by Claire Davon
“Aren’t you checking while you’re away? You’re a computer junkie.”
He smiled, but there was no heat behind it. “As I said earlier, the world is wired for WiFi, although there are some places too remote to have a reliable connection. If I remember right, I couldn’t always get to a port. I wanted that trip to be off the grid, as much as we could be. Even in my time frame Alaska is still remote and I wanted to get away as much as possible. I wanted to check out, jack out of the system for a bit.”
His computer blared again. “Priority email.”
He pulled up the website, studied the email and then frowned. Sonder regarded Fiona with an unreadable expression.
“It’s from you.”
Chapter 3
Fiona looked down at her still dead phone. She shook it in case power somehow lived within it, but it remained dark.
“Me?”
“You,” Sonder affirmed. He did something to the computer and the screen blinked into life at the far wall, showing the website better. Sure enough, there was her name. “Email from Fiona Jensen,” Sonder read aloud.
“Oooookay,” she said, every O like a shot across her senses. “This I have to read.”
Sonder looked at the wall. “There’s an attachment.” He was clicking into the email as he did so and the sight of her old email address filled Fiona with nostalgia. She hadn’t closed the free account that was so popular in her time, but she hadn’t used it since their dash away from Brookline. She’d thought that the IP would be easy to trace and didn’t want to give the time traveling groups more tools to find her. That had been a vain hope, as it turned out. They had known where she’d been the whole time.
Fiona didn’t know why the Commander was so determined to stop her from trying to stop the Event, but it seemed to be his sole mission. He was a former member of the Guardians, and up until he tried to murder Fiona, a high ranking member of that group.
The Voice had told her to study the disasters, and had sent her back to her own time via those events, showing her various horrors that had been wrought upon the Earth. After studying them, Fiona and Sonder knew that the disasters were ones caused by the time ripple, the anomaly that the Voice had insinuated had been responsible for the eruption of the volcano at Thera, the destruction of Ubar, a city she had watched collapse into the sand, as well as others. They had wanted to check out this earthquake in Chile, which had prompted their visit to his time frame. At the end of all these disasters, the ultimate one was the Event.
It was all so strange sometimes, and the paradoxes caught her at odd moments. She still didn’t understand why the Voice didn’t just stop the time ripple. It seemed to want to make things right, but it didn’t act. So many things seemed to be poised on the edge of a knife.
Fiona came back to the present and focused on the attachment. Sonder was waiting, she saw, his index finger over the link.
“What do I say?” she asked, realizing he’d been speaking to her and she hadn’t answered.
He looked fierce, and almost angry. His dark hair swept across his forehead and she realized that it was longer than it had been when they first met. Longer, and a little shaggy. There had been little thought of haircuts or personal grooming when they were moving through time. Impatiently, he pushed it back, a familiar gesture.
The reality was that it had only been five months since they met after the streetcar disaster. It seemed like a lifetime and yesterday all at the same time.
“Read for yourself.” He pressed a button and the text leaped up in size.
“Hi, honey, hi, me,” she read aloud. Yeah, that sounded like her. “I’m amazed this email still works. I’m sitting here with Illiria and she wants to talk to us. After you go to Chile, come here. Read this email from Illiria so you believe me.”
He clicked on the link. The video moved, a smooth shot of Fiona and Illiria at a café somewhere drinking coffee. It appeared to be this time frame, if the futuristic cars on the street were any indication. In the background she saw the Eiffel Tower, still iconic in this era. Sonder’s eyes narrowed.
He shook his head. “I will show you how to notify me of a priority email,” was all he said.
#
When they were finished with the simple process, Fiona looked at Sonder. There was something simmering behind his eyes, but she couldn’t tell what it was.
“Does that make sense?” he asked, and there was a snap to his tone. “Repeat it back.”
Fiona blinked but did as he asked.
“Fine.” He said it curtly, and then turned away, busying himself with his computer.
She looked around the house again, and then back at Sonder.
“Sonder?”
They’d had fights, of course. Neither was the quiet type. She knew something was wrong, but she was at a loss to understand what he was stewing about.
“Sonder?” she asked again when he didn’t answer.
“Damn it, Fiona, what are we playing at?”
She blinked. “I…what?”
“What are we playing at?” he repeated, looking up at her from the soft glare of his computer. In the efficient lighting of his house and the backlighting of the computer he looked stark, bleak, and shut down.
In a swift move he got up from the chair and strode across the room and past her, into the living room. Like the dining/kitchen area, this had basic furniture that matched and an industrial flavor to it. What happened to thrift store chic, she wondered. Do they still have thrift stores in the future?
She shook her head to eliminate the inane thoughts and looked at Sonder, who had begun pacing.
“I didn’t think we were playing,” she said when the silence went on too long.
He had a rug, she noted, something that looked like a reproduction Persian. She hadn’t pegged him as the rug type.
“Really?” One of his eyebrows arched over eyes that were stormy, almost pitch in color. Every muscle of his tall form was tense and ready for action. She saw it in the hard set of his square jaw and the rigidity in his posture. It was there in the way his arms were standing out from his body, his fists curled. It was in the way he strode, stiff legged and jerky, back and forth across the living room of the house he had occupied before he became a Guardian.
“You didn’t think we were playing,” he repeated and his tone dripped with sarcasm. “What, then, was that video?”
“Um,” she said in a helpless tone. “It was a cell phone video by the looks of it, of me and Illiria in Paris. This time frame, I think, and I saw that we were careful to put the Eiffel Tower in there for reference.” She looked at him and he jerked his head, indicating she should continue. “I,” she paused, finding herself at a loss for words. “I think it’s enough to jump to. I can get a fix on that place from what we were shown. Sonder, what?”
“What’s missing?”
“Missing?” she repeated.
“Yes,” he said it with a harsh bite in his voice and she realized how angry he was. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him that way.
“Sonder, won’t you tell me what’s going on? I don’t understand.”
“Me, Fiona. I’m missing.” He pointed back to the computer, at the email still showing against the wall. “That video is of you and Illiria. My former leader Illiria. It’s of the two of you. Just the two of you. You don’t need me.”
She frowned. “Why do you say that?” she offered, trying to sound helpful but knowing she failed.
He shook his head. “You are the one with all the power. So I ask you again. What are we playing at? You don’t need me. You can jump without me, and if I’m anything to you I’m a glorified tour guide. I can show you around the parts of time you don’t have a guidebook for. Otherwise,” and stabbed a finger at the email again. “You don’t need me.”
Fiona realized in retrospect she should have seen this coming. Sonder may be a modern man and more comfortable with female parity than some, but he was still a man.
“I do need you,” she sa
id simply. “I need you much more than you know. I, this,” and she looked around, taking in the house that had been his home for a time. “I had no way of getting here. More than that, Sonder, I would never have known what to do without you. I would have been either captured by one or other of the factions, or killed by the Commander, long before this. You are necessary to the success of this mission, because there would be no Traveler if not for you. I would have power, but very little common sense.” She cursed herself for not seeing that this was inevitable. Once again she’d taken him for granted, not letting him know how much he was valued. “The world needs you. The world needs both of us. Me for the power and you to make it work.”
He looked at her and she saw it wasn’t enough. “Sonder,” she began, crossing the room to him. She thought he would shake her arm off but she put it on his shoulder anyway. To her relief, he didn’t flick his body back to dislodge her. “You believe me, don’t you?”
He pivoted and she saw something indefinable in his eyes. With the intuition of a woman, a power she too rarely used, Fiona understood.
“The world needs you…and I need you,” she said and saw with relief that that had been the right thing to say. It had gone too long unspoken. “I need you, you big future modern man. I need you.”
His smile was slow to come, but once it did, it lit up his face. “That was the right answer.”
#
Like the advertisements and stories from the 1950s that hadn’t come true in her version of their future, most of the things predicted for the 2070s, her future, Sonder’s present, had also not come to pass. Robots did not run every facet of households, which to Fiona’s Terminator tainted view of the world, was for the best. Sonder had said that there were no flying cars. The self-driving cars took a little getting used to, but they weren’t that different. She didn’t know Arizona at all to know much about the skyline but he had told her that the buildings were bigger in his time, but not substantively changed. She wondered how Brookline looked, how the wonderful island of Santorini did, and would have gone on his computer to learn, but Sonder warned her that they shouldn’t stay. They needed money and he didn’t want to use his current credit cards. They shifted back a few months and took out a card in his name but to his parents’ address with online payments only that they would pay off before the original Sonder noticed its existence. He took out the max in currency allowed on the card and they set off for Paris.
First they went to Chile. Shifting back twelve years to the disaster and watching it in action had been as unnerving as any of them were. She felt the wrongness, the subtle taint in the time stream and knew their instincts had been right. This Chilean quake was a part of the broken time pattern. Fiona stored that away, hoping they could get to an open Internet kiosk in this time frame to study news articles. It slowed the Earth down by a few microseconds, and shifted it on its axis. The Earth was too big for such a small shift to have significant impact, but anything done over time would have an impact. She filed that knowledge away. Part of her itched to do something, to change things, somehow. She could freeze time and move people out of harm’s way, and save a few. Fiona shook her head. They had seen how difficult it was to move a body when they’d stashed the younger Rogald onto the 1950s subway and sent him to his fate, and it was possible, but not easy.
As always, Sonder was the voice of reason. Change the destiny for that one person and you don’t know what you change for everyone else. Things had a place in the world and who knew what altering one could mean for another. It was the butterfly effect in action, every day.
She wondered if the Commander had the right idea. If things couldn’t or shouldn’t be changed, then perhaps they shouldn’t be focusing their efforts on trying to change the Event. Maybe that was man’s destiny, in the end.
Fiona shook her head. Something deep inside her, in her awakened time travel powers, rebelled at the idea of the Event. Whatever it was, it was her duty to try and stop it from happening, even if that went against all the tenets of what Sonder had been taught and what Fiona was coming to believe.
The Voice, that cryptic disembodied spirit that spoke to her, had been quiet since her journey to the time of Thera pre-explosion and back again. She had thought it would have surfaced in the last two months, but it hadn’t. Not that she missed the Voice.
The video in Paris hadn’t said why Fiona and Illiria were eating lunch, or where Sonder was, but they had no other ideas. Sonder pulled up the email again, which he had downloaded to an account unknown to the other Sonder, and studied it.
“Look, there,” Sonder said, freezing the video at one spot and pointing to Illiria’s phone. The screen was small but in front of it was a projection widening out against the wall.
Fiona looked at it. It was a neat trick and she wondered if all cell phones of this era had it. What era was Illiria from, Fiona wondered. She had the look and feel of someone contemporary to Fiona’s own time, but that could be projection on Fiona’s part. She had never liked the woman in their short encounters, although Illiria had saved all of their lives in Santorini.
“It’s just her screen,” Fiona said, her shoulders sagging with disappointment. She had expected some grand flash of insight, or perhaps a road map to the Event, but all the projection showed was her front screen, with the apps and weather and more in the corner…
“The information in the top box. The time, the date. She’s showing us when we are.”
He nodded, a pleased look on his face. “I don’t think Illiria is meeting with you at the request of the Guardians. I think she’s doing this outside of their authority. Hence, the video and phone.” He paused and then reached over on the bar and pulled a small tablet out from a corner filing area. “We might need this. I wonder what she wants.”
“One way to find out.”
#
To their surprise, when they got to the café there was no sign of Illiria. Puzzled, Fiona looked at Sonder, who shrugged. He was wearing a large, bulky coat, which looked out of place in this city, but it covered his Guardian belt. Passersby rushed past a puzzled looking Sonder and Fiona, not offering assistance, on their way to…somewhere. Even sixty years later, cultures didn’t change, Fiona decided.
“Monsieur, Madame?”
The voice was lightly accented with Parisian English. Sonder’s hand went to his coat pocket in a reflexive reaction. Fiona knew he had no weapon and part of her was sad for that. One of those blasters that the Commander had would have been welcome defense. She cocked an eyebrow at Sonder.
“Yes?” Sonder said, a hand gesturing to Fiona to keep quiet.
The waiter handed them a small tablet, one Fiona couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a manufacturer she recognized. The waiter’s clothes looked different, almost molded, and didn’t appear to be cloth.
On it was a set of numbers and Fiona frowned but she saw Sonder look at it with a knowing expression.
“The lady said to give this to you. And this.” He flipped the screen and an image of a house similar to Sonder’s swam into view. It had that same look and feel of being a manufactured thing, something out of nature. Sonder took a picture of both images with his own tablet and nodded at the waiter.
“Wipe that.” He pressed a few buttons and the waiter smiled, giving Sonder a low bow. The waiter’s hand moved and the screen was blank. He gestured to a table away from the few other patrons in the place.
Fiona sat where he had indicated, not understanding. Then she stood up again on Sonder’s signal.
To her surprise he was opening his coat, turned away from the crowd and toward Fiona. His belt was on and the light glowed blue.
“What are you doing?” she hissed. They would be tracked, she thought. He had to turn that off.
“Come on,” he said. He looked at the waiter, who was bustling in with water glasses and small menus. “We’ll be right back.” He grabbed for Fiona’s hand. She wanted to snatch it away but knew Sonder well enough to know he didn’t do anything without a good
reason. She let him lead her away, all the while conscious of the beep of his powered up belt, and the danger it represented.
“I think I know what she’s doing,” he whispered. “This is for me.” He pulled out the tablet and punched in the coordinates to his wrist device. He hadn’t used that in five months, and she didn’t want him to use it now.
“I don’t understand,” she said. Sonder dragged her into an alley, out of sight of the street. She wanted to yank at his device until he turned it off, but something stayed her hand.
“I do.” He pointed to the tablet, which he had now stored in a pocket of the large tan coat. “Coordinates are what the belts use. She’s given us the location of where she is.”
“Yes, but why are you programming them in? I can just as easily take us there with the picture she sent.”
He looked grim. “Yes, but she went there so they know she is there.”
Fiona shook her head, still not understanding. “She’s a Guardian, of course they know she is there, if she gave them enough time.”
He shrugged. “There is something strange going on, but I don’t know what it is. Illiria’s motives have always been her own. But she is a Guardian so this must be extraordinary.”
That didn’t answer Fiona’s question and she felt her blood pressure rise. Some of her impatience must have shown in her face because Sonder gave her a sharp glance.
“She wants to talk to you,” Sonder said, “but she doesn’t want them to know what she’s doing. This,” he said, pointing to the wrist device, “is for me. I am going to go there and stay behind. If the Guardians or the Commander come I will be there so the signature will not be out of the ordinary. That’s why I am not in those pictures. You and Illiria will be here, and I will be there. It’s clever.” His tone showed approval of her plan.
She gaped. “You are not staying behind as bait. No way.”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her to him.
“Kale mou, that is not up to you.”
