by Lizzy Ford
“Gi?” The alarmed note in my mom’s voice drew me away from my moment of relief.
I hurried to the foyer and found her standing opposite three Komandi, who were glaring at her while she looked ready to call the police. They, too, were soaked and frowning.
“Caretaker,” one of them boomed when I came into view. “We have not seen your kind in several winds. Where have you been?”
My brow furrowed. By the way Carey had talked, there was more than one portal. Was it possible this was the only one they knew of? Or was I missing something? Had closing one portal shut them all? “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now,” I replied.
“We need food and rest,” another of the blunt warriors snapped.
“I know. Follow me.”
“You can understand them?” my mom was looking at me in surprise.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I’ll explain everything. I promise.” I led the Komandi down the hallway and to their rooms.
“I smell the Woli we were tracking,” one of the Komandi growled.
“She’s here,” I said. “But this is neutral space, remember?”
“We made the rules from the Discovery, Caretaker,” another said, amused. “Unlike the cursed Nidiani, we will abide by them and continue our hunt tomorrow when we leave your world.”
“Hunt?” I asked uneasily. I paused beside one door and opened it, pushing the door wide. “Aren’t you allies?”
One of the Komandi entered, and I moved slowly towards the second room.
“The alliance broke several winds ago,” he answered.
Ugh. I never fully understood the tumult of their worlds, but I didn’t want anyone to be at war with anyone else, either. It wasn’t my business, I didn’t think. I was supposed to provide refuge and neutral ground.
But it had always bothered me to know there were issues requiring both.
I opened a second bedroom door. The second Komandi entered, leaving me with the speaker.
“What of the Tili?” I asked and braced myself for more bad news.
“What of our cousins?” he asked.
“Um … are they well? Still your allies?”
“Of course.”
I opened the third door for him. He strode in without a look at me and closed it before I could ask him anything else.
“Damn Komandi,” I muttered, disappointed I wouldn’t have the ability to pester him with the questions I was burning to ask.
At least I had confirmation from two of the Five Peoples that the Tili were alive. Releasing a deep breath, I felt more upbeat than I had in a long time.
I left the guest wing. My step slowed as I walked to the kitchen, and I debated how to tell my mom about the magic of this place when I barely understood it.
My thoughts quickly slid into the internal exhilaration racing through me. Against the odds, without really knowing what I was doing, I’d managed to reestablish a way station for aliens. I was an official Caretaker, even if I didn’t entirely know for certain that was how I wanted to spend my life or what all the rules of doing so were. My former Caretaker would probably be pissed I wasn’t a complete screw up, and that, too, made me happy.
Best of all, the Tili hadn’t been destroyed. All I had to do was wait for one of them to come through the portal so I could ask about Teyan. Relief didn’t describe the sense of release I experienced when I let go of this fear.
Reaching the kitchen, I saw my mom dutifully prepping plates for our strange guests.
I wasn’t going to treat her the way the Caretaker had treated me and hide everything. My mom deserved to know. But how did I explain this place? It was magic to me, no matter what the Caretaker had claimed about it being more along the lines of an advanced scientific phenomenon. Grappling with an explanation that wasn’t going to sound as if I belonged in a mental institution, I decided to go with the simple truth, or what I understood of it.
“I need to tell you something, Mama,” I said slowly as I entered. “It’s going to sound a little crazy.”
She glanced at me quizzically. “What is it, Gi?”
“I want to tell you where I was for ten years.”
Her hands lowered to her sides, and her gaze was riveted to me.
I took a deep breath and began.
Chapter Fifteen
In my eagerness to host the otherworldly beings, I had forgotten how unfriendly they could be.
The next morning, the Woli left without breakfast, and the Komandi filled two satchels with homemade bread and bagels before departing. No one spoke or thanked my mom for the homemade food or even said farewell. I had never really liked the Komandi, but this wasn’t in line with my interactions with the Woli. Often guarded, the Amazonian warrior women had seemed curious about me when we crossed paths before, if not open and somewhat friendly.
My mom and I watched them walk down the driveway and disappear once they reached the road. I sneaked a glance at her, wondering what was going through her mind. She wore the same expression of shock she gave me last night when I initially explained everything to her. I almost sighed. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who found all this incredibly weird. The Caretaker had brushed off my shock and awe, or flat out denied anything was happening, and acted like I was an idiot.
Seeing my mom’s reaction was a form of vindication to the dead Caretaker. I wasn’t the weird one here – she had been.
Uncertain whether to be disappointed or satisfied by my first encounters as an official Caretaker, I stared into space until the chilly, rainy morning made me shiver. Neither Woli nor Komandis left me with warm fuzzies about whether or not I was doing this right. My former Caretaker had spent every evening talking to her visitors, sometimes for hours, and these guys had been abrupt and uninterested in socializing at all.
Was I missing something? Supposed to do something differently?
“I didn’t think the desert got cold,” my mom said. “Come inside, Gi.”
I trailed her into the house. We lingered in the foyer, and I closed the door behind us.
“So this is what you did before you disappeared?” my mom asked. “Dealt with unfriendly aliens?” She had begun to decorate for Christmas and paused to straighten a faux pine garland that had shifted when a gust of wind came through the open door.
“Mostly. Some of them are nice but they have, like, wars or something going on, so they can be kind of abrupt,” I replied.
“Wars against monsters,” she repeated skeptically from our discussion last night.
I nodded, my cheeks warm. I knew how crazy it sounded, but it was the truth as I understood it. I’d told her everything I could recall, except … well, I only spoke about Teyan in passing. I was afraid to feed any sort of emotion about a man who probably didn’t remember me after so long. I didn’t want her asking me about him when the thought of him caused my pulse to race and simultaneously confused me.
The rest of the universe had moved on, but I couldn’t. It was even harder to cope with what had happened whenever I thought of him and what might have been, had we followed a normal progression of time.
“French toast?” my mom asked.
“Sure,” I said.
I pulled out the journal I bought during our latest run to town and made a note of the time. I’d jotted down the tiny bits of information I’d learned last night from the visitors, adding it to the initial notes I made about my first few weeks here. I was determined to figure out everything I possibly could about their worlds, and my duty, in place of a manual or guidance from Carey or another Caretaker.
When I was done, I tucked it away in my back pocket and went to the kitchen.
The day passed much as the previous one had, with morning chores and time spent in the garden harvesting fruits and vegetables and weeding.
No visitors came this night. Or the next. Or for the next several.
The gentle routine of our new life helped remove the dark circles from beneath my mom’s eyes within a few days, as if the magic of this place
were able to reverse the damage the past decade did to her. I prayed nightly it was healing her inside as well as out.
The brusque, short exchanges I had with our first set of visitors helped me, too. With the knowledge I hadn’t destroyed anyone’s planet firmly cemented in my mind, I found it easier to focus on the day to day without constantly looking over my shoulder. It didn’t seem possible I’d ever fully recover from the attack when I was seventeen, but the more I threw myself into my chores, the less I thought of that night.
My dreams prevented me from appreciating my new bed as much as I should have. I couldn’t distract my mind at night. My mom’s features were brightening with every day she spent here, while the circles beneath my eyes were becoming darker.
I awoke four days after our visitors came to the sound of Christmas music playing somewhere in the house. Dressing quickly, I left my room and followed the cheerful sound through the house to the kitchen, where my mom was making breakfast and humming along to the music.
I seated myself at the breakfast bar, watching her. The house smelled heavenly – of cinnamon, cookies and other fantastic baked foods – in addition to waffles. The holidays always reminded me of my father and how he and my mom used to cook together on the weekends in December leading up to Christmas.
I missed him. Technically speaking, twenty years had passed since his death. The amount of time between now and when I’d last seen him was twice what it had been, and this saddened me for reasons that didn’t make sense. He seemed so much further away when I viewed his passing in this light. It wasn’t fair that a portal between worlds existed, but I could never see him again.
“Hello, baby girl!” my mom sang. She turned down her music. By her smile, her thoughts weren’t as melancholy as mine. I wished in that moment I could be more like her – more grateful for the blessings in my life and less afraid of everything that had, and would, happen.
“Hey, Mama,” I murmured. “That’s a lot of cooking.” I eyed the cooling racks filled with different kinds of cookies and the double ovens, which contained what looked like cakes.
“Just in case.”
I snorted, uncertain what she was expecting. She brought me waffles topped with homemade whipped cream, and then sat down with me to eat.
Halfway through our meal, we heard a knock at the front door.
I froze and cocked my head with a glance at the time. It wasn’t the usual time of day for the visitors to arrive.
“Must be humans,” my mom spoke my thoughts aloud.
I laughed, unable to help it when I saw her baffled expression. “Maybe they smelled your cookies all the way in town.” I stood and left the kitchen for the front door.
Opening it, I gasped in excitement.
“Hello, Caretaker,” Carey said, smiling.
“Where did you go? Why didn’t you come back or try to call me?” I demanded, not waiting for him to enter before I pounded him with questions.
“I’ll explain everything,” he promised, golden eyes glowing. His gaze went to the interior. “This house is amazing! It reminds me of … hello, there.” He stopped, focused on some point behind me.
I turned to see my mom had followed me. Introducing them quickly, I waved Carey in and closed the door behind him.
“She knows about this,” I said quickly before rounding on him again. “I have so many questions for you. How –”
“The man is drenched, Gi. Let’s get him something to warm him up first,” my mom chided with a smile.
I swallowed the encyclopedia of questions I had and glanced over Carey, realizing she was right. I’d thought I would be angry when I saw him again, but I was thrilled instead. Finally, I’d get some answers!
“I’m afraid I’m not dressed for the rain,” Carey said. “I thought it was supposed to be nice and sunny in the desert in winter.”
“Me, too,” my mom said. “I’ve got a pot of coffee brewing and enough bread and cookies to fill you up for a week.”
Carey’s smile was wide. “I’ve never said no to a cookie, ma’am.”
We trailed her into the kitchen. It was everything I could do not to pace or fidget watching him get settled and listening absently to their small talk. I was ready to explode, and no one else seemed to feel my sense of urgency. For the first time in six months, I had someone to answer my questions, to tell me if I were on the right track, and he was discussing gingerbread houses with my mom.
Finally, when I was certain I couldn’t take sitting silent and still any longer, Carey sat back from the table and met my gaze.
“You did an amazing job with this place,” he said.
“It was here when we arrived,” I replied in a clipped tone.
“That’s how it works. The house always reflects the Caretaker, era and location in which the door exists. New Caretaker, new house.”
“That’s nice,” I said without paying any attention to what he said. “We need to talk, Carey.”
“I’ll leave you two alone,” my mom said.
I nodded, focus on Carey. “Where did you go?”
He averted his gaze. His smile faded. “I went to the Council,” he began. “They were understandably freaked out by everything and had been in a state of emergency for ten years. No one could find either of us and this door disappeared, while the other portals were closed. I’m lucky they didn’t force me to stay longer.”
“Where is this Council?” I asked. “No, wait. I can wait for that answer. We had visitors this week, and they told me I didn’t destroy any of the worlds. At least locking the door didn’t hurt anyone.”
He nodded. “I heard that as well. No door had ever been locked, so no one knew what to expect. The portals usually operate on their own schedule, without interference from anyone. They are miniscule tears in the fabric of space and time and open and close at different points in time. It was theorized, if one were forced closed by locking it, time would change along the timeline of the person nearest the door. We actually proved that. It’s probably the only good thing to come of this. No one has to wonder what happens when the door is locked.”
“We proved what?” I asked impatiently.
“Well, we didn’t get launched a thousand years into the future or a million into the past,” he said. “We stayed within your lifetime.”
“I didn’t know the door could open in different times,” I murmured. “It was possible for us to end up in the dinosaur era?”
“In theory, yeah. But the door appears to be bound to the energy and existence of the person who is assigned to it. The fact the house rebuilt itself, once we unlocked the door, seems to prove this as well. There is nothing predictable about when the portals open, only where. This place is a fixed point. No matter what era it is, the door will open here,” he said patiently with a smile.
“I’m sorry. Science isn’t really my thing,” I said. “Why hasn’t anyone told me this stuff? Don’t I need to know it to become an official Caretaker? Is there some sort of Caretaking 101 class that covers the basics of magic time traveling physics?”
“Sort of. It’s more of a mentorship program. We didn’t have time to teach you what you needed to know when you were apprenticed.”
“Was I ever even apprenticed?” I challenged. “Because I don’t remember anyone telling me I was.”
“The former Caretaker had a very unusual way of doing things,” he admitted. “She would often test her apprentices for months before she took them on officially. The fact you’re here, now, means you were supposed to become one of us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I didn’t feel as much like a mistake when he explained it this way. “So we didn’t end up in the dinosaur era, and we didn’t go too far into the future. You think it’s because the door is connected to me, and this is good,” I said with a frown.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said. “The short version is that time aligns itself, in a way, based on its connection to you and correlation to the events that did or didn’t happen
during the period of time when the door was locked. I can’t explain why we ended up ten years into your future, except there must be a reason for us to be when we are. It’s likely we’ll never know what reason, since the universe doesn’t exactly send emails telling us about the bigger picture.”
“That part I get. The universe loves to mess with me.” I shook my head. Growing frustrated, I wasn’t certain what I wanted to understand more: the mechanics or why he hadn’t contacted me. “You learned all that from mentoring?”
“I did,” he said.
I really didn’t have a clue – but I wanted to learn now that this had become my reality. “I believe you,” I said at last. “It’s going to take some time for it all to make sense to me. Is the Council going to fire me for locking the door?”
“I wouldn’t worry about them. You weren’t officially apprenticed until a few days before the incident. There was no way for you to know the consequences of your actions.”
“And I don’t really care what they think anyway,” I added. The idea of never seeing Teyan again left me close to a panic attack. “I didn’t ask for any of this. But if they’re going to fire me, I need to know the Five Peoples and … my friends … are safe first.”
“I think re-establishing the way station will be enough to appease them. It’s very difficult to find Caretakers. We’re a rare breed.”
“I thought we were just chosen by another Caretaker or sent across the country randomly for probation.”
“There’s more to it than that!” He laughed. “I don’t know who put you here, but I’d bet my world that a Caretaker was involved, and it was a concerted recruitment effort that saw you relocated exactly here.”
My eyebrows went up. I hadn’t considered the judge or my attorney or probation officer might have been a Caretaker. It made sense, since my attorney claimed no one in my situation had ever been assigned outside of New York for probation.
