Preserving Hope

by Alex Albrinck

  “Then you showed up.” She looked at him with a strange longing, and he knew his earlier impression was accurate. “You were new, and you were different. I knew right away you had those abilities all of the Travelers talked about, and the abilities I knew I was developing, because I heard the noise around you, and it was louder when I guessed you were doing… things.”

  Interesting. “Noise? What noise?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it. I heard someone playing an instrument at the inn we stayed at, back when I traveled with the weavers. It had strings. That’s the sound I heard, but the noise around you sounded… purer.”

  Stringed instruments that were smooth? Perhaps a violin? “Your Energy sounds like a flute. It’s a beautiful sound, produced by a beautiful soul.”

  She smiled, but it lacked warmth, for she didn’t believe him. “So if we listen well, we can always find each other?”

  He nodded, and then took a deep breath. “I don’t think you can go back to the village.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “I’m dead and buried, and I’m happy to be away from them.”

  “So you should go to Eva.”

  She looked disappointed. “You don’t think we should go to Eva?”

  He sighed. “My place is still here. I know that I’m meant to help this community become what it’s supposed to be. My first and most important mission, though, was to see you safe and out of harm’s way.”

  She bristled. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know that, but it’s far better if you don’t need to do so. Your methods of taking care of yourself would cause a lot of questions to be raised.”

  She considered that. “Will… please, come with me. I… I know how you feel about me.” At his shocked look, she laughed. “I’ve told you for quite some time that I can sense emotions and thoughts, even yours. You can’t hide anything from me. I knew about Eva the instant you got back, knew why you didn’t tell me, knew it was protect me. And I know how you feel about me; your emotions aren’t subtle.” She took a deep breath. “I feel that way about you, too.”

  And there it was. He couldn’t deny what he felt for her, for she knew the truth as well as he did. He knew how she felt for him as well, for the same reason, though she had stated so out loud. Thus, he couldn’t lie, even if he wanted to lie, and that was something he simply couldn’t do. Not to her.

  It couldn’t be done, though. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t be with her every day, knowing he shouldn’t and couldn’t, because it could mean that Josh and Angel might never come to exist. Given the situation they’d thrown him into, all without telling him the truth, however…

  No, they were his children, and he’d fight for them, even if they’d done him this wrong.

  He refocused on her face. “I was sent to save you, Elizabeth…”

  “You never told me why, though, Will,” she replied. “Why? You said that they thought I was worth saving, but why? How did they know enough about me to decide I was worth saving? Why would they care enough to send someone like you to save someone like me, someone they’d never met? It makes no sense.”

  He’d asked the same question in the future… and his son had suggested that the move had been a mistake. An accident. It was a lie, of course; they’d known who and what he was the entire time. He’d not liked what they’d done.

  He made his decision. “They knew who you were, Elizabeth, and knew you to be worth saving, because to them, it was literally a matter of life and death as to whether or not you survived your treatment in that village.”

  He took a deep breath. “They knew all of that, Elizabeth, because the people who sent me to save you…they’re your children.”

  XXVI

  Reunion

  Elizabeth’s face was one of baffled incomprehension. As the implications of Will’s statement permeated her mind, a truth she could affirm with her own empathy and telepathy skills, she sagged back to the ground and curled up. Will was hit with a broadside of overwhelmed emotions as her breathing hastened, sounding much like one hyperventilating.

  Will was surprised that his own reaction to his statement was one of relief. He no longer needed to hide who he was from Elizabeth; she’d know he’d come from the future if he’d been sent by her children. He gave her the space she needed to reach a degree of acceptance. The notion of time travel had been difficult for him to accept, and he’d grown up reading books based on the topic. In this era, where traveling machines of any type, save those pulled by a horse, were unimaginable, it had to be a much more difficult concept to grasp. He would allow her all the time she needed.

  Gradually, he heard her breathing stabilize, and she was simply silent. A few moments later, she sat up. He looked at her in anticipation, wondering if this was the emotion that Adam, Fil, and Angel had experienced as they’d made their own time travel revelation to him. It was far more difficult on this side; he knew the truth of it, and all was dependent on her acceptance of the truth.

  She finally turned to look at him, took a deep breath, and asked her question.

  “Who is their father, Will?” Her eyes suggested she knew the answer.

  Will lowered his head. “It’s not important.”

  He could feel her eyes flashing. “Not important? It’s very important! I can’t risk their existence by choosing incorrectly.”

  Will smiled faintly. “You aren’t questioning if I’m telling the truth? You do realize what it means, if your children sent me to save you, right?” He finally raised his head and faced her again, refusing to back down from her withering gaze.

  She smiled back. “You may have forgotten… someone’s taught me to develop my Energy skills. You couldn’t successfully lie to me even if you wanted to, Will. Somehow, through some form of magic I can’t imagine, you lived in my future and came back to me. My children are the ones who made it happen. I can’t quit now, not if I’m to give birth to children able to figure out how to accomplish something like that.” Her gaze narrowed. “If they’re capable of something like that, though, I rather suspect that their father must be rather special as well.”

  Will said nothing.

  “How far into the future did you live, Will? How far back to you have to travel to come to me?”

  He grimaced. “Your children won’t be born for a very long time.”

  “After you were born? Or before?”

  Intelligent women could certainly be a curse. “After.”

  She sighed. “I suspect I’ll have plenty of time to figure out the answers.” Her face suddenly filled with mischief. “Perhaps when I leave this place I can find a good man to settle down with, who’ll help me create these future children…”

  His eyes flashed with anger at the idea, and he realized she had her confirmation.

  He groaned.

  “I suspect my children were adults when they sent you back to me?”

  Will nodded.

  “What were their names?”

  He hadn’t been expecting that question, and he stepped back, almost as if he’d been hit. “What?”

  “What were the names of my children?”

  Now she was teasing him. It gave him an odd sense of comfort, for it meant that she was healed enough emotionally to derive humor in such a fashion. “Your son’s name was Joshua Phillip. I did not know our daughter until she was fully grown. Her name was Angel, and she looked exactly like you. Including the red hair.”

  She looked at him, and he could feel the sadness from her. “Why didn’t you know her until she was fully grown? Why only Joshua?”

  “They rescued me from three men who wanted to kill me and pulled me into the future, and then sent me here. She hadn’t yet been born when that rescue happened; I didn’t know she existed when the grown-up Angel rescued me from my own tormentors.”

  “You don’t know her middle name?”

  “I didn’t ask. I found out who they were right before they sent me here. Mere seconds before, actually. They hid who they were from me. I
didn’t want to do the same thing to you.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if this made perfect sense. He watched her as she worked through the details, reminding him of their first meeting in the future, when she saw him reviewing plans for a walled, gated community, and told him exactly what was wrong with it. It was that same look of calculation, an expression of deep concentration, that told him that she was examining every detail, developing a thorough understanding.

  “Can we go back to your time, in the future? To have our children?”

  Ouch. “The means… they were destroyed. We cannot go back the way I came.”

  She considered this, and nodded. “I’m going to live for a very long time.”

  He nodded.

  “How long?”

  He looked into her eyes, trying to assess her readiness for the news, and then realized he was judging her again. “At least a thousand years.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes widened, her face telling the story. She knew it would be long enough for any children they’d have to grow to adulthood, so it had to be several decades. And yet if he knew they were to be together, but was sending her away while he remained behind, he clearly must know nothing happened for a while. She was already nearly twenty years old; their children must both be nearly that old or older before they’d be capable of developing the ability to send Will back in time. Will was in no danger that he couldn’t handle right now, no matter how many men came after him. She’d rationalized that it would be several decades before he’d start his trip back to her. She never questioned how she could live so long; perhaps, even now, she sensed that she’d live a long time, though probably not a thousand years or more.

  She also hadn’t asked how long she’d lived after giving birth to their children. The reality was that he himself didn’t truly know the answer to that, didn’t know if, in the future he’d visited, she’d still been alive.

  She accepted her future destiny, much as he had. “I will wait for you, Will, until it is our time. There is no hurry, is there, if one has that much time to live?”

  “I suppose not. I will visit with you, of course. And Eva as well. You should go to her as soon as you can.”

  “She knows that I’m coming?”

  He nodded. “She suspected that at some point, circumstances would lead you to leave those walls forever and at that point, the two of you could reunite. She loves you like a daughter, Elizabeth. You’ll finally know what it means to live in a home where you’re truly loved.”

  Her glance was full of meaning, one that suggested another alternative to forming a home, but she said nothing.

  “We do need to get you moving. They will know that I need some time alone to grieve, but eventually many will wonder why I am away for so long.”

  Elizabeth nodded. She moved with a grace one would never suspect of one who had nearly died only a day earlier, and had come close to dying again earlier this day. They left the cave, walking through the forest. Will’s senses were on full alert, constantly scanning their surroundings for any sign of human activity. It would do neither of them any good for a member of the community to see him walking through the forest with a woman they thought they’d buried that morning.

  That thought gave him pause, and he stopped. “We need to work on your appearance.”

  She gave him an amused look, masked by a scowl. “You look lovely as well.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t express that very well, did I? Your hair, in particular, makes you very notable. I don’t know if red hair is very common in these parts, but it’s something that identifies you very clearly to this village. It wouldn’t take long for people to mention seeing a lovely young woman with red hair. Eventually, the Traders would probably hear about it, and word would get back to Arthur. The hair… it needs to be a different color.”

  She sighed. “That’s a wonderful idea, Will. But how do I change that? I was born with this hair color. I cannot change it, Will. It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible, Elizabeth. I arrived here taller than the man you see before you, yet that changed. You can change the color of your hair; it’s a matter of choosing it.”

  “Like my mother’s. Like Eva’s.” There was no hesitation; she wanted to look like the two women she most admired, the two women who’d been willing to sacrifice their lives to protect hers.

  “Move that warmth, that Energy, so that it covers all of your hair, and imagine it changing to that color, and it will. That’s the thing about Energy; what you can do with it is truly limited only by what you can imagine and the amount of Energy you can build up.”

  She acted without hesitation, her trust in his guidance total. He watched as the flaming red hair slowly lightened, the red becoming yellow and finally white, and the transformation was complete. He choked up very suddenly; she now looked just like he remembered her from his younger days, before time travel threw his whole world out of focus.

  “Did it work?” she asked.

  “It most certainly did,” he replied. They began moving again, and passed a small stream. She stopped to look at her reflection, making as if to pause only briefly, but she stopped. She stood there for several moments, and then knelt down in the grass, continuing to look at the reflected image.

  “I miss you, Mom,” she whispered. She glanced up at Will, her face damp. “I look just like her. I know you didn’t know her, Will, but with the hair now a match, I look just like her. I can look at my reflection now and remember her. And I can remember that she’s the parent I want to emulate.”

  She took one more glance into the water, took a deep breath, and stood. “I’m ready. For the first time in my life, I know things are going to be better tomorrow than they were today. You’ll help me to be sure that’s the case.” Her face was still damp, but there was a new fire in her eyes, a belief that her life was going to get better. Seeing her mother’s face in her own reflection seemed to steel and ground her. “I need you to know something, something nobody else knows now. They all know about the zirple root, but none of them know about the berry. It’s called morange, Will. Morange berries. They’ll make you horribly sick for a while, but it’s less painful each time you take it. Don’t use it every day. You need to take thirty each time; it will seem terribly painful, but you must struggle through it.”

  He nodded at her. “Thank you for telling me. I know it’s something you’ve not been eager to share.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I didn’t want any of them understanding it or finding out. You never needed it for yourself; no sense giving them another person they might find it from. Now, though? You may need that information when I leave.” She glanced at him. “I’m glad that you know.”

  “Me, too.”

  They walked along the stream, one Will hadn’t seen before in his visits to the woods, until they came to the edge of the forest. He closed his eyes. “I can sense Eva’s Energy. To me, it sounds like a—”

  “Harp.” Elizabeth grinned at his look of surprise. “I’ve heard it before, too. It’s never been quite so loud as yours, and I can’t sense it now, but I’ve heard it.”

  Will spread his Energy to Elizabeth, and then reached out with it to Eva, setting up a telepathic three-way conversation. Eva, can you hear us?

  Her response was nearly immediate. Will? Is that you? Is Elizabeth with you?

  I’m here, Eva.

  There was an audible sound of relief from Eva, and Will felt as if the breeze which kicked up at that moment was somehow tied to Eva’s doubtless audible exhalation. I was so worried. I had a terrible dream yesterday, Elizabeth. I dreamt that they had all hurt you, that you had died, and I feared I’d never see you again.

  Will put his hand out to steady Elizabeth, who had reeled at the memory the words evoked. That wasn’t a dream, Eva. Arthur threatened her in front of everyone, and Elizabeth let loose with a burst of Energy that knocked him backwards. The entire community became fearful and attacked her. We are very fortunate she’s still here. All of them thi
nk she is dead, and that I am grieving privately at this time. I must return, but before that I must be certain that Elizabeth reaches you. I can teleport her to you.

  There was a noticeable pause, and Will wondered if they’d lost her. You don’t want to do that, Will. If someone new is suddenly inside these walls, it will raise suspicions. She needs to travel here in a traditional manner, arrive at the gates, and enter in that fashion, fully visible. She will stand out because of her hair, but she will still fit in better than if she is suddenly… here.

  Elizabeth chuckled. The hair won’t be an issue any more. It looks like yours now. It looks like Mother’s now.

  Will became aware of someone approaching. His senses suggested it was someone he’d met before, but he couldn’t place the emotions, couldn’t tell if it was friend or foe. We have a problem, Eva. I can tell you’re a great distance away, farther than we can comfortably walk. I need to return to the community to begin the rebuilding process, and Elizabeth needs to get to you. While I know she’s capable of taking care of herself, I’d be more comfortable knowing she was with someone else. Are you able to come to her?

  Elizabeth turned to Will, her face full of concern. They could hear the clatter of hooves growing louder, and closer, and the unknown identity of the rider made them fearful. Instinctively, they moved back into the fringe of the forest for cover.

  I can’t, Will. I am only now establishing myself here, and if I was to leave for several days and return I would be viewed with suspicion, especially if I suddenly returned with my daughter. Elizabeth smiled at this statement. This is a very secretive place. It is not exactly like our village, but similar, and they are wary of outsiders.