“I’m a restorer, Agent Weston. I’m not here to change anything but to put it back the way it was before it was broken. My mission is to collect the witness protection imposters and send each sleeper in the cell back for interrogation and holding.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” Sarah slapped her hands together. “If there’s no more questions, then grab your gear and I’ll show you how our search is going.
Sarah had pulled the door open and begun to walk out when Henrietta rested her hand on Sarah’s arm. “There is one more thing, Agent Weston.”
Sarah raised a brow and turned to find Henrietta holding out a folded piece of paper. “You’re to go with them.”
“Me?” Sarah asked, unfolding the paper to find a letter from Commander Chase.
“Dispatch Analyst Sarah Weston, is hereby ordered to appear before the Time Enforcement Board for questioning and debriefing.”
Sarah’s mouth parted as she lifted her gaze. “I can’t go forward in time. Cell memory won’t allow it.”
“You’re ordered to testify. You’ll be in transport with the others.”
Henrietta slipped a box from her pocket. She opened the lid. Two blue pills sat inside. She popped one out and held it in the palm of her hand. Sarah didn’t have to choose which color to take to go down the rabbit hole; there was only one choice. The pill was a vibrant blue like the pendant that Sarah’s mother had given to Ziggy. The liquid or whatever was inside must be made from the same thing.
“What is that going to do to me?” Sarah asked.
“Think of it like your blue stabilizer for transporting between slips, only this stabilizes your cells when traveling outside your memory bank. It’s made of technology that will stabilize your cells so that you can adjust and adapt to the Time Enforcement Board’s environment.”
“The Board? You’re talking the place where all Time is monitored?”
“Yes, the board is made up of several members that we call magistrates. Who do you think actually coordinates all of the travel, watches for anomalies, and has been helping you police all this time?” Henrietta asked.
“I never knew where Commander Chase was from.”
“In all this time, you didn’t ask?” Henrietta’s brows dipped.
“I had no need.”
“People like her coordinate all time travel, even to places in the future, although most of our issues we have to deal with are in the past.”
“Why is that?”
“We have better technological advances in the future. Your time period is vulnerable.”
Great. Just how vulnerable were they?
Henrietta held up the pill between her fingers and smiled. “Commander Chase told me you were smart. Now take the stabilizer so I can get to work tracking Foster.”
“Don’t you mean everyone?” Sarah asked.
Henrietta smiled, the forced kind, where the smile on her face didn’t reach her eyes. “Yes, my mission is to retrieve everyone, but Foster and Dr. Steed are at the top of my list. They’re the ones currently disrupting things.”
“How is that possible? I’ve been chasing Foster for six months. He’s barely had time to breathe, much less change things,” Sarah said.
“I’ve said too much,” Henrietta said, slipping the pill back into the box. “How about you show me where you stand in finding them, and you can swallow your pill later.”
“Explain, or I’ll be happy to send you back to the transport,” Sarah demanded.
Henrietta lifted her brow. “He’s most definitely effecting changes in time and lives.”
“Who’s?”
“Yours. Every day that he’s here you veer off your course. It started with minor changes in your life that weren’t significant, but things have escalated. Whatever he’s doing is changing your future self. For you, he’s one of those out-of-bound danger zones you warned me about. You shouldn’t have contact with him.”
“Red zones are meant for not running into family members to prevent travelers from exposing secrets or changing important milestones for themselves.”
“Exactly. Now show me how you’ve been tracking him.”
2018
Chapter 5
Henrietta followed Sarah out of the room. The woman looked as though she were on a mission, heading straight for Ziggy’s desk.
She came to an abrupt stop in front of him and clicked her heels together while saluting the pimply-faced teen.
Diana appeared by Sarah’s side just as Sarah was hiding the smile from her mouth. “What is that about?”
Sarah shrugged. “The future must be more screwed up than I can imagine.”
“Magistrate Carmichael, it’s an honor.” She bowed.
Ziggy’s wide eyes went from the strange woman’s to Sarah’s in a silent plea she’d started to recognize.
“Okay, GI Jane. You’re scaring my teen.”
“My name’s not Jane,” she said, not understanding the term.
“It’s just a saying,” Sarah offered in way of understanding as she walked to Ziggy’s desk and plopped her butt on the corner.
“And I’m not a teen,” Ziggy said, rising from his seat. “But she is kind of scaring me. Sarah, what the hell is a magistrate?”
Sarah clapped him on the back and raised her brow at Henrietta. “I’m sure that knowledge should have stayed in the red zone.”
Henrietta let her gaze linger down Ziggy’s body and back up. “He’s still so…untainted.”
“And we’d like to keep him that way, so keep your hands off my assistant. I just hired him.”
“Unless she’d like to get her hands—”
“Remember your manners.” Sarah playfully smacked the back of his head and pointed to the computer. “Show her how we’re tracking the sleepers through facial recognition while I go down and see Ritter to have him check my biofeed.”
The woman sat down in Ziggy’s chair, and Ziggy hurried to block Sarah’s path to keep her from leaving. “You’re leaving her here with me?”
He lifted his worried gaze over Sarah’s shoulder.
“Ziggy, you’re a grown man. Well, sort of grown.” Sarah patted his shoulder. “I’m not worried about her safety. She could kick your ass.”
“I know. You shouldn’t be worried about her safety. You should be worried about mine.” Ziggy leaned into her and lowered his voice. “Do you want me to tell her about that thing you just did this morning?”
Sarah’s tilted her head.
“You know…that kissing thing you did.”
Realization hit Sarah as she turned to find the woman typing away at Ziggy’s computer. “No, let’s handle that in-house for now so we can see what she’s made of.”
“You’re not ready to turn him in?”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Sarah tossed her hands up. “Henrietta is here to take everyone back. She can’t take Foster until he gives me my mother and Natalie’s location. Remember. After that…then she can take him.”
Sarah spun around and headed for the emergency stairs, jogging down them until she reached the basement, which Ritter called his home away from home.
Sarah yanked open the door and walked into the dimly lit area. Ritter was across the room. His fingers were going at lightning speed as a red warning light flashed through the area.
“I’m going to assume, since there isn’t a siren, that whatever this red light is warning you about must not be that bad?”
“Not bad?” Ritter’s voice shook as he pushed himself, flying across the room in his computer chair. He clicked a few more buttons, and he pointed as a video popped up on the screen. It was a house at the end of a suburban street, the property wrapped in Do Not Cross police tape. Sarah crossed her arms over his chest.
“What about it? We already know there’s a rift in that particular house. That’s why we have it contained and the reason we’re monitoring it.”
“Sarah,” Ritter said, hitting fast forward on the video, “the house was locked up. It ha
s an alarm. The house alarm just activated. The alarm company called me since you guys put me down as the contact and have quarantine stickers all over the place.
“I’m sure it’s just a rat or maybe a kid knocked a baseball through a window. Have you isolated any movements besides the rift hanging in midair?”
Ritter forwarded the video several seconds and then paused it. He pointed an accusing finger at the screen. “What the hell is that?”
Sarah moved closer to the screen to get a better look. An animal she’d never seen was on the display. She took the remote and hit play, advancing it frame by frame. The image looked as though the animal was poking his head through a latex barrier, and it seemed that barrier was the only thing holding the animal back. “This isn’t good.”
“Send the coordinates to my biometer while I get my guns and alert the others to converge. Tell them not to engage and, whatever they do, do not shoot and break that barrier. That might be the only thing we’ve got holding other stuff from crossing the threshold.” She ran for the door.
“Take this,” Ritter yelled, making Sarah pause at the door. She turned in time to catch the little box with the contact and her comm inside.
“Thanks.” She ran out the door, taking the emergency stairs back to her floor. Horror seized the butterflies in her stomach, turning them to stone. Terror and fear fizzled her previously calm façade. Her biofeed issues were the least of her worries.
Sarah tossed open the door to find Henrietta still perched behind Ziggy’s desk. It was almost as if she was so zoned in that she’d tuned everything around her out, until Sarah nudged her arm.
“What?” she asked. “I was seconds away from finding one of them.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I thought you might want to help us with something trying to breach one of the rifts,” Sarah said, turning inside the training room. She grabbed extra guns and tossed her one.
“What is it?” she asked, pumping the gun to make sure it was loaded.
Sarah pulled up the house feed with the rift on Ziggy’s computer, using the coordinates that Ritter sent her. She showed the feed to Henrietta as she eased the contact into her eye and the comm into her ear.
Henrietta’s face drained white, and her eyes bulged. “This is what I’m talking about. The Antiquary Period isn’t supposed to happen for another one hundred years.”
“What the hell is it?” Sarah asked while jogging into the command room to open a time slip at that location.
“It’s an entire species created in a lab that got out of hand. They’re hard to kill and adaptable.” Henrietta took out the pillbox and handed her the pill again.
Sarah didn’t take it.
Henrietta jerked her hand. “If we fight and this thing drags you 100 years into the future, you’ll die. Take the damn pill, Agent Weston. That’s an order.”
“You can’t order me around.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed.
“Listen to me.” Henrietta pointed to the monitor. “If you die, then all the ripples and changes that happen from this day forward will be on my head since I was here to stop it, so take the damn pill, or I’ll incapacitate you so that you can’t follow.”
“Like hell, you will,” Sarah growled.
“Sarah, you need to hurry. The other analysts have already arrived, and they look trigger-happy.” Ritter’s voice registered loud in Sarah’s ear.
“Copy that.” She took the pill and shoved it into her mouth, swallowing hard, seconds before she opened a time slip and stepped inside. “When this is over, I’m sending your ass back to where you came from.”
2018
Chapter 6
Trigger-happy was an understatement. Sarah and Henrietta stepped through the portal just in time for an animal’s tusk to sever the latex barrier and the room to turn into chaos. Gunfire exploded around her, pinging off the animal’s outer metal exterior.
“Aim for the center of the forehead,” Henrietta called out just as the animal found purchase and barreled into the living room. His big bulky body was knocking over everything in its path as people ducked and bobbed in an attempt to avoid the bull looking metal animal and its destruction.
The rain of bullets continued as the gray metallic robotic animal took fire, the ammunition barely piercing through the metal layer. The animal’s red eyes glowed like a computer on switch as it lowered its head and breathed steam out of it nostrils. Even though it was similar in shape to a bull, this was unlike any bull Sarah had ever encountered.
The animal locked onto Sarah as if she alone was its target and he had the intelligence to understand. It changed shape right before her eyes as it advanced on her. No longer a bull, it transformed into the shape of man, and not just any man. Foster.
Sarah hesitated before shaking the confusion from her mind. She aimed at the metal between the thing’s eyes as others jumped out of its way. She pulled the trigger without hesitation, piercing the metal eventually with the fifth round. She watched as the robotic form that looked like Foster fell.
“Well, that was interesting,” she said, holstering her weapon.
Henrietta had her hands full trying to keep the other analysts from accidentally venturing into the new opening. Sarah wasn’t as interested in that as she was at Foster’s body twitching on the ground.
“Well, we now know where your mind is,” Henrietta said, also holstering her weapon. “They take on familiar shapes to make us hesitate.”
It worked. She’d hesitated. “It’s nothing more than a computer,” Sarah whispered to herself as she touched the spot where her bullet struck. The layer beneath the metallic surface was similar to a motherboard. Sarah slipped one of the memory chips out and stuck it into her pocket.
“The shot was a kill shot. You fried its circuits,” Henrietta said.
“It spotted me and attacked,” Sarah said
“We call them Bunters. They take the appearance of bulls, but they are programmed like hunters. They’re mission oriented. They take the shape of people we know or even our worst nightmares. If given enough time, he would have looked like the flesh and bone version of Foster.”
“They read minds?” Sarah asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “And they have no feelings, and they don’t stop unless the programmer calls them back or the mission is complete.”
“Or we kill one,” Sarah said, rising from her squatted position.
“Yes, I forgot you people were so primitive.”
Sarah tilted her head. “There is no killing in your time? How do people protect themselves?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss it. We only have one shot to get it right. There was one occurrence that changed it all, and if that gets altered, it will send my time frame back to the Dark Ages where killing and criminals will be normal and every day will be like it is for you.”
Henrietta’s face pinched. “And that is completely unacceptable.” She placed a disc-like cylinder on Foster’s robotic look-alike. She punched in some buttons on the contraption, and within seconds, it disappeared.
“Where did you send the Bunter?” Sarah asked while trying to right some of the knocked-over furniture.
Henrietta ignored the question and punched information into her time watch. It was similar to Sarah’s, only slightly different, kind of like when you upgrade to a new cell phone. She was sure there were more technological gadgets involved with the inner workings, but not much had changed in the appearance.
“Sarah, the rooster is in the hen house.”
Sarah raised a brow at Ziggy’s words.
“Repeat that,” she said.
“Kissy face is in your hen house enjoying the beach view.” He said it slower for her to understand.
Sarah’s eyes widened, and her breath caught. “Uh...I’ve got to go.”
“You can’t leave the opening unguarded,” Henrietta announced.
“You stay. I’ll send someone to relieve you so you can start tracking the sleepers,” Sarah said as she began punching numbers on her watc
h. She stepped back into the time slip.
Henrietta’s gaze narrowed. “Sarah, you can’t leave. The effects of the pill are about to start.”
The time slip closed, cutting off the rest of her words.
“Have Diana send in a replacement team to the house to shoot any creatures that come through. The rift is wide open. Tell them to aim between the eyes.” Sarah turned in place in the middle of her bedroom with gun drawn. A slight pain pinched her side as though she’d been winded from running.
“Copy that,” Ziggy announced.
Sarah eased her bedroom door opened and strained to hear any sound coming from downstairs. The state-of-the-art tracker she’d attached to Foster had to be working correctly. If anything, they had a day or two tops before he discovered her deed.
Sarah slowly and methodically stepped down the stairs, keeping her back to the wall. She bypassed the one stair she knew creaked. Sarah reached the main floor and made her way through the living room and toward the kitchen. She stepped over the threshold to find Foster relaxing against her counter and drinking her coffee.
“What happened when you let Henry near the rift?”
Sarah slowly shook her head and cocked the trigger. The pain in her side intensified, and she tried to hold in her wince. “There are no smoke and mirrors this time.”
“If you’re going to kill me, then what’s the harm of giving a dying man his last wish? Tell me what happened at the rift with Henry.”
“Henrietta was instrumental in helping me stop a threat.”
His lip twitched. “History was led to believe it was a Henry, not Henrietta.”
“If you’re from the future, then you know what happens. Why are you asking?”
“Let me guess; she told you to shoot the bunter between the eyes?” He shrugged. “And you took some of the future technology.”
Sarah hesitated from reaching for her pocket.
“She can track you with it. As a matter of fact, she does. Henrietta sent that thing to the rift, knowing that you’d be there to stop the threat. Now she knows your every move, kind of like you know mine with this,” he announced, tossing the tracker to land on the table.
Time Keepers Page 3
