Nomad

by JL Bryan

  After leaving office, Governor Carraway founded Providence Security, a private corporation providing security staff and related services to state and federal agencies. The Carraway family owns a majority of stock in the company.

  Fearful memories flashed across her brain like chain lightning. First, the bikers who'd tried to kill her, with the golden Providence Security logo etched into their armor--an all-seeing eye inside a pyramid. Then she saw herself and her friend Kari firing at Providence Security troops from the windows of buildings already shattered by aerial bombs. In some of those memories, she was no older than eleven or twelve, firing machine pistols and lobbing thermal grenades at the company's sleek urban tanks and assault trucks.

  Raven reached a shaking hand toward the blue Providence Security link, wondering what it would say about the company in 2013, but then she saw him.

  A wave of students flooded the coffee shop, and she felt a jolt of sick recognition at the sight of his face. He hardly seemed to be the same person as the craggy old dictator, but the face had been burned into her mind all her life.

  The eighteen-year-old Logan Carraway had an exuberantly healthy look, a tanned face with an easy smile, and electric green eyes that seemed to glow. He moved with a barely restrained vitality that made her think of a wolf in cage.

  Logan tossed a rumpled dollar into the glass tip jar, and the pretty, dark-skinned barista behind the counter flashed him a smile and looked him over. He was already walking away, raising his paper cup in a mock toast as he approached an already overcrowded table. A few of the students there toasted him back.

  A striking blond girl wearing a crisp white dress shirt and dark slacks stepped out to block his way, brushing Logan's arm as she spoke to him, but Raven couldn't make out what she was saying.

  Logan leaned down and spoke a few words into the blond girl's ear, and she laughed, covering her mouth and blushing. She gave him a playful punch in the arm as he moved on to join his friends, then she whispered to a girl beside her, also blond and dressed in clothes similar to hers.

  Raven watched Logan join the overcrowded table. The others seemed to lean towards him slightly as he sat, like plants bending toward the sun. Logan spoke rapidly, with sweeping hand gestures, immediately dominating the conversation.

  "Excuse me, but don't you think you're hogging the resources here?" a voice asked. Startled, Raven looked up to see the snub-nosed blond girl who'd tried to distract Logan. She stood over Raven's table with a hint of disgust in her baby blue eyes. Her friend next to her held both their coffees.

  "Specifically, this table," the blond girl continued. "It has four chairs, but you're sitting alone, and that leaves us with nowhere to sit."

  Raven looked around at the packed coffee shop. Though the shop had been all but empty a few minutes earlier, the newly arrived crowd of students had taken every table.

  "You want to sit with me?" Raven asked.

  The girl snorted, just slightly so it was barely audible. Her friend's lip curled into a sneer as she looked over Raven's scaly black jacket and discount-store blouse. The two girls had matching hair, as though they'd gone through identical treatments to make them soft, silky, and golden blond. Their clothes were well-made and new, and they probably took Raven for some kind of homeless street thug...which she was.

  "I'm afraid not," the blond girl said. "We have more friends coming, so you'll need to go find some one-person-appropriate seating for yourself. That's fair, don't you agree?" The girl smiled, but not in a particularly friendly manner

  "I was finished, anyway." Raven got up. She didn't want to fight over something as stupid as a place to sit, and she certainly didn't want to draw attention to herself.

  "How fortunate for all of us." The girl blinked her eyes impatiently until Raven left the table. As the two girls sat in her place, they whispered to each other, glanced at Raven's combat boots, and snickered.

  "'Oh, I need all four chairs to myself.' That's exactly what's wrong with Americans today," the blue-eyed girl told her friend. "So greedy. Everything for me, nothing for anybody else..."

  Raven hurried out, feeling as though every person in the shop were staring at her. Burning heat flushed her cheeks. She felt she'd been called out as someone who didn't belong.

  On the sidewalk, she took a deep breath of air. Maybe she was wrong about Logan, and she'd actually come back through time to kill the snub-nosed blue-eyed girl instead. At the moment, she wouldn't mind that at all.

  Logan's next known location on her map was the sidewalk where she stood, in front of the art building, but it was more than an hour away. He was probably in a class during the intervening time.

  Her stomach rumbled. She walked to the next block and ate a cheap but delicious bowl of rice noodles with beef. The food was shockingly good--she'd been expecting only basic sustenance, not a perfectly seasoned dish.

  As she ate, she used her glasses and quietly browsed data about Logan's family. There wasn't much about Logan himself because he was only a teenager, not much of a public figure yet.

  She saw even younger versions of Logan in publicity photos from his father's and grandfather's political campaigns. In these, Logan and his younger brothers wore coats and ties or Indianapolis Colts jerseys. He was a kid with a toothy grin and bright green eyes that bored right into the camera. He overshadowed his two younger brothers and their bashful attempts to smile.

  As Raven left the restaurant, a pair of Yale Police Department cars rolled slowly along the street beside her. She felt paranoid that someone might have noticed her lurking around campus and called the cops. She ducked into a bookstore.

  She browsed the shelves of used hardcovers. One title stood out to her: Slaughterhouse-Five, the exact book Eliad had mentioned.

  She gently lifted it from the shelf. The jacket copy described the book as a "classic," as "antiwar," and as the story of a man traveling through time, which startled her. She looked at the back flap of the book. The author had a thick mustache and a curly mane of hair, with a kind of weary, knowing melancholy in his eyes.

  When the police rolled out of sight, she bought the book and returned up the block to spy on Logan as he emerged from the arts center. He took out his phone and nodded politely while the same blue-eyed girl ran her mouth at him. He pointed back over his shoulder, trying to walk away from the girl, and she gave him a quick hug before letting him go.

  Raven followed Logan at a distance of a few blocks. With so much time to kill on the bus, she'd discovered her glasses could zoom in and out, and they could also switch to night vision and thermal vision. She'd tested the thermal vision by looking through the clothes of a cute guy at one of the bus stations.

  She was tempted to kill Logan right away, but it wasn't a good time and place for it. They were in public, surrounded by students, teachers, campus police, maintenance workers, and gardeners, and Logan himself was an annoyingly social creature, accompanied by friends and classmates at every step.

  While she waited between his classes, she read Slaughterhouse-Five. From the first page, the book was different from what she'd expected. The first chapter seemed like an introduction, telling the story of how the author had slowly put together the novel over many years.

  The real story began in the next chapter, following a World War Two soldier named Billy Pilgrim who was "unstuck in time," moving randomly from one moment of his life to another. She began to understand Eliad's reference to the book.

  After his classes, Logan met up with a group of students at the intramural fields. Raven kept her distance, watching the young men and women jogging in shorts and running shoes. Logan himself appeared to be the leader of the group, staying several long strides ahead of the others.

  When the group began to slow after a couple of miles, Logan ran backwards, still maintaining his long lead. He bellowed at the others.

  "'P' is for the 'P' in Pierson College!" he shouted. "'I' is for the 'I' in Pierson College..."

  Grinning, several of the runn
ers joined in with the ridiculously simplistic song: "'E' is for the 'E' in Pierson College...'R' is for the 'R' in Pierson College..." The group picked up speed as they sang.

  A tall girl at the front scowled at Logan as she struggled to catch up with him. She seemed a couple of years older than him. Raven wondered if she was the actual leader of this running team, an established captain who'd seen her position usurped by a loud, energetic freshman.

  After the Pierson College song, he chanted insults about the eleven other colleges at Yale, each one growing a little more sexual or gruesome until he had everyone shouting to "Fuck Trumbull in the skull!"

  "Who can catch me?" Logan yelled. He took off like a cheetah. The rest of the group put on a huge burst of speed after him, some of them shouting with renewed enthusiasm. The tall girl had a truly hateful look for him now.

  Raven felt a sick fascination watching the future dictator as a teenager. He's just a boy, she thought. At eighteen, he was only a year younger than her, but he hadn't been scarred by life as she had, hadn't starved and seen death all around him. He'd no doubt lived in a safe, happy bubble full of money and toys, with no idea what the word "suffering" meant. In the future, when he would inflict misery on vast numbers of people, he would have no real sense of the pain he created. He would not care. He would care only about maintaining and expanding his own power.

  Monster, she thought. You'll be dead this time tomorrow.

  After his cross-country practice, Logan and some of the other runners returned to his residential hall. Later, he rode in a silver Lexus sport-utility vehicle, driven by one of his friends, to a climbing gym in town. Apparently not exhausted from the miles he'd run earlier in the day, Logan spent two hours climbing the steep walls, as though he had an inexhaustible fountain of energy within him.

  Raven wanted to be careful and methodical with her mission, but she felt a single day of reconnaissance was enough. The future Secretary-General didn't have any special security around him now. If she waited too long, her pursuers from the future might locate her, and life would get very complicated.

  Tomorrow, she told herself.

  Chapter Eight

  Raven rented a cheap room at a dank, rundown hotel in New Haven. The clerk was rude and blew his cigarette smoke in her face while she checked in, but he took cash and didn't ask for identification, and the hotel was in walking distance of the Yale campus.

  Her room was dim and narrow, with a foul-smelling green carpet. She locked the door, drew the window curtain, and took the steel cube from her backpack. She sat on the creaky, sunken bed. The microscopic devices built into her sunglasses could access the networks of 2013 and pull present-day data for her, but they seemed to have no memories of the future. On the other hand, the cube was full of future data.

  She flicked through more videos from her own time, the war-torn cities, the political prisoner camps. They prompted a flood of memories, and she lay back on the sour bed and closed her eyes, one hand on her pistol.

  She remembered her friend Kari taking out the concrete face of a heavily guarded building with a rapid-fire rifle full of plastique rounds. The time-travel lab was inside a defense research facility, a former missile testing ground deep in the Utah desert. Raven and Kari were among the team of revolutionary fighters entrusted with the most critical mission of all, the one that could finally topple the regime.

  In the desert sky, drones operated by other revolutionaries would distract the base's air defense system while the ground team made their attack. Nobody on the ground team was older than twenty, but all were hardened veterans with years of heavy combat experience. None of them expected to survive the ambush except for Pascal, an experienced assassin who had spent weeks preparing to travel back through time and kill the dictator long before he came to power. The entire course of history would change.

  Raven and the other foot soldiers were there to open a path into the lab for Pascal, then to shield him while he operated the time-travel device.

  Another, closely related memory emerged from the deep, from several weeks before the attack on the time-travel facility. An old friend had come to see her. She'd been saddened at the sight of him--dirty and tangled gray beard, his threadbare coat, one leg in a cheap, flimsy brace. He'd coughed violently as they spoke, and each time he'd coughed, he'd wiped his lips and pretended nothing had happened, though it left a thin smear of blood on his hand. Medical care was difficult to find for those on the run from the regime, and black-market clinics were expensive.

  His name was Colin Taggart, and he'd once been a good friend of her father's, back in the forgotten, brighter world of her childhood.

  Raven had been living in a squat outside San Francisco with Kari and a few other friends. The shack was cobbled together from wood and sheets of tin, with electricity from the informal pirate grid that ran through the slums. Water and cooking gas had to be purchased from street vendors with cash or barter.

  She hadn't seen Taggart in years, and he'd clearly not been well in the intervening time. He'd arrived at their barricaded front door alone, leaning heavily on a tree limb he used as a walking stick.

  Raven had welcomed the old man inside and heated a can of soup for him. He had asked to speak privately. She did the best she could, taking him behind the ragged sheet of a curtain that marked off her sleeping area, where they sat on a blanket. Kari and the others stayed in the front area, watching a holographic movie ripped from a commercial satellite feed.

  "It's killing me to come speak to you," Taggart had said, his voice hoarse. He coughed into the sleeve of his worn Army-surplus coat. He'd once been a prominent professor of economics who was never seen in public without a coat and tie. "I'm betraying your father by asking for your help, but there is no one else I can trust anymore. The rebellion is filled with spies."

  "I know," Raven said. "You're not betraying my father, either. He would want me to help."

  "He would want you to live. If you do this, you will not...but if you succeed, all of it will end. The world can be changed back, it truly can. And if you succeed, the war will never have happened at all."

  "I'm sorry, I don't understand." Raven felt troubled by his words. He was clearly physically ill, but now she worried for his mental health, too.

  "Because I'm not making any sense, am I?" He gave her a thin-lipped smile. "I'm speaking out of order. The regime has developed an experimental device. A time-travel mechanism."

  "I don't...think that's possible. Is it?" Raven asked, even more concerned about the state of her elderly friend's mind.

  'The scientists involved have been cautious, sending simple objects an hour into the future, an hour into the past. Two days ago, they ran their first live-animal test. The world's first time traveler is a white lab rat named Snappy."

  "Are you joking?"

  "He traveled sixty minutes into the past. He was groggy, but in perfect health. After he recovered, he was right back to his old, snappy ways." Taggart had paused to cough into his hand, then continued. "Initial human trials begin in a few months. They are already preparing a device for human use."

  "How could you know all this?" Raven asked, still not sure whether to believe him or worry about him.

  "A good friend of mine, a physicist, was forced into service on the project. In the old world, we often ate at the faculty cafeteria together, and we played chess--I only beat him once in fourteen years. He contacted me. I assure you, the time travel device is, unfortunately, quite real and functional. The facility is located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, in western Utah."

  "Time travel," Raven had whispered, shaking her head. "Now I wish you were crazy, but you aren't, are you?"

  "I apologize for my sanity. I do wish this were only in my mind." He'd frowned, and she remembered being struck by how wrinkled his face had become.

  "What will they do with it?" she'd asked.

  "One can imagine endless possibilities. The regime could send agents back in time, murdering leaders and others critical
to the rebellion. They could destroy the revolution before it ever has a chance to organize. They could gather intelligence from the future to further consolidate their power. Time travel is the most powerful weapon since the nuclear bomb, and it may well turn out to be far more powerful than that. We can't allow them to use it."

  "That's why you're coming to me," Raven said. "You want help destroying the time-travel lab."

  "More than that," Taggart replied. He paused for another violent coughing spell and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "This can be a powerful weapon for our side as well. We have recruited one of the rebellion's best snipers, who goes by the name Pascal. We intend to send him back in time to assassinate the Secretary-General decades before he comes to power. We can change the entire past and stop all of these terrible events from occurring."

  Raven thought it over, frightened but excited by the idea.

  "If we can do that," she finally said. "Then...my parents might still be alive today. Wouldn't they?"

  "It's very possible."

  "What do you need from me?"

  He sighed and paused for a long moment, looking troubled.

  "We have the assassin," Taggart told her. "Another group will distract the facility's aerial defenses. What I need from you are foot soldiers, individuals who can be absolutely trusted, to break down the doors, insert Pascal into the time-travel lab, and ensure he makes his trip into the past. It hurts me to ask you to risk your life, but there remain so few we can trust..."

  "I'll do it," Raven told him. "I know good, loyal fighters."

  "Understand that none of your team will likely survive this mission," he said. Pain was visible in his eyes.

  "I've risked my life for less," Raven said. "I've killed for less. If there's a chance this can take down the regime..."

  "The regime will not only be taken down, it will be erased from history."

  "What happens then, if we succeed?" Raven asked. "Won't all our lives change?"

  "Your parents could be alive again," he said. "You may find that you grew up in the safe and happy environment your parents intended. We can spin many possibilities, but the reality is this: nobody knows, because nobody has ever traveled back and changed history. This is, however, our only opportunity to not only defeat the Secretary-General, but to undo his evil. Whatever the consequences, we must try."