I find Jonah just where Darius said I would, seated on the back steps and tossing a ball into the yard for Barley. The silver helmet on his head glimmers in the porch lights. The drizzle has stopped, at least for the time being, but the sky is still gray. I settle down next to Jonah as Barley trots up. The dog drops its tennis ball at my feet and waits patiently for me to toss it. I stretch for the soggy ball and whip it as far as I can. Barley vanishes into the darkness in a blur. I’m happy to see that even though I’m over a hundred years into the future, dogs still enjoy the same hobbies.
“Jay’s not a bad guy, you know,” Jonah says. “He’s not.”
I watch the boy’s face. His brow is furrowed. I can’t help but think that he’s been through far too much for his age. First a chronothon and now a brother caught up in a futuristic cult. Some people draw all the short straws.
“I think Jay could just use our help, bud. I get the feeling that he could use some better friends.”
Jonah looks up at me. “Are you going to be his friend?”
I recall the scene I just witnessed from Wednesday night and Elgin as a child, hissing at me. “You’re too late, Traverssss.” Darius suggested that it’s Jay who had chosen to associate with these people. I try to imagine what could possess him to do that. The notes in his journal were the frantic scribblings of someone obsessed. Whatever path he’s gone down, he’s been headed there for a while.
Jonah’s eyes are searching my face. “You can keep him safe, right? The way you did for me?”
I cradle my beer between both hands, letting the icy cold penetrate my palms. “I’ll do my best. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to help him out. Do you know where he’s going? Did he tell you?”
Jonah reaches for Barley as the dog comes trotting back. He pulls the Labrador closer and wraps his arms around its neck, resting his chin atop the dog’s head. Barley pants happily and lets himself be squeezed into his master’s shoulder.
“He’s going to change things,” Jonah manages. “He says it’s his time. He’s going to meet more like him. He says they are going to save the world.”
I picture the scribbled quotations in the journal and the walls of Jay’s room, recalling how they were all from the same person. “Did he say he was going to meet Gnomon? Was that the guy he’s been talking to?”
“I don’t know.” Jonah releases the dog. Barley licks his face and wriggles back a few steps till the tennis ball is at his feet again. He looks from Jonah’s face to mine, then noses the ball closer to us. Jonah picks it up but doesn’t throw it. He merely turns it over in his fingers a few times. When he speaks again his voice is softer. “I know he’s not really my brother.” He runs the back of his hand beneath his nose and sniffs, then wipes it against his pant leg. “I know who he is.”
I rest my hand on Jonah’s shoulder. “I know it’s not easy to deal with all this.” I try to find any words that could possibly console him. “If it helps any, there are some other versions of me too, and it sounds like you get along with your brother way better than I get along with mine.”
Jonah looks up with interest. “What’s your brother like?”
I try to find the appropriate words to sum up my feelings about Benji. I imagine him sleeping in my bed and using my toothbrush and I feel the scowl creeping onto my face. “I don’t know. Old. Smelly. Stupid.”
Jonah grins at me. “He’s smelly?”
I’m happy to see him smiling. “Nah, not really. He’s just different, you know? I’m still trying to get used to the idea of someone else wanting to live my life. I’m probably just jealous. Mad that he gets to hang out with my friends and use all my stuff. I kind of wanted it all to myself.”
“Does he like the same things you like? Do you ever play video games together, stuff like that?”
I recall the last real conversation I had with Benji—his idea about dividing our life up when I get back. I frown at the memory. “Some people aren’t that great at playing with others. You’re pretty lucky that your brother played with you.” I hold my hand out for the tennis ball. Jonah places it in my palm. “And you’ve got Barley.” The dog is wriggling in anticipation. I zing the ball low across the lawn, letting it bounce away, the dog barreling after it.
The door to the back porch opens and Mym sticks her head out. “Hey, guys. Food’s ready.”
I climb to my feet and give Jonah a hand to help him up. He looks up at me and his face is still serious. “So you’ll help him, right? I think he just needs to come home, don’t you?”
“I’m going to do my best. If I see him, I’ll definitely tell him you’re waiting for him.”
“He’s going to a fire temple. That’s what he called it. He says it’s a place where the fire never stops burning,” Jonah says. “It’s in the book.”
A fire temple doesn’t sound like a place I would especially like to visit, but I pat Jonah on the shoulder. “I’ll look into it.”
Dinner is even more delicious than it smelled and, when it’s over, I’m in danger of popping a button on my jeans. Darius, despite not being able to consume any of his own cooking, contributed a great deal to the dinner conversation. Tucket talked animatedly with him through most of dinner, allowing me a bit of time to process through my day while he carried the conversation. Ebenezer was polite, but mostly quiet as well, and after dinner he excused himself, disappearing upstairs.
By way of post dinner entertainment, Jonah invites us to play a video game in his room and loans me another pair of the dreaded metaspace glasses. I’m impressed to see that the entire room transforms around our position on the floor. Jonah leads us on an expedition through a cave in search of buried Incan treasures and Tucket helps him along, apparently a veteran at this interactive game.
After a little while, I take the glasses off and slip out the door, leaving the others inside the virtual world. I climb the rear stairs to Jay’s attic room and grab the prayer book off his bed. I had intended to slip back downstairs with the book, but upon cracking it open, I’m immediately entranced by the scribbles and sketches. I settle slowly onto the room’s only chair and begin to browse the pages. I discover the section Jonah mentioned about the fire temple. The sketch of the building shows a four-sided structure with wide archways on every side. It’s simple construction. No lofty spires like Gaudi would have installed. This temple has only a rounded dome at the top and a place inside for a fire pit. The one depicted has a word beneath it. Ateshgah. I don’t know the significance of that, but the location listed is as familiar as can be—Saint Petersburg.
Part of me wants to believe that the St. Petersburg referenced might be the big one in Russia, but I have a sinking feeling that, once again, these unusual events are circling my home town, drawn to it like some sort of vortex—the epicenter of the strange when it comes to time travel. Whatever interest the Eternals have in Doctor Quickly and his discoveries, they certainly seem to be concentrating their efforts on places he’s been.
I trace my finger over the drawing of the fire temple and down to a long row of Roman numerals written below it. A selection of them are circled, with arrows drawn between them. The first numeral is MMMDXXV. An arrow runs from it past a few others to the next circled number, MMDCCCXXXV. I puzzle over the D momentarily, trying to recall if that meant 50 or 500, but then recall that L should be 50. I work out the rest in my head. 3525 to 2835. One of the numerals has been circled multiple times. I do the conversion and translate it to 2165. The series continues to lower and lower numerals, going into negative numbers.
I’ve never heard of negative Roman numerals. I work out a few more numbers. What could they signify? I ponder the sets and the arrows. The numbers go from larger to smaller, but don’t seem to have any particular relation to each other. The largest number and smallest number are both around 3500, but not identical. I search the surrounding text for more clues. They could be dates. AD and BCE numbers? The arrows could signify a direction?
The idea might fit, but it’s tricky
to try to use a Roman numeral system that far into the past. The switches from Gregorian to Julian calendars cause issues and dates won’t exactly match up. My education as a time traveler has been brief, but I do know that much. Trying to label a date that far in the past with any kind of accuracy gets really hard to calculate, especially since everyone was using the most convenient system they had at the time. Still, if you were only trying to record the year, I suppose you could manage it. But what about the arrows? I stare at the sequence a little longer, then give up and move on.
I don’t know how long I spend reading the journal prayer book, but it’s at least long enough for Jonah to finish his game. Mym finds me and lets me know that I’ve been missed. I pull myself from the journal and let out a yawn. It’s been a very long day and despite my desire to read more of the book, I agree to head to bed. Ebenezer has offered us a guest room, of which there seem to be plenty. Tucket ends up across the hall from Mym and me and, to my surprise, has barely said goodnight before I hear snoring coming from his room. Jonah explains that the metaspace is loaded with sleep apps, even some that use hypnosis, and the average user can be asleep in less than a minute if they want to be. I give the boy a hug goodnight, promising to catch up more in the morning.
I crawl under the covers with Mym and she nestles in as close as she can but is still fiddling with her phone for a little. “Any word from your dad?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Nothing at the moment, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t tried. We need to hook up with a tachyon pulse transmitter to intercept anything he’s sent up or downstream in time. I could ping a message to him, but he’d have to get to a TPT to read it. It’ll be easier if we go ourselves.”
“Have you got a way to get us to one of those?”
Mym shuts her device off and sets it on the nightstand. “Tomorrow we can head back to London. Dad has a house there we can use. More of a relay station than anything, but it will get the job done. We can check in and let him know what we’ve learned.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. Whoever is behind the attacks on the labs is obviously connected to the Eternals. If the guy you saw take Jay away really was the same kid you saw in Valencia, there’s really no way of knowing what year to pin them down to. They could be any time, or at least have connections in any given year.”
“How do you mean?”
“You said the kid spoke to you but sounded like the old man. That means they have to be able to send messages to their younger selves, and if they could do that, they could just as easily use their younger self to get a message to an older Eternal living in that year. That one takes the message back to earlier in his life and does the same thing . . . They could keep that up indefinitely, relay messages to each other up and down a timestream without ever needing gravitites. People in the future can communicate with the past that way and vice versa.”
“Seems like the message has to change hands a lot that way. I feel like it would end up inaccurate. Kind of like a game of telephone. Run it through enough messengers, it’s bound to get screwed up. Why not just time travel the way we do?”
Mym brushes her hair away from her face, then runs her hand over my chest. “Up here time travel is really regulated. ASCOTT is super strict about who gets infused with gravitites and they track the time travelers they’ve created via the Grid. The Eternals don’t seem like the kind of group that would get ASCOTT approval.”
“What about going off-Grid like us?”
“They might. It could be why they stole dad’s gravitizer. It’s not as easy as it sounds, though. We have an in with a chronometer maker and the man who invented time travel. For someone starting out from scratch, if you don’t already know a time traveler, you might live your whole life and never meet one, let alone get someone to teach you how to infuse yourself or risk going off-Grid with you.”
“I thought time travel became common knowledge after a while. The age of awareness or whatever. Have we passed that point yet?”
“We did. For most time streams, the reality of time travel was common knowledge before the 2150s when the Academy existed. But even so, the Academy was only open for about ten years before the public got scared and demanded it be closed. Not that it really ever stopped operating. People who figured out a way to time travel could still get back to the 2150s and attend, but the public face of the Academy disappeared. There have been hundreds of graduates over the years, probably thousands, but they’re spread out over any number of time streams and going all over the place in time. I don’t know how many time travelers you might expect to find in a given timestream at any point in history, but I’d bet its a lot less than you’d think. We’re pretty rare.”
I wrap my arm around Mym and pull her closer to me. “Then I guess I’m pretty lucky that I found you.”
Mym smiles. “We’re both lucky.” She kisses me and lets her fingers linger at the side of my face. “I’m so glad you found me.” Her eyes grow slightly distant, and I wonder if she’s thinking back to the day we met. I recall the moment I first saw her appear in Doctor Quickly’s lab. Though for me, the day I first saw her was not the first time she’d seen me. We’ve had a tangled relationship stemming from an even more tangled beginning. As far as I know, the first time she ever met me as an adult was at Bob’s ranch, peering down from a hot air balloon.
“Are you thinking about Montana?” I ask, running my hand along her shoulder. I can still easily remember the bright colors of the balloon. For me it’s only a few months ago. For Mym it’s been years.
She inhales deeply and turns her eyes back to me. “Actually I was thinking of another time. The day you walked back into my life and told me we could save my dad. I’d been a wreck, but you were so confident. So at peace about the future. I knew that whatever was going to happen, I could trust you. That was a good day.” She smiles again, her gaze lingering briefly on mine. She then curls up tighter against me, burrowing into the pillow and closing her eyes. I study her closed eyelids and the shape of her delicate ears. I don’t remember that day. For me it hasn’t happened yet.
Despite all that I’ve experienced as a time traveler, there is still so much more to learn. I’m changing slowly, adapting to a complexity of thought and memory that comes from living a life out of order, but it’s difficult progress. I still want to think of my life experiences as chronological, though for the last few months they have been anything but. Mym is a constant reminder that life now consists of our individual stories stitched together in places that don’t always match. Each time traveler is a solo act, threading their way through time, no longer needing to share a history with anyone else.
Watching Mym next to me, I get a better sense of her desire for oneness. She was born a time traveler, never knowing anything different. Other than her father, no one has ever shared her story, her history. How lonely do you become that way?
As Mym drifts into sleep beside me, I run a hand along her shoulder, then down her side, letting my arm rest at her hip. Whatever our divergent histories have been, we have a shared path ahead. I may not have been able to be a part of her past, but I can be her future. It’s a thought that makes me incredibly happy. Whatever comes next, we can face it together.
Something is terribly wrong.
Wake up.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sleeping, but I’m woken by a tremendous pressure throughout my body. I’m jolted alert, suddenly upright in bed next to Mym. She’s awake too, eyes wide and staring at the top of my head. My fingers are there, grasping for something. I’m moving but frozen.
My hands stretch for Mym without my control, grasping her shoulders and shaking her. “You need to get away from me! Get away! Get away!” The voice is my voice, but the words aren’t my own. I try desperately to speak, to ask Mym what’s happening, but I have no control over my own body. Someone else is in here with me. I can feel him, the same one from my dreams. What is he doing to me?
I struggle to reconcile the i
mages in my head. I can see Mym in front of me, the room around us, but I can also sense something else. Somewhere else. A memory. There is a timelessness to the place I’m feeling, even a beauty, but it conflicts with the anger and the pain of the force inside me.
Mym wriggles in my grip as I scream at her. “You’re going to die, you’re going to die, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!”
Her eyes are wild.
I want to call to her, tell her that it isn’t true. Whatever this thing is that has control, it isn’t me. Her terrified expression pains me. She’s never looked at me with such horror. She’s panicked and frantic in my hands. She finally breaks away from my grip and rolls off the bed.
I chase her.
No. This is all wrong.
Someone inside me strains to stop my progress. The part of me that’s screaming and chasing Mym slows, bogged down by this other presence. How? How is this happening? Whatever battle is going on inside my mind, I know which side I want to win. I focus my concentration on taking back my body, fighting against this screaming rage. Mym has fled to the hallway. My muscles are on fire, my legs clenched and rigid as they waver between impulses to run and to stay, putting up a stubborn resistance to the part of me that has frightened Mym away.
Something snaps.
The mind inside my own detaches and my legs turn to Jell-O—sending me crumpling to the floor. My fingers clench carpet and I concentrate harder. Get out of my head. Get. Out!
Somehow it has worked. My mind goes quiet, the screaming rage supplanted by only my own thoughts. An uncontrolled shiver runs down my spine. At the end I sensed something else. Someone else. The third fighter. He was angry too, but not at me. His anger mirrored my own fear, my desire to protect Mym. Whoever he was, he’s gone now too.
He’s going to stay that way.
I push off the floor and go after Mym.
The house has gone dark. I stumble into the blackness of the hallway, feeling my way toward the stairs. “Mym? Are you there? It’s me. I’m sorry—I don’t know what happened.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 131
