by Chloe Garner
“Have you even tried it?” Jason asked.
“And sleeping,” Kelly said. “You spend a third of your life asleep.”
Jason looked the kid up and down.
“You really don’t understand anything, do you?” he asked. Kelly shook his head.
“And the longer I’m here, the less I understand. Sam. Sam made sense to me. Protecting her. But the rest of this…”
“This is life, kid,” Jason said, motioning to the bar with his fresh glass. “This is what people are. This is what they do. If you ask me, this is what’s important.”
“Getting drunk while your girlfriend dances with someone else?” Kelly asked. Jason looked over his shoulder.
“She isn’t my girlfriend,” he said, watching as Kara pressed herself against a heavy man with hairy tattoos on his arms. “Though she does normally have better taste.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Kelly asked. Jason frowned at Kelly.
“Really?” he asked. The kid shrugged, and Jason shook his head.
“You really aren’t ever going to understand.”
He was bored, really. They’d driven a long way to get here, and the teenage girls had been anti-climactic. He wanted to go find a hotel and go to bed with Kara, but it was too early, and Kara was still having fun. More than that, it felt odd, settling down like that. For so many years, he’d only seen Kara a couple of times a year. Things had always been explosive, exciting. They’d get drunk and screw all night, then he’d wake up in the morning and she’d be gone, off on another kill or off with someone else. And he’d find a girl who suited his tastes and who liked the look of him, and he never worried about what Kara was up to.
Now, Kara was there every morning when he got up. They spent the whole day together. They’d done it for a couple of months while Sam and Samantha had been on their honeymoon, and now they were doing it again.
And he was content with it.
Happy.
It wasn’t that he was any less preoccupied with getting his hands on her. Her body against his was still every bit as satisfying as it had ever been.
It was that he knew it was coming, and he could wait.
He’d never been able to wait, before. That was one of the mesmerizing parts of their dance. Putting it off, minute by minute, both knowing.
And now… It felt like cheating. Like a shortcut.
Like any moment one of them was going to look and realize they were disappointed. That the anticipation being gone was a loss one of them wasn’t going to be willing to tolerate any more, and it would end.
They would go back to what they’d been before, exciting, frenetic, occasional.
He didn’t know what his life would look like, if she went back to hers. His had kind of blown up and vanished while he hadn’t been looking.
She was laughing, but it was the fake laugh, the one she used when she was just counting time until the next thing. The guy didn’t have a shot.
Tonight, he’d never had a shot.
Jason got up.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. He wasn’t sure if Kelly heard him. He crossed the room and grabbed Kara’s hand.
“Dance with me,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” the hairy man said. “She’s dancing with me.”
Jason sighed.
“I asked her to dance with me,” he said. “Ask her who she’s dancing with now.”
He was bored. He was a little tired after the drive. He might have been a little drunk. The weight of Anadidd’na on his back in her metal sheath where she always was gave him a bold sense of power, even though he would have never drawn the sword in public like this.
All the same, she was there, like she always was, looking for a fight. Something to slash open, to reduce to ash.
The hairy man had it coming.
He had his hands up Kara’s shirt in the back, and he was missing a front tooth.
He had it coming.
When the man let go of Kara to take a swing at Jason, he bent time, moving his face clear of the meaty, hairy fist, just kind of playing at it.
He slapped the outside of the man’s forearm, just hard enough to toss him off balance, the way Samantha had done it to him so many times in training, when he was first learning to bend time.
This was how she saw it.
She’d mocked him. Humiliated him, in her playful, friendly, but dead-serious way. She’d pushed him hard, forcing him to learn fast.
In her world, you learned fast or you died.
She’d trained him well, and now he was on the other side of it, only the stupid, fat, hairy man he was fighting had no hope.
He couldn’t bend time; he couldn’t possibly keep up with Jason in a fight.
He watched, the world moving crystal-slow, seeing as the dance floor slowly gained recognition that there was a fight happening, eyes moving to watch. Kara was somewhere between annoyed and amused; he wasn’t sure which of the two were going to win. She liked a good fight as much as the next guy, more than most of them, actually, but this was nothing like a fair fight. And he had interrupted her dancing. That was going to count against him when the reckoning came.
He batted away another hand, this one trying to grab his throat.
Boy oh boy did the dude lack situational awareness.
It was so clear, from here. The lack of balance, the lack of planning. Just anger. A touch of drunkenness. Blind belief that being heavier meant he was going to win.
For just an instant, Jason felt bad that Kara’s one-time dance partner had no idea what he’d gotten into, but that passed easily. He closed his fist, preparing for his first offensive reply, guiding the muscles in his arm, his shoulder, his core, feeling the balance over his feet, everything crystalline, perfect, watched the idiot’s eyes, reading easily what he intended to do next,
…
<><><>
Sam thought she should call ahead. Samantha didn’t want to tip Carter off that she was coming. It would give him a chance to make things difficult in advance.
So she packed for everything she could think of and was getting ready to go get into the Mustang when Sam mentally flagged her.
Something odd was happening. He didn’t understand it. She felt him dart back in time, veering away some distance, though not all the way across the country. He didn’t go that far back when he hit something that confused him even more. He pushed, but didn’t move.
He hit a wall.
It wasn’t a malignant wall, one set there to trap him or hurt him. He just hit a wall.
“Where are they?” Samantha asked. He brought his vision back up to the future and found her. “Where are they?” Samantha asked again. She walked as he indicated, following along behind him to the main room and sitting to wait. They’d be here soon.
Kara and Jason entered a few minutes later.
“Tell me,” Samantha said. Kara looked lost, but no more than Jason did. Kelly glitched in as Kara started to speak.
“He just…” She had no words. Samantha shook her head.
“He probably needs to tell me, anyway.”
“You told me to come here,” Jason said. “To tell you what happened, but not to tell you anything else.”
She nodded.
“This is your first fragment?”
He shook his head, rubbing his face and wincing when he found the goose-egg there.
“What the hell, Sam?”
“I know,” she answered. “Is this your first fragment?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it is.”
She nodded, looking over as Sam walked in.
“I need you to get an empty notebook out of our room,” she said. “Quickly.”
He wanted more than that, but he left anyway. Kara started to ask a question, but Samantha shook her head.
“There’s a protocol here. We follow it to the letter.”
She wouldn’t say any more until Sam came back with a notebook and a pen. She took it and stepped down, putting them into Jason’s
hands.
“You show this to no one. You broke time. Until you get through all the fragments, we handle you with kid gloves, and you’re just going to have to put up with it. You do not argue, you don’t talk about what you’ve seen or done, not until all of the numbers are in that notebook. You can write down what happens to you, sometimes that helps, but every time you hit a new fragment, you turn the page. If you break any of the rules, you could very easily cause permanent brain damage. The worse you fight it, the more fragments there are going to be. I know it’s confusing. This is the only chance you’re going to get to ask questions, because if you give me any clue about the order you’re going through time…” she shook her head. “I’m a bad guardian, but I’m the best you’re going to get.”
“What’s a guardian?” Kara asked. Samantha shook her head.
“I can’t talk to you now. And I can’t talk to you in front of him. I can explain it to you later, but right now, the only person I can talk to is Jason.”
She held off Sam with no more force than was necessary, but that was a lot. He felt the level of urgency, the importance of the next few moments, the danger, but she couldn’t let him distract her.
She needed to do this right.
“Have you done it?” Jason asked. She shook her head.
“No.”
“Has Abby?”
Samantha almost laughed.
“No.”
“What happens if I screw it up?” Jason asked.
“It could be you never get your timeline straightened out again. Best case, you end up jolting through time faster and faster but still come out of it at the end. Very worst case, you turn into a vegetable.”
He nodded, scratching his chin.
“You keep telling me not to tell you anything,” he said.
“Jason,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Make a big deal out of it. How come?”
“Because me figuring out things out of order is the exact same risk,” she said. “And I’m good at it. I’ll try, but…” She gritted her teeth at him. He grinned.
“We’re gonna make it through, sweetheart. Just do your best to keep me from sparring.”
She tipped her head to the side, exasperated, and he grinned.
“It really sucks getting sucker punched when you knew it was coming, and then you weren’t there any more.”
“Jason.”
“This one was the worst,” he said. “Lost track of everything. Glad to be back here. Everything’s clearer, here.”
“Shut up,” Samantha said. “Just shut up.”
“Dude,” Sam said. Jason grinned.
“We’re gonna be fine.”
Samantha pointed at the notebook.
“Write ‘zero’. This is your first fragment. You keep that with you until you’re in the clear. Every fragment, we’re going to give you a number. You write down the one from your last fragment. Yours are going to be out of order, but when you’ve accounted for all of them, you’re done. Make sense?”
Jason grinned again.
“Makes no damned sense at all.”
“You have to remember the last number we gave you,” Samantha said. “The next one will be one. When you hit your next fragment, you write down one.”
“Ain’t my first shot at this,” Jason said.
“Stop it,” Samantha said. “You may think this is a joke, but I am not going to help you destroy your brain.”
He gave her a sympathetic look.
“I think this is harder on you than it is on me. It doesn’t hurt. Keeping a sense of humor is the only way to get through it. Remember that.”
Samantha read his eyes for a moment, not sure what to do with it, but needing to know. He wasn’t suffering. He was in danger, and he might have even known how much danger, considering it felt like this fragment was pretty advanced in his sequence, but he wasn’t worried.
“Dragon,” she muttered, and he grinned wider. “Get out,” she said. “I need to talk to them.”
“Give them their scripts,” he said.
“Jason, I swear, you will go through this unconscious if that’s what I have to do.”
“Have to catch me first,” he said, jogging backwards, then tossing a grin back over his shoulder at her as he turned and left. Samantha shook her head as he left.
“What’s going on, Sammycat?” Kara asked.
Samantha glanced at Kelly.
“You know the protocols?”
“I can’t help you,” he said. She nodded.
“I figured. Can you keep an eye on him? If he hits a new fragment, I need to know.”
Kelly nodded and disappeared. Samantha sighed, looking back at Kara as Sam came to stand next to her. She drew a breath, getting her thoughts organized.
“I need to write a script for both of you,” she said. “Every time Jason hits a new fragment, we need to give him a new number and read him the script. No alterations, no skipping it, no matter what’s going on. We’re in the middle of a fight, one of you ducks out and reads him the script.”
“Didn’t answer my question yet,” Kara said.
“Right,” Samantha said. “Sorry. When we bend time, we’re pushing the way we perceive time closer and closer to the rate that it’s running on the other side.”
Kara shook her head.
“Too fast.”
“That part doesn’t matter,” Sam said. She frowned at him, then nodded.
“You’re right. Okay, so…” she censored out a bunch more technical background, trying to get down to the pragmatic part. “He broke time. It’s really exactly what it sounds like. It broke like a mirror.” She glanced at Sam. “As long as he’s around, you’re gonna be pretty blind. Time is all messed up around him, and it’s going to stay that way until he hits the end of the break.”
Sam nodded.
“I noticed.”
“If you were able to go forward, you could probably find the edge of each fragment we’re on, but there’s almost no way you could know that without altering time, and then you’d be out of commission, too, and I can’t deal with both of you.”
“Damn, Sam,” Kara said. “If you’re thinking I’m getting any of this, I’m flattered, but I’m not that smart.”
“It’s not intelligence,” Samantha said. “It’s background. There’s a risk, when you bend time too hard, that you can break it. Time, for us, is going to keep going in order, but Jason is out of order. There’s a bunch of rules on how to get through the break with the lowest odds of damage, but you can tell how much he cares about them. What was going on, when it happened?”
“He was in a bar fight,” Kara said. “This guy I was dancing with took a couple of swings at him, then clocked him one and he came up really confused. I thought he’d had a concussion, which…” she shook her head. “I’ve never seen him take the bad end of a fight. Once I got the guy off him, and he said I had to bring him here. Just kind of stared out the window all the way here. The kid hisses at him like a cat. Won’t go anywhere near him.”
“Sounds about right,” Samantha said. “He knows.”
“What else can we do?” Sam asked. Samantha shook her head.
“That’s it. Where we go, he goes.”
Sam’s eyes turned inward a moment and he nodded his head down once toward Samantha.
“You need to figure it out with Isobel,” he said. “She saw the Cruiser pull up and she went out to see what was going on. She’s waiting down there, now. Jason’s on his way.”
Samantha shook her head.
“You taking on more strays?” Kara asked.
“Not the cute, cuddly kind, this time,” Samantha said, looking over her shoulder.
“I’ll get it all loaded,” Sam said. “Kara can help. We’ll meet you at the garage.”
“Thank you, my love,” she said, drawing air and trying to get her mind organized again.
Breaking time, of all things, on top of it all.
“You’re
going to have to drive,” she said as she started toward the front doors to chase after Jason. “I’ve got stuff I need to get done, now.”
<><><>
Abby intercepted her outside, on the way to the car.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
Samantha shrugged.
“So far. Who knows?”
Abby smiled.
“He’s tough. Did I ever tell you Carter broke time once, while you were gone?”
“No.”
Abby nodded.
“He did. It was great fun, telling him what to do.”
Samantha laughed softly.
“I bet it was.”
“I’m stuck here, as long as he’s around,” Abby said. “Can’t see anything. So I didn’t have anything better to do.”
She handed Samantha a stack of pages, handwritten copies of the same paragraph. Samantha read over it quickly, glancing up as Jason introduced himself to Isobel.
“I’m not sure which of them is going to be more trouble right now,” Samantha said, looking at Isobel eying the sword at Jason’s shoulder. “I have no idea what she is.”
“She’s interesting,” Abby said. “You want me to go all the way back on her?”
Samantha shook her head in mild disbelief.
“I forget, sometimes. What you can do.”
“I know,” Abby said. “You’d never do it to Sam.”
“No,” Samantha said, reading the scripts again, focusing now.
“Did I get it all?” Abby asked.
“It’s perfect,” Samantha said. “Thank you.”
“And recon on the gorgon?” Abby asked.
“Find me my hellfactory first,” Samantha said. “I don’t need to spy on her anywhere near as much as I need a target.”
“You’re going to bring him into that?” Abby asked. Samantha pressed her mouth.
“Don’t see that I have a lot of option.”
Abby nodded.
“When you get where you’re going, tell me what you need. I’ll make sure it’s there.”
Samantha hugged her.
“I’ve missed you,” she said.
“Not as much as I’ve missed you,” Abby answered. “Go. Ash them all.”
“You know I’m going to New York to meet with the rest of us,” Samantha said. Abby winked.
“I do.”
Samantha grinned, rushing the rest of the way to the Cruiser, feeling just a fraction less overwhelmed.