No. Rocket Royd came here to look for something nearby.
“My friend Eli’s nest-sire kept a dwelling near here, a place for research and experimentation. And it was this destination I headed for after taking leave of the —”
“Fish!”
I turn to the new human voice. I can see him through the bars. He is a boy, younger than Eli, his eyes wider, his hair darker, more tangled. He seems a little, not gerk-skizzy, but klnndd, frightened—and somehow a little harder, too. Like he is trying to be old before he’s ready.
He also has long strands of human hair coming out of his young face, trailing in front of him.
The Bearded Boy, Silver Eye tells me. He’s part of the carnival, too.
“Fish for dinner!” He has a metal container in his hands, and he throws us whole fish, entire aquatic life forms, with scales and tentacles, most of them quite dead, into the cages in front of us.
“So you’re the new guy,” the Bearded Boy says to me. “The Dragon Man.”
The Dragon Man. Impressive.
“Rocket told me about you. Well, don’t breathe fire on this stuff; you’ll overcook it!” He laughs.
“That is what you human mammals refer to as a joke, correct? And as long as I am here in jail, is it possible to get another name? Such a re-naming wouldn’t be allowed on Saurius Prime, but here on Earth Orange, I should take full advantage of being an outlaw.”
“Eat!” he snaps back at me. “Don’t talk! We’re moving out. And that’s all you need to know for now.”
Moving where?
“You don’t talk either!” he snaps at the wolf. “I told you it spooks me when you get into my head like that! I don’t want any other voices there! And we’re movin’ to wherever Rocket wants to go next. He said something about home, that’s all I know. Huh. Like anyone really has a home anymore.” The Bearded Boy turns to huff-stomp away, but then turns back to us, his eyes still scared, but needing, perhaps, to talk to someone anyway. He stares at me a couple moments longer. “You don’t look so scary in there. No sudden moves, though, or I’ll get Strong Bess to come in here. Rocket might be right. Maybe he’s finally caught a real moneymaker with you.”
The Bearded Boy approaches again. “Or maybe you’re just somebody in a suit.” He takes a stick and pokes it through the bars of my cage.
“Oww!” I yell.
“Even if you are a dragon man, don’t get any big ideas. You’re not the star of the show yet.”
Then the Bearded Boy walks away. The fish he threw at me is already starting to smell.
I’ll take it, if you’re not hungry. Food is hard to come by here. You should try to get some sleep before we move again. We’ll be leaving in the morning.
“Does that boy think I’m a slaversaur, too? Some kind of outlaw Gwangi that wants to hurt him?”
No, Silver Eye tells me. He’s afraid Rocket won’t need him in the carnival anymore. He’s always scared he’s going to be replaced. And he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. You mentioned the place we’re camped now is called Wolf House. Do you know if these great ruins were caused in some war between wolves and men?
“I don’t think so. Has there been such a war?”
They have waged war against us for thousands of their years. Are these the ruins where Rocket captured you?
“No. Close to here, though. I was revisiting the house of my deep friends, and I let my guard down.”
How?
“I was standing in my friend Eli’s room, and it happened when my attention was caught by this.” I take the folded sheets of paper from my pocket — a once-standard medium for communication between humans, but now rarely used except by publications like the National Weekly Truth — that I found next to Eli’s old bed.
It has his name on it: ELI.
“I believe this is what humans call a ‘letter.’ It is from an old nest-friend of Eli’s named Andy. And I need to find a way to deliver it.”
Chapter Seven
Thea: Time Bandits
February 2020 C.E.
I know that I am sick, that I am seeing with what we called pox eyes back in Alexandria, when I witness Mr. Howe and Eli fall out of the sky into my room.
Or at least, through the ceiling. And on to the floor.
“The shortcuts around this place” Mr. Howe says to Eli, wiping himself off, “aren’t what they used to be.” Both of them are wet, almost muddy.
“Being swept away by all that seawater didn’t help,” Eli adds.
It’s already quite a vivid fever dream.
“Welcome back, Mr. Howe,” says the number lady. Which number did she say she was, again? “We’ve been working on the tunnels and pipes since you’ve been away, trying to make them more secure. As you would have wanted, old friend. After all, we can’t have people wandering around here at will, trying to extract people better left under our protection.”
For an “old friend”, Mr. Howe doesn’t seem very happy to see her. But she keeps talking. “Once upon a time, you would have appreciated that. Especially when we have guests like him” — she points to Eli — “who won’t stay put.”
“His not staying put,” Mr. Howe says, “is what made him a chronological asset, remember?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“I think I twisted my ankle,” Mr. Howe replies.
“It’s hide-and-peek!” I say, and giggle, realizing at last what game we are playing, and wondering why everyone seems to be getting it wrong.
Besides, since it’s my dream, I think we should have some fun.
Everyone looks at me with strange expressions, as if they don’t understand what’s really happening.
Next to the number lady are the men known as the two Twenty-Fives. They had been waiting with me for some time, since they found Eli’s confinement chamber empty, convinced that Eli, and Mr. Howe, would eventually show up here, looking for me.
Here in Alexandria. In the library. Where I, in turn, have been waiting for Mother to come back, because I believe I have a late summer chill. That’s why I’m shivering.
Perhaps we should wait, till everyone’s back—safe and home—and this chill goes away, before we have our party.
The entire time the number lady has been waiting with me, she didn’t make any lemon juice with honey like Mother would have. She did bring in a physic or two to look at me—and pry my eyes open and feel my skin—but none appeared to have heard of Serapis, the healing god, and whether I fully believe in Serapis or not, I’m not against bolstering the celestial odds in my favor by whatever means necess—
Ulp.
Oh.
“Thea!”
I believe I have just vomited. Much the way Eli does, after time-traveling. Only a little worse.
Which is funny because Eli is here and he hasn’t time-traveled at all.
It’s very funny.
I start laughing.
“Thea!” It’s Eli again. He’s holding me up now. “Will somebody help her?”
All the grownups look at each other. Finally, one of the Twenty-Fives hands Eli some kind of rag, and he begins wiping my face.
“I’m waiting for Mother, Eli.”
“Your mother isn’t here, Thea.”
“Perhaps she’s with your mother then?”
“Neither of our moms are here. We need to clean you up.”
“Then maybe you can find Sally for me. Unless she’s left, of course.”
“You’re shaking, Thea. I think you should lie down.”
“Sally?” The number lady asks me. She’s making notes of things in a little device in her hands.
“Sally Hemings,” Eli explains. Why would he have to explain a thing like that?
“She’s an Ethiopian princess,” I tell the number lady.
“The slave? Thomas Jefferson’s slave? Then you met her, too?” Her note-taking fingers move a little faster now.
“Can we just try and help my friend? Please?”
“What
do you think we should do, young Mr. Sands?” the number lady is asking. “Perhaps she’d be a little less agitated if you hadn’t burst in and startled her like this.”
“She’s not agitated; she’s sick! She has slow pox. Doesn’t she?”
I laugh again, thinking of Mother helping pox victims back in Alexandria.
“The slow pox plays hide-and-peek, too!” I say, remembering what Mother found out about it — how it can hide in a body for years, then suddenly appear, like the goddess Isis after one of her magic spells.
“Does it?” the number lady asks, making another note. “These days, it doesn’t ‘peek’ anymore unless we want it to. And we certainly didn’t want it to peek at you.”
“Since you’ve gone to all the trouble to wait for me here, Sheila,” Mr. Howe says while he’s still bent over, rubbing his ankle, “maybe you should take this opportunity to go ahead and tell them the truth.”
“You’re just upset over hurting your foot,” the number lady says. “Besides, which truth would you have me tell them? You should know there are many to choose from. You helped us create a lot of them.”
“I didn’t create the disease!” Mr. Howe tries to put weight on his sore ankle. “Ow.”
“Not originally, no,” she replies.
“Maybe you should help him,” I say to Eli, pointing at Mr. Howe.
“You have a fever, Thea,” the number lady answers instead. “Perhaps your young friend is right. Maybe you should lie down.”
“And miss hide-and-peek?”
And then Mr. Howe, shifting on his feet, decides to tell us a story: “All right then, Sheila. Maybe I’ll fill them in. The reintroduction of slow pox was a separate project. It seemed like a perfect disease: it moved slowly, wasn’t usually fatal, but could be —if we needed it to be. People feared it, when they had to.
“So, if something went wrong somewhere, or with something else, we’d have a cover story, a way to give people a smaller panic about something that could be controlled, instead of a larger panic about something that was far more dangerous. You can’t control people if they’re either too happy or too hysterical. They don’t listen well, in either circumstance.
“And we needed them to listen, Eli. Things have been spinning out of control for a long time. In the years right before you were born, with each bomb explosion, each new disease outbreak, each new shock—that the oil was running out, the weather was changing, the currency wasn’t stable, whatever it was— with each reversal, people grew more terrified. So terrified that soon there would’ve been no way left to run a country, or an economy. Who’s going to go to work if they think riots could break out at any moment, their city could erupt in flames, or their children won’t be safe if they go away?”
“Sometimes they’re not safe if the grownups stay. Sometimes grownups harm children on purpose. I’ve seen it. You’ve even done it to me.”
Eli speaks and I giggle again, even though this is serious, because even as he was speaking those words out loud, they were in my head. And I was thinking of another dream, a nightmare I had, about a soldier in a field, leveling his weapon at a mother and a child, because he had orders from some other grownup, part of the dream I had during a time of war, in a place called Peenemünde…
I don’t think that was a dream. “What kind of story is this?” I ask Mr. Howe.
Everyone turns to look at me. Again.
You know, a voice tells me. A voice. The voice! The lingo-spot voice is back! I haven’t heard it in…
Centuries! Since I was with Sally.
“What do I know?” I say out loud.
“You both know more than ninety-nine percent of the so-called grownups on this planet, because of what you’ve seen,” the number lady says. “That’s what makes you what our friend Howe calls ‘assets.’ That’s also what makes you dangerous. You know that certain things are possible, things that would terrify most people, who want to be left alone to live out their lives.”
“Like I did?” Eli asks. This time, I don’t giggle.
“You have a different kind of life,” the number lady tells him. “That’s why we need you.”
“You made it different!” Eli yells at them.
“No, Eli. You are different. The way your body’s made. The atoms in it. Something in you that allows you to time-travel and come back in one piece. Your body is its own time machine. We’ve never seen that before.”
“What is it that you have seen before?”
The number lady doesn’t answer. Maybe she wants Eli to do the guessing game!
“I throw up all the time,” he adds.
“What she’s trying to tell you,” Mr. Howe goes on, “is that not just anybody can be a Danger Boy, or a Danger Girl.” And he looks at me and causes me to laugh again, except the laughter turns into a fit of coughing, and I can’t hear anything else for a moment, and when I can hear, Eli is back to yelling again.
“You blew apart my family, and all you’ve done is mess up the whole entire world! And the lives of everyone in it!”
“And that’s why we needed slow pox, Eli,” Mr. Howe tells him. “In a strange way, when people think slow pox is the biggest problem they have, people are reassured.”
“Pretend, pretend! I knew it!” I try to clap my hands, and wind up slipping out of Eli’s arms, back on to the floor.
It hurts.
This party isn’t so fun anymore.
“Mother is here now?” I ask.
“No.” The number lady looks somewhere else when she speaks.
“When did her English get this good?” Mr. Howe wonders.
You know.
“She learns fast,” Eli says. He’s pulling me up from the floor, but I am perspiring a lot and I keep slipping out of his hands.
We are all trying to keep from slipping from each other’s hands.
“It’s all slipping out of our hands,” Mr. Howe says to the number lady.
“Hah!” I say. It’s a party once more.
You know, the voice repeats to me.
“Can someone please help me get her on the bed?” Eli really wants me to take another nap, but then I’d miss everything.
“Why is she laughing so much?” Mr. Howe asks, because he doesn’t understand this is a festival.
“It’s her fever,” the number lady says.
“From slow pox,” Eli insists.
“No, from Chronological Displacement Syndrome. Which you and your friends are helping us discover,” the number lady says. “Another reason we can’t let you go, Eli. The time-traveling we’ve already done — you and your friends have already done — has unleashed unpredictable results throughout history. We thought history was fixed, finished…”
“But it turns out to be in quantum flux,” Mr. Howe finishes.
“And who have you been listening to?” the number lady asks him
“That’s why I had to come back,” Mr. Howe says. “To try and fix this…this mess we all helped make.”
“You never complained before,” the number lady says.
“You’re saying time travel is making her sick?” Eli asks. “It’s not. This isn’t Chrono-whatever. It’s slow pox! She has it!”
“Oh, this is silly,” the number lady says. “Look, I’ll show you.”
Very fast, moving like one of the warriors from the Eastern lands, the number lady picks up a needle and shoves it into my arm.
“Owww!”
“Hey!” Eli yells.
“Bad party!” I shout.
“Sheila!” Mr. Howe shouts back, but not at me.
“Okay,” the number lady says, quite calm about jabbing me. She holds up the needle, which has drained a little of the blood from my arm.
“We know how to keep slow pox controlled, how to detect it. If she’s positive, if she had it, which she doesn’t, this strip would turn green. If she’s negative, which she is, this strip will turn yellow.”
She drops my blood on the paper—paper like a tiny scroll, though
I can’t recall if there were ever such small scrolls in the library at Alexandria, and whether we ever saved any.
After my blood hits the paper, it turns purple. Scarlet purple! One of my favorite colors!
“What does that mean?” Eli says.
“Oh hell,” the number lady says.
“What does it mean!” Eli says to Mr. Howe.
“She’s caught a strain of slow pox that wasn’t engineered by us,” Mr. Howe replies. “Real slow pox. Wild slow pox.”
“But I thought you said —”
“It’s exactly what I was afraid of. We wanted slow pox as a form of control. We made a strain that was even easier to use. But we’ve lost control of it.” Mr. Howe looks at Eli, looks like he might start crying, and everything about this party seems to be falling apart all at once. So if this is all just a dream, I should plan on waking up soon.
“I’m sorry, Eli,” he adds.
“I want everybody in this room to —”
But before the number lady can finish, the WUMP! WUMP! WUMP! comes again, only louder, much louder. Maybe the musicians from the court are here for the party, the birthday party, the week-long festival, except they’re playing badly out of tune.
The door —the one on the wall — opens up, and Eli’s father runs through it, just in time for our party.
“Dad!?”
Eli’s father looks at his son. “Eli! My God. I didn’t realize —” He grabs Eli and squeezes him close, the way Mother would do to me. It’s the number lady who pulls them apart. Eli’s father looks at her. “There’s been another breech.”
“I know that!” She holds up the purple paper. “Look at this!”
“No. I mean in the time-sphere room. Somebody broke in. And went through.”
“A.J.?” Mr. Howe asks, though he says it in the way people ask questions when they already know—
You know.
“Dad! What are you doing here?” Eli asks his father, who is also invited to my party. “Have you been here the whole time?”
“Eli, I —”
“The whole time they’ve kept me locked up?”
“Hide-and-peek!” I say again.
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