by Claire Davon
“Let’s check it out, and then let’s get out of here.”
Sonder smiled.
Fiona took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders. She looked around the small cabin they were in. She had gotten lucky and discovered a picture online of a way station of that time frame, a small bear trapper outpost in the heart of Siberia, that she had been able to shift them to. It would be destroyed by the blast, the presumed meteor strike in 1908, the one that had cleared thousands of acres of flattened trees and had remained a mystery for almost a hundred years. She supposed that time anomalies didn’t fit with any physics that a scientist would have on hand. No way to test for them. Fiona smiled so broadly that Sonder looked at her. She relayed her thought and he grinned.
“I wasn’t interested in science in my era, and I didn’t care about it until I became a Guardian. There must be an explanation for all of this, but I am not the one to figure it out. All we can do is try to stop this.”
He gestured to the sky, where soon there would be a time anomaly that would destroy much of Siberia, but fortunately affecting trees and wildlife and not doing away with any cities. If the so-called “meteor strike” had hit over a populated area of the world, such as New York or Shanghai there would have been a much greater loss of life, even in 1908. It could have been more than the three thousand plus casualties that the earthquake in San Francisco two years earlier had claimed. Maybe the Voice couldn’t stop the disasters that the time anomalies caused, but they might have some power to direct the stream.
There was some comfort in that thought, she decided. Whoever or whatever the Voice was, maybe it had compassion. Fiona glanced at Sonder, the man who she had been sharing her life with. Without him she would not have gotten very far. He may not have her powers, but he was as much a part of this as she was. He gave her strength and even though he’d never said the words, he gave her love. It was in his actions, in everything he did. To be fair, she hadn’t wanted to be the first one to say them. She’d thought they had time, but time was more precious than she knew.
“What now, Fiona?” he asked, sliding his gloved hand into hers. They looked like Eskimos, she thought, all bundled up against the intense cold of this harsh Russian winter.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think we’re just here to watch, to learn.” Part of her wished she could observe this from a safe distance like she had before, when she saw Ubar without interacting. She didn’t think there was much chance of that happening again. This time, and for future, or past, times, she had to find her own way, discover what the anomalies meant without their help.
He nodded, but his eyes were dark. Sonder gestured to his belt, which was off, but strapped around his waist, low and easy to get to. Fiona found it reassuring that a quick flick of his wrist would bring the devices to life.
“If anything goes wrong, if you are in any danger, I will use this,” he informed her. As if to demonstrate, he turned it on and the light began a slow blink. Just as quickly he turned it off again. “I don’t care if a thousand Commanders come through after I do. If this time anomaly goes bad, I will use it to get you out of here. Understood?”
She nodded, and then smiled. “I understand,” she said.
His grim expression softened a bit and he traced her cheek with his free hand.
“Ah, Fiona, I’m so glad you were in my dreams.” he said. He took her hand, slipping his gloved fingers between hers. His eyes were dark and intense and he studied her for long moments. He exhaled a visible breath, which hung in the air for a moment.
“I love you, Fiona, kale mou,” he said, and his voice broke.
She blinked, hearing the words she’d wanted to speak for so long echo in her brain. There was only one response and she wished she’d had the courage to say it before now.
“I love you back.”
He grinned. “Let’s explore.”
“Lead the way, Guardian.”
“Roger that, Traveler.”
THE END
TIME AND TIDE
By
Claire Davon
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 Claire Davon
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission from the publisher.
ASIN: B012YEV8GY
Chapter 1
“Concentrate, Fiona.”
The flat plane of the Australian desert loomed around them, a few scrub bushes and small dunes the only things breaking the otherwise featureless vista. The landscape seemed to go on for miles, heat shimmering in the sun beyond them. It looked baked, inhospitable.
Fiona shuddered to think of what it would be like to be lost there. Rescue would be unlikely. There were probably skeletons of people and animals that had gotten lost in this place and were now nothing but bleached skeletons in the sand.
She turned back to her task. In a minute the desert floor would collapse, revealing tiny caves that nothing but desert animals had seen for centuries. It was a small shift to the landscape, causing no overall impact. In their disaster hunting Fiona had learned that some of the events created by the time flux did not result in widespread devastation. Just as the time anomaly was capricious so, too, was its damage.
Small time distortions that did not change things were perfect for practicing. Sonder had insisted that she train repeatedly, strengthening her time powers. They sought out these disasters, ones that would make no difference in the outcome of the world if she failed. There were a lot of them, if you followed the pattern. Finding them wasn’t a problem. Changing them was harder than she had imagined.
As Sonder had requested, Fiona concentrated. Next to her, he also watched as the small fissure begin to form. The strangeness that accompanied an unnatural time event rippled through her, a stain on her mind. She could feel the anomaly with her time senses, its unnatural essence coloring her vision with its foulness. She reached for it mentally, using her time senses in ways she would not have believed she could a few short months ago. She knew what she had to do. Stop it. Fix it. Around them the sand started to tip into the new fissure, almost reaching their feet. Sonder grabbed her, pulling her back, away from the crevasse.
Fiona’s brow furrowed. The hot Australian sun beat down on them, creating wavering mirages that seemed to dance in the air. Far off over the horizon she heard a dingo take up a howl, and then another. She didn’t know if they were howling at the sense of time disturbance, or just baying for the heck of it.
Things continued to shift downward. Fiona saw blackness below. She focused again and felt a force dancing out of reach of both her vision and her senses. She tried to pull it down, into her consciousness. Things shifted. She looked at the fissure, trying to will it closed. It stopped moving, neither widening nor closing. It stayed opened to a hole about a foot across and two feet wide. Sand spilled in, drawing small scrubby plants and shards of debris with it to their doom.
Sonder sat back on his haunches, his expression unreadable. Under the cap he wore his dark hair was plastered to his head by the extreme heat. She could see nothing behind the yellow wraparound sunglasses that hid his eyes. It was hot, but so dry that beads of sweat evaporated almost instantly on their skin.
Fiona flushed; glad he couldn’t see her eyes behind similar sunglasses and a floppy hat. It wasn’t enough. Wresting the dark to a draw counted as a failure in her mind. If she didn’t learn to control her time senses better than this she had no chance to stop the apocalypse that lay two hundred years in her future. This time anomaly was small, and meaningless. Too many others were not.
She looked at the hole and once again reached for her senses, but they eluded her like a shy dog skittering away from her touch. Fiona let out a breath,
rage at her failure making her fists curl into claws.
“Better,” he said, “but not good enough. We need to try again.”
She heard the disappointment in his tone and wanted to weep. If she couldn’t change this rupture in time, she stood no chance against the Event. She would not be able to change the apocalypse that awaited them in the future, the thing that apparently only she could stop.
“Okay. We’ll try again. I’ll learn. I’m sorry, Sonder.”
He got up from his crouch. She wished she could see his eyes, but then again, maybe she didn’t. It was obvious by his jerky movements that he was frustrated.
When he spoke, his voice was too kind, as if he was talking to a child. “I know, kale mou. You’ll do better next time.”
Practice makes perfect, she thought. She would practice and practice, until working with time was as easy as breathing. She didn’t care how long it took. She had time.
#
Fiona looked at Sonder, her head cocked and twisted her face into an elaborate show of mock disenchantment. “Don’t tell me that about the future, Sonder! How is that possible? There are no flying cars?” She tried to put a sparkle in her eyes to take the edge off her words.
Sonder looked at Fiona, his expression somber. She nudged him, the feel of his skin never failing to electrify her.
“No flying cars,” he said. “Electric cars and self-driving cars. Nothing with wings. The air space would be too crowded. Imagine flat ground,” Sonder pointed to the dirt and then to the blue sky, “picture drivers zooming around each other up there.”
Fiona followed his finger up to the azure blue of the sky, and then nodded her head. “That would be bad.”
Her original time frame could be tricky, but they had risked it, taking refuge in a small bed and breakfast in Honduras. The Central American countries were easy to get lost in at this time, making them harder to trace.
“Are you sure you want to go to my time frame?” Sonder asked, turning his head to look at her. They were facing the view, looking out over the Sula valley with its lush forests and jabbering wildlife. Monkeys clattered and iguanas the size of small dogs were visible in the distance. Humidity beat at them, a stark change from the dry heat of Australia. “It will be unfamiliar to you. You will have trouble getting around.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Really, Sonder? You’ve been jumping through time and space for how long? Ten years? And you’re telling me that things will be unfamiliar? Everything you’ve done since you joined the Guardians has been something new.”
“Not everything.” The frankly sexual look he gave her left no doubt to his meaning. “Not the people from my dreams.”
A flush crawled over her cheeks and heat flooded her private core. “I’m glad about that.”
“What do you hope to accomplish by going to my original time?” he asked, the space between his eyes creasing. “What do you think we’ll learn?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It feels as if we need to, though. We’ve looked at the disasters, and researched everything we can, from what The Voice showed me to whatever you dug up. We’ve done all of it. I don’t think we’re any nearer to knowing what caused the Event than we were before. All the disasters tell us is that buying property on the coast is silly.”
He didn’t smile. “It’s a risk.”
“I know,” she said. Fiona examined the trees, seeing the big leaves, the dense foliage, and the thick pad of brush all around it. “Yeah, I want to do this. It would be fun to see your future. We don’t know where the answer lies. It may be there.”
He looked uneasy, but then nodded. “Okay. I can’t stop you. I don’t want you jumping without me. I can describe it for you. Better yet,” he pulled up his Guardian belt, which was lying on the floor in front of them. He picked it up as if it were a snake and examined it, then pressed a button. It beeped to life, startling Fiona. It was always a hazard to use the belt. Once triggered, it sent out a unique signature and they could be traced. The Commander had done it before. Fiona had no doubt that he and also the time travel groups were waiting for such a lapse. They were much safer without it. But even she had to admit it had features she lacked, and there were times when it was necessary. They couldn’t rely on her time travel alone. The belt gave Sonder power similar to hers, and in some ways greater, and its use could not be discounted.
“Whatcha got, pal?” She heard the quaver in her voice and stopped talking before she betrayed her nervousness to her stoic lover.
How different her life was now. Sometimes she wished for the quiet days, the days before she had discovered her powers as a time traveler, and been swept into the political struggles between the two groups using the belts to do the same thing she did naturally. Both the Guardians and the Liberators would love to find the pair and it was all Fiona and Sonder could do to stay one step ahead of the others.
People without the natural ability she had, ones who used the equipment to move through time had a built in stopping point of about a hundred years in either direction. They could not go much beyond that barrier of original time or they would fade, become insubstantial and sometimes wink into nothingness. Sonder relayed tales in the Guardian archive, of early Guardians who had tried to go back to the Civil War, or other events too far back in history and had never made it. He had told her of a story of a couple who had traveled to the turn of the century of the 1900s, and one watched the other disappear before his eyes. Fiona had tested it unknowingly when they had jumped to the 1950s, on the edge of Sonder’s range. He had faded for a moment, until Fiona touched him and everything was fine. It seemed as long as she was there they could jump beyond that time. It was strange and humbling and exciting and scary mingled together.
So far Honduras in the 1980s had been a good base. It was close enough to her time that she could use modern money. In addition she had set up safe deposit boxes in another run to the 1950s, and laden them with hard gold currency, bars and Krugerrands, things that could be used in any era she knew about. Most of the time it was easier to store these things in banks in countries other than America, and Switzerland became a favorite spot of the duo, sprinkled through time. It was tricky and Fiona was grateful for Sonder. He kept a cool head about him and could be counted on to have thought through the details.
He pointed the beam that emitted from the belt toward a clear wall. A picture came into view. In the background was desert and scrub plants and endless horizon of sand and Saguaro, dotted by mountains in the distance. In the forefront was a small house, one of many of tract houses lining the street. It was a basic thousand square foot starter home, looking much the same as they had in her time. She guessed that not too much had changed on the architecture front in the years that separated her original time from Sonder’s. Fiona was perversely disappointed. She had expected flying cars, robot helpers, moving sidewalks and all manner of things promised by the science fiction and fantasy storytellers. But then again, they were supposed to have all of that in her time, if people like early science fiction writer Frederic Brown had been right. At the end of the day nothing was all that different.
“It looks like my time,” she said, knowing her disappointment showed.
Sonder nodded. “Things are the same, and also different. Wifi is universal. A billionaire seeded the entire world with it not too far in your future and it is part of our culture. Some people are jacked into the network using chips in their hands that give them immediate access, but that’s a personal choice. There will be uproar about that between our times when some people claimed that that was the signal the devil had taken your soul.”
“Like the Terminator being able to access data. Of course he was a machine,” she said, and shook her head when she saw Sonder’s blank look. It was another personal reference that eluded him. Sometimes she missed the quiet life that she had had prior to the subway car derailment that had activated her powers. She missed her friends. They would have understand her Terminator reference immediately,
and begun a spirited dialogue sprinkled with “I’ll be back,” and “come with me if you want to live” and discussions of whether Kyle Reese had created his own paradox by going back in time to rescue his leader’s mother and then becoming the father of that leader. It had all seemed so theoretical, until it wasn’t.
“I know that look,” Sonder said. “We will get this movie over the ‘Net so I can see what you are talking about.”
Fiona waved a hand. “It would seem silly, especially the later movies. Now that we know what time travel can do.” She focused on the picture. “This is your house?”
He nodded. “The plant was close by, which was a plus. Gas is expensive and I only used it when I had to.” He pointed to the solar panels on the top of the house, and all the houses in the area. “We had the advantage of being in a sunny climate, and sold back the electricity to the state. In my time everyone who lives in such areas has solar panels, and most even in the colder states do as well, although if it’s not as effective. It helped with the fuel supply. I am not sure about Massachusetts.”
She shrugged. “Probably. We get a lot of snow, so we’d need backup. But Sonder, Arizona is a landlocked state. Why would you have a desalinization plant there?” She knew that he had been killed in an accident at the desalinization plant, which she had never questioned, but now realized it made no sense.
“It’s still a landlocked state, but the coastline is changing as the water level rises. The glaciers and icebergs are melting in the Arctic and Antarctica. It’s less a desal plant than a way to channel water to the desert states. It’s not important.”
She focused on the house again. Nothing stood out about it. “When do you propose we go?”
“I have the perfect time. I was between jobs and went to Alaska for a month. I wanted to see the Matanuska glacier before it was gone. The house should be empty and we won’t raise any eyebrows. I’m not close to my neighbors. As for you, we are not living in a prison state. You won’t be able to drink at a bar or cash checks until we get you some ID, but you’re used to that. It should be doable.”