I toasted him with the steaming cup of coffee I’d kept hidden in my other hand.
“Cheater,” he grumbled.
“All right, listen up,” I said, gesturing to the screen on my right projecting satellite imagery of Haiti’s jungle-infested coastline. “Crask set up camp here about six weeks ago.” The view zoomed into the densely packed foliage, revealing a squat concrete bunker beneath. “Since then we’ve been detecting huge fluctuations in the tachyon output for this entire region. We’re going in to figure out why.”
“I really hate the jungle,” Maddix said. “Mosquitoes and hea—”
“Colby,” I interrupted, locking eyes with the fly-boy stuffing his face with pastries at the snack table in the back corner. “Go get our chariot ready. Pack light, standard recon package.” He snapped a salute with donut in hand before ducking out of the room.
I dragged my gaze over the room’s remaining occupants: Maddix was kicked back dangerously far in his chair, boots on the Formica table; Zoe’s gaze was locked on the data-pad in her hand; and Taylor and Abigail were sitting close enough for their shoulders to touch.
Taylor was already suffering from a handful of premature wrinkles and a spattering of silver hairs, but Abigail didn’t seem to mind. She’d married the boy-turned-man-overnight and never looked back, even as Taylor’s blitzing pulled his body ever faster into old age. They had one of those rare relationships that made everybody else in the room simultaneously jealous and nauseous.
That they’d worked the system to get assigned to the same team indicated just how desperate Central was for good Chronos. Fortunately, their relationship had never affected their performance in the field, and I’d never had a reason to get out the hose.
“This is just a sneak-and-peek to confirm what we think we already know about this facility.” I cued up the schematics Administration had dredged up that morning. “Maddix and I will lead the sweep. Twenty second blinks, in and out.”
I highlighted an area on the map and said, “Taylor and Abigail, you’re running a secondary sweep around the perimeter.” Abigail patted Taylor’s hand, but her expression remained frozen and professional.
“Zoe, you’ll stay on the horse with Colby. We’ll call you if things go sideways, but—” I gave Maddix a pointed look, “—nobody’s getting shot on this one. Understand?”
“Will the bad guys be playing by those same rules?” Maddix asked.
“Let’s try not to find out,” I said.
Chapter Eleven
NOW
Abigail spewed up a mouthful of blue fluid onto the dark wooden floor. It smelled vaguely of vinegar.
I supported her head, stroking slimy black curls of hair from her face. “It’s all right, just breathe.”
Her eyelids fluttered open, revealing pupils that pulsed with unnatural brilliance. Two phosphorescent orbs emitting an impossible blue. Icy dread slithered through my veins, worming its way into my heart.
“Oh my god,” Zoe said, putting to words the shock I myself felt.
“She’s full up on so many tachyons that her eyes are literally glowing blue,” Maddix said, mastering his own shock by dumbly vocalizing the obvious. “Shouldn’t her body have rejected them by now?”
“Kae, this isn’t right,” Zoe confirmed. “We should go.”
“Grab her legs,” I said.
“Actually,” Maddix said, lifting an eyebrow, “I don’t think we should.”
“You’re not here to think.” I shot back. “Grab her legs. Now!”
Zoe put a hand on my shoulder and opened her mouth to say something, but Abigail beat her to it. “Kae? Is that you?”
“Yeah, Abi,” I said, stroking her forehead. “It’s me. Don’t worry, we’re gonna get you out of here.”
Abi’s smooth skin furrowed in concentration as she shook her head. Then all at once, clarity resolved in those unholy blue eyes and she said, “No. You’re not.”
Her fist moved in a blur, fast as any Blitzer. An eruption of pain and flickering fireflies burst in my skull.
On my back, I stared up at the ceiling twirling round and around, wondering how I’d gotten there. Above me, flashes of movement flickered in and out of my vision. Footsteps squeaked on the floor made slippery from Abigail’s blue vomit.
Zoe stood beside me, her lips pulled into a thin grimace of concentration, her eyes white like snow. “She won’t let me pause.”
I didn’t stop to consider how that was even possible; with the wall for support, I struggled to my feet. There was a resounding crack like bone snapping, followed shortly thereafter by a black shape flying out through the open doorway and into the living room, stopping only when its flight path intersected a chestnut liquor cabinet. Maddix appeared in the broken debris.
I stumbled out of the room and dropped to a knee beside him. “Are you okay?”
He grunted and coughed up a small puddle of blood onto a throw rug. “I hope that leaves a stain,” he said, grinning through carmine-stained teeth.
“Don’t bother blinking back, Kae,” Abi called out from behind me.
I turned quickly and my head thanked me for the effort by swimming frantically. Abi stood in the doorway to the tachyon bath chamber with her arm wrapped around Zoe’s throat. Zoe clawed at the young girl’s forearm, teeth bared from exertion; Abi hardly seemed to notice.
“Abi, what are you doing?” I asked, moving toward her slowly, hands out to my side to show her I wasn’t a threat. Which I probably wasn’t considering how quickly she’d neutralized both Maddix and Zoe. “We came to rescue you.”
Abigail rolled her eyes with exasperation. An entirely normal gesture for her, minus the fact she was threatening to pop Zoe’s head like a pimple. “You’re way too late for that.”
“Help me understand what’s going on here, Abigail.”
“How do you do it, Kae? How can you go on after everything you’ve seen?” Abi’s ice blue eyes thrummed. “You said it would get easier. You said “time heals all wounds,” but that was a lie. You never told me the truth.”
Chapter Twelve
THEN
The electrocardiograph beside Abigail’s bed emitted a slow, rhythmic beep in time with her pulse. I lost myself in that electric tone, letting it absorb me so I wouldn’t have to acknowledge the thoughts careening around my skull.
Sometimes nothing goes according to plan. Not your plan, at least.
The ICU’s off-white walls had the granulated textures of an egg shell. So bland, so sterile.
Abigail didn’t care. She’d just lain there for hours on end, rolled up in the fetal position, twirling the five multi-colored bands adorning her wrist—one for each year she and Taylor had spent at Central together. Slowly she was coming to terms with the fact that there would be no more new bands.
There’s a long bureaucratic list of paperwork, briefings, hearings, and debriefings following the death of an operative in the field. All to simply figure out what went wrong, what could have been done differently, and more importantly, in Administration’s eyes, who’s to blame.
Abigail wasn’t ready, it had been less than forty-eight hours since Haiti. Not even two days since she’d lost Taylor, but Administration wanted answers. They needed to file their reports, to distill a life lost into a couple hundred words of black ink and paper.
“Abigail,” I said softly, placing my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t flinch, though that might have been preferred to how numbly she just lay there. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to.” Her voice lacked any fluctuation, an eerie monotone drone.
I swallowed hard. If I couldn’t get her talking, Admin would send somebody else. I had to push. “When Maddix got you, you were unconscious, but we couldn’t find any injuries, no trauma. The doctors here can’t find anything wrong either,” I said. “Tell me what happened to you out there.”
She answered me with silence and a slightly elevated heart rate mimicked by the beeping EKG.
Eventually she
said, “You never told me why you joined Central.”
It’d been a long time since I’d thought about that. The motivation that drove me to Central had eventually proved itself to be a combination of youthful naivety, wishful thinking, and a misplaced desire for parental approval.
I’d buried those reasons beneath years of routine and tried not to look back.
“I wanted to save lives,” I said.
“Never mind.” Abigail sighed, sensing my platitude. She was searching for a deeper connection, something to fill the void Taylor had left.
“My brother served in the Army,” I said, revisiting a memory that time had robbed of its potency. I felt numb and somehow that made it worse. “He was on a peacekeeping mission, defending a food refinery from some third world warlord with dreams of being king.”
“He was time-locked?”
I nodded. “The Warlord purchased three Chrono-mercenaries from Crask. And that’s all it took; they slaughtered my brother’s entire platoon.” I paused, fingers twisted up in the thin sheets covering Abi’s bed. “My dad never looked at me the same way again. I figured he blamed me for not being there to save my brother, but after a couple years here at Central I realized it wasn’t that; I was just another Chrono to him, no different than the one who murdered my brother.”
“Do you still miss him? Your brother, I mean?”
I was ashamed to admit I rarely thought about him anymore. Time had slowly, minute by minute, stolen his memory from me.
“Sometimes,” I said, unsure if that was the answer she wanted to hear.
Abi nodded, tears rolling down her cheek. After a long while she said, “I see Taylor whenever I close my eyes, but he’s always covered in blood. I can’t remember him before that moment.”
I recalled Abi, lying curled up in the leaves beside Taylor’s body where we’d found her soaked in his blood. The bullet had caught him in the throat; he was dead seconds after hitting the ground. An awful mess.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
I stroked her hair as she silently sobbed.
“I keep thinking this is all a bad dream. That I’m gonna wake up at any moment in my own bed and he’ll be there, hogging the blankets, smelly breath and snoring and…” Her voice hitched, stumbling over itself.
I didn’t know what to say or where to begin. I sat there, failing her a little more with each passing second.
“It’ll get easier, Abi. Just give it time.” I said the words because that’s what you’re supposed to say. But in my heart, I knew it was a lie.
I think she knew, too.
Chapter Thirteen
NOW
“I watched Taylor die forty-seven times.” Abi’s sudden calm was chilling, utterly unaffected by Zoe struggling against her grip. “We swept the perimeter like you told us to. Everything was fine, and then it wasn’t. All it took was a second, just one, for everything to break.
“He was just…laying there. Staring up at me with those eyes, begging me to help. His lips were moving, but nothing came out. I covered the hole with my fingers, but there was so much blood and it was so hot. It burned. I was falling down this bottomless pit inside myself, Kae. I couldn’t control it. You never taught me how to control something like that.”
Abigail paused, her chest heaving with the remembrance of raw pain still so fresh. “My body kept blinking back; four seconds each time. Right before the gunshot. I relived that moment over and over and over…If only I could have gone one second further—” Abi held up a single trembling finger, “—I could have shoved him out of the way.”
Abi’s confession tore at me. I hadn’t realized how badly she’d been hurt that night. Perhaps part of me hadn’t wanted to know. Hadn’t wanted to carry the burden of that knowledge.
“Eventually I just cracked. I broke.” Abigail looked up, her pupils were flaring spheres of sapphire. “I was too weak to save him. But not anymore.”
Rivulets of tachyon-enriched fluid dripped from her hair. Falling slowly in thick droplets. Zoe was right, she hadn’t been taken—she’d come to Crask to change the past.
“Abi, you can’t do it. You can’t go back.”
“Why not?” she said defiantly.
“Because it’s an infinite loop.”
“That’s what you say, but you could be wrong. Crask says you’re wrong.”
“He’s using you. You know that!”
“Honestly, it doesn’t even matter,” Abigail said. She suddenly seemed so old, so tired. “It can’t be any worse than staying. At least this way I’ll get to see him again.”
“Please, Abi,” I pleaded, desperate to find the right combination of words that would make her see reason. “Don’t do this—”
“Sorry about your ribs, Maddix.”
Maddix made a noise not unlike a chuckle.
“I’m sorry for all of this. I knew you guys would try and stop me, but I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. You’re all family.”
My mouth moved but nothing came out.
Abigail smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen her wear. “Goodbye, Kae.” And then she shoved Zoe away.
The smile vanished along with the light in her eyes in an instant. Abigail stood as still as a mannequin, her eyes scanning, wide and suddenly frightened. The blue fire had been quenched, her tachyons used up in a single massive blink. No sign of her once fierce intelligence, or the heart so innocent it could only break beneath the strain of a world too cruel.
All that remained was the shell of a friend and a past I couldn’t fix.
Chapter Fourteen
NOW
“Get up, Maddix. We’re leaving,” Zoe said, striding to the door through which we’d entered. It was locked. “Shit.”
I stared numbly at Abigail’s vacant expression, swimming through thoughts of how I’d failed her. Zoe shook me hard.
“Kae, I need you,” she said. “Don’t fall apart on me, okay?”
I nodded slowly, forcing away the thoughts of Abigail holding me paralyzed.
Lionel Crask’s overly enunciated voice piped into the room via invisible speakers. “Agent Kwon, you and your team are no longer welcome here.”
“Were we ever?” Maddix said, grunting to his feet and clutching his ribs.
“Young Abigail requested an opportunity to say goodbye face to face,” Crask said. “Your presence has fulfilled that contractual obligation. Now I would like you to leave.”
“You went too far, Crask,” I said through gritted teeth. “Abigail was emotionally unstable. You took advantage of that. You killed her.”
“She and I had a business arrangement; she wanted to go back and I needed another blinker. We both got what we wanted.”
“You handed her a loaded gun.”
“Yes, I did,” Crask agreed. “I gave her the strength to claim her legacy. To become mo-”
“Save your proselytizing for someone who’ll actually buy it. You’re just a power hungry thug preying on the vulnerable.”
“Every ecosystem has a predator, I suppose,” he said unapologetically.
I shook my head, frustrated not so much with Crask and what he’d done, but with myself and what I hadn’t. I should have seen it coming. I should have done more.
“Now,” Crask continued, “per my contract with Abigail, her body is now the property of Crask Incorporated.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think we’re giving her to you.”
“It goes without saying that he’s out of his mind,” Maddix said, searching the room alongside Zoe for some means of escape.
Crask ignored Maddix and said, “Agent Kwon, I sealed your compartment well over a minute ago while you were preoccupied with Abigail. Blinking will do you no good.” A hidden wall panel slid back, revealing a trio of paralysis rings. “Now, please see yourselves over to the detainment bands, and we’ll see about getting you back to your ship in one piece.”
“We’re not gonna do that.” Maddix stepped away from the wall. “Right?”
“Nope,” Zoe agreed. “Definitely not.”
“Then I’ll vent the room of oxygen, wait until you pass out, and then my men will detain you,” Crask said. “But understand, I’ve lost a dozen good followers on account of this farewell meeting. That was the price of doing business. I hold no ill will towards any of you. I’m prepared to let you leave, unharmed, if onl—”
“I’m not giving you Abigail.”
“She is not yours to give. You have no bargaining power here. You are trespassing on my property, you live at my discretion. For the sake of what remains of your team, do the smart thing and make this easy on yourselves.”
“Abi is still a part of my team.”
Crask’s laugh came high and tinny through the speakers. “Abigail is gone. You owe h—”
“Is anybody else tired of listening to this guy?” Zoe asked, removing a silver cylinder from her bandolier. Maddix raised his hand.
“I wouldn’t recomm—” Crask began to say.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Resistance is futile. We’ve heard it before.” Zoe thumbed the thermobaric grenade and tossed it at the downward slanting window with the stellar view of Hong Kong, and then she tackled me into the bathroom.
Maddix blitzed over to Abigail, picked her up, and dove for the tachyon bath chamber.
The explosion was deafening. My eardrums popped from the violent shift in pressure. I covered my head; it didn’t help. It felt as though somebody were jamming knitting needles through my ear canal and stirring my brain.
Somebody shook me. I opened my eyes and Zoe slapped me, which did nothing for the ache in my skull, but did snap me back to a semblance of coherency. She yanked me to my feet and dragged me to the jagged hole ripped in Haven’s hull. Maddix appeared on my right, carrying Abigail over his shoulder.
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 4