“Why’d you pause?” I asked, marveling at the serenity of the moment.
“We need to talk.”
“About?”
“Expectations,” she said with her typical bluntness, “and what it is you’re hoping to find here.”
“I’m hoping to find Abi.”
“I am too,” Zoe said softly. “But you need to prepare for the possibility that she isn’t here for the reasons you think she is.”
“Crask took her,” I said sharply. “What other possibility is there?”
“That she came here on her own accord.”
My stomach coiled into an iron knot. “You saw her apartment back at Central. It was trashed, she was in a fight. Somebody took her.”
A bead of sweat trickled down Zoe’s cheek, exertion from holding the pause. “I saw,” she agreed, nodding slowly.
“You think she did it herself?”
“Abi was troubled,” Zoe said. “She came back from Haiti brok—” Zoe caught herself by biting her lower lip, “—a different woman.”
“You would have too.”
“I’m not blaming her. I’m just saying she was hurting. Bad.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“I know you do, Kae.”
“Then why?” I struggled not to shout. “After what happened to Taylor, why would Abi come to Crask willingly?”
Zoe smiled sadly. “I think you know why.” And then the world snapped back like a rubber-band, accelerating suddenly to normal speeds. My head reeled as I re-matriculated with the flow of time.
I clenched my fists at my side and forced my breathing to slow.
“Hey, Kae?” Maddix voice broke in. “What are we waiting for?”
“Sorry,” I said stiffly, carefully avoiding Zoe’s worried gaze.
BLINK
“Maddix,” I said, quickly assimilating future memories. “Stay out of 3013B.”
“Why?” Maddix’s voice was high-pitched and strained with effort. “Don’t tell me I got shot again.”
Chapter Six
THEN
The giggling betrayed her.
The over-stuffed vinyl recliner, worn thin from years’ worth of aggressive relaxation, was cracked and spilling gray cushioning onto my office’s gray carpeted floor. It creaked under my shifting weight as I perked an ear at the peculiar sound of youthful bliss drifting down the hall.
Central—a place where Chronos not suckered in by Crask’s religious dogma could serve a home and country that didn’t entirely want them to begin with—was the military-sponsored alternative to the Farm. Lots of getting shot at by bad guys and even more paperwork, which didn’t leave much room for bliss.
“Just try it,” a girl said. “I dare you.” Feet scuffled in the hall followed by a squeal and another bout of giggling. Then some moderately deeper giggling. A boy.
“You’ll pay for that,” the girl said again.
I couldn’t hear the boy’s response—his voice didn’t carry down the hall very well—but it must have been terribly funny judging by the girl’s reactions.
Then it all abruptly stopped, replaced by an intense flurry of whispering just beyond the threshold of my office door.
“You might as well come in and introduce your friend, Abi,” I said, putting down the binder of resource allocation spreadsheets and operational logistics I’d received from Administration that morning.
Abi’s head popped into the doorway, her eyebrows raised in shock at having been discovered. “How’d you know I was here?”
“Were you trying to be stealthy?” I asked, genuinely confused. “Because tickle fights—at least that’s what I assume is happening out there—are not, by their natur—”
“Kae!” Abi’s cheeks turned a shade of red bordering on purple. She was dangerously close to death by embarrassment. To the young, there were worse ways to die, but not many.
I waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, stop that. You have a boy. Good for you. Now bring him in here so I can vet him.”
Abigail stepped into the office, shoulders slouched as though she were compressed beneath an impossible load. The red-haired boy followed a step behind with his chin up and shoulders back as though he were marching to meet Hannibal’s invading horde.
“Hi, Agent Kwon,” he extended his hand and then froze, possibly debating whether he should salute, shake my hand, or offer some hybrid form of a thumbs-up.
Oh, to be young and awkward again.
***
The elevator shuddered to a stop and deposited Abigail and myself at the Ward. “Taylor seems nice,” I said.
Abigail bounced along beside me like a rubber ball with legs, any lingering feelings of embarrassment having long since dissipated.
“He’s all right,” she said, trying to play it cool. Unfortunately, she did a poor job of concealing that dopey grin indicative of puppy love. “But he is pretty cute, huh?”
I made a point of letting her see my eyes roll as we pushed past a couple of swing-styled doors into a waiting area guarded by a single stern-faced old man wearing a smattering of time-earned wrinkles as though they were Purple Hearts. He was absorbed in a vintage comic book with a red blur streaking across the cover.
“Hey, Kevin,” I said, guiding Abigail to the check-in counter.
The man glanced over the comic, white cataracts swimming across his eyes. “Ah, Kaelyn,” he said with a dusty voice. “Finally, somebody around here who doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out with a stapler.”
“How’ve you been, Kevin?”
“They say I have Alzheimer's. Ain’t that something?”
I winced. “Sorry to hear that.”
“Eh, what can ya do? Time comes for us all eventually.” Kevin shrugged. “Suppose you’re here to see Mati?”
“Got it in one.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He thumbed a button on the desk with knuckles bulging like walnuts beneath thin, nearly translucent yellowing skin. The door to our right buzzed and I led Abi into the ward.
“That was weird,” she said the moment the door had swung shut behind us.
“What?”
“Grandpa reading a comic book. Never seen that before.”
“Kevin’s only twenty-seven,” I said, walking through a room that would not have looked out of place in a retirement home, if not for all the old men playing the latest first-person shooter—where everybody and the family dog is a potential enemy—on a big screen projector. The constant stream of trash talk into headsets strapped to bald and liver-spotted skulls probably would have turned a few heads as well.
“No way,” Abigail said doubtfully.
“Manipulating time always comes with a cost. For Blitzers, it’s physical. Moving forward through time accelerates the aging process. Most of these guys—” I gestured to the room of geriatric young men, “—are in their early thirties. A decade of hard blitzing takes a heavy toll.”
Abigail stared at something and nothing, her mind drifting elsewhere. Possibly grappling with what that meant for her burgeoning young love, Taylor. “Why do they do it then?”
“Can you stop yourself from blinking?”
“No,” Abi said. “But you can.”
I nodded in agreement. “Most of the time. But our bodies are constantly absorbing tachyons, and if you don’t use them, they decay until eventually your body just rejects them in one big burst. Which can be much worse.”
Abigail took that information about as well as anybody could be expected to. From what I could tell, she’d known Taylor for only three weeks, but the Theory of Adolescent Relativity stated that in teenager time—where infatuation’s concerned—that equated to roughly two lifetimes. Knowing what lay in store for Taylor hurt, but it trumped ignorance. At least this way she could mentally prepare for the inevitable.
“Come on,” I said, holding open the door to the west wing. “Let’s go meet Matilda.”
Chapter Seven
NOW
“Why?” I quickly asked. “Is she hurt?”
“No, she looks…all right.”
An earlier conversation with Zoe resurfaced. A spike of anxiety stabbed me in the gut. “Then what?”
“It’s best you see for yourself,” Maddix said. “What’s the time?”
I glanced at my watch. “Twenty-seven seconds.”
“Fourteenth floor, northwest wing, room 2890,” Maddix said quickly. “You got everything else, right?”
I wasted no time replying, we were creeping up onto the firm edge of reality and I didn’t want to miss the reset point we’d established. Never know what sort of logistical complication can arise when you do.
BLINK
Time slew around me. Molecules and thoughts strained against the temporal load as I dragged myself back thirty-one seconds into the past. A huge pull requiring massive exertion against the nearly solidified reality. Bits of it sheared away, cracking beneath the strain and branching into tangential tributaries of space-time to account for any unintentional paradoxes.
I opened my eyes to a world painted by a drunk. Thoughts swirled and my legs buckled.
A pair of strong arms beneath my armpits steadied me. “Whoa, hey now.” I recognized Maddix’s voice. “I got you, I got you.”
My vision pulsed with black spots that slowly resolved into a blurred image I vaguely recognized to be Zoe. Her face was an object lesson in concern. “What happened?” she asked.
“I, uh…” I massaged my eyelids with finger and thumb, “didn’t want to miss the reset point.”
“Jesus,” Maddix said. “I’m sure you could’ve erred a second or two on the short side.”
I shook my head and pointed at the stairwell. “Soldiers down there.” Strength and clarity returned as the effects of my big blink faded. “Didn’t want to accidentally drop you in on them.”
“I could have handled them,” Maddix said, entirely overconfident in his abilities.
“Does getting shot qualify as handling them?” Zoe asked, her look of concern for me ebbing as my equilibrium returned.
Maddix crossed his arms with feigned indignation. “Eventually that’s gonna get old.”
Zoe shrugged. “Kae’s seen the future. Any sign of that joke losing its luster?”
“Not at all,” I confirmed.
Maddix sighed and asked, “Where am I in the search?”
Which suddenly reminded me that we’d found Abigail. Though judging by Maddix’s words before the last blink, I wasn’t going to like what we found.
“You found her on the fourteenth floor.”
Maddix beamed like a toddler mastering the toilet for the first time.
“You said something about soldiers down there?” Zoe asked, gesturing with her rifle.
“Six.”
“On it,” she said, her eyes clouding over. And then with an utter lack of pomp or circumstance, she vanished. My brain shied away like a skittish horse from a snake, trying to make sense of what could only be conceptualized as a smoke and mirror type illusion.
And then Zoe’s voice chirped in my earpiece, “All clear.”
Maddix and I stared at one another, dumbfounded as always following a long pause.
At the bottom of the stairwell, Zoe stood with eerie nonchalance over the bodies of six Crask Incorporated soldiers lying unconscious in a variety of uncomfortable positions.
Maddix surveyed the controlled carnage and said, “Took you long enough.”
Zoe shrugged. “Something, something, something…at least I didn’t get shot.”
“Gah.” Maddix threw his hands in the air. “You’re not even trying anymore.”
Chapter Eight
THEN
Matilda squatted over a battlefield of red, green, and blue building blocks assembled in a rough approximation of Central’s campus—albeit more colorful than the actual facility, which only employed two tones in its color wheel: beige and beiger.
Abigail sat in a chair painted nuclear pink while I knelt in an opening of blocks indicating the southwest quad.
“Mati, I’d like you to meet my friend,” I said. “Her name’s Abigail.”
Matilda cocked her head to the side and froze as though listening for something far off. Her lips pursed, creating crow’s feet of wrinkles that forked across her cheeks like dry lightning.
“Abigail,” she repeated quietly. “Did she bring me a present?”
I smiled and nodded to Abi, who held out a closed fist. “I sure did.”
Matilda studied the outstretched hand dubiously. Her fingers tapped Abi’s knuckles twice. “What is it?”
“A secret,” Abi whispered. “Can you keep a secret?”
Matilda nodded once, twice, and then a third time; each occasion gaining in momentum and decisiveness. “I can keep a secret. I have lots of secrets.” Matilda smiled with a youthful deviousness entirely out of place on her middle-aged facade.
She jabbed her empty hand out, holding it below Abi’s nose, and closed her eyes. Abi placed a small conch shell in her palm. When Matilda’s eyes opened, they went impossibly wide. She jumped to her feet, squeaking and grunting with unbridled excitement. Clutching the shell to her ear, she did a half-run, half-skip maneuver across the room.
Matilda pulled a shoebox off the shelf and skip-ran back, the contents shifting and clattering around inside. She placed the box on the table beside Abigail and lifted the lid, exposing a cache of hundreds of shells spanning a broad spectrum of sizes and coloration.
“What’s wrong with her?” Abi finally whispered in my ear after many long minutes of silence.
“She blinked back beyond the reality barrier,” I said, watching the woman with a child’s mind carefully arranging her shells on the table.
“But why is she like this?”
“Nobody really knows.” I shrugged. “You can’t tamper with reality once it’s solid. This—” I gestured to Matilda, lost in her world of Conchology, “—seems to be the universe’s failsafe to prevent paradoxes. Going back thirty-two seconds doesn’t introduce a significant enough change to the time-space continuum because everything is still in flux. But if you go beyond that, the timeline splits—” I gestured with two fingers in opposite directions, “—creating tributaries of time, alternative reality loops that you cycle through indefinitely.”
“That still doesn’t explain what happened to her,” Abigail said.
“There’s something like a temporal black hole beyond the barrier. An inertia that sucks you in. All of you.” I gestured to Matilda. “What’s left behind is just a blank slate.”
“So somewhere out there, Matilda’s mind is still alive and conscious?”
“Possibly, but if so, she’s locked in.” I eyed Matilda sadly, remembering the person she’d once been: my own mentor.
Abigail worried at the hem of her shirt, a question etched itself in the wrinkles of her forehead. “What about the Chosen’s Gift?”
I tried hard not to sigh audibly. The billion dollar publicity stunt Crask had used to create a religion around time travel had more or less been the thorn in my side since joining Central.
“That’s quasi-religious nonsense Lionel Crask uses to prey on vulnerable Chronos,” I said calmly. “Reality does not allow paradoxes. Wherever Matilda is, it’s not because God wanted to give her a second chance. She’s stuck in a loop. A prisoner of time and her own mind.” I reached out and stroked Mati’s head; she barely registered my touch. “This is why you don’t go beyond the reality barrier.”
“Then why’d she do it?” Abigail asked.
I inhaled slowly through my nostrils. “That’s a conversation for another day.”
Chapter Nine
NOW
It took six minutes, twelve blinks, and one bullet to Maddix’s thigh to descend the fourteen floors and find Abigail’s holding cell. My first impression was that it didn’t
look much like a holding cell at all.
Her living quarters—though located inside a flying hunk of metal where space was a priceless commodity—were lavishly appointed with glossy wood floors, scarlet curtains cut from a material that looked an awful lot like velour, and an enormous bay window angled out and down to offer a truly spectacular view of the wind-turbine farm above Hong Kong.
Maddix emerged from the kitchen, his rifle pointed at the floor, eating a genetically modified strawberry the size and shape of a banana. “Are we sure she’s Crask’s prisoner?”
“What?” I said with enough annoyance to cover for the lack of confidence I suddenly felt. “Now you think she chose to come here, too?”
Maddix’s eyes pinballed between Zoe and me. “Well, she does have a Jacuzzi,” he said, jerking a thumb at the bedroom.
“So?”
“All I’m saying is they don’t usually give prisoners stuff like that. In my experience, there should be more iron bars, concrete walls, and something should most definitely smell like urine.”
I clenched my jaw and turned without another word. I marched into a room which could have passed for a guest bedroom had it not been for the enormous vertical glass chamber filled with a phosphorescent blue, tachyon-enriched fluid sitting where a bed should have been. I put a hand to the glass wall moist with droplets of condensation and peered at the body floating inside.
Abigail.
“Get her out of there and let’s see what the hell is going on,” I said, but Zoe was already seated at the control panel, her hands blurring over a flickering display with more dials and levers than a spaceship. “I want answers.”
Chapter Ten
THEN
Maddix blitzed into the conference room, swooped the mug of what he thought was hot coffee from my hand, and stole a seat on the opposite side of Zoe.
“Good of you to join us, Maddix,” I called out from the head of the table.
“Sorry.” Maddix held his cup in the air and gave a wink. “Had to grab some cof—” His smirk dropped to the floor with satisfying quickness as he eyed the empty mug. “Damn. You blinked, huh?”
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 3