by JL Bryan
Raven nodded slowly, still trying to grasp the scope of what the old man had told her.
"We don't have a choice," Raven said. "I can provide your foot soldiers, and I'll be part of the team myself. Just tell me what you need us to do."
In her smelly hotel room in 2013, Raven waved her hand and told the data cube to make all the files and images vanish. She didn't feel like reviewing the horrors of the future any longer.
Her head pounded at the resurgence of memories. The old man's visit had filled her with a profound sadness. Taggart had been her father's friend, and he had also somehow been involved in the death of her parents....she knew that, though she did not have specific memories of her parents yet. Perhaps that was for the best. She could sense terrible pain and loss there.
She did remember the attack on the time-travel lab. After Kari had blasted open the face of the building, the team had rushed inside and come under heavy fire from the guards. Dressed in light armor to stay fast on their feet, they died one by one as they made their way inside, screaming as the heavily armored guards struck them down with a merciless barrage of glowing plasma rounds.
Raven, Kari, and the quiet, dark-eyed assassin Pascal survived all the way to the inner sanctum of the lab. Pascal seized the prototypical time-travel device, designed for humans but not yet tested, and strapped it to his wrist. He'd been studying the information leaked from Taggart's physicist friend for weeks, so he knew how to operate it.
While he activated the device, a squad of guards arrived and fired high-powered cutting lasers into the lab. Kari screamed as two glowing, wire-thin beams passed across her. The first destroyed her flexible armored jacket, and the second slashed across her torso, sweeping towards her heart.
Raven pulled her friend to the floor, away from the lasers, and flung her single emergency phosphorus grenade at the squad of Providence Security guards. White fire and a blinding cloud of smoke engulfed them.
"Kari!" Raven held her closest friend in her arms, but there was nothing she could do. The laser had sliced the girl open, and she was losing enormous quantities of blood through her gaping torso, while coughing up more through her nose and mouth. The laser had pierced her lungs. Kari's eyes turned cold and empty.
A hand grabbed Raven, and she raised her plasma pistol, ready to kill another guard, ready to kill everyone in the facility. It wasn't a guard, though, but Pascal, crawling forward through the smoke. His legs dragged limply behind him, and he left a smear of blood--he'd been shot through the stomach, and it looked like the laser had severed his spine.
Pascal glowed with a shimmering golden aura, which vanished when he removed the time-travel unit from his wrist and pressed it into Raven's hand.
"Go," Pascal whispered.
"Me? I can't--"
"Take my pack, complete the mission...return immediately," he whispered. "Surgical strike. Change nothing else in the past. Nothing. The consequences could be...could be..."
More armored boots approached. Panicking, she pulled his backpack over her shoulders, strapped the bracelet onto her wrist, and activated the holographic display. The time destination was set for a date in October 2013, but the place destination was set for her current location, the time-travel lab in Utah.
"What do I input for space coordinates?" Raven asked. She passed her fingers through the numbers, and they scrambled at random. "Pascal?"
Pascal wasn't moving. He didn't appear to be breathing, either, which left her as the only surviving member of the team.
A black sphere the size of her fist emerged through the grenade smoke, whirring toward her on air jets. A remote-controlled drone bomb. Someone had decided stopping the invaders was more important than protecting the exotic technology in the lab.
Raven initiated the time-travel jump. The randomly chosen latitude and longitude would have to do. She didn't have time to look up coordinates. She felt a magnetic throbbing in the air around her, and the world took on a glimmering, lightning-gold color.
The bomb exploded with concussive force, knocking Raven off her feet and sending her spinning back toward the concrete wall..
...and then she'd found herself stumbling along the side of the highway in the year 2013, her memory wiped, the last traces of Kari's blood fading from her hands in the hard rain.
That's how I got here, Raven thought, looking around at the dingy hotel room.
"Show me the map again," she said. The cube projected the blue-grid model of New Haven and the hundreds of red dots scattered all over it like bedbugs, marking Logan's future locations. The dot marking his next known location blinked inside the freshman residence where he lived.
"I'm going to kill you, Secretary-General Carraway," Raven told the blinking red dot.
Chapter Nine
Harkness Tower was the tallest structure on campus, two hundred and sixteen feet high, made of lavishly carved stone embellished with gargoyles and statues of historical and mythical characters. On a cloudless, sunny morning, Raven knelt among the stone cornices at the top of the tower and assembled her rifle. Below her was a belfry fronted with four copper clocks, one facing in each direction.
To reach the top, she'd ascended a narrow spiral staircase from the chapel at the base of the tower, through the offices and practice rooms of the Guild of Carillonneurs, the Yale students who played the tower's array of bells twice a day. Raven had picked open a locked door to access the tower.
The tower offered a commanding view of campus, Gothic towers and walls surrounded by trees in full autumn blaze, and the more pedestrian buildings of New Haven stretching out beyond them. It could have been a postcard picture. Students thronged the sidewalks, and it struck her that they were beautiful and brimming with life, facing a future rich with possibilities. In her own time, fifty years from now, many of them would have already died, and the rest would be quite old.
The tower was an excellent sniper position, but a terrible place from which to escape. She would have to run down two hundred and eighty-four narrow steps before reaching the single door at the bottom. With so many people outside, someone would see the bolt of plasma launch from the top of the tower, striking down Logan Carraway like the wrath of God. It would take a couple of minutes, at least, for her to reach the bottom and flee the scene of the crime.
Raven didn't intend to escape on foot. She activated the fake moonstone on her wrist just as Eli had, and the glowing concentric circles appeared above it. She'd set her destination: she would arrive in 2064, the same day she'd left. Her space coordinates were set for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the city where she'd lived most recently. She would try to reconnect with her friends there, regardless of the confusing things Eli had said about being a time nomad. She didn't know where else to go.
She watched the intersection of High Street and Elm Street, her glasses zoomed in so she could see individual faces down on the sidewalk. Logan rounded the corner onto High Street with four other students around him, talking excitedly. They were walking towards the dark, windowless Tomb of the Skull and Bones Society, or the Starbucks just beyond it.
She zoomed in on Logan and toggled her glasses to thermal mode, and he turned into a boy-shaped blur of red and orange. She centered the crosshairs of her scope on the pulsing red blob of his heart.
Her finger touched the trigger, ready to unleash a quick, fiery death. Below her, the tower's four clock faces clicked along. She stood at a crossroads in time, preparing to send the entire world down an unknown path. Time seemed to slow for her, as though noticing the importance of the moment. Her pulse raced, and her heartbeat sounded like crashing waves in her ears.
"Death to the regime," she whispered, as though the phrase had been programmed into her. She pressed her finger more tightly to the trigger, but she didn't fire.
Raven remembered the warnings from Eliad and Pascal about not intervening too much, not changing more than necessary. You can change the world with time travel, but you can't control the results. You might make things bett
er, but you're more likely to open the gates of Hell. She could almost hear Eliad's whispering voice and see his strange eyes gazing into her own, making her profoundly uncomfortable. Then he'd stolen a kiss and vanished.
No single magic bullet can rewrite a story that complex. What had he meant by that? No single bullet? Raven recalled Logan had two younger brothers. The family's political power and influence could simply pass to them--either one might become dictator instead. If she were going to kill Logan, she would then have to kill the other boys, too. They were currently fifteen and twelve years old.
Supposedly, Eliad had brought a message from Raven's future self. The message seemed to be that she shouldn't carry out her mission--but, then, Eliad had rejected that idea when she mentioned it.
The message was more blurry, but it indicated she wasn't going to accomplish all she hoped by assassinating Logan. It would take either a much larger bloodbath or a different strategy altogether.
At the moment, Raven found it hard to believe that roasting this boy alive in front of his friends on a bright afternoon would usher in a better future. She would only be changing one element of a complex drama, and possibly changing it far too early to make a difference. Powerful interests, the megacorporations who dominated the economy and funded all three major political parties, had worked behind the scenes to overthrow the elected President and install a dictator. Other people could have played the role of front man, the face of the regime.
Raven clenched her teeth and cursed under her breath. She lifted her finger from the trigger and watched Logan and friends turn the corner out of sight. She was at a loss for what to do next.
She broke down her rifle and stashed it inside her backpack. She started down the spiral staircase, her heart still pounding, her skin and hair damp with cold sweat. She had no intention of aborting the mission, but if she wasn't going to kill Logan--not yet, anyway--then she had to figure out how to stop his regime from rising to power. That was her mission and her responsibility. In the future, millions of people desperately needed her to succeed.
Voices approached from below, an unwelcome surprise. Three girls ascended the narrow spiral staircase toward her, arguing among themselves.
"I did! I did lock it!" snapped a girl with thick glasses and short brown hair.
"Then why wasn't it locked, Bree?" asked the girl in the lead, who looked Korean and wore a shirt that read CARILLONNEURS Do It With Bells On. Her jokey shirt didn't match the withering expression on her face. "Membership in the Guild of Carillonneurs is about more than playing the bells. It's about protecting and preserving the bells, and even the tower itself--"
"Who is that?" The third girl, who had freckles and braces, pointed at Raven charging down the stairs towards them.
"Excuse me, you can't be in here!" the lead girl shouted at Raven.
"Did you break in?" asked the girl in the thick glasses.
"Sorry, excuse me, can't talk," Raven said as she shoved past the girls on the narrow stairs, cramming them back against the railing.
"How fucking rude!" the lead girl screamed.
"She broke in!" the second girl said. "See, I told you I locked it--"
"Call the police!" the third girl yelled. "Somebody call them! Should I call them?"
Raven put on speed, charging down the stairs as fast as she could, two and three at a time. The girls shouted after her, but didn't pursue her. Instead, they argued about whether they ought to chase her or call the police.
She burst out onto the sunny sidewalk and dashed away. She needed to be gone before the police arrived. Now she would need to keep an eye out for those three girls and change her appearance so they wouldn't recognize her. Fortunately, she'd been wearing her dark shades and bulky jacket, and the interior of the tower had been dim.
More importantly, now that she'd delayed the assassination, she had to figure out just what the hell her mission was going to be, and she had to execute it before the security agents from the future located her again.
Raven took a long, roundabout way back to her hotel so she could stay out of view of the girls in the dark tower. She'd made a scrambled mess of everything, without making any real progress at all.
Chapter Ten
The house in Fair Haven, across the river from Yale, was three stories high and dilapidated, missing a number of roof shingles and a few window shutters. Boxy air conditioner units jutted from the windows. A rickety-looking staircase zigged and zagged up the side of the house, with a narrow landing on each level. The outside staircase did not look like part of the original house, but something added much later in a fast, clumsy fashion.
The house sat in a neighborhood of old houses, many of which had been carved into apartments. Mailbox clusters, trash cans, and chain-link fencing lined the sidewalks. She was in a different world from the fairy-castle campus where she'd been skulking.
Raven climbed to the third level, where green shrubs and fall flowers in little clay pots decorated the landing. Wind chimes with circles of colored glass hung in front of the door. An aluminum letter C was nailed beside it.
She knocked.
Raven had spent an unpleasant portion of the morning staring at herself in the hotel room mirror, trying to figure out how to make herself look normal. She was in a strange place and time, and she needed camouflage. Here, all women had a dizzying array of cosmetics and clothing available, much of it alien to her. She didn't know how to begin to disguise herself among them.
She'd decided to wear only her sunglasses and the sneakers, jeans, and simple white blouse she'd bought at the large discount store. Her gun and other future gear were stuffed inside her backpack under her hotel room bed. She'd left her bulky, scaly jacket behind, since nobody else wore jackets that looked like black dinosaur hide. Now she looked more like she belonged in this era, but she was unarmed and unarmored, and she felt dangerously exposed on the third-floor landing of the rundown house.
A young woman in a long flowered dress opened the door. She had dark red dreadlocks and looked about twenty years old, and she greeted Raven with a tentative smile.
"Hello?" the girl asked.
"Hi, I'm Riley," Raven said. She'd picked the name from a website list of trendy girl names. "I called earlier about the roommate ad...are you Audra?"
"That's me." The girl's smile grew large and warm, and she opened the door as wide as it would go. "Come in. Don't mind the apartment's weird shape, it used to be an attic..."
Raven followed her inside. The apartment was snug, with a single living/kitchen/dining area. Heavy old roof timbers supported the steeply sloped ceiling. It definitely looked like a former attic.
It was furnished with a two-seater futon, potted plants, and a bulky old television set parked on brightly painted cinderblocks. An old, heavy cabinet-style record player squatted near the front door, and a raw-lumber bookshelf stood in one corner, piled with old paperbacks and textbooks. Some portions of the wall were crammed with art and posters, while other large areas were blank, with faint squares and rectangles where items had recently been removed. A cone of incense smoldered in one of the clay flowerpots, filling the apartment with the smell of burning roses.
"Like I told you, not a huge place, but it's cheap...you can walk to the waterfront..." the girl named Audra was saying.
"It's nice," Raven said.
"Full kitchen, stove and all that." Audra walked into the narrow galley of a kitchen, separated from the living area by a low bar. "A little washer and dryer, too, in this cabinet, so that's good. Um...Nina kind of owned most of the stuff. She dropped out because Google offered her, like, a billion dollars to move out to California and start work right away. Some app she was developing for her senior project. They were like peeing their pants to buy it. You'd think she could throw me a little cash for rent, since it's hard to find a roommate mid-semester...but, that's cool, whatever. I can manage." Audra gave Raven a huge smile. "So what do you think?"
"It's a very nice place," Raven said.
Raven laughed, caught off-guard by the joke. She'd spent a lot of time on the city bus herself in the past few days. She was starting to think she might like this girl, not that it mattered. She had to intervene as little as possible with the past.
"I loved living in Silliman for two years, seriously," Audra said. "I love my Sillipeople. I do. But on-campus is such a, you know, dense ecosystem, socially. I was like, it's junior year, I need to get out in my own space. Right? Your room's over here." Audra pushed open one of three doors crowded along the longest wall. "We share a connecting bathroom, which is a minus, I guess, but..."
Raven looked into a bare room with a steeply sloped ceiling and one large window with a view of gnarled tree limbs. The empty hardwood floor seemed to glow in the sunlight. It was a small space, only three feet high at the low end of the ceiling slope, but it seemed luxurious to her.
To one side, a wooden folding door stood open to a bathroom not much larger than a closet, into which someone had managed to jam a clawfoot bathtub, pedestal sink, and toilet. Another folding door, leading to Audra's room, was closed on the opposite side of the bathroom. A third bathroom door opened back onto the living room. The black and white tile floor was badly chipped, but everything seemed clean and polished. Potted plants hung high over the tub, their long vines spilling over the sides to create a jungle look.
On the other side of the empty bedroom was another door, no taller than a child, built into the short wall where the ceiling reached its lowest point.
"What's in there?" Raven pointed.
