Timewise

by P. K. Gardner

  Ty's fingers tense on the trigger of the stunner. "Put him down," he orders the tikker. "Put him down right now or I'll start shooting."

  It's a bluff, a poor one at that. Even at its highest setting, the stunner isn't going to do much better than knock out a tikker. Ty knows from experience that it hurts like hell, but it's not fatal. Where there's one tikker, there will be another.

  One of the tikker's hands curl around Zane's neck. The other is pressed flat to his temple

  "Ty," Jax croaks from behind him. "The hell is that?"

  "Tyler." Zane forces the words out through partially crushed airways. "Just—"

  Ty squeezes the trigger. The tikker disappears in a flash of light, Zane with him. The bolt from the stunner crashes ineffectually into the tree behind them, charring the bark.

  "What's he doing?" Annie asks. Spense has walked them through Zane Tucker's last four slips, saying they can catch him on the fifth if they just move now. "What's he changing?"

  "I don't know," Ty says. He's tired. He hasn't been this tired in a long time. Zane's been running them all across time and Ty still can't figure out why. What changed? In the six months he'd been missing, Zane Tucker went from one of the best and most respected Timewise operatives to topping the agency's Most Wanted list.

  And that isn't Zane. Ty knows Zane. Zane's loyal, Zane believes in this agency, this place. He loves it because it's the only home he knows.

  "What I don't get is the people," Annie says.

  There's a whole task force dedicated to finding Zane. They comb newspapers, keep an eye on the past, looking for any sign of Zane Tucker, looking for any changes in the news. Annie and Ty have been interviewing witnesses. Zane has left a trail of them. It's the only way to tell where he's been for sure. The descriptions don't vary.

  "Sweet boy," says a curly haired waitress from 1992. "Came in here right before the fire started. Managed to put it out with his coat. Left before I even got a chance to thank him."

  "Some street kid, I appose," says a market vender in 2312. "Comes in here, all floppy hair and scruffy jeans and mucks with my stand. Spent me a day fixing it back up. Well enough I appose, considering the market got shot up."

  "Off sort of guy," says a student in 2319. "Comes in here, tells me stay in tonight. Didn't say whyfore. I listened, acorse. Talk on your omens."

  Zane is saving people. It doesn't take long for Ty to figure that out. Zane's hopping through the timeline and pulling people out of danger. If he hadn't been leaving great big temporal sores in the fabric of the universe, Ty could admire him for it.

  "Going to have tikkers in 2319," Annie says. "Another never-ending daylong battle. Thank you, Zane Tucker."

  Ty doesn't know what to do. A part of him (it's been there for longer than he cares to remember, whispering sweet betrayal in his ears) just wants to let Zane be. Wants to leave him running, let him change the timeline. A part of him wants to trust Zane, wants to believe he'd never do anything this destructive.

  But there's another part of him, screaming about betrayal and revenge, that just wants to make Zane pay.

  The first time Tyler Smith meets Zane Tucker, Ty will later realize, is also the last time he meets Zane Tucker.

  One minute he's warm in his bed, listening to the pulsing yowl of his alarm clock and the next he's stumbling out of bed expecting warm carpet on his feet but getting the cold surface of a white tile floor. Tyler looks up, blinking. His familiar bedroom with its friendly blue walls has given way to a white sterile room that resembles something out of a mental hospital. It's dark, but the full moon's eerie incandescent light shines through the window, painting a shimmering pattern of shadows on the floor.

  Tyler blinks, half sure he's gotten stuck in the distorted reality between dreams and waking, but the illusion holds fast. As his eyes adjust to the relative darkness, he notices the bars on the window and the guy lying on a small white cot, staring at him with hawkish intensity. Tyler takes an involuntary step backwards.

  He's not stupid. He knows what sort of places have bars on the window just like he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's not in his house anymore, like he knows from his bare feet against the cool white tiles, that this is real. . .

  "Where am I?" he manages. "Who are you?"

  The guy sits up in bed. There is crispness in his movement, an almost military precision that Tyler finds unnerving and familiar all at the same time.

  "Prison cell 67B," he says, gaunt face splitting into a grim smile. "Welcome hellside, kid."

  "We're in prison," Tyler stammers. He keeps moving backward until he feels his heel clip up against the wall. He doesn't remember how he got here, doesn't know how he can go from his bedroom to a prison in the blink of an eye.

  Yet there's something familiar about this. The guy is shrouded in shadows, sitting in a streak of darkness coming through the window. He has short-cropped dark hair, hollow features and black circles circumventing his brown eyes like bruises. His long, stick-thin limbs fold up awkwardly, bones jutting out at bizarre angles. He looks as much like a skeleton as a person.

  "Yessir," the guy says, sounding a little sheepish. "Name's Zane Tucker. You're in my cell. 67B."

  "You're a killer, aren't you?" Tyler asks. His breath catches in his throat and sticks there, choking him. His hands are quaking. "That's why they locked you up. Ivy says the criminal mind works in all sorts of twisted ways. The killer tries to gain your trust and the next thing you know, he's shoving a knife in your stomach and slicing out your entrails. I heard—"

  "I haven't got a knife," Zane says with quiet, almost detached amusement. "And I always preferred eyeballs to entrails."

  Tyler starts to laugh but the sound has trouble passing through his lips. For all he knows, the statement is not a joke. He forces the laugh out anyway, but it's a strangled, hollow sound.

  "Not a killer," Zane says, as if anticipating his question. "Just made enemies of some of the higher-ups. Broke some rules that needed breaking."

  "Was it worth it?" Tyler asks before he can stop himself. Sometimes his curiosity gets the better of his common sense.

  Zane blinks once, taken aback, but then his face splits into a wide grin and he doesn't look like a prisoner at all. "Most definitely."

  "Well then, what did you do?" Tyler asks. The panic's waning but it still hovers like a mist in the room, coating every word, every action. "Don't they let people off if there are extenuating circumstances?"

  "Not quite so simplified," Zane says. He pushes himself to a standing position and Tyler can't help but notice how his feet don't make a sound when they hit the floor. "Big on rules, these guys are." There is a sudden maniacal energy to his movements, to his speech, like he's running high on caffeine and low on time. "No matter what they say, you haven't done anything wrong. You'll make the right choices. Don't let them tell you elsewise. You hear me, Ty?" He starts to make a grab for Tyler's shoulder but thinks better of it, hand hovering in the air just out of reach. "It's going to be—"

  A loud, insistent knocking sounds on the door. Zane and his prison cell fade from view, giving way to Tyler's bedroom and his mother's voice. "Did you oversleep again, Tyler?"

  The clock next to his bed reads 6:50 in glowing red numbers, a full twenty minutes from the time his alarm had gone off.

  "Tyler!" his mom yells.

  "I'm up!" he hollers back.

  "Well, hurry! Your sister needs to drop something off. She's threatening to leave you behind and I'm thinking I might let her."

  "I said I'm coming!" Tyler grabs a pair of jeans from the floor and a clean T-shirt from a drawer. "Coming, coming."

  He's out the door in two minutes flat. He forgets his English homework, his jacket and his lunch. It's not until he's slumped into his customary math-induced stupor that he wonders how the hell Zane Tucker knew his name.

  "Timewise is the present," the professor says, adjusting his sweater as he steps out from behind his podium. "Anything before Timewise is classified pas
t. Right here, right now is the present. The future does not exist."

  Ty feels his eyes glazing over. This is an overarching theme of the Timewise Agency. The past is history. The future doesn't exist. Ty sits in the back of the classroom wondering how much is propaganda and how much is truth.

  (about one third of the class had involvements with Timewise before Timewise was involved with them, but no one besides Jones talks about that)

  The Timewise Academy class of 2401 had twenty-six students to start, pulled from all over the United States and from across the timeline. Twenty-six people dating from 1972 all the way up to 2399.

  Just twenty-five of them now. One is missing, gone without a trace. Jones Longwood picks up on that immediately. The missing student had been a pretty little thing, barely more than a wisp with silky black hair, olive-colored skin and eyes so dark they looked black. Her name is Wendy, or at least it was.

  Her name was Wendy and she is gone now.

  Jones Longwood whispers theories about what went on that night she disappeared, just starts talking about conspiracies and betrayal until Ty looks over his shoulder wherever he goes.

  (no one is ever watching)

  I hear she tried to go futureside, Jones says late one night, his voice invading Ty's ears as Ty tries to drift into sleep. Told Dix she was coming back, told him she jus' wanted to see. She never came back. Nothing and nada futureside. You know what I think it is, Ty? I think in the future's the world's ending. Place where tikkers come from.

  "At first glance," the professor says, "time travel may appear to be limitless, lawless. Like those science-fiction stories some of our students are so very fond of. For starters, writers used to hypothesize that one could spend five, ten, twenty, years pastside and return to the instant they left, able to visit their old house, their old life and find they had aged while the world didn't. However, the interesting anomaly we at Timewise have observed is this: if you are grounded here in Timewise and you spend six weeks pastside, it is physically impossibly to return here the day you left. The time spent pastside is always equal to the time lapsed in the present. If it wasn't, nothing and nada would ever get done."

  Ty thinks of Ivy Lane growing up; his sister, Erica, graduating and heading to college; his mom with graying hair and creaking bones. He realizes he's missing it all. It's going on right now and four hundred years in the past and he can't go back.

  He glances to his side to find Jones Longwood asleep on his desk. Stace Lemond sits in front of the classroom, leaning over her desk, drinking in everything said in lecture. The Professor with his 1980s sweaters and 1990s glasses is teaching about how to slip through time and why it works.

  Ty realizes with a sudden clarity that Timewise is home now. This is where he belongs.

  So he leans back, stretching gangly arms, and he nearly hits the girl sitting behind him. She pushes him away, squealing, "Ty."

  He turns around and smirks. Then he folds both arms behind his head and leans back in his seat until his head is lying on her desk. He is smiling the whole time.

  The first time Tyler slips through time, he doesn't realize what has happened. He is twelve years old and easily panicked — too undersized to have any real chance at defending himself.

  And he is freezing.

  He opens his eyes to all-consuming darkness. He rolls over, trying to get comfortable, and topples straight out of bed and onto the carpet. Weird considering he usually has enough room to roll over in his own bed.

  He lands roughly on the ground, rolling into a glass table. The glass slides off its holder and clatters to the floor, making an uncomfortably loud crash. He remains still until he can verify it didn't shatter. Pushing himself to his feet, he staggers toward the wall and gropes for the light switch.

  The light's glow dazzles him, blinds him worse than even the darkness, but slowly, his eye adjust.

  The room is not his own. There's a couch with red cushions where his bed should be. If it wasn't so new, it would look just like the couch in the basement. The floor of the room is littered with packing boxes instead of his dirty clothes.

  But at the same time, Tyler knows that it is undeniably his room. Same shape, same size, same configuration.

  He backs out the door. He doesn't even realize he's moving until he backs into a wall, sending a photograph clattering to the floor. The glass splinters inside the frame, littering the carpet with tiny slivers of broken glass.

  Ty looks behind him. The wallpaper is familiar, robin's-egg blue with the faintest hint of white stripes, but it's too new. It's missing the scratches from the stray cat Erica dragged in and the stain from Tyler's ill-timed science project. In a daze, he turns to pick up the picture from the ground.

  The couple in the photograph is smiling brightly. The man is handsome, with shaggy brown hair, bronzed skin and blue eyes. The woman is radiant with dark curly hair, thick lashes and a smile so big it threatens to swallow her face. The man has an arm slung around the woman's shoulder. The woman's laughing and it must have been windy because her hair is flying all over the place.

  Tyler traces the man's face, then the woman's. He's never seen this particular picture before, but he knows the people well. They're his parents, before he and Erica were born. Before Dad died. It's a precious slice of the path. He can't look away.

  A door creaks open and a voice he hasn't heard since he was three years old says, "What the hell are you doing in my house?"

  His father — Garrett Smith — is standing in the doorframe with a baseball bat heaved over his shoulder. He's a newlywed by the looks of it, scarcely older than the man in the photograph. His parents must be moving, out of the old apartment into their new house, the house Tyler will grow up in.

  "I don't know who you think you are, kid," his father (not Dad yet, still just Garrett Smith) says, "but if this is a joke let me tell you, I'm not laughing."

  Tyler feels his eyes widen. "I'm sorry, sir," he says, all too aware of the quaver in his voice. "I have this problem. Sleepwalking, you know. I used to live here."

  Garrett's gaze softens. The bat drops down to the ground. Tyler isn't sure what to make of this abrupt change in demeanor especially when the lie is so flimsy. Garrett looks at him strangely. His matter-of-fact voice doesn't match the introspection in his eyes. "Well, it's probably not safe to head back out tonight. Got a phone in the kitchen. One of the few things we actually managed to get in working order. I think the den is mostly unpacked. Tell you what, give your folks a ring, let them know what's happening, then you're welcome to the sofa."

  "We're not far," Tyler says. "I can walk. It's no big deal. I'm really sorry."

  "Relax," Garrett insists. "It's a mistake. I'm sure stranger things have happened." He yawns. "I can take you home first thing tomorrow. No use in heading out at this hour."

  "But," Tyler starts.

  "Really," Garrett says, smiling. "It's no problem at all. I'm looking for some sleep tonight and I'm sure you are as well. We'll deal with this in the morning."

  Tyler opens his mouth to protest, but thinks better of it. "Thank you very much, sir."

  His father yawns. "It's Garrett," he says, "Garrett Smith."

  "I'm Zane Tucker," Tyler lies.

  "Zane Tucker," Garrett repeats, eyes distant. "That's a good name. I'll see you morningside."

  "Yeah," Tyler says, fighting through a fog. "You bet."

  Garrett nods and pulls the door to the bedroom closed to leave Tyler standing alone in the hall. He still has the picture clutched in his hands. Tyler tries to think about how long the smiling, trusting Garrett Smith has to live. Four more years? Five? How long before his daughter comes downstairs to find his broken body sprawled across the living room?

  (shit happens, Zane will tell him someday soon. Shit happens and despite everything, there's nothing we can do to fix it.)

  Tyler's feet lead him downstairs, dodging through empty moving boxes with an ease that surprises him. He's in the kitchen before he realizes he still has th
e picture. The jagged edge of the broken glass has sliced his palm and now the smiling faces of the newlyweds are distorted by a thin layer of his blood. He sets the photograph down, hands shaking.

  He knows he can't stay here. There's a strange icy feeling in the pit of his stomach that tells him nothing good can come from this. He grabs a pad of paper from the refrigerator and a pen from a coffee mug.

  He hesitates for a long time and then scrawls, a short note.

  Thanks for everything. I'm sorry.

  He signs it Zane Tucker and every letter feels like betrayal. He wants to sign his real name, but something won't let him. His hands are so numb he has trouble holding the pen much less writing down the lie.

  He is so very cold. The longer he stays the worse it gets. At the last minute, he grabs the photograph from the table and makes his way toward the foyer.

  The door is unlocked. Tyler bites his bottom lip. His father shouldn't be this open, this careless, this trusting. That's how it happens, the door will stay unlocked one night and...

  And innocent, naive Garrett Smith will pay with his life.

  Tyler takes a deep breath and flees into the fresh air.

  Ty and Annie trace Zane Tucker to an abandoned warehouse in 2224. And Ty doesn't realize something is off until it's already too late. Zane should have slipped by now because that's how it goes. Zane sees they're on his tail and he slips back into the living fabric of the past to hide until the next time Timewise tacks him down.

  Annie doesn't notice the change in Zane's pattern. She just follows him straight ahead into the warehouse.

  The building is old. Ty guesses it was a factory at some point. The lighting is poor, the roof is caving in and it appears abandoned. Ty figures it's one of the few structures too unstable for even the desperate multitudes invading the streets after the governmental collapse of 2223.

  Ty trails Annie into the building. He has no choice. Annie's tearing up the rickety stairwell, gaining on Zane with every step. Ty has never been able to stop her when she's on the warpath like this. Besides, there's not a lot of room to hide once you reach the second deck. Just a rim resembling a balcony that circles the warehouse's open lower level. Zane will have nowhere to go.