The Sphere: A Journey In Time (22 page)

Her laugh faded and she went into deep thought again. "I can, yes. But I don't know that I want to." She turned to Erica.

"No one is going to force you. It's your choice, Daphne." Erica smiled, "But why stay here with us old folks. You could have so many adventures."

In the back of my mind a wretched thought flickered. She could take herself anywhere she wanted and never come back, and there was nothing we'd be able to do about it. Maybe that was part of the reason the lab kept the programmers so restricted. Their rules, while harsh, made sense. Would I be any better at being head of the lab? I shuddered at the thought. I would never force someone into this. I would never kill innocent people. But if I let the Gardian rebellion happen to my advantage, isn't that what I would be doing?

I had no choice but to trust her if I wanted this to work. And just like her a few minutes ago, I had no basis on which to lay that trust.

Daphne finally came out of her introspection. "That is true. But there is one more thing we need to test." Before I could ask what, she grabbed my hand and I found myself falling onto my butt in a field with a startled horse while Daphne shrieked with glee. "Perfect!" She grabbed my hand again and yanked me up and we were back at the table with Erica. "Ok, so one part of the plan works."

I felt a little dizzy from the time change, though it seemed so effortless for her. Perhaps an adolescent wasn't the best choice for this sort of power.

"What plan?" Noah and Marina emerged from the trees and joined us at the table.

I explained my elaborate plan to get control of the lab and continue on with the work to Noah.

"So you're going to take my box and your sphere and Daphne and leave me here to rot?"

"Noah, you'd have Erica and the means to create another sphere. You could keep traveling as long as you like."

He looked hurt. I wondered if he felt like I was abandoning him for a younger version of himself. I wouldn't necessarily call it abandoning, but I was more likely to succeed in my plans with a younger Noah than him.

"Aw Addy, I can't keep this up forever. Maybe it's time I just start taking it easy." He looked sad, but there was a slight tilt to his mouth that made me think he had no intention of settling down with his life. "So what do you need from me?"

"Do you know if the Gardians had someone on the inside?"

"Not a clue. But I would assume so, given the ease with which they took over."

"It's a chance we'll have to take,” I said. “If we should need to, how do we find the man who created the sphere?"

"I'm not sure where he'd be when you got back. The lab should have files on him. Once you've taken over, it shouldn't be hard for Jim to find him."

"Do you know who is following you?"

Noah’s face darkened. "Doctor Lancing.”

“Doctor Lancing,” I repeated. It was his office I had been in. He was the one who had connected that helmet to Eliza’s brain. He was still alive and working from the lab. I must have just missed him when I was wandering around.

Noah nodded. “He was above the board, the head of the entire lab. Bit of a recluse, didn't like to be seen but had his hands in everything. The board did all his dirty work for him. But now that they're all dead, I guess this is personal for him. He's young. Way too young. I think some of the research going on in that place must have been aging related. You'll have to deal with him as well, the Gardians never got to him."

That could complicate things. Granted, he was only one man, but I wasn't about to kill him just to get him out of the way. Even if I could. With Eliza on his side, I had no real idea of what I was up against. I felt the remnant of the robot leg in my pocket, pressing against my thigh. “Lancing Electronics,” I said to myself.

Noah nodded. “An offshoot of the company. Apparently the security person there was a real wizard at electronic surveillance.”

I pulled the leg segment out of my pocket. “Marina, do you and Carlo go up to Adam’s grave every day?”

She gave me a somewhat apologetic look. “I go every day, Carlo hasn’t been in years, it’s too painful for him.”

“And did you find a robot up there recently?”

“A robot? No, but I don’t often look around. I’m usually focused on Adam’s grave.”

Somewhere on the island a small robot was hobbling around watching us again. “Lancing knows I’m here,” I said, holding up the leg. “We better hurry.”

Chapter 22

Daphne and I found some floor length linen skirts that would have to do for appropriate costumes. The jackets available were incredibly modern compared to where we were going, but we didn't have much choice, and it wasn’t like my backpack was period appropriate anyway. I told her we would just have to do our best to not be seen and get through the first two parts of the plan quickly. I described the towns of Salem and Georgetown as well as I could. She had never been there, but we were counting on her ability to sense the other versions of myself and Noah to get us as close as possible to our targets.

We said our hasty goodbyes. I promised Marina that I would come to visit her and Adam more often once things were settled with the lab, and that I would not mention anything about Carlo until after he was born. Daphne spent a while saying goodbye to Noah, and though she seemed excited to be leaving, he seemed saddened by it. His mood had turned a bit foul by the time I got to say goodbye. I knew he was unhappy to be cut off from the sphere, and now I was taking away Daphne, one of the few people he had left in the world. As much as he claimed to never want to settle down, there was a definite father-daughter relationship about them. I kept the observation to myself, though I thought it was telling that both this version of Noah and the version that got stuck in Salem had found their own versions of family. It gave me hope that when I got back to the Noah in the timeline I was supposed to be in, he would one day find that kind of fulfillment in his life as well.

We put the sphere box in my pack with the money I hadn’t spent, some extra clothes and the few things that would be necessary for our journey. We didn’t intend to spend much time in the past but weren’t sure what would happen when we made it back to where I belonged. I was counting on Jim’s help to figure out the rest of the plan. I held Daphne’s hand and waved goodbye to the people gathered on Marina’s patio. My hand was still raised when we arrived behind the house Noah had stayed in while in Salem. “When are we?”

“1692, a few days before you arrive.” Daphne raised her hand to silence me. Her face screwed up in concentration. I knew she was trying to see into the different timelines. There was a split created when Noah had his memory erased, and she’d need to see into this for her to find a way to get Montgomery home. “Amazing,” she whispered. “Okay, go.”

I pushed the button again. There was a subtle shift in the trees. Leaves that had been there before were suddenly gone. The sky was suddenly a little darker and the temperature a little colder. Otherwise, I could not tell anything was different.

I let Daphne’s hand go and told her to stay put for a moment while I went to peek around the side of the house where I knew Sarah would be. She was looking into the window and using her hands to block the light for a better view. She backed away looking startled and ran off into the woods, so we must have arrived just before Noah and I disappeared from Salem. I had no idea how long it would be before Sarah came back, so I called to Daphne and we wasted no time in going inside to do what we had to do.

I had gotten Noah to write another journal entry detailing the existence of the second sphere which I quickly copied into the journal we had left behind. Noah had also written a note for Sarah, which I tucked neatly into the back of the journal. "Done!" I grabbed Daphne's hand and we suddenly arrived in a pitch black room. "Where have you taken us?" I hissed at her.

"The root cellar."

It took me a moment to put two and two together. This was where Noah came to steal some food while we had been waiting for our chance to sneak into town. "Ah, brilliant. How soon before-" I was cut off by a door opening. The faint lights from outside illuminated us softly as a figure descended the few stairs down into the cellar and stopped short when he saw us.

"Oh excuse me, I was just-"

"Noah." I would've loved to delay my greeting and hear what excuse he had come up with on the spot, but we were in a hurry.

He had turned to leave but stopped abruptly and turned back. "Adelaide?” He glanced behind him at the open door. “How the hell-"

"Noah I don't have a lot of time. Here." I grabbed the burlap blanket he had found and started collecting food from the shelves. "You're going to take this food back to me in the woods as you were planning. You absolutely cannot mention this to me. You need to take this sphere and take it back with you and you cannot tell me that you have it either. Don't second guess anything you're about to do, just take this sphere." I handed him the blanket with the food and then handed him my sphere. "And when you get back to the lab, you need to tell them I'm dead, that I died here, and you brought back my sphere. Do you understand?"

He hesitated, but it was clear he trusted me. "No, but I'll do it anyway." He turned to leave and grinned at me from halfway up the stairwell. "See you soon, Addy." He walked back upstairs and closed the doors to the root cellar.

"I hope that worked," I said as I pulled the wooden sphere box out of my pack and gave it to Daphne.

"One way to find out!" Even in the dark I could see the brightness from Daphne’s teeth, exposed as her expression widened with excitement, and she grabbed my hand again.

I squinted against the sudden brightness. For a few moments I felt like I was back in the return chamber, but the air was fresh, I could hear birds, and I didn’t feel like I was about to vomit. I gave my eyes another moment to adjust. It was a little disorienting, but nothing in comparison to my last return.

"We're in the field you told me about. Look!" Daphne walked a few steps past me and I turned around to see what she was pointing at. "Here's the hatch to the tunnel! Do we go inside or wait to surprise them out here?"

Admittedly, this was the part of the plan I was least certain about. "Well, I suppose it's safer to wait out here. Perhaps we should hide in case the first people who come out aren't Jim and-" I was cut off by the sound of an explosion. From the direction of the lab we saw a plume of smoke rising above the glass dome. "The Gardians. Come on." I tugged on her sleeve and we walked over towards a bale of hay that was rolled up in the field. I wondered if they paid someone to plant these in the field and remove them every year. I couldn’t imagine this field was part of an actual working farm.

"How long do you think?"

"Supposedly Jim and Noah escaped in the chaos of the attack. It can't be too long, I should think. If Jim was already planning to help Noah get out, he'd be prepared and ready to go. So a few minutes to realize what is going on, a few more minutes to find Noah, then maybe half an hour for them to get out?" I tried to remember the details of the story I had been told. I couldn’t remember if they had stopped by Montgomery's on the way out. I didn’t think so, since Noah gave him the letter before the attack happened. It had taken me at least half an hour to get to the hatch after leaving Montgomery’s place. “At least half an hour, maybe an hour.”

"We could pop forward a few minutes."

I smiled at her enthusiasm. And again, the need to keep her under control seeped into my thoughts. "Impatient are we? We can wait. I don't want to miss them if they come out running."

"Fine!" It was a whine, but she gave me the box.

I stuffed it into my backpack. Her enthusiasm was contagious. "So we've got a few days with Noah and Jim before things calm back down. Where do you think we should bunker down and plan our takeover?"

"How about Paris?"

"What?" The word came out as a laugh.

"Well, we've got that sphere, I can take us anywhere. Why not somewhere fun?"

I couldn't think of a reason to object. "Let's see what Jim and Noah think when they come out." Why not Paris, I thought to myself. I'd never been there. Noah would love breaking out the French accent again, to be sure.

"Why give them the chance? Let's grab them the instant they come out and leave!"

"People don't like being whisked away unannounced unless they're being saved from imminent peril." She sulked so I decided to throw her a bone. "Paris sounds good though. Noah will hate it." She grinned again. It was odd, I felt like I had inherited a daughter. Noah’s adoptive daughter. What a strange little family the four of us would make for the next few days. I wondered how much to tell Noah about who Daphne was to him in the future. We sat in the field and leaned against the hay bale for a while. She was thankfully quiet for a few minutes, no doubt thinking about Paris. "Think you'll have any trouble traveling with two more people?"

"Nope. Easy peasy."

It occurred to me that we never traveled into the future on missions, with the exception of my accidental arrival eighty years from this point. I always assumed it was an impossibility. Yet Daphne had just suggested going a few minutes into the future here to pass the time. “How far into the future could you take us?”

She grimaced at me. “I’m not completely sure. Not far beyond what year it was when we left the island, I think. Technically, we’re still in my past. But I couldn’t see anything beyond the present while we were on the island or when I was working with Noah on honing my skills.”

“What do you think would happen if you had tried to send someone ahead in time?”

“Noah asked us to. Me and Erica. She said no, and I was too nervous about it to contradict her. I can’t see anything. I’d have no reference for where to put someone.” She looked disappointed and a little frightened by the idea.

“But Noah said he skipped 10 years into the future to plant the box in the safe.”

“Erica merely waited 10 years to bring him back. For him, it was instantaneous. She basically just had to ignore him for all that time. I don’t think she could’ve sent him forward though.”

“It was an idle curiosity. Probably better to leave the future unknown anyway. Which reminds me, you probably shouldn’t talk much about the other version of Noah that you know.”

“Why not?”

I sighed. As much as I resented the lab, their rules made it easy for their employees to just obey without question. “Noah didn’t react that well to finding out that there was another version of him. Especially one who didn’t adhere to his version of a life. I think it might be better for him to not know how he turns out in another timeline.”

“Was he very different?”

“No,” I said. “But had he been given the option to continue along in his current state, I think he would’ve turned out slightly different. But he’s stubborn enough that if he knew what he was like in another life, he would want to be different from it. Almost like he would need to prove it wasn’t him.”

She giggled a little. “Yes, I could see that about Noah.” We sat in silence for a moment. “How is he different here?”

“It’s hard to say. I don’t think he’ll seem that different to you. Younger, but you’re meeting him at a rather pivotal moment in his life. While we were in the lab together, his personality was much the same, but the traveling through time was really the driving force in his life. As much as he might complain about the lab, he needed it. Without the lab, he seemed like a much more relaxed person, though he still seemed to be driven by the same needs.”

We heard a hollow metallic thud as the handle on the hatch moved and were instantly alert. We jumped up and watched over the top of the hay bale as the door opened and Jim's head peered out. He glanced around quickly and came out, turning his back to us. I moved around the front of the hay bale and motioned for Daphne to be silent. I leaned against it as casually as possible and waited. Noah was emerging from the door while Jim looked around to get his bearings. His eyes skimmed over me and the bale of hay before snapping back to stare at me. He was too far away for me to hear, but I saw the word "Adelaide" form on his mouth.

Noah had emerged from the tunnel and was closing the door, and turned to see where Jim was looking. His mouth broke into an enormous grin and he ran over to greet me with a crushing bear hug and a hearty chuckle. I joined in his laughter.

"Adelaide, at some point you'll have to explain that bit in the root cellar!" He put me down and noticed Daphne. "You were there too, weren't you?" She looked at him curiously. He held out his hand. "I'm Noah."

"I know." She looked a little wary of him and didn’t take his hand, but focused on his face. I could only assume she was trying to see the resemblance between this Noah and the one she knew in the future.