The Time Travel Chronicles (2 page)

From the mirrored
aparador
, my mother selects four enormous albums, settles down on the sofa. On the coffee table she piles them into a precarious ziggurat, and opens the topmost one to the first page.

“This was at our old house on Zafiro,” she says, pointing to an enlarged, monochrome photograph of four sisters and two brothers in front of an iron garden gate, held open by a woman as old as my mother is now. A whisper under seven years old, my mother holds an older sister’s hand as my other aunts and uncles smile in sepia.

She is about turn the page, but she hesitates. I glance at her, and I see her eyes dart first to her own image, then flick down, to her knees.

Her eyes turn inward, and I know that in that moment, she’s no longer there with us, but somewhere else, transported by that photograph.

And so, too, am I.

About a year later, there would be war.

Air raid sirens would signal the approach of the 5th Air Group, supporting ground operations of the 14th Army of Japan’s Southern Expeditionary Army. An amphibious invasion by the Third Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy would breach the coast of the island of Luzon, supported by the aircraft of the 11th Air Fleet. 

Fleeing with her family as the bombs fell, my mother would stumble over the concrete-strewn road and lose grip on her older sister’s hand, screaming.

One of my uncles would scoop her up, continue running. Later on, my aunt would press a strip of torn cloth against the blood flowing from a gash on my mother’s leg.

On that photograph from Zafiro Street, her knees are bare and smooth.

Here and now, my mother absently strokes the scar on her leg. She’s silent, and I know she hasn’t returned yet.

Four kilometers away, my father would have been nine years old, living with his family in the older part of the city. During the occupation, they would hide guerrilla units from the Philippine resistance under beds, in closets. Discovered, some of them would pay with bayoneted lives.

Only years later would my mother’s and father’s timelines cross. Only years later, the hesitant courtship of a lady artist by a young anthropologist, the triumphant staging of his first play, a son named after a character in that play…

But now the sirens blared and shadows of planes swarmed like bats against the evening sky.

There are no photographs of that time, not in those albums. If they existed, they might be hidden, sequestered, perhaps, in a secret drawer of that
aparador
. If they existed, they would show a city devastated, and lives forever changed.

I’ve pieced those shattered lives together from her recounting, from my father’s stories, assembling the prehistory of my existence from that time machine of memory.

My mother sighs, and turns the page. She’s back.

And here, too, am I—back with her from the past, continuing that inexorable journey we all take, day by day, into the future.

www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta

by Anthony Vicino

Chapter One

NOW

M
ADDIX HADN’T EVEN LANDED on Haven before catching the first bullet of the day. Still tangled in the remains of his deployed chute, he tumbled off the hover-compound while Zoe and I did a crab-walk sprint to the first of three large energy displacement cylinders.

Bullets sparked off the metal hull as we ducked beneath a girder.

“I want a redo,” Maddix said, his voice a mixture of indignation and shock ringing loudly through my earpiece.

Zoe nodded an enthusiastic agreement. A bullet pinged off the cylinder beside my head. I flinched, but didn’t wet myself. Zoe popped up like a prairie dog and released a
rat-a-tat-tat
from her rifle.

The mission was not off to a good start.

“Give me a second,” I said, not keen on doing that jump again. “You know I hate heights.”

“And you know I hate dying,” Maddix said. “So hurry up.”

Zoe glanced over the top of her ultra-reflective Aviators, pulled a silver canister from the bandolier slung across her chest, and gave it a hook toss toward the trio of bad guys currently trying to kill us.

Normally she would’ve been more frugal with those, but we were about to play some spatiotemporal hopscotch and she never missed an opportunity to make something go boom.

The explosion followed a second later, a deafening plume of sound and vibration.

I shook away the dull ringing in my ears. “Maybe next time you’ll do a little less showboating,” I said, recalling the triple backflip he’d used to exit the hover-jet.

“Oh, look! Buildings and people and cars and pavement,” Maddix said with far too much joviality.

“You can’t be that close to the ground yet,” Zoe said.

“Don’t mind me, Mr. Office Worker, I’m just plummeting to my death over here.”

“Fine.” I clenched my eyes shut and focused. “We’re going back.”

“Thank you!” Maddix shouted.

Time reversed, dragging at my atoms like a boat suddenly throwing down its anchor whilst traveling at full speed. Nausea and vertigo twisted about, dancing just beyond the perimeter of my mind before slamming into my chest and driving the air out of my lungs.

BLINK

I opened my eyes and gasped as molecules of thought rearranged themselves, forming memories of what would happen in the near future if we continued on our current course.

“—gonna go for the triple backflip thi—,” Maddix was saying, half his body hanging out of the hover-jet’s open cargo door.

“Stop!” I grabbed the collar of his flak jacket and yanked him back before he could make a very regrettable mistake.

“Really? Already?” He frowned. “Did somebody miss the jump?”

“You got shot and fell off.” The wind played tag with my ponytail as I leaned out of the hover-jet and pointed to Haven hundreds of feet below. “In seventeen seconds three soldiers pop out from that service entrance.”

“Boy, that must be embarrassing,” Zoe said, putting an elbow in Maddix’s rib for good measure. “Didn’t even make it thirty seconds.”

“There’s absolutely no proof that’s how it actually happened,” Maddix protested. “All we have is Kaelyn’s word and we both know she likes you more.”

“You sound paranoid,” I said.

“All I know is that whenever you come back it’s because
I
got shot. Seems a little coincidental, is all.”

“And why do you think that is?” Zoe asked.

“It’s obvious. You two are trying to make me look bad.”

“Or,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes, “it’s because you do triple backflips onto small floating cities under enemy control.”

Maddix’s blue eyes sparked and the fake frown he’d been trying to wear disappeared beneath an ear-to-ear grin. “So you’re saying I landed it, huh?”

“Boys and girls,
” a voice crackled over the ship’s intercoms.
“Are we still doing this today or what?”

I thumbed the radio transceiver on my shoulder. “We’re waiting for the welcome wagon.”

“Roger that. I don’t enjoy sitting around so close to that thing, is all. They could practically granny toss a couple missiles up t—”

“Hold that thought, Colby,” I said as three soldiers clad in battle armor tromped onto Haven’s roof. I gestured to Maddix and Zoe, “Right ther—”

My words were drowned out by the crack and boom of controlled rifle fire. With the benefit of high ground, Maddix and Zoe made quick work of the trio below.

“They weren’t very good,” Maddix said, sounding disappointed. “You sure one of
them
shot me?”

Zoe ignored him and said, “Let’s get down there before any more show up.”

I nodded and grabbed my rifle off the rack. The rush of blood in my ears was nearly as deafening as the guns had been. With sweat-slicked palms I edged towards the open door.

“Last one down there’s a time-locked bum,” Maddix said before hurling himself out of the jet, his body spinning like a gyroscope.

“And he wonders why he always gets shot first,” Zoe said, grinning. She glanced over and must’ve noticed my apprehension. “Don’t think about the heights.”

“It’s not the heights that bother me,” I said as the caterpillars in my gut hatched into full-fledged butterflies. “It’s the falling.”

Zoe nodded as though she sympathized, but I doubted the pint-sized warrior had ever felt anything closely resembling the anxiety rooting me to the floor. “Just remember you’re doing it for Abi.”

I nodded, steeling my resolve. I took deep calming breaths through my nose and counted down from ten in my head. I made it to six before Zoe gave me a hard shove. And then I was falling.

Chapter Two

THEN

“Here’s the thing you need to know about time travel: none of this is permanent.” I gestured to the cavernous auditorium for the benefit of my audience of one. “Nothing is set in stone. Not yet, at least.”

The wispy girl sitting in the third row stared at me through Medusa curls of brown hair, looking too excited to blink. Not a terribly impressive recruiting class, all things considered.

“It takes roughly thirty-two seconds for reality to solidify. Until then, everything’s malleable, like paint drying on the wall. With enough training, Abigail, you can change it. Repaint reality, correcting for all the little mistakes you make along the way.” Feeling strangely exposed, I paced the stage in search of a good place to put my hands. “But that’s not always an easy thing to remember, especially when you’ve done something real stupid like getting shot or stabbed. Watching liters of blood leak out of your body certainly feels permanent.” I did a pretty good pantomime of blood spilling out of my stomach. “Well, actually, the psychic pain is real. You’ll carry that no matter how far back you blink.”

Abigail’s mask of enthusiasm temporarily faltered; the prospect of getting maimed will do that to even the best of us.

Why am I telling her this? She doesn’t want to hear about getting shot on her first day! You’re freaking her out!

I sighed and closed my eyes; seven seconds should be far enough back. An invisible pressure compressed my thoughts, enveloping them in a bubble of tachyons that shifted me seven seconds into the past.

BLINK

“—cially when you’ve done something real stupid like—” I opened my eyes and bit my lip before the next words slipped out. A long pause followed, during which I tried to think of something new and not absolutely terrifying to say to the new recruit.

I looked to the blank dry erase board beside me for answers. The black and blue marker smudges left over from the previous class were giving me nothing. I wasn’t cut out for mentoring; that really should go into my personnel file somewhere.

Screw this
, I resolved and hopped off the stage. “Let’s go see the campus.”

Abigail did not need to be told twice. She bolted from her chair and scrambled over the three rows of bench-style seating separating her from me.

“You could’ve walked around,” I said. “I would’ve waited.”

“Sorry. I’m pretty amped to be here,” she said, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “Joining Central is sort of a dream come true.”

“Really?”

Abi nodded vigorously. “Nobody back home understands me. They tolerate me as some obscurity of the natural world, but I’ve never had what you might call friends.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over that, we’re only grudgingly accepted by the majority of time-locked people regardless of where you’re from. Though if you wanted to be around other Chronos, you could’ve gone to the Farm. Much safer.”

“I want to use my gift to help others.” She smiled sweetly. “To save lives.”

They come in so young and innocent.

A wave of blistering heat greeted us as we exited the auditorium. I led Abigail off the black asphalt sizzling underfoot and onto the crunchy brown grass, dead from dehydration.

“How ‘bout you?” Abi asked. “Why are you here?”

A memory of my brother blipped across my mind’s eye: Swinging on the front-porch, enjoying the cool breeze and a tranquil afternoon, when a man in uniform brought me a folded flag and the news that my brother had died a hero, as though that somehow made his death mean something.