Timewise

by P. K. Gardner

  (except, of course, the past)

  Annie lets out a yelp of frustration that can only mean Zane's slipped again, off to another time that they have to pinpoint before they can follow. But they have more pressing matters. As Ty tops the last stair to the second floor, he notices the ground level is filled with tikkers, about thirty of them hiding in the corners like cockroaches in the shade. He goes mute, stops breathing. Annie follows his gaze and swears softly.

  She draws her stunner and fires off four rounds before he can stop her. She connects on two, misses two. But now she's got their attention. Thirty pairs of huge, glossy black eyes swivel up toward the second story. One by one, hands with long spindly fingers unravel and the entire warehouse is filled with the ethereal blue light.

  "Down!" Ty screams. Operating on instinct and adrenaline, he reaches for the back of Annie's head, forcing her off to the ground. Blue lightning sizzles above them and crashes into the rotting wood of the roof. The entire place caves in on top of them, showering them with wood shards. The air thickens with dust until it is almost opaque.

  "Annie!" Ty hisses.

  "Alive," she chokes back through a hacking cough.

  As the dust settles, Ty can make out Annie's dirt-caked face. Ty can feel something sticky on his forehead — blood seeping down from a cut on his temple. The single warm streak burns his frigid body.

  "The tikkers," Annie says.

  Ty crawls to the edge of the platform and peers down. He can see them moving slowly in the dust-laden air, like zombies lurching forward through a fog.

  Annie is reaching for her stunner, for her switchblade, ready for a fight. Ty can tell they're outnumbered, overmanned. He knows they don't have a prayer. The flow of blood from the cut on his forehead doesn't show any signs of slowing and there's a bruise forming on Annie's cheek, standing out black against her skin.

  "I'll take the ones on the right," Annie says thickly.

  She's insane, Ty thinks. Either that or she has one hell of a concussion. "No," he says, panic cutting through the haze of pain. "Timewise."

  His limbs are stiff from cold, but he manages to reach out and grasp Annie's wrist, manages to pull them through the icy frost of time until they're both lying, bleeding, gasping for breath in the blinding white light of Timewise's recovery room.

  Ty tries to push himself to his feet. He loses his balance and sits. Propped up against one of the whitewashed walls, he stares at the brown dust outlining the area where his body had just been. Annie rolls onto her back, coughing explosively. Plumes of coarse brown dust billow over her prone form.

  Strands of her dusty hair have fallen out of its tie and hang limply on either side of her face. "Zane fucking Tucker," Annie mutters. "That's your old pal Zane Tucker. Good guy, ain't he, Ty?"

  "That's not Zane," Ty croaks.

  He can get used to the idea of Zane Tucker gone rogue, but he can't believe the same guy he knew would track them through tikkers, trying to get them killed. He can't believe Zane is even capable of that.

  "You didn't know Zane before," Ty says. "Now, that's not him. Six months gone and that's just not him anymore. I should have fixed onto it sooner."

  "Near died back there," Annie says, pushing herself to her feet. "We've got to get up with this guy. He's gonna cause some damage."

  "Yeah," Ty says.

  For the first time, he really believes it.

  Tyler's at Timewise for seven weeks before he first lays eyes on the contemporary Zane Tucker. The difference between this Zane and the one Tyler had seen that day in the school is shocking.

  Don't tell anyone and don't look back.

  Zane has an almost military-style haircut, a rumpled T-shirt and a pair of jeans that look freshly ironed. He looks younger, skin dotted with the leftovers of adolescent acne. He's talking to a superior officer and Tyler can tell he's uneasy. He's standing too straight, with limbs that are too rigid, and speaking in a voice that is too curt. Tyler ducks into an empty classroom to listen.

  "I've heard great things about you," the officer tells Zane. "One of our brightest upcoming field agents. Started solo ops at age fifteen. That's something to be proud of."

  "Yessir," Zane says. "Thank you, sir."

  The voices drift into the classroom, floating to Tyler's ears. He cups his hand to his ears so he doesn't miss anything.

  "Solo op at fifteen," the officer repeats.

  "Helped alongside by early starts," Zane offers, and Tyler can hear the embarrassment in his voice.

  "Ah, yes," says the officer. "You were scrubbed when? Age eight? Been at Timewise ever since?"

  "Yessir."

  "You're a fine young man, Tucker," the officer continues. "You would have done pride by your parents."

  "Thank you, sir." Zane says tersely. "Means a lot, sir."

  "Where you from?" the officers asks. "Everyone's got stories about home."

  Tyler peers out from the classroom, he's close enough to read the honest bafflement in Zane's face.

  "I'm from Timewise, sir," Zane says.

  The professor has an oddly serious look on his face when Ty walks into class one morning late in his first year at Timewise. He is perched on the edge of his desk, running a hand through graying hair. When the class is settled, he takes off his glasses and polishes them on his sweater. He is dressed to match his mood, in black slacks and a dark-gray sweater. Ty can feel the ominous air to the room. Even Jones Longwood is sitting up straighter in his seat. A single word is scrawled across the blackboard in bold white letters: TIKKERS.

  The professor waves a hand toward the blackboard. "So, what've you guys heard regarding tikkers?"

  A clamor of voices suddenly rises through the classroom's still air. Ty doesn't say anything himself, but he's heard almost all the theories before about what they are and what they want. His roommate, Jones Longwood, collects tikker theories the way some people collect stamps.

  One rumor is that tikkers are a product of a splintered timeline, appearing where a Timewise agent had changed something. Another story says they're really a version of humanity, but about a thousand years of evolution and two nuclear wars later. Ty's not sure what he believes.

  After a few minutes, the professor raises his hand palm up and the voices trail off one by one. He pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He's sweating faintly, a tiny drop slipping from his gray hairline and trickling to his cheek. Perspiration is something Ty rarely sees at Timewise. He can't recall the last time he broke a sweat.

  "How many of you have seen a tikker?" the professor asks.

  One by one, hands start going up. Ty rises his first, then Stace Lemond and Jones Longwood. All in all, fourteen of the twenty-five students (Wendy never does make it back) have a hand in the air.

  The professor nods as if he expected the results. "That's about normal for a class. It varies year to year, but it tends to be rounding half. I'll have it known that four more kids like yourselves would have been here with you now if the tikkers hadn't gotten to them before Timewise did."

  He pauses for a moment to allow the effect of the statement to take hold. It works. Ty leans forward in his seat, hanging onto every word, every syllable.

  "Those of you been around tikkers afore know the symptoms. Same thing ops complain of around scenes of temporal instability, where paradox abounds. Timewise hypothesizes that tikkers are walking paradoxes. They create havoc everywhere they go, spreading temporal destruction behind them and making more work for Timewise.

  "Pastside, they were called Temporal Instability Keepers or, on occasion, TIKs, but the lexicon has evolved over time and now they're nearly universally referred to as tikkers. Originally these TIKs were more curiosity than threat, but now, it seems they're The Enemy. Save physical, we don't know anything about these TIKs save they don't much care for human life. Factoring in language incompatibilities they're unreceptive to all forms of human communication.

  "Timewise doesn't know what they want or how to deal them. These tikk
ers were discovered by Harrison Wise a few short years after the agency was established. Chronologically, the first human was lane up in May of 2013, implying the general public has known about tikkers since before Timewise was in being. Contrary to that, our records show definitively that Timewise predated these attacks. Several battles were discovered literally within hours of each other from the perspective of Timewise, and these battles have. . ."

  As the professor switches back into lecture mode, Ty starts to phase out. His eyes grow heavy, his head lolls back in his chair and he's pretty sure he's asleep even before Jones Longwood.

  It is raining. Ty is freezing. Zane is frantic.

  There are tikkers, way too many tikkers, just outside the house. Zane and Ty are holed up along with a family of three that can't just slip away — not that Ty or Zane are in any shape to plunge into the ice.

  Ty is barely conscious and slurring his words, thanks to a wooden beam to the head from the collapsing roof. Zane is better off, but only just. He's got a nasty cut on his forehead that's spilling blood all over his face and a broken left wrist bulging awkwardly under his sleeve.

  Zane refuses any help the family tries to give him, batting away the lady's hands every time she tries to get a closer look. Ty knows why. The medbay back at Timewise is top notch. With the depression going strong in 2224, nothing here will provide decent medical care. On the other hand, Ty doubts grinding his teeth through this siege is going to be much fun.

  The family they're protecting is typical for the time period, or at least what Ty knows of it. They're all roughly the same shade of brown, with coffee-colored skin and dark hair. Racial identity is all but impossible to discern and Ty thinks he likes it this way. The mother is clinging to her two children like they're all she has left in this world. She keeps reaching for Zane, pointing toward the gash on his forehead, to the bulge of his still swelling wrist and jabbering at high speed in that 2220s slang that Ty never has been able to replicate.

  Zane, on the other hand, has the language down pat. The accent that sounds like a mix between Bostonian and Puerto Rican with words going faster than Ty can comprehend, syllables spilling into each other.

  "Don't need mending," Zane grumbles, sounding just like a native. "S'good, really, covered square."

  "Zane," Ty mumbles. "The tikkers. How many we got?"

  "Lots," Zane says.

  The lady says something to Zane that Ty doesn't understand. The world spins slowly in his vision. There's an odd sort of buzzing in his ears.

  "Can't get out," Zane says to the lady. "Tikkers, hear me talk at you? Rounding ten of them. Not getting out through that."

  Ty feels himself slumping down next to the staircase.

  "No, no, no, Ty," Zane says, slapping his cheek lightly. "Ty! You don't get to do this. I need you here, Ty, need you to stay with me. No one and nadie getting out if it's just me here."

  Zane's face is swimming in front of Ty, skin twisting as if in a kaleidoscope. Ty is intensely aware of the throbbing in his head. It feels like his skull has a heartbeat all its own. There is the coppery taste of blood in his mouth. The pervasive, invasive cold numbs him, making him not care.

  "Concussion," he says thickly, stumbling over the ss's, tongue heavy in his mouth. "Zane, I—"

  "Get your ass standing," Zane hisses. "If you've got a concussion, leastwise we need your falling asleep on us. You're tikker bait as you are."

  Ty tries pushing himself to his feet, but his legs are dead weight; he can't get them to cooperate with his arms. He stumbles on the bottom step, toppling into Zane. Zane catches him with his bad hand, letting out a sharp wail of pain that makes Ty's blood stand still.

  The lady is at Zane's side instantly, two tiny children peeking out from between her legs. She's jabbering incessantly in that mind-numbing dialect.

  "Get on mending later!" Zane says through clenched teeth. His face is streaked with dirt but Ty can see wet patches where tears mixed in with the grime. He grabs the lady by the shoulder with his good hand. "Listen at me. Take your kids and run quick. Tikkers frontside. Rounding back, though, you get chances. No matter what happens don't stop. Read me? Stop and you're lane up for certain."

  Tears stream down the woman's face but she nods, stringy black hair swirling wildly around her head. Her arms are wrapped around her children. They're small, reed thin. Ty tries to smile at the smaller one but her eyes go wider and she buries her head in her mother's skirt.

  "Listening, you?" Zane growls. "Get out! Buying you as many ticks as possible. Prolly got whole moments if you hurry."

  With a single nod, she leans up to kiss Zane on the cheek and then ushers her children toward the back door. Zane turns back to Ty. Slumped against the stairwell, he fights to keep his eyes open.

  "Up," Zane growls. He does his best to force Ty into a sitting position, but his best isn't much with his own wrist broken. "Crissakes, Ty. Got to get standing. Sunk if you don't. We need to do them a distraction."

  "M'tired, Zane," Ty mumbles. There's a pleasant darkness on the edges of his vision threatening to consume him. "S'cold. Can't move."

  "We're always cold, Ty," Zane says, pulling him into a sitting position. "Welcome to Timewise. Now you're lane up if you don't forget the concussion and give me your focus for three ticks."

  Ty nods vaguely, head slumping. Zane catches his chin before it hits his chest. "Start talking, Smith. C'mon, what happened afore Timewise? What do you remember from home?"

  "Remember," Ty says quietly. "I remember. . . had this girl. you know. Girl next door, except she wasn't. Best friends and all."

  "That's good, Ty." Zane says distractedly. "What was she called?"

  "Called Ivy," Ty slurs. "Ivy Lane."

  "Keep on." Zane says. He roots through Ty's jacket pockets, looking for something. Ty can barely see his face, but he can feel the warmth of his hand, the dampness of his breath, hear the rapid beat of his heart, his irregular breathing.

  (it's so cold it burns)

  "She was," Ty coughs and tries not to look at the flecks of blood that appear on Zane Tucker's skin, the darker splotches standing out against his ashen skin. "She was pissed with me when I was leaving, but I couldn't, you know? Couldn't tell her because she wouldn't have—"

  Zane presses something cold and metal into Ty's hands. Looking Ty in the eyes, he speaks slowly and deliberately. "Hear me now, Smith. Got a stunner in your hands, got tikkers frontside. Between you and me, we can take them. Real quick. Stun a few to give the family ways out, then back a Timewise where you can enjoy the concussion or just up and die if you want. Just not right here, not right now. I'll not be lane up today."

  "Ivy," Ty mumbles.

  "She'd want you alive, yeah?" Zane says, wincing as he grabs his own stunner out of his jacket. "She'd want you out of this, scrubbed or not, she'd want you out."

  "I'm cold," Ty slurs.

  "Stand up," Zane says, hauling him to his feet. "You got your stunner?"

  Ty lifts it weakly. The weapon feels like it weighs more than he does. Zane nods approvingly, bringing his own to a firing position. "Take them out," he says. "Don't pause to finish them. We don't have the ticks to spare."

  "Zane," Ty slurs. "I'm not sure I'm—"

  Zane catches him before his legs give out, hauling Ty back to his feet. "Yes you are, Ty. You're fine. You're going to make it. No one and nadie lane up today. You hear me? We turn the stunners on them. Ten out. Five for each of us. Five shots and a slip and everyone gets out breathing."

  Ty nods but he doesn't share Zane's reckless confidence. Zane is smiling now, the shit-eating grin of a kid who's about to do something incredibly stupid and hope to get away with it. "My counting three."

  "Sure," Ty slurs. "Counting three."

  Zane fingers the doorknob. "Three, two, one." He gives Ty a look. "Down goes nothing, right?"

  He flings the door open.

  Ty doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want to be back at his old high school (Ivy's here, somewhere close
and Ty wants to see her so bad it burns) in the 21st century tailing Zane's haphazard slips. No matter what happens, Zane is always four steps ahead of them, tracking them on a wild goose chase through tikkers, paradoxes and death. It's a good way to disappear.

  Zane is still the best in the business.

  They get lucky this time. It's only one tikker where it could have been one hundred, but even that rings an alarm in Ty's head. Zane doesn't make mistakes like this.

  Something about the entire scene bothers the hell out of Ty. They'd arrived just in time to see Zane knock some hapless local out of the range of a tikker's blast before hightailing it into an empty classroom dragging the kid along beside him.

  But why save the kid? Why step out into danger if there is no need?

  "Annie?" he hisses.

  She's made quick work of the tikker, but he's come to expect nothing less. That's his Annie Gallagher, efficient and deadly. She'd stunned the creature and whipped out the standard Timewise-issued switchblade to slit the thing's throat. When she looks up, her hands are slick with the visceral yellow fluid that functions as tikker blood. "Yeah, Ty?"

  "Did you just see what I did?"

  She scowls, wiping the blade on her T-shirt. "I saw that bastard take a hostage. Some idiot local."

  "Yeah," Ty says thickly, staring at the blood on her hands. "Acorse." That makes sense. More than the other notion did. "If you circle around outside, we can head him off. Can't walk crosswise. Glass panes in the window; he'll see you if you walk across."

  "What if Tucker's slipped already?" Annie asks. "We've got to go in now."

  "There's a kid in there," Ty says. "An innocent local who should keep breathing. We go 'round. Head Zane off, catch him clean. Remember, we've got the block." He pats his pocket where the comforting hum informs him of success. "As long as it holds, no one gets in or out of this time."