Selfless Series Box Set

by S Breaker

  He met her gaze but was in no mood for questions. “Let’s go.” He pulled her up and started to run again.

  They ran down the streets of the dead city. Laney didn’t know where they were headed, but she felt like they had been running again for miles. They reached a bridge and took across it. And when Laney happened to look back, she marveled, “Is that…?”

  Behind them, she could see a tall tower. It was unmistakeable—the gothic architecture, the spire, and the huge, round broken gap where a clock face should have been. The structure was all ruined and crumbling, but she blinked again with another spark of recognition. Big Ben… She and Noah were running across Westminster Bridge. Yep, this was definitely London.

  She heard a faint whizzing coming up from behind them. The drones were still in pursuit. A set of missiles made a loud rocketing sound as they flew over their heads. “Noah!” she called out in panic.

  The missiles hit the bridge squarely midway, sending debris flying everywhere.

  “We have to get to the other side!” Noah yelled, dodging falling rocks and jumping over the road where the bridge was only just beginning to crack.

  Laney’s eyes widened as the bridge began to collapse behind them. It was going to catch up to them in no time, but she couldn’t run any faster. Her throat felt raw, her legs were aching.

  And as the concrete gave way beneath their feet, Noah and Laney leaped across to the other side. He reached for her and they both hit the ground rolling.

  The rest of the bridge fell with a loud crash, kicking up a giant dust cloud of more debris, washing over the combat drones, until they were no longer in view.

  Laney opened her eyes to see that she had landed right on top of Noah. He looked unconscious. One of his arms was still around her to protect her from the fall. She was still breathless.

  She looked up. The pavement had collapsed through, and they had fallen into what looked like an abandoned cavernous underground railway station, the faint sunlight filtering through the dust settling around them.

  “Noah. Noah! You okay?” she yelled at his face.

  His face twitched, his eyes still closed as he groaned. “Okay…now we better have lost them,” he said, still wincing. He rolled them both over before he opened his eyes.

  Laney couldn’t help a relieved laugh of amusement and exhaustion. She looked up and met his gaze.

  His eyes were so intensely blue, and the hint of a smile on his lips seemed, at that moment, irresistible. It was probably all the extra adrenaline pumping through her veins, but on impulse, she leaned up to kiss him.

  Strangers

  Noah’s eyes widened in surprise when he felt her lips catch his, and for a second, he kissed her back, closing his eyes again, his mouth opening against hers, his hand pressed against the back of her neck.

  An incredibly warm tingling spread throughout her entire body and she responded, reaching up to run her fingers through his hair.

  Then he broke off. He blinked hard, meeting her gaze.

  “Stop that,” he said, pushing to sit back across the platform, away from her. “Don’t do that,” he said, as though telling her off.

  Laney blinked, stunned herself, but couldn’t move otherwise. Her cheeks flamed red, not looking at him. What in the world was she doing? “S-sorry.” She shook her head to snap to attention, sitting up. “Um, I just…meant to say thank you.”

  He pursed his lips, still looking annoyed. “Look, I have someone,” he informed her.

  She put up her hands in resignation. “Hey, me too!” she told him, without a hint of deceit. “I have a boyfriend, back in my world. I’m really sorry. I really, seriously don’t know why I did that.”

  He huffed. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

  Laney felt a little insulted. “You don’t have to be a jerk about it,” she snapped, unsettled at how she was somehow still tingling from the kiss.

  Obviously, it wasn’t her first kiss, but she was seriously not the kind of person who would go around and kiss guys she barely knew. It was completely disconcerting.

  He grunted, pushing off the platform to stand up. “We should get out of here.”

  Laney brushed herself off as she stood up, still really annoyed with herself. But somehow when she glanced up at him, she felt even more annoyed. Her heart was still pounding in her chest. “You kissed me too, you know,” she pointed out with an accusing tone.

  Noah visibly swallowed hard, before turning to meet her gaze. “Look…”

  Just then, there was a loud crash as six guys, all dressed in commando black, rappelled down from what was apparently a silent hovering airship above the street where they had fallen.

  Laney’s eyes popped wide in alarm. Trackers!

  Unfortunately, one of them landed right on top of Laney and grabbed her.

  Laney met Noah’s gaze and her scream choked in her throat. “N—!”

  “Laney!” he shouted, getting ready to run toward her.

  The air exploded with a bluish-white flash.

  Laney blinked, confused, as she felt the grasp of the tracker who was holding on to her go slack, as all the other trackers passed out on the ground.

  There was a loud ringing in her ears. When she looked over at Noah, she saw that he had also fallen unconscious. What the—? Then she started to feel woozy herself, her vision blurring amidst the glaring white of the surroundings, and she could see the airship crash to the ground some distance away.

  “Well, hell’s bells, Laney. There you are,” was all she heard, before her knees buckled, and she passed out too.

  ***

  “Ow.” Laney groaned as she woke up, squinting in the bright light.

  For a moment, she thought it was her roommate Stephanie, having left the light on in their room again. Then the fact that her entire body was aching, as though she had run ten marathons back-to-back—because she had—finally registered in her brain.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, her pulse already beginning to race as the past day’s events all came rushing back to her.

  Right…parallel world, lots of running, flash of light. Noah—

  She stopped short in recall. She turned her head and an image of Noah, still unconscious beside her, was hazy in her sight. She felt as though she was trying to move in pineapple slurry, as though she was weakened even further. What the hell happened?

  She tried to nudge Noah to wake him up. “Noah,” she whispered, trying to shake him by the shoulders. He simply grunted and rolled over. At least he’s definitely still alive, she thought.

  Her vision was starting to clear up. She took a deep breath, slowly propping herself up on her elbows. When she tried to stretch, she knocked her arm against a glass wall. She looked around again.

  They were inside some type of small, brightly lit glass box enclosure, with some sort of opaque screen through which she couldn’t see outside. There was no telling whether they were in the middle of a desert, in an alien spaceship somewhere, or in some prison on any other different parallel world.

  Laney whirled around in alarm when she heard something rustle. She tried to scramble away in time to look up, as a “door” to the glass cage opened, and something, rather someone, materialized into the room.

  “Hey, you’re awake.”

  Laney blinked at him warily as he came closer and knelt down in his hazmat suit, or spacesuit, or something. Through the face shield, she could see that he was giving her a smile, as though he was familiar with her.

  Laney narrowed her eyes at him, putting her hand out for him to keep away. “I’m not who you think I am,” she announced.

  The figure tilted his head at her strangely. “Really?” he prompted. “Do you know where you are?”

  Laney cocked her head to one side. “Uh…outer space?” she ventured a guess.

  That made the figure chuckle. “Right, I think you are exactly who I think you are.” He reached his arm out toward Laney, and she tried to back away, but not before he employed something quickly ag
ainst the side of her neck.

  She winced at the sudden prick. “Ow,” she muttered, rubbing the sore spot. “Who are you?”

  He grinned again, preoccupied with whatever he was reading off his little instrument, instead of looking at her. “My name’s Berry. I’m an assistant. Yours, in fact…” he trailed off, tapping the screen he was still reading. “Hmm…Noah was right,” he mumbled.

  Laney gave him a strange look, then she remembered the unconscious Noah lying beside her. She looked at Berry in alarm. “Oh my god, is he dying?”

  That made Berry laugh. “Man, you crack me up,” he remarked. “If only Captain Blood was as funny as you,” he said, before giving Laney’s shoulder a reassuring pat. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just a little phased out. My flash bomb causes something like a major hangover. He’ll be fine in another few minutes,” he informed her, before waving her over. “You’d better step out of the recovery chamber now. We won’t have enough power to support two, and he’s got to snap out of it soon, we don’t have much time.”

  Laney pursed her lips hesitantly.

  Noah had told her not to trust anyone, and she didn’t know this guy. Hell, she really didn’t know either of these guys.

  “He’ll be fine. I promise.” Berry crossed his heart solemnly. “Besides, we’ll be right out here, in the lab,” he said as he led her through the glass “door” then out through something like a tent flap.

  Laney looked up as she exited the recovery chamber and her jaw dropped.

  Friday, 20 March 2020 10:25 a.m.

  Ethereal blue light bathed the entire laboratory space, wavy sparkles of light shone in different patterns across the walls and the floors. They were in a large metal capsule to be sure, with grated floor to ceiling windows that looked so thick they had a magnifying effect.

  “This…is the lab?” she asked in wonder, before walking toward the railing that ran along the windows.

  Laney discovered that she was on one of several levels of platforms in what seemed to be the rounded front of a submarine. She could see metal staircases going up and down from where she was. Through the window, her gaze followed a giant reef that they passed, a school of creatures in their graceful silent ballet swam into view. Green fingers of seaweed seemed to wave at the bubbles coming out of the sub’s filter pipe.

  Berry unclipped his hazmat/spacesuit headgear and suit. It came off him with a hiss, revealing his spiky wheat blonde hair, glasses, and the torn jeans and holey maroon sweater he had on, before he amended, “Mobile submersible laboratory.”

  “We’re…underwater,” Laney breathed. She felt herself smile as she looked back around the platform with incredible curiosity.

  The feel of the sub compartment they were in was a mix of ancient and rusty, shiny and new. There were large machines with analog readouts and dials, different colored bulbs blinking from multiple panels, monitoring, and navigational equipment at the front, brass and copper tools propped up against the walls, stacks and stacks of paper spread out on other tables, metal boxes piled in corners, something that looked like it was producing static in one corner, fantastical machines and gadgets literally covered the entire room, and steam vented out from another corner of the room—somewhat inexplicably.

  Berry walked up to one of the tables and began tinkering with one of several spinning centrifuges, before directly heading to the next table to solder something tiny beside a metal box. It looked almost like a computer, if not for the dials and levers instead of a keyboard.

  He spoke animatedly as he worked. “I don’t know how you guys ended up quite so inland. I’d been waiting out on Gravesend since zero-hour. But I suppose that was as good as we could get with the jump calibrations.”

  She walked up to Berry. She had so many questions! She didn’t quite know where to start.

  “Good thing I decided to cruise in when I did,” Berry quipped.

  Laney’s enthusiasm dampened slightly as it occurred to her what would have happened had Berry not arrived when he did. “Berry,” she began somberly. “I don’t have the Zeta device.”

  T minus 11

  Berry blinked at her before he shrugged and went back to work. “I know.”

  Laney tilted her head slightly. “You do…?” she echoed, pausing to stare off into space, then threw up her hands. “Then what the hell am I doing here?”

  He looked nervous. “There’s a certain sector of the government who wants to get their hands on the Zeta device in order to gain access to, and control, all the known universes. They think you have the Zeta device.” He looked back down at his soldering iron. “I know it may be hard to believe now, but you, Dr. Eleanor Carter, led our team on a breakthrough series of amazing discoveries on alternate realities and dimensions.”

  “Oh. My God. Do not call me Eleanor.”

  Berry met her repulsed gaze with a smirk but creased his forehead. “Didn’t Noah tell you all this?”

  Laney made a face as she plunked down on a stool beside him. “Well, yes,” she replied. “Let’s just say, I was trying to take his story with a grain of salt—maybe an ocean of salt.”

  He chuckled before he went on. “See, when we started, we could only open transient rifts to random parallel worlds. They were completely unstable and absolutely unpredictable. Then basically, you—the you of this world—developed the Zeta device that should allow a person to travel across parallel worlds and realities while safely providing a way back to their launch point, kind of like an anchor—well, in theory.”

  “In theory?” Laney echoed.

  “We never got to test it,” Berry said. “That was the point when you—Laney—decided it was too dangerous to meddle with parallel worlds, and shut the entire program down. The development of the prototype was supposed to be kept ‘Top Secret’. I mean, Laney barely even let anyone else see it. Except, of course since the government commissioned the program, they kept tabs on everything, and somehow they found out about the prototype. I suppose it was inevitable.”

  Laney made a face. “That sucks.”

  “Laney only wanted to study the other parallel worlds,” Berry went on ruefully. “But the government bureaucracies, well, let’s just say they have bigger plans, and they weren’t about to let a bunch of spineless scientists get in their way. They’ve—already killed some good people,” he trailed off frowning as if reliving the event.

  “Oh—god, I’m so sorry…”

  “Anyway.” He shook his head quickly to change the subject. “I was lucky to have escaped with the sub, since obviously, the government owns this too.” He smirked. “Can’t tell you how much it amuses me to think how much it must piss them off to have misplaced this old rust bucket.” He met her gaze briefly then took a deep breath. “But the main thing is,” he said, waving his hand to dismiss it, before returning to his soldering iron. “We have to make sure they never get their hands on the Zeta device.”

  “Well,” Laney started. “Since I definitely don’t have it, and Laney’s managing to keep mum on the issue, somehow I don’t think that will be a problem.”

  Berry looked hesitant. “Maybe,” he replied noncommittally.

  Laney watched the expression on his face. It was as though he knew more than he was letting on. But before she could ask, Noah popped out from under the flap of the recovery chamber, though he still looked haggard.

  “Heeey, there he is,” Berry remarked. “How you feelin’, buddy?”

  Noah shot him an irritated look before heading straight to a console panel to immediately start working again. “What time is it?”

  Berry replied with a grave tone, “T minus 11.”

  Noah cursed loudly.

  “Sorry man, we looked for you all morning. The quantum shear wasn’t stable enough.”

  “It’s fine. It’s fine,” he dismissed.

  “Hey, this should cheer you up,” Berry started. “You were right about her. This Laney is practically immune to the parallel jumps, like ol’ Captain Blood.” He grinned. “It�
��s like we got ourselves a brand new Laney Carter. You must be pretty happy.”

  Noah shot him a look that felt like it could have cut. “She’s not Laney.”

  Laney winced at the cold tone in his voice.

  Although he was right, she thought. There was obviously no way she could ever replace the genius Laney they had in this world. Not in a million years. Not in a billion years.

  “Uh…” Berry glanced over at Laney. “Sorry about him. He was a lot more mellow when he was just a nerd like me, you know, before all that military training.”

  She met Noah’s gaze tentatively.

  Somehow it was hard to imagine Noah having the same easy-going countenance as Berry. Noah was so…rigid and aloof, and not at all approachable—point in fact, not at all Laney’s type. But try as she might not to recall, the memory of their little moment back at the train station kept popping back into her head. Vividly.

  She still could not understand how the heck she could have let herself get that out of control. But that’s what it had felt like…like it was out of her control. That’s total nonsense, she thought dismissively.

  Her gaze was drawn to Noah’s clenched jaw and already her heart started to pound again. Dammit. Why must he look so hot anyway? Stupid Jake Donovan. She blinked quickly to clear her head, turning her attention to Berry to occupy her thoughts with something else—anything else.

  Berry was speaking to Noah. “Gimme your thingy.” He put his hand out toward him.

  Noah placed a little silver contraption into Berry’s hand.

  Berry held it up to his nose to examine it. “Yeah, it’s pretty burned out,” he said, with a little wrinkle in his nose.

  “What’s that?” Laney asked, squinting to see.

  “This.” Berry held up the little round gadget. “Is what Noah used to cross into your world. It was the last working quantum anchor device our team built. That is, before the Zeta device prototype. I stole it from the lab when the government took control and we escaped. Was in pretty bad shape at the time too,” he went on. “I had to do, like—” His eyes widened at the enormity of what he wanted to convey. “A ton of work to get it to actually work. To tell the truth, I was worried about the return trip a lot. Could’ve failed altogether. Good thing, too. I was already under orders to destroy everything.”