Echo in Time

by C. J. Hill

  She stepped into the room, hobbling a bit. He let out a long, relieved breath and stared at her. Even with a limp, she reminded him of a fairy maiden from an ancient story. Her long green hair cascaded past her shoulders in smooth waves. Pansies and butterflies shimmered around her. It was more than her clothes, though. Her hazel eyes had a mischievous and magical look to them, as though she knew all sorts of secrets she had no intention of telling.

  Taylor turned to him, and he saw she held a large glass in one hand.

  Echo’s relief immediately changed into anger. “Where did you go? I told you to stay here.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not in charge of this team. I am.”

  He shut off the laser box and shoved it back onto his belt. “You’re injured, and you don’t know your way around this city or this century. Right now, I’m a better leader.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not stepping aside.”

  “You shouldn’t be stepping anywhere for another forty minutes.” He strode over to the computer screen on the far side of the room and left a message for Allana, telling her to call his comlink from this computer. “Besides,” he said as he walked back to Taylor, “Joseph will never forgive me if I let anything happen to you. So consider this a mutiny. From now on, you do what I say.”

  “Not likely,” she said.

  “It’s a mutiny. You have no choice.” He put his arm around her waist to help support her. “Lean into me,” he told her.

  She put one arm around his waist and kept hold of the drink with her other. Slowly, they made their way out of the room and down the hallway.

  “Where did you get that drink from, anyway?” He let out a huff of exasperation as he considered its most likely source. “Did you go to the foodmart and flirt it off some guy?”

  Instead of getting defensive, Taylor laughed. It wasn’t the coy and sophisticated sort of laugh Allana had. It was natural sounding, happy. She smiled at him, clearly amused by the idea. “If you were sitting in a foodmart and I limped up and asked for your drink, would you give it to me?”

  “Yes.” Echo glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching them. “And I wouldn’t let you walk off without getting your name and number.” This was another reason why he shouldn’t have left Taylor alone. She had no idea what guys were like in this century.

  “Really?” Taylor asked him. “You would try to pick me up?”

  Echo tightened his grip on her waist. “Do you need me to carry you again? Are you having trouble walking?”

  “No,” she said. “Picking someone up is a twenty-first-century way of saying that, you know, you’re hitting on someone.”

  Hitting on someone? Before he could ask about that, she said, “I mean, you want to hook up with them, hang out. . . .” She must have seen the blank look on his face. “It means you’re interested and you want to date them.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “That all sounds so violent. What exactly did you do on dates in the twenty-first century?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “A lot of our slang didn’t make sense, and I have no idea why we said any of it. Your father has already spent the last month and a half interrogating me about it.”

  “Yes,” Echo said.

  “Yes what?” Taylor asked.

  “Yes, I would pick you up . . . hang you on a hook, whatever the phrase was.”

  “Oh,” she said, and smiled. It was a soft, knowing smile, one that had encouragement all over it. It warmed Echo in a way he hadn’t expected.

  Not this. Certainly not here. He and Taylor had other things to concentrate on. They were running for their lives. This wasn’t the time to start thinking of matching off with someone new.

  But then another part of him asked, Why not here? Why not now? Who knew if either of them would even live until tomorrow? This might be the only time they had.

  And besides, when would he ever meet another girl from the time period he’d studied for the last five years—a girl who was smart, beautiful, and effortlessly made Allana seem like an outdated version?

  “I left the room,” Taylor said, as though he’d been brooding over that, “because you took so long that I got worried. I peeked out into the hallway to see if you were around, and I noticed a couple girls leaving a room. One of them left her drink on the table, so I walked over to see if it had ice. And it does.”

  That didn’t sound nearly as bad as eyeing up interests in the foodmart. Echo relaxed his grip a little. “Why do you need ice?”

  “For your burn.”

  It didn’t make sense to him. “What does my burn have to do with ice?”

  “If you put ice on a burn, it takes away the pain.”

  He looked at her skeptically. “Right. How could ice erase pain? It’s just water.”

  Taylor reached into the cup, strained out an ice chunk, and put it on his arm.

  The pain vanished. Immediately. He stared at it, trying to make sense of what had happened. He knew the chemical formula of water. Two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to an oxygen atom. It couldn’t . . . And then he understood. “The ice is numbing my skin.”

  “Yeah, we ancients knew a few tricks.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I just never thought about numbing wounds. I’ve always had something around that cures them.”

  She lifted her chin with mock offense. “I don’t think I should let you be team leader anymore. I’m mutinying back.”

  They’d reached the new room and went inside. Once the door shut, Taylor took a wrap from Xavier’s pack. It was meant to hold broken bones in place, but she used it to keep the ice on his arm. Her fingers brushed against his skin quickly, efficiently, as she secured the wrap in place.

  “First the gas mask and now this,” he said. “Is there anything you can’t fix with water?”

  “A few things.”

  He helped her over to the couch, noticing things about her that he probably shouldn’t have—how small her waist was . . . the curve of her neck . . .

  He went to the eastern side of the room and plunged his laser cutter into the wall. Slowly, he pushed the laser cutter downward. After a couple minutes his shoulder began to ache and he had to stop to rest. He glanced over at Taylor. She had her comlink on scanner function, but instead of looking at it, she was watching him.

  He smiled at her. “Are you staring because you think I’m gorgeous, or is it some social custom of yours?”

  “I’m trying to figure you out.”

  “Ah. I wish you success. Then you can explain me to me.” He turned from her and pulled the laser cutter sideways to make the top of the hole.

  Taylor made her way over to him, limping less now. “People aren’t complicated if you know what motivates them.” She took hold of the laser cutter, helping him pull. “Helix, for example, is motivated by power. Reilly is motivated by an intense desire to prove he’s brilliant—it’s his own special brand of egotism.”

  The laser cutter handle was made for only one set of hands, so Taylor had put her fingers around his. It was easier to move the laser cutter now, and he liked the feel of her fingers against his.

  “Joseph,” she went on, “is motivated by learning but mostly by love. It’s why he chose to work with your father, why he changed time to bring you back, why he’s trying to rescue Sheridan right now.”

  Echo nodded. “That’s Joseph.”

  Taylor turned her head to survey him. She was so close, she only had to whisper to be heard. “But you’re harder. . . .”

  “Well, you only just met me.”

  “I only just met Allana too, but I can tell she’s motivated by power.”

  “Power?” Echo shifted his grip on the laser cutter, then pulled again. “Vanity, yes. Comfort, luxury, all those things. If she wanted power, she wouldn’t have chosen Joseph for a boyfriend. She would have wanted someone important, a leader in the government or in the Dakine.”

  “She went after Joseph,” Taylor said as though it was obvious, “because bringing him int
o the Dakine would give her more power. She’d already gotten what she wanted from you, so she dumped you and went to work on him.”

  Echo paused. He’d never considered this before. “Joseph wouldn’t ever have joined.”

  “Yes, but Allana didn’t know that. She got you to join easily enough. She probably thought Joseph wouldn’t be much harder.”

  Echo went back to pulling the laser cutter through the wall. They were nearly done with the hole, but he didn’t see it. He saw Allana coldly calculating Joseph’s worth to the Dakine.

  “The only thing I can’t figure out,” Taylor went on, “is whether Allana wanted to become more powerful than her father as some sort of ego thing, or whether he was involved in the Dakine too and she was just taking up the family business. Did your Dakine leader order her execution because he was actually that strict about the laws? Or was it his way to undercut a rival?”

  “Wait, wait,” Echo said. “I’m still back on the fact that you think Allana didn’t care for Joseph. What sort of proof do you have?”

  They’d finished the cut. Echo handed Taylor the laser cutter, and he used his good shoulder to push the wall piece outward.

  Taylor stood back and surveyed their work. “Guys are so blind. You’d think after all these centuries, you would have, I don’t know, devised some program that alerted you to when a girl is playing you.” The top part of the cut piece didn’t come loose, so Taylor pressed against it. “Allana is so concerned about rank that she doesn’t want to leave the city, even though she knows she’ll be executed if she stays. Do you think a girl like that really wants to date a historian wordsmith? Joseph didn’t have any ambitions to rise in rank. Is that Allana’s type?”

  Echo took in her words, each of them bluntly truthful. He had given so much of himself to Allana, done things he shouldn’t have, and now it all seemed pitifully stupid. “You’re right,” he said, and gave the wall an extra-hard shove. The piece came loose and toppled to the concrete outside. “I’m so used to everyone liking Joseph better, I never even considered that Allana might be gaming him.”

  Taylor clipped the laser cutter to her belt. “Everyone likes Joseph better? That’s hard to believe.”

  “My father always favored Joseph.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Echo didn’t argue the point. Glancing through the hole to make sure no one was around, he went outside. He quickly took a picture of a spot of undamaged wall, set up the holocamera to project the same image over the hole, then dragged the fallen piece of concrete back inside. Taylor was sitting on the floor by the hole checking the scanner. Without looking up, she said, “After the Dakine assassination, Jeth defended you to everyone, even though he knew you were involved somehow. He left the city and everything he’d worked for, just to be with you.”

  “To be with Joseph,” Echo corrected as he pulled the wall piece behind a couch.

  Taylor looked up then. “No, with you. He thought Joseph died.”

  “What?” Echo let out an incredulous cough. “He didn’t realize Joseph was alive? He couldn’t tell the difference?”

  She shrugged. “Jeth isn’t all that observant.”

  “Yeah, but still . . .” Echo straightened and wiped wall rubble off his sleeves. “My own father?”

  “Besides,” Taylor went on, “Elise told me that girls always favored you.”

  It was mostly true, but Echo wasn’t about to concede the point. “Our caretakers always liked Joseph best.” Echo walked back over to Taylor and helped her to her feet. “By the first month of school, I usually had a detention schedule and he was appointed captain of the young soldiers’ team. If we hadn’t traded places once in a while, I would have never led a recess offensive.”

  Echo put his hand around Taylor’s waist to help her walk to the couch. It seemed a natural thing to do, as natural as her putting her arm around him for support.

  “Teachers,” Taylor said, “like whoever causes the least trouble. I somehow doubt that was you.”

  They reached the couch. He eased her onto it and sat down beside her. She shifted, sitting so close to him that their legs touched. Taylor checked her scanner again. “You don’t have to compete with Joseph. It isn’t a contest.”

  Echo tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. “Joseph and I,” he said slowly. “You can’t understand—can’t know what it’s like to have only half a claim on your own identity.”

  “Did I mention,” Taylor said, taking her attention away from her comlink, “that Sheridan is my identical twin sister?”

  Echo blinked at her in surprise. “You’re . . . No, really?” It seemed unbelievable, and yet why else would she say it? Her expression made it clear she wasn’t joking.

  “You would think,” Taylor continued, “that my parents would have been thrilled to have a genius daughter, but my dad was a pastor, so he was more concerned about his children being good than being smart. Guess which one of us was naturally kind, charitable, and so tenderhearted you couldn’t take her to a sad movie?”

  Echo smiled. “Not you?”

  “Sheridan cried so incessantly, strangers in the theater felt compelled to come over and comfort her.”

  Echo laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He’d thought he would never meet a person who could really understand him, and yet here in the most unlikely of places he’d found one. If he had set out to design the perfect girl for himself, he couldn’t have accomplished it as well as Taylor was doing naturally. Even if Allana hadn’t cut things off with him, he would still be attracted to Taylor, would still be sitting here marveling at how right she was for him.

  Taylor misinterpreted his laughter. “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if your father had constantly quoted you scriptures about love and charity. He might as well have come right out and said, ‘Why can’t you be more like Sheridan?’”

  “Could he tell the two of you apart?”

  “Yes, which means Sheridan couldn’t even switch places with me to get me out of trouble.” Taylor paused, then grimaced. “Until we came here.” Her jaw tightened, and everything about her stiffened. “She told Reilly she was me. That’s why they have her. They want information from her that I have.”

  “I’m sorry.” Echo put his hand on top of hers. Back in the Scicenter he had wanted to find a way to strain Sheridan and had been frustrated by the impossibility of it. If he’d had days to study it and weeks to work on it, he might have found a way around the scientists’ barriers. But he had wanted to strain Sheridan only because Joseph wanted it, because Echo could tell by the panic in Joseph’s eyes how much it meant to him.

  Now Echo wished he’d been able to do it for Taylor. He wished it because a tenderhearted girl who looked like Taylor was sitting in a detention cell somewhere.

  “She can’t make it through a sad movie,” Taylor said, and her voice wavered with emotion. “How on earth could she survive a month and a half of government torture?” Her fingers unconsciously curled around Echo’s. “That was supposed to be me. It should be me.”

  Echo gave Taylor’s fingers a squeeze. “If Joseph doesn’t rescue her, we’ll find a way to do it.”

  Taylor’s gaze went to Echo’s, testing it for sincerity. He must have passed. She nodded and then seemed to realize that she still had hold of his hand. A slight blush crossed her cheeks. She let go of his fingers and returned her attention to the scanner.

  He leaned over to see her screen. The courtyards around the building were mostly clear. “I don’t see any Dakine from my base. . . . No, wait; there’s one. But that could be coincidence.”

  Taylor arched her eyebrows. “In a city of seven million?”

  Echo hesitated, frowned. “If we leave Allana, the Dakine will kill her. We have to be certain it’s not a coincidence.”

  Taylor let out a frustrated sigh.

  He could have gotten Xavier’s comlink out, but it was faster to lean over and use Taylor’s. He enlarged the scanning parameters and scrolled through more names. “It�
��s only one Dakine. . . .”

  Their foreheads were nearly touching. Taylor kept watching him, didn’t move her head away from his. “Are you sure you’re not letting your feelings for Allana color your judgment?”

  He wondered what color Taylor thought his judgment was. “Yes,” he said.

  “What will happen if Allana wants you back?”

  “Then she’ll be disappointed.”

  Taylor kept hold of his gaze. Her hazel eyes were an interesting color, a mix of greens and browns. The city hardly ever used genes that produced hazel eyes anymore—which was clearly an oversight. Hazel eyes were beautiful.

  “Do you need proof I’m done with Allana?” he asked.

  “Proof is always good.”

  Echo reached over and ran his fingers through a strand of Taylor’s hair, gauging her response. She looked at him steadily, waiting.

  “I’ve learned a lot about Allana today,” he told her. “A lot about myself too. Thankfully, I’ve also learned a lot about you.” He leaned toward her.

  She put her hand on his chest. “Don’t you think this is a little fast? I mean, how long has it been since you and Allana were a pareja? Ten minutes?”

  “Two and a half months.”

  Taylor tilted her head, making her hair spill to one side of her shoulder. “I don’t think it counts if you were dead for most of that time.”

  Echo kept running his hand over the strands of her hair, twining them around his fingers. “I think it counts double the time. Dying gives you a perspective about life.” Echo didn’t know what sort of perfume Taylor wore. He’d never smelled it before, but it made him think of the color gold. Rich. Strong. Warm to the touch. He leaned in closer, taking it in. “I don’t recommend dying for everybody, of course. It doesn’t always work out so well. . . .”

  Taylor didn’t move away from him. She didn’t move toward him either. His fingers left her hair and ran down the length of her cheek, caressing it. She had such soft skin. His hand trailed to her neck and then to her chin, tilting her face closer to his.

  She still looked at him cautiously. “It seems like you’ve had a lot of practice at this. How many girls have you kissed?”