proceeds to tell her about why we were at Trinity, and that the soldiers who invaded the facility were coming for me and the items Dumont possesses that belong to me.

  Clora asks more questions, a lot of questions. And though I can figure out some of them, I remain silent as Jovan answers.

  In the end, there is a lot she still doesn’t understand—Jovan also, for that matter—but she returns with us to the basement.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SINCE CLORA DID not flee to the authorities and turn us in, we wait until the sun sets before we leave.

  We head east through the foothills, toward the gentle mountains that parallel the coast. Not even a half hour has passed when we hear a distant whooshing sound.

  Jovan surveys the terrain ahead and begins running. “This way!” He leads us into some bushes at the bottom of a hill. “Get down.”

  We drop to the ground and crawl under branches as the whooshing noise grows nearer and deeper in tone.

  Three minutes later an aircraft flies directly above us, its engines so loud that if we were talking we wouldn’t be able to hear one another. I want to peek up at it but I’m afraid any movement will be seen. Soon enough the din lessens as the craft heads west, back along the path Jovan, Clora, and I have been traveling on.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Troop rotor,” Jovan says. “Many men. We need to keep moving.”

  We crawl out of the brush and continue east, as fast as we can manage in the dark. We hear another transport not much later, but it’s farther west and never gets closer than a couple of miles. Though it flies without exterior lights, I can make out its shape against the starry night as it lands. It’s huge—passenger-jet huge. If it carries fewer than a hundred soldiers, I’d be surprised.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I ask.

  “I found some old cabins in the mountains last time. If any of them are still standing, we can hide out in one.”

  “Won’t the searchers know about them?”

  “I doubt it. They’re spread out all over the place, and I was probably the last person ever up there.”

  He veers our course to the northeast, taking us deeper and deeper into the forbidden zone.

  When the fence is about six miles to the south, Clora nervously says, “I know you told us it’s not as dangerous out here as people think, but…but…how much farther north c-c-can we go and still be okay?”

  “We could go three times as far as we are now and still be fine,” Jovan says.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. I’ve been this way before, remember, and I’m fine.”

  “Right, right,” she says, but doesn’t sound convinced.

  “We’ll turn east in about fifteen minutes. Are you okay with that?”

  “Fifteen minutes?” She thinks about it. “Okay.”

  At the end of the quarter hour, we stop at the summit of a hill for a break. To the south, two more aircraft have arrived where the transport landed north of the fence. These are smaller ones with spotlights trained on the ground. We’re too far away to tell, but I have a feeling they’re close to our former basement hideout.

  As Jovan promised, we head straight east when we start walking again. As the mountains close in, I take a last look to the southwest. Where there were only two aircraft panning their searchlights over the hills before, there are now dozens. They all seem to be hovering, with their lights focused at the same spot on the ground.

  The distance is still too great for me to make out any details, but my gut tells me they’ve found the basement. I know we’ve done all we can to cover our tracks since we fled—walking on old roadways where possible, sticking to hard ground when roads weren’t an option—but I can’t help fearing they’ll pick up our trail anyway.

  The mountains are a mix of grassy fields, swaths of thick brush, and the occasional grove of trees, but nowhere near what would qualify as a forest. Several times we hear the whoosh of aircraft engines echoing off the slopes, but every time I look around, I don’t see any in the sky.

  In the wee hours of the morning, we find a cabin. It’s small and in considerable disrepair, but none of us has the energy to look for another. We eat a dinner of prepackaged nut bars before we curl up next to one another and fall asleep.

  Despite my fatigue, I wake up numerous times, convinced I’ve heard footsteps outside, but all remains quiet. The sun rises after a few hours, and though the others are still sleeping, I can’t anymore. I’m too worried about getting caught, about not being able to find Dumont, about never getting the chance to give Iffy and Ellie their lives back.

  If I could walk around, I might be able to burn off some of my anxiety, but the daylight co
ming in through the glassless windows means I’m stuck indoors for now. Quietly, I move to the other end of the single room and lean against the wall.

  Two days ago, I would have said my chances of putting history back the way it should be were good. I was with the people who had the chaser, or at least had knowledge of its whereabouts. All I needed was the opportunity to get the device back and be on my way.

  Now?

  Maybe my chances aren’t zero, but I can’t imagine they’re much better.

  Iffy, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t come back yet. I’m sorry that…

  I rest my chin on my chest.

  I’m sorry for everything.

  In my mind, I can see her behind the wheel of her car, me in the passenger seat. I have no idea where we’re going, but I do know this isn’t a dream. It’s a memory. She’s smiling and singing along with a song on the radio. It’s one of her favorites, “Other Side of the World” by…KT Tunstall. Yes, that’s it.

  A song that was never written by a singer who has never existed, sung along with by my girlfriend who never was, and yet I hear the music in my head. I hear KT singing. I hear Iffy singing.

  I remember this day.

  If I turn around, I’ll see Ellie in the backseat. We’ve just come from the appointment with Ellie’s doctors, who told us her test results confirm she’s improving and they expect her to make a full recovery.

  It is perhaps the happiest moment of my life. The woman I love beside me. The sister who died once before is behind me, alive with a future. We are headed home, but not before we honor Ellie’s request to stop at the beach. For an hour, we sit on the sand and watch the small waves lap the shore.

  There’s music here, too, coming from a radio belonging to a trio of college-aged girls working on their tans.

  Iffy leans against me as we watch Ellie walk to the edge of the water.

  “I love you,” she says.

  It’s not the first time either of us has shared the sentiment, but on this occasion—the impromptu celebration of my sister’s renewed life—it hits me harder than ever before. I gently squeeze her shoulder but don’t say the words back, not right away. I’m so full of happiness that I don’t even know if I can make my lips work correctly.