by Michael Shaw
“I’m not faking this, Alex. What did you see?”
He looked at me grimly, and I began to hear something in the distance. Sirens.
I looked down. By his side, Alex held a phone in his left hand. He put it away and spoke with painful deliberation. He hardly even got the words out of his mouth.
“He showed me how my father died.”
The sirens grew closer.
I took a step back from Alex once again. The sirens blared loudly.
“I don’t know if I can call you a friend anymore, Jon,” Alex said tersely. “You’ve lied to me all along.”
I backed up further and further from the graves.
“You kept the truth from me all this time.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I couldn’t pursue it any further. I couldn’t stay here. I had to get out of the graveyard.
Alex stood and watched as I bolted to the perimeter. I stopped when my feet reached the curb. Where’s the yellow Jeep? I scanned the road. This was where I had told Hunter to send someone, but police were coming. There was no more time.
Suddenly, there it was. A bright yellow Jeep pulled up to the curb, and the passenger door immediately opened.
The man inside wasn’t Hunter. Instead, it was someone I had never seen before. He was a guy about my age, sitting in the driver’s seat with one hand on the wheel. Buzzed hair, stark blue eyes. He let go of the handle to the door and leaned back into his seat. “Jon Ashe.”
“Yeah.” I got in and closed the door.
He drove.
Through my rearview mirror, I saw the police as they pulled into the cemetery. They had just barely missed us. We blended into traffic; the police didn’t follow after us.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes; we were on our way. Just like that, this guy I didn’t know had picked me up and was taking me to where Hunter was. Now I could finally see this “Eclipse” company he had always spoken of, and I could get my fake Mark.
What was Alex talking about? I didn’t have any “secret.” What was he saying about our fathers?
I turned to look at the guy. Buzzed hair. A silver bracelet on his wrist. He wore a green cargo jacket over a white t-shirt.
I put my seatbelt on. “Where are we-”
“Shut up,” he demanded.
I did.
∞
After a long silence, the guy finally spoke up. “You used your phone to call us?”
I pulled it out. “Yeah.”
He snatched it from me and rolled the window down.
“Hey,” I interjected. “Wait a second-”
He removed the SIM like I had before, but then he tossed everything out the window.
I slouched in my chair.
He rolled the window back up, and the vehicle returned to silence.
I began to feel it rush over me. Exhaustion. And hunger. I hadn’t eaten for about eighteen hours, now. So much had happened to me in such a condensed period of time, that now sitting in a car, with no one trying to kill, catch, or accuse me of something, I finally let my guard down. My eyelids descended a bit. My head rolled over to my left, and I looked at the man driving. “What’s your name?” I asked in a low voice.
He didn’t answer. Of course.
As my body received its respite, my mind kept moving. I have a clear plan now, I think. David Kemp has a way to open the back part of the watch. It was that claw device that the train ended up running over. The people he works for may have another. I turned my head and looked out the window. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I want to distance myself from them. I can’t give them another chance to capture me. My eyes followed the power lines that hung over the road, stretching from pole to pole. Maybe Eclipse will be able to help.
Howard Miller. Jacob Richards. David Kemp. They were using Luna as a cover, and they were after me. That remained one of the biggest mysteries in this whole thing. Why had the current CEO allowed them, helped them to pursue me? What sort of “situation“ were they in that Patrick Corley would have provided for them to carry out their plans in this way?
I tried to let my mind rest for a moment and put the unanswered questions on hold. I lowered my hands into my pockets, and I felt it. In my left pocket was the card that had fallen out of the watch. It had slipped my mind. I pulled it out and examined it.
The card was round, like a disc, in order to fit into the watch. Thick, like a business card. In fact, that must have been what it was intended to be. Or at least, some sort of product tag.
In bold print on the front were the words “THE TIME TRAVEL POCKET WATCH.” I smirked. Original title, Dad. Then I turned it over to see the back. “George Ashe and Steven Edward.”
Steven Edward? I said to myself. I had never seen that name before. I checked my wallet to compare it with the other names swimming in my head. Peter Simmons: the man killed by police the night my parents died. Daniel Pruitt: the man that had just tried to capture me the night before.
So, this “Steven Edward” was neither of those people. I ran my thumb across the name. Steven Edward. My father created the watch with someone else?
Memories spun around in my mind. Memories of my own that the watch had returned to the forefront of my thoughts, and David Kemp’s memories that the watch had somehow shown me. I wondered why it even did that, why it showed a past event in my mind as though it were a movie. And it wasn’t even consistent; sometimes the pocket watch replayed a memory, and sometimes it didn’t. I did not know what to make of this little clock. I couldn’t even study it yet without a way to look inside.
“You’ve had a rough day, haven’t you Ashe?” The driver asked, breaking the silence once more.
I rubbed my eyes. “To say the least. Yeah.”
He nodded. “We’re almost there.”
We were still in the city. I thought we were going further than this.
“How did you get involved with Eclipse?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
“Is Eclipse like a… black market company?”
“You don’t even know what it is, do you?”
I breathed out. “Not really.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it. You apparently have something Luna wants.” He glanced at me. “Something that can manipulate our temporal reality.”
I looked at him. How did he know that? “What makes you say that?”
He hesitated. “Just wait until we’re there.” He peered over at me. “What’s someone like you doing with a time machine?”
I kept watching him, wondering the same thing. He kept his eyes on the road.
“I mean, what are you going to do with it?”
I scratched my head. “If you already know about it, I guess I could tell what I want to do.”
He nodded.
I hesitated. “I’m going to go back in time to save my parents from dying.”
He frowned. His mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I’m chasing a miracle.”
He took one hand off the wheel and leaned back a bit. “Actually, I… I lost my parents too.” His eyelids sank a bit.
I folded my hands. Adjusted my body to face him. “I’m sorry about that.”
He lost his stern expression. The muscles on his face seemed to loosen. “Why are we so surprised by death?” He asked.
My eyes lowered. I surveyed the red veins in the base of my palm.
“I know that death has always just been a part of life,” he continued. The sun caught the front of the windshield, and he narrowed his eyes. “But how can something that we say is ‘normal’ still seem so unnatural?”
I lowered the sun shade on my side. My fingers gripped the handle in my door.
He let out a deep breath and put his other hand back on the wheel.
“Saying death is a part of life…” I watched my veins, grimacing as they appeared ready to jump out of my skin. “Saying death is a part of life is like saying negative is a part of positive.”
He tilted his head. Our eyes met for just a moment before he looked back at the road.
“Death isn’t a part of life.” I unraveled my fingers. “It’s just the thing that comes after.”
He pursed his lips. “Interesting…”
The car pulled into a parking lot and screeched to a stop. I looked out the window. We were there. A building sat in front of us.
“Cooper,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“My name’s Cooper.”
“Thank you, Cooper.” I pulled on the lever to open the door. “You saved my back out there.”
“So if you go back…”
I stopped.
“If you really can go back, that is,” he shrugged, “what will happen when you change the past?”
I kept my hand rested on the door handle. “Well…” I hadn’t considered all the possibilities yet. What did I really know about time travel? What would the consequences of my actions be?
“If you change the past,” he repeated, “what happens to this present?”
I inhaled, realizing that I had a lot of work to do before I could accomplish my hopes for the past. “I don’t know much, but if I change my own past, I suppose we would find ourselves in a world where this conversation didn’t even happen.”
His eyes drifted off to the side. “Let’s go.” He opened the door and jumped out.
I exited the vehicle and pulled my bags out of the back.
Cooper walked toward the building. I followed after and lugged my bags along, puzzled by what I was getting myself into.
∞
“A storage unit.”
Our destination turned out to be a large public storage building. Cooper got us in with a key and took me to his block. Number 365. I started to feel uncomfortable.
“I thought we were going to Eclipse, not a garage.”
Cooper smirked. “Patience, Ashe. We’re saving your life.”
He kneeled down to unlock the door. “Even Superman needed a place to hide his spacecraft.”
“I was more of a Batman guy myself.”
He pulled the metal door all the way up. “Here we are.”
I stood there, underwhelmed. I saw two objects in the large and otherwise empty room. One was a device that sat on the table. It almost looked like a sewing machine. I tilted my head. That must have been what they used to administer fake Marks, and that was just what I needed. “This isn’t Eclipse, is it?”
“Not exactly.” Cooper walked over to the other object in the room. A large metal door frame, fastened to the wall. It led to no other room; it was just a big rectangle attached to the storage unit. On one side of the frame were two large buttons, red and green. Red was illuminated.
“Are you ready?” Cooper asked.
“Don’t we just need this thing?” I replied, pointing at the Mark machine. “And where’s Hunter?”
He ignored my objections and reached up to the green button. With an open palm, he mashed it down.
Cooper’s question was not as dumb as I had thought.
I wasn’t ready.
Chapter 16
A white light blinded me. I shielded my eyes. “Cooper?”
The word came out of my mouth, but I couldn’t hear it. In fact, I couldn’t hear anything. Everything was white and silent.
I stumbled back until I could feel the wall. “What’s going on?”
The light began to subside, and I started to hear again. I opened my eyes; the room came back into view. Cooper was still standing there, in front of the door frame. The green button was now lit.
I walked toward him, rubbing my eyes. “What was that?”
He turned toward me, stepping away from the door frame. “You’ve discovered that man can time travel. We can do other things, too.” He watched my eyes as I took it all in. “Say goodbye to your comfortable world where rules can’t be broken.”
I stopped when I saw the wall. That is, I saw what had replaced the wall. Behind the door frame was no longer a stretch of metal, but a whole room. I peered in through the doorway, and my mind couldn’t handle what I saw. It was a circular room. Around its walls were other doorways that looked like the one through which I gazed. The door frames were fastened to the wall of the circular room just like the one in the storage room was fastened to the metal wall. I stared long and hard at the thick door frame; it shone white around the edges.
Was this some sort of portal? “What am I looking at, Cooper?”
He stood next to the door frame, shedding a small smile. His hand gestured to the side, reaching in past the door frame. “Welcome to Eclipse Technologies.”
∞
I left my bags on the floor and stepped through the doorway. It didn’t even feel different; it was just like walking into any room.
Cooper followed in from behind me.
Just as I had seen, it was a large, circular room with multiple metal doorways. Each with a red and green button. On all of them, the red button was illuminated. The doorways, save for the one we had just come through, showed nothing but the wall behind them.
I looked back at the doorway, and I saw through to the storage unit on the other side. On this side of the door was another set of buttons; the green one was lit. I stared, amazed. “How is that possible?”
Cooper pressed the red button, and the scene of the room turned white. I shielded my eyes once more. After a moment, the white vanished. All that was left was a concrete wall. He smirked. “The time traveller just asked if portals were possible.”
I continued to take everything in. The whole room was the same gray color; the entire place looked like it was made of concrete.
Cooper walked ahead of me. “People travel forward in time at a second-by-second pace. On the other hand, people travel through space at a step-by-step pace. Your device exploits time so one can travel through it in new ways; our portals exploit space for a similar reason.”
One of the portals opened up, flashing bright once again. A woman walked out of it, heading toward a door to my left. This door was unlike the portals; it was just a normal door. Metal, with a latch on it.
“This is Eclipse?” I asked. My voice echoed in the large chamber. “Where do all these other portals go?”
“This room isn’t Eclipse, Jon.” Cooper led me over to the metal door. “It’s the entrance.”
We entered into a small square room. One door was at the other end; the woman I’d just seen at the entrance exited through it. To the right was a metal table. Waiting in front of us, two guys stood tall. In their hands were black devices that appeared to be scanners. The men almost looked like airport security.
Where am I?
“Empty the pockets,” one said.
Cooper obeyed, walking over to the table and setting his things there. I followed after, putting my wallet down. I reached into my front pocket, just about to touch the watch.
I hesitated.
Everyone stared, waiting for me.
I felt a strange gravity. It was similar to the feeling I always got when the watch took me through a memory. I got an odd premonition about touching it. My veins felt as though they were pulsing.
But this was the only way to move forward. One of the security guys watched me impatiently.
I grabbed the watch to take it out of my pocket. It turned out, my premonitions were right.
I shouldn’t have done that.
∞
Memories flashed before my eyes.
“So everything’s fine, now?” It was January 2038. I sat across from Alex at the Nelson’s kitchen table. He and I were the only two in the room.
“Well, it’s still a day-to-day thing, but…” he smiled. “She’s back at work, so that’s good. Once she got movement in her arms and hands back,” he shrugged, “you know, that’s all you need to use in accounting.”
“That’s good,” I replied, nodding somberly. “Really. I’m glad things are improving.”
He gestured to me. �
�What about you? How are you… feeling?”
I held a hand up. “Don’t worry. I’m not chasing after suspicious characters with scars anymore.”
The scene immediately changed. Now I was in my room. Jason held a box in front of me. An empty necklace box.
“I promise,” I sat on my bed, elbows on my knees, “I have no idea what happened to it.”
“This was your mother’s necklace.” He stood over me. “It has immense sentimental value, not to mention, it’s very expensive. Now I need to know if there was anything that could have led to-”
“Maybe we got robbed.” I held my hands out. “Ever think of that? I don’t even know where you keep Mom’s necklace-”
“There was no sign of a break-in, Jon. That’s how I know it wasn’t a normal robbery.” He closed the box. “Whoever took this came in the same way that you and I do.”
I crossed my arms and shook my head, looking down at the floor.
“I’m not accusing you.” Jason sat down next to me on the bed. “I just need you to remember.” He set the box on my lap. “Think of anyone you’ve had over. Any friends or classmates who may have seen you put the code in.”
He was talking about the front door’s pass code lock. I was never a strong proponent of having one at our house; I preferred regular keys. But I still used the code periodically. Sometimes it was easier to enter the numbers than dig in my back pack for keys.
I tried to remember like Jason asked, but nothing came to mind. I ran my fingers across the top of the necklace box, trying to think back.
My phone lay on the bed, just to the right of my leg; Jason sat to my left. My phone lit up with a new text message. “Hunter: ‘Got a new lead. Haven’t heard from you in a while.’”
I looked back at the box. Hunter, I thought intently. Alex was the only person I brought over to the house consistently, but I tried to remember if Hunter had ever been here.
I blinked. That night that we spied on another possible suspect. That night I brought him into my room. It had only been for a minute. But he was right there when I put the code in for the house.
