by Fae York
Emelia stood and gently propped Aleph against the wall. “I’ll be right back,” she whispered. “I’m going to get help.”
As she moved to walk away, Aleph reached for her leg then groaned. “Please, don’t go. Emelia, I want you here with me.”
“Don’t you dare die on me, Aleph.”
He looked her in the eyes and smiled. “I love you . . . so much . . . Emelia McEntyre Plater . . .”
Emelia would have sobbed again if she didn’t feel so numb. “I’ll be right back. Stay alive, okay?”
“Please . . . Emelia . . . stay . . .”
Emelia pushed against the door and, miraculously, it creaked open. She dashed down the empty corridor, sliding to a stop when she heard movement in the distance. She leaned around the corner and spotted a guard with his back to her.
Emelia noticed a loose brick on the ground and stooped down to carefully pick it up. Tiptoeing toward the man, she raised the brick above her head and swung her arm down hard. The man slumped to the ground with a muffled thud and Emelia stepped over him, peering into the window of the door that he had been guarding.
On the other side of the door, there was absolute chaos. Guards were running back and forth across the floor of what must have been the Pierce Global warehouse. Fifty models of the super weapon, each one a perfect copy of the first, were coming to life. Emelia swallowed hard.
Ducking down, she pulled the guard’s gun out of his belt then gingerly opened the door, entering the room unnoticed. Emelia took a few moments to analyze her surroundings before setting off at a mad dash around the outside edge of the room, ducking behind shelving and equipment as she went.
Emelia reached another door on the opposite side of the room and pulled out Vane’s power glove. She slid it on and activated it, more confident with the glove on one hand and the guard’s gun in the other. She opened the door and swore when an arm shot out, grabbing her gun and pinning her arm behind her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the man snapped.
Emelia let out a relieved breath, it was Vane.
“VANE!” she shouted. “I thought you were done here. What are you doing?”
Vane released her arm and shoved her back. “I came to collect what you promised me. The bone sample.”
“Now?” she blurted in disbelief. Emelia wanted to shock Vane with his own power glove, but then she remembered Aleph.
“Okay. Vane, I promise that I will give you the sample. I’ll cut it out of my own arm if I have to. But my friend, the other traveler, is severely injured. I need your help.”
Vane clenched his fists then sighed. “Fine,” he relented, and Emelia led him through the warehouse and back down the corridor.
They found Aleph just as Emelia had left him, with his back against the cold cement wall. Emelia fell to her knees and checked for a pulse but felt nothing. She pounded on his chest, trying to will him back to life, but they had arrived too late.
“He died alone!” she screamed hysterically. “He asked me not to leave, but I wouldn’t listen!”
Vane stood in the doorway, clearly uncomfortable. “Emelia,” he said quietly, “judging by the size of that wound, there wasn’t anything that anyone could have done anyway.”
“I could have stayed,” Emelia replied. “I should have stayed.” She sniffled and stared down at the ground. Emelia felt empty. Her eyes moved back to Aleph and she buried her face in his chest.
“Emelia . . .” Vane began.
“Just take it,” Emelia growled. Without Aleph, she no longer cared about the future. She didn’t care what happened to Artemis or if the government was corrupt. There simply wasn’t anything left for her to fight for.
Vane gave her a curt nod. “I’ll be right back.”
22 The Future
Emelia shifted on the soiled floor, still in shock. She was sitting there, in the sewer, and everyone she knew and cared about was probably dead. Being in the sewer was a perfect metaphor for everything, really. How the hell did she get here?
She stood up, taking notice for the first time in . . . how long has it been? . . . the sound of the two rings on her necklace clinking together. Emelia reached up and pressed her hand to her chest, feeling the bands push into her sternum comfortingly. Stumped, she fidgeted with the rings, sliding them up and down the necklace, then clinking them together, over and over.
Emelia stooped beside Aleph’s body, raising his arm to examine his watch. She was detached enough that her professional instincts took over and Aleph’s arm became, simply, just another arm belonging to just another lifeless human body. Pressing the appropriate button, the digital LED surface lit up, reading “11/28/2018 01:18:56” and she set his arm back down, gingerly.
Standing, Emelia looked at the corpse again. Corpse? Am I so cold? His form didn’t look so different from the hundreds of dead bodies she’d examined throughout her career. She wondered if there was some way to save him. If time travel existed . . . wouldn’t that mean this could be prevented? Were there any weird rules about paradoxes governing the whole thing? But Vane didn’t seem like the type to negotiate further after she already agreed to give him what he wanted.
She returned to her spot and slumped down, leaning her head against the curving back of the wall, closing her eyes, and allowing her hands to fall beside her upon the floor, fingers relaxed, palms up, she sighed. Emelia shook her head, struggling to remember the date of the party at Plume. When she met him.
Shocked, Emelia realized it was almost two months ago. In a way, it felt like only moments ago, but when Emelia reviewed all that she had experienced, it seemed more like centuries.
With her eyes still closed, Emelia pushed at her hair, flinching when she hit the crusty bump on her forehead. Her body ached all over and she wanted desperately to climb into her comfy bed, throw the covers over her head, and sleep for an eternity. My bed.
The memory of her home floated to the surface and Emelia grinned, realizing that if anyone went into her place right now, they would think she was an absolute slob. Her laundry bins were overflowing and there was clothing all over in discarded piles, dropped wherever her distracted self had let them fall. If they looked in the fridge, they’d find soured milk. In the breadbox, the pastries were probably moldy. The sink was full of dishes. The blankets were strewn about the living room. There were shoes lying about haphazardly.
Hell, Emelia might’ve not even locked the door the last time she left. Emelia couldn’t remember locking it and was sure that she hadn’t checked to verify if it was locked.
Even now, sitting there, Emelia had no idea where she had left her purse, keys, or phone. She didn’t remember even having them in the car. Struggle as she might, Emelia couldn’t, for the life of her, begin to imagine where she had left all of that.
“Great . . .” Emelia murmured, sighing. “That will be a colossal nightmare to fix.”
To distract herself from the fact that her life had been effectively unraveled and she had completely lost control of everything, Emelia began to hum, her eyes still closed. In between the few bars of melody, she would inhale deeply and exhale just as deeply, calming herself and drawing her energy back to center. Emelia was exhausted.
“I’m back. Get up.”
Emelia managed to keep herself from jumping multiple feet in the air at Vane’s approach, not that she had much energy to jump in the first place.
“That didn’t take long” she said, a hint of disappointment in her voice.
Vane scowled for a brief second. “You know, you’re helping the future by doing this, Plater.”
“Yeah. I’m sure I am.” She sighed then sat up and pushed her hair back anxiously. “Hey. I remembered something you said to me when we first met, and I would like to get some clarity on it.”
Emelia dropped her hands to her thighs and looked up at him.
He nodded. “Okay . . .”
“You said something to the effect of ‘Noah Thicke rose to power and helped create the utopia
you live in.’ How did that happen?”
Vane opened his mouth to speak then closed it again. After a few moments of thought, he cleared his throat. “Apparently, I was unclear. Following the end of the conflicts sparked by these terrorist attacks, Thicke manages to unify the United States under the Protectorate Party. The government he establishes in your time is the foundation for the ideal society that exists in mine. Having done a lot of time traveling, I can assure you that things are much better when I’m from than in your current era.”
Emelia arched an eyebrow at that last statement, which was delivered with a deadpan bluntness one would almost mistake for sarcasm. She remembered Aleph’s description of the future being significantly less positive, but she felt too exhausted to argue semantics.
“Alright, let’s get this over with. I think you’re full of crap, Vane, but Aleph is dead and I don’t really care anymore.”
She bent over and began rolling up her pant leg.
Vane applied rubbing alcohol to the area and handed her a bottle of prescription painkillers.
“You ready?”
Emelia looked at the bottle and frowned, “You couldn’t find anything stronger?”
His response was merely a quick, harsh, “No.”
Sighing, she took several pills from the bottle and swallowed them. “Oh hell, I already feel like garbage today. Do it.”
With frightening speed, he swiped the surgical steel blade down her shin, lying open a 6-inch-long wound that gaped open to show her white, glistening bone.
Emelia screamed, laying her head back against the wall and squeezing her eyes shut. The pain was excruciating. She couldn’t cry, instead pouring out a stream of expletives vile enough that Emelia’s could have sworn she saw Vane blink once or twice.
No amount of speed or precision on Vane’s part made the experience any less agonizing, but there was something cathartic about just screaming. Endlessly. Or rather, it felt endless. She almost blacked out a few times but managed to steel herself away from the blackness.
Within a few minutes, Vane had the bone fragment extracted and placed in a closed container. He stitched her up rather clumsily, though she at least appreciated he had the humanity to not immediately leave her once he had what he wanted.
“Okay, Plater, we’re done.” Vane said, seeming visibly exhausted for the first time “This could’ve been a lot easier if you had given me the bone sample the first time I asked you, instead of running off.” He glanced at Aleph’s body. “A lot easier.”
It was all she could do to raise her middle finger to that remark. Thankfully, it seemed Vane still knew what the gesture meant despite being from a century into the future.
“It might not mean much to you, but this is going to change things for the better in my time.” A chunk of the ceiling fell immediately behind Vane as he said that. “Speaking of time, I need to go.”
“You cut me up and now you’re going to leave me in a sewer?” Emelia said as incredulously as she could manage.
“Sorry,” Vane said, devoid of any emotion. “You’re surprisingly tough, Plater. You can manage.”
Emelia was taken aback at what appeared to be a genuine compliment from this hard-bitten man, and instinctively reverted to snark.
“If I die of whatever horrible diseases are lurking down here, my ghost in going to haunt your ass in the future.”
Another chunk of ceiling fell next to Vane, and he gave her the hint of a smirk. “I’ll look forward to it then. Farewell.”
There was nothing left to be said. Emelia watched as Vane closed his eyes and breathed deeply, dropping into a trancelike state. A look of concentration crossed his face and she could feel the popping bubbles seemingly coalescing inside of her, as though they were being sucked into an internal vortex in the core of her being. That’s strange, she thought, as she watched Vane beginning to waver in front of her. I’ve never felt this sensation before when they leave.
With unexpected swiftness, the popping bubbles began screaming at such a high pitch that Emelia ducked her head. Covering her head with her arms, she found herself swirling in a miasma of sensations. All at once, the screaming bubbles melted into a churning mass of lights spinning around her in concentric circles. She could sense the lights, even though her eyes were closed. It was as though the lights were within her and outside of her, all at once.
There was a rush of air around her, as though Emelia had found her way to the center of a cyclone and the wind caused her to shiver. Her entire body was covered in goosebumps and she was falling. It was as if Emelia had finally dived off into an abyss.
Emelia wanted to grab onto something to stabilize her, but she was in free fall—it wasn’t a comfortable, floating free fall; it was an unstoppable, spiraling, tumbling, end-over-end fall into nothingness. There was nothing within her or around her that she recognized.
Perhaps I’m dying.
As abruptly as the shift had happened, it stopped and Emelia felt herself ensconced in cool blackness, suspended in nowhere land. She floated there like that for what felt like centuries.
Yep. I’ve definitely died.
Then, without warning, light and pain.
☐ ☐ ☐
The sound of machines slamming into one another and shaking the ground Emelia was lying upon filtered through her head. She felt dizzy and breathless, as though she had just gotten off the Tilt-a-Whirl. Clawing at the ground, her fingernails grated across stone and gave her no purchase to pull against. She struggled to rise, but had no energy to do so.
From a distance, Emelia heard voices. At first she couldn’t distinguish words, everything was all jumbled and incoherent. She felt broken, exhausted, delirious. The place she was in was loud and crowded. Someone was hollering orders and Emelia could feel people poking at her and prodding her in the side, probably trying to discern if she had made it through in one piece.
“ . . . impossible . . .”
“ . . . forward travel . . .”
“ . . . no one . . . before . . .”
It took several minutes for Emelia to fully regain consciousness. When she opened her eyes, several people were staring at her. A barrage of questions immediately ensued.
“Miss Plater, how did you travel forward?”
“What was it like?”
“Would you be able to replicate it?”
Her mind was a tangled web of stress and panic. Emelia held up her hands, signaling that she needed them to stop, unable to get a word in edgewise, but they kept at it.
“Why haven’t you traveled forward before?”
“Why did you do it at this specific time?”
“Did you hold onto Commander Akralian?”
Commander Akralian? Who in the hell is that?
“Did Commander Akralian behave differently than he has before?”
“Did you behave differently?”
“How did you do it?”
“Shut up. ALL OF YOU!” Emelia yelled it so loud, that every single person in the room snapped their mouths shut and popped their eyes open wide. There was absolutely no movement in the room, no one knowing what to do or how to respond. “You can’t seriously expect me to answer all of your questions when I don’t know where the hell I am. Or maybe . . . when the hell I am?”
“She’s right,” came a familiar voice from behind her chair.
Emelia was strangely relieved to see Vane walk in front of her. He was the only familiar face in a crowd of people.
“Vane,” she said.
A few people gasped, their hands flying to their mouths, their eyes growing even wider with shock.
Emelia watched their shock. “What?”
“Here,” Vane said to her, “I am addressed as Commander Akralian, and you will adhere to that protocol as well, Ms. Plater.”
His ice-cold tone suggested talking back would be unwise, at least in front of all these people. She nodded once.
“Leave us,” Vane barked the two words in a way that allowed neither disagre
ement nor negotiation. Every person in that room bowed slightly and filed out of the room in a hasty and efficient manner. Within moments, Vane and Emelia were alone.
Immediately, she snapped at him, refusing to adhere to his ridiculous protocol, “What the hell am I doing here, Vane?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing, Emelia,” he responded with equal venom.
“When are we, Vane?” She was seething mad.
“We’re in my time, 2121.”
“What day?”
“I left on Friday, January 24, 2121, and unlike your lover, Aleph,” he spat out the name with abhorrence and Emelia’s heart twisted remembering that Aleph was dead, “I travel in a government machine so it is well calibrated and returns me precisely at the time I left so I lose no time here. Therefore, you can rest assured that it is Friday, January 24, 2121. 18:15 to be exact.”
“You said I couldn’t—no one can—travel forward, which is why we had to perform surgery on my . . .” Emelia glanced down at the area of the surgery site on her leg. Remarkably, after the rough and tumble journey to get to where she was, her pant leg was still rolled up and revealing a smooth skin with just a thin line of a scar as a trace of the surgery she had endured. Her eyes grew wide. “Hey . . . it’s gone.”
Vane nodded. “That was unexpected. You’re going to go through some tests before you can be released. Assuming you aren’t needed for permanent observation, we’re going to have to find something to do with you.”
“Something to do with me?” Emelia stared at him, aghast. “Why do I have to stay here? Can’t you send me back to my time?”
“That is not an option,” Vane said flatly.
Emelia’s eyes flashed. “Why the hell is that not an option, Vane?”
“There will be an investigation and you will be held here until it is complete.”
Emelia’s mouth gaped open and she clamped it shut, shaking her head vehemently.
“Truly, Emelia,” he said, disgustedly, “I don’t care if you agree or disagree with what I just said. It is what it is and you have no say in the matter. In fact, you don’t have a say in anything here in this time. At this point, you are a persona non grata, so you will follow orders and you will adhere to protocol. You are under my command and unless you want to be officially detained in prison, I suggest you get your attitude under control and keep your mouth shut.”
