Erasing Time

by C. J. Hill

  Sheridan walked beside him, trying not to think about how natural it felt to hold his hand. “That was only so you wouldn’t figure out what she’s doing. You already know.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe I just want to be alone with you.”

  Was he flirting with her? The thought made her heartbeat speed. But then, he probably had some reason for wanting to be alone with her that he hadn’t disclosed. After all, he thought she was a low-ranking flesh eater.

  They kept walking until a large support beam stood between them and the others. Then Echo slowed to a stop.

  Sheridan felt nervous, awkward. She hardly knew what to say to guys from her own time period, let alone this one. When Echo didn’t immediately speak, she let go of his hand and stepped toward the city wall. It stretched upward as far as she could see. Gray sloping panels vibrated and smelled of something old and worn, like the inside of her grandparents’ boat.

  She reached out to touch the wall. “Why do the walls hum?”

  Echo took hold of her arm and pulled her back. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “There’s a force field. Unless you’re authorized, the wall sends out a shock.”

  Sheridan took another step backward and peered at the wall from a safer distance. She and Taylor couldn’t scale it or cut into it. Would it be possible to break through the concrete on the ground and dig underneath it?

  Echo pulled Sheridan toward him, drawing her attention away from the wall. There wasn’t much space between him and her now, and it was hard for Sheridan not to notice how well defined Echo’s muscles were. What did guys do to work out in the future?

  “I have something for you,” he whispered. He took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. Slowly, as though he held a great secret, he slipped the paper into her hand.

  She flipped it over. It could have been the front of a Christmas card. The picture showed Santa Claus with a child perched on one knee.

  “Don’t let anyone see it,” Echo said, leaning in. “After yesterday, pues, you were so sad. I thought it would make you feel better to have a picture of the god you worship.”

  Her gaze went from the picture to his eyes. “Echo, this is Santa Claus.”

  “I know, and you can’t imagine the techneloops I had to craft to access a site with that image.”

  She forced down a smile. “That’s so thoughtful. Really. But Santa Claus isn’t God. No one worshipped him—well, not unless you count retailers in general or children on Christmas Day.”

  Echo’s brows drew together, puzzled. “You celebrated his birth every year. The birth of your savior.”

  “That was Jesus Christ, not Santa Claus.”

  Echo nodded. “An omniscient god who rewarded the good and punished the bad with coal.”

  “No, actually, Santa Claus and God are completely different.”

  He frowned. “But we have references—”

  “And your interpretation of those references is wrong.” She looked down at the picture in her hands again. “Maybe you can’t understand history unless you understand everything that happened in a culture at the time. Maybe it’s all just guesses about what went on in the past.”

  She put the picture into her skirt pocket and smiled at him. “Thanks for giving me this, though. It was sweet of you to try and make me feel better. Sometime when we have more time, I’ll explain religion to you.”

  Echo’s expression clouded, and she knew he was still deciding whether to believe her about Santa Claus. Instead of asking more questions, he said, “I’ll try to arrange a time for you to be alone with Elise today. Remember to ask her about leaving the city.”

  “I’m not likely to forget.” Sheridan looked back in the direction the others were but couldn’t see anything past the support beam. “Maybe Taylor is already working on it. I bet she sends Jeth over to get us.”

  “And Jeth will wonder why I’ve taken you off alone.” Echo reached for her hand, threading her fingers through his. “We’ll have to come up with a believable reason.”

  He pulled her closer, and Sheridan found it hard to breathe.

  When she spoke, her voice was uneven. “What do you mean?”

  He reached out and touched a strand of her hair, holding it between his fingers like it was something delicate. “Is this your born color?”

  “Yes, and the freckles are natural too. I wouldn’t have put them on my face otherwise.”

  “I like your freckles.” He dropped the strand of hair and ran a finger across the trail of freckles on the bridge of her nose. “They were top fashion three years ago. Everyone wore them.”

  “Just my luck. I missed being beautiful by three years.”

  His finger made a slow line down her cheek. It was the smallest of touches and made her skin tingle. “You haven’t missed anything. You’re beautiful right now.”

  Her heart doubled its speed. Echo was definitely flirting, but did he mean any of it? Perhaps he was testing her, studying the male and female interactions of the twenty-first century. Or perhaps flirting was a casual thing people did in the future, and she was about to show herself as being very awkward at the pastime.

  She should put an end to this until she figured out what it meant.

  And she would. She would tell Echo it was time they returned to the others.

  “Do you remember,” Echo said, his words a soft lull, “when I told you I didn’t specialize in Sheridan Bradford?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve changed my mind about that.” He bent his head lower. Slowly. Still giving her a choice to move away if she wanted.

  She didn’t move. She shut her eyes and let his lips come down on hers.

  Kissing had not changed in four centuries.

  Sheridan leaned into Echo, slid her hands up his chest until they met behind his neck. A voice somewhere in her mind said, This is a mistake. But then another voice countered, What does it matter now that everything you knew is gone? All that was left of her world were artifacts in vacuum-sealed boxes. It felt comforting to have someone’s arms around her. It made her feel like she wasn’t quite alone, like things could be normal again.

  Echo ran one hand up her back until it rested against the nape of her neck. His fingers twined through her hair and he leaned in closer.

  The voice, the one that steadily repeated, This is a mistake, got loud enough that Sheridan pulled away from Echo.

  As she did, she heard Jeth say, “There you are.”

  Sheridan felt her face blush bright red. Not only Jeth, but Elise and Taylor stood nearby. Three pairs of eyes watched her—Jeth’s amused, Taylor’s surprised, and Elise’s—well, Elise’s features were drawn together in tight lines. Was that anger or disappointment?

  Echo took hold of Sheridan’s elbow and propelled her forward. When he spoke, his tone sounded only a little forced, like it was a small thing to be caught kissing a girl he’d only known for a day and a half. “You’re done seeing the walls?”

  Jeth nodded, smiling. “I thought we could go to a foodmart for lunch. As long as the girls don’t talk to anyone, the scientists shouldn’t mind if they’re out in public.” He gestured at Taylor’s long sleeves. “No one will even notice they haven’t got crystals.” Then he smiled again.

  He was too pleased by this, just as Elise was too annoyed. Elise’s glare was practically burning holes into the side of Echo’s head, and Sheridan wasn’t sure what any of it meant.

  Why in the world had she let Echo kiss her in the first place?

  Well, she knew why. The guy was gorgeous and she was practically all alone in the world. Vulnerable.

  It was simply a fluke, and she wouldn’t let it happen again. From now on she would have a policy that she would refrain from kissing any guy until she knew enough about him to discern his natural hair color.

  The group continued walking back to the car. Taylor strolled along beside Sheridan and Echo at an unhurried pace. “So,” she said to Sheridan, “have you lost your marbles or are you simply pulling the wool over someone
’s eyes? Come clean....”

  Sheridan blinked in embarrassed surprise, then remembered that only she understood. “It was spur-of-the-moment.”

  “Great. While I’m brainstorming on making tracks, you’re going off the deep end.”

  Sheridan rolled her eyes at Taylor. “Chill. We’ll chew the fat later.”

  “Oh, there won’t be much fat at lunch,” Jeth called over. “We eat a healthy diet now. What were you saying about wool and spurs, though? Is that a reference to cowboys?”

  “We’re just making small talk,” Sheridan said.

  “Small talk?” Jeth repeated. “How interesting. Do you also have big talk?”

  Taylor shook her head. “No, but in our day we had big talkers. We also had people who shot off their mouths.”

  Jeth considered this. “That sounds painful.”

  “Only to the people listening,” Taylor said, and drifted off to talk to Jeth and Elise.

  Echo took Sheridan’s hand again, weaving his fingers through hers.

  It didn’t mean anything. He’d been holding her hand since she’d arrived in the future. It was a custom of theirs. Only he’d never held hands with Taylor or Elise.

  She thought about this while she wondered if Echo’s kiss had meant anything to him.

  Some things never changed. Four centuries had gone by, and she still didn’t understand guys.

  chapter

  13

  Echo sat in the foodmart trying to concentrate on the menu items instead of thinking about everything that had just gone wrong.

  Kissing Sheridan had been a mistake.

  Enjoyable as far as mistakes went, but still a mistake.

  Echo had been so sure Jeth would come by himself to get them. After all, Taylor needed to talk to Elise, and Taylor had been manipulating the entire trip. Had it been too much to expect that she would have found a way send Jeth alone? He was supposed to see Echo and Sheridan together so that when Echo left Traventon with the girls, Jeth would assume it was an act of infatuation. He’d think Echo cared too much about Sheridan to risk losing her to memory washes. Jeth would understand, even though it would hurt him to lose his second son.

  Or perhaps it would be a relief.

  Since the funeral, every time Jeth had looked at Echo, there had been a small accusation in his gaze, a hurt that indicated Jeth knew more than he wanted to.

  Things weren’t supposed to turn out that way.

  When Echo and Joseph were children, and it was Jeth’s turn to pick them up at the caretaker center, he always greeted them with a hug. It generally took Jeth a few minutes before he could tell who was Echo and who was Joseph, but it didn’t matter. He was excited to see both of them. Jeth always stopped on the way home and bought them candy swirls even if the caretakers reported bad behavior during the week.

  Those days seemed impossibly far away now. The hug, the candy, the feeling that anything he’d done wrong didn’t matter.

  Now it all mattered.

  Echo had only wanted Jeth’s happiness. He knew Jeth needed family with him. It had been a conscious choice. Echo had chosen which brother would live.

  And now here he was, sitting in this foodmart making plans to leave anyway. The thought caused a sharp pain in his chest, but he didn’t flinch. He had lived with pain like a second skin since his brother’s death.

  Echo glanced across the table at the others. Sheridan and Taylor were both reading their medical data. Whenever someone sat down at a foodmart, the table lit up with their weight, body fat percentage, heart rate, and blood pressure.

  “That is totally amazing,” Taylor said.

  “That is totally going to keep me from ordering dessert,” Sheridan added.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeth assured her. “If your fat percentage goes too high, you can pay to have a med remove some of it.” He patted his stomach. “It’s slightly illegal, but we all do it.”

  Taylor turned her attention to a waitress who was placing food on one of the tables. “With all your advances, you still have waiters?”

  “It’s a matter of work policy,” Jeth explained. “Everyone must work, so there must be work for everyone, even if that means some people have jobs that could be automated.”

  Sheridan looked at Echo for the first time since they’d sat down. “If there are no animals, how can the menu have chicken parmesan, chicken pasta, and shrimp pizza?”

  “It’s bioamino protein,” he said. “They grow it in the agrodistrict. The meat titles just indicate the flavor.”

  Taylor squinted at the pictures on the menu. “What do you use in place of dairy products?” Before anyone could answer she said, “Oh, you have almond milk.”

  Sheridan smirked. “It must be hard to milk an almond.”

  “Not really,” Taylor said. “They have tiny milking machines they attach to the almonds’ udders.”

  Jeth laughed. It had been a long time since Echo had seen his father laugh so easily.

  Elise, however, stared at the menu screen with unmoving eyes. She wasn’t reading but thinking, and Echo knew about what.

  She wasn’t happy to see Echo and Sheridan together. Perhaps now Elise wouldn’t trust any of them. If she thought Sheridan and Echo were attached, if she suspected Sheridan would tell Echo things, Elise wouldn’t tell her anything.

  How was Echo supposed to fix that?

  Then there was Sheridan herself. She’d been unusually quiet on the way to the foodmart, and every time Echo looked over at her, she blushed and glanced away.

  He hadn’t thought there were any old-twenties taboos about kissing in public. It was done on a regular basis in the entertainment from that era. But perhaps he was wrong about that, the way Sheridan kept telling him he was wrong about everything else.

  Next time he kissed her, he’d have to make sure they were someplace private.

  Assuming, of course, there was a next time. Assuming the scientists didn’t call to say they had a fix on Tyler Sherwood and completely ruin his plans.

  As this thought passed through his mind, Echo’s comlink beeped. He sat motionless, feeling like his breath had been sucked from his body.

  “It’s not the scientists,” Jeth said, guessing at his worry. “They would have beeped me, not you.”

  Echo slid his comlink into a computer that perched on the side of the table. The menu vanished, and two young men appeared on the screen. Caesar had bronze hair and spiked metallic eyebrows sticking up over his eyes like a row of teeth. Next to him was Geno, whose short-cropped hair stood up in purple rows. It matched his lips, which had been decoratively split in several places.

  “Echo!” Caesar crooned from the computer. “Where are you shoveling? We stopped by your site, but you weren’t there.”

  “I’m at a foodmart,” Echo said flatly. “I’m working with my father.”

  “Work?” Geno asked. “As I see the event, you’re sitting with two beautiful girls.”

  “Three,” Caesar said. “Don’t forget Elise.”

  Geno grinned, making the scars on his mouth stretch. “I’d never want to forget Elise.”

  Elise pursed her lips and pushed her chair farther away from the table to be out of the two men’s sight.

  Caesar smiled, leaning forward a bit, looking around the foodmart. “When do we get to darty with your new friends, Echo?”

  “I don’t do darties anymore,” Echo said.

  “Doesn’t have to be a darty then,” Caesar said. “We just want to meet them. They look interesting.”

  They looked useful, he meant. Echo gritted his teeth together. Somehow Caesar knew about Taylor and Sheridan. How did the Dakine always learn things so quickly?

  Caesar’s gaze traveled from Taylor to Sheridan, and then back to Echo. “I give it odds they’d like to jump with us.”

  Which meant the Dakine was determined to have them, and Echo knew why. Sheridan and Taylor were the only two Traventon residents not in their infancy who didn’t have crystal implants. The Dakine could send th
em anywhere undetected, and if the girls were inadvertently killed in the process, pues, what did that matter to the Dakine?

  Echo put his hand on his comlink, ready to pull it from the computer. “I need to turn off my comlink so everyone can order lunch.”

  “We’ll beep you later,” Geno said.

  “Really soon,” Caesar said, then added with a cryptic smile, “You can’t keep filed away forever, you know. It isn’t good for you.”

  Echo unplugged his comlink without saying good-bye and shoved it into his belt. The menu returned to the computer screen, and he stared at it unseeing.

  Jeth leaned over and touched Echo’s arm. In his normal voice, not the one with the old-twenties accent, he said, “Caesar’s right. You’ve been much too solemn lately. Joseph wouldn’t want that. You need to go out again. See your friends. Perhaps the next time the girls need a break from our research, you could beep—”

  Elise leaned over the table and cut him off. “Don’t even consider it, Echo. You’re not taking the time riders to those filthy shadlers.”

  “Elise!” Jeth gave her a look of reproof, but she kept her gaze locked on Echo, her eyes sizzling with anger.

  She knew. Somehow she knew Caesar and Geno were with the Dakine.

  But how?

  A feeling of dread crept up Echo’s skin. Perhaps she knew because she was Dakine herself.

  He pushed away the thought. Elise had connections to the Doctor Worshippers, and those two groups were as opposite as could be. The DW’s motto was Freedom of Knowledge, Speech, and Belief. Every once in a while they draped banners with that phrase from the sides of buildings. Sometimes they cut into city program feeds demanding more citizen rights, telling the public they deserved them. They met in secret groups to pass on knowledge and talk of their beliefs.

  The Dakine had a different sort of motto: Power to the Dakine, and Death to Anyone Who Got in Their Way. They didn’t have to make banners with those words or put them in city program feeds. Every assassination they ordered proclaimed their message. The Enforcers couldn’t stop Dakine, and no one else dared to try.