A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (26 page)

“You don’t have to respond at all, other than to promise to be careful.”

“No, I know, and I will. But I mean…” Spit it out, Dani, she told herself. Just say it. Don’t run from it like you have every other relationship since Jhon dumped you. “I mean, you’re wrong about the other part.”

“Which other part?”

“The part about my feelings for you.”

“Oh.” His eyes brightened. “Really?”

That right there—that look of surprised delight—that would have been enough to charm her. The realization that it was Dani herself who caused the delight put it right over the top. “You doing anything important? Want to go for a walk?” she asked.

They both knew he was, in fact, doing something very important. But for the moment it didn’t really matter.

She was vaguely aware of an amused and not at all surprised Dr. Seebak watching them go, but all her attention was on Lexil.

SEEBAK LABORATORY, Vashon Island, WA. 1130, Sunday, June 11, 2215.

Outside the lab, Lexil noted that the clouds were clearing. The day promised to be a warm one, another in a string of sunny days. In the Pacific Northwest, a day was considered “clear” if the cloud cover burned off for part of the day. Completely cloudless days might occur for a day or two during the summer months, but not usually in mid-June. Summer had not yet arrived in the Pacific Northwest, but the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the madrona trees held promise.

As Lexil and Dani walked along the trail through the woods, the branches brushed their sides, gently coaxing them closer together. So far, they hadn’t said anything. He assumed that she, like he, needed a little time to process this new possibility. His thoughts had already run the same course several times. He pictured them together, working side by side, excited by new discoveries, laughing unself-consciously just as they had that first day. Could it be that it was only three days ago? He shook his head, marveling how quickly he’d abandoned his practical decision to avoid relationships. Three times since they had left the lab, he had indulged in thoughts of companionship and tenderness, and three times, he had stopped himself abruptly with the realization that this relationship, more certainly than any other in history, was bound to end. It had to, if they were to rescue the timestream.

And each time he came to that realization, he slipped right back into wondering what could develop between them if this were the true timestream and they didn’t have to worry about all that. Where would it lead? Where could it lead?

Dani spoke first. “We can’t just ignore this, can we?”

“I know I can’t. I’ve been trying, actually.” He realized that might sound as if he didn’t want to be with her, which was exactly the opposite of what he thought. He felt the need to explain. “I didn’t want you to think I didn’t care about Jored. I was worried it would trivialize what we were doing to help him, if I told you how I felt about you. But no, we can’t ignore it. And I don’t want to.”

Almost unconsciously, they found their hands connecting, first with a brush, and then with a feeling of belonging together. They walked along in silence for a few more moments. He hoped she felt the same way. He worried a little about her silence.

He stopped in the middle of the path. She looked over at him questioningly. How could he put this? He struggled for the right words. He had to know. “Dani, if this whole timestream mess weren’t an issue, if we were just two people who met and found a common interest in science, who went outside to enjoy a pleasant walk on a sunny day, who discovered…. Would you let me kiss you?”

The suddenness of his request took them both by surprise, but he saw his answer in her smile and tenderly, hesitantly, brushed her hair back from her face. As he leaned in closer, she closed her eyes and tilted up her chin. The first touch of their lips was like electricity finding ground, like atoms bonding covalently. He went back for more, and all at once it was her seeking him, her arms across his broad shoulders, her palms gripping the back of his head, pulling him toward her. His fantasies about a perfect partner for his life’s work gave way to other, stronger yearnings.

Abruptly, she pulled back. “If!” she said, in a frustrated tone. “If we had no worries, no obligations, if you weren’t working on solving a problem that has stolen a little boy and threatens the whole timestream, if we were actually two people who could decide things based on our feelings and nothing more. If.”

“What?” He shook his head, trying to clear it.

“In another world, without so much depending on us…yeah. But don’t you see? We can’t. And it wouldn’t last anyway.”

He felt miserable, frustrated. More than he wanted her, he wanted their relationship to be founded in honesty, not this false set of circumstances and events. He knew, without going back into the lab to look on the viewwall, that there were time disturbance ripples surrounding them, there in the filtered sunlight, with the tingle of her lips still fresh on his.

They stood for a few moments, avoiding each other’s gaze. He hated the thought of returning to the lab to work on the one thing driving a wedge between them, but there was no question that it had to be done. Nobody else in the world was even aware of it. Nobody else in the world could fix it. He wrestled through conflicting emotions, but ended up where he had known he would. He looked up at Dani just as she looked up at him, and their eyes met.

Lexil nodded and gestured toward the lab. “Shall we get back to work?”

Back inside, he was pleased to see how quickly Dani caught on. Soon she was setting up separate trials and recording the results alongside his own efforts. It doubled their speed, but the automation process was challenging enough that it took several hours to begin working properly.

Doc hadn’t said a word when they came back to the lab in a much different frame of mind than when they left it. He noticed their intensity, though, and when they started running into complications, he pitched in and monitored the sensors as they ran each trial. They didn’t even take time for lunch; Doc brought out a tray of fruit and cheese, and they snacked while they worked.

Finally, with repeated successes, assuring them the timing of the automation process was correct to the millisecond, it was time to make the device that would alter the settings on Dani’s scanner at the institute. “Do you know the file structure on the scanning stations?” Lexil asked her.

“Do you need the specific file structure?” She looked worried. “I’ve never been able to get to that from my control screens. I mean, I can give you a rough idea, but not the specific path names.”

He pondered that. If he could figure out a way to be there when she inserted the device, he could find his way to the right path, but he dare not let anyone at the institute see his name. Entering through the security gate would pretty much ensure that they would make the connection between Lexil Myles and Nicah Myles, his father, who had died in the same accident that put his mother into a coma. But perhaps there was a way around that difficulty. “I will need it, but I might be able to give you something to extract that information for me. It will mean another day’s delay, though.”

“Can we afford that?”

“We’ll have to hope so.” He stretched. “Help me with this extraction program, and then we’ll take a break.”

Later, after the work was done, he invited her into the house.

“Is it okay if I look through your lab notebook?” she asked. “I know I won’t remember any of it any more than you will, but I’m curious about how you first began analyzing this, and how you arrived at your conclusions. What were you thinking?”

“Sure, you can look. Actually, I can do more than that. I can make you a copy.”

“Really? How do you do that?”

He had to laugh at her astonishment. He was aware that outside the Vashon lab, paper records were almost unheard of. “We keep a lot of notes, and sometimes we have to look at each other’s numbers.”

“Why don’t you just make the notes in digital form?”

“That would be more efficient, I
know, and that’s what Doc usually does, but
there’s a kind of energy you get from having papers piled around you, being able to scribble notes in the margins, emphasizing things by pressing harder on the pen.”

“Okay, I guess I can see that. Can’t really imagine doing it myself, but okay.”

“Anyway, if Doc wants to study my results or want to pass information without an electronic trail, we make a copy on this machine over here. We built it ourselves. It was one of the first projects we worked on together.”

He remembered when they started, those first mornings after his mom had died, when he was feeling the need for something to fill his empty days after spending so much time at the hospital. Doc had told him that if he wanted to handwrite things, they needed a way to share. Many hours of research later, they had some diagrams and schematics, and they began building the copier, the same way Doc had built most of the other instruments and machines in the lab.

Dani was fascinated, more interested in the way it worked than in the copies themselves. After she told him which pages she wanted to look at, he left the door open to the innards of the machine. She watched, absorbed in the workings of all the gears, drums, and multi-colored inks, while he made the copies.

When he was done, he handed it to her with a flourish. “And just like that, it’s done.”

“They’re warm!”

He laughed. “Yes, the machine has baked the ink into the paper so it won’t smudge.”

She flipped through the papers. It was amusing to watch her check each page, as if she thought it was some sort of illusion. “It’s amazing. Every page is here.”

She tucked the papers away in the back pocket on her worktablet. “One more blip, I suppose. You would never have made a copy if we hadn’t met.”

He didn’t even have to go look at the monitor to answer. “True. Those copies only exist here. In the other reality, they’d be blank paper. I’m sure there’s a blip. But what’s one more?”

SEEBAK LABORATORY, Vashon Island, WA. 1730, Sunday, June 11, 2215.

“Thank you for making the copies,” Dani said. “Is there anything else I can help you with before I head home?”

“You’ve been amazing!” Lexil’s smile was genuinely appreciative, without a trace of his earlier passion, and she was grateful. She had been worried that their relationship would get even more awkward after the moment in the woods, but instead, the decision had helped them turn back to their real focus and work. They had made a good team, and it felt nice to be productive. Tomorrow, she would find an opportunity to run the extract program, and soon—oh, so soon!—she would be hugging Jored again, without any memory of the last few days.

For just a moment, she let herself visit the corner of her mind where she had stuffed all her feelings for Lexil. It would have been nice if they had been free to explore that possibility further. If they’d met in the real timestream, she had no doubt she’d be hugging him goodbye, leaving reluctantly if at all, instead of merely asking if their work was done. Part of her still wanted that, but she made the conscious choice to ignore its muffled voice.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house before you go?” Lexil broke into her reverie.

“You mean there’s more than a library and a kitchen?” She smiled.

“Let’s go see.” He led her around the side of the house so they could enter through the front door. The entry way featured a tile floor. An umbrella stand, a shoe rack, and a simple bench sat against the left wall. On the right, a staircase led up to the second floor. “If we go straight back, we’ll get to the part of the house you’ve already seen. But here’s the living room on the left.”

In the living room, a couch and two comfortable-looking chairs flanked a fireplace in the center of the far wall. To Dani, it looked rustic and old-fashioned, an effect lessened only slightly by a couple of ergonomically-correct, modern plastic chairs on the right near a small gaming center. She knew the plastic chairs would automatically provide the exact support needed for anyone who sat down in them, but these other chairs, the upholstered ones, looked strangely inviting, and she wondered what it would feel like to sit in one of them. Her move to try them out was cut short by Lexil ushering her out of the room.

As they passed the gaming center, he commented, “Doc got me started on these games when I moved in.”

“Doc got
you
started?”

“Oh yeah, he loves them. He’s way better than I am, too, but I have fun playing. He says they remind him of scientific experiments. You try one thing, and if it doesn’t work, you get do-overs. And he likes that there is guaranteed to be at least one solution.”

“That’s always nice.”

They moved on. “We have a guest room down here. Doc had an extra-wide doorway put in for wheelchair access when we thought my mom might recover.” He paused. “Back in the beginning, we had a lot more hope.”

“I’m sorry, Lexil.”

“No, I’m fine. I’m happy here. I like it a lot. I miss her sometimes still, that’s all.”

Judging from his expression, she doubted that he was telling the full truth. But she didn’t really expect that kind of familiarity, not after just a few days. And a few days was all she would ever get; she would never have a chance to get to know him well enough for any real trust.