by Claire Davon
Illiria stood. “ Good work.”
Fiona glanced at Sonder, who looked back at her, his expression impassive.
“Now,” Rogald said, glancing back at Fiona. “We need to work with Fiona on her powers. We have time, but we shouldn’t push it. Let’s continue. San Francisco can wait.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. “Not for long. I don’t care how much time we have.”
The others nodded, a gesture Fiona took as a sign of respect.
“Okay. What is next on the agenda?”
Chapter 7
Her training was going well and over the next few weeks Fiona improved considerably. The four of them were time dragged, though, out of sync with any sequential pattern, but she had learned a lot. Fiona was inordinately proud of herself. She could do this. She could control and harness her power. All she had to do was practice and it would get better. It was getting better.
The next time anomaly loomed in front of them. Her next big test, they had told her.
It appeared to be a little storm, Fiona thought, but it was anything but. Rain and lightning came down hard, but that was typical for the Pacific Ocean – or at least she thought so. She had been learning a lot about history and time and the world and everything in between. Her time with Sonder on Santorini seemed like a distant memory, an interlude ripped from a storybook. They had gone to too many disasters in the interim. Tornados, earthquakes, asteroid strikes, mudslides, you name it, they had all been there. Sometimes they had discovered that there was no whiff of time anomalies and that a disaster was just a disaster. Others Fiona felt the smear of wrongness, the faint trace that there had been a touch of the time calamity. Whatever had caused the Event, it left its mark, just like the Voice said it would. They hadn’t been able to determine if it had started with the Event and rippled backward in time, striking at various points in history, or if it had started somewhere like the Theran eruption and flowed forward, culminating in the Event.
“It’s just a storm,” she said, frowning. “Why are we here?” They were thirty years in her original timeline’s future, if she calculated right.
Rogald tugged his SmartPhone out of a pack in his belt. Holding it out, he brought the phone to life. Its backlit screen shone in the dark grey night. Fiona frowned.
“Nice tech,” she said, pointing at the device. It looked newer than her time frame, somewhere between hers and Sonder’s, perhaps. “I want one of those.”
The storm poured around them, rain whistling across the wind, sometimes falling where they were huddled under an awning. The streets of this Philippines Island were empty in the early morning hour and the rain fell unabated across cracked concrete beginning to be littered with tree debris. Shapes were in the darkness, but she didn’t know if they were shacks or some other kind of structure. She could see the dim shadow of palm fronds whipping around the trees and falling, crashing to the ground with a loud thud.
Lightning cut the sky, followed by thunder. She saw the three other strikes in a flash of light, illuminated in stark yellow.
“Nope,” he said, and despite the storm his voice was smug. “Mine. Don’t worry, we can’t be tracked with this. I downloaded the files,” he said. “I’m not using Internet, if there is any here, and I’m not accessing our devices. You need to see this.”
Up until now their practice had been on ever increasing events of calamity, but none with lasting impact. They were always ones that had a taste of time wrongness, but the outcome was minimal.
Some instinct told Fiona even before Rogald pulled up the file that this would be different. Play time was over. Show time was at hand.
“This is an output from our computers,” Illiria said, picking up the thread.
Fiona contented herself with nodding, in case she was wrong.
She could feel Sonder’s warmth behind her, a living heat shield that offered her all the protection she needed.
There was a crack across the sky, followed by the roll of thunder. The storm was getting closer. Winds picked up, dancing around them, debris skittering across their feet.
The split screen was difficult to see in the darkness, and Fiona squinted. For a moment the screen looked the same on both sides. In a scene similar to the one they were standing in there was rain and wind and lightning crackling. Palm trees and shanties swayed, the powerful gusts blowing through and around them. She could see that the roofs and walls of the unstable homes were already starting to be affected by the storm. If it didn’t abate soon they would lose internal integrity and fail.
On one side the storm continued to play out, a normal storm that you would find in the rainy season in the tropics. Lives and business might be lost, but it was just a rain storm.
On the other side she saw the wind pick up, as if the storm doubled in power in less than a minute. Without warning the winds swept up, their fury increasing exponentially. The trees went from swaying to cracking under the sudden impact of a storm that had spun out of control. The wind hurled into the small town, bearing down on the defenseless homes and businesses, which began collapsing as soon as the howling air struck them. Water rushed in and the wind surged through and picked up speed, heading for a larger city a short distance away.
On the other side the rain storm fell for a time, soaking everything, and then started to move across the landscape as a regular storm would.
On the right side, the “bad” side as Fiona was coming to think of it, the storm continued to gain power. Now the screen shifted, following the wind as it shrieked across the land. The rain landed as if it was thrown down from Olympus in buckets. There was nowhere for it to go on the waterlogged land and it began to gather in streets and canals, making everything impassable. Lightning cracked in the sky, touching down into the populated area, surging its electrical force through homes and people. The devastation continued and people streamed out of their homes, heading for higher ground, but the water in the streets made the going difficult. She saw people getting swept away, wailing. Cows lowed as they too got taken by the rushing water. Trees, cars, debris from houses was being flung around. And always, always the wind and rain continued.
On the other side the rain abated, slowing to a light pour, and then a drizzle, and then it was gone.
On the bad side the storm was unremitting for several hours. Rogald sped the video up. Daylight came quickly, and still the rain fell. The sun couldn’t shine through the heavy dark clouds but she could see that the city that the video now showed was devastated, ripped apart by the fury of the storm. It seemed stationary over the city, venting its wrath on the hapless island.
“Turn it off,” Fiona cried. She felt Sonder’s steadying hand on her waist. “Just turn it off.” She leaned backwards, against his warm body, and was grateful for his strength.
“Which one is the right one?” she asked. “If this is one of your simulations, which one is the way it is supposed to happen?” Please, please, she thought, let it be the scenario on the left. The devastation that the storm wrought made her breathless.
“I have no memory of this,” Sonder said.
Illiria nodded. “None of us do. Yet the simulations show that both are accurate. Both happened, and only one is right.” She turned to Fiona. “We have downloaded all the disasters we could find, once we realized what you and Sonder were doing,” she said and looked at Sonder. “He leaves traces from time to time and we worked backwards. We ran simulations on all of them.”
So…what did that mean, Fiona wondered. This was a bigger test than any she had taken on to date and she wasn’t sure she was ready. Looking at the destruction on the right, there was no doubt in her mind that she was going to try.
Ready or not, here I come.
“It’s so…big,” she said helplessly, seeing the frozen scene of destruction on the right side of the split screen. She swallowed.
“Fiona, it’s time to stop playing. The two of you have been fumbling around and you’re never going to be able to do this if you don’t get serious.�
�� Illiria’s voice was harsh, but Fiona nodded.
She thought she understood why Illiria had been chosen for this. Putting aside the fact that she was involved with Rogald, and had a personal stake in this, she was a no-nonsense, no bullshit person who told it like it was.
“Okay,” Fiona said. “Let’s do this. Do you know when the time anomaly strikes?”
“Any minute now,” Sonder said from behind her.
“Do we know I’m doing the right thing? What if I fail?”
He nodded to the right half of Rogald’s screen, which the Liberator now turned off and slipped back into the flap.
“Then that happens, Fiona. Then all those people die. I, this is weird. I suddenly have an overlay of a memory, like a shadow, of hearing about a great typhoon in the Philippines. If you fail then this typhoon kills hundreds, maybe thousands, and our history will be replaced with this new history. I don’t know what that means for the fate of the world, but I know what it means for the people in the middle of this right here, right now.” He shook his head. The wind continued to blow around him.
Fiona straightened.
Illiria and Rogald were shifting from side to side, and Illiria’s hands were moving over her hips in impatience. “Come on, come on,” Illiria said. “We are out of time.”
Sonder tugged at her. “Fiona?”
She hadn’t been slouching, but now she raised herself to her full height, looked Sonder in the eyes, and pointed with her eyes to the swirling storm outside their protective canopy.
“Let’s do this.”
She turned, stepping to the opening of the awning, and facing the tempest. Wind whipped around her and her hair was soaked by pelting rain. There was a howl, almost like a beast, as the wind tried to swoop in and claim her. It blew against her body, bending her at the waist. Then Sonder was there, bracing her from behind.
Fiona reached out with her senses and focused. All she heard was howling and the crack of lightning, followed by booming thunder. The tableau was grey with shapes moving past them in the eerie dark twilight. She was wet and the brush of debris hurling past was an awful noise. Then those faded as she opened her mind to the power within her. She had another moment of doubt. Just because she had been learning didn’t mean she could do this.
Stop. It. She shook her head. There was no more time for doubts. No more time for inaction. It was time to be the woman she was meant to be.
Yes.
She heard the voice boom through her. Buoyed with the knowledge that The Voice was with her, Fiona opened her senses wider. The storm faded until she was only peripherally aware of it. The touch of Sonder’s body against hers kept her anchored. She searched for that sense of wrongness that she felt at the disasters that had been caused by the time anomaly. It eluded her in this storm, obscured by the fury of the weather.
Then…yes. There it was. It was like a stain on the landscape. She saw everything in reverse image, like a photograph negative. The time wrongness was superimposed over the storm, existing everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A frisson of awareness curled through her, growing and expanding, then it moved out of her body and surrounded the time wrongness, gathering it at the edges and forcing it into itself. She pushed and it got smaller and smaller, coalescing together until it was a small wedge, almost like a slip of black paper. Focusing, she pulled it forward. It came, fighting her like a living thing. Then Fiona pushed and it gave. She opened her mind to the time black, and with her new abilities shoved the defect into the black, hurling it like she would a baseball. It fluttered. For a moment she thought it was going to fall back into the storm and reassemble. She thought she felt the wind lessen, and the rain lighten against her body, but there was no time to speculate. Fiona kept up the pressure, compelling it into the void. With a final flurry it vanished into the black and was swallowed up. She held the connection for a few moments longer until she felt it vanish. It winked out like a shutter had gone across it, and was gone.
Fiona staggered as she came back to herself, and sagged. Sonder grabbed her, supporting her with his body.
She told herself she could feel the difference. Unless she was mistaken, it was now just a normal winter storm, the usual for this time of year in the Philippines.
“You did it,” Illiria said and Fiona thought she heard a grudging note of respect.
“Well done,” Rogald said.
“We’ve got to go,” Sonder said, slinging his arm around Fiona’s waist. “The Commander will see that we’ve fixed the storm. He will be here in no time.” He looked at Fiona. “She can’t do it. She’s too drained.”
Doesn’t he ever sleep, Fiona wondered. Does the Commander do anything except hunt for her in time, trying to stop her from stopping his descendant?
Fiona pulled herself up, although her head was spinning. “I can do it.” Everything seemed a little further away than usual but she saw with pleasure that the clouds weren’t as dark and threatening. Lightning still cut the sky but the rain was different, lighter and without the heavy pound of menace. The difference might not be apparent to someone without her senses, but the changed outcome would be obvious.
“I can do it,” she insisted again. “I’d like a little down time, if I can have it. We can’t have the Commander finding us through your belts. I need a few hours to get it together and I’ll be fine. Where should we go?”
“We need to take her back to base and run tests,” Illiria said. Sonder made a loud noise that was somewhere between a threat and a protest.
“Absolutely not,” Sonder said. To her surprise, Rogald also stepped forward.
“No, Illy. We agreed. Our groups agreed. We are equal and together, neither getting an advantage over the other. You cannot go back on that now.”
He turned to Fiona. She saw Illiria next to the Liberator, and her face was dark with fury. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that this could be a ruse on Illiria’s part, a way to catch her and take her back to the Guardians. Fiona didn’t think even her time powers could take her forward a million years. She thought she understood why the bases were where they were. No natural ability, no matter how powerful, could travel to the bases.
Illiria hesitated. “Very well,” she said and Fiona relaxed. A little. She saw and felt by Sonder’s body that he did not. “That was our agreement. I was only thinking of her safety.”
“I have that covered,” Sonder said and his voice was a growl.
Fiona’s time senses were slow to come, her mind muddy with fatigue. Maybe she should let them use their belts. But…no. That was a one way ticket to Commander land.
“Where to?” she said, her voice thick. “Somewhere warm, please? And I’d like some protein.”
Rogald handed her his phone with another image on it. There were cliffs and palm trees and she saw the frozen red of an erupting volcano. Hawaii. In the foreground was a shack, surrounded by the jagged shards of cooled lava. It didn’t look like the most inviting part of Hawaii, but it would do.
“That’s fine. What happens after we get some food and sleep?”
Rogald glanced at Illiria and she thought he looked wary. The woman’s jaw tightened and she glared at her lover.
“We agreed, Ro. It was a suggestion, nothing more. I don’t go back on agreements.”
He seemed to relax.
Fiona knew they needed to leave. “What’s next?” She studied the picture, trying to get all the details before they jumped.
“Then, Fiona, after Hawaii we go to Tunguska. To fix the meteor.”
She frowned. “Fix the meteor? But Sonder and I were already there. It is fine. There’s nothing anomalous about it.”
Rogald nodded. “There’s nothing anomalous about it in our time frame,” he said. “But there is another possibility where it explodes over New York City in broad daylight, killing tens of thousands.”
“That, Fiona, is the next thing we have to change.”
Chapter 8
She looked at the new split screen image, a
frozen picture this time, but revealing stark differences. The meteor strike as she and Sonder had observed it was on the right, showing widespread felling of trees in an odd circular pattern. There was devastation, but it was confined to timber and luckless forest beasts.
The left side showed the remains of New York City after the same midair meteor strike. In 1908 the buildings were not as high as they were in this day and age, but that didn’t make the scene any less horrific. Buildings, instead of trees, were flattened, radiating out from an unseen central point in that same pattern, but this time in brick and wood, with the remnants of people, horses and early carriages crushed under their bulk. The Brooklyn Bridge was twisted and bent, its frame too unstable to support traffic. It was still and quiet, but even through a photograph she could tell that the stillness was not natural. In the background Fiona could see a dog, patches of white showing through the brown dust that coated its flanks, picking its way through the rubble. The sky looked unnaturally dark, a combination of debris and meteor.
“This didn’t happen,” she said, taking the picture and hurling it onto the table. “We were there. This is not what happened. I saw it. We thought that we had gone there to see what a normal disaster felt like.” She remembered, though, even at that time she had been grateful that the meteor had occurred where it did. She had thought what if it blew apart over a populated city?
Maybe she had caused this. Maybe somehow she had affected it so it turned out this way and not the way it was supposed to.
Fiona looked around at the others, wanting to flee, to escape, the crushing burden of her gifts feeling like a curse and not a boon. She couldn’t do it.
But she could do it. She had done it.
Sonder picked up the photograph. “I think I understand what Liberators are doing. We were keeping things as they were. We were always told you had the gall to think you could improve things.”