A Warp in Time

by Jude Watson

  “He’s almost out of reeds,” Javi explained. “For his oboe. The vibration of the reed inside the instrument makes the music. Very cool.”

  “We brought lots of reeds on the trip,” Hank said. “We were afraid one would break in the parade, so we all brought extra. All the woodwinds in the band. I was able to find all the reed cases from the plane. One reed lasts about two weeks if you’re lucky, sometimes three if I don’t play very much. I kept thinking I’d be able to make new ones, but so far, no luck. I’m down to maybe ten good reeds now.”

  “I don’t know much about music,” Molly said.

  Hank held up the plant. It was long and spiky at the end. “This is the closest I could get to cane. I know how to take care of reeds; I just never made one.” He pushed his long hair out of his eyes. “It’s not easy,” he admitted. “I can’t get the response I need. If I can’t play the oboe, we’re down to percussion and flute and some brass. It just won’t sound the same.”

  “I guess that’s important?” Molly asked. She stirred impatiently. She didn’t want to talk about oboes; she wanted to ask about the boy in the hut.

  “Music keeps us together,” Hank said. “It just … keeps us sane, I guess. And it protects us. It lures the birds for food, keeps away jawbugs.” He continued to work on the long, stiff plant. “Kimberly has been teaching me the piccolo. I’m not that good at it.”

  “I get it,” Javi said. “Engineering is our music. Figuring out how something works, or how to make something work better, is what we do. I really miss coding for the ROS. Basically a bot is software, the robot is hardware. But the skills are basic, right? See a problem, try stuff, solve the problem.”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying,” Hank said.

  “Oh right.” Javi looked abashed. No doubt he’d just remembered that a computer was the size of a room in Hank’s time. “Doesn’t matter,” he added with his genial grin. “Just engineering stuff. It just means I get it. I think I would have lost it if every day we didn’t have something to figure out, or something to fix.”

  Javi waved in the general direction of the woods. “If you let go of the awful stuff, like the crash and people dying and everything? You’ve got an engineer’s dream out there.”

  “I see what you mean,” Hank said. He lifted a reed out of a small dish of water and fitted it into the oboe.

  “Hank’s friend Cal played the clarinet,” Javi said to Molly.

  “The one who died?” Molly asked.

  “He didn’t die,” Hank said. “We never said that. I just changed the subject because … ” He concentrated on the oboe. “Anyway. He was bitten by a big beak and … his mind isn’t right.”

  “He’s the one in the hut,” Molly said. “You lock him up.”

  “No! He just gets sort of crazy sometimes. He’s the one who likes to stay in there.”

  Hank blew into his oboe experimentally. A high, almost tuneless sound came out, and he sighed. “Not good.”

  Suddenly, a bellow came from the hut. “Ratio!”

  A shadow passed over Hank’s face. “It’s Cal. Sometimes he likes the music, sometimes he gets upset.”

  “Can we meet him?” Javi asked.

  Molly hoped Hank would say no. She didn’t want to meet Cal. She didn’t want to look in his eyes again. The eyes of something not human.

  “It’s okay,” she said quickly. “We don’t have to—”

  But Hank was already rising and heading to the door. “Come on, then,” he said.

  Cal sat against the wall. Javi nearly choked. There was a pulsing green line down his cheek like a scar. Smaller lines spread out from it and disappeared under his shirt.

  It was the color of Molly’s rash. The rash she didn’t think he saw.

  Cal ignored Javi and stared at Molly. He held up a wristwatch with a cracked face. “Tick-tock, tick-smash,” he said.

  “My watch,” Hank said. “Cal broke it. It was our only way of telling time.”

  Cal began to drum his fingers on the floor. “Not all sounds operate with the same ratio system.”

  “Cal, this is Molly and Javi,” Hank said. His voice was flat. It was clear to Javi that it was painful for Hank to see his old friend.

  “Music, noise, music, noise,” Cal said.

  Hank shook his head. “Here he goes.”

  “Four, five, six. Two five six is not the frequency. Chromatic, diatonic, chromatic, diatonic,” Cal said.

  “What does it mean?” Molly asked.

  Hank’s mouth twisted. “Nothing. It’s just everything in his brain that’s all mashed up comes out in pieces. Chromatic and diatonic are scales.”

  “What does it mean,” Cal repeated flatly. It wasn’t a question so much as an echo. He leaned forward, his eyes locked on Molly’s. “Triple diatonic nonchromatic tempered untempered! Just find the frequency sequence! Maintenance is in damage mode! Intruder!”

  “She’s not an intruder, Cal,” Hank said.

  Dana pushed through the door, a mug and plate in her hands. “What are you doing? You’re upsetting him!” She turned to Hank accusingly.

  Hank held up two hands. “Fine. I’m leaving.”

  “Don’t worry, Cal,” Dana said in a soothing voice. “I have your breakfast. Tea. Fruit. See?”

  Cal turned to Dana. For one instant only, Javi saw something in Cal’s eyes. Something broke through, some sort of human feeling. Cal held out his hand for the tea.

  “She’s just like me,” he said to Dana.

  Dana patted his shoulder. “Right.” She looked up at the others. “We should go. He’s calm when he’s alone.”

  Cal hit the ground hard in an odd rhythm. “Four five six are not the ratios!”

  Javi followed Dana out the door.

  “Why do you keep him in the hut like that?” he asked her. For some reason, he felt like crying.

  “We don’t force him!” Dana exclaimed. “But there were a few times when he got kind of … violent. He broke Hank’s watch. And nearly broke his own clarinet. He basically just tried to rip it to pieces. He was going after my flute when Hank stopped him. It was awful. I don’t think Hank has forgiven him for it.” Dana hugged herself against the dawn chill. “It’s so sad,” she said. “He used to be this really smart, fun person. He and Hank grew up together. Best friends since they were little.”

  “BFFs,” Javi said. Then he realized that Dana had no idea what that meant. “Best friends forever,” he explained.

  “BFF.” Dana tried it out. “Yes. Good one. Anyway, the … accident happened soon after we got here. Hank and Cal volunteered to go past the stream, try to make it up the ridge. They were gone for weeks. We thought they were dead. They got lost and then they were attacked by what you call the triple D. Hank barely made it back—he had to half carry Cal for miles. Cal ran this horrible fever for days.”

  Javi nodded. So had Molly. Dread was snaking up his spine.

  “Then when he was better, he said he wasn’t in pain. The wound was glowing green, and we just kept putting antiseptic gel from that plant on it. He seemed better. Back to himself. And then, I don’t know, he started to change. I can’t explain it. At first it was hard to tell. It was little things. It was more like a feeling … something was wrong.”

  “Yeah,” Javi said. He swallowed against the lump in his throat.

  “Hank really noticed it because they were close. And one day … Cal just cracked. He was never the same after that.”

  Dana shook her head and looked out at the woods. “You know what? We lost good friends here. Dave lived down the street from me. We held hands in third grade. I mean, those deaths were horrible. I saw Dave die.” Her chin trembled. “But seeing Cal like this? It’s almost worse.”

  Now Dana was crying, and Javi didn’t know what to do. It made him want to cry, too. Over Dana’s shoulder, he saw Molly emerge from the hut.

  She looked shaken. Lost. She looked past Javi as if he weren’t even there.

  There was a place right by her
and Kira on the log, flat and dry, but Yoshi took his bun and tea and stood by the fire instead, his back to them. Why did he do that? What was he thinking? It was almost like he was angry at her.

  Anna chewed on a bun, made from ground seeds and fruit, which Dana had grilled over the fire. It was flat and chewy, but it wasn’t bad. The tea, made from dried nettles and flowers, would have been delicious if only she liked the taste of meadow.

  As she ate the seed bun (judging by the chew factor, this could go on all morning), Anna relived the moment when Hank had called her stupid. She wanted to chuck her bun at his head, but that might give him a concussion.

  It was a terrible thing to be called stupid. Sometimes people say it if you don’t raise your hand in class, or if you prefer sitting alone in the cafeteria. And when you’re called stupid, it’s easy to begin to think you’re stupid somewhere deep inside. Then, no matter how many good grades you rack up in school, you never really feel smart.

  Javi was on his third bun and was talking to Stu and Drew. Akiko was playing a melody on her flute while Kimberly joined in on the piccolo. Kira was sketching.

  Anna leaned over to watch Kira draw. She never minded if Anna peeked. Kira was sketching the net hung between the trees. It was a detailed drawing, with cross-hatching on the trunks and the leaves rendered delicately.

  “Good,” Anna said.

  “Thanks,” Kira said. Then she said something in Japanese. Akiko overheard her and lowered her flute. She frowned, then looked up at the trees.

  “Yoshi!” Anna called. “Can you translate?”

  Yoshi didn’t look happy to be interrupted from staring into space. Kira repeated herself.

  “She said things don’t quite match here,” he said.

  “What does she mean?”

  A long burst of Japanese from Kira, and Akiko chimed in. They talked excitedly to Yoshi.

  Yoshi shrugged. “They don’t know.”

  Anna shook her head. “If you’re going to translate, why don’t you try actually telling me what they say?”

  “I am telling you!”

  “No!” Kira blew out an exasperated breath. She pointed her finger at Yoshi. “You’re fired.”

  She reached down and picked up a leaf, then held it against her page. Quickly, she sketched a leaf next to it. Then she stabbed her pencil at it.

  Anna leaned closer. She suddenly saw what Kira meant, and what had been bothering her in the woods.

  “That’s it! That’s what I saw, only I didn’t realize I saw it! It’s asymmetrical! Look at how the blades are attached to the stalk. They aren’t opposite each other. And the veins are all over the place. This is … very unusual. Symmetry is almost always part of nature’s design. Nature prefers thing simple. I wonder … ”

  Anna closed her eyes, trying to remember. Was that what had fascinated her about the insect? Were the wing markings, unlike those on a butterfly, asymmetrical?

  “The place looked almost normal,” she said. “But it violates the laws of nature just as much as our devices. These mutations … it’s like the living things are carbon-based, but the DNA is twisted in really weird directions.”

  “Look, everything about this place is screwy, from the moment we landed,” Yoshi said impatiently. “If we stopped to try to figure out every bizarre spectacle we see, we’d stay in one place, just like them. We need to leave, now!” He translated what he said to Akiko and Kira. Akiko answered him, and Anna looked to him for a translation.

  “She says I’m right,” Yoshi said, glaring at Akiko.

  “Try again,” Anna said. “That wasn’t what she said.”

  Another burst of words from Akiko.

  “Okay, okay! She says we don’t know what’s ahead, but if it’s as bad as what’s behind us, we’ll need to be strong. That’s why she agrees with Molly about staying another day. She said … what happened to Oliver knocked us down.”

  Kira nodded. It was like saying his name had thickened the air around them, making it hard to take a breath.

  “Molly says he’s still alive,” Anna said.

  “Right.” Yoshi made it clear he didn’t think so.

  “Anyway, I’d love to get another look at that forest,” Anna said. “Why was Hank so mad at me for leaving yesterday? I wasn’t gone that long. You found me really fast.”

  “Gone a long time,” Kira said.

  Yoshi turned. He spoke to Kira in Japanese, and she answered. Yoshi shook his head, and then questioned Kira closely. Akiko answered him, pointing at the woods and then up to the sky. Anna stirred impatiently. Clearly she needed to know more Japanese words than midori and omoshiroi. “What’s going on?”

  Yoshi turned back to her. “How long do you think you were gone?”

  Anna considered this. She had followed the insect for a very short time. Then she got lost, but she figured that out pretty quickly, and the clock thing with the cones didn’t take too long to accomplish. Then the hog creature who tried to ambush her and the jawbug attack. That part had seemed long, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes.

  “Maybe an hour?”

  “We were gone for five hours,” Yoshi said. “The whole afternoon, in fact. Kira and Akiko say we left after lunch and came back at dusk.”

  “That’s impossible,” Anna said. She looked down at her wrist, where a watch might be if she had one. She looked up for a sun that wasn’t there. But Yoshi was right. She’d wandered off right after lunch and the fire had been burning brightly against the dark gray when they returned. How hadn’t she noticed that?

  “Given that we’re lost in some sort of weird valley where nothing makes sense, maybe we just banish the word impossible from our vocab,” Yoshi said.

  Anna swallowed and tried to laugh. “Yeah.” She tried to wrap her head around losing that much time. Kira was folding her paper into an origami shape, her fingers quick and expert.

  Kira held up the origami crane. She pointed to the folds. “Time.” She twirled the paper creature around.

  “It bends and folds,” Yoshi said. “Thanks, Professor Einstein.”

  “Are you saying we fell into some sort of time fold?” Anna asked, touching the origami crane with a tentative finger.

  Kira shrugged. “Only answer.”

  It made her feel strange, like the world was just this shifting, spongy, elastic, changing, spinning thing that could throw you sideways at any moment.

  Which, of course, it was.

  Since the plane crash, things had moved so fast. There was water to find and food to gather and strange devices to decipher and places they had to get to. Sleep was snatched under an unfamiliar sky. Molly had gotten used to being scared.

  This was different.

  Cal had stopped her before she’d left the hut.

  “Wait.”

  She turned and met his gaze.

  “Memories. Coming fast now. Good, bad. Everyday ordinary, perfect spectacular, horrible terrible.”

  “How did you know?” Molly whispered.

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “Get over what?” Molly asked.

  “Being human.” Cal turned away, swinging the broken watch.

  Now Molly couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.

  How could he know about the memories that kept flooding her here? About the beach in July and a snowstorm on a school day and ice cream after dinner. About a ringing phone in the middle of the night, about a hospital hallway where she watched her mother slide down a wall to crouch with her head in her hands.

  When he said “you’ll get over it,” did he mean she needed to say good-bye to what she felt in those moments? Joy, unimaginable pain. Was she turning … inhuman?

  Or was she just slowly losing her mind?

  Whatever was happening to her, Cal knew. Was she turning into … him?

  She couldn’t leave the compound until she knew. She had to find a way into his mind, like he’d found a way into hers.

  But first she had to tell Hank that
there might be help at the end of the valley. That Oliver had said so. She owed Cal that, she owed all of them.

  Molly sat with her back against a tree. Javi was helping the Cubs pound seeds into paste. Hank was changing water into gel blocks for storage. She watched as Yoshi turned from Akiko, Kira, and Anna and walked toward her, frowning and intent.

  Decisions. When to leave. He was coming to discuss it.

  She knew they had to decide whether to tell the Cubs about the time warp. Was it better to leave them with their seed buns and their music and their belief that Lyndon Baines Johnson was still president? A world whose soundtrack was transistor radios playing the Beatles? Where nobody had invented frozen yogurt (she didn’t think) or knew who Obi-Wan Kenobi was?

  Yoshi crouched down next to her. “We have to go. Today. This morning.”

  “I was thinking tomorrow.”

  “How long were we gone yesterday?”

  “Long enough for me to approach freak-out territory. Maybe four or five hours?”

  “Molly, listen. It felt like less than an hour to me. Anna, too. I think we got caught in some sort of time”—Yoshi hesitated, looking back at where Kira sat sketching—“fold. In the woods out there. Maybe there’s more than one. There are magnetic fields, why couldn’t there be time fields? We’ve seen rings of low gravity, perfect circles with stunted trees. So … places that stop time? That would explain the whole 1965 thing. We’ve got to get out of here. I don’t want to get rescued and find out it’s 2070. Do you?”

  Molly pressed her hands on the ground, needing to feel something solid. “No. But you experienced that time loss in the woods. I think we’re okay here. We can certainly wait another day.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Yoshi shot to his feet. “One more day could be another century! We don’t know how time works here!”

  “It’s just a feeling … I can’t explain it.”

  “You can’t explain it?” Yoshi looked at her, incredulous. “Whatever happened to Molly-logic? ‘Theories’? ‘Conjectures’?” He mimicked Molly’s serious voice. “Now you’re just sitting there … feeling?”

  Yes, because I don’t know how much longer I’ll feel anything at all.