“Shame,” Mom says. “But it’s probably one of a kind. It burned itself with its own acid. One imagines it’s not a popular creature among its own kind, either.”
“True, but we mustn’t assume,” Dad speaks up, poking up from behind his station.
“Very true,” she agrees, shooting him a smile. They still love each other very much. It shows in each of their movements. The careful attention they pay to each other. The gifts left behind, or thoughtful gestures.
“I’ll go tell Glast and see if we can get some more parties out there,” Mom says, kissing Dad before leaving.
I love them so much. I want what they have.
And my heart aches for Eron. I imagine him now the way he looked last night, looking up at the lightning, speaking about his parents… my heart still aches for him. I can’t imagine losing my parents. I can’t imagine losing my world and being thrust into something that I want nothing to do with.
Dad is busy, and I need to stretch my legs. I should go see how the fields are doing.
And, if I’m honest, I want to find Eron, and see how he’s doing.
I miss him already like he’s always been a part of my world and my life.
No matter how I run the equations in my mind, I come to the same conclusion, time and time again.
We’re running out of food. The two lost fields are more than just an inconvenience. I swing by the storage caves and take stock, under the pretense of looking for seeds.
I don’t want to let people know my suspicions. They’re already terrified. I can imagine it now. Half the villagers would fall into the “we’ve been here before, we’ll be fine” camp, and the other half would be in the “let’s go crazy and kill people to survive with less food” camp.
Neither of those would save them.
Maybe my parents and I can come up with a solution. It’s been dire before. We could figure this out again.
My stomach is in knots by the time I find Eron. He’s in the makeshift lab that Starz created at the edge of our village to help in his research while they wait for their pickup.
They’re leaning close to each other, whispering. I approach quietly enough to make out a few words before they spot me. The ones that catch my attention the most are “time travel” and “marry.”
“Time travel?” I ask as I approach. Eron looks up, shocked to see me there. Starz shakes his head, as though not quite believing he’s been overheard.
Well, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. It’s not like I didn’t have enough worries of my own! But this... this sounds intriguing. It fascinates the scientist in me and I’m more than a little skeptical. I hurt the human in me to hear him mention marriage.
I hate to admit it, but I’m mostly focused on that one. Time travel is just a wild theory.
Marriage, however...
“Sybil,” Eron says, running a hand through his hair. “Look, I should have told you everything… I just didn’t know how to tell you. Sit down, please.”
I don’t want to sit down right now. After all that we’ve shared together… all these moments? All the secrets and hopes and dreams shared? What possible secret could he be hiding from me? Why would he hide anything from me?
“Are you married?” I ask, suddenly disgusted.
“No!” Eron says. Starz laughs.
“Don’t you laugh!” I tell Starz. He holds up his hands defensively.
“Look, I can tell a tense conversation when I walk into one,” I say. I walk around to the chair and fall into it. I lean on the table and look both of them in the eye.
“And I heard the word marry, on top of time travel. You’re going to tell me exactly what you were whispering about, and not apologize about not telling me something earlier. Just tell me now.”
I wait, making it clear that I’m not moving until those two give up the details. Starz takes the lead. I’m a bit surprised.
“We used the term marry outside of a relationship context, chatting about technology,” he says. He offers nothing further about Eron, to my disappointment. His next words, however, surprise me. “I’m a Time Agent.”
“A Time Agent?” I repeat, dubious. He ignores my tone and continues.
“My job is to make sure that any strange ripples in time are analyzed and repaired as needed. Any anomalies that disturb our time-space continuum, my agency deals with. This is what we do. And I’m proud of it.”
“Okay,” I say. “So what you’re telling me is that, for some reason, my planet needs a Time Agent right now?”
“It does.” He casts a furtive glance towards Eron. I don’t miss it. I turn to him.
“Does this have something to do with your parents?” My voice softens. I can’t help it.
“It does.” He runs his hands through his hair again.
The lightning that I felt when touching Eron— I can feel it at the base of my skull, piercing, coursing through my bones. I stare into his eyes as he speaks. He feels like the most real thing to me around here. And none of these words surprise me. They should, but they don’t.
“Sybil, the day my parents died... it was only a couple of weeks ago, and it happened right here, over the earth.”
“Right over my planet?”
“Yes,” he continues. “But, not your planet.” He looks frustrated, angry at what he has to tell me. “Your planet was different then, it had thriving cities and communities. It had vehicles and civilization and billions of people. I know it’s hard to imagine…”
But it’s not. It’s not, and I close my eyes and break his rampage.
“And buildings that reach up to the sky,” I whisper.
“How would you know that?” Eron asks.
Starz leans in. “What else, Sybil?”
I close my eyes. I imagine the world as it should be. Not as it is right now. Not the thunder and lightning above the clouds. Not the houses in caves, nor the dying crops. Not the mutated animals that leak acid from their hair follicles. I begin to recite what I see in my mind’s eye.
“The sky is blue, with storms sometimes, but not like this. With yellow lightning streaming down towards the water below. The water is vast and grand and pure. The people are many. Speaking all types of languages. Going to great learning institutions. Working together to make the world a better place, or a worse one. The air smells different. It smells fresh. Not like this. Humidity and plants lining every breath. The plants are different too. They’re green, and they have flowers. And there are bees in them. Bees that collect the pollen. I’ve never even seen a bee. Why do I know about bees?”
I open my eyes and I look at them. First at Starz, then at Eron.
“Why does this world seem so wrong to me? Why do I dream about another place that’s right here— but so different? Why do I feel that way?” I want to know. I need to know. Like the beast, our time is running out, and I know it. I sense it in my bones, how wrong this place is.
And it’s only been getting worse since Eron arrived.
Starz speaks up first. “You’re feeling an echo of what the world was,” he says. “You’re a time anomaly. What you’re experiencing is an echo of the timeline you should have had. Of the world that you should have known. That was here not that long ago, and at the same time, centuries ago. Caught in a time rift. Echoes are common in people who are temporarily displaced.”
“So this world doesn’t feel right because it’s not right?” I say. “But it’s always been this way!”
“No, it hasn’t.” Eron breaks in. “It hasn’t been this way forever. It feels like centuries, but the accident happened a couple of weeks ago, with a temporal bomb, basically going off right above your planet, smashing into your atmosphere, throwing your planet into a temporal rift. Creating one all its own… I’m not a Time Agent, but I’ve seen pictures of what your planet used to be like, and it used to be like you described it - not like this.”
But this is all I know, my mind wants me to shout, but my heart knows better. I know so much more. I’ve seen and lived so
much more...
“Okay, so far, that all sounds weird to me. It sounds really weird. My scientific training is telling me that theories are only theories until they’re proven true, which they rarely are. My human training tells me that my gut… my gut has always felt that this place is off, and your words feel right.”
All of my life, I felt I belonged elsewhere like this wasn’t where I should be. I know no one else who feels that way. Not my parents, who told me to hush up about such strange stories when I was a kid. Not Jordain and his tiresome advances. Not any of my school friends or any of my friends who have long since passed. Not other scientists from communities. I’ve never met anybody who understands the vision that I see. Who understands that feeling that everything was just… wrong. And I certainly never expected anybody to make sense of it for me! To explain to me why it felt so wrong!
I look around me at the worn caves beaten through the centuries to create more hospitable homes. At the technology that protects us from the lightning, the radiation and the beasts. At the people who mill about working hard to keep us alive, generation after generation. Or however long we manage, still. And it still feels so wrong.
But it’s still my world and the only world that I’ve ever truly lived in.
“I just have one question,” I say. I look up, look at Starz, and then at Eron. “If I am an echo, for lack of a better word... what happens to echoes, once a timeline is reset?”
I receive no answer. I didn’t really expect to.
I spend the day trying not to think about what they told me but obsessing about it all the same. It’s a disorienting feeling and made me a less productive biologist. I made mistakes, which thankfully my parents caught. I apologized for them, which thankfully they accepted. And, more thankfully, nobody died because of them.
Eron’s parents had been caught in the explosion. If Starz and Eron found something from that previous timeline that still exists here, they could reset things to how they’re meant to be. To everything that haunts me in my dreams. That haunts me in my waking hours, even, when I look around. When I smell the air that doesn’t smell right.
The bones of his parents… If he could find the bones of his parents, Starz could help him reset the timeline. Not just that, they would save his parents as well.
And then, what about my people? They didn’t know. I’ve been thinking about that problem while screwing up everything I was actually supposed to focus on today.
We would go back to our own timelines, I assume. I mean, I don’t know! I can guess as much as I want, but I need to study the matter much more. And I’ve never really given it much thought before now.
But, if we’re here now, and I’m an echo of who I might have been, then probably everyone else is too. I just remember more, that’s all.
And maybe I remember more because I have a link to the calamity.
His parents had been headed to the city that used to be here. The one that I see all around me. The one that I can still hear and smell.
What if I’m not the echo— that it’s the world giving off an echo that I can hear? Does that mean that when this new timeline resets, that I become the echo and the new world only hears me as a ghost? Is that all that I’ll be?
Starz told me that they’re not really sure what happens to the reset timelines, but sometimes they can find the same people. A few rare people are anomalies outside of time itself and can survive even once their timelines are reset.
But he made it clear that it’s not something I could count on. And even then… if I’m the only one who glimpses this other world, could that mean that I’ll be the only one who will survive? That everyone I’ve worked so hard to help keep alive, and help thrive as much as possible, would be gone?
Trading in my parents’ lives for those of Eron’s parents? And yet, was I really? How long would we continue to survive in this world, with the radiation storms trying to kill us? I need more answers. I need to know more.
This is like the beast all over again. An impossible moral choice compounded by an irradiated landscape.
After finishing my duties, or, more to the point, after Dad kicks me out because I’m making too many mistakes, I go for a walk across my village. My village. My city. What should have been a city.
I see the villagers milling about. Should these people be living in an alternate timeline? Maybe with riches and fuller lives than this? Not just working to survive the next radiation onslaught or the next mutation, but to fulfill dreams, grow their families, make great discoveries, and explore the world outside of the boundaries of their own village.
I reach the center of the village and I look up to the stormy sky. The lightning dances, multi-colored. That sky could be blue, with the sun shining down on us.
It should be blue. If I close my eyes, I can see it. But I don’t, forcing myself to look at my sky.
Billions of people lived here. Did they die, so we could live?
“None of this even makes sense,” I mumble. I look back down to the center of the village, and there I see the shrine. The shrine, made of a material that’s not quite metal, or rock. Made of something, perhaps from outside this world.
The elders tell us that it came from a place far away and yet had always been here.
Oh no.
I need to talk to Eron. I think I know how to reset the timeline.
Chapter 17
Eron
Starz leans on some kind of microscope, looking at some of the genetically modified wheat.
“This is amazing,” he says. “The cellular modifications are some of the most advanced I’ve ever seen, marrying radiation and cellular mitosis to ensure a strong crop…”
He goes on, but I don’t listen anymore. There he goes again, using the word “marrying.” A slight smile tugs at my lips as I remember her reaction.
She’d heard about time travel, a highly theoretical concept which probably made all of her scientific training twitch with curiosity, but it was the word “marry,” taken completely out of context, that she’d jumped on.
At least I know where her heart is.
And it’s aligned with mine.
Even if our timelines aren’t. I glance outside the cave toward the fields under the lightning trapped skies.
All of this will be gone soon. As soon as we find the bones of my parents. I’ll get what I came here for.
But I’ll lose what I never expected to find. Especially not here, in a rift.
“This is interesting,” Starz mumbles. I look back his way, surprised to see that he isn’t at the telescope anymore. How lost in thought am I?
“What is?”
“I’ve been looking at the origin of the time rift,” Starz says, not looking up from the readings on the tablet before him. “And it looks like a bomb strong enough to rip space-time itself.”
I stand up. Now he has my attention.
“So, a trap?”
“Basically,” Starz says, his look becoming grim. “They didn’t necessarily know it would be so destructive, but it ripped time apart. This is why the earth is at the center of it.”
“And the radiation?” I ask, looking back out at the irradiated world.
“It could also explain it. The radiation might be as trapped as these people.”
“Who would set such a trap for my parents?” I turn to look at him. Any skirmishes that my planet suffers from are relatively minor. We’ve never had an interstellar incident. We barely have a space fleet.
We’re wolves. Space is useful for supplies, trade, and diplomatic ties, but no other world calls to us like our own. No other has the same fresh smelling earth, wild woods, and blood moon.
Why would we take to the stars when our blood sings for the earth?
“It might not have been for your parents,” Stars says, not unkindly. “But they may have struck it. Almost like a space mine.”
“Someone wanted to destroy the earth,” I follow him. A coward who didn’t want to be found. Who set a destructive dev
ice for a ship to strike, probably cloaked. And then they made their escape, and waited for the strike…
“Cowards,” I spit out. Starz nods.
“Cowards, indeed. And dangerous ones.”
“How do we stop them?” I ask, my blood boiling.
“We don’t, Prince Eron,” Starz says, using my honorific to remind me of my duty. Starz is no fool. “The Time Agents will. After this. You worry about this mission and let us worry about the next.” His voice softens. “Your parents paid a terrible price in this trap, as did all of the earth. Let’s fix this. Then me and my own will hunt them down. I promise I’ll let you know what happens.”
“Thank you,” I answer, though I still want to tear the flesh from the throats of those responsible for my parents’ deaths, I know it’s not my place. Not now, anyway. Perhaps another time.
Time.
That was the problem. Again. Always.
“The time vault,” I whisper, thinking of Sybil. “Have you...have you ever tried to put people in it? Pull them out later?”
Starz looks at me with kindness in his eyes. He’s been down this road before. I wonder how many lovers he’s left behind, on worlds long forgotten. That was the worst part, really. The fact that I’d just forget her. Even though I’d dreamt about her, had tasted her before now... she’s just be gone.
Ripped out of time. Created by a time trap, destroyed by time.
“We cannot do that,” Starz says. “Anyone in it would survive the shifting time, yes, but they’d be trapped there forever. Unable to leave. Having lost everything they’d ever known. A being out of time.”
I can’t imagine trapping Sybil in a vault for all of time. I can’t imagine letting her wither away, having lost everything, now losing her freedom... I’d just lost my parents and still felt that pain. To lose an entire world?
No. Starz is right. He warned me or tried to, at least.
But how can he know that I’d quite literally met the girls of my dreams?
My heart and mind are at war with one another. I want to stay with her forever and know I can’t. I want to save my parents.
Her Merciless Prince Page 9