Quantum Entanglement

by Liesel K. Hill

  After Maggie obliterated the Traveler on the island nearly five months ago, Colin had disappeared. Clay was injured—killed, for all intents and purposes—and Marcus returned Maggie to her own time. Soon after, he and Karl had slipped quietly out of Interchron while most of the compound still slept.

  They’d been careful to keep their minds Concealed so the other members of the team couldn’t find them. The rest of the team would either try and stop them, or try and join them, and Marcus didn’t want either.

  Colin. A coward and a slime ball who’d betrayed the team on every level imaginable, including some Marcus wouldn’t have thought possible. He’d sworn to kill Maggie, but not before raping her and probably brutalizing her in other ways as well. Colin possessed the Deceiver ability. He could use Maggie’s neurological abilities to torment her or drive her into madness. That kind of torture could be worse than death.

  Marcus intended to dispense with Colin, to keep Maggie safe, but he didn’t want anyone else involved. True, Colin deceived the entire team, but because of Maggie, it was more personal for Marcus, and he refused to put other team members in danger for a personal vendetta.

  Karl came along because he was Marcus’s best friend and, in truth, Marcus doubted he could have slipped away without Karl noticing. Karl knew him too well. Besides, Marcus was glad of Karl’s company. The two of them had known each other for so long and thought so similarly, they practically functioned as one entity. Even their neurochemical abilities lined up. Karl possessed skill in the physical aspects of battle, while Marcus could destroy with directed energy. Marcus could create adequate Concealments for both of them. Karl lacked in that area. Due to his Time Travel abilities, Karl could sense things at a much farther distance than Marcus could manage. He could sense big events, but couldn’t decipher the detail Karl could. They complemented each other perfectly.

  It took weeks to get any kind of lead on Colin. He’d become embroiled so deeply in the politics of the collectives as to be quite protected. They eventually intercepted a message which said he’d gone on a raid. The word raid as the collectives used it meant to go out and rove around, looking for stray individuals to snap up. In application, it was similar to the rape-pillage-and-plunder mentality during earth’s medieval period. All the violence and exploitation would be present, the only difference being that the endgame consisted of forced assimilation into the collective and a lifetime of enslavement.

  In Marcus’s mind, death would be the better choice.

  He and Karl were relegated to physical tracking—literally following footprints and other physical signs—because Colin kept his mind and the minds of all his collectivist goons Concealed.

  After several hours of travel, Karl stumbled, skidding to a stop in the dirt.

  “What is it?” Marcus asked.

  Karl stared off into the distance, looking troubled. “I’m not sure.” He concentrated for a moment, and Marcus waited. When Karl’s eyes came back into focus, he shook his head, looking worried.

  “I think we’re too late.”

  Marcus sighed. He’d been afraid of that. “What do you sense?”

  “Energy. A lot of it, about twelve miles ahead.”

  “Twelve miles? I didn’t think we were so far behind them.”

  “Neither did I, but that’s where individual is meeting collective.”

  Marcus nodded. If Karl was right about the distance, it would be long over by the time he and Karl arrived. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t see much choice except to go on. If we can’t stop it, we can still bear witness.”

  Marcus nodded and they moved forward. Night crept in around them, but they kept going as twilight turned to murky opaqueness. No lights lit the countryside, not even the moon. They didn’t need their eyes to tell them what was in their path, or to sense the rise and fall of the land as they moved through it. They used their neurochemical abilities to sense the path ahead and could clear things out of it if they wanted, though they rarely did because it took more time and energy than simply moving over or around the obstacles.

  As dawn nudged at their backs, Marcus sensed what Karl had hours before.

  Uneasiness oozed over him as they moved. A feeling of muck and pain and acrid vapor. The woods around them sat silent and still. Not a peaceful stillness; rather, the greasy dread that comes right before bad news.

  They jumped over a meandering stream that gave off a strong sulfur scent and climbed a rise that overlooked a large clearing. When they reached the top of the rise, they both froze.

  They’d found it.

  The battlefield had turned into a slaughter field. Parallel to the river, the stretch of forest was only sparsely populated with trees. Bodies carpeted the clearing below. Marcus counted twenty—both male and female, though no children he could see. It wasn’t uncommon. Children were more easily forced into submission than their parents. The collectives rarely killed them. If the collectives could traumatize and indoctrinate them at a young age, they would have a hard time recovering; a hard time wrapping their heads around insurrection. It made for better collective drones.

  After a moment, Karl moved silently down into the clearing. Chest feeling like it housed a boulder, Marcus followed.

  The two of them picked their way through the field, searching for any remaining breath of life. Marcus had a talent for Healing, but he couldn’t heal death. There must be some spark of energy present—something to start from and build on. He couldn’t make a corpse breathe and flourish dynamically any more than he could a rock.

  As Marcus moved among the corpses, his boots squelched in blood-drenched soil and he studied the faces of each victim. Most were covered in blood, many with limbs at odd angles or torsos bent in the wrong places. Marcus fought to not look away from the gore. He’d seen this enough times to discipline himself. He did his best to fix their faces in his mind, if only for a moment, said a silent prayer for their souls and thanks for their sacrifice, and vowed to find some way to bring them justice. Then he moved on.

  When he reached the edge of the field, he turned to find Karl squatting over a cluster of bodies at the farthest pinnacle of it. Marcus waited for Karl to finish, and was surprised when Karl called out to him.

  “Marcus, come look at this.”

  Marcus crossed to his friend, whose attention was fixed on one particular woman. She lay on her back, eyes closed, one arm draped over her abdomen. Black hair framed a pretty face and she was tall for a woman, though still smaller than Marcus. A fist-sized wound on her chest had gushed blood when she still lived. The now-congealed, dark red liquid stained the front of her boxy, colorless shirt. The wound sat directly over her heart. Probably her cause of death.

  Marcus raised a questioning eyebrow at his friend. Karl studied the woman, concentrating, as though he sensed something. Marcus gazed back down at her and reached out with his mind, probing for whatever caught Karl’s attention.

  Then he felt it. Somewhere, deep in the most isolated part of her brain, the place where the soul cocoons itself when the body is comatose, where secrets the conscious mind can’t grasp lay waiting, something lurked: movement, a spark.

  Marcus gasped. “She’s still alive.”

  He moved the body of a middle-aged man aside so he could knee beside the woman.

  “Wait.” Karl grabbed Marcus’s wrist as he leaned forward to put his hands on her face. “Don’t Heal her yet.”

  “Yet? She’s on the cusp of death, Karl. She won’t last much longer.”

  “Marcus, probe her mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Marcus did, and what he found surprised him. Her mind was grossly under-developed. The neural pathways were few, far between, and stunted. The areas of her brain housing independence and creativity lay fallow, nearly lifeless.

  Marcus leaned back. “She’s not an individual. She was with Colin—part of the collective.”

  Karl nodded. “Wounded and left for dead.”
He reached forward and tipped her chin upward with one finger. A large area of her neck had what looked like dark lattice work drawn on it. “What does that look like to you?” Karl asked.

  Marcus rubbed his finger along it. It didn’t come off. “Similar to the tattoos the Arachnimen sport, only it’s on her neck.”

  “Closer to the Trepids, whose entire faces are covered,” Karl put in.

  Marcus frowned. “Have you ever seen an Arachniman or a Trepid that’s a woman?”

  “No. They like to be physically imposing. Most women simply aren’t large enough.”

  “Neither is she,” Marcus pointed out. “She’s kind of tall, but not particularly big.”

  “No, there must be some other reason for her to be here. Perhaps she had some particular ability they needed.”

  Marcus glanced at Karl. “We could get useful information from her,” he said quietly.

  Karl gave him a wary, sidelong glance. “Agreed,” he said slowly, “but we need to be sure that if we Heal her, they won’t feel it and come back for her.”

  Marcus probed the woman’s mind again, knowing the decision had to be made quickly. They might already be too late to save her. He followed her neural pathways, searching for whatever linked her to the collective. The fleeting thought occurred to him that, even if they didn’t save her, they ought to find some way to get her brain back to Interchron. A gruesome thought, but studying the brain of someone so recently linked to the collectives could yield invaluable information, and only Doc could make truly intelligent observations about it.

  Finally, Marcus found something that extended from somewhere inside her brain and stretched to the outside. It was made of non-tangible energy.

  “I don’t think there’s any danger of them returning for her,” Marcus said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I feel something outside her mind. I think it’s a tether.” Karl knelt beside Marcus and probed the woman’s brain, feeling for the tether himself. “It’s been severed,” Marcus went on. “The end feels like it’s been cauterized. She’s not linked to the collective anymore. She’s an individual, now. Unless they see her, or specifically reach out and look for her, which they have no reason to do, now they believe she’s dead, I don’t think the collective will know she’s been Healed.”

  Karl nodded. “I feel it, too. Interesting.” Karl sat back on his heels, looking at Marcus. “You really want to try and do this?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Karl raised an eyebrow. “It’ll be like having a child along. We’ll have to tow her, care for her. She may put up a fight. It’ll slow our progress toward finding Colin.”

  Marcus considered. “We’re not far behind Colin. We were too late to save this group,” he motioned around the clearing. “A few days, give or take, won’t make any difference now. If she can furnish information to help bring down the collectives, we can’t ignore that.”

  Karl grinned. “Afraid of Doc, are we?”

  Marcus smiled briefly. “Among other things. Her mind is so underdeveloped, she won’t be hard to overpower should this backfire. I think we should try.”

  Karl nodded. “All right, then. I got your back.” He stood and thrust his arms down toward the motionless woman, indicating that Marcus should have at it.

  Marcus leaned forward and put a palm on each of the woman’s temples.

  Chapter 6: Traveling Pains

  AFTER AN HOUR OF JOGGING mostly uphill, into the mountains, Maggie’s calves burned red-hot.

  When they stopped for a breather, Jonah leaned over, resting his hands on his knees and panting. David and Lila panted as well, but were obviously less affected by the exercise.

  “How much farther?” Jonah gasped, touching his bandaged arm gingerly.

  Maggie felt for him. Lila healed his broken arm. Still, he jogged with a sizable injury.

  “Not far at all,” David said. “Probably another ten minutes.”

  They started moving again, up a steeper slope. Maggie knew the area well. This was the same route Marcus took her on when he’d come to get her five months before. He and Karl used the same path—only in reverse—to return Maggie to her home. She’d walked it countless times since then, hoping for any sign of Marcus returning for her.

  Now she was headed back to Interchron, but it wasn’t Marcus who’d returned for her, nor Karl. Why did life always end up being more complicated than she planned?

  When they reached the field, it appeared empty. Maggie automatically swept the area with her neurochemical abilities, searching for signs of life. It only took a few seconds for her to locate a young woman, squatting out of sight behind a large aspen tree.

  David looked down at Maggie, then followed her gaze across the field. He must have sensed what she did, because he raised his voice.

  “Kristee, it’s us. Come out.”

  The figure that emerged was more girl than woman. No older than eighteen, she had the longest hair Maggie had ever laid eyes on. Dark brown, thick and course, it hung down well below Kristee’s buttocks, almost to her knees. A tie gathered it at the nape of her neck, the gather as big as a tea saucer. Her bright, brown eyes looked strained.

  “Why was she hiding? Can’t she tell us from the enemy?” Maggie asked as they walked.

  David answered in a whisper. “Kristee is a decent Traveler, and she’s good at bringing energy out of non-animate objects, but that’s about it. She can’t defend herself, she can’t identify people or things by their neural signatures, and she definitely can’t Heal. Don’t ever let her try.”

  David’s voice sounded a little too serious, and his eyes twinkled. Maggie smiled.

  Kristee moved toward them. They met her in the middle of the field.

  “Are you all right?” David asked Kristee as they neared her.

  “Yes.” Her voice was high and timid. “I was worried. I keep feeling things I...can’t identify.”

  “Like what?” David asked.

  “I don’t know. Were you guys scanning anything?”

  David frowned. “You can pick up on scans?”

  “No. Well, I don’t know. I sensed something and didn’t know what it was.”

  “Kristee,” David looked worried, “we’ve been jogging for more than an hour. None of us has touched our neurochemical abilities at all.”

  “It’s gotta be that woman...thing...the assassin,” Lila said. “She’s probably looking for us. We need to go. Kristee, this is Maggie and her brother, Jonah. Guys, this is Kristee, our Traveler.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Kristee murmured faintly. Her eyes shifted constantly to the land around them.

  “Let’s go,” David said before Maggie or Jonah could reply.

  Kristee nodded and pushed the sleeves of her sweater up to her biceps. “Everyone needs to be touching my skin.”

  David stepped forward and grasped Kristee’s forearm. When Maggie didn’t move, he reached down, took her hand, and placed it on Kristee’s wrist. Lila and Jonah took hold of her other arm.

  “Okay,” Kristee said. “Hold on.”

  Maggie felt more than heard it: something small and fast whispering past her ear. A force, more gargantuan than anything she could have imagined, slammed into Kristee. The young Traveler flew ten feet back and landed in a heap. Bright red immediately sprouted on the shoulder of her sweater.

  Lila stumbled forward a few feet, but only she held on tightly enough for even that. Kristee was yanked cleanly from everyone else’s grasp.

  David cursed and turned away from Kristee, while Lila ran to her side. Maggie followed David’s gaze in time to see Justine, still looking like a river monster from the Amazon, coming through the foliage, followed by a dozen Trepids.

  Energy swirled around Justine. The woman gathered unbelievable amounts of it, amassing it like a cache of ammunition. Maggie could see it: swirls of red with ribbons of darkness and barbed ends. If that much energy hit them, it would obliterate them.

  Justine molded the en
ergy, folding it in on itself until it became a dense, heavy ball of energy. Maggie wasn’t sure how, but she knew when Justine threw the heap of matter at them, it would explode like a bomb.

  The next instant, Justine’s weapon came hurtling toward them. Maggie threw a shield up right before it hit her and David in the face. The energy hit her shield and reverberated so violently, Maggie’s legs gave out. David caught her.

  “You all right?” he whispered in her ear.

  She nodded absently, her attention on Justine, who pointed at something and motioned to the Trepids. Maggie realized Justine was telling them where the sides of the shield were. She hadn’t thought about the shield at all. She’d created it out of instinct, fashioning it like a thirty-foot brick wall. Justine measured the height of it with her eyes, which meant she would probably try to lob energy over the top. Meanwhile the Trepids headed for the sides Justine indicated.

  Maggie changed the shape of the shield, pulling more Constructive energy toward her to extend it out. She created a dome around her small group and used metal elements from the bedrock beneath her to fortify it. Justine’s mouth set in an angry line, and she hurled random energy pulses at Maggie’s shield, varying the intensity and frequency of her attacks.

  She might as well have been pounding on a titanium wall.

  Justine marched forward, and Maggie felt a difference. David said Justine must have some way to cut Maggie off from her neurological abilities when she was close. That assessment, it seemed, was quite literal. As Justine got closer, Maggie could feel the shield weakening, the energy slipping from her grasp.

  As Justine’s energy hit the shield again, the air bubbled and coalesced, making the shield visible to the human eye for an instant.

  “How are you doing that?” David asked from above her.

  She glanced up at him. He stood behind her, a head taller than she was, his hands resting on her upper arms. He studied the shield, watching Justine attack it with a fascinated frown. Maggie became aware of sweat beading her upper lip and beginning to pool underneath her eyes. She told herself it was the strain of raising the shield.