A Question of Will (41 page)

“I’m what?” Angel asked, walking up to join the group.

Fil gave her a quick recap of the conversations, and Angel smiled. “He’s out there, hiding in the shadows, protecting me, protecting Fil, and mostly protecting Mom, wherever she is. He’ll reveal himself only if he feels it necessary to make sure that all of us are safe.”

“Have you seen him?” the Mechanic asked.

“No, but I’ve sensed him, before, during, and after the time he was here with us from the past.” She looked into the forest. “He’s probably out there now, listening in, but making sure that the Hunters are heading in the wrong direction.”

“And so,” Fil said, “we will wait until he decides to show himself to us, and we will wait for the Elites to find us and attack. Until then?”

He smiled. “We live, freely.”

XXX

Steps

Will was completely oblivious to his surroundings in the time machine for several minutes, lost in the shock of the events of the last few moments at camp.

He’d found his son. Josh had survived the attack and the fire. He’d grown into a man, had managed to meet up with and join the Aliomenti Alliance, and was a major force in their organization.

And Angel. He had a daughter? He’d had no idea. The only explanation that made any sense was that Hope had been pregnant at the time of the attack, and only recently so, if she hadn’t told him yet. It wasn’t something she’d keep to herself.

He’d found his children. They’d survived the fire. The Assassin who’d been sent after them had not killed them; he had, as he put it, failed in his mission. He’d only managed to burn the house down, but houses could be rebuilt. In the camp where he’d been living, buildings assembled and disassembled themselves on a regular basis.

Josh — no, Fil now — had survived. He was there. Almost two hundred years old, but he was there. And since Angel hadn’t been born at the time of the fire — then Hope had survived as well, long enough, at least, to give birth to their daughter.

That meant his mission had succeeded. Or at least, it had succeeded in the last iteration of whatever time loop he was on. Time travel would certainly make your head spin.

He wished he’d gotten the chance to shake his son’s hand, to tell him he was proud of him. Sure, Fil had been rather aggressive towards him, but he’d explained why. Left unsaid was the obvious: for a man like Will, knowing his children had survived — and had actually been with him the entire time he’d been in the future — might have been enough to dissuade him from getting in the time machine. He’d want to spend time with his children, to be sure. How long would it have taken for him to decide to leave, though? He could talk of duty and claim he’d do what needed done, but that was a lot easier said when the desired result — healthy children, children who had survived an assault on their home — wasn’t looking you in the eye.

The three of them — Adam and his two grown children — had manipulated him. They’d preyed upon his sense of duty, and Fil had ensured that at least one person in that camp made him feel unwelcome, that someone who wanted him gone, that someone would make him feel as if his mere presence would be the death of all of them. It was certainly easier to leave that type of environment, real or imagined, than one that mirrored the future he’d always wanted. They knew him well enough to play their parts and ensure he made the decision he needed to make. It didn’t make him happy, but he understood their logic.

Yet in the end, they’d misjudged him. If he’d known that Fil was his adult son, and Angel the daughter he’d never known he had, he would eventually have left anyway. For there was one person he’d never seen in that camp while he’d been there.

Hope.

He would go back for her, even if everything else was as it should be. How long had she survived after the fire? Had she been hurt at all? Fil had said to focus on Hope, not him. That was disconcerting. Had she been gravely injured in Fil’s memory of the day, living just enough to deliver Angel, and then...? He didn’t want to think of it, but he must.

The larger issue is that he didn’t know if Hope had been invited into the Alliance culture, gone through the Purge, developed her Energy, and gotten the other treatments that enabled extreme longevity. She could have survived the fire, lived her life out, and died of old age. Perhaps Fil had been delivering that message: that Will needed to bring his mother home, or enable her to live. He didn’t know the ingredients of the Purge, but he had a large batch of nanos. She could certainly live long enough to meet him in the future if needed.

Something nagged at him, though. Something he was missing in the emotions of the moment, whether a sense of duty or a sense of shock.

His mission, as they’d discussed it, involved him going back to the night of the fire. He was to rescue Hope and Josh from The Assassin, from burning to death in the inferno he’d seen before the Hunters had jumped him and beaten him. Josh was saved. He’d grown into a man, becoming known as Fil, and had managed to live nearly two centuries before coming back to rescue his neophyte father. Likewise, his daughter Angel had been born, grown to adulthood, and like her brother had lived an impossibly long lifetime. She had joined her brother to risk her life traveling through time to save her father, a man she’d never met.

But they’d lived. More to the point: they’d
aged
. They’d existed throughout all of those two centuries between his disappearance in 2030 and his reappearance in 2219.

It meant the time machine had failed. He’d not, in this cycle of history, saved his children by returning them to the future. They’d reached the future by living their way to it. And now that he knew that, he certainly couldn’t take young Josh and unborn Angel back with him.

Was he to wait until Angel was born and then return to the future with only Hope?

He would not do that to his children. He’d vowed that he would not. His birth parents had abandoned him emotionally when his older brother died suddenly at the age of five. Nothing Will did was satisfactory, compared against the idealized image of the older son they’d adored in life and idolized in death. He’d later heard the expression that the opposite of love wasn’t hate, it was apathy, and he knew it to be so from living that truth growing up. It wasn’t that his parents hated him; they simply didn’t care about him at all. When they’d died in a car crash when he was sixteen years old, people had remarked how well he’d handled it, how mature he’d seemed. The reality was that his parents had been dead for years. He’d lived in poverty; his parents had directed their meager estate to anyone and everyone but him. And in that poverty he’d vowed that he’d be rich and that when he had children, he’d never leave them emotionally abandoned, or devoid of a loving household, as he had been.

No, he would not leave his children behind. Not without their mother.

Perhaps that was Josh’s message to him as the adult Fil, though. He needed to rescue Hope, even if it meant leaving Josh in the past alone. How would Angel come to exist in the past then? Had he waited the months it would take her to be born before leaving for the future with just Hope?

If that was the plan for him, he’d prefer the machine get stuck in whatever time loop he was in and never emerge on the other side. They wouldn’t send him back expecting him to make that type of decision, would they?

He became aware of a sudden hush inside the machine. The top became clear and vanished, and Will scrambled out of the craft and walked several yards away before he stopped and looked around.

He was not in a forest at all, but rather a field, cleared for miles around, with no sign of his neighborhood or the rest of the town, including the massive dome over the main city of Pleasanton, in sight. He supposed that when traveling back in time that the physical location on the planet might be only a secondary concern, so perhaps he was simply a few miles from his destination. The concern there was that he doubted he’d been given any excess time to travel to the neighborhood upon arriving in the past.

He had the ability to travel instantly, however, though he didn’t want to do so. No sense alerting the Hunters of his location. But if he had to do it, he would.

He chose to teleport to his watching post in the forest behind his neighbor’s house. He’d walked among those trees many times, and knew the area well. Perhaps that was why he’d been so drawn to the majestic trees near the Alliance camps; they truly reminded him of home. He concentrated on the image of that spot, and pictured himself traveling there.

Nothing happened.

Will frowned. He’d not had that happen before in his teleportation efforts. Perhaps he was much farther from the location than he thought he was.

He needed to go back to see the people in the Alliance about this. And while he was there, he would take the opportunity to truly see and speak to his children. To find out what, exactly, he was supposed to do in the past, knowing they needed to stay there and age their way to their present. Or perhaps there was a GPS device in the craft that could give him directions.

He turned back to the craft and froze.

It was gone.

Lying on the ground where he’d expected to see the time machine were several objects he’d not noticed in the craft, possibly items that had been stored in the trunk. One looked like a bag containing clothing. He opened a small pouch and was surprised to find a large supply of copper, silver, and gold coins. He closed up the pouch and examined a third item, which looked like a piece of paper. He flipped it over and noticed writing there, which moved as he touched the surface of the paper. It was a computer, the size and texture of paper, operated by a touch sensor. And the image of it being a letter was a correct one. Will read the note.

Will Stark —

You are reading this at the end of your journey in the time machine, no doubt wondering why the machine has disappeared, why you are in an open field instead of a dense grove of trees near your home, and why you have doubts about the actual nature of your journey.

You see, we’ve known since before we retrieved you from your backyard what your true journey would be, and we knew that, even for one as devoted to duty and family as Will Stark, that simply telling you what needed to be done would frighten any man into avoiding that duty. We say this not as an insult to you, but from the perspective of knowing how great the ask of you would be.

We knew that, in order to complete your journey, you needed to be adequately trained in Energy usage, be well-supplied with nanos, have a basic grasp of the history of the Aliomenti — and not have an Alliance tattoo on your palm. We also believed that you needed to make the decision to climb into the time machine, rather than being forced into it. Our actions since bringing you into the future have been designed to meet these ends. We realized that knowing the true identities of Fil and Angel would lessen the likelihood that you’d make that choice, and as such they hid their identities. Fil, against his every true desire, played the role of one seeking to push you away, invoking guilt and anger where necessary, to ensure that you’d be more eager to leave.

We created an elaborate story about the decisions you might need to make during your journey in time, knowing full well that you’d never need to make any of them. But you needed to recognize that it was not a journey or a mission to take lightly, and thus we pushed various horrific scenarios at you to reinforce this truth.

On the night of the fire, you will, in fact, successfully teleport your wife and son away from an assassin and into a secret underground bunker beneath your home, a bunker created by your wife without your knowledge. She built that bunker for just that occasion, for she knew the attack was coming, and knew that she’d need to teleport the two of them to safety. In the face of the assassin, however, she froze, and but for your action they might have died. You do, in fact, save them.

How is it that Hope could plan to teleport anyone to safety? How did she know what would happen that night?

She knew because someone from the future told her. She could plan to save herself and her son because the woman you know as Hope Stark had been alive for nearly a thousand years before the assassin entered your house that night.

The woman you know as Hope Stark was born in the village where the earliest Aliomenti made their first homes, the first and only child ever born to at least one Aliomenti parent until Josh Stark was born many years later. Hers was not a happy childhood, Will. Her father decreed her to be the one subjected to all manner of experiments to find what exercises, substances, and foods would trigger the Energy they’d seen others use, the one to test if a given substance might be useful or harmful. Her mother fought for her, and the viciousness of that battle tore the village apart. Factions developed supporting husband and wife, but in the end, the greed — the desire of having another to absorb the pain needed to make progress — won out. Her mother died with a broken heart.

This left Elizabeth, as she was known, without a protector. Her health deteriorated, for no one loved her, and her own father watched his own power over the community grow in exchange for his daughter’s suffering. She needed someone to save her, to remove her from her hellish existence. And her hero arrived one day.

Her hero was — and is — you.

You see, Will, the reason that the Hunters and the Leader and all the rest of the Aliomenti know of a mythic hero named Will Stark is because that man arrived in that first small Aliomenti village as Elizabeth celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Unknown to everyone in that camp, Will Stark had just arrived in their area from a different part of the world, and in their time from the distant future. That is why, Will, you are standing in a field in the wilds of England in the year 1018 A.D., armed with clothing and coins appropriate for the time and place. You will guard Elizabeth’s life, not just in the near term, but for the next millennium, for she must survive to meet a young man named Will Stark in the twenty-first century. She must survive to give birth to Josh and Angel. And she must survive to ensure that the events of the night of the fire come to fruition, to ensure that Will Stark, a man born in the late twentieth century, is in a position to be carried into the future, trained, and sent to the past.