by R. A. Rock
“Jesus, Chad. Could you shield please?” Yumi sent, her cheeks pink. The others had turned away so as not to embarrass me and I felt my face go fiery red. It’s the curse of being a redhead — I blush audibly.
“What are you a first year recruit?” It was her usual insult but somehow it hurt more this time.
“Fuck off, Tanaka,” I sent. It was possibly the most rude thing I had ever sent to her and she reacted as though I had slapped her in the face because it was the mental equivalent. But it felt good. Then I did that thing and turned off my emotions.
There. Now I really didn’t care what she thought of me.
I was completely numb. But if that was the price I had to pay to be free of her, then so be it.
I was done with her.
For good.
Well, at least I wasn’t hung over anymore.
A moment later, Yumi’s voice came from outside and it had an odd quality to it.
“Uh, guys? Could you come out here?”
“I can’t,” Gracie said, trying to sound weak.
“You can come too, Grace,” she said.
What the fuck?
We all walked out the door to see Ernest holding a gun on her with Nessa and Matt beside him.
“You all have a lot of explaining to do,” Matt said.
He met my eye with a look that said it all.
I had betrayed his trust and it made me feel sick because after only a few days, Matt had become a friend.
Could this day get any worse?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
YUMI
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to cry.
I wanted to throat punch, Chad.
What an asshole.
It felt weird to realize that we might be free of the soul bond. It had chafed at me since we had created it by accident. But I wasn’t sure I wanted it gone. Because I didn’t know what that would mean for my life. And for his.
I pushed the thoughts aside as I opened the door of the guest house and stepped out, coming face to face with the barrel of a shot gun.
“Call your friends to come out,” Ernest said, his face grim.
Shit. Busted.
I did as he said and as they came out the door, I sent to all four of them on a tight mental channel.
“Guys, shields up. Ernest is a telepath.”
I felt surprise wafting off of all of them at this revelation. But there was no time for that. They had found us out. Who knew what they had seen if someone had been at the window.
We were in deep trouble.
***
When we arrived in the living room, the three of them seated themselves on the couch and Matt indicated we could stand in front of the fireplace. I supposed that Penny was still sleeping, since it was an unholy hour of the morning.
“Okay,” Matt said. “Ernest saw a strange light coming from the guest house and looked in.”
Oh shit.
“He was considerably startled by what he saw and called Nessa and I,” Matt said, nodding at Nessa who looked nervous but determined. “We all saw.”
“What exactly we saw is what we would like you to tell us,” Ernest said.
“Well,” Grace began. “We were making a Circle.”
“Gracie,” Shiv said. “Start at the beginning.”
She nodded and began back at the beginning…
***
A week ago…
September 2481
“Ready?” Audrey said, her hand hovering over her bracelet.
Suddenly I had some serious misgivings about this time travel mission. I mean, it would be cool to time travel. Even if it was only two years into the past. But something was twisting in my guts and as a soldier and an assassin and as someone who had always had to fight for her life, I had learned to listen to my guts.
“Wait,” I said.
She stopped but kept her hand over her bracelet.
“I’m not sure about this anymore.”
“Why?” Chad said, his eyes troubled.
He trusted my gut as much as I did. I seemed to have an instinct for avoiding trouble. And he always listened to me — even now that things were a mess between us. They all trusted me to look out for them.
“I don’t think this is a good idea anymore.”
Shiv looked disappointed but resigned and Gracie, frankly, looked relieved.
“What? Why?” Audrey said. She was all in on this mission. She was the one who had suggested we try out the bracelets we had found in the lab. She was going to be pissed if I called it off.
“It just doesn’t.”
“Fuck, seriously Tanaka? We’ve been planning this for months.”
“I know, but…” I couldn’t explain. I just knew we shouldn’t do it.
“Look, how about we change to two minutes. Nothing can go wrong if we go back two minutes.”
“Um, we’ll run straight into ourselves,” Shiv said. “And that would be bad. We do not want to run into ourselves.”
“Why?” Grace said, nervous.
“Well, let’s see. We’re looking at cataclysms, apocaplyses, the universe collapsing, destroying the timeline, all that sort of thing.”
“Oh,” she swallowed hard and turned a paler shade of white.
“Fine,” Audrey said, waving off the universe collapsing as if it were nothing. “We’ll go back two weeks. None of us were on Earth two weeks ago.”
“Okay,” Shiv said. “That should be okay.”
“I’m still not sure…”
“Yumi, please,” Audrey said and the plaintive note to her voice got me. I knew she was desperately sad about what had happened with Dorian. We all were. And that she was using this as a distraction.
Fuck. This was a bad idea.
“Fine,” I said. “But only two weeks. And we only go once. Just to test. Then we can turn it over to someone else. Or destroy them. We should just destroy them now.”
“No,” Audrey said. “Just one test. Thanks, Yumi.”
She hugged me, which was totally out of character for her. That wasn’t the kind of friends we were.
“Ready everyone?” she said, beaming at us. We nodded. None of the four of us were smiling. “Three, two, one, and go.”
Everyone tapped their release button at the same time and I immediately lost consciousness.
***
“Where are we?”
“What happened?”
“Why does my head hurt so much?
Oh God, I felt as though someone had stabbed me in the temple and then twisted the knife.
Through the pain I heard the telltale sound of a gun being cocked, which brought me up to full consciousness immediately. I dragged myself to my feet, trying to get my bearings and locate the shooter.
“Hands up,” a man said in English.
Ah, there he was.
But wait. Why were we in a forest?
“Shit,” I said in a soft voice to Chad who was closest to me. “I think we missed our mark by a few weeks.”
“A few weeks?” he whispered back. “There’s been a city in this spot for over one hundred and fifty years, Yumi.”
Oh fuck.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” I said.
“Yeah, well too late now. We should have listened to you in the first place.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
YUMI
I felt my energy draining as we explained to Matt, Nessa, and Ernest the whole story. I had been up all night and I was so tired I could barely sit up straight. I just wanted to go to sleep. Still, we owed them an explanation. But maybe after that was done, I could catch a nap - if they didn’t kick us out immediately after they found out the truth about us.
“You’re trying to tell us that you’re from the future?” Matt said, his face filled with skepticism, at the same time as Nessa eagerly spoke. “So, you ended up here? Now?”
“We came back four hundred years, instead of four weeks,” Grace said. “And then we got captured. On purpose.”
We told them the same story we’d told when we first arrived but with explanations that we’d left out the first time.
“Okay,” Ernest said. “Can you prove it?”
“What if we told you something that was going to happen in the future?”
“What and then wait ten years to see if it comes true? No way,” he said. “We have to know if we should trust you, kick you out, or kill you — right now.”
Everyone was silent trying to think how we could prove that we were from the future.
“I know,” Shiv said, keeping a serious face but sending gleefully.
“Comm units.”
I caught an image that Gracie sent of them high-fiving and then her kissing him senseless.
“Could you keep your broadcasts G rated?” I sent back.
And felt laughter in my mind.
It wasn’t really the time or place but I was so glad my little sister was feeling well enough to joke.
“Ernest, you mentioned you used to be a coder and a hacker. Tell me about the state of technology at this point in time.”
“Sure,” he said. “There isn’t any. But there’s no Internet. There’s no signal. As far as we can find out, the entire electrical grid was destroyed throughout the globe and there’s been so much chaos that most people have been busy trying to survive that nobody’s even started to rebuild yet.”
“So, if I could show you a device from the future would that convince you?”
He nodded, looking suddenly intrigued.
“Now.” Shiv sent and we all flipped over our forearms where our comm units were located. They were like the smartphones of the past but way way way better. No, they were nothing like the smartphones of the past.
“And… now,” he sent again. “Show that holographic picture of us in front of your Class 4.”
We all activated them at the same time.
Then we each opened our holograms and popped up the holographic photograph of the four of us. Shiv coordinated our movements telepathically so that everything happened at the same time, making the demonstration even more impressive.
“Okay, I’m convinced you’re from the future,” Ernest said.
“But what about what was going on in the guest house,” Nessa said. “Tell us about that.”
“Yeah, and how come you all look so healthy now and not beat up anymore,” Ernest said, his suspicion back. “Except for her.”
Grace hadn’t had a chance to heal Audrey before they found us out.
“Well,” Grace began, sure that this was going to be a harder sell than us being time travellers. “We’re Telepaths.”
“What?” Matt stood up. “Okay. Stop. You know what? I’ve heard quite enough for one night. I mean, okay, somehow you have fancy devices that seem futuristic. But that could be stuff that we didn’t know existed. And maybe there are people with technology because it was somehow protected. And maybe you’re just here to somehow cheat us out of our home. I don’t know. That’s all just weird enough. But now you’re trying to tell me that you’re fucking mind readers, too? You know, that’s just going too far.”
“Well, thankfully, that’s a lot easier to prove,” Audrey said. “Think of something that no one else knows about you. That we couldn’t possibly know because it was in the past or you were the only one there. And please don’t pick something that’s personally embarrassing.”
“What?” Matt said. “No.”
“That’s good,” she said. “That’ll do.”
“What?”
Matt sat down suddenly, his face white. Nessa patted his knee and threaded her arm through his.
“Okay, do me next,” Nessa said, bouncing up and down in excitement. Audrey repeated the procedure.
“What about you, Ernest?” I sent. “You’re next.”
“No,” he answered me out loud. “I don’t want a turn. I’m convinced.”
Nessa smiled a confused smile.
“No one asked you if you wanted a turn, Ernie,” she said.
“What are you talking about, Ness? She did.” He pointed at me with his lips — a custom of the aboriginal people of the area. It was considered rude to point with your hand.
“I asked you in your mind, Ernest. You’re a Telepath, too.”
He glanced frantically at Matt and Nessa.
“You heard that, right? She said she asked me in my mind. She said I’m a telepath, too?”
Nessa and Matt looked at him wide-eyed.
“What are they thinking, Ernest?” I sent.
“Matt’s thinking that I’m as crazy as you guys. And Nessa thinks this is all so cool.”
Matt and Nessa’s mouths flew open.
“You could have guessed that,” Matt said.
“That is so cool, Ernest,” Nessa practically squealed.
Then Ernest whispered something into Matt’s ear and Matt’s eyebrows flew up so high they nearly hit his hairline.
“Okay. You’re one too. I’m sorry but this is all a little much to take in,” he said.
Shiv explains the ante-prefrontal cortex and the evolution thing.
“So what was that whole glowing, floating thing you were doing in the guest house?” Ernest said, clearly not liking being the centre of attention.
“Oh that? We were making a Circle. It’s when people like us connect our minds to become more powerful. We were healing Gracie and each other.”
“Why isn’t Audrey healed?” Nessa said.
“She’s not a part of our Circle,” I said. “People are born in Circles of four.”
“And their Circle happens to be the most powerful ever discovered. Most Circles don’t glow and float when they do a simple healing, but these four can’t seem to resist making a show,” Audrey said, sounding a little resentful. Maybe she felt more left out than I had realized. “Grace was going to heal me but we didn’t have time, since you broke up our little party.”
“But listen,” Grace said. “This doesn’t change anything. We’re still going to help you get back Zoe. With our powers, it’ll be a piece of cake.”
“What?” Audrey practically shouted. “We’re going back today. You heard what Shiv said.”
“What did Shiv say?” Matt asked, a frown on his rugged, handsome face.
“That we only have a three day window before the bracelets may go haywire and not work at all.”
“So if you stay and help us get Zoe you might miss the window and get stuck in our time?”
“I didn’t say it like that,” Shiv put in giving Audrey a look. “Because I don’t use words like haywire. But yes, that would be the result. We wouldn’t be able to get home.”
“But if we go home now, we would be bailing on our new friends that have helped us so much,” Grace said, addressing both Matt, Nessa, and Ernest, as well as Audrey. “And which we totally won’t do because we’re not like that.”
“You’re not like that, Dvorski,” Audrey said, furious. “I am most definitely like that. And I won’t stay. I’m leaving right now.”
We all stared in dismay as Audrey walked out of the room and straight out the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY
YUMI
“Uh, we’ll be right back, okay? Just a sec,” I said, following Audrey with the others right behind me. She was pacing in the yard. The first rays of the sun were spearing through the trees and I squinted against the bright light.
“Audrey, you need to know that you can’t just leave without us. The bracelets create a field. That’s part of what makes them work even though they’re so small. That’s why we had to all press the button at the same time,” Shiv explained.
“What?” she said. “So you idiots are staying and I have to stay, too? That just figures.”
“Audrey, please,” I said, feeling terrible. “It’ll be okay. We’ve been in tighter spots than this. Many of them that you put us in. And we got out of them all. You’d think you would have faith in us by now.”
“I have faith in you,” she sai
d. “And in your Circle. But what about me? I’m not a part of that. I’m nobody. And I don’t even have Dorian anymore. And I can’t get back to him.”
She suddenly broke down and started crying, dropping to her knees on the ground and covering her face. I had never seen her cry before. And it broke my heart. I couldn’t bear it.
I sat down next to her and wrapped my arms around her, tears coursing down my own face as I rocked her and let her cry.
After a few minutes, she managed to calm down. And I wondered if she had cried at all since Dorian disappeared. She was tough like me and didn’t give in to emotions very often.
“I’m sorry,” she said, getting up.
“You don’t have to apologize to us,” Chad said. “We’ve all been there.”
And I couldn’t help but fucking admire a man who could admit to having broken down and bawled like a baby. You have to be pretty confident to be able to say something like that. It was one of the things that had always impressed me about Chad.
Everyone nodded. It wasn’t like Audrey was the only person who had ever cried.
“So, you’re staying to help get her back, then?” Audrey said, her eyes empty. “And I have to stay too. Fine. But I refuse to help. I’ll be in the guest house if anyone needs me.”
She stood up with dignity and walked slowly into the building.
“Fuck,” I said. “This sucks.”
“There’s something else Shiv needs to tell you,” Gracie said, elbowing him in the ribs. “He knows something that affects you both and I think you should know before you make a decision about whether we should do this or not. Whatever you two decide, we’ll go along with. We believe we should stay and help Zoe. But if you decide otherwise, we’ll stand by you.”
I glanced at Chad.
That was quite the speech.
“Nothing’s going to make us change our mind,” Chad said.
“Just listen,” Gracie said.
“First,” Shiv said. “I’m really sorry I didn’t mention this sooner, but it didn’t seem important then. I figured I would tell you someday. But now. Since if we do this, we might not make it back home, well, I feel it’s my duty to tell you.”