Nomad

by JL Bryan

  Her heart was beating much too fast, and she took deep breaths through her nose to calm her pulse. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became that her mission could never work. She tried not to think about it.

  She saw him in the extreme periphery of her vision. Logan moved toward her on the sidewalk, his face turned down to the phone in his hands while he texted with his thumbs. She would have a few seconds, a brief window in which she could believably bump into him.

  She'd tried to rehearse this moment in advance, even studying dating tips from the magazines she'd bought, but she'd come up blank, because she simply had no idea how Logan would react to anything she did.

  She waited, watching him from the side of her eye while she held the camera in front of her face. Logan moved closer, still staring down at his phone. He was broad-shouldered and several inches taller than her, and she calculated that her head would land on the left side of his chest.

  She stepped back and crashed into him, knocking his phone away. She let herself fall against him. Her cheek landed just where she'd expected on his chest, and then her body slid downward against his.

  "Watch out!" he said. His hand caught her under the arm, his fingertips brushing against the side of her breast for a moment, which was almost unavoidable under the circumstances. She looked up at him as he drew her to her feet, and for a moment their faces nearly touched, his eyes looking down into hers, and she sensed vitality and power caged inside him. The monster, the beast.

  She returned his gaze for a moment, her lips parted as though she expected a kiss. She believed there was a moment, that maybe he was seeing something in his arms that he liked.

  Then she pushed back from him and pretending to check her camera for damage. He picked up his phone.

  "You should try walking forwards instead," Logan said. "You'd be surprised how easy it is once you get going."

  "I had the perfect shot lined up," Raven said. "I should have taken it when I had the chance. Did I hurt you?"

  Logan looked down and touched his stomach. "Only my organs. You've got a strong elbow. What do you play, football? Boxing?"

  "Sorry." Her smile was much more nervous and shaky than she'd intended.

  "Don't worry about it. I have to get to class..." His eyes flicked over her, quickly, as if taking her in for the first time. "Try not to walk into too many people today. They aren't all as understanding and sympathetic as me."

  Raven panicked as she watched him go, feeling she hadn't made much of an impression. She turned back to the dark church and raised her camera, again watching him from the side of her eye.

  As he walked away down a tree-lined path between two colleges, he glanced back at her. According to the magazines, this was a good sign. It meant he was still thinking about her.

  She stayed ahead of him all day, letting him see her twice more around campus, snapping pictures of towers and gardens. She was always there before him. The first time, she stayed on the far side of a college lawn and pretended not to see him. The second time, she made only the briefest of eye contact. He was usually with friends, anyway. She wanted a chance to talk alone.

  At sunset, she strolled alongside the black iron fence of the Grove Street Cemetery. Trees that had turned the dying colors of autumn shaded the marble headstones, monoliths, stone angels, and mythological creatures. She studied it through her camera as she walked, a necropolis glowing red in the last smolder of sunlight.

  The front gate was a tall, squarish stone arch supported by heavy fluted columns that looked as though it had been stolen from an Egyptian temple. The inscription above the archway read "THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED."

  Raven took a picture of the words, thinking of all those fated to die under the regime and in the war against it--all the lives she might save.

  Logan approached her down the sidewalk, wearing frayed khaki shorts, an old t-shirt, and a blue Indianapolis Colts cap turned backwards on his head. He spun a Frisbee on one finger while checking his phone with his other hand.

  Raven checked the time display at the lower right corner of her glasses and frowned. He was a few seconds late. According to her map, he should have arrived four seconds earlier, but she didn't have time to think about that now.

  "Are you stalking me?" she accused, trying to be playful about it. He looked up at her, startled, then gave her a big, lopsided smile that he probably considered charming. Raven had opened an extra button on her shirt to reveal a little more of her bra top and cleavage, for whatever that was worth.

  "Should I be stalking you? Is it National Stalking Day?" Logan asked. He looked from her camera to the graves beyond the gate. "What are all the pictures for?"

  "Class. I wanted to see if I could find anything unique on the Yale campus."

  "Have you?"

  "Maybe." She looked at him through her camera. "I should take your picture if you're going to follow me everywhere. I may need it for evidence."

  "Should I demonstrate my master scoober toss?" He flipped the Frisbee upside down and drew it back for a throw.

  "No."

  "Are you sure? Future generations will study this Frisbee technique. You should document it."

  "You're in front of a cemetery," she said. "You should look out and think about the dead."

  Logan lowered the Frisbee and studied the graveyard with a mock solemn expression on his face. "What should I think about them?"

  "All this death doesn't make you feel anything?" Raven continued watching him through the camera. Somehow, she felt bolder speaking to him this way, keeping him framed inside the walls of her viewfinder rather than looking him in the eye. When she looked him in the eye, she saw the giant reptilian eyes of the dictator glaring down from a digital billboard.

  "Some of these people would be two hundred years old if they were still alive," Logan said. "Now that would be freaky. That would be a good picture for your photography class, a two-hundred-year-old man crawling out of his grave."

  "Death doesn't bother you?" she asked.

  "We're all going to die. We should just have fun while it lasts, right?" He smiled, but it looked forced. He was looking at a dark marble obelisk marking a grave. She took another picture.

  "Did you ever know anyone who died?" Raven asked him, thinking of the countless people she'd seen killed in the war to remove this boy from power.

  "My great-grandfather. He was ninety-six, though, so..." Logan shrugged. "That was years ago."

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "I have to go to this thing," he finally said, and he looked up the road with a frown, like he didn't want to go.

  "A mysterious, nameless thing?" she asked.

  "It's this environmental thing, I don't know. These girls are making me go."

  "What girls?"

  "Girls from the floor above me. It doesn't matter."

  "How are they making you go? Blackmail?" Raven took another picture of him.

  "Yep. They have thousands of scandalous pictures of me. I'm doing a lot more than making faces at a graveyard."

  "You know, when I take pictures, I can see things about people."

  "What kind of things?" He clearly expected a joke.

  "Just hints, little things about their past. Or their future."

  "And what's in my future?" His smile faded, and his bright green eyes were suddenly less friendly.

  "You're going to be powerful, aren't you? You're going to rule over millions of people."

  "'Rule over'?" He laughed. "Like a king?"

  "Yes. You want that, though, don't you? You want people to obey you. You like being in control." Raven told her mouth to stop talking.

  Logan laughed again. "You're crazy. Or, wait, is this about the cross-country team? Are you friends with Beckley?"

  "I'm not--"

  "Seriously, tell Beckley it's just an intramural, so she needs to turn the drama down a notch, all right? I'm not trying to take over...my golf coach doesn't even want me doing intramurals, but what am I supposed t
o do, just swing clubs all day? My uncle does that, and he's still a hundred pounds overweight. Out on the course, he looks like a giant jellyfish swinging a lollipop."

  "I'm not friends with Beckley."

  "Are you sure? Because that's exactly what she said to me last week after practice, that I'm obsessed with controlling people. It's like, hey, I'm just running here, so just relax, you know?"

  "Again, I'm not friends with Beckley, so..."

  "Right, sorry. She's the captain of my...forget about it." He checked his phone. "I really have to get to this thing now..." He looked her over with a quick flash of his eyes, and she thought she glimpsed something almost predatory in his look, just for a moment. He held out his phone to her, open to his contacts list. "Give me your number. You can tell me more about my future."

  "Give me yours instead. If I see more in your future, I'll text you."

  "Let me know if it involves falling rocks. I'm not kidding." He told her his number, and she saved it. It was only the second number in her contact list, after Audra's.

  "Are you scared of rocks?" she asked.

  "Only when I'm hanging from them above a thousand-foot drop." A puzzled look crossed his face as he glanced down at his cell phone. "I still don't have your number here."

  "You'd better get to your thing, right?" Raven backed away from him, under the archway and into the cemetery. "I hope it's as fun as it sounds."

  She took a final picture of him, then let him watch her as she walked away among the stones of the dead, who were still waiting to be raised. Some of them had been waiting for centuries.

  Raven felt a small tremor of hope. She had made an impression--he might remember her as vaguely insane, maybe, but he would remember her. He'd seemed at least a little bit interested in her kind of crazy, which was good, because she didn't have anything else to offer.

  She wove through the avenues of the cemetery. Now that night had fallen, it was dark under the cover of the trees. She passed row after row of silent, ornate headstones, some of them mammoth-sized, as though the dead had feared being forgotten unless their names were carved on giant slabs of marble.

  She reached the eastern wall of the cemetery, which was eight feet high and made of stone. Old, uprooted grave markers leaned against it.

  Raven climbed onto the sturdiest-looking headstone and scrambled up and over the wall. She landed quietly in the grass beside a dark street across from the heavy gray block of the physics building. She wondered what the scholars there would make of her time-travel device.

  Logan crossed under a traffic light a block away. She trailed him from a distance, keeping herself in the shadows. He moved quickly, talking on the phone and assuring someone to relax because he was on his way. He was generating a phone record that would, many years from now, become a time-stamped red dot on Raven's map.

  They passed a block of modern-looking, office-style school buildings and another dark castle before reaching his destination, which didn't look like anything else on campus. The structure was long, narrow, and round, shaped like a loaf of bread, its curved roof tiled with black solar collectors--the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

  The open plaza at the school's front doors lay deserted except for a pretty blond girl who paced, shaking her head and visibly frustrated. Raven recognized her. She was the girl who had complained about Raven hogging a four-person table at the crowded coffee shop, the girl with the snubby nose and baby blue eyes.

  Raven crouched against the dark castle building and crept silently forward to watch the plaza.

  "Finally! Come on!" the girl shouted as Logan strolled up the walkway. She turned and stalked to the school's front door.

  "Where is everybody?" he asked, gesturing toward the plaza's empty benches.

  "They're already inside! Hurry!" The girl opened a glass door. "You aren't hurrying."

  "I'm right here." He didn't put on any speed as he approached her.

  "You're so slow! We're going to walk in late. So totally embarrassing. Why did I invite you?"

  "To broaden my mind, you said."

  "What mind?" she snapped, but she melted against him as he hugged her. She smiled again as she led him inside.

  Raven waited, then followed. It was the first time she'd entered a building to spy on him, and it was a risk, but she needed to know more about his relationship with the girl.

  The interior of the building was paneled in red wood like a giant hunting lodge. Raven tracked her quarry by sound, keeping herself out of sight. She followed them to the fourth level, where Logan and the girl entered an auditorium with a vaulted ceiling. The doors to the auditorium had been left open, and a man with a deep Latin accent lectured inside.

  A color poster on an easel by the door advertised the speaker, an Ecuadorian botanist. At the moment, he was explaining the amount of untapped petroleum below the Ecuadorian rainforest, and a fund through which international donors paid the Ecuadorian government to prevent drilling.

  Raven peered into the auditorium, where there were many more empty seats than audience members. Logan and the girl had joined a couple of other girls in the second row from the front.

  Over the next few minutes, Logan and his blond friend fought a slow war over elbow space. The girl kept holding a finger to her lips to tell Logan to be quiet, though he wasn't making a sound, just scowling playfully whenever she claimed the armrest for herself. The girl tried to focus politely on the speaker, but she was blushing crimson and squirming in her seat.

  Raven began to think she recognized the girl--not just from the coffee shop, but from her memories of the future. In the deep-water shipwreck of her memory, something was trying to break loose.

  She used her glasses to take quick snapshots of the girl and her friends. Perhaps the girl had been some sort of adviser or high official in his administration. She would check the records on her data cube at home.

  Raven left the building and jogged to the nearest bus station. She had a feeling this girl might get in her way, and she wasn't sure what to do about it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Raven returned to her apartment, the lights were low and a scratchy bluegrass record played by the front door. The apartment had a pungent, herbal smell that Raven first assumed to be one of her roommate's countless flavors of incense, until she saw the cloud of smoke swirling in the flickering candlelight of the bathroom. Through the open door, she could see Audra in the tub under a heap of bubbles, smoking a large joint.

  Raven hurried toward her own room, ready to sift through the data about Logan's future and try to identify the girl.

  "Raven? That's you, right?" Audra turned toward her with droopy eyelids. "Hey....Yeah. Look, I know I said I was clearing my head this semester, but I ran into a friend and he gave me this...I figure, hey, it's been a few months, I deserve a break, right?"

  "I don't know," Raven said, reaching for her doorknob.

  "You're probably right." Audra sighed. "This was a mistake. Here, come help me with it." She held it out toward Raven.

  "No, thanks."

  "Seriously, this is way too much for me. Come on."

  Raven reluctantly walked into the smoke-filled bathroom. She took the joint from Audra and pretended to smoke it. Raven had always preferred drugs that sped her up rather than slowed her down, and she didn't want to dull her senses. She lived in fear of Providence Security agents breaking down her door. Getting drunk at the bar had been a big mistake, and she didn't want to repeat it.

  "I should cut these off. Do you think?" Audra held up one of her limp, snake-like wet dreadlocks, dropping water from its tip.

  "Maybe."

  "Maybe I should. I'm getting too old." She laughed. "Hey, how did it go with that guy? Um, what's his name?"

  "Logan."

  "That's right. Logan Carraway." She spat the name and rolled her eyes. "So how did it go? Did he totally suck, or did he completely suck?"

  "It wasn't great. I was nervous." Raven sat down on the toilet lid
and held out the joint to Audra, who was too busy toying with a fluff of bath bubbles to notice.

  "What happened? Did he ask for your phone number or anything?"

  "Yes. I didn't give it to him, though. I took his instead."

  "Ha! See, you're already a pro." Audra beamed up at her with glassy, red eyes.

  "Am I? I feel pretty amateur. Can I put this out, or...?"

  "Yeah, use the flower pot on the sink. So what's your next move, Riley?" Audra asked.

  "I'm trying to decide. Right now, I have to go study, so--" Raven stood up.

  "Wait, let's think about this." Audra held up a soapy hand to stop her. "What college is he, again? You said Pierson?"

  "Yeah."

  "So, yeah, perfect." Audra sat up a little in the tub, sloshing water over the edge in her sudden excitement. "It's almost Halloween. We go to Inferno."

  "What's that?"

  "How do you not know? The big Halloween party they have every year. It used to be one of the wildest parties on campus, years ago, until the police kept busting it and they lamed it up. He'll definitely be there."

  "And we can just show up?"

  "All Yale students can come."

  "I'm not one, though."

  "Not a problem. I have friends in Pierson." Audra winked, then shook her head. "I can't believe I'm helping you hook up with that guy. Friends support each other in their mistakes, though, don't they?"

  Raven laughed. "I really have to study."

  "Fine, go study. I'll dream up sexy costumes for us. For you, I mean. I'm celibate this semester. Sober and celibate." Audra laughed and covered her eyes as though ashamed.

  Raven stepped through the folding door into her room, where she opened her crawlspace and brought out the data cube from inside her new safe.