by Dean Murray
I nodded and then started pulling. Kyle didn't have the same kind of bulky muscles that made Jace so mouth-wateringly yummy, but he was surprisingly strong. I was pulling with everything I had but I still hadn't felt the bones slide into place.
"How good is your fine control when it comes to amping, Selene?"
"Um, good?"
"That's not exactly reassuring…"
"I've been working effects for something like two days. I barely know which way is up at this point."
Kyle broke out into a cold sweat from the pain, but he managed to bite back the scream that I knew had to be trying to force its way out of him.
"Fine. At this point you're able to recognize wards. Have you noticed the ward-like field that follows us around when we get out to the outermost wards?"
"What? What does this have to do with anything?"
"You asked for me to explain some of the discrepancies that you've noticed so far. Do you want to hear the answer, or not?"
"Really? Now?"
"I'm too strong for you to set the bone. I'm trying to distract myself so that you have a fighting chance."
I felt like he was saying I was just another weak little girl. I wanted to argue with him, but I was pulling with everything I had and so far I hadn't managed to make any headway.
"Fine. Distract yourself. I've seen the field you're talking about. It's like everything on our side is super vibrant, and everything on the other side is washed out and dreary."
"That's it. It moves in fits and starts."
"Yeah, I've seen it."
"That is something that nobody else has ever managed. I've created a field inside of which time moves at double speed."
He said it with such obvious pride that for a second I thought he was pulling my leg. "You just finished telling me downstairs that you and I pioneered the first time bend something like two or three hundred years ago…"
That earned me a dirty look. "It's not even remotely the same thing. The time bend that you and I researched doesn't do anything to the actual flow of time. All it does is change our perception of time."
"No way. That can't be right. If that was the case I wouldn't get out of breath so quickly."
"Fine, if you want to be technical about it the underlying effect also serves to soup up our muscles slightly, but all of the modifications are purely internal."
I tried to finish straightening my legs, but he was still resisting me too much. There was a little more give to his arm now, but it still wasn't the same thing.
"Okay, I see what you're saying. So how is your latest mumbo jumbo different than that?"
"Surely even in your current state you're intelligent enough—"
I relaxed my body slightly and then jerked on his arm like I was trying to rip it out of its socket. I caught him completely by surprise and his bones slid into place with a disgusting, grinding click.
Kyle had gone white and his smile was shaky, but he managed to reach over with his left hand and pull on the straps that tightened the splint down to the point where it had a chance of keeping the bones in place.
"I should have known that you were dissembling."
"Yeah, that's me. Masterful dissembler girl. So you've found a way to speed up the actual flow of time, so as far as Fenrir and the rest of the world are concerned we are recovering our emotional reserves twice as fast as we should be."
"Yes, exactly—that's not all though. We're also accruing baseline memories at a much faster rate than our contemporaries."
"That's brilliant. Why didn't I think of that? Even with the old-style time bend that would be a great way to make sure that I got more memories faster than everyone else."
Kyle finished tightening down the splint and then shook his head. "No, it would never work. Creating a time-amping effect burns memories too fast. You would always come out behind where you'd be if you just allowed everything to happen at its normal speed. Time amping is only effective if you've got a specific time-bounded objective that you're trying to accomplish."
Something about what he'd just said didn't ring true to me. I tried to think back to my early experiences bending time. Measuring time when you were functioning at two or three times normal speed was kind of a subjective thing, but I'd been sure that I'd come out slightly ahead as far as the time experienced versus the memories consumed.
I thought about challenging him over it, but then I remembered that I was apparently experiencing memory loss in a different fashion than most of our kind did. It was possible that Kyle was wrong, but nobody had ever been able to measure the memories involved with enough accuracy to arrive at any kind of definitive conclusion. Given that, it was a lot safer to avoid the confrontational route.
I forced myself to smile. "Nice, you've renamed the old stuff time amping and the new effect time bending?"
"Yes. The most difficult part of everything is dealing with problems created when you have one contiguous block of material which is aging at different rates. That's why the field moves around in such an erratic manner. It's compensating by only moving along existing faults where the temporal differences won't create problems."
"You make it sound like it's self-aware."
"I guess you're right. I'd never thought about it in quite that fashion." Kyle looked away from me for several seconds and then sighed. "As much as I would like to continue this conversation, it would probably be best if I took that pain medication and got some sleep. Functioning at twice the normal speed has huge benefits for us, but we're going to need to push ourselves or we aren't going to have any chance of beating Fenrir."
Kyle rolled back up to his feet and then walked over to the kitchen. Ten minutes later he was passed out on the couch.
I hadn't bothered to get up off of the floor. I just sat there and watched him for another twenty minutes. I wasn't sure exactly what was going on, but I was positive that I'd just been lied to.
Chapter 9
Once I finally got to my feet I wasn't sure what to do with myself. Kyle was asleep, so in theory I had the run of the entire bunker—other than the section that was sealed off with wards—but that didn't amount to much.
I didn't particularly feel like heading downstairs to his bedroom. I'd be able to read his journals if I went down there, but I just couldn't bring myself to invade his privacy like that. Kyle had kidnapped me, but he'd also saved my life, Kat's life, and Ari's life before he'd brought me here.
Kyle was no saint, but if he was to be believed, at one point we'd loved each other desperately. Apparently I didn't want to risk burning bridges—even when I didn't remember creating the bridge in the first place.
That left the garden—which was a bad idea given that I was more likely to pull up the vegetables by accident than I was to pull up weeds—one of the storage areas, or the office and workout area downstairs. Actually I probably could have stayed up on the first level—a heavy metal rock concert probably wouldn't have pulled Kyle out of his drugged slumber—but I wanted to put some distance between us.
Poking into all of the boxes and spare equipment felt particularly pointless, so I ended up down in what I was starting to think of as Kyle's office. It wasn't any less impressive the second time around. The exercise equipment was dated and the furniture looked like it had seen some heavy use, but all of the electronics were much too new to fit together with the timeline Kyle had originally tried to paint.
He hadn't been locked away down here for the last thirty or forty years—he'd been out shopping as recently as the last year or two. I wasn't sure what to make of that. Was that an outright lie or was it just a detail that he'd failed to include?
I wandered over to the computer and confirmed that it was locked with some kind of password. Someone with more experience and knowledge probably could have figured out a way around Kyle's cyber-security, but I didn't even know where to start.
From there I headed to the mats and ended up stretching for an hour or so. It wasn't the kind of thing that I normally did, b
ut my body had been through a lot over the last little while. Kyle had apparently healed most of the worst of the damage both from my fight in the mountains with Fenrir and from tangling with Kyle's ward, but the healing effect had still left me feeling tense and stiff.
Once I was done stretching, I headed over to the big bookshelves, but Kyle's taste in books ran mostly to non-fiction. There were a few classic novels, but nothing that really reached out and grabbed me.
I ended up over in front of the DVD collection—which was further proof that Kyle hadn't been locked away like I'd initially thought. The movies weren't all that new. The newest one I could find was about a year old, but the selection was broad enough that I was able to find a romantic comedy that I'd only seen once before.
I was on my third movie when I finally heard movement out on the staircase. A flash of worry shot through me, which in turn just sparked more of the anger that I'd spent so much time lately trying to keep locked down.
I wasn't going to scurry around like a mouse caught in the middle of the floor when the lights came on. If Kyle came in and got pissy about the fact that I'd been down here 'unsupervised' then I was going to give him a piece of my mind.
I heard him pause outside of the door to my level, but I wasn't about to acknowledge his presence, and he didn't venture inside. He continued on downstairs a few seconds later. Once he was safely out of earshot, there was every reason to relax, but instead I found that I couldn't pay attention to the movie.
Instead of watching the two main characters work through the misunderstanding that had kept them apart for the last half hour, I found myself listening for him, wondering what he was doing.
It didn't make any sense. I'd spent nearly my whole life steering clear of guys. I'd never understood why other girls my age had spent so much time obsessing over one guy or another, but now I was doing it. First with Jace, and then with Kyle.
The two situations were different—obviously. I was in love with Jace. Whatever was going on with Kyle wasn't love. Maybe it was some kind of Stockholm syndrome thing. He had the power of life and death over me, so it was only to be expected that I would be hyper-aware of him, of what he seemed to be thinking or feeling, but that didn't mean that I had to like it.
Honestly, I would have traded away a lot in order to have a bit more of my normal detachment right then. At this rate I was going to have ulcers in just a few days.
I sat there with the movie playing, the volume down so low that I should have just muted it, and listened to the silence from the stairwell, the silence that told me Kyle wasn't nearby. Several minutes later I heard him come back by my level, this time heading up. Unlike the time before, he didn't slow outside the door to the office level. He went straight up to the top level, and then pulled the door shut behind him with a clang.
It took another half hour for the movie to wrap up. I kept thinking that I was going to get up and put another one in, but I didn't. I couldn't seem to find the energy—instead I just sat there and watched the title screen loop endlessly through the cutesy little animation that had gotten old by the second time around.
An hour after I heard Kyle head up to the top level, he finally came back down the stairs. I grabbed the remote and started the movie back up, paging forward several chapters so that it wouldn't be obvious that I'd just sat there like some kind of love-struck lump for the last half hour.
"You decided to watch that one again?"
"Yeah. Your selection sucks. It's heavy on blood and violence and light on anything redeeming." Kind of like you.
"You're lying."
"Why? Are you running one of the lie-detection effects that Jace told me about?"
"No. I can just tell. I guess I just know you too well…"
"I call BS. You don't remember our time together any more than I remember it. You're just screwing with my head."
Kyle sighed. "You're right, I don't remember you—I barely remember Jace—but that doesn't mean I don't still have journals from our time together. I've memorized every passage that includes your name and I read back through them on a regular basis just in case I've forgotten something."
"Wow, that doesn't sound at all stalkerish."
Kyle's smile was sad and more than a little tired. "I know. I've spent more hours than you can imagine wondering if I'm starting the slide into psychosis. I've told myself at least a million times that I'm wasting time that would be better spent in other pursuits, but I can't seem to stop."
"Why?"
The question should have come out dripping with sarcasm. I should have been running away, taking my chances with Fenrir rather than sitting there listening to the guy who was the very definition of a bad ex-boyfriend, but I wasn't. I was genuinely curious.
"Every bit of logic and intellect tells me that I'm on the right course, that this is my best chance to make a lasting difference to the endless violence of our kind, to the pointless cycle of death and rebirth. I know that I'm better off by myself, that I'm more focused on my research now than I ever was before I was wiped clean, but when I read my older journals I can't help but doubt myself."
"Doubt yourself how?"
"I seemed so happy back then. There was a time when I thought that you'd doctored my journals, that you'd gone in and altered them so that I would spend the rest of this incarnation longing for something I couldn't have."
"I would never do that!"
This smile was less sad. It had something to it that somehow felt right. I would have said that this was the kind of smile that the old Kyle used to give me, but there wasn't any way I would have known that.
"You're so quick to assume that this version of you is just like the last version of you."
"Isn't it?"
"It seems like it. The version of you I've read about in my journals would never have done something so vindictive, but of course I had to suspect that you'd edited the journals in such a way as to make me think that you were incapable of editing them."
"Do you ever get lost inside there? It sounds like your head is a pretty twisty, dark place."
"No, not yet, but I suppose there is a first time for everything."
"So what's the verdict?"
"I'm still forming one, but so far it appears that the current you is very much like the you that was the focus of so much of my writing."
"That scares you, doesn't it?"
"Yes. It does indeed. It means that my journals are probably accurate, that the stranger who wrote about you isn't a fabrication, he was just a different version of me, one who was less driven but much happier than this version."
"It sounds like you've got some thinking ahead of you."
That earned me another smile and this one was even more natural than the first.
"I've made a meal. Would you like to come upstairs and eat?"
I very nearly said yes. The last meal was fast becoming a distant memory, and I was only going to get hungrier with each passing hour. As tempting as that was, I wasn't ready to just let him sweep everything under the rug.
"Why did you lie to me earlier?"
"Because I thought I could get away with it."
"That's not what I meant and you know it."
Kyle rubbed his eyes and I remembered for the first time that it had only been a few hours before that he'd been lying on the floor with a broken arm.
"It's a complicated explanation, Selene. As much as I wish I could just tell you everything, there are reasons for my secrecy. Earlier I strayed too close to something that would be safer for you not to know about. When I realized what I'd done, I tried to throw you off the scent. I'm a practiced liar, I should have been successful, but somehow you were able to see through me."
"Is that really such a surprise? You just finished catching me in a lie…"
"Yes, but I have the advantage of my journals. You shouldn't be able to read me this well, not after such a short acquaintance."
"Well, I guess I'm full of even more surprises than you realized."
> "Yes. You are indeed."
Chapter 10
The meal was once again simple, but tasty. This time it was homemade tortillas wrapped around a combination of colorful vegetables that had been smothered in lime juice. The biggest shock though was the vase of red roses that were so dark the color was almost three-dimensional.
I stopped breathing for a second when I saw them. Kyle turned back towards me with a shy expression on his face.
"They aren't very aromatic, but they are beautiful. It's a strain called Black Jade—it seemed like something you would like. You always loved flowers."
"You've got a rose bush downstairs in the garden?"
"Several. You couldn't see it from the doorway, but nearly five percent of the usable space downstairs is dedicated to roses."
"Why?"
"Why would I waste space that could have been used to grow more food on something that serves no useful purpose?"
"Yes, that exactly?"
"My original plan didn't include roses or computers. My original plan had me sequestered away down here for decades without any contact with the outside world. I thought that I would be more productive that way and I knew I would be safer."
"So what happened?"
"I got lonely."
I nearly laughed. It was the last thing I'd expected to hear out of Kyle, the man who'd admitted to trading my life away for a few more years of undisturbed research, but there was an earnestness to his manner that told me he was entirely serious.
"You asked earlier why more of our kind didn't hunker down behind powerful wards and wait for the other pantheons to kill each other off. My answer wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the full truth. There is a lot more to the question than I let on.
"Some of us don't isolate ourselves because we want to interact with mortals—because we crave the worship of lesser beings. Others don't go to ground because we're uncomfortable with the idea of shifting over to a completely defensive strategy where it's only a matter of time before someone comes along with a big enough hammer to bring our wards down.
