“You know about the Interns?” Jack asked. And then he shook his head. “Of course you know about the Interns. Dean Fucking Jordan told you.”
“Something else you wanted to keep from me,” I growled. “First the dreams and now this. Ivanov has been playing with you for months. Not just the past few days. You had me believe this was all new, something unseen before. But it isn’t. He has a plan, and now he has my sister. But you don’t give a shit about that.”
Jack stared at me as if he didn’t know me; which was closer to the truth than anything else. Those dreams had fooled us both. But that was over now. I was destroying any chance of them being realised.
Part of me broke apart at that notion. But the part of me that loved Carrie rejoiced.
Jack slowly pulled himself up to full height, attempting to kowtow me. I offered him a roll of my eyes.
“You have no idea what you have done,” he ground out. “Got a good man fired, that’s what. Jordan won’t be at RATS by the time we return.” I stopped breathing. “Dr Hoffman, send a probe back.”
Hoffman remained silent, watching from his seat, but not moving an inch to obey his Surgeon.
“Did you hear me?” Jack demanded.
“I heard you, Jack,” Hoffman said carefully. “But let’s not be hasty about this.”
“Hasty?” Jack yelled. Then thrust a finger out towards me. “She stole RATS property, and Dean Jordan helped her.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Of course we bloody well know that!”
“Actually, I got him shitfaced on Tequila and wheedled the answers out of him,” I offered. Jack spun back and glared at me.
“I beg your pardon.” Even irate he was polite.
I smiled. He grew enraged.
“I found out how to get an Orion to return to previous coordinates,” I said with a shrug of my shoulder as if it was nothing. “Bypassing the failsafe when no one was on board. I couldn’t be, you see because I don’t know how to fly these things yet.”
“And you sure as hell won’t find out now,” Jack muttered.
“And I might want to get back afterwards,” I said, ignoring him. Again. “So I hid on board here, knowing you’d be the crew to trace it.”
“How did you know that?” Jack asked mystified.
I frowned, not liking this next part. “Got to know Dr Winchester,” I mumbled under my breath.
“What was that?” Jack demanded in a lethally soft voice.
“Flirted with Winchester,” I snapped.
Rafe started laughing. Sally looked shocked, but also strangely impressed. Jack was beside himself.
“By flirting you mean what exactly?” The entire sentence was said between clenched teeth.
I waved a hand dismissively at him. “It doesn’t matter. But I knew his crew would replace Orion Two on today’s flight plan, and you’d be the one called up to follow the missing Vehicle.”
“It’s actually quite clever when you think about it,” Hoffman offered.
Jack just glared at him. The seconds stretched.
“Bloody hell,” he finally said in defeat. I let out a breath of air I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. “You are quite remarkable, Miss Wylde.”
“Thank you?”
“Oh, don’t thank me,” he rushed to say. “You’re also in a wealth of trouble. I’ve a right mind to…”
He let the sentence hang.
“Mind to what, sir?” Hoffman asked mischievously.
“None of your bloody business, Doctor.” Jack sighed and slumped back down in his chair. I noticed Sally immediately relax a little too. Hoffman just winked at me. I bit my lip and chewed on it a while, watching Jack for clues.
He hadn’t immediately ordered a return flight, so there was still a chance he’d help me. The probe back to RATS hadn’t been sent either. So we still had a little time. But further than that, I was at a loss.
I’d only planned this far ahead.
“What now, Miss Wylde?” Jack asked. Bastard. He could read me like a book.
I let a slow breath of air out and ventured toward the fourth seat. Jack leant back in his and watched me with a shrouded look. Contemplative. Wary. And was that amused?
I shook my head and sat down and then played with the zip on my flight suit.
“You haven’t thought that far ahead, have you, Mimi?” Jack said.
I shook my head.
He huffed out a breath and stared at the screen. “Mend that rip, would you, Rafe?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Bloody hell, Mimi,” Jack muttered.
“I had no choice, Jack.”
“You had choices. Everyone has choices. But what you’ve done; I don’t think I can cover for this.”
I blinked. I hadn’t expected him to cover for me. Jack was a rule follower; even I could tell that. And I’d just broken God alone knows how many of RATS’ rules. I’d assumed he’d be honour-bound to uphold them. Hopefully after we’d found Carrie.
“Bryan Fawkes summed it up really,” I said quietly. Jack met my eyes with a look of regret. “Once those dreams are realised, Time will settle, and returning me to my time will…what were his words? ‘Put a lid on all of this.’”
Jack let out a long breath of air.
“We’re Time Surgeons, Mimi. It’s what we do. It’s how we think. But that doesn’t mean his was the only solution.”
“I saw your face, Jack. I saw you recognise the truth in his words. The lack of further options. And then Dean told me about the Interns. The ones you can’t find. And it all made sense. Your time is already out. Your future altered. Desperation makes us do unheard of things.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he offered.
“I didn’t throw the first chestnut,” I said, unsure why that came tumbling out.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“But I sure as hell threw the last.” Rafe almost fell off his chair laughing. Even Sally let out an amused giggle.
Jack fought a smile and won.
“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “It was nothing. It was the best we could do given the circumstances.”
“We?” I asked.
“You think I wasn’t involved in your punishment, Miss Wylde? You’re my Novitiate.”
I glanced at Sally.
“Miss Groves is too,” Jack said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
My turn to raise an eyebrow at him.
“You know what I mean.” No actually, I was quite sure I didn’t. But I let things lie as is.
“Twenty-four hours would have been too late.”
“You don’t know that,” he argued.
“I do!” I pressed a hand to the centre of my chest. “In here. I know it. I don’t know how, but I do. If I don’t find Carrie today, she’ll be lost forever. I couldn’t wait, Jack. I couldn’t let Harding and Pratt keep me grounded. I couldn’t let Carrie slip away.”
“Then what’s the plan?”
“You’ll help me?”
He looked toward Sally and Rafe.
“I’m in,” Hoffman offered.
“Me too!” Sally squeaked.
“You realise how this could go?” Jack queried. “You understand the consequences? Miss Groves?” Jack pressed.
Sally glanced towards me and smiled. “I believe in Mouse, sir. She’s my friend. And friends help each other.”
I let out a sharp breath, feeling it keenly, deep inside. Feeling it in that place that was hollow. The place Carrie usually lived. I struggled not to show how much her words meant to me, but I was certain she saw. Sally blinked and looked away, smiling softly to herself.
“Well then,” Jack said. “I guess we’re doing this. Whatever the bloody fucking hell this is, Miss Wylde. But you’ve got yourself a flight crew. Now, where the bloody fucking hell do you want us?”
Jack could also be very crude at times too.
I smiled. He shook his head.
“How about this?” Hoffman said. “We’ve trie
d Cocoa Beach and the VAB in ’69. We’ve also tried Mimi’s time, also at the VAB.” He ticked off locations on a tablet screen as he talked. “We’ve visited ’61 at the Lewis Laboratory, albeit we didn’t exit the Vehicle, and we’ve travelled to South Beach, Miami in 1962. Ivanov or his Lunik was at Cocoa Beach and the VAB only out of all of those destinations. But there has been one other location his Vehicle has travelled to, or through, that we haven’t rechecked.”
“Launch Pad 39A,” I said.
“Precisely,” Rafe offered quietly. “It’s our best bet.”
“It’s also back in my time,” I pointed out.
Rafe had the decency to look abashed. “That’s not why I suggested it, Mouse.”
I nodded. Going back made sense. But leaving me there would save their skins when they returned to RATS.
No one offered a platitude to reassure me. It was an option they wouldn’t dismiss.
“So do we do it?” Sally asked.
Jack and Rafe looked at me intently.
“This is your mission, Miss Wylde.” I wished he call me Mimi. “Your flight plan, so to speak.” Mimi meant he wasn’t hiding something. “We’ll go if you so desire it.”
What choice did I have?
I nodded my head.
“Dr Hoffman?” Jack asked, keeping his eyes on me and not Rafe.
“On it, sir. Working the coordinates now.”
“Do we drag Orion Two with us?” Sally asked, and still Jack didn’t stop looking at me. Wouldn’t look anywhere else.
“Send it back, Miss Groves. That’ll give RATS something to contemplate.”
“They could send Fawkes straight back out in it after us,” Rafe pointed out. Jack held my gaze with a steady one of his own.
“We might well need him,” he finally said.
Silence descended as the weight of what we were doing sunk in. Not just risking their jobs at RATS. But facing off against Sergei Ivanov. The man responsible for stealing the original Orion.
And for taking several RATS Interns. Possibly killing them.
The man who was doctoring Time to suit his needs. Needs we didn’t yet understand.
He was unstable, unpredictable, and lethal. And we were hunting him.
Because he had my sister. Because I couldn’t abandon Carrie. Because I wasn’t RATS trained and didn’t give a rat’s arse about rules.
“Thank you,” I mouthed. Jack ran a hand over his face and scratched at his jaw. His eyes never leaving mine.
“Don’t thank me, Mimi,” he murmured. “I can’t help feeling I’m enabling you. I’m allowing you to do something monumentally stupid.”
“Like rescuing Carrie?” I demanded.
He took one last look at me and said, “Like getting yourself killed out of time.” And then turned to the console, checking Rafe’s coordinates, and preparing to hit the launch button.
“Buckle up!” Rafe announced cheerfully. Sally offered me an encouraging smile.
I fiddled with my harness, getting it wrapped around itself and somehow upside down. Jack’s hands appeared from out of nowhere, untangling it all. My eyes darted up to his shadowed face. There weren’t shadows in here; he just seemed that way.
“It’ll be all right, Jack,” I whispered.
His eyes met mine. A soft brush of his fingers across my cheek. A small smile.
“Just don’t die,” he murmured quietly.
“I don’t plan to.”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t plan, Mouse, and still you somehow manage to get into trouble.”
“You called me Mouse,” I said, stunned.
“I call you Mouse in my dreams.”
And then he was gone, in his own seat, buckling up with efficiency, and hitting the button.
My mind stalled. Visions of my own dreams swamping me. As clouds formed and stars winked and a sonic bomb sounded.
In the silence of space, I realised something.
I was falling for Jack Evans.
A Woman Living Out Of Time
Jack
If I’d thought I’d known what sort of person Mimi Wylde was, I’d thought wrong. Cautious, but once committed, recklessly so. That courage I’d witnessed, time and again, was tempered with a vulnerability that caused my chest to ache. A more impetuous creature I had yet to meet. Wild, rash, careless, misguided, she was all of those. But she was also determined, headstrong, dedicated, devoted, and loyal beyond anything I had ever seen.
Her heart was her biggest strength and also her biggest downfall.
And all I could think was I wanted to call her mine. To lay claim to this miraculous woman. To shout it from the rooftops that she belonged to me and no one else.
And all I could do was watch as she flew headlong into chaos, dragging every poor unfortunate soul who fell for her charms along with her, and try to protect her while she did it. But protecting her against Sergei Ivanov was a tall task indeed.
There were things she didn’t know. Things even Rafe didn’t know. Things only Surgeons were privy to.
“Touchdown!” Rafe exclaimed as the Orion softly landed in Mimi’s time. Sally had the screen illuminated immediately, and we all looked out on an empty launch pad, the Fixed and Rotating Service Structures dwarfing us, the scorch marks of previous launches visible against a stark white concrete, shadows stretching long as the afternoon sun sank toward the horizon.
“Time,” I said, forcing my voice to sound normal. Nothing was normal anymore. I was trapped in a dream; part beautiful and alluring, addictively sought every time my eyes closed for even a second; part nightmare, the certainty that death stalked us riding me hard, causing my heart to clench and my stomach to churn.
“OE: Alpha 1,” Rafe said quietly. “If we shift dimensions we should see Lunik fly by and pick up Carrie any minute.”
“Do it!” Mimi ordered as if she was in charge here.
“Just one moment, Miss Wylde.”
“If we catch her before he does, we can put a stop to all of this.”
“Everything has consequences,” I pointed out. “Even corrections to Time.”
She paused. Then, “What aren’t you telling me?”
Too clever by far, this woman.
“What happens if Lunik fails to pick up your sister?” I asked. “You both leave here, undetected, and go about your lives unaware.”
“I don’t see a problem with that,” she supplied. The knife dug in a little deeper.
“You wouldn’t get arrested by the KSC security team,” I went on. “You wouldn’t get hauled into the VAB. And you wouldn’t get picked up by this Orion.”
“So?”
We wouldn’t meet, I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “We’ve had the dreams. They can’t be taken away.”
“Why not?” I wanted to shake her. Then hold her tight and never let her go again.
“No Surgeon has ever managed to alter a dream once realised. Yet another nail in the coffin for dreams being connected to our DNA, wouldn’t you say? Not only has the dream manifested, but it's also adhered to our genetic makeup and cannot be changed.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Always an argument, Miss Wylde.”
She shook her head. “Has anyone ever tried this? Stopping something before it has happened? Taking out a key component to a series of events?”
“She’s an Origin Event, Mimi,” I said softly. “They’re unpredictable at best.”
“And at worst?”
“We explode this time apart. No more life in this time as you know it. Perhaps, no more Carrie in this time as you know her too.”
“No,” she said on a breath that sounded too close to a sob for my liking. “That can’t be true. How do you mend Time then? How do you fix a rip?”
“We catch it. Stitch it. Or remake it,” I said.
“But if we grab Carrie now, aren’t we catching the rip before it’s happened?”
She was grasping at straws, and she knew it. That bloody stubborn streak of hers beat
ing herself to a pulp.
And cutting me to shreds while she was at it.
“The rip has already happened, Mouse,” Rafe said from the side, reminding us both, I think, that we’d had an audience.
“Retrocausality,” Groves added in a soft tone of voice. “The temporal paradox exists.”
“And that can’t be changed,” I finished. “There are limits to what we can do,” I added. “We can mend Time, and in certain situations, we can make Time, but we can never change Time. Not directly. Not like this.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “If you can make it…”
“Remake, Mimi. Consider us reconstructive surgeons. We can return a time to its original state, or as near as the talent of the Surgeon allows, only if the time succeeding it hasn’t altered too far or travelled too long down the new dimensional wave created by the rip.”
“What does that mean?”
I held her sorrowful gaze, let her see the regret on my face, even if part of me did not feel it, and said, “You know too much. You’ve been in our time too long. What makes you, you, has changed.”
I closed my eyes and said aloud the one thing Surgeons are sworn never to repeat.
“Time has a failsafe switch. If tampered with outside of these parameters it wipes itself clean. Carrie is an Origin Event for this rip; you may well be part of that OE as well, I’m unsure. But if you try to meddle with this rip before it occurs, you may wipe Carrie, and yourself, from existence.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Rafe said forcefully. My eyes met his, and he slowly shook his head. “Need to know basis, huh?”
“What do you think the widespread knowledge of this failsafe switch could create, Dr Hoffman?” I asked.
His lips pressed into a thin line, and he shook his head more vigorously, eyes boring into mine hard.
“Sergei Ivanov, that’s who,” I said.
“Motherfucker!” Rafe swore. Mimi grimaced, and Groves jumped in her seat. “That’s what happened to them, isn’t it? That’s why we can’t find them.”
“Oh my God,” Groves muttered. “No.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Rafe demanded. “Why let us think we could still find them?” Anger made the air thick.
“The fewer people who know this failsafe exists, the better,” I offered.
Losing Time (Lost Time, Book 1): A Time Travel Romantic Suspense Series Page 24