by KD Mack
Bendon gave up eventually, turned in to go to bed. Steff waited until she was sure Bendon was asleep, then walked a while away from camp. She stood in the open field, looking down at the anchor in her arm.
Matias had already contacted her, asking about the trips she had made without Bendon since she was on this mission. She had told him it was surveillance, that she needed to check everywhere. But he had told her to stop. And he would know if she shifted again.
She needed to find the next object alone. It would be the one, Steff was sure, that would solve this for her. She wasn’t sure how she knew it, but she trusted her gut.
Whatever this man was, Steff was tired of having unanswered questions about her life. And she was tired of people telling her how she was supposed to live with those questions, how she was supposed to find those answers.
The pocket knife, a gift from her father when she joined the Academy, was out in her hand. She stared again at the tracker. It wasn’t deep, only a surface implant. It would take a moment. She had received worse injuries in the line of duty.
“It has to be quick,” she told herself. There was no doubt they’d be able to tell it was removed. She’d have to shift right after. And shifting again, anchorless, into the time stream… the thought chilled her. There was so much that could go wrong. No beacon to light her way.
“It has to be done,” she told herself, and brought the tip of the knife down.
It hurt worse than she expected, but was done in a minute, and she yanked a bandage from the kit at her side, binding the wound without looking. Steff thought for a second how nice it would be if you could just skip ahead to when things were healed, when questions were answered, but that was the problem with time travel. You always took yourself with you.
She shifted into the stream, sending a silent apology to Bendon. She would understand when it was all done.
The stream was overwhelming at first. Without an anchor, it was easy to feel like you were going to be whipped away in the flow. But she smiled as she saw it, ahead. The golden glow. The last marker he had left for her.
Steff made her way to it, moving slowly, careful not to get off course. It shone out among the shimmering, shifting colors, and she was surprised when she finally saw the thing. Just a little scrap of tapestry, lost among all this craziness.
Steff picked it up, turning it over in her hands. It didn’t give her the same shock and there was no tear here nothing to see. But when the memories came, they flooded into her. The last nights together. The fight they had. How he didn’t want to save the world if it meant losing her.
And it all returned to the cabin. But it wasn’t fuzzy now. It stood out for her, crystal clear, like the tapestry was throwing down the string that she could follow through the maze to it. That’s where he was, at the cabin in the mountains, where they had huddled together looking for answers. With their friends – friends long forgotten now – except –
Bendon had been there, she realized with a shock and a smile. Bendon, and even Rollins, Bendon’s weird friend, for a time.
But then he wasn’t. There had been a betrayal.
And she had fallen. She had fallen from the sky only to wake up in her own bed, in another world. The earth suddenly rushed towards her, and Steff was falling again, but this time, this time when she landed, it was in snow.
She wasn’t in the stream. Steff looked up ahead of her. There was the cabin, a wisp of smoke curling out from its chimney.
Chapter Ten
Steff opened the door of the cabin to a candlelit dinner.
“Steff!” Kreg exclaimed, jumping up. “You made it, you’re here! I – I hope this isn’t too forward, I just thought… we’ve been doing this for so long, I’ve been trying to find you – you won’t believe what happened. The damn time cops were finally after me. I had been hiding my tracks but it just wasn’t enough, you know, darling? They always find you. And then I’ve just been here, and I’ve been setting this up, I didn’t want to risk it not being ready when you got here –”
He looked at the cuffs in her hand.
“I’m –” Steff gave him a conflicted look “– I’m here to place you under arrest.”
A storm of expressions passed over his face, finally settling into annoyance. “Not this again,” he moaned. “Is this always going to be how our story starts.”
“I’m sorry,” Steff said, stepping forward. “I have so many questions for you - I don’t want this, but the fire, the anchors…”
She shook her head. She had so many plans, before she stepped through the door. Plans for what she would do. But seeing him, and the dinner, and the confusion that had surged through her. Why did she think she could trust this man? This man following her through time, breaking every code. Bendon had been right. She had ended up in the middle of nowhere with no one knowing where she was, with some strange man she only thought she remembered, who had been telling her what to think the whole time she had been following him.
“No, no, it’s fine,” he put out his hands. “If I’m going to be arrested, it might as well be you.”
Steff put the cuffs around him mutely, trying to figure out what to do next. “It looks like a nice diner,” she said lamely.
“Porkchops,” he said, with a sad smile. “I’ve been working on the technique all week. Not much to do here.”
“You can’t shift with the cuffs on,” she told him. “They’re protected.”
“I figured. What now?”
“I have to take you back,” she said. “My supervisors, Matias and the others, they’ll have questions for you. It’ll be easier for you if you just tell them everything you’ve been up to.”
“I won’t.” He gave her a smile. “But they can try.”
She looked again at the dinner, back at him. “We could eat, first. I won’t take the cuffs off, though.”
Kreg shrugged again. “I’ll take it,” he said. “Arrested in style. My last meal, right? Before I’m banished to time prison?”
“You won’t go to prison,” Steff said, taking the seat across from him, shifting awkwardly. “I don’t know. Probably not. If you’re a first-time offender.”
“Oh, darling, this isn’t my first time,” Kreg said, trying to cut his meat with his hands bound close together. “This is what I do, in every time.”
“Why are you doing this?” Steff asked, taking a bite of her food. It was good. He hadn’t been lying about practicing.
“Because I know what happened before, and I know something too close to it can happen again.” He leaned across the table. “I don’t know what you’ve remembered Steff, but you and me and some other people –”
“Bendon,” Steff replied. “She was one of them.”
“Bendon,” he said, sitting back, mulling the name over. “Yes, Bendon! I have to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to the people in the memories that weren’t you. She was at the market, chasing me down.”
“So was I,” Steff said. “You nearly set me on fire.”
He gave her a long look. “Sorry,” he said finally. “But I wonder if you being there – if that was why… Anyway, we have a problem. A major problem. The world ended, and we helped reverse it. But there were people who didn’t want it reversed.”
“Phoenix Base. I remember,” Steff nodded.
“Yes, exactly. And if we don’t stop them before they gain power, Chrono Corp.”
Steff sat back. Some part of her had expected this, had dreaded this. That he would just be some free time revolutionary that was trying to use her.
“I work for them, Kreg,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why I was following you.”
“No!” he exclaimed. “I mean yes, I get it. You work from them. I’m sure everyone with any ability in your time does. I sort of figured. But that’s not why you followed. You followed because you remembered! And you’re stronger, right, stronger than most people in your time?”
She nodded, not saying anything.
“Exactly
!” he exclaimed. “That’s what happened to all of us close to the origin point, all of us who were involved. Things got stronger. More intense. It gets into your bones. But if we don’t stop Chrono Corp. from happening, Steff, I’m convinced that something like the time that we fixed will happen again. Nobody should have that much power! It’s a road of perdition.”
“Have you checked?” Steff said sourly. She didn’t like this talk against the Corp. It had been her whole life, everything she had worked for. They were trying to keep the peace. It had been madness, discordant madness before they had taken the timeline back to where it was supposed to be. “Checked the future, to see if it’s going to be this dystopia you think it will be?”
“I can’t jump that far on my own,” he replied. “You should know that. Nobody can jump that far and see without just, losing themselves. But it happened once. It’ll happen again.” He lifted his hands, making a little circle. “It always comes around again.”
“And your plan?” Steff asked, losing her appetite.
“Sabotage!” he said, trying to spread his hands. “Stop them before they can get started! If they can’t gain ground, we don’t have to claw it back.”
“We’re leaving,” Steff said, standing up. “I don’t know what I expected but this… no. You’re just an anarchist. I’m not listening to this.”
“Steff!” he said desperately. “But the time we had before – we know each other, Steff.”
“If this is all right, you helped me save the world before. I’m not going to help you destroy it now.”
Steff had him back before Bendon even awoke. She woke her friend, tossing over the bag of anchors.
“Here’s him and everything he left,” she said, sourly, ignoring his pleas and Bendon’s questions. She just wanted to get this over with. Whatever she had hoped to find in that cabin, she hadn’t.
The next week was a blur. Matias took him in, to the interrogation chambers, and Steff tried not to think of that look Kreg gave her as he was dragged away. One last, desperate look.
But she’d made up her mind. She wouldn’t listen to this. This was madness. This was betraying everything she had ever stood for, for some random person who claimed a common past? She moved through things robotically, the thought always tugging at the back of her mind that she had already removed her anchor. She could have just gone with him. Just gone. Matias hadn’t even said anything about the anchor, though he had watched her like a hawk the whole time she was in his office.
When he called her and Bendon into his office at the end of the week, she expected the dressing down.
“We have a problem,” Matias said, as they came into the office. Steff waited stiffly for the rest.
“The anchors you brought back. We’ve analyzed them all, and they bear the echoes of the times they were activated, as all anchors do.”
“What’s the problem?” Bendon asked.
“Well, he clearly interfered with them, and we know that Steff here interacted with them as well. But there’s something else.”
“What?” Bendon squirmed.
“Someone else interacted with them. Someone else was moving through the stream, tracking this Kreg fellow, and could have even been tracking Steff as well. We know they have memories of some older version of the world. But the echoes here, they’re powerful. Angry.”
Steff knew what was happening, as soon as Matias said it.
“He’s coming back,” she said, meeting his eyes. “He wants his old world back – no, that’s not it.” She hesitated, Bendon and Matias both watching her closely. “He wants revenge.”
Continue Reading with Time for a Mission…
Also By KD Mack
The Paradox Journals Series
Book One - Ripples in Time
Book Two - A Time of Madness
Book Three - A Switch in Time
Book Four - A Time of Trouble
Book Five - Just in Time
Book Six - A Rift in Time
Prequel - The Story of Amy, Elliot & Blaine
Box Set - Books One - Six
The Story Continues With…The Paradox Adventures Series
Book One - Time for Hunting Rabbits
Book Two - Artifact Hunting in Paris
Book Three - Fight for the Scepter
Book Four - A Time of Discovery
Book Five - The Race to Apocalypse
Book Six - Time for Deception on Oak Island
Book Seven - Showdown with the Collector
Book Eight - A Time for Hacking
Book Nine - Trapped in Time
Chronomancer Chronicles Series
Prequel - Sacrifices Must Be Made
Book One - The Time Hopper’s Gambit
Coming Soon…
Book Two - Time for a Mission
You can also find all of my book titles with updated links on my author page here:
https://books.bookfunnel.com/paradoxseries
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About the Author
I've enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy from a young age, under the covers with the flashlight at night, enthralled in the worlds of Asimov, Heinlein, Foster and others. My clever dog, Dejah, is named for a Burroughs’ character - Dejah Thoris of the red planet we call Mars.
I'm pleased to be able to share my love of all things weird, different, magical and out of this world, and I hope you'll be able to lose yourself in new worlds, on fantastic adventures in my books. Enjoy!
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