by JL Bryan
"The crawlspace." Audra dropped to her knees and pulled it open with the miniature knob. "Totally sealed with drywall inside, not one of those creepy crawlspaces full of exposed wires and spiders. I hope you love it, because it's kind of all you have for a closet..."
Raven cautiously approached the open door and peered into the low, dark space. Prickles crawled up the back of her neck, and she felt a sense of imminent danger. In the back of her mind, she could hear boots, breaking glass, screams, gunfire. Someone was shoving her backwards through a tiny door like this one, back into the darkness, and she was crying...
"Riley? Hey, Riley, are you okay?" Audra waved a hand in front of Raven's eyes. "How many fingers do you see? Fourteen?"
"What?" Raven blinked. She'd spaced out, lost in a fragment of horrible memory, or maybe a forgotten nightmare. She found herself staring into the dark crawlspace with a sob rising in her chest. She fought it back down.
"You don't like it, do you?" Audra frowned, and her shoulders slumped. "That's too bad. You seem nice, you know?"
"Oh...it's fine. I like the apartment," Raven said.
"You do?" Audra looked her over. "I told you I'm a Silliman girl. What about you?"
Raven realized that she was asking to which of Yale's twelve residential colleges Raven belonged. All students were randomly assigned to one of them upon admission--Audra to Silliman College, Logan to Pierson College.
Because of this, Raven had realized, the community at Yale was tightly networked. She could not pretend to be a student without also pretending to belong to one of the smaller communities. If she claimed to be a Yale student, it would take no time for someone to determine she was a fraud. She'd devised her next lie to avoid that problem.
"I'm actually at Albertus Magnus," Raven told her, referring to a private college across town.
"Oh, the Catholic place, right?" Audra asked. Raven saw something change in Audra's demeanor--it was slight, but she looked at Raven a little more cautiously, putting a little more distance between them. "That's cool. What's your major?"
"Criminal justice," Raven said. She couldn't repress a small smile. The words had popped out at her from a list of degrees offered at the private liberal arts university. Raven was here to straighten things out and make the world more just.
"Oh, wow, that's different. You're going to law school, then?"
"Sure," Raven told her. She hadn't thought so far ahead, but it sounded like a good ingredient for her cover story.
Audra laughed. "You don't sound like you've made up your mind."
Raven shrugged, not sure how to recover from her stumble. She blushed. She was accustomed to challenges that involved hiding and fighting, not elaborate personal deception.
"I know, it's so hard," Audra said. Raven felt relieved when she realized the girl would do most of the talking if she let her. "I mean, I'm solidly an Anthropology major, but I'm still torn within that. Do I want to help record the last pre-industrial indigenous cultures left on the planet? People think that's being done, but it's not being done. Someone has to do it, or we lose our heritage as human beings. But...there's also the future, and I'm so interested in horizontal communication, you know? Like social media. How information empowerment creates broad, evolving networks that undermine traditional hierarchy...whether we're talking about the media, the state...you know what I mean? The revolutions of the future will be organized on a networked basis."
"I do know what you mean," Raven said. "No central leadership, just local leaders, and experts and specialists going where they're needed. Self-organizing. It works because lots of people agree on an idea, or at least they have a common enemy. They share information, resources, they collaborate as needed..."
"Wow, you have thought about this!" Audra smiled brightly again, looking her over. "So how can I get you moved in here, like, today, Riley? I'll carry your couch on my own back if I need to."
"You do want me to move in?" Raven asked.
"Oh, yeah! You said you liked the place, right? I think we'd be good roommates. I get a sense about people...good, bad, in between...and I'm always right. I get a very good feeling about you. I can tell you're a good person."
Raven felt a completely unexpected warmth inside herself, and she was startled that the girl's acceptance of her seemed to mean so much. She felt less like an obvious outsider who didn't belong. She began to feel some hope.
"Thank you," Raven said. She returned Audra's smile.
"Only a couple of things," Audra said. "I'm on total hiatus right now, drug-wise. If you want to get high or whatever, that's your business, but I don't want to see it or smell it or be invited to it. I'm doing a clearing and healing thing with my brain this semester."
"That won't be a problem."
"Also...and this isn't totally necessary, but...if you could pay just partial rent for this month, like even a week, it would really help me survive to the end of October." Audra spoke in an apologetic tone and bit her lip after asking.
"Is cash okay?" Raven asked, and Audra surprised her with a hug.
"You're awesome," Audra said. "I have class this afternoon, but then I can help you move if you want. Let's go get your key."
Chapter Eleven
Raven collected her things from her hotel room. Audra was gone by the time she returned to the apartment.
She stood in the center of her newly rented bedroom and frowned at all the empty space. Her new roommate expected her to bring more items, even furniture, but Raven owned nothing else. She couldn't risk Audra questioning her cover story.
Raven stepped through the bathroom and nudged open the door to Audra's room to see what a college student in 2013 ought to own.
Audra's room was chaotic compared to the rest of the apartment, with books and half-completed craft projects scattered everywhere. She had a bed, a cupboard full of clothes, and a chair facing the window across a small writing desk heaped with more books. Audra also owned an old laptop computer, which she'd taken to class with her.
The majority of used paper textbooks related to Audra's Anthropology major, including books on human evolution, globalization, and archeology. It would be easy for Raven to buy textbooks and scatter them around her room, but furniture seemed like a bigger problem.
Raven stashed her gun and data cube inside the crawlspace in her room. The dark interior of the crawlspace made her feel, for a moment, as though she were suffocating. She hurried to escape it.
She rode the bus to the Albertus Magnus campus, a four-mile journey that took about forty-five minutes. That campus was impressive in its own right, antique brick mansions nestled in a park-like setting of tree-shaded lawns.
Inside the bookstore, she gathered texts for sophomore-level criminal justice classes, including studies of street gangs, poverty, and criminal procedure. Audra owned texts on other subjects not related to her anthropology major, so Raven decided to browse the history section. She felt herself smile just a little as she picked up a slim paperback book on political assassinations. Perhaps she could learn something from it.
She bought an introductory photography book, a hooded black sweatshirt with the school's name, and binders with the school's seal. She filled the binders with blank notebook paper.
Outside the store, she stuffed her new books and shirt into her backpack. Her next stop was a convenience store for a prepaid cell phone.
Her shades could use the early twenty-first century telecom networks to search the internet and even make phone calls, but there was no way for anybody to call her. The disposable phone provided a phone number to go with her address. Her false identity was gradually coming together. She still lacked any legitimate, legal identification, but she didn't know what she could do about it.
She asked her sunglasses where to find cheap furniture, and they quickly mapped the route to a large store called IKEA, down by the wharf. She picked out a bed and a desk and hired a taxi back to her apartment, paying with her rapidly diminishing spool of cash. She wondered how
she'd come by such a large supply of brand-new money from fifty years in the past. The money was probably counterfeit, she thought. She hoped it was good enough to fool whatever anti-counterfeiting technology existed in 2013.
She lugged the boxes from IKEA up her stairs one at a time, then took a break to check Logan's activities on the holographic map. He was busy, all over campus from day to day, as though incapable of sitting still for more than two minutes.
Raven opened the box containing the pieces of her bed and quickly grew disheartened at the sight of so many little screws and rods. The directions began with a mystifying cartoon that showed a guy standing over the bed pieces. That cartoon was crossed out, as if to say "wrong."
The cartoon beside it showed the exact same guy and the exact same bed pieces, but now he was joined by a friend with a pencil tucked behind his ear. It seemed to indicate that Raven should not attempt to assemble the furniture without someone watching, preferably someone with a pencil in at least one ear.
She'd hoped to set up her furniture before Audra arrived home, but she'd only pieced together a portion of the bed by the time her new roommate returned that evening.
"Wow, somebody escaped from IKEA," Audra said, glancing into the open door of Raven's room. "You're lucky you made it out alive."
"It's a maze in there!" Raven said.
"They want you to get lost and hungry so you'll be forced to buy Swedish meatballs to survive. So...new bed, new desk." She glanced at the desk, still in its original box, and a puzzled look crossed her face. "Did you ditch your old furniture?"
"It was kind of like your situation, where your roommate owned most of it," Raven said.
"Even your bed?"
Raven had to think fast, and she mentally revised that portion of her story.
"I was living with...a guy. My boyfriend. We stopped getting along. It was his bed."
"Oh, an evil ex-boyfriend." Audra leaned against Raven's doorway, looking sympathetic. "Sorry to hear that."
"It happens. Now I just have to figure out where to put these other nine thousand little screws, and I'll be done."
"Let me help. I'm a hardened veteran of the furniture-assembly wars." Audra took another, hesitant step closer.
"Please! I need to finish this bed so I can pass out on it."
"Let's look at what you have...where are the sixteen screws that look like this?" Audra pointed to the open instruction sheet.
"Wait." Raven flipped back to the cartoons on the first page of instructions. She pointed to the guy with the pencil behind his ear, the guy whose presence apparently made it magically OK to begin assembly. "It says you have to put a pencil behind your ear if you're going to help."
"Wow, we almost totally screwed that up." Audra dashed through the bathroom to her room and returned with a mechanical pencil behind her left ear, mimicking the cartoon. In a solemn tone, she announced, "I am now fully qualified to assist in making your bed." She sat on the floor next to Raven. "The key is to avoid thinking too much..."
Within twenty minutes, they'd assembled a small bed with two huge drawers in the side.
"A single bed?" Audra asked. "Trying to keep your life simple, huh?"
"I suppose."
"I understand. I'm kind of on a sex hiatus, too, this semester. Let's do your desk--I bet I could handle that even without a pencil behind my ear." Audra tossed the pencil aside.
"That's much too risky!" Raven pretended to be horrified.
"I live for danger." Audra tore open the next box.
When they were done, Raven stacked her new textbooks on her desk. Audra picked up one title with a curious look on her face. "Conspiracy and Power: A History of Political Assassination. History class? Light bedtime reading? Planning to overthrow the government?"
"History class," Raven said. "I read some on the bus today. It's pretty interesting. The author starts by saying that the real impact of political assassination on history is both smaller and larger than most people think."
"That's exactly the kind of thing professors like to say." Audra flipped through the small book. "It makes them right no matter what happens."
"He says that, in Western society, the most famous assassinations are often the least important. Abraham Lincoln was killed for the Confederacy, but they'd already lost the war, and his death didn't change that....He even goes back to Julius Caesar's assassination, and he says it just led to Caesar's family becoming the imperial family. His nephew Octavian became the first emperor of Rome."
"I'm sure you could find examples where it changed history, though," Audra said. "Like the Kennedys."
"But it's hard to know just how history was changed. He says it's rare for the assassin to get the results he actually wants--assassination is more likely to lead to a chaos in which anything can happen." Raven was delighted to talk over her problems with somebody else, however indirectly.
"Sounds like you've got a paper due on this." Audra smiled.
"Yeah, a very big paper..." Raven hurried to think of a lie. "It's a little strange, though. We're supposed to write about a situation where we can travel back in time and kill a future dictator when he's still young, before he's ever in power. Would we do it? What would happen if we did?"
"That is strange. Sounds like a cool teacher," Audra said.
"What do you think?"
"About your teacher?"
"Would you travel through time and do it?" Raven watched closely as Audra considered the question.
"That's hard for me, because I'm really about nonviolence and peaceful solutions," Audra said. "But if you have a chance to kill somebody like that, it's hard to say no. Think of all those lives you'd save. An evil dictator, right?"
"Lots of people killed, lots of people put into prison camps. Open warfare in the streets."
"Wait, who are we talking about?" Audra asked.
"Nobody specific."
"It would depend on the specifics, though." Audra looked off into space for a moment, as though daydreaming. "You have to wonder whether he's right. I mean, if you just take one individual out of the situation, even one major individual, will you really change everything? Or anything?"
"That's what I'm wondering. Then how would you change the past?"
"You'd have to figure out exactly what happened, all the details, and change the events that led to it," Audra said. "Find the keystone, if you can."
"The keystone?"
"Yeah, the one event that could go differently." Audra sat up straighter, excited. "If you really want to prevent World War II and the Holocaust, you have to change something about World War I, don't you? Rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, maybe. Maybe not, but there would have to be something you could change to reshape the broader society. Right?"
"How can I do that, though? How do I find the keystone?"
"I don't know, but I'm glad it's not my assignment." Audra checked the time on her phone. "Sorry, study group tonight. I have to run."
"Thanks for helping with my furniture," Raven said.
"No problem! Hey, listen, there's a good band playing tomorrow night, I'm meeting some people there. Want to come with me?"
"I'd like that." Raven smiled at her, and she smiled back. Raven thought Audra's dark amber eyes seemed particularly kind.
After Audra left, Raven thought over their conversation and felt better about her choice not to kill Logan right away, but to explore her options instead. She hadn't failed in her mission, she told herself. She'd recognized that a broader mission was needed. She was adapting to reality.
Her new mission, she had decided, would require her to do more than pull a trigger. She needed to intervene in Logan's life and somehow change its course. She had to determine how to steer the way in which his family's power and influence was used. Some kind of profound change was needed, but it wouldn't happen unless she made it happen.
She couldn't simply tell Logan the truth, that she was from the future, or he would naturally assume she was insane. In order to interact succe
ssfully with him, she had to project herself into his reality, in a sense, taking on an identity appropriate for his place and time.
She had created "Riley Falcourt," a sophomore at another college in New Haven, and was assembling the pieces of her new life. She hoped the false identity lasted long enough for her to make a difference, before the security agents from the future found her again.
Chapter Twelve
The next day, Raven visited the supermarket to stock up on food. The apartment's kitchen offered an amazing amount of storage space, she thought, with a full-sized refrigerator and a pantry. The kitchen's designer must have been optimistic that the world would always overflow with food.
The grocery store nearly overwhelmed her with table after table offering mountains of fresh fruit and vegetables. She had a visceral reaction to the sight of an entire wall of freshly cut meat. The dairy case offered fresh milk, not powdered or canned, and row after row of different varieties: skim, whole, buttermilk, chocolate and strawberry milk, pure cream, goat milk.
She resisted the urge to stock up on everything and forced herself to buy just a few days' worth. She had to convince herself the store and its mountains of food would still exist the following week.
She looked over the bewildering array of cosmetics and hair products that took up both sides of an entire aisle. Most of the college girls she'd seen, except for Audra, wore make-up, but not in the over-the-top theatrical manner in which Raven and her friends painted themselves for nightclubs in the 2060's, with chromatic makeup that shifted colors with changes in body temperature. Raven would have to learn about contemporary styles it if she wanted to appear normal.
She couldn't avoid the fact that she was female, her target was male, and her odds of connecting with him would only increase if he found her attractive. She'd noticed the kind of attention the handsome young future dictator drew from other women. She would need to compete for his attention.
Raven chose a large makeup kit at random. At the checkout aisle, she noticed a number of magazines advertising tips on makeup, hair, attracting men, and even sex advice. She bought a copy of each, hoping they would provide some guidance for how she should look and act.
