by Melissa Faye
“Say it!” Ridge yelled. “Say you’ll return what you took, and say you’ll go home!”
“Yes, fine!” Smith screamed. His eyes bulged in panic. “You win!” He looked down at the crowd. “Old man wins! I give up!”
Ridge kept staring. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could see him mouthing it. “Take off the bracelet.”
It was his biggest advantage. Smith looked around helplessly.
“I can’t! I’ll fall!” he screamed. Ridge folded his arms. I held my breath.
“Take off the damn bracelet!” Ridge yelled.
Smith scrunched up his face in pain, pulled his hand from the bar, and dropped the bracelet. Then he instantly grabbed the beam again and pulled himself up.
Ridge didn’t move.
“What do you want? You win!”
“Do it now! Put the money back, from your account to hers!”
Smith’s face was deep red and his breath quickened. He looked at Ridge, and down at the ground. I pulled up my banking app. Smith did something with his hand and the cuff on his ear. I reloaded the app. The money was back. All of it.
I waved to Ridge with a thumbs up. Ridge backed slowly towards the scaffolding and climbed down. Smith followed. I met them at the ground. Harrison covered me, and Ridge helped push the crowd back.
“Give the man space!” he called. “He lost a dare to a man twice his age!” Ridge waved his arms in the air, giving me the privacy I needed to make this happen.
Smith sneered at me and went to put his hand to his ear. I saw it coming and immediately pulled the trigger on the Some Gun. Back-U-Go.
He flickered, shrinking down into a tiny dot, then disappeared. I hide the Some Gun back in my bag and marched away.
Chapter 11
I was back in the dorm by the time Ridge texted.
My bones ache, June. No more climbing scaffolding.
Got it, Ridge.
Harrison walked me to my suite.
“So.” He leaned against the door.
“So.” I smiled shyly.
“...Can I come next time too?”
I giggled. I’d never have someone ask permission to get involved with my work. Ridge got involved because I was a little kid, and now I depended on him. It appeared as though my team was growing.
“If you want. If you can forgive me for what I did.”
“I will forgive you on one condition.” A smile crept onto Harrison’s face.
“What is it?”
“You tell me everything that happened that I don’t remember. And you sleep for a really long time this weekend before your stitches come out. But not in that order”
“That’s two things!”
Harrison crossed his arms with a look of mock disapproval. “Two things, take it or leave it.”
“Agreed.” He hugged me good night, and I had that feeling again. A little shock that ran through my whole body.
I went into the suite and found Lacey laying on the couch and reading a book. She gave me the side eye as I came in.
“Lacey, I’m sorry,” I started. “I should have been around more...”
“Yeah, you should have.” She shut the book and swung her head away from me, letting her braids fly past my face. She didn’t speak for a minute.
“It’s not all your fault,” she finally whispered. “You did have that concussion and all.”
“I’ve been letting you down since before that. I told you I’d help you with our problem sets, and we were on that project together...”
“Maybe don’t apologize, ok? Just don’t be like that next time.”
“Ok.”
“You promise?”
I couldn’t promise anything. I had a job to do. There was no boss, and there were no coworkers. It was the thing I had to do because no one else could. And when I didn’t do my job well, people got hurt. And even if I did it well, I hurt people like Lacey, who were supposed to be my friends.
“I promise.”
We flipped on the TV and watched together for a few minutes.
“Who’s that guy?” There was a man in a suit talking in front of the podium.
“June, where have you been? Lee Olliver announced his campaign for mayor a month ago. He’s running independent, but he’s way up in the polls.”
“Isn’t it only September?” I must have been too busy with traveler stuff to pay attention to these things. Plus, I was a year behind everyone else. I wouldn’t get to vote in November.
“Yeah, but they campaign early.”
“What’s his platform? Why does everyone like him?”
Lacey rolled her eyes. “You know a lot about math and science June, but I can’t believe you missed all of this. Both parties want him to join, but he won’t. He’s saying all the things people want to hear. He’s got tons of support.”
I sat back with my hands behind my head for a while. The man was a great speaker. Confident, charming, poised. There was something mystical about him. Like Lacey said: he said all the things I wanted to hear. Maybe he would be a good thing for the city.
I left when the television screen brought my headache back. I did have one promise to fulfill for Harrison immediately.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I treated Harrison to a tour of the trunk under my bed. Like last time, he wasn’t allowed to touch much, but I let him know what most items did.
“This is the J-DAR.” I held it up for him. It looked like an oversized microscope. “It shows me where travelers are. They have a sort of light they emit with particles I call chronograms. You can see it when you hold the J-DAR up to them. It’s how I found Leslie Leslie.”
“Why didn’t you send her home then?”
“Could you send Leslie Leslie away? She’s my best resource. And that laugh...”
Harrison held the J-DAR up in the air; I breathed in quickly as he turned it towards me.
“Does everyone have lights?” He stared at me through the glass. “You’re lighting up like a Christmas tree.”
I snatched the J-DAR out of his hands. “No. Not everyone has it. Just travelers.”
“Does that mean...”
“No. I’ve never traveled, and I never will. I’m just as likely as one of those travelers to slip up and say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing and...erase someone’s existence. So June doesn’t travel. That’s Rule 4.” I had shown Harrison the Rules of Time Travel that I hid in my bag, and he was already trying to memorize them.
“Then why the lights? You must have seen them. They’re all different colors. Spinning all around you, weaving in and out...”
It was the first time anyone asked me about them. If Ridge noticed, he never brought it up. No one else even knew about the J-Dar besides a couple annoyed travelers.
“I don’t know. It is what it is.”
“Come on, you must have a theory, Wires.”
I had one in the back of my head where all my ideas started, but like the lights, I hadn’t shared it with anyone else.
“I told you my parents died.”
Like everyone else, Harrison shifted uncomfortably.
“It was nine years ago. I don’t mind talking about it.” Harrison’s mouth curled downwards but he nodded sympathetically.
“I found out....”
This was a challenge. Only Ridge knew about the letter from my parents. There was no one else to tell. But all my thinking about it lived in that place in the back of my head, and I actively tried to keep it there. For now, at least.
“I found out that they didn’t die. They were kidnapped from someone from the future. Someone who’s after me for some reason.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I have no idea who he is, except his name is Jasper. He doesn’t know who I am, I guess. He found my parents but that’s all. And with the lights, I wonder if it’s related now. Like, my parents traveled through time. So maybe I caught some of that from them.”
Harrison frowned.
“It’s not a great theory,
I know.” I liked ideas to stay in the back of my head until they were fully formed for exactly this reason. “But I’m trying to figure it out, and right now all I can think of is that it’s related.”
“Don’t worry, June. We’ll figure it out together.”
Read more about June’s adventures in the next book: Guardian of the Present Book 3: The Candidate.
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Melissa Faye is a former teacher who loves sci-fi, reading, and writing. She lives in Colorado with her small dog and likes yoga, rock climbing, and thinking about weird dystopian futures with snarky heroines who save the world.
Appendix A: June’s Rules for Time Travel
The following rules were written by June Moore starting when she was eight years and one month old. Rules have been added and revised over time.
Don’t try to take over the world.
Don’t try to change anything Don’t take anything from the Present or bring anything from your Present.
Don’t remove or add people or change genealogy in any way.
Don’t do anything noticeable that could change something else. (The Butterfly Effect)
Don’t introduced new technology before it’s invented.
Don’t do anything that could change the ecosystem.
Don’t mess with your ancestors or ancestors of people you know.
Don’t mess with politics or anything else major on a local, national, or international level.
Don’t use your knowledge for personal gain. Don’t do anything for financial gain.
Don’t change anything for financial gain.
Don’t use this Present to hide things from your Present.
The guardian doesn’t time travel. For her personal or financial gain.
Unless it’s very, very important.
The guardian can use technology from the future only for her work in guarding the Present.