The Time Ender

by Debra Chapoton

  Alex tried asking other people we passed, but got the same nasty response. I tried approaching a woman, the only one we’d seen so far. It was pretty bold of me and quite far out of my comfort zone. I could feel my clothing soaking up the perspiration everywhere except my forehead. As soon as I said thotti her eyes darted around and she pulled her neck flap up over her nose and spoke through the fabric. “Hotah. Bega api.” Yes, follow me. “Nia wa.” Keep back. She released the fabric and moved off, taking a sharp left down a wider lane.

  We waited a beat and then followed.

  “It was like she didn’t want anyone to read her lips.” Alex said. He took my hand and I let him lead me as I scanned everywhere for cameras or spies or anything suspicious. All I saw were merchant displays of unidentifiable objects. Round tubes brought rays of sunshine in at the ceiling—we were probably twenty feet down—and more round windows appeared at our feet every ten feet or so. Clear purlass, I guessed, like what we saw on our welcoming parade and at Marcum’s farm and obviously the female element not the male purlass we were using for the capsule.

  I wondered how many levels there were to Plickkentrad and where did people live?

  “Did we lose her?”

  “No, she went into that archway.”

  Five seconds later we walked into the same archway and stopped dead. She was nowhere to be seen.

  Sometimes Alex is simply amazing. He reached up high and touched something. An opaque wall of glass closed us in and the floor dropped down like an elevator.

  “Wow,” I said, “I’ve never been in anything that moved like this.”

  “Actually, you have.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “But you were out cold. Remember when we escaped with Coreg and then Marcum found us? I carried you up in one of these.”

  “Right. I bit through the pechan vines that tied us and they were poison. That’s all kind of a blur.”

  The glass wall rolled back and we stepped out onto a dark and gloomy level. The woman we’d followed stood waiting, holding both elbows out toward us in a greeting we acknowledged with a quick touch. Satisfied, she nodded and gave us directions to the thotti.

  “They keep moving the entrance,” she said. “But I listen. I watch. My son is a thotti guard.”

  I braved a question. “What about this plague? Should we keep our faces covered?”

  “The plague is not with the living, but the dead. The galactic lard is infected. Walls crumble. Risers stop. Lighting fades. Clothing does not function well.”

  I exchanged a curious look with Alex. I hoped to heck we weren’t going to be trapped by crumbling walls. Or worse, have our clothes fall off. If this city was collapsing, I wondered how we got permission to leave the Academy to come here.

  The woman gave us a Klaqin farewell and slid off like a ghost, cloaked and hooded, though the hood part was in front. She stepped into the archway and its ingenious door closed.

  “Oh, I had one more question,” I groaned as soon as she disappeared. “Why was she so secretive about leading us here?”

  Alex grunted and started cracking all of his knuckles, a sure sign he was probably wondering the same thing.

  The level we stood on had wide halls and ceilings ten feet high, maybe higher. There were no glass portholes in the floor, which was rock hard and smooth, and no light tubes in the ceilings. Disks along the walls provided a low level of light.

  At first the area exuded the eerie quiet of an empty classroom in the evening, but then I realized the difference. This silence was alive. And whatever lived in the silence here, it was waiting. I could smell the galactic lard, thick in the air.

  “Soooo,” Alex drew out the syllable and gave it at least three musical notes, “she said to take that passage and look for the door marked nta.”

  “Is that a Klaqin letter or a number?”

  “Both.” He fiddled with his thumb ring and showed me a tiny readout. When he squeezed the ring’s sides the readout popped up and glowed like a hologram. Totally cool. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  Alex just blew my mind again. I couldn’t help myself. I stood up on tiptoe and threw my arms around his neck, pressed myself against him, and hugged him hard. To heck with the ominous silence and the intense stink. We held onto each other for a long time. I wasn’t time-bending. Couldn’t time-bend down here, but nevertheless the moment snailed on. I felt his heart beating, the warmth of his arms around me, his hands one above the other on my back, his breath in my ear … goodness and safety and comfort and …

  A high decibel clang startled us apart.

  “Sounded like a ramik,” Alex said.

  “A what?”

  “They ring it to start the practice bridge battles. Sometimes it’s an F, sometimes B flat.”

  “But nobody’s around here.” Unless you counted the ghosts my overzealous imagination was conjuring.

  Oops, I spoke too soon. The resonance of marching feet reached our ears at the same time. Usually Alex hears stuff before me, but not this time. We glanced around for somewhere to hide. There were plenty of doors, all with unique symbols on them, but no door handles.

  “Don’t panic.” He repeated it in Klaqin. Right, we needed to blend in. I should keep our conversation in Klaqin and puff my cheeks out, not my boobs.

  I could feel the sweat snaking down my sides and maybe the bio-fibers, too, tickling my skin as they licked it up. A new odor hijacked my nose. I switched to breathing through my mouth.

  Alex took my hand and led me up the passageway and toward a group of the most unlikely soldiers: six children, all uniformed like mini-Fifth Commanders, in baggy lavender uniforms. All boys, of course. They stopped, lined themselves tight against the wall and clucked their tongues at Alex. We kept moving closer with as much nonchalance as we could. One spoke a description of us and our location into his thumb ring, then without a word to us they continued on, filing past on our left. We turned and watched.

  “That was close. Guards in training, you think? Or kids playing?” I sniffed the air noting that the scent of them had quickly diminished.

  I slid my hand into the crook of Alex’s arm, my cold fingers seeking heat and comfort. He pressed his elbow to his side to warm my frozen grasp, but he didn’t look down at me; he was studying the retreating backs of these marauding children, eyes narrowed and one hand ready on the small weapon at his side.

  He shrugged his shoulders and checked his ring again. “There. That door.” The strange marking, etched in the center waist high, matched.

  “Do we knock?”

  There was no handle. In fact there were no hinges or framework at all. The door coordinated with the granite-like wall with its swirly gray lines. A millimeter crack ran in a neat rectangle to outline a doorway. I put my hand against the hard surface wondering if I’d be able to meld my uniform’s bio-materials with whatever the wall was made of. Or, maybe it would crumble like the Klaqin woman said.

  Alex made a fist ready to rap his knuckles against the door. Instead he opened his palm and ran it from one side to the other and over the wall as well.

  “I think it’s purlass,” he said.

  “How can you tell? Why isn’t it clear?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe it’s something other than male purlass or female purlass. Can you feel the difference?”

  I drew three fingers across the door, over the crack and onto the wall. “Yeah, it’s smoother. Kinda soft.” I pushed my fingers against the door ready to spring my hand back if I plunged through, but I didn’t.” Alex started poking at it too.

  “I’m surprised there isn’t a thumb ring reader,” he said. He turned around and checked the wall behind us.

  “What about the symbols?”

  Alex ran his thumb over the nta and pressed. Success. A thumb ring reader beneath the symbols popped out and Alex twisted his ring around to fit it against the tiny indentations.

  The entire door changed from opaque rock to clear as crystal. And what we could see on the other side render
ed me speechless. No hashtags, emojis or stage cues came to mind. Well, maybe Alex could make some angelic sounds. That would work.

  “After you,” he said.

  I stepped through the purlass the same as I had swum in the purlass river, holding my breath and keeping my heart in my chest. Alex came through quickly and stopped short, stunned and lacking song lyrics.

  With a slow-motion clarity—no effort to time-bend on my part—I took in everything, from the enormous height of the space to the tiny blades of Klaqin grass beneath my feet, interspersed with charming pink weeds. I had not been impressed with Plickkentrad until now. What I could see. What I could smell. What I could hear. It was overwhelming. If this was a thotti, then thotti meant paradise or Eden.

  There were amazing aromas. Food scents like grilled hamburgers, melted butter, popcorn, roasting turkey and, be still my heart, there was something chocolatey in the air. Heaven.

  Great big bushes grew by the door we came through and on the hills I could see in the distance. Yes, hills, deep underground. Incredible. There were buildings, too, like I’d seen on our parade through the surface town when we first arrived. They looked like plops of mud shaped by wasps. If I hadn’t known they were homes I might have thought they were enormous boulders.

  And the light. I had no idea where or how they were bringing the natural sunlight into this space. There were no shadows. I lifted my foot and checked. Light was everywhere.

  “Cue the doctor,” I said. “Take my pulse. I think we’re dead.”

  “I know.” Alex took my hand and squeezed.

  “I felt that. We’re alive.”

  We took a few tentative steps forward. I for one expected quicksand or a trapdoor. Maybe this was an illusion. A very nice one.

  “Look.” Alex pointed right. A huge yellow bush with fantastic purple flowers had started to move, squirting a scent into the air that was as flowery sweet as the most aromatic Earth rose. We crept over to it and I touched a blossom, drawn to its beauty but quickly repelled by its sticky feel. It left a residue that I rubbed between my fingers like pasty glue and wiped on the knee of my uniform. The bio-materials sucked it in and underneath the material my knee tingled. Oh great, I probably absorbed some Klaqin hallucinogen or poison.

  Alex stepped around the bush, crushing fallen blossoms and raising a heady stink that made breathing difficult. Or maybe breathing was difficult because my excitement was verging on panic. Something was off. Where were the people? The Plickkentradians.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “No.” I hurried around the bush to catch up to him. Our view had been blocked before, but now I could see another valley. What the—

  There were plenty of people down there, far enough away not to be heard. Some were working, but most were sitting or walking to and fro like caged zoo animals. It was super easy to spot my mom. She wore Earth clothes and her skin wasn’t pink or blue or green. Most of the others were more colorful—the rainbow race of Klaqins, skin and hair anyway; their robes were dull brown.

  What Alex had heard, sharp clipping sounds, met my ears now. And so did the sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath. I was afraid to turn around and find a fierce hulking warrior armed with shield and blades. But of course there was no sword, only a three foot high child in a lavender uniform pointing an arc-gun at us.

  He made the sword-like sound again as he fanned the arc-gun closed and spoke clearly into his thumb ring as if it were a walkie-talkie, telling someone that we’d arrived and he’d bring us down.

  To us he said, “Bega api.”

  We followed him along a winding path that descended into the underground valley. The way was overgrown, so narrow that we walked in single file most of the way. I was third, following Alex through an amazing labyrinth of sweet scents and stunning flowers and at times ducking under the boughs of young trees and huge red ferns that dwarfed them. The path widened and I quickened my pace to pass Alex and our guide. I expected my shout to draw everyone’s attention, but only my mother looked up when I yelled.

  She jumped to her feet, dropped her water bottle and startled a row of Plickkentradians sitting in the short grass. “Selina!”

  I raced across the last few yards and flung myself into her arms. It probably felt like a lot longer for her than for me since we last saw each other. She squeezed me as hard as I squeezed her.

  She crooned in my ear “my baby, my baby” and I sang back: “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She didn’t want to let me go and when she did she leaned in again to kiss my forehead, taking my temperature like the attentive mom she is. Then she held my left wrist with both her hands and took my pulse, like the efficient nurse she is.

  She greeted Alex and thanked him for bringing me.

  “No problem, Mrs. Langston. Has everything been going all right for you here?”

  “Oh, it’s … different, to say the least. These poor people—” She swung an arm out to indicate all the seated Klaqins, but didn’t finish her thought. The people who were standing or working—harvesting, it appeared—all looked like the rest of the full-blooded Earth men, women and children who had come along. They were watching us with interest, but the Klaqins seemed indifferent to our sudden presence.

  “What’s wrong with them? Is it the plague?”

  “Plague?” Mom said. “Hardly. These people have forgotten how to eat. They’re dehydrated and malnourished.”

  I looked at Alex and he said what I was thinking, “We’ve been on a Klaqin diet since we arrived. Are we at risk? We drink a special formula and go into the mists pretty regularly. Our clothing is supposed to help keep us healthy.”

  “Well, if there’s a plague it’s in the clothing. I’ve been trying to get them to eat and drink, using my most basic nursing skills.” She shook her head and pointed to a man in a shabby robe. “He was perfectly healthy when we arrived and his clothing was tight as yoga pants and functioning. Now it’s lost it shape, looks like a bathrobe and stinks horribly. His round face has grown sallow and sunken. He barely moves and when he speaks it’s gibberish. Well, I assume it’s gibberish. I never understood him to begin with, but I’ve picked up more than a few Klaqin expressions and the others tell me he makes no sense. I don’t suppose you’ve learned the language yet?”

  Alex and I exchanged looks and I suppressed a giggle. She hadn’t been flabbergasted by our time manipulating abilities, but maybe our language proficiency would impress her.

  “Yeah, mom, we can speak Klaqin. Alex is better than I am, but I’m better than I was in Spanish.”

  Her smile was all I needed to go on talking. We sank down onto the spongy ground and I told her about the language cabs, the Academy, my abduction, how Alex and Marcum rescued me, then how Alex and I were hidden then abducted again and taken into a Gleezhian resistance camp, our second escape … then I realized I had the order of events goofed up and Alex took over the story. He added a lot I didn’t know and also toned down some events that would have shocked my mom. Her eyes flicked back and forth between us as we took turns telling the complicated parts. All things considered she took it pretty well and I was reasonably sure she wasn’t going to ground me.

  “And this last month?” she asked. “I’ve seen your dad once and Buddy not at all. What have you been doing to help finish this war and get us back to Earth? The sooner the better.”

  “Well, Mrs. Langston, we’ve built a purlass capsule that will shield whoever is inside from the effects of time-bending or time-pacing.” Alex gave her the basic plan and she nodded. I knew she’d had a lot of science classes before finishing her nursing degree so she probably understood. He did not tell her the scary part of the plan or how I would have to go to Gleezhe.

  “Mmm, well, when you go back to this Academy you be sure to tell whoever’s in charge that there won’t be a population to save unless they either fix their bio-whatevers or teach their people to eat. There’s plenty of food especially since there’s no problem with it growing underground. I don’t know how t
hey’re getting the sunlight in here, but these trees are producing plenty of fruit and the flowers on these bushes are safely edible. There’s water everywhere. I saw hundreds of lakes and ponds on the way here.”

  “Mom, you’re not a prisoner here, are you?”

  “Oh, very definitely. We are watched continually and we haven’t figured out a way out, but then we’re safe and we get visitors, so we’ll keep on doing what we can to help these … these zombies. Force feed them if we have to. This is the third thotti they’ve put us in and I’m afraid we failed in the other two.”

  “Just what is a thotti?”

  “Why, it’s a neighborhood, I guess. See? There are homes all around.”

  We fell into a discussion then regarding why they would be prisoners and why they would be moved often yet allowed so much freedom within the thotti. Before we’d come to any conclusion Alex’s thumb ring alerted us that our time was up. Mom walked us up the path, followed by our armed child-guard, all the way to the door we’d entered through. A couple of quick embraces and final words and we were allowed to leave.

  I felt relieved to have had some time with my mom, confused by this bio-plague, and anxious to get everything over with. And before we reached the top level I had another vision. At least I think I did. Whatever it was it faded when I opened my eyes.

  I woke to confusion. My head was in Alex’s lap and we were on the ground at the spot where we were to meet Coreg. I didn’t remember getting there. Noise thudded all around with shouting and a sound like barking. No, not barking, it was Coreg’s voice yelling for me and Alex to get up and run. The ground beneath me trembled with the vibration of stamping feet. I jerked upright, half thinking I was in an earthquake, convinced we would fall into a widening crevasse any second.

  CHAPTER 9

  #NotPlague

  COREG WAS A little rough in jerking me to my feet. I felt Alex spring up, catapulted by either another shock wave or possessive anger. Probably anger. That would fit with the vision that was coming back to the dream-remembering lobe of my brain. If it was a premonition then Alex was moments from punching Coreg. Cue the action. Alex took a swing at Coreg, his fist missing my own face by inches and connecting with Coreg’s jaw like he did to Marcum. I knew what would happen next, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it except clutch at them both and fall together through the rift in the walkway.