by Geonn Cannon
“Children of the Burnt Empire coming back from a hunt,” Ketcham whispered. “Descendants of the people who arrived on the airplane. Future generations of people who most likely haven’t even been born yet.”
“I assume there was some amount of interbreeding with the local tribes.”
Neville said, “That’s normally how it works. A combination of the best genes from both parties. The natives knew how to survive in the forest and the plane passengers were savvy in other ways. It’s part of what makes them so formidable.”
“Their camp must be near here,” Ketcham said. “We could follow them. Forget about changing the past and just stop them here, in the present.”
Dorothy said, “You’re talking about genocide.”
Ketcham shrugged. “I’m suggesting the slaughter of people who shouldn’t exist in the first place. If we succeed in closing the anomaly, they’ll never be born. What’s the difference?”
“The amount of blood on our hands,” Dorothy said.
Neville shook his head. “Ketcham is correct. The end result would be the same.”
“Not for the people who were killed when the plane crashed. Not for the tribes that have been wiped out by the Burnt Empire in the centuries since they arrived.”
“The loss of those primitives will hardly affect the rest of the world,” Neville grumbled.
Dorothy grimaced. “A lovely point of view. We simply have no way of knowing how the world was affected the anomaly. By the loss of life, by the countless tribes being wiped out. There could be consequences we won’t be aware of for years or decades, if they’re even obvious in our lifetimes. The plane crash should never have happened. The only solution is to close the anomaly and erase this timeline.”
Ketcham checked his weapon and pushed himself up. “I have a better idea. We kill these bastards, and then we let time do what it wants. We can preserve this timeline and we all get to live. I don’t care about some damn tribesmen. I care about myself, and I’m going to do what needs to be done.”
He was on his feet by the end of his speech. He had only taken a single step when a branch hit him from behind. He crumpled like tissue paper and dropped his gun, his spot on the hill taken by Rute. She tossed away the branch and bent down to pick up Ketcham’s weapon, turning it so she could extend it to Dorothy butt-first.
“You’re right,” she said. “We won’t fix this by blunt force. We have to set things right. Captain Neville, you just spoke of the worth of doing things the hard way. What you’re talking about doing... killing these men and letting everything else stay wrong... that is the lazy path.”
Neville stared at her, and then looked toward the men. All but the last pair had disappeared through the trees. He watched until they were gone, then pushed himself up. He brushed the leaves and dirt from his clothes and sighed as he moved back down the hill.
“Wake him up. I’m not dragging his dead weight all the way to the river.”
#
“Stop, stop...” Felix dropped down and waved the rest of their group to do the same.
Trafalgar was grateful for the chance to catch her breath. Cora also looked relieved as she leaned her shoulder against a tree. Felix was tireless, marching into the forest as if he didn’t have to worry about pacing himself. She had first checked to make sure there were no ants or spiders camouflaged by the bark before she risked touching it. They were both dripping with sweat and panting, though Felix looked as fresh as a man out for a morning stroll. Matta and Viejas, bringing up the rear, also dropped down. They looked more weary than Cora. Trafalgar had a canteen of water hanging from her belt and uncapped it, offering it to Matta. He hesitated, then took it with a nod of gratitude.
Ahead, in the clearing, Trafalgar saw what had made Felix stop: a line of men were moving through the jungle in a slow but steady march. The leader was tall but slouched, his head swinging back and forth as if his neck couldn’t keep it still. The blade of his machete was darkened either by rust or dried blood. She counted seven of them already in the clearing but there were still more coming out of the underbrush. Several of them were carrying animal corpses still bloody from killing blows.
“Slippage,” Felix said. “This is part of the other timeline.”
“How can you tell?”
He held out his hand, closed one eye, and lined his fingers up with a nearby tree. “There’s a shimmer in the air. It takes some effort to notice it but, once you do, it’s hard to miss.”
“So this is a thin space? Theoretically, we could pass through to the other side and find Dorothy.”
Felix sighed. “Theoretically. Even if you found her, I doubt she would appreciate you jumping off a cliff just to die with her.” He twisted to look back at her. “I say this with as much compassion as I can muster, Miss Trafalgar. You have to consider Lady Boone a casualty of this mission. Otherwise we will all be lost, and the world as we know it is doomed.”
Trafalgar pressed her lips together and watched the marching men. “These are members of that tribe you mentioned, yes? Descendants of the people who arrived here from the future?”
“I believe so, yes.”
It was difficult for her to wrap her mind around the fact she was looking at people who shouldn’t exist, who would in fact never be born if they were successful. She recalled what Felix had said about them. She knew they were brutal, they’d slaughtered and destroyed anyone who stood in their way, but there were plenty of so-called ‘good’ armies that had done the same thing. Hell, the British Empire couldn’t claim it was any better than these men.
“Perhaps we should follow them,” she said. “We can talk to them on their own ground...”
Felix stared at her as if she was crazed. “They would slit your throat before you could get a single word out. These are not men who can be reasoned with. There is no strategy you can suggest which would make them decide to wipe themselves from the pages of history. As far as I can tell, they’ve never figured out the Pratear is the source of the anomaly. If they knew that, they would defend it with to their dying breath. Any interaction with them would be futile at best, self-destructive at worst.”
Trafalgar said, “It was merely a suggestion.”
“A poor one,” Felix muttered.
Cora offered a look of commiseration. “I don’t think it hurts to at least raise the possibility. But I do agree with Felix. The less we have to interact with these people, the better.”
Trafalgar nodded. The men were almost out of the clearing now. She knew how easily looks could deceive, how even the worst men could look normal in the proper setting, but these looked like simple men who were providing for their families. They were out hunting early in the morning. They were exhausted. They were just men, for god’s sake, when Felix had been selling her monsters. She wanted a better narrative. She wanted another side of the story before she declared an entire tribe worthy of extinction.
Once the last man had vanished, Felix stood and stretched his legs. “Do you ladies need to rest a while longer, or shall we resume our journey?”
Trafalgar would have liked another few minutes, if she was being entirely honest, but she knew Felix would take that as a mark of weakness. Viejas handed back her canteen, which she noticed the two of them had nearly drained. She took a drink for herself, glanced at Cora to make sure she was ready to continue, then stood and adjusted her scarf.
“Lead the way, Captain.”
Chapter Twelve
They stopped for lunch earlier than Dorothy expected. Neville used Ketcham’s condition as an excuse, and she had to admit the man did look quite shell-shocked. Rute apparently hadn’t gone easy on him when she clubbed his skull. But despite the plausibility of his reasoning, she believed the trip was far more taxing on the captain than he wanted to admit. He was the first to drop onto a stone, mopping his face and neck with a rag that looked positively soaked when he returned it to his pack. His face was red and he struggled to catch his breath even after everyone else seemed settled
.
Whatever the cause of their respite, Dorothy was grateful for the chance to sit and appreciate the beauty of the world in which they found themselves. Creatures chittered high above them in the trees, and she watched as a couple leapt from one branch to another. It was almost as if they were actually flying, though she could have sworn they were squirrels. Or maybe bats...
“Something has been bothering me,” she said, hoping to sound casual. “Maybe you could enlighten me, Captain.”
He gestured for her to continue.
“It’s going to take us most of the day to reach the Pratear from the airplane. Presumably, it will take us another day to make the trek back. According to Eiriz, you and your men were in the jungle for three days before he went looking and found the slaughter.”
“That sounds correct.”
“It doesn’t leave much time for exploring. You must have known precisely where you were going when you arrived in Belém.”
He smiled. “Come now, Dorothy. Certainly you know that a great deal of exploration happens at home, in dusty libraries and hunched over old maps.”
Dorothy nodded. “Yes, of course. But to find something as evasive as the Pratear, you must have had a very good source. Even the people who live here wrote it off as a myth long ago. How did you know where to find it?”
Neville closed his eyes. It took him so long to begin speaking that Dorothy almost thought he’d fallen asleep, but his voice was steady and strong.
“A message. The last time I was in Brazil, a message was delivered to me. It said the Pratear was real, it gave the coordinates, and told me that I would find riches beyond my wildest dreams. Of course, at that point, I had run out of funds so I had to return to London. I had to convince the RGS to finance another expedition. I suppose in a way, the mission was a success.”
Dorothy said, “You’ve lost everything. Your team was decimated. It’s highly unlikely you’ll receive funding for another expedition once we return to London and tell the tale of what happened.”
“A Pyrrhic victory, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless.” He opened his canteen and lifted it to take a drink, but found it empty. “Damn.”
Dorothy passed him hers, and he nodded his thanks.
“Someone wanted you to find the river,” she surmised.
Neville shrugged. “It’s possible.”
It was a mystery Dorothy didn’t want or need to deal with. She had a feeling simply closing the anomaly would be enough of a task without worrying about a conspiracy.
“As long as we’re stopped here,” she said, “perhaps you can tell us more about how you opened the anomaly. What happened when you found the river?”
Again, Neville took nearly a minute before he answered. “Deceptive. The name, it’s deceptive. People look for a river, they look for a ribbon of water curling through the trees. But from the surface, the only visible part of the river looks like a lake. When I first reached the coordinates, I thought I’d been hoodwinked. But I refused to give up. I could feel something special about the place.
“One of my men was actually the one who found it. A crack in the world, mostly covered by the undergrowth. It was just a few meters wide, so of course we were drenched by passing though it to the other side. We found ourselves in a cave which seemed to have been carved by the river. It sloped downward into the Earth. Our lights didn’t reach the bottom, but we could hear the water splashing. We knew it had to be a relatively short drop. We found handholds in the stone, so we ventured deeper.”
Dorothy said, “How far down was it?”
“I don’t know.”
She furrowed her brow. “I don’t need an exact measurement, but a general idea of how deep the cave is would help.”
“I don’t recall anything after we decided to make the descent.” He showed his palms and shrugged. “As I’ve told you, I’ve been back to the site to try fixing this problem myself. The one thing I didn’t mention is that I have started to fear I’m part of the problem. That whatever erased my memory of that first visit also prevents me from seeing the solution. That is why I’m so hopeful for your presence, Lady Boone. It is my sincere hope that your fresh eyes can finally provide the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
Dorothy glared at him. “I don’t appreciate being kept in the dark like this, Captain Neville. I still would have come with you even if you’d shared this back at the airplane.”
“Nothing has changed. The goal remains the same. We must find a way to set things right.”
Rute surprised them all by speaking up. “If you don’t remember what happened underground, how can you be sure you were the one who caused the anomaly?”
Neville said, “Who else could it have been?”
Dorothy realized what the other woman was implying. “The note had to come from somewhere. You recruited me as a set of fresh eyes. Maybe someone did the same thing with you.”
“I supposed that’s a possibility.”
“Whoever it was may have known the anomaly was bad, but it hadn’t grown large enough to have visible consequences. By the time you arrived, it was large enough to create two timelines. Who knows how powerful it will be when we reach it now.”
Rute stood up. “All the more reason to stop sitting around chattering. Let’s get a move on.”
Dorothy was willing, and even the silent and concussed Ketcham didn’t argue, but Neville took longer than any of them to get his pack on.
“Are you certain you’re up to the rest of this journey?” Dorothy asked. “Perhaps you should give us the coordinates and go back to camp. You look absolutely wrecked.”
“We’re halfway there. It will take as much effort to continue onward as it would to go back.” He took a deep breath and blew it out hard. “Come along, Lady Boone.”
She watched him follow Rute and brought up the rear so she could keep an eye on both Neville and Ketcham to make sure neither of them collapsed on the path.
#
They made excellent time to their destination, owing to the breakneck pace Felix set. Trafalgar felt as if they’d been running a marathon by the time he finally lifted a hand to indicate they could stop. Cora’s hair had come loose from the braid she’d put it in that morning and tumbled across her shoulder like a dead creature. Matta and Viejas were faring better, most likely accustomed to running over this terrain, but she could see gratefulness in their eyes as well.
Felix extended his arms wide and turned to face them with a beatific smile. “This is it.”
“This is the river?” Trafalgar said. She scanned the clearing but could only see what appeared to be a large lake.
Felix said, “This is the endpoint of the river. So easy to overlook the truth beneath the surface.” He moved closer and pointed. “There. Do you see? The rise in the ground, that outcropping of stone? It seems to create a cove but if you look closer...”
Cora had moved closer. “It continues underground.”
“Indeed it does! This is where all of our troubles began.” He continued forward.
“You still haven’t explained exactly how the troubles began,” Trafalgar pointed out, “or how you intend to correct it.”
Felix didn’t slow his pace or look back. “It’s too complicated to explain before you know everything. Once we’re in the cave, you’ll see for yourself.”
Trafalgar stopped walking. Cora, uncertain, also stopped at her side. Felix realized they were falling behind and finally faced them again.
“What’s wrong?”
“You don’t know how to fix this. All your vagueness, the lack of a solid plan, your repeated trips back here over the course of the year.” She looked at Matta and Viejas. “Has he ever explained to you or anyone in the tribe exactly what happened? Or told you what needs to be set right?”
Felix said, “There’s no way they would understand. They’re savages!”
“This is their home,” Cora snapped. “They likely understand it better than you ever could.”
The two trib
esmen looked uncomfortable at being caught in the middle of the argument. Viejas was the one who finally spoke. “He says too dangerous for us to worry. Says we only get in way.”
“We can speak in your language if it’s easier,” Cora said, then switched to Portuguese. “Do you know anything about what happened a year ago?”
Matta also switched to Portuguese. “This is not our language, either. But we speak it better than yours.” He pointed at Felix. “He only told us something bad happened at the river. He told us to keep our distance, that it was his problem to fix. At first we tried to convince him we knew the forest better than any Englishman, but then... then things began to change. The ‘Slipping’ he talks about, the changes in our elders’ memories. We started to believe that maybe he was correct. We didn’t know what was happening, but we knew our home wasn’t the same as it used to be.”
Cora paraphrased what he’d said for Trafalgar, who turned on Felix. “You can’t claim we’re too ignorant to understand. So please, enlighten us. How exactly did this fiasco begin and what, exactly, do you need from us to set things right?”
Felix hung his head, shoulders sagging. “Damn... I don’t know, all right? I don’t bloody know. I don’t even remember what happened when I was in the cave. My men and I descended, and the next thing I can recall is making my way through the forest back to the river. I knew we’d spent time underground, doing something, and I knew my mission was finished. But details escaped me. And it was already clear that things were different.”
“Damn it,” Trafalgar said. “So we have no idea what’s actually waiting for us down below. It could literally be anything!”
“Whatever it is,” Cora said, “we can assume it isn’t physically dangerous. Felix and his men were able to leave without injury. Were any of your men bloody or hurt when they returned to the surface?”
Felix said, “Not until we encountered the Burnt Empire tribesmen.”
“That should be some comfort,” Cora said. “Minor. Fleeting. But comfort nonetheless.”
