Rebel Revealed
Time of Death: Book #5
Written by Josh Anderson
Copyright © 2016 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.
Published by EPIC Press™
PO Box 398166
Minneapolis, MN 55439
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
International copyrights reserved in all countries.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark
and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.
Cover design by Dorothy Toth
Images for cover art obtained from iStockPhoto.com
Edited by Ramey Temple
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Anderson, Josh.
Rebel revealed / Josh Anderson.
p. cm. — (Time of death ; #5)
Summary: After learning that he’s more intertwined with the mysterious Seres than he could have ever imagined, Kyle sets off on a collision course with Ayers. The hunt for his nearly invincible enemy forces Kyle to consider exactly how far he’s willing to go to set the time stream back on its proper course
ISBN 978-1-68076-068-2 (hardcover)
1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Traffic accidents—Fiction.
3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.
5. Conduct of life—Fiction. 6. Guilt—Fiction. 7. Self-acceptance—Fiction.
8. Young adult fiction. I. Title.
[Fic]—dc23
2015935827
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.
To Brett,
Thank you for giving me this chance, and for making it fun.
CHAPTER 1
Outside of time
Simyon frowned as he watched his people work. He watched them as they struggled, in silence, to move enormous metal plates across the landscape. The inside of each curved piece was nearly black. The material was the strongest, heaviest steel their mills could make. The outside of each segment of steel was still wrapped with thick mulberry branches, and there were silkworms clinging to the leaves—their only food source.
Despite the backbreaking nature of the work, disassembling the tunnel was much faster than building it. This made Simyon nervous. He pulled off the green handkerchief he wrapped around his forehead like a headband and dabbed the sweat away.
He walked across the dirt, over to where the Old Man sat, as he did, day after day, watching the work unfold. There was a long standing agreement between the two of them that Simyon would handle any issues among his people without the Old Man’s interference, so long as his people always did what the Old Man asked. The problem now was that the directive had shifted and Simyon’s people had begun to panic.
Simyon sat down on the grassy hill next to the Old Man, overlooking the progress. “They need to know what they’re doing, sir.”
“Isn’t that obvious?” the Old Man answered.
“They want to know why?” Simyon said. “What happens when they’re done?”
Even if he and his people were essentially slaves, the idea of finishing their work concerned them all much more than their servitude.
“Well, I don’t envision building the tunnel again,” the Old Man said. “It sounded like a good solution. Kept things in line. But I’m done with all that.”
“Because of the rebel?” the young man asked.
“There’ve been rebels before,” the Old Man said. “I’ve cut your brother’s people a lot of slack over the generations. But, it’s gotten out of hand . . . ” He shook his head as he looked off at the thousands of workers down the hill from them. “We all answer to someone, y’know?”
“But, what’ll happen?” the young man asked.
The Old Man shrugged. “Here? Or there?”
“Both.”
“If we stop pulling up the tunnel, or if we don’t?” the Old Man asked, not that the fate of the tunnel was up for debate. Simyon’s people had removed thousands of years of steel already.
“I don’t know,” Simyon said frustrated, dabbing his face with his green handkerchief again. Every conversation with the Old Man went in circles like this.
The Old Man shrugged. “I don’t know either.”
Simyon looked at him and shook his head. “How can you just get rid of it when you don’t know what’s going to happen?”
“Y’know, the great kings on the other side, they would build these deep moats around their castles,” the Old Man said. “To keep out anyone who wasn’t supposed to get in.”
“Isn’t that what the tunnel does?” Simyon asked, knowing already where the Old Man was going.
“It was supposed to,” the Old Man said. “But, I neglected to consider that a motivated enough person, well, they’re just going to build a raft and get across that moat. And eventually that person will bring others. And, well, then you don’t have any protection at all.”
“No one’s gotten through, though,” Simyon said. “I’ve kept my word. We’ve done everything you asked. And now, my people are scared. They don’t know what’s going to happen when the tunnel’s gone. What do I tell them?”
“Tell them what you think,” the Old Man said. “What you believe.”
“Real helpful,” Simyon said, pounding the ground in front of him with his foot.
The Old Man gave him that half finger point he tended to give right before a lecture began. If whatever cold peace they’d held for generations was coming to an end, decorum wouldn’t matter anymore between them, so Simyon stood up. If he wasn’t going to get answers, he wasn’t in the mood. He’d held up his end of the deal, but the Old Man clearly wouldn’t give him any such assurances.
“You do remember that it’s your mess that started all of this? Yours and your brother’s,” the Old Man asked.
Simyon swatted at the air and walked away without looking up again. He wrapped his handkerchief around his forehead and tied it in the back. He had nothing to bring back to his people. What good were slaves if there was no labor? they had been asking him. He walked back to the work site and picked up his shears from the sand. Dismantling the metal of the tunnel was harder work, but cutting the thick layer of mulberry from the outside of the tunnel made Simyon sad. It had been generations since he’d become an expert in cultivating the mulberry trees, growing them underneath the tunnel site, and forcing the branches to grow around the huge structure to ensure the entirety of the tunnel was covered. Seeing the branches shorn and discarded—the silkworms and their cocoons displaced—piled up in the sand, he realized that he’d have to tell his people something just to keep them working while there was still work to be done. He knew better than to disobey the Old Man, and while his people were feeling unsettled, there was no real gain in pushing for answers that they might not like anyway.
Taio walked over to Simyon. To someone on the other side, they would appear to be about the same age, but Taio was Simyon’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. His best friend, too. “Well?” Taio asked.
Simyon didn’t answer. It had taken nearly three hundred ninety generations to build the tunnel. But, it was clear that, even with some stalling, dismantling it would take them barely a generation. He had nothing to offer. Simyon moved closer to Taio’s ear, as if he were letting him on a real secret. “You can rest easy. He means us no harm.”
Taio flashed a look of relief. “But will he—?”
“I don’t know,” Simyon said. “We need to make more progress before I ask him that.”
“Why?” Taio aske
d.
“You know why,” Simyon said. “He won’t answer me now anyway. Either way, he’d think it would deincentivize everyone.”
Taio looked at Simyon with an exasperated look. “Why do you always start from that defeated place? Think of how everyone will feel if they know we are going to cross over? Can you imagine if we knew we were going to have real lives when the tunnel is gone? It would make this work tolerable. Think of seeing a smile on the face your three-hundredth generation, and our kin after that. You would be a hero, instead of—”
“Instead of what, Taio?” Simyon asked.
“You do the best you can,” Taio answered after a moment, a little sheepishly.
Simyon dreaded the moment in every single one of his people’s existences when it became clear to them, in no uncertain terms, that they were simply functionaries. That their endless time on the beach had a single, simple purpose. No one ever needed to be told—they each realized in their own time that their individuality did not matter one bit. No one would leave, and no one would distinguish themselves from the rest of their tribe in any kind of meaningful way. It was amazing to Simyon that despite this, he would still see shreds of joy among his people from time to time. He’d been presiding over them for too many generations, though, to share in any of it.
“He means us no harm,” Simyon said again. “Please make sure every generation is aware.”
“It’s something, I suppose,” Taio answered as he walked off in the direction of the tunnel. But, Simyon knew he was just being polite to make up for daring to insinuate the truth: that Simyon’s standing among his people was as low as it’d ever been.
Simyon looked back to the hill and wondered how the Old Man could have so little regard for them after so many generations. He had watched them work for longer than it took empires to rise and fall on the other side. But, to Simyon it seemed that he had still not developed an ounce of empathy for them.
He watched as the Old Man reclined on his back in the grass, resting on his elbows, scanning the workers in front of him. Where did he go when they slept? Simyon wondered. When nearly everyone in every generation in their camp was asleep, Simyon would watch the Old Man walk through the thick tree line beyond the hill, only to return again before any of Simyon’s people awoke. They were forbidden to follow beyond the tree line, and with only one exception, Simyon’s people had always obeyed. The one who hadn’t was made an example of in a way that ensured future generations would be warned off making the same mistake.
Simyon went back to snipping mulberry branches from the tunnel. There was still plenty more work before the disassembly was complete, but at his age, time always passed more quickly than he expected. Perhaps something good would come out of his next conversation with the Old Man. Perhaps it would, he told himself over and over again. Perhaps it would. He repeated the words in his head as he clipped the branches, even though in reality, his next good conversation with the Old Man would be his first.
CHAPTER 2
April 12, 2005
* * *
A few minutes after the earthquake
Allaire, lying in Kyle’s arms, had just finished explaining her revelation that both Kyle and his father, Sillow, were Seres. This meant that Kyle was responsible for guarding the secret of time travel for the rest of his life, and for seeing to it that Ayers—also a Sere—didn’t do any more damage to the universe than he already had by creating more and more unnecessary timestreams. Kyle had experienced so much since the first time he’d entered a silk blot with his original goal of saving the children of Bus #17.
If Allaire was correct, then what had been a choice for Kyle when he woke up this morning was, all of a sudden, his duty.
Allaire had spent years trying to stop Ayers’s path of destruction, but ineffectively, since she was not allowed to kill him, because she believed Ayers was the lone Seres heir. Even more than protecting the universe from the damage Ayers could do, Allaire’s job for nearly her entire life had been the protection of the Sere bloodline, which she’d been told was connected with the fate of humanity itself.
Allaire had explained to Kyle how, many years ago, Ayers mentioned another branch of the Sere bloodline to her but, that she’d written it off as one of his mad ravings. If the information hadn’t come from Ayers, she might’ve realized sooner that the best explanation for everything they hadn’t been able to explain so far was that Kyle himself was a Sere. She reasoned that Demetrius—who had been like an older brother to Allaire growing up—had a brother himself, who’d been cast off, since Seres’ tradition dictated there could only be a single heir for each generation. A second heir—especially a second son—was a powerful taboo in their ancient traditions. The jettisoned brother, of course, was Sillow, Kyle’s father, who grew up completely unaware of the Seres or who he really was.
Kyle had had a revelation of his own while Allaire was still stuck under the rubble, even before learning that he was a Sere. He knew now that there was too much at stake to ever walk away from everything he’d seen since he first crawled inside of a silk blot. There was Ayers running roughshod over the timestream, and the tunnel itself getting shorter and shorter, and figuring out what that meant for the fate of the universe. Until today, he’d believed there would come a point at which life became “normal” again. A time at which the Seres, and the tunnel, would become a distant thought to him. But, he knew this was his life now, too.
Since Kyle was a Sere, they could kill Ayers now without the concern of leaving the Seres without an heir. Finding and killing him, of course, would be no easy task. Not to mention the issue of twelve-year-old Ayers, plucked by older Ayers from his original timestream to live captive above a Chinese restaurant in upstate New York. The child seemed nothing like his older, bloodthirsty self, and Kyle had no idea why. And then, even as he’d thought of all of this—as he came to terms with the fact that he was now on the front lines of a war he might never win, or even understand—the one thing Kyle felt most scared about was the possibility of never seeing Allaire again. If she had died under that rubble, the look she’d given Kyle in the car, just before they’d chased Ayers into the building above the Chinese restaurant, would have haunted him forever. It was her real love look—not the fake one she’d drawn him in with when they first met—and Kyle was addicted to it. How could he possibly have lived without seeing that look again?
After spotting Allaire in the rubble a few minutes earlier, twelve-year-old Ayers walked through the rubble, jumping from beam to plywood board to overturned sofa. Kyle held Allaire in his arms, soaking in that look from her again. “No more of the back-and-forth,” he said kissing her lips. “I’m done with that.”
“What back-and-forth?” she asked with a slight look of concern.
He smiled at her. “I’m not interested in remaking any future where there’s not going to be a place for this,” he said, squeezing her gently and kissing her again. “From now on, whatever we do, it’s together.”
Allaire smiled and kissed him back now. “Then let’s go figure out what kind of destiny you’ve got in store, Kyle Cash.”
“First step,” Kyle said, “is that, together, we need to decide what we’re going to do with the kid.”
“It is like he’s a different person,” Allaire said, nodding her head. “I mean, I knew Ayers at twelve, and—”
“You think the older Ayers keeping this younger one locked up in that room prevented him from getting crazy and violent?” Kyle asked. “Seems like being locked up would make you crazy, not the other way around.”
“Listen, Kyle, he’s playing us,” Allaire said. “He knows what we have to do, and he’s trying to make us change our minds.”
Kyle wasn’t sure what Allaire meant. “What do we have to do?”
“You know the answer to that, my love,” she said.
Kyle shrugged. “I know we need to find the older Ayers and kill him. But—”
“But,” she said, “it doesn’t make sense to kill one version
of him and just leave the other around to grow up into the same person?”
“He’s not the same, Allaire,” Kyle said. “I don’t think this child is capable of tricking us like this.”
“You realize that you’re not much older than that ‘child’ right?” she asked with a smile. “You don’t know Ayers like I do. If there’s any of that Ayers inside of this younger one, we can’t risk letting him free.”
It troubled Kyle that she was able to make a joke in the same breath that she tried to convince him their only choice was to kill a twelve-year-old. “Okay,” he said. “Then we keep him close. We don’t have to make any final decisions now.”
Kyle reached into his pocket and pulled out his silk blot. Emergency personnel would be here soon, and they needed to get out of 2005 before people started asking them questions.
Young Ayers breezed over to them, walking on a huge metal beam like it was a tightrope. “How cool is it that I found you under there?”
“Very cool,” Allaire said. “I haven’t properly thanked you yet . . . Thank you, Ayers.”
“I always tell Mr. Ayers that kids can kick some ass too,” Ayers said. “But he still never takes me with him when he leaves. He says I would blow up.”
Kyle noticed a vibration in his pocket and pulled out his silk blot. “Have you ever seen this happen?” Kyle asked Allaire, holding the blot up in front of him. Young Ayers knelt down to look, too. The blot rippled in Kyle’s hands. It was a slow, fluid, life-like movement, like you’d see from a sea cucumber at the aquarium.
“Ow,” Ayers said, his eyes glazing over as he watched the blot move in Kyle’s hands.
“What’s wrong?” Allaire asked.
Ayers put his hands against his ears and squinted like he was in pain. “I’m okay, I think. It feels like a little headache.”
Kyle looked at Allaire. “Little?”
Ayers bent at the knees and waited, shrinking from the pain as he held his ears. The sight of the kid in pain drove home for Kyle that they needed to explore every conceivable option before they considered harming him. A child was a child, even if he might grow up to be a sociopathic, time-weaving monster.
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