“We’d be happy with our own. Mattea, our traveling companion can identify ours. You have my cross bow and arrows. I need those back. They’re hard to come by.
“Of course. I’ll see to it myself.”
Wren stood up, signaling the meeting was over. Coru followed suit, shaking hands with Pendergrass and nodding his thanks, but she knew he was not happy with her. She wasn’t sorry. This way, he had to take her with him to Hope. There would be no disappearing act happening on her watch.
37
TIME BORE
Okay, so Coru was still barely speaking to her, Mattea was keeping himself to himself, and Deklin was hot and tired and whining he wanted to stop and walk around. Great. They — this being Mattea and Coru — had figured they could make Hope in two days, and right on schedule, this was the afternoon of day two of a very hard push and they were almost there. Yes, why not go full tilt back to the Bore and crawl back into it? Be a big baby.
Nothing keeping him here, right?
She bored her eyes into his broad back, ahead of her in the Beast with Mattea. If she had real super powers, he should have burst into flames hundreds of miles back. Still, she stuck to their rear-end, so close she knew it was annoying, but every time they turned a corner and were out of her sight, she couldn’t help the panicked, ridiculous fear that when she followed them around the corner, the highway would be empty, Coru already gone, when she was absolutely not ready to let him go.
“Why are you so mad, Wren?”
She glanced over at Deklin and started at the fear in his blue eyes. She realized suddenly that she was clenching her teeth so hard her jaw ached. She opened her mouth and rocked her jaw to ease the ache, shook her shoulders, trying to shake her tense muscles loose. Her hands were gripped so tightly around the steering wheel they hurt. She peeled one open, flexed her fingers than did the same for the other hand. What was she doing? She was scaring poor Deklin for one, and he was a complete innocent in this whole big mess. She had to let this go. She’d plow Beastette into some immovable object at this rate.
She blew out a cleansing breath and smiled at Deklin. “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t mean to seem angry. I just have a lot on my mind and I’m letting it get to me when I shouldn’t.”
“Because Coru is going away?”
She grimaced and sighed again. “Yup. Because Coru is going away. The poop-head. Don’t get much past you, do we?”
Deklin rolled his head back and giggled. “Coru is not a poop-head.”
“Oh yes, he is. He’s a poop-head for leaving us.”
Deklin laughed, “Poop-head!”
She leaned toward him and whispered conspiratorially, “Don’t tell him I said that.”
“Poop-head.”
Oh no. When Deklin got something in his head, it stayed there — forever. Great.
Coru stopped suddenly, the Beast bucking against the blacktop, it’s tires squealing. Wren stood on her brakes, barely steering clear of colliding with the Beast by veering sharply to the left. She finally stuttered to a stop at the edge of the deep ditch that ran parallel to the highway, the front passenger’s tire hanging over, spinning in the air. Both she and Deklin stared down into the ditch, their mouths open, then looked at each other. She twisted around to send an accusing stare at Coru only to see him marching toward them, his fists clenched, his face set. Uh-oh.
Reaching the passenger’s side first, he unbuckled Deklin. “You go ride with Mattea.”
Deklin took one look at Coru’s face and scrambled from the seat and hurried over to Mattea, who’d assumed the driver’s seat. Next Coru marched around Beastette, and unbuckled Wren’s belt, pulling her from the driver’s seat.
Furious, she jerked away from him, succeeding in only releasing one of her arms from his grip. She demanded, “What do you think you’re—?”
He pulled her against him, the expression on his face making her forget her anger. He lowered his head, touched her mouth with his, testing, softly, sweetly. Her heart somersaulted inside her chest. Blinking rapidly against the sun behind his head, she gasped in air and he captured her lips with his. She closed her eyes. He kissed her gently, he kissed her deeply. All her sharp angles and taut muscles softened, rounded, slipped away.
He kissed her like she’d never been kissed in her life, letting go of her wrist, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulled her up, off the ground, full against him, surrounding her, enveloping her with heat and strength and safety. She wound her arms around his neck, pressed against him in return, melding her body to his, celebrating that everywhere she was, Coru was, that she felt him with her entire body, all at once. Finally, finally she was surrounded by and gave herself up to Coru Wisla.
Their lips parted gently, they looked at one another. They smiled. They laughed and he spun with her still in his arms, laughing out loud. “Oh, my God! Why did I wait so long?’ he shouted to the trees around them.
He looked back down and kissed her again, quick and hard. And again, this time so thoroughly it made her dizzy. He pulled away and whispered, “Why did I wait so long?”
She nestled her face into his neck and with a smile sighed, “Ask Deklin. He knows.”
“Deklin?”
“We were discussing you.”
“Do I want to know what you were saying?”
She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose. “You might want to skip it.”
He let her slide back to the pavement. Sliding down Coru’s body was as good as being held by Coru — except, sadly, it ended too soon. With her feet back on solid ground she saw they were alone. Mattea and Deklin had gone on ahead.
She said, “Alone at last?”
“Something like that.”
“Is it safe for them to go ahead alone?”
“No. We’ll have to catch up, but I couldn’t let another minute pass without stopping this stupid fight we have going on here. Yeah, you pulled a fast one in Pendergrass’s suite, but if the situation was reversed, I’d have done it myself.”
“You and Mattea had a plan that didn’t include me and Deklin.”
He raised his eyebrow and tilted his head in admission. “Yeah.”
“Talk about pulling a fast one.”
His eyes crinkled with laughter. “You sure you’re not back to reading minds?”
She stepped back into his arms, hugged him hard and pressed her cheek against his warm chest. “I wish. Really — I do wish I could. But it’s truly gone. The giveaway was your guilty expressions, and knowing how your brain works. Ever the hero. I knew you’d try to do this alone so we would go north sooner.”
He was slow to answer. “I don’t want to do this alone. I don’t want to do it at all.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I really don’t want to say goodbye to you. It’s killing me to leave you Wren.”
Her eyes and nose pricked at his words, a hard lump forming at the back of her throat, but there was no way she was going to waste a single moment crying. She had him now, in her arms and that was what was important. Once he was gone — uh-oh, bring on the water works; she blinked rapidly, refusing to go there — she could cry all the way back to D.O.A.
She stepped away. “We’d better catch up to them before they decide to climb inside that Time Bore themselves to see what all the commotion is about. ‘Inquiring Minds Want to Know’.”
He frowned his puzzlement.
“An old tag line from some gossip rag Bill hated and likes to quote anyway. Not important.”
Coru pushed Beastette back onto terra firma and they both climbed in, Coru driving.
She asked, “How much farther?”
“We’ll be there before dark.”
“That means we have the next three to four hours to tell each other everything.”
He laughed, as she’d hoped he would, though her heart was racing again at the thought of him leaving her. Hours. They only had hours. “I’m guessing a few months rummaging around inside my head resulted in you knowing a great deal about me.�
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“You could clear up a little matter named Patterawadee, or Patty, for me.”
He glanced at her in surprise. “Really, you want to know about Patty?”
“She meant something to you, and your ex-friend Moses Zhang.”
“The classic lover’s triangle.”
“Lovers? This sounds intriguing.” She kept her tone and expression light and inquisitive, but her heart was still pumping erratically. She drew in a slow breath through her nostrils; that quasi-yoga-cool-down-thingy Sandy had tried to teach her to no avail.
“Patty and I went out a few times. It wasn’t exclusive. She dated Moses too. It kind of died due to a lack of interest on my part. I didn’t handle it well, I’m afraid, and I hurt her feelings. Moses was angry at me on her behalf and at the same time, he’d won the girl and now he didn’t want her himself. Poor Patty, caught in the middle of a left-over rivalry.”
“Before all this happened — the Time Bore thing, him coming through and wrecking it, didn’t you used to be friends?”
“Back in University, yes. We were both burning up about the environment. We were starry-eyed, here to change the world. We put together all sorts of proposals for the Cloud Rez council to consider, to improve Surface.” He glanced sideways at her, his expression regretful. “Here’s where I tell you we’re no smarter in WEN 2341 than you are back here in WEN 2047. Council is not made up of visionaries. They come to their positions on council through family and money.”
“So where did Zhang go wrong?”
“He found your father’s work in the histories, and he was off and running, convinced the answer was to go back in time to where the decline began and change it. He was hot to build the Time Bore, and worked ceaselessly to make it happen. In the end, though, he was half-mad and was assigned a guardian to keep him in check. The day he jumped, he murdered his guardian first. Patty found the guardian and raised the alarm, and it all went to hell in a handbasket from there.” Here he paused and looked over at her again, his expression expectant. “Recognize another Bill expression?”
She slipped her hand into his right one, forcing him to steer with his left. The truth was, she would listen to him recite a grocery list. She was just happy to be here at his side, touching him, hearing his voice. It washed over her like a balm. She nodded, “Hell in a handbasket.”
She watched his expression change from playful to sad. “He’s changed so much here, I have to consider there is no future to go back to.”
Dread seized her, her fragile happy place disintegrating at hearing his words, his truth. “Move the pencil theory?”
He nodded. “I know nothing about time travel. I jumped into a roiling tunnel with my little brother, hoping to stop Zhang. I didn’t know how it worked, didn’t know if we’d still be alive at the other end.” He released her hand and patted his chest, where he kept his tablet. “My father set this so I could jump back to one hour after I left my world. What’s happened in that one hour…”
“Could be anything,” she finished for him. She experienced a fluttering of apprehension. Would Coru even exist once he jumped back to his own time?
“I have to believe Pendergrass and his team at Freeland will follow up on your father’s work. Having Deklin correct it was a gift from God. In this new WEN 2047, without Deklin, your father’s work most likely would have gone unrecognized and un-actionable. That means no Cloud Rez, no Time Bore.”
“But there is a Time Bore.”
He grimaced. “Or there was a Time Bore.”
She felt sick at his assessment. If there was no Time Bore, why was Coru still here, with her, driving Beastette? Why didn’t he just go poof, gone?
“The only way I figure I’m still here, breathing in air, is time isn’t as fragile as we think. I’m imagining time as elastic, self-healing. I’m imagining time tries to restore what came before, if it can, if it isn’t too damaged. That’s how I sleep at night. I imagine my family, my world still exists, in some form. I have to believe that, or why fight to go on?”
The magnitude of her selfishness slammed into her. Coru had the weight of his entire world on his shoulders and she was only wanting him, the one person, to live, for her sake. And he still had his missing younger brother, Payton, someone he’d lost in the most haunting way, to wonder about.
Was Payton still alive? Where in time was he? Was he safe there? Did he die in the plague? Was he back in their old world, WEN 2341? Did that world even exist anymore? Coru had never dragged out his sorrows, displaying them, trolling for sympathy. He’d kept them to himself, opened his heart to the people he’d saved and protected here in her world, his grief and worry about Payton private.
They rounded a corner and saw Mattea and Deklin stopped by a sign that said,
“Welcome to Hope”. They were here already? Hope. The name of this place was so not hope. A feeling of nausea swept through her. How was she going to watch him walk away, knowing he may wink out of existence the moment he returned to his own time? How?
Coru pulled beside them. “Go around?”
Mattea gave a curt nod. “Worked coming to Freeland, why mess with perfection? Now’s not the time to explore the Town of Hope. It may very well be the nice town it used to be once again, but I doubt it.”
“Then let’s get started. I want to be at the Bore, or where I remember the Bore being, before dark. My recollection might be off. I arrived in daylight; my chances of finding it again are better in daylight.”
Listening to the exchange was difficult. This was really happening. It wasn’t all just talk, some theoretical situation happening someday. Someday was here, today.
The two men railed on their steering wheels, taking the trannies off road and into the bush, heading west with Coru now in the lead. She swallowed that stupid lump that kept showing up in her throat. She would be a good friend; a supportive friend. She would not pull at him now.
Was that the sound of another tranny behind them?
She twisted around, thought she saw a flash of sunlight glinting off glass, but then it was gone, like it had never been. Was she losing the rest of her mind now? It had been an echo.
“What? Coru asked her, keeping his eyes on the path ahead.
“Nothing.”
They rode in silence, Coru checking his SPD often, keeping him on course for the Bore entrance. The terrain was getting rougher, with Wren bouncing in her seat, testing the limits of her safety belt. “Sorry,” Coru said, “It’s pretty remote.”
“W-what does i-it look like?” Wren asked, risking biting off her tongue when they thumped down from a gnarly tree root into a hole and back out again. The trees were so thick in here they’d be forced to abandon the trannies soon.
“Nothing. It’s invisible here.”
“Helpful.”
He stopped again, checked his SPD again, then looked up and squinted through the trees ahead. “It’s in these trees up there about 200 yards.”
“But how will you see it?”
“It shimmers, when you look closely, a kind of shift in the air. You have to be looking for it.” He unclipped his harness, looked over at her and gave her a quick, tight smile. She knew this was not easy for him. “From here we walk.”
They climbed out of Beastette, Coru setting her solar charger, then patting the tranny’s roof affectionately. “I’m going to miss you, old girl. You’ve saved my life on more than a few occasions.” His gaze moved back to Wren. “Not a lot of sun in here, but you’ll need all the power you can get for your return trip. She’s low.”
Return trip—without Coru. Wren rewarded him with her best, though wobbly smile and was saved from embarrassing herself when Mattea and Deklin joined them.
Mattea pointed silently up into the sky. There was smoke coming from a campfire close by. They were not alone. Mattea murmured. “We should check them out first, make sure they’re unaware and won’t interfere.”
They all nodded, retrieved their weapons from their rides and moved toward the sourc
e of the fire on cautious feet, Deklin nearby, but last and shielded, with instructions to remain silent. He nodded solemnly and mimicked their soft steps. Wren smiled her approval to him.
As they ghosted through the thickly treed woods, Wren divided her attention between watching for any unusual side movement, her bow at the ready and watching Coru move before her, his focus intense. His thick muscles bunched, flexed, and stretched under the white T-shirt and grey pants Freeland had issued him, and his tattooed head shone with perspiration, every marking clear. She burned the image into her memory, then tore her eyes away and scanned the sides again.
Mattea, who was up ahead, signaled for them to stop. She could hear voices now, in animated conversation. They crept forward, crouched down, and peered through a screening of brush at the campfire, ringed by eight men, demonstrating it was darker and later than she’d thought. These men were unlike any Wren had seen since the Pandemic. These men were well-fed, well equipped with military grade weapons, military grade tracking ATVs which came with mounted repeater style weapons on their top roll-bars that hurt just to look at them. This was some serious weaponry, designed for one task: Kill people.
These were Protectors of Earth soldiers: POE. They were well dressed in similar uniforms, each with an insignia on the left breast pocket. She couldn’t make it out, from this distance, but guessed it was an image set below a large “NP” for New Pacifica.
They were talking loudly, boisterously, unafraid of being detected, confident in their right to be here, of going unchallenged. Their actions said, “This is mine”. Their actions told Wren they were not here to help the locals in their bid to rebuild. They were here to intimidate, to appropriate. These were the Vancouver sanctioned scavengers Pendergrass had told them of.
Mattea signaled for them to back away. They moved back, turned and left, looking back often.
Once safely way, Mattea gathered them into a tight group. “We could engage, save some lives, but risk Coru not getting to the Bore. I say we go about our business, Coru goes through the Bore and we hightail it out of here as fast as we safely can. They’re settled at least until morning. I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking for a fight.”
Lost Sentinel: Post-Apocalyptic Time Travel Adventure (Earth Survives Series Book 1) Page 46