by Claire Davon
He moved again, bigger this time, sliding half out of her and then all the way back in. She felt him in and out of her body, and the feeling thrilled her somewhere deeper than she’d ever known.
“Ah…” he cried, sliding all the way out until just the tip of his long cock remained inside her and then back in again until she felt him pulsing hard and thick. He shuddered hard, rippling through his body. He began moving faster, smoothly, a rhythmic motion with a circular action that found a pilot light inside her she had never been aware of, and she was turned on again. With a gasp, she clung to him even as Sonder began losing his rhythm. His breath came in short gasps, and the pulse of his cock was as erratic as his movements.
“God, Fiona,” he cried, pulling her so hard against him she felt the crisp chest hair like the stems of the leaves, small points. His thick thigh muscles bunched as he pounded into her, his hands gripping her back, both capturing her and holding her steady.
She felt herself soaring again, an unexpected ripple that turned into a flood and, even as she felt him begin to shoot inside her, she cried out, a gentle orgasm gripping her at the same time he came. He cried out, throwing his head back, his lips pulled back, and she matched him, keening a second orgasm as the first powerful one surged through him.
#
They lay tangled in a heap without speaking for a few moments, and then Sonder lifted his head to look at her. There was a quiet satisfaction in his eyes, and a smile tugged at his lips. He gently stroked her face from forehead to cheek and cupped her chin.
“Remarkable,” he said. “Better than the dreams.”
She smiled back, pressing a kiss to the index finger stroking her lower lip.
“I don’t know about that,” she teased, biting his finger gently to show she was teasing. “Those dreams were pretty spectacular.”
He chuckled.
There was the faint clop of shod horses hooves, and a whinny, and it reminded her that, while this was a rural town in the 1970s, they were not necessarily alone for long.
“Your body is gorgeous,” she said, “but we should probably get dressed.”
He sighed and pressed a kiss to her lips, and nodded with reluctance.
She watched him pull the jumpsuit back over his hips, covering that lovely cock that had so recently been inside her. They must have some sort of jock strap or something built in because, once he was clothed, she didn’t see any telltale signs to either side. A pull of the shirt, and he was clad. He motioned to her torso with her top part of the suit in his hands.
“A shame to cover you up,” he growled. “I’d keep you naked all the time if I could.”
She flushed, suddenly self-conscious. Smoothing down the suit until it was one line again, she looked around.
The stories and pictures hadn’t done Pepperell justice. The sky peeking through the trees was so blue, a hint of cirrus clouds wafting through the upper atmosphere. The air, mostly devoid of smog, was crisp and clean, the only smell one of leaves and animals.
“We shouldn’t stay here,” he said, also smoothing the jumpsuit down until it lay smooth. Smooth except for the bulge of his muscles on his taut form. “They will find us soon, I am sure.”
She nodded. Swallowed. Looked around again, wishing they could stay here, away from all the craziness of the lives that lay beyond here. “Any idea where, or when, we should go?”
He shrugged, and his eyes grew distant.
“I don’t know what the limits of your abilities are, but I guess we could go almost anywhere.”
He didn’t say it. He didn’t need to.
The Event. She could go to the Event where they couldn’t. Maybe.
“What is the Event, do you have any idea?”
He shrugged again, and punched something in on his wrist. A screen appeared in front of them, similar to what she would see in simulations, or recent inventions that had made it easy to project to a specific person.
“Nobody has been there. The closest we can get is about fifty years away, and nobody has come to us from beyond that time.”
She looked at the screen. It was flickering through to what looked like a desolate landscape, smooth and arid, devoid of life and vegetation. It was almost like a sand desert but the lumps and a poke of tall shards through the dirt or sand or whatever it was looked like the remnants of buildings.
“This is all we have. It’s just a short ten second video, and nothing happens, but this is it. It’s just…nothing. But look closely, in the background.”
She squinted, and he pressed a button and enlarged the image.
It was still just sand and dirt and peaks except.…
With a swipe, Sonder enlarged the image again. “From what we can determine, there is nothing left, nothing living, anyway.” He pointed. “There.”
One more swipe of his hand, and the image became clear.
In the background, crumpled, broken, swaying from the shattered remains of its towers and one cable, its ocher color long gone, was what remained of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was dull and faded, the color flaking in spots. The steel tendons that held the bridge seemed weak, and a few had snapped. The bridge itself had an air of disuse, and it was clearly no longer safe for crossing. Some of the floor panels had fallen off, and the empty patches were visible in the grey sky.
But there was no question it was the Golden Gate Bridge. Around it was nothing but desolation.
This was what the end of the world looked like.
Chapter 12
Fiona swallowed. “Oh, my god.”
He nodded grimly. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
That shrug she had already gotten used to manifest itself again. “We don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s a blank spot, a cipher, something neither our probes nor we can access. We’ve tried to get there, but nobody was born then, nobody lived then, and we just…can’t.… No matter how hard we try, we can’t get any closer than fifty years. Fifty years before the Event, there is no sign that anything is wrong. Nothing that could cause that, anyway.”
She looked at the image again, transfixed by the desolation on the screen. She squinted, trying to make sense of something that was completely nonsensical. It was all just gone, no green, no blue, just brown and gray and shattered remains of human made structures.
This was what Rogald wanted her to go to. This was what she could fix, maybe, what her talents--whatever talents she actually had--could change. But this jump, the prior jumps to Hong Kong and then Florida, showed that she didn’t need to see, or have been born in, whatever time or place they were visiting, to go there. She just needed a picture in her mind.
A picture he had just provided.
Fiona looked at Sonder again, studied him hard, a furrow between her eyes. He had been with her this whole time, had just made crazy wild love to her, but she really didn’t know anything about him.
A little late for regrets, she told herself grimly.
A little late? Maybe. If she really could jump, then there was no such thing as time. And she could jump. Pepperell had satisfied that question. She could jump. But how far? To the Event? Why would she want to?
“Rogald wants me to go there…” her voice trailed off.
“And fix it. Stop it.” Sonder’s voice held no hint of emotion.
What else?
She realized Sonder was still talking. “It could have been us. Humans. It could have been…them…whatever ‘them’ is. We don’t know. But it can’t be coincidence that we found the bases with all this technology and then got information about this thing. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
She studied the slightly pixelated picture again.
“You don’t know anything else? You don’t have any other pictures?”
He shook his head, a slow negation. “Maybe if we knew more we could figure out how to get to the events that caused it.”
Fiona flipped over his wrist and the image moved, beaming upwards until it disappeared into the air, the dots fading
out as it went higher.
“It’s been hell, Fiona. We try and we try and we try, and nothing we do gets us anywhere close to the answer. Do you know what it’s like to know that you can shift around in time, but never enough to go and find the one thing, the one cause of humankind’s destruction? To know you are just sitting on, quite literally, borrowed time? We had seen evidence in the tech that someone like you could exist. There has been mention of a person outside of the technology, someone called the Traveler. We go.…”
With a flash of insight, she understood. “You don’t just go to the sites to count bodies and collect recruits. You go to the sites to see if there ever is a Traveler. But there never was. Until me.”
“Until you.” He pressed a button, and the image vanished, to her relief.
She was momentarily speechless. This was all too new and had been way too fast–all of it–and she wanted to pass out. Or vomit. Or run.
“So, Wile E. Coyote, what were you going to do?”
He looked blank and she waved her arms jerkily, with no fixed motion, pointing first to the sky, then the ground and then back to Sonder.
“I guess Looney Tunes didn’t survive to your time. Wile E. Coyote. The Road Runner. Meep meep?” He shook his head and spread his hands.
Fiona sighed, the surge of anger draining out of her as fast as it came.
“I’m talking about cartoons from the 1940s that are still popular in my day. Wile E. Coyote was always chasing the Road Runner and would go to elaborate lengths to catch him. He was always ordering supplies from the Acme Company. Rocket launchers, catapults, crazy stupid elaborate devices to catch one scrawny Road Runner for one dinner. The question I always wondered was, what would Wile E. Coyote do if he caught the Road Runner?”
Sonder only nodded, looking thoughtful. He seemed to consider the idea, his face settling into thoughtful lines.
“You raise a good point.” With a motion, he pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her and holding her head against his chest.
“I don’t know, Fiona. We didn’t think you existed. Many of us were resigned to whatever was going to happen to the Earth in two hundred years, but Rogald and his group were not. Illiria–I don’t know. We are Guardians, and we are committed to keeping things the way they are, and the way they are meant to be. Whether the Traveler exists is a mystery that has now been solved and has only led to far more mysteries–very large, deep mysteries that defy my imagination.”
He tilted her head up, and she saw concern and fear, but determination, in those brown depths.
“I’m a fighter, Fiona, a soldier. I know how to fight battles, I know how to take orders. I don’t know what to do with this.”
“With me?” She flushed. “I thought you did a good job back there.” Behind his back, she gestured to the area where they had so lately been intimate.
He grinned. “Oh, I know how to do that.”
She matched his grin. “I know you do.”
“I’m good at the known. I’m not good at the unknown. This, you, I have no frame of reference to figure out what to do next.”
“Literal, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we’ll figure it out together.”
There was a noise, a hum and a shimmer. The sounds and shimmer were all too familiar. Sonder looked up, his face darkening and with a fierce jerk, pulled her behind him.
It was alpha and could have been insulting, but she knew she could use the help.
“Sonder?”
“They’re coming. Somehow they found us.”
Chapter 13
The shimmer deepened and darkened, and then, like a transporter beaming people down, Illiria and Gire, plus a man Fiona had never seen before, appeared.
As soon as they solidified, Illiria looked around, at the two of them, at the trees and forest of 1970s Pepperell, and nodded. “It worked.”
The other man, older than the rest of them--in fact, older than anyone she had seen up until this point within the compound--just blinked.
Sonder blinked as well, firming his grip on Fiona, who squirmed slightly and then pulled free to look squarely at Illiria.
The woman ignored her, looking at Sonder. “Well done. Good job.”
She felt him stiffen even as his grip tightened.
“What?”
Illiria finally looked at her and then to the older man.
“You may not be traceable, but Sonder is. The minute he set off his screen, we had you. Good job, Captain,” she repeated again. “I trust you did it without raising her suspicion. As you were told to do.” She indicated the slowly whitening Fiona. “I see you did.” She turned again to the older man. “Thank you, James. Your help was invaluable.”
The unfamiliar man nodded, his cropped white hair stiff and standing almost straight up, as straight as his posture, but he looked slightly pleased.
He would have been old enough, Fiona thought, flipping back through the things Sonder had said. They needed someone that had been born within the time frame to be able to jump to it. Apparently they had one tucked away.
The minute Sonder had engaged his screen, he was traceable. They should have known that. He should have known that. From what Illiria was saying, he did.
She backed away, pulling free of him and putting a few feet between them.
Sonder looked over at her and shook his head. “Fiona, no.”
She glared first at him, then at the rest. “This, all this, was a ruse?”
Illiria chuckled but Gire looked uneasy. Sonder shook his head again and then glared at Illiria.
“You overstep, Illiria.”
“No, you do, Guardian.”
Fiona was a good ten feet away from the group, raising her hands as if to ward them off. “A ruse,” she repeated. “A lie.”
She had just had sex with this man, had trusted him enough to take him with her to this idyllic little Massachusetts town, and now this. He knew what would happen when he activated his device, and she had been too drugged by sex and mesmerized by the image of Event to remember that fact. He had betrayed her, had not really wanted her, and had wanted to use her just like all the other men she had ever known.
“Fiona, you need to come with us,” Illiria was saying when she focused in on the tableau. “We need to study this, study you, and determine what you mean. As the Traveler, you could be incredibly valuable.”
“Or incredibly deadly,” Gire shot in, and then retreated after a glare from Illiria.
Fiona had never really looked at the slightly older woman, but she did so now. She was about forty, with a few lines around her mouth to give away her age, and short cropped brown hair that stuck close to her head. She would have been alive, barely, when this time frame existed. She looked hard, determined, and very much in command.
Fiona found she had some sympathy for the woman. It could never be easy to lead, especially with unknown technology for an uncertain future.
Then she hardened her heart and her mind. Sympathy or not, this woman, this group, was not going to take her and study her like a lab rat.
She saw that Sonder was not stopping her and continued to move back. He watched her, his eyes fixed on her. She put a comfortable distance between herself and the small group, looking at each of them in turn.
The birds continue to chirp, and the stream burbled. Still in the distance was the sound of cows, the clop of horses, and the occasional rush of a car. The air was crisp and clean, nothing like any air she’d ever experienced. She’d wanted to stay, to explore for a while, to visit this town in this time frame that her mother had raved about. Unfortunately, she no longer had that option.
Where to go, though? Her mind was refusing to concentrate on anything other than the Event and the town she was standing in.
Her eyes narrowed when she focused on Sonder, the man who apparently had only done as he had been ordered. “You, all of you. You lied to me. Especially,” she pointed her finger at Sonder, “you.”
He looke
d grim but said nothing.
“All of you have been looking for someone with my powers, but what were you going to do when you found that person? Found me?”
Nobody said anything, but she saw a look of discomfort move over Illiria’s face.
“I’m not an experiment. I’m not a ‘subject.’ I don’t know what I am, but I know it’s not that. You don’t get to study me. You don’t get to poke and prod at me, have wires stick out of me, to see what makes me tick. Basically, fuck all of you.” She turned to go, and there was another shimmer, and Rogald appeared right beside her. Without warning, he grabbed her, his arms like bands around her waist.
“Go,” he shouted, “jump. Jump now.”
There was a shout, and Illiria and Gire began to run towards them. Sonder stood motionless, just watching her, a look of resignation in his eyes.
She tried to concentrate on something, a picture of anything that would get them away from the Guardians, but her thoughts were so agitated that only one image came to mind: the image of the shattered and desolate future San Francisco, the one devoid of hope, of color, of life. The one with dirt and sand and broken things. The Event. The one that she didn’t want to see, and the only one that mattered.
She felt, rather than saw, the shimmer, and then they were in the black again, longer this time, images and forms passing around and through them. She couldn’t feel Rogald’s body but knew, by now, that he was still there.
Then they were out. Into hell.
Howling wind. Endless sand and dirt. Mounds that may have once been buildings. A grey sky, as unbroken as the jump darkness, with no clouds or anything to cut the vista. It was a strange grey, unnatural and alien, with the glare of the still present sun barely visible through it. There was no sign of any life, no trees swaying, nothing living.
Rocks, as shattered as the landscape, were strewn around them.
All those impressions, Fiona caught in the first seconds before the wind hit them, nearly knocking them off their feet. It was harsh, like being caught in a hurricane, and unremitting. It blew around them and through them, nearly knocking her off her feet. She would have been blown off them, if Rogald hadn’t been holding onto her. As it was, the two of them were barely standing, the wind bending them sideways.